Chapter 1

That first day, when it happened, I already knew I was going to die. I’d had some time to get used to the idea and decided to just try to enjoy the time I had left as much as I could for as long as I could. “Oh, shit. They got me. I’m down,” I told the group chat. “They’re gonna cap blue. Someone defend!”

“Viiiince!” Jacob complained. “Now we gotta defend blue too? You were on blue, bro!”

“Yeah, well, now I’m dead,” I said. “Get used to it.”

Caleb, Brian, Chris and Lamar all let out a simultaneous, “Ooooooooooooh!” before the whole group chat broke into cackles of laughter.

I laughed along with them while I threw my controller down on the side table next to me. On the screen in front of me I watched the enemy swarm all over my body as they captured the objective I’d been assigned to guard. If this match finished out like it looked like it might, that would make five losses in a row for my squad of friends.

“You know what, Vince?” Jacob said jokingly. “When you finally die for real our competitive ranking is going to shoot through the freaking roof!” The whole chat exploded with laughter.

“Ha! Thanks guys,” I said. “I’m gonna take a break. Be back in time to lose the next round.”

“Couldn’t do it without you, Vincey boy!” Chris added.

I took off my headset, still laughing to myself. My mom had set me up in the living room in their best recliner with a side table within easy reach on either side of me. On the table to my left I stashed my headset alongside my controller; on the table to my right was a plate with the BLT I hadn’t had the appetite to finish from that afternoon, a tall glass of coke still bubbling with carbonation, and a plastic shot glass filled with all the pills I was supposed to take today. I popped a handful in my mouth and washed them down with a sip of coke. I was supposed to take them with meals so I wouldn’t get indigestion, but that was hard to do when I barely ate.

On the TV, my character’s view started switching around to my teammates dying in a variety of scenarios. Jacob was the only one still getting kills. His character was posted up in a sniper perch overlooking the red objective. I turned away from the TV and shuffled off to the bathroom. That was definitely one thing I was not looking forward to needing help with some day. When I was done, I came back into the living room and saw my dad’s work truck had just pulled into the driveway. He opened the front door and smiled when he saw me. He was wearing his deep blue jumpsuit with the company logo stitched on the chest. “Hey, Vince. Playing some games with your friends?” He nodded at the TV.

“If you count getting our asses kicked as playing, then sure,” I said with a chuckle.

He laughed good-naturedly. He was fully in on my crew’s running joke about how bad I was at shooters. The truth was I would have preferred to play some fantasy MMOs, but most of my friends just weren’t into them. “So the usual?” my dad asked. “Where’s mom?”

I paused awkwardly before answering. “She’s… taking a nap,” I answered.

My dad nodded like that was perfectly normal. He and I had been playing a game this last week, ever since the doctor gave us the news that I wasn’t a good candidate for surgery, where I pretended my mom just really liked naps all of a sudden and he pretended he wasn’t aware that she was drinking herself silly then quietly crying herself to sleep. Everyone coped differently. “Right, well… I’ll go wake her up and see if she’s up to get started on dinner soon. What are you in the mood for?”

I glanced at the sandwich I’d barely taken two bites of. The drugs I was on were doing a number on my appetite. “How ‘bout some ramen,” I said.

My dad stuck out his tongue and pretended to gag. “Oh, Vince! You’re a college dropout now. You can stop eating that kind of crap around us.”

“Not instant ramen. Mom knows how to make an actual broth. You’ve just got to give it a chance.”

“Sure. Fine,” my dad conceded. “Just play your games. I’ll get her out here in a little bit.”

I plopped back down on my recliner while my dad headed back to his bedroom to wake Mom. I was surprised to see the match still wasn’t over. The screen was locked onto Jacob’s character, crouching down in his same sniper perch. Machine gun fire was pattering into the railing he was hiding behind. As I picked my headset back up he popped his head up just for a second and killed the enemy shooting at him. I settled the headset over my ears and joined the boys in yelling, “Ooooooooooooh!”

“Damn, dude,” Caleb said, “you got him right in the dome!”

“My boy Jake don’t stop!” Lamar said. “Get ‘em! Only one guy left.”

“Hush, I need to concentrate,” Jacob said. I panned over the scoreboard just to confirm that Jacob was the only person on our team still alive. He had four kills.

“Yo!” I said. “That last guy left on their team is the one that got me! You gotta kill him, Jake. He’s using a shotgun.”

“On it,” Jacob confirmed. He jumped down from his sniper perch and switched to his sidearm.

While Jacob slowly worked his way across the map to hunt for the last enemy I pulled up my settings. Out of garden variety boredom I chose that moment to swap out my profile picture. It was currently a monkey with aviator sunglasses, but that didn’t really match my mood. I started panning through pages looking for something better. I pulled my phone out to check the time. 4:48pm. I only had a little more than a half hour before I’d have to get off for the evening. I felt a stabbing pain in my gut and threw back the rest of my pills, washing them down with more coke. At least one of them was sure to be my pain meds.

“Come on, man,” Brian complained. “Why you gotta be such a tryhard, Jacob? We could already be in the next match.”

“Don’t listen to him, Jake,” Lamar said. “He’s just jealous he was the second one to die.”

“Here he comes!” Chris interrupted. I heard the sound of shotgun blasts coming from the game, but the action was hidden by the profile picture menu I still had pulled up. I selected whatever random picture I was currently on, just to get rid of the menu. I had no idea at the time how momentous a decision that would turn out to be. I quickly backed out of the menu to watch Jacob’s character get a shotgun blast through the chest.

Everyone groaned in an, “Ooooooooooooh!” that was similar to the collective cheers we’d give at good plays, just a few octaves lower.

“Damn, I thought you had him,” Lamar said.

“My bad, guys,” Jacob said, “I’m no good in close quarters. Sorry I didn’t avenge your death, Vince.”

“Ha, well there’s always next time,” I told him. That earned a peal of laughter.

“Yeah, man,” Chris said. “You’ll have to challenge Vince’s doctor to a 1v1 if he doesn’t cure him.”

“We ready for the next match?” Brian asked. He was already queued up. “Maybe this time Vince can avenge himself.”

“Yeah, let’s challenge them to a rematch,” I said. I glanced in the corner of the screen to see what random new profile picture I’d ended up selecting. It was a big hulking ogre with bright red skin. “I’m about to go ogre mode on that guy.”

The boys laughed. “What’s ogre mode?” Jacob asked.

“It means I’ll select the heavy machine gun, but only use it as a melee weapon.”

“You gotta do sound effects,” Caleb said. He then mimicked a few. “Grrr! Argh!”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “I honestly think I might get more kills this way.” My score from the last match was still on the screen. Zero kills, zero assists. It’s not like I could do worse. I tried making a few sound effects. “Me ogre!” I said. “Me smash with big shiny stick!”

The boys laughed at my ogre joke. Then, very suddenly, all the laughing stopped. Just for a second my vision twisted. I felt an intense heat flash over my skin, then I dropped on my ass into an icy-cold mud puddle, of all things. The laughing I’d been hearing through my headset was replaced by a high-pitched screeching sound.

Everything around me had changed. Dramatically. Impossibly. I wasn’t in my comfortable living room anymore; I was on the edge of a forest of evergreen trees with some kind of massive golden-winged birds flying around in the sky above me. The screeching sound that had replaced my friends’ laughter was coming from those birds. I pushed myself to my feet, my game controller in one hand, my headset still over my ears. The headset chimed to signal it had just been disconnected. I dropped it down around my neck as I looked around. Cold mud squished between my toes.

This was… impossible. Everything about it was impossible. I tried blinking, expecting the real world to reassert itself. It very stubbornly did not. Before me stood half a dozen or so ten foot tall humanoid monsters with pale skin and tusks sticking out of their mouths. I felt like my life was in danger just being near them. They were taller than my house with the proportions of an NFL linebacker. I had never seen a person so big before. The giants were watching the sky, silently—the sky where those birds were flying. I followed their gaze and found that the birds were actually just as impossible as the giants standing around me: they had long legs, teeth instead of beaks, and were easily twice as big as the largest predator birds I’d ever even seen in nature documentaries. The birds started to swoop low on the group of us and a few of the giant men reached up and tried to grab them out of the air. One of them was even successful, and it swung the bird down on the ground several times until it stopped moving. The violence of it was so casual and immediate I probably would have pissed myself if I hadn’t just emptied my bladder a few minutes ago. The giant bird was discarded, utterly broken. The giant went right back to scanning the sky for another one without a word.

A strange looking dark skinned man walked into my field of view from the left. He had a distinctly disappointed furrow in his brow as he studied me. His skin was a dark shade of gray I’d never seen before, with black eyes and short black hair to match. He wore a crude sort of shirt composed of ocean blue scales that overlapped, with a conical helmet made of the same sort of scales. The handle of a massive, two-handed sword stuck out over his shoulder, but he hadn’t drawn the weapon. “A tiny ogre!” he said, making it a complaint. “You’re not going to be any help at all.” Compared even to this man, I had to admit I was kind of small. I judged him to be about six feet tall, which had him half a head taller than me.

“I, uhhh…” I said, still too overwhelmed by the strange surroundings to form words. “Where am I?” I asked.

The man sighed. “Great,” he said, “a tiny ogre that talks. You’re going to be more trouble than you’re worth, aren’t you?”

“I’m not an ogre.” I blurted out, glancing again at the giants standing nearby. I supposed that was as good a name for them as any other.

“Well my Skill only summons ogres. That makes you an ogre,” the man said, poking my shoulder with a gloved hand. He looked me up and down. The way he talked was casual, more annoyed than anything else and completely unconcerned with the strangeness of my situation. “A tiny, sickly ogre, mind you, but still an ogre. I’m taking out this harpy nest. Are you going to help, or are you going to make trouble?”

“Harpy?” I asked uncertainly.

He sighed a bit more dramatically than I thought necessary. “Alright, this is what we’re going to do. I’m going to summon a few more ogres while you and these other meatheads start killing harpies, got it?”

“Summon… wait, did you summon me here?”

“Obviously! Fayden’s sweaty balls, you talking ogres are annoying.” He brought a finger up to rub one of his eyes, which I noticed then had dark circles under them. “Right,” he said, “I guess simple is better, if you’re not going to listen.”

“Listen?” I asked. “Dude, I’m not attacking those things, I actually have—”

The man pointed in the sky and said more emphatically, “Kill. Harpies.”

Kill harpies. Kill harpies. Kill harpies. His words echoed in my mind. Kill. I knew what killing was. Killing meant smashing. Killing meant stabbing and choking until your enemy stopped moving. Harpies. That had to be those bird things. That must be what they were called. I knew what both those words meant, and there was only one way to get the words to stop echoing in my mind: I had to obey.