Farkas’ vision remained clouded by his semi-unconscious state, unable to twitch the slightest finger yet somehow still able to discern the noise escalating in the field. The two roars he had heard grew louder, with the orc king Purandar resorting to a barrage of [Dead Moon Swings] against the mysterious foe. Oddly enough, this foe stood its ground right before him as though he were an injured fledgling needing protection.
The earth shook beneath its core with each step the colossal, humanoid entity took. He wouldn’t use such a description lightly. Their feet dwarfed even the most renowned lakes in Lupis, and their palms could fit a million Purandars inside before they’d get crushed by its fury. In fact, that was how they tried to end the fight if the orc king didn’t sprint across their legs like an ant searching for the perfect place to bite back.
The entity howled from the sting of its blade, but Farkas knew it was far from over. Just before another lights out, the entity roared one final team and concluded the battle with an obvious solution: a good old stomp. Too bad that also meant he was bound to become a twinkle in the sky from the shockwave alone, and to his credit, it nearly came true. His limp body fell from three hundred feet, but a fleshy cushion prevented him from becoming the next crimson stain on the grass.
It didn’t matter much that he survived since he left his entrails with his lower half thanks to the orc king’s attack—or so he thought. Groaning with a good stretch, he woke up to a gentle breeze under the bright yellow sun, with the horde gone without a trace. That only meant no other player in the field decided to continue the fight, and he knew just who that was, even if he got struck with amnesia.
“Paulie!” he said, running for his aid a few feet away from where he slumbered. Miraculously, he witnessed not a single scratch on him except for a mile-long scar on his torso, a sign of haphazard healing against fatal wounds. His suspicions led him to check his own waist, and sure enough, it was the same.
Players were lucky enough to have any bodily damage considered “permanent” disappear after a day or so, but now wasn’t the time to think about luck. They needed to go home. “Paulie, get up. Come on.” Farkas pleaded again, shaking him in hopes that he merely played a prank on him like their previous teamwork months ago. “Paulie…?”
He got no response, but Paulie’s heart kept booming with every pulse, befitting its monumental size. It still didn’t explain why he couldn’t make him budge, and perhaps that day, he wished he never discovered the cause. Without warning, Paulie began to jerk in a frenzy as though he underwent a seizure, contorting into positions not even humanly possible, like how his hand phased through his forearm in a never-ending rotation.
Eventually, patches of Paulie’s skin turned into mismatched pixels with uneven colors, and his face became what their best friend Hajime would describe as “messing with the character slider.” Farkas recognized nothing at that point, beads of sweat running down his forehead as he remembered what utter suffering had befallen him.
Oh, no, this is so bad. I better take Paulie there before he— Right when his phone rang, the mushy pixels from Paulie traveled to his knee, a careless blunder for the ages. He tried removing them to no avail if there was anything to remove, to begin with. No matter what, they had now become part of him. His hands began to show the same uncontrollable spasms; his eyes rolled back, thoughts devolving into a distorted noise of 8-bit insanity.
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The headlines made numbers in Agrima through statements from the Pale Cross Association. Infectious disease specialist and paramedic Salim Hartman confirmed to the camera-happy press that two of their most beloved players had fallen victim to a dangerous condition. He hoped this would be the day when he could explain that it was far from fatal concerning players, but it appeared national television betrayed his reports again.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
“Stupid parasites,” said Salim, turning off the holo-screen in the meeting room. He turned to the board members with a lengthy sigh while shaking his head at their grueling predicament that might keep him up for months. “Ah… code error syndrome, as I call it. It’s a player’s worst nightmare, bar none, so don’t none of you tell me it’s easier than neurosurgery. My hypothesis about these ‘people’ is now more accurate than ever.”
“Not at all, Salim. We believe you no matter what,” said a man beside him. He placed his elbows on the table with his fingers fastened together. “We just think you calling them ‘people’ in air quotes or calling them ‘things’ doesn’t bode well with our public relations.”
“Hell, yeah, it doesn’t!” Salim stood from his seat, pointing a long finger at the members. “Why should it? I only speak in truth, and truths are a matter of taste. Some think it’s sweet, others bitter, but me? It’s the most savory delight in this mad, mad world. With that, let’s go back to what I observed.”
He unrolled a projector screen behind him, hoping the staff wouldn’t mind his state-of-the-art slideshow filled with every puppy GIF he could find for the intro. The subject was transparent either way since it became a series of clips showing the Seven Miracles steamrolling the horde with bombastic ease and even finesse, at least for one member. After what seemed to be fifteen minutes of presentation, the medical photos finally came.
“Okay, where to begin?” Salim grabbed an extendable metal pointer and walked to the other end of the screen. “Here, we have forty-year-old twins, identical to the bone, but only one is a player. Now, why do we call them as such? Is it because they decided to do a menial job of killing slimes every day? Is it because they decided that clicking on virtual buttons was cathartic?”
“Well, obviously, it’s the former. We all know this,” said another board member at the farthest left.
“Wrong!” he objected, hitting his pointer at the table. “You’re all wrong, whatever theory you have right now. Here’s the next photo. We did a mock liver transplant for the player twin, exposing his innards and whatnot. Nothing out of the ordinary, right? His stomach’s healthy, his heart keeps pumping, you get the point.”
“So, if everything’s fine, what’s the big deal?”
“That’s exactly the big deal, son. His stomach is too healthy for a forty-year-old, and his heart keeps pumping at the same rhythm as he would when asleep. Because of that, here’s what we found through our new X-ray machine coming this week. Please don’t ask where I got it.”
It was remarkable, terrifying even. The staff laid eyes upon not the body of an adult man past his prime, let alone a body in any medical sense. The patient had no bones to keep every muscle and organ in place, and he didn’t have those either. The blood vessels also didn’t exist, including the nervous system, especially what a usual medical standpoint would consider a brain. It was a hollow silhouette of a body, not a man.
Salim cleared his throat, ending the slideshow. “Ever wonder why players die surrounded by what we call ‘pixie dust’ or why they can keep fighting without as much as the sniffles? Death to them is a mere simulation. We only see in them through what this game wants us to see, but beneath their fleshy exterior is a tub full of lies. In other words, we’re not dealing with living beings. We’re dealing with 3D models who can eat, drink, piss, and shit. Any questions?”
The man beside him raised his hand slowly, uttering, “How does this process happen for anyone? Do they transform into players when the game wants them to be?”
He shrugged at the question, eyes closed with nothing else to offer from his observations. “Beats me. I only know that no one dies when fighting the horde, but players are eternal wherever they go. Now, let us begin our latest procedure, shall we? I have more toys I wanna try out, but remember, please don’t ask where I got them.”
“Yeah!” bleated the staff in unison, almost as though they had a newfound respect for their cold yet outspoken specialist. One might wonder how his paramedic days went whenever he had spare time.
Salim and his colleagues raced to the hallway like students following the popular kid on the block. With their most recent knowledge, perhaps there was no point rationalizing their old diagnoses collecting dust in the archives. The hidden science and beauty of medicine was to collect every painstaking data you could squeeze out of your patients for the new generation to learn.
Or at least that was his thought process whenever he had the chance. He could still vividly remember his school calling him the “Sunshine Quack,” giving lollipops to all before obsessing over stacks of journals throughout the day. It merely gave him a lot of excitement upon entering the room of his two new patients. This is gonna be great.