Chapter four

“Hmm? Hey, do you smell that?” asked Liliana as she tightly clenched her nose shut with her fingers while making a sour face. This was strange because, although the game utilized a virtual interface, ‘smell’ was not part of the game.

“Yeah… smells like not showering for years,” Sherry retorted. However, for her the strangest part was still the fact that these corpses didn’t disappear. The smell could still be written off as a bug or test feature from the new patch, but the persistent body effect would probably never happen. The reason for that was because the game had a rating limit and excessive violence would get the company in legal trouble. Bug or not, the developers would’ve taken precautions against such a thing.

Just as an experiment, Sherry summoned more of her throwing knives and flung it at the goblins once more. The corpse was nudged by the inertia as though it were a real corpse and not just a bunch of pixels and codes. That was the final straw, because even if the persistent corpse was an unlikely glitch, there were no way the developers coded in the corpse to be an object that could be interacted with. Once an enemy was killed their bodies were supposed to have become intangible.

“Hey, what are you doing?” asked Liliana.

“That goblin corpse moved.”

“Yeah? So what?”

“Corpses are supposed to be intangible. In the first place they’re set to disappear after a couple of seconds, but it’s been minutes and it’s still there.”

“It is strange…” she nodded. “But there’s nothing we can do about it. Unless you plan on loitering around a smelly goblin corpse all day to study it, we should regroup at the nearest city and discuss what our plans will be moving forward.”

Sherry thought to herself for a moment. It was true that nothing would probably come out of looking at a goblin corpse all day, but she was worried about what the implications of this could be. The biggest question being what happens to players if they died? Alas, the answers remained elusive, and like Liliana suggested, it may be better to reach the nearest city before doing anything else.

“The nearest city to Evergreen Pasture would be the starting town, ‘Northlight’.” After character creation, the players were plopped down onto this relatively safe field with weak monsters to get a feel for how their characters can move. Once they were satisfied they were then lead through a small forest to acquaint players with the combat system, then finally the Northlight would be right in front of them. So far things have turned out exactly the same as the tutorial. “If we keep going north from here there’ll be a small forest, and past that should be Northlight.” Sherry explained in case Liliana had forgotten.

“I remember that part. If I recall correctly weren’t we supposed to fight a giant timber wolf as part of the tutorial quest in that forest?”

“Yeah, that’s how it’s supposed to pan out anyway. If it indeed works like that then we can at least determine that this… ‘sitiuation’ is following the scripted events.” Sherry nodded.

“Great, let’s go?” Liliana shouted with a hint of excitement as she led the way.

The forest separating Evergreen Pasture and Northlight was indeed a small one. Yet, on their way they had run in several goblins and other minute monsters that were taken out with extreme ease.

“To think even goblins would attack us en masse,” sighed Liliana. There was a system in the game that prevented monsters whose level was too low from attacking higher levelled players. According to the game’s ‘lore codex’ monsters could instinctively tell when they were outclassed. This effect only took place if the monsters were below 30 levels of the player. That said, there were still monsters that were naturally aggressive and would attack regardless of level difference. Field bosses and every monster within Raid Dungeons were also exempt from this rule.

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“Stop complaining. At least you’re getting the chance to practice your lower level spells,” Sherry retorted with a sigh. “I bet you haven’t used ‘flare cannon’ in years.”

“How rude! I've used it a few times when I was bored!”

“Whatever. Keep your eyes open, this is the place where the giant timber wolf is scripted to spawn.”

Aside from the scripted boss encounter, it truly was an unimpressive forest. Goblins, horned rabbits and giant wasps were the extent of the spawn and were taken out in a single hit. Yet, as they continued through the forest they came across a large clearing.

“This is it,” Sherry warned and stopped Liliana. “Considering even fresh characters are supposed to beat the giant timber wolf, there isn’t anything we should be afraid of. However, the system has been a bit screwy so we should be on guard just in case.”

“I guess you have a point,” Liliana agreed as she took out the beginner’s wooden staff she previously received from Sherry. It was a thin brown staff with branches of glowing leaves at the tip. Even for a complete novice ranked item it was fairly powerful with all sorts of useful enchantments, the most useful being the +300% MP recovery speed.

Suddenly, they could hear several footsteps approaching their position. Sherry made a perplexed expression as she noted, “those aren’t the sound of wolf footsteps. Sounds like… people.”

“Is someone coming? Was there ever an event like that?”

“No,” she responded as she summoned her throwing daggers.

At that moment, three human figures emerged from the forest. Two men and one woman they were dressed in a style typical of adventurers usually depicted in other works of fiction; the manly guardian, ditzy female cleric, and the aloof archer.

“Stand behind me!” shouted the guardian. He was a buff fellow- the muscle on muscle kind- and easily twice the size of an ordinary man. He covered himself in thick plate armour that made one wonder how he could even run with all that weight on him. After allowing his teammates to take refuge behind him, he drew his massive pavise- which was easily as big as him- forward and prepared himself.

“Hey, shouldn’t we help them?” Liliana asked. It had seemed that the three adventurers hadn’t noticed the two who were standing a bit farther away.

“No, let’s just watch for a moment,” replied Sherry. The tutorial mission to take down the giant timber wolf wasn’t a group event, so there shouldn’t have been anyone else there, yet somehow things were proceeding off script. ‘Are they players?’ she wondered, ‘or maybe NPCs?’ The way they acted, their haggard breaths, sweat dripping down their faces, everything seemed too vivid and improvised to be mere NPCs. There was also a part of Sherry that was curious as to what would happen to these people if they died and they were really other player characters.

“But...” Liliana seemed more concerned but ultimately decided to heed Sherry’s words and stood back.

The ground started to tremble, first subtly and after a few seconds one could really feel the impact of the weight behind those footsteps. They weren’t the sounds of other people. No, this undoubtedly belonged to the giant timber wolf. Like a hungry beast, the enormous wolf erupted from the sea of trees bearing its drooling fangs. Its fur was like fine steel threads with numerous traces of scars all over its body. It stared down towards the three adventurers with crazed eyes like it was looking down at nothing but a pile of meat.

“Awooooo!” its howl echoed through the forest as it prepared to charge like a bull. Using its colossal body it smashed into the guardian’s pavise and completely bent it in half as though it were a piece of cardboard.

The three adventurers were flung back, and the hungry giant wolf approached the guardian and opened its mouth ready to eat.

“Sherry!” Liliana shouted. “We have to help them!” Sherry held her tongue. She wanted to watch what would happen; she needed to understand if what happened to the goblins would also happen to these ‘humans’ as well. Her face soured as her eyes were drawn like moths to a morbid fire. “Sherry!” Liliana called out to her one more time.

Had Liliana not been there, she would’ve most definitely let these adventurers get eaten. It shocked even herself to know that there was this part of her which valued knowledge more than human life and morality. There were articles written about mad scientists that conducted cruel and immoral experiments for the sake of procuring research data, and when she read them she always scoffed. ‘I’d never do that,’ she comforted herself, but perhaps she wasn’t so different from those people.

“But...” she put up one last defence.

“Sherry! We have to go in!”

“Tch, dammit! Fine, we’re killing it! Liliana, launch a Flare Cannon!”