Crouched in the shadows, I quietly moved my way along the long and cobbled path which was lined on either side with high reaching trees, who's thick green canopies intercepted any light which may have been cast down by the midday sun, however with the darkness it may as well have been deep into the night. I deftly walked along the edge of the darkened cobble path with my sword, Shadow Beam, held tightly to my side within my right hand. I moved as swiftly as I could whilst trying to silence every step that I could in the worry of unnecessarily alerting any possible enemies to my position, a task made so much easier due to my sneak skill being unusually high for a Frontline player.

I was mapping out an area of the densely forested 72nd floor, for the use of the main raid groups should I find anything interesting. Unlike the floors below us when we had entered the 70th floor we began to encounter much faster, stronger and more human like thinking monsters, which were seemingly able to figure out a player's style of fighting allowing them to predict and counter incoming attacks at the speed and level of experienced fighters. Therefore the "Frontline Committee" had been created, a group formed from the leaders of various Frontline guilds and a number of solo players which regularily met to discuss matters concerning the clearing of this game. As our enemies began to learn and adapt, so did we. With this surprisingly smooth working committee being in place, players were able to pool all of their information gathered from the floors for everyone to know and learn from. We had become a much more organised force now that players were being truly challenged with death at each possible stage.

In this section of the woods I had found a number of small graveyards and crumbling church houses along the side of the seemingly endless cobble path which I now walked along. At each of the sites there was a number of skeletal monsters, some unarmed while some were walking with almost complete sets of armour and steel forged weaponry which rivalled my own works. However, not wanting to get too close, I was unable to see if they had been awoken by some form of necromancer or if the area was on some form of cursed ground which reanimated corpses. Should it be a necromancer, all I would need to do is kill the necromancer, cutting the skeletons from the mana source that was keeping them alive. However if it was indeed cursed ground, which by the frequent burn marks and petrified patches of land it would seem like, then the skeletons would continue to be reanimated after a period of time, a fancy way to keep the things respawning.

I eventually came up upon a large dark red wooden gate, a gate I recognised to be a Torii gate, a structure found throughout the islands of Japan, the country which both the Nerve Gear and this game was created within. Instead of walking around the grand gate I decided to walk to the centre of the path and walk directly through the middle of it, partly out of curiosity and partly due to the fact that I wanted something interesting to happen on the other side of it after nearly two hours of sneaking and avoiding around unaware monsters.

I confidently walked through the Torii gate, no longer trying to hide my footsteps and with my sword held loosely at my side, point facing down. On the other side of the gate I stopped for a few seconds, waiting for something to happen. When nothing did happen I just stood there, disappointed, slowly scanning the forest line around me still under the impression that I was missing something, I had wholeheartedly expected something dramatic to happen as I passed through the gate.

I turned and looked at the towering gateway, thoroughly unimpressed at its impact on the situation "Wow, creepy forest, creepy graveyards and churches with skeletal warriors and walking through a gate like that does nothing, why even put a big thing like this in if its doesn't achieve anything." I quietly spoke to myself as if the creators of this world were listening in on what I had to say about their masterpiece. With a roll of my eyes I turned back to the road and kept on walking forward, realising how pointless my comments were and how bored I really was to want something big and dangerous to appear out of thin air in such a creepy setting.

However a few seconds later I heard a deafening sound, like the crack of lightning, coming from the gate behind me which echoed throughout the forest. Once the sound had stopped echoing, which had made it sound as if a lightning storm had just erupted above me, I cautiously turned on my heels to face the gate which I had just passed under. To what I saw I cursed under my breath, the gate had seemingly heard my comments and had decided to take some action against me, only problem for me was that I was alone and caught slightly off guard.

The gate still stood there but within it a deep purple smoke portal had opened up, emitting light to the surrounding area and making slight crackling sounds as visible sparks flew from side to side. Standing just in front of the swirling portal were 6 skeletons, each wearing full sets of dark red plated armour and holding visibly heavy and reinforced steel longswords. They stood in a triangle like formation, but with a gap left at the front, which would form the frontal tip of the pyramid formation. This gap was swiftly filled as a skeletal horse slowly moved its way from out of the portal, being ridden by a skeleton who seemed to be wearing dragon scale armour and wielded a simple short sword in its left hand and a red spear in its right hand.

I gripped my sword in both hands with a worried tension at what I had just awoken and started to walk backwards, placing foot after foot as quickly as I could with out making any abrupt movements. However the skeletons simply turned their heads to look straight at me, with a creak of their ancient bones, once they had sight of me their hollow eye sockets erupted a dark blue light. The skeletal horseman then raised his sword and brought it down with a slash of the air to point at me, ordering his men to attack.

Knowing that staying to fight was likely to get me killed I turned on my heels and ran like hell away from the skeletons which were making a huge uproar with their armour clanging around and the contact of their dry and brittle bones on the ground. I looked over my shoulder to see how far away I had got, but instead I was confronted by the horseman's blade swinging down towards my neckline. I quickly ducked down under it and slowed my pace down so that the horseman could get in front of me by a slight distance, with the foot soldiers still a good 10 meters from me.

I opened up my inventory panel with hurried flicks and hand movements, desperately trying to reach the right item before I was assaulted by either the footsoldiers or the horseman who was on a return approach. Finding the item I was looking for I quickly brought it out from my inventory where it materialised into my left hand, however the foot soldiers were now in range of attacking so I ran at them head on. With my sword in my right hand I parried the first two blows from the heavily swung swords, dodged the second two low sweeps by deftly jumping over the blades, but I got hit along the side of the chest and in my right shoulder by the last two skeletons.

I may have taken some damage but I was past the skeletons, I ran for a couple of meters so that I had some distance between me and my attackers. But instead of holding my ground to fight it out I raised the rectangular blue coloured crystal which I had taken out of my inventory and raised it in front of me. "CORAL CITY!" Was what I commanded the crystal in a very urgent manner, the crystal responded by lighting up and surrounding me in a light blue glow which obscured my vision of the forest I was in.

After a few moments my vision began to come back to me and the blue glow faded away as quickly as it had come forth. I was standing on the white granite floor portal which belonged to Coral city, Floor 22, my home city. In relief at seeing the tranquillity of the pine forests around me and the glistening lakes in the distance I gave out a sigh and lazily sheathed my sword. My duties on the Front line were done for today after that and I could go hand in what I had mapped out of the floor to the Committee tomorrow, they weren't in much need for the information right now.

So I began to walk home along a number of cobbled paths and wooden pathways which winded through the deep forests and along the outskirts of the deep clear water lakes. My forgery and weapons shop was along the way home from this path so instead of going straight home I decided to take a slight detour to reach my forgery. I walked up to the door and noticed that it was unlocked and there were voices coming from inside, other than me Sky was the only one to have a key to this door and I doubt the game would let someone break in so I assumed that it was her and someone else in there doing something while I was out scouting for the day.

I pushed the door open and walked in to find two people in the shop section of my forgery, one being Sky who was sitting on the counter in her usual attire of a blue shirt, brown trousers and heavy boots, as I walked in she looked up at me with a slightly smug and mischievous grin before looking back at the other person who was in front of me.

"YOU!"