“Aw, I finally get the samurai clothes today too…”

I was in school, at home in my mind, talking to my friends.

“Homework’s gonna be awful. I just want to play games too. Why do we even need to study?”

“Yeah, life’s just too easy these days. I heard that guy got a girlfriend. Real girls? Too much trouble, right?”

I agreed. Real girls were too much trouble, even if the school wasn’t real the girl’s were.

“Don’t you just want to go off and fight a monster? Don’t you just want to go surfing? Why bother with school when you can do that all in your mind? My dad wants me to become a programmer… why bother…”

Yeah, he was right. In Mental World Online, I’m playing a samurai. Even though samurai isn’t a subclass, it’s good enough if I’m just acting like one right?

I had the new sword already from Nanos and was just waiting on the samurai clothes. I had to help dad with the maintenance later, some livers clogged the chute again.

“Hey, is that Mental World Online game any good?”

My friend asked me that. I told him, “I’m having fun playing as a samurai, but there’s no samurai subclass.”

“Shouldn’t you just play another game?”

“There’s something cool in this one. Instead of just your status getting higher, combat is based on skill and the emotions or thoughts you put into the attack. People can summon monsters based on those too, I’m really into it.”

“Isn’t that just like real life?”

He was lazily yawning. Hey, in real life I’m a cowboy not a samurai.

Entering World Online…

I got the samurai clothes from Ravor and was practicing my swing. There was a good amount of cash in my wallet, my special gauge was full, and I was out on the Vrati Plains for a change. Well, I don’t have any skills to spend the special gauge on though so it’s useless.  There were swirling black clouds and thunder constantly going off as the sun peeked through over the yellowed grasses.

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This isn’t real life. In real life I had to clean cow livers out of a chute for three hours. My spine tingled remembering it. No matter how many times I did it, it was disgusting. Now, I may have chopped up a bunch of golems and some rhino like beasts in the game but that wasn’t that bad. I was killing for fun and profit, not just profit. I wonder if I should tell dad I don’t want to take over the cow farm.

I was thinking like that. I got the new japanese sword a day ago because Nanos wanted to put some extra time into it. Said he was pretty excited and was studying some techniques to improve the design online. It was unnecessary, but I thought it was pretty nice of him to go out of his way to do that. If I had something I wanted to do instead of running the cow farm, wouldn’t it be something like this?

After all, why was reality necessary if I spent all my time playing a game in mind? Nanos was having fun making swords online. Ravor had fun making clothes online. I had fun killing random things and shouting my attack name. There’s nothing wrong with this at all.

Isn’t it dad who’s in the wrong? Uh-oh, a level 15 Chaoser came upon me while I was practicing with my mind wandering. I had fought a few of those, seems like the only ones who wanted to fight around here were Chaosers.

“Hey there ‘Cowboy’, why are you dressed like a japanese guy? C’mon let's fight!”

That was insulting. His handle was Tsekou anyways, what does that mean?

“I’m a samurai. Witness my skill.”

I bent down my legs and moved the sword pointing at him above my head.

He laughed with his horned hat pumping up and down as he hefted an axe.

“What are you going to do? There’s no samurai subclass! You probably don’t even have any skills!”

He charged. I don’t need any skills for the likes of you, I muttered in my mind.

I sidestepped with the right timing and stabbed forward into his gut from the side. He was going for a overhand chop so he was wide open. Not paying attention to my movement at all.

“Urgh!”

I made the second move swiveling my hand on the handle and gutted him. It was unfortunate, but I had seen worse in real life. He was on the ground, spitting up blood.

“Noob.”

He said that. You’re the one who couldn’t beat a level 8 with a level advantage! I wanted to say but since this happened a lot, I just let it drop. After all I did just kill him. I watched the death animation play out as his spirit left his corpse. I had learned early on when I died to a fellow Chaoser that you just go to the nearest graveyard and have to run back to your corpse. It was a good idea to get moving, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to win a second time.

The truth was I had considering getting skills. I looked at my special gauge. Yelling “Tsubame Gaeshi” did nothing to it, or when I used timing or precision. However, I just looked at the sword and felt a sense of destiny. It had to be this way, something felt right about it. Or I was just fooling myself.

Entering Reality…

I was looking at a few videos online in my mind. For Mental World Online, there’s also a augmented reality option. I never bothered to try it being in the countryside but it was pretty much just hunting monsters in the real world. You could also see other people who played the game and fight them too, as long as you kept a good ten feet between you. For safety’s sake, it seemed like. There were a lot of things like that with the brain chips, had to make sure people could pay attention to things and not just get too wrapped up in the game.

Reality still exists at the end of the day. I reminded myself of that as I rode through the countryside on my bike. Nothing but a dirt road and the open blue sky.