A street in The Slums, a young man standing on top of a wagon in a zebra-mask pulling the shirt of another young man over his head.

Step 1: Shirt

With the shirt pulled down to his nose, the driver couldn’t see a thing. “Hey!”

Step 2: Confirm

Henry, studying the driver's back, found a dense network of deep scars, matching the description of the Primordial Path of Nerin cultists.

“What are you—“ The driver screamed, his question interrupted by a fillet knife piercing his throat.

The donkey, hearing the commotion behind it, startled and was about to trot off but stopped itself to avoid trampling the family ahead.

Step 3: Check AP, response, HP, and family.

Henry, having confirmed that this driver was a cannibal, progressed an instant later to the next step. Ducking down, he checked four things.

For stabbing the driver, he hadn’t been afflicted with the Assailant's Penalty. This penalty, signified by your username flashing in crimson above your head, was assigned to players for breaking the law and made you drop extra items upon death. Henry'd tested for this by stabbing the driver with a fairly-harmless fillet knife in case he'd been wrong. No penalty had appeared, however. Saana's game system had evaluated his attack as a justified act of self-defence.

Response-wise, the driver's immediate reaction to being stabbed wasn’t to unsummon his shirt and replace it with armour. Instead, dropping his riding crop, he was raising his hands to tear the fillet knife out of his throat. This suggested a lack of combat training. One of the first lessons was to suppress this instinct, allowing Saana's healing system to eject the lodged object when the wound mended.

A health bar appeared above the driver's head, shedding 1% of its volume. This figure was low but enough to indicate he had no extra HP from a Martial class.

As a last-second addition, Henry also checked on the family. They looked frightened but not in the way people do when you're attacking someone they care about. They shouldn't put up an immediate defence of the driver.

Step 4: Kill

As the driver was grabbing the fillet knife in his throat, Henry, who had bent down to the level of the kid's waist, unsheathed the dagger from his belt, reached around the right side of the driver’s body, and drove the dagger’s point into the left side of his abdomen, before cranking it hard back towards himself. As the blade parted the tender skin of the belly, like the spreading petals of a rose greeting the dawn, a bouquet of severed intestines and yellow fat erupted and blossomed out of the gaping wound, and the air was sprayed with the foul wet organ-musk stored within each person's body.

The driver, his guts eviscerated, spasmed and moaned in horror.

Henry, immediately after slicing the stomach, yanked out the dagger, gave one stab in the direction of the liver, piercing the organ, then a second at the driver’s stomach, the steel of his weapon sinking in against the resistance of the soft flesh.

“STOP!" shrieked the driver. "PLEASE!”

After stabbing the stomach, Henry went back to the driver's abdomen and eviscerated his intestines again, the previous wound having been rapidly repaired by Saana's unique health system.

Rather than representing one's physical constitution, HP was a magical energy that mended any wounds sustained. More severe wounds required more health to heal, but, as long as one had sufficient HP remaining, even a lopped-off head could be regrown, the mending process taking exactly 0.5 seconds.

To kill a person, therefore, you had to first deplete their health bar. Only after that did the body become like a real-world human's, mortal and desecrateable.

The way Henry had been stabbing the driver was designed to maximise damage by hitting three vulnerable zones as they were mended. With the particular organs being hit, each attack cycle removed about a quarter of the driver’s health. A player of the same level would have lost about 60% of their health in the same cycle, NPCs having larger health pools to compensate for their permanent deaths.

Continuing to stab away, Henry headed off any reaction from the shocked family. “Self-defence," he explained. "This guy was plotting to kill me."

The driver, having removed the fillet knife and shirt, looked down in shock at his stomach being pierced rhythmically, a red waterfall pouring down his belly onto his pants. By his waist, the zebra-masked Offworlder was calmly alternating between staring at him and the family.

“Check the Assailant's Penalty," said Henry.

“HE'S LYING!” The driver swung a punch at the creepy face.

Henry shifted his head to deflect the blow, but the knuckles still connected with his temple, creating a loud crunch and whipping his head back.

The parents, feeling sympathetic to the driver, started to cast healing spells.

“FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU!” The driver threw fist after fist, too panicked to realise that he was holding a knife in his hand — not that this would have mattered, the damage this distracting object could do being minimal.

Henry ignored the beating to his head, tightening his grip with his free arm around the driver’s waist and continuing to stab with the other.

The punches didn't hurt enough to disorientate him or interrupt the flow of his attacks, Henry having reduced his pain receptivity to 14% of the full sensation. He, like most veteran duellists, never turned it completely off because pain signals produced a quicker reaction than other sensory cues, and sometimes the few extra tens of milliseconds would decide a bout's outcome. The slight advantage was especially important for Henry. His main weakness during his duelling career had been mediocre physical reflexes that'd made it hard to cross daggers with the world's fastest muscle freaks. It'd been due to this distinctive trait that he'd earned his first nickname in Saana, the bitter fans of his defeated rivals calling him 'The Cripple'.

With the pain settings tuned down, players were like terminators, able to stab happily away without flinching unless you made their limbs inoperable by breaking them.

The driver's panic grew when he realised that Henry wasn't going to release him, his punches glancing and missing.

The parents about to help were stopped by their son.

“There's no name above his head," the boy pointed out, confirming Henry's claim.

The driver desperately summoned his armour and weapons, but this decision had come far too late. By the time the motes of light started flowing out of his Spatial Bracelet, Henry was already finishing the last cycle, and the armour that might have saved him would still take three seconds more to solidify and come into effect.

“Cheers, bud,” said Henry to the kid as he delivered a final stab to the driver’s stomach.

The parents had not actually been a risk at this point either, as they had reacted too slow to finish their spellcasting. Moreover, even if they did get them off, most spells in Saana were projectiles that affected the first person hit, so Henry could have pivoted and absorbed the spells himself. Nevertheless, he'd maintained communication with the family to further delay interference.

With the driver’s health hitting zero, the last stomach wound failed to repair, the open hole seeming to inhale with the rapid pumping of the hyperventilating diaphragm before vomiting out a bright red stream.

Henry, following up quickly, unbalanced the guy by kicking out his legs with his own and using his body weight to pull the driver down.

As the driver fell back, Henry caught him by the back like a tango dancer cradling their partner in a dip and he used his dagger to carve a deep incision from one side of the kid's neck to the other, severing all the arteries and veins carrying blood to his brain.

The driver's body, sinking to the bottom of this dipping motion, was then released. Henry allowed the kid to slip from his grip and tumble off the wagon, this last measure intended to avoid a retaliatory stab from a spear that'd finished being summoned into the driver's grip.

The driver sailed into the air before crashing into the dirt of the street with a thud. His spear dislodged from his fingers as his body tumbled in a cloud of red dust.

The daughter of the watching family started to cry. The father winced. The mother gasped.

“Sick!" The son yelled, feeling like he was watching a clip from a PVP highlight reel, the stabbing and body disposal smoother than if they'd been pre-orchestrated. "Zebra-head, are you a pro?!"

Henry, ignoring the question, checked the driver's donkey to make sure it wasn’t going to bolt. Perhaps because it had been made to watch other ambushes, the creature'd remained stationary, even if its muscles were taut with nerves. Satisfied, he jumped off the wagon, a column of light entering his hands, and sprinted over to where the driver was lying.

A pro...was he, The Cripple, a professional in disguise?

At fighting, at 'duelling', hardly. Objectively speaking, his physical abilities weren't completely useless, the insulting nickname being slightly exaggerated. His natural mechanical talent was probably in the top 10% of the player base, and, combined with his experience, he could pull off feats that would impress an amateur like this simple murder. However, with the game not having grown to 200 million players, top 10% still put 20 million above him. Compared to the actual pros at the top of the top, he'd be like a one-armed baby trying to outbox Muhammad Ali. For him to have stood once against them at all had been a miracle, never to be repeated.

Not that he minded any of this — everyone had their strengths and weaknesses, their areas of expertise and ignorance. You might call him a pro at other things.

When the mother noticed the two-handed axe appear in Henry's hands, she covered her kids’ eyes.

This was really a pointless action, the game having tiered censorship based on age. From 12 to 8, people and creatures resembled anime characters; 7 and below, children's building blocks. Henry himself, at 17, still couldn't see nudity, which was somewhat comical given the ability to graphically butcher a person. He'd once watched a pregnant subordinate get her stomach opened up and her fetus ripped out and jackhammered in its little chest by a knife, and the only thing censored had been the dying woman's nipples - tiny pixelated islands of purity floating in the horrific meat.

Henry approached the driver lying face up in the dirt. The kid appeared to be unconscious already, the blood required to oxygenate his brain spilling out into a red pool around his sliced-up throat. His face had slackened slightly, but still retained traces of a tense conviction to resist passing out in the final moments. His neck was scrawny, undernourished and underdeveloped, and the animal-hide armour summoned too late did not cover it.

Henry raised the axe he'd summoned to the sky and brought it down with all his might.

Amidst the watching family, all except the son winced when they heard the next sound.

Thwack.

Henry, staring down at the mess, sighed.

His axe had split the kid's throat open but been stopped by the cervical vertebrae.

He pried the weapon out, having to plant his foot on the kid's head as the cartilage of the windpipe stuck to the chopping-edge and caused Henry's initial tugging action to lift the dying kid's head by the neck in a last stubborn act of resistance against the downward pull of death.

Henry took another shot.

Thwack.

He sighed again, the second blow also failing.

He was still quite rusty...

While his character had been riding the boat here, he'd been brushing up on his old combat skills with his guildmates in his company's semi-virtual gymnasium. Unfortunately, the technology was too primitive to practise decapitation.

Thwa-clunk.

At last, the axe striking through to the blood-soaked dust beneath, the driver’s neck separated cleanly. Both the head and the body instantly disintegrated into a swarm of floating lights.

Human (level 0) killed. Because you have not unlocked a Martial class, no EXP is awarded.