Respawn Point

The last thing Sakura Hayashi remembered from her previous life was the energy drink slipping from her fingers during hour thirty-seven of her Ethereal Kingdoms marathon stream. She had been pushing for the world-first clear of the Obsidian Citadel raid, her guild depending on her to maintain the healing rotation, when her vision tunneled and the room tilted sideways. Her chat log, she later imagined, probably displayed shock before anyone realized it was not a joke.

She woke up in a field of blue grass under a sky with two moons, wearing starter-class cloth armor and holding a wooden staff that she recognized immediately as the Beginning Rod — a weapon so pathetically weak that most players vendored it within ten minutes of character creation. A translucent blue rectangle hovered in her peripheral vision, displaying information she had seen ten thousand times before but never from this angle: Sakura - Level 1 Acolyte - HP: 100/100 - MP: 50/50. She tried to open the menu. The menu opened. She tried to find the logout button. There was no logout button.

The panic lasted about forty-five minutes, which she spent alternately hyperventilating, attempting to wake up, and systematically testing every interface option the game provided. The world was real — she could feel the grass, smell the iron-rich soil, hear the ambient music that she had once listened to through headphones nowplaying from everywhere and nowhere. When a level-three slime bounced toward her across the field, she killed it on reflex with a basic staff attack, and the experience notification that chimed in her ears felt like a death sentence and a starting pistol at the same time.