by Rae Nantes
+32XP
Just a few sips of blood granted her XP, which in itself was a revelation. Experience points were always understood to be given when swallowing gold - for the PvE economist types - and when a player’s aura was damaged - for the PvP fanatics. Rika first thought it was probably a decision by the developers to make sure players didn’t go around killing everything to grind out their levels. That was the usual response in these types of video games, as it was just about every player’s tendency to murder everything like a serial killer because the game would reward it.
But it appeared that she was wrong.
She brought the cup of blood to her lips and threw it back, gulping it down.
+113 XP
You have gained the effect of Blood Frenzy (23%).
"Valgus," she said. "Do you always get this message when you drink blood?"
"Nope," Valgus said. He was juicing a severed hand like an orange and was using a cup to catch it. "Maybe it's locked behind magic."
"You don't have any elemental magic at all?"
"Nope." He squinted his eyes as he struggled to get the last good bit into the cup. "Never needed it. None of those magic traits or skills or whatever show up on my lists."
She shook her head and swiped open her status screen to read what effect it had.
Blood Frenzy — (23%).
[13s]
Spells cast have 23% more effectiveness.
It was a game-changer. She checked her spellbook to see the difference it made.
Lightweight — 1/5
Decreases own mass by 12.3%.
Additional effect: Increased jump distance.
Duration: 12.3 seconds.
Next rank: Deceases own mass by 24.6%.
Not only did Blood Frenzy increase the power of spells, but also the duration. The additional effect would’ve also been changed, but that might’ve been harder to evaluate.
She stopped for a moment to consider what it all meant. The developers went this far out of their way to create a system that rewarded cannibalism. Not only did she get a small amount of XP, but she got a buff, and that's just for a cup of blood. There was no telling what a heart would grant her.
And now she could find out.
Valgus and Rika sat across from each other, politely on their knees as if at a dinner table. They took their turns slicing off pieces of the poor man's body, giving it a nibble, then guffawing or wowing or sighing at the taste or the effect it had on the status screen. The entire time, Ediha stood comfortably far enough away from them but close enough to show his squinted eyes of disapproval.
An hour of nibbling at the carcass was plenty of time to experiment at the emerging game mechanic. It seemed that most of the body would provide Blood Frenzy, depending on the freshness of the corpse, the amount of adrenaline in the blood, and the body part. A good chunk of a heart likely gave 100% power at its freshest, but this body - roughly an hour or two old - only gave 53%. Pieces of the lungs or brain tissue offered a steady 37%, and the blood was 23%. When they ate more, the numbers didn't stack, but the duration did.
This was good, but Rika didn't like the thought of having to carry around an arm or a foot to snack on. That would be unbecoming of a lady. Yet Valgus's solution to this problem was when she first bore witness to his genius, and the moment she saw the light.
Crispy fried fingers. Human granola bars. Man jerky.
The list was endless. There was no need to consume raw human flesh like some type of cannibal pedestrian. They were not completely barbarians, they could make a gourmet taco or a fancy pizza, sure.
This was when they found that cooked people offered a stable result. Baked heart gave them 50%. Stir-fried lungs, 30%. Blood stew, 20%. They could’ve opened a pie shop.
She tasked Valgus to collect some arms and legs to make something for later - battle jerky. Even though this sort of thing was part of his culture, Ediha was satisfied not having to do with any of this devil's work, so he instead went around to loot things.
When it came time to move again, Valgus pushed a floppy, wet heart into his mouth and cast the spell. "Mmph!" he mumbled in excitement before swallowing hard. "It works! The max teleport distance rose by like 400 kilometers."
"Good." She yawned. "It's about time I log out. How late will you be on?"
"Couple of days."
She nodded, then swung open her player screen to add him to her party. Since there was no HUD to see his name, she had to manually type it in and choose from the list. A slideshow of faces popped up that she could finger back and forth, but the first face was the girly boy who stared back at her.
"Oh, the friends thing," he said. "Yeah, sure."
She sent the request, he accepted it, and then they became a party. "Take my spawn pebble when I'm gone," she said. "I don't want to wake up in the middle of nowhere."
"Sounds good. We should be in Alaska by tomorrow."
She looked over at Ediha who was standing away from them, staring far into the plains and the thickening clouds. Rays of light broke through in spots, sliding across the green. The wind picked up and pulled at their hair. She felt terrible, the sting of worry, that she was taking this teenager far away from his home, entrusting his life to a literal cannibal, and then abandoning him for 17 days. She wasn't even sure if he could survive that long alone.
"We'll be fine," Valgus said. "We'll make a cute little igloo for him and pack it full of food and firewood. Anything else he needs to know, I can show him."
Rika took a deep breath, but that did little to shake off the worry. "Be safe," she told Ediha through the breeze.
He didn't turn his gaze from the distant plains.
She could feel his sadness, and some part of her wanted, so desperately wanted to alleviate his pain somehow. She swiped open her player screen, and with a few taps on her inventory list, she found it and spawned it in.
The red flower with white tips.
She walked over and stuck it in his hair.
He offered an inaudible, split-second chuckle when he recognized it. His momentary joy was empty, hollow. "Thanks," he said. "And rest well."
Rika stepped away, then vanished.
The center of gravity shifted. The darkness faded back into light, then dimmed. The hum of an air conditioner. The smell of strawberry air freshener. The lush softness of the comforter beneath her bare skin. She pulled off the VR headset, plucked off the diodes, and tossed the squid-like contraption aside.
She wiped her teary eyes, then jammed her face into the pillow.
2:5
"I dunno," Stef said. He was sunbathing on a red Martian rock, in the red Martian desert, as well as he could in an ill-fitting hand-me-down spacesuit. "Never thought about it."
Rika stood over him with her hands on her waist, looking down through his darkened helmet visor, struggling to read his expression. She could see nothing. "Has nobody even questioned it?"
"Tons of people have," Nick said. He sat cross-legged next to Stef, trying to stack stones. "It's been a thing for at least a thousand years, even before the Last War."
"Been a thing?" she asked. "They had AI that far back?"
"I mean, it's been an argument that far back," Nick continued, "that artificial intelligence would eventually be advanced enough to..." he trailed off.
"To what?" she asked.
Stef answered for him. "Many things. To pass the Turing Test. To outsmart and outdo humans in everything. To threaten humanity." He rolled his hand. "And so on and so on."
A distant, tinny shout hit them from afar. A few spacesuits topped a nearby hill, another group of students, and they presented a large square sheet of metal. They used it to sleigh down the sand dune, roaring in distant laughter the entire ride. "I don't think it’s that serious," she said. "I'm not worried about AI leaking out and doing that weird sci-fi drama. I'm just worried about Ediha."
"What about him?" Stef asked. He was rocking his head back on the rock, his helmet tapping like a slow metronome. Tak. Tak. Tak. "I mean,
yeah, he did lose everything, I guess."
"For fuck's sake, Stef," she complained. "Do you have no social intelligence? The guy has every right to be broken and depressed and in mourning. If that happened to you or me, we'd—"
"Okay," he said. "I get it." A silence found them for a moment, marked by the weak Martian breeze that dusted them with sand. He wiped his visor. “Honestly, it’s a bit rich comin’ from someone like you.”
She glared. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“How many nipsies have you killed since you started this game?”
She didn’t answer.
“I looked you up, y’know. You’re infamous.”
She crossed her arms. “I was just a noob then.”
“And apparently still a noob now. Killing soldiers and guards and cultists ain’t that much different than raidin’ villages or slaughtering innocents. You’re over here worried about feelings when at the end of the day, they’re still just nipsies. I mean, damn, does Ediha even feel sad?"
Her boot slammed into his side. He yelped and grunted and writhed hard enough to fall off the rock and into the sand. Nick burst into laughter even when his rock stack spilled over. Rika peered down at him as he curled up into the fetal position. "You shouldn't invalidate someone's emotions like that," she said. “Nipsy or not.”
Nick tried to wipe the laughter from his eyes but forgot he was wearing a helmet. "You have a point, Rika," he said. "We should've been a bit more considerate."
"But they have emotions though, right?" She looked at Nick, who was already working on another stack of rocks.
"As well as code can have emotions," Nick said.
"But they can have them."
Nick's stack tumbled over. He turned to Rika. "I know what you're getting at, but we can’t always mix moral philosophy with science. Stella Vallis wouldn't be here if we did.
"This isn't about the survival of a colony," she argued.
"It's research," he countered. "Everything they learn in these simulations gets applied to their respective programs. Psychology, sociology, physiology. Every game season, they study something new. A few months ago, they studied disease propagation. Then it was language evolution. This time they're studying mythology, magic, and religion. There are worlds of insight that could be learned here that we could apply to all sorts of social models."
"So they're guinea pigs," she let out. "Lab rats."
He nodded. "Yes."
"And nobody asks if that's right or wrong?"
Nick sighed. "Is it right to boil water? Is it wrong to engineer a Stirling engine? For the developers, scientists, and researchers, it's never been about what is right or wrong. It just is, and so they seek to learn from it."
***
Shivering cold, white all around. Heavy snowflakes eased to the ground as if in slow motion. Dead trees with white limbs bending under the weight of the snow. Overcast skies. The smell of a campfire. Whispering wind. Rika breathed into her hands, and the fog poured from her. Her teeth were starting to chatter, and she wrapped her arms around herself to fend off the cold.
She looked down. The snow rose just past her boots and was starting to fall in, threatening to soak her socks. Something rustled beside her, something just beyond a large white dome. She pulled her feet along the snow with great effort to find two giggling weirdos sinking their teeth and claws into a fresh dead person. Had she not seen their faces, she'd have thought they were wolves.
She spoke through the shivering. "What the hell... are you asses doing?"
They froze, and their eyes snapped over to her. Bloody faces, red hands, animal furs. "Uh, you're back early," Valgus said almost with guilt. He looked her up and down. "You cold?"
"I'm freezing!"
They grinned wide and seeing Ediha smile at her warmed Rika’s heart. "Come into our abode," Valgus said. "I made something super special for our super special friend!"
She narrowed her eyes in suspicion, but she was too cold to care. Even with the sensory load at 25%, she could feel the icy cold all the way into her bones and joints. This was a moment of desperation. She crawled behind him into a small opening in the ground, down a short hallway, and emerged inside the dome.
It was warm there, or rather, less freezing.
"Here," he said as he tossed her a bundle of furs.
She held out the arms, felt at the fur. Grey and white and soft. She hurried to wrap it around herself. "Thanks," she let out.
Ediha scooted in to join them. "Hey, how was the spiritual rest?"
"Good, good," she said. "Did Valgus give you any trouble?"
"Nope. He taught me all sorts of things. Like how to build this ice house, how to make snowballs,” he held out his fingers and counted along with each item, “how to hunt, how to skin, how to fish in frozen lakes…"
Seeing him go on and on in excitement about the new things he learned and seen and experienced honestly warmed her heart. Perhaps he bonded with Valgus over the past couple of weeks.
He glowed with an innocent smile. "...and which part of a person tastes the best!"
"What?" She narrowed her eyes at Valgus only to see a look of deviance reflected back. "Are you forcing this boy to eat people?"
"Relax," Valgus said. "They can't get sick, remember? Only from stuff like spoiled food, so no weird cannibal-related diseases."
"It's fine, Rika," Ediha said. "Human sacrifices are common in my culture, and by consuming the flesh of my enemies, I feel I become closer to the gods!" He beamed the most heartwarming, childlike grin, and she almost wanted to wrap her arms around this precious little prince if his face hadn't been covered in blood.
Rika sighed with a smile. "Fine. As long as you're doing well."
They gathered up their things, prepared a few snacks, and started messing around before they began the trip. Once Rika started to get impatient at Valgus and Ediha's near-constant snowball fighting, they started off, using chain-casted portals to hop past the Bering Strait, down the Western coast of ancient Russia, onto the Hokkaido Islands, before finally landing in the first place that wasn't covered in snow or ice.
Green grass, blue skies, the heart of Japan.
Sparkling swords dancing in the sunlight. Armor glittering. Clashes and shouts.
A battle was unfolding.
2:6
Red samurai versus green samurai. Colored banners attached to their backs, spears and katanas and cavalry. The generals barked their commands, and the lines ebbed and flowed and clashed against one another. Units of soldiers versus units. Duelist against duelist.
From their spot atop the hill, the three could see far across the fields of battle.
"Tribal warfare?" Ediha asked.
"Basically," Rika said. "It's not really our business."
Valgus yawned and stretched his arms. "Why don't we wait around and loot after its over?"
"It could take all day," she said, "and we have no idea if Mondego already came through or not. If he hasn't, we should hurry to the Wind Temple as soon as possible."
"The Wind Temple? I thought we were here to face Mondego?"
"Doing it here would be premature. If we can get to the temple, Ediha can get stronger."
She glanced over at Ediha. He held an open smile, eyes wide, tracing the fantastic armor of the distant samurai, their agile movements and warrior grace as they slashed and guarded and bested one another in combat. He was in awe, and he wasn't even paying attention to Valgus and Rika.
She found herself smiling but shook it off.
"No need to rush," Valgus said. "You worry too much. Besides, all of this is new to Ediha. We're in a huge new world to him."
He was right. Ediha had only ever known his place in Mexico. The Aztecs likely didn't even know there was a world beyond the ocean, at least until the Spaniards arrived.
Ediha turned on his heels and darted off. "Run."
"What?"
"Run."
Rika and Valgus shared puzzled glances and—
; Fwip. Something zipped by them. Clack. An arrow plinked off the rocks where they were standing.
Rika looked out toward the battle. A small group was facing them, aiming in their direction with pointed hands, angry stares, and nocked arrows.
"Run!" Rika yelled.
They hurried down the hill and found a path that led to the forested road below. A quick check to make sure nobody was wounded, and they sprinted down the path, trying not to stumble on the slippery gravel.
When they reached the bottom, Valgus said between breaths, "Hold on a sec, do we really gotta run all this way? Just use your teleport spell.”
"I don’t have it,” she snapped. “Only tryhards use teleport spells!”
“What?” Valgus shot out. “I’m not a tryhard!”
Hooves hit them from up the road and past the bend. It was coming from the direction of the battle, and she knew what the samurai were trying to do.
"Get ready for a fight," she ordered. "Ediha, you know how to use that gun, right?"
He nodded. "I'm getting good at it."
"Hide behind a tree. I'll try to talk my way out of this."
Valgus stifled a laugh. "Come on, kid. Load that rifle." They hurried a good distance behind her and knelt at their hiding spots. The hooves rumbled closer, then a group burst around the far corner - almost a dozen red samurai.
Rika kept her sword sheathed but stood at them with crossed arms and a defiant stance. They rumbled closer in a full gallop, spears out and pointed at her. Faces of determination. The world was trembling under the weight of them.
She held her breath, and they zipped on by. The wind blew through her hair as they passed. They turned and pulled their horses to a stop.
"Identify yourself!" one shouted.
"I am Rika, a traveling priestess!"
They paused, looked at each other, whispered, smiled, then looked back at her. "Are you one of them?"
She tilted her head at the question. "One of who?"
"The Lost Kami."
She didn't want to answer. He was talking about either all players in general or whatever Mondego's cult was called.