Ros appeared in the middle of a very small, distantly familiar room with a bunk, a locker and a replicator. She grinned and pulled out her boning knife. She cut the insulation seal, pried up some paneling, unscrewed three bolts and pulled the whole replicator unit from the wall. She checked it. No problems, fully operational. She detached the computer module before she put both parts of the replicator in her spatial ring.

Ros was utilizing a cheat discovered by someone else in another station in the other timeline. It was something that she had never done herself, but had seen others use in later realms. She had always wished she’d known to grab a replicator from the First Realm. It would have made the Second Realm a lot cheaper to live through.

Unlike a spatial storage space, which exploded when put in another storage space, a replicator machine could be carted around in a spatial object. All usual coin costs still applied.

The separated computer module could be used to copy pattern libraries from other replicators with site specific patterns.

She could get the patterns from every replicator style in the entire station, the entire realm.

In addition, a savvy replicator user could make new patterns, although the machine would recognize a scan of an unaltered replicator object as an old pattern and charge for it. Mobile replicators were useful for unusual nesting sites, places where humans weren’t intended to live by whatever plans the architects of the Realms had.

Replicators that were removed from places where there was supposed to be a replicator would respawn, much like a mobile monster.

Replicators and similar item spawn locations were available in every Realm, but the menus changed. The first realm menu had some unique items and the most comprehensive food list of any Realm, so carrying one along kept the comprehensive food list active.

Owned replicators had to have their raw ingredients replenished periodically and sometimes specific inputs were needed for items, especially metal items.

Pleased with her acquisition, Ros changed into her thick uniform jumpsuit and quietly left the bunk.

As she entered the nearest main corridor she smiled and remembered the most well known trick in the First Realm. She spotted it attached to the wall.

There was a broken plumbing line in every single green zone corridor, a pipe that respawned every eight days if it happened to be removed during that time frame. Every eight days the whole area reset, erasing any paint marks or structural damage, not that many available weapons could damage the structure.

Roslyn shook the thoughts out of her head and reached for the intact pipe under the break. She screwed the threaded coupling down and lifted the pipe section out. It was a four foot section of indestructible metal alloy pipe. All components of the buildings were nearly indestructible, even the glass windows and the wood or plastic fixtures.

Breakable things tended to respawn whole on a variable range of respawn dates and respawn timeframes.

The top end of this particular respawnable pipe had a hex shaped hole where another pipe ought to fit in. The hole was exactly the size of the skinny handle of a Leaf Knife, which was 2 coins in any replicator.

The Leaf Knife was actually a three leaf knife, with a hastate shape. The main, pointed, spear like leaf and the two smaller side leaves that formed a limited guard on the blade.

Taken together, the pipe and the knife made a very serviceable spear.

Taken alone the leaf knife was a very poor knife.

Just in case anyone wondered what had been intended, the coupling, which Ros removed from the base of the pipe, could be placed on the top end of the pipe and the Leaf Knife had identical threadings just under the blade.

Ros knew that if she was quick and didn’t mind losing cheap Leaf Knives, she could omit the coupling and jab a knife into, say a Moon Wurm, and pull the pole back, leaving the knife in the monster to cause additional damage.

Ros didn’t have a single coin yet, but when she did she was going to want as many Leaf Spears as she could manage for open corridor battles. Pulling on your spear mid battle to dislodge it from something was a danger point in a spear technique. Better to hold multiples in the spatial ring, easily accessible yet out of the way.

Charging hell hounds could be speared like an old fashioned boar hunt and two pipes could be screwed together making an eight foot spear with a six inch blade.

She would need multiples, luckily, she had a large spatial ring with more than enough room for her favorite Hell Hound killing spears.

Ros continued to make her way out of the Ibsen Territory, unscrewing all the pipes she passed.

She deliberately avoided the main lift, which strung together all the most public of the rooms, the observation deck, the ground floor lobby, the gyms, the arcades, the lotto rooms, the restaurant and bars… the central lift opened inside or quite near all of those spaces. She Blinked twice to avoid patrols as she left. She went down stairs occasionally as she headed towards the chasm, the deep gap between sections.

Before she’d originally gotten permission to start hunting in about two months, the Territory would be marked at every cross corridor. Interesting that it wasn’t already marked. Apparently marking the territory was a product of the influx of people.

The moment she saw yellow corridors Ros pulled out her energy shield, mind Barrier and ulu knife. From here on she was on her own and in peril. She needed to find a room on an orange hall and settle for the night.

Luckily Harry was right, the station sections were all the same, not just here but in every station. In her previous life she’d spent years hunting empty stations as a mercenary hunter. She knew where she was and where she was going. The sections were a lot larger than just the central lift column. Each section easily housed 10,000 people in comfort and style. A section reminded Ros of a bunch of cruise ships stacked like shipping containers in an intermodal yard, everything needed for a happy life, all crammed together in what vaguely resembled a squat thirty story office building from the outside. She wanted a simple bunk room for her first night.

She turned each corner cautiously. Her caution was rewarded almost instantly. She eased up to a group of four Evrets, canine type low level mobs in the hell hound family of mobs.

There were six monster families in the First Realm, and most of the minor foes fit in the same general categories: The Hell Hounds of the lower residential areas; the Gelatinous Prisms of the life support zones; the teeth and tentacle monsters of the mines; the carnivorous bunnies of the administrative section; the Wurms of the deep cliff tunnels and the wastes; and last but certainly not least, the bats and rodents of the train terminals and associated corridors.

Each monster family had a variety of harmless minor beasts, three or four main lower monsters and one ultimate foe of that type. The first, openest secret of the Realm was that learning to fight these beasts would bring you to quest chains that vastly improved your stats in a fairly swift manner. Whoever designed the tutorial meant to bring every human up to some minimum standard with as little fuss as possible.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Evrets were the first step in the quest chain to improve your Strength Stat, something most all hunters in the First Realm discovered relatively quickly. You just had to kill twenty of them to trigger the quest chain.

It was actually possible to trigger a later quest in one of the chains without doing any part of the previous quests, but taking some of the reward boosts out of order would reduce your overall outcome.

The six linked quest strings were actually very similar, bordering on repetitive. Unfortunately, the secretive tribal nature of humans meant these truths were jealously guarded secrets that few people knew the complete details of until the next Realm where it was already too late.

Ros herself had finished the Wurm quests in just about opposite order. Someone had shown her the secret way to kill Moon Wurms. She had used that boost first, minimizing her Resilience gains. Resilience wasn’t even a proper Stat until you finished the Grubling quest, just like the Luck Stat showed up with the angry bunny quest rewards.

She made a small knock on the wall on her side of the corner and prepared to Blink if too many of the canines were drawn over at once.

She had a shield, but she was so completely, helplessly, weak that it seemed foolish to trust an energy shield against multiple foes.

Only one curious, hairless, ugly damned thing came sniffing and growling around the corner.

Roslyn was ready. She punched with her ulu, aiming for the line above the snarling beast’s nose, just under and between the eyes. There was a weak spot there. She followed up with an ultimately unnecessary blow of her pipe length to the soft pallet, both blows pierced the brain.

The beast’s teeth impacted her shield at her hand, which buzzed but didn’t let the teeth through

Obtained: 6 coin

Ros didn’t pause to admire her handiwork, she yanked her weapons out and shifted to face the Evret that was attracted by the growls of its friend. She made more or less identical cuts to this greyhound shaped monstrosity.

Obtained: 6 coin

She was breathing raggedly. She could feel her heartbeat throbbing in her arms and neck. Her arms were already sore from her exertions. Reflexively she muttered Warrior’s Ease and her bio signs calmed. Her muscle strains eased. She smiled and clicked her tongue loudly. The Evrets came as if called, as if they were used to her call.

Obtained: 6 coin

Obtained: 6 coin

Roslyn looked around. This was still residential, the rooms were different though, instead of small bunks off a common room, these yellow hall rooms were one and two bedroom suites. She nodded. This was far enough for the first night. In a few days there would be more patrols. Today she probably hadn’t even been missed yet. She dragged the bodies one by one into the nearest suite. All the doors were unlocked. The residential suites didn’t even have locks on their doors.

The blood would fade within an hour. The carcasses would dissolve in a day or two, mostly without much stinking. In a week even the dust of decomposition would be absorbed into the floors.

While the corridors were all a dark reddish brown, relieved only by six inch area stripes running horizontally down the walls and the occasional way finding numbers or information screens, the residential rooms were colored. They were individually decorated, more and more elaborate as the locations got more dangerous.

Some had white walls and ceilings with brown floors like the one she’d been assigned by the Ibsen Group.

This room was rich, buttery yellow with a hand painted green vine twisting across the ceiling and partly down the walls. Red and purple bell like flowers seemed to grow right off the ceiling.

A lot of the rooms had ceiling paintings. Some had alien landscapes like the inhabitants had wanted a view from home.

Roslyn took a moment to remove a latch from a cabinet by the door and used it as a doorstop. It was reasonably effective to prevent entry. None of the units had locks, all of them had something that could be jammed into the door to make them difficult to open. There was even a way to use a pipe to bar the doors, something she would definitely do before she slept.

She looked at the bodies and started to butcher them. She moaned and barely stopped herself from bopping her forehead. The last time she cared about Evret pelts and scent glands she hadn’t had a spatial ring. She stored the bodies whole, and used the lav to clean up. She could do all twenty at the same time, after she built a bit more strength.

Just for laughs she checked all the drawers and she was shocked to find a six blast energy pistol in the cabinet she’d taken the latch from. It had a retractable cord to plug into the wall. It was free but it was a reliable energy pistol. A direct hit anywhere on an Evret would be a kill shot.

She had heard of people finding food, armor, and weapons in residential rooms, but by the time she’d bothered to start looking everything had already been claimed. Unlike latches and pipes, and quest settings with instanced versions, minor loot didn’t respawn. It was gone once it was gone.

Ros redoubled her efforts to search the room. There was a panel beside the bed, there was a hidden catch to move the mirror in the lav. There was a hiding spot on top of the locker. She checked everywhere. The lav was the only place she found anything useful, two low grade health pills in a prescription like bottle, 1 coin each at the store. She grinned. She felt the urge to keep looting the rooms, especially since she should really make tracks away from her bloodstains, since she knew for sure the hunters were planning to patrol.

She put her clothes and weapons in her spatial ring to clean them, then she got dressed again and moved next door. She put a small round chalk mark on the side edge of the door as she left, a simple way to mark her progress if she stayed in the area. Not that she was actually planning to stay in the area.

Since the chalk was magic chalk held in her spatial ring, it appeared effortlessly in her hand as she bent down and disappeared again without leaving residue on her fingers.

The next three rooms showed signs of occupation, mostly that the sheets weren’t in perfect folds and one had a pile of ration wrappers, which Ros put in the recycler on the wall, no reason to leave a mess. The obvious drawers and cabinets were empty, but there was a ‘contraband’ stimulant pack needle on top of the tall locker: instant Stamina replenish-25 coins in the shop.

The fourth room was a bit of a jackpot, although with her shield she probably didn’t need it for a while, a full set of padded riot armor-500coins. It was meant to be worn over a guard jumpsuit, but it worked just fine over the plain worker jumpsuit she was wearing. Plus not wearing armor would make her stand out, or it would in a few weeks.

The pads covered her chest, back, arms, elbows, groin and legs. There wasn’t a helmet, plexiglass shield, rifle or boots to complete the set, but it fit her. She would have been surprised that it fit if she didn’t notice the subtle refitting that happened as she strapped it on. A lot of replicated clothes and armor resized without effort and so subtly that many people didn’t notice.

About twenty rooms and only minor loot later, Ros picked a room on a side hall and barred herself in for the night.

This room was unadorned, just a simple blue carpet with a lighter blue wall and lightest blue ceiling.

She stowed all her gear in her ring, did a body weight workout and had a nice hot shower.

To wind down spent about an hour practicing the Return rune on sheets of plain paper torn out of a sketchbook.

When she thought she had it down she folded a paper ‘football’ like the game she used to play at the lunch table in high school. She drew the rune on the side and flicked it across the room.

A moment later the folded triangle of paper was back in her hand.

Pleased beyond measure, Ros bought 4 leaf knives from the replicator on the wall and an “etching kit.” Etching was a skill she had a lot of experience with, not the magic rune part, just the drawing part.

Etching was different from engraving. She had tried both in the past, and etching would provide a better result here.

She just had to coat the area to be etched with a waxy liquid which dried quickly. The soft resist could be scraped away in elegant, controlled lines suitable for a decorative design, which is what she had used the process for before. She had gotten good at drawing pictures personalized for her friends, mostly on breastplates and swords.

Each Return Rune took a few short strokes and a drop or three of etching acid. Then she waited a few moments and applied the neutralizing foam.

The resist was easily washed away with soap and hot water.

Ros threw the first completed knife. It clattered clumsily into the corner, not weighted or suited for throwing. A moment later it was back in her hand. A prompt immediately asked if she wanted to return to her hand, her ring or a sheath. She chose her ring. Drawing from her ring was plenty fast enough.

She put the knife in a pipe, screwed it down, and threw it again. The leaf spear was perfectly balanced. To her surprise it lodged neatly in the wall seam where she had aimed it.

Then a moment later it was back in her hand. She had been worried that she would need to etch the shaft as well, but the blades were sufficient. She etched the other three knives and tested them.

Then she started her Qui meditation and after an hour of focused work she went to bed. She fell asleep enjoying the feeling of her Qui Energy slowly flowing through her strengthening meridians.

She quite honestly wondered why she hadn’t used Qui meditation to put her to sleep ever before, it had always made her slightly sleepy.