Tales Of Survival : Erangel

Prologue

A harmonious gentle melody orchestrated by nature slowly rocked me back into reality from a deep slumber I sunk in.

I opened my eyes to an incoming monotonous day, the only newness being the beginning of a new month of the year 2036.

I am Aiden Hester, a full-time VR gamer with an individual status in the PUBGVR Canadian national gaming community.

PUBGVR was a genuinely innovative and much-awaited version of the original battle royal game, PUBG, which stood for Player Unknown's Battleground.

I was once the chief programmer of a little upcoming company by day and a fearsome soldier by night, wiping out enemies online with my friends one after the other.

Eventually, I gained recognition and popularity from viewers during my streams due to my skillset and gameplay, gradually ascending the national leaderboard from four-hundredth to seventy-fifth.

I quit my job and became a full-time VR gamer, earning higher revenue from my audience, topped up by a monthly allowance from PUBGVR's company due to my placement.

To this day, certain things remain unclear to me.

In the early beginning of my discovery of PUBGVR, I was the type of gamer commonly known as a noob; all the built-up intel from playing the pc and mobile version was rendered null.

I had to learn everything back from scratch except for the game's various battlegrounds and terrain, for they remained the same.

It was an entirely new dimension; having the possibility to immerse into an alternate world and being your avatar, feeling the environment, hearing the game sound in 8D, the gravity, holding the guns and feeling their weight, controlling their recoil, maneuvering on how to position one's avatar and what angle to lean in for a stable gun spray and so much more.

Slowly but surely, I picked up on bits and pieces of the game's mechanism, struggled to heighten my mastery, and got better at carrying out actions like accurately spraying an enemy over long distances with an M416 AR equipped with either a 3X or 6X scope.

In the meantime, with AR weapons like the AKM, QBZ etc., it was a total catastrophe due to their recoil.

Let me not get started on my sniping skills and how I could not spray an idle target correctly.

However, one faithful day, I woke up in my bed, dazed, as if emerging from a coma.

I remember sitting in my living room in April, the year 2033, complaining about my workload and how I wished more from life then waking up to January 2035, oblivious to what happened during the two-years' time gap, my memories blank on my life after January 2033.

That night made me believe I was going crazy, and I almost thought of the hypothesis that time travel was real, but it was utterly absurd.

I ran tests and checkups for a few weeks at a hospital.

After listening to my crazy recital, the doctors believed I had undergone an emotional trauma during those two years that caused my mind to block out the memories as a defense mechanism.

The cherry on top; the first time I logged into my PUBGVR account, I found myself in possession of newfound knowledge of the game; my in-game battle reflexes were faster.

I did not recall training with the different variety of weapon choices present on the field or learning how to control close to perfection the recoil of other guns other than the M416 AR.

Yet, I naturally manipulated most weapons efficiently, even suppressing the recoil of guns such as the M762 AR, known to be exceptionally high and took arduous practice to control in terms of stability.