June 20, 2142

| | You have 3 unread messages.

Jon sighed. All of them were from unknown senders, and he didn’t even need to check to know that they’d be avatars unlinked to any sort of profile, just like they’d been all week. Every day he got more, strangely persistent. He would block the sender, and the next day he’d start getting messages from a new one.

After the first day, he’d sent a response back advising the sender that if he or she needed help, to contact the police department through official channels. Somehow, Jon doubted the sender had taken that advice. He couldn’t know for sure, since he was still suspended. Officially, he was on leave for recovery, but they’d revoked his access to the LRPD servers for the duration of his leave.

Jon had ignored the next two messages, and then he’d tried responding again. He’d said he’d meet the sender in a secured VR meeting using a government sanctioned account. The sender had insisted that they meet in person, and Jon had no interest at all in doing that.

So he ignored the messages. There would be two or three more of them before he had lunch, and he’d delete them all at once at the end of the day. It wasn’t that he wasn’t curious, because he definitely was. The messages indicated some tie-in to Istrius, but not meeting strangers who contacted the police via anonymous proxy accounts and asked for face-to-faces was pretty basic procedure.

On the other hand, the Istrius angle was not playing out. His unbroken chain of low-drop rate items had continued, and it was definitely Istrius specific. Jon wasn’t superstitious, but it had cost him little enough to play a few other games of chance and confirm that no, he hadn’t been granted a blessing of luck by the Gods.

That was almost enough to make him agree to the meet up with the mysterious proxy avatar user. If he hadn’t been on leave, he might have asked for police resources to help ensure his safety. But he was on leave, and Marc had already assured him that he wasn’t going to be on the case when he got back. Given the situation, taking that risk was stupid.

He’d been at the game for a week now, and the biggest thing he’d learned was that Derek did not know half as much about anything as he pretended. The kid put on a good show, but the more Jon learned independently, the more he realized he couldn’t trust his son’s judgement to know what was or wasn’t unusual in the game.

It might have helped if Derek had known exactly why Jon wanted to know, but he hadn’t wanted to involve his son any more than he already had. As far as Derek was concerned, they were bonding over a video game while Jon was on sick leave, and that’s the way it was going to stay.

Jon was convinced that someone was somehow picking victims through the game, but he couldn’t figure out how. He’d been cut out of the loop on the crime reports, so he had no way of knowing if any new crimes had been committed, and he was forced to rely on his own memories of the files he no longer had access to.

Now that he had a foundation to work off of, Jon had learned quite a bit more about Istrius. Unlike Valit, he didn’t care about spoilers. He’d begun reading up on various quests before doing them to compare if they deviated at all from other people’s experiences. He’d also gone back over the ones he’d already done the first few days.

Nothing had stood out except for the suspicious drop rates. Something had bugged in his character, and somehow the proxy avatar user who’d been messaging him all week knew about it. He had known about it before anyone besides Spiral and Valit, back when it had just been a highly improbably series of coincidences. By the time Kana had hit level 25 and had an unbroken string of rare drops from every rare spawn he’d come across, the odds of it being a bit of good luck were beyond astronomical.

Jon ignored the little blinking light in the corner of his HUD with the three unread messages from unknown senders and logged into Istrius. His vision blurred as the game overwrote what he was actually seeing with virtual reality.

------

As he’d grown more comfortable playing on his own, Kana had gradually left Spiral behind in levels. The knight was splitting his time between two characters, and while Kana enjoyed the time he spent with Spiral, he wasn’t playing the game for personal enjoyment. Starting over on a second character just to keep Kana and Spiral’s levels the same was not an efficient use of his time.

The gap wasn’t too big, and Kana had no problem doing quests that were below his level just to experience them, so they still found plenty of opportunity to play together. Neither of them minded too much if it wasn’t as challenging as it should have been either, though Valit had stopped playing with them. That wasn’t to say she didn’t still message the both of them every single day, just that she’d opted to focus on her crafting over questing.

Kana thought she was somewhere around level 15, but he’d fed her plenty of rare mats and her blacksmithing was coming along just fine. Additionally, she’d become something of a rare item broker for him, and they were both fairly wealthy from selling off some of the many rare drops he’d gained while playing.

That was why, despite many max level players struggling to purchase homes in a primary city, Kana was logging in to his house in the city of Aldur. It wasn’t a barren room either. He’d purchased a waygate upgrade to link him to the travel network for faster transit, had fully furnished it to provide a series of buffs upon logging in, and even had a nether drop that allowed him to remotely store items from his inventory in his house, though he still had to return there manually to pull them back out.

He had 22 new messages in-game when he logged in. Most of those were from Valit and could safely be skimmed and ignored. Two were from Spiral, letting him know that he was going to a guild event during the day and wouldn’t be switching over to Spiral until later, and also suggesting a possible rare spawn to target for a conjurer’s charm that someone in his guild would pay good money for.

The last few were automated system messages about server maintenance and that Sprigot was starting its second round of beta testing for its upcoming expansion, the Tower of Heaven. Kana had been too busy with the base game to worry about what they were releasing in a few months. He’d skimmed a few postings and articles about it, but nothing had jumped out at him. It seemed to have gotten a fairly standard reaction from Istrius’s player base.

The conjurer’s charm Spiral’s guild mate wanted was called Earthsinger’s Echo, and it dropped off a rare spawn in the Ganidred. The area was full of mobs that were mostly in the low to mid 30s, technically a bit too advanced for someone of Kana’s level to safely work through. Then again, the average player didn’t have an artifact grade weapon and several 4-star ranked pieces of gear. Even the slots he didn’t have 4-star pieces in at least had a rare drop.

Kana activated his personal waygate to take him to Aldur’s central teleportation spire, and paid 200 drol to be transported halfway across the continent to the desert trading town of Haltab. It was supposed to be a neutral zone for the various humanoid tribes in the Ganidred to meet for parley and trade, but the shops never seemed to have anything worth anything. Kana used it for its node on the teleportation nexus but otherwise ignored the place.

The mob he was looking for was an area boss in the sand pits section of the Ganidred, a giant scorpion-looking thing made of rocks. That was somewhat annoying to him, as dragoon’s specialized in lightning elemental attacks, which earth elementals of all sorts were notoriously resistant to. There were some high-level abilities that used other elements, but Kana didn’t have access to them yet.

One of the passives Kana had gained a few levels back was a greater ability to gauge a mob’s threat level. In addition to knowing its level, he could also focus on something and get a rough estimate of its stats in relation to his own. That was why he was sizing up a level 31 bad cactus and wondering if it was worth the effort.

The thing’s HP was ridiculously high, like elite boss level high, but its defense was crap. Offense and accuracy were decent, not comparable to Kana’s. It didn’t seem like it would be a challenging fight so much as a tedious one. It had been placed at that spot on the map as a sort of deterrent to prevent players who weren’t strong enough to go into the canyon beyond and reach the sand pits.

It was technically possible for him to avoid it, but that came with its own set of challenges, and in the end, he decided it just wasn’t worth the effort. The bad cactus stood about six meters in height and Kana guessed it would have an attack radius comparable to his own, possibly a bit wider. If it was anything like some of the other sentient cacti he’d tussled with while exploring the desert, it would probably have a ranged needle attack as well.

He brandished Nibelus and closed in on the cactus. It reacted with predictable aggression, launching a hail of needles his direction. Kana had expected the attack and was already diving to one side before they’d even come free of the devil plant. He rolled back to his feet and continued moving in. As soon as he was within the cactus’s melee range, he swung Nibelus in a full circle, activating a new ability he’d recently picked up called wind slash. It did physical damage to the primary target and cleaved for wind damage to anything else in range.

More importantly, it let him skip the initial ramp up of melee attacks needed to start his combo. He went straight from wind slash into arc lance, into rising slash, into another new special attack he’d gained: sunder. Much like Spiral’s shield slam, sunder could put a stun debuff on an enemy. The bad cactus shuddered when he stunned it, releasing a cloud of needles around it.

He backed up to avoid taking damage from it and tossed out a couple of light melee swings at maximum range just to keep his combo going. As soon as the bad cactus’s needle cloud defense dissipated, he went right back in with another arc lance. The lightning damage wasn’t anything special against it, but it did allow him to follow it up with a rising slash, which did hit pretty hard.

The bad cactus was down to half its HP and Kana had yet to take a hit, but he didn’t let himself get sloppy. As he’d gotten to higher levels, he’d found a lot of mobs would switch tactics or play trump cards when they hit red HP. Sure enough, as soon as the bad cactus dropped below that threshold, all three of its arms started pistoning down in an attempt to crush Kana.

He focused on evasion for a bit until he found the rhythm of the mob’s attacks, then continued attacking it. It was almost impossible to keep a combo going with its constant interruptions, but he did manage to get a respectable seven-hitter in just before he finished it off. All said and done, it took him just under two minutes to kill the bad cactus, and he’d gained 300 XP and a handful of desert needles.

Valit would definitely buy those off him. In fact, she bought almost all the crafting mats he picked up in addition to being his store front. If she wasn’t so damn chatty all the time, it would have been the perfect partnership. Still, she was very good at finding buyers for the rare drops he picked up, and despite how much of a chatterbox she was, no one had ever come looking for him as the source of her goods.

They all knew something had bugged in Kana’s character, and that if the game masters ever caught on, he was liable to get an account ban. Since Kana wasn’t concerned with playing long term, he was willing to run that risk if it meant progressing faster. He wasn’t going out of his way to advertise it though, and Valit had been discreet.

Anyone who checked out his gear would just assume he’d spent a lot of money to deck out an alt in some powerful drops, possibly for PvP purposes. He was happy to let them assume that, though it had resulted in a guy playing a berserker attacking him once. Kana had been surprised, but he’d pretty easily thrashed the other player to within an inch of his life before letting the guy run away.

He walked past the dead bad cactus into the valley pass that led to the sand pits. It was a short, straight run, one that he’d made a few times already. The sand pits weren’t a popular section of the desert, mostly because the scorpions were ambush mobs that popped up out of the ground when a player got too close.

Kana had come once to get the rare scorpion venom used in anti-toxins that players stocked up on when doing the Black Manor portion of Thulnar’s questline, as well as a few other assassin-themed lines. If they’d only known about it, it would have made everything a lot easier. The second time he’d ventured into the sand pits, it was part of the quests he was working on in Ganidred.

He came into the sand pits and looked around. There were a handful of lesser cacti dotting the area, but they were far enough apart that they could be easily avoided. Kana might kill them anyway just to get a few more desert needles. Plus, the 100 XP each the small ones were worth was nice, but neither the cacti or the ambush scorpions were why he was there.

He’d skimmed some pages about the area boss on the net and found out where it spawned at. As he got closer, he saw a woman standing there. She had a staff in one hand that she was tapping against the canyon wall, and appeared lost deep in thought. She jumped as Kana walked up to her and let out a loud, “Holy crap!”

“You ok there?” he said.

“Yes, fine. Sorry, wasn’t paying attention and didn’t expect someone else to be here. Are you farming the scorpions or looking for a drop off Elan’scathe?”

“The boss mob. Hoping he drops the conjurer’s charm,” Kana told her. ‘Hoping’ wasn’t exactly the right term though. ‘Expecting’ was a bit more accurate, but he wasn’t going to share that with her.

“Hah. Me too. I’ve been reading up on how to solo the boss as a conjurer, and it doesn’t look like I’ve got the right spirits bound to me to do it.”

“Well, we could probably take it out together.”

“Exactly what I was thinking. I’m Mae, by the way.”

“Kana.”

“Nice to meet you,” she said. A group invite popped up in front of him. Once he’d joined, she took a second to check him out. “Holy crap. You must have paid a fortune for all of that.”

“Ah, heh. The weapon actually dropped for me,” he said. So had the rest.

“Lucky! Let’s hope we’ve got a bit more today. You ready?”

“Sure thing. Do you have a tanky spirit to take front lines?”

“No. That’s why I don’t think I can solo him. I’ve got water, fire, and light spirits right now.”

“Heavy on the healing and medium offense, but basically no defense. Not a great combination for playing solo.”

Mae sighed. “I wasn’t solo until two days ago, but the guy I was running with decided he was too good to be held back by anyone else. So now I’m working on readjusting my load out. Thus, here to get an Earthsinger’s Echo so I can bind an earth spirit.”

They walked into a shallow cave while they talked, one which was half buried by sand. A grinding sound filled the cave, one that got louder as they approached the back. There, a whirlpool of sand churned in place, occasionally splashing up against the cave wall.

“Here we are,” Kana said. “I guess I’ll pull. And focus on defense while you beat it down and keep me healed?”

“Sounds like a plan to me.”

“Great. I’ll just…” Kana took a running start and jumped straight to the center of the whirlpool. Spearpoint leading, he lunged down and sunk Nibelus into the stone flesh of the elemental that was rising out of the sand.