I said, "Give me five minutes, party. I didn't tell them why."
The fountain at nite was not the same as the fountain during the day, fewer players around, the water's particle effects catching the light in a way that felt almost deliberately cinematic, like the game knew this was a scene and wanted it staged properly.
A single figure stood waiting. Hooded, no name tag above their head (which I didn't even know was a thing in a game where everyone has their name floating over their head by default)."You wrote me," I said. No doubt about it.Instead of hello, the figure said, 'Vanguard. "Where'd you get that class." "It opened. Secret way, warrior evolution. "Why are people so invested in a class that, apparently, doesn't exist?"
The hood dropped. A girl, maybe college age from the face of the avatar, though avatars were always lying about that so it was useless. Her expression was not hostile. If anything, grief seemed to have taken the form of urgency.It's not in the database," she said. "Because it got deleted. Eight months back. And that of the only player who ever had it"."How far away?"Deleted. Edited. Scrubbed. [END OF STORY] All of the leaderboard entries, all of the guild records, all of the forum posts that mentioned his name – vanished in forty-eight hours. I know because I spent every one of those forty-eight hours trying to save copies before they were gone and I still lost most of it."
A cold settled in my chest, not the kind of cold that felt like it belonged to a game running a 10% pain slider.Who was he."My brother. She said it flatly, the way you say things you've had to say so many times that the words stop hurting on the way out, yet everything underneath them clearly still does. Top 3 ranked player on this server. Vanguard class. Same name you're wearing now. He went into a Trial like the one you just qualified for, got to the final stage and never logged out....What you mean never logged out."I mean, his body is still lying in a hospital bed in Astia City — the real one, not the kingdom — and it has been for eight months, and every doctor who has examined him says there is no medical reason why he hasn't woken up. And the official statement from the game company is that he just stopped playing. His account was "voluntarily deactivated."
Behind her the fountain kept on, happy and utterly unconcerned, little particle-effect droplets glinting in the light as if there were nothing wrong in the world."Why message me," I said, quieter. "Why not the company, the police, anyone with real power to—"I did so. The whole lot. Eight months. No one in power wants to touch this, because the moment they touch it they have to admit a VRMMO headset can put someone into a coma, and that is a sentence that ends several very large companies overnight." She moved closer, and for the first time her voice cracked a little, just at the edges. "You're the first person to open that class since him. Not one of its kind. That same hidden condition, same title, same everything. It's either a coincidence, which I don't believe for a second, or the system pulled you down the same path it pulled him and I need to know why before you end up wherever he is."
I thought about that flickering icon that had haunted my HUD for weeks before the Vanguard unlocked. The pulse behind my eyes the nite before the Trials started, the one I never told anyone about. Regarding a class database that had quietly and deliberately removed a person.The Trials." I said slowly. The last stage. What went on in it." "No one knows. That's the whole problem. He went inside. The game logged a completion. He just... didn't come out. No, not at all. No, not exactly.
My private chat notification pulsed once somewhere behind me, quiet enough I almost missed it under the fountain.
Ding! Private Message — Dario: Everything okay? "It's been some time since you left.
Still I didn't answer it. I was still staring at a stranger who had just told me that her brother's mind might be trapped inside of a game that I had signed up for two weeks ago on a whim, wearing a class that the system had tried to make sure that nobody ever found again."What's your name?" I asked. "Actually asking this time.Mira," she said. And you've got thirteen days before your Gauntlet stage begins. I'd be very, very careful about how far you let this class take you."
Just as expected, the flickering behind my eyes returned. It had been listening all along.
* More to follow…*