Unital Ring: The Mysterious New World

Trouble For Sinon

Sinon's having a hard, confusing time.

One moment, she's in Gun Gale Online, farming high-level mechanical mobs for rare materials to upgrade her beloved Hecate II in preparation for the upcoming Battle of Bullets. After three consecutive failures to win (well, she tied for first in the third one, but she doesn't count that as a success), she's focused solely on victory. She made the trip to the high-level dungeon to avoid the attention of her rivals as well.

All she needed was one more drop when, at 4:50 pm, the current weirdness began.

The dungeon shook, her vision was clouded with rainbows, and next she noticed she was in a town she's never been to before. No, forget never seen before, it was unlike any town she's seen in GGO. For starters, it was stone buildings and brick roads, far from the steel and asphalt cities in GGO. As she pondered on her surroundings in the grey city, more players warped in around her, all unrecognizable, all of them male. Those two facts made her uncomfortable, so she come to her current position, on the second story of a nearby building.

She listens to the group, apparently a party of ten, just as confused as she is about their current situation. One of them found a change in the user interface of the system menu and attempted to contact the development team. Soon after, they took the only available option, logging out. After gathering that much intel, Sinon reenacts the system menu command, the right index and middle fingers drawing a circle in the air. A circular menu came up, with eight available options to choose from. Her fingers automatically take her to the COMMUNICATIONS option and FRIENDS tab to follow. She knows he was online, doing some farming of his own, but to her utter disappointment, Jaymes' name does not appear.

When the street below her goes quiet, Sinon takes another look outside to see ten kneeling avatars. Like in ALO and GGO, avatars remain in place for a while in the environment when their players log out, a mechanism to prevent escape combat by leaving the game. That meant this town was not a city, where the mechanism doesn't exist, but part of the wildlands. Then again, there are no civilians here, so calling it a ruin is more appropriate.

That meant two things: Sinon could attack them (she won't) and monsters could attack them.

As if the gaming gods read her mind, Sinon heard insectoid-like sounds from the right side of the road. Long, thin shadows creep out from a side path, insectoids that look like an unholy cross between earwigs and centipedes. Size-wise, they look to be no harm, but the avatars are stationary until their players return. "Come on—log back in!" Her words fell on deaf ears, and as the five insects skitter towards the ten men, Sinon reaches for the MP7 at her waist.

She makes the smart decision to not act, but not to allow the players to die and she reaps the rewards. Call it self-preservation, but she had no interest to draw the attention of more of the centipedes with gunfire. Her silencer for the MP7 is buried deep in her item storage. All she can do is watch as the centipedes mount the men, and hope their fancy equipment protects them for a while.

The first one to be bitten dies seconds later.

Stunned, Sinon looks back to the circular menu and clicks the STATUS icon. There's no way he died that quickly. Maybe she misjudged the strength of the centipedes because the other option is as unlikely as she's...Level-1.

Oh hell. Not only has her stats been reset, but she also finds three bars below her white HP bar, a green MP bar, a blue TP bar, and a yellow SP bar. She understood MP, but TP and SP were unknown to her. No time to figure that out...five of those players are victims of the centipedes, and the remaining five are next. At this rate, the entire party will be wiped out.