We were almost at the edge of the village when a notification appeared.

New Mission Received: Investigate the village

Objective: Find out what happened to the villagers

Secondary objective: Locate and rescue villagers

Reward: 250 experience points

My earpiece crackled to life. A smooth, radio announcer’s voice like the kind that soothed the midnight audience on a classical station spoke.

“This is Rho. I hope you all received the mission objective. I’ll be following along with you all on this mission from here on out. Any questions, you just let me know.”

“We’ve got it,” Xiphos said. “Nice to hear your voice again, Rho.”

“Xiphos, hey. Long time no speak. I’ll be your eye in the sky on this one.”

“We’ll be in touch,” Xiphos said.

If I’m being honest, I was a little disappointed that Delta wasn’t our handler for this mission. But this Rho guy sounded pretty competent, and Xiphos had worked with him before.

If our whole mission was to get to the bottom of the disappearance, that seemed like a pretty low reward. I remembered something Xiphos said about anima accumulation and it being potentially dangerous in large doses. Starting out at level 1, a small anima infusion might be all our bodies could handle.

I didn’t understand why EDGE Force sent us in at the lowest power level they could. If they really meant us to face whatever threat might wait for us here, then why not send us in already powerful?

Last time the anima I’d earned through levelling turned me into someone with near superhuman strength. I wasn’t faster than a speeding bullet, and I couldn’t leap tall buildings in a single bound, but with enough anima, maybe I could.

“Xiphos, I need to know something,” I said.

“Make it quick, and keep your voice down.”

“Why don’t they power us up before dropping us into a mission zone?”

“The more anima you have integrated with your body, and the longer it courses through you, the more dangerous it is. The baseline human body is only meant to hold a flicker of anima. Enough to keep your soul adhered to your body. Any more and there’s always a chance that things will go wrong.” Xiphos slowed her pace a little and took a breath before continuing. “When EDGE Force first started doing this, they did exactly what you’re suggesting. They pumped EDGEs with anima and sent them to fight. They won a lot of battles, yes, but things started going wrong. EDGEs started going mad, getting violent, and losing control. It started happening more often, so a new approach was needed.”

“Tell them, Captain,” Khopesh said.

“Khopesh wasn’t there when it happened, but I’ve told him the story,” Xiphos said. “My second mission – my first team mission – was led by an EDGE named Estoc. He was strong, powerful, and talked about how EDGE Force were losing their minds by forcing them to start their missions weak. He was one of those who was turned into a super soldier back in the first days of EDGE Force. Towards the end of the mission, we found a font of anima. A pure spring from another layer of reality bleeding through into our own. Estoc drank his fill, we finished the mission objective, then he turned on us. Started ranting and raving about how it was all futile and that EDGE Force would never stop the reality crash from happening.”

I’d heard that term before. Omega, Delta and Rho’s superior, had used it. He’d said that EDGE Force were aware of this impending reality crash and were actively opposing it.

Was that what EDGE Force was here for? To stop a reality crash from happening?

They’d been pretty clear in saying that our reality was just a simulation, but outside of these EDGE Force missions, it still felt the same as it ever had. The sun still rose each day, people still fought stupid battles over shit that didn’t matter on Facebook, and that dread of the empty page that lived in my heart still lingered. If it was true, then this wasn’t some kind of Matrix scenario where I was asleep in a pod somewhere with my mind beaming into a super complex video game.

No.

Before EDGE Force chose me, I was the equivalent of a non-player character. An NPC. Just going about my life every single day, doing the same things, making the same mistakes, spouting predictable lines that confirmed my non-player status.

Now all of that was different. It was almost like I’d been able to peek behind the curtain and get a glimpse of the wizard pulling the strings of how this reality worked.

EDGE Force had seen the same, and they understood what they saw. Understood it enough to figure out how to start pulling those strings for themselves, to set our reality on a course that didn’t end up with it crashing down around us.

If a computer server is corrupted, the only thing you can do is revert to a previous state. If the hardware fails, you dump it and have to rebuild the whole infrastructure from the ground up. Then you loaded a snapshot from before the crash and pretended like it never happened.

Our reality wasn’t a database that could just be restored or reverted to a specific state. There would be no coming back from a crash that affected our entire reality.

Would this mission shed any light on EDGE Force’s overarching goal at stopping this crash from happening? I had no idea, but the only way forward was through.

We continued on. The slope of the mountainside flattened out somewhat to form a gently rolling plateau. The centre of the village was a little lower than the surrounds. The houses that ringed the town were in various states of disrepair. One had a fallen-in roof covered in snow. Another had broken windows with slats warped from wild weather.

Was this damage caused by what had happened here last night? It was hard to tell, but the damage looked old and widespread, as though everyone in the village had just kind of given up over the last few years.

Crunching through the frost underfoot soon gave way to stomping through powdery snow. I couldn’t see any tracks between the houses, though the snow had probably fallen all through the night.

Something flapped in the breeze as we headed into the village. My foot crunched into a section of frost, then sunk into soft powdery snow a step later.

“Can you feel that?” I asked. “Some parts of the ground are covered in ice, but others aren’t.”

“The ground was disturbed, yes,” Xiphos agreed.

“So something did come into the village from outside,” Stiletto added.

“Or maybe it left the village from within,” Naginata said. She held her edged weapon with the blade pointed forward, ready to respond to any threats.

“It’s possible that whatever happened here is over,” Xiphos said. “Until we can confirm that, I want everyone ready to defend themselves.”

I gripped Gravedigger tighter as we pushed ahead, emerging into a wide park area with deciduous trees planted in artful rows. The boughs were devoid of leaves, shed in the rise of Winter’s bite. A single main road bisected the centre of town, and a quaint hall stood on the other side.

The wide double doors stood open.

“The villagers might have gathered together in that hall,” I offered. “Garrisoned themselves there to fight off whatever threat came at them.”

“It’s a good a place to start as any,” Xiphos agreed.

A cold wind blew through the village as we crossed the dead park and the main road. I glanced both ways out of habit, but no vehicles moved on that snowbound street. A few cars sat immobile under a covering of powdery snow to either side of us.

Suddenly I saw something move. It was nothing more than a black shadow darting across the street from between a red pickup truck and a lime green sedan. It stayed low to the ground and moved more like some kind of rodent than a wolf or a fox. But I’d never seen a rat that big. It was about the same size as a capybara, which was the largest rodent in the world. But it couldn’t be a capybara - they were native to South America, not Romania.

“Movement,” I said. “Something scurried from those cars across the road.”

“Small?” Xiphos asked. “Possibly a stray cat or dog?”

Now that Xiphos mentioned it, that wasn’t outside the realm of possibility. “It moved low to the ground, scurrying like a rodent. But it could have been a cat trying to stay out of sight,” I admitted.

“Keep your eyes peeled. If it moves closer or makes any move to attack, you let us know. Otherwise, we stick to the plan,” Xiphos said as she led us onward.

Mountains with dark roots and alabaster peaks rose in the distance. The creature dared not move again as we marched through Incolţi. We stopped in front of the open doors of the city hall and tried to peer through the oppressive darkness.

“Hatchet, Naginata, I want you two to lead the charge,” Xiphos said.

Naginata nodded. “Yes sir.”

“Yes sir,” I replied.

Kaiser barked quietly once, his way of saying yes.

Naginata and I headed into the hall. She favoured her edged weapon, but I held firm with Gravedigger. A shotgun blast would have more stopping power than my tactical hatchet in an enclosed space.

There was a small counter to one side of the room. A reception area of some kind. The doors that led further into the hall were open too, and nothing rushed at us from the darkness within. I took my torch out of my inventory, labelled as a flashlight, the American term. I flicked it on, and a beam of light shot out from the front.

Again, nothing came for us.

But I couldn’t hold Gravedigger and this torch at the same time. So I headed over to the receptionist’s desk and stepped behind it.

“What are you doing?” Naginata asked.

Kaiser stood next to her, making sure that she’d have backup if anything happened.

“I’m hoping I can find-” I said as I spied precisely what I was looking for. “Aha! This.”

I grabbed the sticky tape dispenser and tore off a long strip. I put Gravedigger down on the desk, which looked exactly like any outdated office desk back in Australia, except that everything was written in Romanian. I wound the tape around the torch and Gravedigger, ensuring that the placement wouldn’t interfere with the pump reload mechanism.

I rejoined Naginata a second later, and she nodded appreciatively.

The hall beyond consisted of a wide open space and a small stage at the other end. Stacks of chairs sat off to one side, piled on top of each other as though in storage. The floor of the hall was in tatters. The wooden slats had been destroyed in some places and torn free in others, revealing the dark soil beneath.

“Captain, you’re going to want to see this,” I said.

Xiphos, Stiletto and Khopesh followed us in and fanned out around the room.

“What the hell happened here?” Stiletto asked.

“There’s no blood, there are no bodies, but-” Xiphos said as she knelt down next to one of the areas that had been destroyed. “Something tore this wood away, and it had sizeable claws. See these gouge marks here?”

I focused the torch beam where Xiphos pointed, and sure enough, claw marks raked into the wood. Then the revelation hit me like a truck.

“Did they come here to find something buried in the earth, or did they come here to bury something?” I asked.

“There would be a divot left behind if they retrieved something and took it with them,” Khopesh said.

Xiphos stood and took a few strides back from the edge of the hole.

“Naginata, use your weapon to move some of that disturbed earth,” Xiphos said.

Naginata complied. It wasn’t long before her blade found something solid. She uncovered it as gently as she could, with the expert finesse of a master of the weapon. She flicked pieces of dirt away from the solid mass, which revealed something white and bulbous. My first thought was that it was some kind of mushroom, but I was mistaken.

A stark white toe.

“That’s a person!” I said, just as I saw the big toe twitch.