41

A Distant Mirage

Decha gasped in pain. The staff clanged as it struck the floor through him, and he vanished.

In place of his body, a vortex appeared, wind coalescing into a funnel. It spiraled out before leveling off.

Opening his eyes after the wind settled, Rian stared in shock as Corvis stood with his giant needle-staff piercing the ground where Decha had been. Slowly turning to look at the now-ivory staff and the massive, glaring eye atop it, Rian saw the info come up.

Obsidian Needle of Obliteration — Active Form (Level 80)

Grade: S+ (Unique)

Obliteration (via Ezre’s Eye: a killing blow performed with this weapon will permanently destroy the target in all possible universes.)

Mirage: Active Form (upon activation, item loses its Nullshard keyword and becomes corporeal, allowing all other keyword effects to activate.)

Rian stared at the window in awe. And horror. That was what Corvis would’ve used to kill him. But he’d used it on Decha instead.

He…lied to me? What the hell’s going on?

“What was that?” Kat said, merely confused as she glanced around, then up at the sky, where even the clouds had been spun like a snapshot of a cyclone. “Where’d Decha go?”

“I don’t know,” Rian said, trying to keep his voice from trembling. “Did he…just die?”

Kat mumbled to herself, “I don’t think that was supposed to happen. Is the game glitching out or something?” She kept looking around. “The Rifts do some weird things compared to the Overworld, so…. It wouldn’t surprise me. That’s unusual, though.”

When nothing else happened, her uncertainty fell away to satisfaction. She held up the Pyceian Light-Dagger, its blade deactivated. “Once we get back,” she said, “it’ll be a good time to craft something with these after they disassemble.”

Corvis, on the other hand, wasn’t talking to him. He was simply standing and facing away.

Returning to the Overworld.

***

They were in front of the ruins of Gorgheit again, in silence. The air felt lighter, fresher than before. The smell of burning air and electronics had finally faded.

Achievement unlocked: “It’s All In The Past” (Completed a Temporal Rift)

Achievement unlocked: “An Unstoppable Force” (Defeated a Loyalist in combat)

GLOBAL ALERT: “Loyalist ‘Altrexis the Blademaster’ has been slain by ‘Cobalt (#003)’.”

Your PVP rank has increased! (D-→C)

Temporal Rift EXP Reward Completion Bonus x2!

You have gained experience! (+12107)

LEVEL UP x3! (23→26)

You have gained 30 Max HP! (637→667)

You have gained 30 Max MP! (415→445)

Available attribute points +6

Available skill points +1

Good lord. That was the most System text he’d ever seen at once. He was half-expecting fanfare and confetti to pop out, too. And that XP reward was absolutely beautiful, but—

It was all a bit dampened by the look Corvis was giving him.

“He’s gone,” Corvis said, almost a whisper. “For good.”

Rian thought their companionship level was about to degrade or something, but nothing was happening, even despite the look of sadness and anger in Corvis’s eyes.

“Why?” Rian whispered, quiet enough that Kat didn’t notice. He’d been fully expecting to be killed back there. And yet it seemed, regarding the conditions of the Mark, Corvis had lied to him.

“I have done what is necessary,” Corvis said, barely keeping his voice level. “What you witnessed was what I would’ve done to you if Decha were not a Miracian, if he weren’t confined to the past. Consider yourself lucky. People won’t notice he’s missing immediately.”

In his hand, the needle-staff reverted to black and the eye atop it closed with the sound of metal snapping shut. The color transition was as if a second version of the staff had appeared behind it and phased into existence, replacing the one he was holding. He threw it aside, and it disintegrated in midair.

“Understand this, Rian. This is the only time I’ll ever grant you this favor. The next time the Mark is exposed, I will take your life, for Yindra’s sake. If your carelessness continues, at some point your mistakes will come back to end your journey, and I won’t be able to step in and save you. I suggest you take your situation more seriously.”

Turning, he stepped off the ground and floated away.

Rian didn’t understand why he was still keeping it a secret, the purpose of the symbol on his shoulder. Both Decha and even the Memory of Goam had seemed to recognize it, whatever it really meant.

Don’t let them. Decha’s last words.

Don’t let them what?

Was the Mark some weird initiation rite? Were they trying to make Rian into one of them—a Loyalist—without him knowing it? No matter how he approached it from what he knew, nothing seemed to budge. The answers weren’t coming.

If he could somehow dismiss Corvis for a while and in the meantime show the Mark to someone who could identify it, then maybe all of this would start to make sense. One of the guild members would know. It was just a matter of getting Corvis off his back.

Until then, they were probably going to have a long talk tonight.

Kat fell back, breathing out as she sat on the grass. She seemed exhausted already, even though they’d barely gotten started with their leveling marathon for the day. She started allocating her new attribute points, and Rian took the moment to do so as well.

He stared at his stats for a moment.

Screw it.

He dumped everything into Strength and felt his muscle fibers disassemble and reassemble, winding themselves tighter against his bones. He looked down.

Damn, I’m almost ripped.

Despite his body feeling heavier and bulkier with each point of Strength, the overall size of himself hadn’t increased terribly much—due to the DEX stat balancing things out, quickening his movement. All that power had condensed itself into lean muscle. He also put the new skill point into Charge Punch, learning the skill for real.

He brought up his full stat page. Even if things were still iffy with Corvis, it felt like he was starting to get somewhere. They were already approaching the level cap and were more than ready for their subclass advancement.

Cobalt

[Moonlight]

Level 26 Fighter

HP: 667/667

MP: 445/445

STR: 31 (34)

DEX: 25 (29)

INT: 11

SPR: 6 (12)

—

PVP rank: C (Silver) (Top 22%)

(1-0)

It was a bit funny to see his PVP rank climbing despite having a 1-0 record, but the count only changed when either a player killed or was killed in PVP. Between Kat’s training sessions and the combat experience from the Rift, he was making decent progress.

“Man,” Kat said, “I was not expecting a World 1 dive to be that stressful. We could’ve lost all the XP for the Rift back there. It’s one of the few situations where you can de-level if you die.”

“I had no idea, honestly,” Rian said. “I thought someone was following me earlier, but I figured it was just some random mob.”

“There’s a super rare chance that it can happen, but if a Loyalist comes across you in the Overworld, they’ll follow you just about anywhere. They like to jump into boss fights during the Rifts so they can negate all your XP gains. Pretty annoying. Not something you want to have sprung upon you when you’re trying to level or doing a time-sensitive quest.”

“They can just…follow you into an instance like that?”

“Yeah, they’re able to cross through instances on a whim. Players can, too, but only inside the Rifts and if they feel like invading someone’s session.” In her hand, she tossed a colorless tesseract up into the air and caught it as it fell. “It takes a certain kind of item to do so—one that provides a special skill called a Mirage skill.”

A skill named after the game?

She smirked at his reaction. “I’m guessing you haven’t heard of it?”

He shook his head.

“There’s four tiers of skills.” Rolling the tesseract into one hand, she splayed her other hand and laid a finger across it. “Beginner skills, class skills, subclass skills. And then Mirage skills—the big ones. Endgame stuff. A lot of them are anything but simple to use and even harder to master.”

“So a player could’ve invaded us while we were in the Rift?” He’d thought the point of it was to avoid players specifically—to prevent losing the locator item for Yindra.

Kat waved her hand in dismissal. “Only if we’re at level 40. Getting ganked inside a Rift isn’t all that fun when they’re once-a-day dungeons. There are some protections in place for lower leveled players, thankfully, so we didn’t have to worry about it. Now…”

Opening her inventory, she retrieved a glistening ruby gem, a blue tesseract, and a small stack of hammered, metal plates—steel scraps.

“Before we get our subclasses,” she said, “let’s craft some cool shit.”