After completing her linen closet quest, Sophitia is as ready as she is ever going to be to brave this new world’s great outdoors. Which is depressingly not very ready. Even looking through the rest of the rooms all she found was a box cutter and a few ballpoint pens. After thousands of years the ink is long gone but the plastic casing survived, so she figures she might be able to sell them as ancient artifacts.

“How dangerous is it outside? My medical gown armor and box cutter weapon aren’t going to do much.” Sophitia asks.

“Have a little faith as I, your great divine spirit, will guide her champion true.”

Sophitia just laughs at that in a mocking tone.

“If you don’t want the minimap guidance divine blessing I’m giving you to the nearest village, I can turn it off.”

Sophitia quickly stops laughing and says, “My apologies great divine spirit who is most high. I just had some dust stuck in my throat and clearing it just sounded like a mocking laugh. Please grace me with your wisdom on the dangers I must face.”

“That’s better. And hardly none. Most of the natural animals are extinct, the few plants and animals left are basically genetically engineered to keep the ecosystem from complete collapse.”

Interrupting Sophitia asks, “What about the FIO38 monsters?”

Laughing, Invidia responses, “Them? AI controlled robots with holographic emitters. Remember the FIO38 system was to keep people alive and give them something fun to do. Can’t really do that if monsters go around killing people. Besides AI are programmed not kill humans. I might as well show you. Start combat tutorial!”

Familiar FIO38 battle music starts playing through Sophitia’s implanted ear transmitter as the robot spider runs in front of her and skids to a halt with two front legs in the air and a menacing head down stance.

“Seriously? You want me to fight a spider the size of my hand?”

“A fusion powered, insect hunter-killer drone spider. But I suppose it should look more impressive,” Invidia says as the robot spider starts to shimmer. A glow quickly envelopes the spider before it grows to an 8-foot-tall bear.

The spider turned bear lets out a ferocious roar which exactly sounds like the stock monster roar sound from ten thousand years ago. ‘What’s next the Wilhelm scream?’ Sophitia thinks to herself.

 Expecting an immediate attack Sophitia puts her arms in front of her to ward it off. A few seconds later she lowers her arms as the bear just continues to look ferocious but doesn’t move.

“Isn’t it going to attack?”

“Not yet, this is the tutorial which means it’s turn based. Having trouble loading the tutorial script; it’s been a few millennia since I used it last, give it a second. Ahh! Here, okay. First try squinting at it to bring up its information.”

“This is one of those forced tutorials which players have to annoyingly go through before they can play the game isn’t it?” Sophitia asks.

“Yes, now be a good little player and do as I say and we can both be done with this quickly.”

Feeling it’s easier and faster to just go along, Sophitia squints at the bear.

“Not really a lot of information on it. And Dreaded Spider Bear? Not really seeing it.”

After Sophitia’s comment, the bear raises its arms, then four more arms appear and it raises those as well. Invidia says, “Happy now? Let’s continue. Please attack with your starter weapon.”

Walking over to the spider bear Sophitia half-heartedly swings her box cutter at it. And is surprised when her weapon deflects off a just materialized green tinted shield and a red 1 floats up from point of impact.

“How in the…?”

“A combination of visual effects from your OLED eye lens and point magnetic repulsion field. My turn now,” Invidia says.

Before Sophitia can react, the spider bear swings its right three arms at her. And just like her attack they are deflected off a green shield which appears a foot away from her.

The AIs even implemented the combat system from FIO38. The artists were too cheap to spend time making realistic combat damage or accurate hit boxes so instead everything was covered in hp-shields.

This leads to some hilariously stupid situations. Case in point, when Sophitia attacks the bear she swings her box cutter 4 feet from the bears side and still is rewarded with a ‘hit’ and a red 3 appears as the hp-shield turns from green to yellow.

The spider bear response with ‘bear hug’ attack which just barely grazes Sophitia’s hp-shield but is enough to deal 5 damage to her and cause the status effect constriction. Constriction causes damage over time and limits movement, or so it says in its description. But in reality Sophitia can still move just fine as it just reduces her game agility and her numeric chance to dodge and hit.

Sophitia uses her aura vision to look at the spider bear. As expected, there is a small red spider shaped aura below the bear and the bear image is a covered in bear shaped UV aura. She figures it’s a combination of the spider’s hologram and AI controlled eye lenses which make it look realistic in visible light but doesn’t change the other spectrums of light.

“Next you should use your— never mind just keep attacking the spider bear till you defeat it,” Invidia says.

“What do you mean never mind? I seem to remember the tutorial goes into combat abilities, magic and a few other things.”

“It does, but you don’t have any combat abilities or magic and no trainer to learn them from. Besides you already know all this so be thankful you can skip past it.”

Grumbling to herself Sophitia keeps attacking with her next attack being a perfect center of mass attack. Which is still deflected by the shield but this time it ‘misses’ and does no damage. This farce of a combat continues for a few more rounds before the spider bear is vanquished.

After the last hit the bear dissipates in a shower of light sparkles. Using her aura vision Sophitia watches the now invisible spider take something out of its back carapace before dropping it on the ground and skittering off to hide in a bush. Picking up the red gooey object she brings up its information and finds out it’s a spider’s eye.

“And somehow this is believable to people now?”

“Don’t ask me. People use to think the earth was the center of the universe and came up with complex heavenly maps to explain it all. Sages of today have a lot of complex theories on the life shield as they call it and how it interacts with mana and the blessing of the gods. I never really understood it. Too many logic fallacies and hand waving away problems for me to make any sense out of it.”

“And you haven’t tried to tell them the truth of things?” Sophitia asks.

“Many times. However, they either think its an evil voice trying to led them astray or a test of the gods to remain faithful. It doesn’t help that the other six tend to dissuade people from questioning the nature of the world around them.”

“I thought you said you didn’t call yourself gods?” Sophitia says, smugly pointing out Invidia’s inconsistency.

“I don’t call myself a god, but a lot of the people call us that. And ‘he’ might be encouraging his followers to do the same. It doesn’t matter; let’s move on to other things.”

“That’s just great. What happens when people’s hp-shield goes down?”

“Depends on the monster and reaction of the player. If they are in a group the monster attacks others or if alone, it ‘plays’ with the food to let them get away. The worse are the ones frozen in terror. Have to knock them out with tranquilizers and manufacture a semi-believable story of how they escaped certain death.”

Grinning, Sophitia says, “No danger combat, I can just keep attacking until I kill high level mobs.”

“Not really, I’ll be forced to put you to sleep and drag your naked body to town were you’ll hopefully be ravaged by the nearest townsfolk.”

“What? Why?”

“Because I hate you and want you to make many dark elf babies?”

“No, not that. I mean why can’t you adjust the game’s difficulty level to cheat for me?” Sophitia asks.

“Two reasons, any adjustment requires all seven AI to approve, which making the game easier for one individual counts. If any of us break this rule, the other six will conquer the offender and force them to follow the rules. And two, we constantly monitor one another to make sure the above doesn’t happen. Which would mean they would start wondering who you are and looking into your past. Not a good idea as we’ve discussed,” Invidia says, explain the situation.

“At least tell me this is a starter area?”

“Nope, everything here will defeat you in one hit. So, unless you want to take your chances being naked in a town of strangers, I suggest you start running.”

After hearing that Sophitia hears the battle music start and several monster roars around her.  She takes off running from several spider bears and other spider mutated animal looking monsters. Sophitia has no doubts Invidia will leave her naked unconscious body in the middle of the nearest town if she doesn’t. That is how FIO38 handled death after all.

As for the ravaged by the villagers, she is doubtful that will happen. But, without knowing more about this world, she has no interest in finding out what townsfolk do to naked defeated adventurers. The next two days she spends alternatively running and hiding from the much higher-level monsters which continue to chase her.

Invidia was right about the one-hit hp-shield breaking. The good news was the monsters stopped trying to attack her normally after her shield went down. The bad news was they then started to poke at her with sharp needle like appendages trying to put her to sleep.

Still it was fairly easy to dodge with her aura vision. Since she could see through the holograms to an extent, and the fact the robots were trying very hard not to injure her she could easily avoid the attacks.

No, the only real problem was the two-day grueling marathon running through the lightly wooded area she was in. Since her level was so low, she aggroed everything in the area. If she paused for more than a few minutes, they would surround her and force her to move again to avoid a bad ending.

At least the new body Invidia gave her was up to the task. Improved strength, reflexes and reduced need for sleep helped out immensely. It might not seem like she has very good physical capabilities from her stats window, but this was incorrect. The augmented game reality was just that, separate from reality.

It was more like she had hidden base physical stats which were quite high with the game stats added on top of them. If her game stats were all zero, that would represent reality. At ten, with the dark elf racial bonus, it meant she received limited assistance to everything she did. Although she hadn’t had time to test how much that assistance was, she did see one noticeable example.

Occasionally her perception stat would highlight monsters in red or various natural resources in green she could pick up. She actually came across a mining node. It looked like a misshaped concrete pour with embedded aluminum ingots in it.

Although she doesn’t know much about geology, she is fairly certain aluminum does not occur naturally in cube shaped shiny metallic blocks. Of course, the helpful information window called it a mithril ore node, and let her know she didn’t have the require tools or mining skill to be able to mine it.

With dawn of the third day starting since she was reborn, she finally leaves the forest full of robot spiders pretending to be various mutant spider monsters. And shortly comes across a small river. Being hungry and thirsty she takes several minutes to drink her fill of water. Surprisingly, even after two days of constant movement she isn’t that bad off and she almost feels full with just the water.

Afterward, she continues to follow the small river downstream as the minimap Invidia ‘blessed’ her with indicates there should be a starter village there. An hour of travel later and Sophitia can see early morning cooking fire smoke from the village not too far away.

Troglodytarum

When I originally wrote this I used iron in the mining node description. But fun fact, iron actually does appear as almost pure cubic ingots in a concrete like rock matrix called Pyrite. Yes, the real world sometimes has mining nodes...