77

The Smell of Rain III

Pitune ran up to Rian from the edge of the arena.

At first squinting, unsure, Pitune seemed to recognize him. “Ah, fancy seeing you here, my friend!” He’d dropped the fake accent that Rian remembered of him, but his mannerisms were still the same, oddly.

Thoroughly upset that this guy of all people was the reason he’d had to say goodbye to Kat again, Rian was about to chew him out for a solid minute. What the hell could he possibly be up to that would scare off someone like Ossyra?

Then Pitune slid to a halt beside him, opened his inventory, and out popped a corpse. “You’re at the right place,” Pitune said. “And the right time—to witness the birth of a god!”

The robed corpse landed on the ground with a thud, and Rian stepped back. It was an Altirian priest, half-rotted, the skin of his face stretched thin, teeth visible through holes in his cheeks.

Pitune pulled out a potion resembling an hourglass. He opened one half and poured the contents onto the corpse. The liquid was transparent, as unremarkable as water. But the moment it touched the priest, the body began to glow.

The dead priest stirred, rising as if puppet strings were drawing his body up. He stood awkwardly, his limbs unnaturally bent, his neck at a hard angle. Then Pitune flipped the hourglass potion, opened the other end, and drank from it.

He wiped his mouth and spoke, and the words resonated on the air as a System command.

“Fast Travel and Player Warp have been disabled,” Pitune and the zombie-priest said in unison. “Maximum movement speed has been set to 10 Agility.”

As he finished saying it, out of the half dozen portals around them emerged six figures in blue and white uniforms and baseball caps. An entire squadron of GMs.

“All currently discarded items now belong to Pitune.”

Instantly, all of Devon’s and Sven’s items appeared on Pitune’s body—the Bone Greatsword in one hand, Sven’s golden lance in the other. Bone Pauldrons stacked themselves on top of Pitune’s plate armor, and Sven’s flared helm enveloped his head.

“What the hell are you doing?” Rian said.

Pitune gave him a look. “I’m winning the game, my friend. This is where it begins. The end of the GMs’ reign over Miriad. And the beginning of my reign.” He faced the sky. “All ban commands have been disabled,” he and the priest intoned.

“You’re…manipulating the System, through the priest?” Rian said. “How the—”

The System was supposed to be weakened in the Penumbra, but the priest was seemingly restoring the System’s stability just by being here. Even if he was dead.

Pitune dropped his weapons, picked up the zombie priest, put him next to Rian, and then manipulated the priest’s arm until he had his hand beside Rian’s ear. Rian almost recoiled, but Pitune motioned for him to stand still.

Pitune—and the priest—whispered, “You have joined Pitune’s party.”

Rian blinked.

“Sorry,” Pitune said, pulling the priest away from him. “Had to make sure the GMs were out of ear shot for that one.” He cleared his throat and resumed his commanding tone. “Members of Pitune’s party are now invincible. Invincibility has been disabled for all other Vessels.”

The GMs were almost here, surrounding them. With Fast Travel disabled, the GMs were flying toward them as fast as they apparently could, but it looked like they were moving through molasses.

Rian began to wonder why Pitune had waited until he was at the center of the arena to start using System commands, but it seemed like he couldn’t close portals or he would’ve done so already. It was like Pitune had wanted to position himself in the middle of all the GMs.

Among the approaching group was GM Nephim. When he spotted Rian, his eyes widened. “Cobalt!” he shouted. “Get away from him! He’s a hacker! The Petrichor and Ichor guilds are—”

When Pitune spoke again, the end of his sentence was lost beneath the sound of distant screams. A wave of pressure slammed through Rian’s body. He went flying backwards as if a freight train had hit him, every muscle and bone stretched to its breaking point, the pain almost unbearable. When he landed a moment later near the edge of the arena, he’d held together. But even through his apparent invincibility, Rian had felt the power behind the System command, a sourceless attack that seemed to pry at the foundation of his existence.

You have taken 9999 damage. (HP: 5854/5854)

All but one of the GMs had been blown away, reduced to dust like an explosion had vaporized them. The breeze carried their remains, faint embers adrift among the floating mirror shards of the Penumbra.

When Rian got up again, Pitune was fighting the sole remaining GM—a GM that hadn’t even budged against the damage-cap attack. Neither of them were moving, and Rian could only sense the exchanges between them via ripples in the System: A wrestling of control over reality itself. An invisible battle within a higher dimension only glimpsed by those outside it. It felt like the space between them was about to break.

“Priority zero, Admin code Silver,” the GM said calmly. “Disable all changes. Begin rollback.”

You are no longer invincible.

Fast Travel has been re-enabled.

Maximum movement speed has been set to undefined.

An Admin, Rian thought with a chill. When he got a good look at the GM, he saw his name: GM Silver. Pure white hair, silver eyes. Mid-twenties. Rian had the strange impression that he looked like a character out of an anime.

At GM Silver’s words, the air—everywhere—halted; it was visible in the rotations of the mirror shards. Then the wind began to move again, but Rian had a strange suspicion that it was blowing in the opposite direction from before.

GM Nephim and the others reappeared as if time had rewound itself. They all glanced at each other, breathless. Then Nephim quickly hovered over to Rian, no longer burdened by the Agility reduction command that Pitune had uttered earlier.

At the center of the arena, Pitune fell to one knee. He grit his teeth, seeming to struggle as if gravity had multiplied for him. Yet all GM Silver did was stare him down.

“You’re here,” Nephim said, arriving beside Rian. Nephim double-taked at something above him. “Whoa, nice cosmetics.” The horns, Rian realized. “So…I take it you got the memo?”

“Memo?”

“You didn’t get the memo but you’re already here?” Nephim blinked. “You should probably check your inbox more often. The Admins sent one out to all GMs, even the interns. Anyway, we’ve been trying to track this guy down for months.” Nephim crossed his arms, watched Pitune struggle beneath the apparent power of GM Silver’s gaze. “He’s part of a hacking operation that we’re finally getting some ground on. There’s been some illegal item crafting going on using an exploit.”

That potion Pitune had used to take control of the Altirian priest and subsequently the Altirian priest’s command of the System…

Of course, something like that wouldn’t stand up to an Admin. But it had been frightening to see the System manipulated like that, Rian admitted.

“We also got wind that the Loyalists were planning on holding an illegal version of the Sacred Tournament,” Nephim said. “So we were already on our way here when this guy tried to jump us.”

Pitune buckled, crashing to the ground, and GM Silver only continued to watch. A pair of the GMs approached them, but Silver waved them off. “I can handle him,” he said. “I’ll have the ban function restored in about thirty seconds.”

“You idiots,” Pitune said through gritted teeth. “You don’t even understand your own System.”

“Oh?” GM Silver said. “And what makes you think that?”

Pitune took some labored breaths. Then he smiled. “Because you haven’t figured out where temporal energy comes from. But I have.”

GM Silver’s calm disinterest flashed into anger. “No, you haven’t.”

“I have a pretty good idea about it. It comes from the future.” Pitune licked his lips. “My future. In about ten seconds, you’ll see what I mean.”

At that moment, everyone stopped what they were doing and listened.

“So, what were you all doing, again?” Rian said, glancing at Nephim. “Something about an illegal Sacred Tournament?”

“Oh, yeah,” Nephim said. “We’re gonna stop that from happening once we’re done here. Can’t have power transfers going on outside of the official tournament, so we gotta clear out the area. Send all the Loyalists packing. Ban all the players involved. Typical protocol.”

His gaze narrowing, Rian started slowly backing away.

Nephim’s expression went blank. “What’s with that weird look?”

Pitune switched to half-sync. He was suddenly standing, and for some reason Rian could see his headset. There were extra sets of wires running to it, and surrounding him was a haze of static in the air. “Inject!” he shouted.

GM Silver blinked, then muttered, “A code injection?”

Nephim gasped. “He’s bypassing the anti-cheat?”

…Wasn’t that was he was doing before? Rian thought. Is this guy an idiot?

Pitune screamed, writhing in pain, and gripped his headset as if it were eating him alive. The arena floor trembled.

A vortex spun up around him, a kaleidoscopic whirlwind of parallel realities reflecting onto this one, a revolving corridor of glass where each pane revealed another corridor: a fractal, an endless recursion, a mirror facing a mirror.

Like the pieces of a sliding puzzle suddenly aligning themselves into a solution, the vortex stopped, and an infinite reflection of Pitune’s Vessel showed upon the air.

Everything brightened to the point that Rian couldn’t see. It was like all the light in the universe, every star in the sky, had been redirected here. Then he heard a shattering so loud that he felt it in his soul, and the reflections were gone.

The light had gathered to one point: all that remained was Pitune, surrounded by a golden aura like the corona of the sun.

Eight white wings unfolded from his back, and he ascended into the air.