The Crystal Crusade Read online

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  ‘The Crystal Crusade’ by Mars Dorian © 2017

  1

  The trees of the forest protruded from the soil like wooden claws. The misty atmosphere swallowed up the bushes in the distance and drowned me in darkness. Seriously, what in the world was I doing here?

  The question whirled around my head for the past thirty minutes, ever since I started to accept that this foolish quest was way above my skill level. I pulled up the area map of the zone and rechecked the stats:

  Location: Finsterland Forest, Norsefalia/Mainland Fourlando.

  Infection: Low Reepo contamination

  Quest: A lumberjack has fallen into a trap in the forest. He sent out a distress call asking anyone for help. Find him before the beasts of the wild do.

  Simple mission goal, but not easy—especially when you ranked at the impressive Level 1 and had no skill or ability to begin with. But you had to start somewhere, so here I was, making my mark in the game world. And because everyone called me a noob back at the Academy, I needed to find an ally who could help me beat this quest. The problem? No one wanted to team-up with a Level 1 sucker like me, but eventually, after spinning my wheels at the Academy’s player hub, I found a fellow fool who decided to take a risk.

  Meet L’ocean, a classless Level 3 player, equipped with a decent neosteel blade and low-armor plating (still better than mine). She marched in front of me and stopped by a cracked old tree.

  “Are you checking me out?” L’ocean said to me.

  “I was just admiring your equipment.”

  My gear consisted of the Academy’s standard cadet uniform and an used armor plate.

  “Are you ready for the escalation?”

  Not really. But you had to start somewhere, right? Hanging out at the Academy and sucking up myriads of tutorial menus was not the way of the warrior. I needed—no—I wanted real world experience. I once read a self-help book which stated that life began at the edges of your comfort zone, so here I was, pushing my boundaries.

  Together, L’ocean and I passed the first row of creepy trees protruding from the ground like demonic claws.

  My equipment:

  1x cutter

  2x low hit-point potions

  1x used light melee blade

  1x Academy uniform with thin chest-plating for protection against low-damage, ranged weapons, and a multi-tool belt with magazine pouches even though I didn’t carry any long-ranged weapons… yet.

  Pathetic gear, but with no money to burn, I was riding at the edges of my nonexistent budget. Gear cost a lot of money—which I had yet to earn through questing. The ping device didn’t count as an item because it required no space in my inventory.

  “Let’s keep up the pace.”

  L’ocean spearheaded the march, her neosteel blade ready to swing. What a beautiful piece of advanced metal.

  “Don’t worry,” L’ocean said as she matched forward. “I haven’t heard of any player dying on the first quest.”

  “Then you haven’t probably heard of Murphy’s Law.”

  She cocked her avatar’s head toward me, eyebrows raised—a cue for an explanation.

  “Murphy’s Law says that anything that can go wrong will go wrong.”

  “You’re really rocking the confidence now.”

  “Give me a couple of minutes. This world is new to me.”

  I followed my partner into the depth of the Finsterland Forest and held the used, light melee blade in deflect position-a passive stance. With no enemies in sight, I pondered my tactic. Maybe I could act as the support player, killing off the damaged creatures she had already battered to near-death. A sure way to level up quickly in the beginning, but I would also risk my reputation in the process. No player liked the cowards coming in at the last-second of a kill to grab the experience points which were evenly shared with each member in the squad. But with no skills and abilities, I counted as a beginning player anyways, so why not play it safe until I upgraded to Level 5 where I could pick my character class? My thoughts exactly.

  The atmosphere in the forest darkened the deeper we ventured. The trees looked even more demonic, with organic vein patterns twisting through their rough surface. The texture designer must have some serious mental issues.

  “Shush now,” L’ocean said, serious all of a sudden.

  She pointed toward the north-west of the misty tree-lines. “Do you see that?”

  With squinted eyes, I followed her finger’s direction. In the perfect darkness between the creepy trees, faint, violet sparks floated. The closer we moved toward the source, the more intense the glimmer became.

  “Reepo flares,” L’ocean said. “Even at the one to three percent level, you can see a concentration against a monotone background.”

  My heart started pounding. Wherever the Reepo glimmered, creatures lingered. Of course, the point of the quest was to look out for dangers, but thinking about danger on an abstract level paled in comparison to facing danger in real-life; well, VR life. This game was scarier than it had any right to be.

  When L’ocean readied her neosteel blade and assumed an attack position, I knew the crap was about to hit the turbine.

  “I thought this was an easy quest.”

  “Recklessness is the first step toward death.”

  Spoken like a veteran player. I wondered if she had played a previous character before. No newbies acted as confident as her.

  “Back me up.”

  “Sure.”

  I guarded her rear from the right and approached the Reepo glimmer.

  2

  “Do you hear that?” L’ocean said.

  It sounded like the wind whistling through the dark space between the trees, but the closer I stepped into the deep forest, the louder the noise scratched at my ears. L’ocean seemed obsessed about the origin of the noise, as if it magically drew her in. She doubled her speed and made me follow up. A hundred meters to the north-west, we found a small clearing in the forest maze. Faint light illuminated the soil and lit up particles. The Reepo glimmer grew, which meant danger lurked around the trees. We discovered a hole in the ground. Maybe it was the work of a specialized class of trapper focused on setting up mechanized traps.

  The whining grew louder. Worse, it originated from the hole itself. L’ocean bent over the dark abyss and said, “Hello?”

  Her voice echoed in the pit.

  “Finally,” came the response from the depth. “Someone heard my call. Listen, I’ve been stuck here for days. Can you help me out?”

  The strained, male voice was probably the lost local citizen mentioned in the quest description.

  Quest update: “The Lost Lumberjack”

  You have found the local resident of the Finsterland Forest. Get the man out the pit and escort him to the nearest safe zone.

  “What happened?” L’ocean asked the man in the pit.

  “I was just trying to chop some wood when I heard strange barking. I followed the sound and fell down the hole.” He hesitated. “Must have been some kind of trap to kill off the reapers.”

  Reapers were the names of infected wolves and other fur bearing predators mutated by the Reepo. Players from the Academy called them Creepos, a wordplay that actually worked.

  “What do you think?” L’ocean said to me.

  “He’s a NPC,” I said. A non-playable character embedded in the design of the game, following his script. Unlike players, NPCs were not self-aware and believed the game world they lived in was real. The NPC called again from the depth of the hole. “If you help me up, I'll give you fifty credits each. Please?”

  L’ocean nodded. When she reali
zed the trapped NPC couldn’t see her face, she confirmed his offer with an ‘okay’.

  “How do you want to get down there? You’re going to die if you jump.”

  “That’s why I got a smart rope in my inventory. We’re going to rappel.” She tilted her head. “Well, you’re going to rappel.”

  She knew her way around, so I shut up and assumed the role of the supporter. L’ocean wrapped the smart rope around the nearest tree and bound it tight. Her firm stare demanded my attention. “You go down and help the man. I’ll help you get back up.”

  “Have you done this quest before?”

  “All quests are original. I did, however, partake in a similar rescue mission.”

  Good enough for me. As a Level 3 character, she must have done a couple of side missions. I rappelled down when the whining increased. This one didn’t come from the man in the hole, but the nearby bushes. A high-pitched growl then cut the misty fog in the forest.

  “Hurry up,” L’ocean said near the edge of the hole as she hoisted me down. “Reapers are nearby.”

  That had to be a goddamn scripted event. No Creepo contact the entire time we wandered around, and the second we decided to climb down the hole, they crept from the depths of the woods. I hated those types of ‘coincidences’.

  “Please, help me,” the NPC said, now only a couple of meters below me.

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m coming.”

  My boots touched the ground. The NPC lay on the soil with his left leg twisted. He should have been dead by the height of the fall, but who was I to judge game logic?

  “Let me guess—you can’t stand up.”

  The NPC looked at me like I was some kind of clueless idiot.

  “Hurry up,” L’ocean said from above the surface. “The reapers are coming closer.”

  I looked up and could only detect a faint silhouette. Damn, I should have brought a torch tool or something, but I had no idea this scenario would turn out to be so intense and realistic. The NPC grabbed my shoulder with a pleading glance. Desperation poured from his watery eyeballs. “Please, just get me out of here.”

  “I’m working on it, sir.”

  I wanted to move but couldn’t. The NPC’s weight exceeded my own. Of course, a Level 1 character like me could only wear a primary and secondary weapon as well as some support tools.

  “You’re too heavy,” I said to the NPC, pretending to be a real person of the game world. He dropped his gear which clanked to the ground with a metallic clonk. His weight load halved immediately.

  “What the heck were you carrying—titanium bricks?”

  “No. I only have my basket for carrying the wood and my axe.”

  “Axe?”

  I looked at his item. My head’s up display icon pointer encircled the axe and analyzed it. The menu opened and caused my jaw to drop.

  Name: Solid Crimson Mech-Axe

  Type: (sharp) light melee weapon

  Damage: 10-15

  Ability: 8% bleed damage, 5% critical damage

  Pretty high-value item for a random NPC, heck, pretty high for a Level 1 player like me. If my avatar had real saliva, I would have been drooling.

  “Hurry up, I can see their eyes,” L’ocean said from above.

  Pressure twisted the moment.

  “What are you waiting for?” the NPC man said. “You heard the lady. Let’s climb up.”

  Simple for him, but not for me. He followed his script, but I had to weigh in different options.

  “I can either carry you or the axe, but I can’t do both.”

  The NPC yelled at me. “Forget about the axe! Our lives are on the line.”

  Not to go meta here, but he was a programmed character while I was a real player. I weighed the mech-axe in my hands and felt the ergonomic grip melt into to my palms. This weapon outranked my crappy blade. Even if I didn’t use it, I could sell it at the Academy for some much-needed credits.

  “Dash!”

  L’ocean shouted at me. She repeated my name like a broken record, each time sounding more insistent.

  “Coming,” I said, and made my final decision.

  3

  With L’ocean’s help, I climbed up in no time. The second I crawled over the hole’s edge, her eyes widened. An invisible question mark popped up over her head. “Where’s the man?”

  “I left him in the hole.”

  Her facial features froze. Silence settled in for a second. The NPC whined from below. “Please, please don’t leave me here. I swear, I’ll give you fifty credits each if you help me up.”

  Before L’ocean could answer, I showed her my new mechanized axe. “Pretty cool bleed damage and critical chance stats for a rookie weapon, don’t you think?”

  “You swapped an item for a human life?”

  “Well, technically, he’s not human. And besides, I don’t have enough strength to carry both him and the axe.”

  Based on the growing redness of her face, she was ready to scream at me, but the incoming growling interrupted her outburst.

  “We’ll talk about this later. We need to get to the safe zone as fast as possible.”

  “Why not kill some Creepos and level up?”

  “Eight targets are approaching us. We don't stand a chance.”

  She stormed away and left me standing there. I turned my head in the direction of the hideous growls. Deep in the distance, crimson eyes pierced the darkness. With my new axe, I could hack and slay these creatures, but with no skills, eight reapers were seven too many.

  “Please, please,” the NPC in the hole said.

  I looked down into the darkness one last time.

  “Keep the axe, and I'll give you fifty extra credits. Heck, I'll give you one hundred.”

  “Too late for that, amigo, reapers are coming.”

  The NPC whined, the echo intensifying his plea. “I don’t want to die.”

  Poor chap; if only he’d known.

  “You’re basically ones and zeroes so don’t worry about that. I’m sure the creators are going to recycle you for another quest.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  I would have loved to chat more, but my life was on the line, so I hit the dirt and ran. My avatar flashed through the tree-lines and targeted L’ocean, now about twenty-five meters ahead of me. She sprinted like the wind. I had trouble keeping up and blamed the crimson axe. A cool item for sure, but it weighed more than a Level 1 character like me could handle. It felt like I was moving through syrup. Damn game mechanics.

  Midway through the trees, I cocked my head and looked back at the small clearing. A wolf-like creature with crystallized skin jumped into the hole. An ear-shattering scream cut through the distance—the sound of a man getting ripped apart alive. No, that wasn’t true; he was a non-playable character. A damn game element.

  Quest update: You failed to secure the lumberjack.

  I had more pressing issues to deal with. A couple of the infected creatures avoided the hole in the ground and jetted through the tree-line, their crimson eyes set on me.

  Enemy: Infected wolf ‘Reaper’

  Type: Beast

  HP: 45-60

  Weakness: Sharp weaponry, fire

  Drops: Reepo samples, fur, fangs

  I should have stopped chatting with the NPC. Now I was going to pay the price.

  “L’ocean! I could use some help.”

  She either didn’t hear me or didn’t want to.

  I pushed my legs but the resistance prevailed. The forces held me back, which prompted me to look at my inventory. I needed to increase my speed, so I had to get rid of some items. It sucked, but I wasn’t going to die as a Level 1 character out here. I dropped the health potions and the cutter, and felt my speed rapidly increasing with the loss of weight. I was going to make it after all.

  A few hundred meters in front of me, sparse light shone through the tree silhouettes. The clearance of the safe zone awaited me. I turned around and readied my new mech-axe. The first infected wolf jumped at me.
I swung my weapon like the mighty Thor. The edge of the blade cut into his neck. Damage delivered.

  The reaper squealed in pain and staggered. 85% of his HP had dropped. I swung again and caused another critical hit, which made the creature bleed. Before he could recover, I chopped off his head with a finisher. The other reapers doubled their onslaught. I was so obsessed with killing one creature I didn’t notice another one attacking me from behind. The sharp sensation of being bit ripped through my back.

  How could this pain feel so real?

  I shook off the predator and targeted him. The second I swung my axe, yet another beast flanked me on the right. Its crystallized teeth sank into my arm and caused major damage. I rolled sideways, hoping to launch another swing attack, when four more reapers stormed toward me, red eyes and foamy jaws intent on slaughter. These predators worked like a pack and launched at me from all angles. Hopelessness ran through my veins.

  “L’ocean, I think I’m going to die here.”

  No response back. She had probably left the level and traveled back to the Academy. I focused on the nearest incoming attacker and released a standard 360 degree axe swipe. The end of my mechanized axe connected with the jaw of the reaper abomination and hauled it three meters forward. A moment to cheer, except for the five other reapers attacking me at the same time and tearing me apart. My eyes flooded in red as my heartbeat hammered my ears. Health points in my life circle dropped like a rollercoaster ride.

  “Help,” I shouted to no one in particular.

  The yell for assistance echoed unanswered through the forest.

  Raorarwararaa.

  The sound of death as the reaper pack ripped me apart.

  My HPs dropped to zero.

  The warning sign ‘Critical Mode’ entered my heads-up display. I couldn’t move my limbs when the countdown started from ten. But with no ally in the area, my chances of getting healed equaled zilch.

  Man, this game sucked.