Elijah groaned internally as the death screen shimmered into view for the second time in as many days.

  [DEATH]

  You have died!

  Time to respawn: 120 seconds.

  Both he and Bo had gained levels from what had happened, and he quickly assigned his stat points before pulling himself out of the bed.

  He stumbled out of the respawn room before he’d even removed his death sickness. He felt miserable emotionally for what he had done to that poor Core and was just self-destructive enough to want to feel physically miserable for a short while. His quest log was trying to get his attention, but he had other things to worry about at this moment.

  A slight glow on one door led him to Bo’s room, and he knocked on it a few times. The rogue opened the door and peered out with a glare that told Elijah that he felt just as miserable.

  “Ready?” he asked weakly.

  Bo looked like he was about to respond before slamming the door closed in Elijah’s face. A moment later he heard the man retching.

  The door opened again another moment later, and Bo stepped out. “If I ever find out whose bright idea it was to code puking into this game, I’m going to kill them,” he muttered as he headed towards the exit to Nethy.

  Elijah followed until they were on the front steps, then activated his teleport ability. He was glad that his spell didn’t come with the nausea and disorientation that Benjamin’s did; otherwise he likely would have joined Bo in trying to empty his already empty stomach.

  Forest replaced the cityscape as the bats returned to Elijah’s shadow. They were now just a couple of minutes walk from the dungeon that they’d agreed to meet the rest of the party at. Elijah leaned heavily against a tree and finally opened his quest log.

  [Quest Complete]

  The Reaper’s Guild

  Description: Congratulations. You have freed a player who the Reapers have imprisoned for weeks. Not only that, but you also destroyed their lair. In doing so, you have also released the Core AI from its years of enslavement by Arturus.

  This will be remembered.

  “Bo? Just how sentient is the AI that arbitrates this game? And how sentient are the AIs that run the dungeon core?”

  Bo looked him over and shook his head. “They aren’t. They’re just advanced processing constructs; they’re not self-aware.”

  Elijah read him his quest completion notification. “That doesn’t sound like self-awareness to you?”

  Bo shrugged his shoulders and gave him a grimace. “I get where you are coming from, Elijah, but we ran countless tests on the AI during development. It’s just flavor text, nothing more. The language model is stringing together words that make you feel the emotion it assigned to the quest. It wants you to feel you did something amazingly humanitarian for both the player and the core.”

  Elijah closed his head, trying to put the thoughts he had felt when connected to the core out of his mind. Bo was a developer for the game, so he knew what he was talking about. But the love and then hatred that the Core had felt in those memories had felt so real to Elijah in the moment.

  “Whether or not it was sentient. I never want to do that again. It felt like a living thing, and I—” He let the thought hang in the air together. They’d both been there. Bo had watched Elijah tear the Core in half. They’d heard the scream as the Core split and the whole dungeon came crashing down on them.

  He opened his menu to look over his new stats.

  [CHARACTER STATS]

  Name: Elijah

  Class: Reality Warper +

  Level: 13 (1765 / 1833 XP)

  Health: 70 / 70

  Mana: 50 / 50

  Strength: 10 (Apprentice)

  Intelligence: 10 (Apprentice)

  Dexterity: 14 (Apprentice)

  Constitution: 14 (Apprentice)

  Skills:

  - Reality Warp - 12

  - Summon Familiar - 6

  - Mass Warp - 2

  - Dragontooth Swarm - 3

  - Dragontooth Teleport - 5

  - Dragontooth Scout - 3

  - Core Breaker - 8

  He’d gained a huge dump of experience from the events within the dungeon. Not as much as he expected, but that Bo was right there with him at level 13 told him they must have split it. Unusual, as the game normally rewarded the full experience to everyone in a party.

  But there had been nothing usual about what they’d done.

  He was happy that his Reality Warp skill had finally reached the Apprentice tier, less happy to see that he’d picked up a new skill related to what he had done.

  “What are we going to tell the others, Bo?” Elijah asked the rogue, trying to hold back the tears in his eyes. He could still feel the core’s sadness about what had become of it. Could still feel its self-pity as it begged Elijah to do what had to be done.

  “Best thing we can do, tell them the truth.” Bo leaned against the tree next to him, breathing deep as another bout of nausea hit him.

  “We took out the Reaper’s base of operations. The rest of the party will be ecstatic; they’ll either have to move out of Raystown or be more open in their actions.” Elijah could see Bo’s point, but the thought of telling the others what he had done still bothered him.

  “They won’t be able to just corrupt another core?”

  Bo shook his head before stopping himself. He scrunched up his face to hold back the bile rising in his throat. “What you told me makes it sound like it was an admin action. Which I know doesn’t sound good.”

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  Elijah agreed with that assessment, even if it struck him as an understatement.

  “Thing is, after we got the bugged message telling us we were trapped in here, I tried reaching out to all the admins I know. There is only one online, but it’s a personal account. He was part of Shardline Midwest, like me—so he wouldn’t have access, anyway.”

  “So there is no one that can help us, and no one watching?” he asked softly.

  Bo shrugged his shoulders. “There might be. But if there is, they can’t help us.”

  He pushed himself away from the tree and stared up at Elijah. “Sorry, bud, but our only hope now is you.” He gestured towards Elijah’s chest. “You and that super bugged out legendary class of yours.”

  Elijah opened his hands and stared at his palms. He could still feel the warmth of the core between his fingers. Could still feel the way it tore apart.

  “We tell the others about the dungeon being destroyed, but not about the Core. Not yet.”

  “Sure,” Bo answered, reaching out a hand to Elijah. “We won’t tell them about the core. At least not yet.”

  The two men made their way towards the dungeon entrance that the rest of their party should be waiting at.

  When they arrived, the dungeon entrance was eerily quiet. No birds sang in the trees, and the sounds of the forest died down entirely as they got closer.

  Bo activated his ‘Sneak’ skill and slipped into the shadows of the world, giving Elijah a light push forward as he did so.

  Bo’s plan was obvious: use Elijah as bait to draw out any trouble.

  He sighed and followed the plan. He trudged forward, his fingers flexing, ready to grab anything that attacked him and ‘warp’ it.

  Then he tripped, not over something, but over someone. He looked back in shock to see the faint outline of Benjamin sitting on the ground in a meditative pose.

  The man stood up, holding his finger to his mouth to keep Elijah silent. “Quiet,” he whispered to Elijah. “I’ll explain in a minute. Where’s Bo?”

  The rogue appeared from behind a brick column of the dungeon entrance. “Here, where are the others?” The rogue asked.

  Benjamin turned and cast his teleport spell. Seemingly unnecessary, as the rest of the party couldn’t be far. He ushered them to go through.

  Bo looked the man over, wanting to argue, but went through without a word. Elijah was about to go through when he felt something strange. The dungeon was calling to him.

  An odd singing played in his mind as he looked at the stone pillars. A light green-grey portal swirled between them. He touched it, feeling the hard stone beneath his fingertips. The singing was coming from within.

  [DEBUG VIEW: Portal to the Undying Library]

  Gate {

  NAME: GATE_UNDYING_LIBRARY_1

  OPENTO: LIBRARY_UNDYING_ENTRANCE

  OPEN_COND: PLAYER_PROXIMITY

  }

  His heart sank low in his chest.

  The Undying Library.

  This place stood as anathema to his very being. To his rightful place as the Dragontooth King. His mind raced back to the Acolyte of the Undying Library. The mini-boss they’d faced in the Abandoned Fort. His Abandoned Fort.

  [New Quest]

  The Library at the End

  Description: You have discovered a place of great power. A great power that threatens your very being. Who built this library, who guards its books, and more important: why was there an Acolyte of this place inside your fort?

  Learn its secrets and then destroy them all.

  The quest notification was clear; he wasn’t hallucinating things. The Celestial-tier class he’d absorbed was linked to this place. He had to resist the temptation to go through the portal now, to delve into its depths and face the challenges, but Benjamin hissed behind him.

  “Elijah!” he whispered in a hushed but insistent voice. “We’ve got to go. Now!”

  He pulled his hand away. He took a deep breath and forced himself away from the dungeon.

  “Okay, Benjamin, let’s go.”

  He reached out with Reality Warp and cancelled the death sickness debuff. He hated using Benjamin’s teleport enough as it was; he wouldn’t do it while already feeling so sick.

  He slipped through the spell and into a clearing. Sasha was already helping Bo to a fallen log by the fire. Nicholas was there to catch him, though he barely needed the help. It was starting to get easier to recover from the teleport, though still no less unpleasant. He heard the ‘vworp’ of the spell dissipating as Benjamin followed them through.

  “Alright! Teleport just levelled up to level three,” Benjamin cheered, only to be met with a demand to quiet down by Nicholas and Sasha.

  “What’s going on? What’s with the secrecy? And how come I couldn’t see Benjamin until I was tripping over him?” Elijah’s questions were rapid fire, and he felt more forming in his mind every second.

  Nicholas eased Elijah down across from Bo and sat down beside him. Elijah would have preferred to sit next to Sasha, but said nothing.

  “Okay, I know you have a lot of questions, and so do we.” Nicholas was eyeing the level indicator above Elijah’s head. “Let me start off by telling you what we found in Nethy.”

  Nicholas, Sasha, and Benjamin watched as Elijah and Bo disappeared in a cloud of bats. Watching the bats swarm still caused Nicholas’ adrenaline to spike and his hands to shake. He let out a heavy breath.

  “Alright. First order of business is the market, then heading over to the dungeon.” Nicholas’ voice was calm but commanding.

  The air of the city felt strange as they travelled. Normally, people would be lining the streets, travelling to and from the city center or its various guilds.

  Today, there was hardly anyone around.

  Nicholas had had enough of the strange feeling and finally stopped a passing player. The woman, her nametag marked her as Lily the level 4 Enchanter, seemed nervous to be stopped by such a large man until she locked eyes with Sasha.

  “What can I do for you?” she asked cautiously.

  “We’ve been off between towns for the last few days. What happened? Why is the city so dead?” Sasha asked her, placing her hand on Nicholas’ shoulder to let him know she would handle this.

  Lily looked her up and down, tilting her head as if she didn’t understand Sasha’s question. “People are scared. The tendrils hit everywhere: the grasslands, forests, dungeons. Even here in the city safe zone.”

  Nicholas felt the blood rush from his face, and Sasha took in a reached gulp of air. Benjamin was the only one who added anything of value to the conversation.

  “Our party was in a dungeon when it happened. We thought it was just us.”

  Shaking her head, Lily looked nervously up and down the street. “I have some friends who play bandit classes. Bandit towns don’t have large temples like we do. They told me that people were getting stuck in the resurrection queue.”

  Nicholas finally righted his thoughts enough to speak again. “That still doesn’t explain why the city is so empty.”

  Lily shifted from side to side, her eyes never stopped darting between the party and the road. “There’s been rumors of Reapers in the city. No safe zones, and we’re all stuck here and can’t log off.”

  The woman ran off after answering the question, and the party let her go.

  “No safe zones.” Benjamin repeated. His voice was shaky as he looked around the city.

  Nicholas clenched his fists. Without his sword and shield, he felt vulnerable. Naked. He had a good amount of strength and health, but with no gear he wouldn’t stand much of a chance against a Reaper even at the same level as him.

  “Benjamin. Take the lead.” He ushered the mage towards the front. “Right now, your spells are the only real offense we have.”

  Benjamin grunted, understanding exactly where Nicholas’ mind had gone. He squared his shoulders, trying to give the impression that he was more confident than he felt.

  “To the market?” His voice cracked slightly.

  Nicholas nodded. “Yeah, to the market.”