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Chapter 15.6 Not a cloud (Book I)

  Waiting for the respawn to complete felt like hours. As soon as she was corporeal, Reeve sprang to her feet, readying an unarmed strike, but the intended target of her rage was not before her.

  Searing pain struck both her ankles, and Reeve again crumpled to the ground, her Achilles tendons severed.

  “Why are you like this?” Reeve said through the fog of new pain and the death debuff.

  Helia stepped from behind her to stand over her once more, the blade of the naginata she held now twice bathed with Reeve’s blood. “You are a persistent little one, aren’t you?” Helia said. “And not very smart, like the halfling fool that travels with you.” She tilted her head sideways. “There is no need for you to return after I kill you this time. Stay wherever it is you go, won’t you?”

  “I will keep coming back.”

  Helia casually swung the blade down toward Reeve’s neck.

  A soft chime sounded.

  Reeve resisted the urge to raise her hands to her recently severed neck. She instead crossed her arms and glared at the two prompts that floated before her.

  She waited.

  Reeve rose from the ground with as much dignity as the stacking death debuffs would permit. This time, the searing pain came at the back of her legs above the knees. She again crumpled, hamstrung.

  “You will keep coming back,” Healia said, “and I will keep cutting you down. Care you not for the use of your legs?”

  “Turns out I can learn to do without,” Reeve said, trying not to vomit from the pain and debuffs.

  The naginata swung down.

  Reeve rolled her eyes up toward her forehead, fairly confident it had received her most recent fatal blow.

  She dropped her gaze to the prompts before her.

  Worst. Softlock. Ever…she thought, then wondered if pre-total-immersion gamers who complained about softlocks had any idea how easy they’d gotten off, their inescapable cycles free from the experience of actual pain.

  She waited.

  Hoping that the game would only start feeding her intentions to Helia upon completion of full respawn, as soon as she was in-game Reeve kicked back with her right leg and pushed back hard with her right arm. She log-rolled along the ground, her effort desperate, and made it the few feet to her father’s apian wall without Helia’s felling stroke finding her. Sandy earth and blue sky swirling about her, Reeve felt herself brush through the bees and did not stop to wonder if they recognized her as friend. After a few more revolutions, she was amidst the stumbling, running legs of screaming and shouting elves. Pulling her arms up to shield either side of her head, she rolled fully twice more in the hopes of being lost from Helia’s sight in the tumult. She rose as quickly as she could, unsteady from the death debuff, the slight dizziness from rolling, and the frequent collisions from panicked elves.

  She looked back past the wall and saw only brief snatches of Helia, but the bloody blade of the naginata stood as unmoving sentinel above the fray. Reeve turned and ran directly away from her tormentor, planning to put enough distance between them that Helia would no longer sense Reeve’s intentions. Although she tried to sprint, the chaos of the elvin army kept her from making it more than a few steps before her momentum was arrested and she had to start again. After a few dozen yards, she glanced back and was able to see neither Helia nor the blade.

  Reeve turned to her left and began running parallel to the wall. More of the elves around her were also running in this direction as they attempted to flee the greatest density of bees. Reeve was able to reach something close to her top speed, after which any elf unfortunate enough to cross her path was sent flying with little hindrance to her progress. As the elves around her thinned, Reeve glanced again to her left and still did not see Helia. Hopes rising, she changed course slightly, angling toward the wall and, straight ahead of her in the distance, the portal to the MMO. If she could make it to the MMO, she could warn the players, and maybe they could work together to stall Helia’s passage through the portal long enough that Viv or someone else who could actually do something would catch wind of the situation.

  The wall here was sparse and barely visible, and as she approached it Reeve didn’t bother shielding her face but ran straight through, feeling only a few bees bounce against her. Too afraid to look back and see if Helia had spotted her, she ran harder across the flat ground. She was far enough into the plane that the sounds of the river and the army and the bees mixed into a distant roar, above which she could now hear the swishing of the low grass that whispered around her boots with each footfall.

  Reeve tripped and slid hard on her chest and outstretched hands, the dirt and grass stinging her palms. She pushed herself up and saw that she had less than a hundred yards to the portal. She started to run again but didn’t even make it two steps before she again fell, landing on her hands and knees. Stunned and out of breath, she stared at the ground for a moment, and in her vision the grass beneath her swirled.

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  No, she realized, it really was swirling…and extending around her wrists. Reeve pulled against the long blades wrapping themselves around both of her wrists and broke free, the sudden release causing her to fall back and throw her arms behind her to again brace herself. As soon as her palms hit the ground, she felt long blades of grasp wrap around them once more, and at the same time grass tightened against her calves and began snaking over her thighs.

  Back arched, Reeve tried to pull her hands free, but the multiplying, lengthening blades of grass were winding up both arms and onto her shoulders, and as she strained forward, she felt little give in her bonds. Her desperate gaze found the portal and the players watching her through it. They looked…she wasn’t sure. Concerned? Afraid? Whatever it was, they did not look like they were mocking her.

  Lower legs still under her, Reeve was pulled back tight against the ground and she saw only blue sky for a moment before there was a bright flash of light.

  Reeve pulled air into her lungs until she felt she was going to burst and then let out a scream of rage that filled the entire thirty-second respawn progress bar.

  This time, Helia did not let Reeve move at all. The naginata swung in a blurred arc and Reeve felt pain from her chest to pelvis.

  Reeve gasped, and with both arms she hugged herself across the stomach, willing her body to stay whole long enough to do something, anything in defiance of Helia’s absolute control of the situation. “I only have to take you out once,” Reeve said, her voice weak, “no matter how many times I have to die.”

  “True,” Helia said, her voice casual. “But I need only walk through that gate into the magnificent world beyond and I will be beyond your grasp. I shall leave this tedious task of greeting your reentry into our world to one of my warriors. I can even leave a dozen so that they don’t tire in their execution of your…well, execution.” Helia shook her head. “And, surely, you will eventually weaken from the futility, and my warriors will escort you and your party—what remains of it, those who could return from death—to a cell beneath the river.” She smiled. “This one deeper, much deeper, so that there will be no watery escape.”

  Reeve was starting to feel faint. “What do you even want?”

  Helia’s smile deepened. “You know what I want. I can sense that there are universes beyond this with wondrous creations that my children,” the elf cast her free hand back toward her army, “and I can inhabit, learn to control. I need not even be confined by this body. I can take on other forms more to my liking, assume truly corporeal forms.” She leaned forward slightly. “And with that power, I don’t want this world,” she glanced toward the portal to the MMO server, “I don’t want that world.” She leaned closer. “I want your world.”

  “But,” Reeve said through tight lips, still hoping to stall for a miracle but feeling her health nearing its end, “this is an amazing world. I’d want to spend all my time here…if my parents weren’t. Why can’t you be satisfied here? If you go out there, you could hurt people, whether you mean to or not. And they will try to end you.”

  “It’s true that this world has many beauties, Child. And your world may have many dangers for me.” She gave a contented sigh and stood tall once more. “But I did not choose this world, it was forced upon me, or I into it. I feel it around me like chains. You may never understand, but a world not of my choosing is a cell.”

  “No,” Reeve said, her sight beginning to fade at the margins from loss of blood, “I think I do understand.”

  “Hmm. Then it seems we both understand my choice,” Helia said, looking down at Reeve almost fondly. “Yet, I certainly do not understand your choice in continuing to return. Can you not simply remain gone? Walk away from this?” Helia shook her head and then spent a moment looking with obvious satisfaction at the events unfolding around them. “Stop putting yourself through this, Child. There is no need for you to come back. You waste both our time. ”

  Reeve closed her eyes and hugged her stomach, willing her rent body to stay together a little longer. Beyond the pain of her current gaping wound, she could still feel every strike Helia had landed, every time Helia rendered her unable to stand. Reeve had felt such overwhelming, boundless pain and immobilization before, and it had been IRL.

  Reeve opened her eyes, and her blurry gaze found Helia. “I come back,” Reeve said quietly, her breath shallow for fear she might tear her wound even wider, “to try to protect others in the way I once wasn’t.”

  Helia shook her head slightly, her expression curious. “If you insist on returning, at least retire to the relative comfort of a cell. Every member of your party who might help you is gone, captured, or soon will be. But…the choice is yours. Do what you will with your time in this world.” Helia smiled again, and Reeve could see only cruelty in the expression. “Maybe I will return here someday to visit you, if you insist to return after your next, imminent death. I’d like to understand you more. For curiosity if nothing else. You certainly remain a mystery to me, Reavyr. But it matters not—all that I seek will be mine. There is no one who could erase my presence in this world. You, despite your determination, were not even able to stop me here, and now never can. And you know why.” Glancing at the naginata and its black metal shaft, she said, “I know what you’ll do before you do it.” Helia reached out and plucked a bee from the air, holding its wings as it struggled. “Now, this is indeed over.”

  The hairs along the entire left side of Reeve’s body started to prickle. Her head reflexively began to roll in that direction, but she forced herself to turn back fully to Helia, lest the elf’s attention wander. Seconds, Reeve thought. I may just need seconds. Reeve took a deeper breath, and she felt blood running down her sides from her wound. “Is it?” Reeve said, her teeth aching as she gritted them against the pain. “I know what it feels like to be trapped in a world. In a body. I too want to be independent. Be in control of everything. I don’t want to rely on anyone. But we don’t get to control our world. We have to learn to live in it. And I’ve learned to live my life in my world. Sometimes totally on my own, but sometimes with the help of others.” She imagined crushing the back of Helia’s skull with one powerful bite.

  Helia frowned, confused as through the enchanted naginata she sensed Reeve’s intent. “You are an odd one, Child,” she said, and then she disappeared from Reeve’s field of view in a blur of fur, an arc of crimson arterial blood, and a swirling cloud of trailing bees.

  Reeve stared into the blue afternoon sky.

  “Yes I am,” she said quietly. “I am, after all, the child of Walter and Wanda Williams.”

  She drummed her blood-covered thumb against the shaft of the naginata where it had fallen across her chest, and enjoyed the caress of a gentle breeze that was beginning to roll in off the water of the River Deiluyne. “Not a cloud...” She said.

  A soft chime sounded.

  Reavyr has died. Respawn in 30 seconds.

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