"Please spare my children! Spare my children!"
"Run!"
"No! Run!"
Fire raged and smoke billowed. The ground shook with the stomping of feet. Outside, everything was in chaos and ruins, with crumbling walls and blazing roofs, but in the room of a small, mud brick house, it was the opposite.
Catlen clutched her head from the pain and hissed. A foggy feeling was taking up residence in her brain, and it was very disorienting. For a long time, she sat on the dusty ground with a hand on her head and couldn't tell where she was.
All sounds were muffled, and there was only a sharp ringing in her ears. Catlen scrunched up her entire face until it looked unrecognizable.
She had always been a fan of electronics. For as long as she had begun earning her own independent money, she would save in order to buy herself the latest high-tech gadgets during the holidays.
The latest device on the market? Ultrasonic DluX28 Virtual Reality gaming headset. It was unlike all the other headsets put out into the market previously. This one was a lot more lightweight, smaller, with 360 immersive graphics and came with matching surround sound earbuds.
Overjoyed, Catlen had gone rushing to buy it. She didn't even consider the price before snatching it to take home. It was a new product, but there had been rumours about this gaming headset for a long time, so the sales had been extremely good when it debuted. They basically flew off the shelves.
When she got home, she finally realized that the console came with a video game preloaded into it. It was an adventure fantasy RPG called 'Endless World Quest.'
Catlen had never heard of the game before, but as a professional gamer, her curiosity quickly won out. She logged in with her universal gaming ID and began to go through the configuration process.
Game name, and character gender. Male, female, other. Character list. There were different character cards with their stats, roles, and basic information.
The entire game consisted of different domes in a vast world, and outside of that world, there were realms that were vertically stacked on top of each other. Each realm had a world in it just like the main one, but they were inaccessible to the low-level player.
It was with good reason that the game was called Endless World Quest. When Catlen saw that layout, she figured it would take her about a year to finish playing the game from the first realm to the final boss of the tenth realm.
The central world of each realm would have the biggest story arc, but each dome had its own main characters. Catlen had chosen to play the female lead of the first central world, Cirella Avone, and her subsequent arc.
According to the main gameplay, the female lead had a psychic power called Perfect Aim, which allowed her to have pinpoint accuracy in things like aiming with weapons, and making plans.
As the female lead of the storyline, she was a favourite of the male lead, the crown prince of the southern country, Ichtren. By the fifth quest of the game, she became his concubine, and began the journey of helping him with his political campaign.
Once the crown prince became the emperor, the female lead outshone the others and rose to become the empress, where she finally launched a war campaign to exterminate the invading enemy race, the orcs. After that, she completely clinched the emperor's heart and reigned supreme by his side, basking in his love every day.
Catlen had thought that it was a pretty relaxing game arc to play, so she had chosen it. There had been other female characters to play, but their stories were a lot more challenging. Since she didn't understand the game yet, she chose the easiest storyline.
Who knew, when she was halfway through the game, she suddenly felt a splitting headache and blacked out. At first, she had thought that it was just dehydration. As a gaming fanatic, it was not weird that she would go without drinking water until her lips dried up.
It would've been fine if that was the case. She would only need to take off her headset and drink some water. However, when she opened her eyes again, that wasn't what happened.
The ringing in her ears slowly subsided, and her vision was clearing up a lot more. Catlen looked at her surroundings, a shabby house with crumbling walls, and was very confused.
Even if the game was in first person, there was no need to make it so detailed.
But why didn't this look like anything she remembered playing? Also, why did the graphics change? They went from looking cartoonish to very realistic. Even the fabric of her clothes looked real.
Wailing and screaming poured in from the closed windows. There was a strange flapping sound coming from the sky, and the hoarse screeching of ferocious beasts.
Catlen had no idea what was happening and couldn't quite get her bearings for a very long time. She slowly hauled herself up from the ground and stumbled over to one of the windows with the intention of opening the wooden frame to take a look at what was going on outside. What was all the screaming and screeching about?
A huge talon nearly punctured a hole in her face before she even had the chance to open the window panels. The wooden frame shattered from the force behind that talon, and the house shook so much that she was sent tumbling to the ground all over again.
Catlen's eyes were wide open as she stared at the scene in front of her with a certain degree of disbelief. The talon withdrew, replaced by the scene of an enormous, monstrous mouth opening to snap someone in half. The people around screamed, running chaotically to and fro in hopes of escaping the violence.
She could see fire beyond the chaos in the foreground, realistically turning everything it touched to cinders. Surprisingly, the flames were green, which only made the scene of the crime look ten times more eerie.
The hulking bodies of tough-skinned orcs waving maces and chainswords followed the fleeing villagers, impaling anyone they saw and taking their life just like that. There was a very strong burning smell in the air as the bodies were meticulously cremated on the spot..
Dumbfounded, Catlen tried pushing herself to her feet again, hissing when a sharp pain stabbed through one of her fingers. It was already looking bluish and swelling at a speed visible to the naked eye, completely different from the rest of her muddied hand. She must've broken it when she fell.
No, that wasn't the point. Wasn't this a game? How come she could feel pain?
"What is going on?" She cradled her hand and muttered.
Everything was very different from what she had seen in Cirella Avone's story arc, so Catlen figured that she had fallen into a glitch in the game.
She waved her left hand down from the upper corner of her vision diagonally, and summoned the menu interface. Her intention was to leave the game, but the illustrious exit button was nowhere to be seen.
"That's weird." Catlen searched for the settings menu with the thought of forcefully logging herself out, only to find that the button was grey. She couldn't click it at all.
She closed the menu interface, and opened it again, but the same thing happened over and over. In the left-hand drop-down menu where the exit button was supposed to be, there wasn't even a pause button.
There was only a single button with a floppy disk drawing on it.
The menu interface itself was also very lacking. The only options she could click on were for her character profile, and inventory.
Except that when she clicked the profile, she realised that she wasn't even the correct character. The game info showed a completely different role than the one she'd chosen.
NAME: Catlen Devicast
AGE: 20
RACE: //
SPECIES: Siren
LEVEL: 0
XP: 0/100
HP: 20/100 (!)
Alright, so not only was this not the character she'd chosen, Catlen didn't remember this character being on the roster at all.
Could it be that she'd glitched into an NPC, and the NPC had her name?
The house shook again, followed by the screeching of a strange creature. Dust fell down from the roof like a torrential rain, blinding Catlen momentarily. She shielded her face with her arm and ran toward a corner without even bothering to close the menu.
She was beginning to panic now. As an eternal couch potato, she had read novels about people being trapped in games. It was even her favourite genre!
The realistic graphics, coupled with the pain in her hand, inevitably made her think about the worst possibility in this entire situation.
Had she been pulled into the game?
A cold chill crawled down her spine. Catlen felt like she had been doused with a bucket of ice water.
It would've been fine if she hadn't come to that reaslitaion, but once she did, it was a thought that firmly took root in her mind.
If she had been pulled into the game, then what happened to her body? Did it still exist and she was consciously trapped in the game, or had it disintegrated and her soul had come to a different game world?
Endless possibilities, none of them pleasant, were in front of her eyes. Catlen turned her eyes to look outside the window at the mayhem taking place.
She did not want to go outside. It was worse outside than inside, and until she figured out what was going on, she wouldn't make any hasty moves. For now, her main priority was to immobilize her broken finger.