【SAO】 Life in Skyrim

Sec. 5 【A New Life】

Approximately three-thousand players have been killed within this month alone of being trapped in Skyrim Virtual Reality. The reason? Lost battles, crime, suicides, and PKers.

Player Killers.

That's right, players are killing each other left and right. I don't know why, but I guess they still don't believe this entire thing is one big brutal death game.

And well, I guess I don't either. It's just so difficult to earn gold and actually level up. You actually need to practice. People aren't too fond of that because IRL, it only requires time and just little finger movements of a controller to fire a bow. You have a cursor to point out your target. But in here, where you're actually inside a game... there's nothing to help you.

It's challenging too, time-wise. We still need sleep, we need to eat, but there are so many skills we need to increase to survive. I've almost died a couple times that required the entire team to save me, but I'm getting better at archery... sort of.

Kurt, DN, Darth, Cara, Anthony, Emilia, and I have been staying at the same camp with Chuck's guild and other players for a month now. Majority left the camp to go their own way, but nobody knows what became of them since most of those guys were solo players. I didn't really care when they left, though. All I wanted was to stick by my friends, so their departure didn't impact me like it did with the others. I only knew their names.

We still live beside the walls of Whiterun in tents, too afraid to venture outside the hold. Each night we have shifts, guarding the camp in pairs. We've never been too comfortable to go explore, so our strongest boss to fight was probably a pack of wolves. I mean we're only Level 9, with Kurt, Anthony, and DN being Level 10, and Darth is way ahead of us with his status of Level 12. Emilia is well... Level 7.

"Honest pay for honest work. Here's your gold." Severio Pelagia hands me a pouch of septims for gathering wheat and harvesting crops from his field. To earn more money, I've been doing this all morning until noon, so I'm really, really tired. I've harvested everything from the fields of every farm until my knapsack was filled with nothing but vegetables and bundles of wheat. Not to mention chop firewood, but I'm unfortunately not physically built to cleanly cut logs of wood.

Still, luckily for me, I've earned a hefty sum of gold while I'm at it. I even talk to the NPCs while I work. Severio does know how to hold a conversation, but to no surprise, he does repeat a few lines of dialogue while watching me. It was still nice to have company while the others were out hunting.

I count my septims. Fifty coins for the wheat, Sixty for cabbages, and twelve for potatoes. Only 122 septims... this is so much more straining and time-consuming than just pressing a button repeatedly to harvest. This required manual labour and I'm so damn exhausted. I had to smell cow shit for six hours straight while pulling potatoes.

Next, while I'm drenched in sweat, I have to haul my ass all the way to the Battle-Born Farm because Severio isn't going to buy my leeks. I don't know why he was programmed that way, but sucks to be me I guess. I sigh. More work for me.

When I sold the leeks, I made twelve more septims at least, which is a lot to me. 134 gold pieces in total. That's barely enough to buy iron armour...

Sigh. I can really use a nap. Earning money in-game is soooo much easier.

I close my eyes for only a second, savouring these last moments of rest before I need to go back to the camp. However, someone has the audacity to interrupt me with an obnoxious yell. "A Giant!" someone - NPC most likely - screams nearby the farm, startling me into jumping and snapping my head in the direction of the sudden earthquake-like sensations.