I plowed through auction-goers, not caring about anything else. Random cries went up as I blasted a praying mantis, sending it flying into the shoddy rafters of the auction house. I kept my eyes fixed on Baby.

  Leaping for the entrance, I crashed down to cage Baby with my body. The little brat screeched angrily, but I had it pinned. It thrashed and wiggled, its tiny horn-tipped head gouging my chest.

  I glanced up to see a minotaur staring at me.

  “You gonna move, or be my doormat?” The minotaur’s voice was thick with menace.

  The second—no, the third person I’d met who I could talk to, and he just threatened to stomp me with his enormous hooves. Super.

  I wrapped my arms around Baby and rolled to my knees. I bared my teeth at the minotaur. Screw that guy. I was on task, not lying there for fun.

  He lumbered by as I struggled to wrangle the thrashing Baby against my chest. Wrangle—hey. The thought reminded me of what I had in inventory.

  Rope. I dropped my rope out of inventory and twisted to pin Baby between my thighs while I fumbled to tie it. Damn my crappy motor skills.

  By the end, I’d lost a quarter of my HP to the Greelanch’s little monster. Baby bit pretty hard. Its horns and claws were no joke, either. I fashioned a harness wrapping around Baby’s neck, torso, and tail so the little buffalo lizard couldn’t escape.

  Once the harness was set, the little shit settled down and ambled along beside me as we walked back to the Salt Spear’s compound. Today, the road stuck to the soles of my shoes instead of sliming them with mud. The blue sun baked away the moisture as it healed my wounds. I poked a finger through my torn shirt to rub brown scabs beneath.

  Greelanch sat on a stool beside the reeking animal pen, cleaning her toe-scraping knife with a dirty rag. So gross. I picked up Baby and untied my rope, because hell if she got that, too.

  “Kill you today, I won’t,” she said as she held out her hands, her flinty eyes softening as she saw Baby. I put the little monster in her grabby digits and waited for my payment. Greelanch tossed me a pouch.

  I opened it, and a mottled brown egg appeared in my inventory.

  I turned on my heel, muttering to myself. “Are you kidding me?”

  The note attached to the item described it. [Mysterious Egg] Can hatch any number of things. Nurture by taking out and basking in the sun once a day for ten days.

  That was garbage. I had nothing, now. No way to buy a sword or training. All I had was an egg that I had to take care of. Thankfully it wasn’t like a real egg, or I would have been in trouble. Most plants I owned died because I forgot to water them.

  The egg rested in my palm as I walked to the Colosseum. This time, no giant birds circled the sky on the way there. I avoided the insect district, which probably had a lot to do with it. After it gave up chasing me, the hawk returned to the hives. It probably preferred them, with their soft, liquidy insides.

  I spotted Jake leaning against a pillar in the shade of Mr. Kim’s shop, munching on a hotdog. I squinted at it, then at him. If I could find fried dough at the bazaar, I guess he could find those. I wouldn’t follow the smell of rank hotdog water unless I was starving, but he could eat what he wanted, even if it was disgusting.

  My smile was toothy when I asked, “So—how did things go for you?”

  “Great! I earned a diamond and thirty quartz. I did twelve quests. Most of them didn’t take more than a few minutes.”

  Figures. I did fewer quests, though, so part of it was a me problem.

  “I got an egg,” I grumbled. “I think the quests are skewed.”

  He leaned in to look at it curiously. “What does it do?”

  “I won’t know for ten days,” I sighed, putting it into my inventory. The egg had a soft blue glow in the slot. [Mysterious Egg] Sunned today.

  With an air of resignation, I glanced around the bazaar and offered, “Why don’t we find you a way to advance you, first? My last task cost me, big time. It’ll take a few days for me to recover what I lost.”

  “That sucks,” he commiserated, then beamed and pointed beyond the bazaar with his hotdog. “I looked at the possibilities, and I want to be a Magetech.”

  “Magetech’s a healing class?” I walked along beside him, poking fingers into the holes in my shirt.

  “Yep.”

  Every few steps, Jake had a hop-skip with his thumbs hooked into the plain sash at his hips. His unbeatable optimism made me nauseous. I forced myself to suck it up. His good fortune had nothing to do with my bad luck.

  I gestured at the wings bobbing behind him. “When will you be able to use those?”

  “Level six. I’ll be able to glide short distances.” He beamed with pride.

  “Cool,” I rubbed my hands together, already thinking of how gliding could be used offensively. Equip him with a crossbow, something with a low kickback, and he could become a real terror from above.

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  I hadn’t spent much time figuring out my progression. I knew I’d get Berserk at some point, and I had a lot of potential with a weapon in my hands, but… no weapon, so…

  “Here,” Jake licked mustard off his fingers before pointing at a building’s facade. We’d walked around almost half the Colosseum to get there, entering another district.

  The steel and glass building resembled what we knew, though the design was foreign.

  I hadn’t been to that district before. My map cleared the fog over the unexplored area. The label that appeared on my minimap read Symbiot. Jake led the way inside, the door whooshing open. Suddenly, I worried that I was leaving mud tracks on the floor, since it gleamed with the pristine shine of luxury vinyl tile.

  Baboon-like simians milled about on all fours with backpacks and lab coats. Each one had a badge affixed to their shoulder with their name and rank in multiple languages that scrolled across the small LED screen. I watched one knuckle past me, and I turned to watch it go, jaw dropping open.

  Jake flicked the back of my head and said with an irritated smirk, “Don’t be offensive. I wanna learn from these guys.”

  “I just didn’t expect…” I trailed off, biting back a comment that would’ve been offensive—like ‘Dr. Monkey.’

  “I looked at this as an avatar,” Jake explained as we went up some stairs towards a reception desk. “They’re symbiotic life forms. The host isn’t all that smart, but once enough bacteria are cultivated in their system, the colony develops a sort of psychic awareness and intelligence that they share with the host.”

  “You considered this?” I whispered, glancing around. They did seem like an advanced form of life, considering their building and integrated technology. Their electronic name tags said a lot about their communication abilities.

  “Yeah, but it wasn’t worth the +5 to my intelligence score.” Jake shrugged. “I’m already smart enough to be a mage or a healer without it.”

  I fought the urge to roll my eyes. “How many languages do you know?”

  “Six,” he admitted with a grin. He approached the desk and spoke a language I didn’t know, of course. The receptionist gabbed back at him for a moment, then waved at the benches. Wide and cushioned, they were designed for lounging on by people with short legs and long arms.

  I crouched to rest on the bench. Jake stuck his legs out and leaned on his elbows, wings flared enough to avoid pinning them. We hung out there for a while, watching the baboon people hurry by, like real people at work.

  Did I just think something racist? Shit.

  One of the Symbiots came around, clipboard in its teeth, and waved Jake to follow. I shifted to stand, but the Symbiot waved at me. I heard her voice in my head very clearly.

  You may stay right there. This will only take a few minutes.

  My HUD flashed PSYCHIC CONTACT: Friendly.

  What the William Shatner. I didn’t blink until they’d gone through another automated glass door. It was funny how bug people, buffalo lizards, and hawks big enough to consider me prey didn’t faze me like these guys did. Psychic, too. Stupendous. I had to monitor my inner ramblings more closely.

  I stretched my legs out like Jake had done. It felt better on the knees since the bench height was a foot off the ground. After about five minutes, Jake returned with a thick, square metal box.

  “Was it a tutorial?” I asked, sitting forward.

  His head shook, and he glanced back at the door. “I sat in a chair, and there was this beam of light, and then I just knew how to use the items in the box.”

  “Oh?” I frowned, disappointed for some reason. The ridge of my brow pulled down, and I scratched my temple. “If they can force information into your mind, why are there intelligence limits on certain skills and professions?”

  “Beats me,” he shrugged. The box vanished from his hand abruptly.

  So that’s what it looked like when people moved things from equipped to inventory. I hadn’t noticed when we did the paper job together yesterday. It was, like most things in this place, weird and a little startling.

  “Let’s go, I guess. Maybe we can find some trouble,” I suggested.

  “Oh, we could arena fight!” Jake bounced on his cloven hooves, a gleam in his red eyes.

  Arena fights sounded intriguing, though needlessly risky. Still, I had five lives. “Do they have a non-weapon option? Maybe I could break a stool and make a club out of it.”

  I wanted a sword—or any weapon I could use to throw my strength into. Being completely untrained and weaponless, I had to rely on my base stats. Jake’s Magetech kit would see a lot of action soon.

  Jake’s expression turned doubtful. His black rat tail swished as he considered it. After a moment, he shook his head and offered me a hand to pull me up. I took it and stood.

  “Sheesh, you’re heavy.” A look crossed his face, and he admitted, “I guess we shouldn’t, yet. Neither of us has anything to use. We’ll get pwned.”

  “Speaking of, I was thinking of your battle build,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest. “What weapons are you interested in?”

  Jake shrugged, but I knew he had a style. Everyone who played a game for more than twenty minutes did. As we descended the glassy stairs, I began listing off possibilities.

  “Sneak-archer?”

  “Who doesn’t?” He replied with a grin. “It’s so overpowered.”

  “What about CoD? You snipe?”

  He wiggled his spidery fingers together, “On occasion. I liked duos where my partner went balls out, and I followed and hit whoever he was after.”

  “I knew it,” I said triumphantly. “Crossbow. Something without a lot of kickback, so when you’re in the air…”

  “Aw,” he tried to look back at his wings as we walked out of the building and into the blue sunlight. “I wish there was a gun.”

  I turned around, spreading my arms wide. “In this place? We can probably find you something with low or no kickback and plenty of firepower.”

  We went gun shopping. The bazaar happened to be closer to Symbiot than the Grand Market. I let him lead the way, skipping along like the giddy sunshine demon he was.

  The gun kiosk stood close to the sword shop. I shot a longing look at Mr. Kim, still lounging there, chewing on his blade of grass and sipping tea. One day soon, it would be my turn. Meanwhile… guns.

  Jake plastered his face against the glass, ogling the styles. Everything from flintlocks to plasma rifles scrolled by on the display. The woman behind the counter wore a flak jacket and had her brown hair in a neat bun. I placed her as from the modern era, her European accent curled at the edges of her English, but I couldn’t tell what region she was from.

  “Are you… uh… from Earth?” I asked bluntly. It was the best way I could figure out if she was an NPC or a player who chose an NPC role, like that lady from 1925. Having been there a whole day, my concern about offending people had already dipped.

  I thought of us as players, but we were captives, stolen from our lives. I’d try never to forget it. The System seemed designed to keep us busy, help us forget.

  “I am part of the System. We are all part of the System.”

  She was being literal, so she was probably an NPC. Technically, we were a part of the System, being uploads from our organic bodies. But we were more than that. I’d prove it, eventually.

  “Neat,” Jake said, not really listening. He was in gungasm, oohing and ahhing over items he couldn’t afford.

  There had to be a way out of this. I thought about that old lady we’d met the day before, sitting in her shop, accepting task drops for a hundred years. The concept of it haunted me.

  The weight of this purgatorial existence weighed heavy on me—thousands of beings, maybe more, kept here for hundreds of years with no way out, and I was one of them. The reality of my imprisonment overtook me, smashing me over the skull with everything I did not know about why I was here.

  My breath caught, pulse pounding in my skull, loud and erratic. My heart squeezed, my breath hitched, ribs locking around my lungs.

  I shut my eyes, but that fucking HUD still taunted me. Without the rest of the world pushing in as much, I forced my breathing to slow and imagined my pulse smoothing. Eventually, it did, centering around one thought: I would get out.

  Freedom couldn't exist in cages. Even this marvelous lie—given to us for a purpose I didn’t understand—was a prison. Escape would happen; I just had to be patient.

  The noise of the bazaar still bustled around me, and I followed it back to reason. When I opened my eyes, Jake was sighing over the plasma rifle. He turned to look at me, unaware that I almost lost my shit, for a second.

  “I can maybe afford a coil gun if I do at least ten quests today,” he said, wings drooping. His demonic voice sounded oddly appropriate at a depressed timbre.

  “Then let’s do ten jobs,” I replied tersely, grabbing his arm and yanking him away.

  The city was big, with plenty of green markers.

  We’d get there. I just had to stay the course.

  -ARCHIVE-