Ok, I’m not going to lie. That was hilarious. But I want a rematch.

Kana rolled his eyes at the message. At least Menic was taking his loss gracefully. The guy was maybe a little bit crazy, but he was having fun with the game. That did not mean Kana had any intention of fighting him again. He’d already had one more clash than he wanted with the powerful berserker.

No.

It was just his luck that one of the NPCs Menic had killed before switching his focus to Kana was the one he needed to talk to in order to advance the quest to the next step. Kana wasn’t really sure that he wanted to stick around anyway, as he felt it was quite likely that the berserker wouldn’t take no for an answer, was probably on his way back at that very moment, and would no doubt attack him on sight.

It wasn’t worth it. Istrius was a big game and he could surely find something else to explore where he couldn’t be dodging homicidal maniacs. Only slightly annoyed at the time wasted hiking all the way up to the Lodge, Kana began the trip back down to Jutan so he could use the teleportation spire to get back to Aldur.

He kept a careful watch as he descended, half expecting to run into Menic. There were plenty of winding trails with blind corners where another person could be close enough to touch and Kana wouldn’t know it until he bumped into him. Those annoying birds that liked to try to knock people off cliffs tended to roost near those spots too.

That was why he kept Nibelus held up in front of him, ready to shank the next bird that got within two meters of him at any time. Usually he was safe, but his paranoia paid off so often that it would have been foolish not to continue on that way.

For all his caution and wariness, Kana was nevertheless caught completely off-guard when an arrow struck him with such force that it passed completely through his torso. No doubt, if he hadn’t been in a virtual environment, he would have died then and there. It seemed impossible that it wouldn’t have struck some vital organ.

In the world of Istrius, the arrow didn’t even damage his armor. All he got was a flash of damage telling him that he’d lost 426 HP and a rush of adrenaline as he scrambled for cover and tried to find the threat. Whatever it was, it was well hidden in the trees. The damage seemed too high to have come from a random roaming monster, so Kana had to guess he wasn’t done with his PvP activities for the day just yet.

Another arrow struck him, this time from a completely different angle. He saw it coming early enough to jerk to the side, so it only sliced through the skin on his arm and did minimal damage. More importantly, Kana was able to trace its trajectory and spot the player who’d shot at him. Like Menic, his name was in red with a skull next to it. It read Nepin, and Kana took an educated guess that he was a ranger.

Seeing that he’d been spotted, Nepin abandoned his sniping tactics and started unloading on Kana. There was a simple solution to that though. Kana dove for cover and the two began a strange game of cat and mouse with each other, only they were both the cat. Kana’s objective was to get close enough to stab the ranger with the pointy end. Nepin’s was to shoot him until he stopped moving while maintaining distance.

In the end, the ranger was simply too fast and too clever to close in on. Kana couldn’t charge at him without taking a face full of arrows, and unlike his last opponent, rangers were every bit as agile as dragoons. The best he was able to do was dart from tree to tree, usually without getting hit. Nepin’s attacks didn’t tear away massive chunks of Kana’s HP bar like Menic’s had, but if he didn’t find a way to change the game, the player killer was going to win a war of attrition.

Kana suddenly realized he had another option. He’d been dealing with it all the way down the mountain. There were plenty of blind switchbacks in the trails where he could wait around the corner and, if Nepin wanted to pursue him, he’d have no choice but to come into melee range because he wouldn’t know Kana was waiting for him.

If he played it right, he could make it look like he was just running away. That would bait Nepin in, and once he was close enough to actually use Nibelus, he was confident that he could win. Then he was getting off the damned mountain before anyone else showed up and tried to kill him.

He started working Nepin from a different direction, chasing the ranger in a pattern that allowed him to get closer to the south end of the trees. After another thirty seconds of dodging and weaving around the pines, he worked himself into position and made a break for it. He figured he had a few seconds at best before Nepin got a visual on him, so he had to be fast if he was going to make it around the corner.

The goal was to let the ranger spot him just before he broke contact, so that he would know where he went, but not have time to actually shoot Kana. That part went off more or less as planned, though the margin of error was a bit too close for comfort. Kana could swear he’d felt one of those arrows ruffle his hair.

The next part of the plan did not work out though, not at all. He made it all of one step around the corner and a bear trap snapped closed on his ankle. “Holy shit!” he yelled as a flash of damage numbers popped up and the trap gave him a snared debuff.

More HP drained away with each second, not a lot, but enough to make getting out of the trap a priority. He jabbed the haft of Nibelus between the trap’s jaws and, using his other foot to brace it in place, pried it open. It only took a few seconds to escape, but even once he was free, the snared debuff didn’t disappear.

His movement speed had been reduced by 40%, and there was no way he could outrun Nepin while the debuff was active. Since it had a duration of another two minutes, it looked like he didn’t have any choice but to fight. That was fine. Kana had been planning on ambushing the ranger when he came around the corner anyway.

He waited, Nibelus raised to strike. And he waited, and waited some more. Ears straining for the sound of the ranger’s footfalls, he heard nothing. Kana wondered if the other player had retreated, perhaps planning on ambushing him again elsewhere. If he was remembering his map correctly, the trail they were on was the only way up and down the mountain.

Time was not on Kana’s side. While he was dealing with Nepin, there was likely a second player killer heading back up the trail to attack him from behind. With his luck, the two of them would be partners. Indeed, that was likely, since it was quite a stretch to run into two people marked with skulls not only in the same day, but in the same zone within minutes of each other.

That also explained Nepin’s strategy. It was designed to drag the fight on, keep Kana tied up until reinforcements arrived. If he managed to kill his opponent first, that was fine. If not, once it was two against one, they’d have an easy time tearing him apart.

If Kana was wrong though and abandoned his ambush spot, he’d be completely open to Nepin’s long-ranged bow attacks. The ranger would kill him easily before he could get to cover, and that was assuming there wasn’t another trap around the next blind curve. And all of that wouldn’t matter if one of those asshole birds knocked him over the edge while he was running away.

Before he could make a decision, a small metallic ball-looking thing was tossed into view. It was covered in short spikes, each one a few centimeters long and glistening. The ball hit the ground and exploded, its interior some spring-loaded contraption that launched the spikes out in every direction. Kana was struck twenty or thirty times in less than a second, each spike doing a few points of damage.

That wasn’t the problem, though he wasn’t thrilled with losing another 76 HP. The problem was that all of the sudden he had six new poison debuffs with such fun effects as complete loss of stamina regeneration, slow drain on his remaining HP, yet another slowing debuff reducing his movement speed even further, a loss of about 10% of his strength and agility stats, and one that claimed to lock his muscles up randomly, causing periodic one-second paralysis debuffs.

He was pretty sure that meant Nepin had won. Just by doing some mental math for the amount of HP he was losing every few seconds against the duration of the poison, he was going to die whether or not he took a single point of damage from any other source.

Nepin came around the corner, and Kana did not hesitate to attack. The ferocity must have surprised he ranger, because he immediately backpedaled while yelling in surprise. It took him only seconds to get out of Kana’s range, and Kana had too many slowing debuffs on him to chase the ranger down, but in those few seconds, he did some damage.

He got off most of his big hitters, including arc lance and rising slash, and as luck would have it, Nibelus managed to spawn a ball lightning that chased the ranger down to shock him repeatedly for its full duration. He’d dropped Nepin all the way from full to red HP in those few seconds, and if he had been at full strength and agility, Kana thought he might very well have killed the ranger.

“Damn man, that was intense. Hell of a weapon,” Nepin said. He lifted his bow and took aim. “I’ve got a pretty decent one too. Good game, scrub.”

A cloaked figure appeared behind Nepin and hit him with some sort of stunning attack, then proceeded to stab him eight more times in the next second a half, killing the ranger before he ever came out of the stun. An XP window popped up, informing Kana that he’d gotten 2000 XP, but there was no loot this time.

“That is disappointing,” Kana’s savior said. “I’d heard there were some PKers in the zone that were high level making trouble, and I thought I might get some good drops off them. This is trash tier garbage though.”

Exodus stepped out of the shadows and looked down at Kana. “Hmm. Not flagged. And only level 27 against a level 41? I guess you did decent taking some HP off him for me.”

“How do you know my level?” Kana asked.

Exodus snorted. “PvP quest line perk. Find the NPC, get the quest, kill some people, and you can see what level other players are. The better you get at it, the more information you can find out. For example, I can see that you have 246 HP and basic arithmetic tells me you have probably less than 30 seconds left to live.”

Kana didn’t have any real interest in PvP, so he hadn’t looked too closely at it yet. It did not surprise him in the slightest that Exodus did though. At least Spiral wasn’t’ there. It had been a week since they’d last run into the assassin and he’d obviously out-leveled them by a huge margin.

“Going to finish me off?” Kana asked. “It’d be easy enough, right?”

“Nah, no point. I like to hunt people who got themselves skulled because sometimes they drop good gear when you kill them. You’re not skulled. I am way more than five levels higher than you, and I’d be flagging myself if I attack you. Besides, I’m already max level, so there’s no XP to get from it either.”

“Don’t suppose you have any idea how I could remove this poison and not die?”

Exodus shrugged. “An antivenom, if you have one. I’m guessing you don’t, probably don’t even know what they are.”

He was right about that. Kana had never heard of them, and he’d specifically looked into ways to counteract poisons after dealing with all the assassins when he had been a low level. “Let me guess, it’s expensive?”

“You betcha.”

“And you have one.”

“Right again.”

“Are you willing to sell it?”

“You couldn’t afford it, noob.”

Truth be told, Kana probably could. “Name your price.”

“I’ll trade you that artifact-grade weapon of yours for it. Better decide quick though, I think you’ve only got about 10 seconds left to live.”

Kana raised a hand up to give Exodus the finger. The assassin just laughed, and for the first time since he’d started the game, Kana’s HP hit 0.

------

Spiral had told him that when a player died, he respawned at the nearest Shrine of Numa. The player was pulled through the nether at warp speed, a shadowy facsimile of the world between his point of death and the shrine rushing past him as he moved at 5000% normal running speed. Supposedly, the shrines were spaced out evenly enough that there was no place in the game where the journey could possibly take more than ten seconds.

His experience was a bit different.

For one thing, time seemed to slow down to an almost glacial pace, where he could see that everything was supposed to be zipping by him in a blur, but it was more like a freeze-frame of speed than actually moving. For another, no one had ever mentioned not being alone when being pulled through the nether.

A reaper-esque figure floated next to him, complete with the hood and the robe but lacking a scythe. It turned to face him and spoke, “This was the only way I could think of to get a message to you in-game. The system is watching everything, recording. The time dilation effect of the nether was the least risky way to approach you.”

“What the hell is going on?” Kana asked.

The reaper ignored him and continued talking. “The AI has gone rogue and taken over. It’s infecting people. For now, the damage is limited, but we’re running out of time. We need to talk in the real world. I can’t use my citizen profile. The AI is watching that too. Respond to my next proxy avatar’s request.”

Then it was gone, and the nether snapped back to full speed. The world zipped past him, there and gone in an instant, and Kana found himself standing in front of a small Shrine of Numa, one that was battered and discolored by the elements, but still entirely recognizable.

“What just happened?”