“JohnWillStab: So, what’s the next quest about?” he asked while following Bonifacius down a familiar-looking cobblestone road.

This time they stepped off the road and headed west, down into the thick forest depts hidden under the blanket of dark leaves.

“Bonifacius: We must find fifteen deathbell mushrooms!” Bonifacius explained holding a piece of paper in his hands, that was the animation displayed by characters while the player checked their stats or opened some menus.

After a few moments, he put the papers away as the two began descending down the hill.

“JohnWillStab: So, are all quests just collect x amount of thing or kill x number creatures?”

“Bonifacius: It would be a lie if I was to tell thee that they do not make up a vast majority of all quests, though there are exceptions!”

Somehow, John wasn’t surprised to hear this.

“Bonifacius: Now that I think about it, thou have not told me what thy classes are, my two classes are sword and shield!” he exclaimed with a thumbs up.

“JohnWillStab: Right, I’m a dagger as you saw earlier, my other class is fist!”

“Bonifacius: …”

“JohnWillStab: ?”

“Bonifacius: Have thou been manipulated by another person into that choice?”

The question made John’s heart stop.

“JohnWillStab: No! Of course not!”

He looked down to his skills as if they were any indication of the class as a whole.

“JohnWillStab: Is it a bad combo?!”

Bonifacius shook his head.

“Bonifacius: Of course not!” he assured JohnWillStab.

“Bonifacius: There is no such thing as a bad combination of classes!”

JohnWillStab breathed a sigh of relief.

“Bonifacius: But thy combination is by far the least good,”

“JohnWillStab: …”

Bonifacius’ attempts at being nice were like splashing boiling hot water onto someone dying of frostbite.

The group continued walking deeper into the forest for a few minutes in total silence, not long later, Bonifacius finally spotted a single, grey-blue, oversized mushroom growing against the rotten bark of a tree.

“Bonifacius: That is one there!”

“Bonifacius: Our objective is to find fifteen as a group, so thou can collect them without concern for my individual findings!”

“JohnWillStab: Kay…” he replied, still a little disheartened by his class-based discovery.

JohnWillStab listlessly stumbled over to the mushroom and began picking it with the vigour and exuberance of a pile of moss.

Suddenly, moments before he collected it, the mushroom disappeared.

“What the hell?” he thought, he opened his inventory and confirmed he didn’t have any mushrooms.

“JohnWillStab: Uhmm, I think this quest it broken, the mushroom disappeared as soon as I touched it…”

“Bonifacius: Are thou sure? Did thou check thy inventory?”

“JohnWillStab: Yeah, it’s empty except for some copper coins…” John replied.

From the corner of his vision, JohnWillStab spotted another mushroom.

“JohnWillStab: Another one!”

Again, he began heading towards the mushroom, only for it to suddenly disappeared before he even touched it.

“JohnWillStab: What the f#$k happened?!”

“Bonifacius: I saw it as well!”

Bonifacius turned to face JohnWillStab.

“Bonifacius: Tis the work of a cheater or bot, they tend to run rampant here, now that the moderators have left…”

JohnWillStab read over the message again.

“JohnWillStab: Wait, some mods left?”

Bonifacius nodded.

“Bonifacius: Indeed, all of them, only players like you and I remain!”

“JohnWillStab: …”

“JohnWillStab: That seems a little unrealistic, who keeps the servers running?”

Bonifacius shrugged.

“Bonifacius: Nobody knows, many cheaters tried to find the server’s origins, yet each one failed!”

Suddenly, JohnWillStab and Bonifacius heard the rumbling in the bushes behind them, they spun around seeing a black-furred bear with green, glowing eyes and pulsating veins like the demon-boars.

John and Bonifacius both drew their weapons.

In a flash the creature was reduced to a corpse, its head and limbs were severed cleanly.

In a mere fraction of a second all the meat, fur and any other drops from the creature were looted by the speeding cheater the group could catch mere glimpses of.

For just a second, JohnWillStab could see the cheating character clearly.

They had green, messy hair and glasses as well as a wide, shark-tooth smile.

They wore all green and seemingly didn’t play the walking animation, this led John to believe it only teleported around instead of walking.

“What the hell?!”

JohnWillStab looked around and saw a big, green mushroom growing inside a hollow tree trunk.

“I SEE ONE!”

JohnWillStab rolled forward, stopping centimetres from the mushroom; he reached his arm out towards it, imagining the unpleasant feel of the mushroom.

In a flash and with a gust of wind, it disappeared.

“JohnWillStab: S#*T!” he exclaimed in frustration.

“Bonifacius: Fear not, friend! This cheater is clearly using a bot to control his character!”

“Bonifacius: This means they lack intelligence! We may be able to outsmart it!”

JohnWillStab looked around seeing the occasional flash of a character coming in and out of existence like a four-dimensional goose, dipping its head into the three-dimensional waters to catch its prey before pulling back out.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

JohnWillStab took out another energy drink and began drinking it while trying to come up with a solution.

“Bonifacius: The cheater has programmed the bot to search for mushrooms and animals! Perhaps we can abuse this logic!”

“JohnWillStab: …”

JohnWillStab used the “/sit” command to sit down on the soil.

“JohnWillStab: *Mushroom Noises*” he said straight-faced, it was meant to be a joke, but a portion of John thought it might work.

A few awkward seconds passed.

“Bonifacius: What shall we do?”

“HE PRETENDED NOT TO SEE IT! THAT’S EVEN MORE AWKWARD!” John thought.

Suddenly, Before JohnWillStab even got up he was met with a flash of a green-haired character followed by a pitch-black screen.

“…”

“…”

“…”

JohnWillStab squinted his eyes trying to see anything on his screen.

“JohnWillStab: Hello?”

“JohnWillStab: …”

Just as JohnWillStab was about to restart his game, he was met with a new message in the chat.

“Muschrum: Hello?”

With no time to beat around the bush, JohnWillStab got straight to asking the important questions.

“JohnWillStab: Are you the cheater?!”

While the room was still dark, John could hear the sound of someone laughing via the “/laugh” emote.

“Muschrum: N-no… not really…”

“Muschrum: give me a second…” the man instructed as in the darkness appeared a light originating from a small lamp.

Even this faint light felt like a big relief for John.

“Muschrum: There… I’ve been using shroomlight potions for so long I forget you people can’t see here,” the man laughed.

He looked very similar to the bot with green hair and a toothy smile except the colours on this character were less vibrant and his eyes had large bags under them.

“JohnWillStab: Right…”

“JohnWillStab: So, where are we?”

The man shrugged.

“Muschrum: Great question… I… I don’t know…” he replied with a curious glance around.

“Muschrum: It’s simply an empty space I found in the game’s code…”

“Muschrum: It’s where my bot drops off all its loot…”

JohnWillStab looked around seeing that they were in a massive, empty cavern with nothing except for smooth massive rocks walls all around.

“JohnWillStab: Wait, you made it?!”

“Muschrum: Well, yes, but I lost all control over the bot a long time ago!” the man explained.

“JohnWillStab: …”

“JohnWillStab: Can’t you just… pull the plug?”

Muschrum laughed.

“Muschrum: If only it was that simple, I actually used a bot-hosting website that seemingly disappeared off the face of the earth!”

“Muschrum: With it, my kill-switch also disappeared…”

JohnWillStab was suddenly met with a new interface menu, a small grid of items with the button “Accept” and “Deny” below.

Several stacks of mushrooms appeared in the slots.

“Muschrum: Here, have a mushroom,” the man offered.

John accepted uncertainly.

“JohnWillStab: Thanks…?”

“Muschrum: Now, I bet you want to figure a way out of here,” he began.

John didn’t need to confirm.

“Muschrum: Those mushrooms, if you eat them all, you’ll die without losing any honour-points,”

JohnWillStab nodded, looking at the several deathbell mushrooms in his bag.

“The good ol’ Nuremburg trials solution…” he thought.

“JohnWillStab: Ok… so what about you?”

“JohnWillStab: Do you just spend days here doing nothing?” he asked.

The man laughed again.

“Muschrum: Of course not, I do have a job y’know…”

“Muschrum: I programmed a bot to notify me when somebody comes down here and it just so happened, I wasn’t sleep yet,”

“Muschrum: I am partially responsible for this, after all…”

“JohnWillStab: YOU ARE FULLY RESPONSIBLE!” he exclaimed pointing an accusatory finger at the man.

The man waved his hand dismissively.

“Muschrum: Now, now, no need to point fingers, have some tea,”

Another trade request came to John, this time it was “mushroom tea”.

“JohnWillStab: This has got to be the worst start to any game I’ve ever played… player-killers, mutant demon-boars and now robot mushroom thieves…” John breathed an annoyed sigh.

“Muschrum: Ah, so you’re the new guy I saw people post about in global!”

John nodded.

The man approached him, with a puff of smoke and a few particles a table appeared before him.

It was made from what was unsurprisingly mushrooms.

The man also placed down two mushroom stools and a mushroom cake.

“Muschrum: my, my, this really is unexpected! I never thought the new guy would fall for my accidental trap on his first day,” the man laughed.

Before John could comment on the moral implications of making a mushroom cake, those implications being the need to violate the Geneva convention for the sole purpose of punishing the one responsible, he was shocked to see Bonifacius fall from a suddenly-manifested portal in the sky.

“JohnWillStab: Bonifacius?!”

“Bonifacius: I HAVE COME TO AID THEE, JOHNWILLSTAB!” he exclaimed, pulling his sword and shield out only to see John and Muschrum sitting at a mushroom table.

“Muschrum: Oh, more people!” he put down another mushroom stool.

It turned out Bonifacius also pretended to be a mushroom and got teleported into the cavern by the bot.

JohnWillStab and Muschrum explained the situation to Bonifacius over a cup of mushroom tea and a slice of mushroom cake.

“JohnWillStab: So basically, this dude can’t get rid of the bot that keeps teleporting people here and collecting mushrooms…”

“Bonifacius: I see, that does make sense!”

“Muschrum: Why… does he talk like that?” he asked, glancing over to John for an explanation.

“JohnWillStab: He’s roleplaying!”

Reminder that Bonifacius still talks with that ‘th’ endings “I’th see’th, that’th does’th make’th sense’th!”.

“JohnWillStab: In any case, I’m trying to think of a way to get rid of the bot…”

“Bonifacius: Indeed, perhaps we shall be able to defeat this bot plaguing the innocent players collecting poisonous mushrooms…”

JohnWillStab’s statement shocked Muschrum.

“Muschrum: Get rid of it? That’s impossible, even if you kill it, it’ll respawn!”

“JohnWillStab: So, we can’t kill it…”

“JohnWillStab: what if there was a mushroom the bot couldn’t reach? Maybe it’ll freeze and burst into flames!”

Muschrum shook his head.

“Muschrum: My bot calculates the value of a given mushroom or animal based on availability, besides, it can teleport!”

“JohnWillStab: Then what would happen if we got rid of all the mushrooms?”

“Muschrum: The impossibility of that task aside, the bot would simply go after the next best thing, boars, bears, slimes and eventually players!”

“Muschrum: Every type of entity has a value, even if the only things left in this world are piles of literal trash, they will be collected!”

JohnWillStab nodded understandingly.

Suddenly, from the sky fell a large cluster of mushrooms, they fell to the ground, forming a small pile.

“Muschrum: Sweet! A new batch of mushrooms!” he laughed walking up to the pile and collecting it, piece by piece.

JohnWillStab breathed a sigh.

“I can’t think of anything useful… maybe I could make it capture itself?”

“No, it’d just teleport out!”

“Bonifacius: I’m surprised thou doesn’t lag with all the mushrooms falling down!”

“Muschrum: Well, this game is remarkably smooth-running!” he replied with a chuckle.

“Muschrum: I’ve hardly ever seen it drop below sixty FPS!”

JohnWillStab still sat drinking his mushroom tea, looking at the bluish liquid in his teacup while his character sipped on it ever so slowly.

“Muschrum: Besides, I always pick them up to reduce any potential lag!” he explained.

JohnWillStab jumped from his seat, prompting both Bonifacius and Muschrum to shift their attention to him.

“JohnWillStab: Does your bot take the quantity of mushrooms in an area into account?” he asked.

The two others turned to face him.

“Muschrum: Of course, that’s why it settled in the low forests of Grimwood, where the mushrooms respawn all the time,” he replied.

JohnWillStab opened his inventory.

He selected one of the several hundred-mushroom stacks, John dragged it onto the floor and selected the choice to drop it.

“How many would you like to drop?” read the notification with a sliding bar between zero and one-hundred.

He selected the full one-hundred.

From where he stood exploded a literal wave of mushrooms.

“Muschrum: What are you doing!?”

JohnWillStab dropped another one-hundred mushrooms.

“Bonifacius: I see! Thou wish to lure the bot here with vast quantities of mushrooms!” Bonifacius exclaimed.

After John dropped another eighty-five mushrooms onto the ground, the green-haired bot appeared from a small portal in the air which shut down almost instantly.

“Muschrum: The bot!”

It began to pick up the mushrooms incredibly fast, those same mushrooms began spawning in the same spot mid-air before falling to the ground.

“Bonifacius: Tis working!”

JohnWillStab anxiously observed the bot get closer and closer to what now looked like an endless stream of the same two-hundred and seventy-five mushrooms which cycled from the portal in the air to the bot standing less than a meter below it.

Eventually the bot teleported into where the mushrooms appeared, trapping it in an endless loop of dropping and picking up the same mushrooms dozens of times every single frame.

“Muschrum: You’ve trapped it!”

“JohnWillStab: Yep! The safety of the world above relies on a pile of mushrooms!”

He couldn’t help but smile in real life at his own achievements.

“I guess MMOs can be about more than just killing boars after all…”

Muschrum spammed the “/cheer” emote.

“Muschrum: FINALLY! I CAN QUIT THIS BORING A$$ GAME WITHOUT FEELING GUILTY!”

He turned to face John.

“Muschrum: Here, take this!”

He sent John a trade request, for a while it looked like his character was writing something before what looked like a rolled-up scroll as well as a handful of silver coins were placed in the trade menu.

“Muschrum: Take it, my most treasured possession! Use it well, JohnWillStab!”

“Bonifacius: Farewell, strange mushroom caveman!”

Muschrum nodded.

With that, Muschrum shut down the game, deleted all the files and dumped his PC into his bathtub.

“Free at last…” he said breathing a sigh of relief.

Still, in the cavern, JohnWillStab opened his inventory seeing his small sum of money as well as the scroll.

“Bonifacius: Did thou receive anything interesting?”

John pinched the bridge of his nose as he typed out the name of the item with his free hand.

“JohnWillStab: a ‘Mushroom Cake Recipe’…“

“Bonifacius: …”

“Bonifacius: Tis nice…”

“JohnWillStab: How do we get out of here?”