Otherlife Dreams: The Selfless Hero Trilogy (36 page)

Passing three sets of women he entered into what could only be called a “room”. Arranged throughout the area were more women, placed like furniture and posed as such. Idly he noticed one woman on her hands and knees had a nearly finished meal on her back. Another woman with her knees and shoulders to the ground rested nearby, taking the place of a chair.

Moving towards the right Runner followed the sound deeper into the house of motionless dead women. His sense of unease and anger continued to build as the sound grew. Entering another “hallway” Runner finally exited into an open space.

In the middle of the area, four women were laid out, side by side. Their arms linked with each other, their eyes vacantly staring into the sky. On top of them was another woman being sexually assaulted by a naked young man.

Runner activated the recording feature that was part of the game for “live feed” entertainers. He allowed several seconds to pass to ensure he had footage of the man raping the dead girl, and then walked up and booted the man in the ass. Sent tumbling to the grass the criminal bounced once and clambered to his feet.

Glancing down Runner found the victim was much like the rest. A husk, empty and devoid of anything, like a doll.

Pinning the rapist with his eyes, Runner whipped his blade up and advanced on the feral little man. He was a rat faced fellow, barely reaching five foot three, with beady black eyes, a thin nose, and a too large mouth. An ugly face framed by lank brown hair that came down to his jawline. There was a scraggly growth of hair from the bottom of his neck up to his cheeks. Apparently he didn’t care to use the hair and beard options and just left them at their default values, which would be how he actually looked.

Though the game attempted to force everyone into an acceptable physique at the minimum, it was obvious that he was pudgy in reality, his neck looking too large and the rest of his frame almost misshapen in his nudity. Glancing at the name floating above the man Runner memorized it.

“Jacob Chesed, my name is Lieutenant Runner Norwood. You have four seconds to explain before I decide to skip a court martial and move to the execution instead.”

Jittery eyes flitted from Runner to Hannah and back again before he gave them a thin greasy smile.

“Sir, please, I can explain. You see, I merely happened upon this place, and decided to stop for a while. It’s dangerous out there and as creepy as this all may be, it’s rather safe. No one likes to come up here and no one comes this deeply. In fact you’re the first person I’ve seen!”

Runner didn’t move but he knew the man wasn’t telling him the truth.

He lies

Unbidden, the words quite literally appeared before him on his HUD as if they had always been there. Tilting his head Runner found the words didn’t change their position but began to fade away.

“Ah, yes! You see? No harm. As for her, well, she’s my girlfriend you see. My fiance even. She may now be no longer with us, but I believe she wouldn’t find me at fault for the actions of a lonely man missing his lover,” Jacob continued, having interpreted Runner’s head movement as a sign he was following along.

He lies.

“Do you see that?” Runner asked, his eyes sliding to the side, the words moving with his gaze.

I’m going mad, I’m going mad, I’m going mad. Aren’t I?

“I see a bastard of a mother fucking liar who should die!”

“Whoa whoa, hold on there pretty lady. You don’t understand this because you’re just an NPC. Why don’t you have her wait outside Lieutenant? This is beyond her comprehension.”

He loots the dead.

Breathing roughly, Runner tentatively swung his blade at the words, the tip passing through them as if they weren’t even there. Locking eyes with Jacob once more Runner finally blinked.

“You don’t see it? The words! Floating there?”

I am
§┌îτ
.

“Srit?” Runner asked aloud.

“Lieutenant, maybe you need a drink? Could I offer you something?”

“Runner, what’s wrong?” Hannah whispered urgently.

Srit? Srit, yes. I am Srit

He has poison.

Suddenly focusing on the situation Runner called up the games console and confirmed §┌îτ, or Srit as it were, was indeed logged in and was now listed as “Active” instead of “Away”. It was the outside, they were there. Breathing out shakily Runner then laughed, smiling at Jacob.

“No, thank you! I’ll pass on your poisoned refreshment.”

Move.

Sidestepping, a dagger passed through the area Runner had vacated. Sinking into one of the women acting as a wall, the blade stuck firm in her abdomen. She crumpled over, hunching in on herself as the poison activated, and lay unmoving.

“Courts adjourned, guilty, I’ll log the transcript personally,” Runner smirked at the little man.

Unexpectedly Jacob laughed and gave Runner the middle finger.

“Fuck off, Sir.”

Spoken with a smile, the man vanished. As if he were never there. Growling Runner cast Wave of Heat in an attempt to bring Jacob back into vision.

As the cone of fire expanded to where Jacob had stood and then faded, nothing occurred. Jacob hadn’t just vanished, he’d removed himself from the area. In his haste Runner had forgotten to confirm the man’s class. More than likely a caster class with access to Scroll creation. Jacob had been nude which had offered Runner no insight to this.

“Ugh. I recorded the confrontation and the act itself. I’ll have him strung up as soon as everything is over.”

“What a monster! It was like looking into the face of fucking ‘disgust’ itself. Everything that shit head said was a lie. Scumbags been living here a while.”

Runner sheathed his sword and forced his way through the doll wall, knocking several women tumbling to the ground. Tripping over himself in his haste to exit he fell to his hands and knees and took a deep breath to steady his nerves.

“You ok? It seemed like you were, uh, going insane back there.”

“Ah, yeah. I have issues that I can’t even pinpoint tied up in-in what Jacob was doing. The outside was also contacting me, but they were doing it in a weird way. I felt very much like a man on edge. It didn’t make any sense at first. Srit, are you there?”

Looking up into the sky as if they were watching him Runner waited. Some time passed before he loaded the game console one more time and found that Srit was listed as Away again.

“Damn, and they’re gone again. What the hell is going on out there?”

Accompanying a shake of his head Runner stood and started north again. They had a distance to cover and a meager window of time to work with.

5:52pm Sovereign Earth time

11/01/43

They were making good time and advancing on Crivel. Putting the cemetery behind them they were now perhaps two or three hours from their destination. Doing some rough estimations from the map the rest of the group would reach Crivel an hour ahead of them. Runner was thankful that they were all journeying towards the waypoint and would be reunited by late evening. A few hours would be all that remained to them. After dawn they’d have to scramble to make everything happen and get out ahead of the army.

“Did they come back yet?”

Runner shook his head. He knew she was asking more about the outside world rather than their party. Thinking about it logically, it must be a daunting thought for her. Her very world could be ending. And soon.

“Nothing. Though, their speech was odd. I wonder if we ended up on the target planet rather than Earth. Supposedly they spoke Sovereign Standard, but that isn’t always the case.”

Hannah made no reply but trudged along beside him. She was troubled and the reasons were obvious.

“I won’t let them turn your world off Hanners. Even if I have to break the rules, I’ll make sure it gets offloaded to another server so it can continue on. Besides, this is all a scientific breakthrough of a magnitude no one expected. They won’t just, end it, once they understand what a miracle this is.”

Once again Hannah said nothing. Runner let the line of conversation drop.

They had passed from lightly wooded forests, empty hills, and finally the open plains of Crivel. Far, far in the distance he could see the town itself. It was a sprawling thing of stone and towers. Built to be a border castle it was clearly devised on a militaristic scale. Based on the reports from the forum, it wouldn’t stand.

The Sunless had called on their alliance and not only were they marching on Crivel but their Barbarian allies were on the move. Under that much destructive power, the city wouldn’t stand long under an assault. Everyone was certain that it would be months before the Humans would be able to retaliate and retake it.

Runner was browsing the forums on expected numbers, reinforcements, and army movements. His screen flashed red, then turned white, and a debuff appeared with a five minute timer. He collapsed to the ground, his body beyond his control. For the second time today.

By chance alone his sight happened to fall on Hannah as he collapsed. Hannah was splayed out on the grass in a similar fashion as himself not more than a few feet from his position. Her icon was green, the color of a poison, where his was a white, a status ailment.

“Hey there Lieutenant, don’t worry, this’ll take but a minute to finish up. You’ll forgive me if I don’t wake you up before I go. Nothing in these parts would be strong enough to end you in a one shot and you’d be on your feet after the first bite,” a voice drawled lazily. A silhouette came into view from the opposite direction they’d been traveling and stood over Hannah.

Catching sight of the name plate Runner saw it was Ted Henshaw. There could be no discussion though, no debate, no interference. Sleep was a weak spell that broke if any damage was taken or a single status changed. It almost had zero use in combat, unless the goal was simply to remove a would be combatant. In this case the spell itself didn’t force the victim into darkness or that their eyes be closed. It was designed as a perfunctory status ailment that wasn’t deeply invested in mechanically from the designers.

Runner’s eyes were open, and he couldn’t close them if he wanted to.

Ted brought his sword down on Hannah, her health bar flashed, the bar briefly becoming a normal color before returning to a sickly green. In that brief interlude between status changes, Hannah had tried to lash out at him.

“Stop squirming, it’s your personal quest item.”

His sword came down again followed by the squelching noise that accompanied a sword hitting flesh. Runner processed that new bit of information and it all made a lot more sense now. Ted had been combative at first, argumentative even. For certain quests an item would be given with the goal of facilitating the end goal. They were sloppily written quests, nothing more than fetch quests half the time.

“The guild made it-”

The sword came down.

“Just to end you.”

And again.

“Make peace with it.”

Hannah’s health wasn’t going down fast, but it was losing ground faster than it would take for the sleep spell to wear off. Runner could only watch as Hannah literally was being put to the sword.

Srit wasn’t there, the rest of his party was separated, and there was nothing he could do. This wasn’t a bed time story, a children’s fairy tale, a hero’s triumphant ballad. There would be no Deus Ex Machina moment to fix the wrongs of the world, no convenient Eagles, specific virus that would strike Ted down, someone unexpectedly showing up, a convenient dialog to show Ted the error of his ways, nothing.

There was Runner, Ted, Hannah, and the bloody quest blade. Runner could do nothing in game to stop this, being bound by all the rules of combat that every other player had to adhere to. Nothing.

Hannah wasn’t trying to fight back between strikes anymore, her eye’s had found Runner’s, and she watched him as he watched her. Dark blue eyes that were filled with fear, pain, and little else. Tears gathered at the corners of her eyes, her unblinking gaze unable to shed the tears that built up.

Crunch.

Blood jetted out from Hannah as Ted scored a critical hit, her health dwindling into the orange section. Helplessly Runner watched, cursing himself for his carelessness and inability to act.

“Sorry Lieutenant, she’s just an NPC. It’s not like she matters.”

Nadine’s voice pierced his mind, from a time when a conversation took place that was very similar.

“If it was to prot-t-tect me? Or Han-n-nnah? Or anyone from our group? A slightly differen-n-nt NPC but just an NPC? Would you let them do as they would with me or would you kill them-m-m t-too? Answer me Run-n-ner,”
Nadine had demanded of him at the time.

Just an NPC.

Crunch, another gout of blood rushed out.

“Two in a row, gruesome. That was a real gusher.”

Hannah’s eyes were tinged with regret now, the fear becoming acceptance of her fate.

She was just an NPC.