Chapter 103: Her Doubt

Zion stood in the center of the dirt courtyard, while she held her black sword in her right hand.

She watched the Unchained practice their combat formations.

They were slow, their stances were completely wrong and they left their flanks exposed

She walked toward a young recruit and hit his wooden shield with the flat side of her blade.

The impact knocked him to the ground immediately.

“You are holding the shield too low,” Zion said. “If an Inquisidor swings from the top, you lose your head.”

The recruit nodded quickly and scrambled to his feet.

Zion turned around because Varek approached her from the command tent.

He held a rolled piece of parchment in his hands.

“Liberator,” Varek said. “The northern scouts sent an urgent report.”

Zion sheathed her sword. “Tell me.”

“St. Sophia Sanatorium was destroyed two nights ago and burned completely to the ground. The Church lost their main extraction facility so the concentrated Gift crystals will not reach the front lines anymore.”

Zion processed the information.

She didn’t order an attack on St. Sophia, didn’t even have troops near that area, but the destruction of the crystal factory gave her a massive tactical advantage.

She looked at Varek to give him a new order.

The blue interface flickered over his head.

[NPC: Varek]

[Level: 34]

[Fear: Dying before he can find his missing daughter.]

[Dream: Buying a small plot of land near the eastern coast.]

Zion blinked.

She rubbed her eyes but the text stayed there.

She looked past Varek and focused on the recruits training in the dirt.

Her interface glitched again and multiple windows popped up at the exact same time.

[NPC: Morrigan. Regrets stealing money from his brother.]

[NPC: Alysa. Terrified of fire.]

[NPC: Jace. Wants to learn how to read.]

The blue text multiplied and filled her entire vision.

It showed detailed biographies, personal fears, and complex emotional states for every single person in the camp.

Zion raised her hand and swiped the air to close the windows.

They disappeared for one second and then they immediately came back.

She forced the interface to shut down completely.

The blue lines of code vanished.

Zion walked away from the training grounds and headed toward the edge of the camp.

Games did not work this way.

The developers did not write thousands of pages of dynamic psychological profiles for generic background characters.

Background characters only needed basic combat stats and a few lines of dialogue to give out quests.

She stopped walking and looked at the tents and suddenly started to suspect this place was not a game, but she pushed that thought away.

She needed to focus on the objective and find the Architect.

***

Night fell over the Ruins of the Radiant Empire.

Zion sat on a wooden crate near the main campfire.

The camp was quiet because most of the soldiers were asleep in their tents.

She heard small footsteps approaching from the left.

She turned her head and saw Mila.

The little girl that now wore a clean gray tunic and held a worn cloth doll.

Mila had brown hair with big brown eyes and was a perfect copy of Maya.

Zion felt a tight pressure in her chest every time she looked at the girl.

Mila stopped in front of the crate. “I cannot sleep.”

Zion looked at the fire. “Go back to your tent, Mila. It is late.”

“The ground is cold,” Mila took a step closer. “Can you tell me a story?”

Zion turned her head and stared at the girl.

She never told stories nor interacted with the NPCs outside of combat commands and quest dialogues in any of her previous runs, but Mila stood there and waited.

Zion let out a long breath and patted the top of the wooden crate next to her.

Mila climbed up and sat down.

Zion looked at the flames again as she didn’t know any fairy tales from this world, so she decided to tell a different one.

“There was a girl who lived in a gray world,” Zion started.

“Everything in her world was boring and loud. She went to a building every day to sit at a desk and write numbers on a glowing screen and she had a little sister.”

Mila hugged her cloth doll. “Was the sister nice?”

“Yes. She was very nice but she got sick.” Zion swallowed the lump in her throat.

“The doctors put her in a white room with a lot of machines, and the girl visited her every afternoon. She brought her toys and read her books, but the sister didn’t get better, she died.”

Mila looked down. “That is a sad story.”

“It gets different,” Zion said.

“The girl was completely alone after that. She hated the gray world because it was unfair and cruel, then she found a secret door and that door led to a new world full of magic and monsters and swords.”

“Did she fight the monsters?”

“She fought everything. She learned the rules of the new world and she became very strong, she gained magic powers and built an army. She became a goddess.”

Mila yawned and rubbed her eyes, then leaned her small head against Zion’s arm.

Zion didn’t push her away, just pulled her black cape off her shoulders and draped it over the little girl to keep her warm.

“And was the girl happy?” Mila asked.

Zion covered her properly. “The girl was powerful. Which is not the same thing.”

Mila looked up at her. “What is the difference?”

Zion opened her mouth.

She tried to find the right words. “…I am still figuring that out.”

Mila closed her eyes and fell asleep a few minutes later.

Zion sat there and watched the fire burn down while she thought about her real life, about the hospital room and the constant beeping of the heart monitor.

She had run away from that pain and hid inside this game, but the game was changing.

Zion picked Mila up carefully and carried the girl to the civilian tents and placed her on a cot.

She walked back to her own command tent and went inside.

Zion opened her interface again.

The blue screen materialized in front of her.

She navigated to the main menu and selected the world map.

The map of Phaedra expanded across her vision.

It showed the southern ruins, the mountain passes, and the capital city in the north.

Then the map updated and a right red dot appeared on the screen pulsing.

It was located in the northeast, right next to the capital.

Zion leaned forward because the system had never displayed a red dot on the map before.

She tapped the pulsing icon with her finger.

A new notification window popped up.

[SECOND PLAYER: ACTIVE.]

[CLASS: UNKNOWN.]

[LEVEL: UNKNOWN.]

[NAME: ???]

The name section glitched continuously.

The letters scrambled and shifted into unreadable symbols.

She didn’t remember it from any of her previous runs, but something in her chest tightened violently.

Zion squeezed the armrests of her chair. “Who are you?”

_________

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