The bandit village was burning around him and Marvin Winston’s white paladin armor gleaned with the flickering flames. It was night. He was soloing. And he knew for a fact that this village, families, pets, bandits and all, were stained with the blood count of raids on passing caravans. These facts were essential.

Marvin was a level 50 paladin, the first of his class to reach this level. That, too, was essential.

Marvin had a dull life outside of the game. He was a database engineer. The databases were largely finance related but the numbers themselves meant nothing to him; he just kept the monster running and kept it’s A.I. from getting confused from bad inputs. Like most jobs, it was non-essential, median pay and four days a week. He spent a lot of time pretending to work when he was physically in the office. When he wasn’t, he just interacted enough with the A.I. so that if it did a productivity report, he’d show up in the findings.

His life was lonely. And it was meaningless. Because, outside of politicians, pop stars, celebrities, life itself was largely meaningless.

Most people in the civilized world didn’t starve or go homeless: 3D printing ensured that. Unemployment was almost unheard of- although most work was make-work. The service industry was largely self-serve or robotics, unless you were a service specialist. Humans were just… another component in a world run by the artificial.

That was Marvin’s reality. He thought about it a lot. He raged against it as a teen. He got training for positions that would give him substantially more than the federal stipend.

But in the game, in *this* game, Nemesis Realms, Marvin had achievement: Levels in one of the hardest classes in the game. The highest level paladin was a beacon to other players and to NPCs alike. His healing aura alone made him an essential to large scale King-level raids. And he was well known to be a guildless freelancer, available to anyone friendly.

It wasn’t easy having 20 levels as a Paladin, much less 50. The trick with the Paladin is that not only must they kill monsters, they have to do with so a handicap: a moral code. Most players didn’t have the patience for that kind of endless yet selective grind.

Marvin… Kaizer, in-game… hefted his five-foot-long great sword over the shoulder of his seven-foot-tall frame and cast a glance towards one of the unburned buildings. He hoped to find survivors there. Good survivors, that is. Innocents. Survivors who a Paladin would never kill. His hope was waning.

Kaizer still himself and cast his Saintly Sight spell, giving the world a golden gauze. Out of the corner of his sight, he saw movement. Red movement. From a half-wrecked hovel he thought he’d cleared.

Kaizer’s boots crunched as he marched towards the building. He didn’t bother trying to sneak; his was a class not known for subtlety. Somewhere in that barely standing shack was the red glow of someone who carried evil in them…. Paladin of light as he was, the player admitted he loved dispatching evil. Zealously.

“Knock knock,” Kaizer called softly while thrusting his great sword, one-handed, through what was left of the door and shattering it to pieces.

Someone cried out from inside. Kaizer looked in but instead of the red glow, he saw a glow of white, barely radiating from behind an overturned table. He cast a glance across the rest of the door, taking in a broken bed, a pile of rags and a long dead body that seemed to have crawled there to take its last breath. The body was female and unarmored. As his Paladin blessings were still intact, he assumed she was as guilty as the rest of the camp.

He looked back to the overturned table and, carefully, barely fitting as he was, stepped outside to put place his great sword onto his back and remove his helmet (which conveniently blinked away into his inventory). Beneath the helmet, Kaizer had a solid chin, golden blonde hair and arrestingly severe black eyebrows. Marvin looked nothing like him.

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“Hello there. My name is Kaizer. I am a Paladin. And I see you are innocent of the heinous crimes… ah, why am I role-playing… I’m Kaizer. Come out here, please.”

It took a moment but a skinny child made his way out, holding his injured right arm. He stared up at the massive Paladin in awe and fear.

Kaizer smiled at the glow of innocence in his vision, breaking it a moment to glance at his mana reserve to see how long the spell would hold. Long enough, it looked like.

“What’s your name, boy?”

The boy said nothing. He stood, shaking.

“Okay, let’s try a different track. Did you live here? In this village?”

The boy nodded.

“And your parents?”

The boy glanced back at the shack. The body, Kaizer presumed. He continued to smile.

“You, little friend, are a Light in the Darkness. Is there anyone other survivors here, bad or good? No? Well, then, you are very special my little friend. You know that?”

The boy shook his head.

Kaizer nodded. “Very special. And I want you… “ Kaizer said, materializing his helmet from his inventory and handing it to the boy, “to hold this.” The boy’s eyes somehow widened even further. Kaizer smiled. NPCs thought inventories were more magical than actual magic.

While the boy held the helmet, Kaizer pulled his sword from his back harness and searched the ground for a clear space.

Once finding enough room, he dragged the blade along the dirt, creating a great circle that he made further designed into; designs that, once completed, glowed site a brief moment before the light dimmed back to the ambiance of flickering flames and dying embers.

Kaizer nodded in satisfaction and let out a long breath. Then he turned to the boy and waved him over.

The boy came, hesitant to break the circle at first but willing once Kaizer gave him an encouraging nod.

“Good,” Kaizer said, ruffling the kids hair. “Now, the helmet.”

The child offered up the helmet and Kaizer put it on. His full Paladin armor on, his Saintly Sight still active, Kaizer looked at the child’s white glow and glanced a gauntlet on his head. He cast a largely useless luck blessing from the Lady of Light then cast a third spell, the Healing Aura, nearly draining his mana completely but giving him just enough time to drive his great sword through the boy’s body, shoving its tip into the center of the circle.

Kaizer’s Saintly Sight broke like shattered glass and a scream echoed in his ear: the howling outrage of the Lady of Light’s holy sacraments defiled.

For a moment, Kaizer saw only black; he couldn’t even see the embers of the bandit village he’d just sacked. From that blackness melted the half form of a shrouded woman, the edges of her black cape translucent like morning mists. Her mouth was pale, full-lipped and beautiful but above the bridge of her nose was a rotting face whose eyes were gaping holes that wept foulness.

“Lady of Darkness, I honor you by spitting in your sister’s face. I am strong. I have fouled my vows. And…” Kaizer paused, brought up notepad in his vision and continued reading, “I dedicate myself to Power, Darkness and the Strength of the Hosts of Darkness. Do you accept my sacrifice?”

The Lady of Darkness did not so much as glance with its empty eyes towards what lay at the end of Kaizer’s sword before floating to him, lifting away his helmet and planting a slow, deep kiss on his lips. As her lips lingered, Kaizer’s armor dimmed into a black that matched the darkness of the lady’s shroud. Kaizer watched his eyes gauntlets change rather than seeing the disgusting half face directly in front of him.

The Lady abruptly broke away from the kiss and vanished, bringing the world back to dim reality.

“Fuck. Yes!” Kaizer shouted, throwing a fist into the sky. “I’m a Dark Paladin! I’m the fucking first! I’m a fucking God!”

Kaizer did the robot, then broke into gyrating hip dance the kids were calling ‘The Dim Sum’ for some reason, then vanished as he fast-traveled back to the Safe Zone city of Heroesport. There he would be allowed to log out safely and brag to the net of his World’s First achievement. No clips, of course. He didn’t need anyone else figuring out how to do it.

All the while, Kaizer had not noticed the body at the end of his sword slowly dying, feeling the last dredges of the Healing Aura as his corruption grew, blackening its power into a torturous aura of Fear. But someone else did. Well hidden beneath a body, in a pile of rags, another child watched through a broken open door as her brother died a long, slow and horrific death.

If Kaizer had not given up the blessing of the Lady of Light, his Saintly Sight would have shown that he had killed the last innocent in that village… and that the child who crawled out from those rags when he was long gone still glowed a faint red.

She crept to the boy and touched his cold cheek, the light having long since left his eyes.

Then she touched the Paladin’s great sword... and it shattered beneath her fingertips and disappeared, dropping the boy’s body with a wet thump.

She felt nothing.

She felt cold.

Then she felt a rush that struck her chest and sent her to her knees, gasping.

And then, the little girl, still gasping for breath, crawled in the dark, away from her home village and into the woods surrounding it.