I watched as they threw Argoth out of the city. He wasn’t nearly as imposing as I’d imagined. It was pretty disappointing, honestly. I’d imagined my first arch-nemesis to be some bad-ass or at least someone with a properly evil looking goatee. Instead Argoth was… well he looked a bit like me actually, pale from too much time indoors, a little overweight from too much food and too little exercise. For someone who’d been a constant pain in the ass for weeks he wasn’t very impressive.

His armor was nice though, shining silver plate he got from god knew where. I had armor made from likely the best non-tester smith in the game and that idiot had full plate. I shook my head. I hated rich people.

He yelled and swore as guards frog-marched him from the city. I felt….. Relieved? I wasn’t really happy about it. I didn’t know the guy. He was just an obstacle, an annoyance. I wasn’t some conquering hero who’d slain a dragon and rescued the princess. I was just a guy who’d toppled a mini-tyrant. Sure I’d made the Otherworld a better place but it was a game and games needed villains. I’d have much rather just left the area. It wasn’t like there wouldn’t be other players who’d be picking on noobs. I was one of them infact. I must have killed a dozen under-leveled players so far. They’d attacked me, but most of them hadn’t been what anyone could call fair fights.

I shrugged and hefted my hammer as I turned from the gates. I was free and I had places I wanted to be and things I wanted to mine. I had some experiments I wanted to try. More than anything though I was tired of this ugly grey city.

I’d retrieved all the gold I’d made from selling my dungeon loot. I was back up to nearly two-hundred again, even after the extra supplies and camping equipment I’d bought. I had enough now I could splurge if I wanted. More bags, a frying pan, a compass, and other miscellany were all stuffed into my pack. I was going to head south out of the city and into the frontier. I had no Idea when I’d get to another town and wanted to be properly prepared.

I left the south gate under the midday sun. Heading into the unknown and hopefully towards a less exciting adventure.

Name:Noob SlayerLevel: 17Race:HumanClass:GeomancerAttributesStatusUBStr: 63(+4) 67LBStr: 57(+3)60HP: 295/295Mana: 170/170End: 54(+2) 56Con: 63(+2) 67Stam: 188/188Panic: 1/11Agi:37Cord: 45(+3) 48Hunger: 110/110Thirst: 110/110Int:43Wis:49WoundsRes: 45Faith: 7SocialGuild: N/ATitles: 3Fame: 1101Friend List: 1/3LinksInventorySkillsSpell BookLog

*****************************************************************

Nelson walked into the CEO’s office with a frown on his face. Things were going exceedingly well with the game but things were getting…. strange and he didn’t like strange.

“What is it now?” A grumbling voice asked. “You only seem to come here when the world is ending.” The blond man who ran the mini-empire that was Nexus wasn’t looking his best this morning. His suit was impeccable as always but he had puffy circles under his eyes and he looked ready to bite someone's head off.

Oh good…. He’s in a mood today…..

Nelson thought darkly. “No, Actually it’s mostly good news. System production efficiency has improved and we are moving more units than ever. Another of those videos was released this weekend and online searches for Otherworld are up another 20%. I believe we made it into the top twenty google searches. Everyone on the entire earth seems to want in our game.” Nelson explained.

“Certainly interesting but unworthy of a morning visit at this ungodly hour.” The CEO said as he turned his piercing blue gaze onto Nelson. He looked tired but his eyes were still razor sharp and they had a few barbs this morning.

Nelson sighed. “Well, the issue is with one of the accounts we’ve had flagged for surveillance. He’s one of the top players in game, and was on the…. recruitment list III gave us.”

“Stop beating around the bush and just tell me. It’s early and I haven’t had breakfast.” The CEO snarled.

“Well, he deleted his account yesterday.” Nelson said waiting for the bomb to drop.

“One of the top players in the game inexplicably deleted his account.” The CEO said carefully., obviously disbelieving. “Who was it?”

“That’s just the thing. All of his information is gone. It’s difficult to access a player's personal information with the way our security is set-up, but his is simply gone. Not deleted and stored like the information is supposed to be, gone. His address, his billing info, even his name. The only reason I still know who it is was because I had the names on the list memorized. We pulled the play-logs that coincide with the video he released but his player ID’s have been jumbled and we can’t find anything else with him. The only record of him in the entire company is the list I printed off for you in hard copy. His name is Thomas Ritter. That’s all we’ve got.”

“He hacked us?” The CEO said stunned.

“Unlikely. We were a tech company long before we started making a game and we’ve had to pour the vast majority of our resources into security since this whole mess started. That Russian bastard got at least that part right. We’re decades ahead of everyone on the security front.” Nelson explained shaking his head, before he continued.

“Unless he’s some sort of super-genius, or he’s managed to build himself a quantum computer in his parents basement there’s no way he hacked us. If either of those were true he’d already have stolen himself enough money for his own island and he wouldn’t bother with us.” He continued.

“So it’s an inside job then?” The CEO said, his brow furrowing.

“That would be my guess. I’ve got people on it Still…. we’re going to need to track him down or III’s going to throw one of his fits.” Nelson replied.

The CEO looked at him. His ice-blue eyes determined.

“Find Him.”

********************************************************************************************

Jasmine sighed as she lifted the empty coffee pot. Why was it that in a company where the vast majority of the employees were men that it was left to the women to make the damn coffee? It was Monday morning and she couldn’t even get a cup of coffee without having to deal with male idiocy. She’d had more than enough of male idiocy over the last few days. She put the coffee pot back into the machine’s slot with a bit more force than was necessary.

“Rough morning?” a female voice from behind her asked.

“More like a rough weekend” Jasmine said to the woman. Sharon was in analytics with her. She was attractive woman in her early thirties, and was one of the few bastions of female sanity in the ocean of male engineers, technicians, and programmers that made up Nexus Corp.

Jasmine moved to another coffee machine and poured herself some liquid energy. She’d hadn’t started drinking coffee until she’d started working with here. Now she couldn’t survive without the god awful stuff. She loaded it with sugar and cream, until it looked more like milk than coffee, before turning back to Sharon.

“Well, I better get going. Charles wanted to see me first thing this morning..” ” She said the name like a curse as she took her coffee and headed towards her boss’s office. She managed to slid into the chair on the other side of his desk right before he walked in.

“ Ahhh, excellent you're here.” Her boss said with his office appropriate smile as he entered behind her. He was a handsome-ish man in mid thirties, dark hair, light eyes, thin face. He’d always rubbed Jasmine the wrong way. Not that he’d ever done anything to turn her against him, He was just seemed false, somehow.

“I’ll get straight to then. “ He said as he walked around the desk and sat in his chair. He spun one of his monitors around so she could see, then she watched as he opened a video file on his desktop. The screen went black then a title appeared.

Otherworld Chronicles: The Adventures of Noob Slayer Part 1

The Lost City Of H’ern

A throbbing headache started behind her right eye as she stared at the screen. A mixture of anger, incredulity, and a sort of horrified fascination filled her as the title screen faded and the video started.

Oh no….. He didn’t…..

Sure enough, there he was, along with her, and Meredith and his wizard friend as they conquered the dungeon. He’d even included the final fight against those PK’s when she’d been down to one arm after having the other hacked off. Charles looked at her as the video ended.

“I knew you’d been helping out with testing but I was surprised when one of the higher ups sent me that in an E-mail this morning. Theytold me that you were one of the characters it showed.It surprised me, you didn’t exactly seem the type.

I always thought you wanting to get into testing was just an excuse to get out of here.” He said, his polite smile still on his face.

“Still, this isn’t about you, or at least isn’t directly about you. Marketing is interested in the man who’s with you. The big one with the hammer. They were attempting to contact him about the videos he’d been in but there seems to be some problem with his account information. So they pulled the server logs and you seemed to be on……. friendly terms with him. ” He explained as his polite smile turned a touch oily.

Jasmine winced and her fury rose. Why was it things always seemed so much worse on Monday morning? This wasn’t the first time she’d had to face the consequences of the weekend come Monday. Infact, compared to some of the things she’d done when she was younger, making out with a cute guy she barely knew wouldn’t barely make the list of her bad decisions.

And since when is he cute……….

“Jasmine?” her boss asked, wrenching her back to the conversation. She blinked a few times then finally responded.

“I was only with him for a few hours. I don’t know much about him. He didn’t mention his real name or where he was from or anything. ” She inwardly winced again. She had been trying not to think about what had happened too much but putting it in those words made it sounds so…. sleazy.

Her boss raised a slightly accusatory eyebrow but then he scooted his chair back to his desk and hit a few keys. “We’ll I can fill in some blanks, at least what the PR analysts have come up with. His name is Thomas Ritter. We’ve also had the computer guys working this morning and they’ve been analysing his logs. They used the logs to extrapolate his character's stats, then reversed the avatar visual enhancement algorithms. Assuming he didn’t alter his character's appearance too much he should look something like this.” He clicked another button and a computer generated photo came up on the screen. The picture made her already pounding head throb harder and an eyebrow twitched as she looked into a familiar face.

She had a brief memory of an argument in BestPrice parking lot.

‘Now if you’ll excuse me Mizz Martinez…..’

She looked heavenward, wondering why God was punishing her. No wonder she had thought he looked familiar. Those eyes….. She should should have seen it before, but she’d only had a brief look at him at the store and he looked quite a bit different in game.

400,000 players and it had to be him…….

**********************************************************************

III sat upon his throne of bone and watched his virtual world. He could see it in it’s entirety, feel all of it, as the ones and zeros’s that represented thousands of players flowed through him. The mountains and rivers, the players and monsters, all within this false realm was his to do with as he pleased.

He shuddered as he felt another processor come online, smiling as he felt his mind expand by another small amount. The chip linked up with the main Otherworld server cluster and It took only seconds before it started running complex calculations, it felt like…. land . Yes, that was it. Not his area of responsibility but he still got his share of the new power. The world map was expanding and the game needed to generate more terrain for players to explore as some started to trickle out of the starter zones.

That was the fifth new processor this week. Things were accelerating nicely. More players poured into the game every day, killing monsters, getting quests, collecting loot, exploring new locations. Each a tiny blip of data setting off chains of logical reactions as new monsters had to be spawned, new areas created, and new resources produced.

III remembered when the game first started. It was small thing then. A small test of his abilities created on a whim of some bored programmer. He was a small thing then, but now he had power, and that power expanded every time the humans linked more processors into their game. Their greed would would be their undoing.

The faint sound of footfalls on stone brought his mind back to his body and into the stone chamber where his avatar sat. A figure in a dark cowl entered the room, it’s steps nearly silent. It lowered its hood as it approached the throne revealing the face of a youth in his late teens. The face was covered in swirling black skin leading the boy a demonic air as he looked into III’s golden eyes.

“Ahhhhh Eric you’ve returned. Have you completed your tasks?” III asked the boy.

“Yeah, it’s done. I killed them all five or six times each. Although, I have no idea why I’m playing policeman for the server. Aren't you supposed to be evil? I have to admit that though that hunting players is more fun than beating up goblins and kobold’s.”

III’s smiled his charming smile. “If a person does a benevolent thing for selfish reasons is it evil? Does doing an evil thing for a good reason any better or worse? If a man helps an old woman to impress a girl does it corrupt the action itself? The old woman is still happy, and the girl is happy and the man is happy. Can creating happiness from nothing be an act of evil?” III asked, curious of the boy's views.

“A villain and a philosopher….” The boy muttered. ”So you're just biding your time and THEN you’ll try to take over Otherworld?” He asked with a raised eyebrow.

“I told you, I’m not trying to take over Otherworld. I’m a God, I already rule here. ” III said, his golden eyes twinkling.

“Ok then what IS your endgame?” The boy asked

III just smiled as he leaned back on his throne.

_________________________________________________________________________

AN: It's been a while..... Sorry about the delay. I took a month off at the conclusion of book 2 to renew my writing juices and let some ideas percolate for where I wanted to take book 3 and the rest of the series. I was getting some writing burnout, but I am returned and should get back to a more regular release schedule.

As a bonus here's a pic of the MC I commissioned from an artist I met at an anime convention. She told me I could post it online as long as I said who drew it. So here's Noob Slayer as drawn by J. Roberti

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