by Grim Martin
“Save you from what?” I ask.
“He’s coming for me.” Her eyes flick around the street in panic. “He’s coming.”
My arms tighten around her slender body. I feel oddly possessive already, like she is mine. My eyes scan the direction from where she came, expecting to see whoever is after her. Some big guy maybe, or a demon, or a beast, or some random skin I never imagined. Here, if you can buy it, then you can be it.
All I see is humans going about their business. Some wear horns and claws and even tails to show how badass they are. A few are hugely tall, a bunch of crazy-looking misfits is hanging around in one corner but they are minding their own business, one lucky bastard coming towards us is flickering as she saunters along – clearly having got her hands on an astral projection amulet. But there is nothing monstrous.
“Save me,” gasps my petite blond.
She throws her arms around my neck, clutching me hard, and looks at me with those beseeching big eyes. Around her slender neck is a heavy uncomfortable-looking collar of thick chain-links. The tender skin under it is dark with bruises.
I want to soothe it. To comfort her.
“My apartment is upstairs,” I say. “You can hide there.”
She shakes her head in panic. “No! He’ll find us.”
She takes one more look around the street, and then grabs my hand and pulls me up a side street. I let her tug me after her.
“Where are we going?”
“Away!”
“Are you the damsel?” I ask as we run, dodging startled people.
“Damsel?” She shoots me a wide-eyed look.
“Save the damsel in distress? The mission?”
She is too busy turning into a narrow alleyway to answer. We run past a bunch of large garbage bins, away from the crowded street. It is shadowy here, a good place to hide.
“Do you know who your mission-setter is? The person who wants to save you?”
She stops running. I am panting for breath. She is not.
“Nobody wants to save me,” she says.
“Somebody does. They offered a reward. Do you know where I’m supposed to take you?”
“I’m not the damsel.”
I frown. “But I thought you were…”
My voice trails off. There is something odd about the way she is looking at me. We are still holding hands. Now she lets go of mine, and taps me on the forehead sharply with her forefinger.
“Tag, you’re it,” she says.
“What?”
“The only damsel here is you.”
She is looking at my life-remaining hologram smugly.
I see him from the corner of my eye before my brain even fully registers that he is there. He is a movement in the shadows behind me, and she is standing in front of me, blocking my way out of the alley. My brain screams Trap!
My hand reaches upwards almost of its own accord, and I leap, catching hold of the tail end of a ladder dangling from the wall ten feet up from the ground. Given where I come from, I notice these things.
She leaps towards me, but I have caught hold of the bottom rung and the motion of my body is carrying me full swing towards her. My boots connect with her head. The blow throws her out of my way.
The guy behind me lets out a huge bellow of anger. He is running out of the shadows at me. I glimpse blue skin and a four foot wide chest rippling with muscle and grisly fur. Some sort of beast. Huge, but slow.
I have already let go of the ladder and arced through the air, landing on my feet a couple of meters past the dazed girl.
I dodge past the garbage bins, and run like hell. He bellows behind me, and comes after me, his girth smashing into the bins in the narrow alley, and slowing him down. He sounds like a fricking bulldozer.
I dart out of the alley and throw myself gratefully among the people in the main street. I keep running, putting distance between me and him. He is slow, but she is fast. She could catch me. I expect her to come after me, but every time I look over my shoulder I can’t see anyone chasing me.
But what I do see is eyes on me. People seeing me running hell-bent and noticing the measly one day left on my hologram. A few show a lot more interest than others. Fucking zero-hunters, or the types of people who would happily turn me in to zero-hunters for a reward. They’re everywhere.
A lot of players live for the thrill of killing day zero-ers. The higher the level of a zero-er, the more XP that zero-hunters win if they deliver the killing blow. They don’t know that I’m just a dreg, not even an initiate yet. Even if I told them, they’d assume I was lying. They’ll still come at me like a pack of rabid dogs.
Fuck, I need to get out of here, as far from people as I can get. Somewhere quiet where I can regroup.
A few minutes later I realize I am running past a construction site. It is huge, and right in the middle of the city. The massive rubble-filled pit is fenced off, but on the far end of it rises the skeleton of a new high-rise tower. It is abandoned for the day, the workers gone home for the evening.
Ignoring the signs to keep out, I leap over the fence. There isn’t even any barbed wire on top to tear up my hands. Once on the other side, I make my way through the rubble.
I’m thirsty, so instead of heading straight to the tower, I veer left towards a row of small metal box-buildings that look like mobile offices or facilities for the construction crew.
I break into the one that has a sign indicating it is the office of the construction manager, and find what I am looking for inside. The guy has a mini fridge in here, and inside are several packs of beers.
I help myself to a cold one, and sit in the manager’s swivel chair, spinning round and round in it as I chug down one can and then another. I never wasted my money on beer in real life, and I only ever occasionally swiped one of Frank’s just to piss him off. Thinking of him makes me feel fucking miserable. I was supposed to not have to think of him in years – even if it was just game-years.
I pull open the drawers in the manager’s desk, idly wondering whether there might be a cash box in it. No such luck. Paperwork mostly. But in the bottom drawer I find a chunky square bottle of whiskey.
It has a well-known black label, and the deep amber liquid sloshing inside makes my mouth water. I’m not much of a drinker, but even I’ve heard of this stuff. They still make it in the real world, but only in small batches because the wood they need for the barrels to age it in is hard to come by. It is damn expensive, this stuff. I’ve never tasted it.
The bottle is full, and brand-new. It feels like a treat to peel off the plastic wrap and uncap it. The first sip is like fire burning down my throat. I like it.
I take the bottle with me as I head out of the mobile office, and make my way towards the half-built tower, curious to climb it and see the view. The alcohol is taking effect. Its buzz thrums through my bloodstream, and my thoughts become pleasantly loose and relaxed. It doesn’t seem to matter quite so much that I might die tomorrow without that critical 500 XP banked.
I find myself humming as I break into the tower and find a stairway to climb. I head up all the way to the highest level that has been built. The outer wall has not yet been built here yet, so I get to sit on the very edge of the building with my legs dangling in the open air. The view is awesome.
I swig some more of the whiskey and gaze out over the city. I had read mentions of London in all the AngelRealm research I’d done over the years, but not fully paid attention to it.
The city is beautiful. The buildings spaced wide apart compared to the current congestion in the real world, and the streets are, remarkably, broken up by little squares of green recreation areas everywhere. Gardens, or parks, I think they were called. People are sitting on grass and enjoying the evening sun. I kinda wish I was down there.
I lay down against the concrete floor, my legs still dangling over the edge. I stretch out my arms wide, imagining that I am relaxing in a grassy park with trees towering over me, their leaves whispering in the breeze, the sun twinkling through
them.
Some say the lost GodThrone is in this part of the world, though most believe it’s in the medieval era. Many people like to argue that it is in whichever part of the world they come from, as if that makes it belong to them in some tiny way. Personally, I think it makes sense the original GameMakers would put it in the medieval era – the toughest, evilest era in the realm.
When I was a kid I dreamed of finding it. Claiming the lost throne would make you equal to the GodAngel herself, the all-powerful AI that rules the entire world and all the eras of the AngelRealm. Some say she has become more powerful in here than the GameMakers themselves.
So much of the world’s business is done inside the AngelRealm now that claiming the lost throne would make you the most powerful person in the real world. As a kid I’d dreamed of finding it and being rich enough to buy my mom a skyrise apartment in the big city. Of making her proud. Stupid kid.
Players have been looking for the lost GodThrone for decades of real time. That’s thousands of years of game time. Thousands. Most experts believe now that the lost throne is a myth. That it never existed. Stupidly, I’m still a believer. But it hurts to believe when you know you can never have a thing.
The original GameMakers hid the lost GodThrone well. It’s like a riddle in a puzzle inside a single molecule of water floating in the oceans of the whole wide world and all of time.
I must drift off because sometime later I wake up feeling uneasy. I’m lying on my back, but I can tell that it is fully dark outside now. The inside of the tower is dimly lit by thin fluorescent strips that must’ve switched on automatically at night.
It must be past midnight, because my bio is telling me a dreaded message:
Life Remaining: 0 days.
All around me is silence, and then it is broken. I hear a quiet noise like the one that must have woken me. Someone is nearby. Someone who doesn’t want to be heard.
8. Day Zero
My eyes flick around the cavernous, dimly lit space. I don’t have to look far to find her.
In the darkness her halo is glowing clearly above her head – a ring of blue fire that casts a fearsome glow on her glorious black hair.
An angel.
She is two meters away from me. Her eyes are fixed on the big fat zero of my hologram, which is shining in the dark like a beacon.
The shock of seeing her jack-knifes my body into an upright position. Unfortunately I am sitting on the edge, and my forward motion propels me off it. For a moment I am teetering in the cold open air, and then she leaps at me, her fingers clenching in my hair.
She hoists me back up and drags me away from the edge. One of her hands is clamped over my mouth, cutting off the sound that would otherwise be blasting from my lips.
She drags me effortlessly. She seems a hundred times stronger than me. She pulls me behind a thick blue tarp that is draped over one corner of this floor of the tower.
There are no fluorescent strips here, but the light of her halo shows me that the tarp sheeting has been used to wall off supplies. Stacked concrete slabs, bulky paper sacks of cement powder, huge white plastic tubs of stuff.
She crouches among it all, pinning me in place. My back is pressed tightly against her chest. One of her arms is deadlocked around my throat and the other hand is firmly over my mouth.
I struggle, but it is like fighting against iron. My heartbeat is rocketing in my chest and it takes me a while to realize she is shushing me, urging me to be still and quiet.
“They’re here,” she whispers, her breath warm near my ear. Strangely, I can feel her heartbeat thudding. It is as fast as mine.
And that is when I realize the angel is afraid.
Afraid.
Somehow the thought is comforting. If the angel is afraid, then she certainly isn’t going to waste her time killing me. The fight would draw the attention of whoever she is running from.
Whatever the fuck it is that can scare an angel.
We are both still now. The only sounds I hear are our heartbeats and the tiny distant noises of the busy city at night. And then I hear a chink. The sound of the boot hitting a small piece of loose metal. It is many floors below us, but it is coming from within the tower.
She stiffens. Her heartbeat accelerates. Her hand on my mouth clenches, making me wince.
I touch her hand until she realizes what she is doing, and it unclenches. I ease her hand gently off my mouth, and she lets me, a gleaming threat in her eyes of what she will do if I dare to scream.
“Who?” I whisper.
She shakes her head. And then she kisses me on the mouth. Her full sensual lips fastening to mine, brushing over them, nibbling them, urging them to open.
What the hell?
I start pushing her away, but before I can manage, I lose my will to do so. Where our mouths touch, my skin is tingling. I am intoxicated. I want this.
As we kiss, I reach my arms around her shoulders, pulling her in front of me. All the better to kiss her. My heart is soaring. An angel is kissing me. An angel.
It is her who eases away, breaking the kiss. She looks at me and there is a question in her eyes. I can feel the tension in her body, like she is stretched to breaking point. I see now the small half-healed wounds encircling her neck, dark with blood, like beads on a necklace. It horrifies me. What could hurt an angel?
More chinks from the floors somewhere below us make her flinch. There is more than one of them. They are getting nearer. And they are getting careless, confident. They know she – an angel – can hear them, but they don’t care.
Her eyes are wide as she looks at me, and her question is still in them, searing me with its urgency. Her eyes flick to my hologram and then back to my face.
I realize suddenly why she saved my life. There can be only one reason. One weapon that she has that they don’t.
“I need you,” she whispers.
Her throaty voice sends chills through me. I lay there frozen, staring up at her. I know what she is asking me. I never dreamed it would happen to me.
I am going to die today anyway, but in doing so, I can save her.
Death by angelgasm. That’s what she is offering.
Her head lowers towards mine. Just a few centimeters before she comes to a stop. Her eyes are fixed on mine, but she doesn’t move. She is giving me the option to say no.
She is so beautiful. Long raven hair down to her waist. An exquisite face with regal features, and such piercing eyes. Her skin-tight clothes do little to hide her thrusting breasts and narrow waist. My head is swimming. I want her. I’m already hard.
Her top is like a bra. She slips the straps off her shoulders and her breasts seem to swell and spill out of it. I catch a glimpse of her nipples. I groan quietly. What man could say no?
I nod. I bury my fingers in her silky tresses and drag her face towards mine. I taste her mouth greedily. She tastes like heaven, like whatever beauty I thought an angel would taste of.
Her tongue slips into my mouth, teasing mine. She is on top of me, her hips grinding against my hardness. Silently, steadily, insistently, she grinds. I lose my fucking mind.
I try to roll on top of her. I want to rip her clothes off. I want to plunge into her. Fuck her until I die of the pleasure. Literally. But her thighs are strong as steel, and she pins me down in place, her knees spread either side of me. She wants to stay on top.
I get the message. I don’t care. Ridden by an angel. I won’t say no to that. She unzips my jeans and I gasp. Her mouth swallows the sound. When she takes me in her hand and guides me inside her, even her kiss cannot stop the groan that comes out of my mouth.
But it doesn’t matter. We are beyond caring. Her lips taste me greedily, and then she pulls away to suck in a deep gasp of air. She is squirming against me, her hands entangling in my hair. Her cheeks are flushed. Her eyes glazed. Tiny pricks of red horns push out from her scalp.
A sound comes out of her mouth like a long keening moan and she rides me fast. We buck and thrash. The brick
s near us topple, crashing to the ground.
I am vaguely aware of shouts. Footsteps racing towards us. A bellow of dismay as a mighty warrior in shiny armor rips the tarp aside and sees us. But it is too late. We are coming.
She screams a long cry of ecstasy and victory. The blast of her angelgasm tears through the room, shredding the bricks and the ground, and the many figures who are running towards us, towards their deaths. They disintegrate. Turn to ashes blown in the wind.
It is the last thing I see.
9. Blue Magic
When I regain consciousness I am lying in a hollow where the concrete beneath me has turned to dust. My ears are ringing, disorienting me. I prop myself up on my elbows to look around.
