Prelude: The Sage

The Sage looked over the wind-lashed hills far below, staff across his lap. He cast his mind down the cliffs of ice and rock, past the talus slopes, through the gnarled first trees into the valley where his charges roamed.

Or were they his wardens?

The distinction was unimportant.

For now.

He pulled his inner gaze back. All was as it should be.

He expanded his mind, evicting the smaller occupants of the great thought space, pushing aside the greater powers. They were meaningless to him.

Now, he surveyed the world anew, the great skein of meaning spiraling before him. Individual threads of perception shimmered and sparked, each colored by experience. The light of the threads flowed through the thought space, rising, always rising.

As always, he was cautious. Even the act of observation was profound. His enlightenment was not such that he could avoid effecting that which he perceived.

The path of wu wei was not simple. What was inaction anyway, when consciousness itself was an act which shook the firmament?

He found the place, the place where the threads were coiling around each other, dark and light, spooling and separating.

Another has arrived.

I wonder which one it is?

Chapter 1: Slice

Lilijoy launched another Qi strike at the shadows, hoping for a lucky hit as she crouched over Skria’s still form. Somewhere in the distance she could hear Jessila bellowing in rage or pain as she tried to catch up.

What a way to travel.

Magpie was… wherever. Somewhere, probably crouching in the darkness, waiting for the right moment to strike.

Now would be a good time.

Five minutes ago would have been even better.

Not that she could blame Magpie for the current situation. That pretty much lay at her feet. Or Skria’s feet. Same thing at the moment.

Her senses caught the blur of movement off her left shoulder, just an instant too late. The shadows spat out a pair of wings, and she felt the gentle pressure of a razor’s touch across her forearm.

Vorpal Crow inflicts 20 points of damage. Left hand disabled.

54 HP remaining

Damage over time now 3 HP per second

They’re just too fast.

Her mind was moving at the fastest possible speed, allowing her to track the attacks of the sharp-winged blurs with ease, but her Flash powered movements were too slow to do anything about it. It didn’t help that the creatures were moving faster than her echolocation could work.

“Stay close.” The faint whisper from Skria was all the warning she got as the air around them howled into a vortex of dust and grass.

Lilijoy hunkered down and Skria pulled her ear to her mouth.

“I can keep this going for a while. Heal your bleeding if you can, ‘cause it’s dripping on me and it’s gross.”

Lilijoy began to pull Prana from her core, when Skria pulled her ear back down.

“Wait. That sounded bad. I’m sorry-”

“Gotta heal now. Dead in ten.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

It took Lilijoy a minute to fully stop the bleeding and bring herself back from the brink.

“Hey Skria.”

“Yes?”

“I’m done dripping. What now?”

“Where are the others?”

Lilijoy stifled a flash of annoyance. “Don’t know. I can’t hear Jess anymore, because of your tornado thing. And you know how Magpie is. What about Swoot?”

Swoot was Skria's shadow owl.

“Swoot’s hiding. These things are too fast for him.”

“They’re too fast for anyone. How are we supposed to fight them?”

“We need to find shelter, get out of this clearing.”

“Can you move your spell?”

“Probably. It will drain me faster though. Oh, and my legs aren’t working.”

“I’ll carry you.” Lilijoy knew that Skria weighed next to nothing, certainly no more than a yellow rock.

“You might have to run. I’m going to burn through my blue pretty fast.”

Without another word, Lilijoy gathered Skria up and stumble-sprinted back toward the large grove of trees as best she could.

The current situation had arisen due to Skria’s insistence that she scout ahead from the air as they traveled.

“I’ll be completely fine,” she had said. “Nothing can touch me in the air. And besides, I’ve got Swoot to help.”

Obviously the Inside had been listening.

The rest of the party had emerged from the edge of the woods to see Skria plummet to the ground several hundred meters away, her body battered in the air by the black streaks that turned out to be vorpal crows.

This was the peril of going too fast in instanced travel.

Soon after Guardian had re-shaped the Inside, all forms of fast travel and teleportation had been removed from the former game. What replaced them was instanced travel. Lilijoy wasn’t sure whether the pun on instant travel was deliberate. Instanced travel was simple enough to do. All you needed was a distance, a direction, and a time. There were some other stipulations that Lilijoy had allowed to wash over her, having to do with starting location and party size.

The main point of contention between the four cohort members had been the time they wanted to allow for their journey. There was a kind of friction at work in the concept. They could have a long, simple journey, or a short, brutal one. Or somewhere in between.

Choose the wrong speed, and watch the death counter soar.

It looked like they had chosen poorly. At the time they decided, two days had seemed like a reasonable figure to Lilijoy. Averdale Forest was located about a thousand kilometers from Academy Town, though the land of the Garden was not completely static. It was prone to something like greatly accelerated plate tectonics, stretching and moving over time, a smooth process that took place in unpopulated areas, never changing so fast as to be directly noticeable.

Lilijoy had figured that since their party could make that distance in about a week, going all out, two days wouldn't be that bad. Skria had suggested that cutting the travel time in half would be more prudent and still leave them plenty of time for the round trip. Lilijoy couldn’t bear to take any longer than absolutely necessary, and her argument had prevailed. Now it seemed like Skria was right.

Guess I should have listened to the person who’s actually done it.

Putting her regrets aside, Lilijoy ran as best she could given the circumstances. Boughs thrashed and snapped around them as she reached the trees in a roar of wind and dove into a brush-filled gully. Skria’s spell ceased.

The abrupt silence was shocking, and for a moment, all Lilijoy could hear was the sound of their breath and pounding hearts.

“Did we lose them?” Skria ventured.

“Hope so. How are your legs?”

“Still attached. I can’t really bear to look.”

“Are you losing health?”

“Slowly. I think it will stop before I respawn. I didn’t want to waste a treatment.”

“Okay. I’ll get myself up about halfway, then I’ll see what I can do for you.”

Lilijoy regretted dropping her field medicine class because it would have no use on the Outside. Even though her Healing was at Augmented Apprentice, projecting her Prana to heal others, particularly non-human others, was inefficient.

It was more of the skill within a skill issue she had run into repeatedly Inside; the Magi portion of a skill was far from an automatic boost. Her weapons skills were lagging far behind her Unarmed Combat as far as that went, to the point that Rosemallow had advised her not to bother using weapons unless her opponent had very low Invulnerability. Her unarmed Qi strikes were mana based and able to circumvent INV.

Despite this advice, her trainer had gifted her an ironwood cudgel.

“You’re going to run low on mana from time to time. Also, it’s just nice to have a weapon in your hand sometimes. You can practice mixing Qi strikes from your off-hand and feet while you swing this around.”

The cudgel was about the length of her arm, and Lilijoy enjoyed the way it felt in her hand. She had done enough training with similar weapons over the past couple weeks to have raised her skill to Augmented Apprentice, though she still hadn’t figured out any of the Magi tricks for club use.

She still missed her evil knife, and felt it was a little unfair that Magpie got to keep the cool Sources from the Trial, while she didn’t get to keep her weapon.

“Sources are different,” Professor Anaskafius had explained the previous week. “They become part of your essence. Make sure you stay alert on your travels, because you never know when a Source will call.”

Guess I shouldn’t have dropped the Basic Elements of Magic class either. Then I might actually know what to look for.

Despite her regrets about all the classes she had stopped attending, Lilijoy knew she had made the right decision. All of this Inside stuff was a means to an end. She had already made plans to leave the monastery on the Outside and meet Anda. As soon as the instanced travel was done, she would log out and let Magpie do all the annoying negotiations and prep work in Averdale Forest.

Lilijoy and Skria were still healing when the sounds of a large body moving through the woods several hundred feet away came to them.

I sure hope that’s Jess, Lilijoy thought.

After a minute of listening to heavy footsteps and snapping branches, she heard Magpie’s voice in a pitched whisper.

“Stop making so much noise! You’re going to bring in every monster within a mile.”

“Sorry,” Jess whispered back.

Lilijoy felt like that was a little unfair. After all, they had walked through the woods for several hours without any particular attempt at stealth. It wasn’t until they reached the fields at the edge that they had been attacked.

When they first began their journey, the Instance formed around them gradually, the sunny fields around the academy turned into steadily darker woods as they walked, the landscape around them blurring slightly, until the trees became dense and blocked their view. The first real surprise was the fall of night, about eleven hours early.

“That’s not a good sign,” Skria said at the time. “Night travel instances are hard.”

“You mean it’s going to stay dark the whole two days?” Magpie asked.

“It’s only my second time. But yes, that’s usually how it goes. If we had done it slower, it could have been grassy fields in morning sun the whole time.” There was a hint of reproach in her voice.

“What if we’d done it in hours?” asked Lilijoy.

“I don’t know. Swimming maybe? I’ve heard of lava fields too. Travel Instances adapt to our strengths and weaknesses, so we can’t be complacent.”

Too bad she didn’t take her own advice.

Lilijoy decided to risk calling out before their party separated again.

“Jess! Magpie!”

After a moment of silence, Jess’s crunching footsteps started up, moving in their direction. Soon the party was reunited.

“Well, that was a total shitstorm,” whispered Magpie.

“I’m sorry,” said Skria.

“We can’t separate like that. Stupid Inside with its stupid lack of party chat. Stupid rocks,” Magpie added, somewhat inexplicably.

“What was that about rocks?” asked Lilijoy.

“This stupid place uses rocks to communicate over distances.” Magpie let out a sigh of disgust.

“Any whole object split up can work with the right enchantment,” Skria clarified. “But geodes and certain crystals work the best.”

“Why didn’t we get some?” Lilijoy asked. She had another thought. “Why can’t Magpie and I message back and forth?”

“We’d need to log out,” Magpie replied. “Outside communications are funky here, and they almost never work when you actually need them. Even logging out doesn’t always work.”

“Communication crystals are really hard to get,” added Skria. “Some high-level parties get rings made, but it costs more gold than we’ll see anytime soon.”

Is this more of the Inside trying to be realistic? thought Lilijoy. Or maybe trying to be fair to the Insiders?

Her musings were interrupted by Jessila moaning.

“Those birds really sting.”

Lilijoy looked over at Jess. Her cow hides were in tatters, and she could see red lines crisscrossing her skin. At least she wasn’t wearing her cloak.

“Jess, they do a lot more than sting. How did you avoid getting sliced up like me and Skria?”

She knew Jessila’s INV wasn’t any higher than hers. Although her braids from Mr. Sennit got it pretty close.

“Ability. Denser.”

That made sense. Jessila’s Juggernaut ability raised her mass the faster she moved. Lilijoy had just never thought of the implications beyond running into things.

“So now what?” Magpie asked. “Can we cower in the woods for a couple days?”

“A bush of no-berries to that!” Skria replied with alarm in her voice. “Uh, I meant to say,” she continued, “no, that would be a very bad idea. We must keep moving. Once committed to a travel instance, very bad things will happen if we stop for more than a quarter portion of our chosen time."

“So what then?” Lilijoy chimed in. “Should we finish healing and make a run for it? Skria, did you see what was on the other side of the clearing?”

“Hills and scrub after the fields I think.”

“There might be cover there, but what about other enemies?” asked Magpie. “I don’t want to run from one danger into another. I’ve got the beginnings of an idea. Lets talk it over while you two finish healing.”

***

“I don’t like this idea any more!” Skria wailed over the bone jarring thud of Jessila’s gait. Huge clumps of grass and dirt flew up behind her as she powered across the field, with Lilijoy and Skria tucked in each arm like squirming footballs.

“They’re coming!” Magpie yelled. “Start the circle, Jess!”

Jessila groaned with effort as she began to curve her path, straining her powerful muscles to override the momentum of her Juggernaut ability. The first vorpal crow arrived as a humming slash, sketching a new red line across Jessila’s neck. Its sound dopplered as new crows arrived, slashing air and flesh.

Lilijoy could tell Jessila was struggling. The effort of running in a circle was slowing her down and diluting her ability, which enabled the crows to cut much deeper than before. She poured as much Prana as she could into Jessila, trying to mitigate the worst of the bleeding. It had been her idea to be carried for exactly this reason, despite her mixed feelings about being hauled around by a larger person yet again.

“Spell!” Magpie called out, followed by a string of curses that Lilijoy could only assume meant that the wiry girl had been hit by a crow as she ran alongside them. Across Jessila’s torso, Skria incanted the four words that focused her spell components, her voice broken by the jarring footsteps of her carrier.

“Air Aspect Altered Cloud!”

A stinking gas that reminded Lilijoy of the dead Amazon swamp burst into existence all around them.

“Again!”

Skria cast the spell several more times as they ran. The slashing buzz of the crows blurred and blended as more and more gathered around them, undeterred by the foul aroma. Lilijoy felt a glancing blow to her dangling legs. Looking up, she could see contrails of blood mist tracing the path of the crows attacking them.

“Head in!” Magpie cried, her voice weak.

Jess canceled her ability and turned to the center of the circle she had transcribed on the field, while Skria began one last spell. They huddled in a pile, under Jessila’s protective bulk, as the winds around them picked up and began to circulate, gathering the gas into a stinking cyclone.

“Here we go... Air Charge Projected Bolt!”

The spark leapt from Magpie’s outstretched hand.

Lilijoy felt the air pulled from her lungs as the air swirling around them became a fiery vortex. The explosive force of the ignition followed, pressing Jessila down on to her, which was for the best, as the heat singed all the parts of her that were unprotected. Over the roar of the flames, she could hear Skria whimpering and Magpie cackling wildly.

“I finally got to blow shit up!”