“Why are you even bothering with him? I told you to just grab an NPC,” a second voice whined. Lucas mentally added a “plus one” to the tally of people annoying him and blocking his sunlight. “Negative hasn’t killed a thing since he started playing, and he’s been playing way longer than us.”

“Negative.” It was his nickname and claim to fame in the game. The moniker wasn’t exactly creative, but it did hit the nail on the head. Rather than being related to his instant-rejection personality, however, it was given to him because of the fact that he was negative Level 71, which was an incredible feat that made him a unique entity in the game.

One of the game’s various penalties was that it actually allowed a player to regress in levels if he died too many times. The cost of dying grew progressively larger at the higher levels, meaning that a player could take a fairly substantial hit to his experience if he died, but in the early stages of the game, someone had to die between three to five times before the system would punish him.

The class promotion quest was one of the first that a player could pick up, and it was also one of the easiest. Most people would finish it within the first hour of playtime and reach level 5, so no one had ever actually gone into the negative levels aside from him. His achievement had earned him a great deal of ridicule from other players, but he didn’t care. The only things that concerned him were lying out in the sun, enjoying the fragrant aroma of flowers, and partaking of his wine. He had become such a permanent fixture on the hill that he had to occasionally deal with some jerk who wanted to kill him just to see if he would drop any money or if he was some secret event—along with some who wanted to kill him just for the fun of it—but that was the extent of his interaction with the rest of the world.

“Well, there is a first time for everything. Come on, Negative, the system told us you’re the only other player right now that hasn’t done the quest yet, so it’d really help us out,” the gruff guy pleaded again.

“Yeah, come on, nya! Pleeeeassseeee!” a sweet-voiced woman begged.

So many voices, so many annoyances. Having a conversation with so many people just felt problematic and cumbersome to him. Lucas squeezed his eyes tighter and turned over onto his side, leaving his back for the others to deal with. He knew the rude gesture was likely to tempt their anger, but it was almost certain to get his point across. Now, they’d either politely leave or just kill him, but the effect would be the same: he’d be free from their pestering.