Chapter 1

Launch Day Arrives Again!

“I can’t believe I’m back.” I muttered as I gazed at my reflection in the helmet's visor. VR had been around for decades but the RealTek was the newest and most advanced Fulldive unit to date, and MythArc released it with the flagship game Age Of Adventure, or AoA for short. They touted the game as the most immersive and realistic MMO of all time, and I lucked out and got ahold of a copy in time for opening day. I remember that day so clearly, the sleek black helmet with its silver accents and the MythArc stylized M emblazoned on the side. The visor so black it seemed to suck in the light as it beckoned me to a new world of adventure…. I was such a naïve fool back then. Release Day was the most amazing day for 100 thousand people across the planet, if only they knew, if only we knew.

That was 20 years ago for me, at least it was until yesterday when I found myself back in my 25-year-old body in my old apartment having just sent my old boss an email saying I was taking my week of vacation that I had saved up off of work to play the new game from MythArc. Don had been trying to get me to take my time off for months now, so I knew he would approve it, just like before. After a bit of testing to make sure I wasn’t dreaming I was ecstatic, one of the big conversation topics had always been ‘what would you have done differently', from different professions, to builds, to entirely different class paths. Everyone always had something they wished they could have changed or an event they wished they had taken part in to make a difference. Regrets, that was all it boiled down to. For me, it was now a reality. I could make changes when it mattered, and it would matter, AoA had a secret we didn’t learn for over a year back then, it wasn’t a game.

AoA was a god damned crucible to prepare us all, a tutorial, and a test, all wrapped up in one nice brightly colored package that was now once again sitting on my nightstand. My alarm beeped to let me know there were ten minutes until launch.

“Well, time to get moving, Jack, once more into the breach and all that. Time to play the last game ever made.”

With the flick of a switch, the unit on the table was humming away quietly, and I laid on my bed to start my quest. Slipping the helmet on, I smiled, it wasn’t a pleasant smile. “Time for some payback, you sick little shits.” I pushed the power button and my mind fell into the multicolored swirl of AoA.

AoA had a feature on Release Day. It let you make your character before the game launched so you could be ready to go at the first moment possible. The creation room was a black-and-white marble hall about 30 feet long with an arched ceiling and gold inlaid patterns flowing from the floor, up the columns, and converging on the ceiling in a grand spiral of lines that felt like a cross between a galaxy and a circuit board. There was a mirror a few feet in front of you as you spawned in, and I could adjust the settings like a touch screen.

I knew many people in the past that had agonized for days preceding the launch about their character details. For me it was easy. When the panels and sliders popped up for customization, I kept my default appearance and moved on. I had spent way too long fighting in this body to learn anything else. It was a bit of a shock to see myself 20 years younger, though. The years hadn’t been kind to me in the past, now I was back to my six-foot slightly muscular frame with a bit of extra padding, something of an early ‘dad bod’ syndrome. I’ll be fixing that soon enough. My hair was a rich brown and fairly short, a style I would keep for the next ten years. My face was something I was still growing into and at this point in time I had been trying out a short goatee. It looked kind of scruffy on me, not that I cared at the moment.

One oddity about AoA that made little sense until later was that you couldn’t select a race. Everyone was a human at the beginning.

If this were the beginning of VR tech that would have made sense but there were already games that let you be elves and dwarves, the sensory feedback for many fantasy races wouldn’t be that different to humans and race selection had been a mainstay of games for years. They offset this limitation, as people would find out, because you could change your race as you adventured within AoA, and the options were many. We wouldn’t find all the races before everything went to hell. Afterwards information sharing tanked, and we lost so much data. Personally, I believed even the people at MythArc didn’t know all the races or classes.

With my avatar made, my name was the last thing to fill out, Lazarus, typed out on the holo-keyboard that popped up. It was both my usual handle and now a private joke. Looking at the clock in the top left of my vision, I saw there were still 5 minutes left. Okay, last-minute checks, I have a plan, sorta; I know what to do, again sorta, and there weren’t any changes I would need to make for at least a week when the next batch of players would come online. To do that though, I would have to be one of the best players in the world. Admittedly, that shouldn’t be too hard.

Launch Commencing.

With a burst of multicolored light, the waiting hall I had been in dissolved, and I found myself in space above a massive planet. The world had glimmering oceans and a riot of color all over it, even colored clouds in some places. Massive mountain ranges painted the many continents like a Pollock painting. You know I think I can actually see the Crystal Palace from here up over near the northern pole. You need legit Light resistance to even get near that thing. Guess it makes sense since you can see it from fucking space.

Welcome to Ardos. This is a world full of magic and wonder, darkness and terror, and everything in between. Choose your starting zone.

A list of starting cities popped up, but I barely glanced at it, I decided where I would start last night. I selected Cloudburn in the Embervale region. If I’m right, some important people will be there. If they had a bit of guidance the first time, maybe the Shade King wouldn’t have escaped. It shouldn’t matter now since I’m gonna murder that thing, but Cloudburn was my home for 5 years before we lost it after the fall of Kerathor, my original zone.

With a jolt, I started accelerating toward the planet as it spun below me. As I got closer, I saw landmarks I recognized, the Spires of Cormar, the Mines of Dur-Ban, the Moon Peaks, and the Dragon’s Maw. Many more rushed by as I slowed to hover above a small city of white marble in a forested valley.

The city of Cloudburn is the major hub of trade in the Embervale region at the foot of the Frostfang mountains. A home for crafters and wizards, it has long kept the peace of the vale against the creatures of the Shiverwoods and the Drakefall Pass. Go forth adventurer and discover the wonders of Ardos.

With that, I landed in a brief flash of light in a marble-paved town square. “The birthplace of the Black Death, the Steam Queen, the Jester of Blades, my old pal Deadeye, and that crazy fucker the Bug Zapper. Nutters the lot of them.” I smiled; it was good to be back.

Ignoring the flashes of light signaling new players spawning all around, I called up my status.

Lazarus

Level 0

Classes

-

-

Professions

-

-

HP: 50

MP:50

Strength

5

Constitution

5

Dexterity

5

Intellect

5

Wisdom

5

Charisma

5

Damn, I am weak, well time to fix that. I may not have the stats that I used to, but I still have all my knowledge and skills that don’t rely on muscle memory. Looking behind me, I see the central fountain is five feet away. Okay, I should be able to do this. I shake out my arms to get a feeling for my level of strength and do a back handspring and then land on the ledge of the fountain. Shit, that was harder than I expected, Dex will need to be upped first thing.

Acrobatics Skill Gained Level 5

Ah, that’s better, I feel a bit more limber already. Doing a front flip back to my starting spot is significantly easier.

Acrobatics Level 6

Okay, now I am not totally immobile, well by my standards at least. I draw the starter sword and do a few basic forms to test its weight. Time to do the basic class quests.

I make my way past the new players that are milling about and marveling at how lifelike the experience is...noobs. Well, can’t really blame them, I guess, since I did the same thing originally. To make things easy and as somewhat of a noob trap the basic guilds are all fairly close to the central square, it only takes me five minutes to get to my destination, the brightly colored storefront with magical glowing displays that is the local mage guild. Since no one else has gotten here yet, I get to talk to the receptionist about training right away. For all class trainers, you need to do an initial quest to even get trained in the basics. I barely pay attention to the bored man and just accept the quest.

Quest Clear the Sewers Accepted!

Collect 10 slime cores from the slimes in the sewers below the city, yay. This is difficult for most people at first cause the cute little shits are acidic, and you can only kill about three of them before the starter sword falls apart. Aspiring mages must learn the most important rule of magic to succeed, ‘be creative’. Some will throw stones at the slimes, some will get a stick and beat them, I heard about one crafty girl that laid out salt to destroy the mucous membrane that holds them together. I stash the starter sword in my inventory as I descend the ladder behind the guild into the sewers, since I am a cheating old bastard and have no intention of fighting them fairly.

At the bottom of the ladder is the anteroom just a ten-by-ten stone room with a doorway out into the sewers and a couple of stone benches built into the walls. It’s not much, but it offers me what I need most, privacy. Sitting on a bench, I let out a breath and fall into a basic meditative trance to feel my mana for the first time, again. In the depths of my mind, I can feel a flicker of warmth, unbridled potential just waiting for my call. I let myself drift in the feeling for a minute just savoring the touch of mana, god I missed this since coming back. Well, time to put it to use. I grab the mana with my mind and flow it through my arms, first one then the other. Then I do the same for my legs and torso. Finally, I spread the mana through my entire body. I just barely have enough mana to permeate my body, hell the only reason I can do this is because of my years of control practice.

This is the reason I started with magic instead of warrior skills. Mana control is one of the few things not affected by stats in this world. Many of the warrior skills require mental discipline as well, but they still require a certain threshold of bodily enhancement. It is not physically possible to execute a Power Cut until you have at least 10 Strength and 8 Constitution. My experience could let me ignore the Wisdom and Dexterity requirements, but without a powerful body, I would tear my arm off for the most basic of skills. The same thing goes for Rogue skills, they aren’t my actual strength anyway, so that makes things worse; I think I would break both legs just trying to do a Quickstep.

Magic though is different, the four basic classes of magic come from Priests, Mages, Druids, and Cultists. Priests draw upon the powers of another being which requires a certain level of Wisdom to breach the Veils and to draw more power, but it is mostly skill. Druids require an understanding of nature and communing with it, druidic magic is very much a symbiotic thing and while I could pull it off, I really suck at that shit, I certainly am not good enough to not have to lean on my wisdom and charisma for it. Cultist magic is probably the easiest to pull off, hell I could summon a minor demon right now with the only limit being the tiny mana pool I have. But dark magics rely on emotions and strict mental discipline, they want to be free, and practicing them without the reinforced mind that wisdom and intellect provide is a fool’s errand and a good way to die painfully. Mages use skill trained over long hours of practice and study, along with careful experimentation. The usual requirement of high Intellect is more for the learning of magic than the actual practice of it. For anyone else jumping into it would be impossible, but I have all the knowledge of a low-level master mage. Without the stats, I won’t be able to use 90% of that knowledge, but the part I can use will be more than enough to give me a head start.

After the magic has infused my body for 10 minutes, I feel the mental click as it locks into place as a skill, this is actually easier to learn with less mana than it was the first time since there is very little to keep hold of. Opening my eyes, I see the window for it along with the others.

Meditation level 10 learned.

Mana Manipulation Level 18 learned.

Mana Body level 3 learned.

Ouch, I knew my stats would restrict me, but that…. well, it’s better than nothing. I now need my ultimate weapon against the slimes. After meditating for a few minutes to recover some of my mana, I call a single point of mana to my hand; it floats above my palm like an exceptionally bright firefly. I picture in my mind the raging flames of a forest fire; I add the heat, the weight of the smoke in the air, the flickering light. By the time I finish constructing the mental picture, the mote of mana is no longer a blue-white light, it is a red-orange wisp of flame just waiting to explode.

“Right enough dawdling.” I snuff the fire out in my fist and set out to find my first victim. It takes a couple of minutes of wandering through pipes and tunnels before I finally find a slime.

Like so many things in AoA, the slime is a trap. The basic slime is a foot in diameter and a cheery green color with two almost cartoonish eyes, that have absolutely nothing to do with its biology. It looks harmless; it looks fairly cute, these low-level ones even behave somewhat like puppies and seem eager to meet a person. They are balls of acid animated by a small magic core in the center, and they are not friendly. I use 5 mana on Mana Body to give myself protection and ignite my hand as the little shit bounds at me. With hardly a thought, I sidestep and snatch the core right out of it and stick it in my pocket. The slime destabilizes and is little more than a puddle by the time it hits the ground.

Level 1 Slime killed

+10 EXP

Flame Fist level 2 learned.

I don’t even break my stride as I continue on. Now that I am in slime territory, they are easier to find. The next 4 encounters go exactly the same and my Flame Fist hits level 8. I take a couple minutes to recover mana and conjure a mote again. This time I picture the howling winds of a fierce gale, the terrible power of the tornado, the pressure wave after a blast. The mote becomes a faint distortion in the air, constantly trying to escape. For the next slime, I coat my hand in a whirlwind as I snatch the core and get the skill Wind Palm. Getting the last 4 cores for the quest gets my Wind Palm to level 8 as well. I have only spent half an hour hunting slimes and the cores can be fairly useful this early on, so I again change my element imagining the crash of a rockslide, the strength of the mountain, the weight of a boulder. The mote becomes a floating stone, solid with the strength of the earth. I kill another 5 slimes with a Fist of Stone getting it to level 8. The last of the basic four is the Frost Palm born of the deep chill of winter, the icy waters of the arctic, and the solid strength of the frozen river. I used it to kill the last 5 slimes of my hunt.

By this time, the game has been out for nearly 2 hours. Most of the rest of the players should be starting and failing their first quest by now. Time to head back. The EXP on these things is crap, I mean I can’t even use it until I get a class but still it gets on my nerves. Oh, just three days ago I would have sent a pulse of darkness through the whole damn sewer and ignored the loot. How the mighty have fallen, ha.