GodsRealm- Betrayal

by Luke Isaacs

  GodsRealm

  Betrayal

  Luke Isaacs

  Copyright © 2019 Anscot Publishing

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  All characters and events depicted in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Contents

  PART ONE – VALHALLA GREATEST

  PART TWO – METAMORPHISIS

  PART THREE - TESTED

  PART FOUR – THE TRAP SPRUNG

  PART FIVE – THE HOODED MAN

  PART ONE – VALHALLA GREATEST

  1

  Rick Hernandez-James sat idly at his station in the ComSE secure data holdings ‘Hive’. Every few seconds a blue signal would flash on his screen followed by a series of numbers. It meant a user was accessing their virtual holding. Even more uninterested than usual, he was counting down the minutes until the end of his shift. Some human company might have helped, but all he had was 76AIFRX and he wasn’t really company at all.

  76AIFRX was a sole purpose AI. He resembled a cheap looking R2-D2 knock-off and was assigned the singular duty of watching over Rick as Rick watched over the data channeling around him to its authorized users as they accessed their portals.

  The job was simple to the point of being mind-numbing. In fact, they only included human operatives like Rick to show their clients they cared about their data and to appear as generous humanitarians in this current time of mass unemployment. What they omitted to say in the brochures of course, was that the job could be performed by a slug, a moth or a well-colonized petri dish. It was tedious, paid little and Rick’s 76AIFRX didn’t even possess speech recognition patterns in order to have even trivial conversation.

  Still, VNet jobs were not common even though the virtual network, VNet, was introduced back in 2024, more than 16 years ago. VNet still dominated the virtual space even after the fall of the world economy in 2032 and the ascendency of one standard digital currency known as DC, and its preferred platforms. These days though, VNet functioned mainly for leisure and entertainment.

  Occasionally his grandmother ranted about cryptocurrency back in the early 2010s and their eventual fall by 2020. Back then in 2018-2019 when she was a crypto miner, she had made and lost a fortune in USD. Rick had no idea what USD meant at first, or crypto mining, or how much a USD was in DC.

  Her answers were more cryptic than her stories, which led him to conclude that people in those old days before he was born were total nut jobs. The idea that cryptocurrency issuers trusted people in their homes to secure their currency not only baffled him, it gave him headaches trying to understand the lack of processing power back then. They didn’t have super quantum computers back then.

  Rick snapped out of his daydream at a flash of red light. The warning signal announced unauthorized access to the exchange’s data. It was no biggie, and he calmly accessed the necessary function in his tech suit and launched a virtual homing torpedo after the hacker. 76AIFRX began to spin frantically, sending power surges by diverting its energy over the grid towards the place the homing torpedo would explode, trapping the hacker in his own suit and voiding him the chance to unplug from VNet.

  The surge, Rick was told, was sufficient to send the hacker into a deep sleep until real-life police in the hire of the VNet could collect him.

  Rick sighed as he finished his part and logged the incident and resolution. They didn’t get more than one attack a day generally, except on Sundays. Hackers always assumed that security diminished because people took Sundays off. In fact, Rick and his co-workers received double-pay for Sundays, so there was always a human presence. It didn’t matter anyway, even if there were no humans, there was always AI, and it was more effective than any human operative.

  Rick relaxed again. He couldn’t wait to shrug off his work suit and slip into his gaming suit.

  To his rarely seen co-workers and management, Rick might be a normal young man but out of his job at ComSE secure data holdings firm, Rick was Lord Errate, a Level 24 Battle Mage in GodsRealm, the most popular multiplayer action role-playing game on VNet. He was currently placed in the top 50 ranked players of the entire game, an impressive feat considering that there were around 600 million active players in GodsRealm.

  The game was unique, essentially for three reasons. Firstly, real money. Up to 30 percent of all loot dropped by high-level monsters was actual DC, the global digital currency.

  Secondly, more money! If you managed to kill a player in Player versus Player (PvP) mode, you got to take up to half of their in-game DC.

  And thirdly, it was immense in size, dwarfing other games and crowding them out of the marketplace.

  The ad copy said it all, Five-times the size of Earth, extreme immersion, hyper-realistic visuals, and huge cash prizes are what sets GodsRealm apart! Have you got what it takes!?

  Rick always played in the Deep Fantasy setting – it was the most popular after Urban Fantasy. There were multiple settings including Space Opera, Arabian Nights and Old West. Least popular of all was the overly realistic Modern-Day. Most gamers that played that setting were scorned by the others. To Rick, playing a game in a world exactly the same as the real one was pointless. A practice in masochism.

  The exception was the annual championship. During that yearly competition, all worlds and settings were replaced by just one. GodsRealm’s own version of Ragnarök where, for the affordable fee of 50 DC, anybody could compete for the five million DC first prize. The game favored teams over singular players and any player who put the time and effort to develop his or her own character knew this for a fact.

  Sadly, all positions under first only received consolation prizes in the form of power-ups and potions, but, even for the minor places, the value of these prizes always ran to a few thousand DC. Rick knew this well since he and his team finished fifth two years before, and second in the prior year’s competition.

  Rick’s team, Valhalla Greatest, had five players, one more than the lower group player limit of four. Their greatest rivals and the reigning champions, a team called Odin’s Hand, had eight players, the maximum allowed.

  Rick was his group’s human Battle Mage, a class only the most dedicated of players chose because of the limitation of its armor and weapons. The payoff came when said player advanced past Level 15 and was able to wield massive ‘area of effect’ spells and a most impressive variety of conjurable swords and staffs. This put a considerable amount of any team’s firepower on the shoulders of players like Rick and was a considerable advantage.

  His teammates were Rania – game name Camille the Dark, Dana – Da’Anna in game, Mark – known as Son of Beelzebub, Mario – game name – Holy Zord.

  Rania, whom he assumed (but wasn’t quite sure) was a girl, always arrived in real world meetings wearing a camouflage suit covering her body and head and a voice disguiser. In the game she was a Level 25 Chameleon Rogue, the perfect fit for her mysterious persona. She was the marksman, trap sniffer, spy extraordinaire and thief of the group.

  He was certain Dana was a woman. His grandmother recalled her from the 2030s as Dana Brown, a moderately famous singer before AI artists became the number one source for music on the VNet. Dana as Da’Anna was a fellow Mage at Level 23, however she specialized in mind and spirit magic, which always placed her at the rear line of attack. Mainly unnoticed in the heat of battle, she was a powerful rearguard for the team and a force to unde
rmine the abilities of the enemies of Valhalla Greatest from afar.

  Mario was a total mystery since he had no presence whatsoever on VNet outside of GodsRealm. Rick had used all of his tricks and contacts to try and track his real-life persona but always came up empty-handed. Mario was the group’s Cleric, a specialized caste of Priests, a Level 27 master of healing, blessings, and curses back-marker like Dana.

  Finally, there was the enigmatic Mark. Rick theorized he was a hacker who managed to tap into one of the legendary DC vaults held by the VNet mega firms. To say that he lavished the most expensive and expansive equipment and power-ups on them was an understatement.

  Rick estimated Mark’s monthly expenditure on the game to be in the neighborhood of 40 to 50 thousand DC, at least ten times what any of them spent on an especially taxing month. Another reason for Rick’s hacker theory was his regular disappearances for days at a time. A thing none of them could afford if they wanted to keep their ranks and levels up.

  Of course, Mark didn’t have to do that; he simply bought experience boxes to compensate for his missing days, boxes that cost him around 100 DC for each 10 thousand experience points. To get a clue to the magnitude of this, around one million experience points are needed to reach Level 20, and from then on, every level needed around 250 thousand experience points. Added to the power-ups and super equipment he frequently bought, Rick sometimes thought his estimates on Mark’s spend might have been a little low.

  As Son of Beelzebub, a demonic Tank Fighter at Level 23, Mark was not just needed; he was almost indispensable when it came to PvP events in the game.

  Although the current group had played together for three years now, they never physically met outside of the annual championship, where only the top one thousand players were invited by coded invitations, where they got to stand together before entering the game and feel the adoration of the fans who pay thousands of DC to attend the stadium event live.

  This year’s championship was around the corner, so as they’d agreed he would, Rick called a team meeting. They were to meet in an abandoned temple in Sector 5 of Eloria’s map, an area only inhabited by the highest-level monsters. Reaching the meeting area and securing it in a secure, sound-proof room was an adventure in itself. The meeting was set for 5-7pm central time after most jobs for the day on VNet, and the real world had finished and stretched to two hours to allow for the inevitable time they would probably need for fighting monsters and other players on their way to the meeting point. Their meetings never lasted longer than 15 minutes.

  Mark, as usual, arrived before the others. It wasn’t because he was prompt. He had one of the most coveted power-ups in the game, the Ring of True Path, which allowed him to reach any set destination with zero monster and player encounter along his route.

  Around 6:15 pm Dana arrived, the last member to join the assembly.

  “Whoa! What happened to you stretch?” she said, looking up at Rick.

  He had used his new spell of double power to reach the meeting point with minimum health depletion. Unfortunately, he hadn’t quite perfected it. Instead of double power, it had given him double height, and his elongated appearance had drawn much laughter from his team mates.

  He filled her in, thankful his avatar couldn't blush, then they got down to business.

  They had gathered to discuss the championship that they’d gone so close to securing last year and had literally been training for ever since. As usual, Mark’s first complaint was their refusal to let him buy a few terabytes of VNet real estate to make a permanent HQ for the team.

  It was brushed aside quickly. None of them cared for the owner of the money Mark had obviously hacked to find them slouching around in property bought and developed using his DC. Reports of people disappearing after serving a sentence of forced labor to one of the mega corporations on VNet were all too true. Rick knew it first-hand. His parents were sentenced to five years of servitude over ten years ago, and he and his grandmother had never heard from them again.

  He didn’t really miss them; his grandmother ably filled the void left in his life when they were incarcerated, and it had been so long now he’d have forgotten what they looked like without holos and photos. His grandmother, usually a realist, never gave up hope they’d return and prayed for that every night over a little shrine she built with candles and pictures.

  “Thanks for the offer Mark, but no thanks,” said Mario over Mark’s final protests. “First order of business – we’re not stocked enough on mana and healing potions, we should either cough up some dough or go on separate grinding missions for the next week.”

  “I got this covered, Holy Zord,” said Mark, facing Mario’s avatar. His avatar’s rough features didn’t really match the delicate features he had in real life and right then they were set in a scowl because of his freshly rejected offer. “When it comes to spending DC, I’m your go-to man, and I like doing it.”

  “I have a hundred of each stashed from last year’s compensation prize,” Rania said, jumping before the usual argument ensued whenever Mark offered to spend money on them. “The team can have them, you all know as a chameleon I don’t need many.”

  “Those were last year’s version, honey,” Dana said, and her avatar patted Rania’s arm softly. “They won’t allow them in this year’s competition.”

  “We could go to an alchemist, and each of us pitches 40 DC to upgrade them to this year’s version?” Rick suggested. “It’s the fastest solution to this problem.”

  The microtransactions of GodsRealm were a fact of life, and most DC made in the game was spent in the game. Mark was living proof that paying to win was a reasonable strategy if you had the money to do it.

  “We have another issue,” Dana approached the subject delicately as she knew they were all sore about it. “Our AC has dropped 13 points permanently in the last encounter with the God of corrosion, and it’s still dropping. We need to find new, uncursed armor.”

  “Well, if Mark had been around when he should have, it wouldn’t have happened in the first place,” Mario spat, the eyes of his avatar glowing like embers with the anger he felt for Mark’s last disappearance. “But I don’t mind if he buys us basic Level 25 armor and we can slot it and enchant it during the ten days till the competition.”

  “We discussed all of this before, folks,” Rick said, his avatar towering over them. “It was not the presence of Mark or his absence that decided the outcome; it was the newbies who crashed the scene as we negotiated with the God of corruption.”

  “Still, we needed his higher firepower and constitution to take down the God,” Mario whined, unwilling to let it go. His sulking in game mode sometimes ended with catastrophic consequences, so Mark stepped in.

  “I will do it,” Mark intervened, remembering that the last time Mario left in a cloud of anger, they’d followed into one of the most dangerous areas of the game. “In fact, I just did it. Check your Vmail boxes; you should have them now.”

  Rania’s avatar was the first to drop her cursed armor on the floor, and Mark eyed her feminine form appreciatively. The new armor appeared around her almost immediately, shimmering with powerful enchantment.

  “Cool, you bought the new Chosen Einherjar line.” She glowed, not just from the magic, but from the pleasure of having the highest rated Level 25 armor in the game.

  The rest followed suit and soon the floor was strewn with the discarded armor — all except Mario, whose avatar crossed his arms petulantly.

  “I asked for the basic armor,” he bitched. “This is 10 thousand DC per set; we can’t repay that ever.”

  “Sure, you can,” Mark encouraged him. “When we win the competition, pay me back the price of the armor. The winners carry home the special branded Odin’s Choice armor anyway. That shit is so far off the rating chart it is almost invincible, so you sell this set without touching the prize money.”

  “Yeah, well we have to win first,” Mario grumbled but seemed placated.

  “There is one l
ast thing to discuss,” Rick said. He was hesitant to open the subject because they’d also argued over it last year, but it needed to be addressed. “Should we bet on ourselves?”

  “No,” said Mark. “Betting is not an option. One, the odds are not in our favor, two, any bet meets a counter bet backed by a crime lord, which could mean we put a target on ourselves and three, the bookies of VNet are not the sort you want to mess around with. They don’t like big winners.”

  Given that Mark wasn’t above taking risks to obtain DC by dubious means, his words were quite telling. They all knew the tales of the mysterious power surges that had killed or crippled people in real life and also that, although covered up in the media, they were almost certainly always because of illegal activity.

  “I will bet a thousand,” blurted Rania, taking them all by surprise. “The odds against us are a thousand to one, so if we win, it means I’d be a millionaire.”

  The team erupted into an argument at her blunt statement, but they hushed instantly when the white walls of their room began to glow crimson.

  “Um, we’re either out of time, or we’re under attack, the shield is about to collapse!” Rick said and began immediately readying his spells for an imminent attack from the Wyvern who frequented the area. He cast an ice shield over the group, then quickly conjured his Chilling Sword.

  Mario simultaneously began to incant a dozen protective and empowering spells as he moved into the circle being formed by Rick, Mark, and Rania.

  Dana put fear and soul traps around the shield erected by Rick and joined Mario in the inner ring.

  Mark beat his massive two-handed sword of severing against his chest; the massive sword was one of many weapons that only the demonic races can wield because of its soul-shattering capabilities.

  Rania disappeared altogether, and Rick could only track her by the pungent smell of her poison-dipped double daggers.

  The concealing shield over the room broke, but instead of a Level 24 Wyvern, the group was beset by a massive Level 35 Dragon.