61

Solo

You have discovered a new area!

You have gained experience! (+1189)

THE CAVERNS OF SILENCE

You have entered TEMPORAL RIFT (GORGHEIT) 3-1.

Goal: proceed toward the end of the cavern.

The Temporal Rift will close if ALL party members die. (Recommended party size: 4)

Temporal Rift World 3 time limit remaining: 16 hours (Overworld); 48 hours (Rift).

The party landed at the outskirts of an underground forest. At their backs, a river gently flowed before a wall of rocky earth. The wall was an edge of the cavern itself—a massive enclosure that spanned the width of a city. Rays of daylight descended from cracks in the ceiling, illuminating curtains of moisture overhead, the air thick and damp.

After the chimes played of Rian and Chrono leveling from the accumulated experience, the area was completely quiet, true to its name. No creatures roaming, no players running around, no wind at all. It was almost uncomfortable to hear.

Enishi and the others broke the silence. Providing Rian with a brief rundown of the World, they explained: despite it being designated as the “Gorgheit” Rift, this World acted as a nexus for all Rift sessions regardless of where the players had initially entered. Much like instances on the Overworld, players would seamlessly enter and exit other sessions at random depending on how they moved through the cavern. It even applied to the separate stages of the World, which were uniquely combined into one area: the cavern itself.

The reason it was so quiet was that there were hundreds if not thousands of “pocket sessions” dispersed throughout. Sound was the signal that tipped off players as to whether they’d crossed into other sessions or not—whether they were alone or not.

“This is the hot spot for PVP at the moment,” Enishi said. “Everyone interested in qualifying for the Sacred Tournament is gonna be here, so that’s the bad news. The good news is: none of us are ranked high enough to be a worthwhile target, so if we stumble into a high-ranker, they’ll probably pass on killing us. Just be on the lookout tomorrow.”

Tomorrow. Rian had almost forgotten. Right. It’s late for them, wherever they are.

“All right,” Enishi concluded. “Guess that’s it. This is a good place to stop for the night. We’ll try to get going again in ten hours or so.”

Again.

“Night y’all,” Bree said, vanishing in a swirl of blue particles.

“Goodnight, Cobalt,” Chrono said, then hesitated. “Are you okay?”

Rian faked a smile. “It’s nothing. See you tomorrow.”

And again.

Her expression revealing that she wasn’t entirely convinced, Chrono watched Rian as she slowly reached for the log-off button and vanished.

***

Rian headed toward the forests, following the river as it curved and disappeared between the trees ahead.

It was always going to be this way. Just me. Like it’s always been.

Maybe someday you’ll learn. To stop hoping that someone else will come save you.

Silence fell to ambient noise, a cold breeze rustling the canopies around him. Rian kept looking for a footpath, a creature, or even another player, but there was still nothing in sight between the trees.

This fight is going to be a complete disaster. I can’t beat Ogrot. I should just—

No, I’ll do it. I can do this. I’ll find a way. There’s still time.

“Are you sure about this?” Corvis said, hovering up beside him. “Going it alone again?”

“I have no choice.”

Corvis seemed to sense the coldness in his voice, as he backed off from saying anything further.

“Going by the System message,” Rian said, “the time-dilation ratio is three-to-one now. If I wait for them to come back tomorrow, assuming they log on as soon as they wake up, I’d have to wait here for at least twenty-four hours. Best-case scenario, that’s half the time limit gone. I can’t afford that.”

When he considered it, the faster he progressed meant the more time he had to catch up with Ogrot. Assuming he understood the time mechanics correctly, moving forward would slow down Ogrot’s experience of time relative to him.

Rian had no idea what he was supposed to do in terms of timing his invasion. If he had to wait until Ogrot entered World 4—which seemed nigh-unavoidable now—then invading probably wouldn’t work. He had to be in the same World as his target.

And if the only reason Ogrot could enter World 4 was that he’d used the locator item to seed his session such that there was a way forward from the very beginning, there was nothing Rian could do.

Thinking he’d found a dead-end, Rian consulted Corvis, who gratefully answered. As Rian had suspected, Corvis knew more than he’d let on about the mysteriously off-limits World 4.

To enter it, all Rian had to do was complete World 3 and then time his usage of a Mirage skill at the moment in which the Rift session ended and returned him to the Overworld. During that brief period in which Rian was “outside” both the Rifts and the Overworld, he could invade World 4.

“Oh my god,” Rian said, face-palming. “Are you kidding me? I literally have to glitch the game to do this? An out-of-bounds glitch?”

“What?” Corvis said. “You’re a speedrunner, aren’t you? You’re the perfect candidate to pull this off.”

“Okay, first off, I’m not that kind of speedrunner. I played Shadow Spirits in the any-percent glitchless category.”

Corvis crossed his arms, then covered his mouth with his index finger and thumb. “Oh dear.”

Pacing around, Rian swore under his breath. “You know what, it doesn’t even matter. I have to do it. It sounds like it just takes good timing. I can do it.”

“You seem…rather stressed about the prospects of this,” Corvis said. “I would’ve thought you’d be happy to hear there’s still a method for you to invade against your Nemesis.”

“No, you’re right. But…” He ran his hand through his hair. “Whatever. Let’s just go.”

Rian continued forward. He didn’t hear the subtle sound of Corvis hovering after him for almost half a minute. When Rian heard it and glanced back, Corvis’s expression flickered from dark to neutral. He almost thought he’d imagined it, but for a moment Corvis had been looking at him with worry bordering on desperation.

***

The river at the start had split into streams winding throughout the forest. The land gradually became more varied, forming hills and meadows and small plateaus of rock rising above the trees. No prompts or messages had appeared yet, but Rian suspected this was an exploratory stage.

When he checked the guild and the Overworld’s time again, it was approaching nighttime for them. Already it felt as if nearly two days had passed since he’d begun the Rift session in general, but only one day had passed in the Overworld. He’d never been more thankful that he didn’t need to sleep. That alone was enough to give him hope that it was possible to catch up.

He tried to access guild chat, to see what everyone was doing and found that he couldn’t. Guild chat itself had vanished. Another line of communication lost to the temporal instability effect.

With the slightest change in auditory dynamics as if he were walking into a room from the outside, he felt himself cross into another session and then carefully looked around. It had gotten extraordinarily dark over the past hour or so, the sparse sunlight through the cracks of the cavern’s ceiling diminishing to night. No stars or moon.

The only sources of light were two distant flames, set far apart from each other, forming a cascade of shadows through the trees. Rian made his way toward one of the lights, then stopped short upon hearing voices. There was a party of level-capped PVPers gathered around a campfire.

He quietly passed by them in the dark. It wasn’t that he was scared of them, just that he knew they wouldn’t want anything to do with him. Nor could they do anything to help him. He suspected everyone was about to log off for the night to get some sleep. It seemed the day-night cycle was still consistent here.

Once Rian got clear of the party, he saw a dozen other campfires ahead. One of them stood out, with a blue glow whereas the others were vibrant yellow. It was, by chance, also the closest one to him.

Rian approached it. Getting nearer, he saw the telltale oversized backpack of a merchant before he saw the merchant himself. The young man sat before the blue fire, cooking a creature resembling a small lizard that was skewered on a stick. Though almost everything nearby was colorless amid the blue flames, one eye of the man was dark and the other was light. His figure was draped in silk folds.

“Ah,” he said, spotting Rian. “Hello there. Need some help?”

Finding himself in luck, Rian saw that the man was an NPC, likely placed here to assist players.

Rian asked him, “Is this stage really as simple as…walking to the end?”

“Of course not. ‘Proceed to the end of the cavern,’ eh? Ain’t that a trick. No, there’s quite more to it. You know who awaits you at the end of the World, don’t you?”

Rian couldn’t help but flinch at what he’d said—the end of the world—before realizing he meant World 3, not in general. “This…Zeniyon person. I think.”

“Righto. Lord Zeniyon himself. The one responsible for this whole mess.” He returned his attention to the flames for a moment. “Everyone here, myself included, is from the future.”

“Wait, what?”

The man flipped the skewered creature over to cook the other side. “That’s right. We’re not all from the same time, but that’s one thing we all share in common. We’re here to stop Zeniyon from defecting. To stop him from founding Pyce, creating his army, and starting the Hundred-Year War against Onsolia. Put an end to the whole thing before it ever started.”

Rian sat before the bonfire, crossing his legs. Something didn’t seem right about what he was hearing. “But doesn’t that mean no one’s succeeded? Like, ever? I’m sure thousands of players have attempted this. But if even one person managed to stop the war between Onsolia and Pyce, then…wouldn’t none of this exist?”

If the Hundred-Year War hadn’t happened, then Ulm wouldn’t have split itself into the Four, and by extension, the Undoing wouldn’t have happened either. Nothing in the game’s storyline would’ve happened. It would cause a literal unraveling of continuity. An undoing of everything—

Rian brought his fingertips to his temples. Oh no. Is this what the Undoing really is? Is it some kind of paradox? Was what Yindra did the real Undoing, or is it the outcome of what’s happening here?

He was probably getting carried away with that line of thought, but he couldn’t help but suspect that everything was even more entangled than he’d suspected.

“There is truly no telling,” the man said. “Perhaps we’re sitting in the past of a timeline in which someone succeeds, and we simply don’t know it yet. Or perhaps it is as futile as you think, an endless cycle of violence and death with no reprieve, spurred on by our ignorance of the future.”

Rian blinked at him.

“Perhaps I’d do better to explain,” the man said. “You see, I’m an Onsolian scout, here to map the area. A temporal cartographer, if you will.”

“Really? I was sure you were a merchant.”

“Oh, this?” The man jostled his towering backpack. “Just supplies for a deep dive into the past. Had to come prepared, you know. I haven’t much for sale, unfortunately.” He glanced all around at the vast, dark cavern they were in, the starless sky. “We’re sitting in a well-worn temporal channel created by my Onsolian brethren in the future—the past, from your perspective, of course. But let’s not get tangled in semantics. You know these channels to the past as the Temporal Rifts. They were created for one purpose: to kill Zeniyon in the past and undo the future that he created.”

Rian chewed his lip. “But from my experience, the future never changes, no matter what happens here.”

“Be that as it may, we must continue to try. And try we will. Of course, we’re not the only ones at work. There are others like me but with different intentions—to prevent anyone from coming near Zeniyon at his most vulnerable, whether out of a sense of preservation for causality or an ill-placed sympathy for his cause. They’ve erected quite a few temporal defenses that you’ll have to deal with.”

Retrieving his meal, the Onsolian blew on the cooked lizard and took a bite. Chewing, he said, “In particular, there is a gate at the end of this World. A gate locked by several keys which you will need to proceed. The first key is quite simple—bound in parallel to a local creature.”

”Uh…what?”

The Onsolian swallowed. “A creature which has become misaligned to an item in a parallel universe. Normally the parallel versions of everything are self-same, but this one was intentionally entangled with a key so as to hide it.” He glanced at Rian. “If I’ve lost you, I’d be happy to elaborate.”

Despite all the temporal shenanigans, it seemed rather simple, like a mob dropping loot. “I think I’ve got it,” Rian said. “If I kill this creature, it’ll drop the item.”

The Onsolian smiled. “You’re more well-versed in this than I thought. The energy used to bind the key to the creature will release upon its death, causing a temporal shift in which the item is produced in its place. As for the creature in question, you’ll need a source of light to attract them. Bonfire’s the standard tactic for most, as you can see.” He gestured to the dozens of other players’ campfires lighting the forest floor. “I can sell you a copy of mine. Would need a few tesses for it, though, unfortunately. And that’s just to pull it from another timeline.”

“Unnecessary,” Corvis said. “Save your tesseracts.” When the Onsolian wasn’t looking, Corvis plucked the rest of the cooked lizard off the skewer and ate it in a single bite.

As Rian thought, Corvis probably had a portable bonfire in his inventory.

Oblivious to his missing meal, with one hand the Onsolian opened a flap on his backpack and pulled out a rolled-up parchment. “I can offer you this, at least.” He handed it to Rian.

Unfurled, almost all of it was blank except for a small area at the bottom, depicting the forests and the landscape nearby—a map of the cavern. As Rian learned, it would fill itself in as he progressed further, giving him an idea of how far along he was and where he’d been before. But it wouldn’t show him what was ahead.

“You’d best get started sooner than later,” the Onsolian said. “Time is quite literally of the essence.” He winked, then leaned toward Rian. “Just remember: stay aware of your surroundings. You’re never quite alone here. Those keys—if you obtain them—are quite valuable, and they’re quite easy to lose as well.” He made a stabbing motion. “Whoever picks them up is subject to the same entanglement properties that the original creature had.”

Rian thanked him, stood up, and began heading into the forest.

A moment later, he heard a rustling from the direction of the Onsolian.

“Why, you—!”

Rian looked back. The Onsolian, standing in front of his campfire, tossed aside his empty skewer. Just as he began to turn and glare at Rian, he vanished, and the forest went silent again.

Rian breathed a sigh of relief. He’d stepped into a separate instance.

Corvis, I swear to god.

Continuing forward, Rian looked for a spot to set up a campfire.