When I was finally calm enough to think straight I pulled open my menu and looked at the time. 4:43 A.M. 001 Summer 1. Whatever that meant.

I could definitely say that this wasn’t the way that I had expected my first full day in Eld to go… What even was that dream? I grabbed my head and pinched my nose. The familiar pressure of touch let me know that I was in fact, no longer sleeping.

I let out a long sigh. No use just standing around here, and after what I just saw there was no way that I would be able to get back to sleep. Fortunately the pit that had formed in my stomach from not eating in what had to be over 24 hours caused me to shake the last ounces of confusion and sleepiness out of my eyes. That at least, gave me a direction.

Guess I’ll go get something to eat.

The inn itself was eerily silent. I stepped out of my room and closed the door behind me. The sound of it latching echoed in the unstained wooden hallway. I walked down the hall, using the meager candles hung from the wall for any sort of guidance. Eventually I was able to find the staircase.

The Inn itself was a thin but tall six story building just outside of the town square. It wasn’t the best place to sleep, but when it came to price and convenience it couldn’t be matched. Honestly it was a miracle that all of the rooms weren’t sold out when I got there, though I did wind up tucked away on the top floor.

Walking down the stairs the creaking of wood beneath my feet was deafening in the silence. Just a few hours before the world had felt so alive, full of hopes for new adventure, now it felt like I was the only one alive.

Part of that certainly had to do with the time, but…

Stepping out of the stairwell and into the lobby I saw two players slouched over a round table. One was crying and the other was running her hand along his back. Her eyes looked like she’d just seen a ghost. In reality, she’d just seen worse.

I couldn’t look at them. The memories of that dream… if you could even really call it a dream, were still fresh enough in my mind that it was taking a real effort to not let them boil over onto the surface.

At the very least, in a twisted way, seeing them both sitting there made me feel relief that I wasn’t the only one who had seen it. I was afraid to admit that I may have been going crazy, but this… this put that to rest.

The more concerning part was that there were probably people who didn’t see the dream. Though the more I thought about it the more it made sense that not everyone would have been asleep when they decided to show it to us.

Putting players to sleep just to force them to have a vision wouldn’t be practical. In fact, it would probably lead to a lot of unnecessary player deaths. Though the truth of who did or didn’t see anything would surely come to light once the sun came up and more people were walking around town.

The outside air still had a faint warmth to it, but the breeze carried far colder air than it had before, adding to the graveyard atmosphere.

Compared to just a few hours earlier, the city looked deserted.

A fair number of small groups were still moving around, ducking into alleys and rejoining the main road, but the fact that I could walk in a straight line towards the town plaza in the first place meant that most of the players that were here the night before were gone.

Only a few of the dozens of street lamps that lined the main road were on, and they cast their dim light on those who decided to sleep outside, or those who had decided to take a break and rest on the side of the road.

On my way over to the plaza I passed groups of players huddling together. Some were worried, their voices laced with panic as they recounted what they’d seen. Some had broken completely, and were clutching their knees or staring off into space.

“This was… supposed to be a game, right?”

“What… what was that? What even was that?”

“…I don’t want to die”

“I… I want to go home…”

“There’s no way this is real, right? Right?!”

Maybe I should just leave the city right now… There had to be more than one town in the game, right? It wouldn’t be hard. Go to the guild and get rid of the rest of my stuff, use the gold I’d get from that to grab some higher end equipment, and try to start somewhere that wasn’t the first town.

I was sure I wasn’t the only one who’d have that idea. Maybe there would be a group the next town over that I could join and…

The visceral sound of a skull popping snapped me back to reality. Was I really willing to take a risk like that? I shook my head to get rid of my wandering thoughts and instead focused on the myriad of smells that were coming from food stalls that now were only a short distance away.

The streets weren’t the only place that had gone through a mood-shift. The plaza that was once full of stalls and people selling wares was now nearly clear of all of its previous inhabitants, with only a few stalls and their vendors set up around the tower in the center of the plaza still trying their best to peddle their wares on the thousands of new customers who appeared out of thin air.

I briefly took a peek over to where Sonnson had been the night before, but like most of the other stalls his spot had returned to a vacant patch of cobblestone. Part of me worried that the old man may have been dragged off by a ravenous group of players and interrogated over the information that he had given me, and indirectly given about forty bystanders, last night. I made a mental note to keep an eye out for him as the day went on and turned my attention back to the part of the plaza that was still alive with commerce. The large spire that marked the middle of the city.

The center of the plaza was dominated by a tower that from far away, looked like it had some sort of light glowing on the top of it. Now that I was able to get close and take a look I couldn’t have been more wrong.

The light emitting from the tower wasn’t light at all, it was a reflection. Water poured out of the top of the four sided obelisk and ran down its sides. As the water caught the moonlight and reflected it over the plaza, it appeared at a distance like the tower was glowing.

The water pooled below it in a fountain, and surrounding that fountain was a large deck that had seating, presumably so that patrons of the various stalls had somewhere to sit and eat.

Speaking of, I had to decide what to get. Normally in games like this each city or town, sometimes entire floors of a game world, had a theme. That theme would dictate everything from architecture to cuisine… but looking at the stalls lined up on the street I could safely say that at least when it came to the food stalls no such theme was present here.

Anything you could realistically ask for, from eggs, to crepes, to pies, all the way to pizza were all on full display. Eager NPCs hollered every minute or so describing their wares. The way they were acting you’d be forgiven for not realizing it was still dead early in the morning.

Most of the stalls had a fair line already forming in front of them, so I figured what better metric to judge my food-purchasing decision on than “how long do I have to wait to get something in my stomach?” With how long it had been since I’d eaten, I couldn’t care less what I actually got…

And so it was that my fated first meal in the mysterious world of Eld was a personal pepperoni pizza and a tall glass of orange juice… Fortunately the venture only put me back three Gold, quite the steal if I did say so myself.

I brought my bounteous meal up to the top of the deck overlooking the fountain and took a seat by the water. The noise of it falling from twenty stories above my head did some good in mitigating the chatter of players and the zealous calling of the NPCs. I kicked my feet up on the empty seat next to me and engaged in some good old fashioned people watching.

As I ate I thought more about what I was seeing. Now that I was really focussing on other people instead of ignoring them, a lot of players, far more than had been gripping their knees and sobbing in hopelessness, wore a determined expression.

They walked in small packs, and in some case, large groups. Those would doubtless be guilds from other games that reunited inside of Eld in order to take on the game. Even in the face of such horrible things as what had happened, here were all these players still ready to take on the world.

I guess that was one thing that we had in spades. Determination. A dissatisfaction with coming in second place. In order to get to the top in a genre as populated as MMORPGs you had to work. For a lot of people, games like this became a second life, sometimes even a second job. I was like that too. Never second best. Always be better. Always push yourself…

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

You would need at least that much guts to get into the top ten thousand in a set of games that each had player counts in the tens of millions. That meant that every single person here had that same drive somewhere in them… Not that pushing yourself that far in a game would get you very far in the real world…

I looked out over the crowd and let out a deep breath before tossing the last bit of crust in my mouth and draining the last bit of orange juice

With the last bit of food washed down I decided to tackle the one thing I had absolutely no patience for the night before.

I flicked over my left wrist to force my menu to appear and swapped over to the “skills” tab where I was once again greeted by a pile of popups.

This time, with a full… four hours of sleep under my belt, I was ready to level up. Honestly it was probably a good thing that I had waited this long. Normally I would have gone for a build that was about pushing my damage to the limit, but now with everything that had happened I needed to be more balanced.

At first glance it looked like things were actually a bit more simple than I’d initially assumed. At present I only had five skills.

One Handed Swords - Skill with a one handed sword, go figure.

Light-Medium Armor - Proficiency wearing armor.

Survival - A blanket skill for outdoorsmanship. Stuff like building a campsite or finding safe to eat food, or so I assumed.

Health - How many hit points I had, and how many hit points I regenerated over time in and out of battle.

Mana - How much magic I could control, how many mana points I had, stuff like that. Since I didn’t know any this was pretty much a dump stat…

Opening one of the skills brought up a separate menu where I could spend points in a sort of skill tree.

I decided to start with the one that I had the most points in, my one handed sword skill. According to the menu, the skill had 1,343 points. Over six times my next highest skill. I guess that made sense given how much I had been using it.

The first branch was a pretty obvious one. Defensive or Offensive Specialization. From the descriptions it was clear that Defensive Specialization was there for those who used shields in their off-hand, where Offensive covered those who would normally be categorized as DPS, or Damage Per Second characters.

While I was definitely looking to play safe, I wasn’t planning on transitioning into the role of tank and play an immobile front-liner. Like I’d said before, the tradeoff for that defense was a lack of mobility. And in a game where death was real, the ability to escape from a situation was far more beneficial than being able to take more hits.

I poked my finger through the “Offensive Stance” tile on the menu and a popup asked me to confirm my choice. “Spend 200 One Handed Sword Skill Points to unlock ‘Offensive Stance’?”.

I hit accept and the game chimed to indicate my choice.

“New Bonuses applied!"

“One Handed Swords increased by 30%”

“One Handed Sword Block Amount decreased by 50%”

I read over my new stats and grimaced slightly. I knew that not taking defensive stance would mean I was foregoing some of my defensive power but I didn’t think that the game would actually take some of my protection away from me… Oh well.

Looking back at the screen another set of tiles then appeared, branching off of the one that I had unlocked. These were a little different.

Thrusting Style

Slashing Style

Counter Style

The first two made sense just at a glance. Thrusting swords like estocs and rapiers were common in fantasy settings, so thrusting style probably had to do with using those. As for slashing style… well that covered just about everything else.

The third style, though, was interesting. Counter could mean a whole variety of things, but it usually meant skills with the ability to dodge or parry an enemy attack and hit back for extra damage.

To be honest, a whole class based around dodging and hitting back at the perfect time sounded super appealing, and part of me desperately wanted to immediately grab it up just to see what it was like! But…

In order to “counter” you had to dodge an attack. That meant putting yourself in danger just for the chance to do a bit more damage. Couple this with what I learned from Sonnson yesterday about the fact that you had to land a clean, straight, attack in order to do optimal damage and Counter Style, while appealing, would be far too risky this early in the game.

I almost felt ashamed of myself. The only things I’d been picking in the last 24 hours were the “safe” choices. It was totally against the way that I normally liked to play games, but if this way was what kept my head from getting crushed like a watermelon then so be it.

I accepted the “Slashing Style” icon and watched as my one handed swords SP total plummeted a full thousand points, leaving me with only 143 remaining. For my sacrifice, another menu popped up informing me of the changes made to my combat skills.

“New Skill Acquired! Cross Slash!”

“New Skill Acquired! Step Strike!“

“New Skill Acquired! Vital Slash!”

Despite the situation I couldn’t help but let a smile creep onto my face. If there was one thing I’d really thought combat in the game was missing it was this… Skills!

I tapped on the first skill, Cross Slash, and it opened a separate menu. The menu itself didn’t have any text, but instead had a graphic of a mannequin holding a sword down by its left hip. It then slashed up and away from itself drawing a diagonal line from the bottom left of its body up to the top right.

Using the momentum from the upward slash the mannequin let the sword pass over its head before bringing it down sharply from the upper left in another diagonal slash ending with the blade fully extended on its right side. The cut pattern, true to its name, was an X

I couldn’t hide the grin as I watched the motion, I was sure that the other skills had similar tutorials, but first things first…

Out of curiosity, I tabbed back over to the skills menu and tapped on the icon for “Defensive Stance”.

“Defensive Stance: 5000 SP.”

Huh. Okay, so it doesn’t go away, just costs way more…

Next I selected Counter Style and a similar message appeared.

“Counter Style: 5000 SP.”

Just for good measure, I checked the tiles that had sprouted out of the newly unlocked Slashing Style, of which there were about ten. Each of them looked like they were skills… and yep, all of them cost 5,000 SP. So it looked like each tile just got exponentially more expensive as you invested in them. That made things simple.

I was so lost in my fascination with reading every little detail of the 1h Swords section that I forgot all about my armor skill, which was the only other skill that had the minimum SP required for me to unlock a new tile.

Coming back to my senses I moved back into my menu and pulling up the light-medium armor skill I had gotten with my choice of equipment I got another set of options. Defensive Stance, and Mobile Stance. Once again, they seemed straightforward enough and for me the choice was obvious. I selected “Mobile Stance” without hesitating.

“New Bonus Applied!”

“Armor Movement Penalty reduced by 25%!”

“Armor Durability taken increased by 15%!”

I clicked my tongue. Couldn’t anything just work as intended in this game! I mean, it made sense… if you’re more mobile you should take less hits, and so you shouldn’t need to repair your armor as often… but still…

Well, no griping about that now, there was totally something way more important than that which required my attention! I closed my menu and- no, it didn’t close.

“You have one unspent Class Point. Would you like to use it now?”

Another screen popped up over the skills page and with it yet another system was introduced. Geez, cut me a break, game!

I clicked the “yes” button and another menu gave me a brief description.

“Class points are awarded once per character level, once a character reaches a certain number of Skill Points. They can be used to unlock new skills or to augment skills into classes. Would you like to unlock a new skill, or augment skills?”

Huh. I guess that “level” when it came to a character had to do with how many total SP they had, and not necessarily with just filling a random exp bar… still, that aside, there was one thing that I didn’t understand.

I read over the menu a couple of times and pinched my nose. Unlock new skills was easy enough to understand, as was the level up mechanic in general, but what did they mean by augmenting skills?

“Based on current skills and abilities, no augmentations are available to you at this time.”

Great. Well, I guess that meant I could use it to at least unlock something new… I went back to the original page and tapped “Unlock new skill” and yet another eye blistering list graced me with its presence.

Thrown weapons.

Light Armor.

Medium Armor.

Natural Armor.

Armories Fighting.

Shields.

Beast Hunting.

Monster Carving.

Monster Taming.

Tracking.

1h Axes.

2h Polearms.

Huh. That was a pretty short one, all things considered… Thinking back to the list of weapons, armors, and magics that had appeared at the start of the game this really was a pretty lean offering. Well, let’s think…

I didn’t need another melee weapon or armor skill. Shields were a no-go, they just weren’t my style. I didn’t really want to take care of a pet. There were a few utility skills that interested me, Monster Carving in particular sounded like you got more loot for killing things, which would definitely help with earning some quick cash.

Tracking sounded great for both keeping track of monsters and not getting ambushed… but it was pretty expensive to invest in something with so little value as long as I was being careful…

And finally, thrown weapons sounded like a great pickup since I was, at the moment, flying solo. Yesterday I had been rudely introduced to javelin throwing Goblins that were a real pain in the ass until they had run out of ammo. Having something to pick them off, or at least something that would give me time to close the gap, sounded really nice.

After way too much deliberating I selected the “Thrown Weapons” skill after all.

“New Skill Tree Unlocked! - Thrown weapons are now available!”

“New Bonus Applied!”

“Able to deal maximum damage with rudimentary thrown weapons!”

“Durability penalty chance for disarmed and discarded weapons reduced by 90%!”

I nodded to myself. Next time I’d definitely go for the “Monster Carver” skill. Well, that is if nothing better showed up in the meantime.

Closing my menu I jumped up to my feet.

“Alright! Now that the boring shit’s over and done with, how about we see what I can really do!” I said, drawing my sword from where it rested on my hip. Its new, reforged blade reflected the yellow light of the lanterns mounted to the railing of the patio.

There was nothing quite like practice. I put my right foot forward and lowered my blade down to my left side, trying my best to mimic the pose of the mannequin in the demonstration.

With a smirk on my face I pulled my sword arm up and across my body in a diagonal slice, except instead of following my orders it felt like I’d grabbed on to a thousand pound weight and tried my hardest to pull. My arm stopped dead and I stumbled forward awkwardly.

“Bweh??” I managed to mutter before a notification informed me of my error.

“Combat is prohibited inside of safe areas.”

I sighed. Guess that made sense. Checking my menu for the time I saw that it was just after six in the morning. The dark sky was just barely beginning to show hints of purple. I still had a few hours before the meeting, and so I decided that the best use of that time would be to get a handle on my new skills. Judging by the absence of lights in most of the buildings, I doubted that many places would be open to visit anyway.

Pulling up my other new skills to study as I jogged, I headed back down the main road and towards the Golden Field just outside of the city gates.