Day 1
12:05 P.M.
Once the man had finished watching the video, he fell to his knees. He frantically searched through the Menu for the Log Out button but couldn’t find it. His breathing became ragged and uneven as he crawled into the inviting shade of a nearby dilapidated house. Was he really trapped? In a video game? A month had passed? What? Through his panicked thoughts, a stupid part of his brain kept saying that he had missed his job interview.
“Occam’s Razor,” he said to himself like a crazy person. “The simplest solution is usually correct. Surely, it’s more likely that someone is lying than a crazy AI has kidnapped three hundred thousand people.” He removed himself from that dark hiding place and just started walking in a random direction. As long as he was moving in some direction, it was preferable to doing nothing.
At that point, the man saw a woman jogging in his direction. She was coming from the direction of the gunshots from earlier, so she was probably the one that had fired them. The woman had a concerned expression on her face. She had probably also seen the video.
The man removed the blood-stained cloth from his satchel and waved it over his head. The white flag of peace was raised. Though, the man supposed, it was the white-and-red flag of peace. She saw him and began to jog forward. Briefly, her expression turned to relief.
Upon the woman seeing him, the man was self-conscious of his own appearance. He had medium-length blonde hair that covered his ears but didn’t go past his shoulders. Blonde facial hair decorated his lower face. His build was average, and he was exactly six feet tall. His skin was fair, and he had green eyes.
The woman had dark skin and dark hair, but her eyes were a bright hazel color. Her eyes contrasted sharply against her skin and hair. The juxtaposition was quite striking. Her hair was straight, and it stopped mid-way down her neck. The woman was short and had a slight build. She couldn’t have been more than five foot three inches tall, though the man's instinctive sense for the height of others was somewhat impaired at the time because his avatar was two inches taller than his real body.
“We need to get back to the City. I’m sure this is all just a joke… but,” she paused for a moment. “You know what I’m talking about, right?”
“Yeah,” the man said, “I’ve seen the message. We’re trapped in this game, and we’ll die for real if we die in the game. That’s the idea, I take it?” The man could tell that his skepticism of the whole situation could be gleaned from his tone.
“That’s what the message said,” she said. “But it’s all got to be fake. This is just too weird to be real."
“I agree. There’s just no way any of this is real. Even if, somehow, we’ve all been taken hostage by somebody, there’s no way it’s an AI. It’s probably just a hacker group that’s holding us ransom, and it’s only a matter of time before somebody gets us out. Plus, the whole thing about the game killing us is certainly impossible. It’s not like any of the devices used to run Ferrum have any mechanisms that could be used to kill the user. The devices attached to our heads are small. All the computations are done by our actual computers, which the headgear is attached to.”
“That makes sense. I’m sure you’re right,” the woman said, uncertain. “But… didn’t GM say that he’d kill us by sending a message to our brains that’d kill us. Theoretically, that could be done through the use of software and not hardware.”
The man let out a short sigh in annoyance, “I don’t know about any of that theoretical stuff. I’m an accountant IRL. I’m just an amateur when it comes to technology.”
“Most of this is beyond me, too,” she said. “My name is Rachel York, by the way.”
“I’m Enzo,” the man said without putting much thought into it. “Let’s just get back to the City so we can see what everybody else is saying. When I logged in, there were more than 20,000 players on this server. Surely at least one of them can give us some insight into our situation.”
Rachel York closed her eyes and held her left hand out in front of her. Enzo was confused for a moment before he realized that she must have been accessing her menu. It was strange seeing it from the outside. Rachel made a few motions with her hand before she opened her eyes. Enzo faintly heard the sound of a bell, and he was aware that the sound existed only within his mind.
Enzo opened his menu and saw a notification overlayed over his home page. It said [Friend Request: Concerto622]. He quickly pressed the button to accept the request.
“So that’s how you do it,” Enzo said offhandedly.
Rachel started to walk toward the West Gate in the opposite direction from where she came, “We really ought to go before more monsters show up.”
“Okay,” Enzo said. As they walked, he gently pulled back the bolt of his rifle and loaded two more rounds. He pulled out his bayonet with the intent to draw more blood, but he pulled short having just had a thought.
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“Have you taken any damage ever since you got here?” Enzo asked.
“No, have you?” Rachel responded quickly. She looked at Enzo's bloody handkerchief. “Did you get into a knife fight with one of them?”
“It’s just,” Enzo was suddenly embarrassed by the thought that he had harmed himself unnecessarily. “I heard a player back in town mention that you need to bleed on the Deluvians to kill them.”
“That doesn’t seem right,” she said. “I shot and killed one earlier. The bullet didn’t have my blood on it.”
Enzo felt a sense of annoyance grow in his chest. “My information might be out of date,” he said. “My point is that it hurt a lot more than it should when I sliced open my hand,” he made a slashing motion toward his wrist with the bayonet. “It was like I had cut myself in the real world."
“It’s probably just a little present our captors left for us,” Rachel said offhandedly.
A moment later, the two players began to hear sporadic gunshots. The two of them ducked into cover and leveled their rifles at the sound. The shots were loud enough that the gunfight must have been less than twenty yards away, but they could not see the actual fighting. Rachel spoke, barely audible over the sound of the fight, “...do gunshots… so loud?”
Thirty seconds of deafening noise continued without signs of stopping. Impatient, Enzo stood up from cover and mantled the low brick wall they were hiding behind.
“What are you doing!?” Rachel shouted loud enough for Enzo to hear over the gunshots.
“It doesn’t matter anyway, right?” Enzo said. “Either we’re in no real danger so there’s nothing to fear from me going, or those people over there are in danger,” Enzo pointed toward the gunshots, “so I ought to go help them. You should go back to the City without me. Sorry I couldn’t be of more help.”
“Hey!” she shouted. “Don’t run in there without a plan! You’re being an idiot!” Enzo turned and began sprinting toward the sound of gunfire at full speed. He held his rifle in one hand like he was sprinting with a lacrosse stick. Enzo hadn’t run that fast ever since he was a kid. Enzo was in better shape than he had ever been in his adult life. Within seconds, he turned a corner and saw five players hiding behind a three-story house. Beyond them, Enzo saw more than a dozen Deluvians. His momentum carried him across the street where he dove for cover behind a large oak tree.
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Of the five players behind the house, two had been injured. One was holding his stomach from which a steady stream of red blood was pooling. The other had both of his hands clamped down on the ragged mess that had once been his leg. Both injured men were screaming so loudly that Enzo could hear them over the gunfight.
Four of the players were men, and one was a woman. The woman was Asian, one of the injured men was black, and the other three were white. The woman had shoulder-length black hair that stuck to her skin where clumps of mud peppered her face. She wore the same loose military uniform as all the other players, so Enzo couldn’t determine her build at a distance. The injured black man, who had taken a bullet to the stomach, had a crew cut and a scar on his face. Considering that the game had started less than an hour ago, he had probably added the scar himself during character creation. One of the uninjured white men had light brown hair and a smaller frame, and the other had swept-back black hair and a more athletic frame. In terms of age, all five of the players hiding behind the house were very young. They all seemed to be in their late teens or early twenties.
Enzo flipped over onto his stomach and put his sights on the Deluvians. There were about ten of the pig-faced monsters firing at the five players. A smooth trigger pull, a deafening bang, a bullet through a monster’s skull. “One,” he whispered to himself as he racked the bolt. The glacial pace of the bolt-action rifle gave the other Deluvians a moment to react. If his rifle had been semi or full auto, he's have been able to easily kill all of them in a few seconds. The second greenskin only had time to rise from its stooped position before Enzo's second shot ripped through its rib cage. “Two,” he whispered, racking the bolt. The remaining Deluvians were moving by the time Enzo's rifle was ready to fire. Enzo's third shot struck the third Deluvian in the leg. He swore and racked the bolt. The Deluvian would have difficulty fighting with that injury, but it would survive. “Three,” he growled. A Deluvian had taken a moment to point a rifle of its own in Enzo's direction. Enzo's fourth bullet ripped through the greenskin's left eye and shattered through the back of its skull. “Four,” Enzo said a moment before a puff of dirt erupted a few feet in front of him. The Deluvians had started returning fire. He rolled back behind the tree. “Wasn’t even able to get through all six shots,” he growled, continuing the trend of him talking to himself. Enzo swore loudly at his luck.
With his back to the tree, Enzo saw a flash and heard the crack of a gun. For a moment, Enzo thought that they had somehow managed to flank him, but he saw that the gunshot had originated from Rachel’s rifle. She was in cover behind a house, and she was shooting past him at the Deluvians. For some reason, Rachel had followed Enzo on his suicidal charge. He was immensely grateful to her, largely due to the fact that he was in a suboptimal tactical position.
Enzo couldn’t reposition without potentially getting shot. The Deluvians knew he was behind the tree, so they’d probably shoot him the moment he stuck his head out again. Eventually, the gunshots started to sound different. The sharp crack of incoming fire had ceased and were replaced by the duller sound of outgoing fire. Enzo rolled back into his earlier shooting position and found that all but one of the Deluvians laid dead on the ground. The one remaining Deluvian had its back turned to him, and it was shooting at something in the opposite direction. Confused but grateful, Enzo shot it in the back, and the sound of fighting abruptly came to a stop. Enzo stood up, half of his frame still blocked by the tree.
On a hunch, Enzo walked out into the middle of the road and waved a hand in the direction of the Deluvians. A moment later, he saw a flashing light come from a few hundred feet past the slowly disintegrating monster corpses. The flash was distinct from a gunshot. It was like someone with a mirror was flashing the light into his eyes. Someone was out there watching Enzo. He jogged to the five players behind the house. The pained screaming of the two men seemed much louder now that the gunshots had stopped.
Rachel shouldered her rifle and jogged up to Enzo. He turned to her, and she said with a smile, “I guess it worked.”
EnzoTheBaker
https://i.imgur.com/2ZBISM9.jpg [https://i.imgur.com/2ZBISM9.jpg]