by P. J. Frost
But deep down, I knew there was more to it than that. She had been momentarily hopeful when she'd heard I might be trapped in the game forever... because she didn't want me to leave.
Chapter Fifteen
“So hey,” Trish said to Quorull, “at the risk of sounding like... you know, me: You do remember what you promised when you asked me to help you, right?”
Quorull sighed indulgently. “It was just a few hours ago, Trish. Yes, I remember.”
“Good, because I'm gonna hold you to that.”
“What did she make you promise?” I asked, raising an eyebrow and smirking.
Quorull rolled her eyes. “That if her avatar dies while she's helping us, I'll create a new one for her and build it back up to Level Eight in time for her next birthday.”
“Damn right,” Trish agreed with a nod. “And FYI? I'm thinking I might want to be a Hobgoblin next time around, so you should probably start reading up on the best way to build experience points while playing as one.”
“First an Orc, then a Hobgoblin,” Erinye remarked, amused. “Why do you choose to inhabit this world in the bodies of monsters, child?”
“Because they're ugly,” she retorted, “and that makes them more fun! Being a plain old human is boring.”
“I am not so certain that is true,” the Empress said quietly. “For some, it would be a form greatly to be desired.”
“Well, like I said before,” the kid told her, “if you can do all this stuff that other NPCs can't do, maybe someday you could change the race of your character! I don't know why you'd want to, though. Those wings? Awesome. And the green skin? So cool.”
Erinye smiled, touched. “You truly think so, girl?”
“Sure! Your boobs are gross, though, seriously,” Trish added matter-of-factly. “I mean, don't they make your back hurt, like, all the time? And aren't they heavy? How do you not fall down?”
The Empress raised her eyebrows, shocked... then burst out laughing. “Perhaps if I lived in your world, young one, I would.”
“If you lived in my world,” Trish snickered, “you'd probably be doing porn.”
Erinye tilted her head. “What is this 'porn' you speak of? Is it a style of combat?”
“Well, there is some wrestling involved!” Trish quipped.
“That's enough about that,” Quorull snapped. “I'm not going to have your mother asking me whether I knew that you know about porn.”
“Oh, lighten up!” the kid giggled. “Everyone knows about porn. Besides, given everything that's going on here, I'd say that's the least of the secrets I'll have to keep from her about this.”
“Yeah, you've got a point there,” Quorull replied ruefully. “My sis isn't exactly the most open-minded person in the...”
“Shhh.” Erinye froze in her tracks, holding a hand up for silence. “Do you hear that?”
I frowned. “What? I don't hear anything.” Her ears had ridges and came to points, so I supposed I shouldn't have been surprised she had superhuman hearing... which made me wonder how much of my whispered conversation with Quorull she had overheard back in Menageria.
I didn't have time to wonder for long, though.
Because after a few seconds, I heard it too.
Clattering.
It was faint at first, but it rapidly got louder, as though whatever was coming toward us was moving incredibly fast. And once the sources of the noise revealed themselves by rounding the corner of the mountain path, I understood why they had been able to cross so much ground so quickly.
It was because they were unencumbered by flesh.
They were a horde of skeletons.
Their bones weren't just human, either. In the grotesque mass that surged toward us, I saw the remains of almost all the NPC animals and monsters in the entire game. Centaurs, Trolls, Ogres, Dinosaurs, Mermaids, and countless other things that walked, crawled, and slithered... if it could be killed, its skeletal form was represented here. Even the bones of birds advanced on us, hopping and flapping along on the ice because they had no feathers to fly with.
Bony appendages reached out. Empty sockets stared. Teeth chattered furiously.
“We must be drawing close to our objective,” Erinye growled, producing her emerald energy sword, “if our enemy is so increasingly determined to stop us!”
“There's thousands of them,” Trish gasped. “Like, thousands. We don't have a prayer.”
“We need pray to no higher powers, friend Trish,” the Empress countered, “for this day, upon this mountainside, we shall forge our own destinies.”
“Okay, now that one actually was inspirational.” Quorull unslung her longbow, brandishing it like a curved staff. “Screw the arrows, guess it's time to get up close and personal.”
“Guys,” I said, twirling my staff, “just in case we don't all make it out of this, I just want to say: Thank you for coming this far with me.”
“Yeah, yeah, enough with the mushy stuff,” Trish sneered. “Let's kick some Skellington butt!”
“Forward, then!” Erinye snarled. “For Sydnar, Sorcerer of Soggoth-Nur!”
We charged forward, howling.
The skeletons weren't carrying any weapons, but their teeth, beaks, and claw-like finger bones dealt plenty of damage. They were coming at us in wave attacks... no regard for safety or self-defense, just running at us endlessly to wear us down.
It was a solid strategy.
Quorull, Trish, and Erinye were cutting massive swathes through the skeletons' ranks, but more of them filled those empty spaces immediately – and the ones who got past the arcs of their weapons managed to chip away at their Health Meters until they were dispatched, only to be replaced by more, more, more.
The clattering was deafening now, a hellish white noise that felt like fingernails scraping against my eardrums. I was slowly starting to blink red, and I realized that the sound was inflicting sonic damage. I wanted to yell to the others, to tell them to plug their ears to block it out... but there was no time for that, no time for anything but fighting.
In between swings of my staff, I conjured the Three Fists spell repeatedly, figuring the force damage it doled out would be perfect for smashing as many of these bony atrocities at once as possible. It worked, but again, it was like trying to punch out the tide.
Worst of all, our surroundings were anything but ideal.
The mountain path was narrow, and the skeletons had a clear objective: To overwhelm us, drive us back, and push us off. They could keep pouring forth without worrying about how many of them tripped and skidded off the edge – in fact, the sounds of the bones clacking and snapping on their way down into the ravine was almost as loud as the chattering all around us, to the point where I was starting to worry the noise would cause an avalanche.
We, on the other hand, had to fight carefully in close quarters to make sure that we didn't accidentally inflict damage on each other while targeting the skeletons. Which meant a lot of our effort and concentration was being spent on staying out of each other's way instead of being focused on defeating our bony enemies.
I was blinking red more quickly now. So were Quorull and Erinye.
Trish was solid crimson and quickly disappearing under a mountain of clamoring bones.
“Trish!” Quorull cried out. “No!”
“Don't worry, Aunt Coral,” Trish answered nonchalantly. “Like I said, I've got schoolwork to do anyway. But hey, good luck, guys! Hope you make it! Erinye, it was nice to meet...”
Then she was gone.
The ranks of the skeletons were thinning out now. Which was good because my Health, Rest, and Magic Meters were dangerously low. All three of us were solid red now, which meant a few more hits would be enough to destroy any one of us.
But they didn't get that chance.
We plowed through the rest of them, knocking their bones off the mountain and breathing hard.
“That girl,” Erinye marveled. “So calm in the face of her own imminent demise?”
"Yeah, and why not, right?" Quorull griped. "It's not like she's the one who's going to be spending hours building up a whole new character night after night for the next six weeks." She glanced over at me and grimaced sympathetically. "Ugh, sorry, Sid. I know the stakes are a hell of a lot higher for you right now."
“It's okay,” I said, trying to sound casual as I drank my final Health Potion. “We still don't know for sure that dying in the game means I die for real.”
But after what had happened when Coral tried to turn the game off, I was having a hard time believing in any other outcome.
I only had one Magic Potion remaining, and I swallowed the contents of that as well. “Quorull, how many Health Potions do you have left?”
“Two,” she said, drinking one of them and returning to her normal color.
“That's perfect!” I exclaimed. “So you still have one left to give Erinye.”
“Yeah,” Quorull answered, “and I would too, if it would do her any good. But it wouldn't, Sid.”
“Why not? What do you mean?”
“She means that these potions are made to be consumed by the players of this 'game,'” Erinye said sadly. “They are not designed to be of any aid to... fictions like me. We are created to be killed, not saved.”
“We don't know that,” I insisted.
“No, you're right, we don't,” Quorull agreed evenly. “But in trying it out, we'd risk maybe wasting the one thing that will allow us to survive to the end of this quest. I'm sorry, but you know as well as I do that it's not worth it.”
I didn't necessarily know that, but I wasn't inclined to argue the point. The longer Erinye stayed solid red, the greater the odds that some new threat would come along and finish her off. “Fine, then. My healing spell worked on her before at the harbor, and why not, right? Healing injured NPCs is a crucial element in certain missions, so it makes sense. I'll just do that again.”
“It'll use up a lot of your Magic Meter,” Quorull pointed out. “You might need that later on.”
“No big deal,” I countered. “I can just grab a Magic Potion from you, right?”
She shook her head. “I don't have any. I'm a Night Elf, not a Wizard, remember? I've got a couple of enchanted arrows, but overall, I don't tend to stock up on the green stuff because I don't get as much use out of it.”
I laughed humorlessly. “Well. Okay. Guess I'll be playing the rest of the game on the 'Difficult' setting, then, huh?”
As I prepared to summon the spell, Quorull grabbed the end of my staff, pointing it away from the Empress. “Sid. Listen to me. You cannot do this. I won't let you.”
“Why not?” I answered angrily. “What the hell is going on here, Coral? Why are you suddenly so insistent about me not saving Erinye's life?!”
For a horrible moment, I almost expected her to reveal that she wasn't really on my side after all... that maybe she wasn't even the real Coral, that the game had somehow gotten to her and turned her against me. If so, that was a shock I simply wasn't sure I'd be able to endure, not after everything else that had happened over the previous two days.
But no. That wasn't it at all.
“Because,” she explained sensibly, “it's time for you to admit that Erinye isn't real. She's a computer program, Sid. One that's been coded with an incredible, adaptable, compelling AI, which has probably been backed up a thousand times over. And you're an actual person. One who's going to need all of your Magic Meter to see this through to the end. You can't save her because she can't actually 'die.' But you can.”
“Your friend is... correct, Sydnar,” Erinye said. “If what you have told me is true, then your life is more real than my own. That makes it far more precious. The only worth that could truly come from my existence would be to sacrifice it in order to preserve yours.”
“See?” Quorull demanded. “Even she knows it. And now you have to accept it too.”
I thought it over for a long moment... then shook my head.
“No. Maybe you're both right. Maybe Erinye is just a computer program, and she'll be re-spawned. But maybe not. Maybe in this iteration of her existence, there's some special... I don't know, spark that has allowed her to grow beyond her coding, and she won't come back the same. Or hell, maybe she won't come back at all! Maybe her creators will see her as a glitch and just delete her completely.”
"Maybe, yeah," Quorull conceded, "but none of that matters because she's still a fictional character, and you're not!"
“Then that makes her even more special, doesn't it?” I challenged. “How many fictional characters come to life? Achieve sentience and develop minds of their own? For all we know, we could be looking at a once-in-a-lifetime quirk of artificial intelligence. Isn't that more worthy of preservation than some random gamer slob who's stuck in an IT job he hates?”
“Not to me,” Quorull replied firmly. “Don't do this. Please.”
“I'm sorry, Coral. But I have to. Even if I manage to escape all this... I just know I couldn't live with myself if I didn't do everything I could to help her stay alive.”
She looked at me for a long moment, then released my staff. I aimed it at Erinye once more. “Cressya, Goddess of Healing, bless these wounds with your celestial hands!”
I felt my Magic Meter reduce by a quarter as the healing energies were channeled through my staff and into the Empress. She returned to her normal color and looked down at herself, visibly relieved. “Thank you, Sydnar. You have saved me once again.”
“Yeah, let's just hope it doesn't come along to bite him in the ass later,” Quorull muttered darkly. “Come on. We've still got plenty of ground to cover.”
Chapter Sixteen
As we climbed higher and higher up the mountain trail, I noticed something odd – and at this point, “something odd” had definitely become a relative term for me.
Everything around us was getting... whiter.
Our surroundings were so relentlessly snowy that it was becoming increasingly difficult to discern between the ground, the sky, and the horizon in-between. There was a lack of detail or definition. Everything was blurring and running together.
The effect was disorienting, and I felt myself getting dizzy – feeling like “up” and “down” were becoming interchangeable. Did either of those terms have any meaning anymore, when it was all just the same blank expanse?
I tried to focus on the rows of peaks that, theoretically, separated the snow beneath us from the snow above and around us. But the harder I looked at them, the less natural the formations seemed. They were strangely geometric... squared off and interlocking, like the shapes from a Tetris game.
“You see it too, don't you?” Quorull remarked. “And that's not all. We're standing in a blizzard of pure white. So why does it feel like everything's getting warmer instead of colder?”
“Yeah, and why is everything so quiet?”
It was true. Ever since the brawl with the skeletons, the air was still enough to hear a pin drop. It was surreal, even oppressive. Human ears were tuned to only accept reality as long as there was some form of background noise.
This was just... nothing.
“What do you think it all means?” she asked.
I didn't have an answer for her – and before I could try to think of one, I felt a patch of ground loosen under my feet. I barely had time to leap closer to the mountainside before a large section of the trail fell away from the slope.
It was made up of colored cubes.
They bounced and tumbled down the ravine, flickering as they went.
Erinye's eyes were wide. “Were those... things... the building blocks of my world?!”
“You could say that,” Quorull said. “They're pixels. I think it's safe to say that the coding in this area of the game is incomplete. Like it's still a work in progress.”
“Or it was just thrown together in a hurry,” I surmised. “In preparation for our arrival. Either way, reality is feeling a hell of a lot thinner around here, that's for sure.”
> Quorull looked up the mountain, shielding her eyes from the white glare. “Huh. Think that might have something to do with it?”
Erinye and I followed her gaze.
At the summit, there was a fortress that consisted of a series of interlocking black rectangles. There were patches of white blocks here and there on its surface.
Given how generally featureless it was, it should have come across as dull, unremarkable.
Instead, the sight of it filled me with inexplicable dread. For some reason I couldn't quite articulate, it was like looking at a face that was devoid of features. Something about it radiated a dark, unnatural, larger-than-life malice.
“Reminds me of the monolith in 2001,” Quorull commented. “Those scenes always gave me the creeps big-time.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean,” I agreed.
“I, too, feel a peculiar terror in looking upon it,” Erinye said. “But still, we must press on. For behind that enigmatic exterior are the answers we seek.”
“Or just more questions,” Quorull added under her breath.
We had to walk single file up the trail, though, for fear of more cubical sections crumbling away beneath us.
The overwhelming blankness of everything around us kept creeping in on my mind, pushing me further and further from sanity. The longer I tromped through this void, the more the implications of it terrified me on a visceral level. Were we even still in WarriorWorld, or was this someplace else... or nowhere at all? Everything was so still and suspended, except for the occasional avalanche of pixels.
With no solid dimensions to anything, what were we even standing on? How could we be sure of what direction we were going – if we were getting closer to the fortress or farther away? The view never changed, no matter how much distance we seemed to cover.
There was nothing to anchor us to anything solid or to help us get our bearings. It felt like at any moment, we could just float away into empty space.