A field, the trainees kneeling in the grass, each hugging their weapons while surrounded by a hexagon with a dead rabbit at each point.
“Close your eyes again," continued Instructor Apari. "Place one hand on the beast before you.”
Henry, his bow tucked hidden under his shirt, lay his palm on a rabbit with a hole in its abdomen, the fur sticky and red.
Instructor Apari clapped two blocks of wood, restarting the droning in the student's ears. "Repeat: Incheta im inye im.”
“Incheta im inye im," the class repeated in a chorus. (Gift unto me my memories.)
Henry felt his senses dull once more, the voice of the trainer heard through the murky veil telling him to recall the creature's demise, before a numbing tingle crawled up the nerves of his arm from the rabbit to his head.
Clap.
He was returned to the moment he'd snapped this rabbit’s spine, the creature wriggling in his hands, the trainees running around him. With the assistance of the game system, the memory possessed no less clarity than the real experience.
The voice of the trainer erupted in the sky like distant thunder.
“We will repeat this memory four times. Each repetition, you will focus on a different sense. First, vision.”
Henry, concentrating, studied the rabbit's head wriggling to free itself from his grasp, and its hind legs kicking, and the shaft of the arrow swinging from its stomach, and the red eyes, and the fur marred with the dirt it hadn’t had the time to shake off, and the muscles flexing taught as he bent the creature beyond its natural range of motion, killing it.
“Second, sound.”
Clap.
In an instant, the scene skipped back a few seconds earlier, the rabbit wriggling again in Henry's hands. Listening, he heard the rabbit making no squeaks of distress under its Bloodlust state, and the players' stampeding feet in the backdrop, and the twang of bows and clatter of missed spears, and his own breath steady, and the crick of the vertebrae.
“Third, smell.”
Clap.
He smelt the musty fur, and the sweat of other players, and the unearthed soil of the mound and the roots of churned-up grass, and the iron of blood mixing with the distinctive sweet lightness of lagomorph viscera, and his own human stench alike yet foreign to the bending creature.
“Fourth, touch.”
Clap.
He felt the sweat- and dirt-smeared fur wriggling under his bare palms, and the tension of its emaciated muscles with the bone palpable beneath, and the weight of its hanging body, and the breeze causing his shirt to beat against his chest, and the speeding pulse of its chin under his thumb, and the futile resistance of its bending fibres.
"Repeat after me: Incheta gya inye im.”
'Gift unto me your memories,' Henry thought in reply.
Clap.
His perspective shifted once more. His surroundings were black, a wall of earth enclosing his wriggling body on all sides. His hands - no, his feet, were scraping at dirt, desperate to escape this burrow and find a meal to alleviate the gnawing pain in his stomach.
He'd become the rabbit.
His foot broke through the top of the soil, covering him in a wave of grass-sweet air that pushed him onwards.
Emerging, he was about to, instinctually, shake the dirt from his coat, when his stomach was filled with a different kind of pain.
He fell, the force of the arrow knocking him off his feet.
As he lay on the ground, the pain radiating out through his body like urine soaking pants, his vision, as though someone had slipped glasses onto his eyes, turned red.
Boom!
A thump echoed in his skull, like the footstep of a sea giant lumbering along a continental shelf, Henry's ear pressed to the soil and feeling its titanic reverberations. This noise, while reaching him from a distance, was not being sounded by the trainer guiding the vision.
Several more thumps followed.
Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!
The thumps seemed to stir from his heart an ugly feeling, an intense, murderous hatred far beyond anything he'd experienced before.
Throughout this's rabbit memory, Henry retained his consciousness, paired with the creatures but detached. Something in these booms inducing the rabbit into a Bloodlust state reminded him of a mysterious in-game language he’d learned in an earlier quest that could condense and communicate a chapter worth of information within what sounded like a simple click.
Out of curiosity, he activated his
Boom! (‘FOR THE VILIFIED ONE, SACRIFICE THE TWO-LEGGED SCUM! MOISTEN THE EARTH WITH THEIR BLOOD! MAIM! MURDER! FEED HIM THEIR CHILDREN'S CORPSES! BREED IN THEIR OPEN TORSOS! BLEED THEIR...’)
At once, Henry's screen flooded with an enormous wall of subtitle text, along with several notifications.
Congratulations! New Language Book created. The Tongue of The Simchowdrati (0.018% complete).
You have run out of Universal Productivity.
New quest available -The Mystery of The Vilified One (Legendary)
Quest Title: The Mystery of The Vilified One (Legendary).
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
Description: Investigating the Bloodlust state, you have discovered an ominous power controlling the monsters of Saana that seems to relate to an entity called 'The Vilified One'. Out of concern for the well-being of humankind, you feel compelled to dig deeper into the origins of these disturbing messages.
Rewards: Unknown.
Conditions: Unknown.
Note: As a Legendary quest, this quest will test you to your utmost limits. Whatever the outcome, the world of Saana will never be the same.
Sigh, Henry thought.
Sigh...
How silly of him, falling for curiosity, the number one killer of cats and retirees.
If he had a human body right now, his face would have looked like he'd just voluntarily taken a third sip of expired milk. This had to be a personal record for him. He had only been here for two real-life hours and already he'd accidentally triggered another Legendary quest.
Legendary quests...those global-scale, multi-month-long annoyances...receiving too many of them was an occupational hazard of being the most powerful player in the game and owning far too many cheats.
As for this specific Legendary quest, based on the preposterously high cost of translating the message and Henry's historical knowledge, he estimated it to be a Tier-12 or Tier-13 quest. In other words, it wasn't intended to be completed until several years from now, when the players were all Gods flying around shooting lasers from their eyes and using dragon thigh-bones as clubs.
A Legendary quest - would this be what Henry needed to defeat to finish this basic noob tutorial? Would he have to first contend with a herculean struggle of mind and body, battling with the most mysterious, most dangerous entities Saana had to offer?
Not at all. Legendary quests were never mandatory, and Henry ignored them constantly.
With one thought, the notification vanished, banished to gather mould alongside the others never-attempted in his quest logs.
Sitting below that notification was another notification for a different Legendary quest pertaining to the new language. With genius, finesse, and bravery, Henry dismissed that one as well.
What was it about him quitting Saana that this stupid game system didn't seem to understand? These were no longer causes of concern for him, Henry The Doer of Naught.
The only trouble this minor mishap would give him was the translation cost, the total exhaustion of today's Universal Productivity pool, preventing him using anymore Civilian abilities until tomorrow, forcing him to go into any further challenges informationally-blind and thwarting his attempts to cure the pesky Earthfriend curse stopping him from levelling his chosen Class.
Except that wouldn't be a trouble at all, because he happened to be carrying a random Legendary that gave him extra Universal Productivity. lol - (laughing out loud).
Henry—free of any interest in that stupid quest, responsibility, care, or consequence—returned happily to the memory of the level 1 Floppy-Eared Rabbit.
He felt himself flying backwards into the sky. With his widened rabbit field-of-vision, despite being upended, he could see his human self lifting his rabbit self up.
Moved by the hatred of the booming message, he tried to wriggle and bite his own fingers, but it was no use, for the grip was too firm.
His throat stretched, his head bent back, and, then, there was absolutely nothing.
“Return!"
Clap.
Around Henry, the other trainees, having not killed their rabbits as humanely, were in a much worse state than himself, who'd already gotten over the whole irrelevant Legendary quest distraction. One of the wretched shirtless meatheads was as pale as a ghost, the poor brute kneeling before a mace and a mushy meat-fur paste.
Henry looked down at his own dead rabbit to see a trail of lights marching out of its forehead and up his arm clutching it.
As these were being transferred to him, they joined each other in swimming in an invisible layer around his skin. Comparing the lights, one could see that some had the sprightliness of a rabbit loping through the fields, while others moved with the sluggishness that sets in after a gluttonous dinner, each storing a different memory of the creature before its expiration.
You have absorbed the lifeforce of a Floppy-Eared Rabbit (1). 50 XP gained. 243 XP remaining until level up.
“Now," continued the trainer, "turn one point clockwise to the next beast.”
Several trainees groaned.
Henry, swivelling, faced a rabbit that had been cleaved in half by another player's sword shortly after he'd tagged it.
“Eyes closed.”
Clap.
“Incheta im inye im.”
After absorbing the sixth and final rabbit, Henry and others were covered in a dazzling play of lights exhibiting the myriad moods of the furballs' brief lives.
You have absorbed the lifeforce of a Floppy-Eared Rabbit (1). 50 XP gained.
You are now levelling up!
To mark the level up process, the lights began to fuse together to create larger lights, which in turn fused again to create even larger ones. Eventually, all of their mass had accumulated into five marble-sized balls, one floating on the tip of each finger of his left hand.
Congratulations! You are now a Level 2 Adventurer!
Hooray! Henry, Level 0 only minutes earlier, had already ascended to the towering peak of Level 2.
With this slow-to-start tutorial finally up and going, the rest should fly by in a breeze.
Along with the above message, a stat screen had appeared for him.
The State of Your Martial Body:
Strength 10
Vitality 10
Technique 10
Magic Command 10
Magic Affinity 10
You have 5 Stat points available for distribution.
The bald trainer answered the confusion on many of the trainees' pale faces. “Your hallowed Martial Body is composed of five sacred Aspects—”
A meathead raised a hand. “Bald Bro, what's an Aspect?”
“...I’m explaining that right now. The Aspect of Strength makes any physical abilities do more damage and allows you to wear more armour. Vitality—"
"Bald Bro, what's a 'physical ability'?"
"...You're going to learn one after the next part of the lesson, just wait and you'll see. As I was saying, Vitality makes your body tougher and increases your Stamina, which is expended when using physical abilities or performing manoeuvres. The Aspect of Technique, later, when I teach you the
The trainer oversimplified Saana's stat-system, but it was probably better than making the amateur pacing mistake of overwhelming and confusing the noobs with too many random details that they couldn't yet attach to anything solid.
“Moving on," he continued, "the method for reinforcing each Aspect is straightforward. For Strength, make one of your fingertips touch a bicep." He stopped, frowning as the meatheads immediately slapped their arms five times, going all-in on Strength. "For Vitality, your chest; Technique, the palm of your other hand; Magic Command, your mouth; and Magic Affinity, your ears.”
“What stats should we distribute them to?” asked a non-meathead trainee.
“That will depend on your Class and your fighting style. My recommendation for now is to put two points in Strength, two in Vitality, and one in Tech. Those will help you immediately, and, for any future Spellcasters, you’re still going to reinforce those Aspects to some degree.”
“What happens if we do distribute them incorrectly?”
“Visit an Oracle and pay a fee to have them redone.”
Henry, while the bald trainer fielded a few more noob questions, distributed his stats equally across all five, the default for Earthfriends.
His choice at this point was mostly irrelevant. In the coming days, he would be paying to redistribute his stats over and over again. For research purposes, he planned on learning a number of combat styles used by different high-placing Earthfriends in his guild’s past tournaments, and part of that would require imitating their stat builds. Following that, after he'd merged their techniques into his own new style, The Strategy of Informed Swiss-Army Knife, he would experiment further to produce the optimal stat distribution for himself.
“If that's all,” continued Instructor Apari, “before we move onto the next Killing Grounds, I’ll need to teach you how to transfer items to your Spatial Bracelets. The next beasts will be too large to carry. So then, grab a single blade of grass, and...”
Since Henry'd already unlocked item-to-inventory manipulation when becoming a Scholar, he stood up and walked away from the group.
Finding an empty spot, he summoned the buckler and the sword he’d purchased from the trainer, Villager recruiters still buzzing around the area in search of a bow-shooting ninja.
Refamiliarising himself with the new weapon, a Roman-style gladius, he began sprinting and rolling about, swinging and stabbing at the silent shapes of shadows.
As when he'd practised before with the bow, with each shove, each stroke, his muscles sweated out a different set of memories from that time when he'd made this simpler activity has calling.