79

Downpour

When he saw Rian, GM Silver froze. “What is this?” he said. “What’s happened to you?”

To Rian’s confusion, he’d said it in a way that was oddly concerned. As if he were seeing someone familiar.

Then slowly, steadily, GM Silver’s appearance began to shift. His hair turned from white to gray. His eyes were hazel. His face was no longer youthful. He had the look of a stern, Japanese businessman.

Rian shrunk back. All the air left his lungs.

“Rian,” GM Silver said. “It’s me.”

“No.” Rian’s voice cracked. “My dad’s dead. He died in a… What the hell? Is this some kind of joke? I just saw Mom for the first time in a year and now—”

“I know it’s a lot.” Dad held out his hands, cautious. “But I’m alive.” He shook his head, glanced down. “I’m sorry, I must’ve overlooked you while I was dealing with Pitune. I didn’t think you’d…”

Rian had never actually seen his dad after the accident. After the truck had hit him—supposedly—the body had been horribly mangled. The funeral, at least twelve years ago, had been closed-casket.

“You’ve been alive,” Rian said, “all this time? Where were you?”

“I understand that you’re in a bit of shock, Rian. I’m sure you’ve been going through a lot up to this point. You’ll need time to process all of this. But I can explain.” He was quiet for a moment. “I’m the admin of the game. I’ve been working—”

“You’ve been working. Instead of, what, being a father? You left us.” It poured out of him with uncontrollable rage, sparking dry tinder that had always been inside him, waiting to ignite. “Did you even know Mom was sick? That she was dying?” Rian muttered, “Oh my god. You had to’ve known. You left her to die alone.”

“With what I’ve accomplished, she won’t die, Rian. She can live indefinitely in this world.”

“I don’t…understand.” Rian’s voice shook. He held his hands to his head, then flinched when he remembered he had horns. It felt like he was going more insane each second. He couldn’t breathe. “Did you…fake your own death? Why?”

Dad shook his head. “Would you believe anything I say?”

“Tell me.”

“I did it for you. And for Emily. Because we’re—”

“No,” Rian said. “Don’t you dare claim to be my family. Get away from me. It’s like I don’t even know you, and now you’re trying to tell me—”

“Rian, please. Just listen for a moment. On top of that tower, Emily has Yindra locked down. Yindra is planning to cross through the Bridge, the portal that joins Miriad and Earth. We can’t control her for much longer. If she gets free—”

“I don’t care. Why would I care about anything you have to say anymore?” Rian swatted his arm at him, stepped away. “If Yindra wants to destroy the Earth, then let her!”

Dad went pale. “You’re losing control, Rian. You’re not used to that body yet. The Loyalist side of you is taking up the missing ten percent of your mind. You’ve been deceived. They’ve tricked you into aiding them. I can help. Let me run diagnostics, and we’ll…”

Rian simply stared at him.

Dad sighed. To Rian’s surprise—and disgust—Dad was starting to tear up. “It’s too late, isn’t it?” His voice was much quieter. “They took you from me.”

“If you actually cared about me,” Rian said, “then why didn’t you do anything when I entered this world?”

“I didn’t know. It’s Yindra, Rian. She’s been interfering, plotting against us since the very beginning. My employees have always been struggling to keep up with her schemes.” He swallowed, glanced nervously in another direction. Toward the black tower. “I had no idea you were here, Rian. I knew you were going to enter the game eventually. I just didn’t know when. You’re still in there, aren’t you? It’s not just him…”

“But…no, it was you, wasn’t it?” Rian said. “The implant. If you’re in charge of Reflect Systems, then it had to be you who ordered that. When I was in the coma.”

Dad’s jaw tightened for a moment. “I did. I wanted to give Emily another chance to see you again. To revive you, in a way—to make a virtual mapping of your brain to exist in Mirage. But it’s so much more than that. Don’t you see it, Rian? You succeeded in contacting Emily in the past. You’re living proof that the Mirage System works—that we can create a deterministic path and adjust the outcome of future events here. We can control the future, Rian!”

Rian grit his teeth in an attempt to contain his anger, then said, “You don’t care about me. You were just using me. For your own sake.”

“We have to stop Yindra first,” Dad said. “She corrupted the future I planned. I underestimated just how deceitful she could be, even while she’s being contained. I never thought she could go as far as hacking the implant before we gave it to you.”

He frowned and stared at the floor for a moment.

“I’ve been piecing it together,” Dad said. “Everything went as she’d intended—to recruit you, turn you to their side, and then hollow out part of your mind and replace it with a Loyalist’s soul. Like a parasite. They hid you from me, Rian. Don’t you understand? The Loyalists were obscuring your presence from us by tying it to a loophole in the tutorial instances. You must’ve been walking around inside a nested tutorial instance, this whole time. It made you invisible to us.”

All while Dad talked, Rian could tell he was doing something else. Manipulating the System. He was preparing something. Tendrils of control were slowly surrounding Rian at a distance.

Rian snuffed it out, extinguishing the latent System commands like dispersing smoke with a hand.

Dad recoiled. “You can see it?”

“It’s the System, isn’t it? What were you trying to do? Ban me?”

Dad was flustered now. Guiltily, he said, “I was trying to revoke your GM privileges. That idiot Nephim. I can’t believe he made you an intern. He just happened to stumble across your ticket and—”

“So you don’t trust me. You went through this whole spiel to get me on your side, and you don’t even trust me.”

“You shouldn’t have access to GM permissions, Rian. It’s too dangerous. Not while you’re like that. You’re breaking the System.”

“Guess you’ll just have to pry it from me.”

Dad chewed his lips. “We don’t have to do this, Rian. Listen to reason. Please. You’re not like this.”

“You don’t know anything about me. I wonder whose fault that is?”

“Oh, come now. Is this the rebellious teenager phase you never got to have with me? Or is this the other side of you? The Loyalist.” His flash of anger subsided as quickly as it had risen. He drew himself up. “No, we can work this out like adults. I’m not going to fight you.”

“Good.” Rian spat. “Then die already.”

He activated Mirage: Flux. Then he did the same thing as Corvis when Rian had first seen him use the skill: he dumped almost all his stats into INT, then branched those stats into Perception.

Rian’s body thinned as if his muscles had partially wasted away.

But now he could see everything. He could feel the wind moving a mile away. He heard the rustling of dead leaves on the other side of the Penumbra. And he could see a shimmering light suffusing the space around him.

He swiveled, cast Vital Strike, and punched the air to his left. His fist broke space itself. When he reached through, it felt like his arm was passing through several universes, all possible iterations until he found what he wanted: an isolated command like a knot in space-time.

It was Obliteration—the physical manifestation of the keyword within the System itself.

Rian grabbed hold of it.

He tried to bind it onto his dad’s Vessel, but it wasn’t working. Something was in the way as if a special armor existed around him. It was some kind of hard-coded protection within the System, making it physically impossible to destroy his Vessel.

Rian couldn’t kill him. But he could still manipulate things, force his will onto the System and bend it.

So he found the commands to activate GM Silver’s HUD, then forcefully triggered the log-out function.

And Dad—no, just GM Silver—merely stood there with despair in his eyes as blue particles swarmed around him. He vanished in the haze.

Silence fell upon the Penumbra again. Rian waited, listening for any changes in the System. But nothing else happened.

Not only had it worked, but GM Silver didn’t log back in. No surprise counter-attack. Either he’d given up, he’d lost access to the Penumbra, or he was waiting until a later moment to show up again.

Then it hit Rian: time was moving so fast in the Penumbra compared to the Overworld—and to Earth—that GM Silver had probably lost synchronization with the events happening here. Wherever Pitune had warped him earlier, it probably wasn’t outside of the Penumbra, and so the time deficit hadn’t kicked in. Even if GM Silver was logging back in immediately, there would be a huge delay before he could return.

And hopefully that would be enough time for Rian to finish up here.

At the destroyed end of the arena, the Second Gate remained. It had survived the collateral damage from Pitune’s attacks, unsurprisingly. The whole construct was probably a nullshard.

Rian approached the Second Gate. One more fight, he thought.

One more person in the way.