>

"It…" he sighed, verging to the point of tears, "it happened again."

The squabble of a dozen dead pig noises had a slight reduction in decibel level, which was a sure sign that it had indeed "happened again".

Amidst the flailing and the running, I answered back. "Have you tried maybe… perhaps, not doing that then?"

A noise somewhere between a groan and a cry exerted from his mouth wide open, looking upwards to the sky with the most forlorn of expression on his face as if to say 'God is dead and so am I".

"I hath only doneth, what I have been toldeth," he wailed, a hand clutching his chest with the sincerest of passion, "yet, sarcasm and apathy only answers I. Tis' a sad fate, indeed."

Somehow, someway, this goddamn pig was actually getting away. I could run, sure, but two legs could never outmatch four. Even if those legs were short, stubby, and had no right to carry its own weight with that much exuberance and speed as it did.

"Must misery stay as my sole companionship? Must my cries of isolation be hearkened and carried only by the whims of the wind? Why oh why?"

I threw a dagger towards that scampering piece of meat shrinking into the distance, thinking it'd hit. But surprise, surprise, it didn't. I only had to walk four short steps before I was exactly where the dagger had landed. I need to invest into strength more, seriously.

"WHYYY?!?!?"

I spun around, abandoning the hunt, and found a sight to behold. It's not every day you see a man on his knees, slamming his fists to the dirt like some spoiled kid.

His hair, once so graceful and flowing ever so valiantly in the wind, reduced to mere frazzles and many jutting strands of stress, shaded blacker than his recent luck. His long arms and legs were further embellished by his posture of humiliation. Didn't help that the tattered rags he calls clothes he wore looked to be two times short his size, making him look like an abnormally large toddler in a tantrum.

As if feeling my quiet judgment, he turned his gaze towards me. The quiver of his lips, the pain in his brown eyes. His hands reached and tugged the end of my shirt.

"Please Sora…" he muttered, pointing a finger a short distance away, despair permeating every inch of him, "help me."

My eyes slowly drifted to the direction of his finger. "You did it again."

"I wanted to help," he said gauntly.

"Hasn't even been five minutes," I replied.

"I wanted to help."

"How did this even-"

"I WANTED," he interjected, his voice hoarse as a horse, "TO HELP."

Beyond the scene of a groveling pathetic man, mere meters away was his sword, which beforehand, was in his hand, contently swinging away with me at all the piggies in the field.

Where was it now, you ask?

In the ground. No, not on the ground. IN the ground. Stop correcting my sentences Grammarly, I wrote it right!

For the fourth time within the hour, by some fuckin miracle of God, he managed to plunge, submerge and glitch it through the grass and dirt until only its hilt was visible.

Unlike King Arthur though, no one is ever gonna extract the sword from its stone. Because unlike us, King Arthur didn't have to deal with broken physics. King Arthur didn't have to deal with the fact that his sword was spazzing and convulsing in the earth like some dude with epilepsy in a strobe light concert.

My eyes found his once more. And I found even words had failed me at this point.

"I wanted to help."

There are certain moments in your life that make you contemplate in absolute solemnity. This was one of them. For the twentieth time today, I glanced at the complete and utter lie that was his player level.

"If I had a dollar for every time I had to ask 'How are you level ten?', I'd be Jeff Bezos by now."

"And if I had a dollar for every time you said that I'd be Jeff Bezos times infinity. Just help me already!" He spoke in a hurry.

"Look… Loliman-"

"It's Tayuma!" He interrupted.

"I'm not changing what you wrote as your username," I said, repressing the unbearable impulse to form a smirk. I eased the temptation with a long sigh and continued, "Look, Loliman, I am not going to risk both hand and shoulder trying to pry out what is essentially an earthquake in the form of a sword."

"Would a 'pwetty pwease, Sora-kun?' change your mind?" He said, batting his eyelids and pouting his lips in an attempt of enticement.

If cringing internally was a form of in-game damage, I would have died right then and there.

I unbound his hold on my shirt, lowering them to his sides, "Oooh, you nearly got me there that time. How'd you know I had a fetish for grown twenty-something-year-old dudes pleading on their knees?"

"Come on, are you really gonna deny a man his sword?" He got up, a very overt look of betrayal plastered on his face, "Is that the type of man you want to be? Is that who you really want to grow up as? Some kind of - of… sword-denying… freak?"

"Oh yeah. With a smile and a thank you very much."

The Loliman gave up, a loud exasperated sigh escaping his lips. "That's twenty gold from me then - gone! I just got twenty gold for crying out loud."

"A basic sword's twenty-seven now last I checked," I replied, sheathing my own.

"You gotta be kidding…" He said.

"Sounds like me, but nah, I'm not joking. It really is-"

"No, not that," he interjected, pointing upwards to the sky, "What in the hell is happening there?"

I followed his gaze and looked to the skies. The furthest edge of the boundless horizon, displayed among the hues of white and blue of the skybox was the player count.

A real-time counter of all remaining players left.

And it was dwindling fast.

It was unlike anything before. The first three days of imprisonment passed by in a blurry daze. No one knew what to do, no one knew what they should do. A big fat sense of denial pervaded the entire server. Thus, an ever stagnant constant it stayed.

Course, you had your outliers. The brave or foolish few that believed the complete opposite of our ordeal. By day's end, you'd find that number sitting there in the sky a single digit down than it was in the morning.

Killing themselves was the simplest solution to leaving. Whether the other side greeted them with our reality or not, only those that had already done it knew. And no one else wanted to find out.

This time, however, it wasn't just a decision of the desperate. That number was dropping in the tens. We watched it, in minutes of silence, as it dwindled in sporadic intervals.

Numbers had never hurt as much as it did then. I found again the same trepidation, the same sense of blame that burdened my shoulders from that day that seemed so far away now. An undetachable anchor of fault that I'm never being freed off.

"Let's go," I spoke, walking already in the nearest direction to the hub area.

"What?" said a stunned Tayuma, frozen in place.

"We got enough drops. We got what we came for."

"Yeah, I suppose." He said, finally in motion after me, "But are we just gonna ignore like we did not just see a massacre in front of our eyes?"

"Technically we didn't. We just saw numbers." I said, drawing open my inventory for a headcount of our drops, "Besides, ain't our problem anyhow."

'You know, I just realized you like to use that excuse for a lot of things."

"That's cause it's true. Unless it directly affects me, then for all intent and purposes, it really isn't my problem."

I heard his strides deepen in pace and when the next I drew my eyes forward, found him directly in front of me.

"But I wasn't your problem." He said, gaze locked with mine. "That didn't really stop you now, did it?."

I searched his eyes for a moment, wondering where this was heading before I relented a response. "Your point?"

"I know you can save those people easily wherever the hell they are if you really wanted to."

I snorted in amusement, "Your confidence is misplaced, my dude. Me, up against something that's killing dozens in minutes? I'm a dumbass but I'm not suicidal."

Tayuma remained adamant, "I've seen you do it. Come on, man. That sword of yours? The one you keep hiding in your inventory all the time? You could-"

"Oh-ho-ho-no… that's a big no-no from me, buddy." I interrupted, resuming my walk, passing by his imploring expression, "Let's just go sell the drops alright? I wanna eat. And I wanna sleep somewhere for once that's not a patch of grass under a tree."

I saw him shake his head from my peripheral view as he relented a sigh, "Whatever you say, boss."

I formed a smile and felt a tinge of happiness. We actually had enough drops to sell to rent a room in an inn for a few days. Somewhere with an actual bed, and an actual roof. I felt like a caveman this whole time, so a few days in the refuge of modern hospitality is practically heaven to my delicate sensibilities.

With that knowledge, the rest of the walk into town was taken with a light spring in my step.