I followed my fellow escaped prisoner into the woods, thinking he would be my ticket to the mainline quest. Unfortunately, he stopped 50 yards away.

"Thanks for your help escaping. If you're ever in Honeynest, look me up. My organization could use a few people like you." He turned and walked away.

I started to follow, but he disappeared around a pile of rocks. And I do mean disappeared. By the time I turned the corner of the rocks, he was completely vanished into thin air.

At long last, my user interface was available. Unfortunately, it seems to have been reset to some kind of default configuration for this system, not the one I’d gotten set up over the past couple of years. Everything was different. My inventory was almost completely empty, which was a shock since normally it was a veritable treasure trove of odds and ends. Instead I just had a few pieces of armor and weapons I must have accidentally picked up in the castle.

My skills were all gone, and the entire list was replaced by a completely different mechanism. A spider web of interconnected skills spread out before me. The trees was grayed out, waiting to be unlocked.

No wonder so many had failed before us. This didn't look anything like the default class system that the Galactics would be used to. I wanted to dig deeper and study the nature of the skill tree, but I needed to get moving to find a town or village. Unarmed as I was, and with no skills worth mentioning, I would be in real danger if I had a random encounter in these woods.

The terrain was rocky and tree-covered, but below the canopy, the forest floor was relatively clean, and the brush between the trees was not heavy, allowing me to move forward quickly. I moved downhill, hoping to find a road. Something moved in the forest ahead, and I jerked to a stop. I looked carefully and caught a flicker of movement between a bush and a rock and a boulder.

I waited patiently, and a wolf stepped out. It wandered up the slope without noticing me, and I waited until it had been out of sight for a minute before turning and skirting the direction it had gone. If it was on a set path or patrolling in an area, I didn't want to move through where I had seen it last.

I really needed some sort of weapons. Wild animals were unlikely to be susceptible to my other forms of trickery, and I didn't yet have any skills that would charm or distract them. I found a likely-sized stick and picked it up. It equipped itself and displayed in my interface as [Level 1 Stick. One to four damage.] It seemed weak. I saw a fist-sized rock on the ground and scooped that up to see if it would be a better alternative.

[New recipe discovered: Primitive Hammer.]

My interface popped up and showed a spinning picture of a rock tied to the end of a stick. I didn't have anything to tie it with, but it didn't seem to matter. The recipe showed distinctly that only two items were needed to complete the weapon. The craft button was glowing green. The items appeared in my hand, and I pulled them together. They pulled themselves to each other as if magnetized.

[New item: Primitive Hammer. Damage: One to five.]

That was pretty pathetic, but it also gave me a skill point into tool crafting. That was interesting since I had distinctly seen weapons crafting on my interface as well. I checked my inventory, and sure enough, the item was classified as a tool and not a weapon. Excellent. Although without access to my normal class, the distinction of tools to weapons might not matter. I was hoping my buffs were still there, just hidden.

I hafted my new tool as a makeshift weapon and continued forward. The slope flattened out, and the forest thinned before turning into a farm field. Beyond that was a road. The field itself was little more than a pasture with a stone wall around it. There was no sign of a farmhouse or anything else.

I had taken two steps onto the dirt road when the background sounds of the world suddenly changed. It was subtle but noticeable, like the ambient soundtrack had been switched to a different one. I noticed the change but couldn't put my finger on what was different. A distant horn sounded, and I heard a drumming of hooves. I

had triggered something, but I didn't want to see what. I wasn't here to experience the linear plot as it had been intended. Playing the game that way had defeated many people in the past, and I intended to do things differently.

I lunged off the pathway and ducked behind the stone wall, pressing myself as low as I could to stay out of sight. Hooves pounded up and then scrabbled to a halt nearby. I heard the creak of leather and chink of metal.

"Why are we stopping?"

"I thought I saw someone.”

“There's clearly no one here now. Must have been the wind.”

“Feather guard, move out!"

The deep horn sounded, and the hooves pounded away. Before the sound faded completely, I risked poking my head above the wall. A group of riders in armor vanished away around the bend in the road. The banner one of them carried fluttered in the breeze over a hedge, the last sign of them to disappear. My guess was I had just avoided a quest interaction, either the start of a new one or a continuation of the main line. That suited me fine. I wanted to know a lot more about the world before being swept along with the scripted action.

I continued down the road now in the direction the troops had gone. While I wanted to avoid the mainline quest, I didn't want to get too far away from the area it was pushing me towards. If this game had leveling zones that were grouped by strength, then I needed to not get too far from where the noobs were supposed to be. It would be extremely deadly to wander into a high-level leveling zone. So I needed to be cautious until I knew whether this fragment was employing a scaling level system for the mobs or not.

I rounded a bend, and a quaint little village spread out beneath me. My interface helpfully told me this was the village of Honeynest. It looked like six houses and two larger buildings, one of which was clearly an inn. The other, I guessed, would be a shop of some sort. I suspected this was the initiation village where we'd get pointers to the mainline quest, not the first quest hub of the game.

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

The town was surrounded by a wooden stockade with a pair of hawk-like guards. As I stepped through the gate, the world flickered for an instant, and then suddenly the formerly nearly deserted town street was bustling with people. Most of them were humanoid, and all of them wore the same ragged clothes I did. So I had caught up with the rest of the players. I didn't see Shad or his team here. That was fine. I was playing a lone hand.

I hurried through the town. There was an NPC woman standing on her porch stoop with a crowd of players around her, lamenting something about a trinket stolen by bandits who were holed up in the ancient barrow in the mountains above the town. Her husband was shouting at her, "That barrow is haunted. Don't send these outsiders to desecrate our ancestors' tombs." Sounded like an important quest chain to me. I ignored it and hurried by.

Another crowd was just emerging from the inn. I started up the steps and came face to face with Rok'gar, who grinned at me.

"You finally made it, Colin. How many times did it take you before you figured out how to dodge the stuffing breath?"

"Stow it," I advised Rok'gar.

"We are about to head to the town of White Plume to inform the Drake of the Turducken's arrival. My team and I have already gained our basic proficiencies." He held up a rusty broadsword. "I have five points in two-handed swords already."

"I thought you were a crafter," I said, inspecting his terrible sword. It looked like one the Raven Guard could have dropped.

"This is a chance to explore other opportunities. Our real classes don't come into it. I'm enjoying a chance to embrace my roots and hack things to pieces a little," Rok'gar said.

I laughed. "You do you, buddy." I squeezed in the door of the tavern. There were still more people in here. I spotted a couple of humans I knew and nodded to them. Then sidled up to the bar. There was a glowing table over in one corner with some vials and a mortar and pestle on it. My guess was that was a crafting station. I'd check it out in a minute.

The barman came over. "Looking for work?" he asked.

"No.” I would need to reject all of the easy, obvious options if I wanted to find my own path here. “Someone needs to take word to the Drake of White Plume about the Turducken attack.”

“My friend’s already on it," I assured him.

"I could use someone to brew some ales for me."

"I'll think about it," I said. "Not right now."

The barkeep looked despondent and wandered away. A moment later, his assistant, a young duckwoman wielding a broom, came over.

"I need someone to take a letter to my betrothed in White Plume," she began.

"I don't think I'm your guy." That was interesting. The system was going to continue to offer me quests until I picked something. I needed to shake them out of their pre-programmed routes if I was going to get my own hints here. "When I was coming over a mountain, I noticed a road leading east of here. The sign was too worn to read. What's down that road?"

The maid's eyes widened. "Oh, you don't want to go down that road. There's bandits and thieves. Anyway, it only goes to Driftwood."

"And where's that?"

"It was a prosperous town once, the heart of the Drakon culture. But since the war and the empire came, it has fallen into ruin. The only people who live there are thieves and those too poor to escape." She moved off without offering me a quest.

I got up and approached the table in the corner. As I thought, it was an alchemy station offering to let me combine ingredients I'd found. So, the cheapest and easiest form of crafting anywhere.

I tried combining a couple of flowers I'd picked and got failures. The barkeep wandered over. "If you brew me a couple of beers, I'll give you a recipe for a healing potion," he offered.

What the hell? I had nothing to lose. I accepted the quest. He gave me some wheat and yeast. I combined them into a stack of beers, handed them back. Took all of five seconds. Why he couldn't have done it himself made no sense, but games rarely do. The barkeep in turn gave me a stalk of grass and a white speckled mushroom.

"Try those," he advised. I did, and my interface popped up with [Recipe learned. Basic healing potion. Alchemy increased by one.]

Excellent. I pulled up the skills pane and was confronted by a confusing mass of skill trees. It looked like every single basic ability in this game was sorted into one of four categories: Magic, Might, Crafting, and Treachery.

Under Crafting was the Alchemy I had just learned. I enlarged it and it spread out in front of me. There were three major branches of the Alchemy: Poisons, Elixirs, and Bombs. The Elixirs were healing potions. All the abilities down that tree strengthened their effects. It looked like some of the potions would buff other abilities. That could be very useful for a stat-stacking build. I glanced at the Poisons and Bombs tree and closed it.

Under Crafting was also Smithing and Tailoring. I'd have to learn the differences between each. I apparently had a point in Smithing, probably from making the hammer, but Tailoring was still gray.

"Is there a smith or a weaver in this town?" I asked the barkeep.

"The nearest weaver is in White Plume, but there's a smithy attached to the general store. You can ask Radolf to let you use it."

"Okay," I said. "Thanks."

As I was leaving, one of the patrons at the far tables, an old white-plumed duck, leaned over as I passed. "I heard you talking to the missy about Driftwood. My kinfolk came from those parts back in the day. My mother made me leave because I was falling in with a bad crew. If you do go to Driftwood, beware of the Thieves' Guild. They run everything there."

"Okay," I said. Then a quest popped up. I groaned to myself. [Find the entrance to the Thieves' Guild hideout in Driftwood.] It was marked with a skull and an X, probably indicating it was much too high level for where I was now. I set it aside and went to find the smith.

After selling my healing potion and the odds and ends I had looted during my escape to the owner of the general store, I had enough on me to buy some coal and iron ore, which I then quickly turned into iron bars, combined with some leather strips, and made into a dagger, getting me my second point in smithing. I was starting to see some possibilities here, but I would have to open up the Sneak tree, in Treachery, to be sure.

That did it for me. The best place to learn sneaking was definitely going to be with the Thieves' Guild. I was underleveled, but time to head off to Driftwood.

As I stepped away from the smithy, I met Rok'gar and his team again. They looked haggard.

"Are you planning to take on the Barrow?" Rok'gar asked me.

"Not really. Why?"

"The Gooselitch who rules the place is more dangerous than we thought. His honks have a nasty knockback effect. We came back to look for a support class. We've already started down skill trees that lock us out of buff and debuff abilities. I thought perhaps you were trying that sort of build yourself. Would you like to come and try it?"

I shook my head. "Sorry. Did you guys die?"

Rok'gar nodded. "We did. We respawned at one of those big standing stones. You know the ones we've seen? You have to have discovered them in order to respawn or you'll respawn at the closest one you know. One member of my team hadn't discovered the nearby stone and ended up all the way back by the fort we escaped from first."

"Thanks for the tip," I said. "But be careful. I'm pretty sure every death puts you closer to the limit of how many times the system will resurrect you, and the higher level you are, the shorter your timer gets."

Rok'gar frowned. "Why's that?"

"I was looking over the high-level reports from previous teams before we came. There wasn't much in there, but I noticed that once they reached about what they were calling level 10, they'd die and then be kicked out. I think it's because the system is emulating an entirely new set of classes for us. Once there's too much information to keep track of, it runs out of resources. So you get a whole lot more deaths early on, untrained, than you do later when you have all of the skills."

He frowned. "I'm not certain that explanation makes any sense."

I was going to hope it did because it was how I was planning to play this. "Well, good luck," I wished them and started out of town.

"Aren't you heading the wrong way?" Rok'gar called. "That's how we came in."

"I forgot to loot the bodies back at the fort. I'm going to go do that now."

"You're wasting time."

"See you later, Rocky.” I waved. He glowered at me.