Welcome to Ithavoll! The challenges we overcome give us meaning! Fight well! The fate of your species depends on it!
‘Well, that statement isn’t ominous at all.’ The errant thought came to Daniel as he read the blue box floating in front of him. ‘Just how did I get here? Where is here? Whose AROs are these?’
“Hey new blood. Grab some gear and move out to join your team. They need to get going and trust me, you don’t want to be known as someone who drags his feet.” The voice seemed urgent but not impatient, and it was clear to Daniel that the man was talking to him. Dismissing the box that popped up, the young man focused on his surroundings.
He was in a tall tent of some sort, wearing coarse clothing. In front of him was a man organizing equipment. To the right of him were piles of neatly folded leather armor and to the left were racks of weapons. Daniel glanced at the man with a puzzled expression.
The man sighed and shook his head, “Young man, you are obviously new here. I don’t have time to explain to you your full situation. Rather you don’t have time for me to do that. So just do what I say. Trust me on this ok?”
The man’s voice was quite earnest and he had an open and benevolent expression on his face so Daniel nodded his assent. This caused the man to give him a weak smile before thrusting a set of armor into his hand, “Ok, take this set of armor here and put it on. Do not worry about the size. Here in the first zone they will change shape to fit you.”
Daniel glanced around to find a place to change but stopped when he heard a sigh, “You don’t have time for modesty. Change now. While you are doing that I will get you the basic weapons for the light infantry division.”
Embarrassed, he began to inexpertly equip the armor. After a while, the other man came along and started helping him. He shifted the pads, and fastened the straps. “Young man, you will want to get used to this as quickly as possible. Equipping your armors efficiently will become an important skill for you in the future. Do not worry about it for now, though, you don’t have time to practice this and you are not likely to in the near future.
“There. Done. Here, strap this dagger here, and hold tight to this spear. Now hurry along and join your team. Do your best to survive kid. If you make it through the day come find me in the camp tonight and I will tell you the rest of what you need to know. If you don’t, well, I will see you tomorrow.”
With that enigmatic statement, the older man pushed him out of the tent. Daniel was incredulous, ‘What was that all about. If I don’t make it through the day, he’ll see me tomorrow. And why am I in a tent in the middle of an encampment being ordered to join a team of soldiers clearly running off to battle? Is one of my friends screwing with me? Did someone hook me into a Full Dive while I was sleeping in the dorms?’
Daniel checked his peripheral vision for any Head Up Displays that may indicate that he was in a game. He saw none of the ones particular to his own Personal Assistant Artificial Intelligence customization, but he saw something in the bottom right of his vision that when focused on raised some form of in game status screen. More concerned about finding an options menu and more specifically an exit option, he ignored the status and pop ups associated with that.
Finding nothing of the sort, he followed his gaming logic and assumed that he may gain access to something like that by hitting a milestone in the game. While he wasn’t as nitpicky about games as some of his friends, he had always hated milestone based save game locations and options menus from before the rise of Virtual Reality, and now experiencing it in what appeared to be a Full Dive game was particularly annoying.
Daniel started grumbling to himself, this kind of situation was too vicious for most of his friends, leaving only Jason. But really what fool would design a game like this in the first place? Full Dives were required to have easy to access escape commands by law. This was one of the firmest limitations the Peacekeeping Authority had placed on Virtual Reality makers since the creation of the first Full Dive games.
‘Knowing Jason, though, he isn’t the type to do something this reckless and not participate in it personally. Let’s just play his game for now and see what happens.’ Coming to that conclusion, Daniel looked around at the camp as he exited the tent with the man that behaved like a quartermaster. To the left and right, the large campaign tents stretched as far as the eye could see, but in front of him were four people dressed in a similar get up to his own.
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These four were three men and one woman. One of the men had slightly better gear than the rest of them with a decent sword instead of the dagger Daniel had gotten. His armor seemed a grade better as well. Following the ‘Dead Collector Method of Deduction’ Daniel concluded that this fellow was the leader. The other three's equipment only varied from Daniel’s in size and degree of wear.
The leader looked over at Daniel as he approached and spoke, “Ah, our new blood has arrived. Good that you have come, I am your team lead, Tian Dong, and these are Eric, Chris, and Natalia.”
The young man nodded to them before speaking, “Daniel Cook.”
The others introduced themselves, but Daniel noticed a strange, almost standoffish like attitude from them. Smiling politely, Tian Dong ignored the awkwardness, “I am sure you have questions but we don’t have time to answer them. If we survive long enough to talk at our leisure, I will try to do my best to clear up any questions you have at that point.
“For now though, I will just give you a few pointers. Just stay close to us and attack what we attack. Try not to get killed and don’t fall behind. Finally, get in the habit of moving with urgency. While it can be excused due to your unfamiliarity with our situation, it will save us all a lot of hardship if you get in the habit of hustling to wherever you need to be. Got it?”
Daniel listened to the man and nodded. Three out of five of these so called pointers seemed linked so he assumed that in this other man’s eyes, moving with urgency was quite possibly the most important instruction of the bunch. “Yes, stay close, attack who you attack, don’t die, don’t fall behind, and hustle.”
The man looked him up and down before continuing, “I really do wish we had more time, the first few days are always the worst for the new bloods. Just live through the morning and we will have a real chance to talk then. If not, well, there’s always tomorrow. Natalia, keep an eye on him for me. Let’s go.”
Tian Dong set off at a brisk pace, not quite running but moving as close to a run you could get while walking. Daniel kept up, while looking around to see more of the encampment as they went through it. After several moments of hustling, they made it to the edge of the camp and exited the gates. A wide valley stretched out in front of them, with small forests dotted around the terrain and a small river cutting through it. Directly in front of them were ranks upon ranks of other soldiers like them, all in the dyed black leather they were wearing. Daniel saw flags standing from every formation but couldn’t read them as they appeared to be in Chinese or some other east asian language. Quickly, their team made their way to one of the light infantry formations in the center left.
Seeing the thousands upon thousands of soldiers arrayed in this formation, Daniel was amazed at the scale of this game. He had seen games that looked almost this realistic before, but never with this much scale. He could just imagine the processing power and throughput necessary for this many models to be accurately shown in the simulation.
Now in position, he took a moment to survey the field. On this side was the army he was attached to, while he was no master at estimating troop sizes, he guessed from the formations he saw that there were easily a hundred thousand people in this army. The front formations were similar to his own, all light infantry with leather and spears. Behind them were crossbowmen and heavy infantry, with the rear of the army and the far flanks made up of cavalry of different sorts.
The enemy force was on the other side of the field. Daniel couldn’t quite make out what their unit composition was and his attempts to estimate their numbers was foiled by how disordered they were, but he could tell easily that the enemy force was smaller than theirs, perhaps only half their force’s size. While he felt that the numbers difference should give him a sense of confidence, the tension he felt coming off of the soldiers around him did the opposite. There was one more thing. After spending a summer on construction crews, he was a good judge of distance and estimating the size of things. Right now if he had to guess, those enemies on the other side of the field were easily eight feet tall and with the sheer mass on them, they would be well over three hundred pounds.
“Just what…” He blurted out as realization dawned on him, but he was quickly answered by Natalia.
“Orcs, they are bigger and stronger than us on average, but they aren’t particularly smart and are chaotic by nature. This means they don’t use formations or particularly in depth strategies. A group of five of us using spears can take a normal orc down pretty effectively.” She said, pausing a moment before deciding to say a bit more. “Don’t try to block an axe swing, just get out of the way. Noone’s expecting anything much out of you, just do your part and try your best to stay alive, understand?”
Daniel nodded in confirmation before she dropped a bomb on him. “Also, if I get badly injured during the fighting, finish me off quickly. I don’t want to lie there in pain until someone finally decides to give me that mercy. Do that for any of the other light infantry. We would do the same for you.”
“Wait, what?”