Kana backpedaled in a desperate attempt to stay out of Malia’s range, but she was more than willing to close the distance. That had the dual purpose of allowing her to use her weapons while denying him effective use of his. Nibelus was a fantastic piece of equipment, but with Malia so close to him, he couldn’t bring it to bear.

He did the only thing he could. He kicked her, hard. The last time he’d been forced to kick an opponent, it had been a heavy orcen. Malia was tall, but thin, and human. His kick knocked her back four or five steps and staggered her. Not one to miss the opportunity, Kana landed a hit on her and immediately chained a sweeping clip to knock her down and give himself more time.

Like the other NPCs they’d been fighting, she had the triple health bar. Unlike the shock troopers, she was not well armored and Kana’s attacks obliterated the first bar before she could recover. After that, it became difficult to keep up with her speed and she started scoring hits on him. The damage wasn’t too bad, but all the status effects that came with it were a problem.

Her poisons quickly brought all resource regeneration down to nothing, and for long enough that he wasn’t getting anything else for the length of the fight. He did get a few more good hits in on her, but she was too slippery to effectively chain attacks on. The AI learned from his attacks, making it harder and harder to deal any damage at all. Any attempts he made to kick her again were avoided and countered.

If Kana had gone into the fight with full HP and no poison effects handicapping him, he thought he would have stood a good chance of winning. That was probably the point of the fight though. Malia wasn’t impressive in combat, but the traps and guards added to the difficulty. It was a war of attrition, and he was almost tapped out on resources.

There was no point in dragging things out. The chance of Spiral and Valit mounting a rescue was about as non-existent as their chance of being rescued by him. With his rapidly depleting stamina bar marking the end of the fight, his best chance was to land a decisive chain of attacks and finish her off before she could recover.

The AI was getting too good at predicting his attacks. The worst thing about it was that it was all completely aboveboard. Malia wasn’t getting faster like that one thug back in Faldsteel had done. He was getting slower, tired, but he could see her setting up to dodge attacks before he’d even started them, and trying to adapt them on the fly wasn’t working.

If he was being too predictable, it seemed like the obvious solution was to do something else. Instead of trying to set her up for a clipping sweep as soon as it came off cooldown, he hit her with an arc lance instead. She took the damage and started to sidestep to avoid the follow up rising slash, but Kana didn’t deliver it. He skipped that part of the chain and went with a waist high swipe instead.

It didn’t do as much damage as rising slash would have, but then, rising slash probably wouldn’t have connected. Any damage was better than a miss. Once he broke his normal rotation of attacks and mixed up the chain, he had a lot better luck hitting her. Her reaction time was still amazing, but at least her dodges were reactions and not anticipations.

That allowed him to finally land another clipping sweep on her, and then he had a precious second or two to really open up. Malia was on her last HP bar, but his stamina was down to a bare 12%. He thought he could do it, if he did it just right. She scrambled back to her feet and skipped backward to dodge his spear, then came right back in before he had a chance to catch her on the backswing.

Kana had expected it, and he had a plan to deal with her, but before he could put that into motion, the unexpected occurred. A second blue orb of ball lightning appeared and blasted Malia. While she was temporarily stunned, he took advantage to drop another arc lance and the follow up rising slash on her. Malia did not come out of that ball lightning alive.

“Well that was close,” Kana said. “Hey, I got her!”

“Holy shit, you did?” he heard Spiral yell from the cellar.

And then about four seconds after that, Spiral died. “Oh crap,” Valit said. “You should probably just run for it now.”

Valit died too, and the remaining elites started moving up the stairs to Kana. He didn’t fancy a round with them, so he headed into the woods at a quick jog while eyeing the sliver of color left in his stamina bar. Fortunately, walking used basically nothing. He just had to break combat.

That took less work than he’d expected, and he knew he was safe when the end-of-combat XP and loot windows appeared. He got another lieutenant’s badge, as well as a 3-star rated assassin’s dagger that increased the effectiveness of poisons used by the wielder by 10%. That was all well and good, but he needed to get back to safety. His HP was in the red, his stamina was so low that he had maybe twenty seconds of fight left in him, and probably not more than a few minutes of leisurely walking. The poison had just over ten minutes left on the timer.

Kana did the only thing he could think of. He climbed up a tree to hide and wait.

A message from Spiral showed up while he was waiting, reminding him that he had his own out-of-game message waiting for him to read. Spiral’s simply said, “That was way too close. Glad we got her though. What crazy rare drop did you get this time?”

Kana sent him back the stats of the assassin’s blade, then dropped out of Istrius. He didn’t log out, choosing instead to just switch his input back to his daily life HUD. His bedroom ceiling flickered for a second before the image solidified. And once again, he was very, very aware of his need to pee.

That was far more of an ordeal than any amount of virtual combat, but he managed and even brought food back with him. Once he was settled back into place and had taken a fresh dose of painkillers, he looked at the message.

The first thing that jumped out at him was that it was an unknown sender, and not just someone who wasn’t on his personal contacts list, but someone who wasn’t tied to any civilian identity. It was a proxy avatar, meaning that whoever had sent it was trying to remain anonymous. Jon could only think of a few legitimate reasons for that.

The message itself was nothing but text. “AI taken over. Everything under observation. Need to meet at neutral live location. NO VR. Will explain victim connection. You pick time and place. Respond to burner account within 24 hours. Proof: You’ve been feeling lucky lately.”

“What the hell kind of game are you playing?” Jon muttered as he read the message again. Even if he hadn’t still been more or less on bedrest, he wouldn’t have gone to a meeting with someone using a coffee shop discount rack anonymous profile to send him messages. Doing dumb shit like that had gotten good officers killed.

Police contact information was supposed to be kept private and any contact with them routed through official servers both for the officers’ safety and to prevent harassment exactly like the message Jon had just gotten. No doubt when he didn’t respond, there would be another attempt to coerce him into a meeting, possibly with a note of desperation to prey on his sympathies.

The only thing that bothered him was the last line. It was an obvious reference to Istrius, but how the hell anyone could know about that was a mystery to him. Frankly, it was more disturbing to think that someone was watching what was going on in the game than to get a direct message from an anonymous account.

None of it added up. Someone knew he’d gotten a few lucky drops in a video game and could send him a direct message, completely bypassing all police channels. But that same person then wanted a next-day meet up, apparently not realizing that Jon wasn’t leaving his home for the next week. Just feeding himself and going to the bathroom was as much physical movement as he could handle.

For the moment, he decided to ignore the message and set his HUD to sweeping its code for anything unusual. That wouldn’t take too long, and he left it running in the background as he settled back onto his bed and dropped a level in the HUD’s systems to re-enter VR.

Kana was still safely wedged in between some branches. He’d been out of the game long enough that he could watch the last few seconds of the poison effects tick down and finally disappear. Slowly, his HP started recovering. He gave it another few minutes until his health was in the yellow and he had enough stamina to run if he needed to.

Spiral had started a party chat, and from that Kana learned that he and Valit were on their way back to Faldsteel. Fortunately for them, the game still gave them loot even though they’d died before combat ended. That was good, as it had been sheer luck that had allowed Kana to clinch the win on that quest and he did not think they could pull it off a second time. If the next quest was even harder, they might have to abandon it for the moment and try something else.

Kana beat them back to town by a few minutes. One fortunate side effect of dying was that the lengthy timer on all of the poisons Spiral had been afflicted with had disappeared, so he was at max HP and stamina when they linked back up. Despite dying, he seemed to be happy with the overall outcome.

“It’s just a bit of time and XP lost,” he said, “Not a big deal. I’ll earn it back with the quest rewards and then some.”

“I cannot imagine how much harder the next quest will be,” Valit said in an echo of Kana’s own thoughts.

“That did seem harder than I remember it being,” Spiral said, “But we had a bigger group with a healer last time. Anyway, let’s go turn this in.”

Thulnar wasn’t at the shack at the edge of the village. It wasn’t until they got there that Spiral said, “Oh, right. I forgot he moves during the second half of the quest line. You have to ask the NPCs if they’ve seen him and follow their directions.”

That wasn’t much of an obstacle, however. They found him at a small temple dedicated to Vulk, the God of the Land, with half of his army off and a pair of tired looking priests working to patch him up. Every part of him was splattered with a brown color that Kana assumed was supposed to be blood but actually looked more than mud. Or maybe he’d just slipped in the mud and the game had gotten it right.

“Still alive, huh? That mean you’ve given up then?”

“No, we found her,” Spiral said. He handed over the badge they’d gotten from Malia after finishing her off. Thulnar’s eyebrows shot up and he gave them a speculative look. Despite the healers’ protests, Thulnar rose to his feet and faced the group.

“Ah, get off of me,” he said to one of the priests when the man tried to force him to set back down. “And you lot. You did good, better than I thought you would. So that’s it for Malia then. I wonder if Alidrak has her replacement lined up. Either way, good job. There’s some people who’re going to live to tomorrow morning because of this.”

“It doesn’t stop him though?”

“No. I can’t imagine any way that Alidrak would give up short of the utter annihilation of his forces. He’ll have five hundred soldiers and assassins, plus however many brigands and bandits and mercenaries he’s pressed into service or paid off.” Thulnar stopped and shook his head. “This is a hopeless fight. I just don’t have it in me to lay down and die though. He’ll get me in the end, but he’ll pay for it. That’s why you lot should just clear out while you can.”

“There has to be something we can do,” Valit said. “Some way to stop this.”

“Maybe we’ll get lucky,” he said. “Pray to the Gods they grant us that.”

The XP gains from the quest were substantial. 300 XP was enough to bring him up to level 8, and though there was no drol or equipment, Kana wasn’t complaining. He wondered if Spiral had also gotten a level up, or if dying had set him back too far. As far as he could tell, the only way to know a player’s level was to ask them.

A horn blew somewhere outside of town, catching everyone’s attention. “Seems he’s gotten impatient with the whole thing,” Thulnar said. “Looks like the end is coming down on us. Odd though. It’s not usually his style to go for the throat so soon. I suppose we had best go out and save who we can. Come on then if you’re coming.”

Thulnar strode out the temple, the party trailing behind him. The villagers were all out of their homes, all of them tense and nervous as they watched. Soldiers started to stream into Faldsteel, weapons bared. Without pausing, they fell on the villagers and attacked.

A notification popped up telling Kana his party was starting a timed event quest. The goal was to save as many villagers as possible before the event ended, and Kana selected that he was ready to participate.

“I guess I don’t have to ask for instructions,” he said. “Kill hostiles, protect civilians.”

“Pretty much it. The more we save, the easier the next step.”

Thulnar started to walk away. He called out over his shoulder, “Get as many as you can back to the temple. I’ll do my best to keep Alidrak’s troops from overrunning it.”

“OK, let’s do it,” Spiral said.

As one, the party advanced into the chaos.