Try a new game, my friends said.

It’ll be fun, they said. Relaxing, and you'll be able to socialize without ever having to leave your house!

“Final Eden.” The latest VRMMORPG to grace the gaming scene and provide entertainment to thousands and give antisocial creatures like me a way to connect with the outside world.

Liars. 

My friends are liars.

It’s a really good joke, but socializing is not on the menu.

I am, apparently. For pretty much everything. 

And I haven’t even left the safety of the starting zone! Ha! What fun!

No. This is not fun.

Running—no—slithering—through a forest at max slithery-speed because a GIANT MONGOOSE WANTS TO EAT ME doesn’t fit any idea of fun I have ever had ever. 

I am not having fun, and I am most certainly not in my house. 

I didn’t even want to play this game. Yes, I’m a gamer. Yes, becoming a NEET after losing my job took a lot out of me. But no, I’m not rich enough to buy a game that requires equipment that was more expensive than everything I owned put together.

My friends, though, they’re the cheeky ones who wanted to play. They entered my name into a contest and used up all my luck on winning an equipment set that came with a contract that I couldn’t sell it.

I would have simply not signed the contract, but the deal came with a sorely needed income, so I handed over my dignity.

I love my friends. They’re great. I love that they love me so much to help me out in my time of need.

If I ever manage to breathe the same air as them in the future, I’m going to wrap my hands around their necks and strangle them all to death. Unless my inner eldritch being finds something more creative to do to them by the time I find my wait out his mess. Then I’ll let it take over.

Right now, however, I need to not get eaten by a rampaging mongoose. 

Ah, yes. The mongoose—shockingly more terrifying than a lovecraftian horror when it's trying to eat you alive. All teeth and claws and saliva and stuff. 

Not that I looked back, mind you.

Well. Maybe by accident, but it was only in the interest of self preservation.

I’m small, and the forest is dense, but the overgrowth only does so much to hide me as I wriggle through. The thing is biologically programmed to kill little snakes like me. Bigger ones than me, even. 

I’m barely a snack to this thing. Like a single piece of popcorn.

Not that there’s popcorn here or anything normal. The forest breaks to an amazing hill-side view I have no time to appreciate, and I’m pretty sure I see a dragon flying overhead. 

It’s fine. Everything is fine.

Oh, look, rocks. My grassy run has run its course, it seems, and I’m not skirting through tall blades of grass but craggly rocks that scrape uncomfortably against my scales. 

I have a love-hate relationship with rocks. They made great hidey-holes—but a good sized one could easily crush me. In my current predicament, I have no time to test how stable they are, so I just have to go with instinct and pray that I don’t find some other death waiting for me.

Seeing a promising escape, I slip into a narrow crevice of a rocky wall. It seems stable enough, and there’s space for my tiny, snake-self to wiggle into. I even have the space to coil around and look back at a big hungry yellow eyeball staring hungrily at me through the sliver before it pulls back to assault the rock. 

Scrape, scrape, scrape, scrape!

My hearing isn’t great, but I can feel the sound vibrating to my core. Everytime its claws dig at the stone grates against me in a way that makes me cringe and think, Ha! Noa, you’re going to die today, and what a gruesome death it will be!

Reality is, though, as long as I don’t leave my refuge, the chance of becoming mongoose food is pretty slim. Starving here waiting for it to lose interest, however? That’s a real fear. 

I may have slithered right on into my own tomb.

Should I just… jump into its mouth and get it over with? This is all a bloody nightmare anyway.

Scrape, scrape, scrape, scrape!

“Nope,” I say out loud—or… hiss, I guess—and turn back to see if I had any luck left. I had at least until nightfall to try and make my escape, so I may as well make the best of my situation, right?

Right?

Ugh. How the hell did I get here? I wonder as I explore my new home. Despite the fact that as a former human I should probably be offended at the lack of homeliness of the dwelling, it wasn’t half bad. It was a good temperature because it faced the sunlight, and it was much bigger than I first thought. 

It was very big, in fact.

I hesitate when I lose the light from the crack, but I’m pretty good at nosing around blind. What’s the worst that could happen? 

It’s not like most things were going to bother me with this small a space to maneuver. Anything bigger than me wasn’t likely to be able to weasel their way in, and anything smaller would become a much needed snack.

Again, thoughts a self-respecting former human shouldn’t have.

But when you’ve been at the bottom of the food chain as a snake for a week, you get over the squeamishness pretty fast. It comes shortly after the acceptance stage of the grief cycle and right before one turns into a cannibal because they’re hangry.

Plus for every kill I’d get Eden Coins—the system’s version of a combination of  experience points and micro-transaction currency that’s still largely a mystery for me. I want lots of those because there’s also that thing.

The system.

“System?” I call out. 

<<Yes, Player Erinoa?>> The system answers with a flat, genderless tone that sounds like something one would hear in any number of sci-fi flicks produced in the 90s. 

“Is there any way we could improve this situation?” I ask.

<<Please define.>>

“Could you show me the show options for ‘Light,’ please?”

<<Of course, Player Erinoa.>>

The shop screen pops up with a glow that doesn’t reflect on the surface of the cave. It would have been a nice way to cheat, but I was expecting as much. I’ve been trying not to use it because of the endless stream of disappointment and depression it supplies. 

The fact that I have the system with me tells me a few things. While this is no longer a game to me, I am still, it seems, in Final Eden. I guess it’s meant to be something of a perk since it offers me things to improve my life, but it never goes out of its way to be useful or helpful in any way, shape, or form.

Thus far all it’s done is remind me of how much my life sucks.

Most things it offered to me in the in-game store were way more useful to creatures with hands than slithery me. Things like flashlights, torches, or the ability to make fire, for example. Unless I was planning on setting fire to the forest—which I’ll admit, I have considered doing—these things were mostly useless.

It does give me hope that maybe someday I can use those things. The system doesn’t like answering my questions, but it does offer me hope that I’d get my hands and legs back one day. 

[Evolution]. The ability that I was betting all my remaining sanity on. It promised to elevate my existence from mere snake to… something more. Something greater. 

I hope it means being able to turn myself into something more human, but at this point, I’d take anything better than what I got—which, according to my character stats, was a rank one creature.

The problem is that each evolution cost ten thousand Eden Coins, and after a week of being stuck in the game I had only accumulated a thousand. Technically I earned closer to two thousand, but I’d spent them to get this far—and now because of a stupid mongoose, I have to spend more.

If this was a game, I’d have quit already with progression this slow. 

“Ah, there it is,” I say and tap my nose on the screen. 

<<Please confirm your purchase of [Dark Vision] for 200 Eden Coins.>>

“I confirm.”

My heart quails as I watch my coins go down into the eight hundreds, but it's a necessary sacrifice. There’s some consolation that it was a skill I always intended on purchasing, but how many bugs would I need to kill to get them back at ten to twenty coins each?

But my coins!

A text box appears announcing:

║Player Noa has successfully acquired the skill [Dark Vision]. This is a passive ability and will activate when the lighting in the area reduces below 30%.║

With a sigh, I take another gander at the store, hoping for something to strike my fancy. If I was going to spend my coins to survive, I may as well see if there's anything to murder the mongoose waiting for me. 

Unfortunately, combat stuff—the useful things in life—were far too expensive for my blood. 

Or, you know, required hands and a considerably larger body.

“Whatever,” I grumble. “System, close the store.”

The store window winks away and leaves my eyes adjusting to its new perception abilities. I blink a few times, hoping to help it along. 

At first there’s not much to see. I mean, there wouldn’t be, would there? It’s just a crack in a rock—but it was bigger than I thought it was. Calling it a “tunnel” would be more apt than a crack, and almost looked like it was carved. 

Carved?

Where the stone around the entrance of the crack was sharp and rough, the interior was smooth.

I slither along. According to the system’s clock, I have at least four hours until dark. A smart snake would go only as far back as they needed to to avoid certain death, but I am a bored snake.

A bored snake investigates. 

How far does this tunnel go, I wonder? Are there other creatures using this passage? 

Other creatures having helped create the tunnel system made far more sense than it being a naturally occurring formation. In that case, could there be another exit? 

That would be the perfect solution to my mongoose problem. In fact, it could be a solution to many of my current problems, so long as whoever else uses the tunnel is either friendly or edible.

Slither, slither, slithering along… oh?

The path diverges. I flick my tongue out and taste the air. It isn’t just a tunnel. It’s a tunnel system, and there is undoubtedly another resident within these walls. 

Now that I’m further away I can tell that the stone has a subtle vibration to it that’s different from the vibration caused by the mongoose. It’s difficult to tell exactly where the vibrations are coming from or what they even are, but they’re there.

They’re slow and rhythmic. It could be the sound of a creature sleeping, or it could be the sound of water. If it's a creature, I should avoid it, but if it's water it could be good or bad. Water increases my chances of survival, but it could also be what carved the tunnel in the first place. 

I don’t much fancy the idea of drowning in flooded tunnels.

Suddenly, the vibrations change. They grow stronger, and I snap my head in their direction. The vibrations cease as I finally see something other than stone. 

Not water, I guess. 

At least not this time.

“Squeak.” A pair of beady black eyes glaring at me from the opposite end of the tunnel.