“The Midwives think themselves strong. Hah! What little effort it takes to deliver a child of the plague. After all, how careful must you really be with a corrupted fetus?”

Grecia the Witch.

We retraced our steps easily, passing the place where we’d fought the Corrupted Villager. I’d hoped he’d have respawned, giving us a chance to kill him again and work off some of this death penalty, but no such luck. My health had sunk from 105 to 90, which had me feeling even more vulnerable than before. We stayed super wide of the group of villagers we’d passed earlier, and slowed as we approached the Midwife’s territory.

“There they are,” Rey whispered as we peered through the thick shrubs between us and her. Our bodies lay on the ground a few feet from where she sat rocking back and forth again in her chair.

“Gone…gone…gone…” she sang as though she were reciting some mad nursery rhyme composed in an insane asylum.

“Think she’ll agro if we go up to them?” Rey asked.

“Tough to say,” I replied, eyeing up the distance. “But probably.”

“We could try outrunning her.”

“What are you a pansy?” I asked her. “You called her a bitch. Don’t you want to kill her?”

“We don’t even know what level she is!” Rey protested. “What if she’s like that Ravenous Beast and is just impossible to kill?”

“This is a low-level area,” I replied, shaking my head. “She’s got to be killable. Tell you what—I’ll sneak around the back and hit her from behind. If I’m lucky, it’ll score a massive. When she starts attacking me, you go in with everything you’ve got and I’ll try to riposte her.”

“Clay, she got us both with one hit last time.”

“I’m going in, Rey,” I told her, crouching down and eyeing the route I was going to take to get around her. “If you’re not up for it, just head back to town and ask Jacob to hold your hand.”

Rey’s lips twisted into a knot and she scowled at me as she drew her Mortician’s Scalpel and held it at the ready. “Just don’t miss your shot,” she warned me.

“Never. This is a skill based game, remember?” I winked at her, and staying low, I crept through the trees in a wide arc, staying out of what I estimated to be the Midwife’s range. She’d given up singing, and was now humming to herself as she rocked, the slow creak of the chair the only other sound to be heard.

I stepped over a rock slab and the sole of my shoe slipped, causing me to stumble. My foot came down on a small branch, and it snapped loudly. I dropped to my knees and took cover behind a fallen trunk. The Midwife’s humming stopped but I didn’t risk looking back at her. If she saw me, it would blow the whole plan, and I knew I’d hear no end of it from Rey. So I waited.

Finally, the humming began again and I peeked out to see her rocking back and forth like nothing had happened. I kept moving, and it wasn’t long before I was looking at her back, hunched and covered with scraggly hair the color of bone. Gripping my axe tightly, I stalked carefully towards her. Again, she began to sing.

“Little baby…little baby…why…why do you….sleep?”

One foot in front of the other.

The wind scratched my cheeks as I moved towards her. I felt the weight of my weapon, the thickness of its handle and the balance of the blade. I had once shot at this and I had to make it count.

“Gone…gone…gone little baby,” she cooed. “Gone…gone…”

I was close enough. I stopped, choked down on my axe so I was holding it by the last possible inch of the handle, raised it high above my head and brought it down on the old hag’s neck.

Doooooooommmmmm!

The sound of steel rang out in the most satisfying way as I scored a massive blow and I watched with delight as at least a quarter of the old woman’s health vanished. Massive red letters appeared above her.

97

“Who dares!?” she shrieked, leaping to her feet with the same incredible speed I’d witnessed earlier. But this time, I was prepared.

In one swift movement, she slid a hand into her sleeve, withdrew the serrated knife she’d used to kill us both with before, and lashed out at me with an arcing attack that would have cut me from groin to sternum. Would have.

I was ready for her this time, and threw myself backwards out of the way. The retched blade cut nothing but air. Rey emerged from the bushes, her scalpel low and ready to strike. My axe swooshed through the air, striking the Midwife’s left arm. Blood poured out and she howled in rage, dashed forward and stabbed out at my chest. Awkwardly, I did my best to parry the attack with my axe, and managed to make contact, but the blade still caught my chest and peeled off a quarter of my health bar.

As the old bag reached back for another attack, Rey slammed into her and drove her Mortician’s Scalpel into the Midwife’s lower back. It didn’t score a massive blow, but the damage was good, and Rey wasted no time following up with a series of strikes that had the old woman at half health before she could whirl around to face her.

She struck out, slashing Rey heavily across her stomach, dealing tons of damage, but I wasted no time scoring an attack of my own. I brought my axe down like I was chopping wood, and carved open the woman’s back. Blood sprayed everywhere.

MASSIVE!

The Midwife’s cry echoed throughout the woods like a banshee’s screech. She spun around to face me, and as her knife plunged through the air towards me, I raised my blunderbuss and fired.

Perfect.

I roared with delight as I hit my riposte and the old lady dropped to her knees, extra-vulnerable to my next attack.

“Take this!” I shouted as I dropped my firearm, clutched my axe with both hands and gave her everything I had. What was left of the Midwife’s health vanished as my blade embedded itself in her skull. I yanked hard and freed my axe and the terrible old lady groaned, face-planted in the dirt and vanished.

“Take that, bitch!” Rey hollered, vaulting into the air with one arm stretched above her head. I stepped forward to the gorgeous, swirling stack of sweet, succulent Quintessence and grinned at her as the tiny orbs spun around us both, and watched as my 5% death penalty was wiped away.

“Lot of Quint,” I remarked. “More than those villagers.”

I reached down to the glimmering loot stack at my feet and retrieved 11 vials of Soothing Syrup.

“You get five,” I chuckled.

“Five what?”

“Soothing Syrup,” I replied.

“How many are there?”

“Eleven.”

“What!?” she gasped. “Why do you get more?”

“Because I’m a Meat Sack!” I said emphatically. “And I’m going to need to heal more than you are.”

Rey frowned with disapproval. “So, you gimp yourself and I get screwed on loot? Nice plan, Stan.”

“Hey, is there any way to give you these without like…handing you five vials at a time?”

“There should be,” she replied, opening her character sheet. “Ah! Trade window.”

She did something, and an icon pulsed in the lower corner of my vision. I glanced down at it and it expanded into a two columned window with my name on the left and hers on the right.

The 11 vials of Soothing Syrup sat together in a stack in my inventory. I selected them and a slider appeared. I dragged it from 1 to 5, then dragged those 5 over to Rey’s side of the trade window. I pressed the confirm button and my name went green. Rey accepted, her name turned green, and the window vanished. I heard a satisfying chime as the vials moved to her inventory.

“How much Quintessence was that…?” I muttered, glancing over at my character sheet. I was shocked at what I saw.

The Corrupted Villager had given us both 35, but the Midwife had earned us a whopping 180. Hovering my fingers over my progress bar showed that I needed 724 Quintessence to reach level 2, but when I selected my Vitality skill, a green up-arrow appeared showing that I could spend 110 Quintessence to raise it one point from 5 to 6.

“Uh oh,” I smiled. “Here comes the fun part.”

“You mean spending our Quintessence wisely and not completely gimping our characters so we have to spend hours and hours grinding later?”

“Exactly!” I pressed the green arrow and heard a chirping sound like a quick series of high piano notes. My Vitality went up to 6 and my HP increased from 105 to 126. “Okay, it looks like 1 point of Vitality gives you 21 HP.”

Rand—Level 1 Vitality:6 HP = 126 Toughness:5 Strength:5 Skill:5 Viletaint:5 Intellect:5

“I’m going to raise my Skill to 15,” Rey said, doing so. “Glass cannon for life!”

“Come on,” I chuckled. “Let’s get our Quint back off our corpses.”

“Wait, what’s that?” Rey asked, pointing down to my feet. Another object glimmered in the grass below me. For some reason, I’d assumed the Soothing Syrup was all that the Midwife had dropped, but apparently there was more. I reached down and grasped at the gleam and heard the sound of an item entering my inventory. I opened my character sheet and found it. It was a tiny stone, amber colored with pointed crystalline shards poking out in every direction.

Kidney Stone—Appears useless, but somehow seems important. Maybe someone knows what to do with it? Oh, and it stinks to high Heaven!

“What is it?” Rey asked. I replied by reading the item description to her. “Ew! Does it seriously say that?”

“Sure does,” I laughed. “This game is awesome.”

Rey stood motionless for a second, then frowned. “My mom’s calling me from the other side. Can we go back to town real quick and log out?”

“You’re bailing on me already?” I teased, slinging my axe over my shoulder.

“You know my mom,” she replied. “She won’t let me eat dinner if I don’t come when she says to.”

“Oh, come on. Your mom’s nice.”

“Yeah…” Rey replied. “I should get going anyway.”

“Is there a way to recall or anything?” I asked, opening my character sheet. At the very bottom right was a grey button that looked like a slab carved from stone:

RECALL

“Oh, I found it,” I said, hovering my fingers over it. “We good to go?”

“Yup!”

I pressed it and felt myself being whisked away.

The world again went dark, but only briefly. The light of the lamppost shone through the black, expanded and grew, and I found myself back in the center of the town square in Weeping Hills. I braced myself, half expecting Jacob’s voice to ring out with some precocious comment, but none came. I turned and looked around, expecting to find him leaning against one of the shacks, grinning a smug little grin at me, but the town square was deserted.

“Huh,” I muttered as Rey materialized behind me.

“Hey, where is everybody?” she asked, looking around the empty village.

“There,” I said, pointing to the edge of town where a small group of players were standing, gazing out at a field of dead crops covered in a blanket of mist.

“What’s going on?” Rey asked. I shrugged and started walking towards them. They were muttering quietly to each other as we approached.

“What the Hell was he thinking?”

“Just out of the blue like that?”

“And did you see his face?”

Jacob was standing at the front of the pack, hands on his hips, staring out at a bloody path that had been cut through the wilted vegetation that hung listlessly beneath the cold moon.

“What happened?” I asked. Something obviously had everyone all fired up. Jacob turned around and looked at me, but this time, he gave me zero attitude.

“Konrad…he just—”

“Went nuts,” a Seeker with a Bloodletter and frayed suit jacket said slowly.

“What do you mean?” Rey asked.

“We were all just talking by the lamppost,” Jacob replied, his eyes focused inward. “And all of a sudden Konrad just sort of…froze, like he was lagging out or something. Then all of a sudden his eyes…”

Jacob’s stopped and shook his head as though he didn’t even believe what he was saying.

“His eyes what?”

“His eyes went…red,” he continued. “Blood red. And then he just started attacking everybody.”

“He killed Clemence!” Someone cried out angrily.

I had to laugh. “Big deal! So the guy’s a PK. Get over it.”

“It’s more than that!” Jacob snapped at me with an anger I hadn’t seen before. “You didn’t see it. You didn’t see…him…”

I rolled my eyes and turned back to Rey and shrugged. “Carebears,” I whispered. She laughed gently and opened her character sheet.

“Will you be on later?”

“Mom’s working, so yeah,” I replied.

“Great. I’ll holo you. Later.”

“Later.” Rey’s body began to dematerialize in front of me, and I opened my own character sheet, found the logout button and pressed it.

As I did, something unexpected happened.

As before, the world began to fade, but then—lightning.

No, not lightning. Electricity. Purple, coiled and fierce, stabbing through the void with a deathly hiss.

Bzzzzt! Bzzzzzt!

My mind exploded.

Pieces of a world chunked into my vision like pieces of a puzzle, linking, snatching each other to form a vista.

A city, both ruined and grand, stood defiantly against a pouring sky. Great clouds hung like mutated squid over vaulted roofs and cold stone buttresses, stained glass windows and peaked cathedrals.

Bzzzzzttt!

Lightning cut the sky, and the vision changed, cut and I was somewhere else.

Street level.

Around me, countless voices droned in agony. Shadowed figures, human, staggered and swayed against each other. Before me, a great black monolith.

It rose from the ground as if it had grown out of the very core of the world. Its inky surface reflected nothing. In fact, it seemed to soak up light from all around it, like a black hole intent on swallowing up the city.

From everywhere and nowhere, a voice scraped my mind like a cheese grater.

“SEEK THE MONOLITH!!” It roared, causing my soul to quake. “SEEK THE MONOLITH AND FIND SALVATION!!”

Blinding lightning flashed again and the vision vanished, leaving me in blackness. After a moment, I was aware of the feeling of my bed on my back and the Crown on my head. I opened my eyes to the patterns of glow in the dark stars on the ceiling of my room.

“What the Hell was that?”