Heaving with exertion and clutching at his chest through the thin leather jerkin he wore over his tunic, Morgan turned around to take a closer look at the room into which he had blindly ran — hoping to hell that he was the only occupant. Thankfully, the only thing the elf spied in the small circular side-chamber was a pile of what looked like gear that the goblins had stripped from previous groups of slain adventurers, and just left here to molder. The sound of a small body throwing itself against the door shocked Morgan back into the reality of the extremely precarious nature of his current situation.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” he shouted in exasperation, sweat pouring off his brow, matting his shaggy pastel blue bangs against his ivory forehead. “I c-can’t do this anymore! I j—”

“Over here!”

At first, Morgan had not been sure about exactly what had just happened. The voice that called out to him seemed to somehow come from both everywhere and nowhere at once, similar to his own internal monologue. However, the key difference here was that this voice was most certainly not his own. It was a woman’s voice, with just enough breathiness to give it a sultry edge that served to pique Morgan’s interest more than a bit, despite the rather dire situation developing on the other side of the door. Not only had his own inner voice never sounded the least bit feminine, but those words had certainly not originated from his conscious mind either.

“You’re not going crazy,” the woman’s voice said, apparently preempting the concerns rising to the surface of Morgan’s mind that he was having some kind of nervous breakdown in response to the situation’s stress. “I’m over here in the pile. I can help you, but you’ve got to move quickly. Those goblins will break through the door in no time at all. Hurry!”

Tearing his frightened gaze from the shuddering door, on whose other side he could hear both the grunting of goblins crashing against it as well as the continued sobbing cries of Marilyn being gangbanged by the other goblin trio, Morgan scanned the room again quickly. However, despite the seeming reality of the voice he had just heard, he saw nothing which could have — he thought — produced a woman’s voice inside his head. However, an extremely well-crafted looking steel shield did catch his eye, gleaming atop the pile of goblin loot, almost as if it were calling out to him like a beacon in the night.

“This can’t be…or maybe…can it?” Morgan mused, more to himself at first than at the voice. But, as the potential realization began to wash over him, his eyes opened wide with amazement, the strange fantasy world’s logic clicking in his mind. “Are you the shield?”

“Ding, ding, ding, we have a winner!” the breathy voice said with just enough sarcasm to draw a grimacing smile from Morgan, despite his exasperation and barely contained panic. “Now, hurry over here and pick me up before it’s too late!”

As if on cue, the voice’s — no, the shield’s — statement was punctuated by a splintering crash, as one of the goblins managed to shatter the lower right corner of the door with its iron-shod boot. This left a hole which, while it was not yet large enough for the goblins to crawl through, left plenty of room for them to see that their quarry was trapped within, and had no apparent means of escape. The wicked little faces disappeared almost as quickly as they had flashed into visibility, and the pounding and hammering against the door redoubled in force and vigor, as the creatures made every attempt to widen the hole they had just opened in the wooden door.

Although something deep inside Morgan, the tiniest of tiny voices, told him that it might not be the best idea to lay hands on some kind of sentient object that wanted to be picked up, it was not like he really had any options at this point. It was either take his chance with a talking shield and maybe get out of this mess alive, or most definitely get hacked to death by a gang of bloodthirsty goblins. With choices like that, there was really no room for debate. Diving towards the loot pile, the young elf fighter reached out and grabbed a hold of the handle on the shield’s upturned backside.

Little did Morgan know that with this one seemingly simple act, his life in Aeternia would be forever changed.

As soon as his fingers wrapped around the handle, the shield appeared to spring to life. Strips of gleaming steel, imbued with some kind of intelligence and obvious animating force unfolded from the shield itself, wrapping themselves at first around the elven fighter’s slender forearm and hand, forming a beautifully wrought gauntlet. His eyes, already wide with amazement, widened even further as he saw that whatever magical process had been triggered by picking up the shield was apparently far from completed. The unfolding process continued, pieces of shining plate mail appearing as if from some dimensional pocket contained within the shield’s depths to cover the elf’s arm and shoulder with elaborately decorated armor.

“What…h-how…this c-can’t be real…can it?” Morgan sputtered.

His mind struggling to comprehend the continual transformation both the shield and he were undergoing together as the — clearly magical — object continued to unfold itself into a full suit of plate mail. It was only when the grill of a helmet’s visor snapped down over his eyes that the process appeared to terminate, with the armor now covering every inch of the elf’s lithe body. However, Morgan soon realized that whatever wild magic had been triggered when he picked up the shield was still at work, as he felt himself filled with something he could only characterize as power.

The process began as a small sensation, burning in the center of his chest, like a miniature sun radiating not light, but strength and fortitude as it shone within him. With each breath the elf took, this internal sun grew brighter and more powerful, rapidly expanding to fill the entirety of his being with its splendrous radiance. His gasping and panting breathing smoothed out, and Morgan realized that not only did he no longer feel the pangs of exhaustion that had threatened to overcome his body when he first burst into the room, but instead found himself energized in a way that was fundamentally different from the surge of adrenaline which had impelled him into this chamber to begin with.

It was like the difference between the facade of an explosion caused by fireworks and that of an actual bomb, and Morgan now felt himself full of the same caliber of dangerously powerful energy — so much so that he was halfway surprised that he did not see arcs of electricity crackling around his gauntlets as he clenched his fists experimentally. His breath caught in his throat as he in fact did see a burst of blueish white flame temporarily encase his gauntleted fists as the elf flexed his muscles.

“You can do this now!” the armor’s voice told him. “Let the power, my power, guide you.”

No sooner had the armor, which Morgan now thought of as a “her” due to the unmistakably feminine voice, spoken than the door against which the goblins had been continually pounding exploded into a hail of splintery wood shrapnel. Three small green bodies poured through the jagged edges of the ruined door, black blades clutched tightly in their tiny hands, their eyes filled with murder. As one, they came at the elven fighter, clearly hoping to overwhelm him with their superior numbers. And, while this would have been an extremely good tactic to use against the elf only moments prior, something inside Morgan was telling him that he could totally handle the situation now, without any problem whatsoever.

The difference that the fighter felt was not merely the surging wave of physical power that he felt coursing through his normally delicate elven body, but was also a matched tidal wave of confidence. In an instant, all of the fear and terror which had come so close to mentally breaking the new player only minutes prior was swept away by the pulsating surges of magical energy filling the young elf. For the first time in the world of Fantasy Adventure Quest, Morgan actually felt like a fighter who was capable of taking on pretty much any monster that crossed his path — even in the full realization he had now of exactly what combat in this world truly entailed.

“Hyaaa!” Morgan cried, this time his voice filled with rage and fury, and not the terror with which he had called out, fleeing from the child-sized monsters.

Following the instinctive motion he felt filling his newly armored body, Morgan dropped down quickly into a low stance, snapping his shield up just as the leading goblin closed the gap. A wall of crackling blue energy erupted from the shield, sizzling the goblin’s flesh as it barreled forward into the deadly energy field. The small creature was lifted entirely off the ground, its tiny body gyrating and spasming uncontrollably as arcs of magical energy tore through it, its screams echoing through the small stone chamber. After a moment, the wall of magical energy faded, and the charred corpse which had been the goblin fell unceremoneously to the ground, collapsing into a heap of blackened bones and smoking flesh scarcely recognizable as even having been a goblin.

“Holy shit!” the elf exclaimed, wide eyed with excitement at having just fried a goblin with his new armor’s apparently ridiculously overpowered defense system. “You sure pack one helluva punch.”

“You don’t know the half of it, honey,” the armor’s voice purred.

The other two goblins looked positively shellshocked at having seen their comrade almost instantly turned into a pile of charcoal before even coming to blows with the elf. Cowardly creatures by nature, they looked at one another, clearly concerned that this would not be the easy kill they were expecting. However, before they had a chance to turn tail and run, Morgan took the initiative and dashed in, swinging his sword in a horizontal arc and aiming for the creature’s neck.

As soon as his arm shot out, the same crackling energy which had exploded from his shield exploded from the hilt of his sword, snaking its way up the blade to wreath its entire length in blueish which flame. With his limited strength, Morgan had not truly expected the blow to do much more than to cut into the goblin’s soft tissue, hopefully cutting its throat. He was, therefore, quite taken aback when the magically powered blade sheared the goblin’s head clean off — cutting through its spinal column as easily as passing a hot knife through butter. The head fell to the ground with a sickening thud as a geyser of blood erupted from the goblin’s neck, hosing down its sole living companion in gore as the headless corpse fell backwards from the powerful decapitating blow.

Grinning madly, Morgan watched as the last remaining goblin stood paralyzed with fear, soaked from head to toe in the lifeblood of its now very dead companion and apparently unable to decide if it wanted to run, fight, or just stand there and piss itself. The fighter decided to make the decision for the goblin. Taking inspiration again from the subtle hints being communicated to him by the armor, he jumped up in the air, amazed at how much height he was able to get, his physical abilities clearly being boosted in some way by the magical armor. Drawing his sword back over his head, the elf came down hard just in front of the stunned goblin, his blazing blue blade slicing cleanly through the top of the creature’s head and continuing all the way down until it had been cloven cleanly in two.

For a split second, the goblin stared stupidly, not yet realizing that it was dead. It tried to lift an arm feebly, and then the two halves of its severed body slid gruesomely apart, falling in opposite directions and spilling the entire contents of the goblins body into a pile of gore directly in front of Morgan’s armored feet. Shockingly, a sight that only minutes before would have filled the elf with nausea and terror now resulted in a surge of elation, as he reveled in his victory over the wicked goblins.

Clearing away the bevy of attack notifications, it was only then that Morgan noticed that one of the game’s system alerts had been hanging translucent in his periphery. Interestingly, although the game confirmed that the armor was in fact magical, it was unable to tell him anything else about it.

“That’s…weird,” he muttered to himself. But, before he had a chance to think any further on the matter, Morgan’s attention was directed back into the tower’s main chamber by a sharp cry of clear agony coming from his comrade, Marilyn. Without thinking, the elven fighter rushed out of the goblins’ loot room, hoping and praying that he was not too late to help.