31

Overdrive

: morning y’all

: man, I had the weirdest dream last night

: I was playing the game but it was IRL, and I was shadow walking all over the place, and there was this weird companion NPC following me around

: don’t u have dreams about Mirage all the time

: well yeah, but this one felt so real!

: damn, and I thought closing my eyes and seeing the game constantly was bad

: you’re up already, Kat? It’s like 7:00 am, lol

: speaking of which, I’m about ready to crash, gn

: yep!! gotta get ready for the ST. less than a month to go now

: damn, that’s some dedication

: isn’t ur main a capped wind mage, Kat? couldnt u just try to enter on that?

: I mean, I could but… I’ve always wanted to play a rogue. they’re way more fun in PVP :3

: well, if u say so. just seems kinda needlessly difficult to qualify on a new char

: oh ye of little faith, Az

: she’s more than capable of pulling this off, just u wait

: once she hits 25 she’s gonna go ham on the rankings

: that’s assuming LastWhisper doesn’t find out where she is

: didn’t they already try to gank you yesterday, Kat

: yeah, but that was my fault lol. Trini found out about this char, and well,

: we took care of it. just don’t go searching for her while she’s grinding early lvls pls

: I’m srs btw. I find u snoopin around to creep on her and ur gettin the banhammer >:V

Sitting at a table and watching players pass through Elmguard, Rian closed guild chat. He’d spent most of the morning exploring the town and repairing his equipment from last night, as well as selling off his old gear. All his Beginner items from before his first job advancement didn’t fetch much, but the Brass Knuckles and his leather armor were enough to buy a few potions for his sparring sessions today. He almost sold off the sunglasses Kat had given him—they weren’t necessary against her in the PVP instances, but he decided to hold onto them.

He looked out over Elmguard again. Kat was supposed to be here in a few minutes.

He spotted her approaching among dozens of other adventurers passing by. She was wearing different armor than before—a full suite of level 20 clothes in pitch black. A Thief’s Hood. Bonded Leather Cuirass. Bonded Leather Pants. Sandals. She looked more like a ninja than a thief. There were some modest Strength and DEX bonuses on the equipment, and her dagger was now an Iron Dirk +3.

She spotted him and waved, then stepped up to him.

“I’ve got some presents for you,” she said, opening her inventory and taking out a stack of clothes. The boxes popping up in front of Rian told him it was a set of items for his class. “For when you hit 20 today.” Kat hesitated. “Whoa, you’re already level 18? Were you grinding all night or something?”

“What? No,” he said, chuckling. “Well, just a little bit.”

“Cool, cool. Just wanted to make sure you’re not gonna fall asleep while we’re training.” She winked, then handed him the new equipment. It was the same style of clothing as his level 10 gear, but the materials were nicer.

The hand wrap was especially nice, made of silk. He realized he still didn’t have a shoes item yet, but he guessed he didn’t really need one. It wasn’t like he could injure his feet. Though with kicking as a viable method of attacking, he wondered if he could get another source of Weapon ATK aside from his hand-wrap. And then he started to wonder how it made sense that the Weapon ATK from his hand-wrap item applied to his kicks as well, but it probably had to do with that weird spiritual stuff Kat had told him about items empowering the body.

It was the “spiritual inertia”—the level of the item—that made the difference. To begin with, it wasn’t like wrapping his hands in anything would make him hit things harder.

He opened his inventory and stuffed the equipment away for later.

Checking the time, Kat said, “We can probably make it to second job if we do things right. There’s some stuff I need to take care of with Maia later on, but it’s basically nothing. Do you feel like going all day?”

“Yeah!” Rian said. “I’m all set for a leveling marathon.”

“All right!” Kat switched into half-sync, flickering slightly, and put her hands on her hips. She looked around at things Rian couldn’t see. “Snacks: check! Water: check! The time is… 7:27 am. First break is at 11:30, then 3:40, then 7:50, and we’ll call it quits. That’s a good twelve hours we can get in.”

“You’ve got this all down to a process, huh?”

“Planning days like these is almost just as fun, honestly,” she said, swiping windows aside. “It’s the dopamine rush before the dopamine rush.”

Rian went into half-sync to match up his timer with hers. He looked out over the busy walkways of Elmguard, the countless players moving about. “Isn’t it kind of dangerous,” he said, “being out in the open like this? Someone in LastWhisper is eventually gonna walk by us, right?”

“So, back at the harbor yesterday,” Kat said, “the game flagged them—as in literally all of them—for ganking me. It automatically puts me into one of the Overworld instances where LastWhisper members are absent. And if I’m looking to meet up with you and you’re looking to meet up with me, it even puts you into that instance automatically.”

Rian blinked. “It can do that?” He hadn’t noticed anything in his surroundings that suggested an instance like players disappearing.

“Yeah, there’s no limit on the number of instances, so it’s not like LastWhisper can occupy every single version of Elmguard to find me. Keeps those assholes from camping me all day. For now, at least. The flag should be good for another day or two, and that’s when we’ll have to start worrying. I’m still gonna set up the wards around our PVP instance, though, just in case.”

***

Outside of Elmguard, the only sound was their footsteps swishing through the grass.

The back-and-forth continued, with them alternating between sparring and taking breaks to have Kat instruct him. Eventually, she stopped and suggested that they start fighting while using recovery items.

She tossed him a few potions like she had on the ship at the start of the game, followed by an entire stack of them—taking the shape of a vial that seemed to flicker at the edges, as if it were unstable. Thankfully, when he inevitably missed catching one of them due to Kat throwing them harder and harder each time to test his coordination again, they didn’t break when they hit the ground.

Kat walked him through the basics. Potions were usable during PVP, of course, but it was a bit more complicated than pressing a button and having one’s HP or MP restored. The correct potion had to be mentally retrieved from the inventory, and then opened and consumed. This involved drinking the contents of the potion container—flasks or vials, typically—which took time. Time that was extremely valuable during a fight.

Potions, like one of the meals Corvis had cooked for him, had cooldowns that were linked to the player’s Strength stat, so it wasn’t as if potions could be spammed when a player was in danger. Slamming potion after potion would eventually cause the contents to spill out of the player’s mouth like there was no more room in their stomach. But the higher one’s Strength, the faster potions could be consumed. The stat applied not only to the musculature of the body but the stomach as well, oddly enough. Like with the other stats, there were multiple aspects to Strength. Fortitude. Resilience. Perseverance. It wasn’t just raw, physical power.

Steadily, Rian was catching up to her in combat, but he could sense there was a long way to go. It seemed his class had at least one advantage over the others: the fact that his weapon, his hand wrap, couldn’t be knocked out of his grasp as other weapons could. If he were able to disarm his opponent, they would be almost defenseless against him.

When he tried to disarm Kat, it didn’t seem possible. No matter what he did, even during parries, he couldn’t knock Kat’s weapon from her hand. It was as if the game knew what he was trying to do and was tweaking the physics involved.

When he asked Kat about it, she confirmed it: it’d be too overpowered, being able to disarm opponents like that in regular combat. Since players had explicit ownership of their items, it wasn’t as if someone could come along and knock a weapon out of the other player’s hands and take it for their own. And it wasn’t just for weapons, but armor and consumables too. Rian could imagine the upheaval it would cause if it were that easy to lose hard-earned items.

There were, however, certain skills that could allow players to temporarily remove an opponent’s weapon from their grasp without changing ownership. The Monk subclass even had one such skill, which surprised him. It sounded like a huge advantage the subclass had over others, but that was still some time away for now.

The hours passed so quickly that Rian hardly noticed until he was level 20, the whirlwind of the level-up surrounding him.

He put on his new equipment—the linen material slightly stiffer than the cotton of his level 10 items—and watched the stat increases play out on the air. He allocated his new skill point to Vital Strike.

Over the hours, when he managed to finally catch Kat off-guard, he found himself hesitating to strike her.

Attacking random forest creatures was one thing, but it was hard to distance himself from what he was doing here. He had to actively tell himself not to hold back just because she was a girl.

He settled for stomach blows and outside hits—against her arms, shoulders, or ribs. Though he knew that face hits would be ideal for a class like his—and that wasn’t even considering the critical-hit modifier that came with them—he couldn’t bring himself to do it.

He managed to parry one of her stabs, knocking her arm aside and leaving her wide open. He wound up for a punch, a body blow that would finally turn the flow of the match. Planting his foot, he leaned into the punch and took aim.

Oh god, no, no, don’t punch her in the boob—

He hesitated just long enough for her to regain her balance, sidestep past him and plant the dirk in his back. The critical-hit sound effect played: the crunchy, resounding noise of a blade severing flesh and bones.

A red number floated up in his vision, and Rian staggered to the ground. His health was sitting at 3%.

After a moment, Kat said, “Is something wrong?”

He held his hand against his face and turned the other way. “Yeah,” he said. “Just a sec.”

As he healed up, she went over his play style from what she could glean and criticized him thoroughly. He understood and took the criticism well. He was used to such things; the ego only got in the way of improvement. It wasn’t anything personal, and he knew from his experience in speedrunning that breaking down his play, looking for flaws, and addressing those flaws was paramount.

It was a matter of breaking things down to their elemental steps, perfecting them, and then moving on until everything came together as one marvelous, finely tuned engine.

In particular, Kat wanted him to practice parrying. With her direction, he quickly caught on to his habits. Parrying too soon, parrying too late. He learned to recognize when he was doing either and then corrected until he was hitting it consistently. And then Kat changed it up on him, rendering all of that practice seemingly useless. But that wasn’t really the case; she was simply evolving her play style to challenge him, forcing him to apply his newly acquired prowess in ways different than before. This constant back and forth was like a stretching of his mind, looking for new ways to implement his skills.

It was working. Before long, he could parry her attacks from all sorts of angles. She was gradually ramping up the difficulty for him, and now he was meeting the challenge in lockstep.

When they resumed their sparring matches, he was almost holding his own against her. He could see it in her eyes: the first hint of frustration in fighting against him. She almost looked confused. At first he thought it was because she was starting to slack—maybe it was too early in the morning for her, or maybe she was just playing worse than yesterday—but as their bouts went on, he realized it wasn’t just a fluke. He was getting better at predicting her, and it was starting to level the playing field between them.

He was starting to catch up—faster than she was expecting.

“Dude,” Kat said, out of breath as they took a moment to rest. He couldn’t see her stamina bar, but it was clearly just above a sliver remaining. “Were you always this good?”

Rian hunched over with his hands on his knees. “I—” he managed to say between breaths, “don’t know.” He swallowed. “It feels…way more natural than last time.”

They took a break to let their stamina recharge. Kat wandered off to speak in guild chat, and Rian found Corvis resting in the grass.

“Is something the matter?” Corvis said.

“I don’t know,” Rian whispered, still trying to catch his breath. “It feels like…I’m playing better than before. Like way better.”

“And you’re surprised by this? Continual improvement is the fundamental nature of the great game.”

“No, it’s more than that. I was never this good at VR games. It feels like I’ve improved by a week instead of a day. It’s the same thing I felt with Torgo.” He turned up his palms, looked down at them in confusion. “Everything’s flowing together so smoothly. I’m knowing exactly when to attack and retreat ahead of time. It’s all feeling way more natural than it should.” He shook his head. “I couldn’t have gotten that much better overnight. Is something screwy going on? Can you check?”

He could imagine it being the fault of his situation, but he had no idea how it was happening. He’d gone from barely being able to keep his balance on day one to almost holding his footing against someone like Kat on day two. Maybe he was talented, but he didn’t think he was that talented.

“Your circumstances are unique,” Corvis admitted. “Perhaps—” He sat up. “Allow me to investigate. It may be due to the Cognitive Mirror’s incomplete instantiation of yourself.”

Rian watched as Corvis pulled up more translucent windows, filled with unreadable diagnostics. “And what would that mean?”

“It would mean”—Corvis narrowed his eyes—“that you’re accessing parts of the game that you’re not meant to.”

“What? You mean like off-limits stuff? Like what?”

“I’m afraid I’m a bit unversed with what’s happening here,” Corvis said. “When I told you your circumstances were remarkable, I wasn’t just saying that.” He cycled between multiple windows as if in search of something. “This is most unprecedented. I will assess the level of danger you’re in, foremost.”

“Danger?” Oh god, am I at risk of tripping something like Mirage’s innate cheat detection?

He wasn’t cheating or hacking or anything—he couldn’t imagine someone trying to hack a game like this—but even a false-positive in the system would likely kick him out if not ban him, killing him instantly.

He ran his hand through his hair. Okay, calm down. There’s no reason to—

“Ready to go again?” Kat said, making him nearly jump. She was standing almost right behind him.

“Uh. Gimme a sec.”

When he’d settled down again, he was having second thoughts about jumping into the sparring matches. Their matches were getting more intense already. Kat was skilled enough to keep from accidentally killing him, but as he got better and the two of them gained more class skills, it was almost certain to happen eventually.

He’d seen how chaotic fights could get in this game. Kat had agreed not to kill him, but with more factors at play, she was going to have a harder time keeping him alive if he started putting up more of a fight. It would eventually force her to go for riskier tactics—riskier for him.

The Y-Locator item was probably going to end up hers if things kept going this way.

He’d been putting this off for long enough. It’d be better to be upfront about it rather than let it be a surprise if she happened to kill him.

Okay, he thought. He brought up his inventory. It was time to stumble his way through this.