Ring of Tantor: Rebirth Ability Activated. Connor Half-Elf, Welcome to the First Realm! May your blades be sharp, your spells fast, and your wits sharper!

“Huh?”

The darkness surrounding Connor started to fade, lightening until he found that he was looking up at a cloud-filled sky, with the green-dressed fingers of trees crossing his vision.

He was lying on his back, on the ground of a clearing.

Not just any clearing, he groaned then coughed, and pushed himself up on his elbows.

This was a clearing that he recognized. With its perfectly circular patch of meadow grass, it’s hump of a boulder, half covered with moss, and the small trail that led back to Woodville.

“This is the place where I entered the game,” he groaned, leaning forward as he felt his head hammer. Why hadn’t he been kicked out of the game? What we he doing back here?

“Welcome, Brave Adventurer, to the First Realm!” said a familiar voice from behind him.

Connor turned back around to see that the boulder that had been empty a moment before, was now occupied by the very same faun who had introduced him to the game before. It was the same chocolate and gold hair, the same cloven hooves, the same shirt and pants, and the same curling horns.

“Wait. I know you. Haven’t we met before?” The faun hopped off of the rock and frowned heavily at Connor, cocking his to one side.

“Yes. You came through here just a day or so ago, didn’t you? You were complaining about professions . . .” The faun narrowed his eyes, but Connor was too busy ignoring the creature to notice, shaking his head as he got to his feet.

“Ah,” he heard the Faun say as he got to his feet. Connor was already turning to the path that led out of meadow before he noted the tone in the Faun’s voice. It was sad, and serious, and something about the way that the creature said it made the hairs on the back of Connor’s neck stand up.

“It’s happened, hasn’t it? It has been done,” the faun muttered to itself, as Connor found himself turning back around, to glare at the creature.

“What’s happened? What has been done?” He snapped, already wondering how he was going to make it all the way back, through the Black Birch Forest, through the SkyBridge Outpost, and then back again to Union City, and the Tower of the Aviatrix.

That’s if the Ring of Tantor even respawned there when I died, Connor was thinking. In some games, powerful items are recreated at the place where they were supposed to be. In others, if they were dropped they could be picked up by anyone, in just the same way that Connor picked up loot from the goblins.

Those elves—or Fey Warriors—might have the Ring of Tantor already. What hope did he have of tracking them down and getting it back for Mr. Grey. If they had the artifact, he could kiss all of that lovely cash goodbye.

“You’re in it, now,” the faun said distractedly, not even looking at Connor. The creature appeared to be deeply considering something. Something very, very serious indeed.

“In it? In what, the game? Yeah, you think?” Connor shook his head.

Why did I return here, anyway? Why wasn’t I booted straight back out to my old Vision 500 set and crummy apartment in Tokyo?

“What’s going on, anyway,” Connor asked, before suddenly remembering what the Ring of Tantor had said.

The wielder of this item gains 1 free rebirth . . .

“Ha!” Connor laughed out loud, unable to believe his luck.. Because he had claimed the Ring, it had conferred on him a one-time only respawn, back here. Even though he had died and lost it in the process.

“I guess you could say you have been lucky,” the faun appeared incredibly sad, before raising his head to look at Connor with large, brown doe eyes.

“You don’t make it sound very lucky,” the thief chided him a little.

“There is only one way into the Realm,” the faun continued. “Only one way. Only in, now,” the faun said crisply, already starting to turn back toward the forest.

“Wait. What kind of cryptic mumbo-jumbo is that?” Connor started to laugh scornfully.

He pushed concern over what the melodramatic goat-man from his mind and turned his attention to himself.

Name: Connor Half-elf

Profession: None

Race: Half Elf.

Level: 2 (700/900)

Size: Medium

Health: 40 / 40

Vitality: 18 / 18

Agility: 12

Charisma: 6

Intelligence: 10

Stamina: 9

Strength: 10

Wisdom: 8

Skills

Combat Ax: Novice Level Magical Instruments: Basic Level Sneak: Novice Level

He was happy to see he was at the same level that he had been before. Same experience and everything. He had lost all of his equipment, but that wasn’t the end of the world.

“Only In, now adventurer,” the faun called back as he stepped into the trees, and disappeared, leaving just it’s lingering, sad voice behind it.

“Good luck.”

Connor tried to shake off the rising sense of doom that he felt at the faun’s mournful last message, and to get his head around where he was now.

“Well, I’m still in the game,” he thought. And he still had advance knowledge of where the Ring was.

Might be, he corrected.

“Maybe I should just log off, report back to Mr. Grey,” Connor mumbled. The very idea of that stuck in his craw, as he was used to winning, not whining to employers about how hard a game was.

But then again, it seemed fairly obvious that Mr. Grey’s plan was flawed. He pondered that thought as his feet started to take him back to the trail, and toward Woodville, where he fully expected to see the Ranger-Marshal once again, and the passive-aggressive halfling barkeeper.

He remembered elvish fighters—Fey Warriors—that should not have been there and shook his head. The Ring was apparently one of the most powerful treasures in the entire First Realm, though. Connor admonished himself for not recognizing the fact that it was obviously going to have lots of traps, obstacles, and competition to obtain it.

Maybe it would even be a better idea for Mr. Grey to pay him to grind out some experience first, and then go for the Ring?

“Yeah,” Connor thought he could sell that. He could even tell Grey that he knew just what he was facing now—at least two homicidal Fey Warriors—and he would probably need to be at least Level 7 or higher to really have a chance.

“Okay,” he nodded to himself as he stepped out from the woods into the tranquil meadow that overlooked Woodville. He stopped near the road that meandered down to the bridge below and decided to log out instead of heading into town.

Log-out disabled.

“What?!” Connor frowned, this time hissing through his teeth. He dropped to a knee and pulled his backpack off. He placed it on the ground and reached inside to pull out the little manual that the faun had given him when he had first joined the game.

“Where is it? Logging out? Saving?” he grumbled, flipping through the pages until he found . . . the exact same message.

Log-out command has been disabled.

“What the actual—” Connor snarled and tossed the manual back into the backpack. He was now thoroughly confused, angry, and annoyed.

He had no idea what was going on or why he couldn’t log out. He wondered if it had something to do with respawning. Maybe there was a minimum time you had to play after that happened.

Connor waited for a while then tried again, but still got the same stubborn message.

‘Only In, now, adventurer…’ the words of the strange faun came back to him, and sounded just as eerie now in his memory.

“This is ridiculous,” Connor complained. “What a really, really stupid way to run a game.”

The notion crossed his mind that maybe, perhaps there was a bug in the log-out feature. The Legends of the Six Realms franchise had only just been released, after all. Maybe there were locations that characters weren’t allowed to log out from. Like here, Connor’s very first starting point. It would be a way of forcing people to play for a while instead of just logging in and logging right back out.

“Well, that’s a gigantic design flaw, isn’t it?” Connor grumbled, knowing that there was at least one other, sure-fire way to log-out.

What do I have to lose, anyway? Connor thought, as he threw his backpack over his shoulders and started marching purposefully toward the humble village of Woodville.

He was only at Level 2, and he hadn’t even been trying to level up—just a few scraps with goblins and random encounters in the world. It wouldn’t be any great loss if he had to start all over again from Level 1, because he already knew just where all of the goblins and monsters were going to be?

Yep, Connor decided.

He was going to march to the first quest he could find and throw himself against the biggest monster he could get his unarmed hands on. He would be killed, of course, but then he would be able to report back to Mr. Grey, explain that he needed more time—and more money!—if the man really wanted this Ring of Tantor.

And Connor was confident that Mr. Grey wanted the most powerful treasure in this world.

First, though, Connor had to get himself killed.