The old man's name was Elder Cain.
The armored one who wanted them dead was Commander Holt, and the narrator would like it noted for the record that Holt looked exactly like someone who had never once in his life been told the word no and had subsequently developed an entire personality around that absence. He was not handling Elder Cain's interruption with grace.
Cain ignored the little temper trnatrum Holt was throwing with his facial expressions, like he had done for years.
When he spoke the translation came through, "Remove the restraints. They are guests, not prisoners."
Holt retorted but Cain did not look at him. The guards, caught between two hierarchies, made the only rational choice available to them; they listened to the one who was older. The cord around Harley's wrists came off and he resisted the very strong urge to dramatically rub them even though they had not been on long enough to leave marks.
Namir rolled his shoulders once, composure resettling like a coat he had simply shrugged back on, and bowed his head slightly toward the Elder. Harley did the same, roughly half a second delayed because he was watching Namir for cues like a person who had just realized he was in an improv scene without a script.
Cain studied them. His eyes trying to determine whether a thing is useful, not whether it is dangerous. The distinction mattered.
He gestured toward the low seats arranged before him, a small wooden table between, a clay pitcher sweating in the close air, "Sit." So they sat.
What followed was less of a conversation and more of a confession that Cain spoke slowly. The game translated steadily. Harley listened and felt the story press against him like a weather front moving in.
"Three seasons ago, the attacks began."
People going into the forest and not returning, which was not, in itself, unusual. Ahmadanam had always been considered dangerous; full of predators, poor visibility, terrain that ate the unprepared. But this was different. These were experienced hunters. Scouts who had walked that forest since childhood. A patrol of six warriors; gone overnight, no bodies recovered. Then livestock, taken from the village's eastern edge. Then the sounds, something in the tree line at night…"
The village had stopped going north. Had stopped trading with the settlements beyond the forest. Had tightened its borders and taught its children to run first and ask questions at a safer distance. The guards who had brought Harley and Namir in were not cruel; they were afraid, and fear wearing armor tends to look a lot like aggression until you get close enough to see the difference.
Cain folded his hands on the table.
"I am an old man," he started, "and I have lived long enough to recognize the difference between wanderers and answers. You fought my guards and did not kill any of them. That tells me something." his eyes barely open but his lips formed the faintest smile.
What Harley thought was that their combat stats were mid, his actually. But how could he say this out loud.
"I am asking for your help," Cain continued, "Find what haunts Ahmadanam. End it. My village will provide what it can in return."
An old man making a direct request to two strangers he had just ordered untied, Harley had to respect it even while his stomach was doing complicated things.
Just a moment of silence before the interface appeared.
📜 QUEST AVAILABLE
The Terror of Ahmadanam: The village of Crestmere has been plagued by an unknown force lurking within the Ahmadanam Forest. Multiple casualties. Travel restricted.
Morale: critical.
Objective: Investigate Ahmadanam and eliminate the source of the attacks.
Reward: Village Resources | EXP | Lore Progression
[ ACCEPT ] [ DECLINE ]
Harley looked at the menu, specifically at the DECLINE button. He reached out mentally toward it, because hope is irrational.
The DECLINE button did not respond.
He tried again. Nothing. It sat there with the smug inertia of a feature that existed purely for the visual illusion of choice. He tapped it three more times with increasing commitment and decreasing dignity. The button remained absolutely, serenely, cosmically unresponsive.
Namir watched this without expression.
"There's no reject button." Harley's hope had shattered completely.
"There never was."
"Then why is it there?"
"Game design philosophy." Namir accepted the quest on his own menu with one gesture; he had made peace with the absense of choice because left to him, he would not be in the game in the first place, "The illusion of agency keeps players engaged. You feel like you could say no. You just can't actually do it."
Harley stared at the DECLINE button one last time with bad eyes. It stared back with a smug expression. He accepted the quest.
✅ QUEST ACCEPTED: The Terror of Ahmadanam
New Objective: Learn more about the forest. Prepare before entering.
Cain seemed to understand that some kind of agreement had been reached even without seeing the interface; maybe it was the shift in their posture, maybe it was the resignation settling across Harley's face like a man who has accepted a dentist appointment. He nodded, and called for one of the village women to show them to the guest quarters.
The room they were given was small and smelled like cedar and old cloth. Two low sleeping mats, a window that looked out on the village's central path, a clay lamp on a wooden ledge. It was the most modest room Harley had ever stood in and he felt a specific fondness for it immediately, it was like his apartment back at home.
He sat on his mat while Namir stood at the window.
"We need weapons," what he concluded internally was said out loud.
Harley looked at his hands, at the character menu he pulled up, at the three equipment slots sitting empty like judgment, "We have no money."
"We'll earn it."
"How?"
Namir turned from the window to see him waiting for an answer, "The village has needs. Every settlement in this game runs on an internal economy tied to the lore state. When things are bad, there's always work. People who can't do things themselves, things that need fixing, gaps that need filling. We find those gaps, we fill them, the system rewards us. Simple."
Harley immediately wore a deadpan face, "So we're doing chores."
"We're doing side quests." he corrected.
"Those are the same thing." he scoffed.
"The EXP is different."
Fair point.
The village of Crestmere, as it turned out, was a small economy held together entirely by people who desperately needed things done but couldn't do them for reasons that ranged from reasonable to deeply specific. The game surfaced these needs through a combination of glowing indicators above NPC heads, a soft yellow that pulsed when approached, and the ancient human tradition of someone seeing a stranger with free hands and immediately having a task for them.
The first side quest came from a stocky woman named Maren who needed crates moved from her storehouse to the market stalls before the afternoon trading window closed. She offered grain tokens; the village's local currency apparently. Harley's UI updated when she made the offer: Side Quest: Market Prep — Reward: 15 Grain Tokens. His lower back updated with a separate but equally relevant notification as he carried the fifth crate.
The second came from an older man who had a fence that needed reinforcing because something had been pushing at it from outside the village perimeter at night. He offered twenty tokens and said this while looking at the tree line. Harley reinforced the fence. Namir handled the structural assessment. The game awarded them each experience.
+35 EXP
[Observation Lv.1] noted structural weakness in eastern post. Bonus EXP awarded.
Harley stared at that notification for a full three seconds. His passive skill had been quietly doing homework the entire time he was holding fence posts. He felt like he needed to thank it and wasn't sure how.
The third was a child, maybe eight years old, clutching a doll with one arm and pointing at a storage hut roof with the other. Something was living up there. It had taken three of the family's chickens. She wanted it gone. She had seven grain tokens and a very serious expression that made it clear this was not a negotiable situation.
Whatever was living in the roof turned out to be a creature that looked like a raccoon had made poor life choices and committed to them, deeply offended for being interrupted. It took ten minutes, some creative improvisation with a barrel, and resulted in Harley's tunic acquiring a new set of claw marks that the game registered as Cosmetic Damage: No HP Reduction. The child watched all of this with her arms crossed, sassy like someone twice her age.
When it was over she handed him the seven tokens and nodded like she was completing a business transaction.
Namir was already waiting at the equipment shop when Harley arrived, which meant he had finished his side of the village in less time and with less structural damage to his clothing. He did not mention this. Harley appreciated that.
The shop was a lean-to attached to a larger building; weapons mounted on the wall behind the counter, armor pieces on wooden forms, a man behind the counter who looked at them the way merchants in every RPG ever made looked at players; with the pleasant blankness of someone whose dialogue options were all predetermined.
They pooled their tokens. Namir had ninety. Harley had sixty five. The math worked.
SHOP INVENTORY (Crestmere — Floor 1 Equipment Tier)
Iron Short Sword — 40 tokens
Hunting Spear — 35 tokens
Reinforced Leather Vest — 50 tokens
Hardened Bracers ×2 — 20 tokens
Basic Healing Salve ×3 — 15 tokens
Namir bought the hunting spear without a second thought; it suited his Striker build the most. Harley stood in front of the iron short sword for a moment. It wasn't impressive. It wasn't going to make anyone's highlight reel. But it sat in his hand when the shopkeeper let him test the weight, and something about the balance of it felt right just like the way his first day at the factory he had picked up the calibration instrument and known without instruction how to hold it.
He bought the sword. The leather vest. They split the bracers and used the last tokens on two salves.
His equipment slots filled. The UI updated.
EQUIPMENT UPDATED
Harley Watson | Lv.1
HP: 61/100 → 73/100 (Armor bonus applied)
Iron Short Sword equipped — ATK +8
Reinforced Leather Vest equipped — DEF +12
Hardened Bracers equipped — DEF +4
Class assignment: Pending combat data.
Seventy-three HP, he was in better shape than he had been two hours ago, which was, he decided, the correct direction to be moving in.
They ate dinner in the guest quarters; the village provided a meal, simple and hot, and Harley ate it with the enthusiasm of a man who had been running on terror and adrenaline since morning. Namir ate like a person who was using mealtime to think rather than to eat.
"The lore," words left his mouth eventually, setting down his bowl afterwards, "What we're actually doing in Ahmadanam… The beast isn't random."
Harley looked up, the last spoon of food just hanging at the entrance of his mouth, "What do you mean?"
"In the original game, there's always a structure underneath the lore. The beast isn't just a creature, it's a symptom. Something put it there, or something is feeding it, or the beast itself is the final layer of something bigger. Floor one of this lore runs three sub-arcs across three floors." He held up three fingers, ticking them off, "This is the first. We go into Ahmadanam, we learn what we're dealing with, we probably get our teeth kicked in a little before we understand the shape of the problem. Floor two, we go deeper, Floor three, we find the cave, we find the thing at the center of all of it, we end it."
"And then?"
"Then we get pulled to the next lore. Different terrain, different story, different rules." He paused, "Same consequence if we fail."
Harley set his own bowl down. Thought about Phantom, the username with no follow-up story. Thought about the look on Cain's face, Thought about his apartment back home, his sorry excuse for a job, the week off that had looked like a gift and turned out to be a trap door.
"I want to go home." he voiced.
"I know."
"I might not even have a job to go back to. My boss gave me a week and that was before I got sucked into an interdimensional dungeon crawler." He picked at the edge of his mat, "He's going to be so smug about it."
Namir looked at him with something that was almost amusement, "Focus on floor one."
"I'm multitasking."
"Stop."
Harley lay back on his mat and stared at the wooden ceiling. The lamp threw orange light across the grain of the wood. Outside, Crestmere had gone quiet, night had announced itself.
"Floor one first." he said to the ceiling.
"Floor one first." Namir confirmed.