by Erik Colombe
Reincarnation:RPG
By
Erik Colombe
Part 1
John was the savior of the world, a hero among heroes, or at least his fingers mashed against the buttons of his gamepad, trying to keep it that way. The school’s final bell rang out behind him, and all his fellow students talked, laughed, and walked together as they ended their day with friends. Except for John; he walked alone.
He was at the last boss after he had spent hours grinding his character's level to the max. He sauntered into the Demon Lord's Castle and laid waste to everything that dared to get in his way. He was over leveled, too strong for anything to stop him. The gallons of health potions his character chugged told a different story.
He walked down the street, his fingers struck the buttons with a mad fever as his eyes scanned for any weakness that the boss might have or clue to an action he was supposed to fulfill. He tried all the inventory items he had collected through all the quests, including side quests. He exploited every skill the game had to offer him. He threw every attack and magic he knew. He forgot to look where he was going.
The red BMW that sped through the traffic light hit him square in the center. John saw his gamepad fly into the air and the pavement rush to meet his face. That was his last memory of the world.
John spasmed awake. He ran his hands over his face and body, trying to find where the damage was. There was nothing out of the ordinary. He felt fine except that he was in a large pitch black room with no memory of how he got there. He rose to his feet, trying to piece together where he was. He moved his head around, trying to listen. He couldn’t see or hear anyone.
"Hello! Is there anyone out there? I seem to be lost," he called out.
"Or dead." he said under his breath.
"Hi there." A high pitched female voice said from the darkness.
"Um, hello. My name’s John. I’d like to go home. Can you point me that direction?"
"No can do, silly head. You’re dead."
John sighed.
"Yeah, I thought as much." He said.
"But don't worry, I took your soul!" She said with a giggle.
"You what!" John shouted; his hands becoming clammy, and a cold sweat started to wet his brow.
"Oh dear me, I don't seem to be very good at this. Let me try that again. Don't worry. I'm the god of this world. You see, I reached out and brought your soul over to this world. I built your body to match your body in the game, so you’ll feel right at home."
"What?" John said, trying to look at his body, but not able to see his hands in front of his face; he quickly gave up.
"You call it a game in your world. It's something I created, influenced, or designed. It's a little funky how different dimensions work when applied with magic theory. Let me cut straight to the chase, cutie pie. I need you to help me out. I can't leave this dreary room, and I really wish I had something more colorful, but that's neither here or there. There's a dark forest, you know it. The sealed forest from the game."
"I remember it. It was just a sign post in the game with a gate, and there was no way in."
"Righty O! I'm going to send you there. In the middle of the forest, there's an altar. One of my worshipers, someone very important to me, is going to die. I need you to save her."
"Are you crazy? I'm a high school student. I play video games, I don’t actually want to go out and fight dragons, and that forest was in the higher levels. I'll freakin die!"
"Don't worry! I wouldn't let you get hurt. I copied your body from the game. You'll have everything you had, you'll breeze right through it, and it's not like you have a choice, sweety." She said.
John heard some fingers snap and suddenly, he was in the middle of a forest, birds scattered from trees, and he could hear hungry howls emanating from the distance. No path showed where he had come from or where he might go. The forest was dense with trees, shrubbery, and fauna; it would take hours to get anywhere in this kind of place.
He tried to look around to get his bearings, but his vision was odd, it had an arrow that blinked and pointed in a direction while a radar in the lower left corner of his vision flashed. Red dots were heading to the center of the radar. John assumed that the center was him. He tried to count the red dots that were coming his way quickly. He saw a few, then more appeared until the radar was just a wash of red coming for him. He ran.
He bolted through the forest and expected the branches to whip his legs and cut into his pants. Except that he didn’t feel anything. He ran through the forest like it was nothing. Branches broke around him, and he could hear them snapping as he ran, the soft sound of them strikes his coat and falling away.
He looked down as he ran and saw that he wore the outfit of the lost city royal guard. It was a secret item in the game. A leather suit, reminiscent of an old French military uniform that offered flexibility while having the same stats as the heavier, bulky armor in the game. It had so many cheat stats, such that the suit itself should have allowed him to get through the last boss without any difficulty.
He moved through the forest with ease. The uneven footing that would trip him or the branches that would try to trip him at the slightest provocation didn’t hinder him in the slightest. The dots on his radar didn’t have the same luxury and fell behind him.
He stopped, allowing himself a moment to breathe. He wasn’t tired despite it being the most running he had ever done in his life. He stopped to try and get his bearings. He needed to get an idea of what he was supposed to do. There was the quest the god had told him to do, but something about the situation irked him, and he couldn’t put his finger on it. He was still following the waypoint out of habit. He stopped.
The god had said that he was based off the game system, which explained the arrow in his vision and the radar, but he had to wonder if the rest of this world was like a game. He stopped following the waypoint and
started to make a large circle around it. The god had told him that there was a need to rush, but every time the music kicked up and a game rushed you to go forward that it means there was something they didn’t want you to see: Bad graphics, poor plot, Easter eggs, or secrets the developers left for the players who took their time. He kept the waypoint in his mind and kept moving forward to his goal, but stepped away from the goal. Instead, he made a wide circle around the target of the waypoint. He walked for what seemed like hours with nothing sticking out, and the arrow in his vision flashing an angry red. It wasn’t until he almost tripped on one that he found the graves; mounds of dirt that stretched as far as he could see. The trees quickly enveloped them, hiding them from an unsuspecting eye.
He looked into the graveyard, the irking feeling he had faded.
“I am beyond screwed, aren’t I?” John said.
He wracked his brains trying to think of what to do, what the graveyard could mean.
“If only I had something to work with. Right now, the most useful thing would be my game inventory.” His eyes grew wide as an inventory screen that was familiar to him appear in front of him, hovering like it was on a monitor. He quickly scanned through the items and weapons in his possession. It was exactly as he had left it when he died, right after he had used all his health and mana potions on the final boss.
“If it wasn’t for that stupid driver, I wouldn’t be in this mess.” He said, picking a shovel from his inventory and started to dig up one of the graves.
It was shallow, there wasn’t too much work to be done, and his outfit helped replace his stamina so fast that it was more like a simple chore than work. When he reached the person in the grave, he was surprised to see that the body looked like it was just asleep. It was perfectly preserved, and the person was wearing an outfit from the game. It was one of the top
tier armor outfits meant for a powerful warrior; instead, it had been remolded to fit a boy that was around the same age as John. It was enough to piece together what had happened here.
He saw a few red dots on the outskirts of his radar. Whatever was in the forest was looking for him.
“This sucks.” He said out to the graveyard.
“I mean what the hell am I supposed to do here? Die?” The graves were silent. John didn’t know what he expected.
“Ok, it was part of the game right? At least, I have my weapons, what about my magic?”
John held out his hand, palm facing the nearest tree. Nothing happened. He lowered his hand.
“How do I get this stupid shit to work? It’s not like I have a user manual here! I mean it would be a different story if I could remember the spells from the game. If I could just shout Fireball, then we might have something.” John jumped as an angry sphere of fire leaped from his hand and hit his foot. He jumped back in alarm. His shoes didn’t seem to care.
“Ok, that’s something to work with.” John raised his hand trying to remember any of the other spells. He checked his inventory, but there were just the titles his character had earned from the game.
“Warrior, Arch-Mage, Dragon Slayer, Thief, Hero. These are useless; I need the actual spells.” John wracked his brains trying to remember the spells he used, but they were in another language, with long-winded names and it was all just text. He would usually just remember the first couple of letters and remember what button he had assigned them to. He didn’t remember their names. A red light on the radar started to flash, drawing his attention. One of the red dots was almost touching him.
He picked a sword from his inventory and started looking around him. The trees were so dense that he couldn’t see farther than a few feet. He needed something that would help him more than a fireball spell.
“There wasn’t anything like a fireball in the game. There was something like it, though; it looked the same anyway.” John pointed two fingers in the direction that the red dot was coming from.
“Ice Arrow.” He said. Nothing happened. The red dot kept moving closer
to him.
“Ok. Fireball.” He said holding his palm facing out towards the direction of the red dot. Still nothing.
“What do I have to do to get this stupid piece of shit game to work?”
He took a deep breath while his eyes closed. He exhaled and opened them again.
“What did I do before?”
He thought back trying to think, the only thing that was different was he had imagined what it had looked like in the game. He pointed his fingers at the dot; it would see him any second now.
“Ice arrow.” He said, his mind imagining exactly what he had seen in the game. Water condensed from the air around him and froze until the rough shape of an arrow coalesced in front of him, and fired itself in the direction he was pointing. It missed.
John looked down at the radar to see the red dot moving away from him, chasing the arrow he had fired.
“Yeah, good luck catching that. Ok, this works; I can cast the magic of the game. Everything I could do there, I can do here; I just need to name it and give it form in my mind. I can do this.”
He looked at the graves silently mocking him.
“And I guess you guys probably figured out the same thing, which means that I am so fucking screwed. I need to just get the heck out of here.” He said to the graves.
“Ok, in the game, it said this forest was built by a god. Meaning that whatever’s waiting for me might not be a god, it just took at least a god to pen it, which is really nitpicking here, but it also means that I can’t get out of here. Something is here waiting for me, and it’s going to kill me. How am I supposed to do what you guys failed at? I need a cheat. But what the hell can I do against a god? I mean there are so many ways this can go wrong.”
The graves stared back at him without a word.
“Hey, it’s not like I’m a coward ok! I mean… I am. If a door showed up so that I could go back home, I would run through that thing like it was a fire sale. But it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen, what I’m trying to say is that I’m not suicidal. There’s no way out of this forest, and there’s no way to kill a god. So, what do I do?” He asked aloud, but no one answered.
“A fat lot of help you guys are!” He said.
John’s eyes flicked down to his radar, and he saw that the red dot was coming back for him, and it brought friends. He looked at the grave he had dug up.
“Don’t worry, I’ll come back to bury you, and if I don’t… they can bury us both.”
John started to sprint. There was a god waiting for him at the end of this waypoint, and he was going to kill it, or it was more than likely going to kill him. It didn’t matter that he was so high leveled for everything around him. He needed an ace up his sleeve. Something to give him an edge and hope to get out of here. He thought as he ran, his mind raced with the different possibilities, but the red dots on his radar were everywhere now, which made it difficult to be clever. The only clear path he had was the one the waypoint pointed towards him.
He slowed when he reached a worn stone courtyard that looked like a large lake and noticed the red dots had stopped, almost like they had hit an invisible wall. Trees surrounded the courtyard on all sides. There was a wooden pillar in the center of the patchwork of stone, and a half-naked and extremely attractive woman was tied to it. Her hands were bound behind her along with her feet. John’s first reaction was to rush to her aid, but instead, he walked into the courtyard with subdued footsteps. The woman woke from her sleep when she heard his footsteps on the cold stone.
“Hero, you have come to save me. I am so relieved.” She said, her chest heaving up and down as she struggled against her bindings.
“Yeah, sure thing.” John said, his eyes darting every direction around him.
He made his way slowly towards her, and a sword was already drawn and raised. He watched every step he took; his eyes fixated on the minute differences in the stone. He glanced towards the sky for anything that didn’t belong to the lake, searching for water moving in the wrong way or bubbles rising from the depths. He didn’t see anything until he got closer to the girl.
“Please hurry and release me, hero. We need to flee quickly.” She said with a deep, seductive tone.
“Uh huh, I’ll get right on that...” He said, finding what he was looking for.
He put down his sword and pried out a loose rock. He hefted it up onto his shoulder.
“Hey! What are you doing?” The girl yelled at him.
He threw the rock. She gasped and looked away. It landed a foot short of her. The moment it touched the ground, a ring of spears thrust out of the ground forming a tight circle around her. John saw one of the spears pierce the rock with enough force to clear a hole through it without shattering it into a thousand pieces. The spears slowly descended, the one with his life-saving rock on it stalled for a fraction of a second before it smashed through the rock without a care.
“Clever, clever, clever boy.” The girl that was bound to the wooden pillar said. She looked down at John as she broke the rope that bound her. She rose into the air as a large torrent of wind swept around her. John raised his sword in sweaty hands, ready to defend himself against whatever was coming his way.
“I was wondering what was taking you so long, little boy. You have no idea how annoying it is, sitting her waiting for brats like you to show up.” The girl said, her voice changed from a sultry woman to the high pitched whiny tone of the god that sent him here.”
“You little bitch! You’re the god from before,” John screamed.
“Oh, poor boy, a little slow on the uptake even though you lived where so many others died.”
She started to chant in a language John recognized from the game, and the spears from the ground lifted themselves into the air before they hurled themselves with a deadly speed at John.
He batted them away an
d started yelling out his own spell for an ice arrow and threw it at the god. She batted it away like it was a fly.
“Tsk Tsk, you don’t really think that the powers I gave you would work on me.”
“Then why give them to me? Why not just kill me?” John said.
“Child, if only it was so easy.”
She changed spells and hurled fire at him. It was nothing new to John; he had seen them all in the game before. He dodged them as swiftly as the spears. The change from a game screen and an actual three-dimensional attack still made it difficult. He grimaced as the close calls left burns on his hands.
“I can’t just eat a soul from another world. No. You need to be part of my world. Otherwise, the soul escapes and the soul is where all the substance is. But don’t worry, you won’t be alone. I have so many that will keep you company.”
John dashed around the circle courtyard, hurling all the different spells he remembered from the game at her. She batted them all aside. John was in a desperate bid for time as he needed to think of an attack she hadn’t seen before.
“It’s useless, John; I’ve done this more times than I can count. Although you have been the most fun to play with so far.” She said, a torrent of air came rushing at him, cutting into his outfit and his flesh.
He bit back the pain and kept his eyes focused on her. He watched every spell she threw at him. He needed to get close. She hadn’t managed to get a clean hit on him yet, but his cuts, bruises, and fatigue were piling up on him while she didn’t seem to be tiring.
“Why take people from my world? Why not just kill people from your own damn world?”
He started on the strongest spell he knew in the game. There was only one element that the gods feared and man had tamed. He just hoped this would be enough; his body was starting to become numb, and he couldn’t shake the taste of blood in his mouth.
“This forest is a jail; no one can enter, and no one can leave. I resorted to finding scraps in another world. People who felt like they didn’t belong. Your video games were an amazing help finding them.”
