I groggily woke up to sunlight burning my eyes. The window blinds were never completely shut — mostly because we had a horrible habit of sleeping in until the afternoon otherwise. I patted Alice’s lifeless body before forcing myself out of bed and into the restroom to clean up for the day. By the time I was done brushing my teeth and washing my face, my phone alarm was blaring away.
Me and Felix made a point to regularly go to the local gym in the early morning so that we could keep up our health. He had seen a video that theorized that proper physical fitness improved performance in VR games. That, combined with some unwanted weight piling on around his belly, started the routine.
Usually I would drag Alice along, but judging by the fact that she was still relatively motionless made me wary of waking her up. I wrote her a text explaining where I went, and headed out.
The air outside was a crisp cold. While the bite of winter had started to wear off, it was still unpleasant enough to justify wearing a warm beanie to protect my ears. I patted myself down, making sure that I didn’t forget my gym pass again, and headed out.
Despite the fact it was a holiday, there was a good amount of foot traffic on the sidewalk. Our apartment (mostly funded by Alice’s absurd paycheck) was comfortably placed in the commercial hub of the city. It was incredibly convenient for us to do most things, which had basically made it impossible for me to squirrel out of any social outings.
“Oh shit, sorry!”
A distracted younger man ran shoulder first into me, snapping me out of my daydream.
“You’re fine! I wasn’t watching where I was going.”
“My bad, my bad!”
The younger man scuttled away as he hurriedly adjusted the beanie that hung loosely on his head. I noticed too late that his lanyard had fallen out of his pocket. Thankfully (or unthankfully) for him, it was his work ID, complete with address and department. An awkward mop of long brown hair covered his face, making it hard to see his features.
I stuffed the lanyard into my gym bag, making a mental note to visit the office building immediately after the session. The location wasn’t too far from the gym, and it would be a decent excuse to grab breakfast with Felix afterwards to chat more about the game.
Our workout wasn’t anything particularly intensive, but today was supposed to be for cardio, so we wouldn’t be able to chat much. Or rather, I wouldn’t be able to chat much – Felix could talk and run rather easily. One of his many mysterious skills.
“Yo, right on time.” Felix was leaning against the outside wall of the gym, dressed in just a black latex shirt and jogging pants. His breath fogged as he exhaled, a light sheen of sweat already on his forehead.
“Hey. You got an early start on the run?” I motioned across my own forehead, causing him to glance up and wipe the moisture away.
“Of course. Warming up is important before any work out. Saw that on a video last night.”
“I thought that was only if you were doing weights or strength stuff.”
“Nah, apparently you can hurt yourself running too. Pull your ankle or something, nasty stuff.”
Felix suddenly shivered and sneezed.
“We should probably get inside before you catch a cold.”
He sniffled and nodded.
I went to the bike machine while Felix ran off to the treadmill, noticeably planting himself near some girls. I put in my headphones and put on some videos, hoping that I wouldn’t have to bail him out later.
The first video was titled “BEGINNER MISTAKES YOU’RE MAKING IN EQUILIBRIUM!!”, by a content creator (BillyTheThief) that I had followed from another VRMMORPG from years past. The information was nothing out of the ordinary. Not wasting copper on useless skills and weapons, constantly checking up on skill progress, and always keeping a defensive skill on the loadout. The only interesting “mistake” was the last one, which claimed spending time anywhere except the bandit area was a waste of time.
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It turned out that there were six total starting zones in the game: Forest, Desert, Wetlands, Volcano, Mountain, and Grasslands. All of them shared three monster areas, which were the slimes, goblins, and bandits, with the fourth area being an assortment of wildlife animals. There was no way to travel between starting zones, so if someone was unhappy with where they spawned, they would have to create a new character.
No one had cleared the bandit area to progress to the next level yet, but according to Billy, farming up the Bandit Killer title was crucial to making it easier. Even though the titles had no obvious stat boosts, the drop in aggression made it easier to run back to the instanced zones and attempt them more.
I frowned a bit when the video ended. I had personally planned on visiting the wildlife zone to at least clear the bare minimum for the new skills. It wasn’t uncommon for these newer “guide” videos to be intentionally misleading to create a larger gap between the top players and everyone else, but this particular point seemed almost malicious.
The fact that no one had cleared the bandit zone in the first few days of the game’s release implied to me that gear and skill power alone was not enough to brute force through it. Otherwise, the players who had been in the game 24/7 would have cleared it already. that meant there were a few more layers of complexity that were intentionally kept hidden.
Well, it was inevitable for someone to leak those layers in the upcoming day. The video industry was vicious, and I was confident that someone would post a partial breakdown of the hard parts sooner rather than later.
I could also just ask Paul…
“…inefficiencies such as not optimizing your loadout for specific roles. By committing to a standard RPG loadout, your proficiencies are going to be aligned, and you won’t have to spend excess copper on low quality skill books.”
My phone had continued to play videos while my thoughts wandered, and the auto-play feature had taken me into another “beginner mistakes'' themed script. This video was created by a young adult who was incredibly good at the games they played, but would constantly insult their teammates and opponents in their commentary. I usually had their videos muted while I studied their movement, but it seemed they were also attempting to cash out on the new game guide boom.
“With all of the copper you save, you can actually purchase an EXCLUSIVE skill, made by yours truly. I can personally guarantee the strength of this skill, and you will BREEZE through the starting zone.”
A blue skill book with mesmerizing holographic trim appeared, bouncing around in the video frame. The exuberant price tag slowly shimmered into view, and I almost choked on my spit.
Alice had mentioned her estimated price tag the night before so I thought I knew what to expect, but there appeared to be an extra zero on the number I saw.
“For the affordable price of 50,000 copper, you can purchase this and massively enhance yourself. This offer is limited, so act fast!”
I did some rough mental math, and it would probably take me multiple months of my first day’s haul to get anywhere close to that amount. I guess I still had to sort out my loot from the run with the party last night, but the investment just could not be worth it.
Unless, of course, creating a high quality unique skill was legitimately that difficult. The more I thought about it, the less outrageous the claim was.
If constructed well, a unique skill had much higher odds of being unbalanced compared to the skills that the game would provide this early. Even more crucially, if the game provided branching paths for upgrading unique skills like with Bolt, then the unrefined version of another person’s skill could be tailored for individual use.
That meant someone was rich enough early on, they could build a loadout of incredibly optimized unique skills. The point of this person’s self-advertisement wasn’t for normal people, but for players who had the means to dress themselves up with luxurious and unique skills. There was definitely a market for converting real cash to copper floating around, so to a wealthy person with the connections, the purchase would be an easy decision.
I stopped pedaling for a moment to catch my breath and let the moment of unexpected admiration to wash over me. The kid, aware or not, had potentially stumbled into an absurdly lucrative market. I sent Alice a link to the video with an explanatory text, before finishing the session. The rest of the videos became white noise as I began to spin ideas for my own unique skill in my head.
…
“- and she gave me her number. I’ll leave her hanging for a bit and text her right before I go to bed.”
“I mean, why can’t you just text her now. The last girl ghosted you because you kept playing games with her like this.”
“If she’s interested in me, then she’ll text first, right? Besides, she hit on me first. Said I had a nice ass.”
Felix pointed his butt at me and flexed it a few times.
“I mean, yeah you have a nice ass. She ain’t gonna see it if you don’t text her though.”
“Whatever dude… You just don’t understand the struggles of single strugglers…”
The streets of the city were quiet as Felix and I walked to the address listed on the lanyard. A few late stragglers speed walked the streets, but the eerie stillness from the lack of commuting students was palpable.
“At least me and Alice don’t act like Paul and Katy do out in public!”
“My brother, I’d almost prefer if you two did! There’s no hidden tension between them because they’re just on t- hey!!“
“Oh, we’re here.” I cut Felix off mid sentence by tossing a mint at his mouth and bouncing it off his lip.