The cold was getting to me as I wandered around. Or maybe it wasn’t the cold. Maybe it was the darkness, yet I could see just fine, apparently, another racial trait. The game had definitely made it a valuable aspect of being elven or dwarven. Except, I needed to stop thinking of this as a game.

Assuming it wasn’t a very vivid bad dream, this was my life now. Some freaking UN Decree had screwed me over royally. Truthfully, I guess it could be worse. My parents were dead. I had spoken to my only sister maybe half a dozen times since our parents’ funeral five years ago. It wasn’t that I didn’t care, our lives just went in different directions. At thirty I hadn’t exactly rung the bell but I had been doing fine for myself and was content with it. Certainly, I wouldn’t have volunteered to have my body destroyed.

I had been studying AI construction. Unable to get into one of the few universities left; I was mostly self-taught. I hadn’t relied on the stuff uploaded to our cortical implants, instead going old-school with digital files that were stored off the holo-net. A gaming buddy owned a bunch of them. They were contraband now, but it wasn’t truly prosecuted.

Beyond that, I was able to snag a beta tester spot in LoS when it came out. That turned out to be a poor decision. Oh well, it was water under the bridge. Being dead wasn’t great, but it could have been worse. I mean I technically spent most of my days inside a game, so this wouldn’t be that different.

I stopped walking as I realized that this was at least the fourth time I had thought something which should have pissed me off. But instead, I was mildly annoyed and then moved on. Definitely something I was going to have to explore more, but again, a problem for later. Being a monster wasn’t ideal. As a gamer, I was never into PvP. I was more into developing small team tactics for PvE. Some guys lived for the thrill of the kill and some lived for huge raids with seventy-two players all coordinated.

To me the first was just too much about reaction speed. I didn’t have the quickest reflexes. The second was always about luck. With that many people involved, you had to hope the wrong person didn’t get disconnected, or that you didn’t find out your tank was actually nine years old and hacked in on his dad’s gear until his mom caught him.

With small team tactics, it was about working with a limited number of resources. If you didn’t have enough healing, it was about learning ways to mitigate damage. If you weren’t strong enough, it was about finding ways to debuff the monster. Best of all it was about synergy, and I loved finding that whether it was with a regular team or with a pickup group.

Now I was the monster, but that wasn’t the worst of it. Or maybe it was. It wasn’t the thing that stopped me in my tracks; that was the sudden fear of what Integration might mean. The AI could be controlling my emotions to some extent. I had that outburst of anger against the snapjaws. Rather than freezing up, I had gone all berserker.

It was also keeping me from caring too much. There was a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach that said the other shoe hadn’t even landed yet. Or was that rumbling in my stomach hunger?

It was making it hard to focus. Suddenly, all I could think about was eating. I thought about going back and eating the snapjaws. The image of me biting into them and tearing away chunks of raw flesh with my strong teeth went through my head. I even had a sense of how good it would taste.

I just shook my head. I certainly didn’t want to eat the snapjaws. They looked disgusting. Then another minor notification popped up:

Ogre’s Hunger Resisted- you have been 94% successful at resisting the urge to eat now. Be sure to sate your hunger before it takes control of you.

I read the notification three times before swiping it to the side. It was then that I realized; it was neither having the AI mess with my head nor being a monster that was the worst. It was having the AI trying to turn me into a monster that I had to worry about.

I really needed to get my bearings and figure out where I was going. Food was gonna become my top priority, followed closely by shelter. I could endure the environment, but I would need a place to sleep, assuming that HI’s sleep. Hmm... it wasn’t something to test now. After that, I needed gear. That part of this brought a smile to my face. As long as I didn’t turn into some wild beast, this might be fun.

The roar sounded again and this time it was closer, like much closer. I started running or at least doing my best impression. Why had I never noticed that ogre legs were bowed before? It would have been amusing if I didn’t hear a tree behind me snap while it was ripped up out of the ground.

I certainly didn’t know every monster in Eastern Kimira. Without Wiki’s it was impossible to know them all, but I knew of only one monster capable of tearing up the ground like this. And knowing that was enough to get me running, bow legged or not. I moved as fast as I could across the snow. With my strength, two feet of snow did little to impair me.

Unfortunately it did even less to impair the frost wurm behind me. That was the name it had been assigned by the AI. It would likely be renamed eventually because the name did nothing to actually describe it. But that would happen later. It was the highest-level monster in this zone, at least level thirty.

I couldn’t say for sure since the one time I had seen one, it had glowed red in the danger sense system the game provided. Red meant deadly threat for whatever party you were in at the moment. Glowing red essentially meant not a snowball’s chance in hell.

So far, all the adventurers had mostly avoided it. I knew of a party of level twenty-fives that was wiped when trying to take one on. This wasn’t something that luck would get me through. I had to find a place to hide, hopefully, a cave with a small entrance.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

I reached an outcropping of rocks large enough for me to climb up on. Maybe there was a crevice on top, big enough to accommodate my fat backside but small enough to stop the wurm from getting me. As I was scrambling up the side of the rock formation, I realized another ogre problem. My hands were massive, but my fingers were relatively short and chubby, proportionally. It didn’t help with the climbing.

When I made it to the top, I dared to look back. Almost instantly, I wished I hadn’t. Thirty feet out from the edge of the rock formation, the ground burst up in a geyser of dirt and rock. Even where I was standing was pelted with rocks.

As the falling debris settled, I saw a creature out of a fever dream shared by Alice and Goldilocks. The creature had the head of a polar bear that was fifteen feet across and the large, segmented body of a centipede covered in white fur. Unruly tufts of white fur were growing out between each of the ten-foot-long segments. Each segment had a massive bear leg and paw on each side rather than the normal pointed legs of a centipede.

It was quite a monstrosity. The bear jaw opened impossibly wide, and it roared its challenge at me. I could feel even my huge body being shaken by it, as bear-pede saliva gave me an unwelcome shower. The hand gripping my spear trembled, and the sonic force was literally threatening to knock me off the outcropping.

A quick notification popped up, but I had to push it aside. I felt rage and anger that this creature was trying to kill me. I didn’t want to be here. At least I didn’t want to be forced to be here. Now this thing was threatening to end my life. I didn’t even know if I would respawn.

Yet for all that, I had given up the idea of hiding. I was Frank the Ogre, and I wasn’t going to be run down by a furry bug. Instead of giving in to the rage and leaping at the head that was coming down to bite me in half, I raised my hand. With no conscious thought I shouted, “Flameburst.”

I felt the mana surge through my body as I willed a bomb of fire to burst inside the cavernous mouth coming for me. In my head I saw the bear-pede’s head explode from the fury of my magic. The reality was far more depressing.

You deal fire damage: 11

The flames exploded inside the mouth alright, but the entire spread couldn’t have been more than a couple feet wide. The bear-pede didn’t seem to be hurt at all. If anything, it was startled. That bought me a second to think as the massive head pulled back and then shook from side to side.

When it looked at me again, there was raw hate in those black eyes. It wasn’t just coming after me for a kill. This was personal. Apparently, it wasn’t used to its snacks fighting back. That didn’t deter me, though. I looked for other ways to use the spell.

Those big, black eyes that were staring at me now seemed my best chance. I envisioned boiling the liquid in those eyes with my fire spell. I held my hand up again and shouted out, “Flameburst.” This time, I willed the orb to appear inside its eye.

Another notification popped up, but I ignored it as my sphere of fire came into existence, not inside the eye of the behemoth but right outside of it. At least I saw it had caused critical damage.

You deal fire damage: 42 (critical hit)

Again the enormous head shook. I waved my hand and began chain casting the spell. I could have shouted the word faster, but something about the magic wouldn’t allow me to cast it more than once per second. Still, even at that speed, and even targeting the eye repeatedly, I only hit it three more times. The other flame bursts exploded harmlessly against its thick hide, doing nothing more than lightly scorching the white fur.

Ten more Flamebursts were all I had the mana for, and then it was back to running. Not that I thought I had a chance. At least the bear-pede was being more careful because of the fire. Finally, though, its hatred of me won out and it lunged for me again.

What I hadn’t noticed while blasting away at the bear-pede was how the rest of the creature’s body was now coiled around the rock outcropping I was standing on. Some brilliant tactician I was. I had allowed my only escape route to be cut off. So, when it lunged at me, I threw myself to the side and thrust my spear at the same eye I had been targeting.

Luck is a fickle mistress and one with a sense of humor because not only did I make contact with my spear, but I drove it straight into the center of the beast’s eye.

You deal piercing damage: 107 (devastating critical) You have blinded frost wurm’s right eye.

I would have cursed about the fact that I had dealt more damage with one thrust of a pointy stick than I had with all my magical attacks, except I was already busy cursing about my predicament. When I leapt off, it wasn’t onto the snowy ground. No, I leapt right into the segmented coils of the bear-pedes body. It might end up killing me, but I’d bite my tongue off before I called it something as inaccurate and lame as frost wurm.

That attitude didn’t save me from being repeatedly batted about by massive bear-like paws and then squeezed tight by its body.

You have taken damage:

34 blunt

11 piercing

22 blunt

13 piercing

37 blunt

9 piercing

39 blunt

11 piercing

44 crushing pressure

My HP bar was plummeting, but I didn’t need to see that to realize that I was in deep doo doo. The system might quantify the damage as blunt for the paws and piercing for the claws, but all I knew was it felt like being dragged behind a car over broken glass. I felt my skin tear and my bones break and then I was having the life crushed out of me.

All of it stopped and for just a moment I hoped something else had distracted the monster. But no such luck. Instead, it was staring down at me. All of that malevolence was condensed into one eye. This was not going to end well for me. Both my arms were broken, and I was held immobile by its coiled body.

Best to close my eyes as that maw came down over top of me. I could smell its fetid breath. The saliva was dripping down onto me. Yet it wasn’t biting down. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what it was doing. Its massive tongue lolled against me, pushing me by its sheer size up against the teeth on one side of the mouth.

I bit down on my tongue, unwilling to scream, as it seemed intent on playing with its food. Maybe this was revenge for its eye, but it pushed me back-and-forth, nibbling on me repeatedly, before finally ending it all. The worst part was that I remember being bitten in half. The notification that I got was one to remember.

You have sustained fatal damage: bitten in half. Ogre Toughness activated. You may fight on for 11 seconds.

Feeling my innards slide out of my upper half for eleven seconds was not an experience that I ever wanted to repeat. All I could say was that shock or Ogre Toughness, whatever that was, saved me from the pain. I only felt a numb anger as I drifted off. All the toughness in the world couldn’t save me when my arms were broken, and I was being squeezed down a giant throat.

Dying clearly sucked, but the final notification at least gave me some hope.

You are being sent for respawn.