Spending My Retirement In A Game

After Katy sprinted toward the living room, and Benjamin hastily tried following her, the old man finally caught up and saw her in her father’s arms, while Benji was sitting quietly on the couch with tears in his eyes. They were pretty quiet for the past few minutes, so Benjamin was unsure if they left the room or if they managed to calm down, but now the old man could happily see that it was the latter.

"Huh, Gramps? You logged off too?" Benji asked with a bit of surprise, while Katy was telling her father about what Sean told her.

"Of course, I did. It took a little while because you left me alone with a Boss Monster that was trying to kill me, but yeah, I logged off." The old man responded before Benji scratched the back of his head. "Sorry, I was a bit... drastic... Sorry if that thing killed you..." He apologized, but Benjamin shook his head with a loud sigh.

"It didn’t kill me, don’t worry. I killed it, actually. I asked Komer to make his way there so that we can properly collect the materials, so they should be there in a little bit. Don’t worry about it at all. You and your father had something going on, and I’m glad you at least somewhat dealt with that." Benjamin said as he placed his left arm on his grandson’s shoulder and slowly nodded, before looking over at Tony.

"I’ll be back in the capsule. And sorry about letting Sean tease Katy like that." He said with a wry smile, and Tony nodded his head with a long sigh before continuing to try and calm down his daughter.

"I’m going to be there in a few minutes as well; I just need to calm down a little first..." Benji admitted before Benjamin slowly nodded his head and made his way back over to the capsule, nearly tripping a few times on the way because his body was getting weaker.

And soon, he managed to return to the game world.

---

A few minutes earlier, inside the game...

---

"Damn these fucking spiders! I wish I were Pyro from Team Castle right now so I could burn this whole forest down to the ground..." A Young man exclaimed in a loud and clear voice as if he was talking to someone else, despite that obviously not being the case.

"But either way, I think we got pretty lucky here, all the spiders on this path here are dead! I already have the stuff for the Adventurer’s Guild’s Quest, but I’m sure this is some secret hidden quest that’s gonna give me a whole bunch of dat loot!" He continued to say and held the small torch that he bought in the nearby town. "Who knows, it might have something to do with that event at the wharf back in town with that Giant ass ship just appearing out of nowhere! I doubt it’s a coincidence! This note wasn’t here the last time I was here at the very least." Once more the man added before his eyes moved over to something floating in the air before he swiftly stuck the sword he was carrying into the ground to make an ’OK’-Hand in front of his face.

"Thanks for the donation, ABCKing!" He exclaimed before reading through the message attached to the donation and cackled a bit in response. "Well fuck you too, King, I’m not a pussy! If you can afford the DICAP, you can see it next week! The spiders are ’literally’ bigger than my fucking head!" The man yelled out before pulling the sword back out of the ground and stepping further through the path, before reaching an open area, the only one that was illuminated by any light in this deeper part of the forest.

Thick cobwebs were covering every single surface, but luckily that didn’t directly include the spiders, meaning that the young man could concentrate on something else. The body of a Giant Spider bigger than a house split up into its back and front sides, and a big statue was standing directly where the Spider was cleaved into two.

It had giant wings that were spread out as if the large metal statue had just landed. From what the young man could see, the figure was made entirely of iron or steel, with some veins of Gold running all over its body and two big golden horns on the top of its head.

It had two items in its hands, a sword that was about as long as the young man was tall, and a staff even longer than that, although they looked relatively small in the statue’s hands.

Excitedly, the young man stared forward and made his way into the area carefully but happily. "Chat, I think we just hit the Jackpot! Give me some of ’dem lucky pogs so that this doesn’t turn out to be a trap! And if you want me to be super lucky, maybe even use your Switch Prime, eh?" The young man laughed to himself as he made his way toward the statue, expecting anything, absolutely anything, to happen.

And when nothing did, he triumphantly looked at the statue. "I’m guessing this is some random loot thing that you can find instead of bosses?" He muttered to himself, still loud enough so that his stream-chat could hear him before he attempted to grab the sword and pull it out of the statue’s hand.

"Come to papa!" He exclaimed, but the sword didn’t budge at all. More and more, the young man tried to pull the sword out with all his strength, before suddenly, it seemed like the sword was finally moving.

"Oh yes chat, I think I’m getting there!" He exclaimed although he was quite surprised when he was suddenly hanging from something, the ground above him, as the statue grabbed his leg and suddenly turned into a fully-fledged demonic creature, merely staring at the man with golden eyes.

---

Meanwhile, from Eisen’s perspective...

---

Slowly, Eisen felt himself return to the game, but at the same time noticed that his right arm had gotten a bit heavier compared to before. And when he looked down at it, he couldn’t believe his eyes. Some random person, a player, judging from the outfit he was wearing underneath the light leather armor, was currently trying to pull his sword out of his hand.

So of course, not going to let that happen just like that, Eisen grabbed the man’s leg and held him up on it. "What the hell do you think you’re doing?" Eisen asked, trying to figure out who the man was talking to a little bit ago, but the man reacted differently than expected.

"Ch-Chat, I think I’m going to die now, so the stream will most likely continue in a few hours..." The man stuttered, but Eisen just let out a loud sigh and let go of him, the man dropped to the ground as he looked back at him. Surprisingly enough, the pupils of the stranger were currently a bright red, which he just recently learned from Zyra to be a sign that someone was ’Live Streaming’ or ’Recording.’ Eisen didn’t know how live streaming would work from inside the game, but he heard that Prime Industries brought out a specific gadget meant to make it possible to enjoy streams from the game ’live’, by creating something like a mock time-dilation to feed the information to the user.

But as he didn’t honestly know how it worked, and neither did he care too much, he hadn’t read about it more than a few sentences. And then he noticed that he went offline with his both his transformations active, Eisen swiftly deactivated them and turned to the player. "Sorry about that, kid. Don’t know if you were planning on fighting this thing, but it’s too late now." Eisen said and crossed his arms, noticing some lights in the distance in one of the paths leading to where he currently was, and from the sound accompanying those lights, Komer and a few of the others had made their way here.

Confused at what was going on, the young man stood up and took a closer look at the now regular-sized, or rather still quite ’giant’ despite being somewhat more natural, person, and immediately recognizing him from somewhere. The man looked to the side, probably at some information window from what Eisen could tell, before looking at Eisen completely baffled.

"Erm, are you perchance Eisen? The Original, Eisen?" The man asked, and the old man formed a light frown on his face before nodding. "You didn’t appraise me, so I guess you just recognized me?" He answered, and immediately, the man jumped up, not wanting to pass on that chance.

"Whoa, that’s so awesome! I wasn’t aware there was a player that was strong enough to kill something like this yet, even amongst the Originals! If you don’t mind, do you want to team up a bit and continue hunting?" The man asked with a bright smile, but he was somewhat surprised when Eisen shook his head.

"Sorry kid, I’m a bit busy at the moment," Eisen said as he walked over to the Mother of Spider’s head and took a look at the different parts. The man was a bit grossed out about it, but he chose to look away and continued trying.

"Come on! I’m sure my viewers will love you if we hang around each other a bit! I’m looking through my chat right now, and everybody’s loving your buff old-man avatar already! A bit unrealistic, but it’s the dream of any of us to look like that in fifty years, so I get where you’re coming from, Bro! I’m Samurai, by the way!" He exclaimed, but Eisen once more just shook his head and sighed loudly.

"Kid, I already said no. You can help me out a bit, but hunting time is over. My friends and I are going to take this spider apart and then take it with us." Eisen said as he turned around and looked over at the people coming over toward him and Samurai, right now. Surprisingly, all the players came along, but none of the NPCs did.

"Brody, bring me a few of the preservation jars!" Eisen exclaimed, and the Demon Orc Halfling swiftly stepped into the carriage and then quickly made his way over to the old man. "Damn. For a geezer, ya did a real job on this son of a bitch. What was it, a Rank four?" Brody asked as he looked at the Mother of Spiders with a broad grin, while Eisen nodded his head and placed one of the preservation jars into the hands Samurai, who was currently trying to figure out what was going on.

"Kid, hold it steady, please. And yeah Brody, a Rank 4 area boss. It was surprisingly easy to kill; it just took a long time." Eisen said as he put his hands into the edges of one of the Spider’s eyesockets to pull the eye out, considering that he had recently found that every part of a monster can be useful for things. Carefully, he placed the eye into the jar, while Samurai was staring down at the eye before another man spoke up.

"Mhm, large monsters usually have high Endurance and Strength, but low Agility. And you were probably a pretty nice match against it because of your fire." Jyuuk explained, while Eisen slowly nodded his head, trying not to damage the other eyes which were all placed into the oversized jars with preservatives.

"That’s basically it," Eisen answered, before the two other Originals also walked up to them, with only one person acknowledging the existence of Samurai.

"Who’s this guy?" She asked, and Eisen just shrugged. "Some Alpha. He was trying to take my sword from me while I was logged off, and then went on to say some random stuff about teaming up to hunt."

And so, while Samurai was holding a jar with a spider’s eye, his stream became the most popular current stream on his platform, as he was the only one that had ever seen one of the originals. But right now, he had all five of them together in a single frame.