60

2-2

Rian found himself standing in the air amid thousands of fragments of metal and dirt. Nothing was moving. Lightning hung in the air, frozen rivulets of plasma. Below were the remnants of the battlefield: shattered ground and scorched earth, the city of Gorgheit, fragmented androids pulled apart by the newly opened Rift, and what remained of the Onsolian army looking onward at the destruction they’d wrought.

Beside Rian was the rest of the party: Enishi, Bree, and Chrono. He was about to wonder aloud if they’d actually managed to group up in time, as they’d said, but everyone seemed slightly dejected as they looked over the battlefield.

TEMPORAL RIFT (GORGHEIT) 2-2

Goal: Reunite your soul with your body.

This Temporal Rift stage will close in 3 hours.

Temporal Rift World 2 time limit: 5 hours and 30 minutes remaining.

“What…just happened?” Rian said.

“Things got rewound slightly,” Enishi answered. He gestured at something distant, on the ground. When Rian looked that way, he saw…

It was another Enishi, standing there, frozen like everything else. There was so much debris in the air that Rian almost didn’t see him.

Further out to the west he eventually spotted his past self, unmoving, carrying Chrono’s past self towards the others.

“The Rift sent us back to when it separated us from our bodies,” Enishi continued as he scanned the battlefield. “Literally ripped our souls straight out.”

“What caused the rewind?” Rian said.

“You’ll see. There’s, uh…someone else here right now, who stopped time. They’ll be offering us a second chance at life if we can clear the stage. They’re also our ticket to World 3.”

Otherwise we’re dead, Rian figured. He looked down again, unnerved to confront the sight of the ground far below his feet, but it felt like he was standing on something solid.

“I’m guessing we can’t just float in a straight line to our bodies,” Rian said.

“Yeah, it’s not that simple, unfortunately,” Enishi said. “The rift broke not just time but space, too. This is more of a labyrinth stage than anything.” He started walking along the air.

Surrounding them was a field of hovering shrapnel. Fitting himself into an open space between shards of metal, Enishi began to navigate the field. The others followed after him, and so did Rian.

Once or twice, Enishi nearly stumbled as he felt for the invisible path with a leading foot. Gravity itself seemed tenuous, as before long they were walking along a twisting path, upside down. A nearby lightning bolt suspended in time warmed Rian’s skin.

When he got distracted enough to walk into a floating piece of shrapnel, it cut painlessly through his body and drew blood, taking a sizable chunk of his health. Reacting instantly, Chrono healed his wound.

“Careful,” she whispered.

When Enishi stopped to reconsider their path, Rian took the moment to check the timer for the World, and it was indeed ticking slower than before—by about a quarter, he guessed.

“It’s real?” Rian muttered. “We have more time, now?”

“Compared to the Overworld, yeah,” Bree said. “That’s the time dilation effect. The six-hour limit is more like eight Overworld hours. And if you switch to half-sync, you’ll feel it kick in. Keep in mind that it’s active if you try communicating with your guild or something. They might struggle to keep up with you.”

Enishi sighed. “We could certainly use more time. This stage is gonna take a bit. We’ve got plenty of time to finish and hit World 3, but that might be all we can do for today.”

“Yeah,” Chrono said, “we got started a bit later than I’d hoped. Good progress, at least.”

Looking at where everyone’s past selves had ended up, Rian understood the stage’s conditions. Here, in 2-2, everyone started at the spot where the rift had opened above Gorgheit. And the closer their past selves were to the rift at that moment in 2-1, it meant less traveling through debris and lightning to reach them. He and Chrono were almost twice as far away as Enishi and Bree. Considering the rift had opened over the charging Pyceian army, he wasn’t really at fault for being out of position.

At random points along the path, space had become twisted into the familiar shape of a tesseract. Reaching out and pulling the object like an unraveling knot, Enishi obtained the item and divided up the gold to the party. Checking his resources, Rian was thankful for the stage-clear of 2-1 granting him another two colorless tesseracts.

As slow going as it was through this stage, the others seemed radiant with anticipation. Rian looked around at them, wondering.

Maybe…this is the party that’s meant to help me.

“Ooh, this is so exciting!” Chrono said. “I hope we can make it to 3-3 tomorrow.”

“What, so you can get one-shot by Zeniyon?” Bree said.

“Well…”

“Yeah, good luck with that,” Enishi said. “I don’t think even the four of us together could down him with our gear. Last time was pretty rough.”

Rian’s hopes deflated a little at that. He’d been hoping for a more experienced group—one that could take him to the end of the Rifts. But even then…

It sounded like they were almost ready to log off for the night. The day had barely gotten started from his perspective. They must’ve been from a different time zone.

“So what are you after, Cobalt?” Enishi said. “Just here to go sightseeing and fill out your lore book like these two?”

He wondered why they didn’t just look up the lore entries they were after, but he supposed they were probably the kinds of players that wanted to do things the official way. For a moment he considered how awful it would be for someone from a rival guild—if they had rivals—to grief them by shouting lore information at them before they could discover it themselves. He almost chuckled at the thought of them cowering and covering their ears.

“There’s someone up ahead I’m going to gank,” Rian said levelly. “A Nemesis.”

“Oooh,” Enishi said. “Revenge, huh? Interesting. What’d he do to you?”

“Trapped my consciousness in the game.”

They all stopped walking, then stared at him for a split second. Silence held the air before the group burst into varying degrees of laughter.

“Oh man, that’s a good one,” Bree said, wiping her eye.

“I thought Moonlight was a roleplayers’ guild,” Enishi said. “I’m guessing you’re a fan of those kinds of stories?”

“Hey, come on,” Chrono said. “Don’t make him break character.”

“I mean, I get the idea,” Bree said, looking toward the others as if Rian weren’t even there, “but god, can you imagine the PR disaster for a game like this? Let alone what that would do to someone’s psyche if it really happened? Brutal.”

“You’d have to blow through like ten safety measures in the first place,” Enishi said. “I can see why it’d be fun, though. Probably ups the immersion factor a ton if you pretend you’re stuck here forever.”

“You guys…” Chrono said, quieter, glancing at Rian.

Rian simply stood there, faintly smiling—partially from disappointment, and partially out of mischief. He’d said it as seriously as he could. He didn’t really care at this point. Part of him had been curious to see how they’d react.

And part of him had wanted to know how it would feel to finally tell the truth.

Of course they didn’t believe him. And the GMs hadn’t descended from the sky to point their fingers and smite him from existence. He felt somewhat liberated but at the same time a bit sad that the party thought it was a joke.

Rian looked over, and Corvis, silently and distantly navigating the debris field, glared at him. But he did nothing further.

Safety measures, huh? I bet you had something to do with that.

Rian almost considered mentioning the Mark to them without showing it, but that was probably pressing his luck.

“Well, we’d love to assist you,” Enishi said, “but these characters aren’t suited for PVP, unfortunately. I’m just a Scout, and Bree’s build is defense-oriented. It’s a shame we can’t switch characters mid-session or I’d be totally down to gank a fool.”

“No, that’s okay,” Rian said. “I planned on doing it myself. As soon as I’m in the same World as him, I’ll be leaving.”

Rian bit down, hiding his frustration. Dammit. Why did I get so unlucky with this group?

“Hey,” Bree said. “Gotta drop to half-sync soon. It’s almost been four hours for me.”

Acknowledging her, Enishi stopped when he found a modestly open area free of debris. The group turned to face each other. Hesitating, Rian watched them. Seeming to pick up on his confusion, Bree said, “Time dilation, remember? We’re all gonna switch to half-sync at the same time. Keeps things lined up for us.”

“Ready?” Enishi said. “Three, two, one…”

Switching to half-sync, Rian found that his body had become heavier. When he shifted around, everything seemed to move in slow-motion. Each movement was labored like his brain was operating faster than his body.

“This is—” he began, only to stop when he noticed how he sounded. His voice had dropped several registers as if he’d inhaled some kind of gas for a party trick.

With voices as eerily deep as his, the others chuckled at his reaction. It unnerved him until Chrono spoke, at which point he struggled to not laugh.

“Yeah, talking’s kinda difficult like this,” she said, sounding like a grown man announcing a movie trailer. “But you’ll get the hang of it.”

“We just have to wait it out,” Enishi said, “but otherwise it’s like normal—take inventory and apply upgrades if you have any. Take care of any IRL business you have, but keep in mind that you’ll experience the slowdown. Things can get…difficult like this.”

Rian looked at his HUD. The half-sync countdown, starting at five minutes, was ticking visibly slower. Beside it displayed the actual, adjusted time requirement for the half-sync session: seven minutes and six seconds.

When he tried to open his menu and inventory through the buttons on his HUD, not only were his hands moving frustratingly slow, but even the interface was operating slower.

Oh my god. Is it gonna be like this every time I go to half-sync, except even worse in the later worlds?

He looked over, and Corvis was practically zipping around, collecting hovering pieces of material from the shattered battlefield—pieces of metal from destroyed androids, cloth scraps from what Rian assumed were the remains of Onsolian uniforms. They vanished into Corvis’s inventory, and he hovered up to Rian.

However his invisibility worked, Rian had to assume it applied to the gathered materials too, as Corvis deposited them into Rian’s open inventory by chucking them into it without anyone else noticing.

Corvis seemed to notice Rian’s confused expression, as he glanced down at him and smirked. “You’reexperiencingtherelativeflowoftimefromtheOverworld’sperspective.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Rian said, holding up his hands. “Slow d—”

“Huh?” Bree said, glancing in Corvis’s direction. “Is something wrong?”

Whoops. As covertly as he could, Rian tried to signal for Corvis to take it easy. “Sorry,” he said to the others. Attempting to keep his mind from outpacing his body, he took extra time to articulate each word. “Just a bit weirded out by all this.”

When he finally managed to get his inventory open, he upgraded his Ethereal Silk Hand-Wrap to +2 with the materials Corvis had brought him, giving himself a bit of extra Weapon Attack and even scaling the power of the item’s keyword. Finding the balance between upgrading items and conserving tesseracts would be key, he figured. As of now, he had nineteen tesses remaining.

Of course, he had no idea what it was going to take numbers-wise to even begin putting a dent into Ogrot when the time came. Bridging the power gap between them seemed impossible, but that wasn’t going to stop him from doing everything he could to close it.

He made a mental note to check Ogrot’s stats and equipment again later, to tally everything up as best as he could and look for a plan hidden somewhere in the numbers side of things. He’d only managed to glance at his equipment during their fight at Nostdal, and now he had a few minutes of rest to look everything over, but…

Something was getting in the way. It felt like he couldn’t physically bring himself to look. And as he sat there, hesitating, part of him knew: he was deferring the opportunity to truly look at Ogrot’s load-out because he feared the impossibility of the situation would stare back at him.

Rian opened his friends list and mentally hovered over Ogrot’s name just to inspect his location and see his progress through the Rift.

He was in World 3-2. Rian sighed with relief. He wasn’t sure how far ahead that was, but being only one World behind seemed doable.

Closing the friends list, he checked on the guild to see if he could figure out what exactly the hell they were doing. He didn’t know why, but he was still holding onto the hope that they would pull through for him somehow.

Even as he checked and saw that none of them were in the Rifts, he had an irking suspicion that something else was going on. Kat had mentioned some kind of special quest, but the secrecy and circumstances around it seemed too strange for him to believe that was what they were really doing.

As he scrolled through the list of guild members, he realized something was missing. The interface had changed. Before, he’d been able to see who was online and offline, their names glowing white or grayed out respectively. Now there was no one offline at all—and it wasn’t that they were all online, but that their names had disappeared completely as if they’d all been expelled from the guild.

What? No, that can’t be right.

A notification popped up.

[!] Temporal Instability

While in the Rifts, communication with the Overworld may become limited, and certain game functions may also become unusable or unpredictably altered. This effect will progressively intensify the further players travel into the past.

While he was somewhat glad to know that the guild hadn’t imploded when he wasn’t looking, this new effect was more than worrisome—particularly because it was vague. It sounded like the devs were admitting in so many terms that the later Worlds were buggy and unstable. World 3 would probably be fine, but if World 4 was normally off-limits like he and Kat suspected, it didn’t sound like he was in for a good time. He had almost no idea of what to expect, and by the sound of “unpredictably altered,” neither did the System itself.

The slightly elongated half-sync timer ended, and the other party members stood up and stretched before returning to full sync. Rian switched over as well.

***

As the party traversed the rest of the debris field, occasionally a miniature rift opened in spaces nearby and demonic creatures stumbled forth. They quickly fell to the party’s combined efforts in combat, but once Rian and Chrono split up with Bree and Enishi to recover their respective bodies on opposite sides of the battlefield, the encounters became more time-consuming. They were, as Rian learned, a penalty of sorts for taking the wrong paths.

Eventually he saw over party chat that the other two had arrived at their frozen, past selves. A distant flash of light out of the corner of his eyes was all he saw as they recombined.

A few minutes later, listening to Bree complain about having to wait on him and Chrono, Rian got within range of his body. Eternally stuck in the middle of carrying Chrono mid-run, his past self dissolved into light and combined with him. Chrono’s did the same.

In the space left behind, an Altirian priest was standing before them in heavy robes, his hands folded into his sleeves.

Rian nearly stepped back in surprise. When he glanced over, another priest was standing in front of Enishi and Bree in the distance.

“Well done,” the closer priest said, and his voice echoed back a moment later. Each word he spoke appeared on the air as a system message.

Would you like to return to the battlefield?

“No,” Chrono said, then nudged Rian. He answered “no” as well.

The priest offered his hand, palm up.

When Rian looked back at the second priest, it occurred to him that there weren’t two of them, but rather there was one Altirian in two places at once, each performing the same actions, speaking the same words. Rian had only noticed because of the apparent echo.

Excellent. Provide me with two blue tesseracts from each of you, and you may proceed.

Rian didn’t have enough tesseracts to fulfill the requirement. He was exactly one colorless tess short of being able to form two colored ones.

The Altirian priest, sensing the delay, was visibly angered.

“You coming up short, buddy?” Chrono said, then reached into her robes. “I got you.”

To Rian’s surprise, she spotted him not just one tess but the entire requirement to begin with. She handed over four blue tesseracts.

Without realizing it, she had saved his life in more than one way. Holding onto his stockpile was essential. He thanked her profusely, but she downplayed her generosity—it was Rian, after all, who’d pulled through in 2-2 for the rest of the party. She was only repaying him for bringing them this far.

Companionship Level Up! (Lv. 1→2)

Chrono is now your Friend!

Adorably, she smiled at him.

The Altirian priest, holding four tesseracts, splayed his palms. The glass cubes revolved as they floated into the air. Arriving nearby, Corvis crossed his arms as he scowled at the priest.

Very well. I shall undo this destruction you have wrought. In exchange for proceeding, you must fulfill the requirements I have set forth.

Locate and kill the founder of Pyce. The man known as Zeniyon mustn’t be allowed to live.

Now behold the Caverns of Silence, and proceed with your mission.

Aligning into a square formation, the hovering tesseracts shattered, and a hole appeared in the air as if a glass pane had been pushed through a window. Darkness expanded from it, consuming everything.

Temporal Rift 2-2 Complete!

World 2 All-Clear!

You have gained experience! (+16381)

Time grade: C (+100g)

Combat grade: B (+1500 EXP)

Advancing to 3-1…