Arena Ren

It started as a prank. Or at least that’s what the Kerbs called it when the symbol of a tree with three roots enclosed in a red circle appeared on White Watch Bank. It was four feet across, blood red on the white wash. It was removed from the code within an hour. Maybe only a hundred players saw it, but it was enough to cause a rumor, like a low whisper through the crowd. As people returned from and went out to their respective quests, they couldn’t help wondering what it meant.

Of course, a perpetrator was found and put to death after the sign appeared again seven days later. This time it was on the side of the market house. This time it was harder for the programmers to remove. Still they said that this mark was made with virtual paint and not via cracked coding. They even prepared a show of the supposed culprit washing it off… after having both his arms broken.

All the techs responsible for safeguarding the firewall were forced to watch as well. It was difficult to take, especially since he wasn’t muted.

He just kept screaming, “I didn’t do it. Please! I swear it wasn’t me!”

You see, we had pre-scheduled upgrades and realized too late that the graffiti slipped in during our system shutdown. The official report was that this hoax would end here. We were confident of that at least. By then, however, the rumor formed like a secret answer to the players’ prayers.

And so the image resurfaced, sometimes lopsided, sometimes only with two points instead of three, etched into the undersides of branches and carved into floorboards. Funny, isn’t it, what hope does to people? They assumed that whoever first placed it had a plan. Some started to use the symbol as a greeting. Only ever at night and only when passing through the thick forest, they would hold up three fingers in silence. It took on a new meaning to them, a chance at peace, a chance at regaining their humanity. They should have known that getting out of this world would mean re-entering their previous hellholes. And yet, many dreamed of a new beginning…

But let’s not get ahead of the story. The fact was, when most players heard about some knight in CGI armor, they started to panic. After all, that was rule number one in the handbook. Don’t be a martyr. That meant don’t sacrifice yourself for another player and don’t try to rally against the indefatigable Kerbs. The Gruesome Three secretly enjoyed it when people broke this rule just so they could revive and torture said heroes on live feed over the skies of Arena Ren. When they created this world, they found that the best way to keep players in line was through gross consequence. Yeah, folks tended to play along once they saw their friends flayed above them. What was worse, as an added deterrent, one programmer had the delicious idea to make it rain blood on execution days.

Rule number two in this magical place, was Kill or be killed. Sure, there were safe zones within the town square, but the surrounding forests belonged to the monstrosities of the Gruesome Three and whatever rich benefactors were logged in at the time. Anyone with enough cash and imagination could concoct new challenges to be faced and new story lines for the players to suffer through; all this with the promise that with enough experience and gold, one could win their way out.

The Arena itself was two miles outside of White Watch. It served as a 24-hour entertainment channel. You could view it in the town pubs, but mainly it was for the outside world. Somewhere in the third dimension, viewers were betting for their favorite fighter and contributing to the carnage with gifts— and entrapments. The crowd favorite was currently ^HelmKeeper: fabled as the only player to defeat a Yunjin.

As the story goes, ^HelmKeeper cut off his own ring finger to summon the fiend.

It stood seven feet tall, with six inch claws. Its white scaled skin acted as armor and its huge ears and black eyes made it the ultimate murdering machine. Thinking that he might stand a chance at seeing his family again, ^HelmKeeper defeated the creature in a frenzy of sword and claw.

Although the battle lasted hours, he was finally able to catch the ghastly beast under the chin with his steel and rip its jaw clean off. This was not the killing blow though. The livid Yunjin attacked him, even as its tongue lolled out of the hole in its face. It carved through ^HelmKeeper’s armour and into his flesh, but he used whatever strength he had left to drive his weapon through the Yunjin’s exposed chest. Only then did the demon let out its death howl. ^HelmKeeper was in shock. He had accomplished something no one else could dream of. In the history of this world no one had ever attempted the ritual, let alone tried to defeat the final monster.

What was his reward for this legendary victory? A lifetime of nearly uninterrupted battle in the Arena. He was so popular that the Gruesome Three denied him the healing potions and upgrades people tried to purchase for him. All this to increase ratings and simultaneously punish him for destroying their favorite pet. And yet, he persevered for seven long weeks, crushing opponents under his Yunjin War Hammer the way you might splatter berries under your spoon.

But none of this was for fun. None of this was the way it had been publicized. This was supposed to be a playground of warfare and fairy tales, a place to rehabilitate, to make up for personal deficiencies and crime. To ^HelmKeeper and to a hundred thousand other convicts, Arena Ren became the kind of game you wished you had an escape key for.

Every time a player left the safety of the village they were met with the horror of their situation. Between the curses of witches, the ire of trolls and the sinister boredom of the onlookers, the forests were riddled with ways to die. In most MMORPGs, this wouldn’t be an issue; you’d just respawn if you bit the sword.

Not here.

Here death is as permanent as your high school memories, and just as painful.

That’s why the symbol stood out like a calling card. People were certain they’d seen it before, but the meaning was lost amidst years of besmirched memes. Still the rumor filled every scrap of stolen conversation in the woods and even in the dungeons beneath the Arena. It gave people a dangerous hope. Even ^HelmKeeper, who had kept a vow of silence since he entered the Arena, was not completely immune to the talk. Listening to the eager voices of fellow gladiators was like hearing kids discuss what they expected from Santa.

“I’m telling you, someone is looking out for us.”

“Yeah, all we have to do is hold out in here. Before long we’ll be rewarded for everything we’ve been through.”

It was hard to listen to.

They had no sense of where the image came from or if it meant anything at all. While he listened to their chatter, ^HelmKeeper could only think about what lay ahead of him. What would the public think of him if he ever was freed? He had killed eighty nine people in his time here, not counting the ones slaughtered in the PVP areas before he knew the true stakes of this game. It’s not as though he could cite the rulebook in his defense.

Even before all of this, he’d always made choices for himself, it was never about the money or the drugs. He’d turned to crime because he knew he was meant to be somebody. Becoming a boss would give him the status he was born into, like his father, and his grandfather before him. Now look at him, a professional killer, a living legend, sleeping in a dungeon while his real body was in an amniotic tube somewhere. He looked down at his arms, erased of the tattoos and the scars, even his birthmarks were gone. For the first time in his life he felt naked and alone.

Two months into ^HelmKeeper’s sentence in the Arena, he still had not met his match. He was however, faced with one of the prisoners he’d heard talking of revolution the night before. The player was a throw away, something to keep the audience occupied before the real challenge of the day. Yet, ^HelmKeeper found it hard to finish him. Intimidat0r75 was kind of fast, he could avoid the hammer at every turn, but looking back at the footage now, ^Helmkeeper didn’t seem to be in the fight at all. It was only when the challenger aimed his sword for his throat that he finally reacted with his signature precision.

After he lifted his hammer, he seemed to notice the blood on it for the first time. You could see him taking it all in as it dripped down onto the soiled ground. He dropped to his knees, removed his blood coated helmet and looked into the eyes of the crowd’s avatars. Who knows why the Kerbs allowed him this small respite. Maybe they had souls after all. Or maybe they were instructed not to outright slaughter a crowd pleaser like him just because he took a knee.

^HelmKeeper knew he was muted to the outside world, and so in the thirty seconds he had before the Kerbs really would kill him, he did the only thing he could think to. He took his gilded dagger from its sheath and in the same movement, slit his own throat.

Let me tell you something. There has never been absolute silence in the Arena. Before that moment, you could always hear all manner of hysterics. People came here for a wild show after all, a chance to escape the mundanity of RL. It’s funny how you can forget what you are witnessing, until it becomes all too real. In the instant that ^HelmKeeper’s blood erupted from him, the entire area was drowned by that realization.

And as he lay writhing in the dust, many audience members claim to have seen something more from him than the throes of a dying 15-year-old boy. In fact, a video that surfaced on the dark web seemed to prove the rumor true. To the right of the growing red pool beside him, he drew a three pronged fork in the sand and encircled it right before the Kerbs stomped through his insignia and kicked him full in the face.

Naturally, ^Helmkeeper was revived in order to receive his true penalty for treason, although the RL audience was never privy to this kind of demonstration. Somehow, his execution did not register with the other players. They had seen the broadcast of his final seconds and they had known by then exactly what they saw him draw. Even as he screamed, even as his life blood colored in the cracks of cobblestone, players did not recoil the way they had a hundred times before. No, this time the children of Arena Ren stared up into the eyes of their captors and listened closely to the warning they relayed.

“Being a martyr means you stand for nothing and your parents will know you were a coward. Only a coward would kill themselves instead of fighting for their freedom. If you will not fight then you will die.”

The words ran down their faces, but suddenly every player sentenced to life here was able to lick their lips and smile back at the Gruesome Three. For the symbol they now dreamed of had solidified in their minds. 126 years after it was first sketched on a picket sign, the man in despair resurfaced as a child in defiance. It took the courage of their greatest warrior to help them understand what they must do. Already as ^Helmkeeper was dismembered above town square, some began to follow suit by whatever weapon they carried. By sword and axe and lance and crossbow, players took their own lives to free themselves.

Now the Gruesome Three had to make a choice. They would reveal the extent of the mass suicide if they continued to resuscitate them for display. Instead they tried to cover up the scene by calling in Kerbs to clear the chaos and chase away whoever was still too scared to die. Regardless of their efforts, the streets grew slick.

***

The software company responsible for the Arena, Three Wisemen Corp, is still in business because, let’s face it, any stories of criminals actually being killed in this game are just fairy tales. When people want to know what goes on there, they don’t ask the authorities and they don’t ask the parents. Both parties are excruciatingly biased. The countries involved will tell you this was their contribution to the world’s growing juvenile delinquency problem. Give the kids what they want and keep them out of trouble. The families will tell you they knew from the beginning what was really being planned, but their pleas for mercy fell on empty blog pages.

If you want to know the truth, you have to be initiated. Of course you must commit a serious crime and be within the age range. I wouldn’t recommend it though. See some stories were created to scare children into behaving, while others are created like a challenge. What with the recent loss in numbers, a call has gone out to youth detention centers everywhere. They say you can earn your freedom here, but take it from me; that’s really more of a slogan.☮

Photo by James Yarema on Unsplash