by Charles Dean
“No! Don’t even try it!” Lee shouted, scrambling backward. He had watched enough B-rated zombie movies to have a good sense of fear about the direction this was heading. “Don’t even think about eating my brains!”
“Eat your brains? No, no I’m saying you need them. You don’t have any brains! How in the world do you living folks consider us to be mindless? Look at you fumbling and stumbling and bumbling around like some uncoordinated idiot. Do you want me to go kill the morose halfwit now?” the zombie asked, twisting his head around at an awkward angle to address the sky.
A blue status window exactly like the ones from the games he played popped up in front of Lee.
You have received Every Noob’s Starting Sword.
“You gave him a weapon? So, what, you want this to be a fair fight? Do I get a weapon too?” the zombie asked.
“No. Well then, we have the coliseum, we have the participants, and I have my drink. I say, let’s begin this! Round one! Fight!” the voice called out.
The zombie didn’t hesitate. He ran across the field, open-jawed and teeth ready as he came for Lee. He wasn’t exactly a full-on speed demon, but he definitely wasn’t a walker, either.
Grotesque scenes of a zombie tearing into flesh flashed through Lee’s mind, and he silently cursed himself for watching so many zombie shows over the years. He hadn’t even been in a fight since his dad made him take martial arts lessons after being beaten up a lot in his younger days, so he could only remember the most basic technique: he turned and ran the other way.
“Seriously? You’re going to run? You have a sword!” the god called down. “And why do you think that’s going to help? He’s a zombie! He doesn’t need stamina! You do! I don’t care if good cardio is one of the rules of surviving a zombie apocalypse. By the time he inevitably catches up to you, you’ll be out of breath, tired and defeated. He’ll be still just as fine as he was when he started, you freaking imbecile!”
“How was I supposed to know that?” Lee shouted back defensively as he ran. “Dead bodies are supposed to decompose and turn to crap after thirty days, not run around! Who the hell thought that zombies having endless stamina made sense? Aren’t dead people just bodies that don’t work? Hence the dead part? So how is it that they now have qualities far surpassing living bodies that never shut down in the first place?”
Realizing that the deity obviously knew more about the zombie than he did, however, Lee heeded the god’s advice and turned around to face the monster.
“Oh, for Pete— The sword. Get the sword out. It’s in the leather pouch fixed to your waist. Just, seriously . . . Ugh.” The voice sighed impatiently and in frustration. “Just look in the pouch and pull it out.”
Slowly comprehending what was expected of him, Lee slowed his run and did just that: he reached for the brown pouch that had appeared on his waist without him even noticing it. The small leather satchel didn’t appear to be large enough to hold more than a wallet and loose change, but as he opened it, a window with a grid popped up. In the upper left corner, he saw a short sword taking up three of the little squares of the grid. He reached his hand out and tried to grab the sword, but his hand just harmlessly passed through it.
“Oh, wow. Just put your hand into the pouch while looking at the sword, grab, and pull up,” the voice instructed him. “Please, tell me you can do at least that much.”
Lee did as he was told, and as he pulled, a full-length short sword slid out of the pouch. Despite himself, Lee was actually amazed—not just that it had worked, but that it seemed so natural. He slowed to a halt and turned to face the undead creature. He felt somewhat powerful as he held the weapon in his hands—like he was somehow safe and right with the world. That was until he saw the zombie’s expression.
“Just keep running,” the zombie groaned as it approached.
Thankfully, there was still some small space between them. Lee took a deep breath, raised his sword, and charged the zombie. He swung as hard as he could at the zombie’s outstretched hands as they reached to latch onto him. The blow connected, knocking the hands to the side and causing the zombie to growl irritably.
“Ugh!! Don’t do that,” it complained in a gruff voice. “That’s not cool. I don’t know how long it’s going to take to regenerate from those scars!”
Lee ignored the zombie and struck out again, taking another swipe at its hands and then stepping back as they once more reached out for him. Again, and again, they repeated the same scenario. The zombie would reach for him, and Lee would swat away his grasping hands and back away safely before the undead creature could reach him. It wasn’t a very effective technique, but it was sufficient to keep him alive for the time being—and that was by far the best outcome he could hope for at the moment.
“This is not fair and equal representation! Give me a weapon so that I can show this noob how to fight!” the zombie growled, its continuous attempts to grab and latch onto Lee met with a flurry of sword swipes.
Lee’s brain kicked into overdrive as he tried to figure out a way to kill the thing in front of him. He’s moaning and complaining about the blade, but it’s not doing much other than keeping him away. I’m barely even hurting him!
“Fine, fine. I’ll even this up,” the voice called down. “It was getting boring watching anyway,” he said. “You know, I watched a dude with a spoon slaughter a fully-armed barbarian this one time, and you can’t even kill an unarmed zombie with a sword? For shame.”
Crap! Lee’s eyes shot open in fear as he heard the voice and watched a sword appear in the air above them. They grew even wider again when it fell between the two combatants and landed blade-first in the ground, penetrating the earth by a good foot. The zombie reached for it as soon as it struck the dirt, his decayed hand clasping onto the sword’s pommel.
Lee reacted on instinct and quickly swung downward as hard as he could. He was rewarded for his effort by cleanly slicing through the zombie’s wrist. The walking corpse’s dismembered hand was left in place, firmly clasped onto the hilt of the buried sword.
“I’m going to have to teach you manners,” the zombie grumbled as he lurched forward shoulder-first into Lee. Stunned as he was from the success of his swing, Lee was unprepared for the abrupt change in tactics. He took the attack on his chest and was forced to stumble backward in an awkward attempt to keep his balance for a brief moment before losing the fight against gravity and collapsing onto the ground. Taking advantage of the space provided, the zombie grabbed the sword using his remaining hand, pulled it free and began using his teeth to pry the amputated appendage off the blade so that he could get a better grip on his new weapon.
“There.” The zombie smiled, showing pieces of his own flesh in his teeth. “Time to kill you now and see just how little brains you have.”
Lee hesitantly backed away as the zombie edged closer, flashing his creepy grin and giving the sword a few practice swings. “Die!” Lee shouted as the zombie came in striking range, hoping the word would give him courage. He stabbed out toward the undead creature, but the monster used his own blade to neatly parry the attack to the side.
The zombie laughed, his jaw opening slightly wider each time as it slowly unhinged a little. “Wow, you really are bad at this! Have you never used one before?” The zombie then swung again horizontally, knocking Lee’s sword to the side.
Lee tried to reposition his blade back in front of him, but the zombie’s handless right arm swatted the blade away almost as soon he did. The zombie then lurched forward and slammed his shoulder into Lee for a second time, sending Lee back onto the ground.
“Don’t worry. All that experience in the dirt will prepare you for what’s next,” the zombie taunted as he lunged toward Lee in a chopping motion. Lee rolled to the side, spinning in what he believed was the most athletically-impressive moment of his life before raising his sword and thrusting it right between two ribs. Rather than showing any signs of pain or fatigue, however, the zombie simply grabbed onto Lee’s hand, held
it firmly, raised his own weapon, and struck down.
“Here. Got one more function fixed!” the voice called out right before the zombie’s sword returned the favor and stabbed Lee in the stomach.
Lee felt the cold blade slide in accompanied by a wave of sharp pain and a dull throb that emanated up his side.
A notification popped up to in his vision:
You have been stabbed and are now bleeding. You have taken 51 points of damage from the stab and are losing 1 point of health per second from the wound.
Holy son of a—! Lee’s mind drifted into a string of profanities as the blade sank in. He felt the cold steel puncture into his abdomen, and he involuntarily clenched his stomach muscles and doubled over, grasping at the wound as soon as the blade was withdrawn. The world spun around him as his vision swam, and his entire focus seemed to shift down to that singular spot on his body. He gasped for air, drawing in several quick, shallow breaths, afraid of rupturing the wound and making it worse. He collapsed forward into the dirt and curled up into a ball, visions of death prancing through his head.
Some small part of his brain, however, refused to give in to the flood of emotions and instead latched onto the flashing blue box that had appeared and what the text it contained actually said. 51 points of damage. Health. Hit points. The idea slowly wormed its way through to his higher conscious, and he suddenly became aware of the fact that the spot in his stomach felt more like a pinch now than a gaping wound.
The initial shock of being stabbed began to wear off when he realized that he wasn’t going to bleed out and die, and reason began to take over as his overexcited brain began to cool down and function logically again. How many health points do I even have? How come I’m not freaking out more over being stabbed? Shouldn’t that hurt more? No sooner did he think the questions than a bar became visible, letting him know at least one answer: 37. He had 37 out of 100 hit points left, and they were bleeding off quickly. He only remembered seeing the one prompt from the stab wound, but he guessed that the earlier knockdowns had actually done damage too.
“Ahh . . . That was a fair bit of fun,” the zombie gasped in satisfaction. He had already turned and backed away as if the fight was over and done with.
Lee gritted his teeth and watched the decaying creature as it shambled away. He clutched the wound in his stomach as if it would somehow stop the bleeding and slowly pushed himself back to his feet, using his sword for support.
He had to do something, or he was going to die. He didn’t have the faintest clue what that might mean, but he knew that wasn’t something he wanted to experience or figure out firsthand. He clearly had absolutely no experience fighting with a sword, and his one successful blow had been as much luck as skill. So, he did the only real move he actually still remembered from years of martial arts classes that cost him hours and hours of his life for a hypothetical fight that never occurred: he stumbled forward, grabbed ahold of the zombie’s crusty suit, and used his head, literally smashing the zombie in the face with a headbutt right on his decaying nose.
The prompt appeared again, letting him know that he had taken a point of damage in the process of headbutting the zombie, but that only increased his sense of urgency. He didn’t care that every time he moved the wound in his stomach hurt enough to make him want to die. He watched his health drain two more hit points, one from bleeding, one from smashing his forehead into the zombie.
“What the—” The zombie tried to say something, but Lee cut him off before he could.
“You. Are. Not. Eating. My. Brains! Dangit!” Lee shouted, his words punctuated by the sound of his forehead repeatedly smashing against the zombie’s skull. It took a half a minute, and he knew that he was on the verge of death, but after ten or twelve hits, he felt the zombie’s skull cave in.
A lifetime of forced after-school activities finally came in handy for something other than filler on a college application.
You have killed the zombie priest, Brian. You have been awarded 59 Experience. You have reached Level 1! Your level increase has boosted all primary stats by 1. Your current Power, Toughness and Spirit have been adjusted to 11. You are 91 Experience away from Level 2.
“Huh, now isn’t that funny?” the voice chortled. “He was only worth 59 EXP? I thought he would have been worth way more, given your level difference. Oh well. Here, I will even heal you as a reward since . . . Well, we got you past level zero! Hooray for that, right? Let’s check out your stats! Maybe now they won’t share the common denominator of nothing with your online dating inbox.”
“What? My level?! You think healing me is just going to make this alright? I ALMOST DIED, YOU FREAKING JERK! What the hell were you thinking?! I don’t know who you are or what sort of ‘god’ you must think yourself to be, but you have no right to just grab random people and—” Lee shut up as the massive wound in his abdomen instantly faded away.
“You know, if you keep up that yelling, I’m going to summon five or six more zombies. The big, evil, mean, super-fast kind that can kill entire squads of knights. You know, like zombie bunnies?”
“Zombie bunnies? Are you kidding me with this?! Not zombie bears, not giant zombie dragons? Zombie bunnies are what you’re threatening me with?” Lee yelled back, his frustration growing. “Look, man . . . woman . . . sloth, monkey, mouse or whatever you are, just send me back already! I lived through your stupid trial, didn’t I?”
“You don’t think zombie bunnies are scary? They have teeth like . . . they can leap like . . . Look at the bones!” the voice said in a Scottish accent.
“Huh?” Lee looked around for bones but didn’t find any.
“That you don’t get my reference makes me want to kill you with a horde of zombie bunnies even more. Or, at the least, manifest a centurion or two to throw you to the floor. Well, unless . . . You don’t happen to have a holy hand grenade on you? No, of course not. I’d have noticed,” the god finished, laughing at its own joke.
“Just send me ba—” Lee was cut off when another blue screen popped up in front of him.
“There we go, your stat screen. Here, take a look at it,” the being said.
Lee glanced at the giant stat screen, his consternation at being ignored growing by the second. The pop-up had all his attributes listed—a much larger list than he could quickly go through—his level, his EXP, his inventory and even a special note about his lineage. But what caught his eye, however, was his name. ‘Lee the NPC.’
Lee looked at the insulting moniker with a combination of annoyed curiosity and outrage. What? I’m not an NPC! I am a player if anything. I’ve been playing games for decades. How can I suddenly be an NPC?
“Yeah, you’re noticing the NPC part, aren’t you? Well, about that . . . You see, when I was trying to convert you over to War of Eternity, I kind of had to register you as an NPC since your stats were too low to just manually register you as a player. It’s the first time I’ve ever run into this problem, but I figured you’re about as smart as the NPCs are, so no big deal, right? I mean, the only minor downside is . . . Well, if you die in the game, then, you know, you’ll be dead in real life too.”
“What the heck? How is that only a minor downside? And not a giant downside? And what the heck is War of Eternity? I’ve never even heard of that game. Just freaking send me back already! I’m pretty sure my boss won’t accept the ‘Well, I was kidnapped by a mysterious voice claiming to be a god that made me fight zombies in a Roman coliseum’ excuse as just cause for being absent from work!”
“What? Your boss wouldn’t even know you were missing if I returned you after what appeared to be three weeks or three years for you. Since we’re not in the same universe or on the same space-time continuum at the moment, all I have to do is just return you back to your own later. I can even get it down to the exact moment I took you away.” The shape-shifting creature suddenly appeared, taking shape as a bear this time, its voice now sounding like the announcer in every movie trailer.
“How would t
hat even work? What are you talking about? We’re not on the same space-time continuum? You still haven’t answered me about the game. What is War of Eternity?”
“Oh, come on. How do you spend all day on computers and not know how this works. Alright, moving on . . .”
“No, tell me!” Lee insisted, talking at the bear as loudly as possible without yelling. “Where am I? And what have you done to me?”
“The real question is: What makes you think you have the right to talk to a giant with that tone? What makes you think I won’t eat you right here and now?” the bear asked, standing on his two hind legs. A giant wooden mug the size of Lee’s head appeared in one of its paws, complete with foam spilling over the sides, and he took a swig before setting it down on the ground in front of him.
“You keep talking big, but I don’t get why. This is how you are acting . . .” The bear shifted into a giant dragon from western mythology and extended its Brobdingnagian wings. “And this is how you should be acting . . .” The dragon, whose voice had echoed through the coliseum with even more bass than it had when he was intimidating the zombie earlier, shrunk into a tiny, white mouse with beady, red eyes.
“You get the picture?” the mouse squeaked out as it climbed up the side of the cup that he had set down as a bear and dove into the drink. “Ahh, swimming in beer. Nothing beats it.”
“You’re not answering my questions. What’s with these stats?” Lee looked back through the list. “It says I have zero intelligence. How do I have zero intelligence if I am capable of knowing something? Anything? That doesn’t make sense! And what does spirit do?” Lee berated the mouse with questions.
“You don’t have any intelligence because you haven’t learned a single skill. Every skill you learn goes towards improving that stat, which goes toward improving your ability to learn skills. Leveling up skills also improves this, but . . . You know what? Forget this. What type of gamer needs a tutorial? Didn’t your father ever teach you that real men don’t use tutorials? They just press buttons until something good happens and then figure the rest.” The mouse wiggled its tiny arms inside the beer, diving under so Lee couldn’t see it.