I remembered Ervigot spewing out massive fountains of anthracite slime that instantly liquefied mobs. Lil Spit. Of course.
“Ten years ago?”
“I guess it wasn’t so long ago for you?” She waited for my nod, laughed. “Well, that fits.”
“Why do you send them so rarely? Is the cooldown that long?”
“A Lesser Rift isn’t good enough. A Piercer sent through one alone can’t level up. It takes a Greater Rift, and that requires a hundred times more shards. They’re not so easy to collect.”
Beta answered with annoyance, like a tired parent answering a child’s dumb questions. She was obviously sick of it, but I still wanted to learn the thing that troubled me most of all.
“What happened to the others that got here? The others like me? Back in reality, I never heard of any cases like this…”
Beta smiled a carnivorous grin. She’d been sitting cross-legged six feet up in the air the whole time we talked, but now she stood.
“Nobody’s heard of any such cases. Three is smart. He got a free ride to MIT, and he planned to work as a beta-tester at Snowstorm to kick-start his career. Anyway, he thinks that players that end up here always get pulled out sooner or later. But you see, they still get left behind here. Like I already said, the database in this version of Disgardium happily rewrites itself when something comes in from outside. I don’t know how it happens, but when new arrivals are pulled out, their consciousness stays with us. I’m certain of it. All of us—all the beta-testers—are living out our lives in reality as if nothing ever happened. Our imprints were left behind here, full copies. Only…”
“Only you don’t think of yourselves as the copies,” I whispered.
“Exactly. Just like you don’t think you’re a copy, right? Your capsule will spit you out of Dis if it hasn’t already. But you’re not Alex. You’re Scyth, and you’ll stay here forever.”
“Wait. You said yourself that there used to be a hundred of you, and now there are only six! Where did the others go if they got stuck in this world forever?”
“The founding fathers strove for pure realism. They wanted players to take Disgardium seriously, to fear death. Punishing players who die by taking away levels is one thing. Disappointing, but just another rule of the game. But how do you punish players who drop down to level one? Or die more than once at level one?”
“By taking their character?”
“Right. In this world, level-one players lose experience points when they die. When there’s no experience left, the character dies a final death—and no resurrection can fix it. We’ve tried.”
She raised her head. Her eyes shone with tears. Her face was flawless, with no sign of the weight of millennia in her beautiful eyes, just sadness for fallen friends. Her voice was young, sonorous, and now it said words that chilled my heart.
“My name was June Curtis before I became Nine. I collect abilities. When I kill a target, I have a very low chance of absorbing one of its skills. You have a couple of interesting abilities that I haven’t seen before. With luck, I’ll get them out of you before you die your final death.”
A second later, she removed the Undying buff from me and I saw nothing but fire.
You are dead.
Reviving in 11:59:59… 11:59:58… 11:59:57…
Twelve long hours in the great nothingness awaited me, then short moments before the next fireball, then death, waiting, revival… And again, and again, for all eternity or until my final death.
Chapter 7: Another Life
THEY SAY HUMANS can get used to anything. Maybe that’s true, but unless Nine and Three were lying, I was no human. Just a copy of the real Alex Sheppard, a sixteen-year-old schoolboy. So I didn’t get used to anything. Each time, I felt it vividly, intensely, regardless of how many times I went through the same thing. Pain remained pain, death remained death. I remembered each one.
There was nothing to mark the time that passed except the timer counting down the hours until my next respawn. I counted my deaths instead. On average, there were two and a half every twenty-four hours, because Beta #9 didn’t always kill me right away. Sometimes she wanted to talk. Sometimes, when I revived, she wasn’t there, and then I tried to run with Depths Teleportation, which she hadn’t taken yet.
My skills were blocked within the castle, so I tried to get the hell away whenever I could.
I died every time. Not to Nine, but to the mobs. The land around the castle teemed with enemy life. I doubted that Dis had anything like it. Ten thousand years of evolution in the Nether had created truly nightmarish creatures, but it was the Living Sieve that I hated worst of all.
It was invisible, but you could detect it from distortion in the air, like the kind you see over hot asphalt. The sieve moved by blinking or leaping from one spot to another—there it was thirty yards away, and then suddenly—poof!—it was pulling you into its insides through its fine sieve, grating your flesh to molecules. Worst of all, you didn’t die right away. Layer after layer, your body turned to a fine paste until the Living Sieve finally absorbed its prey. The torture dealt no damage until the beast finished the process, which meant you had a long time to fruitlessly try to escape while you screamed of pain and dreamed of a quick death. I tried to hasten the end by literally pushing myself into the sieve, but the speed never changed—just layer after slow layer in strict sequence.
I tried dozens of times, but I never managed to get far enough from the castle to use my skills. The Pacified, Amnesia and Enchained debuffs seemed to work in a half-mile radius around it.
After learning from me
