“So… I guess it has been a super long time since you last saw me?” I asked, curious as to how she still acted so childlike.

“Yeah… a couple of years. But I still love to sky fall. My mom has let me visit a few planets in VR to try it inside and she says that Dad is saving so that I can have a physical body to try it in real life.” She said with a wistful sound in her voice. It was hard to tell expressions on a Gurn since only their mouth, nose, and eyestalks extended beyond their fluffy coat.

“Oh?” I asked when a little idea popped into my head. “Well, can you have your mom look into a little planet called Earth and a sport called Sky Diving? I think you will find that what I did is not as good as what they can teach you how to do there.” I said as I imagined her taking the form of a teen and being excited to be the first one to jump out of the plane. Might freak her instructors out.

“Just don’t forget to pretend that things can hurt you and to pull the cord well before you touch the ground,” I added when I saw that I had her full focus on me.

“Earth, Sky Diving, got it!” She said with a cheerful voice.

My cr had finally made its way down to scrubbing my legs off and I was already feeling so much cleaner than before.

“So, when you say a couple of years, do you mean in VR?” I asked when the inconsistency began to bother me.

“Yup.”

“Why is that? I have been outside of VR for a while, I got tied up in something.” I asked.

“Well, you see...” She said as she started to walk slowly through the muck, I noticed that her cr kept cleaning her fluff off as she took each step. Why hadn’t the other players done the same as well?

“My mom believes in the old way that you have to spend real time in reality, experiencing things in different places, and learning how the universe works to grow up. Cavii doesn’t listen to her parents and she tries to play as much as she can. Anyways, mom says that the scientists who created the Personal Live Matrix for the Tela designed it in such a way as to require real-time for the younglings to “Mature or Level Up” to various stages of development. Cavii is a lot younger than me now, I have almost reached the next level.” She said before she seemed to get pensive. I glanced out of the side of the mound, wondering if she had seen anything. This side of the mound sported a sheer drop-off and not a path upwards like the part that I had seen before.

“I need to go. Cavii is very angry with you.” She said before she turned towards me, her little eyes looking up at mine.

“Ha, well, she might get to beat me another time,” I said as I reached out and patted the little cotton candy hair.

“No, you don’t understand. Please, Kevin… you have to beat her as many times as you can. Every time she wins she just gets worse. I think it has something to do with the race she plays… it is bad.” She said as she started to hover a little above the tunnel floor. I looked closer and found that she was using her cr on her feet to lift herself.

“You need to run, her groups are on their way here. I need to get back to another team. Also, thanks for the advice! I will be sure to tell my mom!” She said before she stepped out from the ledge and sailed down the side of the mound to disappear into another opening.

Why did I feel like something was wrong? I looked around quickly. I hadn’t heard anything or seen anything so what was with this strange feeling? I had learned a bunch from that first encounter with Cavii’s team, they used everyday stuff to work around the native’s spear throwing and the Fomys teeth projectiles. What I hadn’t seen was how they attacked with cr. The odd thing was, they hadn’t even used cr to do anything while they had been in my sight. Sela cleaning her feet was the first indication that they even had any to use.

Also, Cavii was out of the game, was her grip on the other players so strong as to mark me out as a target for revenge? Seemed so.

I decided to listen to Sela’s advice and to hurry back the way that I had been going in the first place. The team that was coming for me, quite possibly, was the one who was further along the path south where my heavy breather had been sent on a perpetual jogging spree. The possible way that was clear was the one from which I had just cleared Cavii’s team. I rushed through the muck and set my cr to clean me off again when I got to the other side.

Wait… where was my cr reward for taking out those players? Hmmm… Sela must have been able to claim the cr that they dropped before I could.- I mused as I rushed into the downwards tunnel. That would explain where she got the cr to fly with.

The tunnel down was a lot different than what I had been expecting. I truly had been playing on the outer edge of the map this whole time. The path wound down before branching off in several different directions. Out of curiosity I took the first path to the right and almost immediately wished I hadn’t when I came face to face with 15 spawn. Or rather face to hind legs. The group of spawn was all focused on trying to breach a blocked-off hive comb. The room that I had almost barged into looked like it could have been made by bees. The ceiling stretched at least 30 feet upwards and allowed for 3 huge hexagons to be stacked. To the left and right there were a total of 10 on each level. I surmised that each comb was used for storing whatever the Fomys chose to eat for later. In this case, it wasn’t honey. It appeared that each section was sealed behind a layer of foggy glass or wax-like substance. I could just make out the contents inside one of the sealed combs and I immediately wished that I hadn’t. I could just make out the hand and arm of some, hopefully, long-dead player or native.

The comb that they were all attentively focused on was blocked by thick boards and being held in place by players. Why didn’t they fight back?

Determined to save this group of players I flexed my Blade Barrier, causing it to spin up within the small confines of the tunnel before stepping into the larger space. A wash of matter splattered off my back and ran down my legs before I mentally slapped myself on the forehead. I had forgotten just how quiet these spawn were when they were on the move and had let my guard down. One had just a second before, tried to chomp me from behind. I was getting lucky, too lucky for my own good. I had to always be on my guard.

I looked up, finding that by accidentally killing their brethren I had just become the highest source of attention in the room. “Fine, just get it over with,” I said as I stepped forward into the room to greet the rushing spawn.

For some reason my Blade Barrier seemed to confuse them, they all came at me as though they expected to make it through my defense, only to end up in pieces all over me. Perhaps it was simply something so out of the ordinary that they just didn’t expect to have to deal with another blade coming right behind the last one. The problem with this was, they would never learn and to pass on this knowledge to the next Fomys spawn if they all ended up dying.

I was crouching down, picking up their dropped teeth, when I heard the wooden barrier creak a little. “Who is there?” I heard a gruff low voice ask.

“Oh, my name is Kevin, I just killed the spawn that were out here waiting for you,” I said as I dedicated the 160k of new cr as my body cleaning service. For some reason, the cr did not deem to have the system accept the name as a set title… which I could understand. I wouldn’t want to be called Kevin’s butt and body wash as well.

-Mental Designation accepted: Kevin’s Butt and Body Wash-

“What? What was that?” I asked the air. Did this key come with a personality?

“What was what?” I heard from inside the blocked-off comb. “Guys, it is Kevin, THE Kevin. You know, the one Cavii has been spamming in chat about?” I heard voices saying from inside the barrier.

“Have you come to kill us?” I heard the low voice ask after a second.

“No, why would I do that?” I asked.

“Well, Cavii said that that was what you were probably going to do.” The low voice said.

“Why didn’t you guys fight back against the spawn? The barriers are a good idea and all but you could at least fight these guys through the wall.

A couple of seconds went by before an answer came from a softer voice. “Cavii takes our cr when we join her group. She only leaves one of us with 10k, usually the healer in case they need to do something for her. I have the cr but I am unable to hit any of the spawn. They move a lot faster than a native.”

“Have you tried using momentum?” I asked.

“What is that?”

Really? Was I dealing with children or what?

“You guys want me to teach you all something?” I asked as I prepared 10k for a little demonstration.

I heard the barriers creak a little as an eyestalk peeped out and looked at me. There was a brief discussion behind the wooden walls. I could pick up everything clearly that they were saying with the sensitivity of my normal ears, let alone my new helmet's capabilities. Two of the players wanted to have the one with the cr to attack me and hopefully take all my cr, the others were interested in how I had killed all of the spawn. The last voice, the one that I focused on the most, was the one that wanted to learn and even said that their parents said that it was bad to attack people who hadn’t attacked you first. This one turned out to be the Gurn of the group.

The doors creaked open and out stepped the same cookie-cutter team as the one that I had seen upstairs, sans the evil Cavii.

I kept the Blade Barrier up along my back, keeping the tunnel into this room defended while I made the cr at my front go still.

“Ok, so you all know how fast cr moves normally?” I asked and was instantly thankful that none of them were the smartypants type.

I demonstrated by flinging my little cr disk at the wall of the tunnel, keeping the disk flat so that the impact could be noticeable. The disk smashed into the wall and punched a small hole straight through the mud.

“Momentum is what happens the more you have your cr continually move. It causes it to quickly accelerate and take on speeds faster than it originally could have had.” I said as I brought the little disk back to me and had it start to orbit me, steadily increasing in speed until it was moving the air inside the room.

“Whoa.” I heard one of the eight say before I let it go to strike a different section of the wall.

I might have let the cr accelerate for a little too long because the disk exploded a two-foot hole out of the wall. The players each jumped into the air in fright as the loud clap of sound rang out. The Jaz’era fell to the ground for some reason and the Gurn quickly moved to help it out. It seemed that the loud sudden blast of sound had knocked out the sound-sensitive player. It had simply experienced too much of a shock to its system.

The Herv had moved to investigate the hole from this side, finding that it had made an even bigger hole on the other side.

“Might have been like a hollow point because I made the disk hit it flat…” I muttered to myself when I saw the incredible damage caused on the other side. I think the most damage was from the air pressure that the super speed disk had been able to push. Air weapons? Hmm…

“If you want the damage to be less, yet still get the job done, you can make the cr look like this,” I said as I brought the little projectile back and shaped it into a little 22 caliber bullet.

“You found a treasure room.” One of the Herv said as he looked back at me.

“What?”

“Yes, see that body right there?” He said as he pointed at something that I hadn’t noticed upon my first inspection. There was a deceased dust-covered ancient Tela in the room.

“Cavii is always looking for rooms like this. She says that is why she takes everyone’s cr.” The Gurn healer said when he finally finished reviving the Jaz’era. "The game system randomizes and hides the locations with each new game though, so sometime you will never find one before the game ends."

“But why? You don’t need but a tiny amount of cr to dig out rooms like this.” I said. Something didn’t add up.

“What do you mean?” The Herv asked in his low voice.

“Oh, just use your cr like this.” I said as I took the same 10k of cr and made it into a wire hoop to begin rapidly making the 2-foot hole into a large doorway for me to enter through.

“Wow!” I heard a chorus of exclamations come from the group that could talk. Even the Jaz’era clicked a rapid succession of sounds out.

“So let me get this straight… Cavii takes your cr at the start of the game and only leaves a tiny amount of it with the Gurn to do whatever she wants them to do? She probably does that so that you all don’t experiment and play around with what is possible on your own. That is why so many of you die at the beginning of each game! You don’t have any idea how to use it to defend yourselves with!” I said as I started to get angry again at how scheming and manipulative Cavii was to each of these young players.

“In fact, here you go,” I said as I willed 70k free from my reserves and went to each of the players before handing them each 10k like they had started with at the beginning. “Now, I want each of you to not join Cavii’s group in the next game. Instead, I want you to use the things that I will teach you to defend yourself with.” I said as I showed them how to use the small amount of cr effectively.

First I showed them how a foot-long length of cr could become double that length by having it spin in place. It even worked as a razor-sharp ice cream scoop to carve through tunnel walls with ease.

A couple of times during my tutorial we all paused for a second while a group of spawn tried to enter the room with us. They all met my Blade Barrier that I had left in place and simply created a bigger puddle on the floor.

“Go ahead, you guys can claim those teeth.” I said as I entered the “Treasure Room” to have a look inside.

“Really?” I heard one of the Herv ask.

“Yeah, I don’t mind,” I said over my shoulder as I heard them all, or at least the ones that could make noise, squeal in delight, and jump to collect the teeth. It was right about that time that another swarm of Fomys spawn showed up and baptized the group. This changed their sounds of excitement to disgust and then rapidly back to excitement again when they all realized that that meant more cr for each of them.

The hollowed-out room looked like the last stand bunker made just for this lone Tela. The walls had circles carved into the mud along with words written next to each circle. Words like “Fomys mother chamber.”, “Milk room”, and “Rescue pit” were written next to the circles. I wondered what it all meant. The “Milk room” was written next to a circle drawn above my head. Could it point up to the room with all the mucky liquid in it? Was that supposed to be Fomys milk? I gagged as I walked up to the body and looked around for anything that would be considered treasure.

Nothing stood out so I reached out to roll the large pill bug shaped body over. As soon as I touched the carapace a block of text popped up in front of my eyes.

-Discovered: The Last Tunneler. Available loot: The Last Tunneler’s gloves.-

Oh really? - I thought as I accepted the loot and watched as my three-fingered hands were coated in the strangest gloves I had ever seen. The backsides of the gloves were adorned with odd circles and designs while the palm side… Wow.

The palm side seemed to lead into space. It was dark on the palm side and I could just make out tiny stars inside the distance. Just turning over my hand made it seem like I was looking through a cutout in reality. What had I looted? Could these things be real?

I froze time so that I could have a conversation with Invicta.

“Invicta. What are these gloves that I just discovered?” I asked.

-Those are the Legendary gloves of the Last Tunneler. She used to tunnel through planets in search of rare treasures and resources while she was alive. She even discovered an alien civilization. She used what she learned from them to create those gloves.-

“Oh,” I said sadly. “So I can’t recreate these in real life?” I asked.

-I don’t know Kevin. It is all just information to me. Those gloves are the exact copy of the real ones, as required to upload them into VR. They are just virtual for me inside this game environment. For you… your code seems to absorb and… use the code in ways that shouldn’t be possible.-

Absorb and assimilate? The ants had rewritten my coding! That was why I could keep keys regardless of the environment I was in.

“How did she die Invicta?” I asked.

-She tried to reach the heart of a star.-

Hmm… that reminded me of the all-consuming black dot that I had seen at the center of the sun back when I was a convict. I wondered if she had entered that space…

“Thanks, Invicta,” I said before I returned to normal time.

-You're welcome Kevin-

I turned around and walked back towards the eight grime-covered players. They, as far as I could tell, were all ecstatic at how much cr they had managed to collect in such a short time.

“Kevin! Can you please teach us how you do this wall?” One of the Herv asked me with a voice that seemed just a little higher pitched than the other one that I had heard. Did that denote gender? No clue here, they all looked exactly the same to me.

“Sure. Are you guys ready for the next lesson?” I asked as I first showed them how to use the cr to clean the spawn mess off their bodies.

“Next, I would like one of you to try to hit me with one of your cr disks,” I said before I understood my mistake as, in rapid succession, eight cr bullets were flying my way.

That was when I learned what would happen when cr met cr at high velocities. Absolutely nothing. They impacted each other and immediately seemed to negate each other’s inertia. I was very thankful that I wasn’t dead right then. I could almost feel my Bullet Shield chastising me in the background though.

“Eheh…” I said, clearing my throat as I started to imagine a workaround for something that absorbed forward impact. What if my future bullets could work like a dodging basketball player and roll around a shield? I would need to test that at a future time. “Well done,” I said when they each noticed that their bullets had stopped before touching me.

“What happened?” They asked.

“My Bullet Shield stopped your cr from hitting me,” I said as they each withdrew their projectiles and watched as the little circles of my Bullet Shield moved to hover back close to the skin of my body. I had so many of them at present that I didn’t need them to encircle me at all times. They only had to move a short distance to defend their sector of skin. My head, and now my hands, were encased in impenetrable cr so they only had to focus on my lower body.

“What you need to do is tell any extra cr that you have to split into 5k disks and then to stop anything that comes at your body to harm you,” I said as I watched them begin to play with splitting their cr and to watch as each of them were soon surrounded in small defenders.

“Will this stop a spear?” The Gurn asked thoughtfully.

“Yes, it will,” I answered as they each looked at each other in thought.

“Ready for the cool weapon by the door?” I asked and immediately was rewarded by all of their attention.

“Yes please!” they each almost shouted at me.

“Ok, look close. The design is the same as how you can carve through walls with a stand of cr.” I said as I demonstrated how the Blade Barrier worked. “Then you just have it surround you, or your group, and set it spinning,” I said as I demonstrated it in the air in front of me.

“So… anything can be weapons?” The higher-pitched voice of the Herv asked. I could feel the sparks of ideas just starting to take hold in these young eight players.

“Indeed,” I answered as I walked through them towards the doorway back into the tunnel paths.

“So what do we do now?” The Gurn asked me as I prepared to leave.

“Now? You all can make your own group and keep working as a team. Just imagine how amazing you eight can be if you all work together to protect and keep each other safe. Think about it. Overlapping shields and blades taking down your enemies. Each of your selected species have super ways of detecting monsters and players that would mean to harm you, now you all can have each other’s back together rather than hiding in a hole in the wall.” I said as I pointed back to where I had found them all.

“Oh, and don’t give your cr to Cavii anymore. I think she is using it to put out bounties on any player that gets First Blood so she can keep all the Epic Life Regen motes for herself.” I said as I entered the tunnel and started downwards again.

“She wouldn’t!”

“She was.”

“Whaaat??”

I heard them all talking as I went deeper into the depths of the mound.

-Thank you, Kevin-

“It was nothing,” I said as I checked my map frequently while looking for red marks while heading further downward. The problem was that the mound was so big and the fewer the players that there were the more diffused the red marks seemed to become, almost as if PVP became more deadly and less trackable the fewer killers were left.

-No, you don’t understand. Those were good kids that I have been watching for a long time. They, and others, all want to come in here and have fun but inevitably get caught up in Cavii’s schemes because she promises them that they will last the longest and have the most amazing battles. That tends to be the farthest from the truth when she takes what could make them have fun and simply uses them as either fodder or backup teams.-

“Yeah. It isn’t a good situation all around. Also, shouldn’t there be an age range on this game? This is almost like back on earth where they let kids play games without supervision.” I asked as I spotted a lone blue dot a little distance away. Was that Sela?

I entered into a massive cavern that had seemingly endless narrow pits and hive combs pocking the floor and walls. What was this place? Also, holy cow this helmet was awesome at allowing me to see in the dark! I hadn't realized it till now the fact that I had been walking in perfect darkness for quite a while and been able to see everything. Walkways and arching paths were leading out to different tunnels all over the place. It was a well-designed structure to let the Fomys bring… prey here. Was this the “Rescue Pits”?

“Sela?” I asked when I got closer, keeping an eye out for any spawn that had paralyzed her and dumped her here. I had to step over empty pits, making sure not to trip and fall into one of them while I moved forward slowly. I couldn’t hear anything.

I spied her cotton candy fluff of hair halfway down one of the deeper pits. When I got closer I turned my head right at her, willing my helmet to increase the volume so that I could hear if she was at least breathing. I heard the softest, faintest gasping coming from her mouth.

I was very happy that I had selected a Blidda in this instance as I gripped the walls of the pit with my fingers racially designed for hanging from ledges and upside down. I reached deep inside the pit and through her fluffy fur to grab her gently around the shoulders before lifting her up and out.

“Hey, Sela, don’t worry, I got you,” I whispered to her as I stepped over a shallow adjacent pit to carry her out.

I was momentarily startled when I looked down into two fiery eyes looking up at me from within the shallow pit. I was dead the next moment when numerous blades of cr rushed up through my legs and body.

I didn’t even get to hear Sela gasp “I am sorry Kevin. She tricked me.”