Sam and Kelsey both kipped themselves up onto their feet. Voice offered a hand to Daisy and pulled her to her feet when she took it. I got my feet under me and raised myself up a moment later, only to realise my party were just staring at the worm. As my head rose above the wall, I realised why. What was left of the worm was burning like a candle wick.

  The thing had been flammable.

  “Big badda boom…” I muttered to myself, looking at the blaze.

  “New rule,” Voice declared. “No standing within seven metres of your detonating fireballs.”

  “Agreed,” Sam said. Dusting off his jacket.

  “Agreed,” I echoed with a sigh. Hey, they weren’t banning me from using them. “That felt stronger than the ones I did back on campus.”

  “We are a bit closer,” Daisy admitted.

  “When was the last time you checked your status?” Voice asked. I thought about it… When I opened the chest? No, that was just a pop-up for what was in it.

  “Might have been a while…” I admitted.

  I opened up my HUD and clicked on the blinking icon for the log. Judging by the time stamp, it was around the time of the fight with the two scorpions.

  ‘Your intensive experience in battle with your spells has brought a deeper understanding of your magic, resonance point gained.’

  No new spell this time, but my resonance had gone up.

  “Resonance is now at four,” I confirmed. “The fight with the scorpions, I’m guessing.”

  Kelsey had just tossed another rock into the field. It bounced a couple of times, but then nothing happened. We looked at each other.

  “Just the one?” I asked. “Seems light for an infestation…”

  We tried throwing stones into different places in the field with the same result.

  Voice came back from speaking to the Farmer and handed us each a gold coin.

  “Thanked us for clearing it so quickly, said those worms get pretty territorial. He was shocked at how flammable it was.”

  The road led to a crossroads, and our destination was on the right-hand side, on the corner with the road heading back to Landing. It was a three-story-tall block of a building and it largely had the feel of an office building, but the back end of it had two huge shuttered freight bays. ‘Central Services’ was signposted in large fading letters on the top left corner of each face. Around it was once a car park, which nature was doing its best to reclaim. A couple of trees, but mostly weeds, had broken through the tarmac. There was a crowd of players, mostly in the tutorial starting gear, milling around in it.

  They didn’t look happy to see our approach.

  “Overlords have claimed this land.” One of them told us as we approached, moving towards us from the crowd.

  “We have a quest inside,” I told him.

  “Doesn’t matter. This is our territory.”

  I turned to talk to Voice, thinking it had just been a suggestion on where to find the parts.

  When an arrow came from the crowd and hit Kelsey. I looked at her pained expression and my heart went cold.

  “Leave, or we will make you leave,” a voice from the crowd called out.

  “First Blood?” I said to Voice.

  “First Blood,” he agreed.

  Generally speaking, I’m not a fan of open-world PvP. In my experience, it’s rarely a fair fight. I don’t like being taken out with nothing I can do about it. I also don’t see the fun in taking out people who can’t fight back. And in my opinion, that describes about 90% of it.

  Don’t get me wrong, when the 10% happens, it is awesome. It’s just not common enough to justify the other 90%. If I want PvP, I'll go to the PvP zone.

  My friends tend to be the same. It’s part of why we have gamed with each other for so long. That said, we’re not victims. If someone hits you, you hit back harder.

  We do recognise that emotions in the moment can get the better of you, so we had a rule. First Blood needed to be shed. If we agreed it had been... the kid gloves come off.

  The speaker had told us they had claimed this place, so all of them were the same group. That made it easier. Voice was moving towards the speaker. His shield appeared on his arm as he raised it.

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  I turned towards the crowd, equipped my inferno staff and finished casting through it. The closest in the crowd was ten metres away. I aimed for the middle of the crowd, which had all bunched up to look intimidating. It just made them a more appealing target.

  Voice collided with the speaker. His shocked face at someone actually bashing him with a shield happened just as my fireball went Kaboom!

  Our tank had been ready for the big ball of fire. So he wasn’t rocked, unlike the player he hit. This just made it easy for him to follow up his shield bash with his sword strike.

  The aftermath of my spell made it clear: rank three spells are strong. Half of the crowd was down from just the first one. That didn’t stop me from following it up with another.

  Sam ran past me, shooting one of his pistols at one of the players who was charging towards us. Sam was looking really pissed off. My second shot out to hit the somewhat depleted crowd. It devastated them.

  Then I heard a rapid series of twangs and several players fell over with arrows embedded in their bodies. I looked over at Kelsey, the arrow that hit her was gone, only a trail of blood on her sleeve remained. She nocked another arrow and loosed it. I looked for my next target. Disappointingly, there weren't enough of them standing to justify another fireball. So I hit one with a Fire Bolt instead.

  Voice brought the end of his shield down on the speaker's head. He then raised it to block a strike from a player in a leather jacket. One of Sam’s rounds struck that fellow, turning his charge into a collapse at Voice’s feet.

  I saw another player just fall over dead, Daisy’s infliction, I would later learn.

  My own took out another player who had survived my .

  It seems some of our enemies were good fighters, as they managed to get into range of Voice and Sam and were engaged in melee. Their movements were too hectic to risk a ranged spell, so I switched to my Storm Staff and moved in to join the fray.

  One of the players facing off against Voice was decked out in a Warden’s set; he was probably the more capable of the three remaining players. Next to him and engaged with Sam was a longsword wielder. I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t have been much of a problem, except the third player carrying a pair of daggers kept trying to circle our Dragoon to get at Daisy. Which makes sense, you always go for the healer.

  Sam was doing a good job of containing the rogue, but it did mean he couldn’t give the longsword man his full attention. The Longswordman, in turn, was finding that he couldn’t attack Voice or he risked injury from Sam.

  The three of them, though, were getting increasingly infuriated with how the damage from every single one of their attacks that made it through was disappearing before their eyes.

  “Stop fucking cheating! HACKERS!” The rogue kept shouting out.

  I decided to silence the muppet with a enhanced thrust to the face.

  It turned out to be super effective.

  With the rogue down, Sam finished off the swordsman easily, and with him down, the one in armour fell shortly after.

  With the fight over, I looked around, but none of them seemed alive. I felt the tension I hadn’t known I was feeling melt away.

  I checked my mana, 40% remaining. I’d need to watch out for that, it wasn’t a sustainable way to fight. Still. I looked over at the circle of dead players where my fireballs had hit. Those two spells alone accounted for most of the casualties.

  “Big badda boom…” Daisy said from alongside me.

  “Big badda boom…” I agreed.

  “Are we going to come to regret this?” Sam asked. “They hit Kelse, so they had it coming… but…”

  “They drew first blood. They started it. We just finished it.” I said.

  “I’ll warn the others…” Voice said and went into his HUD.

  “I can’t believe how effective that fireball is…” Kelsey said as she looked at the corpses, which had started disintegrating into specks of light.

  “Anyone with any sort of armour survived the first one,” said Daisy. “Though the second one finished off those who didn’t move…”

  “Ooo, Loot!” Kelsey said. The sparkles of light dissipated, leaving behind little sacks where some of the players had died. “How are we splitting it?”

  There wasn’t much worth splitting, so we ended up just leaving most of it behind. Some of them had been gathering, so we took those plants in case they were worth something, but none of us felt like taking the rags of broken starter gear, which is what most of them had. The Warden had dropped ten gold coins and his sword. Voice stored that as a backup of his own weapon. I took the daggers from the rogue, with a promise to put them into the guild storage. They were nice weapons, just not suitable for any of us.

  Voice stood watch, while Daisy, Kelsey, Sam and I meditated to restore our mana.

  Once full, we turned our attention to the building. We tried the front door and it opened into a reception area. Dead terminals lined the foyer. A circular reception desk sat in the centre of the room, and shuttered doors blocked further travel into the building. From the looks of it, none of them had been successful in forcing open those shutters.

  For the first time, my sunglasses showed me something different. There was a green line leading from the doors around behind one of the terminals, then it crossed under the floor to the reception desk.

  At the reception desk, there was a helpful box with ‘shutters’ written on it. It was controlled by a key, which someone had helpfully found and left in it. Turning it did nothing, though. The line continued on from the box.

  Following the line led me to a filing cabinet which had been left open and empty, but moving it aside, I found a fusebox. Which was locked. I looked around for something to smash it open.

  “I can take care of that,” said Kelsey, who pulled something from her pocket, crouched down, putting her body between us and the box. A moment later, she stepped back and showed off the now unlocked fuse box.

  “Kelsey Eliz…” whatever Sam was saying became incomprehensible to me. “... did you learn to pick locks?” A disapproving Sam demanded.

  “Uncle Jim,” she responded with total innocence.

  “Did anyone else have Sam speaking weird there?” Daisy asked.

  “Minor identity protection.” Voice said. “I’m guessing you called her by her real name?”

  I bent down to check out the fuse box while Sam tried to take a moral stand with Kelsey, who, like all teenagers who find a thread, used it to try to make it about Sam endangering her.

  The switches were helpfully labelled. So I flipped the ones for the door power. I stood up and tried the key again.

  I silenced the family squabble with the rattle of door shutters opening.