Author’s corner: Hello and welcome everyone to the first chapter of my (possible failure) story! First off, I want to start saying that I’m a Brazilian and English isn’t my native language, so there will probably be a few English mistakes here and there, so if you guys could point it out I would be glad.

Moving on… I introduce my main character in this chapter and two of his three closest friends, these guys are all based on real people, and how they interact in real life. Also, I did notice after writing everything that the supposed “short” rant about a game ended up being pretty extensive… Sorry about that (T.T), I couldn’t bring myself to make it shorter. Any way, have a nice read.

P.S.: I have up to chapter 3 complete and will probably upload them later today or tomorrow.

P.P.S.: There will probably happen some editing in the text as I’m not used to formatting it yet.

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NEW READERS WARNING: THE RECENT SITE UPDATE MESSED UP SOME (If not most) OF MY TABLES. I STILL DIDN'T START FIXING THEM ALL YET, SO SORRY IN ADVANCE FOR ALL THE STRANGE AND LACKING THINGS YOU'LL PROBABLY MEET WHILE READING THIS.

I gulped loudly as once again I stared the monster right in the eyes, I couldn’t help but feel that his gaze had a slightly mocking glint to them, but it was probably just my imagination. I readied myself by tightening my grip on my iron sword and lightly lifting my shield.

The monster did not let me have the first move, as it jumped sideways before lunging at me, I rolled away from its fearsome bite, but before I could turn back to him, one of its tails hit me head on, launching me a few meters in the air until I hit a tree. I felt everything spinning as the pain attacked me, but I still managed to foresee its attack as it jumped forward, trying to bite my neck off, and blocked with the shield in my left hand, but I still felt a heavy impact, and became unable to lift myself any more than a simple crouch.

When the monster backed off slightly, it looked me straight into my eyes and let out a loud growl. I saw a small light gathering at its front claws, and soon enough it burst into an infernal flame. It lifted its right claw and swiped at me in a slanted trajectory, which I barely dodged by rolling to my left. Not a smart move.

Soon enough, the monster made the same attack with its other claw while turning to me and landed a hit right on my back. My scale-mail armor barely managed to protect me, but it was far from enough, as I could clearly feel a scorching pain. The impact once again launched me a few meters to the front, but this time I manage to land on my feet and quickly turn back to the monster, only to see its tail gathering light and lashing at the air in my direction, launching arcs of fire.

I somehow managed to dodge the first few arcs by rolling beneath them, but the last one came vertically, so I barely managed to block it with my shield, being pushed back a bit, but I still took some severe damage.

But, much to my demise, before I managed to recover from the attack, the monster howled loudly. It was the first time I saw him doing that, so I stared at him in wonder for a moment.

Third Self-imposed rule of the hunter. When the monster is doing something, do NOT stand still.

When I finally noticed the light gathering beneath me, it was already too late, and sure enough, a large pillar of fire surged around me, roasting me alive as I felt my life leaving me. I wasn’t able to even hit it one time, it’s kind of humiliating…

And that is how I died.

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..

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Was that a bit too fast? Sorry, I am new to this whole story-telling thing… Let me try that again.

My name is Richard, Richard Hadaway. I’m twenty years old student of engineering, living alone in a small apartment near my college. What I have to talk about me? Well, personality wise, I’m pretty contradictory and impulsive if I do say so myself, I usually stay quiet in class and pretty much everywhere else, but can be a real loud chatterbox when someone start talking to me. To tell the truth, I’m kind of unsure how to talk to others I don’t know, so I spent most of my time alone, my closest friends I actually met mostly because of an impulsive moment of mine, but I’ll tell you about that later.

About my likes and dislikes, well, I like to think myself as a gamer. I play from everything, from RPG and strategy, to racing and shooters. I also like to read, I won’t say that I’m the person who read the most books in the city, but I am definitely above the average in that. I’m also what people call Otaku. Well, I don’t go around wearing anime shirts and saying things like “waifu” and such, but I do watch a few animes and read a lot of mangas, so I guess I’m somewhat in the more conservative side of the word.

Appearance wise, well, I am a real good-looking sexy beast!

…

..

.

If it wasn’t clear enough, that was a joke.

Jokes aside, I’m pretty average looking. Being a bit to the tall side, but still within the average, I’m at almost one meters eighty centimeters… Almost. I have a fairly large build, but am far from strong or toned, probably a bit more to the chubby side, I guess? Anyway, my hair is a dark brown, so dark that only five or six years ago I noticed it wasn’t actually black. No, I’m not joking. I usually don’t really bother with combing it and it naturally curls, so It usually stays messy.

Now, about my clothing style… My wardrobe is divided in four parts. One for my shorts, these are divided in two, with the thick fabric for going out and thin fabric to stay indoors; the second part is for my t-shirts, from plaid to stamped, I got everything, not much division in here, whatever is on top I use; Third is the most important, jackets. Jackets and coats, all with tons of pockets, with different thickness for cool, cold and freezing days, these are my reason to love winter. Why I like them? Don’t know, but they are awesome! Fourth and less important… Everything else.

So, even if the colors change, I’m usually wearing the same thing, day in day out.

Well, enough about how I am, you guys probably want something more interesting than the description of yours truly.

Anyway, my story start on with the last class on a Friday right before a large holiday. From this you can guess that the class was pretty much restless. Even more so by the fact that the calculus teacher had pretty much finished the class for a good fifteen minutes, but we still couldn’t leave the room. Not really her fault though, she is just following regulations.

As we still had a couple more minutes to go, I was doing what I do best in class. Playing. I took my trusty old Compaq Concentrt. For those who never heard of it, Compaq is a new gaming platform that appeared suddenly with the PlayStation Neo generation and was focused entirely in the portable category, being the first one to truly go head-on with Nintendo in that area.

The game I was playing? Monster Hunter Finale. The announced last game of the franchise, although there are rumors of a spiritual sequel in the making... To tell the truth, I could go on and on and on about this game because I truly love it, but this isn’t the main part of this story, so let me give you the basics about the franchise since it’s fairly important to explain my situation.

The game revolves around, you, hunting monsters, so you can take their parts and make armors and weapons to hunt even stronger monsters. That is pretty much it, not much work around, the game is pretty much that.

But what makes it so different from the other games? Well, I can say mainly two or three things. Firstly, different from other action-rpg games where the character takes a dragon head-on and literally punch it to submission barehanded, in this game, doing that is pretty much suicide. On Monster Hunter, you are much weaker than the monster, so you have to use strategy and skills to bring down the beast, in fact, it’s not unusual to some fights to last up to thirty minutes as you spend most of your time looking for an opening.

Secondly, there are many more boss monsters than normal monsters. Scratch that, you have large monsters and cannon fodders, in fact, you don’t even have a level to go through before fighting the boss, you literally enter the map, fight the boss and leave, straight up boss fights. In comparison, each boss vastly differs from the others, so you need specific strategies for each one of them.

Third. It feels real. Even if what you are hunting is a large Fire-breathing wyvern, it still doesn’t feel all that surreal as most other games make it. Of course, there are some over-the-top things here and there like a meteor-summoning dragon and what else… But most of the monster feel like they could exist, they get tired, they sleep when weak, they eat other monsters, and their attacks make sense. In fact, you can’t even see the health of the boss, you have to deduce it, like when they begin to limp, some attack start to fail, others are completely unused and things of the like, like a normal hunter would with an animal in real life.

All this make it extremely rewarding when you finally manage to finish that armor set or weapon you had in mind when you start farming the monster.

Now, how does this relate to the start of the story?

Compaq D-lute. The new take of the Compaq on gaming, the first full immersion virtual reality unity. The unity itself exists for one and a half year already, but since it’s too new of a technology, there haven’t many truly good games for it, but today, that changes. Even before the announcement of D-lute, Compaq has been working on a VRMMORPG, Insania Online, and today is its launch date. Needless to say, me and all my friends already own a Dlute and a copy of Insania Online and we are all anxious to play it. In fact, half of our class seemed unquiet.

“So… What race are you taking?” Came the question from my right.

Paul Henry Estevez, or P.H. for short, as we called him. From my three closest friends, he was the last one I met, two years or three years ago, he was also the one who addicted me to monster hunter. Being a bit taller than me, but much thinner, he had a slightly scrawny appearance, his hair was brown, but much lighter than mine.

Unsurprisingly, he had his Concentrt out, after all, we were hunting the monster together.

“I have no idea…” I said after quickly checking the time, five minutes to finish the class. “I mean, surely not human, after all I’ve been human all my life, but we still don’t know all the races they are going to add…”

“From what I heard, there will be an outrageous amount of races to pick from…” This time the one who spoke was on my other side.

Jean Frei, the shortest from us three, but with the longest hair, he would probably be able to tie it in a ponytail or something. From the three of us, he was the only one who was diligently studying with his textbook on the table… Never mind, he’s watching anime on his cellphone. He’s the one who I know the longest, since back in middle school, and was the one who introduced me to anime and MMORPGS.

“How much does ‘outrageously’ translate to?” P.H. asks while looking at Jean.

“Don’t know, but some leaks says about more than twenty.”

I whistled in surprise, P.H. looked even more shocked than me, as he kept staring at Jean for a while.

“Seriously? I mean… Damn, that’s a lot!”

“Agreed… Also, you are dead.” I said with a smirk, P.H. Looked at me in surprise, then remembered the game in his hand, but he was greeted with the more than familiar scene of his character being carted back to the starting camp.

“You bastard! Why didn’t you warn me earlier? I had my health full!” He complained while furiously kicking my leg. Me and Jean started laughing at him while he grumbled something about killing us. “But coming to think about it… Isn’t it weird that we know so little about the game?” He asked after calming himself again.

“Sure is… All we really know about the game is that slogan, play as you want…” Jean said absentminded as his attention once again went back to his cellphone.

I grinned when he said that, the first time I heard about the game I also heard the slogan, and due to pure coincidence, I just had bought this Monster Hunter and had been playing non stop. So when there is the commercial of a pretty much unknown VRMMORPG made by one of the top gaming company in existence, saying that there is a whole new world that we can play whatever way we want… Well, the first thing I though was of the game in my hand.

I already mentioned it, but let me reinforce this. I’m a really impulsive person. It’s not like I do everything on a sudden urge or something like that, but when they do happen, I usually am unable to keep myself calm. That was exactly the case in how I met my Jean, P.H. and Barbara, the last of our group, literally, on an impulse. And when it comes to gaming, well… these impulses are much more frequent than normal, sometimes leading to some hilarious or grave situations.

That was the exact case of Insania. When I heard the announcement of the game, and with Monster Hunter in hands, well, the first thing I thought was: I want to play that as I would play this.

When that thought came to me, I spent the rest of the day grinning like an idiot. Don’t get me wrong, I know that if I were to take an MMO as I take MH, it would most certainly not work at all and I would end up falling behind. But the urge to try and take a monster much stronger than myself head on while only equipped with self made weapons… I was 90% sure that I would end up doing that. As I said, I’m really impulsive.

“Then… What are we going to do in the game? Create our characters, mark a meeting place then tag together from the beginning? Or to each his own?” P.H. asked after some time, with the corner of my eyes I saw Jean perking up to hear the answer.

“Well, I don’t know about you guys, but I am going with solo at the start, there is something I really want to check.” I said while grinning widely, the two looked at me in curiosity for a while, and soon shrugged.

“Well, then whatever it is, do it fast, I’m going as a healer and need an idio… A brave tank for me to test my healing.” Jean said from my side.

“Hey! I heard that!” I complained loudly. “And besides, I’m still not sure if I will make a tan… Watch out, tail sweep incoming!”

“Damn, that was close!” P.H. barely managed to dodge the monster’s tail in the game. “Anyway, I don’t know about you guys, but… Damn, out of pots… But I’m still lost on what to pick… I kind of like the whole swordsman thing, but I also want to use magic and things like that, what should I pick?”

“How the hell would I know? Heck, if the game is like what they say, pick both!” Right when I said that, the monster in-game fell down dead, so we high-fived each other. “Any way, from what I saw, there is a built-in speaker system in the D-lute linked directly to skype, and we can use it in-game, so we should be able to keep in contact without needing to disconnect.” Both of them looked surprised for a moment, then stared me with an inquisitive gaze. “What?”

“How the hell do you know that?” They asked at the same time.

“Any of you actually read the D-lute manual?” the two of them looked away awkwardly.

To tell the truth, I also hadn’t read the manual, I just found this piece of information while randomly surfing the web a few days ago, but they didn’t need to know that. It’s good for my ego.

Anyway, the class soon ended, and in record time the three of us left the classroom, and soon the college. As usual, P.H. took his bike, Jean called one of his taxis and I simply walked away.

Okay, walking isn’t exactly the best word to describe it. I was borderline running on the sidewalk on my way to my apartment. I gave a quick greeting to the gatekeeper and sped my way to the elevator.

Once I got to my apartment, I quickly opened the door and closed it with my feet before throwing my backpack on the couch. After locking the door I went to the kitchen, picked one of the frozen foods and hastily threw it in the micro. Meanwhile I went to the bathroom and took a quick shower before eating.

Twenty minutes and I already had finished doing whatever I had to do. The server’s opening wouldn’t happen for another thirty minutes, but by now they should already have unlocked character creation, so I wasted no time and holed up in my room, jumped in my bed and took the sunglasses like apparel that laid beside me and put it on my face. Different from what I often read on Light novels and manga, there wasn’t a need to shout a fancy word nor anything of the like, so I simply tapped a small button.

Soon enough, I felt a pleasant numbing sensation cover my whole body as the D-lute started to intercept the signal from my nerves, leaving me only capable of some small movements. Finally, a small HUD appeared on the lenses and I used my eyes to select the icon representing the game. Soon after, I felt myself falling into a state similar to a light sleep, and soon, everything turned black.