HC:Pacifist | Ch. 10 - Find Him!

A dark green blur crossed the mouse fields surrounding Greenfield Village. It was so quick that beginners hunting the little rodents didn’t notice it. Only the ones with more acute gaming senses felt a breeze. Gary used all the speed bonuses he could muster to cover as much ground as possible. His class granted him bonuses to his running speed, and many of his active skills were dashes that allowed him to close in or create a gap between himself and his opponent. He had already been through the village twice and had decided to scout all the hunting maps around it, trying to see if he could find Roth. His phone started ringing. He stopped. His blurred sprinting figure suddenly materialized in the view of the beginners hunting nearby.

"Dude? How long has that guy been there?"

"Did he teleport or something?"

"He looks like a veteran player. Look at that awesome gear!"

"Do you think he already has a girlfriend?" a hopeful female player asked.

Gary ignored all of them. He was the cream of the crop in the game. These beginners were all ants to him—ants he could squash with his boot. The caller trying to contact him was in the real world. It was Wilson. He picked up the call. Wilson appeared with a dingy, moldy wall in the background.

"Gary, I just…."

"Hold on, Wilson. Let me get everyone on this call," interrupted Gary. It was better for everyone to be briefed on the situation. Things weren’t looking good for them.

"OK," Wilson said, sweating. He had run as fast as he could to get here and was still huffing and puffing.

One after the other, the other members of the IronIre squad started appearing on screens. In some of them, their avatars appeared. Xana and Wilson were the only ones taking the call in the real world.

"Go ahead, Wilson," said Gary.

"I just arrived at the apartment we rented. I just checked the Slayer’s pod. He’s in there. He’s still inside the game."

Everyone breathed a sigh of relief. If Roth had managed to leave the pod and run straight to the police, they would have been done for. They could still play many cards if he was still stuck inside the game.

"OK. So I’ll go first. I searched the village from top to bottom. I also went around the mouse fields around the village and didn’t find him. Brian?"

"I asked around all the players I could find here in Greenfield Village, offering silver in exchange for any information on him. I only found a female player who said a pervert matching his description tried to approach her in his underwear. There’s no way we can tell whether it was him or not. Doesn’t sound like the Slayer, though."

That had been a long shot. Two years into the game, most beginners quickly leveled to 10 and rushed to the nearest city to start their class quests. Many guides were posted online on how to reach level 10 in three days or less. Many players made a living by finding the shortest route to level up and selling it to others. As members of the Pegasus group, the IronIre squad knew there was a way to get from level 0 to level 10 in less than two days. After level 10, there were fewer and fewer shortcuts. From level 20, all one could do was grind.

Most likely, all the players that had been around that day had already moved on to another village or had even moved to a middle-grade town. Finding someone here who had met Roth was unlikely.

"Then, where in the world is he? Xana? Did you manage to find anything?"

"I’m sorry, guys. The program is designed to block pain settings, hide the log-out button, and prevent players from resetting their accounts. Much more than that, and the game’s security protocols would automatically flag it. There’s no way to track him inside the game."

"We killed him over a thousand times! There is no way he could have gone too far. Not with such low dexterity," protested Brian.

"And are you sure that he couldn’t reset his account? Create a new character?" insisted Gary.

"There’s no way. That option was locked," responded Xana.

"What if…?" Wilson stopped himself.

"What, Wilson?"

"I don’t know. Maybe what we did was unprecedented in the game’s history. No sane soul would stay around after being slaughtered a hundred times. Much less for a thousand deaths! Anyone else who was ambushed like that would have logged out after a couple of hits."

Gary didn’t like where this was going. "Go on."

"What if once you die a certain number of times at level 0, the game offers you the choice of starting over?"

Everyone froze. It wasn’t impossible. What other explanation was there for the Slayer not being here?

"I have tried to contact the Pax character, and it appears offline. I already asked a friend to do the same in case he blocked us, but she also got the same notification. There’s no way to tell if he started a different character or just blocked us."

"What do we do, Gary?" asked Wilson. "If Loki finds out that we lost track of the Slayer inside the game, he won't have it." Once upon a time, Roth had been the leader of this crew. After their fallout, that burden fell on Gary’s shoulders. He had to make a decision.

"Guys, we just need to disappear," said Shirley.

"What do you mean?" asked Xana. Gary stared angrily at Shirley. He knew that she would be the first one to freak out. It was ironic that someone with such a fascination with ice-related skills, even one called Artica, had so much trouble keeping her cool.

"Guys, you know what happened to the Slayer after he attacked Loki. His life was destroyed. Think about it. Loki is even using his former friends to hunt him relentlessly. Four years ago, Loki was a nobody and was already capable of doing so much. Imagine what he could do to us now that he is one of the richest people in the world. You all heard the rumors about little Timmy."

Gary felt a shiver down his spine at the mention of Timothy Evans. He'd been a talented player who had integrated the Pegasus Guild and was even granted a position as a guild elder when he was recruited. He was a talented telekinetic who had drawn the attention of the scouts of the guild. After being in the guild for a few months, he was approached by one of the competition’s guilds with a generous offer in exchange for some privileged information on the operations of the Pegasus guild.

Once it was discovered that there was a mole inside the guild, Loki moved his squad of assassins inside the game to look for the leak, and sure enough, they found its source. A kill-on-sight order was sent out. If anyone saw Timothy inside the game, they would kill him immediately. No one saw Timothy for a while. Everyone thought he had just restarted the game with a new character to avoid being hunted by the Pegasus guild.

Until one day, someone recognized him on the news. They shared it with their friends, who, in turn, shared it with other friends inside the Pegasus group. The article spread like wildfire. The headline read: "Brutal murder downtown." It said that a young man had been found dead in his apartment and that the crime scene hadn’t been pretty. The police didn’t have a clue as to the reason for this heinous act of violence. The theory was that it had been the work of some gang. Everyone in Pegasus knew better, though.

Some had thought of calling to the attention of the police that Loki might have something to do with it, but every time anyone even came close to considering it, a new article was leaked into the grapevine of the guild. "Mother of a murdered young man goes crazy and is sent to a hospice," "Family house of a murdered young man set ablaze downtown," and "Siblings of a murdered young man hunted by gangs." Headlines such as these stroke fear in the hearts of the employees working under Loki.

"Don't be stupid, Shirley. Where would you go?"

"I don’t know, Gary! We've just been paid a million dollars. We could try to run for it and find some forsaken country where Loki’s goons won’t find us." Gary saw in Wilson’s eyes that he agreed with the suggestion. He needed to bring his squad back to Earth.

"Guys, don’t lose your cool. We know that the Slayer is inside the game. That gives us time to work things out. Let's not jump the gun. We all know a million credits are nowhere near enough to evade Loki’s hounds. We need to give it our best shot at fixing this." Gary had said this as relaxed as he could, trying to transmit calm to his friends. To his buttons, what Gary was thinking was quite different, though. If Loki finds out about this, we’re dead, he thought to himself.

"One of two things has happened. Either he found a way to reset his character, or his first avatar found a way to move despite all those negative stats. If he has reset his character, he will make a scene. Keep your eyes out for any posts on the forums about a player wreaking havoc or going on a rampage. Pay special attention to any warrior classes or berserkers. We have played with the Slayer for many years. We know how he hunts and his signature. He’ll cause ripples eventually. Roth has never been the type of guy who could do things quietly."

Everyone nodded.

"We must find him if he is still playing with his Pax avatar. Shirley, Xana. Search around here. Focus on the villages. Try any observation or tracking skills you have to find him. Split up. You cover more ground that way. Maybe he didn’t create a new account and just moved somewhere."

"Are you serious, Gary? That doesn’t even make any sense. How would he have traveled to other villages nearby?"

"I don’t know. But we have to assume that something happened that allowed him to move around. I will search every village in this beginner zone if I have to."

"Do you know how many villages there are in the beginner zone? There are thousands of square kilometers of ground to cover. It will take us weeks to check all the villages out."

"Do it!" he roared. They finally agreed.

"As for you, Wilson," he continued, "from now on, I don’t want you to leave the pod’s side. You hear me?"

Wilson nodded. "How do I play from here?"

"You just got your hands on a million dollars, man. I am sure you will think of something."

"What about you? What are you going to do?" protested Wilson.

"Let me worry about that. One more thing. No one stops leveling. Take turns searching for the Slayer. We don’t want Loki to get wind of things going wrong." Wilson got off the call. Gary clicked his tongue. How could something like this happen? They should have been more careful with the Slayer. He had more lives than the luckiest of cats. They could always come clean and tell Loki what happened, but he wasn't sure if that would go well. People had been permafrosted for less. Even if they turned off the pod and told the Slayer at gunpoint to reset his character and start in another village of their choosing, what prevented him from choosing the easy way out? It could go very wrong very quickly.

"Brian, do you have any friends who are roughly Roth’s size and don’t have an AstroTerra account?"

"Hmm… Maybe. Why do you ask?"

"I’m going to try to find a way to keep Loki off our backs. I want a plan B in case we don’t find Roth."

He also already had a plan C. But he couldn't tell Brian about that one. Not yet.

Ch. 9 - Forums

INDEX

Ch. 11 - Marathonist