I was not having a good day… a clue to this was that I was now lying face down at the bottom of a ravine in a spreading pool of blood. This had happened only moments after I had chosen the Underground World option proceeding character creation. The waves of agony radiating off my leg was a fair indicator it completely shattered, and it was a serious compound fracture. I knew the strange, savage monster that had chased me to my unexpected fall was still up there. It was easy to verify this because it’s stench would occasionally waft downwards as it pounded around, roaring in a confused daze after I had unintentionally given it the slip when I had tumbled down here running blindly for my life.

Luckily, I had picked a medical kit as one of my three spawn items. I tried to feel for it in the dark, but it was difficult. Finally, I found it and rolled towards the light of a glowing crystal along the wall of the ravine so I could see the damage. Already, my head was pounding and spinning from the pain and horror of the wound. I had unfortunately elected to turn up sensation settings along with disabling all the notifications, putting my character into full immersion mode at the advice of one of my fellow testers. I bit back a scream of pain as I pushed the bone back into the torn flesh until I felt it, reasonably straight and then tied the bandage off. Inside the medical kit I found some odd herbs as well as a vial of liquid. Not knowing what the vial was, with the interface off I held it for a second, and got the feeling in my mind that it would help me heal, but it would knock me out for a while. I swallowed the whole vial and everything faded into warm fuzziness.

How long I was out, I have no idea. There was no way for me to tell the time but I did feel a whole lot better when I came to. Looking down at my leg I saw that It was no longer in pain, though the bandage was still soaked with blood. I carefully unwrapped the bandage, while keeping pressure on it. There was a jagged scar where the wound had healed but other than that it seemed ok. I tried to stand up, and the leg throbbed with a deep ache. My sticky hands that were covered in blood slipped on the rock and I tumbled to my side, burning pain along my palms as they were scraped raw. Hissing and cursing softly to myself I crawled along the bottom of the ravine towards where I heard the sound of running water.

Blinking and trying to peer through the dim light of the ravine was difficult, especially with eyes that felt gritty and dry. My entire body felt wrung out but at least I was still alive. The chilly, moldy smelling breeze that wafted out of the side of the ravine caused me to shiver as I continued to craw towards the water. Eventually I reached a ledge that overlooked a swiftly moving dark current below. I shivered again just looking at it and saw that the rushing water was nearly fifteen feet down and there didn’t seem to be any other side to this river, the ravine walls went sheer vertical all around me, the stream of water pouring past extremely fast. The cave was filled with the rumbling roar of the water, something I could feel through the very ground I was standing on.

I sat up against the wall and put my face in my hands and groaned. There was no escape, unless I wanted to try and climb back up and face whatever it was that had just tried to kill me. That did not seem like a good idea. I had been warned by the interface that my next respawn would be without any starter items. It was a one-shot deal. I would lose the nifty survival belt and knife I had picked in addition to my medical pouch.

The bottom of this ravine was lit by several blue glowing crystals and it made it easier to look and take stock of my gear. The survival belt had a small waterproof pouch on it, as well as the bronze knife that was secured to the side of the little pouch. I looked inside and saw it had a set of needles and fishhooks, a small ball of tough looking string, a flint and steel rod and a few other odds and ends. It had been a very good choice. It would be a shame to lose all of this. Steeling myself for serious pain, I curled and flexed my stiff and aching fingers wincing as I rolled off the side of the sloping ravine and carefully started to climb down.

There was a little ledge right above the roaring dark river that I slowly reached. I fell onto it, nearly exhausted with the effort and nearly tumbled into the water when I overbalanced trying to stand up and walk along the water’s edge to sit down. Experimentally I braced myself and stuck my hand into the water, and felt what I expected. The water was ice cold, and my hand almost instantly went numb in shock. It actually felt good to the injured palm and fingers. I breathed a sigh of contentment as I dipped both hands into the rushing water to wash off the blood.

That was a mistake. There was a rushing sound and I nearly lost my fingers when I pulled my hands away just in time to see something with far more teeth than I cared to contemplate snap in the air where they had been just a moment before.

Stifling a scream, I rolled away from the edge of the water, my heart pounding and near panic. Did everything in Endaria want to kill me? This wasn’t how a new player was supposed to be treated… I wanted to cry, I was stuck in this game if I wanted to get better.

What had that guy, Mathew Vandarkin said before we were all put into our testing pods? I had to make something of myself, push the boundaries of the game and I would get better faster. I had no idea why that made any difference but I wasn’t about to argue with anyone who had played this game before and sounded like they knew what they were talking about. I doubted anything could actually heal me, but if it even gave me a few more months left to live, I was all for it.

Now I finally believed those stories I had heard about how brutal Endaria was to new players, and all the cautionary tales all over the forums, about how careful you had to be. I could have chosen a town spawn, but then again if I was going to challenge myself that wasn’t the way to do it. I wasn’t just another player, I was dying and if I couldn’t get the capsule to heal me fast enough like people said it could, I highly doubted I would make it to the end of the testing period.

Gentech told daddy they could cure me, and promised me a medical miracle. I had my doubts, and knew that wasn’t how the world worked. Nothing was free, you had to work and fight to survive. That was the story of my life ever since I had been born. I had been given a very small chance to live past my twelfth birthday, and making it to fourteen hadn’t just been a miracle, it had been a testament to how rich my dad was, and that I had refused to die.

This was a game, that meant there was a way for me to win. I just had to find it. I sat down and decided to meditate. It always cleared my head, and made me feel better. The rushing water around me actually felt kind of relaxing, and while I had no doubt that I would shortly find myself in a respawn, for now It was a joy to at least not be bound to a wheelchair or a bed. In the universe there was always one constant, while you still drew breath, there was still hope.

Taking deep breaths, I felt entranced as if I was tumbling down a dark well and I let the water carry me away and focused on that. It was a strange feeling, and the more I focused on the water the stronger and more relaxed I felt. The power of the roaring underground current seemed to fill my veins and with every breath it made my body tingle. With every heartbeat I felt as if I would burst.

In my mind’s eye I felt something change, there was a kinship there, and my awareness seemed to spin with dizzying speed around it, rushing closer and closer until there was an explosion of light and I was jolted back into awareness. The ravine and the rushing water no longer felt cold to me, and when I looked down at my damp fingers, I saw the droplets of water running down my hands in crazy spirals like vorpal pools of power, and the water was glowing.

I shrieked and tried to fling the water off me, and it glowed and shimmered with energy before it lanced out in a stream and there was a cracking boom as the ledge under me where the energy hit shattered, and I let out a terrified scream as I plunged down into the rushing torrent.

For some reason it didn’t feel cold even though I knew the water to be some sort of icy meltwater. I barely paid attention to this odd fact as I thrashed and tried to swim desperately for one of the sides of the ravine as I raced along with the rapid current spinning and twisting. I dodged sharp rocks and flailed around as I spun and dunked and felt dizzy as the current plunged downwards in twisting spirals.

I had to duck under an overhang before it brained me, and then I felt like I was falling downwards, faster and faster. I realized I had just made the unhappy discovery of the top of a massive waterfall and was shrieking in terror as I flipped end over and then my entire body flared in stinging pain as I smashed into a pool of water. Surfacing, I saw that I was in a massive glowing cave with a ceiling towering far above me. I looked around for the shore of the pool and spotted a green luminescent glow of water lapping along one bank. I had never learned to swim, not in real life but I had played other VR games on my implant and knew the basics. Everything I learned about swimming however was forgotten when I saw massive dark shapes darting towards me under the surface of the water. I thrashed and paddled then gave a leap when my feet touched bottom just as I felt something latch onto the seat of my pants and rip and tear at it. I yelled in pain and panic as I rolled onto the shore with something black and shiny, and with lots of teeth clamped onto my butt. I pounded at it for a few moments before I remembered I had a knife. Ripping it out of its sheath I slammed it into the creature over and over again until it fell off with a wet spat. I lay there gasping, then looked at my hands that were covered in blood and green ichor. I gagged and felt bile in my throat.

It didn’t feel like it had torn me up much, and when I turned to get a good look at it my stomach clenched again and a wave of nausea hit me when I saw it was a gigantic leach with hooked teeth. I felt weak, and my legs trembled as I limped over to a nearby rock and laid against it while I tried to hold one of my last bandages to the seeping wound. When I stood up to try to find another of those healing vials, my world began to slowly revolve, then I slumped into a faceplant as my entire body suddenly refused to respond.

It was then that I realized I had been poisoned. Something that leach had did had made my body stop responding. I closed my eyes to try to make the world stop spinning but it just felt like my entire mind was spinning. I felt that familiar rush of power at the edge of my awareness when I thought about that odd meditation and wondered what it would be like to die in Endaria. If I was poisoned, and couldn’t move this was it. I had tried and failed. I had always wondered what it would be like to give up, to die in a hospital bed instead of fighting. I fought that lethargy and gave a mental scream of anguish and frustration. Instinctively I drew on the power that I had felt before and I opened my eyes to see a stream of glowing water flow from the pool and over me. It snaked around me in a twisting spiral. As it did my body started to feel better, even as I started to feel more tired, and drained. My head throbbed and my entire body seemed to tingle. Weariness seemed to drown me into oblivion, and I sunk down a bottomless well as I passed out.

When I awoke, I felt even worse than last time, if that was even possible. My entire body was numb and tingling with that pins and needles sensation you get when your foot or hand falls asleep. This was everywhere and when I tried to stand up lances of fire went up and down my legs before I gave a gasp and landed hard, my tailbone flaring in pain as I landed on my butt. I felt the rock under me on the one leg that had the seat of my cloth pants ripped out. Looking around the massive cave I didn’t see anything right about to eat me so I shrugged out of the cloth pants and had a look at them. They were completely shredded along the back of my left thigh all the way up to the waist.

“Well, at least there seems to be no one around to gawk at my naked butt.” I laughed and almost startled myself with an echo that reverberated around the cave’s wall. There was a rustling sound and I quickly pulled the torn pants back on as I looked desperately around for my knife, when I realized my little sheath was empty. I saw the glint of metal along the shore of the pool, and scooped up the blade that was covered in congealed blood and dark ichor. I looked around for the leach and couldn’t see its body anywhere. My heart pounded and I quickly backed away from the pool then looked around for the skittering sound I had just heard.

There it was again, and I looked around for the source of the noise but all I saw was glowing mushrooms, round rocks along the shore of the pool…. Wait. Those rocks, they hadn’t been there before! I jumped away just in time as one reared up and hissed at me as it struck, massive crab-like claws snapping in the air as it lunged at me. I slipped on the wet shore and my bare feet scrabbled for purchase few times, before I started into a stuttering sprint away. Fortunately, it seemed like those things were very slow when chasing me. Whatever was under those rocks seemed to be some sort of ambush predator, not something that could run me down.

The rock that wasn’t a rock hissed at me, then it skittered back to the shoreline and slammed back down with an echoing thump. The impact made a few waves ripple out across the water next to it. I breathed a sigh of relief and shuttered as I tried to get my breathing under control. My heart was still pounding and my hands tingled and remained sweaty from the brief shot of adrenaline that had flooded my system. Why hadn’t I been eaten earlier? There was no way for me to know how long I had been out of it, but perhaps those rock things had just arrived and hadn’t noticed me until I had started moving around and making noise.

I picked up a nearby stone and tossed it next to one of the rocks. It reared up, hissing before pouncing on it with a resounding crash. I heard the brief crunching sound of something gnashing on the rock I had tossed, then the creature reared again and the stone was launched away with a splat, then a plunk when it landed in the pool next to it.

Well… there I had it. They must feel vibrations or something. Looking around the cave I spotted something curious along one wall. To get a better look, I padded over to it and peered at glowing moss that covered the walls, except for one round spot. Pushing against it, I realized that it was soft, and sticky. My eyes widened and I jumped away, fully expecting to get attacked, but nothing happened. The dark spot seemed to be some sort of webbing. I gave a near shriek as I realized that it was spiderwebbing. Looking around me and up into the gloom I realized that what I had first taken for dark splotches around the crystals covering the walls was actually splotches of spider silk. I really didn’t want to find out what could make twenty-foot strands of spiderwebbing that were as thick as rope. It would probably, like everything else in Endaria… try to eat me.

I wanted to scream in frustration, this wasn’t fair! Even if I found a way out of this cave, and I didn’t see any exits, the only direction that seemed to offer any real choice was up, where part of ceiling of the cave disappeared into a twisting, turning crevasse that shot up towards what could be the surface. I suspected certain death awaited me up there, probably by whatever had made the sticky strands of silk that seemed to be mostly along the wall that led towards that opening.

Today my options seemed to be limited mostly to the bad and the worse. Whatever was happening to me when I drew on the strange power I was exhibiting, there were serious doubts in my mind that it would help me get out of this mess. I folded my hands over my chest and sat down hard, stifling a shriek when some sharp rock poked my bare skin through my torn pants. I rolled to one side to rub at the ground and push away the offending sharp rock as I took a few deep breaths and tried to think. That strange power was probably connected to water in some way. I had heard about this aspect of Endaria, but I couldn’t quite remember what I had read. Something about the elemental powers, and their relationships, or something. Most players could cast magic, of some sort or another but that was all I knew. I had seen a wide variety of powers displayed on the footage of Endaria I had watched the many thousands of players streaming, but it was one thing to see people casting spells and the like and another thing to try and figure it out yourself.