The spear arced through the air on a collision course with Slade. It happened so fast that Slade couldn’t do anything but shield himself with his guitar. That was precisely where the spear hit with a sickening thunk, causing the guitar to twang loudly.


    Rearing back on its lizard beast, the goblin screamed what sounded like a war cry. The second one rode around looking for a target for its spear. The other three lizard creatures followed the second goblin, snorting and ducking their heads up and down.


    The goblin with a spear looked right at me, and I felt my heart beating against my throat. It was all too real. I could feel the grass underfoot, the sun on my neck, and the fragrance of wildflowers. The spear point looked deadly sharp, and I thought I’d find out any moment.


    Slade hooted a war cry of his own and rushed at the goblins, waving his guitar like a weapon. The goblin that had already thrown his spear wasn’t ready to be bum-rushed by a lunkheaded human. It reared back a little too far, tumbling from its mount.


    The lizard skittered off. Slade wasted no time hammering the fallen goblin with his guitar, its steel strings making awful sounds like a tortured cat. Although, in hindsight, maybe it was the goblin making that noise. Or a little from column A and a little from column B.


    Watching his partner get guitar-soloed to death, the second goblin switched targets and flung his spear at Slade. To say I was relieved would be an understatement. This time, however, the spear landed true, right into one of Slade’s meaty biceps.


    “Yearg!” Slade howled loud enough for the entire server to hear. “He fucking stabbed me! I’m bleeding! That’s blood!”


    For once, Slade wasn’t exaggerating. Blood flowed down his arm in rivers. Taking a step back, my feet tripped in the grass, and I sat down hard, almost biting my tongue.


    The goblin that had just thrown his spear saw me and dug his heels into his mount. I was about to be trampled by a goblin war charge. I watched in horror as the creature and its rider came bearing down. The angry yellow eyes of the rider were all I could see as they got closer.


    Suddenly, Max appeared in front of me, off to one side. A black streak slashed before him, and the goblin flew sideways from his mount. The lizard beast galloped past me without a rider urging it on to murderous trampling.


    The other lizard creatures scattered, leaving us alone on the plains again.


    Slade wailed, “My arm! My freaking arm!”


    I watched as Emma rushed over to him and then noticed a floating blue bar over his head. About a quarter of the bar was empty. For real? I thought. Do we have health bars? There had been a flash of red over the goblin Max had killed. I had assumed it was blood. Now I knew Max had one-shotted the second goblin.


    Emma placed her hands on Slade’s wound and held it, trying to staunch the bleeding. Slade whined a bit about the pain, but they seemed fine together. I turned back to Max, who approached the dead goblin.


    As I got closer, I could see there was no corpse on the ground. Instead, a twisting blue cube spun slowly in the air where the goblin had fallen. Max reached out and touched the cube, which vanished. He stared off into space and flicked a hand in front of himself.


    It didn’t take a rocket scientist to understand what was happening. He was gathering the loot.


    Another cube slowly rotated where Slade had beaten the first goblin with his guitar. Slade was busy wailing about his wound with Emma, so I touched the cube. My inventory opened. Next to it was another glowing box. Inside the additional box were a spear, some jerky, and a dozen copper coins. I moved them to my inventory, then reached out and took hold of the spear.


    With a blink, I closed my inventory, and the spear remained in my hand.


    A series of glowing messages flashed sequentially in front of me:


    Achievement: First Loot


    Achievement: First Weapon


    Achievement: First Experience


    I inspected the spear. It was crude and short. Nothing more than a sharpened branch, really. After almost being trampled by an incredibly real-looking monster, I was all too glad to have some sort of weapon. Hugging it to my chest, I swore I wouldn’t ever be caught again sitting on the ground during an attack.


    “Get the Colonel. I want out of here.” Slade screamed.


    Emma was pinching the gash in his arm, trying to staunch the bleeding. She shot me a worried look, then murmured something to calm Slade, who was close to hysterical.


    “Operator,” I said. I wasn’t sure what would happen, but there wasn’t much that could surprise me at this point.Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.


    “Go for operator,” Kane said with a voice that was all around me.


    “Umm,” I stammered, unsure exactly what to say. “We were. The monsters. It’s all so real. We need…”


    “Get me the fuck out of here!” Slade yelled, “This fucking hurts!”


    “I’m sorry, Mr. Peterson. As per the contract you entered into, you have agreed to participate until the conclusion of The Game. Specifically bug reporting and edge cases all the way to the end level.”


    “You didn’t tell me it would be painful. I’m bleeding out here.”


    “That is not correct. Section four, paragraph six, spelled out that there would be a high degree of fidelity, including physical, mental, emotional, and psychic stimuli. This was covered in both the master contract and the non-disclosure forms.”


    “That’s bullshit. You didn’t say we’d actually feel pain. Not once in all the training sessions.”


    “As you can see, the training sessions were crude representations of The Game. They were only intended to show the rudimentary basics of the menu systems. Training did not cover progression, customization, interaction, combat, classes, crafting, or other systems to be discovered. It was a crash course only intended to show how to interact with The Game. It''s imperative that the players discover the other systems on their own. And, you were all chosen as Beta participants for your high degree of being able to decipher and learn systems quickly.”


    “I don’t care about that shit right now. I’m fucking bleeding to death here, and it hurts. What if that spear had hit me in the chest?” Slade’s voice ratcheted up at least one full octave. He sounded more like a pubescent girl than a young man in his twenties.


    “You signed the contracts, Mr. Peterson. You chose to participate.”


    I had signed all those contracts, too. A quarter of a million dollars had sounded like the answer to all my prayers at the time—play a game for a few months, earn a decade of income. Kane had not answered the second half of Slade’s question.


    “So, what would have happened if the spear hit him in the chest?” I asked. All eyes turned to me, then looked up to where they thought the disembodied voice was coming from for an answer.


    After a pause, Kane answered, “Mr. Peterson would have died.”


    I knew what that meant in traditional video games, but I wasn’t certain here. “So, he’d be dead or released from the game?”


    “Released and lose his bonus?” Max added.


    “He would be dead. Unable to play The Game. And the bonus would be forfeit.”


    “Dead, dead?” I asked.


    “Yes. Mr. Peterson, and any of you in a similar circumstance, would be dead.”


    “What the…?” Slade screamed, “You didn’t warn us that we could…”


    “It was, in fact, mentioned multiple times during the explanation of The Game.”


    “Bullshit,” both Max and Slade said at once. I’d nearly joined them, but the last thing we needed was a triple jinx.


    There was some more arguing back and forth, but I wasn’t listening. I’d almost been trampled, and it wouldn’t have been a respawn type of situation but one where I might have been killed. I gripped the spear tightly. I was never going to let go of it.


    Where this had seemed like an adventure too good to be true just a few days ago, it was now much more serious. I could die playing this game. I wanted to sit down, but that had damn near gotten me killed a few minutes ago. Forcing myself to stay on my feet, I cleared my head to catch the last bits of the argument.


    “And what about the bonus?” Max asked.


    “The bonus is real. Double pay. A half million dollars to any player that makes it to the end of The Game.”


    “How the fuck do we collect if we’re dead?” Slade whined.


    “That was stipulated in the emergency contact and release forms. Your base pay will go to whoever you placed as the recipient.” Kane said.


    The argument died there, and an awkward silence descended.


    Slade stood huffing and puffing, so worked up at trying to argue his way out of this that his face was nearly purple. He stood looking up into the sky, mouthing words but saying nothing. Emma was still latched on to his arm, trying to pinch the wound shut. It wasn’t helping all that much.


    Max and I looked at each other. I could see he was thinking furiously. That intense look in his eyes was ratcheted up to eleven. Finally, he nodded, wiped his katana across one knee, and slid it back into its sheath at his hip. He seemed comfortable, or resigned at least, with the knowledge the game was a lot more serious than we’d originally thought.


    “Damn it,” Slade moaned. “I’m still bleeding. I’m going to die…”


    “I’m so sorry,” Emma said to him.


    The bar over his head said otherwise. A third of it was missing, but even with the bleeding, it hadn’t changed that much since the fight.


    “You have the tools necessary,” Kane said. “Operator out.”


    “Wait! You can’t just leave us like that,” Slade yelled.


    We had the tools. I blinked and thought of help. The Help Menu opened in front of me. I flicked my hand turning the pages, but the entries were endless. Scrolling through all of it would probably take days.


    “Search for healing,” I said.


    A page on healing popped up. As I skimmed the page, I noted multiple ways to heal, including bandages, potions, magic, and status effects. We didn’t have any bandages or potions, literally entering the game with nothing but the clothes on our backs. Magic, however…


    “Healing with magic,” I said.


    The entry was confusing, mostly in symbols and diagrams I didn’t understand. The page mentioned mana pools and spells, but it may as well have said to wish for it. Status effects were mentioned again, but I wasn’t entirely sure what that meant.


    “I think I get it,” Emma said.


    When I closed my menu, I saw her staring off into space and flicking her hand in front of her. She was obviously reading what I’d just skimmed but seemed to be having a better time of it. Her lips moved as she continued reading, then she blinked hard, and her eyes focused on the world around us.


    She turned to Slade and placed the palms of her hands on his wound. She whispered strange words in an alien tongue, and I watched the cut on Slade’s arm close. When Emma finished muttering her strange words, the wound on his arm was completely gone. He was still covered in blood but no longer howling about the pain. Emma looked exhausted and staggered back away from Slade.


    Before she could fall, I leaped forward and caught her.


    “Thanks, Victoria,” she said as her eyelids drooped.


    Slade was too busy checking out his arm to thank Emma. I eased her down so she could sit, then went to Slade. The boys were both poking at where the wound had been. Max had his face practically in the remaining gore, trying to see if there were scars or other side effects.


    “I can’t believe it…” Slade muttered.


    Max saw me watching them and asked, “Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”


    “About what?” I asked.


    Max smiled, “If these are our bodies, or if we were put in the matrix and just think they are.”