My Magic Arrow shattered the head of the beamling and sent little fragments of hardened flesh scattering. It was the third that I’d killed: like the others, this one hadn’t broken my mana barrier. I collected the demon stone that my last arrow dislodged and sent tumbling away into the dirt.
I’d used the magic sense that came with my Mage Class passive ability, but the only thing I could sense came from the demon stones. Focusing on one almost felt like licking a battery: a strange jolt of unpleasantness would strike my mind and give me the urge to turn away.
As I traveled, I kept noticing strange outcroppings along the mountainside, dark shapes with a mixture of jagged and smooth edges—but the smooth edges were simply too smooth for the outcroppings to be the stones I’d initially taken them for. Soon I found a shard of the stuff on the ground, picked it up and tagged it the way I had the first beamling’s corpse.
Surprisingly, despite having no outline visible before I tagged it, it was of a higher rarity than everything else I’d seen:
Common Item – Great Machine Fragment
A broken piece of the ruined great machine that once stretched through the Scimitar Mountains. Perhaps someone can find a use for it?
And the system gave me a message as the button to open my Quest Log began to blink:
Quest Unlocked – The Great Machine
I opened my quest log and sure enough:
The Great Machine
Objective:
Gather parts of the Great Machine that can be found through the Scimitar Mountains and deliver them to someone who can use them.
Alternatively, find a way to use them yourself.
Reward: Sturdy Mountaineering Boots
I accepted the quest, noting that it seemed to fall into one of three available slots—a quest maximum? Regardless, I kept moving on down the mountain, side-tracking less and less as the slope evened out into the little dell I’d seen earlier.
That was where I found her.
She was lying in a field next to the corpse of a beamling, her ear to the ground and her hand outstretched—she was feeling the grass. She was human. Her face, which was half-covered in a wild spread of silver-blonde hair, bore an expression of almost childlike wonder.
But the ominous warning of the loading screen came back to me:
Tell no one you are a true human.
But surely this was—well, her character race was human.
But what about her player race?
They are going to find Earth.
The whole thing was too foreboding for me to shrug it off. How dangerous could this woman be?
“Uh, hello?” I said uncertainty.
I’d approached to within a couple meters of her. She glanced up at me, seemingly unbothered by my presence, then back down at the grass she was feeling.
“Hey!” she said. “Isn’t this amazing?”
Not sure how to respond, I just said: “Uh, yeah.”
“Hey! We should be friends.”
I blinked. “Okay.”
“I mean, neither of us is worth much experience for the other right now,” she said. “So killing you is completely pointless!” She sat up, looked back over at me, and I got a flashing system notification.
Cuby has invited you to form a group.
Curious, I accepted. A little health bar with her name on it appeared along the edges of my vision.
She got up, and I noticed that her movements were strange and awkward, almost as if she was drunk. She raised her arms and started moving them around at random like some kind of really bad interpretive dance or something. “Isn’t this wild?” she asked. “They say you get used to it pretty quickly, but wow—these fingers are tough stuff!” She held out an arm and kept clenching and unclenching a fist.
I tried to be polite and not just openly stare at her. She started blinking her eyes rapidly, then poked herself in the chin a couple times. “Say,” she said to me. “You look like you’re doing pretty good! What’s your species?”
“I’m, um—”
Tell no one you are a true human.
They are going to find Earth. We have to stop them.
Holy shit. The person playing this character—were they an alien?
“You’ve gotta be either a Taxin El or an AI,” said Cuby. “I mean, I’m a phrenodine, and we’re supposed to learn how to move the fastest—but you’re doing great!”
“Yeah,” I said, “I guess I am.”
“I keep trying to make the fingers move separately,” she said. “I can do it if I grab them and move them myself.” She demonstrated this for a few moments, then glanced over at me. “You can just say you’re an AI, you know. It doesn’t matter anymore, here.”
I thought for a moment. “And how did you decide I’m not a taxin el?”
“You would have said by now,” she said. She was distracted by her fingers again almost immediately. “Wow—it’s like I can feel how much my body wants to move on its own. I want to squeeze my face sometimes, and shrug my shoulders some other times, you know? Just like taxin el do—and laughing! I keep laughing!”
And she did just that, filling the small clearing with the sound of sweet joy. It was curious: she was acting so naive. I had to remind myself that one of the first things she’d told me was that she hadn’t killed me because she had no reason to.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
I glanced down at my inventory. At the legendary boon card. No reason that she knew of, that was.
Okay, so if she was an alien—hard to believe, but not harder than anything else, really—then why was she playing an obviously human game? If her people had never seen a human, that what were they doing in a video game world of dwarves and elves? It made no sense, even if now I was certain this was—impossibly, unbelievably—a simulation.
“You look confused, right?” she said, peering at me. “Do you know that you look that way?”
“Uh, yeah,” I said. I growing sense of dread was filling the pit of my stomach. If all the other players were aliens just getting used to humanoid bodies, then there was no way I’d successfully blend in—how the hell was I supposed to act like I was one of them?
“Yeah, I’m a little confused,” I said, hoping that somehow, this person could teach me to better fit in.
And I mean, who better to help me orient than the person who had just now been feeling grass and poking herself?
“I don’t know how I got here,” I said. I was trying to be as vague as I could: here could mean either the little clearing or the game itself, or even the Hierarchy, whatever that was. She’d tell me something I didn’t know in any case.
She peered at me, then blinked. “Did you malfunction in the transition?”
I waited a moment before answering: “Uh, yeah. Maybe, I think.”
Then she rolled her eyes, the most human expression I’d seen her make since meeting her. “You guys are always malfunctioning. What did you do before you entered the Colosseum?”
I tried not to look uncomfortable with my own answer as I said: “Administrative tasks.”
She let out a laugh. “You mean you assisted with administrative tasks. I’m a phrenodine, remember? Anyway, what did you work in?”
Sensing that she enjoyed looking down on me, and hoping to choose something boring that wouldn’t raise further questions, I answered: “Waste management.”
“Ah,” she said, nodding knowingly. “So not only did you enter the Colosseum through the lottery, but you also malfunctioned. Bad luck, that. You probably have no idea what’s going on.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I mean… I don’t really know much about the Colosseum. I never thought….”
“Yeah, but that’s what everyone who gets the lottery says. I mean, it’s like, one in a couple million? But here you are—not having done anything to earn it, but still in the Colosseum. You get a human body—as an AI! And the whole hierarchy doesn’t apply here—ultimately, this is really good for you. Really, really good.”
“Great,’ I said. I didn’t want to give anything away, but I still wanted to squeeze her for information, so I asked: “How did you get here?”
“The usual way,” she said. “I helped a councilor win his campaign. Indispensable, I was, and when my leader was handing out rewards, I chose this. I’ve always wanted to compete in the Colosseum! It feels… almost perverse to be walking around looking like actual humans, doesn’t it?”
“Definitely,” I said. “A big change. What did you look like before you got here?”
“Oh, I’m not too hard to picture,” she said, tilting her neck from side to side as if doing some kind of stretch. “Thin-trunked, long-stalked, I was always a little bluer than a phrenodine ought to be, and always kept my roots a little too high out of the water for some tastes, but I never let others get me down about stuff like that.” She waved a hand dismissively. “It’s strange: now that I’m in a human body, it’s so innately pleasing and interesting to look at other humans.” She leaned close and in a conspiratorial whisper added: “Don’t say this to anyone else, but I always had trouble telling the taxin el apart, even with their clothes on.”
I smiled, but internally my mind was in chaos. If I really had been an AI, I’d have been on the blue screen right about now.
It was just…
Okay, was I talking to a fucking tree?
An administrative tree?
Like, look—I respect people, or like to think I do. If you’re in space, and you’re a tree, and you’re sapient, I guess that’s no big deal to me even if it might take some adjusting. But a sapient tree administrator from a nation composed of different alien species who had uploaded into a simulation as a human?
Who the hell doesn’t need a few moments to process that?
And maybe she wasn’t a tree. There were a lot of ways to picture a blue entity with a thick trunk, long stalks, and roots that rose high out of water.
“You still look confused,” she said, tilting her head and leaning forward a little as she looked at me. “I hope I didn’t put you off, somehow. Sometimes I do that—if I said something that bothered you without noticing that I said it, I’m sorry. I just normally don’t care about others enough to notice these things.”
“It’s fine,” I said, smiling gently. She’d said it quickly, and without much seriousness, but still: it was nice of her to be worried about me at all, I guess. It was the sort of thing you said when you were kind. “It’s just… there’s still a lot I don’t know. You don’t mind if I pester you with questions?”
“Not at all!” said Cuby, spreading her arms wide, then holding them out for a moment before looking at them, seeming to notice they were still spread, and letting them fall. “I’ve spent a long time getting ready to play in the Colosseum—you found just the right person to be confused around. But I only ask one thing.”
“Yeah—what’s that?”
“You gotta keep up with me,” she said, lowering her gaze. “Low levels are some of the most dangerous at the start of a new ladder season. Factions haven’t formed, nobody has warp travel, and everybody has to walk to the first safe zone. Small groups of player-killers are super effective at gaining experience and loot by taking out weaker players who have earned even one level… and once they get a lead by player-killing, they tend to become unstoppable.”
A pang of fear ran down my spine and settled in my gut. Please tell me we just respawn, I thought.
“And death here isn’t any different for you than death outside,” she said.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
“—A one way trip to Solarius.”
I wanted to ask if that was an afterlife or if it was real, but refrained: I pictured someone asking what Heaven was back in America, and the strange response they might get. That was enough to keep me quiet.
“The only way to survive the starting scramble for levels and loot is to win it,” said Cuby. “You got that? Even though it’s level 1, we’ve gotta play hard, kill monsters quick and gain levels so we don’t get picked off.”
“Got it,” I said.
“Good, because my stamina’s full—we’re wasting regeneration. Let’s go kill some more of these demons and try to find the nearest town while we’re at it.”
A system message appeared right as she said this:
Quest Unlocked – Rest and Safety
Objective: arrive in a safe zone.
Reward – 200 Gold
“Huh,” I said, accepting the quest.
“Hey!” Cuby said. “You got it too?”
“The Quest? Yeah. Must be… I don’t know, context-sensitive.” It raised the question: were we being watched, or was the program automatic?
“The system knows what we’re saying!” Cuby said joyfully, apparently thinking the same thing, but unbothered by it.
With that, we took off into the forest. It was almost a comfort amidst all the confusion—space empires, realistic simulations, and sapient trees playing video games was too much for my brain to handle right now.
But farming experience? These things my brain could handle, had been trained to handle since my runescape days back in elementary school.
Monkey in shoes understand skinner box. Monkey in shoes press lever by killing beamling.
In other words: time to grind.