AHA! Bet you didn't expect to have a 3000 word update already! As I've said, much of the material for these first few chapters had been written in advance. Nonetheless, this chapter is entirely new material-necessary in light of edits I made to the plot, but totally surprising in every other way!

As always, the author of Log Horizon is Mamare Touno, and all associated media is owned by him and his associates, with whom I cannot in any way claim membership. If I lie, may goblins attack my neighborhood and force me to bust out some martial arts on them.

"Look, sir," the looming Lander merchant insisted, "We really don't have anything to spare! Apples are the only things high enough off the ground to avoid the goblin raids. I haven't had a decent loaf of bread in days!" He gestured to a pile of rotting apple cores in the back corner of his stall, now about the size of a small child. "Now, if you'd accept the damn quest, and get rid of them for us, I could probably get some REAL food!"

"I told you, I can't kill a for full of goblins without some kind of weapon! If you'd just lend me that sword on your wall-"

"That sword is literally our town's only defense against the goblins. You take that, and not even the apples will be safe! I'll gladly give it to you once the village is safe from goblin attacks."

"This is ridiculous!" Wander shouted, more at the situation than the merchant himself. "I can't beat the goblins unless you give me the sword, and you can't give me the sword unless I beat the goblins!"

"And in the meantime, we're ALL stuck eating apples." Merchant and adventurer collapsed with an exasperated groan onto the stall counter, and contemplated how much longer they could bear the stench of rotting fruit until they both ended up on the road.

Pattonville, where Wander had ended up after a few hours of intentful walking, was a meager hamlet built into the rubble of one former city or another. Up until a week ago, it had been a peaceful place, where new players on the North American server could acquire their starting equipment and train on low-level quests before heading into the big cities via conveniently-located warpgates just a half a mile away from the town hall. Unfortunately, a troop of goblins, taking advantage of the Apocalypse to occupy Fort McHenry-a ruined military base-had waylaid all shipments moving along the main road, and begun making mischief in surrounding villages. With most adventurers busy adapting to their new situation, and the Thirteen Chivalric Orders missing in action, nobody could be bothered to assist a forgettable settlement of People of the Land.

Wander had, with the help of the EXP potions that now appeared in his inventory daily, managed to reach Lv 5 simply by running menial fetch-quests for the residents of Pattonville, including the shopkeeper who provided discount apples for helpful adventurers. Without weaponry, however, Wander was unable to deal with the goblins, and had thus been stuck for the past two days eating only apples and EXP potions. Constant arguments-and an incident with a wheel barrow-had forced the adventurer to become very well acquainted with this particular merchant, whose massive frame and robust beard made him seem more bear than shopkeeper.

Taking a deep breath, Wander made eye contact with his opponent. "Look, sir-do I really not know your name? Sir, I'm getting desperate here. If you just give me any old piece of equipment you've got laying around here, I'll take the quest. Maybe I'll, I don't know, beat the goblins to death. Does that sound good?"

The merchant, with a deliberativeness unfitting to his usually fearsome aspect, paused, then glanced over to the pile of slowly-rotting fruit in the corner. "Call me Elias, and if you take those apple cores with you, then you've got yourself a deal."

Which was how Wander had ended up with a sack of rotting fruit and a worn leather helmet, which he had put on his hand like an antique boxing glove. He wasn't sure that it was going to be at all effective against real, live goblins, but he'd figured it would be better than flailing the sack of apple cores. Now, as he approached the main road, spotting crude goblin flags waving some distance away, Wander walked a little faster, and reviewed his plan.

Using the fruit as a distraction, he would climb over the degenerate concrete walls of the fort, searching for a weapon of any sort to use against his foes. If that failed, he would find a high point along the perimeter, jumping down upon any goblin that happened to stray beneath him and knocking it out with the helmet before stealthily pummeling it into submission. Hopefully, his raw strength, impromptu armament, and stat boost from the EXP potion would let him take down enough to reach another level. He would then retreat, repeating the process until he was strong enough to take down the Goblin Chief, ending the quest and giving him access to some proper food.

If this had truly been some weird manifestation of the video game Elder Tales, Wander wouldn't have been able to use the helmet as anything more than a helmet, sponging up attacks like a proper piece of armor, but Wander had long begun to suspect that the Apocalypse had brought him somewhere else entirely. For one thing, if Wander had been somewhere in the Middle East on his quest, then it would have been impossible to jump all the way to North America. Continents in-game hadn't just been separated by distance-their data was held on disparate servers, which did not communicate directly with any other server. Long-distance travel would have required an extremely complicated and expensive process, which Wander supposed was just another of the things he'd forgotten in the reboot of his account.

For another, apple cores shouldn't have been possible in the game-world. Items, when consumed, simply disappeared. Yet, Wander had eaten the fruit just like he would back home, and not through a menu command. This world clearly ran according to an immensely detailed set of physical laws, one which would have required countless billions of exacting programming to properly execute. Lastly, the way he'd been interacting with the People of the Land was far too real. Landers, as he'd called them back in his gaming days, were supposed to be NPCs, incapable of complex speech and independent behavior. Yet, all of the Landers Wander had encountered had proven independent people, capable of frustration, concern, and the pursuit of their own interests. Either the company behind Elder Tales had created a program capable of passing the Turing Test for artificial sentience, or the Landers were just as much human as Wander was. In which case, what was the Apocalypse? Had the creators of the game been dabbling in transdimensional teleportation, or had a parallel universe somehow transposed itself upon his own, swallowing the players as points of shared information between the two...

Ah, shit. While he'd been daydreaming, a goblin had snuck up on him. So much for stealth.

Wander sidestepped the monsters ferocious lunge, wincing as it sailed inches away from his unprotected left side. Instinct took over, and he threw a roundhouse kick at the Goblin's back. With a surprised grunt, it went sprawling in the dirt, losing about half of its health in the process. Wander supposed he'd been taking martial arts before the Apocalypse, because he could tell that his attack was both instinctual and called a roundhouse kick. Before the goblin could get up again, Wander lifted it by a leg and flung it into the fortress wall, which it hit with a satisfying crunch. Wander, not willing to give the monster a chance to counterattack, got a running start before driving his foot into its knobbly green face. The goblin shattered like a piñata of exp and gold.

Before he could soak in his remarkable victory, however, Wander spotted what must have been the entire troop of goblins pouring through the fortress gates to meet him. With a start, he tossed his sack of apple cores in their general direction, hoping to at least distract them while he fled. Majestic as an eagle, and odorous as a heap of compost, the sack flew in a majestic arc toward the approaching army of diminutive green death.

Luckily, it fell short of his intended target, instead spilling rotten fruit all over the ground in front of the feet of the advancing horde. Many in the leading edge simply fell flat on their faces, tripping up the goblins behind them in an unexpected, but very welcome, domino effect of pure win. Wander didn't even care that it probably counted as littering. After watching a good number of goblins die simply under the weight and weapons of their peers, and observing a number of in-tribe squabbles develop, the adventurer decided that he probably wasn't going to find a better time to begin his attack. Sprinting towards the infighting horde, Wander leapt right into the middle of it, stomping on many a-helmet and taking out a few more foes in the process as he made his way over to the fortress gates. Leaving the sound of goblin battle cries behind him, he rounded the corner and dashed into Fort McHenry.

With the entirety of its occupants engaged in the brawl outside, the fort was abandoned. As Wander seemed to recall, goblins never did have a mind for the nuances of strategic thought. In fact, Wander hoped that once their chief had been defeated, the rest of the goblins would either flee or fight themselves into oblivion. He also hoped that, with all the supplies this troop had stolen from passing caravans, he would find at least one weapon with which to slay the boss.

Unfortunately, it seemed that the goblins had broken everything there was to be broken, and spoiled everything else. Fort McHenry was relatively small and linear, so Wander could inspect each room as he ran by; and all he saw were empty boxes and tear-jerkingly spoiled plates of food. With an anguished sigh, he continued towards the fort's central corridor, until he at last reached a heavy oak door, surrounded with dramatically broken boxes and goblin skulls. Clearly, the boss's chamber.

Wander stopped inches from the iron door handle. It felt like he'd just been blown along with the course of events, and he'd been fine with that-at least, he hadn't thought about it. Since that first encounter with the goblin, Wander had acted on gaming instincts and the Elder Tales equivalent of adrenaline, but he wasn't just playing a game, or running a sport. This was life and death. What would happen if he lost? Would he wake up in a cathedral somewhere, or would death bring him back to his original world? Even worse-would dying in this place mean dying for good? He could stay with Elias, the merchant, and pick apples for the adventurers who came along. And, of course, they would come along. Adventurers always did. He could just bide his time, leveling patiently on fetch-quests and EXP potions, until this whole thing was figured out and he could continue with his life. Why give that up in the name of a quest he didn't want to complete, for some people he wasn't even sure were real?

Wander began to laugh at himself. It was sudden, loud, and he wasn't entirely sure why he was doing it. The thought of simply giving up, though, just seemed so ridiculous; What kind of guy would name his character Wander, lose everything for a Hidden Quest, storm an entire fortress of goblins at Lv 5 with nothing but a helmet and a sack of apple cores, then just give up because he was scared of a fight? This was stupid, and rash, and likely to get him killed. It was entirely illogical, and it was the kind of thing that a good parent would have scolded him thoroughly for.

Wander opened the door.

The room had once been a chapel, it seemed. An altar rested at the back of the room, and benches were piled up against walls. There was a beautiful rose window, close to the elevated ceiling, that admitted enough light to illuminate the goblin chief, twice Wander's height and waiting patiently a dozen feet from the entrance.

At least, until Wander came through said entrance.

As soon as it detected an adventurer, the chief rushed him furiously, swinging a chipped steak knife like a five-year old with a flag. Regardless of technique, it was strong. Even after Wander sidestepped it, like before, and it crashed headlong into a wall, the goblin chief's health was barely affected. It wheeled around and charged again, clipping Wander with an errant strike and dropping him down to critical health. He could not afford to make another mistake.

Searching for some way to defeat this menace unarmed, the adventurer ran in front of one of the benches and waited. As the chief charged, he rolled between its legs and, once it tripped headlong into another wall, kicked viciously at the monster's shins. Though Wander was proud of his strategy, the goblin simply flipped over and made another swing at him. Desperate to dodge and, well, not be dead, the adventurer stumbled backwards and fell flat on his backside, hearing his head hit stone with a startlingly loud crack. As he groaned and attempted to count backwards from ten, the goblin advanced on its now-immobilized prey. By the time Wander had reached seven, it had already picked him up, and was ready to bite him in two.

Wander shoved his helmet right between the monster's looming jaws.

Finding a disappointingly fat-free snack where it had expected a much more substantial morsel to be, the goblin chief staggered backwards, dropping the adventurer and gagging upon tough leather. The adventurer, in turn, unsteadily got to his feet. Though his foe was weakened, he was by no means close to victory. The apple cores were gone; the sack was gone; benches were broken; even his trusty leather helmet-glove was now being swallowed down a gigantic green gullet. Out of options, Wander did the only thing he could think of.

"Six, five, four, three, two... One. That'll have to do." The goblin had somehow gotten the tough leather armor into its stomach, and was not turning to face him one last time. He could still retreat-but he knew that he never would.

"Alright, you ugly green bastard. Come and get me! HIIYAAA!" Wander screamed and charged at his opponent.

"GUOOARR!" The goblin screamed and charged back at him.

The two met in the middle of the chamber, where the goblin chief swung his weapon and Wander swung nothing but his defiance and adventurer's pride.

Something flashed cerulean, and the goblin chief exploded.

"AAAaaa... What?" He looked around, wondering if his foe had somehow jumped into the rafters, or been slain by a timely passing adventurer. But there was no-one in the room but him. "What just happened?"

Wander looked down, expecting an empty fist, but seeing something else entirely.

He was holding a blue, crystal sword. It shone with both the glimmering, joyous light of the mediterranean sea and the ponderous radiance of the summer sky, weighing nothing in his hand and weighing heavily on his mind. It seemed so familiar...

"Oh, THAT'S right. That's what I was doing in the Middle East." With no goblins coming through the door, and the window casting a rose-colored circle on the floor, Wander sat down and remembered the events of the first days of the Apocalypse.

Is crazy, yes? Though I was playing around with the concept before, using in-game items in creative ways is not an idea exclusive to me by any means. In addition to cooking, episode 10 of the anime depicts a prototype steam engine, something not present within the game itself. If Crescent Moon can make a burger, why can't Wander use a helmet as a boxing glove, and a sack of apple cores as an impromptu projectile? Of course, in the franchise, a certain minimum subclass level is required to improvise things like that, but Wander, as we will shortly see, is a special case.

As for his transdimensional rant, the course of Wander's somewhat resembles my own. As a fanfiction writer, my job is to fill in the blanks wherever I can, and the way in which Adventurers have ended up in the world of Elder Tales is, for now, a huge mystery. Venturing into the realm of crack-fiction, I hypothesized that two parallel universes, already entangled by observation in the form of a video game, were brought into even closer contact by a catastrophic magic on the part of their universe, and the game expansion on the part of ours. During this period of overlap, players who logged in, rather than transferring data to this entangled universe, transferred either their physical bodies or consciousnesses to the other universe, either collapsing into a coma or disappearing outright from ours.

This would require a universe exactly identical to Elder Tales, not only in physical law, but in its course of events, hosting a strange group of Adventurers who can resurrect at Cathedrals, level up, and are, one-for-one, identical to the players who design accounts and interact in the game version of Elder tales. The actions of said adventurers would have to correspond exactly, in real time, to the actions of the players in our universe, and every randomized outcome must also be exactly the same.

Of course, this scenario is almost impossible, but with an infinite amount of parallel universes-and an infinite number of histories for each universe-such an outcome is not completely impossible, particularly if said outcome is part of a work of fiction written by an author with imagination. Indeed, within the original novel series, certain characters have already drawn up theories behind the mechanics of resurrection and magic, and there have reportedly been two other catastrophic, world-altering magics in Elder Tales' history. These have been labeled "World Fractions," and have significantly affected the course of events in the Elder Tales universe

For more on this technical mumbo-jumbo, you can check out the Log Horizon Wiki, which hosts articles and specific novel references:

wiki/Spirit_Theory

wiki/World_Fraction

wiki/Ri_Gan

...

Enough with theorizing. Up next: What was Wander doing on the first days of the Apocalypse? What's going on with the goblins outside Fort McHenry? And what is this mysterious, adjective-errific sword that seems to have come out of nowhere? Next time, on "Elder Tale: A Story of Log Horizon. Lv. 3: Day One."

In the meantime, tell me what you think-Review!

~Forkive out!

Note: This chapter was edited on 3/12/14. Why? Because continuity's a bitch. Actually, though, I just wanted to stay consistent with my information. See, I forgot that Fort McHenry is a real place, and so it's in-text description has been reworked. Additionally, physical description has been added to Elias, which comes into play during Chapter 4. There's definitely more of a concrete plot shaping itself here (somehow), so just bear with any further revisions while this story is still in its relative infancy. Thank you!