Chapter Thirty: Dead, Obviously

  Let me state the obvious: with Jack and Emma both gone, I was fucked.

  I’m not going to be crude enough to elaborate on exactly how fucked, but use your imagination. I was surrounded by goblins, not stealthing at all in the midst of their stronghold, and oh, yeah, the murdering, multiple question mark, acid-spitting lizard was just finishing up its snack.

  And I was crying. So, you know, extra tactical advantage there.

  I was dead, I knew I was dead, and I knew there wasn’t a hell of a lot I could do about being dead, so I just kept fighting.

  I don’t know how many goblins I killed while the lizard wandered its way through their stronghold, but eventually, the moment came. I was staggering from exhaustion, my injured leg completely non-functional, a deep gut wound letting half my intestines leak out of my shirt, with more of my blood outside me than in, when a [Goblin Warrior - Level 10] swung its sword at my neck and I just couldn’t lift Warden’s Edge high enough to stop it.

  I had a split second to hope that Zelda would be okay—somehow, some way, some version of okay.

  And then… I was fine. I whacked that goblin’s head off with Warden’s Edge as if he was the first one of the day.

  What the hell?

  I went right back to slaughtering goblins, just like they hadn’t almost finished me off, and much to the chagrin of the ones who were nearest. They’d already been celebrating my end and now they were back to dying in droves. Okay, small droves, but still.

  My leg worked. My guts were where they belonged. I was drenched in blood, but apparently still full of it, too.

  What the hell had just happened?

  I glanced at my HUD, then killed another goblin.

  130/130 HP. So I hadn’t leveled up, I was still at level 10, but I’d somehow been healed.

  Did I have a magical, last-minute, Hail Mary heal ability that I just hadn’t noticed? If I’d been thinking I would have tried leveling up, but I’d been too busy fighting and dying.

  The answer was probably in my notifications. I’m sure the System knew why I was still alive.

  Oh, but wait—I didn’t stop moving as the thought struck me, but it was a little bit of a lightning bolt.

  It wasn’t my ability.

  It was Zelda’s.

  Her Never Say Die ability must have kicked in. How did it go again? “Once per day, when you or someone you love is within thirty seconds of death, you reject the possibility, and restore the dying to full health.”

  She’d brought me back to life.

  Not that it was going to do either of us much good. She’d given me an extra couple of minutes, maybe, but I was still outnumbered and surrounded, and even remembering to level up the next time I was going under wasn’t going to keep me alive for long.

  But I had an ability of my own: Pack Instinct. As long as she was threatened, I could teleport to her side, and then at least we’d die together.

  Okay, yes, I was being a little pessimistic. You would have been, too, in my shoes.

  The threatened part was easy. I didn’t know where Zelda was, exactly, but it wasn’t hard to believe she was in danger. We were in the middle of the goblin stronghold. Even if she’d made it to the building, there were goblins aplenty to go around. Not to mention the killer lizard still stomping its way through the campsites.

  But just possibly I should have figured out how to use this ability before I was in dire danger myself, because I had no idea how to make it work.

  What would Jack tell me to do?

  He’d learned to use his own abilities in a heartbeat, so it couldn’t be hard.

  Use Pack Instinct and take me to Zelda, I silently told the creepy Santa Claus inside my head.

  With a disorienting blur like the world’s worst theme park ride, the chaos around me—the noise, the screams, the mud and blood, the acrid haze in the air, the goblins and shambles of lean-tos—vanished.

  I promptly overbalanced when my swing of Warden’s Edge hit nothing but thin air, only saving myself from landing on my face by skidding a few steps along a stone floor.

  I caught my balance, barely, and straightened, still panting, my heart racing.

  “Zelda?” I called, spinning to look for her.

  She was lying on the floor, completely relaxed, a few dead goblins scattered nearby.

  She stood, did a full dog yoga stretch, first up dog, then down, and trotted over to me, looking pleased with herself. She nudged my leg, demanding pets, her body language saying, About time you got here. What took you so long?

  I took a deep, shuddering breath, and paused for a moment to wipe the snot and tears off my face with the back of a bloody arm.

  She put her paws on my leg, stretching to reach up to my face—Okay? Not okay? Need kisses?—and I dropped to the ground, sitting cross-legged and pulling her into my lap so that I could have ten seconds to just be.

  To just know that she was still alive and I was still alive and this place was hell, but that we were okay.

  My ten seconds lasted a solid minute and if we’d been in danger, we would have died, but I needed the minute to bury my face in her fur and let my breathing slow down and my heart rate ease.

  We were alive, at least for the moment. And we were together, which was always better than not.

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  And then I looked around me, taking it all in.

  Well, it was definitely the Rift Control Chamber.

  Of course it was.

  Because there, in the center of the room, was a glowing crystal hovering above a stone pedestal that looked like it had been sketched by a game designer from World of Warcraft. It pulsed with soft blue light, saying, “Me, me, me,” with every vibration.

  The System couldn't have been more obvious if it had hung a neon sign reading Quest Objective Here with a giant arrow pointing down. The whole thing screamed “final boss room” to anyone who’d ever played a game.

  The only thing missing was dramatic music and maybe some ominous Latin chanting.

  And the only question was, if I touched that crystal, did I start an enormous battle? The kind that wouldn’t be complete without plenty of frantic shouting, spell effects blinding everyone, and at least three healers crying in a corner?

  Because if so, I was not interested.

  Nope.

  Just not gonna happen.

  I didn’t have the picnic basket anymore. It was probably lost with Emma’s body. In fact, the lizard had probably eaten it, which was a pretty weird thought. I wonder if it tasted like its favorite picnic food?

  But I did have plenty of protein bars. And my water bottle, of course, so we had fresh water. I had my cleanse spell wipes, too, and I was absolutely going to use another one of those very, very soon now, as soon as I could bring myself to stop snuggling my girl.

  I’d use two of them, in fact, one for her and one for me, because she had plenty of blood on her, too, although unlike me, it was all green, which meant it belonged to the goblins.

  Oh, and I had my spice gum drops. Yeah, it was totally time to eat my spice gum drops.

  So that was the plan. We were going to hole up in this room and live off protein bars, spice gum drops, and the multiverse’s fanciest water until the timer ran out, and then we would be miraculously transported home, quest having failed.

  Except…

  I heard a noise.

  In the stillness of the control chamber, with only my half-stifled breathing breaking the quiet, the sound of approaching footsteps was like one of those old-fashioned mechanical kitchen timers: tick, tick, tick, right until it hit zero and blared its alarm.

  Oh, hell, no.

  I’m gonna say it was all those points in my Perception stat, but I knew, with a deep, unpleasant certainty, that those footsteps didn’t belong to a low-level goblin.

  Maybe it was because I could hear them at all. Low-level goblins were barefoot. I wouldn’t hear their footsteps on stone.

  These steps were made by someone wearing boots. Either a high-level goblin—higher than any I’d seen before—or the mysterious Participant #4.

  I grabbed Zelda around the middle like she was a football and I was a quarterback lunging for a fourth-quarter touchdown, and I sprinted for that goddamn crystal.

  Boss battle or no, I was not getting stabbed in the back by some rando human.

  And if it was a high-level goblin?

  Fine. It could join the fight.

  I hesitated for a second at the pedestal, just long enough for the goblin to step into the doorway.

  [Goblin Leader - Level ???]

  Was it even a goblin anymore, at that level? It looked like something else entirely. A troll, maybe, or an orc? Whichever creature was seven feet tall, three hundred pounds, and muscled like a pro wrestler with a bad steroids habit.

  Needless to say, if we got into a fight, I was going to lose.

  Especially because I’d left Warden’s Edge lying on the floor where I’d dropped it in my relief at finding my dog.

  Shit.

  I could get it back. That bonded ability it had meant it would fly to my hand when I called it.

  But I only had two hands, and one of them was clutching Zelda to my chest like she was part of my ribcage.

  With the other, I reached out and grabbed the floating crystal.

  Information flooded my mind.

  Creatures first: thousands of them, hundreds of thousands. A bestiary of the multiverse, their shapes, threat level, biology, behavior. Combat techniques for creatures with claws, with venom, with wings, with magic. Then landscapes: deserts, mountains, forests, fields, wetlands, tundra. Plants and flowers, trees and grasses, what grew where and when and why. Soil compositions, seasonal variations, weather patterns. Professions: resources, tools, skills, crafting components. Histories: names, places, maps, trade routes, alliances.

  A library was being forcibly implanted into my brain.

  It was like drowning. Not that I’ve ever drowned. But it was like I imagined drowning in the ocean would feel like, water over you, around you, pushing you, controlling you, driving you under.

  Choking you.

  My head felt like it would explode when a System message appeared: Would you like to restore this rift to stable status?

  “Yes!” I shouted. I didn’t care about the stupid quest, although I knew restoring the rift was the last item on the to-do list. I just wanted the information dump happening in my brain to stop. Human brains weren’t designed for this kind of overload.

  I can’t really describe what happened next, mostly because my head hurt like the world’s worst migraine had invited a demolition crew over for a rave, and my vision was blinded by the torrent of information still flowing across my mind.

  Threat assessment frameworks, rift tier classifications, cross-species etiquette protocols, warning signs of dimensional instabilities... I knew it all.

  And then—I didn’t.

  I had my hands cupped around my temples, my eyes squeezed shut, and I wasn’t holding Zelda anymore.

  Or the crystal, but I cared more about Zelda.

  That was the first thing I noticed.

  The second thing was that I was nowhere.

  I don’t know what image that brings up for you. Floating in space? Pure darkness? Some scene out of Tron, with glowing lights flashing by and lines of code?

  It was none of the above.

  It was just empty space. When I tried to focus on something, anything—the ground, the sky, the environment around me—it almost seemed to cycle through elements, never quite settling on one I could properly see. On the unsettling scale of one to ten, it ranked about one hundred.

  I closed my eyes, because they were obviously lying to me, and tried to focus on what I could perceive with my body, using my kinesthetic perception instead of my visual perception.

  As mistakes went, that ranked right up there with trying to run in the dark forest.

  I was immediately, completely, overwhelmingly nauseated. Instead of standing still in nothingness, as I had been, I was spiraling through chaos. My eyelids flew open as I swallowed convulsively, fighting the need to set my stomach’s contents free.

  It would be turkey Pub sub remnants. Bear would clean that up for me in a heartbeat, so I’d have to keep her outside. Except I wasn’t home, I wasn’t anywhere, and where the hell was Zelda?

  Gritting my teeth, my eyes wide open, I stared into the abyss. And no, it didn’t stare back.

  Instead, I was suddenly in a completely familiar place that I had never been to before in my life.

  I gasped.

  I knew this place. I recognized it.

  It was somewhere in London, circa early 2000s, storefronts and street displays decorated for Christmas. There was an ATM for the London Credit Bank (a stupid name for a bank, in my opinion) and a white, puffy, air-filled snowman.

  And there, across from me, playing their ridiculous brass instruments, were the world’s creepiest Santa Clauses, red hoods, white beards, plastic faces and all.

  I planted my hands on my hips. If I’d had Warden’s Edge with me, I would have gone straight for the kill. As it was, I said, with all the indignation I could possibly muster in my voice, “The System, I presume?”