They went back outside and gathered around Jasper’s body. The warmth and smells of summer washed over them, alien but close enough to home to feel painfully familiar.

‘Commander,’ Ver said to Buzz, and he held a small belt in his hands. ‘It’s very important to the Main that your cultural rights and norms are respected. It is my honor to return this to you.’ He held out the belt.

The whole team stared at it in sudden shocked silence. The last time they had seen it, the belt was at the bottom of their crate.

‘Where the fuck did you get that?’ Buzz asked finally.

‘It was provided to me,’ Ver said. ‘That’s all I know.’

Buzz glared at him, then snatched the belt.

‘Goddammit we spent fucking forever on that crate,’ Mallory muttered.

They gathered around Jasper in a circle and were silent.

‘Jasper Daedalus Ryan,’ Buzz said, after a pause. ‘Twenty-eight years old. A good soldier and a good man. I wanted to keep him safe and bring him home, and in that I have failed.’

No-one spoke. Buzz’s words were deeply unexpected from a man who simply didn’t deal in emotions. But his voice was level and clear. ‘Jasper told me once he wanted the Game money so he could prove to a girl that he was worthy of her,’ Buzz continued. ‘My wish now is that they meet in the next life.’

Buzz took a small silver bar from the belt and placed it gently on Jasper’s chest. He touched the young man’s face for a long moment, then stepped back.

They all stood straight and tall as the device fizzled, and then it and Jasper burst into a white hot flame, so strong and bright that the body within was not visible and the mourners could not look at it directly. They waited silently, unmoving until the flames died away and only a black scorch on the grass remained.

Buzz looked from person to person. ‘All we have now is each other,’ he said. ‘And we need to focus.’

Already Neb could see the instinct of the soldiers taking over, the need to fight and survive overcoming everything else. They checked each of the weapons in the secret room one by one, but everything except the plasma cannon Neb had originally found was locked to a higher level. And even that was now down to two percent charge after Meathead had used it against the cynobugs.

‘Seems like a freak chance I pulled the one gun we could use,’ Neb said to Ver suspiciously.

‘My guess is you could have pulled any gun at that moment and it would have functioned as a Game intro weapon,’ Ver said. ‘I don’t know for sure. But I will tell you that everything in the Game is intentional.’

Neb stared at him with a mixture of dislike and thoughtfulness. Everything in the game is intentional. Was that really true? If so, it was a profound insight, but Ver didn’t look like he felt he had just said something of deep importance.

Mallory was examining a sleek weapon that to Neb looked like a model of a long, thin spaceship. It was a triphasic railgun, according to the overlay, though that description didn’t leave Neb much the wiser. Mallory clearly knew exactly what it was, though, and found it hard to prise himself away from it. ‘This is fucking bullshit,’ he said, for about the tenth time. ‘Nothing for Level One. Level One fucking sucks!’

Equally frustrating for the team was that in the secret room there were only heavy weapons -- no rifles, sidearms or melee weapons. Their mood, already bleak from Jasper’s death, turned darker. All they had to defend themselves were the barely-charged plasma cannon and their sidearms from home. And the supplies of ammo they had brought were now much depleted from the fight with the cynobugs.

‘I’m already starting to hate this fucking Game,’ Gray muttered.

There were no more healing orbs to be found in the room, either, leaving them with only the last one remaining from the original box. That should have been for Jasper, Neb thought, and the thought made him angry and sad. He told no-one about the triggerless pistol he had already taken from the room. It did not count as a weapon in his inventory, which he found strange. He wondered when he would have time to examine it in detail. Or if he ever would.

They got at least some good news when Mallory found a box of four grenades at the last moment, low down in the corner of the room. It was something, but so much less than they had hoped for.

Mallory put all the other guns back on the racks, arranged as neatly as when they had found them. He was very quiet about it, and Neb could see how much it was bothering him to leave everything behind. But there simply was no other way. They closed the door with a soft click, and then Meathead got down on his knees with a rock and bashed the release knob in the fireplace until it was completely non-functional. They had thought of using a grenade to frag the secret room, but it seemed likely that at least some of the weapons would survive and other players might find them. Neb sighed as Meathead broke the release, and Mallory did not watch.

The last thing they did was spend a short while practicing with their inventories, putting things in and taking them out. The experience was profoundly strange. By selecting something in the overlay’s inventory view they could examine it and see system information about it. Then by selecting the option for ‘use’, the item would instantaneously appear in reality, hovering in the air just long enough for them to grab it. If they didn’t catch it in time, gravity re-asserted itself and the object fell to the ground.

Everyone had a few close calls where they almost dropped their side-arms, but soon it became second nature. The overlay in general blended into their experience as a natural extension, Neb found. He could explore the map while still maintaining most of his awareness of the world around him, as if he had always been doing it.

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Buzz had spent some time on his own examining the map, and then he had called Anna and Ver over for a discussion. Now he summoned the whole group. ‘Team,’ he said. ‘We’ve done well to get this far, but we’re perilously low on weapons and ammo. Marked on the map about 12 klicks southeast is a military base. Ver confirmed it exists, though the miserable bastard won’t give me any more info.’

Ver sighed. ‘I don’t have any more info,’ he said, but Buzz ignored him,

‘The main roads are going to get a lot of player traffic,’ the commander continued, and given our weapons situation, we need to avoid that. The map shows a track that passes south through the forest. There are no safehouses shown in that region, and fuck knows what else is out there, so it’s a risk. But without firepower, we’re fucked anyway. So the mission is: get to that base and find some fucking guns. Everyone clear?’

‘Yes sir!’ they shouted in unison.

Buzz looked at Ver. ‘See you around, asshole.’

They moved out in their usual travel formation -- Gray at the rear, then Mallory and Meathead, then Anna and Neb, Buzz at the front. It wasn’t the by-the-book approach, but it was what Buzz liked, and therefore it was what they did. Jasper should have been up front with Buzz, and his absence was loud. Neb stared at the scorched Earth of his funeral pyre as they passed. Poor bastard, he thought. He didn’t make it far.

It felt good to leave the ruins of the Banker’s House behind, but at the same time it was frightening to move out into the world. Ver stood in the door of the Banker’s house like a ghost, watching them go.

They scanned constantly for any hint of movement. In their original equipment case there had been motion sensors and recon drones and all sorts of other things designed for exactly this kind of situation, and without their weapons and equipment the special ops soldiers felt naked and exposed. But to Neb, in a surprising way, it felt liberating. It felt -- and he half-smiled at the layered complexity of the thought -- like unfiltered reality.

A klick or so from the Banker’s house they picked up the trail Buzz had seen on the map, and it wound south-west through the woods before turning almost due south. The trees got thicker and closer together, and the light dimmed. The smell was beautiful, old and peaceful. Neb tried to remember if the real Banker’s house had any indication of a forest nearby, but he was pretty sure there had been nothing around it except the bare rock of the underlying planet.

The forest was a beautiful environment to walk through, but yet something about it was unnerving to Neb, making him feel anxious even beyond the threat of attack and the unknowns of the Game. The feeling persisted, refusing to be dismissed, and yet he could not figure out what was causing it until suddenly it seemed totally obvious: the layout of the trees was wrong. They grew singly or in little clusters, but the clusters seemed to repeat in very similar patterns every few hundred meters. Some of the individual trees repeated also, with almost identical patterns of gently spreading branches. This was not a simulation of a forest, Neb realized -- it was a simulation of a simulation of a forest.

He was about to say something to the others but the thought was pushed form his mind by the sound of gunfire in the distance. There was the rattling buzz-sound of high-energy automatic projectile fire, answered a moment later by an explosion which even at this distance sounded intense.

‘Sounds like player versus player,’ Anna said.

‘Yeah,’ Buzz said. He was listening intently, but there was nothing more to be heard. ‘Or maybe some of the monsters are tooled up.’

Some of the monsters. There could be anything out there -- they had literally no information whatsoever. And yet there was a message here in the forest, Neb knew, like there had been with the Banker’s House, in the repetition of the trees. He was again about to say something to Buzz, but their commander was on edge from the gunfire they had heard. And at the best of times, he didn’t deal well with impressions or intuitions. Facts were his currency.

They kept moving cautiously. The day grew warmer, the sun high. The sky beyond the tree canopy was a deep and slightly-wrong blue. A wolf-like creature raced across their path at one point, just a blur of motion, making them all drop instinctively into defensive positions. The fact that no-one fired was a testament to their training. Neb felt his heart race for a long time afterwards, slow to calm. His mind and body were experiencing stress like nothing he had ever known before. But he was still able to think clearly, and he found that reassuring.

He scrolled around the map as they walked, keeping the overlay view small, doing it almost subconsciously. At a zoomed-in level there was a lot of detail that was not visible at the broader scales, but that also meant that there was a lot of map to cover. In places there were Main symbols on the map that were almost the same color as the background, easy to miss and then mostly impossible to understand anyway. Did other civs have a better grasp on Main symbology than humans did, Neb wondered? It was certainly possible that someone in the Cluster had discovered a Main archaeological site that they had kept secret.

Scrolling around near the top of the map something caught his eye. It was a symbol drawn in light gray, close to a small group of buildings. It was near the northeast ‘corner’ of the map, in as much as a circle had corners, and Neb knew this symbol: It meant library, or at least was generally associated with the concept of a store of knowledge. The building cluster was one of the most remote things on the map, not an area they were ever likely to end up in. He sighed. How wonderful it would be to have time in the Circle without the Game, Neb thought, to be able to explore and immerse himself as he pleased. Thinking about it make him feel a weight as though of loss.

After about two hours they came to a stream, glittering in the afternoon sun, and stopped for a break. They had some discussion about whether the water would be safe to drink, which ended abruptly when Mallory stuck his face into it and drank deeply. ‘Those Main assholes didn’t bring us here to watch us die of dysentery,’ he said, as he shook out his hair like a dog. No-one argued with that.

Neb sat cross legged on the grass, just a few meters from where Anna and Meathead were standing guard. He examined the military base on the map. At the zoomed-in level there was shading on the surrounding area, a slightly darker color than the rest of the map, but there was no key or legend that said what the shading meant. Their position was already deep into the shaded area, but there had been no change in the landscape that he had seen. Neb zoomed out further, looking back at the route they had taken so far. Where had the other player groups arrived, he wondered? What had happened to them? From the distant gunfire they had heard, it seemed like at least one team had found weapons and ammo.

He looked again at the military base. Like with the ruins and with the forest, something was niggling him about it, but he couldn’t pin down the thought. Anna was standing close by, staring out into the woods, her pistol in her hands. He considered saying something to her, but did not. She didn’t have much more tolerance for half-formed ideas than Buzz did.

‘One minute warning,’ Buzz said. ‘Get ready to move.’

As Neb got to his feet he scrolled across the map one final time and a symbol caught his eye, layered onto the shaded zone so subtly he had not noticed it before. It was a faint blue-gray, and it was another of the symbols that human scholars at least partially understood -- something close to the concept of collection.

Neb felt himself freeze. A bunch of thoughts suddenly came together -- the military installation, the strange forest they had been passing through, the library, the shaded area on the map.

‘Everyone,’ Neb said, his eyes wide. The others turned to him curiously, sensing something in his voice. ‘I think we may be in trouble.’