Chapter 1: Void*
(3 days until Game of Soul becomes real)
When SoulCorp unveiled their game, I wasn’t too excited about it. I was never really excited about anything after a multitude of disappointing game releases. Regardless, all of my friends seemed really hyped to play Game of Soul, so I decided to pick up a copy and try it out. At first, my friends and I stuck together and were able to do pretty well for ourselves, but life was always pretty busy in regard to school and work so we never really made it to anywhere notable. My character was called Baku, named after a game I used to play as a kid. Baku is short for the Japanese word for explosion (bakuhatsu), so I designed my character around explosions. One really cool thing about Game of Soul was that it took inspiration from many games and placed references and items that were from those games within itself. For example, the Balefire Scroll from another game I played as a kid was an item that was obtainable in Game of Soul, it was an ultra-powerful tier item that only dropped from Omen, a high level boss. Balefire is basically a long line of explosions that shoot out forward from the user’s hands, or in this case, the scroll. It was the ultimate explosion item, so I knew that I had to have it. One problem: Omen was a very powerful boss, with a huge amount of health, and dying made you lose a bit of SoulScore so it wasn’t like my group of friends could just keep attempting Omen. Soon, college came around and I still hadn’t achieved the Balefire Scroll, and my group of friends had mostly moved on from the game, only logging in for daily rewards every now and then or attempting the occasional event.
However, I wasn’t about to give up. Omen was powerful, but many of the top players had already conquered him much earlier into the game being released, so it was definitely possible for me to take him on alone. It was summertime before my first semester of college when I finally decided to stop watching online tutorials and just attempt Omen myself. I approached the Underside Portal, a black, swirling, corrupted mess of energy that existed behind a waterfall in one of the starting zones of the game. However, low level players that found the secret portal before being given the quest for it were unable to enter. I was all ready to go and had just topped up my potions, so I entered the portal.
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Underside was a massive gothic town. It was constantly nighttime and the moon had a twisted face on it, likely a reference to Legend of Zelda. I had been to Underside before, the zone itself wasn’t too difficult aside from some annoying vampire villagers that would try to pickpocket you, and many quests took place in the zone, including some important dungeons, so I had spent some time in Underside for those reasons. I walked into the bar to meet the NPC Grimmgore, a tall and burly man. Grimmgore smiled and handed me Omen’s key, a dark black piece of metal that weighed heavy in my hands. I turned around and left the tavern to head towards Omen’s gate. Taking one look back at Underside, I inserted the key and turned it.
Right away, I was greeted with the familiar sight of dead trees and blackened grass, a common trait in Underside. This time though, a bright golden throne sat across from the gateway that stood out against the dark black surroundings. One issue immediately crossed my mind, Omen was nowhere to be seen. Puzzled, I noticed a large whistling noise coming from above me. I looked up to see Omen barreling towards the middle of the battlefield wrapped in a purple-colored aura. He landed with a thunderous crash around 20 feet from me and disintegrated into black ash, leaving his loot drops and the guaranteed Balefire Scroll. I was shocked and confused, but my questions were quickly answered when the figure behind the black ash revealed himself. A male half demon with a middle part and an unobtainable event sweatband that ran around his head and under his hair known as the Nightband. The same purple aura that surrounded Omen retreated around the man as he looked over at me.
“Oh crap, sorry dude, just doing a farm run for an item I don’t have yet, I’m a collector” the chat bubble said.
“Oh, that’s okay...but I thought this was a single-combat area,” I replied.
“Um, yep! Anyway, you can have these drops, I already have them, okay bye!” The man said before disappearing into a self-created portal.
“What the hell?” I thought, who was this guy, where did he come from, and why did he just leave me the drop I’d been searching for for so long. Also, how did he destroy Omen so easily, and how in the hell did he get into a single combat zone with me? No point in asking questions now though, he was already gone. I walked over to the Balefire Scroll and picked it up, giving me the familiar “Achievement” screen and the title “Balefire Sorcerer.” As I turned to leave the instance, I thought to myself, “Damn, my friends are gonna think this is crazy.”