I was standing on the top of a green hill overlooking a charming English dale town. A stone wall ran down the road beside me. Sheep grazed along the hill.

I took a step. I took another step. My legs answered me. It felt just like I was walking across a slightly muddy hilltop. I bent my knees and jumped. My body answered. I sprang forward a couple of feet, landing on my legs, bending my knees. I raised my head and hands to the sky and shouted, "Woo-hoo!"

And then I was sprinting down the hill, whizzing past the sheep. My foot slipped out from under me. I went head over heels, tumbling. I came to a stop, picked myself up, dusted off my knees, realized I was wearing a gray jumpsuit with the Joint Task Force Ganymede logo on it.

"Enjoying yourself?" At the amused voice, I turned. The hilltop where I had been standing alone now held four people. The speaker, a girl a couple of years older than me, had an American accent and her hands on her hips.

"Gah," I said. "Sorry."

The guy next to her stepped forward. "Nah, need to be sorry, mate," he said, his sharp, nasally Australian tones ringing clear as a bell. "She's just being a bit of a wanker. We know who you are and glad to have you with us."

I cleared my throat. "Who's we?"

"Welcome to the team, bud," the Australian said. “Hang on, I'm gonna move us." He gestured, and the hilltop vanished, replaced by a cozy coffee shop. Patrons ate at a table in the corner. There were steaming mugs of coffee in front of us. I picked mine up, sniffed it. It smelled exactly like coffee, which I don't like.

"You can change it," the Australian advised me, "just think about it."

I focused on the coffee cup. A menu popped up: "Select preferred beverage." I tapped in, "Tea. Earl Grey." A moment later, the frothing brown surface became a placid, tranquil greenish grey. I lifted it and sipped. It tasted like the best Earl Grey I'd ever had.

"That's cool," I said.

"So," the Australian guy said, "you're the last of our team. Everybody else got hooked up a few minutes ago. They gave us your name, at least. I'm Pete. This is Rose, but if she keeps up with the snark, we're gonna start calling her Thorn," he indicated the girl who had been snappy at me. We had two more people on the team. One of them looked vaguely familiar. He was Asian, and he gave me a quick head nod.

"This is, uh, we're calling him Sam," Pete said, “which is kind of a dick move, I know. Saman- Samanthaphon,” he got out, “I’m working on it.”

"Seriously, Sam's just fine," Sam said. "I stream under LongNameShortGuy.”

"Oh," I said, smacking my forehead. "Right. I remember watching your Age of Imperium exploits a couple months back."

He looked pleased. "I had fun with those."

The last person at the table was hard for me to judge. They were slimly built, with shoulder-length brown hair, and androgynous features. When they spoke, their voice was distorted. "I'm Alpha," they said.

I knew that name. Alpha was an infamous streamer, a record burner, who showed up in a game just to set or destroy an existing record before vanishing, only to reappear in another game months later. Alpha was shrouded in mystery. Nobody knew who he or she was, where they were from. Seemed like Alpha wanted to keep it that way.

"Nice to finally meet you," I said. "So you two are exploiters, and me, also.” I turned to the others. “How about you?”

"I'm a ping warrior," Pete said proudly.

"What?" That wasn't a term I'd heard before.

“In Australia, if you're trying to play cross-continent, we've got horrible ping. Usually means we can't compete in tournaments and stuff. Well, I've made it kind of my point in life to find ways to put that to my advantage. I won an all-Asian battle royale by figuring out that if I timed a headshot for the 59th second of a minute, the lag correction would end up making it impossible to dodge. They fixed that in the next patch," he said proudly.

"And Rose?"

She rolled her eyes. "I'm a social hacker, usually," she said. "I get geeky little nerds like you to teach me all your best strats, the ones you're trying to keep secret until some big tournament, and then I play them myself in a scoop video."

"Oof. Felt like I should know your name."

"Yeah, well, I stream as YourWorstNightmare.

I groaned. I had heard of her, though on streams she wore a filter that hid her face for obvious reasons. If she was doing that kind of social engineering, she didn't want her real face or name known.

"I feel kind of bad you never targeted me," I said.

"Please," she rolled her eyes. "I like it to be at least a bit of a challenge.”

I didn't like her already, but even if she was stealing strats from other players, she had to be able to implement them, which meant she had some skills.

"Apparently, we're what remains of the ones who got a personal invite from Captain Williams," Pete said cheerfully. "The others washed out. They put us all together on a squad because they want to see what we can do against the normie gamers. Most of these squads are six people, and they've offered to give us a ringer if we want, but I say we go with what Captain Williams was trying. We should pull on our strengths as exploiters and cheats. Some normie gamers are just gonna take too long to figure out what we're laying down here."

There were nods all around the table.

"We have no need to carry a plebe to victory," Alpha said in their toneless electronic voice.

Pete had clearly taken the leader slot, and I was all right with that. Rose seemed like she would be a pain in the ass to take orders from. Alpha didn't seem to want the role, and I wasn't sure I trusted someone who wouldn't show me their face. Sam seemed to just be going with the flow. I had no interest in trying to boss around a bunch of gamers older than myself, so as long as Pete didn't seem to be messing things up, I’d go with it.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

"So, first of all, the important thing—how do we win? By being the best, of course," Pete said, grinning. "Of the thousand who made it through to the stage, 200 will make it to astronaut training. It's a one in five chance. Unfortunately, it's by squad, so either all of us make it or none of us make it."

Rose scowled. "That is unfortunate," she said. "Y'all start failing, I'm gonna see if I can talk my way onto someone else's team."

"That's not allowed," Pete said cheerfully. "So you better tell yourself you're one of us. We'll be participating in contests in this VR world. Apparently they'll be throwing different challenges at us over the next week. We've gotta work together and beat them, all the other teams. The first thing we're gonna do is analyze what they've given us so far. Today's just for preparation and getting used to the VR," he added.

"Cool," I said.

"So the first thing we're gonna do is try on a training class. They're giving us simulated classes similar to what the Reality Engine exploiters had."

"Classes?" Rose asked.

"Yeah, there's a reason they're calling in gamers here," Pete said. "The Reality Engine operates on gamer rules. Yeah, so everyone up there has a class with various different special abilities. That's being simulated here. We don't have to pick our final class until the end of the day today. We've got, like, 40 to choose from. They're using the holy trinity of archetypes: Healer, Tank, DPS. DPS is split into ranged and melee."

"Dibs on the rogue," said Alpha.

I couldn't help glancing at Rose. She glared at me. "What? You think I want that kind of role? I'll take some sort of warrior where I can beat people in the face."

"How about you, Colin?"

"Probably support," I said. Support was usually the place where you got the best view of a fight. I'd done very few team-based games, but when I had, I'd usually gravitated there. Support could just mean straight-up healing, which had an art of its own but was kind of boring. Sometimes it meant you also got various crowd control abilities, able to snare and debuff your enemies, or ways to buff your allies.

"All right, let's assume you take that as a start," Pete said. "Sam?"

Sam shrugged. "Sounds like we need more DPS. I'm happy to try a ranged specialist."

"I'll look into the pinch hitters then," said Pete.

I pulled up my menu. There were eleven different support classes available for me. I started to scan down them, but Pete said, "Next, we're supposed to run some physical tests. For that, we're all going to equip the brute class.”

A message popped up in my view. It said, [Do you wish to try the brute class temporarily? This class will be available to you for a period of two hours.] I selected yes, just as the tea shop around me faded away, and we were standing at the edge of a cliff. Waves lapped below us.

Words popped up: [Descend the cliff as quickly as possible.]

"Is this a team exercise or—" I began, but Alpha and Rose were already at the cliff's edge seeking footholds. Sam shrugged and started after them. Pete watched, looking amused. They were leaping from foothold to foothold. It sounded like the brute class had some pretty good strength and dexterity

I opened up the class menu and read its description: [Brute, highly durable, regenerates 5% of health every second when out of combat.]

I looked over the list of active abilities. It had four. One caught my attention: [Don't Die Button. Press this, and the next physical damage source taken will reduce your health to one but not kill you.]

I grinned. This was my sort of thing. “Keep calm and cheese on,” I said as I backed up. I might as well make this impressive for whoever was watching our footage.

Then I raced to the edge of the cliff before leaping out into space and activating my “Don't Die" Button. I hurtled down the cliff, passing the startled climbers.

A second later, I heard Pete behind me shouting, "Woohoo!" as he followed suit. I landed. My legs buckled under me, throwing me face-first into the sand.

My health bar dropped all the way to one. Then it started ticking up. I stood up and dusted off my legs. A minute later, when the others reached the beach, they spluttered at me. I shrugged.

"Always read the class description,” I said. Pete was laughing. Sam was still at the top of the cliff. After a minute, he jumped off and joined us. "Sorry," he apologized as his health pool was going back up. "I have a bit of fear of heights. This is pretty real."

"Yeah," I said, looking around. "It sure is." I didn't just see the world around me. I felt it. The breeze in my hair. Smelled the salt spray. Heard the cry of high-off gulls.

And I felt my body responding to me. My body, doing what it always should have done. Legs that worked.

I was suddenly overcome with a vast, nameless dread. I leaned over, feeling like I was going to throw up. My heart was racing a million times a minute. I took deep, gasping breaths.

"Colin, you okay?" Pete asked.

A voice in my ear whispered, "This is medical. You are having a panic attack. We are turning down the verisimilitude by 50%."

I could see the lid of my coffin now, superimposed over the beach scene.

"How the hell is this supposed to help?" I yelled, feeling claustrophobic as well as panicky. "Get me out of here! Get me get me get me!"

Everything around me went gray. I was floating in nothingness.

"It's alright," a female voice in my ear whispered. "It's alright. Focus. Breathe deeply. Colin, listen to me. I'm looking at your profile now. You're suffering a panic attack. Do you know why?"

"Yeah," I gasped. "Because I don't have any legs. And I just jumped off a fucking cliff. It's exactly the sort of stunt that got me in my wheelchair in the first place. I was on my bike, trying to do a jump at the skate park I'd done a hundred times before, but I slipped and hit wrong. It was all it took. One moment of bad luck."

"You're not at the skate park," the woman said soothingly. "You're in a virtual reality pod. Your body is just the same as it was this morning. Your legs don't work. That's true. But it's not because you just jumped off a cliff. Everything that happens in here is virtual. It won't count. You need to make sure to internalize that right now, or you're never going to be able to compete here."

"I know." I tried hard to concentrate. I'd had a couple of panic attacks in the hospital. They told me to count my surroundings, ground myself. Being in a grey void with nothing but a psychiatrist's voice in my ear didn't exactly help.

"Send me back, quick. I can't have my team thinking I'm a basket case."

"We'll be watching you. We'll pull you out if we have to," the woman said. And then I was back on the seaside. I straightened up, focusing on the waves, counting the seconds that it took for them to crash, turn to foam, and race out again.

"You alright, mate?" Pete asked.

"Yeah, sorry," I said. I decided it was best to be honest with them, at least this time. "I just had this moment, you know, where I was so excited about having my legs back and then realized I'd jumped off a cliff and could've broken my back again. It's stupid because I don't actually have my legs, and we can't actually break our backs. It was just this bad reaction. It won't happen again."

"It better not," said Rose.

Alpha turned on her. "Leave him alone," they said. "You're just being a bitch because you're insecure. You're afraid that you're going to let the team down because you've never come up with a genuine strat of your own."

She looked mortified and disdainful at the same time. An odd combination. "How dare you?"

"Because," Alpha said, "this isn't the first time I've dealt with you, Rose. I was using my ‘4theHam' persona when you tried to steal my wall hack. Remember that?”

Rose blushed deep, deep red. "You, you—"

"Yes," Alpha said. "I knew exactly who you were, and you still don't know who I am since that persona was using a fake avatar and a voice changer as well. I must admit, I was the one who leaked that video onto YouTube after you took down your livestream.”

"You!"

"But that's in the past," Alpha continued. "We've got to work as a team now. You heard what the man said. It's all of us or none of us. Colin's part of that, and he's got some damn clever strats. I've been looking them up in the background while you were drinking tea in that shop. Rose, you've got value too. We're going to find out what everyone is capable of here. Let's finish this physical training. I suppose it is meant to convince us of the fact that these are not our real bodies, and we do not have to be constrained by normal limitations," they said to Pete.

"Yeah, that's how I see it," Pete said more cheerfully. "Right, I'm hitting the next button."

Another message appeared: [Swim out past the breakers and retrieve a mermaid's tear.]