Contrary to Hirrus’ expectations, Alric slept like a soldier. He didn’t even take a moment to get comfortable, he just sagged and went still, but for his breathing. Hirrus was too surprised to be upset that it left the task of setting up camp to him alone.

Not that there was much to do. They weren’t intending to stay for long, and Alric was dead asleep without so much as a thin sheet, let alone a tent and bedroll. Instead, Hirrus took a moment to hack at the dried husk of a fallen tree, and clear a spot of the forest floor to build a fire. Considering he didn’t intend to use it to cook, he arranged the smaller wood fragments in a cone while resting the logs pointed outwards from it. It would offer them enough light to serve as some small protection from the night, while burning low and slow enough to throw up minimal smoke.

Hirrus settled in to wait for Alric to finish his rest.

He wasn’t sure how long to expect to wait, though.

Hirrus had seen the man sleep for a normal amount of time, but Hirrus had assumed that it was after having been awake for a normal amount of time, rather than the extreme that Hirrus’ pace had forced upon him. Without knowing anything about adventurer biology, he had no idea the proportion to which it would keep him sleeping.

Alric had fallen asleep too quickly for Hirrus to provide him with a deadline, and so he was now stuck waiting for however long it took.

The first hour, he just sat quietly and tended to the fire. It was unbearable. The last time Hirrus himself had sat still to rest for this long, he’d skirted close to the line of despair thinking about the loss of Julissa. He knew that she would be returned to him when the world reset, but that didn’t help the pain in his chest at her absence right now.

After the first hour, when he felt the pain building again, he decided to do something productive.

Putting on the new legendary ring had changed its name. Wearing it on his right finger changed it from Freke/Gere Ring to simply Gere Ring, and when he examined it on his hand, the stats no longer had the item’s duality marked, simply giving him BUR, attack speed, and the ability to dual wield. Removing the ring for a moment restored the stranger aspects again, reassuring Hirrus that the item worked the way he expected.

With the new dual wield trait, he sought out his battle axe from his inventory. Wielding it in his left hand with the hooked blade in his right felt strangely natural, when he hadn’t considered the possibility before now. Compared to coordinating multiple bodies with Mirrored Echo, coordinating the two weapons was easy, and Hirrus fell into a warm-up exercise, weaving a web of steel in the air with carefully calculated sweeps, chops, and slashes, mixed with carefully-trained footwork. Even after a few minutes, his arms didn’t feel tired or strained.

With the sword and battle-axe, Hirrus found himself developing a very aggressive form. The pair of weapons wove together naturally, striking together in such a way that one would batter aside any active defenses to make way for the other, or the pair of weapons approached from different angles, where no one defense could catch both.

But somehow, it was wrong. It was a severe advantage - especially if he added attack speed boosts to it - but it didn’t feel right in a way Hirrus couldn’t find the words for. And so he examined his inventory, seeking other options.

While Hirrus had discarded numerous weapons over the course of his adventure - gifting them to Alric or leaving them behind with Barrin - he had a handful that he’d kept. The only weapon he couldn’t stop using was Fidelis’s hooked blade. The Crushing Blade buff was too potent to lose. But he could choose anything for his secondary weapon. Pairing it with a dagger didn’t feel better, just different. It was a more balanced style focused around a reckless offense with the sword while leaning on the dagger to shore up the neglected defense. Pairing the hooked blade with another sword as a secondary option felt worse. It was a midpoint between the two, with neither the axe’s raw power for the offensive supplement, nor the dagger’s speed on defense.

Of course, there was one other option. He’d been focused on keeping the hooked blade as his primary weapon. What if it was his secondary? He shifted the weapon into his left hand, and looked into his inventory for something heavier.

Once he re-evaluated his priorities, it all came together. With the icy greataxe in his right hand and the hooked blade in his left, it took a few minutes to get the clumsy pair in tune with each other. The greataxe was much slower than the blade, but once he got the pair of them working together, it was exactly what he was missing.

His practice with the Mirrored Echoes had trained him well in keeping multiple physical courses of action running at the same time. Wielding the greataxe in one hand was only unwieldy due to lack of practice. The icy material of the weapon was lighter and easier to handle than if it had been made of metal, and once he found the balanced spot on the haft for his grip it was only marginally slower than wielding it two handed. Wielding the two weapons simultaneously instantly became the extreme beyond his battle axe. Despite being in his left hand, the hooked blade flew through an aggressive attack form, slicing through the air in a rapid display of swordsmanship, but each flurry of blows was punctuated by a heavy hack of his greataxe. The attacks were on different tempos and styles, and any defense that would mitigate one would be wide open to the other.

The combination of the two weapons felt like exactly what he was missing. It didn’t just feel powerful, it felt indomitable. It let him leverage every physical advantage he had. The sword let him display his skill, while the axe leveraged his strength. And the ring removing dual-wield penalties seemed to apply as well to any challenge wielding a two-handed weapon one-handed. It certainly wasn’t easy, but he could control it, and as time went on, he could master it.

Hirrus settled down for a moment tending to the fire, but was on his feet again in an instant when someone else was standing next to the fire with him.

“Easy,” the man said, raising his armored hands, showing they were empty. “If I was here to take you out, you’d be fucked already.”

It was the familiar bearded man in red armor. GM Dave. Hirrus didn’t quite realize when his two weapons had come to his hands, but he put them away now. GM Dave was on his side. Supposedly.

“What’s wrong?” Hirrus asked, sparing a glance around at his surroundings. He knew that there existed Arcana that could defeat his senses, but he had to hope that it was an uncommon ability, since he hadn’t seen anyone from Last of the Strong employing it.

“Nothing,” GM Dave said, groaning slightly as he lowered himself down to sit on the forest floor next to the fire. His knee made a slight popping sound that surprised Hirrus, given that the man didn’t look more than five years older than him. “Or, at least, nothing new. I’m just closing out my shift for the night and thought you deserved real talk, you know. You’re doing something to save hundreds of lives. Maybe thousands. I figure you deserve me bending the rules a little bit for some Q&A.”

“Why does it matter?” Hirrus asked, though he settled himself down at the fire as well. “Won’t I forget most of this when this mystical reset event happens?”

“Forget is a strong word,” GM Dave said with a shrug. “It’s more like the details and specifics become unimportant. The point of you being an AI is that you have the ability to learn without a person having to update you directly. But we don’t want guards and sheriffs developing indomitable grudges against specific players. Or, perhaps, entire guilds. So the details go away.”

“I suppose setting us up for forced forgiveness is easier than convincing them to treat us like people,” Hirrus snapped.

“Frankly yes,” GM Dave confirmed. “They literally pay to be here. If they choose to use their time here being assholes, we get paid just the same. And some of the memory manipulation is for your own good. Remembering all the pain of death and loss fucking sucks, especially if it happens a bunch. So you’ll remember stuff in broad strokes, but I can’t say exactly what will stick.”

Hirrus wanted to grumble an objection to that, but he had just been going through an inward spiral of despair over the loss of Julissa. As long as he had her back, he wouldn’t mind not having to recall the horror of who he was becoming in her absence.

“As long as you don’t get deleted, you’ll be fine,” the man in red armor promised. “Everything goes back to normal. At least, on my end. You might have a rough week or two when the players you ganked come back, but they physically can’t give you a hard time with all their gear gone. Though I can’t speak for politically.”

“What do you mean?” Hirrus asked.

GM Dave’s grimace turned sour and he gave a heavy sigh. “Players run the government, so if one of them has strong enough ties to the group leading Hari, they could reassign your guard commission to somewhere really shitty.”

“How do players run the government?” Hirrus demanded, suddenly alarmed. “What about King Larisa Bors?”

“Puppet,” GM Dave said. “Fucking assholes found some way to make him dance to their tune, and corporate calls it ‘clever use of game mechanics’ instead of bullshit. Every other player-controlled nation has to play by the rules with democratic councils and shit, but this fucking shadow council or whatever gets to play by monarchy rules because they found a way to neuter all the in-game preventative measures.”

“Can’t you just… Fix it?” Hirrus asked. “You were ready to punish me for lesser crimes. And you say I’ll be deleted for no crime at all.”

“Again,” GM Dave grumbled, “they pay to be here, I can only stop them if they’re driving away other paying customers. Even if I had the tools to circumvent the EULA privacy bullshit, if I bring them down, I’ll be the one on the chopping block. But I guarantee if someone outside the system found out about this,” he said, gesturing at Alric, “he’d never quit playing over it, because of the misguided idea that he might get strong enough to join them and have a king for a marionette of his own.”

Hirrus was starting to see the connection here. GM Dave and Hirrus weren’t so different. But despite being whatever he was - more an adventurer than anything else - he was still bound by a decision tree. Unlike dealing with Barrin and Dahlia, Hirrus didn’t know if he had the tools to help him circumvent it.

If he did, Hirrus wouldn’t be the only thing standing against his possible deletion.

“What’s going to happen if I fail?” Hirrus ventured. “What happens if I don’t come back?”

“Well, I imagine a bunch of assholes throw a little party because the guy who robbed them of years worth of gear is gone forever,” GM Dave said. “Maybe some are pissed because they don’t get to do whatever bullshit revenge they planned.”

“That’s not what I mean,” Hirrus said. He thumped a hand to his chest. “What about when it happens?”

“I mean, it’s deletion,” GM Dave said with a smirk. “In the most literal sense, absolutely fucking nothing. Servers go down with you on it, either as a person or a corpse, and then when the servers come back up you’re not there.” He shrugged. “I hope you don’t mind if I decline to get technical about that middle part. You won’t be running at the time, so you won’t feel anything. Just ones and zeroes being deleted and coded over with a five percent nerf to Stellar Divinity’s CDR proc rate, or whatever.”

Hirrus wanted to correct himself again, but when he opened his mouth he found that he couldn’t form the words. He remembered Dahlia’s face when he’d asked about Gier. He wanted to ask if GM Dave knew what would become of Julissa. If something about the reset would shield her emotionally from the loss.

He was a strong enough man to wield a giant greataxe with one hand. But he wasn’t strong enough to force the question past his lips.