CHAPTER TWO: THE WORLD HAS NO MERCY FOR BEGINNERS
I logged in for the first time three days after the exhibition.
Not because I wasn't eager. Because the headset's charging cable had a frayed section near the connector that only worked if you bent it at a specific angle and held it there, and it took me two days to figure out the angle. I ended up wedging it against the leg of my desk with a folded piece of cardboard. It held. Barely.
The third night I waited until the laundromat below my room closed — the machines made the floor vibrate when they ran, and I didn't know what that would do to a full-dive session, and I wasn't willing to find out the hard way — and then I lay down on my bed, pulled the headset on, and connected.
The familiar chime.
The familiar nothing.
Then Aethoria opened up around me and I forgot, again, that I'd been worried about the cable.
---
I spawned in a town.
That was the first difference from the demo. The demo had been a hill — open, quiet, designed to be gentle. This was not gentle. This was a *town,* and towns, I was about to learn, are not designed to be gentle. They are designed to be lived in, which is a different thing entirely.
The spawn point was a stone plaza at the center of a place called Varnholt — a mid-sized settlement in the Borderlands region, which I would later understand was the game's polite way of saying *the area where three different world styles collide and nobody has resolved the disagreement.* The buildings around the plaza were a visual argument: stone towers with iron-hinged shutters stood next to structures wrapped in dull chrome paneling with blue-lit seams, which stood next to curved wooden buildings with upturned roofs and paper lanterns strung between them in colors I didn't have names for.
I stood in the middle of all of it and turned slowly in a circle.
There were players everywhere. Dozens of them — moving with the particular confidence of people who knew where they were going and had somewhere to be. They had armor I couldn't identify, weapons I couldn't name, and the air of people who had been here long enough to stop looking at things. I was looking at everything.
A group pushed past me without slowing down. One of them clipped my shoulder and I actually stumbled — the physics of this world were precise enough that an accidental shoulder check felt like a shoulder check.
"Watch it, spawn," one of them said, not looking back.
I watched them go and made a note: *don't stand in the middle of plazas.*
---
My inventory contained:
- Worn Cloth Shirt (no armor value)
- Worn Cloth Trousers (no armor value)
- Basic Leather Boots (armor value: 1)
- Starter Sword — Chipped (damage: 3–5)
- 200 Void Coins
I examined the sword. It was short, slightly bent toward the tip, and had a chip in the blade near the base that the name had apparently decided to just acknowledge upfront. The damage values made it sound like I could hurt someone with a strongly-worded letter just as effectively.
200 Void Coins. I pulled up the exchange window. At current rates, 200 Void Coins converted to roughly forty cents of real money. I closed the exchange window.
I needed to earn more. That was the entire point of being here — the whole reason I'd untangled the charging cable and waited out the laundromat. The game world was a place where effort paid off in currency that was real. I just had to figure out how.
I found a notice board near the edge of the plaza.
---
Notice boards in Aethoria are exactly what they sound like — wooden boards covered in posted slips of paper with quests, requests, and job listings. I stood in front of it for a long time, reading everything. Most of it meant nothing to me yet.
*Wanted: Experienced party for Dungeon Clearance — Ironcroft Ruins, B2 level. Min. recommended level 25.*
I was level 1.
*Seeking herbalist — gather Moonpetal flowers from the Ashfen Marshes, 50 coins per bundle of 10. Must have at least Herbalism Skill Lv. 3.*
I didn't have an Herbalism skill. I wasn't sure how to get one.
*Resource node competition notice: The eastern copper deposits will be open access from dawn to dusk. No guild claims in effect until further notice.*
I didn't know what copper deposits were for.
*EASY WORK — Rat subjugation, Varnholt grain warehouse, 5 coins per confirmed kill. No level requirement. Bring proof of kill (tail).*
Five coins per rat.
I looked at my chipped starter sword. I thought about the grain warehouse. I thought about forty cents.
I pulled the notice off the board.
---
The warehouse was at the edge of town, near where the stone buildings gave way to a cluster of wooden storage structures. A heavyset NPC in an apron stood outside it, looking personally offended by the existence of rodents.
"You're here about the rats?" he said when I approached.
"Yes."
He looked me up and down with the expression of a man who had hoped for better but had learned to manage his expectations. "Level one. Starter sword." He sighed. "How many tails can you bring me?"
"How many rats are there?"
"Too many," he said, and opened the warehouse door.
---
I want to be honest about what happened in the next hour.
It did not go well.
The rats were larger than I expected. Not enormous — not some mutated dungeon monster — just larger than real rats. Dog-sized. Fast. And there were, as the warehouse keeper had accurately described, too many of them.
My first encounter was with a single rat in the corner of the building. I approached carefully, raised my chipped sword, and swung.
I missed.
The rat bit me.
My health bar — which I hadn't paid much attention to until that moment — dropped by about eight percent from a single bite. I recalibrated my opinion of rats significantly.
I swung again. Connected this time. The rat died in two hits, which was encouraging. I picked up the tail, put it in my inventory, and looked for the next one.
The next one was not alone.
I won't describe the full sequence of events. The relevant information is: I died twice in that warehouse. Each death sent me back to the spawn point in the plaza, which meant walking back to the warehouse, which the rats had no memory of and I had too much memory of. The second time I died it was because I had been doing well — four kills, four tails, starting to find a rhythm — and then three of them had come from behind a sack of grain simultaneously and I simply hadn't had enough health left to survive the arithmetic.
Respawning doesn't hurt. It's just an interruption — a moment of black, a chime, and then the plaza again with full health and the faint indignity of having to walk back.
But I noticed, on the third attempt, that I was angry.
Not at the game. Not at the rats. Angry in a specific, clarifying way at myself, at the fact that I kept approaching the same problem the same way and expecting a different result.
*Stop walking into the middle of them,* I told myself. *Stop swinging at the one in front when there are more behind it. Stop treating this like a fight and start treating it like a—*
Like a what?
I stood at the warehouse entrance and thought about it properly for the first time.
Like a room with limited space. Like a problem of angles. Like — and I reached for this instinctively, without knowing why — like wind.
Wind doesn't push everything at once. It moves through gaps. It goes around obstacles. It finds the path of least resistance and then it moves *fast.*
I didn't have powerful magic. Wind Pulse barely registered as damage. But it was something I could use without getting close.
I stepped back into the warehouse, kept to the wall, and tried something different.
---
The first rat I spotted was across the room, nosing at a grain sack. I cast Wind Pulse at it — the usual weak gust — and instead of charging after it, I stepped sideways along the wall. The rat turned toward where the pulse had come from. It started moving toward that spot.
Which was no longer where I was.
I let it pass me. Then I hit it from behind.
It died in one hit.
I stood there for a moment, quietly surprised.
Moving targets are easier to hit from behind. Of course they are. I'd known that instinctively before I'd ever thought about it. But using Wind Pulse not to damage but to *redirect* — to make the rat move where I wanted it to move so I could be somewhere else — that was something I hadn't planned. It had just seemed obvious in the moment, the way things do when you stop panicking and start paying attention.
I found a second rat. Pulsed it from the right, stepped left, waited, hit it as it turned.
Found a third. This time two rats together. I pulsed one toward the wall, stepped back, let them cross paths in their confusion, and took them both in the same second while they were facing different directions.
I cleared the rest of the warehouse without dying.
Twenty-three tails. 115 Void Coins.
The warehouse keeper counted the tails twice, looked at me with what I chose to interpret as revised respect, and handed over the coins.
---
I sat on a barrel outside the warehouse afterward and opened my stats screen.
**KAEL DAWNLESS**
*Level 1*
*Class: Unassigned*
*Magic Affinity: Wind*
*Vitality: 10*
*Force: 8*
*Agility: 9*
*Resonance: 8*
*Perception: 9*
*Will: 10*
*Skills:*
*— Wind Pulse Lv. 1*
*Available Attribute Points: 0*
Not much to look at. The numbers were all starter values, almost identical. The kind of sheet that told you nothing about the person, only that they'd just begun.
I looked at Wind Pulse. Level 1. I'd used it maybe thirty times in the warehouse. The level hadn't moved.
I thought about what the tutorial had said: *Continue practicing to develop your affinity.* And what the demo description had said: *grows in directions its user determines.*
I'd used Wind Pulse thirty times to redirect rats. The skill hadn't gotten stronger. But I had. I'd found something — a use for it that its name didn't describe, a function that nobody had told me about. Using air pressure not as an attack but as a tool for movement, for misdirection.
The skill didn't know about that yet. But I did.
I pocketed the coins and looked at the notice board in the distance, already thinking about which job to take next.
---
The rest of the day — game time moved faster than real time, a full day in Aethoria was roughly eight real-world hours — taught me other things.
A delivery quest from a merchant across town to a buyer near the east gate paid forty coins but involved crossing through a market district where I was pickpocketed by a player I never saw. Twenty coins, gone. I didn't even feel it happen. One second my coin count was 155, the next it was 135. I spent ten minutes standing in the market trying to figure out who'd done it before accepting that the crowd had long since moved on.
I filed that under *things I won't let happen again* and kept moving.
Near the east gate I passed a group of five players clustered around what appeared to be another player on the ground. At first I thought they were helping. Then I noticed the player on the ground had a red marker above their name — the full-PvP flag — and the five standing players were looting the body while the person was still technically alive, just stunned.
One of the five noticed me watching.
"Keep walking, level one," he said. Not threatening. Just informational.
I kept walking.
That was my introduction to the social ecology of Aethoria: there were systems in place to protect players, and there were players whose entire purpose was to find the gaps in those systems. This was apparently considered normal. Nobody around seemed shocked by it. A few people even slowed down to watch, the way people slow down to look at car accidents without wanting to get involved.
I made another note: *learn where the gaps are before someone uses them on me.*
---
By the time I logged out — pulled back to my room by the reality of a school morning in six hours — I had earned 220 Void Coins for the day. Added to my starting amount, I had 320 total.
I did the conversion. Sixty-four cents in real money.
I sat with that number.
Sixty-four cents. I'd spent the equivalent of a full working day — four hours — earning sixty-four cents. At that rate, the game was not going to solve my financial problems any time soon.
But.
I was level 1. I had one skill. I had a chipped sword and no armor worth mentioning. I'd spent half the day learning things I should have known before I started — how the market worked, that pickpockets existed, where not to stand, how to move through a warehouse full of dog-sized rats without dying.
Every one of those things was worth something I couldn't measure in Void Coins. And unlike the real world — unlike the shelf-stacking and the delivery runs and the particular exhaustion of working hard and ending up exactly where you started — I could feel the learning. I could feel it accumulating.
*Grows in directions its user determines.*
I set the headset down on the desk, carefully, and caught my reflection in the dark window above it. The room behind me was small and a little cold and the ceiling had a water stain in the corner that I'd long since stopped noticing.
I looked at my own face and tried to remember the last time I'd felt like I was getting somewhere.
I couldn't.
I turned off the light and slept.
---
*End of Chapter Two*
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