*Mumbling something incoherent the man turned away and went toward another room.

"Haha, Sucks to suck my friend." (1)

"Fuck you! I do this every goddamn day." (3)

The two men chuckled and bumped fists at their colleague's consistent misfortune. For the past week-and-a-half, he had lost in the high-intensity battle known to most as 'rock, paper, scissors' and was the one to wake the Little Miss from her slumber.

For the bodyguards of one of the world's most prestigious families' daughters, their lives were fairly relaxed. With it being a time of peace for all nations, there had been no problems as of late.

While many would say that times of peace dull a warrior's mind, in the case of the three, such a saying couldn't be farther from the truth.

The three come from differing backgrounds; #1 originates from America, he was a mercenary on behalf of the American military for a time due to his various skills he picked up as a spy in Russia whilst tensions were high in 2189. #2 He isn't necessarily the strongest in regards to hand-to-hand or even firearms combat but is instead learned in the field of strategy--as a side note, he has won multiple world-class chess competitions. And finally #3, while being incredibly dense and not the best at strategy, his instincts can be likened to that of a tiger and lion, he is also the youngest of the three at the age of 21 with the others being 34 and 26, respectively.

In the current year of 2199, these three can be said to be some of the most influential people in the underground world, and their current task is protecting the Little Miss of the King family.

While referred to as Little Miss by the three, she is already nearing the age of 18. Audrey King is expected to become a bargaining chip to merge with an equally powerful family, Queen. The purpose of the merger is to strengthen the business aspects of both families and create the K&Q Group. While being the King & Queen Group is a matter of coincidence, in regards to the name anyways, once united it will become a new leader from an economic standpoint.

With new advances in technology every day, the need for more funding and influence increased with each passing minute. If the families were to try and expand through their own means, they would be cast out by rival families and companies hoping to be the holder of history's biggest monopoly over mankind's development.

While seemingly an overly dramatic dream, it is a very real possibility, for people are now leaving the times of manual labor and are seeking ways to occupy their time through entertainment.

In regards to the word "entertainment" many things come to mind; movies, plays, music, games, sports, sex. There are surely many more forms of entertainment, but those were...*

"THErE aRe SuReLY MoRE FoRmS oF ENtErTAInMeNt!"

Using a meme from 2017, which was from over a century ago, Carmen Bishop released his frustrations.

Throwing his phone across the room in a rage, or at least making the motion of such actions as his "phone" was actually a hologram projected from the watch on his wrist.

Back to the matter at hand, while Carmen is not an avid reader of novels and all things associated, he at the very least knows when a novel will be bland and extremely unoriginal to the point of being a slightly modified version of another novel. There's also the fact that he knows that people are automatically biased toward novels with female protagonists as the reviews are significantly better for a novel that has a female MC as opposed to the male MC counterpart.

But such knowledge does not matter, simply because the release of Land of The Exiled, this generation's and the next generation's most anticipated game, has arrived.

Land of The Exiled is a VRMMO set at several times the size of Earth. In addition to a planet-sized map, there will be future updates which will bring about new worlds and quests to explore. Just based on this alone would be enough to get several hundreds of thousands of pre-orders for the game and the newest generation of VR capsules.

Carmen was now on the main page for LOTE; waiting for the announcement of the winners for the Limited Edition version of LOTE. In other games, the Limited Edition would provide some sort of gift, advantage, or ease-of-life attachment, but it was slightly different for LOTE. The only benefits from the Limited Edition version were a personalized VR capsule, the ability to have your feats in-game be recorded on a separate ranking list exclusive to Limited Edition owners, as well as a badge in-game that would show your ownership of the Limited Edition version. While the separate ranking function is completely pointless, the personalized VR capsule is essentially an ad campaign to make more money off of the more well-off people in society.

While Carmen could afford the basic model of VR capsule, he thought that the Limited Edition version would be significantly better, as he is a person who was oddly concerned about the visual aspect of everything he owned. An example would be his home, his first criteria for buying a house was symmetry as his OCD would not permit anything out of balance. His main goal in getting the limited edition VR capsule is to have it be entirely symmetrical as well as be painted with his signature color combination of black and white, as opposed to the default colors of gray and blue.

For the Limited Edition version, there were only 10,000 units made and only 10 would be part of the giveaway. Carmen would definitely not play LOTE if he couldn't get the Limited Edition version, as it would bother him to an immense degree if he were to see the default unit clash with the colors of his room, there was also the fact that he couldn't afford the limited edition version as it cost $10,000.

While Carmen could just paint the default version himself, given the materials, he still would not do it. The reason for this lies in the fact that Carmen is incapable of doing any sort of artistry.

In regards to the game itself, Carmen didn't know much. The main things he knew were as follows: realistic representation of damage and injury to the body, shaped to one's body hit-boxes, and a completely open-world experience. Thanks to a multitude of improved, as well as new features, the hype behind the game was immense.

Crossing his fingers, Carmen awaited the announcement of the winners with strained eyes.

10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

Once the timer even approached the 3-second-mark, Carmen had already hit the refresh button. After the site had loaded once more Carmen, frantically scrolling down, scanned through the short ten-person list. As he went through the names with a keen eye, he happened to see his name as one of the winners and had already fallen off his chair.

Congratulations to the winners of Land of The Exiled - Limited Edition

> Bjorkshire

> Eternal Spite

> [Equilibrium]

> Tungsten Drop

> Matt2100

> Sword God

> URBADLMAO

> BigD0ng

> NoSadNoBad

> FrontalAssault

We at VR Projekt* welcome you to the Land of The Exiled, good luck Exiled.

Recovering from his shock, Carmen checked his messages and found his Unit Number: 05000 as well as a link to the website for customizing his VR capsule.

Immediately Carmen began the not-so-long process of customizing his capsule. His first order of business was to make one-half black and one-half white. After doing that, Carmen started adding different trim options, tapping on, previewing, blending, all until his VR capsule was entirely uniform and oddly similar in appearance to the 2019 Bentley Continental GT.

Satisfied with his work, Carmen tapped on the 'finish' button and then put in his address. All that was left was to wait for it to arrive.