I was transported to a large room that served as a game lobby. The floor was hard-packed dirt and the walls were designed from a light brown bark material. The ceiling was the coolest-looking ceiling that I had yet to see in VR space. It was made from perfectly flat and slightly shiny yellow palm leaves that were laid out above me. It was almost as though there was a sheet of glass between me and the leaves, letting the greenery lay flat. If I peered through gaps between the lowest leaves I could see another layer of perfectly flat leaves a foot above the first layer and another layer beyond that. It created a strange and interesting optical effect whenever I would move, the light from the installations on the floor would shine through the branches and leaves, yet only so far.

All around the perimeter of the room, there were aliens frozen in various poses standing inside rings of light. The light illuminating the lifelike statues wasn’t blinding at all, being more diffused and perfectly tempered to show off each alien’s traits. I counted at least fifty if not more different species of aliens as I walked a small tour around the interior of the room. I saw a human in the mix next to a ten-foot-tall creature that looked like a saber tooth tiger and a praying mantis’s love child. The most underwhelming of the alien creatures that I saw was an actual Tela. It was just a rolly polly looking creature the size of a baby rhino.

I wandered around for a little bit, admiring the strange and different races available until I noticed that there was a countdown timer getting dangerously close to zero at the edge of my vision. Seems like the other players didn’t take forever in the lobby.

I willed my avatar to be a human and changed his clothes to match my earlier setup before the timer expired.

The next thing I knew I was standing at the entrance to a cave looking down from a considerable height at a dense and definitely alien jungle. The trees resembled coconut trees except they branched with thick branches at the top and the fronds hung low, blocking visibility rather than reaching up to absorb sunlight. The heat, I suddenly found, was overwhelming. I felt my pores burst with sweat as my body tried to cool down from the sudden intense and sweltering heat. I stepped back inside the tunnel that I was standing in, hoping that the shade would lessen the overwhelming oppression I was experiencing. Nothing changed inside the shade, the heat seemed to be ambient and the natural temperature of this place. I wasn’t going to be able to deal with this for too long. I felt as if I was going to experience heatstroke any minute. It made breathing extremely difficult as well. It was as though I was inhaling straight from a pot of boiling water.

There was a blinking circle in the bottom right-hand corner of my vision so I mentally clicked on it. It brought up some text and several selection boxes.

-Greetings Kevin! The System sees that this is your first time and that you are playing an environmentally disadvantaged species. In order to balance gameplay, there are several options available to you to adjust. Be advised however that your selections change your reward. Welcome to the Haoolla Defender! We await the spectacle of your game!-

There was a reward percentage at the top of the selection boxes. Currently, it was listed at 200%. It might have had something to do with the debilitating heat that I was experiencing. I imagined that if I managed to gain some experience while feeling that I was locked inside an overheating sauna that I would level up very fast. I wiped my face off, trying to keep the salty sweat out of my eyes while I read the options available to me.

There was a slider bar as well as a selection box to the right-hand side of each option.

-Temperature-

-Vision-

-Skin resistance to abrasion-

I slid the temperature bar down until it was bearable for me to imagine moving around. That dropped my experience bonus down to 172%. I wasn’t sure about the vision thing or the skin protection but a quick look around showed me that I would definitely either need to make a torch or to learn how to see in the dark inside the cave that I was standing within. I shrugged, the additional experience was nice but I needed to get an understanding of what this game was all about first so I increased all three until my experience bar was down closer to 100%.

Once everything was cool enough and at a setting where I could actually see the outlines of the walls leading further inside the cave, I decided to peek out from the cave to see where I was at in relation to anything.

I stepped out to the opening and looked around. The cave walls seemed to be ribbed and worn in an interesting way that spoke of an animal chewing and making the walls as it needed, very similar to how a mud wasp would make its hive. I wondered if this cave was the construct of the maggot/cow-like creatures known as the Fomys. I stepped out onto the ridged path that led down to the jungle at a steady angle and looked around, and up, and even further up behind me. I appeared to be inside a mountain or a mound of brown mud. It definitely was big enough to be a mountain and a huge one at that. The walls, while appearing to be made of mud had a cardboard-like texture, as though there was a bonding agent keeping everything together. There were other cave holes and entrances spotted around the surface of the mound. It was just massive. It made me wonder how many other players there were inside this game with me.

That question made me look at my interface and study it for a second. This action, standing outside like I was, just about got me killed for the first time.

I had just found out that there were a little under 12,000 other players in this game with me when my left foot abruptly exploded with pain. It had felt like a barbed file had been viciously raked across the arch of my foot. I stumbled backward, falling into the entrance of the cave as my painful foot and boot caught on something holding it in place. Something long and barbed passed right in front of my eyes as I fell and punched into a distant tunnel wall. I looked down and found that my left boot had been torn open all down the inner side of my arch. A long and very barbed spear was now pinning the edge of my boot in place. The pain that I had felt was from the thorn-like barbs that had shredded the thick leather of my boot. Luckily, it had just missed impaling my foot to the soft ground.

Instinctively I willed my Prime Speed Control key into action and was rebuffed by a notification.

-Use of Keys and External abilities are disabled while playing.-

…

-Error encountered-

I was greatly surprised when I realized that it still worked for me, regardless of what the notification had said. I simply couldn’t move, my eyes were stuck staring upwards while everything was very still and quiet as I lay there frozen. My pain centers had stopped sending outbursts from the damage that my ankle had experienced, so at least while I was in quick time I could have relief.

I couldn’t move though, which was a first for me in quick time, so instead, I tried to find the settings to lower my pain threshold. Turns out, they don’t exist in this game. I was stuck with either experiencing the pain or turning my skin resistance way up. I had played with the setting earlier and found that if I raised my resistance too high there was a threshold and all of my experience gains would drop to 0%. There was a limit to how little someone could get away from experiencing while competing in a “real to life” event.

I wondered why my Prime Speed Control key still worked yet did not allow me to move. Probably because of how different or, as Tutor and George put it, how broken I was in relation to Tela’s base programming.

I hoped that sitting up wouldn’t reward me with being impaled through the chest but I needed to try to wrestle my foot free before whoever was throwing the spears could get closer.

I slowly increased the speed of time and tried to sit up as fast as I possibly could. If someone had been watching me, all they would have seen was a sweating human grinding his teeth to keep the pain from escaping his lips as he slowly sat up. It seemed that the more I increased time, the sharper and more defined the pain returned.

I sat up, keeping my eyes forward and looking around as rapidly as I could while fighting how slowly my body responded. When I didn’t spot anything flying at me I glanced down at my shredded boot. The boot was beyond saving and it occurred to me that my next action should be to get my foot free from inside the ruined boot as quickly as possible.

I froze time, keeping my eyes wide open so I could have time to inspect everything around me. I needed to somehow unlace the boot and get my foot out. If only I had a knife… - I thought to myself before I mentally slapped myself in the face. This was the whole reason why I was here! To learn how to use cr! I was so angry with myself for forgetting about why I had even entered this game in the first place. It had just been natural for me to explore and to forget about the advanced technology that I was carrying with me. Out of the edge of my vision, I spied the small flat disk of cr attached to the outer flap of my breast pocket.

I tried to will it to move and found that mud cr was not able to move while I was experiencing the highest speed that my key could provide for me. I really missed my gold cr. Before relaxing control of time I wisely decided to look down the hill from my sitting position. I could just make out something sticking up that hadn’t been there when I had first stepped outside. Down, near to the bottom of the mound, I could just make out three tops of the barbed spears sticking up at an angle. I couldn’t see more from this low vantage point but I could imagine that they were either in the hand of a native or bound to his back as he raced up the side of the mound towards my last seen location.

“Don’t panic, don’t panic!” I thought to myself as I looked back at my boot and at the little amount of cr that was attached to my pocket. “Ok, just need to get that off of there, into a straight line, and to quickly cut my shoelaces before that killer gets up here,” I said to myself as I concentrated all my thoughts on making the tiny amount of cr that I had into a straight filament for me to use. With this image stuck in my mind, I began edging time forward in slight increments while repeatedly glancing at the tops of the spears as they moved back and forth, showing the rapid upward movement of my foe.

“Gotta get a move on it you little bots!” I mentally shouted at the cr, moving it towards my boot at the same time as it continued to spool into a hair-thin wire. It seemed that there was no thickness to the disk at all, it was simply a one-layer disk of cr. “Gah! Those cheapskates!” I mentally shouted as I worked as fast as possible. I ended up with a hair-thin strand of cr about a foot and a half long to work with.

The strand straightened out and I willed it to travel and dig under the first lace of my boot, almost stabbing through my foot before I remembered to think of it as if it were my hand. I halved the thick shoelace with ease. “Oh, that wasn’t so bad.” I thought as I worked at moving the strand through the next few laces and not into my foot. They popped apart easily and I started to brace myself to pull my foot away from the barbs and out of my shoe. “It is time to get out of here!” I thought as I turned off my speed control, knowing that I couldn’t turn and run away successfully with my reflexes all messed up using the key.

I was beginning to pull my foot out from the shoe, feeling the barbs letting go of the edge of my foot when I heard huffing and looked up into the snarling face of a native. His double row of lips were just beginning to pull back across the surface of his long and sharp-looking teeth as I watched him in what felt like slow time. No, I wasn’t using the key, this was just my adrenaline spiking, letting me know I was seconds away from dying. He had a spear in hand and was already twisting his body and shoulders in reverse, pulling back to aim and drive the length of the spear he held towards me upon the return stroke.

“No!” I shouted and threw out my right hand at him while my left hand tried to cover my face.

-First Blood Achievement gained-

-First Kill Award gained-

-Global Announcement! First Blood has been awarded to defender Kevin! Kevin has not only achieved his first kill ever in Haoolla Defender but he did it faster than the rest of the defenders… while sitting down!-

-You are now level 2! Regeneration, Speed, and durability increased by 5%-

“What?” I said while I willed away the invasive text in front of me. Sure enough, the filament of cr that I had been directing to free me from my boot had moved in sync with the movement of my hand being raised to defend myself. This had caused the micro-thin blade of indestructible matter to slice the alien native into two segments starting from under his right arm and ending at his left shoulder. Both of these parts had fallen backward and were now tumbling gruesomely chest over feet down the full side of the mound. The double jointed nature of the legs made it look especially bad, as though I had broken his legs as well. “That part wasn’t me!” I shouted down the hill without thinking. Hoots and howls rang out from the surrounding forest and I immediately understood that it was really a bad idea for me to be visible just then. I reached down with my hands, making sure to not include the movement of the hovering cr blade, and worked to extract my foot from the boot and thorns. My eyes caught something strange when the tumbling body segments reached the low hanging strands of the alien coconut trees. The fronds reached out and grabbed the body parts before retracting and sucking the segments whole back into the spongy trunk of the tree.

“Oh, that was not cool,” I said as I managed to get my foot free and rolled backward into the tunnel. I got up after checking my foot over quickly. The spear’s barbs had torn through my arch a little bit and totally shredded my sock, causing it to soak up the blood and making everything look worse than it actually was. I had experienced worse foot injuries by actually walking on sharp beach coral before and knew I would be fine once I saw that my foot was not actively bleeding. I decided to take off my other boot and sock off as well, choosing to move about barefoot on the clean pebble-free surface instead of clomping around with one shoe on. Leaving the boot there, I snuck back away from the entrance, keeping my cr dagger hovering at waist height down the tunnel as I made my way towards the curve of the path inwards. There was a spear sticking out of the smooth mud, a testament to how my falling down earlier had saved my life.

I neared the spear and reached out to free it from the wall. Having an extra weapon to defend myself with would be useful. The spear fell apart in a shower of sparkling motes when I grabbed it, leaving behind 6 little objects in my hand.

-First Kill & First Blood reward gained-

-3 x Epic Life Regen motes gained for First Kill

Epic Life Regen motes will restore your body to perfect health in 5 seconds. Useable while in combat. Squeeze to use.-

-30,000 cr gained for First Blood-

The motes were little blue glowing marbles and the 30,000 cr appeared as 3 little coins as I had at the beginning of the game. I pocketed the motes before shuffling the 3 little disks around in my hand as I moved deeper inside the tunnel in the mound. Was I spoiled or were the game designers just stingy? - I wondered as a little block of purple text appeared at the bottom left of my vision, causing me to glance at it.

~Who the heck are you? - C the Champion~