My eyes open up as I wake to the bright light from the sun illuminating the sky. The heat from the sun beams down on me as it heats up my thin black jacket. I pull it off and let it fall to the grass below me and yawn while stretching my long, thin arms. I see my friend Nathan in the distance, training and levelling up his skills. He thrusts his lance forward at a medium sized zombie horse. He slashes at it one more time to pull off the finishing blow. The undead creature falls to its side and despawns. The drops spawn in its replacement as Nathan picks them up.
“Alex, it’s 3:00 now, time to switch,” Nathan points out to me as he walks over, just finishing up with putting the horse’s drops into his inventory. I quickly open up my menu and double-check to see if he’s being honest. Turns out he was right. I nod in upset as I quickly retrieve my two longswords from my inventory and pull my combat jacket back over my shoulders to get fighting some animals. Nathan and I do this every day, meet at the plains to gather animal hides and food to use or sell. One of us fights first and we switch every hour to prevent argument over who kills what. We then split the drops equally. If there’s an odd number then we sell the extras.
We live in a village near the border to get out of Japan. I live in a different neighborhood than him, so we don’t usually see each other outside of the fields or events that we both attend. We sometimes try to take on some easier quests every now and then, if we have the time or are getting bored of our constant daily routine. I’ve never actually been outside of Japan except for once when I got invited to the World Combat Duel Fest for team Asia as Japan’s rep. That really didn’t go well for me as I got eliminated in the first round of the tournament.
We Japan residents aren’t as strong as other people in the world, mainly because we live in a smaller country and it has more restrictions as to who can come and go. Quest Keepers usually come in with easier quests as they come from North America, where more high class people live in that continent. They sometimes come from southeastern Europe, but their quests never get completed as people usually can’t meet the sufficient requirements to start or finish them. Furthermore, creatures don’t spawn as often for us to try and get resources from. They do have their fair share of exp drops, so that’s a bit of a bonus.
As I unsheathe my swords, I run at high speed to the furthest animal from where I stood relaxing earlier. I approach a Frog/Deer hybrid and point one blade forward to slaughter it. The blow is an instant kill and those usually give better drops. Nathan and I are used to them, as we’re two of the top Japanese combatants. We’re supposed to go to the World Championships this year to compete as Japan’s representatives. We have some of the highest skill levels for almost every skill in this world.
Once I collect the drops from my most recent kill, I turn around and target the closest one to me. I keep killing animals until an hour is up. The animals will respawn, so it feels like forever before an hour passes. Once it does, I go over to Nathan to switch. I begin to relax again. Once it becomes 8:00, we split the drops and go our separate ways home and meet up again tomorrow. Nothing to sell today.
+ + +
I hear footsteps in the hallway that leads to my bedroom. I lay in my bed, struggling for sleep. I hear the door creak open. There stands my mother, checking up on me to see if I’m asleep. I open my eyes, just barely awake and she smiles, slowly closing the door shut as she walks out. I try to sleep again and for some reason I can’t. I quickly message Nathan to tell him that I can’t go to hunt tomorrow so he doesn’t get worried. I look back and notice that one of my window curtains was left open. I quickly get up to close it and get back into bed.
As I curl up under my bedsheets to get comfortable I hear my name being called from nowhere. That’s the only thing I hear until I feel a hard poke to my left shoulder and wake to my little brother standing beside me. We go outside together and stand out on the patio to see the view outside.
“Why aren’t you with Nathan today, Al?” Al is what my little brother calls me. I honestly always hated that nickname, but I keep quiet about it. I don’t like to make my brother upset. It’s just not in my nature.
“Eh, just tired,” I replied with a low tone in my voice. I can barely hear myself talk because I’m so quiet today.
“Huh, wuzzat big bro?” He asked with a bright tone in his voice. He seems more positive than me sometimes. I was always worried that something terrible would happen someday, he never even brought up the thought.
“Never mind…” I wasn’t in the mood for a conversation right now. “I’m going back to bed.”
“Alright Al! See you later!”
+ + +
I hear glass breaking and immediately wake up to it. I open my door and walk to the living room to see the window next to the front door broken and a man in white with a face painted with black marks and blood-red makeup under his eyes on top of my mother. He has a knife in his hand and is trying to stab my mother. He sees me and gives the creepiest smile I’ve ever seen. He looks down at my mother and stabs her, and she despawns as I shed a tear. She would’ve respawned by now, as people always respawn just after they die. She would respawn in the last bed she slept in, which is in her bedroom. The murderer runs up to me as I quickly attempt to jump out the window to escape. He tries to grab at my leg but I manage to get out. I land on my side, depleting my HP by a tad bit, and I run back to the field where I usually train with Nathan and message him to meet me there.
I’m huffing and puffing by the time I’m there. I almost fall to the ground because I’m so tired. I look at my menu and see my teleport option is gone, as well as my self-respawn option. I realize that there must be something going on, and it’s bad. Nothing like this has ever happened before. Not once, never. I panic and wait for Nathan to get here, but he doesn’t show up. I drop to my knees and realize that he’s dead, but he appears behind me and I’m relieved.
“What’s wrong?” Nathan asks me and I panic, my face going red.
“Something broke into my house… It killed my mother…” I blurt out in grief. “She didn’t respawn.”
I see a look of sympathy on Nathan’s face and he looks me in the eye and he forms a worried look on his face. And then we’re teleported into an unknown realm. A human face is projected above us. There’s tons of things in the background that I didn’t know of, futuristic items.
“Alex, Nathan. Glad to see you,” He says as I give him a dirty look.
“Look, I don’t know who you are or what you’ve done to us…” I start.
“I’m your creator, Alex. Your world is alike from mine, but we created yours as an experiment,” The man interrupts and moved so we could see some sort of floating projection of our world in the background.
“What kind of experiment?” Nathan asks and the man cleared his throat.
“A test server. To see if my society could translate and switch from real beings to virtual characters controlled by their minds,” He continues. I looked at Nathan worriedly. “You’re both real people, but also not at the same time.”
“How is that?” Nathan inquires as the man mustered up another sentence.
“You’re controlled by brains of humans in my world. Yet your existence is virtual,” He goes on. “The reason why I brought you here is because your world is under attack by a virus. It causes disasters in technology and also could shut down entire servers.”
“What kind of virus?” I ask worriedly as I raise my eyebrows and shrugged my shoulders.
“It does things like spawn creatures that were never programmed in the server, prevents people from respawning, and could possibly destroy your world,” He explains, and I gasped as Nathan forms a scared look on his face. “We’ve already seen some of your fellow ‘human’s’ brains die out from being killed by unwanted entities. We don’t know the name of it yet, but we believe it’s called S.A.T.A.N.”
“Well why tell us? Can’t you just fix it?” I yell at the man as he sighed.
“Unfortunately, only someone from your world can stop this virus… Many unwanted entities are attacking the legendary gods upholding the countries. If they’re killed, then their country is destroyed, and everybody in it is killed and respawned as other country residents,” He explains again as I keep listening as the info we’re getting may be of use to us. “But the virus is causing all respawns to be incomplete, so it kills the brain of the dead human.”
“Why us though?” I yell louder. “WHY TELL US ABOUT THIS WHEN THERE ARE BETTER COMBATANTS?”
“Because we believe only you and Nathan can do this.” He answers calmly and continues: “You two must gain the aid of the gods upholding each and every country in the world to receive sufficient strength to beat the virus. I wish you two luck in your mission!” He ends as his face disappears and we’re teleported back to the field.
