The world I found myself in was white.

I almost panicked for a second “Is this what being dead feels like?” I thought, but the image of the guide lady saying we would be transported to a white buffer area before the actual simulation began made me feel a bit calmer.

“So this is true virtual reality…” I said.

My voice sounded strange in this empty environment, like talking inside a room so big no echo reached back to me. “Is the tutorial scene starting any time soon?” I asked out loud as I stretched my new digital body.

Everything felt almost exactly the same as in the real world, kinda like my legs were a bit longer or my hair a bit rougher than usual. I took a mental note of the fact that I wasn’t wearing my glasses and of what I was wearing.

A pair of brown, light ankle banded trousers, comfortable leather shoes and a white linen shirt completed my classical, non-descript, medieval styled fit and, over those, I wore what I assumed was a starting set of armour. Thin, steel chin guards protected the lower part of my legs and a long mail (or ‘chain-mail’ if you like) covered my chest, upper arms and groin. Leather braces were tied around my forearms and a simple, light steel cuirass protected my most vital organs.

I noticed that nor clothes nor armour made any sound as I moved around in the empty room and that I felt no discomfort from wearing what I assumed was heavier than anything I usually wore on a daily basis.

Feeling a bit nervous, in the silence, I tried to call out to someone. “Anyone there?” I said. “Um… Menu?” I whispered trying to open some sort of menu like I was told to do before the trial started.

I waited for a couple silent seconds only to realize that nothing had happened. “Options? Settings? Exit… Help?” I tried saying as I moved my arms around mimicking some made up hand motions that I hoped would activate something.

But nothing I tried resulted in anything of note. After waving my arms around and screaming into the seeming void for what felt like hours, I had only managed to tire myself to the point of gasping for air. I bend down and rest my hands on my knees, trying to calm my beating heart.

“Huh…” I heard myself whisper in the middle of the chaos that was my mind. “That felt way too real…”

Suddenly, as I tried to regain my breath, I felt incredibly sick. The world around me turned black as I felt a force that seemed to be trying to pull my brain apart. Flashing images appeared in front of me as disembodied voices rang around me.

I see the lab where my class and I had gone to test the new VR system that Bluelight had created, the Deep Dream Virtual Reality Systems. My sister stands in front of me, I try to move my arm towards her, it won’t budge. I hear someone say “This shouldn’t be happening” I recognize that voice, it’s the guide’s voice, one of the main developers of the system. “We’ve tested it before, it’s never…”

Voices begin to cut off and start again at random intervals, almost like a broken radio. “How long?” I hear someone I don’t recognize ask. “We aren’t sure but… They are still… simulation…”

“Without any… protection… brains don’t know difference… reality and dream…” I head Ms. Laura Engran say. For a second, the images stop and the voices ring clearly in my ears. “… like dreaming of falling and not waking up before touching the ground, the brain won’t always realize it’s not real… It could be fatal…”

The voices cut off and as I come back to my senses, my brain is inundated with colors, smells, textures and sounds. I finally breath in, feeling as if I had held my breath for a few seconds too long.

I am still bent over, my hands still on my knees, as if I hadn’t moved an inch since all of that, whatever that was, began.

My mind feels strangely clear as I gather up my thoughts. “So…” I whispered. “I die in the dream, I die in real life?” I felt myself smile. “What a shitty way to go…”

I stood up, my heart still beating fast, and checked my surroundings. “A forest.” I whispered.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

I could kind of see the sun up in the sky through the thick canopy of leaves and branches, but I couldn’t see much else other than endless rows of trees all around me. I checked myself and noticed I still wore my “non-descript medieval clothing”… plus another thing I had either failed to notice before or that had appeared in the moments between the freakout and appearing in the forest.

Attached to my belt, I found a scabbard containing what was either a very short sword or a rather large knife.

Remembering something I had seen on TV oh so long ago, I took it out of the scabbard and cut a large grove on the tree nearest to me, when lost in a forest, I gathered it would be useful to mark my way so not to end up walking in circles.

After I cut into it and thick, yellowish sap began to pour out of the wound in the wood, I noticed the tree looked a lot like a pine tree, if a bit on the larger side and slightly bluer than any pine tree I had seen before.

Seeing a branch relatively close to my head, I jumped and grabbed onto it. “First things first” I said, propping myself up to the branch and grabbing a second one that waited a bit further up. “Is to get a hold of my surroundings. No use in dwelling on my sorrows now, I know the basics, let’s build up from that.” A part of that was me just trying to be practical, an even bigger part of that was me just… not having accepted my situation, it didn’t feel real at all.

I climbed as such, grabbing onto further higher and higher branches like I had done so many times in my childhood, back when we used to go to the countryside with mom and dad, until I reached the tree’s summit.

I sat onto the thickest branch I could find at the top and grabbed onto the log. “Wow…” As far as the eye could see stretched a seemingly endless ocean of foliage, broken only by an equally impressive wall of cliffs far in the distance. I pulled a twig out of my hair and threw it back to the ground, following it with my eyes on its way back to the underforest. “Die in the dream, die in real life, huh…”

A roar suddenly broke the forest’s silence as two huge lizards appeared into view, seemingly falling out of a bank of clouds. I almost fell off the tree due to shock.

I grabbed tight and looked at the two figures flapping in the air, trying to keep themselves stable while also tied up in a huge battle.

It was far away enough that I was sure they couldn’t see me, which probably says a lot about their size when I say that I could see them pretty well.

The bigger one, a huge red lizard with bat like wings, bit onto the second one’s neck. I heard the second one, a beast so blue that it looked like the night sky, roar. Thunder sprouted out of its mouth, extending towards the sky and spreading in the clouds with intense flickering of lights.

Pretty sure that could have killed me, but it obviously wasn’t enough to dissuade the red lizard, as it bit down on the other one’s neck and roared. For a fraction of a second, nothing seemed to happen, but soon a strange hissing sound reached my ears as bright yellow flames bloomed from the blue one’s mouth… as well as every other hole in its body.

The blue beast didn’t even flinch… I don’t think it even had time to do that. As it fell to the ground, I found myself giving an open-mouthed stare at such display of raw force… and if things hadn’t felt real before, the noticeable heat increase in the air suddenly made it all feel a bit too real for comfort.

“What the fuck was that…” I said out loud and, as if on queue, a green box appeared out of nowhere floating in front of me, pointing with a green arrow to the lizard in the sky.

[RED DRAGON] Lv. ???

I almost fell off the tree for a second time as I scrambled to swat whatever that was off the air, but it wasn’t real… I had the feeling that it was only I who could see it.

“That much I could tell by myself, you know?” I whispered, complaining to a box only I could see. “Maybe that’s what having hallucinations feels like…”

I looked back at the Red Dragon and saw it was moving its head from side to side, as if something was bothering him. Suddenly, the green box began to glitch out, popping in and out of existence in front of me as a stinging pain drilled into my forehead. “NO” I heard a voice that wasn’t mine say inside my head, a voice so ancient that it felt like it had seen the birth of the world itself. “YOU ARE NOT WELCOME INSIDE MY HEAD, WEAK ONE.”

The pain stopped and I opened back my eyes. I looked up to the sky and saw two very, very, concerning things. In one hand, the box had changed, now showing nothing but garbled icons and pointing nowhere, but in another, far more scary hand, I saw that the red dragon was looking directly at me.

The window popped and vanished from its space in the air and I waited, with my mouth opened and my eyes as wide as dishes, for the dragon to do something. I don’t know how the appraisal thing I had just done worked, but it had, for sure, felt it.

“DON’T DO THAT AGAIN,” I heard the voice say in my head, before the lizard turned away from me and began flying back into the clouds, seemingly disappearing into the white banks high in the sky. “IT ITCHES.”

“Huh…” I muttered, as I quickly began making my way back down to the forest.

It all felt very, real now.

Very…

Real…