By the end of the week, our team was on top of the leaderboard. When I spawned into the Orc ship lounge area, Rok'gar was there. I flashed him a grin, "I told you we would catch up."

“Shut it, Colin.” He glowered at me as a notification popped up that we were all being summoned for a special briefing.

Theram'goss, the orc chieftain who had brought us along with his own teams, stood in the center of a circular conference room, with our rival teams arrayed all around him. Rather than turn and address the audience by constantly looking in different directions, he stared straight at me the entire briefing. This was bizarre, but I later found out that everyone in the room thought he was staring directly at them. Reality engines can manage some pretty weird effects.

"I want to congratulate you all on completing the preliminary evaluations. The challenge we're really hoping to tackle had been deemed too dangerous and too much of a resource drain by this reality engine. The local authorities have banned anyone from entering except with special permission. All of the missions we've done so far have been to assess our capabilities so we could get that permission."

Williams, standing beside me, was nodding. Looked like he already knew all this. "And now I have a message from the world authorities that is supposed to give us background." Theram'goss stepped to the side. An alien appeared. I’d seen plenty of aliens by now, but this guy was weird and I suddenly realized why all our challenges had been bird-themed. The bloke was clearly descended from avians. It was bipedal, with wings for arms. Its hands looked like they had opposable thumbs but the fingers were very reminiscent of talons, and its eyes were wide-set around his peaked nose. It didn’t make eye contact and I got the feeling it was a recording.

"Thank you all for coming. We need your help to defeat great evils that have infested our land. The Dark Lord Quackarthurax has cast his dark blight over the land of Duckrym. All heroes who have risen to challenge him have been defeated. He has installed himself in the ruins of the fortress of Drakenar. The Dark Lord himself is extremely powerful, but what makes him an even bigger threat is the minions he has deployed across Duckrym. These forces have been hunting down adventurers and heroes before they gather enough power to face the Dark Lord. His dark power has corrupted the entire region. If this continues, the whole land of Duckrym may be lost."

Theram'goss interrupted, stepping back onto the stage as he waved his hand to dispel the hologram. "Yes, yes, he rambles on like that for quite some time. The real story is we're dealing with an open zone with interlinked quest objectives. This is what you might call a semi-sandbox zone. There's a main plot, but other than that, you miners have considerable latitude in what objectives they want to pursue."

"That sounds straightforward enough," I commented. “What makes this off-limits without permission?”

"The real problem is that this zone has never been defeated.”

Shad leaned forward. “What do you mean by 'never'?"

"This is actually a fragment left over from the original reality engine exploit. It's never been reintegrated.”

“I thought this system was conquered decades ago,” I said.

“It was, yes, but this fragment remains. It's been a remarkably stable fragment so far, but the longer it goes on without being reintegrated, the more it impacts the rest of the engine. There's a fear that eventually the respawn system may be corrupted and then we'd be dealing with a permadeath situation. They would have no choice but to seal off the whole zone. That would be a problem."

“How so?” Shad asked. “I mean, you already said you rarely let anyone in.”

“Keeping people out and keeping the fragment sealed off are two different things. It would be like tying a tourniquet around your pinky. It's going to rot and fall off eventually. The owners of the reality engine are desperate to get this zone reintegrated before this area starts to destabilize. They have had a standing bounty on this zone since the exploit ended, to no avail. The situation is slowly getting worse and they keep increasing the bounty."

Shad leaned back and folded his arms. “And you decided now the is the time to tackle it?”

I got the implication. The Orcs were going after it now because they thought with us humans along they stood a better chance than before. It was a compliment, sort of.

Theram'goss continued his briefing without answering Shad’s question. "We have two major problems with this zone. The first is that there's an unknown element loose somewhere inside. We've had multiple partial reports of encountering enemies that don’t seem to be part of the simulation, too many for it to be coincidence. Who, where, or what their objectives might be are all unknown. The zone is made up of numerous interlocking quests and storylines that make it difficult to spot a faction or group that isn’t an organic part of the zone.”

I was nodding along. I’d played plenty of semi-sandbox games in my time. Half the time there were groups and quest lines that barely made sense anyway. It wouldn’t be hard to slip a whole faction in somewhere.

"This zone is designed with a main quest line. We believe reintegration of this zone could be accomplished by beating that quest line, but no one's managed it yet. It's impossible to go linearly through that quest line because leveling up and increasing in power is needed due to power-level scaling of your opponents.”

I smiled. "So you're saying you have to grind side quests before you can finish the storyline quest? Make sense. I don’t see the problem?”

"Because this is a fragment, maintaining your commlink and your soul backup is difficult, and it gets worse the longer you're in there. Eventually, you can't be sure of a safe respawn."

"How much time will we have?"

He shrugged. "It depends. Mostly on how many respawns you take while you're in there. Also, it varies by how big a party is."

I leaned back in my seat and smiled to myself. So it was a hardcore mode speedrun. I was born for this shite.

The others continued asking questions, mostly about etherium reserve use and respawn links. Someone had questions about how the gameplay in the zone worked. But all of them were noob questions. I already had this one figured out. I just needed a strategy.

I closed my eyes, leaned back in my chair, and started sorting through the speedrunning and exploit strats I knew best for this sort of situation. There wasn't likely to be a dev cache near the start, providing overpowered gear.Basic mechanic exploits were unlikely to work. What I needed was something that needed at least two and probably three or more interactions of mechanics before a loophole was revealed.

My strengths were non-combat skills, so I immediately started considering crafting-based exploits and stat stacking methods that would allow non-combat solutions. The first would depend on getting in there and learning more about the actual crafting system and available recipes. The second was more risky, since it only required one nasty boss fight to make a fully non-combat speedrun unviable.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

"Given up already?" Rok'gar's voice knocked me out of my musing.

"Not exactly."

"So you have a plan, then?"

"I'm working on one." I opened my eyes and looked at him. "What about you?"

He shrugged. "Seems straightforward enough. Bring in a small crack team. Max of three. Look for high-value grinding situations or repeatable quests to maximize our skills. Get each of the storyline quests as quick as we can with minimum grinding in between. If we go in with the best gear we have and a well-balanced team, that should be the fastest way to solve it."

I gave him a lazy smile. "And you don't think others have tried something similar?"

He gave me the toothy grin that only an orc can. "Apparently none as good as us."

I nodded as if I agreed. "So who were you thinking for your team?"

He scratched his chin and considered. "Myself, of course. And then we'd need some kind of high damage output tank. And someone with heals. Not a dedicated healer because we need all the damage output we can get. But maybe with someone with a good bit of damage on the side. I'm thinking Ar'gor and De'lian.”

I nodded. It wasn't a bad strategy but it lacked imagination.

"Have you considered Var'gol?"

His brow wrinkled. "A bard?" Var'gol was one of the few orcs with a nonstandard class, like Rok’gar himself. “We’re already going to be hurting with me there as an armorsmith, but my experience makes up for it. Besides, I have a lot of recipes.”

I shrugged. “A buff and debuff class gives you a lot of versatility in case you encounter something unexpected. If he’s set up right, he can fill the healing role as well."

He thought about that for a moment and then said maybe. Then he looked back at me with suspicion in his eyes. "You're trying to help us? Your rivals?"

"The whole group got this contract," I said, shrugging. "One of us has to do it. I have a very different strategy in mind. If I can't pull it off, maybe you can. I'm all about maximizing our options," I emphasized the last word. “While minimizing our chance of failure."

"Is your strategy good? Do you think your group will let you do it?"

I shook my head. "It doesn't matter. I'm going to take this one alone."

His eyes widened. "But what about the rest of your team?"

"They can come up with their own strategy," I said. "It looks like this one favors small groups or even individuals, so I expect Shad," I nodded my head to the figure on the other side of the round briefing room, "will come up with his own plan, probably going in solo, and the rest of the team will do what they do best."

My head swam. I opened my eyes. My vision was blurry. Something was rocking, and I realized it was the whole world. There was a strange clanking and creaking sound, along with the shuffling of feet.

I opened my eyes, but it took them a moment to focus. I was in the back of a wagon. It was being pulled by something large and feathery, but I couldn't see them well from here. I sat on a hard bench on the side of the wagon. My wrists were chained together. It didn't bode well. Why was this familiar? Across from me was another man, also chained up.

"Oh, finally awake, are ya?" My head throbbed. I had some sort of debuff, and my user interface wasn't coming up. Damn. This was a rough zone integration. I’d been through a couple that tossed you in the deep end and left you feeling hungover, but this took the cake.

"Head hurts, huh? It'll pass. You'll feel better soon, at least until we get where we're going.” The man gave a dry, humorless chuckle. Gallows humor. I glanced towards the back of the wagon.

"It won't be any use to run," the man said. "They'll just shoot you down."

I realized other than turning my head, I couldn't move my body. There was no sign of the rest of my team or the Orc teams. Ah, shite. This was an opening cut sequence. What was next? Character creation?

"What's your name?" the man asked.

Sure enough, a dialog box popped up for me to select my name. I had played plenty of games like this before, including some very popular ones that had large exploit and speedrun communities. It seems like the bigger a sandbox world is, the more buggy and exploitable it becomes. Taking it for a good sign, I added my name.

The wagon continued to roll on, and my companion continued to ask me questions while the user interface popped up windows and took me through character creation. I took my time. The race options were limited, and all seemed to further limit the faction options. At this stage, it was almost impossible to tell which would be the most useful. I was looking for something that either had an obvious exploit available, or alternatively, the most generic option I could find

My fellow prisoner continued to babble on something about a lost prince and usurper king. It was the usual mediocre writing you expected from video game design. The race selection had an astounding number of options, many of which were variants of avian races, mostly aquatic. Apparently, the previous week's missions had been foreshadowing.

I was already classified as a featherless, so all of those options were not available to me. They were still viewable, so I was able to peruse their descriptions at length. I was only halfway down the list when I realized, despite this character creation process having no time limit, the others in my group might be zoning in as soon as they were done. I wanted to come in at a similar time, so I decided to speed things up a bit.

I took my best guess at race and faction. Instead of class choice, the system offered me two backgrounds. One was a former shopkeeper, the other was a runaway smith's apprentice. I selected the apprentice. As soon as I did, my companion in the cart said, "Oh, runaway apprentice, are ya? That's a bad business, breaking your indenture. It’s not normally a capital offense, but I doubt the Imperials will care since you were caught with the rebels..."

I didn't see what rebels he was talking about, but a lot of the backstory hadn't made much sense. The creation menus gave me the option of keeping the default appearance, which was how I normally looked, so I left it. I did notice with amusement that there was a grayed-out menu for beak/bill style that had a ridiculous number of options.

All these avian options got me thinking. I knew this was an established reality engine that had actually been exploited years before. We hadn't seen any of its inhabitants since reaching orbit, aside from the guy in the intro video, but I was guessing they were an avian species. Such creatures occasionally appeared in video games, but I was curious to see what one would look like in real life. Not that "real life" had much meaning anymore. Besides, usually they were eagle or hawk variants. Not duck people.

As soon as the last of the character creation windows closed, the sound of the wagon changed, and the prisoner in front of me straightened up.

"Looks like we're here. I hope you made peace with whatever god you worship, because you're about to meet them."

A pair of tall and muscular avian humanoids carrying spears stepped up. They wore bronze breastplates and fierce expressions on their birdlike faces.

"All right, scum, get down from there." they growled as they menaced us with their spears.

The wagon had pulled to a stop in the courtyard of a castle. All around was the hustle and bustle of armed and armored bird creatures. They had hawk-like beaks and wore variations on the same style of armor. Along one wall of the keep was a row of chained prisoners. They were a mix of humanoids and other avian species, almost all duck-billed ones, although I saw one with a longer neck and a smaller bill that looked more like a goose.

I climbed out of the wagon on shaky feet. My user interface still refused to appear.

"Over there, you! Line up with the others." They chivied us in place with their spear butts and threats. Soon we were lined up with the rest.

In the center of the courtyard, on a small wooden platform, was the headsman. Instead of armor, he wore a black cloak with a hood, so only his beak protruded. Well, maybe it was her beak. I don't want to be sexist. Either way, the bird carried a huge axe. Wait, if it was a she, would calling it a bird also be sexist? I decided it was better to think of them as a "they." Though I found it rather hard to be respectful towards something that was about to kill me.

The first prisoner, crying and pleading, was taken from the line and dragged towards the headman's axe.

I looked around. Something was supposed to interrupt this sequence. I didn't yet see anything I could do, but I didn't relish the idea of waiting. I remembered a sequence like this in a similar game once before that had ended only just before the headsman's axe fell on the player's neck. Was I really going to have to wait that long?

Then I noticed a small icon high up where my user interface should have been. I selected it. A pop-up menu appeared, offering me a chance to skip the opening sequence. Should I do it? I was eager to get on with things, but worried I might miss some crucial piece of information.

Thud. The first prisoner's crying cut off and the head rolled away.

Yeah, I think I had enough of this sequence. I selected "skip."

The world reverberated with a terrifying shriek, something between a gobble and a quack and a cluck, ear-shatteringly loud. It sounded like someone blowing a duck call into an overdriven public address system. All around us, the guards froze.

Someone in the distance screamed, "It's the turducken!"