"F-f-first things f-f-first." Her teeth were clattering when she reached for the guild stash box to find something warm to wear. If she froze to death, she wouldn't be able to think about how she had been pulled into the game world of Prison of Eternity Online.

  But then she stopped, as the gesture that usually opened the stash didn't work this time. Did she have to pull up the lid physically? How would she even flip through the over five hundred stash tabs that Heroic Age had collected over the eight years this game had been active, all inside that relatively small chest?

  "I-I-I g-g-got t-t-this." Logic would dictate that clothes should make the difference, but TripleBatsuDance suddenly summoned a potion bottle into her hand out of nowhere instead. It was a [Chromatic Potion], which had the effect of increasing one's elemental resistances. Maybe in this game world, it would combat the effects of the temperature.

  And sure enough, the moment she drank from it, her shaking stopped, and the buff glow of a potion effect appeared around her. Her eyes fixated on the top left of her vision, where the icons for permanent and temporary effects would usually be displayed on the screen.

  "No wonder my resistances were so low. My auras were deactivated since we're in town." TripleBatsuDance commented with a confused look. In the game, one couldn't drink from potions in town, and their effects would be ignored. The fact that it worked this time meant that this place no longer followed game rules.

  "H-h-how did y-y-you take s-s-something out of y-y-your inventory?" Stuttering while rubbing her arms and stepping on the spot, AFKat asked. She had a similar potion in her inventory, which specifically increased cold resistance.

  "I just thought about it, and it opened before my eyes." Came the answer while TripleBatsuDance honored her name and began to perform a sensual dance that showed off her physical qualities.

  "W-w-what are you d-d-doing?" Forgetting about her initial objective, AFKat watched with an expression that suggested she was worried about her guildmate's mental health.

  "Buffing. You should be fine in a moment." Bending over as she said this, the dancer extended her leg and spun over herself in an incredibly dexterous movement that gave anybody standing at the right angle a glimpse under her already incredibly skimpy outfit. Luckily, the game had no adult content, so every avatar had to wear underwear. Hers just happened to be black strings that just barely hid enough to avoid an adult rating.

  "Woah, Sasahara-san! Why are you wearing the same underwear as I am?!" Just as she spoke her rebuttal, warmth filled AFKat's body. TripleBatsuDance's [Dancer] subclass was [Divine Channeler], which focused on buffing the team. She was one of the two so-called aura-slaves in the guild, entirely built to provide defensive buffs cast in an aura around herself, providing all elemental resistances, raising maximum resistances, granting evasion, armor, spirit shield, and increasing life and mana regeneration.

  "It's sexy, isn't it?" Winking at the little catgirl currently dressed in nothing but the same string bikini, but in white, she replied with a coquettish wiggle of her hips. "But you're wearing it better. I should have gone full loli- ahhh, don't give me that look as if you're looking at trash, Afu-chan!"

  While TripleBatsuDance was usually quite composed, her true nature came out whenever it was about lewd things. Before, Fuuko would grimace in real life, hidden by the anonymity of the game, but now she was her avatar.

  This brought her senses back to the issue at hand. They had been put inside their game avatars from one moment to the next without warning. With the danger of freezing to death averted, she had time to consider this anime-like development, but couldn't think of any explanation that would make sense.

  "Welcome to Prison of Eternity Online!" A male voice suddenly announced in an echo that played across the entire town. "The executives decided today in a board meeting that this game's development would be cut one month from now."

  AFKat could tell from the quiver in the voice that the person it belonged to wasn't happy about that decision.

  "I've been playing this game without sleep since it first came out. I've almost collected all unique items in existence and crafted gear worth millions of gold." He continued, ranting like a shut-in gamer who justified his entire existence through his achievements in a video game. "And you want to shut it down?!"

  His voice grew hysterical for a moment as he continued to rattle down his achievements and monetary contributions to the game's cosmetics-only cash shop, supporter packs published across the various events, and even direct money transfers to the company to support them.

  "So now that it's come to this, I have decided to turn this game into reality. It has been my reality since it came out anyway." Then he finally reached the central part of his announcement. "The server transfer to my personal dimension might have messed up a few things, such as PVP balance, safe zones in towns, or your home instances - those are gone entirely - but I'll get them fixed soon enough. Until then, have fun in Prison of Eternity! Now no longer Online, but Reality!"

  With this, the voice ceased, and silence fell over the land again. AFKat and TripleBatsuDance exchanged a confused glance, then decided that it was perhaps the truth. After all, it was the only explanation as to why they were now in their game avatars they had received so far.

  "Oh, right. I forgot to mention." The male voice suddenly echoed across the sky again, causing the two girls to stop short. "When you die, you automatically revive by losing money out of your stash as before. But if you don't have enough, that's it - no more 0-gold boss suicide runs. I want to thin out the scrubs a bit so that I can enjoy a game based on skill. In other words, git gud."

  Then it went silent again, causing a shiver to run down the two girls' backs. They were trapped in a death game!

  "One last thing... or two. I locked the guild stash so that it becomes only accessible in the actual guildhall. Always made more sense to me that way." They could see before their eyes the shrug that the owner of the voice must have performed at those words. "And no more waypoint teleportation. Go explore the world properly! Good luck with food, by the way. Azrael out!"

  Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

  The sound of a mic dropping rumbled over the landscape before it cut out as if to prove that this announcement had been the last one. AFKat and TripleBatsuDance once again exchanged a look with each other, though this time, it was a markedly uncomfortable one.

  "Is it alright to panic now?" The catgirl asked toward the sky tentatively but obviously received no reply.

  "No, don't panic, Afu-chan. I'll keep you safe!" Speaking in a confident tone that belied her shaking legs - and not from the cold, as she now had the highest possible maximum elemental resistances in the game - the dancer tried to grandstand despite her apparent fear.

  In truth, she was most likely the best person to be around in this death game scenario. As a virtually unhittable dodge tank who buffed her allies' defenses, she already instilled some confidence with her very presence.

  AFKat was a tank build herself, though of the armor variant. Leaving aside her race, she was of the [Vanguard] class, which excelled in drawing enemy attention through a taunting ability that caused enemies in an area to only target her. Coupled with the foundational passive [Challenge the Gods] that upgraded the taunt to work on bosses, her role was to soak up as much damage as possible so that the damage dealers could do their work.

  Since Prison of Eternity Online had no healer class, she had to increase her survivability on her own. When wearing her full equipment, she passively reached the physical damage resistance cap of 90%. Coupled with TripleBatsuDance's maximum resistance aura buffs, she also reduced all elemental damage by 90%.

  However, she had still died a few times to big hits from certain bosses when the aura-slave was knocked out of range, and the buffs stopped affecting her. In a few other cases, she had been overwhelmed by too many enemies that did many small hits too fast for her life regeneration to keep up. In a death game, she couldn't afford to let that happen.

  With access to the guild stash restricted to the chest inside the guildhall - located halfway across the game world, in the Act 5 city of Dragonheart's Sanctum - she had no way to get back to her 90% damage reduction. Her decision to return the items out here in the middle of nowhere had unexpectedly come back to bite her in her currently practically bare ass.

  She was now limited to her personal stash, which held all kinds of relatively useless items that she liked for their in-game appearances. She sometimes switched into them for fashion purposes rather than their effects, which were generally abysmal.

  Then she remembered a combo she had once wanted to play. Her brother had told her that it not only looked lame but also was utterly useless. But why did she ever listen to him in the first place, especially when it came to fashion?

  With the usual gesture toward her personal stash, she opened a screen above the chest, which displayed the first page of the items that she possessed. The amount of gold would be enough to revive her nine times - the coincidence wasn't lost on her when she considered her catgirl avatar.

  But she flipped the pages in search of the items she had banished to the deepest corner of her stash so that they might see use someday when she no longer cared about her brother's opinion. That day was today. The items in question were practically useless on their own, as they severely limited a player's effectiveness in the game, even when playing in a party.

  [Veil of the Innocent] was a unique body armor that took the form of a simple long-sleeved white shirt that resembled robes. Whereas regular body armor had up to three crystal slots in which one could place the most powerful passive buffs in any build, this one had none. It was treated as a noob-trap starter item because of its singular effect: 50% to global damage reduction - when unarmed.

  Some would argue that a melee build using gauntlets to make unarmed attacks, just like what MANhera did, could benefit from that. But there were a plethora of better body armor items available later in the game, which synergized with gauntlets. None had the 50% global damage reduction, but depending on skill tree progression, one could reach that by other means without having to sacrifice the essential crystal slots.

  The reason AFKat eyed the [Veil of the Innocent] with such interest was its incredibly convenient interaction with a rarely-chosen path skill of the [Vanguard]'s [Stalwart Defender] subclass: [Adamantine Transmutation], which doubled the defensive effects of the body armor in exchange for dealing 30% less damage across the board. It would instantly bring her to the damage resistance cap of 90% for all forms of damage, including elemental and divine.

  But another equally common unique item came into play to fulfill her dream at a leisurely game that her brother had denied her: The [Crown of the First Martyr] was a helmet that took the form of a circlet made from thorns that sat uncomfortably on anybody's head, especially now that the game had become reality. It also had no crystal slots, whereas helmets typically had up to two.

  The item featured a double-edged flat damage version of the much more useful [Thorns Aura], which caused the wearer to take 10 points of physical damage whenever they were hit by a melee attack, as well as reflect that same amount of damage to the attacker. It was only able to kill monsters from levels 1 to 10. While the 10 points of reflected physical damage were unaffected by player modifiers, all monsters had a natural 0.1% life regeneration per second. Anything above level 10 started to outregenerate the pitiful damage. And at level 100, regular monsters had more than ten thousand times as much, and bosses one million times as much. The tiny prickling damage wouldn't even register for them.

  However, it came with another ability that made it both notorious and worth considering for peculiar people such as AFKat; the [Crown of the First Martyr] granted 10% maximum global defenses, but locked all other item slots besides the body armor.

  Many players questioned the design philosophy behind this item since it dropped from the final boss, calling it trash that was not even worth picking up. Since there was a limit to the number of drops per boss, having the [Crown of the First Martyr] among them was reason enough for many people to rage in the public chat.

  Only a [Stalwart Defender] with the [Adamantine Transmutation] path skill could make this trifecta of useless things come together into something marvelous. With the [Crown of the First Martyr] raising the cap on damage reduction from 90% to 100%, a person who fulfilled all the conditions was undamageable by any and all effects in the game.

  In exchange for that, it rendered the wearer unable to kill even the weakest enemies beyond level 10, though. Not to speak of the fact that the reflected damage only affected melee attackers, so ranged enemies or spellcasters would not trigger it.

  AFKat loved it, though, because she could do what her brother would have hated: Go afk in the middle of a boss fight. With the game world turned reality, she couldn't really leave the computer anymore, but with this, she wouldn't ever have to worry about dying.

  The moment she put the equipment on by swapping them out in her inventory screen, TripleBatsuDance let out a squeal and jumped straight at the little catgirl.

  "That looks so cute on you!" She hugged AFKat, then recoiled in surprise. "Ouch. Something pricked me."

  "So that counted as an attack, huh?" AFKat narrowed her eyes in a suspicious gaze.

  "Nooo! I wasn't assaulting you, Afu-chan! You have to believe me!" TripleBatsuDance tried to hug her again, with the same result. "Ouch!"

  "Pull yourself together." With these words, the catgirl turned away and looked across the empty town square toward the southern plains with a worried gaze. They had to get back to Dragonheart's Sanctum and meet up with everybody. Yes, that included her idiot brother. Even if she hated him, it was not to the degree that she wanted him dead.

  They had to work together and find a way out of this death game.

  I hope you enjoyed! Look forward to more game shenanigans~

  If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments. I'll try to answer things as long as they aren't spoilers.