We logged out that nite without signing up for the Final Stage, which felt like the first genuinely grown-up decision any of us had made since this whole thing started.
The next morning we met Mira in person, not avatars, real-world faces over a video call Dario set up once we all admitted this had stopped being a conversation you could have through party chat. Her avatar looked younger than she felt, and more tired, and the moment I mentioned the Warden's Fragment singing in sync with the flickering behind my eyes, her face went white as a sheet, all color draining out in one fell swoop."One of those," she said he had. "Almost done. He did it once. He deleted the message an hour later, like he wished he never said anything.What did it say?""That it seemed less like an object and more like it was *listening.*"
There was silence on the line. No one said anything."Okay," Sana said finally, always pulling us back toward something practical. So we have something that might be some kind of... I don't know what to call it. Recording equipment? Consciousness bite? And we have 13 more days until Final Stage registration closes. "What do we do with that, really?""We study it," said Dario. "Slowly. Don't dress it, don't do anything with it but look at it until we know more.""Agreed," I said, and I meant it. The fragment had been in my inventory since the Gauntlet, unequipped, untouched, and every time I opened my bag it sat there at the top of the list like it wanted my attention specifically.
Mira offered to help where she could, which was mostly digging through what was left of the forum backups, cross-referencing every scrap of information about players who'd disappeared the same way her brother had. It was not a short list. Four more names appeared after a few days of careful but exhaustive searching, none as widely publicized as her brother's top-three ranking, all quietly deleted from every database within days of their own attempts at the Final Stage, all last seen active in a Trial cycle."Four that we know of," she said, transmitting the compiled list over a call two days before registration closed. "There may be more the company caught before anyone saw the pattern.They all made it to the Final Stage," Alex read through the names slowly. "Every one of them."All of them," Mira confirmed. "Either Final Stage is where whatever this is actually goes down, or Final Stage is just where the company can no longer hide what's been happening the whole time."
Finally, Tommy, who had been uncharacteristically quiet for most of this, spoke. "So, walking away is still an option. No one's forcing us to register." "It is," I said. I say that loud and clear so that no one feels like the weak link if they want to back out. Any of you want out, I mean it. No hard feelings, not the least bit.
There was silence for a moment. Then, as expected, Dario broke it first. "You're still going in, aren't you?"Yeah."Then we are going in too obviously. We didn't go through thirteen days of training and battle with a twenty foot rock monster just to let you go off alone as the mysteriously vanished hero. I already said this to you, and it is still true.
When it came time to vote, it wasn't even remotely a surprise this time. Five more yeses, quicker than the first vote, steadier too, like knowing exactly what we were walking into made the decision easier not harder.
That evening the Final Stage registration opened. I stared at the confirm button for a long moment, the Warden's Fragment unequipped at the top of my inventory, humming faintly still, still keeping time with something behind my eyes I was beginning to suspect wasn't going to stay quiet much longer.
I click confirm.
**"Final Stage Registration: Confirmed. Countdown: 11 days."**
*To be continued…*