89

God Tier

Light. It was everywhere, only beginning to fade.

At last. He had returned.

He? Was that correct? The last time they had been whole, there was no sense of questioning this aspect of themselves. But it felt right. What had changed?

In an instant he understood, searching the memories of this Vessel. Aside from the Four, who were interchanging and rejoining in constant flux within him like virtual particles popping into and out of existence, there were two other souls as well: one that was fractured and one that was mostly whole. Their names were Corvis and Rian.

That was fine, then. The balance of his soul leaned in that direction now: he could be a he if he wished.

Most surprisingly, his unified presence was contained. Ordinarily, he was far too powerful to exist in the physical realm as a singular being. But here he was.

With time at a standstill, he looked over the land. This was not the world he had reigned over. It was somewhere else. A peculiar place. Similar to Miriad. Perhaps a universal neighbor.

A battle had occurred here, one that had ultimately spared this world if not at the expense of its future. In a few hundred years, this planet would become a frozen Hell, banished from its solar system to traverse the void until the end of time.

Alas, such a thing was not his problem.

But some aspect of himself, perhaps this human fragment of his soul, felt compelled to tidy up. To set things right on this side of the portal. There was something here, in the air. Ingrained into space itself. Something that didn’t belong.

He reached out and crushed the System that had leaked in from the portal above. The System that had caused his world, Miriad, so much trouble. And so too had it compromised this world. A promise had been made with it, a pact to ensure that the Earth’s future became irrevocable—to bridge a moment in the past and future, and thus allow a momentary window of traversal between them for both Yindra and Rian.

It was, in fact, this pact that had allowed him to be reformed in the present moment. But now that he was whole again, he could disregard it. The System no longer ruled here. He did. It would be as simple as reverting the changes that one-fourth of himself, Yindra, had done. The promise, the Systemic pact, could be broken without consequence by merely shunting the old outcome into a parallel universe. A different branch. An alternate future that wouldn’t come to pass—at least not by these causes.

He felt a strange emotion. A humorous one, it seemed. The human soul in him was pleading with him to do it, to avert this world’s impending fate.

All right, he thought, chuckling to himself. They can have a second chance.

He reached out and shunted the nearby black hole—including a frozen Yindra and Rian deep within its gravity well—into a parallel universe, removing it from this timeline. Then he adjusted the planet’s orbit around the sun to how it had been, and the cold future of this world was no more.

He saw the newly opened path that humanity would take instead, but he felt no attachment to the outcome, nor did he wish to share it with the human soul in him. Perhaps it was best to carry that knowledge alone. After all, the people of this world would have to face their future on their own.

It was time to go home.

He approached the portal. Its coordinates were off-kilter. Someone had pulled a tremendous amount of energy through it without realizing the consequences.

He adjusted it, realigning it with Miriad spatially and temporally. There. It was all set again. At first he considered entering it and closing it behind him, but there was still something he needed to do. The portal could remain open for a few more hours; he didn’t suppose anyone else would be foolish enough to enter it in the meantime. But just in case, he cast out his field of control and hid the portal from sight as he passed through it.

Time to make his return. Time to set everything right.

***

The Fata Morgana stadium was filled with people. The tournament was still in a month or so, but the ranking cutoff was about to finally reach its deadline. Everyone was waiting to see who made it in.

A huge list of the top players had displayed itself upon the air, and although the shifting of ranks had slowed down at the top, there was plenty of volatility near rank 256. Livestreams of players engaged in fights popped up whenever the System had sensed that a rank-up was about to happen—mostly in Temporal Rift 3-3, which meant the footage had to be slowed down for the Overworld. The spectators cheered for their favorites, the underdogs, the newcomers, the veterans.

But all Kat thought of, sitting there in the stands with Maia, was whether or not Rian was okay. She hadn’t expected to run into him at the end of it all. Nor had she expected the Sacred-2 crafting process to warp them straight into the Penumbra.

She, Maia, Oblivion, and Hypersphere had been secretly—or as secretly as possible—undergoing a quest that was forbidden by the System itself. The only S-ranked quest in Mirage.

The “Sacred Quest” was what they’d come to call it, though there was no official in-game name.

It had taken them nearly a year to figure it out, to amass the necessary resources, plot the proper routes, and execute it all without being detected. Even if the System could read their minds, there were loopholes that could be exploited, tricks that seemed like they were meant to be used, in hindsight. It was almost as if someone had programmed little pockets of darkness into the System to force it to overlook the players’ actions if they did certain things.

It had gradually unfurled, starting as a peculiar hidden quest before spiraling out into something much grander. No one had been sure about what the end goal was, initially. But only toward the end of its first phase had the quest’s purpose become apparent.

It was a way of recombining the separated pieces of the Four.

To initiate it, a party simply had to bring a Godly Fragment near its corresponding nullshard. There was no way of knowing which nullshard belonged to which god ahead of time, although they were generally in the expected areas. Elmguard for Goam shards. Aetheria for Ezre, and so on. But when a Fragment and a nullshard aligned, they would resonate with each other. Then they could be combined.

And then the System would go berserk.

The local fauna would storm the area. Pre-established communication routes suddenly no longer worked. Even the GMs were alerted to the initiation of the quest. Last time, they’d shown up to intervene, reset things, reprimand the players involved and even bribe Moonlight into abandoning the quest—with the threat of bans, of course, though none of them had gotten banned yet, probably to prevent creating an even larger ruckus about the quest itself.

That had only made Kat’s interest burn brighter. The GMs couldn’t have been serious about it. Why would there be something in the System that they couldn’t control? They were obviously just role-playing with the players. And that was beyond exciting to Kat: the idea that even the GMs were taking part in the lore of the game.

It was today that Moonlight had embarked on their second-ever attempt at the Sacred Quest, and it had taken them to places they’d never anticipated. Portals, across the continent—to secret locations in Aetheria, all the way to the Penumbra itself. No GMs had shown up this time for some reason, but Kat supposed the guild had gotten lucky. Maybe the GMs had been busy with something.

And by the end of the first phase, they hadn’t just obtained new S-tier equipment—they’d created something that was part Goam, part Ezre. A double-sacred-tier item.

Breath of Goam.

It was probably the most expensive item in the game. But that was assuming it could even be sold without the GMs trying to confiscate it. The item had felt like it was burning a hole in Kat’s inventory. She hadn’t been sure what to do with it, so she’d given it to Rian as an apology. After all, the Sacred Quest was partially what had caused a falling out between them. It only felt appropriate to give it to him.

“You think Rian made it out okay?” Maia said. “He had to’ve, by now.”

“Yeah,” Kat said. “It’s probably been hours for him compared to us. I wish I’d had more time to ask him some things, though.”

“So what was all that about him being stuck in the game? I saw he was bugging you the whole time we were busy.”

Kat shook her head. “I thought he was joking at first, but…I think it might be real.”

“Seriously? Wait, so what happened to his body, then?”

They had already switched to half-sync, so Kat showed Maia her phone. “Look. It’s his obituary.”

“He’s dead?”

“Well…IRL, he is. Looks like they already held the funeral and everything. They found him dead with his headset still on.”

“Holy shit,” Maia whispered. “But he’s still here, right?” She sat back. “Oh, man. Imagine if they’d known he was still alive in the game.”

“But I mean, is the Rian we know really him? Wouldn’t that make him…a digital clone of himself?”

“That’s kinda freaky.”

Kat felt like she’d been visited by a ghost this whole time. “Yeah,” she said. “I don’t know what to think about that.”

A Zephyr came flying into the arena, catching everyone’s attention. His equipment was heavily damaged. It looked like he’d been fighting to within an inch of death. As he landed, he tore off his helm and shouted, “It’s crazy! All the nullshards are gone!”

Confused murmurs filled the air.

“That’s impossible,” Maia muttered.

Kat’s breath caught. “But that would mean…”

“Players are raiding the towns!” the Zephyr shouted. “Nowhere’s safe!”

The confusion in the stadium turned to panic. Half the players stood up and took defensive stances toward one another. No one attacked. There were plenty of top rankers here, but none of them seemed interested in finding out if the Zephyr’s words were true.

Near Kat and Maia, a player gasped as he looked at his inventory. “Check your equipment!” he shouted. “All the god frags are gone, too!”

Kat opened her inventory and equipment pages. Sure enough, all her S-tier items had downgraded themselves to A-tier. It was as if the Godly Fragments infused into the items had been removed retroactively.

Some in the crowd took this better than others.

A Kickboxer held his hands to his head. “It’s all gone. All those hours of work…”

“It’s gotta be some kind of glitch,” a Gunslinger said.

“Great,” another said, “now they’re gonna have to roll back the whole server.”

A GM warped into the arena.

The man, with a white uniform and baseball cap, had his tag displayed as GM Nephim. He immediately called for attention, quieting most of the chatter in the air. It was as if a sphere of silence had expanded around him.

“Everyone, please calm down,” he called out, his voice magnifying itself. “The situation is under control.”

Meanwhile, the Zephyr in the arena had gone to half-sync and was pacing back and forth, gazing with dread at his phone. “There’s news reports coming in,” he said, his voice breaking with fear.

Nephim turned to him. “Wait, what? News reports about what?”

“There’s…been an explosion at Refsys headquarters!”

At first there were dismissals and confused glances, but as the seconds passed and more people switched to half-sync to confirm the news, hysteria set in among the crowd. Several people aired their fears that they wouldn’t be able to log out. But as nearly half the players brought up their menus and disappeared in a swirl of particles, the panic diminished.

Kat noticed and eased up. “We can still log out.”

Maia scoffed. “Dude’s just trying to get people to panic at this point. It’s not like they’re gonna have all the servers in one building.”

“Yeah, even if the servers went down, we’d either be kicked out from the game or…”

“Maybe that’s what happened to Rian,” Maia said. “Got his mind disconnected from his body.”

GM Nephim continued to float around the stadium, trying to gain as much attention as he could—and failing, by the look of it. “There’s nothing to be afraid of! The headquarters building is fine. The servers are intact. I mean, come on, guys, the game’s still running!”

Kat went to check the news report for herself. There was some shaky footage of what looked like a control room, a frightened woman’s face as she spoke into her phone’s camera. She was begging for help. A sound like an earthquake was in the background but her voice was still audible.

The woman talked hurriedly: they were inside Reflect System’s true headquarters in the Canadian arctic tundra, and the building was about to collapse. She gave her exact coordinates, longitude and latitude. And then…there was something about Project Mirage. An explosion swept in from above, and the audio cut out amid dozens of screams.

The news report went on to mention that the actual headquarters building for Reflect Systems in California was indeed intact, but that the reports of a massive explosion happening at the location described in the video were real. News helicopters had already obtained footage of the devastation. A black tower had appeared in the tundra. The situation was still developing.

Thunder cracked the sky over the stadium.

Kat jumped, thinking at first that lightning had struck in the distance, but then she saw it: the clouds parted around a single point as if a vortex in the sky had opened for an instant. Sunlight pierced the overcast.

Descending from the sky was a four-armed man.

Kat stood. She recognized that outfit. The all-black martial arts uniform.

It was Rian.

Still falling through the air like he was on an invisible elevator, Rian casually pointed a finger at GM Nephim. Lightning shot between them. It filled the stadium with a flash of pure blue. The sound was like the universe splitting open, and beneath the sound were the screams of the players in the stands.

All that remained of Nephim was dust adrift in the wind.

GLOBAL ALERT: “GM Nephim” has been permanently banned.

What the hell is going on? Kat thought. Why did Rian seemingly have GM powers?

Was this what Yindra had given him?

Rian continued descending until he was just above the stadium, hovering in the air.

“You’ve been deceived,” he said, his voice booming louder than Nephim’s had. But he didn’t sound entirely like his old self. Rian’s voice was in there, but he sounded like he was several different people speaking at once.

“This is not a virtual world,” Rian said, the stadium gently shaking beneath his words, “but a real one that exists in parallel to Earth. The GMs have disguised it as a game. But in truth, you were participating in a military operation on their behalf to conquer Miriad.”

Kat opened a whisper channel to Rian.

Or at least she tried to. The System was acting like it didn’t know who Rian was. And when she navigated to her friends list and her guild members list, Rian wasn’t on either anymore.

Cobalt #003 had disappeared from the System.

“The game is over,” Rian said. “The GMs have lost. Miriad will be returning to its rightful owner.”

Kat couldn’t believe it. “But that’s…”

“In the course of events leading to this moment,” Rian said, “I was recreated by the actions of a human from Earth. He, along with a novai companion of his, worked to mend this broken world and thereby became the focal point into which my divided self recombined.

“I am the Four,” Rian said. “I am Goam, Ezre, Altir, and Yindra. I am Ulm, the creator of this world.”