One Chance

Prologue

Footsteps echoed loudly throughout the dungeon. Two men with relatively new gear were running for their lives from the treasure guards they aggravated.

“Jay, watch out!”

The man named Jay tilted his head as an arrow barely missed.

“That was close, Jude!”

“Yeah well, stop celebrating!”

Jay and Jude were both running from the chasing them, as well as its minions and . Both men were dungeon crawling for the first time in the game and until that point, they were proceeding nicely with their carefully crafted plan.

The game they were playing was a VRMMORPG called One Chance. VRMMORPG stands for Virtual Reality Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game, a gaming genre that holds the largest number of players in the world.

One Chance was the brainchild of the software company Earthlight. Envisioned by a Filipino game designer, it was such a huge step in Philippine technological advancement that the government took full reins of the funding. Numerous commercial and industrial giants from around the world contributed as well, turning the ambitious project into a great undertaking. Everyone could not stop talking about it until the day of its beta testing.

One might think that the game was too overhyped and with good reason; it was just another computer game. But Earthlight had another genius hiding in the marketing department, putting out an outrageous idea to make the beta testing a survival game as well as making playing time limited.

Basically, what Earthlight announced was that the beta was free to play. However, you could only play for 5 hours per day starting from 6 pm and once you died in the game, you permanently lost your character and the chance to play the beta. You had to wait for the commercial release in order to play again. However, if you managed to complete the goal of the game, you would receive a real world prize courtesy of Earthlight itself. The goal: unite the game world.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

Many people scrambled at the limited chance to play the game. Two of them included Andrew Jay Lopez and Kristian Jude King who were currently running away from the treasure guardians chasing them.

“Okay my mana’s sufficient now!”

Both guys stopped and assumed positions as Jay picked the last seed from his pouch. He kissed it and muttered.

“This had better work.”

He put the seed inside his fist and cast two spells, throwing the seed onto their chasers. It was not enough to completely stop the skeletons in their tracks, but it did its part in making sure they got away.

Both of them panted hard at the cave entrance.

“What did I tell you, huh? I knew my strategy would work.”

Jay was too tired at Jude to retort for being a braggart. Hey the strategy worked this time, let the man get his shine.

It involved Jude stopping any opposing projectiles for a moment while Jay cast <> and <> on the touch-me-not seed. So far its only use had netted them an excellent result.

Theoretically, a fully grown giant touch-me-not plant would hurt a barefoot chaser due to its thorny stem. Made magically bigger and it would create a temporary blockade, impeding movement and vision.

This was the strategy Jude came up with in case they needed to run. He was very happy that it worked.

Just then, an announcement came.

“Forced logout will be in five minutes. Forced logout will be in five minutes.”

Jude shrugged at Jay.

“Guess that’s that. See you tomorrow.”

Jay waved goodbye as he logged out of One Chance, thus ending Jay Low and Jude Lawbreaker’s adventures for the day.