original

Epoch: The Cursed One

นักเขียน: SlyOW

บท 1: Video Games

Surrounded by darkness, Felix groggily opened his eyes. Reaching out to his right, he made a small grunt as his hand slammed against the wooden desk, but after a moment, he managed to grab his phone.

But turning it on turned out to be a mistake as he felt like the Lord Almighty himself was scarring the holy light of God into his retina.

"Fuck!"

"Olsson, watch your mouth!"

Groaning yet again, Felix closed his eyes in discomfort, traces of the light still bringing him discomfort as he ignored the voice on the other side of the thin wall.

After a while, as he felt his vision recover, Felix squinted his eyes and made sure to point the phone away as he lit it up again. The light was still bothering, but at least he managed to bring down the luminosity without blinding himself a second time.

And as he did, he finally got a good look at the time.

"Fuck!"

"Olsson, watch your goddamn mouth or I'll whoop your ass!"

Felix did not pay attention to the voice as he jumped to his feet, knocking his shin into the same desk. Holding his leg in great pain, Felix barely stopped himself from crying out another curse as he hopped to the light.

While he may literally have crashed into the wall because of his imbalance, he did manage to turn on the light, revealing a tiny room, four meters by two. A third of the room was occupied by a single person bed, going from one bland, blank wall to the other. There was a small window right above it, but it was closed.

Then, going from the head of the bed to the side of the door was a wooden desk, the very same Felix had knocked twice against. It was placed against the wall, and was slightly larger than the bed. A little too big, as it stopped the door from opening fully.

As for the other wall, there was a bookshelf, filled with books most people would not understand a word of.

Felix, still holding his painful shin, picked up the clothes laying on the ground as he hurriedly dressed himself.

It was 9.30 AM.

9.30!

Putting his clothes on faster than ever, Felix opened the door to his room with force, a little too much of it as it knocked into the corner of the desk.

Felix felt his heart stop beating for a moment as he froze, and slowly, and fearfully, looked at the door. He only sighed in relief when he saw a small mark on the door.

"Olsson!"

Sighing softly to himself, Felix walked out of the room and said, "It's fine, I knocked into the desk!"

Felix walked into the living room, which was the room right behind his wall. There, was an imposing man.

He was sitting down on a stool, his naked back to Felix as he watched TV, but it did nothing to make him look smaller. Etched onto his back were various tattoos, some Asian with dragons and tigers, and others more tribal.

Felix himself was relatively tall, standing at 1.86 meters, or slightly over 6 feet, but the man was even taller, reaching 1.90. Besides, as tall as he was, Felix was lanky, while the man was easily twice as large as Felix, his body ripping with muscles.

In one word, he looked tough.

Without turning around, he grumbled, "Watch your mouth punk, I'm already doing you a favor with the room. My house, my rules, and that includes no cursing."

A part of Felix felt like responding, but he wisely shut up. Not only did he not want to piss him off, he also knew he was right.

Felix's bank account had more often been in the red than the other way around for the past few months, and the situation only got worse as he graduated and did not manage to find a job.

But Yasue, Felix's landlord, had accepted to delay payments more than reasonable, and he was mostly feeding Felix.

So while Yasue liked to remind Felix that he was doing him a favor and generally be a bit of an ass, Felix knew better than to talk back.

As Felix hurried to put on his shoes though, Yasue finally looked away from the TV, revealing the face of a Japanese man. He was in his late thirties, and he looked as tough as one would expect. But right now, his eyes were filled with amusement as he asked, "You're not forgetting anything?"

Felix, who had just put his shoes on and was about to rush out of the house, tilted his head, before he finally remembered.

"F-"

"Watch your mouth punk!"

Felix did not even get to finish his curse that Yasue scolded him. However, the amusement on his face was clear to Felix.

Facepalming, Felix did not go for the door, and instead crashed into the sofa next to Yasue, groaning.

Yasue chuckled and said, "You are both the smartest and dumbest punk I ever met."

Passing his hand through his hair, Felix replied, "I was tired, and I'm used to running around the city to get anywhere."

The game center would open at 10, and even using public transports, he wouldn't be able to get there in under thirty minutes, hence his panic. Why did he not set an alarm then?

"How are you speaking five languages and forgetting I told you I would bring you yesterday?"

That's right, Yasue had told him the night before he would bring him along. With his car.

Fixing his eyes on the TV, which actually showed a reporter interviewing people that were queuing in front of the game center since 2 AM, Felix explained, "I was tired."

Yasue sneered, "You're always tired."

"I told you, I have a condition. My brain works faster than others, but it also tires more quickly. It's clinical."

"So you've got ADHD."

"No, that's completely different. I used to go to the hospital quite often as a child, actually."

Yasue rolled his eyes, before changing subjects.

"So, excited about today?"

A smile graced Felix's lips as he replied, "Of course I am, we're talking about the release of Epoch! I mean, Stanley Burk is behind it!"

Yasue scratched his tattooed chest, "Well, you better do well. I want to see that money you owe me."

Epoch was a game. It was also why Felix woke up in a panic, and what he and Yasue would be buying today.

Of course, it wasn't just any game. After all, this was 2089, thousands of games were released every year, but Epoch was different from the others.

Because Epoch was the first Full Dive VR game. What this meant, was that for the first time in human history, players would be able to truly visit another world. A fantasy world.

To give a little more context, VR games had already been massively improved through the course of the century. However, no matter what was done, VR games still were different from reality. One still played the game through a screen, even if it was right in front of their eyes.

Moreover, playing VR games was quite expensive as one didn't only need the expensive headset, they also needed the omnidirectional treadmill, and immersion was always faulty.

In comparison, Full Dive was another concept entirely. That's because Full Dive VR didn't mean creating the illusion of placing oneself into another world, it actually had the player's consciousness connect to the game avatar.

This sounded insane, but it had actually been discovered for a couple of decades already, back when the first few uses of Dark Energy were discovered.

However, a problem always sprung up. While there wasn't that much danger with the connection itself, while a player went Full Dive, their brain would treat the information within the simulation as the real world.

And the brain did not like imperfections.

By now, game graphics had been improved enough for players to basically become unable to differentiate between games and reality. However, virtual worlds were not really perfect, all they did was fool the eyes.

The brain, though, somehow could detect those imperfections, and it led to dysfunction. Which meant nasty consequences.

This was actually quite frustrating for gamers, to have the technology for Full Dive, the dream of basically every gamer, available, yet to have no game to use it.

But three months ago, everything changed. Stanley Kurt, the man behind the revolutionary Stanley Machine and one of the forefront experts on Dark Energy, had announced this new game.

Epoch was not to be like other games, and this started right from the conception. Instead of having teams of hundreds of game designers make up a world, Stanley Kurt instead worked with a bunch of other scientists on creating a massive AI that would not only oversee the game world, but also create it from scratch.

Using the database of more than a century of gaming, the promise was a game so perfect that even the brain would not be able to tell the difference. And three months ago, the first beta was made, and it proved to the world that they had succeeded.

Players of the largest guilds in the world had played the game for 30 hours straight, and no problem had appeared whatsoever.

What baffled many though was the game created. Because of how close the game needed to be to reality for the brain to accept it, everyone thought it would either be a game taking place on Earth or maybe a Sci-fi game, yet it was instead an MMORPG taking place in a magical world.

Magic and Reality were about as opposite to each other as things could be, yet somehow, the brain of the players did not fry even as they tried magic.

No one really knew how this was possible, Stanley Kurt himself had revealed that he did not know how this was possible, but by now, this only bothered scientists.

For gamers, this was only good news. They were going to use fucking magic!

'Language!'