Lex feels like shit. His boobs hurt, his dick barely exists, his mouth tastes like vomit and Northly is having difficulty with her magic so, for now, it's staying that way.

  What he wants, really, is to log off. He wants to go home. But home is far, far, far out of reach. He was an idiot for thinking it might not be for even a second.

  He clings to Sage. Thank god for Sage.

  Northly had ushered them away from Lex's vomit, only regarding it with mild concern and efficiency when she couldn't summon water to wash it away. Sage offered, but Northly refused.

  The pure nausea that overtook him when Nateria spoke to them has passed, but his gut still rolls as they borrow another office in the church. Lex grips Sage's robe like a child.

  Northly chatters away, but she's different to how she was. She's like the NPCs.

  "Now," she says, "is there something I can help you with?"

  Sage says, "No," at the same time as Lex says "Yes."

  Sage shoots him a look.

  "Do you remember anything that happened in the st hour?" he asks.

  Northly tilts her head. "I was finishing some internal correspondence regarding the upcoming festival. Why do you ask?"

  Lex swallows. He might throw up again.

  "Just wanted to check something," he says and gnces at her status, still open.

  She catches him looking. Her eyes widen as she sees her status. The window blinks out of view in a flutter of Northly's hands, which she then uses to cover her scarlet face.

  "I'm so sorry you had to see that. I-I don't know why that was— I'm so sorry."

  Her alignment had climbed all the way back to seventy percent when she dismissed it.

  "You don't have to show us," Sage says, picking their words carefully, "but can you let us know when your alignment reaches one hundred percent?"

  Lex nods. It could be that simple. Maybe their friend still exists, and it's just a matter of meeting the right conditions. Because this NPC isn't who he knows as Northly.

  "Whatever for?" Northly asks, muffled by her hands, still hiding her face from them.

  "Research," Lex says. "Where we're from, we don't have alignments that are quantified like that, so it's something we could use more data on. We, uh, also don't think it's embarrassing to show your status. So, um, we're not offended or anything."

  She peeks from behind her hands.

  He can almost convince himself that she's just like a pyer on auto. But what "almost" really means is he can't.

  Who did they get to know, these st two days? Is that person just gone?

  His fingers clench tighter on Sage's robe. Lex has barely used auto. He'll stick to that.

  "Look, we'll…" Sage says and turns their status off. Lex does the same.

  Northly's tension eases.

  "Do alignments normally stay the same?" Lex asks. "Or do they fluctuate?"

  "I don't know how to answer that," Northly says. "Can you be more specific?"

  Lex's heart twists. That's such an utterly NPC answer. He tries to be more specific. His ears still ring from the echo of Northly's screams. She is loyal. "Once someone's alignment hits a hundred percent, or more, do they usually stay at or above a hundred?"

  Northly thinks for a moment. "Yes. At a hundred percent it is rare for someone's alignment to lower. But… What do you mean 'or more'?" She smiles. "A hundred percent is the maximum."

  Sage lets out a long sigh. Lex agrees. "We didn't know that, thanks," Sage says. "Look, we should go but… let the adventurer's guild know when yours is at one hundred percent and they can pass it on to us."

  "And you'll come to the festival, won't you?" Northly says, ushering them towards the door.

  Lex smiles at her. "Wouldn't miss it," he says.

  The carvings in the halls are still beautiful. Lex itches to touch them, but he simply follows Sage instead of reaching out to caress the stone and wood. Now, Northly is no more alive than these creatures.

  Once they leave Northly at the entrance, Lex manages thirteen steps outside before his knees lock and he tugs Sage to a halt by his grip on their robe.

  "I know," they say, and pull him close.

  Sage's shoulders shake as they hold him. Lex shakes as well.

  When they've both run out of tears for the Northly they knew, Sage ces their fingers with Lex's. "Let's get you some food," they say.

  *

  Verve's chest heaves as he struggles to track Bel's movements. Lily understated how good she is at other roles. Verve doesn't know if he would have pced her as one of the top pyers without being told, but he'd have been able to tell she's several times better than he is.

  The butt of her spear jabs him in the kidney. He sprawls to the floor of the training hall. Damn thing came from nowhere.

  The NPC adventurers watching them cheer. The pyers stare.

  Verve grits his teeth, puts his legs under himself and leavers himself upright. "Again," he says.

  Bel's smile grows. "You haven't had enough?" she asks, turning her spear hand over hand so it spins in front of her.

  He unches a special — fire nce. She jumps over the fme. He's already halfway through the motion for his next one, aimed two feet above his first, when he realises she isn't where he expected her to be, but has somehow made it to the corner of his vision. He yanks his hand towards her just before it releases.

  He still misses, but it's by millimetres.

  Bel shrieks in delight and crashes into his side. She squeezes him. "Vervie! You're amazing!"

  "I couldn't hit you," he mumbles.

  "You'll get there," she promises. "You're already seriously good. Try fighting someone else," she suggests, turning her hug into just an arm around his waist as she casts her eyes over their audience.

  Several of the pyers take a step back.

  "I'mma practice with Lily for a bit — she's rusty ay-eff — but see how many of these jokers you can get on their knees before I'm done with her."

  "I'm exhausted ," he says, but he's already looking at the crowd, trying to estimate what sort of stage they're at from the pieces of equipment he can identify.

  "Precisely," she chirps and pces a swift kiss on his cheek. "If you can beat the lot of them like this think about the monsters you can beat when you're in top condition."

  "Aren't you underestimating us?" one of the rger pyers growls.

  "Awesome sauce! You've got a volunteer. Do me proud, Vervie~" she says and twiddles her fingers before pouncing on Lily, spear first. Lily deflects it with his shield.

  Verve watches them trade blows for a few moments, before the big guy grunts at Verve. Verve bites back his knee-jerk response that he's not fluent in man-baby. Instead, he raises his spear.

  "If you want to?" Verve asks.

  "I'll beat you, then show her who's the real pyer here," his opponent says with a nod to Bel.

  Good luck with that, Verve thinks, but just nods his acceptance and shifts his feet further apart.

  They stand at an impasse for long moments. Neither of them moves from their ready stance. Seconds tick by.

  A muscle in his opponent's jaw tightens.

  Verve has him on his back with a sweep behind his knees before the guy takes one step from his opening stance.

  Verve is just as surprised as his opponent. If that had been Bel, she'd have twisted his weapon out of his hands for such an obvious first move.

  "Your centre of gravity was too high," Verve says, mouth working before his brain. "If you'd been more stable, that wouldn't have worked." The mistake is so basic he'd pnned around it being a trap.

  "Me next!" says a catgirl, bouncing forward. "Do you mind if I use my staff? I'm mostly a magic user."

  He shakes his head. If she was decked out in high level equipment he might need to hash out some safety details to protect his gear, but even with a spear, Bel had been throwing around plenty of elemental specials.

  His downed opponent opens his mouth to protest, but two of the catgirl's friends announce that they're after her, and a line forms without Verve saying a word.

  An hour ter and nearly at the end of the queue of people, several of whom faced him multiple times, Verve is drenched in sweat and bck spots dance across his vision. He blinks hard. The st opponent, a swordsman, takes the opportunity to lunge. The point of Verve's spear slices the swordsman's fingers. Verve wrenches his eyes open. The swordsman's weapon falls from his fingers.

  "H-how…?" the swordsman asks.

  "Could hear it. Knew where your hands would be. Buy some protection for your hands or a sword with one of those cover thingies." He probably knows what the proper name for those is, but right now his brain has the thinking power of oatmeal and is incapable of dredging it up.

  Verve tucks his spear back in his inventory as he drags himself to the benches that line the training ground.

  Betedly, he realises that not a single one of the people who faced him could nd a decent hit, much less beat him. Fuck. Bel is a good teacher.

  As Verve's mush brain sets to the task of coming up with what he should be doing, Lily colpses on one side of him and Bel presses up against the other.

  "Crazy bitch," Lily says. "Don't ever let her have her way with me again."

  "Back at you," Verve says. "Next time, you wear her out first."

  Lily snorts. "You don't want that," he says. "Trust me. The only thing worse than her at full stamina is her when she's tired. You'll get more out of training with her when she's at her peak. Her brain was working overtime to make sure you learnt as much as possible."

  Verve squints sideways at Bel. "That how it is?" he asks.

  She hums and bumps her shoulder against his. "Maybe~"

  Verve groans. "It's unfair that you're this hot."

  Even with her skin glistening with a sheen of sweat and her makeup off, she's stunning. She could be a model. Maybe should be, instead of spending her time torturing him.

  She bounces up and offers her left hand to Verve and her right to Lily.

  They take them and haul themselves upright.

  "Baths?" Lily asks, and Bel nods.

  "Excuse me!" an energetic reptilian person in a guild uniform calls after them as they make their way down the hall that connects the ablutions to the training ground. She presses a bag into Verve's hands. It clinks with coin.

  "What's this?" he asks.

  The guild employee tilts her head. "Teaching fights are one silver each. From the guild."

  "Oh, but I wasn't—"

  Lily shoves him. He staggers a step to the side. "Don't be daft. You gave everyone good feedback. Even the assholes."

  The guild employee nods. "Please hold another session when you are able. Our new members will benefit greatly."

  "Do they pay you?" he asks Bel. He must have had more than a hundred rounds with her before he worked his way through the queue of challengers.

  "Nope," she says as the guild employee's expression sours. "We have other arrangements."

  "Honoured Bel is no longer an adventurer, so the situation differs." The employee said "honoured Bel" like she was biting into a lemon.

  "She bled them dry," Lily expins. "They had to make a deal with her or rethink their entire guild structure."

  Bel sniffs. "I did offer to help the restructure."

  "She offered to turn them into a gold farm," Lily says to Verve.

  "It was a sustainable model!" Bel insists.

  "It was not," the guild employee says, shaking her head as if just the thought of what Bel proposed is causing her pain. "It was lunacy."

  "It involved breeding monsters," Lily expins.

  "Ah," Verve says. "I can see how that would be unfeasible."

  "So now she's an 'Honorary Adventure Master'," Lily says. "She can use the guild facilities and take her pick of quests, but she's required to give the guild information she gathers and train anyone they think could use the lesson. Mostly kids who were the highest level in their vilge and had the ego to match. About a third of your partners today had a session with her."

  Verve blinks. "A session? Just one?"

  "Why do you think you had an audience?" Lily asks with his crooked smile. "No one but you had the guts to face her again."

  "You're only level eighteen," Verve says to Bel.

  "And you're only level fifteen," she replies and nudges him down the hall.

  He obediently takes another step. "What level were my opponents even?"

  "The highest newcomer is level twenty-two, the highest regur member is level thirty-one," the guild employee says, tone dry.

  Verve freezes in his tracks. Bel pulls gently on his elbow. "Thirty-one?"

  "Mhmm! You're super good, Vervie," Bel says.

  "Seriously," Lily says. "I could tell you are from the Mega Knight, but you nearly hit Bells after a day. You'll rank if you stick with it."

  He's still in a state of shock as they bundle him the rest of the way to the baths.

  *

  R can't get the thought out of her head. His head. Her head. His head. Fuck.

  R shakes their head like a dog getting dry.

  Not even "you could rank" but "you will rank."

  Before they can talk themself out of it, they type "pro FEViR starting sary" in their search engine. They hit enter.

  It's… a reasonable starting wage. FEViR itself sponsors competitions, and they colborate with companies who want to advertise, who then make private deals with individual pyers.

  He worries his lip, then searches for "pro FEViR lowest rank". His heart jumps to his throat. There are pros with ranks in the high six figures. Verve would only have to make it inside the top million.

  Though… R looks into the details of those pros. They frown.

  Hot women. And femboys. The search on one name brings up no less than five Reddit posts debating what the pyer has in their RL pants. R did not need to know about r/wutSheGotOuttaNS.

  Their heart falls out of their throat and into the bottom of their stomach. The first low ranked pro who doesn't look like a woman in game is just as gimmicky. He pys a clown. And they all have screen recording and another pyer to film them.

  R has a job. They can't toss that away to pretend to be a guy in a video game. Maybe Bel isn't actually that good. Maybe she lucked into screen recording through a promotion, and not for ranking in Necroshock.

  They search for "Beldonna world vector" and switch to videos when no pages seem to be talking about her. But she doesn't appear there either.

  R pauses. He can't imagine she hasn't posted something online. Once a pyer gets screen recording, they're set for the duration of the game since they can always team up with someone good who doesn't have it. But to keep it, you do have to produce content. FEViR don't care what kind of content, but it's a use it or lose it feature. Some of the music videos are insane.

  They try "world vector mega knight." The first few videos are just yelling about the purple lightning. The next is one of the top pyers theorising that the lightning is an insta-kill and you need to burst damage to beat the Knight before it gets it off, and pyers will need to hit HL before it's possible to clear the dungeon.

  In the comments, someone replied saying "the lightning isn't that bad??? i joined w some randoms and we just got out of the way b4 it went off. lmfao. r we sure sasd is this guy??? suuusssssss!!!" They were downvoted to hell and back. Several replies linked to Sasd's other video of the Mega Knight.

  Verve clicks on that video and watches, transfixed.

  Sasd's style is factual monotone monologue with wry humour. The compition starts with rapid fire cuts between triggers of the purple lightning, each fsh followed by him saying something like "bother" or "fantastic." He must have tried a hundred times.

  From there, the video goes over what he theorised could be a trigger, and then what he did to rule it out. R pauses on one of the final screens where Sasd had put up his "napkin math" on coordinates and the pyer positions with their alignments. The guy must have a maths degree.

  The video finishes with Sasd asking for thoughts on more things to try, even offering to run it with them so they can appear in his video as the hero who cracked it.

  Hundreds of people replied. Most of them suggested things that Sasd already ruled out, or were too vague to test as actual theories.

  One of the earliest comments says, "bb, t light changes j b4 she goz sparky?? y dont u use that? soooooo mch ezr!!" from a user Lilybell.

  R snorts and clicks on her profile. She doesn't have a lot of videos up, and none of them have a heap of views. He clicks on the test one, posted the night before, titled "(WV/Mega Knight) After the electro-storm best be careful…"

  It's a simple recording without significant editing, and R recognises Verve on screen. He hadn't thought he was doing well at the time, but as he watches the Knight dart around and take chunks out of the other pyers' HP — helpfully notated on the video with approximate percentages and the occasional "ouchy!!!" each time the knight nded a crit — he sees what Lily and Bel must have: Verve eating significantly less shit than anyone but Lily.

  He only took one crit, he realises. Watching back, the strikes that will crit are obvious. They come faster, and always in a downward diagonal. He'd taken one, before this video started, and then done everything he could to get the hell out of the way when another came for him. Including one time where he'd sprawled on his stomach, chin on one bck tile, feet on another. Bel captioned that feat of elegance with "good call!!" R doesn't know whether to ugh or grimace.

  The video's audio scrambles for a moment, and the onscreen text says: ""Everyone back, now!""

  The lightning fshes. One of the pyers wasn't fast enough to get away. They disintegrate. Thankfully, Verve's collision with the wall wasn't captured.

  R hears himself as Verve call his thanks to Bel and Lily. Bel drew a heart for Verve to run through and an arrow belled "total sweetie!!"

  The audio distorts again, onscreen text saying, "spoilers, soz!! come find me if u wanna kno t secret ;)"

  The fighter's ill-advised special rushes up.

  Bel didn't put any further captions on the video, instead letting the scene py out. The Knight speaks. The Knight eats the fighter. The video ends.

  The only description the video has is "bummerrrrr."

  R checks the comments, already pretty sure what they'll contain.

  "Faaaaaaaaake!" reads the top comment.

  The others are ruder.

  R makes themself a new account.

  Vervacity commented with:

  Nice vid. How long until people work out it's real? (I'm the "total sweetie", lol.)

  Lilybell replied to your comment:

  we meet sasd 2morrow~~~~