“Today's class conclude here, make sure to prepare carefully for the exam coming up in two weeks!”
I took that as my cue to finish and leave the lecture hall, quickly packing up and slipping by the double door at the back and straight into the water closet. I, Hoàng Đình Khánh, an average 21 year old student enrolled in the university of education, studying for English education, a fulfilling and honorable life ahead of me. Oh, and I have some time to spare in the afternoon before I have to show up for my part-time job – an English teaching assistant. While making my way to the parking lot, I text to my girlfriend, asking her out as I can set aside a reasonable amount of time for her.
After getting back to the dorm, I quickly change out of my schooling attire, do my portion of housework for the day and quickly snuggle my way up on the top of the bunk. It is an ordinary top bunk bed reminiscent of an unorganized person, history books, English materials scattered everywhere, and on top of that an unorganized bundle of wires chock full of chargers and the likes.
I quickly weave my way around the pile of papers that double as my sleeping space, quickly take out my laptop and phone as finally I can slow down and relax for the time being. Boot up the laptop, I make my way to my Mist, my game library, and randomly boot up a game of Dichotomy Interactive, this time my luck land me on “Core of Steel”, a pretty old game about the second world war, however the thing that this game is known for is it constant updates throughout the year making the experience worth revisiting after some months.
In “Core of Steel”, you can play any nation that exist in the mid 1930s and can possibly play until your real time runs out, however, just like the real conflict, a good cut-off point of a play-through is around the early 50s at most. As I just read some articles and discussions online about kamikaze in the war so right now I’m in a mood to be a Japanese in the 1930s committing all sort of atrocities in the Pacific.
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I play the game quite historically, the border conflict with the Russians, the Marco Polo, the annexation of Indochina and Dutch East Indies, and I also additionally succeeded in capturing the majority of China, Malaysia, Singapore (+Brunei) and some random island off the coast of Australia, getting ready to storm through Australia, Burma and India all before 1942 (I delay Pearl Harbor because I haven’t have kamikaze on my arsenal yet, I also need to have fun!).
Right after kamikaze is acquired, the alarm that I set on my phone earlier to mark the time for me to get prepared and go pick up my girlfriend and hang out before my job come up go off. Dang it, slightly out of reach.
As I try to nudge myself closer and reach for the mobile, the phone slipped through my hand and starting to fall down from more than 2 meters to the concrete. And at that very specific time, I made my biggest and very last mistake in my life, I think. What happened is, the railing that prevent people who toss and turn in their sleep safe from falling down to the floor did not prevent me from stumbling my way down to catch the floor with my face; to put it bluntly, it snapped and I fell.
However, the face catching the floor comes later, not before I hit my entire 86kg (approx. 190lbs) on my forehead, pressing against the bottom railing that somehow bust me wide open, at least I think so, as I can notice blood spurting all over the face right before all of my vision from my left eye suddenly vanish, follow by a piercing pain from the left side of the head.
Somehow, before I lose my vision of my right eye due to the blood pouring into it, the last thing I can make out is that somehow, someway, my laptop, still on and all, make its way down into the concrete joining me and the phone, and due to the impact, the display is glitching out and showing weird and trippy imagery. And finally, my vision completely black out.