Skyeater Chronicles B1 Chapter 1

Chapter 1.

Hunger is inevitable. At one point or another, we all get hungry. Every gamer knows it, and it is often the cause of us having to exit that amazing tournament we were so close to winning, or going AFK and getting killed or kicked because we had to leave to satisfy that stupid need to eat. No matter whether young or old, rich or poor, no matter what we ate, we all likely have suffered for our basic needs in out gaming lives.

So when I heard about the game Reikal, a new MMORPG that allowed you to have an option to live inside the game and eat in the game and gain stats from it, of course I had to jump straight into it without reading the fine print. Big mistake.

* * *

I always had a great and insatiable appetite. It came with the territory of being an active, high-metabolism young adult. I would consume pounds and pounds of food each day, and it would never be enough. Even on the budget of a professional streamer, it wouldn’t be enough. Goodness knows I lost many a match of Bedwars to Technoblade because of a sudden pang of hunger that threw off my aim or click or spacebar pounding.

I was eating away when my friend Jason messaged me on Discord.

"Hey Bottomless Pit, I heard about a new game that is dominating the charts! An MMORPG that people are able to transfer their minds directly into!"

I nearly choked on my sandwich. I hurriedly typed out a reply.

"What? How is this possible? Are they just living in the game now? Is that legal?"

I could nearly hear the chuckle in his reply.

"Nah, man. It’s like a capsule thing, except for hospice type situations where people are released into the game full-time. Those guys are living in the game while their bodies are gone. Pretty caring, huh?"

"Hol up, man. You’re saying that causal players don’t get this option?"

"Na, there is the option, but it requires so much more paperwork and TOS and is fifty times as expensive for non-charity cases that no one bothers with it anymore."

I sat stunned. I could live every geek’s dream and get in the game. Not only that, there was a lot of food in RPGs that I could stock up on, as as a streamer with clout, I could make buckets of cash from this once I got good at the game. There was just one thing left to ask.

"Is Technoblade playing this game yet?"

* * *

“Now you’re absolutely certain that you want the move-in option?”

The assistant looked at me with a questioning look. “Once you go in like this, you’re stuck in there. One character, one race. You can respawn, but there are penalties to doing so afterwards.”

I nodded once curtly. “I am absolutely positive.”

The assistant sighed and began to bring out a stack of release forms for me to sign. I skimmed over some of them, not reading quite all of it but getting the gist and signing each one. I finished it off with a whopping $5000 for the process to begin. Most of that went to legally disposing of my body after it would be done and to keep the server space for my consciousness constantly up and running. A small price to pay for virtual immortality.

The assistant led me to a back room where I was told to wait for the doctors to come for me. I played a quick match of Bedwars solo, got my winstreak to 1,200, and then they came. They wore a nice set of scrubs over lab coats, and they led me to another room with a chair and a bunch of cables hooked up to it. They all led to a massive hard drive which I assumed would house my consciousness in a few hours. They strapped me in, prepared a sedative for me, got me all injected, joked and chatted with me about games and streaming while it kicked in, and finally I began to drift off. Just as I felt the final slight pinch of the last cable being hooked up and the last bit of my consciousness slipping into code, there was a loud BANG which surprised the doctors as the door blew open, some muffled yelling as another wet sound started repeatedly echoing off the sterile walls, and in the last bits of my fading vision, a hooded figure walked up to my chair. He took something out of his pocket: small, pointy, and indiscernible to my blurry eyes, and he shoved it in my indefensible mouth. The last thing I saw was him taking out the knife, prepared to stab downward, with the last words I would ever hear:

“For Al-Tora, the Skyeater.”

Matthew Finch, aged 19. Died to a stab wound to the heart while in the final 3 bits of his mind being downloaded to a hard drive. Hard drive intact. Delivered to Reikal servers for upload after clearance from evidence department after scanning final half hour of life.

Then I awoke.