Unnamed Totally-not-Terraria LitRPG Chapters 1-24 (Patreon)

((Terraria + Rune Factory 4 + Isekai + Harem + lite LitRPG. That's the story. It's generic as fuck and I wrote this entire first volume, about 80k words, in the last 2 weeks. Just sat down and started writing. This is the first half of the first book, and I'll post the second half of the book tomorrow. This should also be considered a very rough draft with practically zero editing done, and there might be a few mistakes here and there since I jumped around a lot when writing. But I'll talk more about that in the weekly update. For now, here's half a book. And in case anybody would rather read it as a PDF for any reason, here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1W1mzbG3Vg5ZsDDgsAC8GLSTZL4HmefeS/view?usp=sharing ))

Chapter 1

Like most people, I enjoyed getting home from work so that I could unwind with a cheap, microwaved dinner, some coffee to go with it just so that I would have the energy to enjoy my free time, and video games.

After having to pull back-to-back shifts to cover for a coworker, and that was after working for nine days in a row due to scheduling issues, I finally had one day off from my life as a wage slave in a grocery store. Yes, clearly, better choices could have been made so that I didn’t end up in such a “career,” but that could be thought about some other time. All that mattered was getting to relax and play some games. Thinking about work and work-related things was reserved for when I was actually at work. I could fantasize about going back to college and getting a better job all I wanted while I was on the clock getting paid to do so. At home, all I wanted to think about was whether or not I should spoil myself by ordering cheap pizza for delivery to enjoy while gaming.

You know what?

I deserved it.

I deserved some cheap, delivered pizza that was arguably not even real pizza. Besides, my next paycheck was definitely going to be rewarding me for all the overtime I just finished raking in, so I was able to order some pizza without worrying about whether or not I would be able to pay my overpriced rent in a couple of weeks.

As for my pizza… extra cheese, garlic parmesan sauce, pineapple, grilled chicken, tomato chunks, jalapeno peppers, and banana peppers. Now that was a good pizza and exactly what I ordered for myself.

And with that, it was time to get gaming.

The only problem was choosing what to play. Seeing as how I didn’t exactly have a life, and I may or may not have splurged on buying out my excessive wish list of games after breaking up with my ex, my computer’s game library featured roughly five hundred different titles. Only… about ten percent of those were ever actually played.

Maybe that was what I would do? I would make some coffee, caffeinate up, and pull an all-nighter eating pizza and playing some of the games I bought but never even bothered installing before? Yeah, that sounded like the perfect way to enjoy my one day of freedom before returning to wage slaving.

But what to play?

With so many choices… it was hard to actually pick something. There were hundreds of unplayed games, most of which I never even installed… yet… as I scrolled up and down my library… my eyes kept on focusing on the few games I already had installed which I also already had hundreds of hours in. Yeah, sure, I already played them to death, but… maybe it wouldn’t hurt to just play them a little more first? Just to warm up before trying out some new games? Maybe just to pass the time until my pizza arrived?

Yeah. That was what I’d do. I’d definitely play a new game after my pizza arrived! But for time being…

It was time for one of the classics.

It was the very first game that I ever bought, and I bought it on the game’s day of release before it took the world by storm. It was a game I held dear to my heart: an indie, 2D, pixel art RPG that featured adventure, building, crafting, boss fighting, and… that was pretty much it. It was a pretty simple game, but it was a game loved by the people and its developers. The developers even said multiple times that the updates they pushed out would be the last one, and then they went on to just… update it some more. It got to the point where people just didn’t take the developer’s words seriously when they said an update would be the final one because there was always another update. It was as if the developers were addicted to updating the game.

And it was thanks to those updates that I kept on coming back to the game over and over again over the past decade. I had… over four thousand hours total in the game and could basically beat it with my eyes closed on the hardest difficulty.

It… wouldn’t hurt to generate a new world and start over with another character, right? Sure, that would take a longer time investment than just until the pizza arrived… but time enjoyed wasn’t time wasted, right?

Alright! That settled it. It was time to speedrun collecting every single possible item in the game… again! And this time, I would actually build myself a proper base instead of shoving every single NPC into tiny, wooden boxes stacked on top of each other!

Despite having so many hours in the game, I couldn’t help but to feel excited as if I was starting it for the very first time again. The game just had that sort of effect on me.

And when I clicked on the game to launch it… I noticed something.

There was a new update.

“Seriously?” I asked my monitor as if it would actually answer me. “There’s no way. The devs just released a new update a few months ago. There’s no way that they already pushed out an update big enough to warrant changing the version number.”

I already clicked play to launch the game, so I wasn’t able to click on the update announcement to check it out before the game’s window popped up to blacken out my monitor for a moment. However, there was preview text available for the announcement post that I caught a glimpse of… and it looked like gibberish. It was a bunch of random characters that looked like they were glitching out or something.

But maybe I was just seeing things? I brewed my coffee but didn’t actually drink it yet, so maybe I was tired and misreading things.

No big deal. I could always just alt-tab to check out what the announcement actually said.

Only… that wasn’t an option.

No matter how many times I tried to alt-tab, nothing happened. My screen remained black. On top of that, the game should have finished loading and given me a splash screen with the developer’s name and logo on it.

But there was nothing.

“Did the update break the game?” I asked, assuming that my computer must have frozen while trying to launch the game.

After a few minutes of nothing happening, I finally caved and reached over to shut my computer down the hard way. I wasn’t even able to bring up the task manager, and alt+f4’ing didn’t work, so I had no other option.

And just as I hovered my finger over my computer’s power button, the screen flashed.

“That timing though,” I said, withdrawing my finger to spare my computer from a temporary death.

The game finally loaded.

The splash screen showed up… but there was no developer logo nor name. And once the splash screen went away to show the game’s main menu, the game’s title was so glitched out that it was impossible to read, and all the options except for a distorted “Play” option were missing.

“I see what you’re doing,” I said. “This is some kind of glitch horror update. That explains the announcement text and why this is so sudden.” It wasn’t uncommon for modern game developers to experiment with inducing horror by making games deliberately glitchy, so I figured this was another case of that. It also made sense considering some of the game’s endgame bosses broke the fourth wall a bit by causing full screen distortion effects that would make it look like there was something wrong with the game. This was probably just a continuation of that.

So, I clicked the distorted play option.

Next, the game was supposed to take me to the character selection screen, and then after that would be the world selection screen.

But that didn’t happen.

Instead… I found myself standing in a grassy field. Just a moment ago, I was sitting in my overpriced “gaming” chair in front of my computer. But now? I was outside with the sun shining its cancerous warmth down onto my skin as a gentle breeze brushed against me. Birds could be heard chirping from some nearby trees, a familiar slime was spotted hopping around up ahead in the distance, and looking up revealed some floating islands scattered throughout the sky.

It was all too realistic to be a dream or mental delusion, and realistic VR wasn’t a technology that existed, so… that only left me with one option.

Somehow, I was transported into the game that I loved so much.

“Hey there!” an androgynous voice called out from behind me, causing me to jump with a racing heart. “Ah, sorry, didn’t mean to scare you. It’s just… you look lost.”

Given where I was and the familiar dialogue that I heard, there was only one possibility for who that voice belonged to.

And surely enough, when I turned around to check out who it was, I saw a man that me and everybody else who ever played the game would instantly recognize. Jeans, a plain shirt, and a generic haircut with brown hair.

“Would you like some help?” the man known as Guide asked, a kind, eager smile worn on his face as he held a hand out to me for a shake.

Out of all the complex thoughts and feelings running through me, there was one feeling that overwhelmed all the others.

And that feeling was one of excitement.

Sure, there was a chance that I actually did go crazy and was hallucinating everything, or I passed out from exhaustion due to not drinking my coffee and was currently having the most realistic dream anybody ever dreamt before, but on the off chance that what was happening was real… well, who wouldn’t want to get transported into their favorite game?

Actually.

Considering that the game was primarily focused on adventure and combat, and that there were bosses which would naturally spawn if the player took too long getting to them…

I was probably in grave danger.

Chapter 2

“Feeling better now?” Guide asked me, standing over me with a concerned expression.

Once I realized just how much danger I could possibly be in, I ended up panicking a little. I didn’t run around screaming or anything, but I did start breathing a bit heavily seeing as how I had no idea how to fight and would probably have to do exactly that if I wanted to survive.

Fortunately, Guide had a bottle of water he shared with me, and he also guided me into sitting down in the grass so that I could calm down.

When I felt the water taste as real as water normally would, and go down my throat with all the same realism that drinking water would normally have attached to it, I came to the conclusion that what was happening was undeniably real. There was no way a dream would perfectly simulate everything to that degree. Same for a delusional hallucination. I was even able to reach down and run my hands through the dirt and pluck individual strands of grass out from the ground.

It was all realistic. Trying to deny that the situation was really happening would take actual delusion.

“Yeah,” I answered, handing Guide back his water bottle. “Thanks.”

“No problem!” Guide replied. “I’m just glad to see you’re doing better. You scared me for a moment there.”

“Sorry about that. Also, this might sound strange, but… am I inside of a video game?”

Guide tilted his head to the side and looked genuinely confused. “Inside of a video game? Well, you did warn me that the question would be strange, but I didn’t expect it to be that strange. But to answer your question to the best of my knowledge, no. We are not inside of a video game.”

He was just an NPC in the game, so what if he was designed to not believe he was in a game? Then again… he was already going off script and saying things that he never said in the game before. “Do you know what a video game is?”

“I do! A game created by programmers for the sake of entertainment. In some cases, they are created for the sake of art. Well, it depends on who you ask. I suppose some people believe that a video game can’t be art, but others do. Besides, art is subjective, so who is to say whether a game is really art or not?”

“And who says these things? You said some people believe games can’t be art but others do. Who are they?”

Guide opened his mouth as if to answer my question, but no words came out. Instead, he looked confused and like he was trying to recall something on the tip of his tongue, but nothing came to him. “I’m… not sure. I can’t remember. I know there are people with those opinions, but… I have no idea who. I… don’t even know how I know any of that.”

“Do you know your name?”

“Of course! I’m Guide!”

“Do you have parents?”

“Well, obviously. A human can’t exist without being born, and you can’t be born if you don’t have parents.”

“Do you know your parents?”

That confused expression returned, this time with a hint of sadness attached to it. “I… I don’t. I know… I believe I have parents, but… I can’t remember anything about them.”

“Can you remember anything? Do you remember where you were born? Where you grew up? Do you remember what you did yesterday? What you ate for breakfast?”

Guide went deeper and deeper into his thoughts, and the longer he spent in them, the more worried he looked. “I… can’t remember anything. My earliest memory is seeing you. What… what happened to my memories?”

The more he talked, the worse I felt. Even if everything was “real,” it seemed like he was still basically just created at the same time as me being brought to the world. He existed for less than a few minutes and I was already giving him an existential crisis. “Sorry,” I said, standing up and placing a hand on his shoulder. “I didn’t mean to upset you. We’ll figure out what’s going on together, alright?” I felt like I knew him for years, like he was my best friend, even though I only just met the “real” him. So, it was only natural that I wanted to try and cheer him up. He was there for me back when I first started playing the game, so it was time for me to be there for him.

And in response to my words, Guide smiled and nodded. “Thank you. I am not sure why, but when I look at you… I feel like everything is going to be alright.”

That’s because you’re scripted to believe the player character is capable of slaying gods, I thought. “Right back at you.”

Guide smiled even more. “Well then! We’ll figure this world out together! But first, would you like some help?”

Even though he was a real person capable of going off his script, it seemed like there were some instincts that inspired him to act like he did in the game, and that included offering help and starting items to the player character. For the time being, I chose to play along. “Sure, what have you got for me?” Asking him more questions about what was going on and trying to understand his existence would probably only upset him even more, and I didn’t want to do that to one of my favorite characters. Not to mention that it just would have been cruel seeing as how I doubted he knew anything, so it would only serve to upset him in a desperate attempt to sate my own curiosity.

“Here you go!” Guide said, holding up his satchel in front of him. In the game, that was a scripted animation that played when he handed over the player’s starting items.

And as I was about to find out, even though everything seemed real, the world still very much behaved like a game.

A status screen flashed in front of my eyes for a moment before fading away.

//[Copper Short Sword] added to inventory!

//[Copper Pickaxe] added to inventory!

//[Copper Axe added] to inventory!

Even though apparently three large tools were just added to my inventory, I didn’t see nor feel them anywhere on my body.

“You can open your inventory by pressing ‘escape,’” Guide said.

“Sorry, but there is no escape button,” I replied.

“A-ah… right. My apologies. I… do not even know why I said that. There must be something wrong with me today. That aside, perhaps you should try thinking about your inventory? Maybe… that will open it?”

The more confused he was, the worse I felt for him. I felt bad for him in the same way that somebody might feel bad for a loved one suffering from dementia. It is always depressing to see somebody you care about forgot everything and talk like they had no idea what’s happening.

For his sake more than mine, I hoped that just thinking about my inventory would be enough to open it up.

Thankfully, it was.

My inventory opened up on a window in front of me and showed a grid that displayed everything in it. For now, only three slots in the grid were taken up, and they were taken up by the tools that were just added to it. Focusing my attention on the individual items also brought up more information about them.

//[Copper Pickaxe]

//Damage: 3 (Melee)

//Knockback: Tiny

//Power: 5%

The pickaxe’s stats even lined up with how they were in the game.

//[Copper Axe]

//Damage: 3 (Melee)

//Knockback: Tiny

//Power: 5%

Same for the axe. All that was left was to confirm that the short sword would be as garbage as it was in the game.

//[Copper Short Sword]

//Damage: 6 (Melee)

//Knockback: Tiny

//Critical Rate: 3%

Yep. It was just as bad as it was in the game.

After checking those out, I noticed that I had what looked like a hotbar above the inventory just as I would have in the game. All I had to do to drag the items onto the hotbar was think about moving them there, and that caused the items to show up on the hotbar. And by showing up on the hotbar… they showed up on me. The pickaxe and axe both became strapped to my back while the sword hung from my left hip.

“You’re a fast learner!” Guide said. “If I didn’t know any better, I would almost think you’ve done this before.”

I figured I could fill him on the situation later. For now, getting a shelter set up for us was more important. First, though, I drew my sword, turned away from Guide, and swung it around a little. In the game, only rapidly thrusting it forward was an option. However, I was able to swing it around in any direction I wanted to. That was another way that the world I was in diverged from the game.

“Look at you, a natural expert with that!” Guide said, inflating my ego a bit even though it had no right to be getting inflated so easily. “With your skill, setting up a shelter before nightfall should be no problem at all! Oh, right. I should warn you about that. Dangerous monsters come out at night, so it is advised to create a shelter to stay in. You can create a simple shelter by chopping down trees for their logs using your new axe and then building a small house with those logs.”

“Wanting a guy to chop down some trees and build a whole house in just one day is a pretty tall order,” I replied. How that would go was entirely dependent on how realistic the world wanted to be in that regard. If chopping trees and building houses was as easy as it was in a game, it would be no problem. But if it was more realistic… we were screwed.

“If anybody can do it, it’s you!”

“I have to admit, being constantly praised is pretty nice.”

“Then I will do my best to continue praising you as your guide!”

“I appreciate it.”

With that being said, I didn’t want to disappoint my guide, so I returned my sword to my hip and took my axe off my back.

It was time to try and chop down some trees.

Chapter 3

With my axe in hand, I stood in front of my target: a perfectly innocent tree. The tree committed the grave sin of existing while I was in need of wood, and so it needed chopped down. I just had to hope that chopping it down would be as easy as it was in a video game and not realistic at all. I didn’t want to spend hours chopping down trees and processing logs into usable lumber and all that.

So, after taking a deep breath and hoping for the best, I swung my axe into the tree.

A handful of acorns fell out of the tree as soon as I did that. That, too, was similar to how the game worked. Hitting a tree a single time was always enough to make anything inside of it fall out.

Not only that, but once the acorns fell to the ground… they bounced off the ground and traveled toward me. As soon as they reached me, they disappeared and a new message popped up.

//[Acorn] x3 added to inventory!

The more like a game the world was, the better for me.

With that, I swung my axe into the tree a few more times. After a total of five swings, cutting deeper into the tree’s trunk each time… it worked. I chopped the tree down, as to be expected when repeatedly swinging an axe into it regardless of how game-like the world is.

Now, in the game, the tree would basically just instantly explode into a bunch of small logs.

But that didn’t happen.

Instead, I noticed the tree falling down. No exploding. Falling. Toward me.

I didn’t want to get crushed by a tree.

So, I did what any normal person would do when they saw a tree falling down toward them and jumped out of the way. However, the tree crashed into another tree on the way down which altered its trajectory… and sent it toward me again, forcing me to desperately roll away in a panic. It was as if I was meant to die and the tree was trying everything in its power to kill me, just like in those old movies where somebody saw the future where everybody died, avoided the future, and then fate tried to correct things by killing people off in ridiculous ways.

But I lived.

The tree landed right next to where I was. Not on me, but next to me.

I looked at the tree, looked up at the sky, and let out a deep, long sigh… just before the tree exploded. Fortunately, it didn’t explode in an outward way. It was more like the tree imploded if anything. And thanks to its implosion, it got converted into dozens of smaller, wooden logs that were all automatically pulled into my inventory alongside some more acorns that fell with the tree.

//[Acorn] x5 added to inventory!

//[Wooden Log] x23 added to inventory!

The world behaved differently from the game in the sense that the tree actually fell instead of just exploding into logs first, but the end result was ultimately the same… albeit with far more terror thrown into the process.

And then, just like always after chopping down a tree on a new character, an achievement window popped up.

//New Achievement!

//[Who Needs Nature?]

//Awarded for cutting down a tree! Nobody cares about trees, right?

//Reward: [Wooden Log] x50

Everything looked the same as usual there… except for getting a reward. There weren’t any rewards tied to achievements in the game. Sure, it was just some more wood, but what about future, more difficult achievements? What were they going to potentially give me? And the more things that were different from the game I was used to, the more curious I grew about what sort of other differences there would be.

For the time being, though, I went ahead and chopped down a few more trees until I felt like I would have enough wood. Ten or so trees was usually more than enough to create a small house, a table, chair, workbench, and door. Though, I was still going to need some torches for light if we didn’t want to be stuck in the dark as soon as it turned night… and the way torches were made was typically by combining wood and slime.

And slime was acquired from, well, slimes.

And slime was acquired by slimes by killing them.

I never killed anything before. I never even got into a fight before. The closest I ever came to being involved in any sort of violence was when a customer threatened to kick my ass because one of my coworkers messed up his order. And given that he looked like a bodybuilder and I was… well, just some guy, I probably would have had my ass absolutely handed to me.

But all I had to kill was a slime. As long as the world wasn’t set to the highest difficulty or anything, I would… probably be fine. On the lowest difficulty, you had to purposely mess up to get killed by a slime. On the highest difficulty, two hits from a slime at the start could kill you.

Did I even have a health bar or anything?

I did!

I managed to completely, subconsciously ignore it before. Not to pat myself on the back too much or anything, but I got so good at the game that I never needed to look at my health since I just never got hit in the first place. So, my brain got trained to ignore the health bar. But when I looked at the top right of my vision, I noticed that I had a row of hearts sitting up there with a total of one hundred health. No mana yet, though.

There was even a minimap! But instead of the usual map where it looked at the 2D world from the side, this minimap looked at the 3D world from top-down.

My brain apparently got pretty good at filtering out information it didn’t think it needed. I was going to have to train it to actually pay attention to those things again.

But for now, it was time to try and kill a slime. I just needed to remind myself that I was killing an unfeeling monster without a life of its own from a video game. It wasn’t like I was about to murder some poor, innocent creature with a family.

…

Right?

For the sake of my sanity, I decided that slimes did not, in fact, have families, and that they just appeared out of nowhere and were no more alive than rocks.

Chapter 4

Before approaching the slime, I did what most people would do when starting a new character and opened up my inventory to see if a crafting menu would show up now that I had a bunch of wood in my inventory. Thankfully, I did.

And within that crafting menu was the trusty [Wooden Workbench].

It cost me fifteen [Wooden Logs] to make, and crafting it was as simple as making the mental decision to do so. Once I did, it showed up in my inventory and I was able to drag it out of there which resulted in it falling onto the ground in front of me. As soon as it landed on the ground, it counted as being a crafting station within my reach, so even more crafting options opened up for me.

I was going to need to chop down some more trees if I wanted to get myself some armor and a better weapon first, but that was alright. By the end of crafting myself [Wooden Vest], [Wooden Boots], [Wooden Helmet], and a [Wooden Broadsword], I went from 145 [Wooden Logs] down to only 35 left. However, each piece of wooden armor gave me a point of defense each. The wooden sword was pretty much worse in every single way aside from being bigger than the copper sword and having more knockback, and I honestly preferred that.

Then, upon equipping all the armor, I got a new achievement. One that wasn’t in the original game, either.

//New Achievement!

//[Gearing Up]

//Awarded for filling all armor slots for the first time! Hopefully it’s not just wooden armor.

//Reward: [Basic Armor Sphere]

I felt like I was being sassed when I read the description for the achievement, but what was more important than that was the [Basic Armor Sphere] item. That wasn’t an item that existed in the game.

So, I did what any curious gamer would do and checked out the item’s description.

//[Basic Armor Sphere]

//Used in enhancing the defense rating of armor.

“Huh,” I said to myself. Then, just to experiment with it, I tried dragging the armor sphere over onto my [Wooden Vest], and as soon as I mentally “let go” of it while it was over my armor, it disappeared and the [Wooden Vest] became [Wooden Vest +1].

I opened up its description just to confirm what I believed had happened.

//[Wooden Vest +1]

//Torso

//2 Defense

Yep. Surely enough, the defense was increased from one to two, giving me a total of four defense. I also noticed while hovering over the armor that there was an active set bonus… which wasn’t included in the original game either. Well, the game always had set bonuses for armors, but that was usually for the more advanced armors, not the basic starting armor sets.

//Wooden Armor Set Bonus: Trees are 25% more likely to drop items when hitting them.

I wasn’t sure how useful that would be, but I wasn’t going to complain about an easy bonus.

Then, while in the inventory, I had an idea.

On the game’s easiest world setting, a character could equip up to five accessories. On the higher difficulty option, that could be expanded to six slots by using a special item that dropped from a boss, but I would have no way of knowing if that was the case or not until it dropped and I was nowhere near that point. On the hardest difficulty level, however, characters started off with six accessory slots available.

In theory, I would at least be able to rule out that I wasn’t in a world set to the highest difficulty by counting fewer than six accessory slots.

So, I counted them.

One…

Two…

Three…

Four…

Five…

…

Six.

There were six accessory slots unlocked by default.

I was officially on the world’s hardest difficulty as far as I could tell. That meant the slime up above would be able to kill me in just a couple of hits if I wasn’t careful.

As much as I felt nervous about potentially getting killed by the slime, I had no other option.

I approached the slime with my sword drawn. As soon as I got close enough to it, it turned to look at me and began hopping toward me. It was only able to move by hopping, and it only hopped every three seconds, so that meant… I would theoretically have a three second window to deal damage without it trying to defend itself or attack me.

Rather than rush up to the slime like an overeager idiot, I waited for the slime to come to me. There was no rush and watching it approach me gave me a good sense for just how far it could move with every hop. If anything, once it got close enough to me, I backed away from it… but not without a good reason.

And that reason was that, the next time it hopped toward me… it landed directly in front of me. Had I stayed still, I would have either been hit or forced to try and hit it while it was mid-jump, and I didn’t have faith in myself to smack it out of the air with my sword.

But now?

Now, it was on the ground right in front of my feet.

The slime was only tall enough for the top of its round, blobby body to reach my waist, so I had to swing downward to try and hit it.

Or really, there was no “try” about it. The slime put zero effort into dodging out of the way. All it did was stay still, its jiggly form wobbling still after hopping, and let me swing my wooden sword right into its gelatinous body.

And then, just as dramatically as it would happen in game, the slime got knocked away from me. Its entire body got bumped up into the air and was pushed a couple feet back, but it bounced at me immediately after. It should have been able to hit me, but… I found that I stepped back just far enough for the slime to land directly in front of me again. It was as if my muscle memory carried. Even though all I did before was press the A or D key to move backwards while swinging my sword, I moved backward with my actual body without even meaning to.

That meant I had the perfect opportunity to hit the slime again, knocking it back once more. And this time, since I was a bit more relaxed having discovered what was apparently muscle reflex protecting me, I noticed that a damage number floated up over the slime’s body.

Given that the slime was green, and I was in a world similar to the game’s highest difficulty setting, then that meant it had around forty health. My second attack there did three points of damage, which matched the sword’s default damage value. Against an enemy with no defense like a slime, my sword, with its three points of default damage, would fluctuate around three damage with each attack depending on luck. Two attacks in meant that I had to hit it around twelve more times to kill it. Luck meant it might die sooner or later than that, but twelve more hits would be the average without any critical hits.

And given that the slime was… pretty easy to handle, I decided to experiment a little. I needed to figure out how the world worked to the best of my ability if I wanted to increase my chances of survival as much as I could. That was why I decided to experiment with attacking the slime in a few different ways other than swinging my sword at it as hard as I could.

For example: I thrust my sword at it. In the original game, each weapon basically only had a single attack animation to go with it. Short swords were always thrust-only. Bigger swords were always swung from over the head down toward the enemy. There was never any crossing over there due to not needing to invest in multiple attack animations per weapon when one did the trick.

But I wasn’t literally in a game as far as I could tell. My body wasn’t limited to strictly swinging the sword in one specific way. So, what would happen if I thrust the sword into an enemy instead?

The result… was that it did damage just like normal.

But what if I tried to swing or thrust with barely any effort? What if I just poked the sword against the slime? Or what if I bumped the flat side against the slime? In the game, damage dealt was based off of physically connecting with the enemy. It was mostly contact damage outside of a few damage-over-time effects that could be applied. If that was the case, then even just gently poking my sword against the slime should hurt it.

Yet, no damage number popped up when I tried that. Gently poking the slime with the sword’s tip didn’t work. Giving it a soft whack with the flat side of the sword didn’t work, either. That meant it wasn’t like I was in some virtual reality game where all I had to do was technically touch an opponent with my weapon to hurt them.

Now, in the same way, coming into contact with the slime using my body should hurt me. If I were to do something like kick the slime with my foot, then that would normally hurt me due to my body’s hitbox coming into contact with the slime’s body.

I looked around first to make sure there weren’t any enemies who would try ambushing me before deciding to experiment with my own health. I was clear, so that meant I was safe enough to experiment.

So, I kicked the slime.

Despite kicking the slime as hard as I could, I did zero damage to it and didn’t even knock it back at all… but I also didn’t take any damage, either.

In that case, it seemed like I had to actually get attacked with intent to take damage. And in that case, it would be best to discover how pain and health regeneration works while I was still only against a single slime. So, following a deep breath, I braced myself and stood still to give the slime a chance to jump at me.

The slime basically thrust its entire body at me by bouncing upward, crashing into my chest and knocking me away just as dramatically as I had been knocking it back. And even though it was just a slime, meaning that it was basically like getting hit by a giant, squishy water balloon… it hurt. It hurt really bad. It was just a single impact, yet I felt like somebody punched me as hard as they could in my chest. Then, upon looking at my hearts, I saw that I lost an entire heart’s worth of health. Each heart represented twenty health which meant that the slime did around that amount, which sounded right. That meant just having the weakest enemy in the game bounce into me five times would be enough to kill me.

“You look soft, but you seriously pack a punch, don’t you?” I asked the slime. “Or, I guess you pack a jump? Whatever, technicalities are no fun.”

Admittedly, getting attacked so painfully by the slime made me feel way less guilty about having to kill it. There was no question about it: the slime wanted to kill me. If that was the case, then I had no problem killing it first.

So, we danced.

I’d swing my sword into the slime, step back, wait for it to land in front of me again, and then repeated the process until I estimated that there would only be a single hit left until its death. The early game was nice and systematic like that. Of course, later on in the game once things involved flying, bullet hell bosses, giant robots and laser beams, literal gods, machine guns and spaceships, and crazy homing magic capable of destroying everything it touched… things got a lot more complicated. But for now, all I had to do was swing, step back, wait, and swing again.

My final swing caused the slime to explode into several different chunks of slime, and a couple smaller pierces of slime got automatically sucked into my inventory thanks to how close I was to them.

//[Slime] x3 added to inventory!

//[Copper Coin] x8 added to inventory!

A new achievement popped up to congratulate me for my victory, too.

//New Achievement!

//[Monster Hunter]

//Awarded for killing your first monster! And so, your path of destruction begins.

//Reward: [Basic Weapon Sphere]

If the armor sphere increased my armor’s defense rating, then it was obvious to assume the weapon sphere would increase my weapon’s damage.

Unfortunately… I couldn’t get too excited about that considering I just noticed very, very bad news.

Character creation and world creation were different things, obviously. World creation had three difficulty levels, and this was the difficulty that affected things like monster spawn rates, monster stats, drops, accessory slots, and so on. I already figured out I was on the highest difficulty setting for the world.

Character difficulty was separate. There was the creative difficulty which meant that a character was basically immortal and had an infinite number of supplies to build with, which I already ruled out. There were three options aside from that.

The default option was dropping money on death.

Then there was the option for dropping all money and items, weapons and armor, on death.

Then there was permadeath. All death was permanent. Dying even once meant game over.

Choosing permadeath also unlocked an optional “true survival” setting. Opting into “true survival” meant that there was no natural health regeneration on top of the fact that all death, including for NPCs and tamed pets, was permanent. It also required food and water to be consumed at least once a day to avoid receiving debuffs that would eventually kill the player.

The community “lovingly” referred to it as “masochist mode.” Most people thought it increased the game’s difficulty in such an unfair way that it wasn’t even fun anymore. Even I avoided playing with those options because I didn’t want to have to completely start over just because I died from something stupid.

And that bad news I noticed?

I wasn’t regenerating any health.

If I worked with what knowledge I had available to me, then there was only one conclusion for me to jump to with that knowledge… and it was that, basically, I was playing on the absolute hardest character difficulty on the world’s hardest difficulty setting.

That meant permadeath.

So… given that I was seemingly in a real world that was just like the game, and permadeath was enabled… what would happen to me if I died?

Chapter 5

I was afraid, obviously. I had no idea what was going on aside from the fact that I was apparently transported to some world that was just like the one from my favorite game, but there were enough differences in it to prove that something strange was going on aside from the previously mentioned transportation, and I also found out that I was on the world’s hardest difficulty setting with my character—or rather, my actual, living body, set to permadeath and true survival.

If I died, I died.

Would I get transported back to reality if that happened? Would I just… start over as if in some sort of time loop? Would I be moved to an entirely different world to try again? Would I respawn like normal?

Would I be truly, permanently dead?

The only way for me to find out was to try dying.

And that, for what should be extremely obvious reasons, was something I had zero intent of trying out. As funny and hip as it was for most people my age to joke around about how much they wanted to die and act like they wouldn’t care if the world suddenly stopped existing, I was one of those losers who actually wanted to live. Sure, I was a wage slave, but I would rather live as a wage slave than not live at all.

I didn’t want to die. Therefore, if I had no idea what was going to happen upon death, with permanent death being an option, then I wasn’t going to die.

“Welcome back!” Guide said once I returned back to where I left him. I decided to chop down some more trees and kill some more slimes while I was out, so I had more than enough supplies to get to building a base with. “Do you need any help?”

Hearing his voice reminded me of my other worry: NPC death. That was considered the worst part about “true survival” mode. If an NPC died… they never returned. Considering how valuable some NPCs were to progression, that alone put most people off from ever trying the difficulty option.

I wasn’t the only one in danger. Guide was as well.

“Do you have your bow and arrows to protect yourself with?” I asked.

Guide looked surprised that I even knew about that, but still brought his bow out from his inventory to show me it. “I do! But how did you know? I… do not recall using this around you yet.”

“I’ll explain later. For now, I’m going to set some rules. No wandering outside at night, no randomly opening and closing doors while zombies are banging on them, no falling down random holes and getting stuck in them with slimes, and stay away from everything that even slightly looks like lava. Understand?”

Guide blinked a couple of times before nodding his head. “Very well! It is a bit of a shame considering how much I love the sound of doors opening and closing, but… I do not even know why I love that sound in the first place.”

“I’ll create an extra room inside our house with a door you can open and close as much as you want, alright? Just no opening the ones that lead outside at night.”

The genuine smile from Guide at being told I would create another door for him was too absurd. No grown man should get that happy at being given a door to open and close. Yet… there was something endearing about it—endearing in a way that made me look at him more like a dog than a human being.

Now, with those rules set, it was time to get to work.

I started by taking out my pickaxe and digging a trench around where I wanted to build a house, and it took no time at all for me to wish I practiced yoga.

It took three swings per “block” of dirt for me to break it. The dirt, or any of the environment, didn’t look like it was in block-y form by default, but it broke into block shapes upon—well, breaking. Once I swung my pickaxe into the dirt below me three times, a large chunk of dirt disappeared from the ground in the shape of a block which got immediately absorbed into my inventory. The hole in the ground wasn’t large enough for me to stand in, though. I had to dig up a two-by-two space for me to actually have enough space to completely stand in it. In the original game, it only needed to be two blocks wide since everything was 2D. now that the world was 3D, it made sense it needed to be two-by-two instead.

If I wanted to make the hole deep enough for it to reach my height, it needed to be three blocks deep. So, to completely cover me, it had to be two blocks wide and long, then three blocks deep. Twelve blocks of dirt needed dug up just to fit one person in a hole in the ground.

That was twelve blocks of dirt I had to dig up, with a pickaxe, by swinging it into the ground three times per block. Thirty-six overhead pickaxe swings just to dig up enough space for one person.

My back was killing me after just a few minutes of work.

But given the circumstances… I couldn’t give up. I needed to prepare a shelter for us before it was night, and the sun was already falling in the sky.

For the next couple of hours, I worked as quickly as I could to dig up a massive moat of sorts around where I wanted to build a house. It was deep enough that any zombies and slimes who fell into it would struggle to jump out, and I also built a wall using all the dirt I dug up on our side of the moat. The wall didn’t need to be thick, just tall, so I built the wall to be eight blocks tall. That would prevent any monsters from being able to jump over the moat. If they tried, they would just crash into the wall and fall down into the moat.

Normally, if somebody really wanted to cheese the system, they would just build dirt walls if they were afraid of zombies reaching their house and opening the doors. Starting on the second highest world difficulty, zombies and other night monsters could open doors if they were on the same level as the doors or within two blocks of their ground level. A three-block deep hole was required to prevent monsters from reaching up and opening the doors.

Furthermore, on the hardest difficulty option, monsters could very slowly break through barriers if the player tried blocking them with walls. Weak monsters such as zombies were only able to break through dirt and wood, so anything stronger than that would stop them, but dirt and wood was all I had access to at the moment. Therefore, the moat also served as a method of stopping the zombies from trying to break through the dirt wall. In theory, they would detect the dirt wall as being the main barrier stopping them from reaching me, so they would break it down. But since the moat was three blocks deeper than the ground level of the wall, and zombies weren’t known for digging underground, they would have no way of getting through our defenses.

All I had to do then was leave a two-by-two dirt bridge connected to an opening in the wall for me and Guide to cross over, and that was only left long enough for us to actually get inside the wall. As soon as we were inside, I destroyed the bridge and closed the wall.

Fortunately, building was pretty easy. All I had to do to build was place the material I wanted to use on my hotbar, and that would create a small version of the block for me to hold and place where I wanted. Upon placing it, the block would instantly turn into its full-sized form. When blocks were placed next to each other, they seamlessly blended together to maintain a natural look. Worrying about physics didn’t seem to be an issue, either. No matter how much I pushed against the dirt wall, I wasn’t able to push it over. I had to deliberately attack it with my pickaxe to deal any damage to it.

Next came building the actual house.

I was barely able to keep my eyes open at that point from just how much pain my muscles were in and how tired I felt, but I kept at it until my mission was done. And my mission… was creating a small, square house with a table, workbench, and couple of chairs inside it. I also made an empty, extra room just so that I could give Guide a door to open and close as he pleased.

Once the house was done, all I had left to do was light the inside and outside of it up with torches. Despite being fire on a stick, they didn’t create lasting smoke that polluted the air even when inside. All they did was create permanent, safe, flickering light.

And with that… I could finally relax. With Guide inside with me, I sat down on one of the two chairs I made and slumped over onto the table using my crossed arms as a pillow. I was going to need some form of cloth if I wanted to make a bed, so my options were either sleep in a chair or sleep on the floor.

“Are… are you alright?” Guide asked, his voice sounding extra gentle like one would when talking to somebody who was sick, injured, or just absolutely exhausted like me.

“My body feels like it’s on fire, but we’re safe, and that’s all that matters,” I answered.

“But… even with how tired you are, you still made me that room with the door. You didn’t need to do that. Such a thing could have been saved for tomorrow, or just not done at all.”

“I’m a man of my word. If I say I’ll do something, I do it.”

A felt a gentle hand stroke through my hair. “Thank you… ah. I just realized, I have no idea what I should call you. Do you have a name?”

I was so tired, and feeling his hand brushing against my head made me feel even more exhausted, that I could barely think straight. “A name? Well… you’re Guide, the guide, and I’m the player, so… just call me Player.”

“If that’s the case, you are more of a hero than anything, so should I not call you Hero instead?”

“Hero feels too narcissistic. Just call me Player.”

“I see. Very well, Player.”

Hearing him actually call me that was kind of funny, but I liked it. Plus it felt fitting given the world I was in where everybody was just named after their role. “I’m gonna sleep now, alright? And remember, no going outside until the sun is up.” Even if I blocked any zombies and slimes from getting inside our walls, flying monsters could still get inside. They wouldn’t be able to break through the house’s walls or anything, but they could still hurt us if we stepped outside.

“Please do. You deserve the rest. And tomorrow, I will try to be even more helpful.”

“Don’t worry about it. Just give me some praise every now and then to make me feel good about myself, and that’s enough for me.”

I heard a soft laugh from him as I drifted off into sleep. “I will give you all the praise in the world, as much as your heart—”

“Wait… shit.”

“What? Is something wrong?”

“I forgot… about the… pizza I ordered. I wonder… if it’ll be cold by the time I—”

Chapter 6

I opened my eyes and immediately related to everybody else my age and younger who joked about wanting to die. Given that my entire body felt like it was on fire and like it was going to fall apart just from moving a couple of centimeters, I was pretty sure that death would be a preferable alternative at that point.

Why did my body hurt so much anyways? All I did was work, order pizza, and play games! There was no reason for my body to feel like I pulled every muscle in my body! I—

My attention got stolen by the sound of a door opening and closing behind me. It wasn’t just any door sound, either. It was the specific sound of an opening and closing door from my favorite video game. It was impossible for me to ever forget that sound due to NPCs constantly opening and closing doors automatically while moving around their housing. It was as if they existed for the sole purpose of opening and closing doors whenever they weren’t being used as various merchants.

“Ah, Player, good morning!” Guide said, causing me to slowly remember everything that happened in the past twenty-four hours.

Right. Somehow, I found myself in the world of my favorite game. I had no idea how or why, but I was inside it, everything was real and set to the hardest possible difficulty, and I probably actually did pull every muscle in my body from chopping down trees, hunting slimes, and digging up a moat.

More importantly, if Guide was still alive, then he listened to my orders and didn’t get himself killed by wandering outside in the middle of the night. My defenses also worked.

“Morning,” I grumbled to him. “Everything alright?”

“Even better than alright! Here!” The next thing I knew, the stripped corpse of a small bird appeared on the table in front of me. “I want to help you more, and this bird landed in the yard outside, so I killed it for you! You’ll be able to cook and eat it if you craft a campfire outside.”

I looked at the bird, looked at him, looked back at the bird, and then looked at him again. “You killed it yourself?”

“I did!”

“And not only did you kill it, but you looted it and brought it back to me?”

“I did!”

“Were you trying to shoot something else and accidentally hit the bird instead?”

Guide blinked and shook his head. “No, your wall has done an excellent job of keeping everything else out, and I only went outside once the sun rose.”

“So you purposely hunted the bird all by yourself?”

“Yes? I… I suppose I understand the confusion. With how useless I was yesterday, it is no wonder that something like this needs so thoroughly confirmed.”

“That’s not it at all!” I shouted, getting out of my chair to put my hands on his shoulders. “This is seriously useful! And it’s not just because of yesterday. This is something you’ve never done before and shouldn’t even be able to do.”

Guide looked away with a hint of red on his cheeks as if he was embarrassed by the praise. “It… it really is not much, especially when compared to everything you have done. You built this entire home for us, so killing a single bird is—”

“Is exactly all you need to do to be amazing right now! I’m hungry, and I’m too sore to go out hunting for food myself, so this is perfect. Seriously, Guide, you’re the best. Also.” I slumped back into my chair. “Standing up required too much energy. I want to die even more now.”

Normally, the guide would never be able to do that. Animals like birds, which were considered “critters,” were never intentionally targeted by any NPCs regardless of whether they were friendly or hostile NPCs. They might accidentally get killed if caught in an attack, such as an NPC shooting at a monster and accidentally hitting the critter, but never intentionally. Even in the later parts of the game that involved building up a town, creating defenses, hiring farmers and workers, and all of that, there was never anything like what he just did.

On one hand, that made the world even more concerning since it meant that everything was likely more intelligent and capable of new behavior. Except the slimes, apparently. They still acted just like normal.

On the other hand… the guide acting more and more like a human with free will was worthy of nothing short of celebration. It was like if a kid had a favorite toy that came to life and wanted to be best friends! How could I not get excited about that? Just going off the night before, there was no reason to think he was anything but his usual self albeit with slightly more advanced chatting algorithms, but he was undoubtedly more capable than some advanced chatbot now.

I had no reason to believe he was anything short of being his own person.

Though, I was going to have to experiment with him a bit more later. The game had a system that allowed the player to recruit any one NPC at a time as a follower to go fight with, but that always required befriending them first and then completing a sort of quest to unlock them as a follower… and potential love interest. So, what would happen if I tried to take him with me without going through all those steps to officially “unlock” him as a follower?

What if I gave him an axe or pickaxe to gather materials with? Most NPCs were considered different from laborers. NPC companions could follow the player around and help them fight, but not gather resources. Only the nameless, hired laborers at the town building stage of the game could do that.

There were many experiments to be performed, but, for now, I placed some wooden blocks and torches on the table in front of me. “Can you try building the campfire yourself?”

“I… suppose I can try that,” Guide replied. “But I do not believe I will be able to.”

“Any reason why?”

“Well, no. It is just… a feeling that I have. But for you, I shall try my best regardless!”

Guide went outside after that, and it took a couple of minutes for me to finally get out of my chair to go and check on him to see how it was going.

And what I saw was him just… standing there, staring at the ground, with a wooden block in his hand. He looked like he had no idea what he was supposed to do. When he noticed me watching him, he looked at me and sighed. “I am sorry, Player. I do not even know where to begin with this. As ridiculous as this might sound, I feel as if I have been given a piece of dirt and a leaf and told to create a rocket out of them.”

“The important thing is that you tried your best,” I said.

“I am not sure it can be said that I tried at all.”

“You did. And thanks for trying. Here, give me the materials back.”

Following another sigh, he handed me the wood and torches which allowed me to simply open up my inventory, focus my attention on a single button to create the campfire, and then placed it down in front of us. The fire was already blazing with all of its usual intensity, giving off heat and causing a buff to show up at the top left of my vision underneath my hotbar. All I had to do then was open up my inventory again to craft the [Raw Bird] into [Roasted Bird] using the campfire as the cooking workstation.

But instead of just… instantly turning into its cooked variant in my inventory like normal, the bird was teleported out of my inventory and showed up on a skewer over the campfire instead.

It was actually cooking; it didn’t just instantly cook by crafting it.

“There is something… strange about this,” Guide said.

I nodded. “It obviously makes sense to see a bird cooking over a fire, but… it feels wrong at the same time.”

If the bird needed cooked, was I going to have to actually wait for metal ores to smelt in furnaces, too?

There was even more to learn about than I thought.

More importantly, another bird landed within the walls behind Guide. I grabbed his attention by waving at him, held a single finger over my lips to shush him, and pointed over his shoulder. As soon as he noticed the bird, he brought out his bow, readied an arrow… and fired.

With the aimbot-like aim I would expect from an NPC, his arrow pierced the bird’s body and instantly killed it, causing it to turn into another piece of [Raw Bird] on the ground.

“Nice shot,” I said, giving Guide a pat on his shoulder. Every single movement, even that, made me want to die again. “Now we have enough for both of us. Wait, do you even feel hungry?”

“I most certainly do,” Guide answered. “At least, I believe I do? I have never felt hungry before today, but I am not sure what else this empty feeling in my stomach could be.”

That… posed another potential issue.

Even in “true survival,” only the player needed food and water. NPCs didn’t. Sure, hired labor during the town building section of the game had generic “food” requirements, such as hiring farmers to produce enough food to enable hiring other types of laborers, but that was all just a very generic system and normal NPCs never engaged with it.

So if Guide actually felt hungry as well, then that meant he might be susceptible to starvation just as I was.

That could potentially prove to be problematic, but… he was clearly capable of passively hunting any birds that came within our walls, so maybe it wouldn’t be an issue after all.

For now, I crafted another [Roasted Bird] which caused another skewer with meat to appear over the fire.

Chapter 7

Five minutes turned out to be all that was needed for the birds to actually finish cooking. And, once they finished, they popped off the fire and became dropped items on the ground which got sucked up into my inventory.

//[Roasted Bird] x2 added to inventory!

And just like in the original game, an achievement popped up.

//New Achievement!

//[It’s (Not) Raw!]

//Awarded for acquiring prepared food for the first time! Picking an apple isn’t preparing it, but chopping it into slices is!

//Reward: [Beginner’s Plate]

“Beginner’s plate?” I asked out loud while handing one of the [Roasted Bird]s over to Guide. When I looked in my inventory, I saw that it was just… a plate with a picture of a generic slime on it. It had no description, no stats—nothing. It was just a plate, presumably for decoration’s sake.

I’d place it on the table later.

For the moment, I took my own serving of bird and took a bite out of it. The buff from being near the campfire already healed me in full since it gave me a health regeneration of one per second, but eating the bird gave me another buff that showed up next to it.

//[Light Meal]

//Provides minor buffs to most stats and slightly increases health regeneration.

//Duration: 59:47

I noticed my health was increased up to a total of 105, which was something buffs from eating food in the original game never did, and that my defense went up by another point. Not only that, but my damage and crit rate for my sword were both improved as well. Even my base senses felt improved, being able to see more clearly farther, hearing more distant sounds, and both tasting and smelling the rest of my food with even greater intensity.

And unlike the original game where the buff would only last for ten minutes, this one looked to last for a whole hour. Seeing as how an in-game day lasted fewer than thirty minutes, and we were in a real place now with what seemed like a more normal passage of time, that made sense.

“That was delicious!” Guide said. “Thank you, Player.”

“No problem, glad you enjoyed it,” I replied. “And thank you for hunting those birds in the first place. Now, I want to test something out. Could you follow me?”

Maybe it was hearing those specific words, or perhaps it was the intent behind them, but Guide froze when I asked that. He then shook his head and said, “Sorry, but… I don’t believe I can. As soon as you said that, I wanted to say yes, but… it felt as if something gripped my heart and demanded I say no. And each time I think of accompanying you, it feels as if that grip begin to tighten around my heart again.”

So, something like pointing out that there was a bird behind him was fine, and then he was able to hunt it of his own free will. But requesting him to actually follow me… and even him thinking about following me, was apparently not allowed. Something was stopping him from doing that even if he wanted to.

If that was the case, it would probably be impossible to get him to follow me around as an active companion without going through the usual steps to unlock him or any of the other NPCs as companions.

“Is something on your mind?” Guide asked.

Hearing that, I remembered that I kept on intending to explain everything I knew to him, but never did. Seeing as how it was early in the day and I was still too sore to actually go out and do anything, it was probably a good time to infodump everything I knew onto him.

I just had to be careful not to overwhelm him or give him an existential crisis.

The two of us returned indoors, I placed the plate down on the center of our table, and then I got to work explaining everything.

I started off simple, telling him about who I was, where I was from, what seemingly happened to me, and that my pizza probably went cold and was sitting outside my old apartment’s door… if any of that even existed anymore.

Then, since Guide seemed to be handling all of that pretty well, I went into more detail about him and the game he was from. I told him about how he was originally an NPC inside of a video game created by a couple of developers and that none of our situation was supposed to be real. I expected a bit of shock or concern, but there wasn’t any. Instead, at the end of my explanation, Guide simply sighed and said, “I knew something was wrong ever since I failed to remember my past last night. I feel as if I am half a person—no, not even half a person. As if I was designed by something, or somebody, greater than me with only a single purpose in mind. Everything else… is missing. From the sound of it, even though I feel as if I am supposed to have parents… I have never had any, have I?”

“At the very least, your original character never had any dialogue lines about parents.” I could have elaborated and told him that he was actually regarded as the most basic, generic, boring character with zero personality who basically existed only to encourage the player and give advice here and there, but he didn’t need to know any of that. Besides, no matter how basic he was, he was always one of my favorites.

“I see. It is… sad to hear that, but I am not surprised. And you have no idea why any of this is happening?”

“No, sorry. And I take it you have no idea either?”

“That would be correct, unfortunately.” Guide brought his hands in front of his face to look them over. “So… I supposed I am not even supposed to exist. These hands should only be graphics for a virtual game, yet when I look at them,” he clenched his hands together, “when I feel them… they seem so real. What does that make me, then?”

“A person, obviously. Come on. Being dumb isn’t one of your personality traits.”

Guide smiled for a second, but that smiled disappeared so that he could ask, “But is that really true? You—you are a true person. You were born into the real world to parents, raised from birth, you had a life… but I am just some artificial creation of another given some strange form of life that neither of us understand.”

“And? You’re here and real now. That makes you a real person just like me. None of that other stuff matters. Even if it turns out that I’ve gone crazy and you’re just a figment of my imagination, or if it turns out that the government drugged me and kidnapped me to test some sort of hyper advanced virtual reality using me and you’re the world’s most advanced AI, then I’m still going to call you a person. As long as you’re like this, you’re real to me. And if you don’t agree, too bad, my opinion is better and thus true.”

Guide laughed a little and asked, “Yet you turned down the name of ‘Hero’ due to it sounding narcissistic.”

“I’m enough of a narcissist without blatantly calling myself ‘Hero,’ don’t you think?”

“I still think that name suits you perfectly, but very well. Though, I must say, I believe there is something going on aside from either of those possibilities you mentioned.”

“Yeah, I know. Mental delusions are never this realistic, and the government wouldn’t just go and kidnap some random guy for an experiment… well, depending on who you ask, they might, but that’s not the point. The point is that you’re as real as me right now. Welcome to personhood, Guide. It only goes downhill from here.”

“I have no doubt when I look at you that our journey will not be one of falling downhill. Rather, I have full confidence in you to rise to greater heights than anybody ever has before.”

I had to admit that as much as I loved the praise, it was still embarrassing enough to hear that it made me blush a little and look away. “I know I’ve said to praise me, but you don’t have to inflate my ego that much.”

“Player?” Guide asked, suddenly sounding more serious than before.

“Yeah?”

“I have… a personal question.”

“Shoot.”

“If you do not mind my asking… what was it like to have a family?”

Any embarrassment I felt was replaced by being unable to hold back my laughter.

“Did—did I ask something wrong?”

“No, no,” I answered. “It’s just… I’m the worst possible guy you could ask for that. Let’s just say my parents were pieces of shit and leave it at that for now. Instead, I have an idea.”

“Oh? What would your idea be?”

“We’ll find out together,” I answered, holding out my hand to him. “Family is about more than blood relations. So, how about me and you be our own family? Brothers surviving in this world together.”

“Br-brothers?”

“Yeah. We’re both men, after all.”

“But… I’m a girl.”

I looked at Guide, blinked a few times, stuck my pinkies into my ears to try and clean them out in case there was something in there distorting what I heard, and asked, “Say that again?”

“Player… I’m a girl.”

“But… but you’re the guide.”

“And a girl.”

“But—but you look… oh.”

Oh.

The last time I played the game… I… decided to try out an extremely, excessively modded playthrough. I downloaded all the biggest content mods with zero regard for how they blended together, mods that allowed combining basically everything in the game into one ultimate god-tier item at the end, a ton of decorative mods even though I was always bad at designing things and never used them, quality of life mods… mods to make the game far, far harder with extremely difficult bosses who I never even mastered and could barely beat at my best… and… then, just because I thought it would be funny, and definitely for zero other reasons, I… I got mods that… may or may not have… turned every single NPC into a girl… some of which would have very mature designs… and… also a mod that would let me marry all of them but totally only so that I could benefit from getting the unique married stat boost from each girl… because I wanted to do a run that involved me mastering everything and everybody…

There were… dozens of NPCs turned into girls because of just how many mods I installed. Even the bosses that turned into NPCs after beating them got turned into girls so I could marry them, definitely just for their stat bonuses.

And after hearing what Guide said, I remembered the mod I got for him—for her. It was the “Tomboy Guide” mod.

“Look, see?” Guide said, forcing me to leave my thoughts and look over at her.

That was when I confirmed that Guide was definitely, without any doubt, a woman, seeing as how she pulled down her shirt enough for me to see her bra and the mounds held back by them.

After looking at her some more… I was an idiot for not figuring it out sooner. Even the slightest bit of attention revealed that while her clothes were loose enough to hide most of her figure, they were definitely still form fitting enough to prove that she had curves in the right places. Then there was her voice. While her voice could pass for a man’s, it was androgynous and could go either way if anything.

And now, with a hint of red on her cheeks, Guide let go of her shirt and looked away. “I… I can’t believe you didn’t notice I’m a girl. Maybe you’re not a ‘Hero’ after all.”

I felt like I should apologize. That had to be rude, right? But right as I reached a hand out and opened my lips to apologize to her…

Guide turned back to look at me and smiled before saying, “Just kidding. Did I trick you?”

I stared right into her eyes, causing her to blink and tilt her head, as I thought…

Shit. She’s cute.

Chapter 8

So.

Guide turned out to be a girl. Not just a girl, but an incredibly cute one who I struggled to remain calm around once I discovered the truth.

And that was only the beginning of my problems. Or really, it didn’t even count as a problem, I was just being dramatic to mentally cope. The actual beginning of my problems, aside from the beginning that I was in a game-like world with permadeath and all that, and aside from the original beginning that involved me being born, was the realization that all the mods I installed before may or may not be active.

On one hand, the mods being active meant there were some absolutely busted weapons, armors, and accessories available for me to use that would make some of the vanilla game enemies total laughingstocks. On the other hand, I downloaded some of the most challenging, bullet hell bosses I could find so that I would have worthy enemies to use the broken items against without feeling like it was way too easy.

Not to mention that while I might have mastered the behaviors, stats, and attack patterns of the vanilla game’s enemies and bosses… the mods I had deliberately changed a lot of those things to mix things up and make them even more difficult. For example, one of the mods added a special spider enemy that could fall from trees when hitting them. These spiders were strong enough that they would instantly kill any new player with zero hope of getting away from them. They were unbalanced, unfair, total bullshit, and that was why I refused to ever play permadeath with mods like it on. I could handle unfair bullshit when it just meant I’d respawn with all my things still and get to try again and learn from my mistakes. I didn’t want to deal with unfair bullshit when dealing with it meant a high chance of permanently dying and losing everything.

That meant I needed to be as safe as possible.

And that meant… I had to go some form of ranged build. There was no way I was going to run around with nothing but a sword to fight everybody up close and personal. The slimes? Fine, they still behaved normal, so I was confident in farming them with melee weapons. But anything else? I was going to have to go with some form of ranged weapons or magic. I could even potentially go a beast master or summoner build to just let others do the fighting for me while I stayed back and focused on survival.

But… that meant taming and summoning creatures who would be dying for me. In a world where everything was real, taming and summoning things to fight and die for me was different than in a video game where their deaths didn’t matter. They were just code in a program, not living beings.

So, beast master and summoner builds probably weren’t options I would ever feel comfortable pursuing. At least, not until I had access to such strong monsters and summons that I could safely use them to farm weaker monsters.

Ninja was an option. It was a pretty niche build that was a hybrid of melee and range with a high focus on speed and evasion, but that speed and evasion also meant they were glass cannons. Masters of not getting hit, but practically every boss beyond the midgame could kill them with a single attack when they did get hit.

Then again… maybe melee was the way to go after all if I made myself as defensive as possible. I could completely disregard high damage output to instead focus almost purely on my defense and boosting my health regeneration as high as possible. Defense, damage reduction, and health regeneration. The only problem then would be the modded enemies and bosses capable of completely ignoring armor since some mod developers were assholes who thought it would be fun to just say “fuck you” to an entire playstyle.

And even worse… if one of the mods was active in this new world that I feared might have been, it meant bosses would naturally spawn even sooner than they did in the vanilla game. In vanilla, the first boss automatically spawned after seven days. With the mod, it spawned after three days.

We were on the second day already.

I had fewer than forty-eight hours to prepare for the first boss fight, probably, and I had nothing but the bare minimum of starting gear.

The sound of a door opening and closing grabbed my attention.

Looking up from the table, I saw Guide standing at the doorway of the extra room I made for her. “Sorry,” she said when she noticed me looking at her. “I just… have this urge to do it sometimes.”

The endearing sight of somebody who just really loved opening and closing doors to the point where they felt an urge to do it was enough for me to calm down a bit.

However, what I heard next did the opposite of calm me down.

“Also… about what you said. About us being family,” Guide continued.

“Ri-right,” I replied.

“I… I like it. Being your brother doesn’t make any sense, but I still want us to be family! So, if it wouldn’t bother you… I know I’m nowhere near as capable of you, but I promise to always do my best helping you however I can! Would you… be my family?”

I felt my heart throb when I heard that, and it throbbed so powerfully that I was pretty sure it was actually trying to jump out through my chest. Having a girl want to be “family” with me was completely different from a man wanting to be family with me. But… regardless of what gender mods turned Guide into, Guide was still Guide. Only her physical sex was different. Aside from that, and the fact that she was real instead of a programmed chunk of code in a game, she was still the same, helpful NPC that she had always been.

She might have been a cute girl instead of a man, but she was still my bro. Something as weak as gender could never disrupt a bromance.

And if I was really her family, then I would accept her as my bro regardless of how much I wanted to see under her shirt again!

“You might be a girl, but you’re still my bro,” I said, looking Guide directly in the eyes. “Being brothers transcends physical gender. What you have between your legs has no effect on who you are in my heart, and you have always been, and always will be, my brother. That is what it means to be family.”

I wasn’t sure how Guide would react to any of that… but I definitely wasn’t expecting her to tear up. Not only did she tear up, but she tightly wrapped her arms around me for a hug, and hugging her made it extremely obvious that she was a girl given what I felt pressing up against my chest.

But it was hard to be a pervert thinking about that nice feeling against my chest when I heard Guide whisper, “Thank you, Player. Even if you are just entertaining me… I’ve never had a family before, so this means a lot to me.”

I wrapped my arms around her to return to the hug, placing one hand on the back of her head while my other gave her back a few pats. “You have no idea how much you’ve helped me over the years.” Especially with reminding me about crafting recipes. “In a… probably cringey way, even before we were brought here, I’d sooner call your old self stuck in a video game my family than I’d call any of my actual relatives family.”

Guide nuzzled her face up against the side of my neck, letting me feel her breath against my skin which caused me to feel many different, but nice, things all at once. “Player…”

“Yeah?”

“Did you know that you can find metal ores by exploring underground and mining them with a pickaxe?”

Even if she became her own person, old, generic advice habits died hard, apparently. “I had no idea. Thanks.”

“Really? You didn’t know even though you said you played the game for so long?”

“I’m teasing you. I knew that. Consider it revenge for teasing me earlier.”

In possibly the most adorable way ever, Guide tightened the hug even more and gently “smacked” her hands against my back as if she was throwing a tantrum for being teased.

I was going to have to tease her more often.

Chapter 9

It didn’t matter how sore my body was. If the mods that I believed were active in this world that I feared were active, then I had basically no time at all to prepare for the upcoming boss fight. All I had was some wood and slime. I needed way more than that.

That meant it was time to go mining.

If enough of the world was the same as it was in the game, then I would be able to find cave systems that contain ores, chests valuable weapons and accessories, and old pots that could give random buff potions upon breaking. There was also the chance of finding the hearts that might permanently increase my health, but I couldn’t hope for too many of those. Ores and chests were more important.

“Are you going out?” Guide asked as I broke a hole in the dirt wall for me to jump over the moat through.

“Yeah,” I answered. “Gotta get spelunking if I want to stand a chance tomorrow night. Want me to make a bridge for you so you can get across and walk around outside the wall, or should I seal the wall back up?”

“Could you leave it open with a bridge? Maybe I’ll be able to find or do something useful while you’re gone!”

“Got it, but don’t push yourself too hard.”

“Please, Player. You are the last one who should be saying something like that.”

“Just take out any more birds you see so we can have food for dinner, alright?”

Guide perked up as soon as she heard that. “I’ll do my best!”

With that, I created a dirt bridge to cross the moat with and went off in… well, the first direction I picked, really. I had no idea where to go. The forest was just dense enough that I couldn’t see too far into the distance, so I had no idea what I might find in any direction. The good news was that, thanks to the minimap, I would always be able to find my way home.

Now, I was a fan of removing maps and quest markers from games because they made things too easy. I wanted to get lost in games. I wanted a big, vast world to explore with the genuine possibility of getting lost and having no way to find my way back to my base.

That sounded fun.

But not when my actual life was at risk.

With my actual life at risk, yes, please, give me as many immersion-breaking tools as possible so that I wouldn’t get lost and get myself killed in some stupid way.

And speaking of getting killed in stupid ways… I made sure to keep an eye out for the treetops seeing as how I had no idea if any of those bullshit spiders would drop down and instant kill me.

I didn’t find much for the first hour or so of exploring the forest, heading west from the house… which barely deserved to be called a house, but that was beside the point.

While I might not have found anything like a natural cave entrance or giant trees with chests hidden inside of them, I did find something that didn’t exist in the original game: berry bushes. That was when I discovered that I could hit the bushes with my pickaxe, sword, or even just start to pick the berries from them and get the same result no matter what. Regardless of which three of those I did, just one hit, or a couple seconds of picking berries, would cause a berry-related item to drop to the ground and get sucked into my inventory.

I found [Blueberries], [Raspberries], and the most important one… [Blackberries]. Really, the last one was only the most important because they were my favorite. Each berry also counted as a ready-to-eat food item that would refresh the buff I got from eating the bird, but it seemed like there wasn’t any way to farm the berries. I tried breaking the bushes to loot them or get seeds to drop or something, but breaking them only… well, broke them. I got a couple pieces of wood from each bush but nothing else. Still, it meant I had two more food items I could eat or share with Guide later in case we didn’t get any more birds.

I also picked every [Mushroom] I saw, since those were typically used in creating and upgrading potions, and picked a couple of plants. To be more specific, I picked the [Shaded Sleeper] plant, which was a grey and blue flower that only grew in the shadows right up against the trunks of trees, and the [Day Glow] plant, which was a pretty generic plant found all over the surface which always bloomed during day with a gentle glow around its sunflower-like flower.

The [Shaded Sleeper] was what I was most excited about. [Day Glow] was used for some pretty helpful potions, but none that would help me against the boss or help with my survival right away. The [Shaded Sleeper], however, could be crafted into a potion that would make all my attacks inflict a debuff known as “lethargic” in the game. I had no idea if the debuff would be named the same thing and have the same effect in this world, but the debuff caused all non-boss monsters to temporarily lose about half their movement speed and jump height.

And, because I harvested both plants while they were in their ideal growing conditions, that meant I got their respective seeds as well so we could start growing our own.

But I really needed a cave.

At that point, I was almost tempted to just try digging straight down until I dropped into one… but that sounded like a horrible idea given the potential dangers and permanent death. There was also the fact that I wanted to conserve my energy as much as possible. My body already felt like it was breaking down, so the last thing I needed to do was dig my way down into the world in hopes of getting lucky and dropping into a cave… that I might not have any way out of.

Searching for a natural cave was my best option and the one I committed to.

And after about another hour of walking, which put me at around six miles away from the house, I found one.

The terrain had been growing rockier as I approached the cave, so I had my hopes up, and my hopes were satisfied once I noticed a large opening in a small hill behind some trees. There were even some pots already visibly sitting on the ground inside of it, confirming once again just how game-like the world was.

There were few things more out of a video game than breaking pots for loot.

So, with a torch in hand and many more in my inventory that I made from killing more slimes and breaking bushes for wood, I entered the cave and made sure to light it up as I went. It didn’t take long before I came across a drop that would require some digging or building to make traversable, so I went back to those pots and broke them instead by swinging my sword into them.

I broke three pots in total and received a pretty good assortment of loot from them for a new character. Each one dropped some money and then their respective items.

The last one that got sucked into my inventory was the one I was most hyped for.

//[Copper Coin] x27 added to inventory!

//[Silver Coin] x2 added to inventory!

//[Toughness Potion] x2 added to inventory!

//[Rope] x16 added to inventory!

//[Bomb] added to inventory!

That’s right.

I got a bomb.

Chapter 10

//New Achievement!

//[Absolute Menace]

//Awarded for breaking some pots! Not just the pots, but the wompots and chipots, too.

//Reward: [Invincible Pot]

//New Achievement!

//[Boom!]

//Awarded for acquiring any explosive consumable! Bakuretsu, bakuretsu!

//Reward: [Explosion Loli Figurine]

I looked at the two new achievements I got… and the second one made me think that I must have downloaded some mod which added questionable anime references or something that I forgot about. But that aside, the new items looked like they were bunch of just decorative since their descriptions didn’t mention any uses when I checked them in my inventory, so I didn’t spend too much time thinking about them.

I did, however, start to worry about my inventory space. Sure, there was barely anything in it at the moment, but it was filling up pretty quickly now that I was inside of a cave. It was only going to fill up even faster if I found more pots, chests, and ores as well.

And on that note, I needed to explore more of the cave.

With the new rope I acquired, I walked over to that drop I found before and placed down three blocks worth of rope for me to climb down. That reached the next level below, so—

Wait.

I realized something.

I placed the rope down because I doubted I would be able to make that jump normally. I wouldn’t be able to jump down to the next level without hurting myself, and I also wouldn’t be able to jump back up to the entrance’s level. But, in the game, that jump would be easy. The player character was able to jump higher than they were tall pretty easily. That was also why I built the wall around the house so tall, because zombies could easily jump about twice their height.

But was the same true here?

I didn’t want to test jumping down to the next level to test out fall damage and whatnot, but I did use the rope to climb down and then tried jumping back up on my own.

Nope.

I was only able to jump as high as I normally could.

I didn’t know whether or not that applied to monsters being able to jump as high as they could in the game as well, but I was sure I would eventually find out. For now, though, I found one of the first things I was hoping to find: stone.

Admittedly, I probably could have just dug some up while I was looking for the cave, but I figured I would save my energy for once I actually found a cave. Now that I did, I got to work mining some stone blocks out of the wall after placing down some more torches so I wouldn’t be mining in the dark.

//[Stone] x13 added to inventory!

That was probably enough stone. Well, actually… it wouldn’t be enough if I wanted to build a furnace and whatnot later, but it was enough for me to craft some arrows once I was ready to. Before I could craft some arrows, though, I wanted to find some spider webs to make string from so that I could actually make a bow. Did that make realistic sense? Using spider webs as a bow string? Probably not, but the game didn’t care.

And fortunately, just like in the game, it didn’t take too long to find some spider webs. They were all abandoned, thankfully, but each one was the size of my head which made me feel pretty… strange. I was worried about what spiders were around making so many large webs, but the chances were that the webs just existed as part of the environment without anything to actually spin them, so I didn’t worry too much about it and just swung my pickaxe through them to break them instead.

//[Spider Silk] x21 added to inventory!

I actually managed to get the exact amount of silk that I’d need from the cluster of webs I found. So, with that, I placed down the workbench I brought with me which enabled a few new crafting recipes. One of those recipes was turning seven pieces of [Spider Silk] into one [String], so I made three of those. Then, combining ten [Wooden Log]s with three [Spider Silk]s created the [Wooden Bow] for me.

//[Wooden Bow]

//Damage: 4

//Knockback: None

//Critical Rate: 2%

And since I had a bow, I had reason to actually make arrows. Those were only one [Stone] and one [Wooden Log] for ten of them, so I crafted a hundred and thirty to use up all the stone I mined so far.

//[Wooden Arrow]

//Damage: 3

//Knockback: Tiny

//Velocity: Average

If I remembered the damage calculation right, damage for ranged weapons was the combination of the actual weapon and ammunition, so I’d be dealing seven damage before any modifiers with the bow and arrows. That was better than what I had and would also let me fight from a distance, so I considered that a pretty huge upgrade.

And given that I heard the sloshy, wet sound of jumping slimes coming from the darkness deeper into the cave, it sounded like I was about to have a good opportunity to test my bow out.

With my bow on the hotbar now and arrows equipped in the ammo slots I had, I delved deeper into the cave while placing torches on the walls every single time it started to get dark again. And once I reached the end of the passage I was in, it opened up into a large room too vast to see all of with multiple different cave branches connected to it. It was in this room that I also found the source of the slimy sounds I heard, spotting multiple slimes of different colors hopping around… but also some ants and spiders large enough that they reached up to my knees.

Slimes were vanilla, so I expected those. The ants and spiders, though, were absolutely modded creatures which really confirmed my theory about mods affecting the world.

Now, while there were way too many in that room for me to comfortably deal with on my own, none of them aggroed onto me yet. That meant I had time to go mine some more stone.

And with that stone, I built a wall. A wall that blocked off the room from the passage I was in, but I left a few, one-block-large holes in it for me to shoot through. That way, I could clear out the room from the safety of behind the wall without worrying about any of the monsters being able to reach me.

I took my bow in hand and prepared my first arrow.

I never used a bow in real life before, but I found myself… unnaturally competent with it? Actually, that could be applied to everything so far. I only really noticed it when I was taking steps away from the slime after each attack as if it were muscle memory, but the same applied to pretty much everything I was doing. Even swinging the sword and pickaxe felt natural. Mining rocks and chopping down trees? No problem. I felt like I already had tons of experience in doing those things despite having never done any of them outside of video games.

So, with new confidence in myself, I took aim and loosed an arrow at the nearest slime.

And… the arrow missed. Not only did it miss, but the sound of it hitting the ground and breaking alerted all the monsters in the room to my presence, and they all came charging at my stone wall.

Fortunately, a one-block-large hole wasn’t big enough for anything to fit through it in the game, and none of these monsters would be capable of breaking through a stone wall. That meant I could take my time dealing with them without worrying about getting hurt. Not only that, but them coming right up to my wall would make it way easier to actually hit them.

I was going to need to practice my aim later. Even if actually using the bow felt natural to me, that didn’t mean I had good aim with it, apparently.

But there was a problem.

Slimes were pretty squishy, and the giant insects were only big enough to reach up to my knees. While they never would have been able to fit through a one-block-large hole in the game, even if it looked like they should have been able to realistically squeeze through, they couldn’t. Nothing but ranged projectiles could go through such small spaces.

But I wasn’t in a game. I was in some sort of world that featured a hybrid of game logic and realism. That meant that while I might have been able to build a stone wall like it was the easiest thing in the world to do… my enemies were still able to squeeze through the holes I left for shooting through.

I was in trouble.

Chapter 11

“How are you this stupid?!” I shouted at myself while running back toward the rope, taking potshots with my bow at the pursuing monsters behind me.

I could not have felt any dumber than I did. Sure, in a video game, it made sense that the slimes and giant insects wouldn’t be able to fit through those small holes I left. Even if their graphical sprites looked like they should have been able to squeeze through, and even if they would have been able to in reality, they just didn’t. That was how the game worked. Was it realistic? No, but nobody questioned it.

But I wasn’t in a video game! Yes, the world might have been nonsensically close to one in a bunch of ways, but I wasn’t literally in a game!

I needed to be even more cautious than I thought. I thought I was being careful enough by preparing a wall to shoot through for some of the weakest monsters in the game… but no. I needed to be even more careful. I potentially needed to be even more cautious than that one character I heard of online before where his entire gimmick was that he was an overly cautious hero who was always prepared for everything.

That needed to be me. I needed to become him, but even more cautious.

Yet, the idea I came up with was arguably anything but cautious and depended entirely on hoping that the world’s logic for bombs remained the same as it did in the game.

Bombs detonated three seconds after being thrown. They could also bounce and roll.

The monsters chasing me were about two seconds behind me.

If I gently tossed the bomb a little bit ahead of me, but not so much that it would roll or bounce even farther ahead, then that would give me two seconds to run past its explosion radius. That would also give the monsters behind me enough time to get right on top of it.

I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to climb up the rope quickly enough to avoid the monsters catching up and knocking me off, and standing my ground to fight them wasn’t an option since they had enough numbers to overwhelm me, so using the bomb seemed like the only good choice I had. Not to mention that, in the game, bombs did one hundred points of damage. As long as I wasn’t at the center of the explosion, it wouldn’t be able to kill me since I had full health.

The rope was about ten seconds ahead of me. Once I reached it, I’d be at a dead end unless I spent the time trying to climb up it, and I didn’t have full faith in myself to climb up it in time.

I had more faith in the bomb’s timing and my ability to run past it than I did in my ability to physically climb up a rope.

Throwing things and running was easy. Climbing was not.

I was born and raised in a city. I never had some adventurous outdoor life where I climbed trees and all that! The core and arm strength just wasn’t there!

So, I had to open my inventory, move the bomb to my hotbar, and then take it off my hip where it appeared on my body. Then, following a deep breath, I tossed the bomb in front of me a little bit and ran past it as quickly as I could while counting down in my head.

Three…

Two…

One…!

I dove to the ground to try and get a bit of extra distance between me and the bomb while also getting low just to avoid any potential debris being launched from the explosion. Speaking of the explosion, it was loud. That made sense considering it was a bomb being set off inside of a cave, but even so, it left my ears ringing and I felt the blast throughout my entire body.

But when I looked at my health… it was still full.

I also got another achievement.

//New Achievement!

//[Multi-Kill]

//Awarded for killing multiple enemies at once! Killtacular!

//Reward: [Referential Multi-Kill Medal]

A… what?

Wait, before looking at the item I just got from that achievement, I needed to confirm that the monsters following me were actually dead. The last thing I needed was to get distracted by something only for one of them to sneak up on me and kill me.

Fortunately, when I turned around, all I saw was a cloud of dust and dirt with various bits of monster gore scattered across the cave’s interior as well as a large hole in the ground and dozens of items floating above the surface of the floor waiting for me to loot them.

I let out a breath I didn’t realize I was holding in and wiped my arm across my forehead. “That… was closer than it should have been. And that trick won’t work again.” Not to mention it wouldn’t work against any monsters with more than a hundred health, either, and only the very beginner monsters of the game had under that.

For now, I stepped into the new hole I made so that I could loot everything the bomb destroyed.

//[Dirt] x15 added to inventory!

//[Stone] x11 added to inventory!

//[Copper Coin] x87 added to inventory!

//[Silver Coin] x4 added to inventory!

//[Slime] x8 added to inventory!

//[Ant Leg] x2 added to inventory!

//[Baby Spider Eye] x3 added to inventory!

“Nothing about those spiders deserved to be called ‘baby,’” I said before opening up my inventory to check out that achievement item I got.

//[Referential Multi-Kill Medal]

//Vanity Accessory

So, it was officially my first accessory, but only a vanity one. That meant I could safely equip it in one of the vanity accessory slots which were usually used to override the appearance of a different accessory. Anything in the vanity slots didn’t give their effects, but that didn’t matter when it was just for vanity in the first place.

I equipped it because why not?

As soon as I moved it into one of the vanity accessory slots, a shiny medal that looked like some sort of military reward popped up over the left of my [Wooden Vest]. It had a green background and five, silver stars sitting inside of its circle. Seeing that, I understood why it was called what it was.

It also made me wonder if there would be anything like a killionaire reference since that one only referenced a killtacular.

But back to business.

I returned to the useless wall I made and made a hole in it large enough for me to walk through after checking out the room to see if it was empty. There were another couple of slimes in there that must have recently spawned, but it was empty aside from that and slimes were more than manageable for me to deal with. In fact, I dealt with them before properly heading into the open room. It took me more arrows than I’d like to admit, but I did manage to kill both of them before they could reach me. I just had to keep on switching between which one I was shooting at to keep knocking them back whenever they started getting close. Though, even if they did get close, I could always just walk away from them.

Now, with the room seemingly empty, I stepped into it and started placing some torches down to light it up. And as I made my way toward the center of the room, I noticed something in the darkness reflecting the light from the torches. Upon getting closer, whatever it was even began to sparkle a little.

The outline of a chest grew more and more obvious the closer I got until I was finally close enough to see it in full.

A golden chest.

I couldn’t have been any happier than I was to find it. The chest alone made my entire trip worth it. Well, hopefully. There was always the chance that there wouldn’t by any good accessories in it. But even so, it was a golden chest, and that meant it was guaranteed to either have a useful accessory or weapon in it!

I stepped forward and—

The chest began to open on its own as a rather fleshy, wet noise came from inside of it.

“There’s… there’s no way, right?” I asked, taking a step back… only for the chest’s lid to swing open and reveal a terrifying mass of teeth inside of it.

Mimics were supposed to be enemies only available after killing a certain boss that would send the world into “hard” mode.

But… one of the difficulty mods I installed made it so mimics could show up before then just as an extra “fuck you” to the player.

…

I was fucked.

Chapter 12

I was genuinely fucked.

Mimics were rare spawns found throughout the world’s underground once the world was pushed into its “hard” mode. They could deal hundreds of damage per hit even against good armor, had over a thousand health, high defense, and were deceptively fast. They moved like slimes in the sense that they “hopped” everywhere, but they hopped much faster… and were also capable of lunging at extreme speed straight at their target, AKA the player, AKA me.

The difficulty mod not only made it so that they could spawn before the world’s hard mode, but made it so that they could fucking travel through walls. It was impossible to trap them because of that, since trapping them was a common method of dealing with them in the vanilla game.

I was legitimately fucked.

Even if I hit it, I would only do a single point of damage due to its high defense against my weapons’ low damage. If I got hit even once, I would instantly die. Running away wasn’t an option because it would have a higher speed than me, and it wouldn’t give up its chase until one of us was dead anyways.

I was actually about to die.

The mimic lunged at me and I barely jumped out of the way in time. And to make matters worse, it landed over near my exit, so it basically blocked me from escaping anyways. The only places I had to run were into one of the other cave branches connected to the room, but that would require running into the unknown darkness where other monsters or even traps might have been waiting for me.

Once again, the mimic lunged at me, and I barely jumped out of the way. The only reason I was able to dodge it at all was because I was familiar with the timing of its attacks. It would hop three times and then, if it didn’t hit the player with any of those three hops, it would lunge. There was about a second of buildup between the third hop of a series and the lunge attack, so I knew to jump as soon as it was about to lunge. Even then… it almost grazed me each time I dodged. The only reason I was still alive was because of my experience with the mimic, and that experience wouldn’t keep me alive forever. All it would take is a single mistake for me to die.

But at the same time…

Knowing that I was so close to death… was… exciting.

I felt… alive?

My whole life, I was just some guy with shitty parents who grew up sheltered in the city. I went to good schools, had everything provided for me, and then bailed as soon as I was old enough to get out from the authoritarian controllers known as my parents. Since then, I just worked whatever random minimum wage jobs I could find, and I was happy that way. I worked, play games, and repeated. Life was simple and that was all life needed to be.

But for the first time—no. It would be wrong to say it was the first time. Instead, it was the second time. The first time was when Guide suddenly and basically flashed me, and the second time was fighting the mimic and knowing I might die at any second.

I felt alive.

No matter how absolutely terrifying the situation was, and no matter how confused I might have been about everything going on… I never once wished it wasn’t happening. Even when I let the slime attack me and felt like I got slugged in the chest by a pro boxer, I was having fun.

After all, what kind of coward wouldn’t be ecstatic about getting transported into a world based off their favorite game to live and fight there instead of having to go work some minimum wage job dealing with rude customers all day?

And with the risk of death being permanent… I looked at the mimic after dodging it again and said, “Sorry, but I can’t let you kill me. No way after getting brought to a world like this.”

Sure, I was fucked, but that didn’t mean I was going to roll over and let it win. There was still something I could try.

After the next dodge, I hurried into my inventory and unequipped the medal I got, placing it on my hotbar instead which let me hold it in my hand.

One jump.

Two jumps.

Three jumps.

Lunge.

As soon as the mimic landed after its lunge, I ran up to where it was, familiarized myself with the exact timing and positioning of how it opened its mouth mid-jump to try and bite me, and waited while stepping back. I was probably only going to have one good shot at my idea, and it might not even work, but I had to try it.

One jump.

The mimic jumped toward me, landing a foot in front of me.

Two jumps.

The mimic jumped again, its mouth opening a quarter of the way into the jump and closing right before landing, meaning its mouth was most open at the peak height of the jumps.

Three jumps.

The mimic jumped. At the height of its jump, its mouth was open as wide as it could go, revealing the horrifying mass of jagged teeth inside of its false body…

And I threw the medal accessory right into its mouth.

The mimic landed, chewed on what I threw into its mouth, and…

//Taming Success!

//[Mimic] has been successfully tamed!

//New Achievement!

//[Monster Tamer]

//Awarded for taming a monster! Why fight the monsters when you can befriend them?

//Reward: [Universal Monster Treat]

A golden “5%” floated up over the mimic’s body, signifying that there was only a five percent chance of successfully taming the mimic… and that it worked.

Monsters in the game were tamed by throwing their preferred items at them. Things like spiders preferred any critter captured with a net, slimes preferred bottles of water, and so on. Each monster had a different rate of success, with the rarer and more powerful monster having lower chances of success. Sometimes, it might take one water bottle to tame a slime with a 75% chance of success. Other times, somebody might get unlucky and require a dozen bottles of water.

Then there was the mimic. Mimics required any random accessory as a taming item. At the point in the game where mimics usually became available, the player would often have dozens of spare accessories they didn’t need anymore, and those could freely be sacrificed in pursuit of taming a mimic. On top of that, the accessory had to be thrown into its mouth, which could only be done when the mimic was in the middle of an attack. Given that the game was previously 2D, being close enough to throw the accessory in made it impossible to dodge out of the way in time of its attack. But since we were in a 3D world, I was able to jump to the side after throwing the accessory to avoid getting hit.

To tame a mimic before they were even supposed to be available… on my first attempt… was nothing but a pure miracle.

My new pet mimic hopped up to me, opened up its top, and stuck out a long tongue that it used to lick my face with. I didn’t even care if it covered my face with its drool, I was just happy that I was alive and had an OP-for-the-time pet to protect me. I was apprehensive about using the monster taming system before due to not wanting to permanently lose a pet I might get attached to… but I wasn’t going to be losing a mimic  against anything the early game might have to throw at me. Well, there would still be some trouble against the boss, but still. With how much health and defense the mimic had, it would easily outlast me in any of the early boss fights.

…

I got a pet mimic.

I also felt like throwing up from just how nervous and excited I was.

Chapter 13

“Who’s a good mimic? That’s right, you are!” I said to my new best friend as the mimic repeatedly dragged that oversized tongue over my face. I had to be careful to shut my mouth whenever its tongue was against my face, but it was fine. More importantly, I realized that the mimic basically acted like a dog. It happily licked away at my face as I stroked my hands against the sides of its chest of a body. “You might be a terrifying monster in disguise with way too many teeth, but you’re still a good mimic! Also, you need a name. I guess to keep up with tradition… I’ll just call you Mimic.”

It wasn’t like I ever bothered naming my monsters when I played the game originally anyways. That meant they always just stayed with whatever their generic species name was. So, really, all I did was change my mimic’s name of Mimic… to Mimic.

Oh well.

More importantly, I heard one of those wet, slimy sounds in the distance. Looking over there, I noticed that a large, yellow slime dropped down from one of the cave branches that were higher up. Unlike me, monsters didn’t take fall damage, so it was allowed to make such a drop without instantly splattering to death like I would have if I tried the same.

And seeing the slime… I didn’t even need to say or think anything. All that mattered was that Mimic detected a threat, so Mimic dealt with said threat.

One jump.

Two jumps.

Three jumps.

Lunge.

Mimic lunged at the slime at full speed, tearing straight through its gelatinous body, instantly killing it and sending chunks of slime flying in every direction.

“You’re beautiful, Mimic,” I praised. That slime would have taken me a dozen hits with a sword and slightly fewer hits with my bow and arrow, yet Mimic instantly killed it. It was like watching a bulldozer up against a sandcastle.

And that was beautiful.

Though, while Mimic might have used its lunge attack to kill the slime, it only did its normal jumps to get back over to me. That was when I realized… that there was something really cute about a sentient “chest” hopping over to me as quickly as it could. Of course, as soon as it reached me, it went back to trying to lick my face.

“Good Mimic,” I praised some more, patting it on its side again. “A tomboy Guide and pet Mimic… that makes it official. This is the best start I’ve ever had on a new character.” Really, there was no way for it to get better outside of maybe finding some random, really rare and overpowered drop. “Alright, Mimic. I’ve still got to do some mining, so you up for the task of being my bodyguard so I can mine in peace?”

Mimic, in response, made some sort of absolutely terrifying gurgling noise from inside of its body. The noise was so… wet sounding, too, which was almost enough to make me shiver in a bad way.

As cute as Mimic was, Mimic was still a pretty scary monster. A cute, but scary, monster.

And thankfully, a loyal monster.

Thanks to Mimic’s protection service, I managed to mine out everything in the large room that was visible on the surface. That included more stone, some blocks of clay, and most importantly… not just copper, but iron as well. Barely enough, but still. I got eleven chunks of [Copper Ore] and four chunks of [Iron Ore]. Actually… it wasn’t enough. That would only be enough to make a new sword or bow. I needed… a lot more ore.

A lot more.

And if I wanted to upgrade our defenses at the house from a dirt wall to a stone wall… I needed a lot more stone, too.

“Hey… Mimic,” I said, looking down at my pet who had been happily killing every single thing that dared to exist in the cave within our sight. “You wouldn’t be able to mine for me, would you?”

Mimic tilted its body back to “look” up at me, got distracted by another slime appearing, then lunged at it.

“Guess not. Alright. So that I don’t disappoint you or Guide, let’s get back to mining.”

Of course, not before walking around the room to pick up all the monster drops from Mimic’s murder spree. Mimic couldn’t loot anything itself, so I had to walk to wherever it killing something to pick up the drops myself. Thanks to that, I had a bunch more [Slime], [Ant Leg]s, and [Baby Spider Eye]s. I couldn’t remember what those latter two items were used for since they were modded, but [Slime] was something that stayed pretty consistently useful throughout the game as something flammable.

As… something flammable.

The world was modded.

Slime was flammable.

One of my favorite items not available until far later in the game, only available at a point where it wouldn’t even be useful against the toughest available enemies at the time, was a flamethrower that used slime as fuel.

But I recalled that, thanks to the power of mods, there was an earlier flamethrower of sorts that was available for crafting. I couldn’t remember the exact details, but I remembered it being crafted with [Wooden Log]s, a [Torch], some [Slime], and one other item that was escaping me. I also knew it was crafted at an anvil, so that meant I needed to mine some more iron so that I would have enough to make one.

What was that last item?

I’d have to ask Guide about it later. Guide’s whole point as an NPC was to basically tell players what crafting recipes called for what, so I was sure she’d be able to help me out.

I really wanted a flamethrower. As strong as Mimic was, it was the lunging attack which really made it powerful, but it only did that after three normal jumping attacks. Honestly, Mimic would barely be able to deal any damage to the first boss with how limited its attacks were. It might land a few hits with the lunging attack, but that would be it. Even just shooting my [Wooden Bow] would deal more damage per second than Mimic.

That meant I needed a good weapon to fight with.

And given that the first boss was known for summoning enemies to help it out, a flamethrower would do amazing for me.

I may or may not have also just wanted to play with a flamethrower. What sheltered city boy didn’t want to go wild with a flamethrower at some point in life?

Chapter 14

“I want to die,” I groaned as me and Mimic walked through the forest together, heading back home.

At the cost of my body, I managed to explore long enough to find two more veins of copper which left me with a total of twenty-seven [Copper Ore], and I also found another vein of iron which brought me to a total of thirteen [Iron Ore]. I probably could have mined more had I gone deeper into those connected cave branches, but I kept on thinking of Guide. Every time her face popped into my mind, I felt an urge to protect her, and that inspired me to suffer through mining dozens of stone chunks out from the walls and floor of the cave so that I could upgrade our dirt wall to a stone wall. I also needed that stone to create a furnace and more arrows anyways, so it was just a good idea overall to mine a bunch more stone.

But every single time I mentioned wanting to die, Mimic made sure to lick my face which always resulted in me reassuring it that I didn’t want to actually die. All I actually wanted to do was complain.

There was just something about complaining about things that always made them feel more tolerable.

“Alright, Mimic, that’s us,” I said as the dirt walls surrounding the house came into view. “There’s a cute girl living with us. Make sure not to eat her, alright?”

Mimic made another one of those sounds inside of its body which I just could not get used to hearing no matter how many times I heard it.

I was sure there wouldn’t actually be any problems between Mimic and Guide, though. In the game, tamed monsters never posed any issues for NPCs. They basically ignored each other’s existence. Only Guide and one other NPC ever even had dialogue lines related to tamed monsters, and Guide’s line was just to let the player know that it was possible to tame them in the first place.

That made me wonder whether or not she’d actually have a response to me taming a rare monster on my second day. I kind of hoped she did. I wanted to hear her praise me some more.

Though, I had to admit. Part of me was imagining her coming running out from behind the wall to greet me as soon as she saw us coming back. That didn’t happen, though. In fact, I couldn’t see her at all. She wasn’t outside the walls anywhere I could see, and I couldn’t see her when looking in through the gap in the wall, either.

Admittedly, I stopped walking so slowly when I got a bad feeling that something was wrong.

Me and Mimic rushed over the bridge to get inside the walls and looked around. Guide wasn’t anywhere to be seen.

I swung open the door to the house next and—

“Player… geez… how many times… do you want me to prove I’m a girl…”

I found Guide curled up on the floor next to the table with some drool leaking out from her mouth onto the floor, creating a small puddle of it.

She was dreaming.

…

She was dreaming about me.

I clapped my hands together and looked up at the sky. “I’m sorry for never believing in you before, God, but I believe you now. Thank you.”

A couple hours later of me lazing around in the grass outside of the walls, specifically staying outside of them so that Mimic would get line of sight on other monsters and charge off to murder them so I could collect the drops later, I heard a familiar and sleepy voice call out to me from the hole in the wall. “Player? Is that you?” Guide asked, rubbing an arm over her eyes. “Ah! It is!”

I raised a single hand to wave it at her and immediately regretted it. The longer I lazed around for, the more my muscles hurt. “Morning, sleepyhead.”

“A-ah… did… you catch me sleeping?”

“Yep. Didn’t want to disturb you, so I figured I’d wait out here with my new pet until you woke up.”

“You didn’t need to do that. You could have—pet?”

“Mimic!” I called out.

A few jumps later after hunting down another slime in the distance and Mimic came right up to us. Mimic stopped next to me, looked up at Guide, and then licked my face.

“Guide, meet Mimic,” I said. “Mimic, meet Guide.”

Mimic looked at her again, made its disturbing, signature noise, and then noticed another slime to exterminate which prompted a lunge into the distance.

The funny thing about mimics was that their lunge had no distance cap as far as I could tell. They simply lunged at their target no matter how far away it was as long as it was within their line of sight. So even if some random slime spawned into existence several sports fields away from where we were, if Mimic saw it, Mimic killed it with a lunge that looked like it was flying through the air.

“That’s—that’s amazing!” Guide said. “You tamed a mimic so soon?! I was sure you would have a successful trip, but I had no idea it would go that well! But… wait. How is that even possible? Mimics shouldn’t be—”

“Mods, Guide. Mods,” I answered. “I didn’t explain that revelation to you, did I?”

“Mods? I… do not believe so.”

“In that case, time for more explaining.”

One explanation about mods later and Guide was fully caught up on everything that I knew.

And ever since I told her about the fact that she used to be a man… she couldn’t stop laughing. “It—it makes so much sense now! No wonder you thought I was a man. Ah… I had no idea you were such a perverted hero to download those sorts of mods. I’m surprised you didn’t get one that changes my outfit into something more revealing!”

Apparently, Guide enjoyed getting teasing whenever she could tell that I was embarrassed about something. “Sh-shut up. I respected you too much to download a mod like that, but there were options for it. Heck… one of them made your—your umm… chest, like three times the size of your head and gave it physics to bounce with every step.”

Guide looked genuinely horrified when she heard that. “I—I see. Thank… thank you for not downloading one of those. But… there is a part of me… that is curious about just how popular that mod was.”

“Should I lie for your own sake, or give you the truth?”

Guide gulped. “The—the truth, please.”

“It was one of the most downloaded mods. It had a couple hundred thousand downloads.”

“A—a couple hundred thousand? Then, you mean… hundreds of thousands… of people… downloaded a mod to make me like that?”

“Yep.”

“Perhaps… it is a good thing you were taken away from the rest of humanity.”

“I can’t argue with that one.”

“But still, a mimic! That really is impressive! I suppose I don’t need to give you the advice about how it’s possible to tame monsters by giving them their favorite treat, then.”

“You’re going to have to think up brand new advice unrelated to the game if you want to actually surprise me with some new advice.”

“Hmm… alright. Challenge accepted. I’ll think of something you’ve never heard me say before!”

“I’ll be looking forward to it.”

Guide let out a relaxed sigh and ran her hand through my hair. She ended up sitting down next to me while I explained the mod situation to her, and it didn’t take long for her hand to find its way to my head once she was sitting there. “But I do wonder just what reason you could have had for downloading a mod that turned me into a girl.”

I turned my head away from her as soon as she said that.

“Oh? What’s wrong? Embarrassed for some reason?”

“I’m… I’m not embarrassed,” I answered.

“It’s a good thing your survival skills are better than your lying skills.”

She had me there. “It’s secret.”

“Oh? Is it? Hmm… I wonder… you also mentioned a mod that let you marry every NPC instead of just one, didn’t you?”

“Only—only for the stat boosts!”

“I see. Then… you must have wanted to marry me, for the stat boost, of course, but felt uncomfortable doing that while I was a man. Am I close?”

“Cl-close enough.”

Feeling her fingernails scratching against my scalp made me shiver in a very nice way. “A brave hero who struggles with his feelings has a certain charm to it.”

“What’s—what’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means that I would not have you any other way, Player.”

I finally found the courage to turn my head to look at her again… only to see her staring down at me with such a satisfied smile on her face.

My heart felt like it was ready to pound out of my chest like before, so I turned away again and asked, “Did—did you get more birds?”

“Oh! I did!” Guide shouted, her voice full of excitement.

The next second… dozens of bird corpses were dropped right above my head. Fortunately, they all went into my inventory rather than fall against my face, but it still made me jump a little.

//[Raw Bird] x39 added to inventory!

“Thirty… thirty-nine?” I asked.

“There were quite a few birds brave enough to visit our home!” Guide answered, sounding far too pleased with herself having committed a genocide of the local bird population.

Then there was Mimic who was in the middle of killing every slime in existence.

I was surrounded by muderhobos.

Chapter 15

While I might have been surrounded by murderhobos, Guide’s bird genocide was actually really good for us. Assuming that food didn’t spoil like it did in the original game, that meant we had almost twenty days’ worth of food when split between us. Of course… as soon as we got more NPCs, that was going to change.

And thinking of which, I was going to have to build more houses. That was how it worked in the original game, anyways. While conditions could be met for new NPCs to move in, they wouldn’t actually move in until a house was built for them.

The trader, appropriately named Trader, was typically the next NPC to move in. The requirement for unlocking him was having a total of five gold across all active players on the world. Once there was a total of five gold spread across any number of player inventories, Trader would move in as long as there was an extra house available for him.

As for Trader himself… he was supposed to be an old man with a big, white beard. It was almost guaranteed that I had a mod which would turn him into a cute girl, too, but I had no idea what kind of girl.

Modders could be scary at times with some of their preferences.

I was also worried that Guide might judge me based off of how some future NPCs might look. I… I was sure that I definitely downloaded some mods that that would really… well, for a lack of better words, make some of the NPCs look straight up slutty. Like the doctor NPC. If I remembered correctly, the mod I got for Doctor turned him from a middle-aged man into a young girl with a pretty big chest in a tight nurse uniform of sorts which left little to the imagination.

…

Thankfully, it was possible to dress up NPCs after gaining their trust, so I could always switch their outfits later on for clothes that looked more… normal. It probably wasn’t going to be good for my health if I had to walk around seeing a busty nurse every day. Or actually, in the sense of improving my blood flow by increasing it, maybe it would technically be good for my health.

Actually, when even was the first NPC who was supposed to be a girl in the first place? Probably… either the beast master or druid. Considering the first boss was coming up far sooner than I would have liked it to, it was possible the druid would arrive before the trader since her only requirement was killing any boss. The doctor required the trader to have moved in as well as the player increasing their total health to at least 120, then there was the demolitionist who required the trader as well in addition to the player having some form of explosive consumable in their inventory.

The beast master didn’t require the trader to be in town, but did require me to catch a few different critters first which could only be done with a net sold by the trader. There was also the gunsmith who could move in without too many requirements, their only real requirement being an empty room to move into and the player owning any sort of gun. If I built that flamethrower like I wanted to, then I would have a gun-type weapon that would prompt the gunsmith to move in.

So, the next three NPCs to move in were most likely going to be the trader, druid, and gunsmith. Which one I got first depended on what I got done first. Either grind more monsters until I got up to five gold, defeated the first boss, or built a gun.

Getting the gunsmith first was probably the best option. The gunsmith wasn’t supposed to be unlocked after the first couple of bosses since that was the earliest a gun was available in the vanilla game, but, thanks to the power of mods, I could get a gun and thus the gunsmith sooner. And if I got the gunsmith, I could buy a pretty basic gun and bullets to go with it which could help me out against the boss. The flamethrower I was thinking of wouldn’t be all that great against the actual boss, only good against the adds it summoned, so being able to set the boss on fire before switching to a gun that dealt higher damage per shot would be good.

But having the trader move in would unlock the ability for me to buy basic healing potions from him. Her, rather.

Getting both of them to move in before the boss was probably for the best if I wanted to increase my chances as much as possible, but I had to consider my body’s stamina. Sure, exerting myself and pulling all my muscles didn’t deal damage to my health, but it still made me feel like absolute shit and it hurt just to move around a little. I was already pushing myself beyond my limit.

Never really thought about just how tiring swinging around a pickaxe and axe for so long could be, especially with no prior experience.

I was going to need to gather some more wood at least if I wanted to build another couple of houses. Or, I could be a bit lazy and just add on to the house we already had to basically turn it into an apartment building. One house, multiple rooms. NPCs only really needed a dedicated room rather than a dedicated house, so that could work to spare my body a bit of extra labor.

But at the same time, I needed more metal. I wanted better armor than what I had if possible, and all I had was enough copper to make myself a breastplate. The iron needed to be used for an anvil.

Speaking of which, after heading inside with Guide, I made a furnace, which just looked like a stone oven with a chimney on top, for smelting ore in which did turn out to take actual time. It didn’t instantly turn ore into metal bars like in the game. For copper, it took about five minutes to turn one [Copper Ore] into one [Copper Bar].

If it wasn’t for wanting to upgrade the dirt wall to a stone wall, I would have built another furnace to speed the process up, but there was no need to speed things up other than impatience.

Letting it take its time also meant I had more time to relax. Though, realistically, I needed more than just a few hours of rest. I needed a few days of taking it easy if I didn’t want to mess my muscles up even more.

Fortunately, after the first boss, I would earn some time to take things easy. If I was remembering things right, there was a minimum of seven days before forced boss spawns. And after the first two bosses, the others were all dependent on biomes, so no more would be spawning naturally in the forest until we got further into the world’s progression.

All I had to do was survive the first two bosses. One tomorrow night, then one a week after that. As long as I could survive those two encounters, I would have all the time I wanted to rest and take things easy until I was ready to progress at my own pace.

But for the time being, it would be best to get up and replace the dirt wall with stone while waiting for the ore to smelt.

“Would you like some water?” Guide asked, leaning over in front of me. The way she leaned gave me just the slightest look down her shirt… and I caught her smiling at me once I was able to stop looking down her shirt to look at her eyes instead.

“Ye-yeah, that’d be nice,” I answered.

Guide stood up straight with a satisfied smile and brought out her water bottle which… looked as full as it did before. It must have been like an infinite water bottle for drinking, which was pretty nice. It also made sense. In the same way that NPCs had infinite ammunition in the cases where they used ranged weapons, she had an infinite water bottle.

In the original game, she didn’t actually have a water bottle, but she did have a dialogue line that came up sometimes where she reminded the player to hydrate. That must have been translated into having an infinite water bottle when she became a real person.

That being said, I took the bottle from her and drank about half of it. Then, when I handed it back over… she brought it up to her mouth and wrapped her lips around the exact same opening that mine were just touching and drank the rest of it down.

There was something… exciting about watching her drink from the same water bottle I just used, and even more exciting about the way her throat moved as she gulped the water down.

“Thank you for the treat,” Guide said as she returned the bottle to her inventory, looking right into my eyes as she said that.

A slutty looking nurse didn’t need to be around for my blood flow to improve.

Chapter 16

Dirt wall, replaced.

Ores, smelted.

Anvil, crafted.

Body, dead.

With what little energy I had remaining, I went around chopping down some of the nearby trees until it got dark. The end result was having enough wood to build a few more rooms, but I didn’t yet. Instead, I built a new table and chair for the bonus room that previously only existed so that Guide would have a door to open and close.

Then I realized something.

While in the cave… I didn’t gather more [Spider Silk]. That meant I couldn’t make a bed.

That meant me and Guide were sleeping in chairs or on the floor again.

Because, in the game, only a table, chair, and light source were required for a room to count as a space for NPCs to live in. They never slept in the game, so they didn’t need beds. Having a bed was also important for the player to use to set a spawn point, not that that feature mattered much to me given that I was set to permadeath.

Gathering more silk completely slipped my mind, and I couldn’t have felt any more stupid than I did for making such a simple mistake.

“What’s—what’s wrong?” Guide asked, placing a hand on my shoulder.

“I forgot to get more silk so I could make us beds,” I answered.

“Oh, well, that’s alright! The chairs and floor you have made are more than comfortable enough!”

“That’s because you’ve never experienced the sweet embrace of a bed before.”

“Well, that’s true… I don’t exactly have anything to compare the chairs and floor to.”

“That’s part of what makes this even worse. You deserve a bed to sleep on. I want you to finally experience what it’s like to sleep on a bed, not to mention that it would help my body recover faster, but I forgot all about it until now.” I sighed and slouched over in my chair. To make matters worse, I felt stupid for feeling stupid. There I was, worrying about beds, when I should have been more worried about the fact that I’d be fighting a boss in one day.

I might die. Guide might die. Mimic might die. We could all die and everything might be permanently lost if I failed. There wouldn’t be any escape or running away from the boss, either. It needed to be fought and I needed to win. If I didn’t win…

Yet, I was more concerned about the lack of beds.

Was that my brain being stupid because of how sheltered of a life I lived? Something like not having a bed seemed like a way bigger deal than having to fight some giant monster. It was a very first world problem.

I probably wasn’t cut out for the world I found myself in. Anybody would have been a better choice than me to fight for survival against monsters wanting to kill them, but—

Guide wrapped her arms around me, hugging the side of my head against her chest. “You are doing great, Player. Please, have more confidence in yourself, be prouder of what you have accomplished already. I cannot even begin to imagine what you must be going through, to have been forcibly taken from your world and brought here to one so different, but you’ve been working so hard ever since you arrived. You deserve to feel good about yourself. After all, nobody but you could have accomplished all of this. I may tease you about whether or not you are a hero, but you really are one. So, as my hero, I want you to have more confidence and to be more proud of yourself.”

“That’s… a bit too much praise even for me to handle, especially when I haven’t even done anything that great yet,” I said. As tempted as I was to try and get away from her just because of how embarrassed I felt, I… wasn’t going to deprive myself of something that I always wanted to experience.

“Then I’ll keep on praising you until you’ve gotten used to it.”

Guide was something else. I was already thinking that, even if anybody else would have been a better choice than me… I wasn’t going to throw away my opportunity and would still try my hardest.

But hearing her kind words made me want to try even harder than I was already planning on.

“I’ll do my best,” I said to her.

“You already are,” Guide replied. “What I want is for you to do less and to rest.”

“I promise I will after the boss fight. I’ll even be selfish and ask you to spoil me during my break so that I can be as lazy as possible.”

Guide chuckled a little when she heard that. “I’ll be looking forward to when you ask for a spoiling. Though,” she paused… and held me even closer against her chest. “Doesn’t this already count as spoiling you? Actually… maybe this counts more as spoiling myself if anything.”

And there went my heart again. “And—and what’s that supposed to mean?” I was pretty sure I knew exactly what it meant since I wasn’t some dense idiot who couldn’t recognize flirting, but… I was somebody who was never really flirted with before, so I wasn’t prepared to completely disregard the possibility of her just being nice. I wanted to have some actual confirmation.

“Who knows?” Guide whispered, leaving me without any solid confirmation… but a pretty strong implication.

“You said you wanted me to take it easy, but you’re not making it easy for my heart to do that.”

“Well, I suppose it is a good thing your muscles are what have been strained, not your heart.”

“It’s going to get strained at this rate.”

“Oh, well, I wouldn’t want that. That would just be,” she paused, unwrapping her arms from me and stepping away, “horrible, don’t you think?”

“I feel like it’s a lose-lose situation either way.” At least I wasn’t the only one blushing. Guide had a hint of red coloring her cheeks which made me feel like less of a stereotypical virgin for getting flustered by her. However… when I noticed that Mimic was just sitting there watching us, I gave my pet a poke on the top of its body and asked, “What do you think you’re looking at?”

The next thing I knew, Mimic lashed its tongue out at me, wrapped it around my head, and yanked me out of my chair to bring me toward it.

Needless to say, I blacked out as soon as my head crashed into Mimic’s chest of a body.

Chapter 17

I felt a splitting pain in my head the next time that I woke up and opened my eyes.

My health was still full, though, which made me curious about something. Was it possible to die even if my health didn’t drop to zero? What would happen if, for example, my head got chopped off? Or what if a sword went through my heart? Could I die even with most of my health in place? If it was possible to feel realistic pain without taking damage to my health, then could I die without losing my health?

More importantly, even though I opened my eyes, I couldn’t see anything.

And even though my head had the worst headache I ever felt before, I also felt something warm and soft against her. There was even a familiar scent that I recalled smelling shortly before I lost consciousness.

There was also something across my chest.

When I pulled my head back to look around, I noticed that I was on my back on the floor and that it was Guide’s arm draped over my chest. When I turned my head back onto its side, I saw that it was Guide’s chest my head was being hugged against, and that Guide herself was asleep again.

She must have stayed with me after I passed out.

And speaking of passing out… I remembered the final sight I saw before I did: my pet yanking me toward its body with its tongue.

Looking around the room, I saw Mimic sitting in the corner, and that was when I discovered that it was possible for a chest to look depressed. Mimic’s entire body looked droopy and reminded me of a dog that was scolded and forced to sit in their cage.

As soon as Mimic noticed me awake and looking at it, though, it perked up and was about to jump, but I raised my hand to stop it and shook my head.

Guide was sleeping, so I didn’t want to disturb her, and it was impossible for Mimic’s hopping around to not wake people up given just how heavy and loud it was. Instead, I carefully removed Guide’s arm from my chest and… felt an incredible urge to just cuddle with her, but I couldn’t. It wouldn’t be right to cuddle with somebody in their sleep when we didn’t have that sort of relationship.

Then again… didn’t she basically do just that to me? So, if she did it to me, it was alright if I did it to her, too, right?

No, no. She was probably just staying with me and then fell asleep while watching me, then started cuddling me in her sleep. That was different from intentionally cuddling me while she was awake.

Even if it was a nonsensical world that shouldn’t have existed, consent was still important.

So, instead of embracing my desires, I stood up, walked over to Mimic, and picked it up in my arms so that I could carry it outside instead. There was no problem with letting Mimic hop around outside on the grass, but doing so on the wooden floor inside would just be too noisy.

“You can move again,” I told Mimic before looking up and noticing that it was almost nighttime.

Mimic stuck its tongue out from its body again and hovered up in front of my face, pointing it at my head but not touching it.

“It’s alright, I know you didn’t mean it,” I replied. I wasn’t sure if worrying about me was Mimic’s intent, but I had a feeling that it was.

To respond, Mimic slowly, carefully brought its tongue against my forehead and gave it a soft and gentle lick.

“Thanks for that.” Now my head hurt and had Mimic’s sticky drool on it, but I knew that Mimic had good intentions. “With how late it’s gotten… I guess it’s a good thing I closed the wall up early. If I slept any later and hadn’t done that, zombies would be able to walk right in. And speaking of zombies… Mimic, want to do some zombie hunting tonight?”

Mimic hopped up and down in place, clearly excited.

“I haven’t found any accessories that actually help me out yet, but zombies can drop one, plus they’ll give us more money. Only problem then is the flying eyes. I don’t doubt you’ll be able to instantly explode every zombie around, but dealing with flying enemies might be difficult. I doubt my skills with the bow are good enough to shoot them down, but I might get some good target practice out of it. Actually… I have an idea. Do I have enough stone blocks left…? Good, that should be enough. Alright, let’s see if I can get this built before they start spawning.”

Mimic hopped in place again as I got to work.

The plan was to build a tower within the walls. A tower that reached up to just over the height of the wall, had slots for me to shoot out of, and a roof to prevent any flying threats from attacking me from above.

Now, in the cave, the idea of leaving slots in a wall to shoot at enemies didn’t work because they just swarmed through the holes.

But the only flying enemies who would be able to reach me were the flying eyes. They weren’t able to change direction very easily, and they moved in arcing patterns that made it difficult for them to come right at an enemy. So, while it was entirely possible that one might get lucky and come through one of the openings I left in the tower, that was where my next idea came into play.

The flying eyes suffered way more knockback from the player than most enemies. Even just a weak attack was enough to send them bouncing away.

So, if I saw an eye coming toward me… all I had to do was take my sword and stick it through the hole to let the eye impale itself on it.

Would that work?

I had no idea, honestly. The world sometimes behaved in a realistic way which meant it should obviously really hurt if a flying eye flies straight into a sword, but the world also behaved like a game sometimes which made things difficult to judge. Even though Mimic knocked me out and left me with a horrible headache, it didn’t deal any damage to me, yet a slime bouncing into my chest did a huge chunk of damage to me.

It was a gamble, but I wasn’t going to learn how the world worked unless I experimented with it. And besides, even if an eye got into the tower with me, I could always just run out of it to go hide inside the house until morning.

As for the tower itself, it was pretty simple. The tower was built out of stone in a tall, rectangular shape. The inside of it was hollow to save on materials, and I saved on materials further by using wood for the floor at the top of it. Then I built walls on three sides of the flooring, leaving the back facing the house open, and created an enclosed space with a stone roof. At each corner was a stone support to keep the roof held up, and the space between the corners was left open at the level of my head for me to shoot through. As for that open area behind me, I placed a door down to keep anything from getting inside from that direction while also giving me a quick escape route if I needed one.

Then there were some wooden stairs leading from the door down to the ground. All in all, it took about ten minutes for me to build… and it looked pretty ugly.

But I was used to the things I made in creative games looking ugly. It was impossible for me to make things that didn’t look ugly.

And with that, I waited in the tower with my bow and arrows ready, my sword still equipped on my hotbar which let it sit on my hip, while Mimic waited outside the wall with no way in. I felt kind of bad for sealing Mimic out there, but I didn’t want to risk anything slipping by and getting inside the walls, plus there was no way that anything would be able to kill Mimic.

“Alright, Mimic,” I called out. “The sky is pretty dark now, so get ready. Let’s have a nice night of hunting monsters.” At least, until I was tired enough to sleep.

Mimic waved its tongue at me just in time for the first zombies to appear in the distance, crawling out through the ground just like in classic horror movies.

Considering that they weren’t simply able to spawn off screen and then walk inside of it like in the original game, that made sense.

Chapter 18

I had to admit that I wasn’t exactly all that comfortable killing monsters who looked like humans. Sure, they were zombies, and they were already dead… but they still looked like former people. Former men and women just like me.

But still.

They were zombies.

Even if I was uncomfortable killing them because of their humanoid figures, the fact that they were undead zombies who lived off of human flesh made me comfortable enough to kill them. Or try to, anyways.

The zombies shambled toward the wall in an attempt to reach me even if I was impossible to reach, and them walking so slowly straight at me provided me with plenty of targets to practice firing my bow with. Though, it was kind of awkward shooting at them given how small the space I left for myself to shoot through was. It was doable, but made me feel pretty cramped. I was going to have to make the tower bigger the next time I wanted to do something like that.

It also would have been smart to have the tower go beyond the wall by a block and then leave part of the floor open so that I could shoot down at any zombies who got stuck in the moat. I didn’t think of that until a couple actually got stuck down there, though.

Of course, they didn’t stay stuck for long. Whenever there was a lull in zombie spawns up above, Mimic would return to try and get as close to me as possible which sometimes resulted in it dropping down into the pit where the zombies were trapped. And each time that happened, the sound of zombies exploding into chunks of gore everywhere could be heard seconds later.

Now, while I was sure that Mimic was fine, I still wished I could have seen its health. That, however, required an accessory sold by the beast master. Equipping that accessory would place my active pet’s health underneath my minimap for me to keep an eye on. Without it, though, I had no idea what Mimic’s health was at.

There was something else bothering me.

No flying eyes were spawning. That was somewhat of a relief since it meant I could safely practice my archery skills without worrying about any flying enemies trying to get into my tower, but it was also cause for concern because they absolutely should have been spawning.

On top of that, I didn’t see a single star fall from the sky.

Shooting stars were supposed to crash into the ground throughout the night, and these could be collected and turned into special stars that gave the player mana, making using magic possible.

But not a single star fell.

No flying eyes, no stars… what was going on? Was there a mod changing it? Were those too absurd to exist in the world’s attempt at being somewhat realistic?

I didn’t know.

I did, however, get noticeably better at firing my bow. I still wasn’t hitting every shot, but I felt like I improved way faster than somebody realistically should have been able to. I started hitting almost every shot after just about an hour of practice against the zombies. That being said, I didn’t kill a single zombie myself. They had too much health for me to kill with a bow—or rather, I just wasn’t able to kill them fast enough. Every single time there was a zombie within my range, I could only get three arrows fired at most before Mimic would lock on and explode straight through the zombie.

Sometimes, Mimic would hop up to the front of the wall and look up at me while covered in zombie guts. The sight was… cute, in a disturbing way, and it was even more disturbingly cute the one time that Mimic slurped some zombie intestines into its body as if they were a noodle.

I didn’t want to let Mimic lick me anymore after that.

Then, finally, a flying eye appeared. Normally, they would spawn at the same time as zombies. Maybe they spawned later on in the night in this world? Or was I just unlucky and none wanted to spawn? I wasn’t sure, but I was sure that I wanted to try shooting it.

I aimed my bow and shot an arrow at it, managing to hit it straight on, but that didn’t kill it. Mimic lunging through the air like a cannonball, however, did instantly kill it. My aim was improving pretty quickly given that I could hit a relatively small, flying target on my first try. And fortunately, after hitting its target, Mimic dropped straight down to the ground rather than continue flying off into the distance.

More flying eyes were on the way, too. Maybe they only spawned after a certain hour of the night? They started spawning as frequently as I would have expected the flying eyes to spawn, and nothing changed aside from the time, so I couldn’t think of any other explanation for it.

They eye dropped some coins, but no iris. The iris item they dropped were meant to be collected and crafted into a boss summoning item, but that wouldn’t matter too much with the boss naturally spawning on its own after enough days.

That aside, more eyes spawned in the distance to approach me in my tower. One of them even reached my tower due to Mimic being distracted by zombies, but the eye failed to actually get inside the tower. When it tried charging at me, it simply flew into one of the corner pillars by mistake, bounced back, and gave me an opportunity to shoot another arrow into it.

And that one killed it.

Between my tower and Mimic, farming monsters all night turned out to be one of the easiest things in the world. I did eventually run out of arrows, though, which meant I needed to just… point my sword out through the openings I left for myself. Any time an eye approached the openings, all I had to do was swing my sword through the openings to knock the eye away.

I might have been in trouble if the eyes coordinated and had better accuracy, but they didn’t, so I remained safe throughout the night.

Then, once morning rolled around and the monsters stopped spawning, I opened up the wall to go and collect all the loot on the ground outside. That meant a bunch of [Zombie Flesh] and [Flying Iris] items got sucked into my inventory alongside whatever coins the monsters dropped, but none of those were what I was after.

Instead, I was after one specific drop that managed to drop twice from the zombies.

A [Chain Necklace]. According to the original game’s lore, what limited amount of it that there was, the original zombies were experiments that were kept chained up in some secret, magical, testing facility which would actually be a dungeon later on in the game’s progression. In this dungeon, zombies could be seen chained up by chains wrapped around their necks keeping them in place.

Therefore, some zombies dropped the necklace upon death even though they weren’t actually seen wearing the necklaces, and it didn’t make sense for any random zombie to drop them when only the very few original zombies were chained up, but nobody—myself included—cared about that technicality.

All I cared about was the item itself.

//[Chain Necklace]

//Accessory

//+2 Defense

And that was it. It gave some more defense. That was all. While that might not have seemed like much, it was still an accessory to put in my empty accessory slots and also boosted my defense some more. Equipping it was as good as getting to equip more armor.

More importantly, there were a few different accessories that the necklaces could combine into. So, getting duplicates of the accessory was great since. I was pretty sure I’d need another one if I was right about there being three different combo accessories, but I was sure I’d eventually come across another one by the time that I needed it.

For now, I equipped one of the necklaces as an accessory which caused the loose, metal chain to appear around my neck.

That was one accessory down… and probably the only one I’d get before the boss battle unless I tried my luck exploring caves until I found some non-mimic chests.

Chapter 19

It being morning meant that Guide came out from the house looking for me. She was great at following my order about staying indoors at night. She was also great at coming out to look for me as soon as she could, since apparently she could detect that it was morning.

“Player! Don’t tell me that you were up all night,” Guide said as soon as she came over to me and Mimic sitting down on one of the steps leading up to my watchtower.

“I was awake, plus I wanted to farm some zombies, and then I didn’t want to risk getting ambushed by eyes leaving my tower here, so, I may or may not have been up this whole time,” I answered. “Got this out of it.” I looped a finger behind my necklace and gave it a little jangle. “That means more defense for me, which means more safety for me.”

Guide pouted a little, but she gave in and sighed. “Well… I think you should have tried to get more sleep, but I suppose it’s alright. You can get some later.”

“Trust me, I plan on it. By the way, I’ve been meaning to check some things with you.”

“Yes?”

“Do you still know all the crafting recipes?”

“Off… off the top of my head?”

“Well, in the game, you’d pull that book off from your side and open it up whenever asked about crafting recipes.”

“A-ah…”

“I have to admit, your response is kind of worrying.”

“It’s… probably better for you to see it yourself.” Guide picked up the large book strapped to her side and held it over to me.

I took it from her and opened it up to the front page… only to see nothing. Next page, nothing. No matter how many pages I flipped through, I didn’t see anything.

“You know, I’ve noticed that items which would normally have the ‘material’ tag on them haven’t had that tag even though they’re still materials. That, combined with this… I guess whoever is responsible for this doesn’t want to let me have an easy way out and wants to test my memorization of all the recipes,” I said and sighed. That sounded like nonsense, but it was the best explanation for what was going on.

“I’m… I’m sorry,” Guide said. “The one use I used to be best for… I can’t help with at all anymore.”

“All this means is that we’ve got to fill the pages up ourselves.”

“What?”

“It’s an empty book. What use does an empty book have if not for writing in? Look, it even has a quill. So, you can write whatever you want inside of it. Maybe record what items I get and what combinations we know of if you’d like the book to be like it used to be.”

“I… like that idea. Alright!”

“We’ll start with some slime and wood.” I dropped a single one of those each out from my inventory, splitting them from their growing stacks.

Guide didn’t waste any time getting to work with her new recording duty.

I felt like enjoying the grass for a bit longer, so I just lay there and watched while she drew a picture for each of the items in her book and then a simple description for each.

Then, once she was done, she sounded significantly more excited than I would have expected her to sound. “Pl-Player!”

“Yeah?” I replied.

“Look!”

I leaned up to look at what she wanted to show me, and what she wanted to show me was the opened book… and a list of crafting recipes on the page next to the two items she wrote down. Everything made using [Wooden Logs] on their own, as well as everything made from a combination of [Wooden Logs] and [Slime], now showed up in her book.

Not only that, but a bunch of greyed out options showed up as well. The problem was that each recipe which didn’t have every known ingredient recorded only showed a silhouette and no name for what they made. Furthermore, it looked like only recipes where at least half of the required items were recorded showed up.

But still, that was progress and new information.

“See? You just have to believe in yourself,” I told Guide. “Have some more faith in yourself. You’re more than useful to me.”

Guide couldn’t stop smiling. “I’ll do my best to record everything then! If this is what I can do to be useful to you… then I will do it to the best of my ability.”

Looking through the listed recipes, I spotted one that called for [Wooden Logs], [Slime], and then two more ingredients. One of the unknown ingredients clearly had the silhouette of a torch, but I wasn’t sure about the other one. More importantly, the silhouette for the item crafted from the four ingredients looked extremely familiar.

And it looked like a gun, too.

“Here,” I said, dropping a torch out from my inventory. “Record this for me real quick.”

Guide nodded and got to work.

Surely enough, once she was done recording the torch’s info into her book, that torch-shaped silhouette got colored in and displayed that it was a torch.

The item those four ingredients crafted had to be the flamethrower I wanted. All I had to do was find out what the fourth item was.

The flamethrower was supposed to be a very easy weapon to get. It was a pretty weak weapon, but it was one of the best available until the first tier of boss items or mid-tier ore weapons.

The fourth item also looked pretty rectangular shaped. What was available early in the game, before bosses, that was… rectangular… shaped.

“Wait, am I being stupid?” I asked.

“I doubt you ever are,” Guide answered.

“No, I’m pretty sure I’m being stupid.” I went into my inventory and took one of the spare iron bars I had left and dropped it for Guide. “Up for another recording?”

The more items I gave Guide to record in her book, the happier she looked.

Guide proceeded to record the iron bar into the book, and… it was at that moment that I felt really, really stupid.

In my defense, I was more of a vanilla guy. I had some experience with mods, but not enough to have memorized everything. So, part of me doubted that something like a weak-but-decent-for-its-availability flamethrower could be made with such simple materials.

But modders rarely knew how to balance things.

With all the required items recorded, the result of the recipe was officially revealed with its name and stats included.

//[Makeshift Flamethrower]

//Damage: 1 (Ranged)

//Knockback: Tiny

//Critical Rate: 1%

//Ingredients: [Wooden Log] x20, [Slime] x25], [Torch] x1, [Iron Bar] x3

Unable to feel any more stupid than I did, I walked over to the anvil, did what needed to be done, and walked back over to Guide.

“Player?” Guide asked as I just sort of stood there in silence.

That was when I unveiled my latest creation to her, pulling out the [Makeshift Flamethrower] I just made.

To demonstrate, I aimed it at the stone wall, pulled the trigger… and fired flames. Slime was shot out through the iron “tank” on the top of the wooden frame, and this slime passed through the torch at the front of the gun to light it on fire.

It had barely any range to it, but that didn’t matter.

Only one thing really mattered.

I looked at Guide, unbelievably proud of myself, and said, “I have a flamethrower.”

Chapter 20

Before I forgot to, I made myself a [Copper Breastplate] which only gave me one more point of defense than what I already had, but that was still useful. It also let me feel a bit more professional since it meant I wouldn’t be running around with what were basically wooden sheets strapped to my chest.

There was something else that I needed to consider seeing as how my list of things I needed to do just didn’t run out, instead only permanently growing.

And that was building a boss arena.

Boss arenas in the original game were generally a few different layers of platforms floating in the air stretching out across a long, flat area. They allowed the player to easily run in either direction without fear of getting interrupted by anything, and the multiple levels made it easy to dodge attacks. On top of that, they would have campfires and other health regen-boosting items spread out across them to increase the player’s health regeneration as much as possible.

If I wanted to survive against the boss, I was going to need a boss arena.

Wherever I built it, it also needed to be away from the house. I didn’t want the boss to accidentally fly through the house and kill Guide since that was possible and a very frequent occurrence in the original game.

It probably wouldn’t be a good idea to give it multiple levels, either. That would require me jumping up and down them, and I didn’t have faith in my agility for that much vertical movement. Also, unlike in the original game, I couldn’t just… hop upward with my entire body and land on my feet. For multiple levels to be worth it, they needed to be far enough away from each other to completely move my body onto a new height level, and that would require me having to jump up and grab onto the above platforms to climb onto them. Then there was also the fact that the world wasn’t in 2D anymore. The boss would be able to attack me from any direction which meant I might end up moving away from the platforms entirely.

Though… it was possible to create a bunch of overlapping platforms to walk across going in every direction. Like a giant board of sorts with holes between some of the platforms for me to jump down through.

That… could work.

And then to fix the problem of having to jump and climb up onto the higher levels, I could build staircases or ramps here and there that I could run up instead. But then… the reason why it worked in the game was also because bosses could, for the most part, clip through terrain. That would be too unrealistic for this world, probably, so then what was going to happen to a boss trying to fly through a boss arena? If simply clipping through wasn’t an option, would it break through, thus making the arena pointless anyways?

Maybe it would be better to try and create something that was more like a literal arena? A space with a large, open center to fight in?

Alternatively, I could try my luck in the caves again. I could try finding an abandoned minecart track, steal all the tracks, and then place them in a straight line on the surface. I could also go hunt for more iron to make the tracks myself which would be even more efficient. If I could do that, then I could just ride a minecart in a straight line to kite the boss behind me while firing my bow at it.

But if I failed to kill the boss before reaching the end of the track, or if the boss behaved in an unpredictable way that the minecart couldn’t outrun or evade, then that would also be an issue.

The more I thought about it, the more I found issues with basically every single possible plan. Fighting it out in the open was probably going to end up being the best choice at the rate things were going. Just find a patch of forest, lay down some campfires all over it, and hope for the best. Anything else heavily depended on whether or not the bosses would be able to break through blocks or not. If they couldn’t, there were all sorts of things I could do to cheese them. If they could, or even if they could just clip through them, then all that potential cheese basically disappeared.

Then again…

Who was to say that the bosses couldn’t be cheesed even with a realistic world and physics?

“Guide, I’m going to go test some things,” I said, heading over to the door with Mimic following behind like expected.

“Oh, alright!” Guide replied. “Be safe, alright?”

“Being safe wouldn’t make my experiments possible.”

“That… that makes me a little worried to hear.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll be fine. Probably.”

“It would be more reassuring if you left off the ‘probably.’”

“Don’t worry, I’ll be fine. Hopefully.”

“That sounds even worse.”

“I’ll be fine. Maybe.”

Guide started to pout at that point, so I gave her one final version of the sentence.

“I’ll be fine. Promise.”

And just like that, Guide’s pout turned into a smile. “I know you will be, but still. Be as safe as you can.”

“Now that, I can do.”

With that, it was time for some experiments.

After several hours of experiments, most of which were surprisingly successful, I made it back home and felt like my arms and legs were ready to detach from my body at the slightest touch.

“I’m home,” I grumbled out as I opened the door to the house, finding Guide just… sitting there at the table.

As bored as she looked before, Guide stood up and smiled when she saw me. “Welcome back! How did it go? Wait… you look horrible! Are you alright?”

“Hmm?” I checked out my health. It was full still, so, “Yeah, I’m fine.”

Even so, that didn’t stop Guide from coming up to me and patting my shoulders and hair to clean me off. A lot more dirt and ash fell off than I was expecting. “You look like you were rolling around in the dirt… or maybe like you were rolling around in a fire. Look, even your cheeks look all scorched.” She then wiped her thumbs across my cheeks which got some black soot on them. “Are you sure you’re alright?”

“My body feels like it’s ready to fall apart more than ever before, but I have full health, so… actually, after those experiments… having full health definitely isn’t an indicator of being alright.”

“Just what sort of experiments were you doing?”

“It’s more fun if I keep it secret for a little, right?”

“No, not knowing… makes me worried.”

Well, if she was actually worried about it, then I didn’t mind letting her know. Besides, it wasn’t like it was actually a secret.

So, I told her.

And by the time that I was done explaining everything that I did and what my plan for dealing with the boss was…

“That—that sounds insane!” Guide said, raising her voice at me for the first time. “So many things can go wrong with that!”

I had to admit, hearing her like that was kind of shocking. Guide was always the cool and calm type who basically had faith in the player to do anything and everything no matter how impossible it seemed. Yet, for the first time, Guide sounded like she doubted me. “How’s this any different from the usual god slaying and crazy stunts?”

“I… I don’t know. I know that… logically, what you want to do probably pales in comparison to all the other battles you have fought, but…” Guide raised a hand up to her chest, clutching her shirt over her heart. “I’m scared. Everything you just told me… sounds like it shouldn’t even be possible. But what does sound possible? None of this world sounds possible, right? Even collecting those birds for you… doing that felt like I was doing something that shouldn’t be possible. It felt wrong even though I was doing it to support you.”

“I know the feeling. I really do. Anything that wasn’t a part of the original game just feels like it’s wrong, almost in an uncanny valley sort of way. Even just the trees falling down when they’re chopped. But, I think that’s exactly it. It’s all uncanny valley territory. My mind is so used to reality and games being two separate things that it’s struggling to cope with a world where they’re blended together. And you—all you ever knew was the game. You don’t even have that real world experience that I had for the added realism to feel familiar at all. But… we’re just going to have to deal with it. We’ll get used to it eventually, and we’ll do it together. Alright?”

Guide’s eyes never left my own as I talked, and she sighed before smiling once I finished my little speech. “Thank you, Player. It… does make me feel better to know that I am not the only one who feels this way. It just… it feels like I’m supposed to know everything, but… now it feels like I don’t know anything. And even the things I do know and want to help you with by teaching you about them, you already know.”

“No matter what you know, you’re still my guide. I’ll be expecting you to guide me through this world as best as you can, just like always, alright?”

Guide started to tear up a little, but she wiped her arm over her eyes before any tears actually left her eyes. “Alright! Ah… sorry, I’ve shown you such an uncool side of me.”

I shrugged in response to that. “I like every side of you, including the cute side.”

Guide’s eyes widened a little and, a second after processing what I said, she turned away and scratched her cheek. “I—I don’t have a cute side. Somebody like me couldn’t even act cute if I wanted to…”

“Wow, Guide. Didn’t know you were such a liar.”

“I’m not lying! I meant it! Somebody like me isn’t cute! I’m—I’m cool sometimes, I think, but not cute!”

“I don’t know about that, you denying how cute you are just makes you even cuter.”

Guide’s face was turning more and more red. She looked like steam was about to come blowing out of her ears at any moment. “Since… since when did you get so bold?”

“I’m not bold, I’m just so tired and in so much pain that I don’t care about feeling embarrassed or holding back. That’s why I don’t mind saying that not only do I find you cute, but I find you fucking adorable, and you’re just going to have to deal with it. Anyways, saying that made me actually start to feel embarrassed again, so I’m going to pass out and take a nap before nightfall.” I really needed to fix my sleep schedule. The last thing that my tired and sore body needed was a bad sleep schedule.

“Can… can I do anything for you?”

“Well, the sooner I fall asleep, the more sleep I can get, and I’ll probably fall asleep pretty quickly if you pet my head.”

Guide found her opportunity to be the cool and teasing one again and asked, with a teasing tone, “Are you a dog now?”

“Woof.”

“Then… how about this?” Guide walked over to the wall and sat down with her back against it, her legs stretched out straight in front of her. Then, when she patted her lap, I could tell where she was going with that. “I don’t know how it compares to something like a pillow, but you can use my lap as one.”

“Your thighs sound like a way better pillow than an actual pillow does.” Needless to say, I was happy to take her up on her offer and once more used the floor as my bed. This time, though, I lowered the back of my head onto her thighs.

On one hand, I was using a cute girl’s thighs as a pillow. That was awesome. On the other hand, her thighs were thick enough that, for my head to use them as a pillow, my neck needed to bend in a pretty uncomfortable way. It wasn’t like using a pillow that would get indented and deformed by the weight of my head.

But still.

Guide lap pillow.

A normal pillow couldn’t beat that at all.

Chapter 21

I was wrong. A normal pillow was absolutely better than a lap pillow. All those people who posted memes and fanart online about lap pillows had no idea just how uncomfortable it actually was for the neck. At least, sleeping on my back using Guide’s lap as a pillow was uncomfortable. Draping myself over them with my front might have worked, or maybe lying on my side, or even lying from the front between her legs… there were a few different ways I could have approached it in hindsight, but I was too tired to think of any of them before.

That just meant we were going to have to try out different positions in the future.

But for the time being, it meant that I woke up in even more pain than before since my neck developed a terrible stiffness thanks to it.

“Are you awake?” Guide asked, poking my cheek.

“I am,” I answered, sitting up properly. My neck felt so stiff that I wasn’t even able to straighten it out right away.

“How was your sleep? Did you rest well?”

“Yeah, it was great.” Technically, that wasn’t a lie. The sleep itself was great. The position, however, was not.

“I’m glad. So… there probably isn’t much time left before nightfall. Are you ready?”

“As ready as I can be.”

“Did you do everything you wanted? You aren’t forgetting anything, right?”

“Yeah, everything is ready. I got my flamethrower, got my armor, the boss arena is set up—all that’s left is to head over there and wait.” Guide didn’t say anything, and I wasn’t sure what else I should say. So, I just stood up, double checked my inventory, gave Mimic a couple of pats, and said, “Guess it’s about time to get started. I’m hoping I turn out to be wrong about this, but I’ve got a good feeling I won’t be.”

“I wish I could go with you,” Guide said, looking like she wanted to reach out and grab me, but she held herself back. “I feel so useless just staying here while you go out and fight for us…”

“Useless? It’s thanks to you that we’re not starving. Plus having you here inspires me to try even harder.”

“It—it does?”

“Obviously. You think I’d be working this hard if I didn’t want to impress you? Well, that and to not die.”

Guide laughed and looked away for a moment before looking me right in the eyes again. “You will come back, right?”

“Don’t even need to ask.”

“But hearing you say you will would make me feel better.”

If that was what she wanted to hear, I’d let her hear it. But, right as I opened my mouth to say it… I got a better idea. It was an idea that probably made me blush a little and caused my heart to beat even harder than it already was thanks to nerves, but it sounded like a pretty good idea in my head.

Maybe it was because I wasn’t a hundred percent sure I was going to survive? As far as I was aware, I was marching off to my potential death. There was no guarantee that I was going to survive no matter how much I wanted to, and I had no idea what might happen if I died.

It was entirely possible that I was living my last few hours of life.

And if I was going to die… I wasn’t going to die without doing something.

“Close your eyes for me,” I told Guide.

Guide blinked at me a couple of times before doing as I said. “Player? Why am I—”

I pulled her against me with my arm around her hip, placing my lips against her own at the same time.

I wasn’t going to die without ever kissing a girl before.

Our kiss lasted longer than I thought it would. If anything, it seemed like it had no intention of ever ending unless I broke it off… which I forced myself to do after a few more seconds of enjoying it.

And once it was finally over, Guide looked me in my eyes and asked, “That wasn’t a goodbye sort of kiss, was it?”

I shook my head and said, “That was a ‘we’ll continue this later’ kiss… that sounded cooler in my head.”

At least I was able to make Guide laugh. “You should leave the being cool to me.”

“How about I leave the being cute to you instea—”

I was cut off by Guide grabbing me by my collar, pulling me close to her again only for her to press her lips against mine, her free hand holding the back of my head as she kissed me far more intensely than the first time around. Then, rather than step away after breaking the kiss off like I did, she only barely parted our lips before whispering, “Tell me, which of us is the cool one?”

“Def—… definitely you.”

“That’s what I thought.” She brought our lips together one more time before letting go of me and stepping back. “For future reference, that is how you do a, ‘we’ll continue this later,’ kiss. So… you better come back.”

Guide was doing such an amazing, heart pounding job at acting cool… but then she totally swapped back into cute mode for that last sentence.

But that just made her even more endearing.

“You can count on it,” I said. “There’s no way I can lose after that.” I didn’t want to go, but I had to. And not wanting to go was probably a good thing since it made me all the more determined to survive and come back to her. “Ready, Mimic?” I asked, earning its signature, disturbing noise in return. “Then let’s go.”

Losing wasn’t even a possibility anymore as far as I was concerned.

I was going to win no matter what.

And as soon as I stepped outside, an overwhelming sensation of being watched hit me.

That was all the confirmation I needed to know I didn’t prepare for nothing.

The boss was coming.

Chapter 22

The “boss arena” was a large, flat area about thirty minutes away from the house. While the ground itself might have been flat, it was also the most heavily wooded section of the forest I could find within an hour of the house.

I already had a couple dozen campfires spread out pretty far from each other to maximize the area I could be in while still gaining the buff from them. That was figured out by simply walking around until the buff disappeared, placing down a new campfire, and repeating the process.

But aside from the campfires, there wasn’t really anything else there to make the place look like a boss arena. If anything, it didn’t look like one at all with just how many trees were in the way.

And that was exactly how I wanted it.

Night officially began about fifteen minutes after arriving at the boss arena. I could tell since Mimic lunged at the first zombie to crawl out of the ground before it even finished standing up straight.

“Somebody’s excited,” I joked. Though, that was just how Mimic always was, never wasting a single second to kill any hostile monster in sight. And while Mimic handled the first zombies, I buffed up with some food and a [Toughness Potion] which increased my total defense by ten.

Now, with each passing minute, that sensation of being watched grew stronger and stronger. It was honestly pretty unsettling. In the game, all that happened was a message showing up in the chat log telling the player that they feel like something is watching them. Actually feeling that as intensely as I did was something the game could never get across no matter just how intimidating it tried to be sometimes.

“Deep breaths,” I told myself. “Don’t panic. You’ve got this.”

The stronger that feeling of being watched grew, the harder it became to stay confident.

Then I remembered that kiss Guide gave me.

Remembering the warmth from that kiss was enough to calm me down, and the desire to kick the boss’s ass and return back to her overwhelmed the anxiety I felt with ease.

When Mimic returned to my side during a lull of zombie spawns, I gave it another couple of pats on the top of its body and said, “We’ve got this. Ignore the small eyes that spawn, alright? I want you to focus on the boss. Don’t worry about anything else.”

Mimic made another noise and then tried to lick my face, but I blocked its tongue with my arm.

“Not after you ate more zombies.”

I never saw a tongue retract back into a body with such sad energy before, but that was what Mimic’s tongue did.

And then I felt my heart skip a beat.

A sense of dread filled my gut, telling me it was time, and that was confirmed when I looked up and saw a massive, round silhouette flying around in the night sky.

“Ready, Mimic?” I asked, pulling my axe off my back.

Even Mimic must have been able to tell that the fight was about to go down since it gave off a concentrated feeling that I never felt from it before.

A few moments later and a loud, undulating wail came from above.

It was time for the fight to begin.

The boss, a giant, flying eye, descended to beneath the forest canopy landing in the only spot open enough to fit its massive body.

“The Watcher” was the boss’s name. In the vanilla game, it was a simple boss with two phases, and it also looked more like a normal, giant eyeball would with large, red veins spread out across the eye which then turned into trailing “tails” behind it.

But this eye was not that color.

Rather, the eye’s sclera was still white, but its pupil was black and its iris red. The veins running over the surface of the eye looked even more engorged as they pulsated, and they were also darker, almost black. In other words, it was the modded version of the boss which changed graphics when one of the other mod’s enhanced difficulty mode was enabled.

The world just kept on getting harder and harder, it seemed.

But that didn’t change that I was going to win.

The first phase of both fights was more or less the same. The boss was going to follow me around at a pretty slow speed, trying to bump into me, while spawning smaller eyes that would home in on me with pretty decent speed.

And it was during this phase that I wanted to deal as much damage as possible to make the next phase as short as possible.

First, though, I had to see what the boss was going to do. It was officially in a forest where it had barely any space to move around. Was it going to be stuck, clip through the trees, or just knock them over?

The answer was…

Knock them over.

The boss flew straight at me, knocking every tree in its path down. The trees that were knocked down fell to the forest floor and broke into a bunch of [Wooden Log]s which was reassuring since it meant that, no matter how much damage bosses caused to the environment, the items themselves wouldn’t get destroyed.

Bad news, though, was that there was no health bar like in the original game. I figured as much since none of the monsters up until now had visible health bars, but I was really hoping the bosses would at least still have them.

But no. The world didn’t want to give me that.

“Really making me work for it, huh?” I said, speaking to whatever might have been listening.

Meanwhile, Mimic lunged at the boss and crashed straight into its pupil before dropping down. The eye then contracted a little as if it was in pain, but that attack alone wouldn’t be anywhere near enough to kill it.

We needed to do a lot more damage still.

Or, alternatively, we just had to hurt it until it died.

Those two things might have sounded the same, but they weren’t.

As the eye approached me, slightly slowed by the trees in its way, I swung my axe into the tree next to me. I made sure to cut it just as I practiced during my experiments to get the falling directions right.

After just a few hits from my axe, the tree broke off from its stump and fell directly toward the eye, crashing onto the top of its body and knocking it down into the ground.

A wail of pain came from within the eye.

Even though I didn’t do anything that could deal “damage” to the boss, I still did something that hurt it.

And while the boss was on the ground, recovering from the pain, I got close enough to switch to my flamethrower just in time to get both the eye and the first two smaller eyes that spawned from it. The smaller eyes just straight up slithered out from the eye’s surface which was pretty disturbing to see, but it didn’t matter. I caught the boss and its two mini eyes on fire. Ticks of damage alternating between 1s and 2s appeared above each enemy about four times per second for as long as I was holding down the trigger of my flamethrower, and the damage continued ticking away at them even as I stopped thanks to the debuff from being on fire.

The smaller eyes, in too much pain from being on fire to concentrate on flying toward me, flew off in random directions while I ran over to another tree and pulled my axe out. Meanwhile, Mimic kept on attacking the eye by doing its usual pattern of three jumps followed by a lunge. Each jump attack did a decent amount of damage, and then the lunge did even more.

Normally, those basic jumps wouldn’t be able to reach the boss due to it flying over the ground, but getting knocked down by the tree forced it into Mimic’s range.

But the battle wasn’t over yet.

Still on fire as the eye finally got back up and tried flying toward me again, it wasn’t able to get close before I sent another tree crashing down onto it, forcing it against the ground once again as an even louder wail of pain reached my ears.

While the boss was left recovering from pain again, I ran up to it once more to bring out my flamethrower and light both it and the smaller eye spawns on fire.

The plan was working way more effectively than I thought it would. I didn’t consider that keeping the boss knocked down to the ground would give Mimic the perfect opportunity to attack it over and over again without relying only on lunges, but it worked.

At least… it worked until the boss reached its next phase.

If I remembered right, with the enhanced difficulty mod, the boss reached its second phase at around sixty percent health remaining. We were able to get it that low that quickly thanks to Mimic, but the chances of Mimic being as useful during the next two phases were pretty low.

The Watcher, still pretty shaky from having two trees dropped on top of it followed by being lit on fire, lifted up off the ground to fly above the trees. Its body then spun in the air a few times as it let out a wail which sounded more clear than before thanks to its “mouth” actually opening up.

This was the boss’s “true” form.

The iris that previously made up most of the front of its eye shrunk in size and slid upward away from the center. At the same time, several more irises popped up across the surface of the eye to give it sight in every direction… while the eye itself split open to reveal a massive mouth inside of it. Each one of the jagged fangs inside of the boss’s mouth were as large as I was.

Thinking about it, in the game, getting hit by the boss in that form would just knock the player back like any damage would do.

But here?

It was entirely possible that even just getting hit once by its mouth would give it the chance to grab onto me and tear me apart, almost instantly killing me. Or maybe it would just try to swallow me whole.

Whatever it might try, I wasn’t going to let it win.

The Watcher, with a wail even more intimidating than before, charged back down into the forest and tore through several trees at once without any issue.

It was time for the next phase of my plan.

Chapter 23

Phase one: drop trees onto a slow-moving boss and light it on fire.

Unfortunately, the trees didn’t kill it. One of the experiments I did involved whether or not “environmental damage” such as falling trees could actually damage and kill monsters. Some unfortunate slimes were my test subjects. I chopped down trees, had them fall onto slimes, and watched as the slimes instantly died and exploded into their usual loot without any damage numbers ever popping up to signify damage being done.

In the game, lava was the only source of environmental damage that could hurt monsters, and even that came with showing damage numbers above their heads.

But this world was realistic enough that other forms of environmental damage could hurt them as well.

Phase two: run away.

It wasn’t possible to outrun the boss at the speed it was capable of flying at… normally, and without accessories, but being in the forest made it possible. Each tree it crashed through slowed it down just a little bit. Between the trees and the boss occasionally switched to focus on Mimic instead, I was able to keep a healthy distance between me and it.

That was one of the most useful parts about having a battle pet, or just any form of companion to fight with. While monsters and bosses would still prioritize the player ninety percent of the time, they would occasionally switch over to focus on the companions which gave the player a bit of breathing room to either heal up or get some free attacks in.

And I didn’t waste those opportunities. Each time I had an opening, I got in several arrows that got stuck inside of its sclera and caused it to shriek out in more pain.

Then the trouble began.

The boss started to actually perform its new move that came with the second phase, and that was a series of fast-paced charges which were impossible to outrun even with the trees getting in the way. The only way to avoid getting hit was by actually dodging them.

Each charge also spawned multiple of the smaller eyes that would home in on me. One or two would occasionally target Mimic instead, but they would basically just kill themselves on Mimic by flying into it.

The ones that targeted me were dealt with by switching to my flamethrower and spraying them with blazing slime as soon as they got close.

And the eyes weren’t the only things I was setting on fire.

I was going to burn the whole damn forest down.

Whenever I wasn’t taking potshots at the boss or burning down the smaller eyes, I targeted the trees I was running past.

Letting the boss get close enough for me to use a short-ranged flamethrower against it to light it on fire was too risky, but it wasn’t too risky to light all the trees it kept on flying through on fire. Why? Because it passed on the fire debuff.

In the game, fire didn’t spread between enemies and setting the environment on fire wasn’t possible.

In this world, as I discovered during my experiments, it was possible for some debuffs such as fire to spread between enemies… and it was also possible to set the environment itself on fire. This also meant that the environment could spread its fire to enemies and vise-versa.

Now, it took a lot to spread. Two things couldn’t just bump into each other and spread fire. That was also why Mimic didn’t catch on fire despite attacking the boss while it was on fire. They were never in contact long enough for it to spread. However, when it came to crashing into a bunch of different trees that were on fire thanks to me, it was pretty easy for them to catch the boss on fire.

The bad news was that I wasn’t able to spend the time chopping trees down any longer, and the boss was too fast to get hit by them falling anyways.

While I might not have been able to see the boss’s remaining health, I still had a pretty good feeling it was dropping way slower than I would have liked it to. But at the same time, something seemed off.

In a good way.

The longer the eye burned for, the weaker it seemed. Parts of the sclera burned through to the point where red flesh was visible underneath it, and the boss’s movements felt more erratic than ever before. Sloppy, even. Every single one of its charges should have been straight, but they wobbled around and would sometimes go slightly off track.

The boss must have been in pretty serious pain if that was the case.

I might have felt just a tiny bit bad for it if it didn’t want to kill me.

That aside, I wished I had some bombs. If I had some bombs, I would have been able to do something similar to how I tamed Mimic. I could throw the bombs while being charged at, and they would explode inside of the boss’s body. While it wouldn’t deal that much damage relative to its health, I was sure it would deal a ton of non-health damage to it. Having a bomb set off inside of its body couldn’t be good for its health.

That sort of strategy might be pretty useful against future bosses, though, once I had a supply of bombs to use against them.

But for now—

The boss changed focuses.

The Watcher turned to face Mimic and charged at it while Mimic was in the middle of lunging at it.

“Mimic! Stop!” I shouted, but Mimic wasn’t able to change direction in the middle of the lunge nor was it able to stop one early.

Mimic flew right into the boss’s mouth, and the boss closed its mouth around my companion as soon as it was inside.

I was ready to shout more to tell Mimic that I was coming and going to get it out of there, but… I stopped when I heard the boss making its damaged sound effect over, and over, and over again.

Then I noticed the damage numbers popping up over its body.

123.

131.

126.

185.

Jump, jump, jump, lunge.

The numbers lined up with Mimic’s attacks. Three smaller attacks and then one bigger one. By trapping Mimic inside of its mouth, all the boss did was give Mimic a free ride and easy access to spam attack it, causing the boss to shake out and wail out in greater pain than ever before.

Distracted by the relentless attacks from inside of its own body, the boss trashed around within the forest, barging into more of the flaming trees to set itself on fire while spinning around to try and shake Mimic out from its body.

I wasn’t sure if Mimic was safe inside of the boss like that, but I did know that the quickest way to make sure Mimic was safe was to kill the boss as fast as I could, so I kept on shooting arrows into the oversized eyeball while Mimic ruined its day from the inside.

Any other tamed monster normally available at the level I was at would have died within just a couple of attacks from the boss, and I doubted they would survive being literally inside of its body… but mimics had almost as much health as an early boss while having over twice as much defense.

I doubted that Mimic would be able to deal much damage after the first phase given how agile the boss, but I couldn’t have been more wrong about that. The damage Mimic was dealing was insane.

But it didn’t last.

The boss flew up above the trees once more and opened its mouth wide open while facing downward before shaking Mimic loose, causing my companion to drop to the ground like a sack of rocks. That didn’t hurt Mimic as far as I could tell, but it looked like it should have given the fact that Mimic made a small crater in the ground where it landed.

“Mimic! You alright?” I shouted out, wanting some confirmation that it was alright even if I was sure Mimic was fine.

Mimic turned its body and waved its tongue at me, so I took that as a good enough confirmation.

More importantly, a series of wails erupted out from the boss’s mouth, and that was when I remembered that the enhanced difficulty mod gave every single boss an “enraged” mode that they only went into once they were under twenty percent health.

We were almost there. There was just a little bit more to go. I didn’t even get hit once, but Mimic was hit a few times and also trapped inside of the boss’s mouth for a bit there, so I had no idea how Mimic’s health was faring.

I also couldn’t remember what the boss’s enrage phase was like since I only dealt with it a couple of times before… and was pretty sure that I only defeated it through luck because of how much of a bullet hell it turned the boss into.

And when the boss disappeared from above the trees only to teleport behind me with a wail and a swarm of pulsating, smaller eyes shooting at me, I decided it was time to start running again.

Chapter 24

All I could think of doing was running away at that point and desperately taking any potshots I could to try and get in what little damage was possible. As long as we kept dealing damage, the boss was going to eventually die.

The problem was just how hard it was to accurately fire at the boss with how fast and erratic its movements became. Mimic wasn’t able to keep up, either, as the boss became fast enough that not even Mimic’s lunging attack was able to reach it in time.

Things only got worse from there.

I recognized the boss’s pattern, but I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to deal with it other than randomly run away and hope that I didn’t get hit by it.

The Watcher would teleport to a new location high above, charge down, then charge up and down in a sort of zigzag while moving in one horizontal direction. A trail of glowing eyes were left in the path of its charge, and these glowing eyes would fly at a fast speed in a straight line a few seconds after getting spawned. What was worse, though, was that each time the boss reached the bottom or top of its zigzagging movements, it spawned a dozen of the glowing eyes that locked onto wherever I was and shot toward me. That meant I needed to not only dodge the boss’s charges, but I had to avoid the eyes coming from a bunch of different directions, some of which homed in on me.

I was already utterly exhausted at that point and I could barely find any opportunities to attack the boss.

Then, once the boss’s zigzag pattern was done, it flew up into the air, spun around while spawning even more of those homing eyes, and teleported to begin the process over again.

There was another problem.

I had no idea why the smaller eyes were glowing all of a sudden… but I found out when I failed to jump out of the way from one, letting one fly right into me, hitting my right shoulder.

The eye didn’t hurt me by coming into contact with me.

But then it exploded.

In an instant, two of the hearts on my health bar emptied out which meant around forty damage was done. It would only take two more hits like that to kill me unless I survived long enough for my health to regenerate, and I didn’t know if the battle would last that much longer. I needed to kill the boss before that much time passed.

But… I wasn’t sure how that was going to happen.

I looked at my shoulder and saw most of the skin either burnt away or charred from the blast, and there was an alarming amount of blood coming from the wound. Even worse, I could barely move that arm anymore which was pretty bad considering that a bow was a two-handed weapon and I needed both of my arms to fire it. Moving it caused excruciating pain and… it just wasn’t going to happen. I could lift that arm anywhere near enough to properly use a bow.

That meant I would have to rely on my flamethrower, using my non-dominant hand, with its short range, against an extremely fast boss that I had to concentrate on dodging more than anything else. I was only going to have a short window of opportunity to actually shoot the flamethrower at it. However, letting the boss get that close to me meant also letting all of its exploding eyes get close to me. And if they worked like they did in the game, these new, glowing eyes counted as projectiles rather than spawned enemies, so I wouldn’t be able to just light them on fire to interrupt them.

I realized I was panicking, and it was that panicking which let another one of those eyes fly into me. This time, it hit me in my right thigh, once again managing to hit one of the spots where my armor didn’t actually cover me up which allowed it to blast away the section of pants I had in the way and destroy the skin underneath.

I could still walk… but I wasn’t going to be doing any running, and trying to jump out of the way would leave me too vulnerable if I fell and had to get back up.

Then, when I looked over at Mimic, I saw that it was taking some heavy damage as well. Mimic’s movements were getting sluggish and the surface of its body was covered in what looked like explosion impacts. As powerful as Mimic was… it wasn’t going to last much longer at the current rate, either.

I needed to end the battle.

I didn’t want Mimic to suffer any longer. I didn’t want Guide to be in danger.

And I really didn’t want to die.

So, I took a deep breath and forced myself to calm down to the best of my ability. Getting all worked up wasn’t going to accomplish anything. I needed to be calm and collect my thoughts. Panicking wasn’t an option.

As real as everything was, and even though we were in a 3D environment rather than a 2D one, the boss still relied on a consistent pattern of attacks. Thanks to the modded difficulty enhancer, the boss was far more of a bullet hell than it was in the vanilla game… but it being a bullet hell meant that not panicking was all the more important. Not only that, but that frantically running away and dodging attacks was the wrong thing to be doing.

Bullet hells—the good ones, at least—were very methodical. They consisted of patterns to be memorized and exploited. No matter how many projectiles were sent, and no matter how fast the bosses might have moved, there was always a clear pattern for the player to work with. More often than not, barely moving at all was the key to victory in such battles.

With a swarm of homing eyes flying toward me, I took a deep breath, waited for them to get as close as possible… and then took a single step to the left.

The swarm flew right past me and exploded out of distance behind me a few seconds later.

The boss then teleported to begin the pattern again, flying straight at me… or so it looked. Given just how large the boss was, it was hard to feel like it wasn’t coming directly at me, but it wasn’t. If I paid attention to its actual trajectory, it was charging toward the ground behind me instead. The boss’s intent was to make the player panic and run into all of the eye projectiles it was spawning. All I had to do was step forward a little bit to make sure that the boss didn’t clip me at all and I was fine. Then, to deal with the eyes it spawned during its charge, I stepped to the side again so that they could fly in their straight path without hitting me.

“Sorry for taking so long to realize that all you wanted was a dance,” I said to the boss, holding my flamethrower in my left hand to wait for it to get close again.

That was how bullet hell battles worked. They were dances.

My brain kept on fighting against me, trying to make me consider all the realism of the world, but this wasn’t one of the times for that. Our battle was unrealistic and exactly like it would be in a game. Realistically, the boss could kill me at any time by just charging directly at me over and over until it got me, but that wasn’t what it was doing. Instead, it was fighting in an unrealistic, game-like way with a clear, repetitive pattern.

This was no time to care about how real the world was. In this moment, it was just a video game boss battle, and those were what I was best at.

A single, timed step was all it took to dodge every attack the boss threw at me. Each time it charged toward me, I readied my flamethrower and started shooting in the spot it was going to pass through so that it would fly straight through my stream of flames. Waiting until it was close enough wouldn’t work due to the time it took the flames to actually spread out and reach it, but putting the flames in its path beforehand worked just fine.

The Watcher’s wails of agony grew more and more frequent the lower its health dropped, its health slowly burning away thanks to my flamethrower’s flames, while Mimic tried its best to lunge at the boss but just wasn’t able to keep up with the speed.

As for me, I came dangerously close to getting hit a few more times, but nothing actually hit me. Or, to use bullet hell terminology, I was “grazing” all the attacks. They came extremely close, but I didn’t let a single one of the attacks hit me again.

All I had to do was dance with the boss.

And eventually… the boss teleported into the sky again, presumably to spin and spawn more eyes before charging again… only to drop straight down to the ground instead.

I blinked and watched for a few moments, checking around me to make sure nothing suspicious was going on, while waiting to see what the boss was going to do.

It did nothing.

All the boss did was… lie there, its mouth slowly opening and closing as if it was struggling to breath.

Even Mimic, for some reason, stopped attacking. I would have assumed that Mimic would lunge at it to finish it off, but no. Mimic just hopped over to me instead and started licking at my wounds instead. It tried to, at least.

“Save that for later,” I said. “No offense, but I’m not sure letting something that eats zombies lick my open wounds would be a good idea.”

Mimic looked disappointed again and retracted its tongue into its body.

“But good job, Mimic. It looks like we’ve won… and that might not have been possible without you. So, good job.”

That perked Mimic right back up, causing it to hop in place a little.

Now then.

In the game, when a boss was defeated, it would just… explode into chunks of gore like any normal enemy. I never saw a boss actually fall to the ground defeated, but still alive, before.

With my flamethrower pointed at the boss still, my finger on the trigger ready to fire at the first sign of danger, I limped up to the boss and got right in front of it.

Yet, despite me standing right in front of its mouth, it didn’t do anything. The most it did was look at me with its main pupil. All the smaller pupils that appeared across its body before were already burned away or cut by arrows.

Looking into the one pupil remaining on the giant eye, I saw… pain. It was impossible to interpret the look in its pupil as anything else.

Despite being a boss that was just trying to kill me and Mimic, I saw no hatred nor desire to kill within its pupil. I only saw pain.

“Hey… can you understand me?” I asked.

I didn’t expect an answer.

But I got one.

The Watcher moved its pupil up and down, which was probably its equivalent of nodding its head.

I… honestly wasn’t expecting it to be able to understand me. If that was the case, then it was alive, right?

“Why did you try killing us?” I asked.

There was no response.

“Do you even want to fight?”

That one worked, and the boss moved its pupil from side to side.

It didn’t want to fight.

“Then why?” I asked again.

Still, no response.

I felt like I was having my emotions played with. Something tried its best to kill me and almost succeeded in doing so, and then it got revealed that it didn’t even want to fight and was just as alive as me that entire time? What kind of shitty attempt at screwing with my emotions was that?

No, maybe it was trying to manipulate me.

What if it was trying to buy time to recover and kill me?

…

It wasn’t possible to deceive myself into thinking that. The feeling in my gut told me that wasn’t the case.

I put away my flamethrower and took out my copper sword instead. I wasn’t sure how good my wooden one would be for what I was about to do, so copper it was.

I didn’t want to kill something that didn’t want to actually fight me, but with just how severely injured the boss was… it looked like it was in its final moments anyways. Not to mention that the inside of its mouth was turned into a gory mess thanks to Mimic, most of the surface of its body was charred and covered in burn wounds, it was sliced open and dented all over… I didn’t want to let it suffer.

And once I pointed my sword at the boss, its pupil looked at the sword, up at me, and then nodded again.

It wanted me to end its suffering as well.

“I’m… sorry,” I said, which was something I didn’t expect to ever say to a boss before, but there I was.

I thrust my sword at the eye, stabbing it as deep into its sclera as it would go.

It was only then that the boss’s usual death animation occurred, basically exploding with chunks of its body flying everywhere as all of its loot, my rewards for killing it, dropped into a pile on the ground at the center of where its body just was.

I won, but the victory only felt pyrrhic at that point.

“Interesting,” an unfamiliar voice said from behind me, causing me to spin around as quickly as I could in my current state to get a look at who it belonged to.

Somebody new and unrecognizable was standing there, dressed in a white, hooded robe that completely covered their body with a matching white mask that hid their face.

“Who are you?” I asked.

The masked figure turned their head toward me and answered, “The humans of this era have given me the name of ‘Entity 17.’”

They weren’t from the game nor any of its mods, I knew that much. They also had a sort of… presence about them. It was a feeling that made me think they knew at least something about what was going on. “Do you know what’s going on? Do you know why I’m here?”

“Yes.”

“Yes to what?”

“Yes.”

“Can you at least tell me what this world is? Is there anybody else?”

“There are others, but most have already failed.”

Hearing that there were others, presumably other people like me, was reassuring, but… “What about the ones who failed? What happened to them?”

“They failed.”

“But what happens if we fail?”

“Then humanity will have failed once more.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? You’re not answering any—”

“Kingmaker. That is the name humans of eld gave me. This knowledge will serve as your reward for making it this far.”

“Can you at least—”

Entity 17—no, Kingmaker, disappeared, leaving me frustrated from just how one-sided that conversation felt… if it even deserved to be called a conversation.

I was left with even more questions than I already had, but… at least it sounded like there was somebody, or some group, who understood what was happening. I wasn’t sure whether that was more of a positive or a negative, but it was something. I also learned that there were others like me who were, I assumed, human and in a similar situation to me. It also sounded like some of them might have already died.

For the time being, I slowly lowered myself to the ground, got on my back, and stared up at the night sky. I tried to, anyways. There was too much smoke from all the fire to actually see the sky thanks to all the trees I set on fire.

I might have been confused about what was going on and feeling guilty over killing something that didn’t truly want to fight in the first place, but… at least I survived, and now I could return to Guide.