To the average person, a game is merely all it is. To others though, it could mean the world.
To Warren, games meant an escape from his shitty reality and a break from the mundane.
When he heard about *Ascension of Souls*, it wasn’t from some flashy trailer or influencer review. It just appeared one morning on a quiet forum he frequented. No ads. No fanfare. Just a link and a date.
The moment the servers opened, he logged in. The startup sequence was crude and lacking polish, but that only made it feel more personal. Realer, in a strange way.
There was no character customization. No sliders, no names, no class choices. You entered as yourself, or close enough. Warren didn’t mind. If anything, he appreciated the honesty of it.
He hadn’t expected the world to be so beautiful. The forests moved like they were breathing. The towns felt alive. The people, even more so.
Warren spent the first two days just watching.
He told himself he was learning the game, getting a feel for things. But mostly, he just wandered from place to place, keeping his distance, listening.
He liked how unaware everyone was. How relaxed. There was something raw about it, like watching people before they realized they were being watched.
He followed a few players. Not out of malice. He was just curious. One girl spent almost an hour trying to pick herbs and failing every time. Another kept getting lost between map markers, doubling back again and again.
Warren found it funny.
Not in a mocking way. He just liked seeing the little things people did when they thought no one noticed.
He made mental notes. Where people liked to go. How long they stayed in one place. What time of day they usually logged off.
It was comforting, building patterns.
No one spoke to him directly, and he didn’t try to force it. He liked the quiet. He liked observing.
Sometimes he would sit in the corner of a tavern just to listen to the laughter. It reminded him of something. He wasn’t sure what.
When someone finally approached him, a low-level aspiring mage asking if he needed help finding a quest board, Warren smiled too quickly. His answer came out too slow.
The man with the staff looked uncertain. He left soon after.
Warren watched him go.
He knew he had come off strange. He would fix that next time.
It was still early. The game was new. People were still open. Still soft.
Only after observing for the first day did Warren finally try his hand at combat. He entered the forest unarmed and was lucky enough to find a goblin off guard as it napped after eating, right next to an animal carcass. Sneaking up behind it, he grabbed its rusty blade and immediately jammed it into the chest of the goblin.
And Boy did it scream
Warren’s heart didn’t race with fear. It surged with something far more primal. Excitement. Satisfaction. The goblin thrashed beneath him, its limbs flailing weakly as the blade sunk deeper.
Its shriek was sharp and wet, a panicked cry that faded into a gurgle. Blood, if it could be called that, soaked into the dirt below. The goblin’s eyes locked with his for a split second before the life drained out of them.
Warren stayed crouched over the corpse, breathing slowly. He felt calm. Grounded. More real than he had in weeks.
A small chime echoed softly in his ears.
[You have slain a Goblin. Experience gained.]
He watched as the body began to lose shape. The edges blurred first. The color dulled. The weight of the corpse grew lighter as it flickered gently, pieces breaking away into tiny glowing particles.
Within minutes, the goblin was gone.
Warren stood, wiping his hands on the grass. The blood didn’t cling. The smell faded. The world didn’t punish him. It rewarded him.
He looked down at the rusty blade in his grip. It was old and nicked, but it was his now.
The forest was quiet again. Sunlight filtered through the trees like nothing had happened.
Warren didn’t stop at one.
The next goblin didn’t even get the chance to scream. He approached from behind, blade dragging lightly through the dirt, and drove it straight through the back of its neck.
The body hit the ground like a sack of meat. No alert. No warning. Just silence and blood.
He stood over the corpse and waited again. Watched it flicker. Watched it vanish.
The goblins started to run when they saw him. He learned their paths. Their schedules. Where they liked to sleep. Where they gathered. He stopped thinking of them as enemies. They were prey.
The rusty blade was replaced with a jagged one. Then a pair. Then a sickle. He started using traps too. At first, simple snares. Then spike pits. Rope tripwires with sharpened branches.
One goblin got its foot caught and screamed. He sat nearby and listened to it howl for several minutes before walking over and slitting its throat.
It was only through their deaths that he felt exhilarated. Alive.
Eventually, the goblins stopped being fun.
They screamed the same way. They died the same way. They were too predictable. Too easy.
Warren tried to mix it up. He used poison. He triggered traps while they were half-awake. He tested how long he could leave one alive and still keep it from crawling away.
But the thrill was fading.
Even the way their bodies disintegrated began to feel routine. The glow. The flicker. The silence after.
He stopped feeling anything when the experience messages popped up. The chime that once brought him satisfaction now barely registered.
On the third morning since the game opened, he stood in the middle of a clearing, surrounded by what had once been a full patrol. Nine goblins. All dead. All vanished.
And he felt... nothing.
He sat down beside the pile of weapons they’d dropped, let his fingers trail over the blades, the clubs, the jagged bits of metal they called tools.
His eyes drifted to the horizon.
There were other monsters. Wolves. Boars. Undead.
But he had seen the way they moved. They weren’t enough.
They lacked the spark. The flicker behind the eyes. That small glimmer of fear. That twitch of thought.
He wanted something that could beg.
Something that could understand.
And with thousands of players in this village alone, he was positive he would have plenty of possibilities to pick from.