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Volume 4

Chapter 26: The Girl Named Samantha

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ONE SECOND after their teleport lights disappeared, the pause that engulfed more than 200 players ended with a yell.

“Get her!”

Five long staves with different shapes, wielded by five wizards in varying different colored robes burst into an attack formation. Following their lead, the crowd went off to a unified roar as spells and swords, arrows, dark spears, daggers, explosions, gusts of winds, chains, and all kinds of attacks available echoed in the whole area.

The scene was like a miniature version of the battle of the five armies as they all came to attack the ones they thought was their greatest rivals in the mission.

In the central plaza where they appeared, the citizens of the city was needlessly dragged in.

“There are people in here!” shouted the girl that pulled Siva and she pulled her guns and shot the wizards.

But her bullets didn’t reach them. It stopped in midair as if invisible hands grabbed them.

With a crazed smile on his face, Six pulled a staff as he used telekinesis to throw it further than the two.

The staff pierced the land 30 meters away from them and she clicked her tongue as she looked up. The rest of Six’s team began to take formation and the girl had to press Siva’s hand hard as she click her tongue.

“This is bad.”

One man on each sides of the pentagonal formation, 50 meters apart from each other, a five layered seal with runes and characters in them appeared at the lines.

“What’s happening here?! Why are you attacking us?”

No answer came to Siva as him and Samantha went back to back. “Don’t be fooled, Rex!”

“These guys aren’t good people!” after saying that, she knelt down and released her Dual Beretta, summoning in place a large coffin that manifested on her side. And when she saw Siva’s petrified shocked face, “In what part of what I said did you not understand? These guys are just pretending to be good people! They’re father’s henchmen!”

Father’s henchmen?

Pegasus…

Siva couldn’t immediately process the thoughts that is currently running on his mind. First he was kissed by a person he seem to know but don’t remember, and now he was being hunted by the people under the person who he just also learned had once tried to kill him.

“Who… who are these people?”

Eyes wide without his skull mask, as Siva’s shocked face was still yet to vanish, Samantha pulled the ending latch of the coffin-shaped container and pulled the long hilt of the weapon up to her shoulder.

With the base and the top surface expanded and folded into a guard, the large weapon in her shoulders were in the impression of a giant sword without a blade.

That’s where they heard Six’s voice calling. “She’s in the move! Fortify the seal!”

With their outstretched hands, the five people with Six up front, poured more manna into their staves and the pentagon seal that imprisoned her and Siva started to emit brighter lights in five different colored layers.

There’s blue, red, yellow, green, and then white. In the middle part of the pentagon where Siva and Samantha were back to back, a cage made up of an invisible wall was lit in a hazy manner.

“Cover your head!” Samantha yelled and the long half of a meter long hilt of her weapon was dragged behind as she dashed forth in a running slash.

A bright metallic blade five meters long appeared from nothing and she swung it diagonally towards the face of the barrier. A sound of a glass mirror wall shattering in the impact came where she attacked and the collapsing shards of it fell on the paved floor of the plaza waning like shimmering crystal sands.

Her momentum was halved but she continued her run towards Six, brandishing the large bladed weapon trice until she totally ran out of juice.

Sadly, she only barely destroyed a small part on three of the five layers of the hazy barrier and she clicked her tongue as she left the sword in its place, stabbed in the ground and jumped back.

“Damn it, we’re trapped!” She cursed. Ignoring that exclaim, Siva shouted again.

“Six! What is the meaning of this!”

“You really have a bad habit of not listening to other people’s words, eh, Rex Kingsley? Just like what she said, we’re Master Alfred’s men and we are here just to seal you off until his son arrives.”

Upon the words, Samantha yelled angrily!

“Damn it! Damn it, dad! You’ve fallen so low!”

Siva pulled her shoulders. “What the hells going on? I want to know now!”

Tears were flowing on Samantha’s cheeks and Siva had to try his best not to falter on the unreasonable pain that he was feeling seeing her cry.

“Rex… I’m sorry. I tried to stop him but I… I…”

She collapsed on her knees and like an innocent child, she was trying to catch her tears and wipe it off her red flushed cheeks. The sight of her looked adorable and yet alien at the same time. The only feeling that Siva is getting from the sight of her crying is just pain.

Rex looked around and glared at Six for a moment and he knelt down to calmly speak to her.

“Please, miss, tell me. Who are you?”

“You really can’t remember me?”

“I’m sorry. As much as I wanted to say I do, but I really don’t. I don’t know you and I am confused as to why is all this happening.”

She sobbed and tried to laugh at the same time. Irony is how Siva translated her expression. It’s as if she just heard something worthy to laugh at in derision.

“I can’t believe you’re actually saying that.”

No proper answer and a hurt stare is hat Siva received in his inquiry. Her look was so pained that he just had to sigh and reserve the questions.

“Alright, let’s talk about that later. Firstly, why are they sealing us and not attacking us?”

As Samantha tried to keep her sobs to herself, Siva stood up and pulled her to her feet.

Samantha glared at Six who smiled maniacally.

“Dad kept his grudge against you ever since that day four years ago. And that’s probably the reason why he hired these men to chase you down. He’s finishing the project he started.”

When Samantha looked at him again, she had this look that said she was in real pain. A pain different on how Siva imagined Amanda would have been when he said not to look for him. It was a pain that says clearly that she is tormented by her father’s criminal actions.

And when that thought entered Siva’s consciousness, he recalled the revelations he just heard from Augustus and his uncle Faust.

“Mefisto… Extraction…”

Samantha frowned at him. “And why do you remember that detestable event and not me? Why did you forget me and not that day? Why are hurting me like this?!”

Samantha slapped him and shouted at his face. She went on and punched his chest with her fists, while her eyes were shedding tears that pierced through Siva’s frozen heart. The pain was real and Siva staggered. He wondered why she’s making that pained face and why is it affecting him.

But as much as he wanted to fight back and pull her hands to stop her from hurting him, Siva’s heart felt that he might have hurt her real bad.

“I really can’t remember any of it.” But he admitted in a tone that fully extended the feeling in his heart.

“Then tell me why you remember that experiment and not me? At least tell me that! Rex! Why?” Samantha was crying and sobbing on his chest and her punches were getting weak with each hit. “Why are you hurting me like this?”

“I was…” Siva could feel the words coming out from his heart. Words that he knows can’t make her tears go away but is still enough to answer her questions. “I was in a coma and… I just learned of that event a few hours ago from a hospital.”

The truth that he told her made Samantha bit her lips and she hugged him tight that Siva had no other choice but to hug her back. Or at least the situation made him.

“You were really hurt that bad? And I… I hurt you in reflex… Rex, I-I’m sorry… I’m truly sorry.”

Hurt? Siva wondered why it seems to sound like she’s referring to this pain as if it’s not normal? As far as he knows, being hurt in this game is the norm. That’s also one reason why he detested this game.

Being hurt in a supposed to be ‘game’ already cancels the very thought that it was a game. Every since the day he started his career, he had been feeling the pain of this world. He could feel everything. Yes, even the very detail of how his skin is caressed by the gentle wind in cold mornings of his adventures, was engraved to his very senses. 90% reality? No. excluding ’pain’, every senses in this game works 100% like the real life!

RPG: Terroa is a detestable ‘game’ that lets its players experience pain that shouldn’t exist in a video game. It was supposed to be fun and not like this that players get bothered by the painful sensation.

So why does it sound like the ‘hurt’ she was referring to doesn’t seem to encompass the aspects that defines a video game?

As Siva pondered on that thought, lost in a moment, a pair of wet eyes came to meet him when she pulled his cheeks to her direction.

He realized, that topic can be discussed later. For now, Siva remembered Six having said about Alfred’s son.

“Who is your brother?”

Samantha shot him a look. “I have no brother!”

“But Six said…”

“He’s just a computer program! My father is deluded to this world and to that program that he even went so far as to call that dreadful virus his son instead of me, his real daughter! He even tried to kill you for it!”

Samantha escaped from her entanglement with Siva as he just followed her warmth with a reaching hand. He even mulled over why his hand stretched out to try and reach for her. There was just the feeling of loss there.

But then he remembered the things that he heard from Augustus and Faust, as he noticed that the wall that she destroyed had started to fix itself.

Samantha shot a glare at Six and then she turned to him while wiping her tears on her cheeks.

“We can’t let Mefisto get you.”

“The program?” Siva asked, deliberately setting aside the ‘you’ in that sentence for a question later.

“It’s not just a program. It’s actually a special virus that has a special function and ability.” Upon her words, her teary eyes was placed at him.

Siva took a step to get close to her.

“Why does it sound dangerous?”

At his question, Samantha’s expression was soft and full of pain when she pulled his arm sleeve. Siva had an urge to knock her hand away but a feeling in his chest said that it would only hurt him more than it will hurt her.

“Because… I-it’s because dad made him that way. He’s a computer virus that can kill a human. In this world, in any Virtual World, Mefisto is like a devil granted with an ability to kill any human being.”

“That’s…!!”

“It’s not impossible, Rex.” and the hand that grabbed his sleeve tightened and their eyes met with her painful stare. “It almost killed you!”

Samantha hugged his arm and she placed her head on his shoulder to hide the tears, and Siva felt her sincere feelings coming from her trembling embrace as he, for the umpteenth time, set aside questions for later.

Their situation remained dire and they need to get our of this place. Especially now that he heard a story such as that. The longer they dallied, the more questions he piled up in a corner of his mind. And the longer they do nothing, the closer and sooner Mefisto will arrive.

“We have to get out of here.” He finally declared.

“But how?” Samantha asked.

Siva looked around them, his eyes resting on the still and motionless formation of the five men.

His eyes rested at Six, who was talking to himself, for a moment, and he gently pushed Samantha as his eyes rested on the large sword stabbed on the ground.

“I will trust you with my abilities. You will be the one getting us out of here.”