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My knees buckled with exhaustion as I stepped into the hollowed out base of a gargantuan spruce tree, barely visible from the artificial moonlight permeating the canopy above us. Collapsing against the inside wall of the trunk with a dull thud and letting gravity take me to the floor, a pleasant chime in my ear helpfully informed me that I'd just entered a safe zone. Anemone, maybe my only real friend in this world, walked around one of the massive tree roots and slowly plodded into the zone, sitting on another one of the roots a couple feet away and turning to face me with a dull stare. She looked about the same as I felt- hair a complete mess from our half-run, half-stumble through the forest, fatigue baked into every line of her posture.
"So," she rasped after more than a few seconds of stunned silence, "thanks for not leaving me to become a statistic and all, but what the fuck are we gonna do? Anyone with Tracking will easily be able to trace us, and it's not like we're gonna be able to run into town. That shitstain's probably told all his buddies what happened to them, like, hours ago by now, and I'm not sure I even want to know your deal with the other two who helped you fight them. The only thing stopping them from just finishing us off after was-" she let out a dry, humorless laugh- "that they'd already killed and robbed the guy with all my shit on him first. Fuck, I thought they still might do it anyways, spare us before those Asper-whatever freaks catch up. God might not know what they'll do when they catch up to us, Cat, but I think I have a pretty good idea-"
"...!" I started to say something, lifting my left hand to shush her, but something about it felt a little weird. She noticed and cut off, looking darkly at something near my shoulder. Oh, right, my arm.
Severed just above the elbow in a desperate fight against the other four members of our ill-fated dungeon group turned criminals and wannabe abductees, there was something truly odd about the dull pain and lapse in normal awareness of trying to move a virtual limb that was already missing. Like two layers of weirdness, really, and obviously quite debilitating. Not that it was gone forever, though; the game would "regrow" my arm after I got some rest-- if I got some rest, that is.
"...listen," she said quietly, drawing my attention again, "Cat, look at me. I know getting your- your friend to help you was the only thing you could've done. Even if you won't tell me how you know each other. You saved me. I also know there isn't a chance in hell I'm letting those fucking pigs catch up to us- me- like this." She took a shaky breath. "I want to get out of this just as much as you do. But-" she looked straight into my eyes, a haunted look on her face- "I want the sword you got off that guy. Doubt I can wield it with any meaningful talent, yeah, but my effective health is pretty low without armor. I don't have Hiding. I'm not especially fast. If they find us, there is nothing I can do about it."
"Ane, I'm just-"
"Stop." Anemone swallowed. "Just give me the sword. If you want to get us out of this, that's fine. I'm fine. But if you aren't going to let me have it, I'm just going to go riiight over there-" she gestures roughly to the pitch-black woods behind me, no doubt full of monsters at this time of day- "and end it on my own terms, yeah?"
I choked back a sob, opening my inventory and handing over a spare one-handed sword. "Okay. You're right. I just- fuck, It's just so unfair! We didn't even do anything wrong! And you're my- my only real friend in this hell. I don't wanna lose you." I materialized my only teleport crystal, an exorbitantly expensive savior angel of a consumable, and placed it on the ground between us. "Listen. You can still use this, even if you're orange. The guards'll try to kill you on sight, and maybe you'll- you'll let them, but it's still a safezone. The other players can't do anything to you inside a town."
Ane's eyes, light green and glassy as the surface of the crystal they were looking at, refocused a little as she held it in her lap with both hands. She took a deep breath, forcing the virtual air in and out of her lungs, and looked back up at me after a second with an almost perturbing amount of composure. "Alright. Thank you, Catwren. I'm sorry about all that. I'll follow whatever plan you come up with."
She looked calmly at me, uncaring, content to let me dictate the terms of our survival. Fuck. Ane hadn't been this bad in forever. She hadn't called me by my actual player moniker in forever, either. It's just been Cat and Ane since, well, since just a couple months after the start of the game, really. We've been through so much shit together over the last year. So much, and this wasn't going to be the end of it! Gritting my teeth (well, mentally), I forced myself to focus, stop thinking about my physical pain, just... push the exhaustion and brainfog away for a few more minutes.
I opened my Messages tab and typed a very hasty but hopefully comprehensible message to a couple infobrokers I'd dealt with over the past year or so, asking how long the flag stayed on a first offense and telling them to warn others about the remnants of the party that'd tried preying on us. "Alright, here's the deal," I said flatly, closing my chat tabs and looking up to see Ane's emotionless hazel eyes fixed on mine.
"Sun's rising in about nine hours. Nobody's tracking us through the woods until then. We both need sleep, or we're gonna die when they come looking. As soon as the sky begins to brighten, we're getting the hell out of here, yeah?" I echoed her statement from earlier, prompting a small nod in return. "Since I'm faster, I'm going to give you my AGI gear. I... I don't think either of us are able to properly fight right now. I'm sure we'll look like a couple of clowns with our mismatched set, but." I grinned sardonically.
"We're going to run along the circumference of the floor for the entire day. It's about... 25km around, I think, and we only need to go half that, away from the main town of the floor. As long as they can't somehow cut us off, we should be fine... they might not even be looking..." I trailed off, my voice cracking a bit. Moron. You're going to get her killed. She's counting on you.
"Tomorrow night, we're gonna hide in the ruins of the quest we cleared last week, next to the other town on this floor. The Rat says it's thirty-six hours for a first minor offense, so come daytime we'll be good to book it to the town and, god, I don't know. I'm gonna take a hot bath. Sleep. You can buy a new set of armor. We'll get food. Anything. We just... we just need to survive until this nightmare is over, okay?" I looked over at Anemone, exhausted and maybe just a little afraid of what I was going to see reflected back at me.
Tired relief flooded me as a small smile creased her face. She looked at me with a familiar, mildly amused fondness that I'd grown used to seeing after I pitched a particularly harebrained idea; I didn't quite get how it was warranted in this situation, though. I materialized my sleeping bag on the ground between us, gesturing at Ane with what remained of my left arm. "You can use it. I'm just gonna curl up here with my spare coat. It isn't that- that cold this time of year anyways..." I held back a shiver, trying my best to gently smile back amidst the litany of unpleasant signals the game engine was feeding my senses.
Anemone stared past me into the darkness outside our safe room, holding her lifeline idly against her chest. "Not sure if I'm gonna be able to sleep, Cat," she said hollowly, unmoving from her place against the wall.
"Okay. I don't..." Despite the dire circumstances, it was a herculean effort to stay awake any longer, the buzz of adrenaline having given way to exhaustion and dull pain hours ago.
I unequipped what few pieces of light armor I was wearing and curled into a lightly trembling ball under my coat in one of the sheltered corners of the trunk, using my arm as a pillow.
"I don't know what happened before I started following them from the dungeon, but. I'm sorry. I'm so fucking sorry for leaving you." My brain was mush, babbling out anything I could think of to try and keep my companion here even as I fought against my waning consciousness. "It'll be okay, I promise. We're gonna get out of this. Just... just sleep. Please."
Ane finally, wordlessly, got up from her spot on the floor, still gripping the crystal as she moved towards my sleeping bag. Thank god. I don't know what I'd do if she wasn't here when I woke up... and thought nothing more, falling fitfully into the world beyond.
Swaying slightly on my feet, I crouched down on the dirt and wood floor watching my friend and savior lose the battle to stay awake, her words burning a hole through my mind. Catwren looked peaceful in sleep, emotions and worries artificially smoothing into a blank mask thanks to the nature of our world. I tore my gaze from her and doggedly shuffled my body into the sleeping bag, wearing a very goofy-feeling combination of armor liners and underclothes thanks to the ignoble loss of my beloved set of full plate earlier in the day. That shit took so long to gather all the ingots for, not to mention finding someone with Heavy Armor Smithing, dammit. It's gonna take, like, a week just to get the materials again... I dramatically shivered at the thought. Or, maybe, it was just getting kinda cold.
I glanced over at Cat again under her shitty coat of self-sacrifice and internally sighed. The poor girl was already kinda skin-and-bones, and while her willowy, lithe build made her a terrifying opponent in combat, it sure didn't go a long way to keeping her from getting a chill at night. Catching an annoying, lasting debuff could make the difference between life and death, of course, and thus I dutifully scooted the both of us into a little huddle in the corner of the safe room. She didn't even stir as I tucked a spare blanket around her. Jesus.
Mentally focusing on her pinged my HUD with a warning similar to what my own status displayed- the orange tag signifying a criminal. The outcome of aggressing other 'good' players, it barred you from entering guarded towns, made quest NPCs treat you far more unfavorably, but the biggest issue was that you'd be treated as a social pariah by other players, immediately and unforgivably tarnished. Before the world became... "real", roleplaying as a 'bad guy', while some considered it poor taste, was still acceptable under the guise of it being a for-fun game. That'd gone out the window a long time ago.
Lost in thought and unable to fall asleep, I found myself replaying and weighing the events that'd gotten us into this horrid situation. Fortunately, the brand wasn't permanent. The duration factored in severity and repeat offenses and if The Rat's information was right (and it always was), we'd be back to normal in just over a day-- if we survived long enough.
Unfortunately, there were quite a lot of ways to manipulate this system of criminality. Anyone branded orange could be freely attacked and killed by green players without risk of being designated a criminal, and it was common to see 'lawful' players gathering information for criminal friends, taunting others into attacking them first- or even forcing them to under social leverage or threat or any number of other things- and then killing or, worse, subduing and forcibly abducting them.
This was a godless, paranoid world, and for the most part, everyone looked out for themselves first. Outside of the larger political tensions, a majority of people in the upper echelons of the game were at least tolerant of each other- there really weren't all too many of them, and word of peoples' exploits traveled fast- but nobody would risk their own life to save a mere acquaintance.
I've had several friends I trusted with my life, and forming groups with people I don't know all that well is a pretty common occurrence, but these people wouldn't help me if things really got dire. In fact, the only one who'd demonstrated she would was right in front of me. Catwren could very well have ran off and left me to those... those... well, at least they weren't alive anymore. It felt hard to think clearly; walking back through the events of the day akin to wading through a proverbial swamp of molasses.
Hell, the Anemone of just a few hours past thought Cat had abandoned her. She thought rather bitterly that, while it would have shattered her, she couldn't have blamed the girl too much for it, either; while it went against everything they'd built between each other, reckless selflessness was the kind of trait that had been selected out of their ranks over the last year or so of the death game. Almost everyone left near the forefront of progress- herself and Cat included- had more than a few skeletons in their closet, either from regrettable, irreversible choices in the heat of the moment or colder, more strategic grabs for sociopolitical power or personal gain.
The more twisted and sick people lurking around the fringes of the playerbase would inflict misery for fun, just because they could. Because they knew nobody would stop them. Some of the larger, more militant guilds did their best to compile a list of missing but alive players, 'unreachable' due to being in message-restricted areas, and swept through these locations as best they could. It was never enough.
Past Anemone had assumed she was on her way to meet a similar end- or worse. She'd already traded over all her gear after being reduced to a near sliver of health, the four guildies greedily taking her beloved set of heavy plate mail, halberd, consumables, money, and pretty much anything else of value that wasn't stored back in town. She felt intensely helpless and vulnerable without the metal visor obscuring her face, the intricate, interlocking plates as familiar to her as a second, far more durable layer of skin.
It didn't make them relent, though; paralyzed with some sort of poisoned consumable they'd forced her to drink, a rough sack tied over her head, and subjected to the relatively common criminal practice of gouging chunks out of her and healing her with cheap items repeatedly to overload the game system's pain stimuli until she stopped trying to get back up, Anemone had been dragged out of the dungeon like so much luggage.
There wasn't really anything she could do anyways, Anemone noted idly, floating around in the waves of agony and numbness that continued even after her health bar had hit full again. Paralysis poison severely inhibited the movements a player 'sent' to the game's server- the virtual body just wouldn't obey the command you knew you were giving it. The truth was really just that death was often a kinder fate than giving in to any sort of demands. Anemone, as well as almost every other player who went outside safe zones for long stints of time, knew this. So why hadn't she gone out fighting? She wasn't sure.
It might've been the glimpse of Catwren she caught leaving the dungeon, looking back at her with fiery determination in her eyes. It might've just been her own hubris. She knew, in her heart of hearts, that Cat was going to save her, Cat had to save her, but as minutes stretched on the numbness gave way to something like dread. She heard the rush of what sounded like a waterfall, odd on a floor without any rivers, but realized after some consternation that it was her heart beating rapidly, wildly, blood roaring in her ears.
Anemone vaguely registered that they were stopping to re-paralyze her, debuff ticking towards zero agonizingly slowly in her HUD- but this time instead of violence and jeers, screaming rent the air. It took her a few seconds to realize what was happening, laying ignominiously on the grass. The sounds of steel on steel overlapped over someone roughly kicking her in the ribs and saying something she couldn't quite make out, followed by a yell- Cat!
As her paralysis finally, blessedly wore off, she tore off her blindfold just in time to see her savior, Catwren, intercept a strike aimed at Anemone's helpless avatar with her swordbreaker, shunting it to the side and preparing her counterattack even as the player on her right readied a skill of his own.
Anemone stared at Cat, resplendent against the setting saffron sun in all her wrathful glory. Eyes wide, screaming with wild abandon as she lunged- the other man's two-handed sword pivoted to cut through her offhand at the bicep, swordbreaker and arm attached to it spinning to the ground in a spray of blood- driving the point of her rapier through Anemone's would be killer nearly up to the hilt in his neck. His health bar, already in the yellow, emptied to nothing in an instant. With a choked, cut-off yell, he split into a cloud of a million reflective shards.
As the other man settled into the stance of a Rage Spike, sword glowing with purple light and glaring at the low-health Catwren stuck in a cooldown, Anemone unconsciously stood into a crouch, her right fist glowing green as the system assisted her movement of a lightning-fast Flash Blow that sank into his stomach, throwing him way off balance. Get away from her!
With the low post-skill cooldown Martial Arts skills afforded their users, she re-engaged before losing the upper hand, loosing a couple throwing picks to delay his counterattack before engaging the incoming strike with a perfectly timed, overly exaggerated backflip kick. It dealt almost no damage with her complete dearth of gear but still pushed him back on his feet; his Slant caught her on the leg, chunking her health below half in return.
A harsh shattering of glass sounded behind her, and she glanced back while her enemy was in his post-skill cooldown to see two people cornering one of her criminally tagged captors, heavily off-balance. They showed no hesitation in cutting him down, slamming a nasty-looking longsword through his chest with a system-aided charge even as he begged for mercy, a spray of red polygons spurting out of the wound.
Anemone watched passively as his avatar burst into glass shards a few feet away, reflecting the orange light of the setting sun as they faded into the air without a trace. Cat growled in frustration, and she looked back to see their fourth and only surviving assailant dashing back into the forest, suddenly outnumbered four to one.
The rescue party took a second to heal and catch their breath, unmoving but ready to react. A dazed, weaponless and armorless Anemone supported a one armed Catwren, trying to hold it together; in contrast the two players who'd helped Cat free her stood together about fifteen feet away from them, entirely composed and unscathed. One of them- a hood concealing most of his face- looked around the tree line, eyes glowing green and clearly Searching for anyone still hiding nearby. When it became obvious there wasn't, he shrugged roughly.
"Tch. He's gone. Teleported out. Probably gonna go tell all his buddies," he spat. Anemone tried to focus on what he was saying. It seemed important. "At least the other ones put up a fight."
"Of little importance," the mousey one said, trying maybe a little too hard at being aloof as he walked over to something in the grass and casually tossed it to Cat. Her swordbreaker, sans arm it had been attached to, which she caught in her sword hand with a small grunt of surprise.
"Thanks, Bl- thank you both," Catwren recovered, dipping her head in acknowledgement. "I don't know what I would've done if you hadn't come. Probably something stupid."
"Of course, of course. Well, with this juicy of a target, how could we complain? Guys were loaded. I'm almost at my weight limit."
"Yes, thank you both for helping her," Anemone said, carefully, "I really appreciate-"
"That's nice, darling," the hooded man interrupted, smirking. "But I'm still not sure why you think you've been saved. I mean, look at you two. Both "criminals", not in any state to fight... It's not like you can just go back to town, haha!" He accentuated criminals in exaggerated air quotes, as if it was a laughably funny joke nobody else got the punchline of.
Criminals...? Anemone checked her status, and sure enough, it was bordered with a sickly, light orange. The only logical conclusion was that the player she gut punched wasn't flagged, which means... Cat was also considered a criminal by the system. Fuck.
Like an ice-cold bucket of water dumped over her head, Anemone was suddenly very aware of just how much danger she and Cat were still in, both able to be attacked without consequence. The two of them, three arms and one set of gear between them, against, well... whoever Catwren managed to pull into this whole shitstorm. Where the hell did Cat know these guys from, anyways?
"Oh, c'mon, I'm not like the freaks we got rid of for you," he grinned, clearly enjoying the look of dazed comprehension and then foreboding on Anemone's face, "but still. What's gonna stop us?"
"Nah." The mousey guy put a hand on the handle of his sword, eyes flicking from his buddy to Cat. Was he going to try to kill them after all? "I owe the wren... a lot, really. And 'sides, we already got the other one's shit from the guy I skewered. Not really much point in finishing her off after going to all this trouble, ya know?"
None of them moved. After a very tense moment of silence, the hooded man grumbled almost cartoonishly. "Tch. Surely you two can take care of yourselves. Real waste if you go off and die to some fucking monster spawn."
Catwren straightened herself a little, and Anemone could feel her shaking with adrenaline through the hand she had on what was left of Cat's left arm to stabilize her. "You're right, though. We can't go back to town for a little while, and we need to get the fuck out of here before nightfall." Cat said, a lot smoother than Anemone expected her to sound. "Appreciate it, boys, but if you're done scaring the everliving shit out of us, I'd really rather be off."
As they turned around to go, the mousey guy mouthed what Anemone was pretty sure seemed like a quick Thank you. Exactly what had he just called her? Cat waved him off, but jerked her chin towards her message window, something he seemed to acknowledge before hurriedly joining his friend in the thick undergrowth of the forest as they were obscured from view.
Cat stood still for a few seconds, looking off at a message window only she could see for some kind of confirmation. With almost no warning, she collapsed to her knees into the grass, clutching what remained of her left arm to her chest with a hastily choked-back sob.
"Don't say it, I thought... I don't know what I thought, really. It just all happened so fast!" she cried, "I had to call an old friend for help, there were four of them, and we followed them for so long I thought my heart was going to burst watching, you were so still the whole time, and after all that they were gonna m-murder you, and I couldn't let them, and then- and then one of them died because of me, I mean I killed him, and-"
Anemone cut her off there, gently cupping one of Catwren's cheeks in her hand as she tilted the other woman's panicked face up to meet her eyes. "Honestly, Cat?" Anemone grinned, a real, honest smile splitting her face ear to ear, "You were incredible. Damn near angelic. I'm never going to forget that moment."
She knelt and drew Cat into a quiet hug, tenderly wrapping her arms around the other girl's trembling body. Cat sniffled, tucking her chin onto Anemone's bloodstained shirt just above her collarbone. As she stilled in her embrace and Anemone looked out at the sunset, it struck her that it really was incredible a game engine could recreate natural beauty in such a meaningful way.
Gazing idly over Cat's head at the sun slowly falling ever lower in the sky, the setting orange sun melted into a vast airborne sea of gold and crimson as it dipped behind the tree line, colors smeared across the sky like a giant set of paints on a canvas. Anemone absently stroked Cat's wavy brown hair and lightly sighed, content to drink in the moment for just a little longer despite the many unanswered questions pooling in her mind.
"I think I'll be okay now, Ane," Catwren reluctantly murmured into Anemone's shirt. "Any ideas?"
"We gotta get as far away from here as possible before they come back," Anemone said dazedly, still holding Cat with one arm as she opened the floor map. "There's a safe room about a kilometer from here through the forest. If we hurry, we can make it before the spawns change. Sort ourselves out once we live through this mess." She stood and shook her head, trying to clear it. "I can't... I can't really think about it. We just need to go."
No matter how tired I must be, sleep just... wouldn't come. Careful not to wake Catwren (though I doubt she would have woken up even if the rest of the tree fully fell over), I opened my character menu and started thumbing through the pages absent-mindedly over my sleeping bag; a familiar habit of many insomniac players. Other than confirming just how fucked I was with my criminal status and complete lack of gear, though, it made me think about the reality of, well.. my reality.
The only thing holding me in this world was the device hijacking the signals of my brain, feeding it synthesized information from a central server and blocking my normal senses. Other than the obvious kill trigger, there was almost nothing physically keeping me from just... waking up. Not that I wasn't awake already. The world I'd spent the last sixteen months laughing and crying and bleeding in was a construct, a false reality that would immediately become meaningless upon its conclusion.
Oh, but it was such a good lie, though. The game engine faithfully recreated all five senses, and even a weird danger gut-feeling that everyone agreed existed but couldn't prove. Getting severely wounded actually hurt, and it took me quite a lot of time to get used to blocking out the pain signals mid-combat. You'd get hungry just like in real life, and eating food made you feel sated. If you didn't think about it much, this could be a 'real' world.
But it just wasn't quite the same. Outside the heat of combat and monotony of grinding mobs or questing that took up an annoyingly large but necessary amount of my daily life, it was easy to notice little discrepancies. Tiny things, really, like water not flowing quite right, the feel of air on your skin, all those little imperfections of being human didn't really exist in this world. Maybe it was just that I was tired, but how I felt right now didn't really add up with those normal discrepancies.
Even in this moment, temporarily parted from the usual cocktail of adrenaline and stress, idly looking at the back of my hand while it flicked through my Skills tab, I still felt this odd sense of unbelonging. Something akin to staring through your eyes at the world, like the arms in front of you at the keyboard are being piloted in realtime, but compounded by the evident falsity of my current reality. Or something. I wasn't quite sure.
Cat's breath, warm against my neck in the cool night air, felt real, but somehow not full. Almost as if the closeness was taken out, somehow. It was a miracle that this much feedback was conveyed in the first place, but the cracks in- or rather reinforcement of- this false, constructed reality, was somehow so isolating in this moment. My most treasured friend in this world, my savior, was right here next to me, but she might as well have been a thousand miles away.
Hidden under the veil of the night and obscured by the thick forest, staring at a hand under the light of the moon, I could barely recognize it as my own. I felt numb, cold as the sensation increased, looking through someone else's eyes at that arm which looked so similar to my own. Materializing a throwing pick, I dragged it idly across the palm, gouging a dull red line through the other three.
Instead of the expected sharp sting, it was more of a disappointing dull throb, pulsing in and out as the poison on my pick ticked my health slowly towards the left. This, too, was the system's doing, tweaking the players' pain receptors into something acceptable with the extreme fantasy violence expected on a daily basis. The 'blood' coming from it was nothing like normal, either, appearing in little red shards that dissipated tactfully into the night instead of welling up in the gouge and lines of the palm like it ought to. Ironically, I noted, the usual spike of adrenaline and clarity came not with registering the wound but with the peripheral view of my health bar, ticking ever closer to an arbitrary death as the damage effect of my poison began to wear itself off.
Letting out a breath I didn't realize I was holding and tearing my eyes away from my menu, I turned my head to look at Catwren, her unworried, delicate face just inches from my own. Something about the way the moonlight hit her face reminded me of the day we met, exhaustedly resting in a field after a too-long day of group farming. Guess we never really got enough sleep, even back then.
Cat gleefully telling me about another one of her airheaded but oh-so-precious ideas. Of course, I always went along with them, often landing us more than a couple disgruntled remarks from whoever happened to get caught in the crossfire of her silly plan. Cat, for just a second, staring into my eyes before ducking out of sight in the dungeon. I'm sorry. I'm so fucking sorry for leaving you.
My world may be entirely artificial, but my memories of this abhorrent falsity feel so real. There were... no, there still are people in this world I truly care about, and that's enough. With one last look at Catwren's still form, I flicked the pick away into the all-swallowing darkness, sleep beginning
to claim me at last.
barest hint of moonlight
faintly glowing against my skin
they say what you are is your brain
sequences of neurons firing in patterns
a chromatic ragtime of sent-events
her breath warm against my neck
packets of data from a central server;
electric signals through wires on my skull
the boundary between truth and fiction blurs
i see my false and bone arms held in front of me
halting, unsteady
a twinge of surreal muscles as i lift the shield
escape from myself, another cross to bear
if this construct is any less real
why am i running away
...
...
...
The first crepuscular rays of sunlight sink through the canopy-- a steadily increasing glow that would soon rouse the two fugitives of this artificial forest, curled up in the corner of a safe room. They slowly breathe in, then out; blissfully unaware of the ordeals ahead.