The world North of Stoneburg was like Northern New England, but with enormous trees, at least fifty feet tall, the first half of their trunks bare.

                  The grass was green, speckled with rocks and boulders. Birds chirped and flew above us, and insects buzzed by my face. As we continued back to the Horngrin camp where we’d been hunting, I found myself having to remind myself that it was all a game.

                  “It’s so strange that none of this is real,” I said out loud, kicking a rotted stump, feeling the wood crunch realistically under my boot and hearing the sound of the fiber snapping.

                  “What is real?” D asked me, a sly look on his face. “How do you define real? If real is what you can feel, smell, taste, and see, then ‘real’ is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.”

                  “You and your movie quotes, man.” I laughed. “How many do you watch a day?”

                  “Nah, I don’t watch that many,” D replied. “I just have a really good auditory memory. I hear something, and it just sticks.”

                  “They’re all so old too!”

                  “Star Wars? The Matrix?” D replied, aghast. “Those are classics, dude!”

                  “Oh, yeah?” I grinned. “What’s this from? A dream within a dream—”

                  “Inception,” D replied instantly. “Easy.”

                  “Bah, whatever,” I replied. “Only in this game, when you die, you don’t wake up.”

                  “You just wake up at a Bindstone and pray you didn’t drop your armor and end up half naked in a loincloth!”

                  We both laughed as we came back upon our leveling spot. I saw my corpse lying on the ground in front of me. It was sort of spooky, seeing my lifeless body, even if it didn’t really look like me.

                  Like all games, Call of Carrethen let you design the way your character would look, and I’d gone with an optimistic view of myself—how I liked to think I’d look after two years in the gym.

                  I was tall, somewhere over six feet, muscled with broad shoulders, and a chiseled jaw. I never understood why the game gave you the option of being short and fat, but some people liked it I guess—especially the trolls who liked to strip down to nothing but their loincloth and run around town screaming memes at each other.

                  D, on the other hand, was slightly shorter, lankier and a little more rugged looking, like a bandit or a ravager—someone you didn’t want to mess with. Which he really kind of was.

                  I reached my corpse and it instantly vanished. I was too low level to have dropped any loot, so there was really no reason for it to stay.

                  “Weird,” I said, eyeing the now empty ground below me. A tiny salamander-like creature slithered through the grass and I marveled at the game’s attention to detail.

                  “Yeah, yeah,” D said impatiently. “Come on. Let’s get back to it.”

                  He nocked an arrow and fired at one of the Horngrins that was wandering off on its own, away from the rest of the other three that were clustered together in a pack. It howled, turned, and charged. D stepped behind me.

                  “All yours.”

                  “Okay,” I said calmly, drawing my sword. “Let the Force flow through me.”

                  “That’s right!”

                  It was another level 5, just like the one that had killed me. With a snarl, it leapt at me with an opening attack, swinging a chipped axe at my head. I ducked and replied with a cross strike across its chest. It actually hit, dealing a decent amount of damage.

                  “Ha! I got him!”

                  “That’s great, kid. Don’t get cocky.”

                  The Horngrin snarled, showing its hideous yellow teeth as it charged, aiming the two brown horns on its skull right at my chest. I tried my best to get out of the way, but he hit me hard and knocked me back, stunning me briefly.

                  Being stunned in games is always annoying, but in a virtual world, the effect was ten times worse.

                  Thankfully, the Horngrin wasn’t that quick and the stun debuff wore off before his next attack, which I blocked easily. I stabbed out, feeling more confident with my sword, and this time, the strike hit him, chipping away more HP.

                  “Nice! That’s it!” D roared with approval from behind me. “Now finish him off!”

                  “Finish him!?” I gasped. The Horngrin was still at half health!

                  “Use your skills!” D reminded me.

                  My skills! Of course! I’d been so preoccupied with learning how to actually get my virtual body to do what I wanted it to, and aiming my attacks, that I’d forgotten my skills.

                  Quickly, I activated Warrior’s Charge. It was meant to be an opening attack but could be used at close range. I felt a blast of power in my legs and kicked off the ground as the game assisted me, propelling me forward at twice my normal speed. My shoulder slammed into the Horngrin and knocked him back.

                  This time he was the stunned one.

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                  “Broad Strike!” D shouted behind me like a soccer coach.

                  I activated the skill, slashing out viciously across the Horngrin’s chest, knocking off a massive amount of his health. He was still stunned, and I brought my sword up, down, and across again for three more hits.

                  Yes!

                  The Horngrin’s HP was low. In fact, it was critical.

                  “Finish him!” D yelled.

                  Without hesitation, I activated Execute, a skill only available for use when an enemy was below ten percent health. My sword chirped a satisfying slicing sound and sparkled briefly as I swung. The blade connected and the Horngrin’s remaining health was gone.

                  With a final death rattle, the beast died in a puff of flame and smoke.

                  “Very good, grasshopper.” D applauded behind me as I turned to face him, feeling as though I’d just accomplished a major victory, when in fact, all I’d done was kill a low level monster.

                  “Easy,” I bragged, spinning my sword in front of me.

                  “Yeah?” D asked, aiming his bow at the main Horngrin camp. “Let’s step it up a level.”

                  “Wait!”

                  But D didn’t hesitate. He fired his arrow straight into the group, striking one of the Horngrin in the back. It reared around and screamed, getting the entire group’s attention. All three of them charged us.

                  “Are you nuts!?” I shouted, stepping back.

                  “You’ll be fine.” He laughed. “If not, just run!”

                  The group raced towards us, weapons held high. D loosed an arrow, picking away at the one in the lead. It screamed, raising its chipped, rusty sword high above its head. I brought my sword up to block the blow, but then—something happened.

                  The Horngrin stopped.

                  No. The Horngrin froze, like time itself had stopped. The other two Horngrin behind it froze as well, their faces contorted in their snarling rage, their weapons ready to strike. Even D’s arrow hung motionless in the air between us.

                  I turned and looked at D for an explanation, but he looked just as clueless as me. It was as though somehow the entire game has frozen. A bug in the hardware?

                  “What the Hell?” I asked. “Server crash or something?”

                  “Nah,” D replied. “We’d be booted back to reality if that had happened…”

                  It was then that I noticed everything was silent. The birds had stopped chirping. There was no sound of insects or the breeze. It was as though we were standing in a completely unfinished model of the game that had yet to be turned on.

                  I opened my mouth to speak again, but suddenly, the sound of rushing water filled my ears as I was pulled into portal space.

                  “Jack!” I heard D shout as I was pulled away, teleported to somewhere unknown.

                  The purple-blue portal twisted and turned at high speed as I was pulled through it to an unknown destination.

                  I was being teleported somewhere. But how? By who? Some sort of admin? Someone in control of the game? Only someone with those kind of powers could teleport another player in the game world. Maybe it was one of those in-game events that GMs would sometimes stage.

                  But I had no time to think. The portal began to peel apart, and I felt a tugging sensation at my feet. Looking down, I saw dark purple stone, and as my boots hit the ground, the remaining walls of the portal stripped away like a thousand threads being pulled, and I found myself standing in the center of an enormous crowd of people.

                  The sound of their voices was deafening. Everyone was shouting questions to each other, trying to figure out what was going on.

                  “What the Hell?” Someone laughed. “Aye, Kugen! What’s going on?”

                  “I dunno, Kodiak!”

                  “It’s a GM event!” Someone suggested, obviously having the same idea as me. “Oh, this is gonna be epic!”

                  “Nah, it’s a bug!” Someone countered. “Didn’t you see how the game lagged out?”

The entire server population had to be around us. I looked around, trying to get a sense of where we were. But all I could see were more people.

                  “This is no GM event,” D whispered beside me. “And this is not good.”

                  “I agree.”

                  We were on some kind of plateau. There was nothing on the horizon in any direction. No trees, no mountaintops, nothing. The only thing in sight were more players. It felt like an unfinished part of the game, or a place players weren’t supposed to ever go.

                  “Welcome to Carrethen,” a voice boomed like thunder from all around us. Everyone looked around, but it seemed as though the voice had come from everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

                  “What was that?”

                  “See?” someone shouted. “It’s a GM event! I told you!”

                  Lightning snapped above us, followed by the deafening sound of thunder. I looked up as the sky darkened and the clouds began to swirl together.

                  Then, a deafening crack, like the earth shattering beneath us. The entire plateau shook as a thick column emerged from the ground at the center of the crowd, rising into the air. And on top of it, stood a figure.

                  “Is that…?”

                  The column kept rising and rising until it was hundreds of feet above us, the figure barely visible. I squinted up for a better view, when suddenly the figure itself grew. It expanded, faster and faster until it loomed above us all—a black knight, clad in demonic black plate mail with a horned helm. His face was hidden, everything but the eyes and mouth.

                  “Whoa, cool!” someone whispered beside me. Obviously, he was on board with the GM event theory, but I was already looking around for a way to escape. But with all the bodies around me, it just didn’t seem possible. Whatever this was, it wasn’t good.

                  “I am God,” the voice boomed.

                  A few people cheered, but the rest of the crowd was starting to get nervous

                  “But you may call me The Ripper.”

                  “Hey, Ripper!” someone called out, waving to the face in the sky.

                  “Silence!” the voice boomed, shaking the ground beneath us. Thousands of players cried out as they tumbled over, thrown back by the sheer power of the voice.

                  “Let’s get the Hell out of here!” D tugged at my arm and we began to move through the crowd, trying to find an escape route. The face behind the horned helm was strange, like an optical illusion. No matter where we moved, it was always looking at us, straight on, like it was impossible to escape his gaze.

                  “Welcome to Carrethen. I have taken control of this world. As of now, your lives belong to me.”

                  “Yep,” D whispered as we pushed through the crowd. “Bad news.”