I looked at the winged girl again. Her equipment looked similar to the ColdBlooded Punisher• set: close-fitting, seamless, light-absorbing matt armor. She had no helmet, so I could see her hair, not moving in spite of our flight. It looked ordinary, long and red, a little curly.
Her level was insanely high: 301672…
You couldn’t get there through ordinary leveling. Maybe this version of Dis allowed the developers to dig around in the database and enter whatever numbers they wanted. That would explain Beta’s ludicrous level, but not the superpowered local mobs. And the fact that I could see their level instead of the usual question marks was strange too. In the Dis I knew, when a player or mob was too strong for you, you couldn’t see their level.
Good thing my frozen body didn’t seem to need food or drink. At least, I hadn’t gotten any extra debuffs during our flight. But for me, the good news stopped there.
I felt us descending and saw the tips of some tall, unmoving trees, then a high fortress wall, then I hit the ground and felt myself being pulled along it. Beta landed nearby. Raising me up and standing me on my feet, her invisible magic put a series of effects on me: Pacified
All main attributes reduced to l.
Amnesia
You have temporarily forgotten all your skills.
Enchained
You will always revive in the same place where you died.
The system informed me of this as if merely relaying facts. It didn’t matter if Beta had done this herself or if it was the defensive systems in her fortress. Either way, I couldn’t escape. The debuffs had no duration. The drop in my physical stats was palpable. Even my vision suddenly got a lot worse.
I stood on shaky legs on a carefully tended lawn. Equally well-tended bushes grew along the fortress wall, cut into the shapes of various animals. A path of polished flagstones meandered alongside them. To our left towered a castle well, perfectly polished and gleaming with thousands of gemstones.
Not seeing, but feeling someone’s eyes, I saw Beta give a short nod to someone behind me. That confirmed my suspicion; she wasn’t alone here.
“What does he have?” Beta asked.
“Plenty, Nine,” a male voice said behind my back. “Check the list and the descriptions I just sent you. Note Depths Teleportation in particular—an interesting skill.”
Beta was silent for some time, reading lines in the air only she could see. The corners of her lips lifted.
“Yeah. Useful. Alright, Three, I’ll handle it. You staying?”
“Of course. I want to see what happens. You don’t mind if I listen in, right?”
“Won’t your girlfriend get jealous?”
Laughter behind me.
“Well, I have half an hour. I can’t be late for dinner. You know how it is.”
Beta smiled crookedly, approached me.
“I’m about to remove your stun. But you’re going to stand there and not move, not turn, not open your mouth until you’re asked a question. I’ll be the one asking, and you answer. Ready?”
She did nothing, didn’t even lift a finger, but the Chilled debuff lifted.
“Who are you, what do you want from me?!” I asked, then turned around sharply, but saw nobody.
The second person might have been invisible, although I suddenly had other things to worry about anyway. The punishment for disobeying orders came immediately: Beta cast the Undying buff on me (You cannot die), then traced a finger through the air and cut my body in half. Diamond Skin didn’t activate, but my health didn’t drop below one either. I was still alive, but I felt only my top half, which slowly slid off and fell to the ground.
Then came pain the like of which I’d never felt. Everything I’d experienced before, even with the undead curse in the sandbox, had been filtered by my capsule. There was no pain filtration in this version of Dis. I screamed. Beta frowned and cast a Seal of Silence on me. She watched me twist in agony a while, then used telekinesis to rejoin the two halves of my body, then healed me and set me on my feet.
All without a single word. Those came later, while I stood like a totem pole and didn’t move for minutes, not trying to look around, not moving a muscle.
“Break the rules again and I’ll let you try out Hellflame.” Beta’s angelic voice was a strange contrast to the meaning of her words. “You won’t die. Don’t even bother hoping. If you break the rules a third time, you’ll be swimming in Sandworm stomach acids. For a day. Nobody has lasted longer than that, but just in case, I have worse in store for you after that. So I advise you to obey my commands without hesitation. Nod if you understand.”
I dropped my head in agreement, with still more questions appearing in my mind. Why would Snowstorm treat me like this?
“How did you get here?”
“I flew.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. Some evil bitch dragged me here from Tristad.”
After a two-second pause, the man’s voice spoke from behind me in amazement.
“He’s making fun of you, Nine!”
The next hour was nothing but uninterrupted pain. Nine put the Chilled debuff back on me and dragged me to a huge hole on the other side of the castle, where there were three leashed Lava Drakes at level one hundred thousand, a mix of dragon and basilisk about the size of a flyer. The only thing I extracted from that forced trip around the castle grounds was the knowledge that there were no other players there. Or I just couldn’t see them.
I spent an hour that felt like a year in the Hellflame— the beasts cast it in turn almost without a break, broiling me to a crisp, but the
