Chapter Fifteen

  “No,” Jeremy said dully, raising shaking hands to his face.

  “It’s okay,” Miranda said, taking him by his shoulders and trying to lead him back to the bed. “Just come sit down and we’ll—”

  “Noooo,” he moaned, refusing to budge, unable to tear his eyes away from the man in the mirror.

  It was him. He could tell that much purely by instinct. The man staring back at him with those haunted eyes and haggard expression was without a doubt Jeremy Heinrich Faulkner. But just like when he looked at Miranda, it also wasn’t him. His features were…harder, somehow. Fuller. More defined. The boy he had been a day ago was still there, but it was hidden beneath a layer of what he could only describe as maturity.

  “You’re going to be okay,” Miranda was saying.

  There was even a hint of black stubble on his cheeks and chin. Since when had he been able to grow a beard?

  “Just sit down and we’ll work through this together.”

  “I’m old,” he whispered.

  “You’re not old,” Miranda argued. “You’re just…older.”

  “Thirteen years older. I…” He ran his hand over the strange contours of his face again as all the feeling drained out of him. “I missed thirteen years of my own life!”

  Miranda, who’d had her hands on his shoulders, clenched her fists, her face contorting with grief. She was fighting back tears, he realized. Lucky her. He wished he could break down and cry. Anything would have been better than this cold, stunned numbness.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered, and before Jeremy knew what was happening, she had thrown her arms around him. “I’m so sorry! This isn’t how it was supposed to happen. I didn’t want you to…you weren’t supposed…I’m sorry!”

  Not knowing what else to do, Jeremy raised his arms and hugged her back. It felt good to hold on to something. His life had, out of nowhere, become a storm. The winds were blowing so hard that he didn’t even know which way was up. Miranda had always been the strongest, most stable person he knew, so he clung to her. If anyone could keep him safe and grounded in all this chaos, it was her.

  “What happened?” he forced himself to ask, his voice barely coming out as a croak.

  “So much,” she answered, burying her face in his shoulder. “So much that there’s no way I can explain it without telling you everything.”

  Taking a deep, shaky breath, Jeremy stumbled over to the bed and sat back down heavily. Miranda looked at him for a minute, tears running down the sides of her face. Suddenly, he was reminded of that night—just a few hours ago for him, thirteen years in the past for her—when he’d broken the news that his parents were going to send him to a high school on the other side of the country.

  Everything has changed, he thought, but somehow it’s all stayed the same too.

  “Tell me,” he finally managed to say. “Everything.”

  Miranda wiped her face dry, then took a moment to steel herself. She didn’t sit back down, instead opting to pace back and forth across their room, her hooves making sharp clicks against the grainy wood floor with every step.

  “We call it the Remaking,” she said again. Her voice started off weak, but it grew stronger with every sentence. “We don’t really know if that’s accurate or not. Maybe Earth was completely destroyed and Nyr was created in its place. Maybe whatever did this, like, recycled our planet to make this one. All we know is that nothing from the old world still exists on Nyr.”

  She paused, then looked at him. “Nothing but the people.”

  “That man on the street,” Jeremy said, “and the one at the bar. What did you call them?”

  “NPCs, like non-player characters in the video games we used to play.” She started pacing again. “Some people don’t like the name. They say it’s insensitive. It fits, though. Either way, roughly ninety nine percent of the people on Earth were turned into them.”

  “Does that mean…”

  “Yes. Until today, you were one, too.”

  Jeremy grew pale, and he looked down at his hands as if he were suddenly expecting to see some kind of obvious deformity in them. It was stupid, and he knew it. He had seen Duncan downstairs, and dozens of others when they’d made their way through town. They looked just like normal people. The strangeness was all in the way they talked and acted. Like robots made of flesh and bone.

  “Then how am I,” he paused, gesturing at himself, “here?”

  “It’s complicated, but we’ll get to it,” Miranda answered. “I promise.”

  Jeremy let out a long, slow breath, then nodded for her to continue.

  “The most important thing you need to know about is the System,” she said. “Do something for me right now: think the words ‘Menu, Open.’”

  “Okay, but what—” Jeremy began, before nearly jumping out of his skin when a glowing rectangle appeared, hovering in the air right in front of him. He froze, staring at it. “What is this?”

  “It’s your menu,” Miranda said. “Things work differently now, Jeremy. The world didn’t just change, the rules of reality did too.”

  Jeremy ran his eyes over the menu, trying to take it all in. It looked…well, it looked like the menu he would see in just about any roleplaying video game. There were multiple tabs up at the top, saying things like HERO, STATUS, SKILLS, SPELLS, and GLOSSARY. Tentatively, he reached out and poked at the Status tab. A new page took the place of the one he’d just been looking at.

  JEREMY FAULKNER

  LEVEL 4

  CLASS PENDING

  HUMAN

  STRENGTH: 0

  DEXTERITY: 0

  CONSTITUTION: 0

  SPIRIT: 0

  INFLUENCE: 0

  NOTE: YOUR STATS ARE BEING WITHHELD UNTIL A CLASS IS SELECTED, AT WHICH POINT THEY WILL BE DISTRIBUTED ACCORDINGLY.

  “It…says I need to choose a class,” Jeremy said. It felt surreal to hear those words come out of his own mouth.

  “We’ll worry about that later,” Miranda said. “For right now, look down at the bottom of that screen.”

  Jeremy did, and he saw a bar sitting beneath his stat list. It was about halfway full, and had a little number “4” sitting next to it. It was the same bar that had popped up when he’d stabbed Zara with that dart earlier, he realized.

  “That’s your XP bar,” Miranda explained. “You’ve played games before, so you probably know what XP means.”

  “Experience points,” he said numbly.

  “Exactly. People have four basic needs here in Nyr: food, water, sleep, and XP. Look at your XP bar. Look really close at it.”

  Jeremy did as she said, leaning in until his face was only an inch away from the floating, semi-transparent menu. He expected the image to get fuzzier, the way it did when he sat too close to his TV, but it remained as crystal clear as ever.

  “Do you see something weird about your XP?” Miranda asked.

  Jeremy stared at the little white bar so hard his eyes began to ache, then shook his head. “No, I don’t think—”

  His XP fell. It was just a tiny bit, barely a microscopic sliver, but it was so sudden that Jeremy recoiled from it with a yelp.

  “XP is what sets us apart from the NPCs,” Miranda explained. “The System is what gives us sentience, and it runs on XP. Don’t ask me how, because I don’t think anybody really understands it. What we do know is that by killing monsters, running dungeons, and doing quests, we earn the XP that we need to keep our System active.”

  “So it really is like a game,” Jeremy said in disbelief.

  “A game that can kill you if you aren’t careful.”

  Jeremy looked up at her in alarm, and Miranda immediately cringed as if she hadn’t meant to say that.

  “If you earn enough XP to fill the meter, then you go up by a level,” she went on quickly. “That’s how you woke up. I…made a mistake this morning. I accidentally hired you as an NPC partner, and you followed me into the dungeon that Derrick, Aaron, and…”

  She paused again, a haunted look crossing her face.

  “That Derrick, Aaron, and I were running,” she said, her voice sounding strangely hollow. She shook her head, banishing whatever dark thoughts had invaded her mind just then. “I tried to keep you out of harm’s way, but because you technically took part in the fight, you got a share of the XP.”

  “And it was enough to activate my System?” he asked.

  She nodded. “All NPCs are level zero. Any amount of XP at all is enough to bring them up to level one. Once that happens, their System comes online and they become Heroes.”

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  “Heroes?”

  “That’s what the System calls us. After that, you paralyzed Zara with that dart—good job with that, by the way.” To Jeremy’s surprise, she smirked. “Since we were able to escape, that meant that you technically won the fight against her, and because her level was so much higher than yours, it gave you enough XP to reach level four.”

  Miranda finally seemed to get tired of pacing, and sat down next to him.

  “It’s not really fair, if you ask me. Visantii was level forty, and Zara was level seventeen. They were both way above you, so you’d think that together they would have given you enough XP to shoot you all the way up to, like, level ten. But the System has its own way to measure out how much XP everyone in the party should earn. I don’t get it. Too much math. When we get to Faen’s Hand, you should ask Sun about it.”

  Jeremy blinked. “I should ask about it…soon?”

  “You should ask Sun. He’s Father Lancaster’s assistant, and he’ll talk your ear off about how the System works if you give him half a…” She paused, glancing over at him. “I’ve completely lost you, haven’t I?”

  Jeremy nodded mutely.

  “Sorry. I guess I got carried away.”

  He looked at her, and before he knew it, he was smiling. “How many times have I heard that?”

  She smiled back. “You have no idea how long I’ve been waiting to see that again.”

  “What?”

  “Your smile. When you were an NPC, you never smiled. You never frowned. You just walked around everywhere with a look on your face like you were pretending that you weren’t completely lost.”

  For a moment, happiness lit up the inside of Jeremy’s chest—but just as quickly as it had appeared, it was gone, leaving him just as exhausted, scared, and overwhelmed as he had been before.

  His XP bar went down by another almost indistinguishable blip.

  “So the System runs on XP,” he said, bringing the conversation back around. “And if it runs out, then I guess…”

  Miranda nodded. “You turn back into an NPC.”

  Terror rippled through Jeremy at the thought of becoming one of those mindless things again. Out of nowhere, he remembered a zombie movie he had watched at Miranda’s house once. It’d had to be at her house, since his parents hated scary movies almost as much as they hated Miranda herself. One of the characters had been bitten, and had opted to shoot himself in the head rather than become a zombie. Back then, the decision had struck Jeremy as overdramatic to the point of being silly.

  Now, however, he felt a not-insubstantial urge to do the same thing before…

  “We’re not going to let that happen,” Miranda said quickly, reading his expression in the way that only she had ever been able to. “I’m not going to let that happen. I brought you into this world, Jeremy, and I swear on my life that I’m going to take care of you!”

  “I’m going to have to fight, aren’t I?” Jeremy asked, his voice shaking a little.

  He thought back to the battle that had broken out earlier, and all the incredible things that Miranda and her friends had done during it. Was he supposed to do those kinds of things? He could barely run twenty feet without feeling like he was going to pass out, and Miranda expected him to pick up a weapon and start doing flips and spins like her? He may as well just take a swan dive off the inn’s roof and get it over with.

  To his surprise, though, she shook her head. “No. There’s another way.”

  Jeremy looked at her, confused.

  “It’s…I guess you could call it a glitch,” she went on, frowning as if she was just as confused by her explanation as he was. “Like, a computer glitch, except in real life. Derrick says that isn’t possible, but I don’t see why not, since the entire flaming world is a giant video game now, but whatever. What’s important is that if enough Heroes get together in one place, they can form a guild.”

  “Okay?” Jeremy said, confused at the sudden change of subject. “Those guys from earlier, they said…”

  “Yeah, they were part of the Shield Warden guild. Derrick, Aaron, and I are in the Underwing guild.”

  She looked away guiltily and muttered something. Jeremy couldn’t quite hear it, but he thought she said something like, “Or, at least I was.”

  “What does that—”

  “Guilds can claim any city in Nyr as their home base as long as another guild hasn’t already taken it,” she interrupted him, turning around again. “There, they can spawn a Nexis Crystal. It’s what bonds the entire guild together. You can do a lot of cool stuff with them, but the most important thing is that we can send trade requests to the guild through the Nexis Crystal, no matter how far away we are from it.”

  Miranda held out her hand, and with a flash of blue, a small, clear crystal appeared in it.

  “This is a mana crystal,” she said. Jeremy raised an eyebrow at the second random subject change, but didn’t interrupt. “Mana is what we use to cast spells. If we bring this crystal to a Mana Fount, we can charge it with mana. Then, when our mana points start running low, we can breathe in the mana and recharge our MP.”

  “Okay,” Jeremy said again.

  “But here’s the trick,” she said, holding up the crystal between two fingers. “We can put empty mana crystals into our trade boxes and open up a trade request with the Nexis Crystal back at base. Normally, mana crystals only absorb mana, but a few years after the Remaking, somebody found out that if you’ve got an empty crystal in your trade request, somehow it’ll start absorbing XP.”

  Jeremy just stared at her, uncomprehending.

  “For every monster we kill, about half of the XP we earn will go to the mana crystal,” she went on. “Eventually it’ll fill up, someone back at base will accept the trade, and they’ll be given a crystal filled to the brim with free XP. Nobody’s sure why it works that way. Like I said, mana crystals don’t absorb XP except in that specific circumstance. That’s why we call it a bug. Are you following me so far?”

  “I guess so,” Jeremy lied. “But how does that keep me from having to fight?”

  “Because your System needs XP to stay powered,” Miranda said, putting the crystal back into her inventory. “But nothing says you have to earn it yourself.”

  Jeremy blinked as it became clear to him. “Is that allowed? That sounds like cheating.”

  Miranda scoffed. “If whoever’s in charge has a problem with it, they can come down here and say it to my face.”

  Jeremy froze, looking up at the ceiling as if a giant hand might suddenly pluck the roof off of the inn. Considering everything he had seen today, he wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised. If the sadistic god who had created this world decided to punish Miranda for what she’d said, would he be caught in the—

  Miranda snorted with laughter.

  “What are you waiting for?” she asked, still giggling. “A thunderbolt to come down and smite me for my blasphemy?”

  Wha- no, I just…” Jeremy sputtered, face red with embarrassment. “I wasn’t—”

  “Don’t worry. If there is a god up there watching us like some kind of cosmic Dungeon Master, he hasn’t delivered divine retribution on anyone I know yet.”

  Jeremy relaxed, but only a little. There was only so much insanity you could witness in one day before you stopped thinking anything was impossible.

  “Anyway,” Miranda said, bringing the conversation back on track, “that’s what the Underwings do. Once you do a hundred dungeon runs, they let you bring in somebody you knew from before the Remaking. We wake them up, and then do our best to give them as normal of a life as we can.”

  “Normal?” This time it was Jeremy’s turn to scoff. “Here? Yeah, right.”

  “You’ll get used to it. Soon, all of this will be normal.” Miranda took his hand again, squeezing it. “The important thing is that I’ll be able to get you all the XP you need without you having to take a step outside of town. You won’t be in any danger, and we…”

  She clutched his hand to her chest.

  “We’ll be together again, Jeremy. Just like we used to be!”

  Jeremy looked at her, and realized that tears were running down her face again.

  “That’s the only thing I’ve wanted for thirteen years,” she whispered. “A day hasn’t gone by that I haven’t thought about what I said to you just before the Remaking. I wanted to tell you how sorry I was. I wanted to tell you I wasn’t mad anymore. I wanted to tell you…”

  She began to lean toward him.

  “…that I still love you.”

  Before Jeremy knew what was happening, her lips were pressed against his in the most passionate kiss she had ever given him. At first he wanted to push her away. His entire life had just been turned upside down and inside out, and she thought now was an appropriate time to start making out?

  But then he realized how warm she was. How soft her lips felt. Even with horns and hooves, even when she looked thirteen years older, she was something familiar in all this madness. He didn’t have it in him to push her away. He wanted this. He needed this. Needed her, and the stability she represented.

  Miranda pressed herself against him, until he could feel the rise and fall of her chest against his own as her breathing began to get faster. He jumped a little when her tongue suddenly pushed its way into his mouth. Reaching up, she stroked the side of his face as she explored his mouth with her own.

  We’re not really going to… he began to think, but his train of thought derailed when Miranda swung herself around so that she was straddling him. The hem of her dress rode up, exposing her thighs to a scandalous degree.

  Pulling her lips from his, she buried her face in the crook of his neck, kissing and nibbling the skin between his head and shoulders. Jeremy let out a quiet gasp, reflexively putting his arms around her and pulling her close, pressing their bodies even harder together.

  We- We can’t do this! he thought, alarm rising up inside him—but it was having a hard time making itself felt under the firestorm of emotions raging inside him. His face burned, his head spun, and for a moment he was afraid that the rush of blood would make him faint with Miranda right on top of him.

  She was heating up too. Already, her skin was so hot that he could feel it through the fabric of her dress. He could feel her. Not just her presence, but the…details…of her body. Pressed against each other like this, he could make out the curves and contours beneath the thin fabric in a way that made his heart hammer so loudly in his chest that he thought it was going to explode.

  I don't want this!

  “Mmm,” she purred as her hands ran down his chest. “Jeremy…”

  Her hands went to the hem of his shirt and began to—

  “Stop!” he shouted, snapping out of the trance and shoving her hands away.

  Miranda stared at him, cheeks flushed and chest heaving. “What’s wrong?”

  “What’s wrong?” he asked, his voice rising in disbelief. “What are you doing, Miranda?”

  “I’m…what do you think I’m doing?” she asked, confused.

  “We- We can’t do…that! We’re just—”

  “What, kids?” she asked, smiling a little. “Look at me, Jeremy. Look at your reflection. Do we still look like kids to you?”

  Something short circuited in Jeremy’s brain.

  She was right. Whether he liked it or not, thirteen years had passed between yesterday and today. He wasn’t some awkward fifteen year old boy anymore. Now he was an awkward, scared, and confused twenty eight year old man. They could do that.

  The revelation hit him like a gong. There was nothing stopping them from…

  He paused, then shook his head.

  “I can’t,” he said, looking down in shame. “After everything you just told me? It’s too much. I need time to process all of this.”

  To his relief, Miranda got off of him and gently took his hand. “It’s okay. Take all the time you need.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, the inexplicable feeling that he’d let her down somehow a weight in his chest.

  She smiled at him. “Don’t be. All that matters is that we’re together again. Forever, this time.”

  His head spun, all the excitement reminding him just how exhausted he was. “I…I think I need to get some sleep.”

  “All right,” she agreed, turning and blowing out the oil lamp. The room was plunged into darkness.

  Jeremy lay down on the bed. It was every bit as uncomfortable as it had looked. A moment later, he gasped a little when he felt something settle down next to him.

  There’s only one bed in here, his subconscious jeered. What did you expect? For her to sleep on the floor?

  Miranda scooted over until she was pressed up against him again. Not in a provocative way this time. She just wanted to have as much contact as she could get with the man she loved.

  Jeremy hesitated for a few seconds, and then wrapped his arms around her from behind, pulling her close. She sighed happily.

  Lying there in the darkness, he held on to her like a child would cling to a stuffed animal. The one thing protecting him from the monsters lurking just out of view.

  “Sleep well, Jeremy,” she murmured. “I love you.”

  “I love you, too,” he replied.

  Less than a minute later, Miranda was asleep and breathing peacefully. Jeremy just laid there, staring into the impenetrable darkness, trying to come to terms with everything that had happened in the space of a single day.

  Silently, he began to cry.

  TO BE CONTINUED: 2/14/2026