PROLOGUE

The man dropped low to avoid the claw aimed for his head and gave a quick stab in response. His scowl only deepened when the blade slid off the hard, slick body of the being and he rolled past the figure to avoid its other arm. The roll brought the man a distance away from his opponent and his ears failed to pick up any chasing steps. Swinging the sword behind him just in case, the man recovered from the roll and picked himself up off the ground. Only when he turned back to his opponent did he relax a bit and try to recover his energy.

Concentrating was a difficult task with the many wounds on his body, but he was glad they had closed earlier in the fight. Fighting low level troops had made the party mistake the difficulty of the enemy leader and the results were fatal. The man forced himself to concentrate and then noticed that his mana had recovered. He raised a hand towards the staggering opponent and shouted the name of his strongest spell.

“FORDENSHEN.”

A large purple ball of flame appeared in his hands and he threw it at the shocked enemy. Not even giving it time to recover, the man chased after his spell and raised his sword in both his hands. The purple ball roared as it approached the tall monstrosity and the man saw its tall body try to avoid the blast. It was useless as the ball changed its path and continued towards the dark figure. Seeing this, it raised both its arms and tried to block it with his claws but the ball only swerved around the claws and struck its chest hard. The being flew backwards and slammed into the central monolith, shifting it several feet back. The black demon tried to raise its body and retreat, but the man arrived before it could.

“Raaaah!”

The man’s sword pierced through the damaged chest of the being before crying out at the pain that coursed through him. The being had set itself ablaze with the resulting heat powerful enough to reach past his enchanted armor and affect his body. He couldn’t see his bare skin underneath the armor he wore but could still feel the fire that licked at his arms. The man clenched his teeth and rammed the blade deeper in, his struggle rewarded with a deeper, more intense heat. Not letting his struggle lapse in the least, the man looked up into the eyes of his opponent and watched as the light died away. Only when nothing appeared in those dark sockets did he feel the gradual lessening of pain. Before long, the fire dissipated leaving a blackened corpse.

With a deep sigh, he staggered back from his opponent and left his sword in its heart. His mind was still reeling from the pain and he found himself thinking of insignificant things. How dirty he was, how much money he must have earned, what kind of sword he wanted next. The sword itself wasn’t important. He had bought it at the last town for a mere 300,000 Gold pieces and the stats it gave was only a few attack points higher than the last one. He had ignored the ridiculousness he’d felt at seeing a sword sold for that much inside a run down village. Now though, he had the time to think of such frivolous thoughts. Maybe there was a sacred blacksmith in every town? And the closer one got to here, the higher the quality of work produced? If so, he would have to try and convince all the blacksmiths to come to his home and work for him somehow. Ah, he needed to concentrate more...

Music started playing up again and the candle lit hall changed ever so slowly. He raised his head to face the dark ceiling and saw a glint of white poking through the black murkiness. On one side of the room, the curtains were open and revealed a dark cloudy sky that was rolling with an unnatural movement. A ray of pure sunlight pierced the clouds, and was near blinding as it hit the dead earth; he felt a stir in his chest at the sight.

Walking out of the room took a considerable effort. His companions had all perished in the battle and he had run out of Phoenix Downs to revive them. He needed to head to a Cathedral and ask a priest for a full revive before they could celebrate. Again his thoughts wandered, this time to the bodies of his friends. When they revived in the Cathedral, they usually appeared right beside him and lost most of their wounds. Plus their clothes were also repaired. Did that mean there existed two bodies - one dead and a one living? It was a creepy thought. He put out the thought of necrophilia as he walked; that was a line of thought he shouldn’t cross.

The castle he was in was an enormous architectural art piece. From the outside you could see towering spires and large walls and it seemed to gleam, even with the lack of light or colour. Inside however, he started to wonder at the extravagance. There were no heavy weaponry on the walls and the platform was flimsy at best. He had seen how thin the walls were and was pretty sure he could push it down with his stats. The castle’s designer seemed to focus on aesthetics to the detriment of functionality. How on earth would it have survived if it was under siege? The towers were just tall, flat pieces of wall with no interior. He had been afraid it would have fallen on them with a strong enough gust of wind. The castle was a decorative object, not a proper castle.

The man walked through the halls and took out a few potions. He downed them all like water and was close to choking a few times at the taste. They were the cheapest of the cheap and dropped from all the monsters he encountered. It was unfortunate, but he had run out of ‘Large Potions’ and ‘Elixirs’ during the fight. What kind of being was it that had given him such a hard time? Well, he didn’t want to think about it right now.

Finally out of the castle, he stopped his walking and surveyed the land he had been trying to save. It bathed in the sudden sunlight and the ground was becoming more verdant as plants started to grow. Seeing this phenomenon was better than the stories had predicted. It was something only done after he completed his task, so the man quickened his pace to the closest village. After reviving everyone, they would celebrate all night before going back to the city. Maybe he could finally settle down once more and be happy. Miss Cleric had been eying him a few times, but he had ignored her since the quest had been the main priority. Now though…

He fell. Face hitting the ground, a moan escaped his lips as he lay there breathing into the rough dirt. With dimming eyesight he saw the impossible. His health was dropping and showed no signs of slowing down. He was pretty sure he hadn’t taken any damage just now, and there was no poison in the land with such devastating effects. Then what...?

Watching the last bit of his health go, he succumbed to his fate and in his withering thoughts he apologized to his comrades. He wouldn’t be able to revive them this one time, after everything finished..

The Light in the Land, the Opponent of Darkness, the Embodiment of all Good, the Champion of the Gods, the Hero and his companions. All died upon completing their mission.

“So, how was the scenario this time?”

“He performed it wonderfully sir. He accomplished all the routes in record time and didn’t hesitate in his mission. He even triggered all the romance flags that you jokingly placed inside and could have had his pick of a wife. Out of all of them, he chose the Cleric in the end, and I count that as another plus to him. He was the only survivor of the battle and had enough potions to last to the next town.”

“Impressive.”

And it was. Most of the scenarios were of easy to moderate difficulty. The easy one was just to gain the quest to defeat Demon King and then go and kill him. No dillydallying or anything and it was usually a solo mission. The moderate scenario involved making proper choices and assembling a solid and balanced group. That group would then be able to take on the Demon King’s army.

This scenario though, was set to hard. The other group members were tough to convince into the group and easy to annoy and lose. You needed a good degree of social skills to convince the varied personalities to get along and that was rather difficult. As if that wasn’t enough, the scenario included special flags that the Hero would have to trigger and approach with a level head. If he didn't then the other party would get mad, flustered, moody, or even downright suicidal and ruin the rest of the adventure. As a last laugh, the monsters had random skills that could sometimes completely decimate a party. Or there could be scenarios where the party faced a few hundred monsters at a time.

“Then how many resets did he have to go through before he finished?”

His assistant typed in a few commands and stopped dead cold.

“What’s the problem? Don’t tell me the number was too many? In the end he made all the right choices so it shouldn’t be a problem, even with 100 resets.”

“I-its not that sir. Erm. He has 0 resets.”

This time, it was he who froze on the spot. 0 resets. ZERO RESETS. As a game it would have taken a regular player a few weeks of playing and resetting to complete the game. A month with a full group of companions. To trigger all the flags would have taken another few weeks. This though…

“Take him out, make multiple copies, and then place him in scenarios 12, 422, and 995. Speed them up and have it finish in the next few minutes. Leave a copy as a base we can compare to.”

“Yes sir!”

Furious typing echoed through the room for the next minute before the assistant stopped his work. The two of them waited for the results of the scenarios to finish and soon enough it did. The assistant typed a few more lines of command and read the results out loud.

“Sir! Scenario 12 finished with a 97% completion record. 422 finished with a 100% completion record. 995 was-”

Again the assistant paused and this time his eyes bulged and his mouth gaped open like a fish. He waited for his assistant to compose himself, but the wait made his patience wane. It took a few minutes and he started to worry that he would have to get a new assistant. The man was competent, but his reactions tended to go a little overboard.

“995...130% completion rate. He managed to destroy the corruption inside the royal kingdoms and rally the Human race together. Furthermore, he made deals and pacts with the other races and was the head of the Continental army. He led a successful attack on the Demon King with a 0.003% loss and would have become Emperor if we didn’t take him out. Computer says he would have also gained the blessings of a Goddess and become immortal. Harem number reached a size in the triple-digits and was rather accepted by the people.”

His smile grew larger at every sentence said. 995 was the closest scenario to the game they were creating now, and this man had completed it in one go with flair. If a man like him was ever born in this period, he could unite Earth under one flag. Unfortunately, the man was only a program and, alas, no person would follow a machine. Damn those movies that portrayed robots as enemies of Humanity. Damn Isaac Asimov!

“How many Heroes have we decided on at the moment?”

“Sir! John has said we need 20 files. At the moment we have around 13 accounted for!”

“Fine, place this file with the rest of the group and make sure he gets chosen first.”

“Sir!”

On various televisions across Earth, a certain talk show and its live broadcast had a few million viewers. The program was using the recent universal translators created by the company Terra, the creators of the game ‘Gaia’, to reach out to all audiences. The guest of this special episode was just one man who was average in every way possible. From his height to his looks, and his hairstyle to his clothes, everything about the man screamed Average. This man was anything but that; he was the developer of the AI that created ‘Gaia’ and was the only one with any control over it. His real name has never been disclosed.

“Welcome sir… what do we call you anyways?”

The host was a middle aged man with an air of nobility, one that is not found often in this day and age. Even within the ranks of actual nobles you couldn’t find a person that could dominate a room with their presence alone. Sir George Killen, however, was such a person and his talk show invited various important people from across the globe. Regardless of their social, political, and religious standings, if they were important then they were invited.

“You can just call me John Doe. John is fine.”

The ‘normal’ man’s voice was moderate and a small smile was on his face as he faced both Sir George and the camera.

“Alright John, let’s get right into things. To be perfectly frank, people are a little put off about your company’s new creation, ‘Gaia’. We’ve had the ability to access Virtual Reality for several years, again because of your company, yet experts haven’t expected a game to come out for years. Decades even. Even now, only the most technologically powerful countries have been able to make any use of the VR technology , and they were only able to come up with basic educational and military use. Why, and how, has your company been able to make the game so quickly?”

“Well, I should first thank you for inviting me here Sir George. Good enough, yes? Now on to the topic of the VR game. People should first know and understand that I did not create the VR machine. I only created the AI. After I created her - her name is Jane Roe by the way - I tasked her with finding ways to improve human happiness. Jane came up with some absurd ways; some like kill all the unhappy people which had about a 30% chance of success. Virtual Reality was at the top since a person could live an unhappy reality here but go to the VR and have a vacation rather easily.”

“Interesting, so can you tell us how your AI was created?”

A slight twinkle could be seen in Sir George’s eyes as he asked this. That twinkle lent some evidence to what the critics refer to as his mischievousness.

“Alright.”

Shock permeated from Sir George and most of the people watching, especially the programmers. They hadn’t expected this level of candidness.

“First you need a computer strong enough to support the AI. Then you make an AI whose task is to make a slightly better AI making AI. Understand? No? Well lets just say if you fail at doing this, then the chances are your computer will burn up first, the AI will degenerate instead, the AI will gain sentience and view humans as harmful and try to kill all of us, or the AI will just kill you and live in relative solace. Chances of those happening are around 99.9997% for someone not me.”

A useless answer for a crazy question.

“Fine then, can you at least explain the game in general? And this ‘NPC system’ your company had previously stated...”

Sir George was a little gruff in his questioning but he couldn’t fault the man for his answers.

“Sure, first off the game is running at 5x speed. This means a person that works 8 hours a day and sleeps 8 hours a day can leave 4-8 hours for the game. That is about 20-40 hours of in game time - enough for a short, yet restful vacation. The game follows the generic rules of an RPG game but also has to follow some of reality’s rules such as ‘repeated training makes you stronger’.

“As for the NPC system...let me first say, the game is already running. Yes, it is running, no it is not on some secret Beta Test. The game is running for the NPCs in the game. And it is running at around 20x speed. For the next few years, all of the NPCs in the game will go through decades of life. All of the important NPCs have been created already and during these years they will get stronger. Understand, these NPCs are supposed to be not any different from us. They can unlock hidden classes and go on immense adventures. And they had plenty more years in the game as opposed to the new players. This is a game ruled by the NPCs and you people will need to find a niche to crawl through in the game.

“Now I’m not saying this will be impossible. NPCs are like regular people in a world. Unless they have the drive, they just won’t try hard enough. That is why I will release a group of Hero NPCs into the game 1 year before the game starts. This will allow these Hero NPCs to grow 20 years before going on their adventure. This will start making it more impossible.”

A slight smirk on John’s face told everyone that he wanted it to be hard. An easy game was boring and too many games nowadays held the players’ hands from beginning to end. With so many casual gamers, complaints after complaints just kept piling up. This forced developers into making easier games. It was nonsense in his opinion. Games are supposed to be difficult!

“This seems incredibly unfair John. Why should people even play such a difficult game?”

John just continues to smirk at the uninterested question from Sir George. He must have noticed it was a question from his network and not a personal question.

“Well for one, these ‘Hero’ NPCs will only have one life. Players would have an infinite number of lives to play with and that gives players the advantage of recklessness. Two, players can pretty much rush through 72 hours of gameplay easily without rest while the NPCs actually live there so they’d have to spend 1/3rd of their lives sleeping. Three, Hero NPCs are still NPCs. They will probably not have the drive to do anything important if they don’t have any serious reason or motivation to do so.

“That will be all I will say about the game at the moment.”

Sir George’s mouth was open as he was in the act of asking another question but had to snap close at John’s comment. Sir George also looked like he wanted to punch John repeatedly until he got what he wanted but decided to just close the show. He had done that twice and gotten in some trouble with the network, but it was his wife that had scared the living daylights out of him after the second time.

John’s smile at the end though caused Sir George to wonder what he was planning behind those thoughts.

Leaving his assistant to the work, he walked out of the room deep in thought. The implementation of Hero characters into the world would have rather sizable effects. Even just one Hero was usually enough to change the tide of the worlds he had created. And here he was with an entire group of them.

Sighing, he walked into a different section of the building. There, his second assistant stood up to greet him.

“Hello boss. I was about to call for you since you were late.”

Soft and calm tones hid the barbs that were in the words, but he just ignored her comment. He motioned her to sit and start.

“Well boss, we have gone through the hard scenario for this program and it has completed with an overall completion rate of 55%. Highest we have so far.”

“How many died?”

“He managed to kill 984,734,221 citizens of the continent before the rest fled. He has somewhat stabilized his realm and created a system that should last years with no problems. Upon his death though, the realm would dissolve to chaos and destroy itself. All acceptable parameters.”

“Fine, add him to the pile and make him last. Test another file and use scenario 666. We haven’t had a successful run through that file as of yet.”

“Yea boss.”

Why John wanted several files with this kind of disposition was beyond him. He found it was far tougher than he expected to make the perfect villain. Villains were much more difficult to make than Heroes and the process was going slow. Right now they had a slew of 40% completed villains and he doubted he would get anyone close to 80%. Sighing, he watched his second assistant work and thought of the future.

This is a prologue...Lalala, STORY START!

Ah, happy christmas everyone. I might as well give out this prologue of mine. Its finished. I don't know when the first arc is finished but I am making progress. Hope everyone likes the prologue and rate this new version of the fic.

Hrm hrm...

For the people who wonder, the old fic is here