The next location I arrived to looked like an abandoned Wild West town or boom town from Klondike Gold Rush days.

One L-shaped main street flanked by dozen surprisingly well-preserved buildings. The wooden two-story buildings with impressive fronts and substandard back ends reminded me of the Mandarin River area in the game. I didn't expect to see this type of Potemkin village architecture in this area at all. I was tempted to stop and explore a bit.

Maybe there was a Slave Dome here too? Slavemasters in these type of towns collected and kept slaves in beehive-shaped buildings called Slave Domes. Uh, but I don't want to see a beehive house full of human skeletons. Well, I don't want to see living slaves either. But I still want to explore.

Wait a minute... Did the punks in the previous area driving the carriage take it from here? The wild west style carriage matched this area better than the previous one. How did they get it over the landwall? I'll ask them next time.

There were recent mining vehicle tracks on the muddy road leading to the empty town. Suleiman's soldiers probably used this place as a night camp as well. I was wondering why a relatively well-preserved town had been left empty; Suleiman's army must be the reason gangs haven't settled here permanently.

The walls of the buildings were smudged full of gang tags, though. I could even recognize some of the gangs that had visited. Ratliners had left biggest markings.

Good thing the soldiers were traveling north. Dodged a bullet there. They didn't leave any watchmen back in the other night camp, so this place was probably safe.

All right, if this place is anything like the similar towns along the Mandarin River, I should check the abandoned Sheriff's Office. The weapons had probably been taken long time ago, but there might at least be some useful information like old wanted posters.

After entering the town and slinking in the sheriff's office, I noticed a layer of black dust on the floor. No one had visited this place for a while. Cell doors were taken away; there was just empty, wide open stone rooms. As expected, soldiers or gangsters had taken everything they could rip off to use or sell, from jail cell bars to bed frames.

So that building was a dead end.

Next building I checked was a combination of a tavern and a bordello. Places like these existed in the Mandarin River level as well. All furniture, round tables and chairs, had been taken away. Even the second floor railings were gone.

Hm... In the basement of these type of establishments, there were sometimes small treasure caches behind walls if you knocked them down. I should definitely check the basement. Let's see, if there's a hidden spiral staircase to the basement behind the counter, the architecture is the same as in the game.

Yep, there was. I crouched under the counter, pulled the long floorboard hatch open and went down the creaking metal stairs.

The basement looked exactly the same as in the game, except there wasn't any wooden crates. I moved some rocks and bricks out of the way, tapped the wall under the stairs and found a hidden compartment.

Bingo. A small iron safe with a symbol combination lock.

I quickly tried the symbol combos I had memorized for all Mandarin River level locks, but no dice. I didn't know the combo for this one. If this were the game, I would immediately switch to a slower backup strat – a Chair Smash Combo to brute force the safe open.

Can I try it here? Maybe it could work because it's not a system-breaking glitch, I'm just using in-game assets in unexpected ways. Kind of like breaking a padlock with two nut wrenches. Standard pen tester stuff.

First, jam a chair under the symbol lock to raise it in horizontal position. I collected some bricks under the lock and used them instead of chair.

Secondly, hit the lock horizontally and vertically until the right combination of symbols settles in naturally. Another brick for this job.

Boom, boom, boom. How about that? Chair Smash Combo worked on first try. Took only five minutes or so.

Shoutout to a fellow speedrunner DutchBoyMuffin18 who originally found this trick!

Yes sir, finally an exploit that actually worked. I can probably use this to collect all the symbol combo treasures. I feel so overpowered right now.

Let's check out the loot.

There was two leather pouches with gold krúricks and silver krúricks in the safe. Nice. I don't have to sell my card belt, there's enough cash here to live for several months, if I don't splurge. Might be the whole life savings of the bordello runner, or whoever lived here before the front lines of the war moved through this area.

That's the real meta, isn't it? Reality is a pay-to-win game. Cash is the cheat that opens doors and skips grinds.

Under the coin pouches, there was also an ornamental Dagger of Damage +2... No, not really. It was just a normal dagger with cool decos.

Should I actually aim for 100% treasures after any-percent is done? All I have to do is stay alive and visit places. Dying midway is not good, there's no save point suicide resets. You lose all treasures and items, if you die. Only in-game maneuvers allowed. Survive the old-fashioned way by exchanging time for money.

If only I could find get some overpowered items immediately... Early fast travel airship would be really nice.

There was one completely broken neurogame I played before Mu-Ur where you could get infinite teleports and then speedrun the whole campaign under three minutes by jumping straight to level end triggers. By the way, did I mention that my untied world record for Mu-Ur was sub 8 hours? Casual playtime for full Mu-Ur campaign was 30+ hours and even taking it sub-ten was considered impossible back in the day.

Feeling rather proud of myself for a change, I left the basement and climbed the spiral stairs back to ground level.

“Stop! Put your hands up!” (soldier)

My instant reaction to hearing these classic enemy NPC lines from behind me was to drop down, roll back and to the right, and stab the guy in the flank with a deco knife.

The blade sank into his right lung. The young soldier had a shocked expression on his face for a moment, then he just collapsed on the floor and died. The black powder revolver loosened from his hand as he fell forward.

Oh crap...

That escalated quickly.

My reaction just now was the same as in the game.

In Mu-Ur Quincunx, when you got startled by an enemy audio cue from behind, you quickly learned to roll diagonally on your 4:30 to avoid damage, then immediately shoot or stab because diagonal backroll had the effect of speeding up short range attack afterwards. Just like aggro could be turned into dialogue, this technique could turn melee engagement into assassination.

It was the standard panic move I had done thousands of times in the game. How did it work here when there was no frame cap? The wind-up cancellation shouldn't work like this. Was it simply the surprise that did the job?

I normally played Ivorythief, so the best assassination attack bonus was to stab enemy in the armpit, which I had just now tried to do, but I had missed and stabbed the poor guy between the ribs.

I almost got killed because of my neurogame muscle memory.

No, that's not it.

I just killed a guy with my neurogame muscle memory.

I just killed a guy. He surprised me and it was self-defense, but I still killed someone.

This was one of the controversial discussion topics about photorealistic neuroware first-person shooter games: players getting totally desensitized to violence. Operant conditioning and brutalization were the military training terms for it, if I remember correctly. Neurogame speedrunners had to get used to shooting real-looking people in real-looking environments straight to their real-looking faces again, again and again, as fast and as efficiently as possible. If you played an RPG that was placed in psychological horror category like Mu-Ur Quincunx, there was no way to become a good runner, if sudden gory images and severely discouraging and traumatizing story events slowed you down.

As I stared at the dead human on the floor before me, it felt only slightly more real than an enemy NPC turning into gibs. I guess your sense of reality turns out like this, when... In the extremely unlikely scenario where you glitch into a parallel world similar to a neurogame... Real violence looks and feels the same as game violence. No difference.

I couldn't imagine this guy being a living human. I saw him as an erratically moving speed bump.

Wait, I don't have time for all this psychological crap now!

Where did this guy come from? Was he alone?

He was waiting for me to climb up from the basement. What was he even trying to do, arrest me? He wasn't the sheriff of this town, was he?

No, he was dressed like a regular Suleiman's soldier. Were there more of them in the town?

I went prone, crawled to the window, pulled myself up and peeked outside. No enemies on the front yard. Was he alone?

There was one lonely-looking horse tied to a pole on the main street two buildings away, but nothing else. I waited a minute, but couldn't see or hear anything. He was alone, was he?

He rode to town, heard me hacking the safe in the basement, walked in and saw my footprints on the dusty floor.

...I really did the Four-Thirty Roll with my own real body, huh? If one combat strat works, are there other combat strats that work?

There was a common trick you could pull against guards running after you on some levels: turn around a corner, center your aim on the texture pattern on the wall and turn 90 degrees. This way your crosshair is exactly on the unprotected face of the NPC when he comes around the corner. But this trick only works if all the guards are the same height and have the same type of helmet without a visor. Is there an in-universe reason for guards to be the same height, like minimum and maximum height for soldiers picked in the guard duty?

Ugh, it's probably not so simple here.

But then again... first the chair combo worked and now four-thirty? I finally got to a sub-area I could recognize and manipulate, and suddenly things started to click.

Bring a knife to a gun fight. I guess I can add that experience to my bucket list and cross it out immediately.

Chair Smash Combo, Four-Thirty Roll and Force Dialogue. I actually had three working tricks – no, don't get excited! Don't start thinking all execution-heavy sploits are consistents in this world!

I was already holding the knife in my hand; I dropped the coin pouches, which probably distracted the soldier; there was enough room behind the counter to roll backwards; I was wearing clothes that were easy to move in – without all these practical factors in place, I wouldn't have been able to execute the move.

You just got a lucky streak, dude. Next encounter might end you. Safe strats, safe strats.

After waiting a bit more and catching my breath, I crawled back to check my first kill.

The soldier was about twenty years old; a blonde guy in a brown tight-fitting Suleiman's army uniform, carrying two shoulder bags. Great, more inventory slots.

The bigger shoulder bag contained a small wooden box full of caps and balls, a tube-shaped pouch full of black powder, a rod that was used to push the ball in the cylinder and several dirty rags. I also checked his pockets and took his small pouch of krúricks, his short-blade knife, and the hip holster for the revolver.

Then I checked the revolver itself. It was a regular black powder cap-and-ball revolver; the most common tier-one slot-one starter handgun in Mu-Ur. Almost every regular soldier carried one. Slow reload, limited range, limited accuracy, limited precision. There was a lever under the barrel for pushing the balls in the cylinder. The separate loading rod was just a backup then?

I could learn how to load and shoot a revolver on my own... maybe? The gun won't just explode in my hands, right? Malfunctioning revolvers didn't exist in the game, but I was worried that shooting a real revolver without any knowledge of proper handling would backfire.

Yosh, let's put shooting practice on hold for now. It's loaded, so let's save the six shots for emergency situations.

No, wait, shouldn't you practice before emergency situation exactly because you can't practice during emergency? Oh well, let's think of it as a level-locked weapon for now.

Then I checked his smaller should bag. A bottle of ink, a set of calligraphy pens, and a bundle of papers with ink sketches of a young woman. So this guy was a into drawing and had a girlfriend? That's regrettable. The bag also contained one food pack and two wax-sealed letters. Ah, he was a messenger for the army? I decided to read the letters later.

Two shoulder bags equipped. I can't carry too much random stuff endlessly like in the game, the revolver already weighs enough to slow me down a bit. Well, there's no item box strats or nested menu manipulations, so I have that going on for me. There's a trade-off in everything.

Should I hide or bury the corpse? Nah, I just want to get out of here fast.

Killing a messenger is quite a serious issue, I think. But it's not like they have crime scene investigation skills to catch random murderers in this world.

Now that I think about it, if an actual working postal service existed in this world, I could just write some strongly worded letters to certain influential people in high places and have them work for me with threats or bribes, depending on person. As it is now, my best bet to even have a word with such people would be to work my way up the status ladder in person.

I'd probably get assassinated on the way. Let's not try that route.

By the way, did I gain experience points? Did I level up? There's no time or need to grind in speedruns, so its been a long time since I've given any thought to the weird XP mechanisms of Mu-Ur. That system doesn't exist here for sure, but it doesn't matter, if I find the main characters. Their basic skill sets are adequate enough to take down Caliph Tze, especially when combined with my Canon Knowledge cheat. Or so I hope.

I left the building through a side-window, just in case, and sneaked towards the lonely-looking horse. I stopped to wait for a moment, then untied the horse.

The horse didn't move, just looked at me like waiting me to hop on.

Sorry, buddy, I can't ride horses. I'm just going to fall off. I just thought I'd untie you and let you find your own happiness. Why are you just staring at me? Go forth and run to freedom, horse. Don't get caught by gangsters who like to eat horse meat.

Call me a coward, but I really don't have the courage to learn how to ride a horse and shoot a black powder revolver on my own. In the game, it was faster to bunnyhop or steal mining vehicles than go through the trouble of getting a horse and taking care of it.

Well, I'm going to leave first then. Goodbye, lonely horse.

I left the abandoned wild west town the same way I arrived; on foot. Previously I had felt like a foreigner hiking in rural China, where instead of loyalty to your family, loyalty to your gang was the most important thing. Now I felt like an old west outlaw, running from lawmen and bandits alike, trying to reach the border of Mexico or Canada to escape gallows.