Rune Universe: A Virtual Reality novel (The RUNE UNIVERSE trilogy Book 1)

by Hugo Huesca

  Wait a second, I thought, he isn’t paying any attention to the people ignoring him.

  A girl even had the gall to leave the room. The transparent door opened for her without any complaints from the soldier.

  My brain caught up with me and I immediately felt like an idiot. I was standing around taking orders from an NPC. It was only a string of software dressed into a convincing human skin, designed to entertain players and more or less herd them like cattle.

  In Lower Cañitas, disrespecting an officer of the law (at least with him watching) was a sign you weren’t very bright and probably wouldn’t live very long, either. That’s because it usually meant you lacked common sense.

  But here, military and government had no real authority. Only if I choose to play along with them could they order me around. I was in no real danger from them… The thought was exhilarating.

  “What’s so funny, cadet?” the soldier asked.

  “I just realized I don’t have to waste my time with you,” I told him, grinning like a maniac.

  The instructor blinked. “Is that so? I must warn you, if you choose to skip your basic training, you won’t be able to join the Terran Federation until you come back and complete it.”

  “They give you some free shit if you do this introductory quest, man,” a red-headed player told me. Another guy nodded.

  “I don’t care,” I announced. “I hate tutorial-quests anyway. I can figure things out as I go.”

  “Aren’t you the coolest kid on the block,” the second player muttered, as he went back to the soldier.

  I don’t care what you think, little prick. I am the coolest kid on the block.

  Still grinning with satisfaction, I ignored the soldier and his trainees. I had things to do. I wasn’t sure at all of what those things were, but I had all the intention of doing them. I left the same way the girl from before had done.

  I arrived at the corridor of some kind of research facility. It was open to the sky — which was blue and cloudy and very much earth-like. NPC scientists walked around in their lab coats while one or two players ran around carrying containers. The place looked like some set you could find in a science fiction movie from fifty years ago. I had seen two or three of those films, mostly to make fun of the campy lines and the cringe-worthy special effects.

  Except this “set” had several more millions of production value than those movies. Even if nothing similar existed on real life, except as concept art, everything seemed to fit together nicely. Grav-cars streamed along, floating at high speeds over special lanes of the corridor, transporting busy-looking NPCs towards their random destination.

  Now that I was paying attention, I realized players and NPCs were easy to tell apart. There were no usernames floating on top of anyone’s head, but players had a solid quality to the way they moved, and NPCs just didn’t.

  Alright, I thought. Time find something to shoot.

  Rune Universe was a videogame after all. You shot at things on a videogame.

  I stopped one player and asked her about it.

  “Sure, you can go hunt wolves in the woods nearby, not that they will do you any good,” she said. “You won’t get any useful materials from wolves. Shoot some of them and your marksmanship skill will go up, though. If that’s the build you are going for, have at it.”

  “Sounds great, thanks. By the way, do you know where I can get a gun?”

  She eyed me like I was a baby in a party for toddlers.

  “You are a starting character, right? You should be equipped with a blaster right from the start.”

  A blaster sounded great. If only I knew how to open my inventory…

  The girl must’ve realized just how lost I was, because she sighed and pointed towards her hand. “Your inventory is stored on a pocket dimension near your body. You can access it using the nanobots of your bloodstream. Just focus on your hand, extend it like this…” A screen appeared in front of her, but I couldn’t see anything beyond it.

  “Thanks! What’s the deal with this ‘nanobots and pocket dimension’ talk? It’s just an inventory, same deal as in other games.”

  “Get used to it,” she said as she started to walk away, “you don’t come play Rune to feel like you are playing a game. You want to immerse yourself in another universe. Seriously, read about it on the wiki. And stop skipping the lore, it makes the experience better.”

  “Sure, sure,” I said as she left. So far, the game seemed fun, just not “let’s pretend this is a real universe” fun. Thanks for the tip, lady, but your advice just doesn’t work for me.

  Now, about that blaster. I raised my hand in the same fashion the other player had done. A circle of faint blue light surged from my open palm and my inventory screen appeared before me.

  Cole Picard

  -Recruit-

  Inventory

  Skills

  Quests

  Map

  Options

  Stats

  Basic Blaster

  Personal Assistant (Rare)

  Translight Message

  0 databytes

  I selected the Basic Blaster by pointing my finger at it. A message screen informed me that once the weapon was equipped, it would lock to me, so I would be unable to transfer it or sell it. Which was fine with me since there probably wasn’t any market for starting guns out there.

  I equipped my blaster and it materialized with a holster by my hip. It was a red and yellow gun with an antenna instead of a barrel and an over-sized chamber. It looked like a hair-dryer that some kid painted red.

  “I hope more advanced weapons look better than this,” I said.

  “There are,” said the red-headed guy from before. He walked down the corridor in my direction, “they come in tiers. A bit before reaching end-game tier, they start looking like sweet killing machines.”

  “I could dig a sweet killing machine,” I told him earnestly.

  “So could I!” he said. Then he paused to think, smiled, and added:

  “What do you say if we go and kill something?”

  “That sounds fantastic,” I said. “I kinda need to go kill something, now that you mention it.”

  My new friend’s name was Lance. I didn’t ask if that’s his real name or just his username.

  “The Sargeant gave me a quest,” Lance told me. His avatar was pale and almost as packed with muscle as Darren was in real life. His voice was so deep that I suspected his real age was much younger than he looked in-game. “You can come with me. I’m sure there are plenty of things to shoot in the woods. Some experiment of the scientists got out of their cages or something.”

  “What, go kill thirteen rats and come report back?” I said, thinking back to the original MMOs from a generation back.

  “I suppose,” he said, confused. “I don’t think they give you any skill points for shooting rats, though.”

  Rune Universe had no levels. Instead, it had ranks, professions, and skills. You raised your skills by practicing them. The more you had, the harder was to raise the next one. The skills you had determined your class, which came with its own bonus and special equipment.

  Unless you had your character genetically altered or enhanced with cybernetics, there were no fancy abilities tied to a character. You had to rely on skills, equipment, and wits to survive. Since my only item was a blaster and I had zero skills, all I was left with were my wits.

  Lance and I hailed a shuttle from an open-air hangar nearby. It seemed we were part of the Terran Federation or some-such since the scientists and non-military NPCs deferred to us even when we were grunts.

  “The Federation is the Earth Defense Force equivalent of the whole Terran Sector,” Lance explained. The shuttle flew itself towards his quest marker. I could see the tree tops sway in the wind and feel the cool summer breeze. If I looked at the Sun, it blinded me.

  I had never seen so much green in my entire life. For all my brain knew, I was flying over a real forest, over a real clear sky, on a real su
mmer morning. If I had been alone, I may have choked up up.

  But Lance was oblivious. He was talking lore —background history of the game:

  “The Terran Federation is the basic starting faction. It has its own ongoing storyline, but most people prefer the player Alliances. It’s much faster to become stronger if you join one since they’ll sponsor you and equip you with corporation-grade weapons. Part of your earnings go to them, of course, but in the end it’s good business. I think I’ll apply to some Alliances after I’m done with the tutorial. What about you?”

  “Hmm. I’m not big into clans or the like,” I said. I couldn’t take my eyes out of the forest beneath me. Rune Universe was supposed to include billions of planets, even I knew that. A player could spend a lifetime exploring the game’s map at random and not once end up in a repeated planet.

  Knowing that, the developers had spent who knew how much money on simulating Earth as the starting planet. A bird flew nearby as I thought this. It was a spotted flycatcher. It looked at me with curiosity as we passed it.

  “You can be an explorer, then,” Lance went on, “some people like to do that. Rune provides them with their own quest-lines, not sure how it works. But they never are as strong as Alliance players.”

  “You’ve played before?” I asked him. “You seem to know a lot about the game.”

  He looked at me as if I had come from under a rock. “I saw some streams before I got my subscription. Really, Cole, you shouldn’t buy a game just for the hype, you gotta do your own research. I mean, Rune is cool, but not every game is.”

  After that, the shuttle landed in an outpost in the middle of a clearing. Lance got up with an eager jump and I followed suit.

  “Alright, get frosty. These mutants are weak by the lonesome, but get them in high numbers and situation can get FUBAR faster than you can blink.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about, but I got my blaster out.

  At last, I thought, something to shoot at.

  We wandered into the forest. The vegetation became dense enough to hinder movement very fast. The little branches stung when they scratched against my hands, neck, and face. The forest reeked of humidity and decaying plants. The fallen leaves that covered the floor crunched with every step we made, and for a while it was the only sound we could hear in the entire forest. Other than my constant grunts as bushes smacked me in the face on our walk.

  “Where are they?” I asked after we were about ten minutes into the forest. The sun was hidden now behind the top of the trees and everything was covered by a cozy shadow. Made less cozy by the wandering mutants we were hunting, but were nowhere to be found.

  “Shhh!” Lance demanded. “They’ll hear you!” he whispered.

  “What do you mean they’ll hear me?” I went on like an absolute idiot. “We are farming mobs, right?”

  “Mobs? You think we are farming mobs?!”

  That was the first real clue I had that Rune Universe —and some other VRS in the market— didn’t work like the retro MMORPG’s I played with Kipp back in school.

  In those old multiplayer games, critters wandered around the hunting area, usually sorted out neatly by level. You went around killing them and farming their items until you leveled up or you had enough money to buy a new item. Then you went looking for stronger monsters to hunt. That’s why I preferred flight simulators.

  In Rune, the damn monsters heard you coming and set up an ambush. And no one had bothered to tell them they were supposed to sort themselves by level.

  An ooze-covered humanoid dropped himself from a tree right in front of me and lunged at me, bellowing from a mouth that could have felt at home in a motorcycle accident.

  I took out my blaster and fired three shots at him. The gun spat red lasers barely stronger than a flashlight. The beams missed him completely and then he was on top of me. He tackled me with arms that felt heavy as concrete and threw me to the floor. I shot at him some more and kept missing entirely. He lunged for my neck with his terrifying wound of a mouth.

  I tripped him with my leg and he fell flat on his bloated belly. This time, I rolled towards him, put the blaster against his head and pressed the trigger.

  “That did the trick!” I roared in triumph. Then, I gagged when bits of roasted mutant’s brain landed on my open mouth.

  I looked around and realized Lance was fighting against three of the same deformed monsters. I ran over to set up a flank and shot at them as fast as I could press the trigger.

  It didn’t seem to do much to them. Of every ten shots, I seemed to land just one, most of them grazing shots. I had no skill points on Marksmanship. Even if you were a trained military sniper in real life, you’d miss most of your shots in Rune if you had no skill points in shooting. Accuracy in-game was a mixture of real skill and Skill points.

  I lacked both of those and the result was bad. But at least I got their attention. Which got me in trouble when my blaster overheated.

  Lance ran towards the mutants the second they turned to me, jammed his blaster on the forehead of the closest one, and blasted him to bits.

  Basic blasters were as strong as a shovel to the head at close range. Virtually useless in a fight against an armored foe at a range, though. Luckily for us, the mutants were not armored.

  The second mutant tried to grapple Lance away from his blaster, while the third one ran screaming towards him, ready to secure the kill.

  I tackled that mutant and punched him in the face. I heard a sickening crunch and more bits of rotten flesh landed on my face.

  Hope there isn’t any sickness in Rune Universe, this couldn’t be healthy.

  The mutant fell forwards, stunned. I jumped on his head and heard a sickening crunch. He stopped moving. But now my boot was covered in goo. So, who won, really?

  Something heavy slammed into my back and I hit the floor in a crumble. Another mutant had managed to slip behind me, unseen, and now he was at my left side, his terrible mouth inching closer to my face.

  Terrified, I kicked at him and pushed his neck back with all my strength, but the monster was stronger and his jagged teeth got closer and closer to my face. My arms stung in hot pain where his claws tore open my skin and I could smell his putrid breath as lines of greenish saliva flowed down his mouth and onto my face.

  I grasped at my overheated blaster and unleashed a new round of shots only centimeters away from the monster’s body. If any of them hit I didn’t know, but the mutant lost his balance for a second. I pushed him hard and threw him to his side. He tried to jump to his feet instantly, but I was on top of him immediately. I slammed the back of my blaster against his skull, over and over and over. I tried to choke him with my free arm and the mutant bit me, hard. I screamed, horrified. Even if Rune’s pain was dulled, my brain still thought a quarter of my arm had been eaten by a monster.

  I pressed my blaster against his back, pushed him away and shot at him until he stopped moving. I turned around. Two mutants were running back, retreating instead of staying to fight a losing battle. Exultant with adrenaline and rage, I shot at them until my blaster overheated again, this time much faster. Only the trees felt the punishment of my shots, but my point was made.

  At the same time, Lance kicked his mutant away from him and blasted him to bits at close range.

  “Yes! Nice shot, man!” Lance had even managed to avoid most of the fried meaty bits. “We didn’t lose any health at all!”

  “There’s no health on the game, you just get injured the same as real life,” Lance grunted. Then he gasped and said:

  “Just what the hell are you doing?”

  “Searching them for loot,” I said while patting down a headless mutant. “Obviously.”

  “Do you see any pockets on them?”

  “Well, no, but…”

  “So why would they carry anything with them? They are failed experiments, not crazed millionaires running around the woods with gold bars in their pockets.”

  I stopped my search of the
body on the ground. My hands were covered in goo. Lance walked towards me and got out of his inventory a small mechanical syringe. “I have to take a biological sample for the military so they can develop a poison to take them out,” he explained. As he extracted the black blood of the mutant, a window appeared in front of him. A bell ringed.

  “See?” He turned around the window. It was a quest marker, announcing he had to turn back to the research station to deliver the vial.

  “Listen, Cole, it’s been fun, but ah… I gotta go back, now.” He said. “No offense man, but you are aggroing the enemy way too much for my play-style. I prefer to shoot at them from afar, not let them eat me slowly. Let’s do this another time, with more equipment… I’ll send you a friend invite, okay?.”

  “Oh. Sure. Of course,” I mumbled. “See you later, Lance.”

  He headed back towards the shuttle. Running, actually. I stayed behind, watching the results of the first shoot-out in my entire life. My heart was still racing from the fight. It felt real enough to be scared. For a second there I really thought my life was in danger. My arm had a terrible bite wound and it still sent waves of pain towards my brain, but it was game-pain, designed to let you know you were hurt and how badly. Stubbing your toe against a chair was worse.

  So I got hurt, I killed mutants, I was alone in the woods with a pissed off enemy nearby, and I couldn’t shoot to save my life. Things looked bleak, right? Yet I was smiling, and I hadn’t even realized it until I stopped to think.

  Rune was lethal, mean, and didn’t pull its punches. But it was also the most fun I had had in years.

  So what if I was a bad player. This was a game, right? Not a military simulation. There were VRS for that and they did well enough. Know what? Screw Lance. He was a dick anyway, playing the soldier like that. I didn’t need any partner. I could play solo just fine.