The camp we’d set up near the forest worked fine, though it was a bit barren. Just two bedrolls. The alert system still showed us as “Vulnerable.” Hopefully there wouldn’t be any mob attacks, but the two of us were high level enough that we could take any that stumbled on by.
Jess frowned, taking off her armor. “I can’t imagine that it’ll be too comfortable, sleeping like this.”
“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” I told her, picking up the scratchy looking wool roll and taking off my own set. “Or maybe not. Least it's realistic.” I stared at the damp, dirty-looking ground around us.
She took out her roll and laid it out on the grass, next to an oak tree. “Why is being realistic even a selling point? Real life sucks.”
“Agreed,” I said. “If I wanted to sleep someplace uncomfortable, I’d go camping with my dad.”
Jess looked at me. “Your dad likes to camp?”
“Yeah. I don’t, but that doesn’t stop my dad from trying to drag me along with him. “
“What do you think our families are thinking right now?” wondered the knight.
“Mine are probably worrying their heads off,” I figured. “Mom always said that I was trapped in my video games. Guess she was right, though I’m pretty sure she was speaking figuratively. What about you?”
“They’re probably wondering why the heck I was playing a VR game,” she groaned. “They always grilled my brother for playing too much. God only knows how they’re gonna react once they know both of their kids are frequent VR gamers. Well, ‘were.’ Like I said, I won’t be playing any more after this.”
“You know,” I said, “that seems kinda weird to me, that you’re quitting.”
She gave me a skeptical look. “I’m more surprised you’re not quitting yourself,” she said. “After all this, can you really say that you’ll feel safe ever playing VR games again? I wouldn’t be surprised if Altera went belly up after this.”
I dismissed her. “Altera won’t go down. They’re too big. And VR is basically the only thing I’ve got to distract myself from my life. Sorry if this is a bit too personal, but I’m kind of a wreck out of game. Take Altera games away from me and you got, like, half a person.”
For a moment, there was something in her eyes. Pity? Looked like it, but it was hard to tell. “Ah I didn’t know,” she replied nervously, “I’m sorry if that was inappropriate.” She looked ready to say something else, but must’ve thought better of it.
I sat down on top of my wool roll. “Don’t be sorry. And it wasn’t inappropriate. I made my bed and I’ll lie in it.” I looked down at where I’d be sleeping. “Literally speaking, too,” I joked.
“Anyways,” Jess went on, trying to change the topic. “Why do you think it’s so weird that I’m quitting? I’d bet most people who got trapped with us are gonna do the same.”
“Because you were a first adopter with a 1.0, just like me. Five years ago, no one would’ve gotten surgery just to play video games unless they really liked video games. Not to mention, you got the Alpha on release day, no less. That tells me you’ve been a huge fan for at least five whole years. Everyone here is like that. Heck, I’d say that the majority of people stuck here aren’t going to stop playing.”
“Well, I’m less of a huge fan of Altera than you think I am,” she murmured. “My whole family got the 1.0s when they came out. Mostly for non-gaming stuff, like VR paragliding or surfing. We’re kinda rich. That stuff about student loans earlier, that was more an exaggeration. I’m a casual fan of VR—the only reason I bought the Alpha was because of Dragunova. Buying Delsana was an afterthought. I rarely play games.”
“You know, you don’t need to lie,” I said.
She scowled. “What makes you think I was lying?”
“Come on,” I responded. “I saw you in the dungeon today. No one who ‘rarely plays games’ is that good.”
She scowled even deeper this time, but didn’t say anything else.
“So why’d you lie?” I continued. She said nothing. “Come on, you can tell me. I promise to keep it a secret.”
I said all of that casually, but when I saw the concern on her face, I stopped myself.
“Hey, woah. What’s up? You look like you saw a ghost. If you don’t want to tell me, don’t tell me.”
For a moment, Jess seemed ready to drop it, but then she turned to look at me head on.
“No, I may as well just tell you,she said, sitting down and staring at me face to face.
“Uh, alright.” I sat straight up.
“Recently,” she began, “I’ve been trying to wean myself off of video games. I kinda don’t wanna associate myself with VR crap anymore, even before we got trapped here.”
“What for?”
“My friends say that they’re getting sick of me wasting my time with it.” She looked pensive.
“What, have you been playing too much?” I asked. I could kinda relate. My own friends online thought that I played way more than was good for me. Didn’t stop them from asking me to play with them whenever they needed another person, though.
Jess shook her head. “No, it’s not that I play too much, it’s that I play at all.”
“What, really? I dunno much about your friends, but it seems like kind of a jerk move to hassle you just for playing VR.”
Jess held up her hands. “Well, it’s a bit more complicated than that. I didn’t want them to think that I was some loser that played on Altera devices all day.”
I squinted, suspicious. “That doesn’t sound more complicated at all. You think just playing VR games makes you a loser?”
“No, of course not! But, well, they think it does.”
“Then what does it matter? So what if they don’t like it? They’re your friends, right? Surely they’ll overlook it.”
Jess seemed unsure. “Maybe? It’s not like they gave me an ultimatum. I just didn’t want them thinking poorly of me.”
“Hold on, did your friends tell you to stop playing? Or did you want to stop playing because they might think poorly of you?”
“The latter,” Jess answered sheepishly.
“Oh my gosh. You do like playing video games, don’t you?”
“Well, yeah,” she muttered. “Of course.”
“Then it shouldn’t matter what your friends think. They didn’t even tell you to stop. Even if they had, they should just learn to deal with it.”
“Huh?” She looked confused. “What do you mean? You mean I should’ve kept playing, even if it annoyed them?”
“That’s exactly it,” I confirmed. “My old roommate is a pretty good example of someone who did crap I just had to put up with. The man would smoke so much weed that he would smell like Bob Marley reborn. I got so used to seeing rolled up joints on the floor that it felt weird not seeing them when I moved out. Your case isn’t nearly so bad. So what if you play video games and your friends don’t like it? It’s your life. If they’re your friends, they’ll look past it.”
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
“You don’t know them,” she groaned.
“Maybe I don’t,” I conceded. “But what I do know is that you seem to care a lot about what others think.”
She stayed quiet.
“Well, don’t,” I declared. “Jess, you know how much I care about what others think?”
She eyed me. “How much?”
“Not at all. The only people I ever talk to in real life are those at the warehouse I work at. No one else. Know what they think of me? They think I’m some creepy hermit. No one talks to me unless it’s to give me directions or to ask me a question. That’s not to say I didn’t have it coming. I haven’t done much to change that impression, since I come in everyday looking like a zombie. Everytime I try to talk, I act like a nervous stuttering wreck.”
“Sorry to hear tha—“
“No, don’t be sorry! You heard what I said, didn’t you? I. Don’t. Care. I go to work and I get paid. So long as that part is true, I couldn’t care less what anybody thinks of me. No one has a good opinion of me in real life. The few people that know me well, like my family, all think that I’m some reclusive and spineless worm of a man. I’m more of a man right now, even with this body, than I’ve ever been in real life. And I care about that as much as I care about what my coworkers think of me.”
“Not at all?” She guessed.
I nodded. “Not at all.”
“But I’m not you,” Jess countered. “I can’t just throw away what other people think of me. It might sound silly to you, but I genuinely care about what people think of me.”
“I’m not telling you to stop caring, not completely,” I scolded. “I’m telling you that you need to care less.” I put my hand out, palm down, and raised it above my head. “This is how much you care.”
I lowered my palm down to about chest-level. “This is how much you should care. Look, it isn’t my call to tell you how to respond to people’s opinion of you. Just like you’re not me, I’m not you. I can’t know how important all of this is to you. What I do know is that you’re way more paranoid than you need to be, and that it shouldn’t stop you from enjoying what you like.”
She couldn’t come up with a good response to that. “I guess I don’t have to try to accommodate everyone. Still probably never gonna play Altera games after all this though.”
“Huh? What, why not?”
“This,” she gestured at our surroundings, “is still happening. My friends might’ve been the original reason I’m going to quit, but being trapped here by some loon is kinda the nail in the coffin.”
“Oh,” I squeaked, embarrassed that I’d forgotten about everything that happened so far. “Well, at the very least, you won’t be too overly concerned with people’s opinions of you in the future, right?”
“I’ll try,” she hesitated. “You’re not exactly the first person to tell me that I care too much about what people think of me. I know I really shouldn’t concentrate too much on it, but once the thoughts get into my head, it’s hard to really not focus on it. Brooding is bad for me, I know. I just can’t help it.”
I wasn’t sure how to respond to that. “Couldn’t help it” had always seemed like an excuse to me, but it was one that I had my own experience with. When people asked why I was always so skittish talking to people, “couldn’t help it” was my go-to response. What kind of hypocrite would criticize Jess for doing the same thing?
“But,” Jess went on, “I’ll try.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean what I mean. I’ll try to stop paying so much attention to what others think. You might not have been the first to tell me to stop caring so much, but you definitely gave me another kick in the head. I’ll try my best to finally stop worrying about so much meaningless crap.”
“It’s all I can ask,” I told her, slightly relieved. “Besides, considering where we are, you won’t have to worry about that at all, not ‘till we can get out of here.”
“Speaking of which, it’s taking a pretty long time for that to happen, don’t you think? For the devs to pull us out. It’s been a solid day and a half, and still nothing.”
“Maybe the guy causing all this is a bit smarter than we thought,” I speculated. “It’s not gonna matter in the end, anyways. No matter how smart the dude is, Altera’s got people that are just as smart, and that are being bankrolled by a multi-billion dollar company. “
“...You’re right,” she said hesitantly.
“What is it?”
“It’s nothing. I’m just a bit unsure of everything, that’s all.”
“You’re not the only one.” I pulled up the in-game clock. It was almost midnight. “Look, let’s get some rest. Take your mind off of things, eh? Once we meet up with more players, we should be able to get some direction on what to do and how things are going. The Altera staff that came here might even be able to give us a better explanation of what’s happening.”
“Yeah, that, um, that sounds good,” she said, settling down on her bedroll.
I laid down on my own. “Well, goodnight then.”
“Night.”
I turned to sleep on my side and tried to head to sleep.
Tried, and failed. No matter how much I tried to rest, my mind would not let me. As much as I attempted to let go of my thoughts, to let everything go into oblivion, I just couldn’t. It was like there was some mental block in my head that prevented me from sleeping.
“Hey Jess, you awake?”
Nothing. Pulling up the menu with my mind showed me that the time was about a quarter past one. If I didn’t get some rest soon, I’d be totally exhausted on our way to Jensen. I might not have felt tired now, but it was only a matter of time before I did.
Would Jess leave me if I was too tired to keep going? No, she wouldn’t. Both for her benefit and mine. Still, it was better for us to get to Jensen as soon as humanly possible, and it wouldn't be right to weigh her down. But it was so hard. Maybe the stress of the whole situation was just getting to be too much, but for the life of me, I couldn’t get any rest at all.
Half past two now. Still no sign of me sleeping. But, if you would believe it, there was no hint of me actually feeling tired. It’d been about twenty hours since the last time I’d gotten any rest, but there was still no sign of me finally getting worn out. No, I felt just as energized as I had in the morning.
...That didn’t mean much, since I was pretty much always some level of lethargic, but I genuinely didn’t feel even the slightest bit different at all. I’d been awake for this long before, and I knew what it was like. Whether it was because of a bit of overtime at the warehouse or because of a game raid that had gone on for a bit too long, I’d gone this long without sleeping before. VR or real life, the feeling of mental exhaustion always came. This time there was none of that. My mind was just as alert as it’s ever been.
A sound echoed in the woods. A mob? A loud alert sounded through my mind. Definitely a mob.
“Whazzat?” Jess slurred. She must’ve heard the alert too.
I whipped out my blades and put on my armor, the pieces appearing on my body as soon as I selected them from my inventory.
“Some mob. Should be low level, considering where we are. I can handle it.”
“No, no, “ she said, groggily, “lemme help.” Jess tried to stand up and immediately fell face first into the grass.
“You rest. I can handle it. “
“Wait!” she exclaimed, drooping eyelids popping wide open as she observed me closely. “You… have you been awake this whole time?”
“Uh… Maybe?” I answered awkwardly.
“You were the one that said we needed rest! And you’re still awake, what, three hours later?”
“Two and a quarter,” I corrected her.
“We have to leave in three and a half hours! You’ve spent nearly half the time we were supposed to rest wide awake!” She was absolutely fuming.
“I couldn’t sleep!” I defended myself. Judging from the look in Jess’ eyes, that was hardly an acceptable excuse.
Jess opened her mouth to shout again. “Now I have to--”
Her words were cut short by an ear-splitting howl from somewhere deep in the woods. It sounded like a wolf’s howl, but somehow more throaty, almost human-like.
“Think we’ve got bigger problems right now,” I murmured.
“Argh,” said Jess, putting on her gear and activating Eternal Bulwark. “You’re gonna get an earful once we deal with this thing.”
The beast that had made the noise howled again, this time almost right next to us. Turning to the left, we saw a pack of red-eyed wolves staring at us. Right at the front of the pack stood a tall, upright figure that looked like a cross between a human and some wild animal.
The thing had thick, long black fur across its body. A long, mutt-like snout protruded from the monster’s face, and its red eyes bored right at us. The beast’s back was arched forward, as if it couldn’t stand up straight. Long and pointed ears rested on its head.
There was only one word to describe it.
A werewolf. Or as Jess put it…
“Come on, you overgrown furry!” she shouted, taunting the monster and sending the pack right at her.
The wolves accompanying it were only level 3, and with my daggers, I made quick work of each of them, distracted as they were on Jess. The wolfman, or “furry” as Jess had so eloquently put it, was level 5. With me at level 6 and Jess at level 8 from the extra slimes she had killed on her way out of the dungeon, we should have made easy work of the pack leader.
Should have.
As soon as enough time had passed, Jess’ Eternal Bulwark ran out, and just as soon as it did, the werewolf took its sharp claws and gored me through my armor and into my scaled right arm.
“Huh?” was all I managed to choke out before my right side exploded in pain. “Aaagh!” I screamed loudly , making even more noise than the wolf had. The agony was unbearable, worse than anything I’d ever felt in my life. In a wild panic, I attacked the monster with my left arm, but it still had about a quarter of its health left. With another strike, the beast slashed the bottom of my armor, and a red hot burning coursed through my stomach.
“Crystal?” Jess squeaked, staring dumbly at me.
“The monster!” I urged, gesturing wildly.
“Why are you screaming? She looked at my wounds. “You’re not supposed to feel...”
“The monster!” I yelled again. “Get its attention!”
She turned back to the werewolf and stabbed it straight through the back, just before it could slash at me again. In a panic, I used my uninjured left hand to drink a health potion. I couldn’t see what my health was, but I didn’t really care. At this point, the only thing that mattered was relieving myself of the pain. I didn’t even know if it would work.
It did. In an instant, I could feel the pain washing away as my wounds knit themselves together. My relief was palpable, but I couldn’t stop yet. Just as I was readying myself to attack the monster, it ripped away Jess’ shield and tore at her side. Wincing, I prepared myself for the same strange pain to show itself on Jess’ face.
But nothing came. Blood dripped down Jess’ legs as the beast tore a gash right through her hip. The same unnatural pain I’d felt didn’t come to her.
Rushing over to the two of them, I pulled off a Blade Flurry just as the werewolf was gearing to take another swipe at the knight. With a final howl, it fell to the ground, dead.
Jess rushed over to me, fear and uncertainty plain on her face. “What was that?”
“I don’t know. When it slashed at me… it hurt so much! I didn’t even know that it was possible for pain in VR to feel that real.”
Her face became stony. “The hacker. He must have done this somehow. Made the pain you feel in-game real.”
I shuddered. “You really think he’s capable of this?”
“Think the devs would be psycho enough to pull this on us?” she said dryly. “He must’ve done it somehow.”
“But he didn’t do it for everyone. I mean, you’re not affected. You think other people are going through what I’m going through?”
“Maybe you were just a test,” she suggested. “Whatever the reason, we can’t know it just by speculating on it. If anything, this just shows that we need to get a move on to somewhere safe and without mobs as quickly as we can. For your sake, we can’t have you getting hit again.”
“When do you think we should start moving?”
“Now. I might still be a little tired, but I’ve got enough energy left in me to get going. I know you still haven’t slept, but don’t worry about falling behind if you get too tired to go on.”
“What do you mean?”
She sighed. “If you end up getting too tired to walk, which you will, I can carry you.”
I stared at her. “You’ll… carry me?”
Jess gave me an exasperated look. “Yes, I will. Look, you might’ve screwed up a little by not going to bed, but I doubt you did that on purpose. And considering what’s happening to you, it’d be cruel to just leave you behind. Besides, I got these strong man arms. Might as well put them to work.”
I went a little red. “I do not need you to carry me!”
She stood up and began packing away our bedrolls. “You can say that now, but when you fall onto the ground completely exhausted, I’ll make sure to piggyback you all the way to Jensen.”
Piggyback?
“Jess…” I started.
“Save it. Look, let’s just get underway. I don’t really want to hang out here anymore. Not so long as those wolf-things are still around and ready to hurt you. Unless you don’t mind being hacked at and bloody again?”
That pain was fresh in my mind. I could still feel the white hot pain that had coursed through my body when the beast had rendered my flesh into gaping wounds.
“No, I guess we should go. Thanks for helping me out, by the way. I can’t imagine what it’d be like if I didn’t have you around to taunt monsters. Especially now, with what’s happening to me.”
“I could say the same about you,” she said, cracking a smile. “Now let’s head out.”