There was movement at the far end of the trail, so Sam stopped and crouched near a tree to see just who or what was approaching. It was some sort of bearded huntsman who appeared to be looking for something. He wielded a huge two-sided greataxe in his left hand and a wooden shield with a chipped blue deer painted on its front in his right hand. He gazed from left to right as he passed tree after tree. Sam grew a little concerned when the huntsman stopped only a few yards in front of him and started sniffing. The huntsman walked forward a little more, stopped again and stared with wide opened eyes at something straight ahead of him. Sam looked over and saw what he was looking at. It was a dreadful sight. A tall beast of a man with a large and broad frame noisily approached, each of his footsteps hit the ground with a metallic clatter. He was decked out in black and red metal and had a blood red cape draped across his shoulders which fell to the length of his calves. His mask was absolutely terrifying, it looked like the bleached skull of a huge vulture and attached to it were pristine white feathers which fell down the back and sides of the mask and further obscured the man’s features. A cross-guard sword hilt poked out from his back. The swordsman drew his weapon very quickly and held it down to his right side. His knightly greatsword caught the moon’s light and refracted it into the dark forest. The huntsman quickly strapped his shield unto his back and gripped his greataxe tightly with both hands. Sam had learned from the manual that wielding a weapon with two hands increased its attacking power greatly.
As the two combatants stared at one another, the forest seemed to be on pause. Sam was forced to wonder if the game had frozen. They stayed that way until the swordsman with the vulture skull helmet broke the silence.
“Can you satisfy me?”
His voice was all ice, but it had a polite quality to it.
“You fiend! I’ve come to end your miserable life and to insure that you lose all your quintessence. You’re not a man anymore now, so you don’t need it. I’ll send you to the depths where you belong!” screamed the burly huntsman.
The armored swordsman casually lifted his massive greatsword and laid its blade down on his shoulder. He then flexed the fingers on his free hand and strolled towards the huntsman calmly, his cape catching some of the night wind.
The huntsman gritted his teeth and gripped his great axe even harder.
“For Marcus, for Maria!” he shouted as he ran towards the swordsman.
On approach, the huntsman hefted his mighty greataxe overhead and came down with a powerful blow that Sam knew would cleave the swordsman right in two. The swordsman was too fast however and had anticipated the blow. Sam had seen it all. The swordsman had stopped the blow at its base by catching the greataxe’s handle and pushing it aside. The swordsman then took his greatsword into both of his hands and sliced through the huntsman’s right shoulder and neck. The huntsman’s blood had sprayed through the air and his head went rolling along the open forest trail and into the dark woods. Sam had to stop himself from cursing aloud and whistling at such an impressive yet frightening showing of strength. He certainly didn’t want to attract the attention of the bloodthirsty swordsman, so he kept completely silent and still.
“Now, I guess you’ll do then. I’ll hang you up real nice too,” the swordsman said, murderous glee in his voice.
He bent down and grabbed the dead huntsman by his foot and started dragging him down the forest trail. Sam felt an unease in the pit of his stomach as the swordsman and his carcass passed by, only a few feet in front of him. The unease turned into a heaviness when the swordsman had suddenly stopped only a little ways past that. He inclined his head to the side of the forest that Sam was on. Sam couldn’t help but stare into the hollow sockets of the vulture mask that the swordsman wore, but he made sure to stay low and out of sight. There was no way that he could be seen from the clearing, no way at all.
Sam resolved not to move until the swordsman was completely out of sight. Nothing would convince him otherwise. Thankfully the swordsman focused his attention to the path ahead of him. Mentally Sam was relieved, but his virtual body had yet to relax even as the swordsman began to shuffle forward. A light breeze buffeted Sam, the swordsman, and the forest trees in a brief cold wind.
“Ah, there it is. Another trophy.”
The swordsman dropped the huntsman’s carcass and drew greatsword so fast that Sam called BS. The nightmarish warrior quickly closed the distance between him and Sam. Once he knew for certain that he was caught, Sam lifted his shield and drew his Dagger. With both hands on his sword hilt, the swordsman busted through Sam’s meager defense easily with one downward strike, draining all of Sam’s stamina in the process. Sam was left stunned and vulnerable as the swordsman naturally finished his attack with a vicious two-handed thrust into Sam’s midsection. Sam felt the tremendous pain and cold weight of the steel inside of his digital body, which was starting to feel indistinguishable from his real one. He felt all of his strength draining right out of him as his blood spilled onto the forest floor. The swordsman violently pulled his greatsword upwards and wrenched it out of Sam’s body with a vicious slash that ripped apart Sam’s flesh from inside out and sent his blood spraying into the surrounding forest. Sam’s health had already depleted and he was now simply waiting for the translucent ghost health bar to fade completely. His vision had blurred and he felt an overwhelming urge to just lie still and rest. And so he did, not knowing if it would really be his last breath. His vision faded to black and dark red words painted his screen:
YOU HAVE DIED
10 Undead
“Sam?”
A voice, but whose was it?
“Sam!”
There it was again, but who was calling out to him like that?
“Oh my god, Sam! Are you okay?”
It was a woman, but who? Was it Alex?
“Come on now, Sam! Wake up, you still have some glitches to find.”
It was Alex and she was right, he did have a lot of glitches to find. He just knew that he was behind. But right now he couldn’t see anything. He also had a horrible headache and overwhelming nausea. Was this an aftereffect of faulty Full Dive technology?
“Ow, I’m up Alex, but games shouldn’t make you feel like this. I feel like I’m coming down with some sort of illness while I’m playing this. Is it intentional?”
“Not intentional Sam, but it is an aftereffect of dying in the game. We did want a penalty for it and the penalty is supposed be an aversive stimulus to the brain, like a dull mental discomfort. Our algorithms should have adjusted to your mental state, but it seems to have given you more pain than was necessary. I’ll work on a fix for this and we’ll call it your first glitch for now. I’m just glad you’re okay.”
“Yeah, well I don’t feel okay. I can’t actually die in here, can I?”
“No, not at all Sam. Nothing in the game will affect you to that extreme of a degree. As a matter of fact, all the pain you feel in here is completely simulated. If you were to log out, you’d see that your physical self is still feeling as good as you did when you first started playing. Well, maybe a little more hungry than before, but you get what I’m saying,” she explained.
That gave him some comfort, but the pain he was currently feeling didn’t fully convince him that she was telling the truth. He was at least satisfied that he had been awarded one glitch pretty effortlessly. Though he wondered if the pain was worth it.
His vision was starting to clear and he could feel the game’s cold forest atmosphere.
“Okay Alex, I got it. As long as you assure me that I’ll be okay then you don’t have to worry about me.”
“That’s great Sam! Hang in there. You’re doing really well. I’ve been checking the data of the other testers and it looks like they’ve been dying at much more frequent rates than you. As a matter of fact, only you and four other testers have died less than three times so far. Only two other testers haven’t died in the game at all so far. All things considered, that’s a good start. Now, until I fix the pai
n threshold, try not to die again.”
“Hell, Alex, I can’t promise anything as long as this madman is roaming through the woods.”
“Haha, good luck Sam. Sorry about all this. I know you’ll continue to do well, just keep pressing forward and playing smart. I’ll be in touch. Ciao!”
And that was it for the cheer. Sam’s eyesight had now completely returned and he found himself in a horrible predicament. He was upside down, hanging from some really tall tree. He looked around and saw other corpses hanging around him. The corpses were hanging from long thick gray branches on a score of tall trees. There had to be at least a few hundred of them.
Most were dry mummies, but a few were actually still moving around and moaning with low forlorn voices. You couldn’t call any of them alive as it seemed every one of them had been robbed of their very quintessence, that which made them human. They were all revenants. Some were just closer to becoming mindless husks than others. Sam remembered the term from his days of playing The Death Planes. He saw at least close to a hundred of these revenants wearing the same equipment as the starting classes. There were more than a few twilight garbed Cutthroats hanging right near Sam. Unfortunately the game devs (developers) had even included a sense of smell into the game. The forest now reeked of dead and decaying things.
How the hell did they even know how to program that smell into the game, Sam thought. Frickin sickos!
Sam started swaying his body without even thinking about it. He looked over to his left and saw a humble wooden house hidden in the thick woods at the end of the forest path below him. He tried to twist his body in the direction of the house and was mostly successful. His stomach tightened when he saw the vulture headed swordsman walking from the residence down a dirt path towards him.
“Fuck.” he whispered to himself.
When the man was right below him, Sam heard something peculiar, something he didn’t think he was really hearing.
Is he crying?
“Oh no ... I can’t believe this.”
He wiped something from his unseen face.
“I’ve messed it all up now, haven’t I? What will they say when they see that old Caesar is just hanging up anyone?”
He must’ve been referring to himself. Sam heard him sob some more, but kept still on the off chance that the fiend thought he was still dead. That hope ended when Caesar, as the man called himself, looked up at him and spoke.
“You’ve gone and really messed it up for me, haven’t you boy? It was all perfect before you came. A forest of the fiercest warriors in Heimfall. The strongest undead from around the world on display. It was fine art, really.”
He wiped his face again and sighed for an unnaturally long time.
“But I suppose it’s my fault for putting you up there. It was an honest mistake and I didn’t dare pillage your quintessence. That would completely ruin everything, all those years of beautiful work on my greatest masterpiece. I’ll have to correct this and go get that huntsman instead and put him in your place. You’re such a pain to get down though. Please find your own way down. If not, the only way to get you down is in pieces and I don’t want to worry about cleaning that mess. I wonder if the mad king is out there now? Snagging him would fix everything that I bungled.”
The madman walked off down the forest path and out of Sam’s sight. Sam looked up at his own body and saw that he was still in his gear like many of the others. He even still had his weapons equipped and hanging from his sides. He quickly grabbed his Dagger and worked at the rope that was binding his legs together. That rope snapped and Sam fell to the ground hard. Sam was hanging so high up that the fall had shaved his health down to forty percent. He landed right on his back and although in a lot of pain, he quickly got to his feet and took a swig of Soul Fire. His health still didn’t restore itself completely, and so Sam took another swig from the silver container with no results.
“What the hell?”
Sam looked closely at his health bar and saw that there was some sort of metal bar where his health had stopped. It seemed to be preventing his health from filling to maximum. Then he looked at his stats and saw that his health was locked at one-hundred and eighty and next to his character name it said, (Revenant).
“Oh yeah, I’m dead now. So I’m a revenant.”
He took off his gloves and looked at his skinny mummified hands which confirmed his suspicions. He put on his gloves and started to run away into the forest, until a crazy thought crossed his mind.
His house is probably unguarded. I might find some rare items inside of it.
Sam thought that the chances of that happening were highly likely. After all, who would invade this madman’s house? The game devs would count on no one wanting to do that. If Sam wasn’t so desperate for good gear, he wouldn’t even consider it. Now though, he had nothing to really lose, except the pain that came before and after dying. He figured that the chance of finding rare loot outweighed the horrible pain, so he ran up to the residence as fast as he could and circled around to the back of it. Already, he found a treasure chest right near the house. He leaned down and opened it and found some sort of rosary called the Priest’s Charm. He didn’t have time to read the stats for it. He was quickly on the move again and quickly ran to the front of the house, opened the door, and snuck inside. There was a single lit candle sitting on a large wooden table in the first room. There were wooden carvings of many people fashioned into crude partially finished dolls, all lying across the floor. Sam crept past all that and looked around the mostly empty house. The only part of the house that looked lived in was the room with the strange blue hearth fire. Inside of it was a small unburnt stone snake totem. How it survived the fire unscathed, Sam had no idea. He reached out and touched it and suddenly found himself with a similar Soul Beacon menu to the one that was displayed at the cave. It surprised him that the two beacons were so different. A thought popped into his head then. He felt he’d made some sort of mistake.
Will I respawn (revive and teleport) here after I die? And how come I didn’t respawn at the cave Soul Beacon the last time I died?
It was all very strange. The manual had clearly stated that Soul Beacons were respawn points that reset much of the world, and that players would respawn at the last Soul Beacon they rested at upon death. What had happened when he had died? It was a question that he had no time to answer. He exited the menu and removed his hands from the fire. After refilling his Soul Fire, he saw nothing else around of interest in the room, so he quickly crept to the other side of the house and found the madman’s bedroom. It was also very bare, with only a small wood frame bed, large wooden dresser, and a bunch of small wooden crates. Sam did find one small treasure chest here. Inside it, he found two items called a Wishbone along with three Quintessence items and a Forest Residence Cellar Key. He wondered what these items did, but he didn’t dare stop and look. He made his way to the back of the house and found the cellar that the key went to. He quickly summoned the key from his inventory and unlocked the cellar doors. He crept down into the dark cellar and activated his torch. He looked around and was surprised by what he didn’t find. There were no dead bodies or even any prisoners, but there were two long rows of treasure chests. Sam hurriedly stooped down and opened them one-by-one. There were six in total.
In the first one he found something called Broken Shackles (wrists) which sounded quite useless. Then he found the matching Broken Shackles (ankles) in the chest next to it, followed by something called a Priest’s Extinguisher in the next. On the other side he found an item called Sinner’s Scriber and next to that he found a Three Headed Hound Seal. Each item sounded fairly useless and Sam was now dreading the fact that he even journeyed into the house. Sam was most disappointed in the final treasure chest. When he opened it, there was nothing inside and nothing special happened either. He wondered if it were another glitch or not, so he quickly made a call to Alex from the Alpha Build menu.
“Yes, Sam?”
“Alex! I’m sh
ort on time here! Can you check this treasure chest to see if something was supposed to be inside of it? I know you guys can be trolls, but I don’t want to miss out on any good items.”
“Gotcha. Let me check it out ...”
It only took her about ten seconds to check her data.
“Wow! I can’t believe this, it’s so careless,” she said with a frustrated tone. She sighed and continued, “this used to be a mimic, but the other devs thought it wouldn’t be very fair or make much sense to have a mimic here, so we changed it at the least minute. It was one of the few instances we decided to have mercy on the players. Though I can’t even remember what was supposed to go in there. I think it was a weapon, but I wasn’t the one who finalized it. I don’t want to slow you down either, so I’ll just analyze this one on my own. In the meantime, we’ll just note this down as your second glitch and put you a decent weapon in there, nothing game breaking though. So what do you need, Sam? I know that the Dagger is causing you some frustration,” she asked affably.
Sam couldn’t contain the crazy grin now plastered across his face. How lucky was he? Whatever was supposed to be in that chest might not have even been useful to him. Now though, he could get something directly tailored to his playstyle.
“Thanks Alex! Can you get me a mid to long range DEX weapon? Preferably a sword if possible. This Dagger’s lack of reach and base attack power is killing me, literally!”
“Okay, will do, sir. Give me just a sec and I’ll randomize it to make it a little more fair. Each weapon will match the parameters you asked for, but you won’t know which one you’ll get.”
“Fair enough,” he said still buzzing with excitement.
The chest closed itself.
“Can I open it now?”
“Go right ahead, Sam.”
He gleefully did as instructed and received a Rapier for his troubles.