With one fluid motion, Kyle bumped his crystal against his hip while thrusting his hand forward, hitting two buttons nearly as soon as they appeared. A candle-sized wisp of flame appeared in his right hand, its glow completely subsumed by the half-dozen torches lighting the cavern. He dropped it on the ground, where it winked out. Kyle performed the motion again, summoning another tiny flame which he dropped immediately. He did it again…

…and found himself holding a bowl of warm soup.

“Hey, what’cha doing there?” Jacob asked. The cavern became lighter as Jacob pulled away from the rest of the group to approach Kyle with his torch.

“Practicing,” Kyle said, glancing at Jacob. “The guy who burnt our town drew a dagger so fast I didn’t even realize he was doing it. And I think I figured out how.”

“Yeah?” Jacob said.

“Like this,” Kyle said, holding up his hand with his index finger and his thumb extended, but all other fingers curled. “See, if I just jab my hand forward, my finger hits my menu before my thumb, so I can press two buttons with a single move. And if I bump my crystal against my hip at the same time, I can open the menu, hit skills, and hit a spell, all at once.”

Jacob tried performing the motion as well, much slower. He shook his head. “Seems hard, man. If you mess up even a little, you go into your inventory instead.”

“Yup,” said Kyle, holding up his stew. “But if you could get the hang of it, you can pull off a spell really fast. I’m trying to get it into muscle memory so I could do it in combat. I even made a powered-down version of the flame spell so I could practice without wasting mana.” Kyle put his stew away and went back to bump-jabbing his hand.

“Seems like a lot of work to get that good,” Jacob said.

“I guess,” said Kyle, dropping another candle flame. “But I guess that’s the world we live in for now, right? It makes sense to practice so we can keep our city safe from trolls.”

Jacob shrugged and turned away as Kyle continued making and dropping the tiny fireballs. After a moment he turned back. “So what do we need all that wood for, anyway?”

“We don’t,” said Kyle, still focused on his practice.

“Wait, what?!” Jacob said. “We chopped wood for nearly two hours before coming into the cave!”

“Yep,” Kyle said in a deadpan.

“If we didn’t need the wood, what was the point?”

“The point was to chop the wood. To get used to the feeling,” Kyle heard heavy footfalls, and held up a hand to quiet Jacob’s complaint.

From the darkness, Mason emerged, dashing quickly. He was being followed by a dozen goblins, who were slowly gaining on him. Kyle spared a glance back and saw the dozen or so people he’d brought to the cavern standing and drawing weapons. Kyle could hardly suppress a grin, and calmly continued practicing his hand motions.

With a leap, Mason dove over a chalk line on the floor. The goblins skidded to a halt right in front of the chalk line, then shrugged, and sauntered away, completely ignoring the rest of the nervous players.

“They only pursue for about a hundred yards,” Kyle said to the bewildered players. “Don’t sweat it; we measured before we brought you here.” He ignored the murmurs from the players and turned to Mason, who was covered in pink dots and lines. “You got the torches set up?”

“Yeah,” Mason said between heavy, even breaths. “It’d better be worth it,” he muttered. Aubrey strode to Mason on her thick dwarven legs and placed her glowing green hand on Mason’s thigh. The dots and lines on Mason’s arms started to fade, and Mason breathed a sigh of relief. “Thanks.” Aubrey nodded and withdrew.

When asked by the angel why she sought power, she said “I originally came expecting to get healing spells,” which was technically true.

“What was that all about, man?” Jacob asked, looking back and forth between Kyle, Aubrey, and Mason. “Am I missing something?”

“I’m about to explain,” Kyle said, and he stood and faced the group behind him. “Okay guys. Follow me down the hallway.”

After a short walk, they arrived at the mouth of the cavern, the same one that Kyle’s group had fought in before. He found himself looking at the corner he had “buried” Dvorak in. It seemed like such a long time ago, though it had only been a few weeks.

Unlike last time, the cavern was brightly lit. Torches had been strewn every ten feet or so, and the goblins didn’t seem to mind them. They’d only stay lit for a few hours, but that was plenty of time for what Kyle had in mind.

“Thanks again,” Kyle said to Mason, who only nodded in response.

Kyle turned back to the group and looked at the faces of the crowd. A good mix of races. Mostly middle-age. Scared. Out of their element.

“Sit down, guys,” Kyle said. “We’ll be here a while. Don’t cross this chalk line; that represents how close you need to be for them to notice and chase you.”

“What are we doing? Are we going to fight them?” asked a middle-age dwarf. Tim. Kyle was making an effort to learn the names of everybody in the town; not just his friends.

Stolen story; please report.

“Not yet,” Kyle said, addressing the crowd as much as Tim. “We’re just going to sit and watch for a while.” Kyle sat down, and the others started to do so as well. “Pay close attention.”

Kyle looked out at the cavern of goblins. Three near the back of the cavern were playing cards. One stood and started shrieking at another in a way that vaguely sounded like it might be a language. The other stood up, and the two goblins start pushing each other. Kyle smiled as a third stepped in to break them up. This was good. This exercise wouldn’t take as long as Kyle was afraid it might. He leaned back and started the wait.

The minutes ticked by as the group watched the goblins milling about, oblivious to the players. They seemed pretty realistic; they communicated in hoarse grunts, sharpened weapons, milled about, ate food they pulled from hammerspace, threw rocks against the walls, and otherwise acted like bored and undisciplined sentries.

The players Kyle had brought started out attentive. As time passed, some quickly lost interest; others lasted longer. Before long most players (including Jacob) were watching the goblins with obvious boredom. Some players were chatting with each other, not paying attention in the slightest. Tim had blessedly gotten paper out and was taking notes.

Slightly before fifteen minutes had passed, Kyle stood and pulled his own notes from his pocket. “Guys? Guys, pay attention again.” As the group looked up at Kyle, he motioned towards the goblins. He glanced at them, looking for signs and counting seconds. “See if you recognize… that.”

Just as Kyle finished his sentence, the two goblins playing cards stood up and started screeching at each other. “Then that one gets up and stops the fight,” Kyle said, pointing at a goblin right before it moved in to stop the altercation. “That one cheers and goads them, that one laughs, and that one gets annoyed.” Kyle looked at his sheet of notes for reference. “In about a minute, that one objects to the quality of his stew-”

“That’s because that one over there drops the meat in the embers before putting it in the soup. He’s hoping nobody notices,” Tim said, looking at his own sheet. “Look, there he goes. Boop.”

Kyle hadn’t noticed that detail. He nodded appreciatively as the goblin receiving the soup took a bite and started shouting. “Then that guy starts sharpening his sword,” he said, pointing to another.

“Is he going to offer to sharpen the other guy’s sword?” Jacob asked, pointing out another goblin. “Because he did last time.”

Kyle nodded. “Who here thought that these goblins were awfully realistic? Show of hands.” Nearly every hand went up. Kyle smiled. “I did too. They did a really good job giving these goblins a great idle animation. Fifteen minutes long! And they all interact with each other! I’d hate to be in the animation department for this game.”

“They probably didn’t animate this,” Aubrey said. “They probably just motion captured a group of people doing improv, ran it through a deep learning network to teach a computer how to generate ‘bored guard’ routines, then baked out the results.”

Kyle nodded sagely as though he understood more than half the words. “Yeah. But they aren’t real.” He looked down at his sheet. “That goblin’s going to throw a rock at the wall. It’ll bounce off and hit his head. Just like it does every fifteen minutes.”

“It’s a wonder he hasn’t run out of HP by this point,” someone said from the back. Some people glared at him, and some people chuckled. Kyle wanted to encourage this line of thought.

“Yeah, I know, right?” Kyle motioned back to the goblins. “Those swords are sharpened every fifteen minutes. It’s a wonder there’s anything left of them.” After waiting for the chuckles to die down, Kyle resumed being serious. “These aren’t real. It’s a sham. A show. There’s nothing here. Code. Animation loops. Actors. Baking. Whatever that is. The point is, these things don’t think. We’ve all played games at some point, right? Most of us? These are no more real than any other goblin in any other game.

“But the people you were talking to, when you were bored and distracted? They’re real. Hopes and dreams and all that. There’s the paradox. This game’s trying to make the NPCs look real. And it tries to make the players look like monsters. Killable. Fake.” Kyle rolled his eyes. “No matter how long we stay in this world, we’ve got to remember this. We’re real. It’s fake.”

Kyle saw nods of assent. This was the easy part. Most people here knew this intellectually.

But did they know it viscerally?

“Axes out, guys.” People started withdrawing their axes. Kyle did the same. This training exercise was for him, too.

“Remember how you chopped down those trees? Good, solid hits. Holding nothing back. Half-hearted strikes just slow down the process.” He patted the back of the Axe-head into his palm. “Well those goblins and those trees are the same thing. It’s just code. We just spent an hour cutting wood. Well now we’re cutting goblins. And it’s the same thing. No spells, guys. I want you to see the fake look in their fake faces when you hit them with your fake weapons.”

Most in the group wore grim expressions. Jacob gulped. Kyle understood the feeling.

“Why?” Asked Tim, face disgusted. “Why do we need to do this? Don’t think you’ve pulled anything over on us, young man. You gathered the townsfolk least suited for combat to go on this little expedition.”

“Except Avina,” Mason muttered.

“And I think she was the smart one,” Tim continued. “None of us want this. None of us care. Why are you trying to make us into murderers?”

“First off, not murderers. Unless you’re already a murderer for chopping those digital trees.” Kyle expected a laugh, but got none, so he continued. “Second off, the more people that run dungeons, the better off we’ll all be. We’ll have higher-level players. More skills for our town. More ranks in our stats. And more stuff. Aubrey?”

Aubrey nodded and pushed towards the front of the group, before turning and facing the crowd. “There are chests in dungeons. From what data we’ve gathered, there are two kinds of loot in this game. We call them ‘diminishing loot’ and ‘personal loot’. You’ve heard chests respawn, right? Every time they do, they’ve got less stuff in them. Inverse tangent or something. But,” Aubrey continued, holding up a finger, “when a player opens any given chest for the first time, it’s got some extra, randomized loot in it. Just for them. We call that ‘personal loot’, and it makes it so no matter how many times a jacker’s run a dungeon, there’s always something there for people who run it for the first time.”

“And that’s one of our many advantages against the game-jackers,” Kyle said, nodding towards Aubrey. “With thirty people in our town, we can get thirty copies of the personal loot. If we pool those resources and divvy them up according to what we specialize in, we can end up with way more stuff than game-jackers who are at the mercy of the random drop table. But we all need to run dungeons to get that advantage. And that means you need practice.”

Jacob nodded, fingering his axe nervously. Tim looked skeptical, but proffered no further resistance. Others in the group were variously fearful, resigned, or occasionally excited.

“Okay folks,” Kyle said, turning away from him into the cavern. “Line up at the chalk line. Pick a near goblin. On my signal, charge it. Then, just… chop down a tree. If you get hit, shout for Aubrey; she’ll patch you up.” He heard players shuffling into position behind him. “Oh. And one more thing. This is a game, right?” Kyle grinned with an impishness he did not feel. “Have fun! I’m being serious. It’ll help. ‘Kay, ready? Three. Two. One….”

Kyle took a deep breath. He had to show by example how completely meaningless this “violence” was.

“Go!”

Time to slaughter some hapless goblins.