Leaving the Asylum Demon behind, I walked slowly down the stairs to re-enter the dungeon. As soon as the staircase opened up into a larger room, I stumbled into the next bonfire. I reached out like I was going to grab the sword, just like before, and a small fireball shot from my hand to the pile of ash and bone, setting the sword ablaze. I had to admit it was a cool effect.

The bonfire lit the room only marginally better than the two torches on the walls. Flickering firelight reflected off of the four inches of water on the floor. I dipped an experimental toe in the water. It only took a moment for the water to slosh around in my boot, and as the dampness soaked through my socks I remembered that I was wearing the starter set. I pulled my foot back and the feeling of wet socks immediately disappeared. I cackled to myself. "There's no rules!"

The endless possibilities of virtual reality were something that had always appealed to me, and that I felt were underutilized. Most people expected and to some extent desired for virtual reality to reflect actual reality, with the only difference being that you could take actions and visit worlds that you would otherwise be unavailable to you.

There was validity in that. Escapism has always been a necessity, the ability to step away from the harsher demands of real life. Virtual reality was the most effective form of escapism, because it could so closely mimic real life while only removing the negative aspects.

My point being that that thought process, that desire to use virtual reality as something similar but better, made sense to me. I would suggest though, that we should have loftier goals. Don't just mimic reality, surpass it. Don't just recreate the laws of physics, write new ones.

I'd heard of some indie games that actually tried that, and they occasionally got a bit of a cult following but nothing too widespread. Given the ability to experience infinite possibilities, most of us choose to remain with the familiar.

All this to say that when my foot went from feeling totally soaked one moment to completely dry the next, I giggled like a fool. I love that shit.

I messed around with the water mechanics for a while longer. To be honest I probably could have spent the entire afternoon there in that room, but at one point I felt the knockback effect of an arrow to the back, and the telltale numbness and tingling that signified an injury.

Side note: what ever happened to that company that thought it would be a good idea to have pain sensors in a virtual reality game? All I remember is the advertisement that pain could be " lowered to 10% ", as if feeling any pain at all was anybody's idea of a fun video game to play in their free time.

Anyway. I got shot in the back with an arrow, and like a fucking idiot I spun around a few times looking for the archer, as though they had somehow appeared in the small flooded room without me noticing. There were two windows in the room, and I use that term loosely. They were holes in the wall with broken bars across them, but the space outside of them was only about 2 ft deep before there was another wall, so the concept of windows obviously hadn't been well thought out in the first place.

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But I checked those "windows" like there was a chance the Archer had snuck between the walls and was shooting me from there. I'm embarrassed to say how long it took me to realize there was a hallway branching out, and I'd been messing around so long in the flooded room that the undead archer had actually walked halfway down the hallway to get a better look at me, and to shoot me four more times. By the time I ran across the room to the bonfire, I was nearly dead.

It was at this point that I learned that resting at a bonfire actually resets the monsters as well as healing me, which was convenient because that put the archer back at the beginning of the hallway. This time I was ready for him, and he only shot me once before I was able to beat him to death with my weak ass sword hilt.

I stood over his body for a moment. It’s an odd thing, to kill in VR. It doesn’t really feel like anything. I had thought it might, since the undead were humanoid, but whether it was because the undead were different enough or because I firmly knew this was a video game and they weren’t real, or because I had the gore settings turned all the way down to zero… I killed the undead and knew I could kill a hundred more like it, and I was instantly relieved because if that wasn’t the case, I would have had to sit by the bonfire and twiddle my thumbs for the next year.

With the archer dead, I was able to loot the rest of the hallway, which is how I netted my first shield and longsword, the descriptions of which were pretty basic. I won’t pretend I know anything about gaming, but the numbers on the longsword were higher than the numbers on my broken sword hilt. With my new gear, I felt ten times more dangerous.

When I turned the corner past the archer’s body, I saw that the doorway was filled with a sheet of rolling white fog. Shield up, I stepped into it, and I could feel a light mist over my entire body as I passed through.

I paused for a moment as soon as my vision cleared. I was ready for anything. I ran up a set of stairs and another long hallway (no archer this time) and found myself on a balcony that overlooked the first bonfire I had rested at. There was a broken area of the wall that I could step over, if I wanted to drop back down to that earlier bonfire. It wasn’t clear to me why anyone would want to do that, but I could.

I followed the balcony to the right and saw two sets of stairs, one leading up and the other down. I followed the one going down first, which allowed me to open a gate to the first bonfire, conveniently linking me back to the beginning. I looked up at those big double doors that led to the Asylum Demon, and I felt an unpleasant certainty that I would meet that Boss again.

I went back up the stairs and continued up the second set. I only made it a few steps before a massive boulder came tumbling down. It slammed right into me before I could dodge, and I was lying down with the wind knocked out of me when an undead approached and started slashing at me.

I jumped to my feet and put my shield between us until I had a moment to strike. When I did slash out at him with my longsword, it only took two hits for him to crumple to the ground.

I whistled. That was a huge improvement.

I made my way up the stairs with my shield up. It hadn’t even occurred to me that I might be in danger of rolling boulders, but I supposed I really did need to be ready for anything. At the top of the landing, there was another gate, but this one rattled helplessly when I tried to open it. Even when I tried my Master Key it refused to open, which I thought was a bit of a ripoff.

I turned back down the stairs and my eyes widened. The boulder had knocked a gaping hole in the wall, and I could just barely make out the familiar armor of the knight who had rescued me.