CHAPTER 42

  Déjà Vu

  The raid boss launched into his scripted sequence. Swing, swing, pause, then repeat. Bash moved before his mind caught up, barely avoiding the flaming blade, feeling the heat as it passed by.

  The memory of last time came unbidden. The arm. The blood. The bone jutting through skin as he jammed his own severed hand into the bastard's mask.

  The boss swung again. Bash stumbled back. His legs were shaking. His breath came in ragged gasps that had nothing to do with exertion. Get it together. You're not that person anymore.

  Another swing. Another frantic scramble. The pattern was the same. Swing, swing, pause. Swing, swing, pause. The same sequence that had nearly killed him. The same opening he'd paid for with his hand.

  But something was different. The opening was huge. Last time, that pause had been a fraction of a second. A razor-thin window he'd had to sacrifice everything to exploit. Now? Now it stretched out like an invitation. Like the raid boss was moving through molasses while Bash operated in real time.

  Holy shit. I'm faster. I'm so much faster. The realization broke through his fear. He stopped retreating. Planted his feet. And when the next swing came, he didn't just dodge. He sidestepped with inches to spare. “That all you got?”

  The raid boss roared and swung harder. Faster. The flaming blade carved an arc that should have bisected Bash from shoulder to hip. Instead, he leaned back, watched it pass and straightened. He could end this; he knew that now. But something petty and human had taken hold of him. Something that remembered the terror and the pain and the desperate bargain he'd made to survive this fight the first time.

  “You took my hand,” Bash said, still dodging, still dancing. “You remember that? Probably not. But I remember.” The raid boss didn't respond. Couldn't. But Bash needed to say it anyway. “I remember watching blood pump out of my wrist. I remember thinking I was going to die.”

  He slapped the blade aside, the sting of the hot metal barely registering. “But I didn't die. And now?” Bash charged Psionic Strike. His arm began to crackle with red electricity, the energy building until it hurt to contain. “Now I'm going to take yours.”

  The raid boss launched into the combo one final time. Swing, swing… Bash moved. He timed it perfectly, sliding into that pause like he'd been born there. His palm strike slammed into the creature's wrist with every ounce of psionic power he could muster.

  Bone shattered. Sinew snapped. The massive sword went spinning through the air, the severed hand still death-gripped around the hilt, flames trailing in its wake. The raid boss roared in agony.

  “Payback's a dish best 'hand' delivered.” He grabbed the severed arm. The hand was still locked around the sword's hilt, fingers fused to the leather. Perfect.

  Bash swung his makeshift meat-baton, the attached blade an obedient extension of his will.

  One horizontal sweep sheared the boss at the hips. A riposte took the shoulder. A rising arc halved the mask, splitting it down the middle and revealing nothing but shadow and code beneath.

  He kept swinging. Couldn't stop. Didn't want to. Each cut was catharsis. Each chunk of digital flesh that hit the ground was a piece of trauma excised. When he finally stopped, the raid boss lay in pieces across the dirt road, still sizzling.

  Bash stood there, breathing hard, still holding the arm-sword. Around him, the surviving bandits had frozen. Their expressions shifted from rage to confusion to something that looked a lot like fear. Then, they ran.

  Bash squinted as they retreated, his exhaustion vanishing at the thought of lost experience. “Oh no, you don’t!” He charged, electricity flying as he tore through them. No mercy, no survivors.

  The last body hit the dirt, and it was done. The clearing around the village was covered in clumps of gore and body parts. Bash felt joy as he saw the stats piling up. And it didn’t even cost me an arm… and a leg this time.

  > “Is it safe to resume visual processing? I stopped watching the last few minutes.”

  Bash couldn’t help himself. He just lifted his head to the sky and started laughing. “They were just scripts, Shai. It’s not like they’re real.”

  > “If I was one of them, would you do that to me?”

  Bash’s laughter faltered. “Um. Well... no, Shai. You’re... you’re different. Special, I mean.”

  > “Thank you, Bash. I’m glad you think that, but remember, I am also just code.”

  Bash sighed, a little softer now. “Maybe… but you’re my partner. If anyone messes with you, I’ll turn them into a bug report.” Despite the joke, the mood had changed. Looking around at the silent carnage, pieces of bandits scattered about, he briefly considered Shai’s perspective before shrugging and heading back toward the village.

  As he entered the square, the villagers didn’t cheer. They didn’t move at all, their scripts had broken. NPCs frozen mid-pose, faces locked in an uncanny valley.

  > “They appear to be experiencing unhandled errors. The system will resolve the issue momentarily.”

  Pausing at a clothing stall, he took a pair of trousers and a shirt to put on. They weren’t the best fit, but they saved him from being an embarrassing Conan the Barbarian look-alike.

  As he went deeper, he finally found signs of actual life. A couple of Uploads saw him and pointed, whispering to each other. “Another raid, another player?”

  Then his gaze snagged on a familiar face. Marisol stood in front of the market and was giving Bash the same hate-filled glare from the first time they met. Seeing her again threatened to bring back the bad memories from the first disastrous raid.

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  > “Cross-checking human behavioral patterns tells me she does not like you very much.”

  Bash hissed, “Understatement of the century there, Aristotle.” Slowing his gait, he moved toward Marisol with both hands raised, palms out.

  “Marisol. Hi. Uh... so... I did a thing. I swear I didn’t know it would cause another raid.” His voice cracked around the words. “Look, I’m an idiot, not evil.” He hesitated, then blurted the question twisting in his chest. “Is, uh... Patrick here?”

  Her stare could have frozen a bonfire. “No,” she said flatly. “He was with you. Unless you killed him, once he stopped being useful.”

  Bash visibly flinched. “No, no, no. Patrick’s alive. We just beat a bunch of skeleton dudes, then I Remorted and…” His voice died, a sudden realization.

  Scripts reset. Uploads did not.

  Bash sprinted through the village. His feet carried him straight to the blacksmith’s stall, his hands itching for the weight he remembered. The rack was still there, bent from the last raid. Waiting on it, as some kind of cosmic joke, gleamed a familiar pair of spiked brass knuckles.

  Bash grabbed them as Investigator pinged in the corner of his vision. “Even the gear resets! You see this, Shai?”

  > “Yes, the logic here is as sophisticated as a vending machine.”

  He didn’t linger. The moment the knucklers settled over his fists, he was gone, sprinting hard down the southern road. The ruts and weeds blurred past as he pounded along the highway, lungs burning.

  His focus went to the west, toward Londonland, and beyond that, the mountain pass, where his friends were.

  Bash muttered, “If I don’t stop to eat, don’t stop to sleep... maybe two days, flat out. If my stats don’t pancake me first.”

  > “I can recommend simulated caffeine sources. Though none are... particularly effective.”

  He huffed out a laugh. “You got a digital espresso shot in there? Or just the achievement for exhaustion?”

  > “No espresso, but there are three variants of coffee cake.”

  Bash rolled his eyes. “I guess that’s a no, then.”

  Would his numbers keep him upright for that long? The stat points from his skills and titles made him nearly superhuman, but losing all the stats from his levels still meant he was much weaker than before.

  Branches snapped. Metal clinked. Shapes moved in the treeline. Bash skidded to a halt as ten bandits spilled onto the road, blades flashing. He groaned. “Damnit, I forgot about these dweebs.”

  Bash cracked his knuckles, psionics buzzing faintly across the spikes. ‘Whatever. Easy levels. Might as well do some farming while I’m here.’ His gaze flicked over the bandits’ metadata. ‘No Uploads this time.’

  The thought evaporated as the bandits lunged. The asshole didn’t even ask for money this time. He exhaled and began dancing back, overlays painting the optimal strike angles. His first strike was a simple psionic empowered jab, followed by a quick backfist. Each hit was minimum input, maximum output. No clumsy haymakers, no frenzy of gore like last time.

  He flowed between them as prediction spiraled ahead, showing him where blades would be, where throats would open, where a single flick of his wrist ended everything.

  Ten bodies hit the floor almost in unison. Bash stood straight, knuckles steaming, barely a fleck of blood on his clothes. He grinned, flexing his fingers. “Damn. I probably looked so cool just now.”

  > “I keep a five-minute buffer, if you want a copy.”

  Bash snorted. “Careful, Shai, you’ll ruin the mystery.”

  Last time, the approach to the bandit camp had taken hours. Sneaking and crawling through brush, watching for traps, taking the careful stealth option. This time? Investigator and Prediction lit up the woods. Every snare, every deadfall, every clumsy ambush point, he saw them, sidestepped them, and never even slowed down.

  Bash burst through the treeline into the heart of the bandit camp. He half-expected to see Carl swaggering there again. Instead, some random NPC, flagged ‘Bandit Leader’, stood in his place. Bash smirked. “So this is who was supposed to be in charge, huh? Not an Upload. Just a script. I guess Carl was just a LARP after all.”

  Four minutes. That’s all it took to wipe this nest clean. Bash sat on a half-rotten log as the world finally permitted him to stop moving. All around the corpses of the NPC bandits lay broken, some twitching as if their scripts tried to reboot and failed. His knuckles still tingled from the hits.

  He blinked. Almost half the level he had been last time he’d done this side-quest. “If only I’d listened to Patrick, we’d probably be drinking goat milk and singing kumbaya around a nice fire right about now.”

  > “Statistically, hindsight has a 100% accuracy rate.”

  Bash let out a dry laugh. “Nice pep talk. Don’t quit your day job.” Scanning the square with a casual, calculating eye. No escorts were waiting for Londonland this time, no broken Uploads lined up with no hope in their eyes. Just the NPCs he had set free, blinking, scripts warped by his passage, waiting for instructions.

  He mentally opened the stat menu and rubbed his forehead. He could feel the weight of the choice before him.

  > “Do you want me to help with optimizing your stat distribution?”

  Bash envisioned stacking those bonus stats with Rewind each day. Banking the maximum points for maximum power, making himself untouchable. However, now wasn’t the time. If he really wanted to max out his stats and run around in brightly colored spandex, it would have to wait until his friends were in a safer place.

  “No, unfortunately, optimization isn’t an option. Everything needs to go into Dexterity for any chance of making it on time.” He pictured the plan, every point allocated to speed for the forced run west. Enough mobility to jump over the damn mountain if he had to.

  > “I agree that’s your best chance of reaching everyone in time. But Bash... you’ll be vulnerable.”

  Bash's voice was sure. “Yes, but we will do anything for our family, right? I'd rather take the risk than be too late.”

  > “I'm with you. Whatever happens, we face it together.”

  He opened the stat menu. Twenty-eight unassigned points stared back at him, two per every level. Without hesitation he dumped every single one into Dexterity, watched the number climb, and felt his body lighten like someone had cut the gravity in half.

  Then he triggered Rewind. The points came back. Twenty-eight again. He dumped them all into Dexterity a second time.

  It hurt. Not physically, but somewhere deeper. Every instinct screamed at him to bank those points, compound them, stack them for maximum efficiency like he'd always done. This was the opposite of optimization. This was burning resources for a sprint instead of a marathon.

  Zero unassigned. The number sat there like an accusation. Prioritizing family over spreadsheets, what a great Hallmark moment. “Character development, literally and figuratively.” He half-joked.

  Even with the absurd dexterity, if he went straight to the mountain pass now, it'd be the same as trying to kill a dragon with paper ninja stars. He needed to power level, but how?

  He thought of the goblin nest and troll under Londonland. The choke points he'd memorized, the methane pocket, the massive fireball. This time, though, he wouldn't fight his way through the tunnel, killing one goblin at a time. No, he knew exactly where it was now, exactly how to get to the lair without any of the slimy bastards getting in his way.

  “Okay, I've got a plan. But first we need to stop by and see some old friends.”

  > “Old friends? Your social calendar appears to have expanded since I last checked.”

  “The resistance, remember? I need their help with something.”

  > “Help with what, exactly?”

  “Explosives.” He grinned despite himself. “You'll like them, Shai. Well, most of them. Jill's intense, but in a grandmotherly way. If grandmothers were actually around your same age and ran underground terrorist cells.”

  > “She sounds lovely.”

  “You have no idea.” Bash started moving, already mapping the route in his head. Londonland first. Find the resistance, get some equipment, then the sewers. Then west, as fast as his legs could carry him.