by J D Astra
I turned toward the clearing, the ache in my chest threatening to bring tears to my eyes. I wished I hadn’t let that slip away. I wished I hadn’t let that school fondness get snuffed out without a single kiss, but it was too late now.
Or was it? What if I died? What if I didn’t make it? I wanted to live at least a single moment like it could’ve been. And what if I lived through the transition? What if he lived? We could have a fresh start on a thing that could’ve been great?
I spun back and threw my arms around his neck, pulling him in tightly. He wrapped his arms over my back and held me just as tight. Like when Naitee had held me, it felt like the best thing, the kindest thing, I’d ever felt. I missed hugs so much.
“I know we didn’t work out in college, but if we both live through this, survive the next few days, maybe we can do things differently this time around.” I pushed my face into his chest and sniffed deep, keeping the wall of tears behind the facade of calm.
One in six wasn’t terrible odds, but maybe I’d never get another chance like this. I turned my head up and pushed onto my toes, planting a single, warm kiss on his dark lips.
“In case this is our final goodbye.”
His tranquil expression dissolved back to worry, and I gave him a gentle pat on the cheek, then turned to leave. Otto’s heavy footfalls followed behind me, and I popped the seal on one of the scrolls of return.
My fingers touched the shimmering portal, and gravity left me as I departed the clearing.
Death Sickness, The Other Side
VERTIGO STRUCK WHEN I landed on the oaken wood floor of the Boar’s Head. No one was there to greet us except... Meredith? I wasn’t sure if it was her or her sister. Still, the sight of only her brought me comfort. Sandra didn’t know where we were bound and didn’t know we’d finished the dungeon yet. I hoped.
“Sit where ya’d like!” the bartender called to Otto, and the Risi tromped to his usual booth along the far wall. I followed, the queasiness canting me to the left and right as I made my way to the seat.
“So,” Otto started in, all business, “did you get a quest update?”
I nodded, my throat feeling weak and narrow. Uncomfortable heat swelled in my chest, and I pulled at the neckline of Wildfire.
“Do you need to go?” Otto asked, his words distant and garbled.
“No.” I snatched the water cup as it went down in front of me and swallowed in big gulps until the glass was emptied.
“She a’right?” a woman queried as the room spun into oblivion.
I struggled to keep my head up, propping my elbows against the table for support.
“Otto...” The word barely left my lips before my face slammed down, and I lost track of the world.
“Hold on, just hold onto me. You’re going to be okay.”
My mother’s wicked, beautiful, bile-puking face appeared in my mind. “You never even came to say goodbye.”
Her face warped into Osmark’s as he pushed his glasses up his pompous nose. “You leave now and I’ll make sure you never get paid to write another line of code in your life.”
Pain swelled in my head and surged down my limbs. I stiffened and cried out, grasping at the cool hand that held mine.
“Don’t do this to me, Abby. Don’t die, not like her. Don’t die.”
Tristen’s hopeful smile popped to the forefront of my mind. “It was nice being your manager. I hope you make it!”
My fifth-grade teacher handed me an aptitude tablet. “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
Jack’s downtrodden, puppy-dog eyes came full view. His face lingered, hanging in a black ether before he spoke. “I guess this is goodbye, then.”
He’d wanted me to ask him to stay, to stay with me, be my boyfriend. I’d gotten the internship with Osmark Technologies, and though he had no prospects in California, he wanted to stay for me. I knew now what I didn’t understand then.
I never prioritized Jack. I never made him the thing I woke up for, got out of bed for—it was always the code. I never treated him as important as he really was to me, and that’s why it didn’t work. That’s why he left. That’s why they all always left.
I gasped, clutching my chest as I lurched forward. The room was dark and smelled of onions. The bed below me felt like straw with a blanket cast over it and lumpy rocks below that.
“You’re awake.” Otto’s voice was close, just to my left. “I didn’t think you were going to pull through with the way you’d been screaming.”
His voice cracked with the telltale tone of tears. Candlelight flickered behind me as Otto struck a wick to life with something sharp. I pushed my knuckles into my eyes and rubbed at the agony. My head was splitting, my mouth dry, and my throat raw. The nerves in my skin itched with the heat of an open bonfire two feet in front of me.
“Where are we?” I rasped. “What time is it?”
His gentle hand pulled my fists from my eyes. “It’s 5:13 AM, and we’re in the secondary pantry of the Boar’s Head.”
“Why?” I moaned the y out much too long and flopped back down on my straw mattress.
“Sandra.” The mention of her name set my hairs on end and snapped my eyes open. “She found us. Luckily we’d paid Meredith well enough to warn and help move us before Sandra and a brigade of Imperials stormed the inn.”
“Is everyone okay?” I grabbed Otto’s arm as he set the candle down on a small desk. Dark circles ringed his eyes.
He nodded. “They got us down here just in time. I had to pay Patel a bit more than I wanted, but we’re safe, and they’re safe.”
I inhaled the oniony musk and relaxed. I’d transitioned. I’d freaking made it! A message from Osmark Technologies Customer Service blinked in the corner of my vision, and I deleted it outright. I didn’t have time for that shit.
“Otto, we need to find out what this Imperial Faction Seal is all about. Osmark and at least twenty of his goons all have one. These could be game enders for anyone not siding with the Imperials.”
He placed a hand on my shoulder and lowered me back to the bed I hadn’t realized I’d left. “We have time.”
“No,” I prompted, “we don’t.”
I checked the countdown timer for the new leg of the quest: 9 days, 2 hours, 4 minutes, 6 seconds. Just when Astraea was scheduled to hit. Something was going to happen, something big, and we needed to get ahead of it.
He didn’t seem convinced, so I pressed it. “This quest has an expiration date. Just over a week. And by then, my world will be destroyed.”
My world, my mother, my everything will be destroyed, and I’m trapped in here with my boss hell-bent on ruling over us like some kind of rightful king. Angry tears formed at the creases of my eyes, and Otto’s face melted from frustration to sympathy.
“I’m sorry you had to come here,” he started, and I held up a hand to cut him off.
I chose to come here, I wanted this. And honestly, the idea that I could live out my life in a fantasy game was sort of the awesome silver lining to everything on Earth being incinerated. And now I would, because I’d made it. I’d transitioned. Now, I was just the same as Otto: a series of code running on a server.
“I’m not sorry I’m here, and I’m glad that you are too.”
He smirked and placed his hand against my forehead. “Fever must’ve messed with something.”
I slapped his hand away with playful indignance. “Don’t start, I’m not getting all mushy on you. I need a strong doofus to take all the aggro from the bad guys for me, that’s all.”
We chuckled, and I held my ribs as spikes of pain shot up into my stomach and throat. Otto passed me a glass of water, and I chugged it down. The cool liquid didn’t lessen the pain or the fire, but it felt satisfying.
“Tell me more about the quest.” Otto went back to business, taking the deadline seriously.
“It just says ‘the item will not reveal its purpose to you, you will need to do some digging.’ I assume that means more investigation, but
unlike the first leg of the quest, it’s not giving us any sort of direction on where to dig.”
Otto nodded thoughtfully. “Alaunhylles has a Grand Archive, one of three in Eldgard. It holds all of the knowledge of the world. If we’re going to find something, it’ll probably be there.”
My splitting head ripped through my train of thought as I laid out the plan for the next steps on our journey. Get to the archive, find the information. No, get to Naitee first, get a teleport scroll, get to the archive, find information, report back to Jack, take down Osmark. Okay, we could do this.
I looked to Otto in the flickering orange of the candlelight. He’d stayed by my side through my death sickness, carried me to safety, and paid off the bartender of a bounty hunting club. It was obvious he wasn’t going to leave my side, and for once, I didn’t want him to.
“I need to send a message, and then”—I leaned close to the candle and puffed it out with a single breath—“we’re going dark.”
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The end of the world is not such a bad thing for Russian weapons engineer Vlad Nardoir.
REALLY HIS WORLD ENDED six months ago when his wife died, and ever since then, things have been downhill. Soul-crushing medical debt. Favors to the Russian mafia. Now, asteroid. For Vlad, this is life in a nutshell.
But, in a wild twist of fate, he has found a way out. A chance to start fresh in a brand-new ultra-immersive MMORPG called Viridian Gate Online. Making the leap might kill him, but again, death is not such a bad thing for a man with nothing to live for. Even in the virtual world, however, old grudges burn true, and the past is not as far gone as it seems. He must use his quick wits, rugged persistence, and peculiar set of skills as a weapons engineer to make a place for himself in this new world, or be forcibly dragged back into the very life he fought so hard to escape.
ONE: Times of Crisis...
Timeline - 4 days before Astraea, 09:45
“INA, IT HAS BEEN TOO long.” I sat with my legs crossed at the grave of my beloved. The grass, what little remained of my small backyard, was overgrown and dying. There had once been flower beds under the windows of our home; they were a riot of colors, all shapes and sizes. Flowers I could never keep, but Ina was different. Plants thrived under her eyes, they flourished under her care. Sadly, those were also dead. I’d had a friend who worked in stone masonry carve Ina’s headstone, made of a dark black marble.
It was truly gorgeous.
He had done a fine job—it looked like her, even down to the way her auburn hair flowed in the wind. He had captured every detail I could remember, everything she was in the picture I had given him to recreate. It was a simple scene: we were at a festival in the Saint Petersburg Plaza, she was looking at the statue of Catherine the Great, the wind blew, her hair billowed in the wind, and the picture was perfect. She was my own personal Catherine.
“I regret that we cannot be together any longer.” I choked back a tear—no, I did not have time to cry. There was much work to be done yet. Time for crying would come later, after the incredibly deadly asteroid, Astraea, slammed into the Earth, annihilating life as we knew it. The entirety of Earth was doomed. An asteroid, named 213 Astraea, was on a collision course with the planet, and there was nothing we could do to stop it. Many attempts to redirect the asteroid had failed, as had missions to destroy it. The mass of rock and ice measured fourteen-and-a-half kilometers. The impact was expected to be absolutely cataclysmic. Many organizations had attempted to predict the asteroid impact site, giving it a rough estimate of landing in the North Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Greenland.
I stood from the grass and laid a small bundle of flowers at the grave. She wasn’t buried here, of course. She was buried in the National Cemetery, for her work to advance the science of chemistry in Russia. It was the one thing that Mother Russia had given her. The flowers were purchased from one of the small flower stalls nearby, one of the last bundles they had. I was late leaving work again, and it was shameful for me. Bah, regrets are a powerful thing. I needed to get my mind off of her. It had been six months since she passed away, and the pain was still too fresh. Perhaps having her memorial in the backyard was not such a smart thing after all, but I wanted to keep her close, and the graveyard where they buried her was too far away for frequent visits.
I went back inside and shook my head at all I saw. The house was a mess, as I hated cleaning. Ina was always so good at keeping after that. I would make a mess, she would clean it up. We had an understanding. We also had grumbling. But we made it work. I took a sip from the coffee I had made earlier and forgotten about.
“Shit, tastes like week-old engine oil. And not even high test.” I tossed the coffee cup into the sink harder than I intended. It shattered on impact, little chips flying in every direction.
“Ina, your coffee was always perfect.” I looked down and clenched my fists, caked with years of work, grime, and oil. “This was not what was in my head. It is not what I intended.” The smell of multi-part oil and degreaser invaded my nostrils, and I was taken back to another time.
Ina had just started working for the National Laboratory’s Saint Petersburg branch shortly after attaining her doctorate in chemistry. She started as a basic research assistant, working on a new type of oil that would last until the end of time. She quickly advanced through the ranks, working harder and faster than anyone else, until she had taken a position as a head chemist in the Chemical Manipulation Department. It was a research facility that was dedicated to the development of new, completely unique compounds, often using dangerous chemical components. Ina had always told me that working in the chemical plant would kill her; I had thought she was talking about it being the end of her career path, though I often said her genius would last forever. She once clarified that it would be due to the vials that were left open absentmindedly, or the frequent spills due to careless laboratory technicians. I had not expected her to be so right.
The cancer took her within a year’s time. I watched my beloved Ina devolve from a gorgeous, intelligent woman into a bedridden husk of what she once was. There was nothing I could do. All of my knowledge and expertise, my absolute genius, was useless. Russia had withheld treatment toward the end, as a result of some perceived debt to society. After all, socialized medicine paid for Ina’s expensive chemo treatments—well, some of them.
The medicine was too expensive for the insurance to pay for, and about halfway through, the medication was not covered at all. There were some situations where we had to seek alternative funding, and Ina no longer could work to cover the costs. More regrets on my behalf, and t
he decisions I made will follow me forever, but wasn’t the cost of having Ina for just a little longer in my life worth absolutely anything I could pay? Mother Russia, in her “infinite wisdom,” had taken Ina from me. One day, I knew I would get back at her. Perhaps not in this lifetime, and perhaps not the motherland herself, but I would fight back.
As luck would have it, or fate, or whatever you want to call the fickle bitch, Almaz-Antev, the weapons developers I worked for, had connections and ins with Osmark Technologies. I pulled a few strings, made a few promises that I knew I would never be able to keep, and suddenly I was admitted to the Viridian Gate Online program, the one hope for mankind to survive after Astraea. Ina was disqualified due to her cancer, which could potentially cause major issues with the transition, according to the information I received. At the end, she held my hand, gave me the best smile she could afford, and told me she would see me in paradise. She told me she wasn’t upset that I was going into V.G.O. alone, that her spirit would always be with me. I had never believed in heaven or hell, or whatever you want to call it, but I believed her.
I regretted making those promises, especially since I was expected to contribute to any future war effort within V.G.O., on behalf of the bigwigs. Almaz-Antev had helped to fund Osmark’s work to make V.G.O. the product it was. It felt like a waste, all of the work I had done to renovate the basement to admit a pair of V.G.O. capsules, and I had spent weeks working on it. I ran electrical wiring and conduit, I adjusted network propensities, and I improved the layout. I even did some off-the-books excavation to expand our room.
I looked at the watch on my wrist, at its hands moving with flawless precision. It was one of my own designs, and a small twinge of pride hit my heart, but bounced off the cold exterior. I had a few hours before I needed to meet the deadline for my transition into V.G.O., giving me enough time to transition before impact, and there was still that project for Almaz-Antev that needed finalizing. Namely the nuclear automata that would usher in the new age of people on Earth, tasked with cleaning, demolishing, and rebuilding after the impact.
