“Past this next level. Just a few more enemies and I will be able to get past this level.” These damn enemies are getting annoying,

I thought as I stared at the visor. For a while now, this nest of dwarves has been giving me more trouble and pains than the other ones combined. My health even dipped past 50%.

I do have to give it to the developers of this 'simulated reality' game though. It is the most realistic thing I have seen yet. Like I can make out each and every detail on, say a rock face. Even though there have been all these recent advancements in technology and video games as a whole for the past 100 years this one is different. this one seems to be almost impossible to distinguish from reality.

In it, you play as a giant robot that is saving the human species from a small race of dwarves that plague the underground. The lore states that when the humans and the dwarves first made contact, it was not pretty. The dwarves almost immediately lashed out. The first people who contacted the small race where some unsuspecting miners who happen to detect traces of a large cavern, little did they know, when they blew the hole, the evil they would unleash upon the world.

Dwarves attack at lightning speeds, have razor sharp claws and fangs, and are smart enough to rival the humans themselves. After the first month of fighting between the two species, the dwarves progressed through the civilization scale at lightning speeds thanks to the humans they killed. The dwarves quickly took over almost all underground regions, creating a vast underground network, consisting of large cities interconnected with each other. Finally, after a long time, the humans were able to devise a robot, one capable of harnessing a power capable of withstanding the bullets of the dwarves and fast enough to rival their own agility.

And that is what you play as. As one of the many pilots selected to operate these massive machines.

Now I will admit, the mech does seem a little overpowered. I mean you get to mow through waves and waves of dwarves at a time. Killing numbers equal to that of the doom slayer from the early 2000’s. Or so I have heard, I don’t usually pay much attention to games from that far back.

As I finished off one the last dwarf of this colony, my friend flew over to me using his prepaid jetpack. God I was jealous of that thing.

“Hey, mate, glad to see you got the last one.” He said, sounding exasperated.

“Yeah, they were tough this time. I wonder if they changed something about their AI?” It was possible.

“I think they did, they seem more aggressive than normal.” We heard a loud war scream come from above, to see one of the dwarves flying through the air, wielding a crude looking knife. I always forget how realistic this game is, I can see into his eyes. The bloodlust was definitely there. It was so apparent in fact that I almost felt sorry for the thing, until I remembered that it was just an AI, and while their sentience has been long debated, it was deemed that as long as they only display human like characteristics then it is fine, as long as the program itself felt no pain then it was legal.

My friend raised a robotic arm to the dwarf and fired his arm mounted minigun, tearing the thing to shreds and showering us in blood. That was one other thing, they deemed this game too realistic for kids to play, so in order for you to actually play it you had to… do… something I can’t quite remember right now. Anyways, we need to get to the next dwarven village, I am almost at level 69 and only true gamers know how special that level is.

…

The next village wasn’t too far off from here, just through a tunnel about 3 miles long. We were able to get the signals the dwarves use from the last village to find this one, for some reason they use some strange pattern sequence to recognise that we are ‘fellow dwarves’ because if we tried to get near the village without the code it would be nearly impossible to find due to the vastness of the underground and how well they are able to hide from our sensors. Now it's not exactly unheard of to just stumble upon a village, but it's just a lot more efficient to go down the trails with the code in hand.

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The next village fell no differently than the last, we basically strolled up to the door, due to the code, and barged in with little to no effort.

“Surprise!” My friend said cheerily as he started mowing down an entire block of dwarven houses with a minigun in each hand. I went with a more tactical approach, my mech’s armor radiates so much heat that it is able to literally melt off the face of anything within 30 feet of me. Of course I don’t just have that. As I stared down the barrel of a cannon the dwarves were desperately attempting to point at me, I pulled out my energy sword. A weapon as hot as a lightsaber but twice as deadly due to its size and girth. Whipping it out, I swung the sword in an upwards motion, separating the cannon into two.

For a moment, I decided to go off of defensive and go full offense. I turned off the heat generator to save on power, and activated my shoulder mounted railgun. It still uses a lot of power, but not nearly as much as the heat generator.

Wave after wave of dwarves went down. We were unstoppable. The gore was violent, and the intestines were worse. But it was a necessary evil if I wanted to get to that next level.

Once, I looked down to see a dwarf cut in half, its legs were most likely disintegrated, but as I looked I noticed it reaching out to something in an alley. I guess it's still alive. When I knelt down and looked into the alley I noticed a smaller dwarf, almost looking like it was… crying.

These games get way too realistic.

Oh well, I decided to kill the both of them anyway.

…

After destroying my way through about a third of the settlement, I looked over at my friend, to see him gleefully tearing down the main structure in the middle. He was basically sawing his way through the base of the metal structure as if he was some sick lumberjack.

Wait, why did I make that analogy?

I felt something spark next to me. Not on the outside of the suit, no. Something short circuited inside of the suit. The kill counter on the top right of my vision flickered and went back to being solid, currently it sat at 29,183.

I looked down at my hands, still clutching onto the saber I noticed something, they were caked in blood, as well as dust from the air.

The blood was supposed to disappear after a while.

I looked down at the rest of me, I was absolutely covered in blood.

I decided to turn off the saber and I placed it back in its compartment on my hip.

What's gotten over me. I usually would have decimated this entire section of this pitiful town by now.

I noticed something, while looking down at my hands, off in the corner of my vision. Was a human, his leg was blown off.

Slowly, I walked over to him. each step I took damn near shook the entire cave. I noticed in his left hand, a gun. One probably designed in the 1990’s. My shoulder mounted cannon started up, and blew the device out of his hand.

I had finally reached him, and with a single hand, I flipped him onto his back. And grabbed him by the throat.

I pulled the human to meet my eye level, wherever that truly was.

Choking on his own blood, he spat something out.

“I don’t care.” A smile formed on his face. “I don’t care if you kill me. You AI drone bastard. My family is safe, they moved on to somewhere else."

He started a random coughing fit before continuing.

"I also destroyed the access code you fucks have been using to get from town to town. They are safe. That's all I care about.” The smirk started to fade as he realized I wasn’t immediately killing him.

“You know, I heard that you bastards have people inside of ya, is that true?” He paused.

“I heard that your AI overlord wasn’t willing to put actual AI into these drones of its, so it put people in em. You may be mauled beyond comprehension inside of that damn thing, but you still are conscious. Somewhere deep in there, you will go to hell for what you have done.”

I squeezed and his neck snapped, killing him. I squeezed some more, his head separated from the rest of his body with a disgusting pop followed by a squelch, before dropping to the ground.

“I NEED to get to level 69. One way or another.” This is the only way I know. The more of these Humans Dwarves I kill, the closer I get. But for some reason, it also seems so infinitely far away.