by Simon Archer
I was going to be a gamer saint again! I couldn’t even imagine the sponsorship deals, the corporate checkbooks I could cash in on, the babes I could nail. God, saint sluts were so fucking hot. What I wouldn’t give to just rub some peanut butter over one of them and lick it off, slap that bitch until she calls me ‘King!’ FUCK YES! THAT COULD HAVE BEEN ME!
But, no, ‘B00GAB00GA234’ was destined to stay behind in the leaderboards forever. Shit, I couldn’t have caught up to anyone else in a million years in this game starting from scratch. Undersea Man was my meal ticket, my rise to stardom, my big shot! And it was all just taken away from me.
I’d spent the past day trying to grind up a brand-new character from level one, hoping that maybe I could try to get my ass somewhere decent in the charts, then PVP my way through the rest of the noobs until I at least got back to where I was. I mean, I already had a guild to work through, and I’d just hitch along with some of the other higher-level players on their missions and power level through to the top again.
Guess what? Those BACKSTABBING BITCHES didn’t let me back in! Could you have believed it? I built that guild from the ground up, recruiting the best players that’d take a bribe, from the GODDAMN BETA ONWARDS, and those cocksuckers had the FUCKING BALLS to tell me I couldn’t come back into MY OWN GUILD! Little assholes said that I’d already gotten most of the good players killed with that ‘stunt’ I pulled and bopped the leaderboard scores already. It wasn’t a fucking stunt, it was a hack! I got HACKED. I SWEAR TO GOD, IT WAS A HACK! That motherfucking villain was too on top of every little thing that happened to just have been another raid boss. It couldn’t have just been the game, man.
Could it? Fuck me. I didn’t even fucking know.
God, this was just like with the Penultimate Pretending leaderboards just a year ago. It was the oldest, lamest series of JRPGs out there, but everyone thought it was the best thing ever, so anyone who played JRPGs was playing PP. God, the babes in those games were so fucking hot. What I wouldn’t give to cover one of them in peanut butter and just lick it off, slap one of those bitches until they called me ‘King’…
Anyhow, I was rocking it as one of the top three speedrunning saints in PP, having one hundred percent completed the hardest in the series, Penultimate Pretending 7, over three dozen times in less than one-hundred forty-nine hours. So, I was going to show everyone that I could play the game blindfolded on a livestream, and it was going great. Until someone proved that I wasn’t actually blindfolded and posted a video explaining the one-way blindfold I was using. I tried to play it off as a joke, and it almost worked, until someone also made a video of themselves ACTUALLY playing the game blindfolded and beating my best record in just twelve hours.
I was so humiliated, and I swore I’d tear down that gamer with every last dollar I had to get my reputation back. I tried to spread rumors that the video was a hoax. No luck. Apparently, the official speedrunning sites all verified it, and it was being streamed live and viewed by over a few hundred thousand people at once, played on an original Gamebase 3 at an official event, no emulators or anything.
I searched the whole net to find out who this asshole was. No luck there either. The guy was a mystery, with only the gamertag ‘Metnad’ to go by. Couldn’t fucking believe that I got Saintslayed so fucking hard, man. And it was like it was happening all over again with this fucking event boss that FUCKING RUINED MY LIFE AND MY BITCH GUILDMATES WHO WOULDN’T KNOW LOYALTY IF IT FUCKED THEIR ASSHOLES RED!
Whatever, those fucknards didn’t want me back in their stupid guild, I’d just go do my own thing. I’d been playing for a while, and I had some good ‘pay-to-win’ items I could just put on my new character. I’d make a new guild, one that was ten times better than the Retributioners could have ever been. Maybe I’d have even sneaked in a few of my other cheats into the code that I had used to get my speedrun scores in Penultimate Pretending, just to be safe.
Holy fucking shit, the code in Forge of Heroism was fucking airtight! They weren’t fucking kidding when they said that they’d gone all out on this game. God, I fucking hated that. Most gamers say that they hated glitches and shit, but a saint knew that a good set of glitches was the way to become the king of the video gaming world. None of the glitches in this fucking game could actually help me out now, no matter what I did. That asshole who killed me being a raid boss was sounding more and more like the real deal with every turn.
As a responsible, sensible, morally upstanding adult, I did what anyone with a rational and emotionally healthy response system to negativity would do: found the most toxic and salty message board I could and posted as many posts as I could, shitting all over Forge of Heroism. That’d show them. That’d show all of them that they couldn’t just shit on me and get away with it. Imagine how they’d feel when they felt the sting of a thousand hate-filled posts saying how terrible they were, how scathing it would be to see their precious game marred so utterly and totally on such a public stage! I bet those bitchnard developers would cry and whine like, “Wah! Wah! Our bitchnard game is so bitchnard that we can’t even make it good, and we put in random bullshit in our game that just randomly shits all over players for no good reason! Wah!”
Wait just a minute, was I a pathetic excuse for a human being, with no sense of personal responsibility for my own actions or their consequences, projecting my insecurities onto others for the sake of preserving my fragile and sensitive ego while simultaneously hoping that the attention that I would get from the deliberately inflammatory statements on the public stage provided by the internet would substitute my unstable feeling of self-love by pumping up the already unhealthy pride I felt in dishonestly participating in illicit and illegal activities within the gaming community to become a false, undeserving icon of cyber-sportsmanship, only reveling in all the hedonistic debaucheries of the status rather than the actual skills, honorable conduct, or respectable effort required to earn such a lofty position in the first place?
No, it was The Forge of Heroism that was wrong. To the message boards!
As I hefted and heaved my body over from the couch to the computer, unsticking myself from the leather, I adhered myself to the felt of the gamer chair several exhausting feet away. I logged into my glass computer, seeing the floating screen display the message boards I longed to see. While I began to search for the already scathing messages against The Forge of Heroism to join in the hatefest and to garner their attention for myself, the suggested videos in the banners sidetracked me.
One of them was a theorycraft video about ‘the Mysterious Villain of the Forge,’ and showed some clickbait thumbnail with a hot chick. I thought the chick was super-hot, hot enough that I wanted to cover her in peanut butter, then lick it off and slap her until she called me ‘King,’ so I clicked on it.
Alright, so the babe in the video was super-hot. Not clickbait. Like, ‘cream my computer screen’ attractive. So, I decided to give the video a few minutes of my attention, all while keeping my eyes thoroughly focused on this hot babe’s cleavage and trying not to let the sweat of my face leak too far down my neckbeard:
“Hey, Taky Team, Takitaki22 here with another video about Forge of Heroism for you today.” The breasts spoke, or at least, that was what I was looking at when I heard the voice. “Now, we all know that this game is, by far, the most expansive open-world MMORPG on the market today, the map literally as expansive as thirty thousand miles. For reference, that’s as much as the planet you’re standing on right now.”
God, I wanted to give these boobs my money, so this bitch would say my name, just once. Just once, I swear. Then I’d smother her in peanut butter and lick--
“Anyhow, this game’s got a lot going for it,” the boobs kept going, “but, for the longest time, everyone was weirded out because, like, the game didn’t have a villain. Like, what’s up with that? The beta players used to have the fabulous Mr. Yin to play with, but they nearly beat him to a bloody pulp on the day the beta ended. The fact that he didn’t show up
on the release day was a bit of concern for everyone, until HunterKiller started a marketing campaign with commercials saying that Mr. Yin was dead, and the world was saved. Yay! Right?
“Well, some players aren’t so sure. Over the past couple of months, the rumors have started to build up that there’s something strange going on in this game. It all started with a post on Chitter from Matthew Goldstein, known more by his gamertag ‘Xx69pU$$y420$LaYeR69xX,’ who had this to say.”
The boobs disappeared, instead replaced by the words from a Chitter post I only barely cared about:
“WHAT THE FUCK THERES A FUCKING HELL DEMON OR SOME SHIT IN THIS GAME FUCKING WITH ME OR SOMETHING I CALL HACKS ON THIS FUCKING MONSTER I CAN'T SLEEP I CAN'T EAT I CAN'T SLEEP I CAN'T EAT I CAN'T EAT I CAN'T”
The blessed boobs returned to talk about the post, which was alright, I guess:
“Weird, right?” Takitaki22 jiggled, “but you might be saying ‘Takitaki, isn’t this just regular gamer salt being shaken here?’ Well, you’d be right, if the man wasn’t sent to a freaking insane asylum, not a week after posting that. I know, right? Creepy.
“Is this revenge of the coma helms, claiming another victim? Some unforeseen side effect of prolonged exposure under the dreaded maximum settings that we’d all been told was nearly fatal? Maybe so, but it doesn’t fit the profile of the other medical episodes that we’ve seen for that. To point out the obvious, the guy made it to his computer and logged into Chitter to make a post about it instead of frothing at the mouth in his bed.
“What makes me the most interested in this post is that it mentions some kind of ‘demon’ within the game of Forge of Heroism. This very post marks the first of several similar posts mentioning some kind of malevolent entity within the game, making people go insane before having to seek some kind of psychiatric help. More than twenty other people have gone through the same kind of psychotic episode, trying to warn people about some kind of evil lurking within the game! That’s super weird, right? You don’t just see people play a game and go crazy. That’s, like, never happened in the history of ever.
“There was actually a lawsuit in the works to make HunterKiller pay for all the bills for these people, but the judges concluded that, with over a billion players invested in this game and only twenty or so cases have popped up, there simply wasn’t enough evidence to convict HunterKiller of any misconduct in game design. The damning argument for the lawsuit was that, without a clear reason for these psychotic episodes, especially when there’s almost no medical condition linking any of these people, these were just random occurrences and coincidences. There were way too many factors at play, which meant that there’s nothing that connects the episodes to the game, and especially nothing that links them to HunterKiller specifically.
“But, here’s the thing. There is something that connects the people, and that’s the regional grouping of these people. They were all players in the Northwestern Hemisphere. Now, that may be way too big of a group to pin down anything specific, a whole quarter of the planet, but it’s different for a video game. For those of you that don’t know, The Forge of Heroism’s gigantic world is run on one gigantic super-server, the first-ever quantum server to be used in video gaming, meaning that the video game is one huge world that everyone plays on. The regions that people live in the real world are actually grouped together with similar regions of the game world.
“Here’s another thing that you just can’t ignore: every single one of those players that went crazy had their hero avatars killed less than a week before. Six days, in fact, nearly down to the hour. Now, players have lost their hero avatars without having to go to the nuthouse for it, but that’s still a connection between them! And they all mention some kind of demon, a devil, a monster, some kind of malevolent person that terrified them to their absolute core.
“Rumors had begun to pop up ever since these posts became viral about this monster, some kind of boogeyman that was killing people in the game, only to follow them into the real world and ‘kill’ their minds, making them crazy. Everyone had their own versions of the story. Some people said it was a serial killer that hacked his way into the game, hunting in the virtual environment without fear of being caught, while others think it’s the revenge of the old villain from the game’s beta, Mr. Yin, exacting his revenge on the heroes! A few people even suggested that it was the fancy new AI that HunterKiller was bragging about going rogue, trying to escape the game using the bodies of the human players. I guess we can only hope that it hasn’t been successful yet, or we may have a possessed serial killer out here in the real world! Oooh, spooky!
“One final pattern that I discovered while researching these people to make this video, one that might be the most damning if it turns out to be pertinent: each of these cases were from a player that’s ranked in the top one hundred in at least one RPG played within the past two years, and more importantly, they were all part of the beta testing of the game. Isn’t that crazy? If that’s just chance, then those are some stupidly crazy chances!
“A lot of gamers chalked all of that psychosis up to coma helm overstimulation or to permadeath spooks. Still, though, there are a lot of coincidences, and the Forge of Heroism is one of the biggest open-world RPGs out there. Isn’t it possible that there could be someone, something, prowling around inside the game? Could it be that there’s something evil in there that’s targeting players and driving them crazy? If so, who could it be? Is it a serial killer finding a new place to kill? Mr. Yin’s ghost, come back from his dark web grave to haunt the heroes he couldn’t stop in the beta? Some demon trapped in the game during its launch? A nasty piece of malware amplified by the insane computing power of a quantum server? Maybe, it could be the Saint Slayer coming to reap the plentiful harvest from the newest crop of saints in this game. Which do you think it is? Leave a comment below sharing what you think the ‘Forge Demon’ could be--”
I stopped the video there. Takitaki’s boobs were making a good point. That’s a lot of people to get permadeathed, mention some kind of evil thing, then go crazy. And they were all beta gamers. That couldn’t have just been a coincidence, right? Who did they meet before getting killed? Was it… that guy? That asshole of a… whatever he was?
Oh, shit, did I meet the Forge Demon?
Think about it. Whoever that guy was, he could do shit that literally no one else could do. He could do crazy evil shit, something that players would get fucking nerfed as shit for, but he could think like some kind of super-genius or something, way smarter than any programmed robot could do. Was he something new? Was he some kind of machine spirit possessing the game, and I just ran into him?
OH FUCK, AM I A VICTIM?
OH FUCK OH FUCK OH FUCK OH FUCK OH FUCK! OH SHIT FUCK! FUCK SHIT FUCK FUCK! FUCK! FUCK MY FUCKING FUCK!
Okay, stay calm, stay calm. Alright, these guys didn’t get fucked over until they were chattering about crazy shit, then--
OH FUCK, I WAS ABOUT TO MAKE A POST ABOUT THE DEMON!
That must have been how the Forge Demon hunted! He found perfectly innocent gamers, then made their lives a living hell, and when they posted about it later, he made them crack under the psychic pressure of hell unleashed, and they’d all go crazy! FUCK, as if my life hadn’t become shitty enough. First, I got Saintslayed, and now I was going to go fucking crazy from a demon inside an MMO! Oh, God, save me from the demon! Save me from--
Wait, I didn’t need to do that shit. All those other people posted before going crazy, right? I just gotta focus on not posting crazy shit, and then I’d be good! That would have been easy! Then I wouldn’t have been targeted by the Forge Demon, and I could keep my brain, the last thing I had to my name now.
Lord knew I wasn’t going to just start playing that game again with a goddamn demon inside of it! That would have just been stupid! I’d just have to distract myself from it by doing something else. Easy! Easy as pie. Fuck this game! Fuck this demon! He wasn’t going to get my sanity! I was going to be the most nor
mal, most CALM, COOL, AND COLLECTED PERSON EVER! TAKE THAT, VIDEO GAME SATAN!
Could I have still made my posts about the game, just as long as I didn’t talk about the Forge Demon? Like, could I still have shit on this game, like, a little bit, but not too much? I could do that, right? I mean…
“Who did this demon think he was? Was this tiny cock popup ad thinking that it was so hot, but it couldn’t take a spicy post about him? What a fucking bitchnard, right? I bet those three girls around him were just fucking pay-to-win items he purchased to make himself look good, right? Fuck that fucking demon and this whole fucking game.”
OH FUCK I JUST TYPED THAT DOWN!
It was inside my head. That Forge Demon was trying to get me to type shit down. I could already feel his eyes staring at me. That hellish smile cracked every time I closed my eyes. Was this it? Was he killing me as we spoke? Was this him getting his revenge? WAS HE HERE TO FINISH THE JOB? I’M TOO YOUNG TO DIE! THERE ARE SO MANY GIRLS I HAVEN’T SLATHERED IN PEANUT BUTTER--!
How about we just not think about this shit for a minute? Deleting the post before it would ever escape into the internet, I backed all the way out of the messageboard site, leaving it to go visit one of the many other sites I’d go on. Maybe there was some other video that I could watch that’d take my mind off of the fact that I was almost the victim of a spiritual attack from a demon, or some kind of brain malware spike to my mind, or whatever the hell was happening to me. At any rate, I sprawled over the videos, looking over what people were talking about and what was all the rage, hoping that someone would talk about something other than The Forge of Heroism.
How The Forge of Heroism Made Me Rich… The Forge of Heroism For Noobs… My Mom Plays The Forge of Heroism… The Forge of Heroism Boman’s Den Raid Damageless… Five Facts About The Forge of Heroism You Probably Didn’t Know About… Gramma Reacts to The Forge of Heroism… The Forge of Heroism Patrol Daily Quest Hack… Social Justice and The Forge of Heroism… The Early-To-Mid-Evening Talkshow and The Forge of Heroism… The Forge of Heroism Parody Song “Grind that Hero, Baby”… The Forge of Heroism Critical Review--