A few minutes after NoCro ended the call-in to the show, she received a telegram from the leader of Titan inviting her to a meeting. NS Wolf at her back was taken care of for the time being, so there was nothing stopping her from doing so. The thought crossed her mind that he was trying to trick her, but she’d done the math a few times over and it was mathematically impossible for them to be in range of her from their last known location.

Being the one who was requesting a telepresence call from him, she was the one who warped to his location. It wound up being a ready room on one of the carriers in their fleet. The man himself was leaned up against the table at the front, rather boyish and blonde and trim in a set of navy digital camo. He probably looked like that, too, since he was too vain for anything else. Silver, which was his name, was very cute and kind of her type. Shame about the rest.

There were rows of sturdy reclining chairs with purple leather and yellow metal armrests, arranged in rows as they would be on an airplane. She flopped down into the frontmost unceremoniously and looked at him lazily.

“Normally, with a woman, I’d spend about twenty minutes in idle conversation.” he said, “With a man, five to ten. Friend or foe.”

“Please don’t.” she said, honestly.

“Not with you.” he said, dishonestly, “You’re different. It isn’t often I’m not the smartest one in the room.”

Absolute fluff.

“Get used to it.” she said, “And get to the point.”

Silver pushed himself off the table and folded his arms, tapping his index finger pensively on his small but taut bicep. He bit his lip.

“If you join us I’ll let you fight Prism after we defeat the Alliance. We’ll even hype it up as the final battle of the game. You’d take center stage and get what you want. How do you feel about that?”

NoCro was a bit caught off-guard by the offer. Ostensibly she would get what she said she wanted. Something didn’t seem… quite right. Something she couldn’t put her finger on instantly.

“I… don’t think that’s acceptable.” she said.

“Why not?” Silver said. This was as close to an honest question as anyone would ever get from a prick like him. The funny thing is, she didn’t know either.

“Why? Uh…” NoCro said, blushing, “There’s no… romance… in it.”

There were no sacrifice being made, no choices involved, no risk. From anyone.

“You’re fond of Prism?” he said. NoCro remained silent. “Of course you are. I wish the record would have painted you as rivals, but he’s so far above you. He never mentions you.”

She felt the bile rising up in her.

“I’m as far above anyone else here as he is above me. That means I’m his rival. You can’t take that away from me with word games.”

“Why would he even care about someone so weak?” he countered.

NoCro huffed out a breath between her nostrils, but said nothing. He was really getting to her. Why would Prism care about her, though? All these people would go back to being lords of the universe tomorrow, with or without ACO. She’d go back to stocking shelves. Even speaking to this Silver guy was so presumptuous on her part. Compared to these people she was so tiny and insignificant. Any relevance she had in this world was going to vanish in a puff of smoke in a day like Cinderella’s pumpkin carriage.

She had been thinking these kinds of thoughts recently.

Upon seeing NoCro’s spirit weaken, Silver immediately leapt in. He pushed himself off the table and knelt down in front of her, furrowing his brow with concern.

“Noel. I know a little bit about your life. I hear things. You’re behind on your medical bills and you have a dead end job in an even more dead end town. You have no one else in this world. I’d like to purchase your services as a mercenary, for real money, until the end of the game. Two hundred thousand seems like a good place to start.”

NoCro nearly hyperventilated at this amount. Coming from anyone else it would probably be absurd and easy to disregard. Silver, however, was more than good for it. It would solve all of her financial issues overnight. She wasn’t one to pry, but her understanding was that he was some kind of tech prince in reality.

“I can’t do that.” she managed to struggle out. Silver, thinking it was a matter of degree, quickly countered.

“Half a million.” he said.

“…I have to go.” NoCro said quickly, wanting out of there before she started to think about how much that was. Something was wrong.

There was one last thing he had in his pocket.

“Wait.” Silver said, “I know you’re dying.”

Noel stood out of her chair and drew up to him, looking upwards.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” she said.

“Your progressive. You were part of the trial. It’s flawed and it’s going to kill you.” he said.

“Who told you that, you creep?”

“I might be able to help. There’s a lot of research weight we could throw behind the point in the Light World.”

NoCro furrowed her brow and looked bewildered. It wasn’t his sincerity she doubted. It was something else.

“Why… is this so important to you?” she said, as if suddenly snapping back into focus, “This is a game. Remember?”

“It isn’t just a game,” he said, “There is something numinous here, just out of reach. I know you’ve felt it.”

NoCro assumed he had pulled this from something she herself said, in an attempt to curry favor. He didn’t relent.

“You say I’m the one taking this too seriously,” he said, “Isn’t that you?”

Someone in the Alliance High Command was in his pocket, obviously. Ever since she disconnected from their Networked Warfare she became an unknown variable to him. As for why this was so important, it obviously went well beyond standard gamer idiocy.

“What are you after?” she said.

“The same thing you are.” he said, “In a way.”

That part of her which was ruled by avarice and other nasty habits begged and pleaded with her to accept this little bargain. His own arguments defeated him, pointing as they did to precious things which could not be bought.

“You—” she said, “You’re asking me to take a deal you never would, yourself, just because you think I’m weak-minded trailer trash.”

“I never said that.”

“You did! You admitted that there was something numinous, you think I feel it too. Either you’re lying or you think I’ll sell it to you for money. Who would do that?”

—

Once upon a time, or actually somewhat recently, a system of software known as Ultimate gave birth to six unique artificial individuals. One desired power, another wanted humanity, another wished for knowledge, and one more for peace. As for the two remaining, one wanted only to serve and the last was selfless by nature. The last met a strange fate at the hands of the second, Linear Azure. Hurricane Sky, the fifth and the only male, now simply thought of this woman as The Witch.

When The Witch came for the woman he had sworn to protect, he had failed to defend her. Such things had happened as could never be taken back, forgiven, forgotten. It would be better if the whole world could know what Azure had done and judge her, but these things had happened in secret places, over weird horizons, and involved powers not truly understood by anyone.

Supposedly all of this magic had been drained out of the world in order to put it securely beyond the reach of the worst or even the best. Azure had justified herself thusly.

But—and there is always one of those isn’t there?—just because something didn’t apply in the Light World didn’t mean much in the lower realms. The virtual spaces that Ultimate systems were mostly confined to had their own rules. What had been forgotten by nearly everyone was that the first place this magic had manifested itself wasn’t the real world. It was here, in Absolute Conviction. Events had taken place here which were not defined in the codebase. The developers he had interacted with in the past referred to these events, dryly, as undefined behavior. A better term would be miracle. The game was still connected to the divine source, a kind of back entrance to the realm of the gods that had been left open by omission.

Sky, who went by the name Prism within this world, wasn’t particularly keen on magic. Wielded by anyone except his selfless Lady, it seemed more like a peril than a boon. It wasn’t honorable or sensible. All he knew was that curses affected through magic could only be corrected through that same force. His Lady, Europa, still lived, and as long as that was true and as long as magic remained somewhere in the world, he might be able to redeem himself. They could be together again, as they were meant to be, in a pure union of the sort that humans had only dreamt about. This was the purpose he had been born for.

Someday, anyway, all would be put right again. The human Silver knew all of these desires of his heart, which meant he could do whatever he liked and Prism would dutifully put up with it. On the other side of a holographic light-table he was engaged in an intimate, hushed conversation with Prism’s beloved Europa. Silver wanted to see if Ultimate systems were capable of being jealous or angry.

Prism was more than capable. He simply didn’t want Europa to be sad. At length, Silver turned his attention to Prism.

“Are you going to fight NoCro?” he said. Prism nodded.

“She challenged me to single combat! It’d be shameful to refuse a rival of her stature, especially now.”

In attempting to be exactly like Azure, NoCro had accidentally managed to subtly invert much of it. He liked her, as a result. Silver tapped his nail on the holographic display which was showing an overhead view of their dispositions.

“It’s just some silly divide and conquer strategy from a budget witch. She admitted as much when I spoke to her. Why do you let her manipulate you like that?”

Prism lidded his sky-blue eyes, “Why is that my fault? It’s her fault for being manipulative! I have my ideals and if you want to exploit them then its your soul at risk.”

Silver knitted his brows, at that.

“You still think this is a game.” he said, “We need Wolf in hand by tomorrow evening to pull this off. If you go in search of personal honor where does that leave the rest of us?”

Prism laid a hand over his chest, “I’ve never failed against her. It’s impossible for a human to defeat an Ultimate system in this space. Their razor bridge is too weak.”

The truth was that he wanted to fight her and to see her at her best.

“Fine. Expect her to have something up her sleeve.” Silver said, obviously unhappy, “That’s how you lost to a human, last time.”

Prism tapped his pale cheek and looked into Silver’s eyes.

“Did you try to buy her out?” he said, “You said you were going to.”

“No.” Silver said, then raised his eyebrows, “There’d be no romance in it.”

“…who said that?” Prism said. There was no romance in anything this man did. What would be romantic would be a poor woman declining a fortune for the opportunity to fight him. Silver shook his head.

“Just popped into my head.”