I could probably avoid being attacked for a few more moments if I dodged back into the palanquin.

  The blood was turning Poppy’s blue robes purple.

  “Poppy… What… What about the story?” I called, stupidly. What the hell happened to my seven Intelligence points?

  “You wouldn’t know, would you…?” she shouted back, her voice a biting dog. “The Tale of Ye Xian… A girl is orphaned and left to the mercy of her stepfamily, and all she has to keep her comfort is a goldfish. In the end, she marries the prince and they live happily ever after… But there’s an alternate ending.”

  Maybe if I tried to get to where Jesse and the others were… There were too many people in the way. I grabbed a spear from the ground where someone had dropped it. It was ceremonial only, excessively decorated and weighted wrong, but at least it gave me some reach. I swung it back and forth like I was trying to shoo flies at a barbeque. What an embarrassing way to die this would be.

  Poppy was still shouting at me over the din. “The prince becomes the king, the king becomes greedy, and the people begin to suffer.”

  “The people aren’t-”

  “People always think they’re suffering, Maria,” Poppy said sarcastically.

  “What… What are you trying to do?” I yelled back, still brandishing the absurd spear. It was so heavy.

  “I’m trying to live, Mik Tsaam.”

  “You didn’t have to-”

  “Why are you so na?ve?” Poppy screamed. Tears streamed down her face. Her expression was horribly twisted, the beautiful, elegant image she had so carefully cultivated melting like a cake left in the sun. I had never seen her this way. Even when she had cried in the past, over breakups and her mother’s greedy pressure, she still looked like an actress in a drama.

  I didn’t recognise this bitter, howling woman with the reddened face and the slowly purpling robes. But she seemed far more real than the previous Poppy. Her anger was a force that was crushing us all and I wished desperately that I had known this side of her before today.

  I wish I’d known her.

  The speartip dipped, and I fought to raise it again. My ribs burned.

  If I told her I was sorry, would that change anything?

  Probably not. What was I even apologising for? I couldn’t even begin to guess what was going on in Poppy’s head. Especially not with three armed men advancing towards me, now that I was struggling to lift the spear again.

  Wait. Now it was two. What…?

  One of the men fell forwards, a knife buried in the back of his head.

  I looked wildly in the direction the knife had come from, and found a pair of electric blue eyes staring back at me. Then Jesse was pushing Han Sung-hyuk’s head down and forcing him and Jihee towards the back of the room. I assumed there had to be a hidden escape route.

  “Maria!” Jesse roared. “Get out of here!”

  I managed to lift the spear and trip one of the men, but the other one was still coming after me, so I dropped the weapon and turned to run.

  My brain froze along with my shoulder. A sword tip jutted through my body, at the edge of my vision.

  I’d never felt a pain like this before.

  At least when Han Sung-hyuk injured me in the tutorial, the pain was momentary, there and gone like a spark from a fire.

  This pain burned all my rationality.

  Runrunrunrun

  The sword slid out.

  I couldn’t see. I couldn’t hear. I was a senseless, screaming thing formed only of pain and fear.

  I stumbled over something, a body, perhaps, and hit the ground.

  Get up!

  Forget the pain!

  You’ve had worse!

  Move, you stupid bitch!

  I staggered up, turning to see where my assailant was. My hand, clutching at my shoulder, was red as my robes. The fishy, metallic smell was so strong as I tried to will my heart to slow, to stop pumping my precious blood out of my body.

  Poppy. I’m sorry.

  “Stop looking at me like that, you idiot!” she screamed.

  Had I spoken out loud?

  She was running towards me, or maybe I was just falling through a tunnel. My vision was fuzzy and dark at the edges. I should probably cast Heal on myself…

  Get up.

  I stood up and stumbled away from the man with the sword, light-headed but upright. Poppy was running towards me, but she didn’t seem to be armed, so what was she doing?

  As the man raised the sword again, she jumped on his back with a cry. “I didn’t mean for this to happen!”

  Reflexively, the man threw her off and slashed with his sword.

  The first experience of seeing someone sliced apart is…Well, I could say it’s something you can’t prepare for. I could say that luckily, most people would never see such a thing, except as a special effect in a movie.

  I could.

  I couldn’t describe how I felt.

  The blade crushed her collarbone first. I heard the crunch, the wet tear. It kept going, a diagonal slash that finally halted at her sternum.

  She screamed.

  The fighter yanked at the sword, trying to dislodge it. He had to pull several times before it came free.

  She didn’t die immediately. Arterial blood pumped rapidly across her beautiful face. She was voiceless, the excruciating pain stealing the air in her lungs.

  The man with the sword raised it towards me again, and I couldn’t have dodged it. Not with my shitty Dexterity and my friend bleeding out before me.

  And then she died.

  I was in the lobby again.

  Text boxes kept flashing up before my eyes. I couldn’t read any of them.

  To be honest, what could I do? There was some part of me that was screaming get up! But it was distant, almost inaudible. It didn’t have the strength to pull me from the floor.

  I sat motionless.

  I was shaking, at least. Had the lobby always been this cold?

  The room spun.

  I came to on the floor. Or what I thought was the floor. It might have been the ceiling, for all I could focus.

  Poppy was…?

  My mind shied from the thought immediately. I pushed shakily from the floor and tried to focus on the windows of text.

  I read and re-read the lines over and over without absorbing them in the slightest, then finally dismissed the text box and turned to the next.

  Dismissed.

  “THE FUCKING WHAT?” I screamed as a new window began to resolve itself in the right side of my vision.

  I scrolled down.

  I kept scrolling. Tommy? Were any of these Tommy? Was it ‘ilovecatvideos’? ‘Vocaloid_Fan’? God, there were so many names. How many people had been playing?

  Shit. Rohan?

  Red?

  Had this happened back in the second scenario? There was no way of telling. The kill feed simply joked about each death without further detail.

  If the six of us had been safely sitting in Poppy’s living room, stuffing our faces with the snacks Lee Wai Meng had brought, the tone of the kill feed probably would have us intensely amused.

  As it was, I wanted to throttle the game devs right now.

  More importantly, what did this mean? Had he woken up in the real world? Respawned?

  Actually…?

  “Dead, Mik Tsaam,” I hissed aloud. “Fucking say it.”

  My voice sounded awful, as if I’d just come out of a four-hour karaoke session.

  Ah. I guess I’d been screaming then.

  More slowly, I read back over the list of names in the kill feed, lingering on the ones I remembered. I was so cold now that I was shaking violently.

  I wanted to throw up my guts. I thought I might, until I was puking blood.

  The pressure in my head was so intense that perhaps I would die from my brain exploding instead.

  I wasn’t going to think about the Kill Feed. There was no evidence that anyone on that list was actually dead. They just weren’t in the game anymore. Until it was proven to me that they were really gone… Until then…

  I tried to stand.

  Oh, right. 2HP.

  I retrieved the ham sandwich and forced it down my throat, retching and hating myself. When my HP was maxed once more, I looked at the Kill Feed again. There were no new names. No Excellent_Ruthless_Woods or Han_Sung-hyuk or KuraiChuuGeemu.

  If they died…

  They’re not dead. No-one’s actually dead. Shut up.

  I scrolled back down.

  However, there was someone who was going to wish they were dead if I caught them.

  10 Experience Points. I opened the skill tree.

  I’d been stupidly careless. I needed to invest my points into combat skills.

  I’d already passed the point of diversifying my class, so I had to try something else.

  There was a sight skill to boost Perception as well, but I ignored it and loaded all my points into Divine Wrath, boosting it all the way to Level 4. At this level, it could take 5HP from whoever it hit.

  My dagger was gone. Not that it had been particularly helpful, but there was no point in dwelling on it.

  Scenario Three was over. Rohan and Poppy were out of the game, if that’s even what was going on here. Gates One to Three were closed.

  There was no way out but forward.

  I stared at the textbox.

  What kind of vague bullshit was this? ‘Life is about to change significantly’? How?

  I’d never even heard of this fairytale before. Poppy –

  Poppy was gone.

  Moreover, Red was here. What role would he be playing? I sincerely hoped he wasn’t the Magistrate’s son. The urge to kill him would make passing my tasks very difficult. Was that why this scenario was considered ‘Hard’?

  I was sitting on a swing, it appeared, with a river lazily sparkling nearby and the green grass whispering as it brushed the soles of my slippered feet. My short hair was plaited, with a heavy sash or ribbon attached at the tiny tail of hair.

  I examined my outfit. I was wearing some kind of white dress that was tied high on my chest, and a short jacket to top it off. I could feel several layers of skirts and a pair of pants under the dress as I rocked back and forth; I seemed to be wearing traditional Korean clothing.

  No wonder I didn’t recognise this fairytale. I knew very little about Korean folklore, which was interesting, now that I thought about it. I roughly knew of fairytales like Rapunzel, which had come all the way over from Germany, but not a tale from a country next door?

  Philosophical musings on euro-centricity and globalisation aside, I had to decide what to do next. A little breeze was blowing, and in the late spring air, rhododendrons were blooming all around me. The only sound I could hear was birdsong.

  Let me have this, just a little longer.

  I closed my eyes.

  “You?”