Van glanced at his character map, noting that there were no red icons, meaning that the place was safe from enemies. Of course, his perception score wasn’t high enough for him to really see anything of value, either.
“You know, this is still so breathtaking,” Sang said as she glanced out at the forest in the distance. They were getting closer to it.
“Yeah, beautiful,” Van mumbled as he focused on trying to keep an eye out for bandits. He couldn’t remember if this quest had randomly generated bandits or if the attack was some kind of triggered event.
“I think it’ll be much more beautiful once we get an aerial perspective of this place,” Sang said.
“How so?”
“Well, whenever this thing hatches, we can ride it,” Sang replied as she pulled out a small purple egg from her satchel. Van immediately recognized it as a dragon egg—he could see the shifting within it, the pulsing energy that represented a primal force of energy.
“That’s… a… you… how?” Van stammered.
“It was easy enough; I used a backdoor into the system to give myself the dragon egg. It seemed like it would be useful, and you said it was hard to grab it through a quest, so I just hacked myself one.”
“Hacked? Hacked? Sang, you’ve got to hide that!” Van shouted he shoved the egg back into the bag.
“What’s the big deal?” Sang asked as she shoved him away from her.
“The big deal is that you just cheated to get an egg! You can’t do that!”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s cheating! You can’t grab a high-level item and cheat like that!” Van shouted, growing more irate because of her nonchalance. It was ridiculous that she would do such a thing. Van didn’t mind taking shortcuts, using guides, or even paying for items that increased his skills or power, but all of that was within the legal framework of the game. Cheating was unforgivable in his world because it broke the sacred bond of trust that all gamers needed to share with one another.
“I hate to break it to you, but we’re on a mission here. We aren’t here for fun. I have zero problems with cheating,” Sang said. “You clearly seem to be upset about it, though; what’s the big deal?”
“The big deal is this: we are here to abide by the rules for many reasons, the first being—”
His words were interrupted as he felt an arrow sharply going into the side of his arm.
“Ahhh!” he screamed as warm blood gushed from the wound and he reeled back with pain. It felt really damn real at that moment. He saw his health bar immediately drop down to half.
“Crap! Sea raiders!” Sang shouted as she drew her bow. Behind them were three large, burly Orcs approaching. They were all Level 1 and none of them were elite mobs, though, so Van knew already that it shouldn’t be too much of a problem to fight them.
The three Orcs charged at the two guardians of the merchant. Van instinctively reached for where his great sword would have been kept, but realized that it didn’t exist. “Crap!” he shouted as he fumbled to pull out his darts instead.
“Sea raiders are evil cultists! We have to kill their high priest!” Sang said as she started shooting arrows at the tallest Orc.
“They aren’t sea raiders, they’re Orcs!” Van said. “They don’t have a high priest!”
Sang’s arrows were missing the Orcs.
“Why am I missing? My aim was dead-on!”
“They have a high Dodge skill, and you have to account for that!” Van said as he threw a few darts at the approaching enemies. The words Miss kept flying overhead of the Orcs. He certainly didn’t have enough points in his Dart Throwing skill for it to be useful here.
“Look out!” Sang called out as she tried to roll out of the way of one of the Orc’s clubs. The word Hit rose above her head and she immediately fell to her knees.
“Crap! Sang!” Van shouted as he saw her health bar drop down. Then another arrow nailed him right in the chest. He felt the pain surge through his body as he looked down to see the blood pouring from his wound. The health bar dropped at the same speed as the blood poured from him. The last thing he saw before he died was the Orcs laughing and pointing at him.
Sang opened her eyes. She was lying on her back by the beach. The gentle roaring of the waves seemed to greet her as she felt the cool breeze gently blowing across her face. A second ago, she had felt the impact of her skull being crushed by a massive club, but now she was alive and unharmed on the beach. What was going on?
Dang that sucked,” said Van as he stood up and brushed himself off from the sand.
“What happened?” Sang asked quietly, still staring up at the sky. She wasn’t sure what was going on and she was beginning to feel a little queasy. The game wasn’t so bad, but the transitions from location to location without warning had been extremely jarring. And she’d been so full of adrenaline during the fight that she hadn’t had time to come down from the high of it yet. Her heart rate was still hammering, her muscles were twitching, and despite the fact that there was no danger, she was in fight or flight mode. A split second had been all it took to completely remove her from the danger, but she had no idea what to do with the experience of that leap.
“We died. No big deal,” Van said.
“No big deal?” she repeated as she slowly got up.
“Yeah, it happens. Sometimes you bite off more than you can chew, or maybe you get greedy and try to open a trapped treasure chest; maybe you even mouth off to the wrong player and they really respect their mom enough to kill you over it... regardless, it happens. We just pop up at a random starting area or safe town with a few days of experience lost, and… well, we lose all of our items. Death is a little brutal in this game if you’re someone who has a lot of important items.”
“The egg!” Sang muttered as she grabbed her satchel and opened it up. She sighed a deep sigh of relief, though—it was still there. She had gone to a lot of trouble to get her hands on it, and there was no way she was willing to lose the thing over something so stupid as dying from a couple of Orcs.
“Yeah, it’s there, because you grabbed it illegally. That means the system doesn’t exactly know that you have it. Yet. And the keyword here is yet, because at some point Draco is gonna find out—and when they do, well, it’s gonna mean a ban for you. Or worse, they might find out who you actually are.”
“Doubtful,” Sang said. “Draco might be good at running their game in here, but there’s no one who can trace me. We’ll be fine.”
“I just want to say, for the record, that you are endangering this entire mission by your insistence on grabbing that egg.”
“And I just want to say, for the record, that you are endangering this entire mission by having decided to willfully make a bad character,” Sang said.
“Feh, it was just a prank,” Van replied, shaking his head. “Your slip is a freaking cybercrime.”
“Cybercrime or no, what’s next? Do we go back and save the caravan?” Sang asked.
“Nah, look at your quest log,” Van said. Sang brought up the menu and watched as it gave her a list of her quests. There was only one quest, and it read, “Cargo Escort: Failed,” in big red letters. She felt a sharp sting at the word failed. She didn’t like failure. It was a word she tried to keep out of her vocabulary, and she generally did just about everything in her power to avoid it.
“We failed?” She scoffed.
“Yeah, like I said: it happens, and it’s a crap quest anyway. Let’s go find something else to do.”
“We can’t fail a quest, Van,” she protested.
“Why not?”
“Because it’s important that we succeed.”
“The quest literally doesn’t go anywhere; we’re fine. Look, we’ve got to figure out a real quest so we can get moving on whatever it is that you are trying to achieve.”