There wasn’t much to find, if he was being honest. Forensics had never been his area of expertise, and in the virtual world of Istrius, it was a moot point. There were no blood splatters, no footprints, nothing unusual done to the victims. That struck Kana as out of place, because it felt like the game should have given him some clue about what to do next.

His quest log hadn’t updated with a new directive, so there was probably still something he needed to do now that he’d actually reached the Lodge. He explored every room, started poking through cupboards and wardrobes, even rolled some of the bodies over to see if there was anything beneath them, and came up with nothing.

He was missing something, probably something extremely obvious that he’d feel foolish about once he realized it. A stubborn part of him wanted to keep trying to figure it out, but the practical side of his brain reminded him that he wasn’t playing the game for personal enjoyment. There was something off, and he needed to know what was supposed to happen at the lodge so that he had a baseline to compare with what he was experiencing.

He backed out of the VR a single level, just enough to browse the net and read up a little bit on the quest line he was attempting. As he’d thought, nothing indicated that everyone was dead. The NPC Kalanna wanted him to find wasn’t supposed to be there, but that was part of the storyline. There should have been twenty NPCs at the Lodge, and there were, but they were supposed to be alive.

The guide was a few months old, but comments timestamped as recently as last week had been talking about the quest, so it didn’t seem like Sprigot had intentionally changed anything. If that was the case, then Kana had found another genuine glitch in the game, and this time not one that was affecting him at a personal level. The Lodge could lead him to someone who was hacking the game, affecting other players.

He felt that familiar rush, the one he got when he was on the trail. Finally, after a week of being submerged in a virtual world, he was starting to get somewhere. He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do with the new information yet, but he had a place to start asking questions. Grinning, he started narrating his findings into a voice recording program, taking care to note the names and positions of the dead NPCs. It probably wasn’t important, but he wanted it all down in case it was, including screenshots and ocular footage.

He was about two minutes into his documentation when the first body disappeared. It faded away, and two seconds later he heard the sound of a man outside grunting as an axe thunked into a piece of wood. Kana poked his head out the door to find a man splitting wood.

He watched for a second, then started swearing. More bodies faded away. Within five minutes, every single corpse was gone and the Lodge was full of NPCs again. Kana swore the entire time, every bad word he’d ever heard in every combination he could think of and when he ran out, he started making random, strangled sounds of frustration.

Spiral had told him about players who slaughtered NPCs to gain some sort of reputation as evil-doers and fight with the city guards. In hindsight, that was obviously what had happened to the Lodge. There was no great mystery, and he was no closer to figuring out what connection Istrius had to all the attempted break-ins.

The whole experience put him in a foul mood. He was debating whether to keep going or just log out when another player walked into the area. The NPCs’ immediate hostile reactions were enough to tell Kana that he’d found the player responsible for the slaughter. Without stopping to blink, the player pulled a giant two-handed hammer off his back and attacked the nearest NPC.

They fought back, but he easily defeated each one with one or two swings. The more he fought, the faster he got, and his skin slowly reddened until he was completely flushed. Attacks that hit him glanced off as if they had struck steel, and the player just kept blasting one NPC after another away. Once all the ones who’d charged at him were dead, he barreled across the open ground to attack the bow-wielding NPCs.

As he got closer, Kana saw the name above his still green HP bar read Menic. Strangely, the text was red with a small skull icon next to it. He’d never seen anyone with a name like that, and he had a sneaking suspicion he knew what it meant. It would probably be a good idea to clear out before Menic went through the rest of the NPCs.

Just as he thought that, the berserker leaped forward and charged at Kana. He’d fought a berserker earlier in the week, but that player’s name hadn’t been red or festooned with a skull, and while Kana wasn’t entirely sure what the difference was, Menic seemed far more capable. He led with an overhead chop that had Kana scrambling to dodge just from the sheer speed of it.

Nibelus appeared in his hand and he whipped it in a circle to activate wind slash. Either it didn’t work against players like it did against mobs or the berserker class had some feature or ability that allowed them to resist knock backs. The attack went off and shaved an almost pathetic sliver of HP off Menic, but it failed to toss him into the air.

Instead, the berserker kicked out, pushing off the hammer with its head buried in the dirt like some sort of kung-fu master. Both feet left the ground and connected solidly with Kana’s stomach, and he was hurled backward to slam into the Lodge’s outer wall. Menic came down easy, still balanced, and charged in to close the distance once again.

Kana had learned a few things from his first taste of PvP, but Menic was on a whole different level, both in literal game terms and also in the amount of skill he displayed. He had no idea what level the berserker actually was, but that double kick had taken out 15% of his HP. If Kana actually took a hit from a weapon, it might just kill him in one blow.

It seemed like his best chance of survival was to keep out of melee range and hope the remaining NPCs peppering Menic with arrows would eventually whittle him down. That didn’t seem to be happening, with most of their attacks literally bouncing off his beet-red flesh and the ones that did penetrate not budging his HP bar in the slightest.

Kana dodged desperately as the hammer came down again. He was ready for the follow up kick, but Menic switched up his tactics and shoulder checked him with a short rush instead. He followed that with an uppercut swing of the hammer that thankfully Kana dodged mostly by virtue of falling down before the weapon arced up to connect.

Undeterred, Menic put a boot in his ribs and launched him four or five meters. “You’re pretty slippery,” he said, “But you gotta hit back if you want to win.”

He laughed as he pursued Kana, obviously having fun. His attacks were still wild swings, easy to predict and, now that Kana had a feel for the range, not difficult to avoid, but the berserker was fond of following up with powerful punches and kicks. He knew which way Kana would dodge, often because that was the only way he could dodge, and was ready to follow up with a lightning fast attack.

By the fourth hit, Kana was down to half his HP and the best he’d done was an aborted combo that had failed at clipping sweep. Menic had defeated it easily by hopping over Nibelus and retaliating with a powerful kick that had snapped Kana’s head back and left him with a one second stun debuff. Lucky for him, he’d come out of it and for once correctly guessed which way to dodge Menic’s war hammer.

It seemed like the berserker was finally starting to run out of steam. His skin was returning to normal color, his attacks were slowing down, and the arrows were starting to stick. Even better, there was a slight but still noticeable drop in his HP bar as the NPCs ganged up on him. Kana almost dared to hope he might survive after all. He’d made it to level 26 and hadn’t died yet, and he wanted to keep his record intact.

“So what’s the skull next to your name mean?” he asked casually as he dodged one of Menic’s attacks and countered with a three-part jab that ended with an arc lance. The lightning damage took out far more of the berserker’s HP than the melee attacks did.

“You serious? You must be new. Means I’m a player-killer who broke the level barrier.”

They continued to attack and dodge, with Kana getting the better of the exchanges now that the berserker’s rage buff had worn off. He was more agile and had more range, and while Menic had shown a lot of skill in playing his class, Kana had been training to fight against other humans for over a decade. Even though he hadn’t ever trained to do it using a spear against a war hammer, some of the fundamentals still transferred over.

He doubted a limb lock would restrain the berserker. Any move that relied on incapacitation by pain wouldn’t transfer well in the game unless it had been specifically programmed in. Then it wouldn’t be pain so much as pressure that prevented the player from moving, sort of like a heavy weight pressing down on him. But the footwork, defensive movements, and watching for openings all translated well.

Plus, none of the NPCs were trying to kill him. That helped too.

Menic was too good to let him get deep into his combos. He had to have a strong idea of how the dragoon class worked, because he was more than willing to prioritize interrupting Kana’s momentum over dealing out some extra damage. That locked Kana out of using some of his more damaging abilities, like rising slash. Arc lance had worked surprisingly well, and Kana suspected it had something to do with a berserker’s enhanced physical damage resistance while raging.

The problem was that Menic’s HP was slowing draining to the halfway point, and Kana knew from past experience what happened there. He’d looked it up after his first run in and discovered that one of a berserker’s early abilities was a thing called second wind, which automatically put them back into a rage that was even more powerful than the one they could use at will.

A common berserker tactic was to deliberately push themselves past that threshold and then turn into a living wrecking ball, but Menic was playing it smart and trading away his HP a little at a time for the chance to take away more of Kana’s. They were close to even in HP for the moment, maybe a 10% difference, but the berserker had way more total HP than Kana did, and as soon as his second wind triggered, he’d become almost immune to damage.

There was no way to stop the slow drain either. Even if Kana devoted all of his efforts to defense, the NPCs were slowly chipping away at Menic’s HP. In the next few seconds, he was going to go back into a rage, and he had started grinning as his HP bar inched closer to halfway. “It’s been a fun fight,” he told Kana. “Nothing personal. Just a game.”

An arrow skipped across his shoulder, leaving a line of red, and Menic’s whole body started to swell. His skin brightened again and his muscles bulged. Howling with laughter, he surged forward and brought the war hammer down on the spot Kana had been in only a fraction of a second earlier. He was still so close to the point of impact that the shockwave caught him.

“Not like the first rage,” Menic said. “Gotta do better if you’re gonna win.”

The berserker swept his weapon around in a full circle at chest level, leaving himself open for a counter attack, but Kana didn’t take it. He had hoped to come up with something clever, but there hadn’t been any last-minute epiphanies. The best strategy he’d thought up was a simple one that had served him well for years as a fallback plan: he ran like hell.

“Hey!” Menic yelled, outraged. “Where are you going? Get back here and die like a man!”

The berserker chased after him, and in a race of pure speed, he would have won. Dragoons were a strength/agility hybrid class though, and that gave Kana the advantage once he reached the trees. He darted between them, forcing Menic to make wide swings as the berserker tried to bleed off enough momentum to make the turns.

He crashed heavily into one, cussing and swearing. “Come on, this isn’t fair!”

“Where did you get the idea that I was going to fight fair?” Kana yelled back.

“Look here, you little shit!” Menic’s hammer smacked into a tree that Kana ducked behind. “Just hold still.”

Kana couldn’t find a good opportunity to fight back, but as long as they were dancing around the trees, Menic simply couldn’t keep him in range. Every time he tried, Kana would slip away. If he could keep it up long enough, the berserker’s second wind would wear off and he could lead him back to the Lodge where the NPCs would help him finish off the other player.

That was all well and good in theory, but then Menic managed to predict which way Kana was going to dodge around the next tree and got in front of him. A hammer blow caught him square in the chest and lifted him off his feet. Kana crashed into a tree and slid to the ground, already rolling to dodge the next attack and get behind cover.

“Oh no you don’t,” Menic said, grabbing for him. Kana felt fingers grab at his collar, but he ducked his head and ran blind around the tree.

Then his foot hit open air and Kana had to make a desperate grab at an overhanging branch to keep his balance. Menic was right behind him and there was only one thing to do. Kana leaped, twisting his whole body into a swing and praying the branch would hold as the berserker rounded the tree right after him.

Arms wind milling, momentum too great to stop, Menic went over the edge of the cliff into open air. The last Kana heard was him yelling, “Oh fffuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu-“ as he plummeted to the ground below. An XP window popped up announcing Kana had gained 4500 XP and advanced to level 27, and that he’d recovered an item known as iron bull’s belt from a notorious criminal.

Kana got both feet on the ground and leaned over the cliff to look down for Menic’s corpse. “Well, that was unexpected,” he said. “But I’ll take it.”