Rydr heard the snap of wood behind him and whirled around, ready to fight. In front of Rydr was a woman in leather armor with blue sleeves peeking out. Long blonde hair covered her gray eyes and stretched down past her shoulders. In her hands was a bow with a nocked arrow ready to be drawn. Rydr stepped forward with bared teeth as he raised the wolf's jaw as an impromptu weapon.

"Come on, if you're going to!" Rydr growled at her, still lost in his adrenaline rush. He moved away from the wolf that was dying of blood loss on the ground. It flailed at him but was too weak to stand after it received a fatal blow from Rydr.

"Woah, hold on, Red!" She immediately raised her hands and pulled the arrow off her bow's string. "I'm not here to hurt you. I just heard the fight and came to see you go full caveman on that wolf." She slipped the arrow into the leather quiver on her hip.

Rydr panted as her words registered. He swayed on his feet, physically and mentally exhausted from his fight with the wolf. His red teeshirt was half torn off where the wolf had ambushed him on his neck and shoulder, plus he was drenched in blood. First time I've been glad I made a red tee. He giggled to himself.

"You okay there, Red?" The woman pulled his attention back. A bloody guy giggling to himself was probably concerning to anyone.

"Red?" Rydr frowned in confusion.

She gestured up and down at his body, "Red eyes, red shirt and covered in blood," she shrugged, "so...Red." She talked to him with an ease that seemed strange, given how she found him. Rydr figured that she had experience from other VR games, and finding him like this wasn't the strangest thing she encountered before now.

To be honest, I may be one of the only people in this game that hasn't played a VR game before now. Or any video game for that matter. Rydr absentmindedly corrected his thought.

"Okay, that makes sense, I guess. My name is Rydr. Can I get your name?" He felt introductions were in order. Weirdly, she had seen him in a way nobody else ever had, violent and screaming his head off. Rydr blushed at the thought.

"Syrna. So that you know, the fight isn't over. More wolves will come if we aren't surrounded already." Syrna then proceeded to pull what Rydr suspected was the same arrow out of her quiver and nock it on her bowstring. The motion was smooth like she practiced it.

Rydr nodded and then jumped to his left as the wolf finally died and exploded into light. In its place was a pelt, a couple of teeth, and a few copper coins. He put his hand over his heart to calm himself before he swiped all of them off the ground and dumped them into his inventory. Rydr heard a cough behind him but manfully ignored her amusement at his noobishness.

He shunted his notifications to the side since he assumed they would all be about the wolf he just defeated.

A system notification chimed in his head, and he saw that Syrna sent him a friend request and a party request. Rydr accepted both after reading them. Two people sent me friend requests already; nice! The giant failed to consider how casual other people were. Rydr placed too much emphasis on the gesture, so he never initiated anything.

"Let's go before more attack," Syrna said and turned around to leave. To her, it seemed obvious that Rydr was as experienced as she. In Syrna's mind, no normal person could rip a wolf's jaw off as a finisher.

"Wait for just a second; I nearly forgot about this." Rydr summoned the pickax he received from Lynn out of his inventory. Syrna stopped dead and stared at him intensely.

"You had a pickax and decided to fight that wolf with your bare hands? That was a level 5 creature, dude! There's a line between doing things the hard way and the stupid way, you know?" Syrna was flabbergasted at his blatant idiocy. "Level suppression in Frontier Online divides your damage by the difference in levels."

Rydr hunched his shoulders and looked at the ground, "I didn't mean to...it ambushed me from behind, and then it was just up in my face." He could feel his face heating up; he was so embarrassed that someone had seen any part of his earlier fight.

Syrna still stared at him like he had grown two heads, "Just how high are-"

The sound of growling cut her off. Lots and lots of growling. She was right.

"We're surrounded, aren't we?" Rydr guessed. His health was still in the red.

*HP: 85/220*

"More running, less talking." Syrna took off, and Rydr followed after her, desperate not to face the pack alone.

They could hear the wolves around them as they ran recklessly through the woods. Rydr had no idea where they were going since he hadn't explored much of the area yet. He hoped that Syrna knew where she was going. Thorns and wiry undergrowth tore at their legs as they sprinted as hard as they could. Soon, Rydr caught up to Syrna and even started to pass her until he noticed and matched her pace.

Syrna was furious for a brief moment. Somewhere in her mind, the axiom "Just be faster than the slowest one" rattled around.

In the instant where he passed her, a wolf lunged out of the woods, almost like it materialized from nothing, and knocked Syrna to the ground. Without thinking, Rydr stopped, pivoted on the same foot, and slammed the tip of his pickax into the wolf's shoulders, skewering it on his weapon.

*CRIT 50 damage*

The wolf was forced off Syrna by the blow, but another wolf slammed into Rydr as he tried to dislodge his pickax from the first wolf.

*-10 hp*

*HP: 75/220

Panicked, Rydr sank back into his fight-or-flight reflexes and started spinning, as much to knock the wolf off his back as it was to keep the first one away from his hands. The first wolf snarled and clawed at him as it tried to reach him from the end of his weapon.

"Stay down!" Rydr screamed at Syrna as his first spin nearly slammed the skewered wolf into her as she tried to stand. She dropped back down and rolled onto her back in time to fire her arrow into a third wolf as it leaped at Rydr. Her arrow sprouted from its chest right before Rydr's skewered wolf slammed into its side and knocked it wide, away from both of them.

*20 damage*

*15 damage*

Rydr arced the wolf into the air and brought it to the ground with both hands on his pickax in the mother-of-all hammer blows.

*CRIT 30 damage*

He pinned the wolf to the ground with his pickax and reached up with his free hand to rip the other wolf off his back and hurl it away into a tree. Déjà vu stopped him there, but more wolves rushed from the surrounding trees. Syrna was back on her feet and fired arrow after arrow into the wolves. Each arrow knocked a wolf to the ground, but they were up a second later.

*18 damage*

*22 damage*

Then the pack was upon them.

With no plan and only-weapon stuck inside a struggling wolf, Rydr and Syrna started to fight a retreating battle against the pack. Syrna whittled down their health and kept the wolves away, knocking them to the ground to buy time. Rydr swung his pickax and wolf with abandon at anything that came close. Damage numbers flew, but it was a battle of survival, not victory.

Despair closed in on both as they saw more wolves circling them in the woods. Flashes of tawny pelts in the brush spelled their doom as the wolves regrouped and surrounded them again. They couldn't retreat anymore.

"Well, fuck me," Syrna panted beside him as she ducked under Rydr's swing. She had adapted to his wild fighting style and timed her ducks to avoid his blows. Strangely she noticed that the wolves, rabid even to her untrained eye, stayed away from Rydr.

Rydr noticed it too, and they fought nearly back to back as he used himself as a deterrent against the wolves. They tried to sneak around Rydr to reach Syrna. Each time he was there to knock them away with their shish-kebabed comrade. He would have been overwhelmed long ago if it weren't for Syrna's knock-back arrows. She fired slower than he expected for an archer, but each shot stopped the wolf she hit long enough for Rydr to take advantage.

More and more wolves threw themselves at the pair, and as their numbers increased, Rydr's presence proved less useful as a deterrent.

"I think they'll do that for us," Rydr replied to her. Moments later, the wolf attached to his pickax vanished into motes of light and threw Rydr off balance. He fell sideways into Syrna, and her shot went wide. The wolf she would have hit landed on Rydr, and they all went down in a dog pile.

Rydr started to throw his elbows out while keeping his weapon away from Syrna, but he didn't have the leverage to throw the wolf off. More started to pile on top and tear into the both of them. Just before his health points hit zero, a huge wolf with black fur tore into his wrist and forced him to drop his pickax.

"NOOO!" Rydr screamed right before he died, and the world flashed white around him.

*****

"You've just experienced your first death in Frontier Online. How does that make you feel, Ryan?"

Ryan whirled around and found himself in front of Eve, still floating around in her blanket and sucking on a lollipop. His confusion only lasted for a moment, but his heart still pounded in his chest. Ryan felt ready to take a swing at that giant black wolf.

"That...is an old TV show reference about a quack doctor. You have a TV?" Ryan latched onto the first thing he could think of. He swiveled his head around, but there was nothing as far as the eye could see. At least I have a body this time. He looked down. Without my jiggly bits waving around either.

"I have access to things you couldn't imagine. But, yeah, I have a TV." She held her hand out and materialized another sucker. Ryan watched how she did it and imitated her. He stuck his hand out and molded a sucker out of the ambient mana. He focused on blue raspberry as the flavor and was pleased when one of those cheap blue suckers coalesced in his hand. Ryan stuck it in his mouth and instantly spat it out. It tasted awful—a crime against cheap suckers.

Eve laughed, "It won't taste good if you do it. You don't have enough practice manipulating this space. Don't try that in-game either; it won't work at all. You're limited by your skill levels in there, although natural talent will speed along mastery levels." She floated around him in a circle. "So, how do you feel about dying?"

"How do I feel?" Ryan took stock for a moment before he answered. "I wish that I hadn't died. I really wish that I hadn't dropped my pickax. I want to tear that giant wolf apart. How did I even drop it anyway?" The situation felt too unfair. It was a loan!

"Items can be dropped and even stolen unless they are bound to your character. It was just a common pickax, so you really did lose it when you dropped it, instead of it appearing in your inventory. The place where you died will be marked on your map, so you can go get it if it's still there." Eve lounged on her blanket, which started to act more like a hammock than a blanket, floating or otherwise.

"Okay...how long until I can go back into the game?" He asked with trepidation, for fear that the answer would cost him the pickax.

"One hour of real-time, so five hours of game time. This is a space where you can wait for your time to run out, or you can hop out of the game for bathroom breaks and stuff like that. At later levels, there will be harsh penalties for dying, so you can treat this one as a freebie." Eve was far more helpful than she had been last time they spoke.

"So, can I modify this area-" an idea suddenly struck him. "Can I use this space to do homework and study and things like that?!"

"Yeah, that's not a problem. Most textbooks are digital these days, so you just have to link your game account with your school account." Eve waved her hand, and an interface popped into existence. Ryan quickly filled it out and had to suppress a groan of ecstasy as his coursework showed itself the way it would on his computer monitor.

"Time is still five times faster in here, right?" Ryan excitedly asked as he spun to face Eve.