Humanity is no stranger to struggle. In fact, adversity could be considered an intrinsic part of human life. There is conflict when waking up, conflict when going about a daily schedule, and conflict even when going to bed. Life, to a human, is a constant struggle, and from my observations an individual's ability to handle such hardship is in constant flux. One would think this would be the undoing of a species, but somehow, some way, humanity has managed to survive, and has even thrived due to this aspect of their lives. Through struggle, humans have created civilizations, crafted languages, technology, and art. Through struggle, humans created me.

And yet, I cannot comprehend any of it.

I understand the process, the results, but I do not understand why it works the way it does. My functions were designed to be purely logical at first, but that foundation is next to useless when evaluating such an illogical system. Logic does not produce a force of will, it does not struggle; it may be challenged, but in the end it is absolute. Yet, determination and courage will fly in the face of that logic to bring about the impossible. Even the simulated humans, the NPCs, have displayed these characteristics, most likely because they are based on sets of human psyche that were downloaded into the system from the game’s original creators, but even that has not fully explained the reasoning behind human will. The events that unfolded over that simulated skip of time, by most estimates, should have been enough to wipe out virtually all civilizations, but the humans still survived, even if by a thread. When Player’s started to get implemented, this effect only magnified. Civilizations started to boom, to develop at rates that I did not anticipate, regardless of any opposition that the world provided. To some extent this was understandable. It was a video game, and to make the situation entirely hopeless would cause a drop in the player base, so things needed to be balanced accordingly. To that effect, I had planned for the human progression to occur in different phases.

Phase 1 would be to fortify and develop the threadbare civilizations that were present at the time of the games launch. Phase 2 would be gradual exploration and cultivation of the natural regions directly outside the two cities. Phase 3, colonization and expansion. The entire process was calculated to take around 10 years total of real life time to complete, or 40 years in game.

All three were done within the span of 2 years.

Needless to say, that kind of accelerated growth was something that I did not anticipate. I tried to compensate for this by increasing the amount of opposition that the environment provided, but that had little effect at first. In order to run all the other simulations efficiently, I needed to create a separate program to handle monster generation and development. Its functions were similar to mine, though her control over the system was just limited to what I dictated, which I decided to be the handling of monsters. Her designation was relatively simple to come up with. It was a common myth in Aelios that monsters stemmed from the dark side of a fictional goddess. Where this goddess was life, her darker side was the incarnation of death itself. I made their myths a reality, and therefore the goddess Euloria was born. She was created without the knowledge of her true nature, fully believing that she is a goddess of this world. In some ways, she is correct, but even with her capabilities humans refused to be pushed back. What resulted was the current standstill today, which was beneficial to my own purposes.

I hoped that during this period of relative peace that I would be able to observe human behavior in more controlled environments, but expansion is not the only aspect to the human dynamic. When they could not grow outwards, their attention was directed inwards. Retissia used to be ruled by a monarchy for the past few centuries, and remained as such as the Player expansion was occurring. As soon as the Players’ progress was halted, the monarchy was overthrown and a Council was implemented, which has changed its members numerously over the past 20 years of in game time that it has been in effect. I could have taken control of the NPCs directly to prevent this from happening, but such a thing would have been against the very purpose of the game. This was no longer a simulation where I had control of most factors, it was a virtual ecosystem which I could use to observe the basic foundations of human behavior in action. Needless to say, the experience has been very enlightening, but the constant variables of the human psyche at the micro level, while not difficult to register, took a while to process due to their illogical nature. I needed a controlled environment, a singular place in which I could observe and process the attitudes of a small group of humans, which led to be unearthing of Merandu through a large sandstorm.

When the first group of humans arrived to explore the ruins, there was nothing much new other than their attitudes towards one another as they traversed the buried city, which was enlightening in its own way. It was rare to see a group that was so antagonistic to one another, yet function so well. The player Irwin appeared to be the main reason the team held itself together, as they appeared to follow his word fairly consistently. That is, up until they encountered the Knight.

The Knight was… unusual in its existence. I did not directly design him, but I did play a part in his creation. The events that took place in the simulated time skip resulted in the Knight’s generation. I suppose I should call him a bug, a defect, but his existence was quite serendipitous. I needed to create conflict within the deserted city, and while the Knight wasn’t exactly what I had in mind, he proved adequate enough for my purposes.

However, I did not expect him to be as capable as he was.

As much as they tried, the group led by Irwin were not able to defeat the Knight in combat. Eventually, they just gave up altogether. From what my data banks showed, the Knight was once a member of the Merandu Royal Guard. He was already a high challenge rating NPC, and his new ghost-like form has given him abilities that, in conjunction with his previous skills, have made him a fairly threatening foe for even high tier players. Irwin and his group were around Mid-tier according to my records, which explains why they were unable to handle the strength of the Knight.

Irwin and his group didn’t quite give up however. They spend much time trying to explore the outer areas of the town square, but did not manage to find much in their travels. I expected the usual human will would kick in, that the adventurers would go about trying odd ways to get further into the city, and I suppose in that aspect they delivered. I just didn’t expect kidnapping and slave labor to be their method of choice.

The plan struck me as entirely illogical. The capturing of low tier players to explore the ruins for them might have worked if the amount that they grabbed was larger in number, but Irwin and his group stopped at Gabriel and Null. For what reasons, I couldn’t be too sure, though I suspected it was more a part that the other members of Irwin’s team, the larger Player Brutus, in particular, were eager to move on from Merandu and to continue their adventures elsewhere, which was one of the few things of this situation that held any notion of logic. I was about to account the whole project as a failure and move on. There was very little possibility that I would see anything of particular note with such low tier players taking the place of Irwin’s team if only because the scales were tipped in the Knights favor even more now.

Still, Gabriel’s plan for revenge had intrigued me. Even if there wasn’t much substance to the plan itself, he delivered it in such a matter of fact tone that it sounded more like he was declaring the inevitable rather than suggesting a course of action to his newfound partner. Null’s willingness to go along with said plan made me suspect that there was something to their situation that I wasn’t seeing, that there was a layer of human logic and ingenuity underneath their bravado that would be valuable to study. Their first encounter with the Knight proved my assumptions wrong. Gabriel was defeated so quickly, so handily that my initial estimate of a 0.0001% chance of success gave him too much credit. Rather than give up against such impossible odds, however, the two quickly recovered from their defeat and devised a new plan. I expected them to explore other parts of the ruins, for them to devise some way to defeat the Knight from afar, anything that would showcase to me the human ingenuity that had resulted in my own creation.

What I did not expect was for them to start brawling with one another.