My digital body reacted treacherously at the sight of the beautiful naked girl. My heart tried to beat its way out of my chest and I stood still as a statue, not knowing what to do. I mean, I knew the theory, but…
Beta saw my hesitation and took the lead. She nestled against me, embraced me passionately, started kissing me, and then threw me onto the bed with a single light touch…
It may have been in virtuality only, but then I became a man. I had a million reasons to hate Nine, but the fact remained: she was my first.
It was the longest time I’d spent in the Nether without any deaths. And without them, it was hard to judge the time Beta and I spent in bed together… I can say for certain that it was a long, long time. She had a way of approaching everything she did with such seriousness and significance. If experience like this could be expressed in levels, I would have said she powerleveled me up two or three ranks.
If this had happened in real life, then the real me would be in seventh heaven. After all, Tissa and I never made it to bed. All the same… I’d be lying if I said I regretted it, but I couldn’t say I felt much connection to Nine. I was still an imprisoned slave, living life in a cycle of suffering in death, revival, death, revival… until Beta sucked out of me all that she needed.
After one of our sessions, as I lay next to her happy and limp, she spoke quietly as if to herself:
“I think that’s enough.”
Then I died: she cut my head off with her blade of air. Ten seconds later, I died again. Another hour and Beta dragged me into the castle grounds and killed me once more.
She didn’t take me to bed again. Worse, she didn’t say a single word for many deaths to come, or let me say anything.
Deaths, deaths, deaths… More deaths, more silence. I tried to say something, of course. Again and again I offered to help her open a Greater* Rift. And each time, the reaction was the same—a blank look, death.
As soon as I revived, I died again. When she wasn’t around, I tried to run. Then I screamed with burnt vocal cords as I choked on acid in a Sand Worm’s stomach. Once, I badly angered her. She placed the Undying buff on me and threw me to a Living Sieve.
Hundreds more deaths with that interminable wait in the great nothing.
While I was between worlds, I had time to rest, and I thought of options for fighting back against the preventers in case I ever got out of the Nether. I built models in my mind of the various ways that events might go in main Dis, in my life, in the clan. I mentally drew connections between the individuals involved that I knew of. I tried to predict what would happen to Dis if the beta testers got there with their hundreds of thousands of levels. Would they overturn the gods? Kill everyone? Would Nine continue harvesting skills out of sheer habit?
On the rare occasions when I wasn’t killed right away, I tried everything from my inventory that Beta hadn’t shaken loose. The items she gave to me on our memorable night together turned out to be useless. Their bonuses were measured in astronomical numbers, but none of them were anything useful like “Kill everyone.”
In despair, I tried swallowing the random-effect Explosive Lollipops that I’d gotten from Defiler outside Kinema. The dumb effects did nothing useful at first. Until one lollipop turned me invisible.
As soon as I realized what had happened, I ran as fast as I could out of the castle. I had three minutes—that was how long the effect lasted.
Successfully running past Rainbow Unicorns— beautiful and at the same time nightmarish creatures with tentacles and pincers,—I ran past a pack of Magnetic Toads, but fell into view of a Living Sieve. The creature saw through my invisibility.
I’d punished myself yet again. It took a long time for Beta to return, and the Enchained debuff made me revive in the same place for several days, each time landing on the same Living Sieve.
On the fifth day, I was already praying to the Sleepers to bring the girl back. The damn beast had brought me down to level one, and my experience was melting away. I was risking permanent death.
Nine appeared just in time. Another couple of deaths and that would have been it. Once she returned, she found where I’d died, cleared it, then waited several hours for me to revive. She didn’t kill me right away. First she grouped up and leveled me back up by killing a pack of mobs, then took me to the castle. Even there, death didn’t reach me right away—first the girl magicked up two bottles of strong dwarven hooch and handed one to me. She drank her own down in one gulp.
“What happened?” It seemed I was getting Stockholm syndrome. I was worried about Beta, not just for my own sake or because of the night we had together. “Where were you?”
“Dealing with problems,” she answered, glancing at me and gritting her teeth. “Nine-Six has joined with Seven-Tw^o. They attacked Three. They dropped him almost a hundred thousand levels by the time I got there. Twelve and I had to weigh in, but we did it. Three is saved…”
Beta let me finish the bottle and get drunk and only then killed me. Then once more. When I revived again, the castle was empty.
I wandered the grounds, not wanting to hurry’ to escape this time—if Beta was delayed again, there was a non-zero chance that I’d die forever. Then it was all over:
Emergency exit activated: external immersion capsule command interface in effect!
Exiting in: 3… 2… 1…
As the intragel receded, I felt like I’d just woken up. All the events of the Nether lost their color in mere seconds, and everything that had happened before it took on new freshness and clarity. The Nether felt like a nightmare.
Dry throat, elevated pulse, shaky legs, rattly breath… My head was pounding so hard I thought it would explode. Everything around me was murky. But even that didn’t stop the voice I heard from getting through to me from my nearest and dearest: “You scared the hell out of us, Alex.”
Seeing only vague shadows in front of me, I moved forward and my hand caught Ed’s broad palm. I couldn’t hold back my tears as I pulled my savior of a friend into a hug.
“Woah-woah, easy, bro! At least get dressed first!”
“No way! Come here! You don’t even know how much I love you, asshole! Oh, Hung! Malik! Hairo, you’re here too? Let me hug you…!”
The only thing that stopped me from hugging all my dumbfounded friends was the fact that my legs folded beneath me and I fell down. That brought some blood back to my brain and the pain lancing through my knee seemed like nothing at all. After Living Sieve, it didn’t even count as pain.
Chapter 8: And the Knives Flew
I WAS PULLED out of my capsule at twenty past six. First I quenched my throat-burning thirst, then ate a protein bar. Then another.
Then I spent ten minutes recovering, hooked up to the Home Doctor. The medical AI calmed my skyrocketing pulse, lowered my intracranial pressure, injected me with sedatives. My friends waited patiently the whole time, asking no questions. I started to feel a lot better and we moved to the lounge. Hung made eveiyone coffee and a couple of pizzas. The discussion began. First, the boys told me their perspective.
Grey-haired Hairo crossed his arms on his broad chest and paced the lounge with measured steps. Ed did most of the talking, with Malik adding colorful comments here and there. Hung listened along with me as if every’ word was news to him.
As it turned out, yesterday, Scyth logged off. After midnight, while the boys continued to explore Holdest, the miners wrote to the clan chat—apparently, crowds of cave people had filled up the fort. Based on a sharp leap in his stats, Ed realized that more adepts had arrived for the Sleepers.
They’re so ugly, Gyula’s daughter Eniko said of the ragged sewer troggs that Patrick O’Grady brought in. They really did look like cave people, with unnaturally long arms that reached to the ground, but according to game lore, they were closer to the titans. They had great stamina, strength, high resistance to enemy magic and pathetically low intellect.
The boys jumped to Kharinza, where they found the first priest watching on happil
y as the troggs met Behemoth. Not only were the troggs there, but so were the kobolds and the cultists of Morena. The fort looked as packed as Times Square on New Year’s Eve.
Patrick told the others where he and I had parted ways, but couldn’t tell them where Scyth had gone; and hadn’t he been planning to play until morning? The boys began to suspect the worst: that I’d fallen foul of the Alliance of Preventers and the High Priest of Nergal at the Ravager, and died. Permanently died—eliminated as a Threat.
“My heart was in my throat,” Ed recalled. “I thought for sure that was it, you were a goner.
They decided to test their horrible theory. The boys logged out of Dis and tried to contact me. Without success, obviously, since I was still in my capsule. They decided that meant I’d gone to sleep, but when they watched the news and the videos of what happened during the battle with the Ravager Harnathea, they got worried again.
My disappearance didn’t seem odd to the enemy; I must have died and respawned in my camp. But my friends knew that I hadn’t turned up in the fort! They spent all night on Kharinza, periodically logging out to check the news, which just kept yammering on about the vulnerabilities of the Threat, killed, as it seemed, by the High Priest of Nergal.
“We barely slept,” Hung admitted. “Couldn’t stop wondering what happened to you. We were worried.”
“I got in touch with some old contacts,” Hairo added. “They confirmed that nobody had left your house. We could only hope that you were just sleeping and you forgot to put your comm on. The police reviewed your physiological stats: everything was mostly normal, but your brain activity was anomalously elevated. Nothing out of the ordinary—it happens in capsules. But you were offline!”
From around lunch, they started calling me non-stop. After a while with no answer, they came to find me. Hairo picked up the boys in his flyer, and once they arrived and couldn’t wake me up with the door chime, they started looking for my parents to unlock the apartment. The boys knew that my folks were at a resort, but I hadn’t told them which, and our security officer had to get some acquaintances involved. It turned out the Sheppard couple had flown to the Moon. After Hairo learned that, it was only a matter of time to find out which hotel they were staying in. After receiving a quick run-down of the situation, my father gave Edward Rodriguez access. Within mere minutes, my friends were pulling me from my pod.
The details of life in the Nether were disappearing from my memory like a fading nightmare, but the key points stayed in my head. It was all like something that had happened five years ago; you remember the broad strokes, but you can’t reconstruct the days. Just the moments that stood out the most. So I told my friends of my year in the Nether without much detail.
They listened to me carefully, but I knew it was hard to believe. Beta testers living in virtuality for ten thousand years, leveling up into the thousands, infinite deaths, incredible abilities…
“I can’t wrap my head around it…” Malik said. “A year in the Nether? How is that even possible? I mean… technically. You were in your capsule just over a day.”
“It’s possible/’ Hairo answered. “Back in the fifties, the army used to use deep immersion for training combat skills. A month of training meant years in virtual reality. Our brain isn’t adapted to process information at that speed, of course, but the experiments proved the method’s efficacy. When they ended immersion, the test subject felt as if they were waking up from a long sleep. They couldn’t remember the details, but on some deep level, the skills and reflexes stuck. I guess Snowstorm introduced that technology during the beta tests.”
“Doesn’t an experiment require special capsules?” Ed asked doubtfully.
“Maybe not. Maybe they planned to use that feature in the game. Time magic and that kind of thing…”
I knew the technology was already in use in Dis—that must be how Divine Revelation worked—but didn’t tell the others. After I told them everything that had happened, I realized I had a problem left unsolved. My character was still in beta Dis. How could we pull him out?
“Let’s try this. You go in for a minute, check where Scyth is and we’ll pull you out,” Ed suggested.
“Five hundred minutes there? That’s a whole day… Well, alright, let’s try it.”
As soon as I logged into Dis, I saw myself in limbo. Scyth was dead and awaiting revival. But apart from the timer, another line suddenly appeared:
Synchronizing…
The line blinked, disappeared. My head cleared up. Suddenly, I remembered all the events of the Nether just as vividly as before. But now I also recalled the extra few weeks that had passed for the Scyth that remained here while I was outside my capsule.
With surprise, I realized that the other ‘me’ had been continuing to live his best life (sarcasm) while I was gone, and knew nothing of the emergency exit. Apparently, he hadn’t seen the system notification about it—but now he knew. I felt joy, not my own, but his, over the fact that he (I?) had been pulled out. We merged into a single personality again. Now, when I was pulled out again, he would be able to have hope, and not just the sense of doom that I felt in him, in myself.
My five hundred minutes passed almost entirely in the great nothingness. As soon as I revived, I fell into Nine’s baleful clutches.
“What the hell are you up to?!” she shouted in rage, having failed again to steal an ability from me.
In my absence, she hadn’t managed to get anything out of Scyth. Hold on, buddy, I told myself mentally when the emergency quit activated. As reality materialized before me, my own answer echoed in my thoughts: Get me out of here.
The intragel slid off me. I saw my friends’ anxious faces behind the walls of my capsule and pushed it open, shook my head.
“Still in the Nether…” I suddenly felt how tired I was, how important it was now to forget about Dis and everything related to it, to switch onto something else. I remembered that we had plans for that evening. “What about that party, guys?”
“Uhm…” Ed exchanged lost glances with Hung and Malik. “We forgot…”
“What did you forget?” I said, not understanding.
“We forgot to cancel it!” Hung shouted, his eyes widening as he checked the time on his comm. “All this stuff made me forget that we told everyone to arrive at eight! Damn it!”
“No problem, I’ll cancel it now,” Ed said. “Sorry, Alex, I know you aren’t in the mood to party…”
“On the contrary!” I climbed out of my capsule, tramped over to my bed and got dressed. “Who’s coming? I invited Piper, Rita and Karina yesterday. Who else?”
“Well… I called Alison,” Hung answered. “And Ed…”
The big man shut up, and Rodriguez continued for him.
“Basically, Alex, Tissa’s in town. She flew in to visit her dad for the weekend. And I…”
“You invited her?”
“To be precise, we invited her.”
“You did the right thing. I need to talk to her, set a few things straight,” I said calmly. I looked at Hairo. “You staying?”
“Afraid not, kids,” the security officer answered, frowning. Three deep wrinkles furrowed his brow. “I’ll be nearby and keeping an eye on you. You’re playing with fire. If my information is correct, Melissa Schafer is still in the Awoken even though she’s been recruited by the White Amazons. And on top of that, you’ve invited Piper Dander and Alison Wu, members of T-Modus, right? Rita Wood, a potential member of the Awoken that guessed Alex’s status… And Karina Rasmussen, her friend. Both those girls study in the same school as a certain Wesley Cho, former leader of Axiom, who blackmailed Alex. And that matter hasn’t been solved yet, am I right? I think this should be a pretty fun party. Who taught you to be so careless? So naive? Or are you just morons?”
Hairo raised his voice with each sentence, until practically shouting the last few. It seemed the party was news to him. After a pause, the security officer sighed and finished calmly:
“Next time you
wanna throw a party, just let me know first. I’d like to see and hear all your conversations, too. Can you stream to my comm?”
We looked at each other, nodded. Privacy was one thing, but security was more important.
“Alright,” Hairo said. “While we’re on the subject, I suggest signing a mental non-disclosure agreement with all the clan members, the noncitizens first.”
“Mental agreement…?”
“That’s what it’s called. Put simply, it creates a mental block that prevents the disclosure of anything they know about Alex or the clan’s business.”
“How does that work?”
“It’s not an entirely legal procedure, but it’s widely practiced in corporations. It’s harmless. Works on a friend-or-foe basis. If the carrier of the knowledge is talking to someone outside of the corporation, or in our case the clan, then the ’foe’ mental trigger activates and the person simply can’t discuss secret information. Works for social media and private messages too. The mental block puts the ’foe’ tag even on empty rooms.
“What about Dis?” Malik asked.
“Works in Dis too,” the security officer nodded. “But we could do with something else there. I questioned the noncitizens and they constantly referenced a certain Behemoth. I hope you’ll introduce me to him. If he’s really as awesome as your workers say, and Alex is his favorite, then it might be worth discussing a punishment for betraying the faith. He’s a god, right? That means anyone who betrays Alex should be punished by Behemoth. But that’s just an idea. I’ll leave you for now, boys. Have fun and try to keep your lips sealed. Remember what’s at stake.”
When he was gone, Hung smacked himself on the forehead and ran after him. I looked at Ed in confusion.
“We need beer, Alex.”
Chuckling, I left my friends and sent a stuck character ticket to tech support. After a moment’s thought, I duplicated the message to Kiran Jackson, the Snowstorm director. I doubted he would answer right away, but in any case, Scyth would have to spend another year in the Nether. I really hoped he wouldn’t lose all his skills there.
Holy War Page 12