The next day I logged in early in the morning after having trouble sleeping due to my own excitement. The sounds of water splashing into the fountain filled my ears, the bustle of people buying and selling a host of items all around. I had begun to walk out of the market when I realized that I hadn't even thought about how I was going to go about obtaining a workshop to use.

  It took a bit of thinking and digging through forums, but I remembered that I would need a license for unregistered firearms which could only be found in the same place where I could purchase or rent property in Bastion.

  Before long I was walking toward the very center of the city, finally having a reason to go there other than eventually needing something. The forums were blowing up again as a small guild had begun fighting a guerilla war against the Lion's Mane, Crescent Shield, and Zephyr guilds. The images I saw surprised me, a familiar mohawk attached to JelloBelly. She was disguised heavily, though the gun she was using tipped me off, the shining frame of the Hornet firing down from a balcony at some Lion's Mane members.

  Other images showed blockades being broken repeatedly, normal players pushing harder and harder to get outside. The guilds were being whipped up into a frenzy as things were getting way out of hand. I grinned inwardly at the misfortune they'd brought upon themselves.

  It was at that moment a flurry of bullets flew by, one of them striking me in the leg and sending me to the ground. "He's over there, kill him!" My brain froze. I'd been shot and was now on the ground, bullets zipping through the air around me. NPCs ran away, sirens already wailing in the distance.

  Dumbstruck, I looked over and saw three players all marked with guild symbols, two of them shooting at me with handguns while the third ran for me, a crowbar in his hands. It was at this point that my brain finally rebooted, my fight or flight instincts kicking in.

  My Cobra was in my hand just as the crowbar wielding player reached me, his arm pulling back for the first swing, grinning maniacally as money signs must have been floating through his mind at the prospect of killing me.

  Three bullets hit him, two of them even being my own while I dragged myself behind a nearby metal trash can. My health was at three quarters of what it was before, my left leg crimson on the display, a bleed effect ticking my life away. I silently thanked whatever game developers had allowed the rest of my body to heal on its own.

  Bullets pinged off the metal relentlessly, the sound echoing in my ears. My breathing was erratic and impossible to control as I blindly fired back in what I could only assume was their direction.

  I pulled my duffle bag around and onto my lap, my left leg feeling a bit numb and a little less usable. Reaching in I ripped the Recycler Rifle out and cycled the bolt. Gunfire rang out on the now empty street, slowing only for moments at a time as it continued to get closer and closer, little holes and scars appearing on my already small amount of cover.

  My nerves were still a bit raw from the past several times I'd fought before, this just more of the same as my heart slammed against my chest while I reloaded my Cobra with the speed loader. Footsteps crackled against the ground around my cover, way too close for comfort. I rolled away from the trash can just as two bullets ricocheted off the ground where I'd just been.

  Now on my back I raised the revolver to see one of my assailants leaning over the trash can, bringing his gun around toward me. He didn't get the chance to fire off a third shot as mine threw his head back, taking the trash can with him as he went down.

  I felt another impact in my right shoulder, turning with my revolver in one hand and the rifle in the other, firing off a shot from the rifle the moment I saw the other player. The shot was off by a bit but it still packed enough of a punch to catch him in the shoulder, his arm and body separating in a flash of light before he disappeared.

  I grunted audibly as my health was now just under a quarter. I dragged myself into an alley even as I switched the guns out for my medical kit, dealing with my shoulder first before moving on and taking care of my leg. By the time the bleed effect went away, my health was blinking red. NPC guards were beginning to swarm the street as I hissed out a thanks to God that the pain setting was so low.

  I hauled myself up and over the edge of a full dumpster, closing the lid once more and just resting, the garbage bags providing a decent enough bed as I slowly began to recuperate.

  This is not how I was hoping to start my day.

  I needed a disguise, and soon. Being recognized and shot at was no longer on my bucket list, the discomfort from both wounds like an annoying itch in the back of my mind. For five minutes I was kept company by rotting filth while the guards patrolled for five minutes, unable to find much from the remains of the fighting.

  My health had recovered to about half by the time I made my way back to the market, swiftly purchasing a new set of clothing to hide my appearance. Now I was dressed in a mask that covered both my mouth and nose, along with a hoodie and a hat all for ten credits, putting everything on before trying for the center of the city again.

  I passed by three groups of varying guild players on the way there, my hand on the grip of my Cobra, safely tucked inside the oversized pockets of my used hoodie.

  The stairs leading up to the entrance of the massive black cube of a building were bleached white stone, finely cut and currently being swept clean by a nearby janitor. A symbol of a human with a globe for a background was painted onto the doors as I stepped inside, cool air chilling me a little bit.

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  The inside was patrolled by NPCs wearing armor reminiscent of the Horizon guards that had brought us here, though it was clearly a few steps below that level, lacking many of the edges and even the faceplate I'd seen. Their guns were similarly less advanced, none of the glowing lights or wires running through them, though I did notice their magazines were all colored blue around the bottom. The same symbol on the door adorned their armor and the center of the dark granite floor, reminding me of the villainous organizations in some dystopian movies.

  Players were all over the place, getting quests or licenses, some of them grouped up and having discussions that I didn't bother to pay attention to. Instead, I stepped up to the main desk, manned by a well dressed woman who gave me a small smile as a greeting. "How may I help you today?" I explained why I was there and got directions from her, though her tone never changed from what was very obviously a customer service voice, fake and wooden in her mannerisms.

  It didn't take too long before I was in front of a terminal that hung from the wall, showing available workshops all over the city, all of which being way out of my price range. Each one cost several thousand credits per in-game month just to rent, which translated to about a week in real time. If I could keep going outside Bastion and having successful runs, I could manage the costs, but otherwise it wasn't worth the risk at the moment.

  I also found a sort of cloning service that players could purchase, which would activate upon dying. It had to be renewed with each death however, costing three hundred credits per activation. Sighing inwardly at my new expense, I did so without hesitation and the threat of perma-death washed away.

  The houses were somewhat cheaper than the workshops, only costing around two thousand credits of upkeep in the worst parts of town. I kept going down the list, trying to find anything that would be an answer to my problems.

  My fingers tapping the screen repeatedly, I searched through page after page of cheaper and cheaper places to purchase. The sense of failure sat in the back of my mind as images of increasingly wretched buildings flashed across the screen, the prices still falling. Fifteen hundred credits. Fourteen hundred. Thirteen hundred. Lower and lower the prices went, until I finally hit one of the absolute worst places to buy. It was a storage shed that could be purchased for seven hundred credits, having jumped down from a full thousand for a one room apartment in the southern part of town.

  The image was of bare concrete, metal corrugated walls, and a single lightbulb hanging from an exposed wire, long since burnt out, the light switch equally exposed to the elements. It was so small that at most I'd only have room for a basic workbench and a locker. Even then I would still have to squeeze myself in to work.

  I found that as long as I marked things as 'to be stored,' I could get a workbench and a locker put inside, which cost a grand total of nine hundred credits.

  Lucky me.

  I purchased the space without hesitation, adding in both the locker and workbench. This left me with only two gold credit sticks to my name, or two hundred credits in total. I marked the property on my in-game map and set off to buy materials to start working with.

  As it turned out, resources were a bit more expensive than I had expected them to be, scarce materials like metal and sturdy blocks of wood costing more than I could've predicted.

  Furthermore, I didn't even really know what I was hoping to build. I could still get some leather and duct tape for the rebar club I was going to make, but aside from that I didn't have any real plans.

  I sat down at my usual spot by the fountain, players and NPCs milling about. A few minutes of wracking my brain didn't bring me any closer to any solutions, the simplest gun I could think of selling being a musket, though that wouldn't work for my purposes. Nobody would buy a weapon that took forever to load a single shot. I needed new information if I was to even think about selling weapons.

  I logged out and my vision shifted, now sitting in the slightly cold white void of my virtual home screen, the desk in front of me. One of the bright sides about the VR pods was their compatibility with the regular internet. It was here in this void that I began searching for the simplest guns I could find, going further and further until I finally found what I was looking for.

  In World War Two, the Japanese had been developing weapons that were incredibly simplified versions of rifles they'd already had in production, the designs little more than blocks of wood with a gun barrel and trigger assembly. The only moving part on the entire gun was the bolt itself that would be pulled back in order to load and shoot a single round before needing to be reloaded again.

  "Simple, crude, but effective." I muttered as I started working on learning how to manufacture the bolt mechanism and trigger assembly. Some machining was normally required these days, but I figured with enough time and grit I could manage to do it with whatever tools I could get my hands on. If not, then I'd just have to risk going outside of Bastion again.

  I shivered a bit as the temperature chilled me, readjusting it to twenty degrees celsius, the warmth washing over me like a blanket. I even changed the floor to a soft carpet before getting back to work.

  As it turned out I had missed another step. To make a barrel, I'd need something to drill a hole through the metal. I was certain I wouldn't have that with a meager workbench. Boring machines were big things, even the smallest ones big enough that I'd have to swap out the locker to have space enough to fit it in.

  I slated the machine for later purchase once I had enough money, deciding to just purchase pipes big enough to fit whatever rifle cartridge I could find. It would be little more than a slapdash rifle, but it would work about as well as a musket with a far faster reload time.

  After a solid hour of relentless research I logged back into the game, the sounds of the fountain and city flaring to life all around me. I then set off to find some materials for my pathetic arms manufacturing.

  It took some time before I could find someone selling blocks of wood cheap yet solid enough for my desires, buying five for fifty credits, just enough to make ten rifle frames. The metal and pipes were more expensive though, costing a hundred credits overall, the pipes specifically designed to fit the cheapest ammunition I could find, which happened to be 5.56 NATO cartridges.

  With all this filling my bag I had to buy another one and duct tape it together, bringing me down to a measly five credits and two full duffle bags smacking uncomfortably against my back as I walked south once more, heading for my new home.

  The number of looks I received increased compared to the last time I'd been there to sell my first haul, forcing me to show my revolver more than once before I reached my storage shed. It was one of several, most of which were either empty or had been broken into at one point. There were even a few tatted NPCs standing across from it, giving my bags a glance or two as I went inside and closed the door behind me, leaving me in total darkness.

  Home sweet home.