At the sound, I practically ran to the door.

  Who would be first? Jesse? Maybe all of them were together?

  But when I wrenched open the door, there was no tall woman with a cheerful grin and dark red hair. Nor a cute girl in a bomber jacket, hurling herself forwards to hug me.

  And it was not my friends, Calvin and Lee Wai Meng.

  The crude spearhead stabbed directly towards my head.

  I dodged, just. The spearhead scraped my cheek, tearing the skin.

  I had no idea who the man was at the doorway, twice my size in heavy bear furs. He, on the other hand, seemed intent on murdering me. He lunged again, forcing his bulk through the doorway with a whirl of snow.

  “Sanctuary!”

  The man was pushed back suddenly by an invisible force. He growled, stabbed with his spear again, and it merely bounced off thin air. “Witch! You can’t cower in there forever!”

  “Maybe not forever, but long enough,” I muttered, swallowing my stress, following up with a deep, steadying breath. “Get out before I strike you.”

  “Strike me?” He laughed triumphantly, pulling free from his furs a large crucifix. “I know your weakness, witch. You cannot touch those who are blessed.”

  I looked at the ground. The floor was covered in mud and melting snow, tracked in by the man’s heavy boots. I felt… annoyed.

  I looked back up at the man, whose bearded grin was fading somewhat as he realised I wasn’t fearfully screaming as much as he hoped. My voice shook, unfortunately, but I gritted out, “You came into my house, tried to stab me, waved a crucifix in my face…” I clapped my hands together and bowed my head. “Hey, God, could you please do something about this guy?”

  [This guy kind of sucks, huh? Let’s do something about him!]

  [Your Prayer has been heard! Your opponent’s socks are now completely drenched in water!]

  I’m so grateful that I want to bang my head against the wall.

  The man started in shock, his steps suddenly becoming uncertain. “What in God’s name did you do?”

  “I chatted to that God you believe in so much.” I turned for the door and found myself unable to walk through it. Sanctuary at Level 3 prevented anything from getting within five metres of me. Which apparently meant a doorway more narrow than five metres wide was impassable.

  I’m going to kill God, I thought wildly. I’m going to fight Him. Or at least the game devs. Which is the same thing, right?

  The man thought he would take advantage of my turned back to stab with his spear again. He bounced off.

  As he fell back against the wall, I let Sanctuary lapse and rushed outside.

  By the time he minced out after me, unsteady on his wet and now surely freezing feet, I had seized one of the posts that carried a flaming goat skull and menaced him with it. The skull swung loosely at the end of the post, tied to a crosspiece.

  The man crossed himself at the sight, but he was beginning to shiver. He stumbled in the snow.

  I thrust the flaming goat skull towards him, catching the side of his face with a burning horn.

  “We match,” I said sarcastically.

  He spat in my direction.

  He was too close to the house for me to cast Divine Wrath; I would probably blow half the house up, which wasn’t a welcome prospect with how cold it was.

  With no such concern, the man was all too happy to do everything he could to attack me. We circled each other in the front yard. Although I was carrying a flaming skull, the pole it was tied to was a little too long for effective combat, and the man was far more proficient in fighting than I was.

  I was soon bleeding in a dozen places, all small wounds, but they stung and made it difficult to concentrate. The man’s furs were singed, the smell of burning hair sickening on the cold air.

  I was backed up against the wall of the house. I could feel the rough timbers prickle me through my priest’s robes.

  He lunged again. I dodged, but the spear caught my side and took a piece of me with it, nailing it to the wooden wall where his spear had eventually lodged. I screamed aloud, the sound far louder than I had expected, an enormous cry that hurt my ears and sounded…

  Like a chicken.

  There were chickens that lived in a pen at the back of the house, but they were all normal-sized, incapable of making such a noise…

  I looked at the house.

  The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  It had stood up.

  Four huge chicken feet now protruded from the bottom corners of the house. One of them was practically horizontal.

  I followed the line of that orange, ridged leg and sharp talons, away from the house, towards the woods.

  The man lay crumpled where he had been kicked directly through the fence, shattered timbers hanging crazily from the leaning posts, their respective flaming goat skulls listing drunkenly. He did not move.

  I tried to check the man’s name. Nothing, not even a half-arsed name for a random cannon-fodder NPC.

  He was dead.

  The house was clucking, disgruntled, and trying to scratch at the spear, still sticking out of the wall, with its closest leg. I pried it out, hesitated, then patted the wall.

  The house shook itself like a chicken fluffing its feathers, and then sat down, the legs disappearing.

  I returned the goat skull to its original position, picked up the spear again, and went to prod the man.

  The body.

  Part of me knew that I should examine the corpse for useful items, but the thought of touching that heavy, limp body with my hands was terrifying, and I was colder than I had realised. The most I could bring myself to do was to plunge my hands into the furs, drag the body to the gate, and leave it there. Perhaps that would scare off any more would-be witch hunters.

  Honestly, I would have thought that the flaming goat skulls would have done that, but apparently not.

  I hurried back inside to warm up by the fire and sweep away the mess the man had left. I made tea, wrapped myself in the furs that covered my bed, and shivered by the hearth.

  The shivering did not stop.

  Weak.

  I covered my ears.

  What are you sulking about? Get up.

  I whimpered.

  Stop whining, you pathetic thing. If you’ve got time to whine, you’ve got time to do something.

  “LEAVE ME ALONE!” I screamed into the empty house. “YOU’RE NOT EVEN HERE!”

  I’m always here. Who else will tell you how to live your life properly?

  The shivering hadn’t stopped, but I stumbled upright. That critical voice inside my head was right. I had to fix the fence.

  I found the spear, and some rope, and after wrapping myself in more layers, I trudged out into the snow. Using the spear as a walking stick, and avoiding looking at the dark shape sprawled beside the gate, I made it to the broken section of fence and began to lash the spear into the broken space. My fingers, numbed by cold, struggled to tie the rough rope into tight knots. The spear sagged in the loose loops. I yanked at the rope desperately, trying to tighten it.

  I heard a strange, hollow thunk behind me –

  A stabbing pain, a crunch, in my right shoulder blade –

  I screamed and wheeled about, clutching for the arrow in my back with my left hand. “Sanctuary!”

  The next arrow bounced off the invisible barrier around me.

  “Witch! You’ve killed another and callously left his body to be savaged by wild animals! I will punish you, in the name of God!”

  The figure at the gate was slight, nocking another arrow into his bow. He couldn’t be more than fifteen.

  Another arrow bounced off my Sanctuary.

  “I’ll take your head back to my village and prove myself an adult!”

  “Please go back,” I shouted, gasping in pain. “Leave me alone!”

  “Shut it, witch.”

  My Endurance stat allowed me to remain focused, but for how long? If I tried to heal myself, my concentration on my Sanctuary would break.

  “Please.” I was begging now. “I don’t want to hurt you. Please go home.”

  The boy hesitated, confused. He keep his bowstring taut, but the arrowhead wavered.

  It began to snow again.

  “You won’t trick me.” He fired again.

  Like a rock, I sat motionless, putting all of my concentration into retaining the Sanctuary. Ten arrows bounced off. Twenty arrows.

  The boy finally stopped after firing thirty arrows. He clicked his tongue in frustration. “You watch! I’ll come back with a longbow and bigger arrows.”

  “Please don’t.”

  I watched him stomp away through the snow.

  Reaching over my shoulder, I tried to pull the arrow from my shoulder with my left hand. Even simply stretching made the muscles shift and scream. Pulling the arrow both hurt even more, and failed to work. I tried bending my left arm back the other way and wrenched at the shaft with a reversed grip. Still nothing, except more pain.

  I let my hand drop back, breathing heavily. Sweat began to crawl over my forehead. My right arm felt numb.

  “Heal.”

  The smaller cuts inflicted by the first attack sealed up, not even leaving scars. But the arrow remained lodged in my shoulder. If anything, it felt worse; the flesh appeared to have healed around the arrow, without pushing the head out, and so the muscle slid uncomfortably over the foreign object. My arm still felt numb.

  There was no way I was fixing the fence with one arm, and my non-dominant one at that. I waded back through the snow to the house.

  The weather warmed incrementally over the next week, and with it came more and more hunters. It was as if they had sprung up with the early spring flowers. The snow began to slowly melt, turning to a horrible brown slushy mud.

  I tried to fight some of them. The house dealt with several.

  I held out for that week.

  On the eighth day, I invoked Divine Wrath.

  They’re just NPCs, I told myself. The smell of cooked flesh is just… is just…

  Is just what?

  Did it matter if they didn’t exist, if they weren’t real, if I was smelling them cooking from within? If they left behind charred corpses that stared at me with eyeless sockets, their eyeballs evaporated or melted down their cheeks?

  The bodies piled up.

  I cried and retched and told myself I was weak and useless useless useless.

  My mother was right.

  I wished I could sleep. I wished I had kept spinning the daily wheel and found another Autopass and I wished that I hadn’t agreed to play this game in the first place and that we’d all gone and played mah-jeuk or something like a bunch of oldies instead.

  I lay on my stomach, when I lay in bed. Two arrows protruded from my right shoulder. I had been able to pull the others out.

  I watched Heal stitch my lopped-off hand back to my wrist.

  “Should I just threaten to eat them, next time?” I said aloud to myself. They’d probably just yell even more insults at me, if I did.

  The days were still short. I drifted outside, my feet sinking into the mud. The chickens clucked disagreeably in the sludge, pecking at microscopic specks.

  I shouldn’t stand out in the open like I was, but my eyes were caught by the weak, sinking sun.

  A twig snapped, close, so close by.

  I heard the hollow, wooden thunk that I now knew was the sound of an arrow leaving a bow.

  But the following cry of pain came from the woods, and I turned, my shawls dragging in the mud, to see the man who had been stalking through the trees with a throwing axe in his hand, fall…

  “Maria!”

  “Mik Tsaam!”

  I was hallucinating.

  I had to be. I’d imagined them turning up so many times, I’d heard their voices and rushed out to find empty woods or gleaming spearpoints, I –

  Peach cannoned into my waist, throwing her arms around me. “Mik Tsaam! Mik Tsaam!”

  A strong hand gripped my right shoulder, and Jesse turned me, teeth clenched, a strung bow in her other hand. “What the fuck? What the fuck?”

  Calvin lumbered from the trees just behind Lee Wai Meng, who was talking a mile-a-minute. “… that she would be here, and I was right, and – Ah Tsaam? Holy shit, Ah Tsaam! You look terrible! Are…”

  My good arm wrapped around Peach, who was sobbing into me. I leaned against Jesse, and felt her arms around my shoulders, carefully avoiding the arrows.

  “I’m… I’m okay,” I said, forcing the words out from around the lump in my throat so hard I thought I would taste blood. “You’re here now. I’m okay.”