by Rachel Aaron
A coward, Tina’s voice repeated in his head. And a liar.
Cursing himself, James yanked his runner back toward the western road. “Arbati!” he yelled, kicking the animal to a gallop. “Wait up!”
****
An hour later, James had never been happier that he’d chosen to do the right thing.
On a ground mount, going by standard FFO mount speeds, Red Canyon should have been fifteen minutes away. But they’d been galloping for over an hour now, and they were barely past the first set of hills. The brown-and-tan savanna surrounded them like a sea, a thousand times larger than it had been in the game. If he’d tried to make a break for Bastion, he’d have been hopelessly lost by now in the endless rolling grass.
At least the ride itself was fun. Arbati refused to speak to him, and their speed meant dust was constantly blasting him in the face, forcing James to pull his shirt up over his nose to keep the grit out of his lungs. But neither the dust nor the sour company could shadow the sheer joy that was being on a runner.
Despite their long legs, the strange mounts ran much lower than a horse. The runners practically flew down the road as the ground rushed by less than a foot below his feet. He had to crouch low over the beast to stay streamlined, but the pose made him feel like he was racing a motorcycle down the highway. The sheer physical joy of riding was completely unexpected and the first nice thing that had happened to James since he’d come here. He just wished it weren’t the only one.
Whenever they rode past a crossroads or a hut, James looked for other players. Every time he failed to spot one, the feeling of being utterly alone grew sharper. He told himself there was no reason to panic. The savanna had been a big zone even back when this was a game. It made sense he’d have trouble finding people now that it was even bigger. Still, James couldn’t shake the feeling that if there were other players out here, they were probably in a lot more trouble than he was. He’d had the advantage of being alone in a nice safe yurt when the transition hit. Going through that same sensory hell out here in the wilderness where anything could attack you would be another story entirely.
He was still cycling between enjoying the ride and worrying himself sick when his nose caught the smell of smoke. Looking at the horizon, James spotted a dingy column shimmering in the hazy air. As they got closer, a sickly-sweet odor of decay joined the acrid smell of woodsmoke. The combination was enough to make his fur stand on end, especially when he spotted the vultures floating on the thermals above the smoke.
Fifteen minutes later, they were close enough for James to make out the blackened shapes of two covered wagons by the roadside. Arbati kept their speed up to make a fast approach. Or at least that was what James assumed he was doing until Arbati blew right past the wagons without a glance.
“Arbati! Stop!” James shouted, pulling up on his reins.
The warrior turned his own mount around with a fierce scowl. “Why? We have no time for this!”
“We need to see if anyone needs help,” James said, hopping down. “This used to be the quest hub for the Crazy Schtumple Brothers.”
“Why do you care?”
“I don’t know,” James snapped. “Maybe because searching for survivors is the right thing to do? The Schtumple Brothers were good people, and there might be other players here.” He started poking through the charred wreckage of the first wagon. “If anyone’s still alive, it’s my duty to help them. I am a healer.”
“No,” Arbati said with scorn. “You played a healer, just like you’re playing with my sister’s life by wasting our time!”
James glared at him. “How would you feel if you were dying in the grass and the only two people who could save you just ran by because they wouldn’t spare five minutes?”
“That would be the last eighty years of my life!” the warrior roared, making his runner rear. “Where was your mercy, player, when I was trapped in the Nightmare? Doomed to be captured, tortured, and killed every single day only to rise and do it all again every sunrise? Countless players ran by me without a care!”
“So that makes this okay?” James said angrily. “No one saved you, so screw everyone else?”
“You are not in charge here, player,” the warrior growled. “I am. You lied to Elder Gray Fang about your powers, and now your life rests in my hands. You will do as I say if you wish to survive, and I say we have no time to spend looking for the corpses of stupid, lazy, greedy, cheating Schtumples who were obviously killed by gnolls.”
“You can’t just write them off because they’re Schtumples!”
“Again, you show your ignorance,” Arbati said with a sneer. “All Schtumples are conniving, selfish liars. I would kill them myself if I caught them on our lands. Thankfully, the gnolls saved me the trouble this time, so we are moving on.”
James turned away in disgust, focusing on digging through the charred wreckage so he wouldn’t have to look at the warrior’s hateful face.
Unfortunately, it looked as though Arbati was right about that last part. Just like in the game, this place was a small merchant camp with a semi-permanent fire pit flanked by two large, colorfully painted covered wagons. There was a makeshift hitching post off to the side, but no beasts of burden were tethered to it. James found plenty of arrows stuck or broken against the blackened sides of the wagons, as well as gnoll paw prints in the dirt, but no bodies, living or otherwise. He was about to check the tall grass around the camp when he heard Arbati start to growl.
“No,” James said before the warrior could hurl whatever insult he was thinking of this time. “We’ve already spent more time arguing about this than it’s taken me to search. I just need a few more minutes, so why don’t you just sit there and think of how you can be a bigger racist asshole.”
A deadly silence fell over the road, and James knew he’d gone too far. He began to search more quickly, desperate to cover as much ground as possible before Arbati came over to drag him back to his mount. He was frantically pushing the waist-high grass aside when he spotted a pack of black buzzards eating something behind the first wagon.
James ran over, scattering the birds…and was almost sick on the spot. The chopped-up, half-eaten remains of the two Schtumple Brothers lay like empty sacks in the bloody grass. The first had been split open with an ax, his squashed pug-like face cracked right down the middle between his round, wide-set eyes. The other Schtumple had been shot with arrows until his round body looked like a pincushion.
Both were long dead, their bodies pecked apart by scavengers, but James began to cast his Raise Ally spell anyway. Dead didn’t really mean dead in FFO. If he could bring back players who’d been dissolved in pools of acid or drowned in lava, then this was nothing. As he pulled the mana together, though, he discovered that there was nothing in the Schtumples’ bodies for it to latch onto. Their corpses were inert, no more resurrectable than a door would have been. If it hadn’t been for the horrible stench of death, he wouldn’t have known they’d ever been alive. He was about to try to force the spell into them anyway, just so he could say he’d tried, when the iron clap of Arbati’s hand landed on his shoulder.
“You do not get to speak to me like that, player,” the warrior growled, whirling James around.
James glared right back. “If you don’t want to be called an asshole,” he said through clenched teeth, “don’t be an asshole.”
The warrior raised his arm to backhand him across the face for that, but James ducked away. “Oh, hell no,” he said, ripping away from Arbati’s grip. “I’m not letting you hit me anymore.”
“Like you get a choice,” Arbati replied, advancing on him.
James took another step back, eyes going wide. Was the jubatus really going to fight him here? Now? They were on their way to the enemy’s camp. There was no room in the plan for beating each other up beforehand.
But as he opened his mouth to tell Arbati he was being a moron, James realized that everything he was about to say applied to him as well. The warrior wasn’t the
only one turning on his allies. James had insulted him, too, and while that didn’t excuse what Arbati was doing—or what he’d said—fighting him back now made James just as bad.
With that, James changed his footing, bracing his legs in the tall grass as he let Arbati close in and deck him across the face. The punch was strong enough to knock him flat back on the ground, but while his head was left spinning, his pride hurt more than anything else as he put up his hands in surrender.
“Okay, okay, I’m sorry,” he said, forcing the words out. “But we don’t have time to fight each other. Lilac is counting on us.”
For a second, it looked as if the head warrior was going to hit him again anyway. But he must have cared more about his sister than taking out his anger on James, because a moment later, he dropped his fist.
“Let this be a warning, player,” he said, stabbing his finger at James’s face. “You only continue to live by my mercy alone. You would do well to remember your place.”
“Understood,” James said bitterly, but the word met Arbati’s back as the cat-warrior stalked across the burned camp to the road. With a final look at the poor dead Schtumples, James followed, pulling himself onto his runner without a word. The moment he was mounted, Arbati took off, leaving the remains of the Crazy Schtumple Brothers’ camp smoking in the hot sun behind them.
****
The next five hours was a different repeating cycle of anger at Arbati and self-blame at his own poor handling of things at the camp. After all, James had been in the right. Arbati was the one being a racist rage-junkie. He should have stood up to the warrior, but there was no undoing it now. At least Arbati had kept his mouth shut, riding in angry silence as the sun sank lower and lower in the sky.
By the time it touched the tall hills in the distance, James had something new to worry about. Dark would be on them in less than an hour, and they weren’t even in sight of the Red Canyon village yet. They had to be at least fifty miles from the Windy Lake by now. The road had turned from a nicely paved, if slightly overgrown, path to a wagon-rutted dirt track. They still cleared it with amazing speed, but it didn’t seem to be doing any good. Every time he looked around, all James saw was grass, grass, and more grass dotted with the occasional squat grove of trees. There was no sign of the low, rocky hills that ringed Red Canyon or the smoke that would rise from a militarized town full of smithies. He didn’t even hear the sounds of a village. Just the empty howl of the wind in the grass, blowing for miles in every direction.
James gripped his reins tighter. His theory that the world had returned to its original size had been well proven by this point, but as they rode deeper into the wilderness, he was beginning to worry that scale wasn’t the only thing that had changed. Maybe locations had been rearranged as well when this place ceased to be an environment whose only purpose was keeping gamers entertained. The rolling grassland made it easy to miss things, too. The hills surrounding Red Canyon were high compared to the rest of the savanna, but it would only take being off by a few miles in either direction to ride right past the village without ever knowing.
James’s worries became suddenly short-term, however, when a volley of arrows screamed out of the tall grass from his right. Bolts peppered his runner from head to flank, and the animal went down with a bloody scream, sending James flying head over heels off its back.
He twisted instinctively in the air, landing on all fours in the dirt road. Ahead of him, he heard the scream of Arbati’s runner going down as well. He turned to see the warrior trapped beneath his dying mount. Arbati shoved the animal off with frightening strength, rolling to his feet to face the wave of gnolls that was now pouring out of the grass on either side.
Howling their battle cry from dozens of throats, the short, hairy, hyena-like creatures charged with axes raised high. Most went for Arbati, but six of the muscular dog-men split off to attack James, running at him with black eyes bright with bloodlust.
James shot to his feet. Snagging a fistful of his mana, he used it to grab the ever-present streams of magical light floating around him. Weaving air and earth together, he made a conduit between the ground and sky before unleashing it in a massive blast of lightning.
Back in the game, chain lightning had been a satisfyingly dramatic spell with shots of white lightning arcing between targets like a Jacob’s ladder. Now, there was only a flash and a thunder crack followed by the stench of burning fur as four gnolls fell dead in their tracks. The remaining two fearlessly charged forward, raising their axes to attack.
James stared dumbly at the gleaming weapons. Logically, he knew this should be an easy fight for him. He had fifty levels and an entire foot on his attackers, but that didn’t seem to matter to his body. Now that his one big shot of lightning was gone, every part of him understood that this was now a life-or-death situation and panicked accordingly.
Thankfully, decades of martial arts held up when his brain could not. James caught the first gnoll’s ax handle before he realized his hand had moved, twisting it sideways to send its owner flying into the dirt. The second gnoll swung hard at his left, but when James reached out to grab his wrist, his arm refused to move that way. He must have landed on it wrong when he’d been thrown from the runner, he realized, but it was too late to switch up. The gnoll’s ax had already bitten into his arm, sending burning pain deep into his bicep as blood went everywhere.
James screamed. Gasping from the shock, he wrenched his arm away from the gnoll’s ax, using his free hand to clutch the wound, which had already soaked his sleeve in red. But as terrifying as the pain of the cut itself was, what terrified James even more was the numb chill he could feel spreading out from the wound like water through his flesh. The blade must have been poisoned, he realized, heart pounding. Maybe with the same cursed poison that had crippled Lilac.
Desperate and terrified, James fell back. Letting go of his wound, he used his good hand to grab a few lines of amber earth magic and spun them around the feet of the gnoll who’d chopped him. As soon as he released the spell, a massive hand made of rocks rose up from the road to engulf his target, leaving only a brown paw poking out from between the fingers.
Barking in anger, the remaining gnoll raised its ax over its head with both hands. James rolled to a knee, managing to catch the gnoll’s paws in his hand. Since he was much taller than the creature, he surged to his feet, carrying the hyena-man right off the ground.
It yowled as he lifted it, snapping at his face with his fangs, but James barely noticed. He was too busy marveling at how he’d been able to lift what had to be a hundred fifty pounds of scraggly, beady-eyed gnoll one-handed.
In the back of his head, he realized this was likely because he was level eighty. Even though he was a caster, his base strength would still be four to five times higher than the average level-one human. Scared for his life and soaked in adrenaline, he reveled in the power. Ripping the ax from the gnoll’s hands, James dropped the creature into a knee strike before throwing it to the ground. It yelped in pain as it crashed into the road, clutching its stomach where his knee had dug in. Grabbing its dropped weapon, James took advantage of its shock to bring the stolen hatchet down right in the middle of the terrified gnoll’s snout.
The curved blade landed with a sickening crunch. Hot blood and bits of bone went flying as his victim screamed and went still.
One enemy down and the other trapped in a fist of rock, James turned his attention to casting a cleansing spell. It was hard to do with only one working arm, especially since this was not a condition he’d had to deal with in normal FFO. This was a spell he’d cast countless times in the game, though, and the ingrained habit carried him through. As the cooling magic landed, the terrifying numbness in his arm vanished, leaving only the normal burn of pain.
Immediate death avoided, James let out his held breath and looked around for his enemies. When he laid eyes on the gnoll he’d axed, though, his stomach churned so hard he was almost sick.
The gnoll’s face was b
isected down the center by the ax, but it wasn’t dead. It was still twitching under the ax, whimpering with a whine that cut straight to the quick of him. Heart pounding, James grabbed the knife Arbati had given him with a shaking hand. It was technically unnecessary—the gnoll would be dead soon enough—but letting it lie there suffering was too cruel for James to bear. But when he leaned down to slit its throat, the knife fell from his shaking fingers into the bloody mud of the road.
“What am I doing?”
Normally, James loved fighting. He enjoyed good combat in normal and full-sensory VR games. He liked it in real life, too, so long as protective gear and a dojo were involved. After spending thousands of hours fighting in this game, sparring in gyms, and going to competitions, he’d never even considered that actual violence would be a problem for him if he ever found himself in a life-or-death situation. Now, though, with bodies everywhere and blood all over his hands, all James could see was what he’d done.
The gnoll whimpered at his feet, sending up bloody bubbles as it struggled to breathe through its destroyed face. Watching it try so desperately to live broke James’s heart. He’d done that. The start of this battle had been out of control. He hadn’t thought before he’d thrown his lightning, and now there were four smoking corpses on the ground. Corpses he’d made.
As the iron reek of gnoll blood filled his nose, the reality of what was actually happening here hit James like a sucker punch. These weren’t computer-generated monsters anymore. They were real, as alive as James or the jubatus or anything else in this world. They had families, or maybe packs, but the exact terminology wasn’t important. What was important was that someone was going to miss this gnoll when it didn’t come home from its patrol. If no one found its body, this gnoll’s friends and family could be left wondering about its fate for years, never knowing why it hadn’t returned.
James closed his eyes with a curse. He knew he was being an idiot, but he couldn’t take the possibility that he’d orphaned some gnoll pup today. Pulling bright-blue mana from himself, he wove together the vibrant-green life magics of the grasslands and laid them across the dying gnoll’s body, wrapping it in a verdant cocoon as he released the spell.
