When Lily pressed the green button and answered with an annoyed, “Hello?” there was, at first, only silence. So, she waited, listening to the faint hiss of the line, and the longer nothing happened, the more her annoyance grew. Her head still throbbed from exhaustion, and she could still see Tessa’s eyes when she closed her own. Ruby red and predatory, and it was far too early to trust that the girl wouldn’t do anything she later regretted. Lily didn’t have the time for distractions right now.

  After a few seconds she made an irritated huff and started lowering the phone again.

  “I really have no time for this,” she muttered. “Is this showcase mannequin now doing prank calls on me to distract me from the important things?”

  But before she could end the call and pull the phone back into her inventory, the speaker crackled, and a voice came out. It sounded like a call center robot trying to imitate a friendly woman. The tone was warm, but the warmth felt wrong, like an emotionless machine pretending to be friendly.

  “Hello, Lady Lilithia Nocturne. Thank you for using our service. We from [??????????????] are very glad to have you as our esteemed customer.”

  Lily snapped the phone back to her ear, eyes narrowing.

  “What?” she snapped. “What customer? Are you kidding me? Who are you, and why’re you calling me? God damn it, what service? I didn’t sign up for anything.”

  Her voice came out harsher than she intended, because her headache was still there and the sleep deprivation was slowly grinding down her patience, and also because the whole thing felt completely wrong on an instinctive level. But the voice didn’t react to her tone at all.

  “Of course. You are listed as one of our esteemed platinum members, Lady Nocturne. Your membership is already paid, and we are from [??????????????] now calling you to inform you that your request is granted. Congratulations! Yay! Our reality bending service is now in progress. We will soon open the connection towards your intended target. Please confirm the target! Doomsday member Lissy F???l???a???m???e???s???b???o???r???n???. We need your approval to recalibrate the fragmented soul.”

  Lily’s stomach dropped so hard it felt like she missed a step.

  “Your what need what?” she snapped. “And who the fuck are you?!? No. What!? I paid nothing! … Oh, come on… Is this a joke? Please say it’s a joke! Yo showcase mannequin, is that you. Don’t dare to do anything to Lissy!”

  “Thank you for your trust,” the voice said, still cheerful. “We are [??????????????] with the best service in all of X-3XXXXX. Lissy Flamesborn is confirmed. We have located her current soul location in X-32737 on the planet Earth. Reality bending now in process.”

  Lily’s blood turned cold.

  “Wait,” she said immediately. “Stop. What do you do? Hello!?”

  The line erupted into static. It wasn’t the normal hiss you heard when a connection went bad. It sounded more like the phone was trying to speak in symbols, as if a system window had glitched open and started reading its own error log out loud. Fragments poured through the speaker in broken bursts, and the voice began to switch between coherent words and binary. The few parts Lily could actually understand made her start to worry.

  001101100011…011100

  ?? L???I???S???S???Y??? [s?y?n?c?h?r?o?n?y?.?f?a?i?l?e?d?]

  01001100 01101001 01110011 01110011 01111001 F???l???a???m???e???s???b???o???r???n??? {core link unstable}

  ???system_s?y?n?c?r?o?n?…incomplete…???

  [connection request: ???????? ????????????]

  ?? D?o?o?m?s?d?a?y? ?I?n?i?t?i?a?t?e?d? ??

  S?y?s?t?e?m?_?W?a?r?i?n?g?:? ?S?o?u?l?_?D?e?t?e?c?t?e?d?

  ?? [core breach imminent] ??

  ?? FRAGMENTED ?S?O?U?L? ?D?E?T?E?C?T?E?D? ??

  [reconnecting: LISSY.FLAMESBORN]

  Lily didn’t pull the phone away. She probably should have, because it grew louder and louder, and every instinct screamed that this was not safe, that she was letting something unwanted touch her. But her fingers only tightened.

  I swear, if he does anything to her, I will tear the fucking world down to find him and kill this motherfucker… she thought, getting angrier and angrier at the damn mannequin, because this was, of course, something he had planned. And Lily was sure he had lied about the phone, that he knew she wouldn’t use it, but would keep it in her inventory on the chance that she might meet her friends again somehow, someday.

  Out loud, she growled into the phone. “Answer me. Who are you? What are you doing?”

  The noise rose, then abruptly cut, as if a switch had flipped. And the call center voice returned, bright and pleased, like it had just completed a purchase.

  “Link established. Congratulations! Yay! We have successfully linked the fragmented souls between reality X-34822 and X-34237. The Faith Program is now active. Congratulations! Yay! You can now instruct your intended target personally on the next course of action. Please be aware that the Faith Program will suppress the target’s memories of this conversation until complete synchronization.”

  Lily’s mouth went dry. “Instruct it on what?” she hissed into the phone. “I didn’t request anything!”

  “We established the link for you and thank you again for your trust in [??????????????],” the voice continued. “Remember, as a platinum member, you have full access to extracting souls across X-3XXXX up to five times. You have already commissioned five souls. The extractions are already in progress, so there are zero extractions left. Extraction one is now in progress. Please don’t worry. The service may take a bit of time. Please now inform the intended target for extraction how you will proceed once the service is completed. We will inform you of the location where we will drop the extractee once we finish the extraction. We will now upload the system into the subject. We will call you back when we are ready for the next extraction.”

  “That’s dogshit,” she snapped into the phone. “I didn’t commission anything, and what the fuck are you even supposed to be? Don’t hang up. Do you hear me? I didn’t agree to any of this, and if you touch her, I will find you. I swear I will. I don’t care if you’re a god or a system or some idiot hiding behind a—”

  A click interrupted her, and it sounded as if someone had hung up, and the call center voice vanished. For a second there was only silence again. Lily pulled the phone down, only to see that the call was still active, so she stared at it and was about to complain again when another click came through and a quiet voice said, “H… hello?” The voice sounded like the speaker had sobbed earlier, and there was a deep sadness in it.

  Lily almost dropped the phone from fright when she heard that voice while her pulse jumped high. She knew that voice all too good and it shouldn’t not be real.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  “Lissy?” she said slowly.

  There was a pause, and then a small sob, muffled, like someone had pressed a hand over their mouth and failed to keep it in.

  “Is this a prank?” Lissy whispered. Her voice sounded thin and broke as she spoke, and it made something twist in Lily’s chest as she listened. “Why are you doing this to me? Why would you call me like this? What is this shit with my phone? Did you hack it?”

  Lily sat very still on the edge of her bed. Her coat was half on, her hands were cold, and the room suddenly felt smaller. The instant she heard Lissy’s voice, she forgot about everything else. There was only the phone in her hand and the voice she had heard every day for years, the voice of her best friend, the person she had cared about most in her life.

  “It is not a prank…” Lily whispered, and she tried to keep her tone even, but it was hard, far too hard. “Lissy, it’s me… Lily.” She paused.

  On the other end, Lissy drew in a shaky breath that sounded like she was trying not to panic. “Please… why are you doing this to me… please…” she whispered back.

  And Lily felt tears running down her cheeks. “No… I… Do you remember when I was visiting you?... That day we wanted to join your idiotic brother because he’d spent the whole day before bragging to me about what a badass scout he was, and you said you would show him what a real scout is? Your family is really obsessed with the outdoors…” She sniffed. “And then we went out, and he sprained his foot because he was jumping around us like a total moron, and we had to carry him back. It was my first time ever walking up a real mountain, and because we had to bring your brother home so quickly, you promised me that the next time I visited, you’d show me the stars from the top...”

  When she finished, she heard Lissy already crying. “How is this possible? You’re dead. Your funeral is tomorrow. That… Lily? Is it really you…?”

  “Yeah, it’s really me… And… oh god, I don’t know how to explain it. I don’t even know what’s really going on here, or why we’re talking right now.” She paused, trying to get her bearings and concentrate.

  She forced herself to focus on what the call center voice had said earlier, and she also remembered her short meeting with the damn showcase mannequin inside Sevrin’s soul yesterday. It had said she was the first spark, and that many would follow her. She knew she couldn’t trust its word, but if even half of what it had said was true, then it made sense that she had set something in motion unconsciously, some proxy war against a deity that had already summoned people from Earth to Xantia.

  But what was this shit with the telephone now? Sure, the mannequin probably wanted her whole guild to come over somehow, but why this farce with this “service”? Maybe because it couldn’t interfere directly anymore, and this service was some outside force? And why did it feel like everything was trying to keep her from sleeping? No, that wasn’t important right now…

  Her thoughts were already starting to spiral again, but the only important thing was that she was speaking with Lissy right now. The call center voice had said she needed to prepare Lissy for extraction, and since Lily had no real idea what was going on, and probably no chance to stop it in the moment, she had to tell Lissy as much as she could in the time she had.

  She forced herself to stay calm, wiping the tears from her cheeks, and she began to speak again. “Listen, Lissy, we don’t have much time. I really don’t know how much of a choice you have, but I was told I need to prepare you for extraction. You said my funeral is tomorrow, and yeah, it’s true. Some motherfucking hobo shot me, and I… I’m pretty sure I’m dead on Earth…”

  “On Earth?” Lissy chimed in. “I… am I hallucinating? Lily, I wanted—”

  “Please listen to me first, okay?” Lily cut in. “As I said, I don’t know how much time we have. So please, please, if you can avoid this ‘extraction’ somehow, do it. I don’t think it’s a good idea. But if what I’m assuming is correct, they want to take your soul from our reality, no, I mean from yours, and bring it over here.” Her breath hitched. “It sounds completely insane, I know, but you would… you would be here in your Xantia avatar, and it’s not as fun as it sounds, okay? You have so many plans for the future, and I want you to actually live your life, and ah, fuck it…”

  Her words started coming faster and faster until Lissy interrupted her. “Lily.” Her voice was steadier now. “I don’t care if I’m dreaming right now. I don’t care if I’m losing it right now, but… there was so much I wanted to say to you. Please. Just one moment.”

  Lily paused, and her voice dropped to a whisper. “Sorry. I know it’s hard, and you probably didn’t cope with the fact that your best friend died. I just…”

  “Lily!” Lissy cut in again.

  “Yes…?”

  “I… I love—”

  Lissy’s voice vanished abruptly with a loud crack, and the call center voice from earlier spoke again. “Faith Program now finished uploading. Extraction set in motion; reality is now bending.”

  “Wait, no! What, Lissy? Oh, come on, don’t do this to me!” Lily stood up, shouting into the phone as it began to glow. She wanted to throw it against the wall. She began the motion to throw, and…

  …

  …

  Lily opened her eyes. She was standing in full armor, [Nocturne’s Requiem], on a wide field in bright daylight, and in one hand she held her soul-bound sword, the [Nocturne Crownblade], dripping with blood. Corpses of soldiers lay all around her. Lily recognized them as soldiers of Burm, since she had already seen that armor in Tiara, but these sets were a bit different from the ones in Tiara.

  A nagging feeling pressed inside her head, and she recognized it as a status message. She closed her eyes for a moment and took a steady breath. Then she opened them and said, “Status.”

  A message popped up in front of her.

  [WARNING: Reality Distortion Detected]

  Reality is shifting. Mental exhaustion detected. Defensive integrity too low to resist. Mental state compromised. Loading mental defenses failed. Resistance weakened due to current mental exhaustion.

  Loading alternate defenses: Combat Autonomy…

  Loading successful.

  Soul fragment detected: Princess of the Abyss. Granting access for autonomy.

  Emotional latency suppressed. Manual override unavailable.

  Lily closed the message, then sighed. She let her blade vanish into her inventory and looked slowly at the corpses around her. She couldn’t pinpoint how many there were, but it was a lot, maybe fifty, maybe a hundred, maybe more. The sight was gruesome.

  She knew she should probably feel something while looking at them, but she felt nothing in that moment. It still felt like she had been someone else, even though she was herself again now. But she knew what had happened. Days without sleep had been enough to weaken her natural mental defenses, even at level 999. She didn’t need to be a genius to interpret the status message and her last memories.

  “Pfff. Faith Program,” she muttered. “You really want to play it like this?”

  To set faith in whatever direction they wanted, they had taken control of her and had set things in motion that she probably couldn’t stop now. And to do it, they had somehow tricked her into not sleeping for days. The only question was how much they had done while she wasn’t in control, and how much time had passed.

  “I swear this is the last time anyone ever takes advantage of me like this,” she whispered. “This was the last straw. You don’t want to play nice? All right. I’ll find every one of you and show you how nice I can be. I’m not a chess piece in your fucking game…”

  She spread her wings and flew upward into the sky. She needed to fly back and see what damage had been done in her absence, and she also needed to find out who was lying dead on this field. As she ascended, she looked down at the sea of corpses again, and her eyes wandered over it one last time while she felt her emotions slowly returning. A sickening feeling spread through her stomach, and she was about to turn away, but with her last glance she saw something golden shimmering between the dead.

  “That can’t be…”

  Without thinking, she vanished from her point in the sky and stood almost instantly in front of what she had seen. Before her was a golden sphere, radiating heat, surrounding a sleeping woman. The woman had golden hair and wore a golden diadem with a red crystal set in it. She had layered red robes, and an amulet shaped like a flame that glowed faintly with a red aura.

  Lily didn’t even think about what she was doing. She burst the sphere absentmindedly and picked the woman up. The woman was still sleeping, or unconscious, and didn’t react. Lily took her in a princess carry as she rose into the sky again. She looked around, and luckily it hadn’t been a whole week, because she could still see the lucent flag of Xares hovering in the distance over the fortress in the forest.

  Ignoring everything else, Lily began to fly in that direction, and she felt tears sliding down her cheeks as she held the woman in her arms.