Might as Well

The real world snapped back like a fresh coat on his brain. He looked around as he took off the helmet and for a long minute just sat there on his gaming couch taking in his room. Things, on the edge of his vision, were a little fuzzy, and the color of everything in the room was shifted toward gray scale a little, but as he recuperated, everything came back into focus and color.

Playing the game so actively, especially with the way Sam used the skills with the first-generation helmet, always put a strain on the body. One would expect the strain on the mind, but for some reason, the entire body was affected by it. There were little shakes and sometimes when he moved, there were phantom pains shooting through his body. Sam mostly chalked this up to the gaming helmet not being up to the task. While it was a rather mature technology, having reached the thirteenth generation, this was the first time a game like Magic Unbound was played on it. The game was simply too different and the helmet didn't really have the tools to properly handle it. It was safe. There was no question about that. The regulatory authorities made sure, as there had been several accidents, murders, and even a few death games reminiscent of the anime he watched in his past life. But that was all in the past when the technology first came out. There were so many safeties in the thing that doing anything to it would be almost impossible.

And Magic Unbound was all about the impossible...

With the way it was affecting his body, Sam was reminded of all the stories he consumed during his last life, and he almost expected that he would need to fight invading inter-dimensional aliens who gave the virtual reality tech to the world’s governments to prepare the populace for a deadly dimensional arena fight. That wasn't going to happen though. At least not for the next ten-ish years, unless his actions affected the timeline in a really unexpected way.

Idle musing aside, he sat up from the couch, placed the gaming helmet on his stand, and stretched a little. The bone-weary exhaustion he felt in the game was not fully gone, but he didn’t feel like he would collapse into a puddle of bone dust only to be ferried away by a gentle breeze.

Sam left the room, took a shower, ate a healthy meal, checked the news, and made sure that his investments that were independent of the game and his gaming company were still doing good and just lazed around a little. He even played some small indie game that was basically asteroid but on steroids. It was a good time waster.

But in the end, the call to work was too strong.

Sam stood up from his couch, stretched once again, groaned in satisfaction when he heard his back crack, and with a sigh, returned to his office, plopping down in front of his computer.

Half an hour later, he was also caught up with the gaming news. Magic Unbound was increasingly dominating the fantasy and roleplaying genre, with a lot of people clamoring for a game made of the same quality but sci-fi-themed.

Magic Unbound was a fantasy game, but with the technological development they were capable of, Sam suspected that the endgame would probably happen in space after somebody fully conquered the planet.

Thankfully, other types of games weren’t really feeling the squeeze as Magic Unbound really didn’t have car racing or first-person shooter. Though, tragically, most farming simulators died a quick death as Magic Unbound provided a much more realistic and fantastical experience for those who wanted to take joy in raising the flora of the world.

Another industry that was majorly affected by the game was the streaming industry. When the game came out a lot of small names jumped to try the game, just to ride the initial wave, but with the ever-increasing popularity, not long ago, even the big names jumped ship.

As he casually scrolled through the streaming site, he saw everything from people doing fracture speed runs to scantily clad women and men prancing in front of the camera or in medieval jacuzzis.

He had to scroll down a few seconds to even find the first, a stream that was not about Magic Unbound.

Liz wasn’t currently streaming, but a quick click on his favorites led him to her site and another few clicks provided him with her public-facing statistics. Lucy got the full raw data per the contract so he could have asked for it, but he only wanted to do a simple check.

Her numbers were good, much better than the ones he saw when he looked her up a few months ago. Liz wasn’t the top streamer, but being a woman and having such a unique skill made sure that she was very visible.

Satisfied, he turned his attention toward Shadowland. Where he found, to his joy, that most of the attention, at least in the Emerald Kingdom section, was centered around the new fracture that was going to be made available by the kingdom.

The same one he tricked Katie’s dad into focusing on.

It was a pretty great dungeon if you had the money to fund your expeditions. Most people did it once, just to say they did it and gave up on it. Farming it was economically impossible. At least with the current level and magic knowledge.

Any of the powerhouses from his future knowledge would have been able to bulldoze through it with the sheer amount of health and defenses they had but for the current players?

It was mathematically impossible!

Why? Because the poison was a rare type of dimensional poison that required an equal amount of antidote to fight against. In short, the dimensional nature of the poison actively destroyed the antidote in the players’ system. This meant that no matter how long an antidote lasted, if you got hit by an ounce of venom, you would need to drink an ounce of antidote.

And the antidote wasn’t cheap.

More importantly, the entire dungeon was filled almost to bursting with this exact type of poison gas.

But nobody knew this, so everybody was hoarding the antidote and planning for the riches that would come from the dungeon. Granted, there were a few skill books and materials that were worth a lot of money, but their drop rate was so low that it was worth importing them from other countries that had easier fractures that dropped them.

Sam just made sure that the AFK company bought a lot of base materials for the antidotes and their supermarkets sold them with a hefty markup.

Grinning evilly, he connected to the server where Lucy stored some of the data for the company, and after entering a rather lengthy password and biometric identification, he took a quick peek at the income from those materials. He couldn’t help but let out a cackle.

‘Try to kill me, hah! I will kill your purse!’ he gloated in his mind as he took in the amount of money they generated from the sales. And when the time was ripe for it, Lucy would dump the remaining materials on the market, causing another frenzy.

‘I do love when a plan comes together…’

His joy was short-lived, however, when his thoughts turned to another task he wanted to deal with.

Sighing quietly, he minimized the windows and opened up one of his messaging apps, the one used to communicate with his team. A few messages back and forth to make sure the person on the other end was online, and he was listening to the call ringing.

In short order, he was face to face with a short brown-haired girl, sitting elegantly in front of whatever device they used, the high quality of everything behind them clear to him even with his amateurish taste. She was also shifting anxiously and frowning a little.

“Sam? You wanted to talk?”

He sighed again.

“Yeah, Katie. Nothing bad, but I needed to have a word with you,” he said, and the frown on the girl deepened.

“Is this about my dad? Did he offer you something to dump me?” she asked, and while it was well hidden, Sam still could hear a little quiver in her voice.

“Nothing like that!” he was quick to reassure the girl. “It’s about the fracture run…”

Instantly, she perked up and the dullness of her eyes was lost. “Oh, what about that? It was awesome! All those stupid bears…” she began to chatter excitedly.

Sam held up a hand and waited until the girl quieted down.

“Exactly. The bears,” he began, steeling himself. “Look, Katie. I like you. We all like you. But your roleplaying is going a little too far. I get it that you like to play the berserker, but you take it too far.”

“What?”

“When I say ‘Don’t charge at the bears!’ I mean it. And I would like if you listened to my instructions.”

“But we killed them!”

“Yes, because we’re OP as fuck. That’s why I didn’t say anything there. I didn’t want to ruin the mood,” he explained. “Anywhere else, however, we would have been dead five times over because Clarissa had to focus on healing you because you were always charging at things…” he finished with a pleading note, hoping that Katie wouldn’t take it the wrong way.

The girl tilted her head to the side (rather adorably) and, after a few seconds, spoke up.

“So, what you’re saying is… that I can’t charge at things?”

“No, no… You can! I just want to make sure you follow my orders. You do whatever you feel like and works, but the moment I say don’t charge, you don’t charge. Got it?”

Katie looked back with that stereotypical rich girl look that somehow looked cute but at the same time conveyed the feeling that the owner of the look was considering how to fillet up the one they were speaking with.

Finally, after a full minute of silence, Katie looked away from the camera.

“Sorry…” she murmured.

It was Sam’s turn to be surprised. “Why are you sorry?”

She hesitated for a few seconds, even looking around furtively before speaking.

“I was just having so much fun that I kinda forgot about all that. When I’m in the game, I’m not the same person. It’s really easy to get lost in that…”

Sam listened, then nodded.

A pretty common issue from what he could tell from his inherited memories. Fortunately, thanks to that, there were also a lot of common techniques to deal with that.

He smiled at her encouragingly and began speaking.

“Alright, Katie. Here is what you do…”

As he spoke, the young woman on the other side went from morose to attentive with a small smile playing in the corner of her mouth.

Dealing with Katie was emotionally draining. Neither the other Sam whose body and memories he inherited, nor he, were great with people. Hell, in his past life he only left his apartment when he needed food or one of his very few friends dragged him out. So, dealing with Katie, who was very much an emotional person, was a challenge. Still, Sam believed that he had nipped a developing issue in the bud and now he could focus on something else.

Which, naturally, was creating even more chaos.

Returning to the Shadowland boards, he spent a few minutes looking through the requests that he had received and finding the ones about the new poison fracture.

Sam, the nice man he was, sold them everything that was known currently about the fracture. Thankfully, to cover for himself, he had Lucy investigate and acquire the antidote recipe and stuff like that, so nobody could say he was pulling the information out of his ass.

And nobody would be able to complain that he didn’t know about the nature of the poison in the fractal…

‘Sometimes, my evil even surprises myself…’ he mused as he continued to answer requests from all sorts of people while making a decent amount of money.

The game welcomed him with open arms, exactly where he left his character in his own tent built in one of the corners of the outpost set up for this exact purpose. In the game, the reason was that the government didn’t want to pay for accommodations for the flighty and destructive adventurers thus they just provided a fenced-off area and told the adventurers to solve their own issues.

He exited his tent, stretched, and looked around. The crowd was still the same. The majority of them were gold (and silver) farmers, going through the motions with a few flamboyant groups intermixed with them all congregating toward the cliff face.

Wandering over to one of the unoccupied picnic tables, while making sure there were no hidden Eternal Light members ready to ambush him, he opened his skill and status screen and stared at it, pondering the possibilities.

‘Level 50 was given, and I got it. But I doubt my sword skill will be enough to impress them…’ he mused as he thought back to the NPC at the Training Hall. ‘I’ll need to level up the skills a few more times before I go back. But where to?’

He had several options, including continuing farming the silver bear fracture, as it was currently called by people on the net. But honestly, he was a little sick of it. Then his eyes fell on one of his other quests.

‘I do need to kill a lot of demons… Why not two birds with one stone?’

Decisions made, he stood up, closed the screens, took a last look around, and headed for the gates while starting to send out messages. First his team, so that they would know where to go, and then to Lucy to make sure everything was prepared for his arrival.

“Back to Ironwood we go…” he murmured.

Leaving the outpost, he followed the road for a while, then quickly veered off it and entered the sparse forest with all the speed he was capable of. Not sensing anyone following him, he called out to Lucky who emerged from the shadow of a tree branch up high, scaring a poor squirrel almost to death, and landed in front of him with a wolfish grin.

“Ready for a long run, buddy?”