Holy War

by Sugralinov Daniel

  I was vaguely concerned about whether my absence had been noted yet, and how much time it would take my friends to pull Alex ‘Dangerous Adventure Magnet’ Sheppard from his capsule. But I felt good: not tired, not hungry, inspired by my huge jump in level and excited for the heights I would reach. Even the horrifying and unavoidable pain was only an inconvenience.

  I left the bounds of Tristad and looked around, ready to run back at any second. But I should have watched the skies instead of searching for enemies in the grass.

  Liberation repelled the first crowd-control effect, blit the second made my body freeze. I don’t know why, but even my undead racial bonus didn’t work.

  I started to fall onto my back, the vast blue sky filling my vision, and against it, the shadow of a winged girl hovering in the air:

  Beta #9, human, level 301672 Collector Mage

  Chapter 6: Nine

  THE NUMBERS in the timer for the Chilled debuff were too high to believe. Like all the other numbers in this place. If I calculated right, the stun would last a million minutes, or almost two years.

  “I have him, Three,” a graceful female voice said.

  “Level?” The second voice sounded fuzzy, as if through a comm amulet.

  “One thousand six hundred and ten. You’ll see him for yourself soon. Over and out.”

  Beta #9, whose name I decided to shorten to just Beta, flew off toward the Nameless Mountains. Judging by how I was dragged along behind her, she’d attached herself to me with some magical line. Then she seemed to realize that I’d be easy prey for the rabbits that way. The longeared monsters were approaching from all sides like a pack of wolves… No sooner had I remembered them than they appeared. Maybe they caught the scent of blood, or maybe the other rabbits clued them in. Something seemed odd about them, but I couldn’t make them out properly.

  Realizing that she risked losing her prize, Beta suddenly beat her ghostly wings and ascended higher, letting me hang in the air. An invisible thread pulled me by the belt. My frozen body didn’t bend, just rocked and bounced as if on a rope.

  We flew for a long time, more than an hour. My absence should have been noted in real life long ago. I expected an emergency exit any minute, but nothing happened. I couldn’t talk to Beta, and she stayed silent. I couldn’t see anything except the sky rocking above me with its painted clouds. The sun shone brightly, but not enough to blind; it looked painted on too. Time stood in place, and it seemed there were no weather effects here. At least the terrain objects weren’t sprites.

  Why had this world been created? Why wasn’t it switched off? Who was Beta? Why was everything here so high level? It comforted me that this strange player had kidnapped me and not killed me. That meant there was a chance for a dialog. Although, to be honest, none of this boded well for me; only Snowstorm could make something like this happen. Had they decided to take advantage of my mistake? To capture me with some admin’s demigod character and eliminate me ‘within the limits of gameplay’? I had no other explanation. If that was so, then it meant there was a path back from the Nether, and they were afraid I’d find it.

  I looked at the winged girl again. Her equipment looked similar to the ColdBlooded Punisher• set: close-fitting, seamless, light-absorbing matt armor. She had no helmet, so I could see her hair, not moving in spite of our flight. It looked ordinary, long and red, a little curly.

  Her level was insanely high: 301672…

  You couldn’t get there through ordinary leveling. Maybe this version of Dis allowed the developers to dig around in the database and enter whatever numbers they wanted. That would explain Beta’s ludicrous level, but not the superpowered local mobs. And the fact that I could see their level instead of the usual question marks was strange too. In the Dis I knew, when a player or mob was too strong for you, you couldn’t see their level.

  Good thing my frozen body didn’t seem to need food or drink. At least, I hadn’t gotten any extra debuffs during our flight. But for me, the good news stopped there.

  I felt us descending and saw the tips of some tall, unmoving trees, then a high fortress wall, then I hit the ground and felt myself being pulled along it. Beta landed nearby. Raising me up and standing me on my feet, her invisible magic put a series of effects on me: Pacified

  All main attributes reduced to l.

  Amnesia

  You have temporarily forgotten all your skills.

  Enchained

  You will always revive in the same place where you died.

  The system informed me of this as if merely relaying facts. It didn’t matter if Beta had done this herself or if it was the defensive systems in her fortress. Either way, I couldn’t escape. The debuffs had no duration. The drop in my physical stats was palpable. Even my vision suddenly got a lot worse.

  I stood on shaky legs on a carefully tended lawn. Equally well-tended bushes grew along the fortress wall, cut into the shapes of various animals. A path of polished flagstones meandered alongside them. To our left towered a castle well, perfectly polished and gleaming with thousands of gemstones.

  Not seeing, but feeling someone’s eyes, I saw Beta give a short nod to someone behind me. That confirmed my suspicion; she wasn’t alone here.

  “What does he have?” Beta asked.

  “Plenty, Nine,” a male voice said behind my back. “Check the list and the descriptions I just sent you. Note Depths Teleportation in particular—an interesting skill.”

  Beta was silent for some time, reading lines in the air only she could see. The corners of her lips lifted.

  “Yeah. Useful. Alright, Three, I’ll handle it. You staying?”

  “Of course. I want to see what happens. You don’t mind if I listen in, right?”

  “Won’t your girlfriend get jealous?”

  Laughter behind me.

  “Well, I have half an hour. I can’t be late for dinner. You know how it is.”

  Beta smiled crookedly, approached me.

  “I’m about to remove your stun. But you’re going to stand there and not move, not turn, not open your mouth until you’re asked a question. I’ll be the one asking, and you answer. Ready?”

  She did nothing, didn’t even lift a finger, but the Chilled debuff lifted.

  “Who are you, what do you want from me?!” I asked, then turned around sharply, but saw nobody.

  The second person might have been invisible, although I suddenly had other things to worry about anyway. The punishment for disobeying orders came immediately: Beta cast the Undying buff on me (You cannot die), then traced a finger through the air and cut my body in half. Diamond Skin didn’t activate, but my health didn’t drop below one either. I was still alive, but I felt only my top half, which slowly slid off and fell to the ground.

  Then came pain the like of which I’d never felt. Everything I’d experienced before, even with the undead curse in the sandbox, had been filtered by my capsule. There was no pain filtration in this version of Dis. I screamed. Beta frowned and cast a Seal of Silence on me. She watched me twist in agony a while, then used telekinesis to rejoin the two halves of my body, then healed me and set me on my feet.

  All without a single word. Those came later, while I stood like a totem pole and didn’t move for minutes, not trying to look around, not moving a muscle.

  “Break the rules again and I’ll let you try out Hellflame.” Beta’s angelic voice was a strange contrast to the meaning of her words. “You won’t die. Don’t even bother hoping. If you break the rules a third time, you’ll be swimming in Sandworm stomach acids. For a day. Nobody has lasted longer than that, but just in case, I have worse in store for you after that. So I advise you to obey my commands without hesitation. Nod if you understand.”

  I dropped my head in agreement, with still more questions appearing in my mind. Why would Snowstorm treat me like this?

  “How did you get here?”

  “I flew.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. Some evil bitch dragged me here
from Tristad.”

  After a two-second pause, the man’s voice spoke from behind me in amazement.

  “He’s making fun of you, Nine!”

  The next hour was nothing but uninterrupted pain. Nine put the Chilled debuff back on me and dragged me to a huge hole on the other side of the castle, where there were three leashed Lava Drakes at level one hundred thousand, a mix of dragon and basilisk about the size of a flyer. The only thing I extracted from that forced trip around the castle grounds was the knowledge that there were no other players there. Or I just couldn’t see them.

  I spent an hour that felt like a year in the Hellflame— the beasts cast it in turn almost without a break, broiling me to a crisp, but the Undying buff prevented me from burning away entirely. I hoped that my capsule’s emergency systems would detect dangerous levels of pain and kick me out of Dis, but nothing of the kind happened. I couldn’t even lose consciousness from the shock, and Beta got what she wanted. She’d beaten a subconscious terror of punishment into me.

  Finally, I was pulled from the pit and healed. All my equipment had melted away. Nothing remained of my Unconquered Herald set. Only the divine Balancer and Reaper’s Scythes survived the Hellflame. It would be silly to tty and use them while that invisible stranger stood nearby. No doubt he had a six-figure level too. It would be silly anyway—I had no skills, no moves and all my attributes were cut down. No way could I deal with Nine alone within the artifact’s five second duration.

  I stood before her again. The second player must have gone to run some errands, because the girl didn’t seem to be looking at someone else anymore and I felt no more watching eyes. Beta repeated her speech on punishment, removed Chilled and asked again: “How did you get here?”

  “On a Ravager as it escaped death at the hands of a High Priest of Nergal.”

  “Nergal? Oh, one of the gods of Disgardium?”

  “Yes. The god of light.”

  “How did you survive? Why did Smoldering not kill you?”

  “It did, just after I got here. Back in Dis, I had a divine skill. I was practically immortal.”

  “Shame you didn’t bring it here… What year is it in real life?”

  “Two thousand seventy-five…” I screamed as a fine stream of liquid fire burned my chest. “What was that for!?”

  “You lied.”

  “How’s that?”

  “According to your timeline, another traveler like you arrived here two years ago. He said the maximum player level was four hundred. The highest-level player at that time was Mogwai at three hundred and eighty.”

  “That’s true. He still has the record. Three hundred and ninety-eight, last time I saw him a couple of days ago.”

  “You contradict yourself…” Beta crooked a finger and my arm was sliced clean off. Seal of Silence held the whole time I screamed in pain.

  Beta soon got bored, stopped, healed me and explained: “Your level is over one thousand. You couldn’t have gotten experience here, so you’re hang. Even if you’re top-i in the other Dis, you couldn’t gain seven hundred levels in two years. So the year isn’t seventy-five there.”

  “I was level three hundred and nine when I got here. I killed a rabbit and leveled up a lot…”

  “Oh, I get it. Reflection? And you survived with Diamond Skin… That explains it… I guess you survived Smoldering the same way. Right. You have some fun skills! What’s the precise date in real life?”

  “When I logged into Dis, it was Friday, April nineteenth, two thousand and seventy-five. Listen…” I paused, she nodded and I continued. “Please don’t burn or cut me. To answer your questions, it’ll help to know why you’re asking. Do you really not know what year it is? Aren’t you from Snowstorm? What does all this mean? Who are you? You and the other guy?”

  She was silent a while, her eyes drilling into me. There was no anger or hatred in them, just cold indifference. Finally, as if deciding something, she nodded.

  “Alright. Why not talk to someone new?”

  “So you’ll answer me?”

  “I will. Always the same, every time…” Beta sighed. “Everything repeats. Questions, shock, surprise, denial… But everyone accepts it in the end. You will too… if you have time.”

  “What should I call you? Nine? Beta? Maybe you could tell me your real name? My name is Alex.”

  She ignored my questions. Instead, she started to tell me a story.

  “We were once the first group of beta testers—one for each race and class combination. We logged into the game, each in our own sandbox. At first we were amazed. Everything looked so real… We explored it all, started leveling up spells. But the quit function didn’t work. We were told that all we had to do was fall asleep or die. In the first case, we were told that we would exit the game automatically, and in the second, we were supposed to get an option: wait for revival, or quit. Something went wrong. We got stuck here.”

  “You mean you’ve been in Dis non-stop for almost twenty years?”

  “Twenty…” Beta laughed bitterly. “Snowstorm was in a hurry, so they accelerated all the events in the beta version to get their results faster. Can you imagine the stress that puts on the brain? Time here flows differently. Maybe that’s why the sun is always at its zenith, there are no days and nights, and it’s always the same time of year. No matter where you are in the world, always this tired old summer. Those rabbits that attacked you outside Tristad… They were level one when we first arrived in this world. Tristad is my sandbox. Back then, there were NPCs there that handed out quests. One of my first was to kill rabbits. ‘Bring ten rabbit’s feet,’ it said.”

  “Where did the NPCs go?” I asked in surprise.

  “They died. Those rabbits… they gain about a level or two every year. I already know that Snowstorm abandoned that idea in your Disgardium, but here the mobs level up too. They earn experience and revive, saving their progress. Their offspring are born with the parents’ level. And NPCs die permanently.”

  I didn’t bother asking who had iced all the NPCs in Tristad, because something she said just hit me.

  “Wait… If the rabbits gain one or two levels a year, then…”

  “Almost ten thousand years have passed here. I don’t know how long it’s been exactly. I have no calendar.”

  Ten thousand years? And only twenty years in real life? So time here flowed five hundred times faster. That meant that in real life it had been… less than three minutes since I’d fallen into the Nether? My mind refused to believe it, but then I suddenly recalled something about how Divine Revelation worked—in mere seconds, I had ‘lived’ for far longer without feeling the difference! My head had hurt bad afterwards…

  Suddenly, I felt a cold sweat. It seemed the features of the undead didn’t work in this world. Maybe the race didn’t even exist here.

  “How did you get to such a high level? I mean, weak mobs don’t give you experience, and if they gain just one or two levels a year…”

  “That’s just the rabbits. Predatory mobs progress a lot faster, and some can absorb the levels of others. It wasn’t always that way. Only a few mobs had the perk, usually rare ones. But damn Snowstorm loved their experiments. It turns out they added cross-breeding… You should see some of the chimeras you can find here! You were lucky the mobs can’t access sandbox towns, otherwise you would have had an unforgettable encounter with some wolfsnakes or hedgehogbears. This world evolves and new species appear, ever more and more nightmarish. Those of us stuck inside here can’t afford to waste a single day—we have to keep leveling up and not fall behind. Or else…”

  “How many of you are there?”

  “There were a hundred. Now there are only six…” Beta trailed off, looked away. “Anyway, we don’t know what happened to our bodies. The beta test was held in a closed Snowstorm bunker. We signed a liability waver. We were all orphans, as it turned out, so I doubt anyone came looking for us.”

  “Have you not tried to get out? What if you could somehow get
through to the main version of Dis? Maybe the interface will update and you’ll get a quit button?”

  “Are you joking? All we try to do is get out! We send Piercers there constantly, but they never manage to level up high enough to create a Greater Rift”

  “Piercers? You mean the Ravagers?”

  “They’re actually my pets. I heard they call them Ravagers in your Disgardium, yeah… Number Three… My friend who you heard, he’s smarter than me and he thinks there’s no information on the Piercers in the main database, so the controlling AI resets their level and name. Fortunately, every Piercer can absorb experience from other creatures, so they quickly level up. Well… At least, that’s what one of the other arrivals told me.”

  “So the Ravagers are all your handiwork? But if they can get there, then what stops you from following them?”

  Beta’s cheeks reddened and her eyes flashed. She looked ready to explode or tear me apart, but she just sighed tiredly and answered.

  “We tried ever} which way as soon as we figured out it was possible. I started as an ordinary mage, but after many years, I gained the ability to absorb magical abilities from other creatures. I became a collector. Maybe six thousand years ago, a chimera, a mix of two beast-gods, learned how to form a rift leading to the main Disgardium. I ran into it in a closed instance and killed it. I was lucky. Thanks to the First Kill, the skill was added to my collection. Activating it required a new resource: Smoldering Nether• Shards. None of us had ever heard of it before, but as soon as we learned about it, the shards started to drop from almost every mob. The world kept evolving, and now even ordinary mobs can create a rift, albeit it a small one, as long as they have the resources. But that’s another matter. The important thing is that I made a rift through to your world and walked through it.”

  “But you’re still here.”

  “But I’m still here… The main database has no information on me as a player. That’s what Three says, anyway. Whatever the reason, when I walked into the Rift, I lost consciousness, and when I came round, I was dead, waiting to respawn. We were fighting amongst ourselves then. All the betas were split into warring groups in a battle for resources and power. But when I told them about the Rift, we made peace. We gained heart! Even if we couldn’t escape Dis, we could at least live among people!”