Simulation: The imitation of the operation of a real-world process or system over time. Simulations require the use of models; the model represents the key characteristics or behaviors of the selected system or process, whereas the simulation represents the evolution of the model over time.

-Muted Infinity-

-Arc Start: Prologue-

Thunder echoed in the distance, as lightning flashed, illuminating discolored raindrops as they fell from the smog choked skys to the cracked and scorched surface of a war torn world.

Dr Howard R. Faust dispassionately watched the acidic rain through the thick glass window of his office, with a far away look on his face. His mind thought, but worked on nothing, merely delighting in the act of thinking itself.

“The musings of nothing”, he called it.

“The talk of a madman”, his employers would mutter behind his back.

But he didn’t care what they said, or what they thought- he could turn up carrying a headless corpse, and it wouldn’t matter. They would keep him around as long as he produced results, and results… Well, results were the only thing he cared about.

And the need for those results, where what had led him to the present.

“Sir.” A mechanical hiss sounded as the door to his office slid open, and one of his subordinates stepped in. “Everything’s in place, and all fields are reporting green across the board.” The young woman looked up from her tablet. “We’re ready to begin on your command.”

Yuyara Ito was the odd one out of the group of scientists under Faust, and it wasn’t just because of her artificial minty light green hair that hung down to her waist. She was the new hire for a team that hadn’t taken on members in almost three decades, the youngest by almost 50 years, and was the only one with a doctorate that didn’t trace back to mathematics as one of its base principles.

“Good, good. Very good.” Faust muttered to himself. “What are your thoughts on this operation, doctor?” 

“The technology in use has been tested thoroughly, we have double backups for every crucial component, and the paperwork is clear that we have complete legal immunity for this.” The assistant rattled off, robotically, as if reading from a script. “The only variable left is the test subjects themselves, which of course we can’t influence without invalidating the experiment.”

“Hmmm… that’s not what I mean, and you know it.” The old scientist watched the rainfall with a pensive frown. “You were specifically brought onto my staff for this experiment, due to your expertise in psychology and sociology- the only two fields of science that I have never been able to truly grasp. Your inputs are valued for your ability to understand the human thought process, and your ability to think with more than numbers. So again, I’ll ask, what are your thoughts on this operation, doctor?”

“Well.” Yuara took a few moments to put together her words. “I- What we’re doing here, this experiment is- I don’t like it.”

“You disagree?”

“...Yes.” She hesitated for a moment before affirming.

“Disappointing… but ultimately expected.” Faust drawled. “What points exactly, might I ask, do you find unpalatable about our actions?”

Yuyara blinked, and actually had to take a few seconds to fully process the absolute audacity of the question.

“What do I- SIR! We’re going to murder tens of thousands!” She exclaimed. “You plan on putting well over half a million people in an environment without the resources to sustain them all, and then slowly taking away those as well, just to see what they’ll do!”

“No.” Faust cut her off with a pensive frown. “I made sure to have more than enough resources to not only sustain the population, but to allow for expansion. The high material cost of the gameplay loop will cause the pool to gradually shrink. Excess resources followed by rapid expansion, then by scarcity, and finally extreme depletion, is vital for the simulation to match our world’s situation.”

“It’ll be chaos!” Yuyara shouted at him. “People fighting wars for food, and mugging each other for whatever survives the conflict! We’d be turning normal people into killers and thieves!”

“A Resource War: The intentional mass burning of resources in order to forcibly seize resources from others. A fascinating concept and one I wish to document and study in full detail.”

“I- You- How!?” Yuyara seethed, pulling at her hair in exasperation. “You’re insane!”

Lightning struck, thunder echoed, and Yuyara’s eyes widened in fear as she realized what she’d just said.

…

“...Tell me doctor…” Faust drummed his fingers against the window glass. “How did scientists as early as 1972, accurately predict that humanity’s industrial output would peak in 2040, followed by a decline in both population and food availability?”

Yuyara instinctively took a step back as Faust turned away from the window, his unnaturally gangly height overshadowing her by almost two whole feet.

“Uhm, they uh,” She buffered as she tried to recall the oddly specific vague fact, “They built a primitive computer from the ground up to run a simulation thousands of times over, controlling the whole thing with punch cards.”

“Indeed, though they never were able to tell if their model was predicting a drop in food production due to a decline in population, or a decline in population due to a drop in food production. Truly a shame, perhaps they could have prevented everything before it even began.” Faust let his fingers slide off the window as he began slowly walking away from it. 

“Another question then. How did we come to our current theory on how the solar system formed?”

“We simulated it thousands of times on a computer.”

“Correct. What was it we used to replace clinical trials?”

“Medical simulations of human anatomy.”

“Indeed, Indeed. Correct once again. Now here’s a free question.” The scientist paused, now only an arm’s length from the doctor. “What exactly do all of those examples have in common?”

“They- They were all simulations.” Yuyara choked out, forcing herself to say it even though she knew exactly where Faust was going with this.

“Yes, simulations.” Faust took his last step forward, and Yuyara was forced to take a step back as his withered face and cold gray eyes centered on her, only to find herself pressed against the door. “Simulations are science’s greatest tool, allowing us to harvest data and information that we should have no way of knowing.”

“It was a simulation that predicted this world would collapse, that we’d eventually run out of both food and materials.” He leaned down so that he could look her dead in the eyes. “It will be a simulation that shows us our way out.”

As if on cue, a lightning strike shook the building, and echoed Faust’s declaration with a roar of thunder.

The scientist held her gaze for a few moments more, before he slowly rightened himself, and walked back towards his window.

“H-How…” Yuyara struggled to find her voice, “How many times are you going to run this simulation?”

‘How many lives are you going to feed into a grinder?’

“As many times as I need to.”

Yuyara nodded in affirmation, her mouth completely dry.

“And how long do you predict each test will last?”

“Entirely dependent on the subjects’ ability to think long term, and how soon they realize that finite resources in a game about infinite expansion, has catastrophic implications.”

-Muted Infinity-

Did you ever bite down on something cold with a rotten tooth? 

Or crush up dry SweetTarts and snort them?

Well, connecting into full dive was a vaguely similar sensation. When you put on the metal collar, and it connected to the little chip in the nape of your neck to hotwire the signals being sent to your brain, it always had a very distinct feeling.

Like someone popped open your skull and drizzled caffeine over your brain. You could taste colors, and smell the temperature. Every part of you had a prickly staticy numbness, like it had all fallen asleep at once. But almost as quickly as it came.

It disappeared.

Lucy jerked awake with a gasp, breathing desperately like she’d just broken the surface of the water. Muscle memory would have had her sit up, but that somewhat failed on account of her floating weightlessly against the backdrop of space, so all it did was send her on a slight spin.

Countless stars of every color, dotted the air above her like priceless jews in a lost treasure chest, hugging the horizon as it stretched out into the unfathomable distances of the universe. 

The treasures of the cosmos, laid out for all to see, so close it was almost as if you could reach out and run your hands through their dazzling glow.

Lucy blinked a few times and her breathing calmed down as she took in the familiar view of her bedroom. Well, not her physical bedroom, that was just a worn down, three foot by seven foot, concrete box with only a stained mattress and rusted dresser in it. But this… this was her real bedroom.

A Digital bedroom, a Dive Box, or whatever you wanted to call it, was the fully customizable space that you appear in when you enter Full Dive, acted as your personal travel hub for navigating everything on the extranet, and was what most of humanity considered to be their “home”.

 Lucy hummed along to the slow piano tune that echoed from all around her and lazily flicked her fingers, causing numerous screens to pop into existence in front of her, showing her missed PMs, and sales on her wishlist as she slowly floated through the void. But among the notifications, and the clutter of files she kept forgetting to delete, one thing stood out, it’s luminous golden letters glinting off imaginary sunlight.

Lux in Tenebris: Infinite Horizons 

Free Opening Weekend

Lumina, the world-famous VR tycoon, has finally released the long awaited sequel to it’s greatest masterpiece!

LiT 2, a game that had been announced three years ago, and then delayed twice, was something of a once in a lifetime phenomena. The game had had an almost cult-like obsessive follower base ever since news of it first leaked online, it had more eyes on it than some wars that were going on at the same time, and there wasn’t a single person with access to the extranet who didn’t know it’s name.

Then again, it wasn’t all that surprising, considering it was supposed to be the successor to the single most played game of all time, having as much as a fifth of the world's population as active users at its peak.

She’d personally missed out on the original LiT, a combination of not being able to afford its monthly subscription and not having an up-to-date nano dive interface necessary to properly render its high level feedback.

But that was all in the past. She’d gotten better gear since then, and the hardware requirements for the second installment had been dropped significantly. Given such a perfect lineup, there was only one logical option.

She clicked play.

[Loading]

[…]

[Your Extranet avatar is compatible with this game, would you like to use it?]

Well, she’d hope it’d be compatible- her avatar was literally just herself after all, nothing crazy like a six armed spaghetti monster.

One button press, and the screen in front of her shattered away to reveal a mirror image of herself, sans any clothes and jewelry. A cute blond in her twenties, with hair down to her waist, and cheerful sapphire eyes.

[Is this the avatar you want to use?]

“Yup.” She chuckled, waving her hand and watching her clone mimic her.

[Loading]

[…]

[Please enter your username]

“I’d like to use my Extranet username, please.”

[Loading]

[…]

[Account Created: LuckyLucy114]

[Welcome to your Infinite Horizon!]

[Please enjoy your stay!]

The screen fell away, and the blackness of distant space was replaced by the blackness of the void…

And then the world went white.

-Muted Infinity-

When Lucy slowly opened her eyes, it wasn’t to the colors of the cosmos, but to a serene blue sky, with white wispy clouds, and distant birds flying far overhead.

It was pretty…

Such a sight, of course, was immediately interrupted as she smashed into the hard stone ground with a painful thud. Humans tended to like standing on the ground, and coders didn’t usually have to account for someone floating in space when they decided to warp in.

Lucy blushed in embarrassment and grumbled to herself as she slowly pushed herself to her feet, gingerly rubbing her back, and pointedly ignoring the laughter of people around her. Now that she wasn’t just staring up at the sky, she could see the world around her.

“Wow…”

And she was breathless.

…

It looked like shit.

The ground was made of shoddy and uneven brown bricks, a jankey wall made of vertical wood logs sat in the distance, cutting off any natural scenery, and even though the game had only been launched for all of ten minutes, numerous ramshackle dirty brick huts were being thrown up by players literally just pulling the bricks out of the ground- the resulting pot holes, just making it all look even worse.

But the scenery wasn’t what really had her attention, no, that honor went to the people.

People, so, so many people. There had to be thousands, with more spawning in every second in a flash of light. A practical swarm of humans, a sea of white shirts and black shorts, all blending together as they rushed about. 

Everyone knew how successful the original LiT had been, but she’d still had doubts about the model. A game without any NPC’s, plot lines, or pre-built structures, entirely dependent on nothing but player input and interaction- surely there had to be something else going on that kept people hooked.

But this… this really put it into perspective. That many people, all building, exploring, trading. adding to, and weaving their own stories, would probably wind up making a more compelling experience on accident, as they interacted with each other, than the devs could probably do on purpose.

But as Lucy was gawking, she was drawn from her reverie by slow, sarcastic, clapping from her left.

“Geez, forget making it out of spawn, you didn’t even make it out of your loading point before getting knocked over. That’s gotta be a new record!”

[BloodieRubie]

You could typically tell a bit about a person by their username, it was a giant fluorescent sign hanging above their head after all, and this was no exception.

Red hair, red eyes, her username was literally just two words for red, the only part of this girl that wasn’t red was her clothes, the default white shirt and black shorts everyone else was wearing, and Lucy had a distinct feeling that would change as soon as she found some dye or crafting materials.

“W-Well I don’t really see how that’s my fault,” Lucy stammered, “It dropped me, it was out of my control!”

“You’re really gonna blame the teleport system for your own inability to land on your feet?” The girl raised an eyebrow and gave her a look.

“Yes!”

“Ha! Then this must be your first time playing LiT, the original game’s TP system was notoriously wonky. Anyone worth their salt knew to have both feet firmly on the ground before doing anything.” Rubie tipped an imaginary hat, and spread her arms. “Well, in that case, welcome to Spawn newbie! Just about the only non-player made structure in the entire game!” 

She gestured to the area around them before wincing and giving a pained laugh. “‘Though considering how it looks, that’s probably for the best. Geeze, even some randomly generated hills would look better than this.”

Lucy panned around spawn, and had to agree, but something else caught her attention. “Isn’t having spawn, just… free like this, a bad idea?” She asked. “Couldn’t people trash it, or try to take it over?”

“Of course people are gonna try to take it over, it’s the center of the map, after all!” Rubie laughed. “About a million different groups tried to take spawn in the original LiT, but no one could ever hold onto it for more than a month- too high of a priority target.”

“Ah, that makes sense I guess.” Lucy winced. “I guess there's a lot of pvp in this game, isn’t there?”

Rubie beamed in response. “Yup! There’s  a lot of pve stuff, but most of the fighting is pvp, after everyone gets their stuff going.”

Lucy just sighed. “Great… I don’t suppose you have any tips for the new girl?”

“Well you should probably get going. There’s already a lot of people here, and there's gonna be a lot more coming. So unless you get out now, or figure out how to magic resources out of thin air, all the good stuff’s gonna be long gone.”

…

Lucy’s eyes widened as Rubie’s words registered.

“Crap!”

-Muted Infinity-

The rolling green hills outside of spawn’s walls seemed to go on forever in the direction she’d chosen to walk, the beautiful grassy steppes only being broken by the occasional tree, stream, or rocky outcropping.

Luckily the occasional tree was all that she needed… Well, all that she thought she needed, Lucy hadn’t exactly played LiT before, but she was fairly decent at picking up context clues.

The tier one tools that she had available in her crafting tech tree were all made of wood, so it was obvious she needed wood. What was less obvious was how she was supposed to actually get it.

She had wandered off into the grassland of rolling hills that stretched out from around spawn, and once she was confident in her distance from other players (which was complicated due to the sheer number of them), she immediately beelined to the nearest tree…

And promptly realized she had no idea what to do next.

She’d tried punching it, but that only rewarded her with a bruised hand. Kicking it had yielded similar results.

The juvenile tree in front of her just sat there, mockingly.

Originally it was just to get wood, but now… now, after bruising bother her hand and her pride, it was personal. A challenge of this degree required a fundamental shift of operations, innovative new strategies capable of pushing forward what was thought to be possible, and a breakthrough unlike any seen in modern history.

Luckly, she’d found an unlikely ally laying in the grass, something uniquely fit to deal with this situation.

Humanity’s oldest weapon-

A pointy rock.

“Hiya!”

She slammed the sharp rock she’d found on the ground into the trunk, but aside from scraping off some of the bark, it didn’t really do anything.

“Hiya!”

Again, she slammed the rock into the wood. Then again, with more power, but this time, her grip slipped from the force of the impact, and the stone cut open her palm as it tumbled to the ground.

“Ow, fuck.” Lucy hissed as she clenched her hand, before sighing and leaning down to grab the rock, blushing in embarrassment at the laughter that came from behind her.

“You know, you could actually help me, instead of just sitting off to the side and laughing!”

“Aww, but why would I do that?” Rubie, the absolute villain, who’d followed her for some unholy reason, said with a smirk. “You’re providing such good entertainment.”

“Entertainment? This isn’t entertainment!” Lucy waved her wounded hand at the tree. “This isn’t even entertaining. The game told me to find a tree. Well, I found a tree, but don’t have any way of actually doing anything with it.”

“Well I can see that, and it’s pretty funny, believe it or not.” The red haired girl bit into the apple that had fallen during the half hour Lucy had spent at the tree. “You should try punching it again, it was funny when you did that. Besides, what could I do? I’ve been busy tagging along with you, it’s not like I’ve made tools or anything.”

“You could help me.” Lucy pleaded. “You said you played the original Lux in Tenebris, you know how to play the game… Please?”

Rubie gave her a blank look, before shrugging and tossing the apple over her shoulder after a moment of consideration.

“Sure, why not?” She said, yawning as she swiped the rock from Lucky’s hand. “Helping newbies by making them feel stupid is par for the course in these games, isn’t it?”

“Hey!”

Lucy would have protested further, but her words died off in confusion as Rubie walked right past the tree, and towards a patch of tall grass, which she used the rock to cut out a bundle of.

“What, uh, what are you doing?”

“Actually bothering to think.” Rubie whistled as she strolled back up to the tree before jumping and grabbing ahold of a branch. The weight caused it to bob up and down, but two lazy swings caused it to snap in half, dropping the girl to the ground.

The red head vanished the items into her inventory, and made some exaggerated “magician moves” with her hands, before clapping and slowly pulling a new item out of her inventory as she moved her hands away, making it kinda look like she was pulling it out of her sleeve.

“Rule 1 of LiT: Use your head.” 

Rubie laughed at Lucy’s expression, and twirled her new axe around in her hand. It was a simple thing, with a sharp rock tied to the end of a stick with some thatch, but it was no less gobsmacking to Lucy.

“Wait, wha- That wasn’t in the crafting tree!”

“Bwah bwah, da cwafting twee~” Rubie mocked, “Sure the game starts you off with some basic tutorial stuff, but the rest of it you’ve gotta find yourself.” She lazily tossed the axe up and down, before lobbing it to Lucy, who caught it with a fumble. “Use that to chop down the tree, cut some tall grass, and break a sharp chunk off a big rock, then go ahead and make your own, well, whatever tool you want, just literally anything that’s not the crappy wooden tutorial tools.”

Lucy quickly scrambled to do so, nearly getting flattened by the tree’s final act of vengeance (IE: Falling at her) much to the amusement of Rubie. But she soon ran into another roadblock.

“Uhhh…” Lucy glanced between the items in her inventory and the crafting grid, while repeatedly scrolling through her barren crafting tech tree, which very much did not have the recipe Rubie had made. It let her turn the logs she’d gathered into some sticks, but that was basically it besides the wooden tools.

The girl in question just watched her flounder about aimlessly, for a while, with an amused smirk on her face.

“You know, the crafting system works outside of the crafting interface.” She eventually said. “I actually think it’s easier to get the hang of the system by using your hands, rather than the terminal.”

“You could have said that sooner!” Lucy hissed, hating being made to look like a fool, and promptly ignored her ‘companion’ saying “I didn’t hear a thank you~.”

She sat down on the grass and put the jagged stone shard to the end of a wooden stick, pushing it down slightly against the ground so the stick would stay up, and began carefully winding the bundle of grass strands to connect the two, finishing it off lamely with the only knot she knew how to tie- a bunny knot.

As soon as the knot was finished, the whole thing was engulfed in a white glow, causing Lucy to “Eep!” and drop it in surprise- much to Rubie’s amusement.

The blond sent a scathing glare at the redhead, and showed her a choice finger, but that just caused her to laugh harder. When Lucy looked back at the tool, however, it had turned into an almost identical replica to what Rubie had tossed to her, and when she reached down to grab it, its item name popped up.

[Primitive Axe]

“Rule 2 of LiT: Don’t trust that shitty crafting tree- there’s always better gear you haven't learned how to make yet. Go ahead, open it back up.”

Lucy huffed at her, but followed the instructions. When she opened the tree though, it had expanded to include a whole lot more than just the wooden tools she had originally. And it wasn’t just the axe either, a whole branch of ‘primitive gear’ had unlocked in her crafting tree, ranging from a shoddy shovel, club, and pickaxe, to poor quality arrows.

“You don’t just get new recipes as you find materials for them,” Rubie explained, “In LiT you have to unlock crafting trees. The simple ones are really easy to find, but the good ones you get usually by trying to craft new things on your own, and stumbling onto huge tech branches that just seem to keep going forever, stuff just getting better and better the deeper down them you explore. It really plays on that dopamine rush of discovery.”

Rubie hummed to herself happily before frowning and tapping her chin in thought.

“Don’t worry about running out of new stuff, or not knowing when you’ve run out of content, really… just don’t bother. There was, frankly, an absurdly overboard amount of trees in the last game, and most people think the devs just kept adding shit in without telling anyone.” She sighed and scratched her neck. “Honestly it was kinda ridiculous. Everyone thought runes were a joke item, but then some random guild found an advanced tree for them literally two weeks before the servers shut down- in a game that had been running for FIFTEEN YEARS! And then there was the stupid Legion, who had those weird ass lances that no one could ever figure out how to replicate.”

Lucy just nodded silently, as the Red haired girl continued on her rant, suddenly realizing just how out of her depth she was in this game, as her brain processed everything. 

So the game’s gear, and entire item system for that matter, was entirely based on discovery and exploration. If someone was really clever, or just dumb lucky, and discovered how to make something advanced before anyone else, they could completely control the market- selling it to people at incredible prices. Or even worse, if it’s something powerful, they could hoard it between them and their group, using it to gain a huge advantage against other players.

Whereas the best way to be “good” at most games was through grinding, stat maxing meta builds, and pure skill, LiT apparently valued information and craftiness more than any other- it rewarded information and craftiness more than any other. With this system, arms races weren't just something that could happen, they were a damned near feature!

No wonder she couldn’t find anything about the game online other than just a basic outline and people raving about how she should try it- no one wanted to spill anything! It also explained why the original LiT was so popular for so long, if everything from items, to combat, to the market, and the very world itself, was entirely generated by players, than the only real ‘depth limit’ to the game, was how many players it had playing it- and the devs had sure as hell done everything to support that little tidbit, if the numbers at spawn were anything to go by.

And now it made sense why Rubie was humoring her, tagging along, and flat out not taking her seriously! The old players where at a stupidly huge advantage, and Rubie could probably make more progress in an hour than Lucy could in a day!

A playful knock on her forehead brought Lucy out of her thoughts, and upwards to Rubie’s grinning face. “Is anyone hooome?~”

“Stop that.” Lucy waved away her hand, and pushed herself to her feet. “Ok, it took me an hour to get a starting tool, what’s next on the list?”

“Well now that we’ve got some wood, I’ll make us a basic crafting station, and get you something to defend yourself with, thennn…” Rubie's smile quirked mischievously as she pointed off to the side. “Let’s get you some basic combat training so you don’t die horribly in your first encounter.”

Lucy followed Rubie’s finger and raised an eyebrow at the large herd of wild boar drinking from a small stream of water. She looked back to her maybe-friend-maybe-tormentor and gave her an unimpressed look.

“And how in the world are we supposed to fight all of those? Do you have some sort of special strategy? Maybe a cheat code from the original Lux in Tenebris?”

“Oh please, no. Maybe in a shooter, or story game, you can beat a bunch of stuff before you’re supposed to, via cheese, or something, but if you try that in LiT, you’ll wind up dead and lose all your stuff.” Rubie leaned forward and held up three fingers. “Rule 3 of LiT: Don’t fight a battle you’re not absolutely sure you’ll win.”

Rubie placed those fingers on Lucy’s chin, and turned her head off to the side, where two hogs had wandered off from the herd.

“Rule 4 of LiT: Take advantage of every opportunity you’re presented with.”

Lucy just sighed.

“This is going to go horribly, isn’t it?”

Rubie laughed and slapped her on the back. 

“Only if you’re bad!”

-Muted Infinity-

“RHAA!” Lucy let out a warcry as she leapt to the side of a boar’s charge and swung her primitive stone sword, out and into the beast’s path where it cut deep- using the hog’s own momentum against it.

The boar squealed in a mixture of pain and rage as it crumpled to the ground, and Lucy was left panting at her fourth kill of the day.

The boars were near spawn for a reason, they were “newbie trainers”. They had large tusks, and could deal decent damage on hit, but their charging attacks were very obviously choreographed and easy to predict.

Or as Rubie had put it- “If you’re good, they’re easy. If you’re bad, you’re dead.”

Lucy was ripped from her thought though, as something slammed into her from behind and threw her to the ground.

Let it be said, Lucy never claimed to be a “good” player.

Quickly rolling out of the way of a hoof that would have stomped her head in, the blond managed to turn around to face the new boar that had gotten the drop on her. Offended that she was still alive, the boar lunged forward again, trying to impale her. Acting on instinct, Lucy brought her sword up and locked it with the animal's tusks.

Unfortunately, this put her in a direct brute force contest, with something much physically stronger than her.

“AHHH!” Lucy screamed as she was shaken back and forth, barely managing to keep hold of her sword, as the boar tried its damnedest to dislodge the offending stick.

One particularly brutal yank made her lose grip with one of her hands, and acting on a combination of instinct and adrenaline, Lucy used her now free hand to pull her primitive axe out of her inventory, and slam it down into the boar's head.

The thing squealed in pain, but the dull axe mainly just bounced off.

So she reared her arm back and slammed it down again.

And again.

And again.

And again.

And again.

Until the second rate “blade” managed to break past the boar’s thick skull, and hit something important, causing the monster to slump down dead on top of her.

Lucy weakly let the axe slip from her fingers and fall to the ground, panting heavily as the adrenaline rush subsided.

The two icons on the top left of her field of view mocked her, her health bar was halfway gone, but her new “party member’s” health was still completely full.

“Come on Lu!” Rubie laughed as she slid off the falling body of her own boar, twirling a set of genuinely sharp stone daggers that she’d gotten from God knows where. “That’s only your fifth? I’m on number ten, try to keep up!”

The red gem skipped over and nudged the boar with her foot, skipping the more efficient method of pulling it apart manually, in favor of just having her inventory absorb it into general purpose material.

“It’s just like I said, three steps. Get their attention, sidestep, swing. Easy as cake!”

“Yeah.” Lucy rubbed her back, and her wounded pride, as Rubie pulled her to her feet. “Easy as cake.”

The two of them had spent quite a while trailing the pack of boar, attacking any small groups that strayed too far from the herd. The sun had shifted from its position at the height of the sky, to a beautiful golden sunset that reflected off the snow peaked mountains in the distance.

“Hmm, it’s getting pretty late.” Rubie yawned and cracked her neck. “We should probably get back to spawn before it gets dark. We can trade for better supplies there, and we don’t want to get caught out in the open when the nasty nocturnal stuff starts coming out.” She paused for a moment. “Actually… we might be far enough from spawn to run into some actual enemies, and  we don’t exactly have the gear to fight those.”

Lucy nodded wordlessly, happy to call it there. They’d followed the boars several miles up the stream where it’d turned into a large river, and Lucy had learned the very unfortunate way that the devs of this game were sadists who had found a way to code in being sore.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to carry anything? I mean, I know it’s just in your inventory but the clutter’s got to be annoying, and you said more stuff slows your movement speed...”

“Nah,” Rubie waved her off, “I was the one whose muscle memory used a portion of the leather on a backpack, to expand an inventory we’re not even close to filling up. I should be the one to lug it all back, and besides-”

“RAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!”

They were interrupted by what could only be described as a “power up” scream that echoed from the distance.

“What was that?”

“No idea! But it came from just over that hill.” Rubie grabbed Lucy’s hand with an excited smile, and began pulling her forwards. “Let’s go check it out!”

“Wait! What if it’s a monster!”

“Oh don’t be a worry wart, we’re just gonna take a peak.”

Lucy made to object, but before she could muster the words, she’d already been dragged up the side of the hill.

The sight that greeted them, however, wasn’t the evil monster she was expecting.

A man with the username [McDaddyDouglasTheArthur] was standing atop a small mound of black rocks, shovel raised to the sky, with what could only be described as a poorly made bastardization of a water mill, spinning very slowly behind him in the small river that sat at the bottom of the hill.

“I HAVE HARNESSED THE POWER OF TECHNOLOGY!” The man bellowed to the heavens themselves. “SHEER UNLIMITED POWWAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH!!!”

…

..

.

“...Huh.” Rubie tilted her head, seemingly as at a loss for words as Lucy. “Well this should be interesting.” And that was all the warning Lucy got, before she was being dragged around again.

[McDaddyDouglasTheArthur], or just Douglas or Arthur, because there was no way in Heaven that Lucy would ever say that full name, was an eye-catching figure even without standing on top a pile of rocks and waving a shovel around while screaming at the top of his lungs. He was tall, easily hitting six foot, had a sharp jaw, smooth black hair, and a piercing glare.

His partner, standing off to the side of the large mound of rocks, had long brown twintails that reached to the back of her knees, and short bangs that cupped her rather cutesy face, but while she didn’t look insane…

If Douglas’ shouting had made him seem a little… odd, then just the username of his companion was a clear beacon of psychopathic tendencies.

[lIIlIIII]

It was the name “Lilli3” in a string of capital “I”s and lower case “L”s, in that stupid font where they look exactly the same, and with a roman numeral 3 at the end to boot. The machinations of a mind capable of such evil weren’t just something that couldn’t be understood, they were something that shouldn’t be understood.

Lucy would have approached this pair of peculiar persons in a, err, cautious way- actually no, scratch that, she wouldn’t have approached them at all! But if she did, it would be with a long stick, and very slowly.

Unfortunately, Rubie didn’t seem to have the same basic survival instincts.

“Hey!” She cheered as she skipped down the hill, Lucy in tow.

Both of the player’s heads whipped around towards them.

“Savages!” Douglas whispered, in a still very audible voice. “From the backward lands of the beyond! Halt travelers!” He shouted, raising his shovel at them. “State your business, or face the wrath of the most technologically advanced nation on this earth!”

Rubie just raised one eyebrow at him.

“Or what, are you gonna beat me with a shovel? 

“Do not insult my shovel! It’s sturdy and blunt, and it’ll hurt more than the sharpest sword.” He paused for a moment, and Rubie’s eyebrow rose further. “N-Not- Not combat wise, but pain wise! Death via many consecutive doses of blunt force trauma, to the skull, is not a fun experience.”

He stabbed his shovel down into the black rocks he was standing on and grinned.

“Which is what you’ll have to taste if you try to take our stuff!”

“Nah, no raiding from me today.” Rubie just chuckled and carefreely strode forward, pulling Lucy behind her. “I’m bust showing newbie-Lu’ here the ropes.”

“Oh, well, I guess nevermind. In that case welcome to, uh, wait,” He turned to his companion, “What do we name this place? It’s gonna be the industrial center of the world, but we still want to be a little humble.”

“I Dunno,” Lillie shrugged, “Naming’s your thing, dude. I’d just name it ‘town’ and you’d get mad at me.”

“Crap, you’re right. Uh, quick, what’s German for Industrial Heartland?”

“No clue, but ‘Berg’ means walled city.”

“That doesn’t work! We don’t have a wall idiot!” Douglas whisper shouted at her, waving his hand at the very open area surrounding them, before turning back to Lucy and Rubie with a commercial smile.

“Welcome, weary travelers, to the city of steel!” He spread his arms wide. “NEU ROMA!”

The grand city of “New Rome” truly deserved it’s title, one to rival and even outdo it’s predecessor, the single most important city in all of western history, if not world history, that changed the fate of the world on a level seldom comprehended.

The city of steel, the city of NeuRoma, had a single dingy wooden shack as it’s centerpiece, with two rose bushes haphazardly planted to either side of the door in such a way that you couldn’t actually fully open it, and trying to force your way through would most likely just prick you.

To the right, several large cobblestone furnaces billowed with an obscenely unnecessary amount of smoke, from all the leaves and foliage that had been shoved into them, instead of just firewood.

And then there was the city’s pride and joy, the monolith that would drive forth humanity into a new era of technological progress.

The watermill.

The giant safety hazard that was being held together by nothing but a bunch of crappy stone “nails”, string, several dead childhood dreams, the grace of God himself, and the sheer fucking audacity of the man who made it.

“Yes sir, the big guilds are gonna try to get into some funky bullshit magic, just like they did last time, but the technology train’s already fiiired uuup and ready to rumble!” Douglas took a very amature boxing stance and threw some air punches. “And when the fists of steel start flying, oh baybae- They Don’t! Stop! COMIN’!”

He punctuated each word with a punch, but while they were in very poor form, and probably couldn’t even win against someone already dead, his energy was infectious, and Lucy found herself giggling like she was a kid again.

This, of course, caught the industrialist’s attention, and he gave a politician’s camera smile.

“It seems I’ve got your interest! Well then little lady, step right up to Le de’she-lu-flieur’s El Tuer de NeuRoma! Where we build tomorrow today, and make today tomorrow!”

“That- That’s not French.” Rubie pinched her nose, and closed her eyes as if she’d just developed a migraine from the words she heard. “That’s just gibberish, and the one English word you stuck in there as a fill-in means something completely different in French.”

Douglas just twirled his shovel like it was a cane, and promptly ignored her.

He walked over to the primitive smoke stacks to their right where, using his shovel, he grabbed a glowing hot hunk out of the furnace, and walked over to the windmill, which had two thick stone wheels stacked on top of one another. The mill turned the top one, which in turn moved the bottom one. To the curiosity, and concern, of his onlookers, Douglas slowly began feeding the large lump of semi-molten metal slag into the two wheels.

“No one has the stuff for proper forging, no one will for a while. And actual good forging is a long way off. But with a healthy dose of ingenuity-” 

Once the metal was caught in place, Douglas quickly swung to the other side, and began easing out the flattened plate with his trusty tool of choice. Gently he balanced the metal and kept it from sagging as best anyone could with a shovel, and once the last of it had been spat out by the roller, he slowly dunked it into the river water, cooling it back to solid.

After a few seconds he lifted his slightly bent creation proudly, for all to see.

“-I have successfully made low quality sheet metal, ages before I was supposed to.”

“Uhhh.” Lucy just smiled awkwardly and gave a weak thumbs up. “Good job?”

Douglas let out a sigh that sounded like it shaved two years off his life.

“Little lady, I don’t think you get what’s happening here.” He held up his sheet of metal. “This is the key to the future! I can cut this into pieces, heat it up to bend it, and then use it for anything. Better furnaces, better forges, better crafting stations, I could upgrade the watermill, and that’s just the beginning! I can use this stuff to make the first iron gear of the server, the merchant with the only tools and armor of its tier! I’ll have a monopoly on metal-”

“Which will let you jack up the prices, and use the cash to get even further ahead.” Rubie finished for him, actually sounding impressed.

“Bingo.” He shot a finger gun at her before turning back to Lucy. “So as you can clearly see, I’m not just a step ahead, I’m on an entirely different timeline.” Douglas laughed and spread out his arms. “LiT is all about arms races, and baby, I’ve just lapped everyone before they’ve even gotten to the starting line.”

“Huh, you know I’m actually kind of impressed.”

“Waitwaitwait!” Lucy held up her hands and stepped between them. “If this will let you get so far ahead, then why are you showing us it?”

“Well, because you,” He gestured to her,” are a half bit newbie, and the red ghost behind you, I happen to recognise from the original LiT.” He glared over her shoulder and narrowed his eyes, to which Rubie waved back cheerfully. “Her, and her lot, are a lot of things, but they sure as Hell aren't engineers, they ain’t replicating my mill anytime soon. They’re also not dumb enough to attack a group that’s way better equiped than them, which I’ll be by the time she leads them back here to me.”

“‘Her and her lot’? Wha-” But Lucy’s question was cut off as Rubie stepped around her and cut her off.

“I don’t suppose you’d be open to trade before you’ve officially opened up shop, aye big guy?”

“Ha! Not for my metal, the first few batches of this are going straight back into the furnaces to upgrade ‘em, and even if they weren’t, certainly not to you. But I would be willing to pawn off some of the extra charcoal we’ve made.” His eyes narrowed. “Also, don’t call me that.”

“No problem, ‘McDaddy’!” Rubie crooned and mentally patted herself on the back, as Douglas growled, successfully drawing his attention away from Lucy’s half question. “I’ve got a bunch of boar hide leather, some bones, tusks, and a bunch of meat. You need any?”

Douglas thought for a moment before looking over at Lillie, who just shrugged. “I’d be willing to trade at a rate of two parts leather for one part coal, coal parts scaling with how big the leather piece is, with a discount of up to a 1-1 rate for bulk purchases.”

“That’s a surprisingly not totally one sided exchange. What, not in the mood for haggling me for a better price?”

“Normally I’d be draining your pockets, but not right now,” Douglas chuckled, “Not when there’s progress™ to be made!”

“Hmm.” Rubie Glanced over her inventory for a moment. “How’s five leather for one bucket of coal?”

“No.” He sighed. “There’s a reason I was trying to math it out in ‘pieces’, there’s a thousand loopholes to your offer on both sides. You could trade tiny leather strips, and pull then pull out a giant bucket- it’s not consistent!”

“Oh, but what do you think about this?” Rubie materialized five leather rolls from her inventory, and unfurled one, revealing it to easily be large enough to cover a small desk.

Douglas leaned forward, squinting at the leather, once he could tell the ones under her arm were all the same size as the first he made an impressed sound. “Geeze, forget scamming, you're practically doing my price gouging for me. I’ll take that deal if you use the wooden bucket over to the left!”

“Pleasure doing business!” Rubie spun and hurled the leather rugs at Douglas, who instead of trying to catch them, just slapped them with his palm, dematerializing them into his inventory.

While Ruby swept over to grab the modestly sized bucket, Douglas re-materialized the leather from his inventory in one large stack and threw it at Lillie, knocking her over with a yelp. 

“Make a couple of bellows out of that, and put them on the smelters!” He laughed as he went back to shoveling charcoal into the furnaces. “Business is about to be booming!”

Lucy couldn’t help but chuckle at the scene before her, it was so much more real than what was in the majority of her single player games, which made sense considering it was between actual people. The idea behind the MMO genre was starting to grow on her, but what also started to grow on her was the sense of dread that began when she registered the little clock in the corner of her menu.

‘Holy crap, it’s HOW late!? I’m going to miss the meeting!’

Quickly flicking away her menu, she jogged over to her companion.

“Hey Ru! Can we talk for a sec?”

“Ru?” Rubie turned around with her signature smirk and raised eyebrow. “Oh I like that, ‘Ru and Lu’ we sound like some stupid school girls who just HAD to be friends becasue they wore matching dresses.” Ru chuckled maniacally and struck a sarcastically cute pose. “Wanna be BGFFTAs? Best Girly Friends Forever Totally Always?”

“Sh-Shut up!” Lucy blushed. “I have a meeting I have to attend in an hour, and I need to get going, so could we split the loot now? A-And, well, yeah,” She blushed harder, infuriatingly embarrassed at how awkward Rubie had made the subject, “I was gonna ask if you wanted to add me as a friend.”

The girl gave her a flat look, studying her for almost half a minute, before smiling again.

“Nop*e!~” 

Rubie popped the ‘p’ and booped Lucy on the nose.

“Wha-” Lucy leaned back. “You don’t want to be my friend?”

“Oh no, Ha! If that offer still stands after this, then I’ll gladly take it, but you’re not getting the stuff you let me carry. You can keep the scraps you picked up though, I’m not heartless~”

Lucy just stared at her with an open mouth, causing the red gem to laugh like a devil.

“This is an open world FDMMORPG, with the ‘massively multiplayer’ bit underlined. There are thousands of players online at any time, and very few of them are willing to always play fair. Sooo… Rule 0 of LiT,” Rubie smirked and put her hands on her hips. “Don’t give strangers trust they haven't earned!”

Lucy gawked at the red head, her brain trying to work out a suitable response.

“Ohhhohoho! That’s cold!” Douglas reminded everyone he was there, as he leaned on his shovel and turned to Lucy with an open grin. “Are you just gonna take that?”

“W-What do you mean!?”

“What do you mean, what do I mean?” He scoffed and nodded at the sword on her waist. “You have a weapon, beat her up and take you shit back! Or better yet, since she kept, what, two thirds of the loot it sounds like? You take two thirds of the loot! Just to rub. it. in.”

Lucy looked from Douglass to Rubie, who just raised an eyebrow, and slowly stepped back, her signature smirk never leaving her face.

“What are you waiting for Lu’?” Her ruby eyes twinkled in the amber glow of the setting sun as she spread out her arms. “I’m wide open, and it was a lot more than two thirds.”

Lucy gulped as Rubie’s name disappeared from her hud, and a notification popped up saying she had left the party. Slowly, she brought her sword to bear with hesitation.

“Get her!” Lillie cheered, having come back with two bellows and more than happy to cheer for violence, despite not having a single clue what was going on. “Break her legs!”

Douglas leaned forward in anticipation.

Rubie raised her other eyebrow to join the first.

Lucy’s eyes flickered from Rubie’s empty hands, to the bag on her back she was using to expand her inventory, to the daggers on her waist, to her tensionless upper body, to the perfect footwork that was strung so tight it could explode out in any direction at any second, then finally back to the girl’s ruby eyes.

“Teach her a lesson!”

Her hands were clammy.

“Give her the ol’ ONE-TWO!”

The sword’s weight seemed a hundred times more than what it had just a second ago.

“Snap her in two-no-THREE pieces!”

Blood was pumping in her ears.

“Turn RuBE into RuISN’T!”

Rubie smirked.

The world seemed to freeze as a moment of silence descended upon her-

…

“Rule 3 of LiT,” Lucy sighed as she dropped her sword, “Don’t fight a battle you know you’ll lose.”

…

“”Huh?”” The two audience members questioned at the same time, their heads tilting in unison.

“Ha…” Rubie’s smirk cracked, and slowly morphed into a full on grin. “Haha. HA! HAHAHA! HAHAHAHAHAHA!” She clapped her hands and had to steady herself to keep from falling over as she swayed. “Oh that- I didn’t expect that! Ha! That’s good! Oh Lord have mercy!” She wiped a tear from her eye.

“I was planning on withholding the items from our trip, killing you when you attacked me, stealing all your stuff, and starting a little rivalry that I could have all game. But this is hilariously better!”

“Booo.” Douglas and Lillie jokingly jeered from the side. “It was just getting good.” “I wanted a fight!”

“Oi, shut up you two.” Rubie laughed as she walked back over to Lucy, and threw an arm around her. “Congrats kid, you’re officially smarter than 80% of the people who play this game, you’re no longer a complete newb!”

Before she could respond, Rubie forcefully pulled out her hands, and dropped a pile of stuff into her arms.

Lucy blinked owlishly at the amount in front of her. “But wait, you said-”

“I know what I said,” The thief waved her off, “Think of this as a reward for putting up with me all day, and for deciding to not be stupid.”

It still wasn’t the equal amount that they’d originally agreed on, nowhere close, but it was much better than her first cut of the profit- IE: none.

Lucy hesitantly took it all into her inventory, and then turned to Rubie with the beginnings of a smile.

“Tha-”

And then the world flashed white.

-Muted Infinity-

Lucy shook the blurriness from her head, trying to recover from the veritable flash bomb that had just assaulted her senses, but when she opened her eyes she was met by a sea of people.

Mostly still in white shirts, with a few notable exceptions here and there from people who’d already progressed, but she couldn’t see anything else about them- her view was stopped at the shoulders, that's how many people there were, crammed shoulder to shoulder like sardines. 

There were people standing on the ground, on top of walls, on balconies, on rooftops. People were everywhere, and all of them looked reasonably confused.

It was just like spawn if everyone had been dropped in at once, actually, no wait, it was spawn! It still looked like shit! The only difference was that people had flung up ramshackle houses made of everything from wood to stone, that were all either incomplete… or just bad.

Or both.

A guy to her left snorted. “They probably called us all here to talk about the logout button issue.”

Lucy turned to him in confusion in time to catch another guy join in.

“Yeah, I mean, I get that there’s gonna be bugs, especially on the first day, but come on, for the logout button to not work? The jokes write themselves!”

“It’s not even that it doesn’t work, the thing’s just straight up not there. You have to try to fuck up that bad. The devs are gonna be firing someone, and I wish I was there for that meeting- it’d be hilarious.”

The second guy laughed, then began speaking in an obviously fake lisp. “Gwuys, gwuys, yuo don’t get it! I akchually did it to enhance emmersion! Gwuys twust me!”

“Joe, you removed the fucking logout button.”

“Yeah, Yeah, buy gwuys, the emmerwsion!”

Lucy tuned out the two guys as they descended into laughter, and began rapidly scrolling through her menu to find that, while there were indeed a frankly absurd amount of buttons for game settings, none of them actually said the magic phrase.

[Logout]

But just as she was beginning to go through the list a second time. The hairs on her neck stood up, adrenaline flooded her veins, her stomach flipped, and every leftover piece from her species' inefficient evolution screamed at her fight or flight reflexes.

Her head shot up and her eyes widened in animalistic terror, as the space in front of her rent in two. There was static, incomprehensible noise, and colors that smelt like things she once remembered forgetting.

And then it was over, and Lucy, as well as every other person nearby, was left a mess.

Someone had just altered the world code while people’s dive sims were still getting feed from it- a very poor idea, and something that anyone with experience with full dive programming knew not to do. The sims used to access the extranet were made to interpret virtual stimuli and relay it to the brain, and they were notoriously bad at relaying what “fundamental changes to reality” was supposed to feel like.

“Hello, everyone.”

A calm, monotone voice cut through the air, the system making it so it came from all around, and dragged everyone’s attention to the center of spawn, where there was now a large marble stage that very much hadn’t been there two seconds ago, with a big podium on top of it.

The man standing on the stage was very distinctive, even with how far away Lucy herself was from him.

He was tall, very tall, with long arms and legs, and a long lab coat that only accentuated his gangly figure. He was slightly hunched over… kind of old looking, but he didn’t have any facial hair. The hair he did have however was all white, its color drained even past gray, but whenever she blinked she could swear she saw hints of very light blue.

“My name is Doctor Howard R. Faust, head administrator of this simulation.”

The man said in a completely neutral voice, as if he hadn’t just dragged everyone in front of him, and then given them all a mini seizure by editing world code.

“You are the lucky few that have the privilege to leave a mark on history, greater than even the conquerors of old could possibly understand. This simulation, this experiment, will change the course of history, and set the stones that will become the foundation of humanity’s future!”

“Psst, hey is this supposed to be the game plot or something?” One of the men from earlier whispered, but Lucy ignored him.

“I cannot tell you the exact nature of this experiment’s goals, as that would ultimately undermine it, but I assure you, it is for the greater good.

“Now we do have some general purpose announcements that, even if you don’t care for my experiment, you’ll be very interested in hearing about as players of this ‘game’ of yours.

“As the few of you who paid attention have noticed, the logout button is absent from the menu. This is not a mistake, and is, in fact, an intentional choice we made, and something we went out of our way to change after being ceded control over the game’s code.

This caused confused muttering from all around, but Faust just continued.

“Another doubtlessly controversial decision we’ve made, in order to insure the seriousness that the experiment requires, is that you will no longer be able to set a respawn point, as the mechanic itself has now been disabled. Furthermore, my team has gone through great lengths to link the fatality system to your physical forms.” He paused for a moment to let that sink in. “If you die in this simulation, you will also die in real life.”

The muttering lulled before exploding back into volume, people loudly shouting in confusion.

This seemed to finally be too much for the doctor, and with a press of a button, everyone fell silent, even though their mouths were still moving. Lucy’s attention immediately beelined to the small picture of a microphone with a line through it that appeared on the bottom of her hud.

“Now, to expand upon that, and to dispel any doubts, allow me to remind you of several key facts that you all should know.”

Faust paused, seemingly to flip something on the podium. Wait- was he reading a script!?

“The dive interface you have equipped on the top of your neck, works by intercepting the signals your brain sends out, stops them from reaching your extremities, and translates that into virtual avatar movement. It can just as easily stop those same signals from telling your heart to beat, or your lungs to breath.

“This, of course, would only be possible if someone was capable of bypassing or disabling the countless safety measures such devices have. Fortunately for our experiment, Lumina, the company that developed this title, is also the producer of the dive hardware necessary to access this simulation, and has not just bypassed those measures, but turned them off entirely for us.”

Faust glanced up at them from his script and clicked another invisible button. The ‘muted’ icon disappeared from Lucy’s hud, but the mutter didn’t resume.

Everyone was dead quiet.

Faust nodded to himself and looked back to his podium.

“I understand that to many of you this is not the casual experience you expected when you created your accounts, and to help remedy this, you will be free to access and change your usernames to whatever you wish for the next twenty four hours. Additionally, I also understand that you have been pulled from whatever you were doing, back to where you started, with the night fast approaching, and without preparation. Therefore I will be reverting the simulation’s internal clock to mid day, so that none will have to trek through the dark and die, ultimately, because of outside interference. 

“Your hud clock will also be adjusted to display the system’s world time, rather than standard time, to help you better adjust your sleep schedule to fit the new time table.

“If there are any other basic accommodations any of you need to help smooth the transition from a casual experience, to a more immersive one, the [contact moderator] button that was available to the ‘beta testers’ will be made available for the next 48 hours. Feel free to contact them about any such accommodations that my team may have missed.”

Faust nodded and stepped off the podium, gathering his papers as he left.

“I thank you for your time and cooperation, and hope you are able to enjoy your game more, now that all monthly subscriptions have been removed. Have a good day.”

And just like that, with another burst of static, and inverted screams from the sights she should never have choked on, Dr Faust was gone.

…And then the screaming began.

-Muted Infinity-

The room was cold, dark, and completely silent other than the beeps and whirls of machines… if you only took a glance at the room, you would be forgiven for thinking it was devoid of human life.

Countless monitors, that had sat dark since the moment they had first been installed months ago, were now lit with fast flowing information. Once blank screens now flickered and displayed graphs and charts that changed and updated at a headache inducing rate. 

The room that was the center for the entirety of Lab#S63, stood as a dark, looming, monolith, illuminated only by the gull glow of screen light.

But despite this it was abuzz with the scientists assigned to work there, all working in total silence, without any conversations or muttering, all completely enraptured by their work.

...all except for one woman.

Muted horror. It was a term that Doctor Yuyara Ito had known of, and had seen used before, but never one that she’d ever truly understood until now.

701,045

701,045 People.

701,045 Human beings, just like her.

Each with their own lives, memories, hopes, fears, and aspirations.

…

701,045 data points.

701,045 numbers.

Reduced to graphs, spreadsheets, and readings that flickered across the screens of the lab.

She knew, intrinsically, that behind each digit was a person, and the horror that pooled in her gut as the number ticked down was still there, but when it was all arranged like this, the feeling was… numbing. 

When the number ticked down, it was just that- a number.

… a statistic.

“A single death is a tragedy, but a million deaths is just a statistic.” Yuyara weakly muttered to herself as the quote came to mind. “The human mind didn’t evolve to be capable of processing such large numbers, and it’s even less suited for comprehending actions at such a remote level.”

“An interesting quote, but like everything that came from the soviets, it’s a horribly inefficient use of materials.”

Yuyara grit her teeth at the familiar voice that sounded from behind her, an acidic mix of irritation and anger bubbling in her gut.

“A single death is a thousand statistics, and a million deaths can teach the world countless times over.” 

Doctor Faust’s voice was the same as she remembered it, as he entered the room; tired, gravelly, and with a type of hollowness that gave her goosebumps.

“Stalin may have been in various administrative positions, but he was just a pencil pusher, a mathematician in only the vaguest of terms.” Faust ran his eyes over the screens as he entered the room, drinking in the data with the thirst of a starving man, but the emotional indifference of a statue. “But we… We are scientists. Where others see random events, we see patterns that we can learn from, events we can replicate.

“The main purpose of this simulation is to research the effects that worldwide resource depletion has on humanity, to see how society collapses, to see how order turns to chaos. Our purpose is to see these so that we may learn from them, learn how to avoid, or even reverse them, for when we inevitably face the same thing in the coming future. However… this is an unparalleled opportunity, and it would be a loss to humanity if I didn't allow the minds under me to exploit it as well.”

The way he said that caused an uneasy feeling to settle in Yuyara’s gut, and she finally forced herself to turn from the screens and look at him.

“Sir?”

“You’re a sociologist, are you not, doctor?” Faust spared her a glance. “This is a living, breathing human society that’s going to build itself from the ground up, without any outside interference, and then be subjected to tribulations strong enough to toppel even the mightiest empires, with every single scrap of data archived. 

“Surely you want to know how your predictions size up? To find out if the great minds that came before you, that you read of in your textbooks, were actually correct?”

Faust turned his attention from the screenes, now facing her fully. 

“Surely you want to revolutionize your field, to be the one people learn from in their textbooks?... Surely you want to etch your name into history?”

“Y-You… Shut up! If this is how you plan to get me on board with your idea of scientific genocide, then it’s not working!” Yuyara hissed at him as she backpedaled away, attempting to end the conversation before the tiny part of her that liked his reasoning could be fed anymore.

“And I assure you that whatever you want to learn from this will backfire horribly!” She shouted as she stormed out of the room. “Your ‘simulation’ will fall apart! It’ll be chaos!”

“Good… I’m counting on it.” Faust hummed to himself as she slammed the door shut behind her, before he turned back to the screens. “The simulation needs to properly emulate humanity’s irrationality if we are to prepare for the inevitable.”

-Muted Infinity-

‘This isn’t happening…’

“Now for y’all impatient go-getters who spent the day outside of spawn, like myself, you can probably tell just by the dingy-ass buildin’s and infrastructure changes, ‘long this jewel of a city, that folks have been busy developing spawn towards something actually useful for once.”

‘This can’t be happening!’

Lucy stood in the exact same spot that she had been forcibly teleported to, more than ten minutes ago, staring off into nothing and having a mental breakdown.

But the quick thinking speaker up on the stage, who had managed to just barely stop what would have most likely turned into a deadly stampede, didn’t know about her plight, nor, in all likelihood would he honestly care if he did- too busy dealing with the thousands more in the same situation.

“I know! I’m surprised too! This heap of junk? Useful? I guess there really is a first time for everything!” 

A blond man who had apparently prioritized making a really crude cowboy hat, instead of progressing gameplay wise, paced up and down the stage in front of the podium. He was so far that Lucy could just barely make out “South” amongst his username, but his voice naturally carried well, so there wasn't much problem audibly.

“Now I’m gonna go on an’ hand the stage off to the official-looking gals that are wavin’ at me over yonder, but don’t worry! I ain’t going no where, and y’ain’t gonna do nothin’ stupid that y’all’re gonna regret, right?” He waited for some affirmation from the crowd before nodding and starting to walk off stage. “Yeah, no running ‘round all panicked and tramplin’ the fellah next you ya, trust me they’re just as much in need of a beer as you are!”

That got some laughs from the crowd, and the man tipped his hat, as he walked down the hastily erected stairs, off the stage.

Replacing him was what could only be described as his exact opposite. A small lady with curly hair, and a puffy pink dress ‘How did she make that?’ walked up to the podium, and managed to get up to its height with only a bit of fuss with a step stool.

 “Hello everybody.” Her voice, soft and airy, wasn't one made to carry over a crowd, which of course made it all the more surprising that it did- clearly even to the lady herself, who looked down at the podium in surprise, before smiling and turning back to her audience.

“Hello everybody. My name is Pacilica, I’m the unofficial head of the group that has been building up spawn all day, and this-” She gestured to the purple haired girl who’d followed her, and was standing beside her, “Is Alice, my second in command, who's been helping me set up all day. Now we originally just wanted to make it pretty for everyone, but then we got thinking and said ‘wouldn’t it be nice if we could make spawn an actually nice place? With shops and stuff?’ You all remember the main spawn on the last server right?” 

Pacilica wrinkled her nose, as if she’d just smelt something nasty.

“It was horrible- a nasty bombed out warzone, a giant hole in the ground with lava spires up to build height, broken obsidian walls, and all those stone bridges that were the only way to get around. We wanted to make it something a bit better than that.”

“Unfortunately we’re in a bit of a pickle now, aren't we? Hm? Yes we are~. But we’re just going to continue to make spawn better. We’re going to take advantage of all the new manpower, and all work together to build shelters for everyone! Isn’t that so wonderful?”

More than a few people were uncomfortable with Pacilica talking to the crowd like she was their kindergarten school teacher, but the prospect of getting somewhere to sleep, and of someone having this whole situation under control, stilled any negative thoughts.

Unfortunately this didn’t last long.

“This whole situation is a tuffy, isn’t it? Some people haven't even had a chance to go and collect food, and sending people out would be dangerous since no one can respawn, which is no good because then people’s tummies would go empty. Luckily for everyone, some people have already gone and gotten us all we need.”

That odd phrasing bought some strange looks from the audience, but Pacilica just smiled sweetly, with enough artificial sweetener to corrode someone’s teeth into nubs,

“We’re going to share our burdens, so that everyone can lift them all together!” Pacilica gave a motherly smile and clasped her hands together. “We’ll set up some booths that we’ll all turn our items into, and it’ll all be distributed evenly, so that everyone gets exactly what they need, and no one will get left behind!”

“If we all help each other there’s nothing we can’t do! Doesn’t that just sound fun?”

Mutters and angry whispers broke out at this, but it was a voice in the back that stole the metaphorical cake.

“BULL SHIT!”

A scream ripped from the crowd, turning every head in the overly cramped gathering, towards the back.

Douglas was forcefully pulling himself up above the sea of people, standing on the shoulders of two others, angrily shaking his shovel towards the center stage. Without the podium, or even the stage, he had to shout for everyone to hear him, but he seemed more than willing to do so.

“BULLSHIT! BULLSHIT! BULLSHIT! WHAT TYPE OF IDIOT DO YOU THINK I AM!?” The man roared like a pissed off bear. “YOU THINK I DON’T KNOW THE GAME YOU’RE TRYING TO PLAY!?! TRYING TO TAKE AWAY THE SHIT WE WORKED FOR, AND GIVE IT AWAY TO IDIOTS WHO CAN’T TIE THEIR OWN SHOES, AND’VE DONE JACK SHIT!? ALL WHILE LINING YOUR OWN POCKETS WHILE YOU’RE AT IT!”

“Mr, please calm down.” Pacilica huffed. “I know you might not like it, but this is for everyone’s greater good.”

“OH, AND I’M SURE THE HUGE ASS SLICE THAT WINDS UP IN YOUR HANDS, WHILE THE REST OF US ONLY GET BACK CRUMBS, IS ALSO ‘FOR THE GREATER GOOD’, BUT I DON’T GIVE A SHIT!”

“Now, now, there’s no need to use mean words.”

“OH, FUCK OFF!”

Pacilica’s eyes narrowed, and for half a second, Lucy was sure she could see something past that dainty mask.

“Well like it or not, we’re all in this together. If you’re not willing to help your fellows, then they shall not help you.” She gave him a disapproving look. “If you don’t participate, then Spawn’s services will not be open to you.”

Looking back, with the knowledge of hindsight, this was most likely a bluff, something to make Douglas step down and to try and jostle back some semblance of order. After all, despite the numerous buildings that’d popped up, there weren’t any real ‘services’ at spawn to deny, other than the protection of the walls.

Unfortunately, it had the exact opposite effect.

“WELL THEN GOOD RIDDANCE!” Douglas spat, hitting one of the people beneath him. “KEEP YOUR HYPOCRITICAL BULLSHIT TO YOURSELF, I’M OUT!”

Pacilica recoiled, as if physically struck, she opened her mouth to say something, but all that came out was a croak. She seemed completely blindsided by the idea that someone not only disagreed with her, but was willing to actually go against her, and watched wide eyed as Douglas dropped down off his human platform, and began forcing his way out of the crowd.

A number of the people around him watched him leave in open wonder, before sending a glance back at the stage. Hesitantly they followed after the firebrand, in the open path he’d left in his wake.

“W-Well then…” Pacilica  coughed to clear her throat. “Are there going to be any other interruptions?” The prissy pink lady peered at the people like a school teacher, and after a few seconds of no response, she huffed and continued on.

Unfortunately the damage, if it had even been done by Douglas at all, had already been put into peoples’ minds.

Slowly but surely, over the rest of her speech, people began to leave. Those who had experience in classic LiT, and had already gathered materials for themselves. People who didn’t want their chance at survival slimmed down, their work taken from them. 

The people who perfect Pacilica’s pretty plan of shared burden depended on to work… just left.

…and who was left to lift the burden?

-Muted Infinity-

The golden sun turned crimson as it dipped across the far western horizon for the second time in less than 24 hours, dying the sky a glorious cacophony of orange, red, and yellow that danced in sweet unison with the remaining blue; a final waltz of death as they both slowly succumbed to the black of night.

Hours had passed since… the incident, and spawn was slowly filling back up, as players returned from their various expeditions that the time shift had allowed them to embark on, but while many were returning, it didn’t even account for half of the number who’d left.

Though how many were still out foraging for materials, how many had taken after Douglas and weren’t coming back to spawn, and how many weren’t coming back to anywhere ever again…

…

There was nowhere near the crowd that had been earlier, when everyone had been summoned for the “announcement”. 

The announcement…

Just the memory of it threatened to bring bile to her mouth.

Lucy walked numbly through the poorly paved streets of Spawn- though to call them “streets” was simultaneously both a gross overstatement, and incredibly impressive, considering this had been all completely empty less than a 24 hours ago, and the buildings had been sprung up in the metaphorical blink of an eye.

She wasn’t alone, numerous people who hadn’t the courage to head out, sat huddled together on street corners, while others walked too and fro as if in a daze… just like her.

How… It- It had to be some sort of joke, right? Some hackers must have hijacked the server, and this was all some cruel cruel prank! Or-Or some horrid and wildly unusual marketing scheme that the authorities would be cracking down on!

This- It was- There was no way- There HAD to be another reason that not even a single person who'd gone out had respawned at spawn! P-People were just being more careful!! YEAH! That was it! O-Or the respawn point had been moved as part of the prank! 

A-After all there was nowayanyofthiscouldberealatallright?HaHa!HowFunny!Veryfunnyprank!Thiswasaprankitwasn’trealatallITCOULDN’TBE-

Something grabbed her arms and pulled her off to the side, in between two cobblestone huts, and out of earshot. She tried to scream, but a hand clamped around her mouth, sealing it completely as she was dragged further down the alleyway.

Between her already existing panic and fear, and the sudden wave of adrenaline that was threatening to hurl her into a full blown panic attack, she barely managed to collect her thoughts enough to do what she always thought those damsels in horror flics should have done.

She opened her mouth, and bit down. Hard.

Her would-be kidnapper let out a girly screech of pain, and dropped her like a hot coal.

Shaking like a leave in a storm, Lucy ripped her sword off her belt and spun around to face her assaulter who-

“Wha- RUBIE?!”

“Yes, me, Lu’!” Rubie hissed, nursing her hand. “Ow, fuck, has anyone told you that you bite like a literal bitch?”

“S-Sorry!” Lucy reached out to check the damage, but looked down in shame when Rubie recoiled her hand away. “I was panicking, and I didn’t know it was you. I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, you and everyone else in this fucking death trap of a game.” Rubie scoffed. “And that panic wasn’t really helped by captain watermill causing a fuss and storming out.”

Lucy winced, the memories of Douglas marching out of spawn inspiring hundreds to do similar, flirting through her mind. “And he could’ve helped people…”

“What?” Her friend(?) gave her a look of bewilderment. “Wha- No! Lu! He’s actually smart for doing that! He’s probably got the best shot at surviving out of everyone here, with that setup of his. He'd be a fool to throw all that away, and so would you!”

“What do you mean?” Lucy questioned. “I don’t ha-” Only to be cut off as a leather bag was shoved into her face.

“That bag has most of what we collected today, and all the meat from the boars we killed. Do not give that up, I can get more, but that’s your lifeline!”

“B-But what about the sharing booths?”

“FUCK the sharing booths!” Rubie hissed. “Lie about what you have. Turn in some of it, but not all. Use that food to keep yourself alive. Stay behind the walls for a few days and train with your sword, until the first wave of panic’s blown over and you're decent with a blade. Then take all the leather and trade it in for better gear.” 

Rubie grabbed her by the shoulders and pulled her closer, trying desperately to convey the seriousness of the situation.

“That's your game plan, that’s how you survive! Got it?”

“I, uhh-”

“No!” Rubie shook her. “No ‘uhh’, this is where you say yes!”

“y-yes.” Lucy whimpered.

“Good.” The redhead ruffled her hair with a sigh and gave her a reassuring smile. “I’ve gotta go get better materials, and rush to see what starting tech trees have been changed since the original game, people will pay a pretty penny for that info.”

“C-Can I help in any way?” Lucy asked weakly.

“Sure you can.” Rubie gave her a wink and mock salute as she began jogging down the back end of the alley. “You can help by staying safe!”

“Wait, Ru! That’s not…”

But the leather thief had already slipped around the corner and out of sight.

“Haaaah.” Lucy sighed, before letting out a weak chuckle. “I never did get a friend request from her, did I?”

Reluctantly trudging her way back out of the alley, and onto the streets, Lucy’s mind wandered.

If… If this was all real… If this was really a “death game” as Rubie said, and If there was a reason the authorities hadn’t broken them all out, even after almost a full 24 hours of the game being up…

‘It took me an entire hour just to make a simple starting tool, something Ru did in less than ten seconds… how am I supposed to survive this?’

But she was broken from her train of thought by a soft tug on the hem of her shirt. 

“E-Excuse me, miss.”

Lucy looked down to see a young boy, who couldn't have been older than 10.

“H-Have you seen my big sis? She’s tall and blond, and said she’d be back b-before night time with some food.” The young boy sniffled. “B-But I asked the gate people, and they said they ha-haven't seen her.”

“Shhh Shhh, it’s ok!” Lucy crouched down and rubbed the kid’s hair, trying to keep him from crying. “I haven't seen your sister, but I’ll keep an eye out, and tell you if I see her, ok? Can you remember what her username is? It would really help me identify her.”

“I-It’s ‘SunSmasher’, ma’am.” The boy choked back a sob. “B-B-But there were some n-numbers on it that I can’t r-rememner.”

“Shhh Shhh, don’t worry that’s more than enough!” The blonde forced a smile and tried her best to calm him down. “Did your sis tell you to wait somewhere for her?”

The boy nodded.

“Y-Yeah, n-near the sh-sharing booths, but it’s been h-hours and she n-never showed up.”

“I’ll tell you what, why don’t you go back to the booths so that you don’t miss her, while you’re there you can ask them for some food, and if I see her then I’ll send her your way.”

“O-Ok.” The young boy wiped his face with his sleeve and gave her a soft wave as he began walking down the street. “T-Thank you ma’am.”

Lucy waved back and forced a smile, but inside she was being torn up.

She’d seen Rubie’s prediction of all the easy materials around spawn being swiped up with her own eyes, back when the two of them were boar hunting. People had been swarming over everything like ants, and it was only after the herd had led them miles upstream that players had become less frequent. 

All the “easy food” around spawn was gone, you’d have to venture further out to find new and untouched places… but the further you went from spawn the more dangerous things you encountered…

…

“Hey wait!”

“Huh?” The kid turned and looked at her in confusion as she jogged after him.

“It’s a little late to be out all alone, how about I walk you to the booths?”

“Really?” He looked up at her in childish awe. “Y-You’d do that?”

“Of course.” Lucy smiled and ruffled his hair again. 

“It’s no trouble at all.”

-Muted Infinity-

The “sharing booths” as they were called, weren't the happy sight that their name implied. There weren’t any rainbows or bright colors, no ponies and people holding hands while skipping and singing kumbaya.

No, the long chain of booths looked just like the rest of spawn: poorly made and cobbled together with the cheapest material on hand.

“This way! Line up!” A man standing on a small pillar shouted, waving at people to come over. “Once you deposit your items we record your username on paper, tomorrow we’re gonna make copies of the list and send out guards to round up everyone everyone they see who’s not on it! So do yourself a favor, and just hand your stuff in now! It’s all early game junk, anyway!”

Lucy ignored the man, and instead turned her attention to the kid next to her.

“Hey,” She said softly as she crouched down, “Do you see your sister?”

“Nuh-uh.” The boy shook his head. “But that’s where she said to wait.” He pointed to one of the booths at the end of the row. “S-So I’ll go wait there. Thank you ma’am.”

“It was no problem, don’t even mention it.” Lucy smiled sadly as she waved him off.

It was times like this that she wished she had more experience dealing with kids, there was probably a thousand ways she could have handled that better.

“Hey! You! Girl with the blond hair and white shirt! Are you gonna get in line, or what!?”

Said girl with the blond hair and white shirt cringed as the pillar man brought the crowd’s attention on her, and waved at him apologetically before making her way over to the stands.

Strangely enough, for an initiative that was supposed to include every player in the game, the lines were startlingly short. Maybe it was just because it had already been running for most of the day, and most people had already gone through?

Either way, the “line” she walked to only had one person in it, and they were done by the time she got to the sharing booth.

The lady manning the booth didn’t even look up from her stack of cheap paper as Lucy approached.

“What’s your username?”

“Uh.” Lucy blinked, taking a moment to process the question, and looked up at the name [LuckyLucy114] that was visibly glowing above her head. “Can’t you see it?”

“Yes, I can see it!” The lady snapped, clearly irritated at what must have been the thousandth time she’d been asked the same question. “I need to know if you plan to change it!”

“Oh, uhm, I mean I might shave off the numbers?”

“Then make sure to do that.” The booth lady sighed with a sound that must have cost her a year of her life. “So, what's your username?” 

“Uh, why-”

“Nevermind!” She hissed as she glanced up, squinting against the sun as she scratched down the name with a piece of coal. “Now just hand over the bag, and scram.”

“My bag?”

“Yes, the bag.” The booth lady groaned. “Ms Pacilica said to collect all items, other than clothes, for redistribution, and ‘all items’ includes backpacks.”

“Sorry, sorry!” Lucy smiled at the lady, trying to defuse the situation as she reached for the bag, but as her fingers brushed the strap, Rubie’s face flashed through her mind.

“Lie about what you have! Turn in some of it, but not all. Use that food to keep yourself alive!”

Keep herself alive, wasn’t that supposed to be the overarching goal here?

She could do what Rubie said, it would be easy. She could transfer most of the items from the bag to her inventory with just a click, and only hand over a fraction of the loot without anyone being the wiser.

But just as she brought up the menu, her mind flashed back to the little boy she’d met on her way here, who might not have anyone to bring him food at all anymore.

Should she really help herself when she could help others?

But even if she did help, her ‘help’ would be distributed between thousands of people, it wouldn’t do much of anything! The whole thing would only work if the majority of people chipped in, and a lot of the players with the most gear had already booked it out of town, like Douglas.

But wouldn’t that mean her contribution was even more important, then?

“Miss?” The counter lady asked impatiently. “Are you alright?”

“Oh, Yeah, I’m fine. Sorry, I'm just a bit tired after today.”

Lucy smiled at the booth lady, and made her decision.

…

And for the stacks of tender hog meat she initially gave to the sharing booth, all she got in return from the food line, an hour later, was a single slice of dry apple, and a handful of wheat grain.

-End Chapter-