I came back to consciousness with a ragged gasp. For an uncountable moment, I’d been with Archive again, in whitespace. It felt like a dream, following a night terror.

  Four lives left.

  I shot upright, eyes wide, bed rocking at the violent motion. Was I back at Bauring Dath? Looking around, the room looked the same as always, sparsely decorated with wooden bunks and chests. I resurrected at the last place I slept.

  My hands slid over my body. I was wearing the jacket and shirt I had on before—now both were fucking crop tops. I’d been sliced in two. God.

  I checked my inventory. Everything was still there, but for the few items I shoved into Jake’s inventory for safekeeping. Having never died before, I didn’t know if I’d have a hard reset. Checking my Stats, I realized I’d lost everything.

  I was back to level one, but retained the Rep and items that I’d gained thus far. Guess it could have been worse.

  Fear slammed into me as the flashing party status lit up my HUD. Jake, Akilah, and Elora were still in combat. I launched off the bed and clattered down the stairs. Alga and her customers barely had time to cast me a glance as I burst past them, out the door.

  I ran until I got to the edge of Subterania, slowing to look up at the sky. My head was jumbled, brain cramping as I tried to remember which cave we’d gone into. I looked at the barren dirt for tracks.

  It was hard-packed, but hints of cloven prints led me on. Their life pools stopped dropping, and the flashing on their status bars had reduced in frequency. By the time I found the cave, the flashing had stopped.

  “You okay, guys?”

  Jake: “Dath! Oh dude, you got sliced like a sandwich. It was disgusting.”

  “Death gets one star. Overrated.”

  Akilah: “If you’re done being dramatic, drop us a rope.”

  “Harsh.”

  I made my way back to the cliff and found the chunk of rock I’d braced against before, then tossed the rope down, winding it around my back and fist to keep it steady. Akilah came up first and struggled around her robes to get onto the ledge. She came around to stand behind me. I could feel her eyes on me as I steadied the next climber.

  The rope tugged harder with Jake’s weight, but he had an easier time getting over the edge with a flap of wings and no long garments to trip him up. He clattered over and put his hands on my head, scruffing up my hair.

  Elora came up last, quick as a squirrel. I stood up and dusted off. The rope in my hand vanished into my inventory the same moment the elf launched herself at me with a hitching sob.

  “That was awful!” She choked, arms tight around my now bare midsection.

  I guess the reality of it all sunk in when I died. It was sinking in for me. Four lives left. Then stasis—until the last star faded from the universe, for all any of us knew. I smoothed her hair and met Jake’s gaze. Then I looked at Akilah.

  “We have to get smarter about this. Plan, prepare, execute. We put ourselves in a bad position and had nowhere to fall back to. Never again,” I stated firmly.

  That was as much for me as everyone else. I had to get serious and stop reacting. Take control. Get ahead of the game before it played me, again.

  I felt like we’d been a bad influence on Akilah, too, because she hadn’t said anything. Or. Had she just let it play out to see what happened? Damn, was she that calculating?

  I wanted to believe she wasn’t that heartless.

  “I’ll admit, I went berserk when you died. We wrecked that boss fast, after you got bisected,” Jake grinned, but his voice wavered, chin trembling. He was one step from crying like Elora.

  “Nice. I hope you got good loot from that. My reward was being dropped to LVL 1,” I said it as if I was bragging. Sarcasm is the best defense for anything.

  “So you got a soft reset,” Akilah confirmed, rubbing her chin.

  That did not help my suspicions.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I suggested, turning towards the entrance. “You guys need some deserved R&R, and I need to grind XP to catch back up.”

  Elora let go of me and sighed, “I need alcohol.”

  “That’s the spirit,” I joked.

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  Jake groaned. Akilah shot me a disapproving look. Puns were worse than sarcasm.

  We walked to the Candlewick, and on the way, the demon gave me back what I’d left in his inventory when I died. When we stopped in the dimness of the Twilight street, Jake showed me some of the loot. “Here, look. Bug Eye Marble. Remember the slime cores? They’re like that. They can boost item stats or be used as reagents.”

  “Cool.” I looked at the small white balls in his palm. He handed them to me, along with some of the quartz earned from the extermination. My brows lifted hopefully. “That wasn’t the Den, was it?”

  “Don’t think so. After this, we can turn in the mandibles to see. Elora has them.” Jake tipped his horned head in the elf’s direction.

  “You sure you don’t want to take a breather?” Akilah asked, wringing her staff in her fists.

  Oh, now she was feeling guilty? Maybe it was all in my imagination. Maybe I was just paranoid. I shook my head. “I have to get back to LVL 6. My Rep is the only thing holding our party’s edge.”

  I left them there, at Candlewick, and went on a hard grind. All the low-level jobs were open to me, but this time I did them faster and more efficiently. I knew where to find the markers. I knew in advance what items were needed. I understood the mechanics. The grind was streamlined so that it only took me two days to get back to LVL 5. I didn’t do the Heartland quests again. Fuck that emotional damage.

  I found a weapons trainer right in Bauring Tok Kraup Patarshan, though in a weird place. A gray-haired orc was lounging to the side of the baobab tree where the NPC child’s kite was always stuck. I’d just hit LVL 5 and was walking past, planning my next moves on my minimap when something whacked my shin hard enough to stop me.

  I glanced down at the crusty old lizard and bared my teeth.

  “Rau’dajal, food get me,” he wheezed, showing me a big snarl with few teeth and a broken tusk.

  Kindness was not a gift here. It was allowing others to bully you. I’d seen it at work from my perch on the stool at the far end of Alga’s bar. Getting him food would be adopting him. I didn’t know this old codger from the next orc. But he spoke to me, and seemed more curious than most.

  He didn’t shun me. He spoke to me. I glanced over at the biggest yurt, well across the field from the trees. No one had said it, but I figured that was where the strongest orcs lived. It wasn’t a place for a strange half-orc like me to go poking around, and ironically, the place where orcish warriors would be.

  Like the rest of the population in Convergent City, the abductee players were much fewer in number than the NPCs populating it. But maybe he knew things. No one else would talk to me, since NPCs didn’t talk about anything other than their assigned purpose.

  Akilah had asked around to get her insight into the tasks up to level 6. It wouldn’t hurt to buy him a bowl of Alga’s potatoes in trade for knowledge. He thwacked my shin again, and I growled, fists clenching.

  “Fault yours, move not,” he chuckled like a demented grandpa.

  “Teach me,” I crouched beside him. His rough clothes were dusty, threads worn to bare spots on his shoulders. I gestured from me to him, “Food get you.”

  He grunted and looked me over. “Acceptable.”

  They loved looking at me like I was a zoo animal. There were no others like me, here. There was another orc player, briefly. I saw him in passing and hadn’t seen him since. As for half-orcs, there were none.

  I was an anomaly. Passable, but barely, a mutant among them.

  I stood, and this time, when he took a swing at me with his cane, I stepped out of the way. “Learn slow, you.”

  Story of my life. I waited for him to hobble to Bauring Dath, walking slowly beside him, dodging his random attacks.

  Voj’Kasak taught me about the old days, before the Great Clever cut him from his world. He told me about the spear warriors and the bloodied blades. He spoke of the glory in war and death. Tan’Fukshan seemed like an orcish version of Odin, in a way; god of wisdom, war, frenzy, and death.

  He sat in the shade of the baobab tree for the ghost of his daughter. That was what the orcs thought of the NPCs in the district; they were ghosts of people, living past events over and over, unable to escape them. The ghosts always returned to the same places, said the same words. He believed they were no longer living, but not quite dead. Kinda sad.

  The kid that begged everyone to rescue her kite must have been similar enough to his daughter to fool him, in his advanced age. He didn’t know how long he’d been in the city. Hadn’t counted the cycles.

  His expression drew long and distant when he described the unchanging days of Convergent City. Few new faces and no new children. No new glory.

  I asked him if he knew how to fight with a blade, and he said he did. But spears were what he’d teach me. He’d test me, first.

  We went out into the back, and on dusty ground he thrashed me with his cane. I couldn’t use Baneheart on him, so I fought with my knife. He had some colorful things to say about my technique. That old man’s words cut sharper than a broodmother’s mandibles.

  At the end of the day, I went to bed. While I was lying there, staring up at the dark grays of the ceiling, I reached out to the others.

  “Any of you awake?”

  Jake: “I am.”

  “Do another training in Symbiot?”

  Jake: “Yeah. Looks like you got to 5.”

  “Yep. Let’s meet tomorrow at the Colosseum, high sun.”

  Jake: “Will do.”

  I didn’t know what else to say, so I left it at that. I took the egg out of my inventory and turned it in my hands. Only two days left to incubate, and then I’d find out what it was. If it was a chicken or some other livestock creature, it was going to Alga.

  If it was something else—well, I’d see soon enough.

  -ARCHIVE-