The lush forest surrounding us is reminiscent of mirkwood. Trees taller than the tallest buildings, their leaves a ceiling above us that block the sun and leave us navigating in shadow. The floor is earthy, covered in leaves. Occasionally, an acorn, branch, or leaf will flutter to the ground slowly. How long would this floor alone have taken to code? I pick up a leaf, a green oval with a jagged edge, and crush it in my hand. It disintegrates in blue crystals, the grim reminder that this isn’t real life.
“Hey, Aoi, how much further?” Christopher calls out from the group following behind me, “Bai-ko’s tweaking out.” What?
“What?” I turn around, and sure enough Bai-ko is going feral. She’s practically jumping out of her skin, leaping from tree to tree and mumbling to herself at an incomprehensible speed. Sensory overload. A girl like her who’s obsessed with information can’t handle going this deep into an unmapped forest. She’s trying to jot down every little thing. “Well…That’s the leader of Private Eye, I suppose. Not much further, only a minute.” The other members of the party behind us are all strong. The lowest leveled one, aside from me, is level 10. I look at my player profile, which has changed since I gained my class.
[Player Profile: {Kazesoku}
Class: Bounty Hunter
Titles: Gilgamesh, Cain
Lv. 8 - 25/5500 EXP
HP: 625/625
ST: 775/775
MP: 350/350
Strength: 3
Dexterity: 7
Constitution: 6
Intelligence: 4
Presence: 3
Skills: LOCKED, Swordsmanship (E), Evasiveness (Passive), Tracking (F), Weapons Improvisor (Passive)]
None of my stats are even over 10 yet…I’m doing a terrible job of min-maxing. But at least I won’t die quickly. “Aoi,” Yuto speaks up next to me, and I flinch. I didn’t even notice him appear next to me. We all had to share our states when we started this mission, though not our profiles, so I know what a monster he is now.
[Player Stats:
Lv. 18
HP: 2180/2180
ST: 2000/2000
MP: 1450/1450
Strength: 17
Dexterity: 15
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
Constitution: 12
Intelligence: 12
Presence: 3]
The only stat under 10 he has is his presence. It’s just unbelievable. “Yuto?” I respond to him, raising an eyebrow.
“You should join The North Star after this raid,” he smiles brightly, “We could use somebody like you! And you would have good back-up for the game moving forward.”
“No,” I deny him flatly. Guilds like that, with thousands of members, don’t interest me. It becomes too hard to gain exp as an individual, too hard to get the good quests, even loot is distributed as the guilds see fit. I need to find my friends, and together we’ll make a smaller guild. Simple.
“Hmm…Looking for somebody?” He asks quietly, his eyes following mine to drift back to the group behind us.
“...Bai-ko told you?” I grumble in annoyance.
“No, you did. Your body language, the way you’re analyzing every member of our party, you asked all of them about some blue bird? Only an idiot wouldn’t recognize that as some code.” I tsk. I suppose I could have been more subtle…But I’m saved from having to explain myself to Yuto.
“We’re here,” I announce, as we emerge from the forest and come to the inverted dome clearing in the ground. It’s just as still as it was when I left. I jump in, sliding down the dirt wall and getting closer to the massive tower. After two minutes of walking to the tower, which only took so long thanks to Bai-ko furiously drawing the tower in a notebook as we walked, I’m face to face with the weathered yellow stone bricks.
I place a hand against them, feeling the cool stone.
[Would you like to use key item ‘Tower Key’ to challenge Dungeon: ‘Rapunzel’s Tower’?
Yes O No X]
I select yes. The tower rumbles slightly, and the ground shakes, dust falls from the tower and rises from the exposed dirt beneath us. Abruptly, something falls from the top of the tower. It dangles about three feet above the ground, curly and golden, extending all the way to the top of the tower.
“What is that…?” Somebody calls out from our party. I shudder, knowing what we have to do. I grab a handful of it, my suspicions confirmed by the system,
[1 party member confirmed! Teleporting to Dungeon in 5 minutes.]
“Grab a handful, everybody. Dungeon raid starts in 5 minutes,” I smirk, turning back to our party, “Rapunzel let down her hair.”
= = = = = =
As the timer hits 0, the hair we’ve all grabbed onto retracts into the tower and drags us along with it. It’s a cutscene, which in VR is incredibly strange to experience, control of my body was taken from me and I watched as I held onto the hair for dear life and flew to the very top of the tower. I can’t speak, presumably none of our party can, as we fall into a dimly lit room.
The walls are covered in cobwebs and hold various torches, the ceiling seems to yawn into an endless abyss of darkness save for a chandelier that seems as far away as the sun. The floor is covered with a thick carpet, every step we take causes a small shimmer of dust to fly into the air. A pattern of purple diamond and faded yellow flowers can barely be made out on the floor. The entire room is a cylinder, with no way in or out save for the windows through which we entered. But suddenly those windows slam shut, wooden covers obscuring light and make the already dim room turn even darker and more sinister. Shadows seem to coagulate in the center of the room, morphing into themselves and swirling as a voice echoes through the hall, “Rapunzel? Have you come back for me…?” An old woman croons, “I only have your hair to remember you by…And I’m all alone here…I’m so hungry Rapunzel, you brought food back, right?”
The shadows clear with a sudden burst, and in the center of them a witch has formed. Her skin is gray and saggy, and although she is skeletal thin her stature reaches over three times that of us. Her eyes are white and glossy, like a deep sea fish, and she looks over all of us. Her white frizzy hair seems static, it isn’t moving with her head, but in her hands are beautiful flowing golden hair. Some strands of the hair even connect to her mouth, as though she had been eating it. She hisses, her body trembling as the tower shakes, “You’re not Rapunzel…NONE OF YOU ARE RAPUNZEL!!!”
[Boss Monster {Witch Gothel} has been engaged in combat! Good luck!]