At first, the people there, the followers, had ben afraid. Why had they suddenly changed their minds? Ah'Ming glanced back at the tamer, who was now blocked by many layers of people. From the knowing look in his eyes? Ah'Ming knew that all the sentences he'd heard about not using skills on players was absolute bull.
Ah'Ming rolled his eyes, and walked away.
With his last look though, he saw the woman from earlier touching the child's cheek. With it, the child's eyes flashed with… undisguised fear?
Something was wrong.
Very wrong.
For one thing, it was impossible for that kid to be so scared.
He barely had any reaction to any of the other players.
Whipping around like Phoenix, he pointed at yelled.
"You're the ghost!" He hit the lawyer pose too.
Everyone scattered, then whipped around in fear to look at the kid.
But….
It wasn't the kid who he'd pointed at.
It had been the woman.
Immediately, some of the shadowy nooks started fading to black, blacker than night, blacker than they already were. Yet, the ink seemed to infect the rest of the room. The dark spread, unfurled, racing across the shelves, floors, ceilings.
Shocked screams and panicked noises erupted around the table, hysteria from some at not realizing an NPC had infiltrated their midst, some from shock and outrage that a forum guide could be so wrong, and some panicked from being so far away from the main table at the point of accusation, devoid of allies nearby, the ones who were first to be picked off.
The air thickened with that familiar pressure, fear trying to crawl up his spine and make a home there. It didn't work on Ah'Ming, at least, but to the other people there? Sheer terror emerged. A thick, pungent smell.
Please, Ah'Ming hoped. Please don't let that be urine.
Gross.
As the room turned to pitch black, (reminiscent of how bright Ah'Ming's future was), bright blue system screens flickered to life in front of all of the unlucky souls who were in the broadcast live. To be completely honest, the people should have been pretty happy at some excitement in their show, Ah'Ming bet that all the viewer ratings and counts were skyrocketing.
He knew his were.
|Views: 21,978
He didn't bother checking the likes.
From what he could tell though, the viewer ratings would likely play as a lifeline, a complete life saver. Ah'Ming knew that he'd often tune in whenever a video game live-streamed was about to die, since that was often the most interesting part.
the mission this time though? For the ghost?
|Find the [][][][] of the lost
Who the hell was the lost? And the what now?
Welp.
Although Ah'Ming did feel slightly guilty about plunging the group into chaos, it woulda happened anyways.
Though the room was dark, it still had the shelves. It was a really novel experience, not being able to see.
Hmm.
If Ah'Ming couldn't see, nobody else could either, right?
Two little strands of hair emerged from his shaggy ponytail, slightly solidifying.
Say, if he killed more of the whatever those things that were coming near him, would he get a higher score? Hopefully, since Ah'Ming really didn't want to get another stupid reward like bone-marrow egg tarts.
Ew.
His hands split mid-motion, fingers elongating, bone and flesh rearranging themselves with a wet, eager precision. Claws bloomed where nails had been, long and hooked, catching the faint light like blades pulled from a forge.
Ah'Ming dashed forwards, ripping some slinky thingies apart. He couldn't really tell, but he thought they were the same shadow monsters from earlier. They seemed slightly stronger now, but not much more. It was pretty curious, how little fear they seemed to hold for him now. At first, at the start of the sub-story, they had all hesitated when approaching him. The only one who hadn't had suffered for it. Yet now? They were swarming, like little army ants. The current mini squadron leader being the slightly taller shadow in front of him.
His claws raked through its torso, ripping the darkness into screaming tatters that dissolved before they hit the ground. The sound it made was short and sharp, cut off as he pivoted into the next one.They came faster now.
Three at once.
One leapt for his throat. He caught it mid-air, hands sinking into its shape, and pulled. The shadow split down the middle like fabric under stress, unraveling in his grip.
Another tried to flank him.
He spun, backhanded it into the wall with enough force to make the stone crack. The shadow smeared, then vanished, erased by violence.
More poured in.
Claws punched through the first shadow's torso and kept going, driving it straight into a shelf behind it. Wood exploded.
Books burst outward in a paper storm, spines snapping, pages shredding into the air as the shadow dissolved with a shriek. The shelf buckled, groaned, and collapsed sideways, taking two more shelves with it in a domino crash that shook the floor.
"Shh," Ah'Ming muttered reflexively, then laughed, breathless. "Oops."
A shadow lunged from his left.
He ducked, grabbed the ladder it was clinging to, and ripped.
Metal screamed as the ladder tore free of its rail. He swung it like a bat, smashing the shadow apart in a wide arc and continuing through into another shelf. Lamps shattered. Glass rained down, bursting against the floor in sharp, glittering fragments.
Moving faster and faster, Ah'Ming could feel the sludge umping through his veins, almost singing and crying out with excitement.
A black talon here, shredding through the soft, silky material of one creature, combined with large, sweeping movements of all four limbs.
He vaulted onto a table (not the main table, somewhere quite a bit away), claws gouging deep furrows into the wood as another shadow leapt for his legs. He stomped down, driving it flat, then dragged his foot back. The shadow peeled up with a shriek and came apart like burned paper.
Ah'Ming climbed onto the shelves, twitching, feeling the vibrations in the air, before jumping and diving down to rip out the non-existent organs of another thing. Faster, faster.
He tore through another two.
He ripped through more.
Movement became instinct. Fear burned away, replaced by a hot, focused fury that made everything simple. See motion. Destroy motion.
He slammed a shadow headfirst into a bookshelf hard enough to crack the stone wall behind it. He ripped another in half lengthwise and used the momentum to hurl himself forward, shoulder-checking through a cluster of them. Shelves collapsed. Bookshelves became barricades became debris.
Tables flipped. Chairs shattered. Entire sections of shelving gave way, books avalanching down in choking clouds of dust and paper. Shadows tangled in falling volumes, their movements slowing just long enough for Ah'Ming to tear them apart with ruthless efficiency.
When another shadow appeared? He grabbed it by whatever passed for a throat and drove it backward through a reading desk, splintering the wood clean in half. The desk caved. The shadow didn't survive the impact.
He shred some more apart.
They all poofed, disappeared once dead.
Soon enough, his hands were stained by the metaphorical blood of his enemies.
One hand grasping his face, he threw his head back and laughed.
It was proud of what it was doing, though it felt a slight deflation of skill from the lack of use overtime.
Another enemy.
There.
It rushed forwards, and jumped, leaping over with a somersault, before landing straight on the shadow's head in a t-pose. It crashed to the floor, crushed to bits.
There.
Another.
It ran forwards, heart beating, cheeks flushed, claws outstretched—-
A warm, sticky sensation covered his claws, dripping down the gouges in his ectoskele-
No.
The monsters….
The monsters didn't leave behind bodies. They didn't leave behind blood.
Crap.
Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. CRAP!
It was okay.
Just a little mistake!
Now. Ah'Ming just needed to double confirm that there were no witnesses. He couldn't sense anyone, but maybe they were just good at masking…
If word got out.
If they caught him again…
No.
There was some movement.
Small movement though.
The only person (well, humanoid. Maybe not human, but at least humanoid.) that small could be the kid.
Coughing nervously, Ah'Ming kicked the not-player-anymore to the side and wiped his hands on his pants. It didn't help much, since he couldn't see how dirty it was, but at least his hands were the slightest bit less sticky.
He hesitated for a second, before deciding what to do.
Ah'Ming sprinted over, to reach the kid. He wasn't really sure why, since the kid probably wouldn't rat him out to the rest of the people, but he still did anyways.
The problem was though, when he tried to grab the kid, Ah'Ming's hand went straight through. Which didn't make any sense.
If the kid had been visible, but unable to be touched, it would have been typical ghost mind-magic. But making vibrations in the air?
Suspicious.
His view count was at an all time high, though. Figures. The viewers could probably see in the dark, able to see what he did.
It was really high.
They must really enjoy watching violence.
He couldn't Balme them though.
He loved dishing it out.
He was too anxious to look at his amount of likes, though.
As Ah'Ming stood by the child, he noticed something rather funny.
One by one, the shadows slid back into the gaps, retreating into the ruined stacks.
They were probably running off to kill the other players, having deemed this one as DO-NOT-PROVOKE.
Silence followed.
Ah'Ming stood in the wreckage he'd made, surrounded by the evidence of excessive force and poor impulse control. Slowly, his hands softened, claws receding until only scraped knuckles and shaking fingers (from excitement or adrenaline, you pick) remained.
"…Yeah," he said to the kid. "I'm not paying for that."
He kept babbling, trying to get the attention of the kid. "It's not really because I'm a hooligan. Wait, that came out wrong. I'm not a hooligan, I swear! I'm just… a little lacking in the financial department as of now."
Yes.
The kid didn't respond though.
He didn't look over, or blink, or even twitch at all.
Maybe it was just a hologram?
Ah'Ming was kind of getting concerned though. Just a little. The kid had certainly had some spunk in him. It. Them. Whoops. He'd forgotten to ask for pronouns. Whatever.
He tried once more to get the kids attention, hoping it was maybe… an on purpose ignore?
"Kiddo?" Not the most imaginative or eloquent, but it worked.
The kid didn't answer.
Didn't fidget. Didn't breathe any louder. Didn't do any of the small, reassuring things living people usually did when you talked at them for too long. The kid hadn't done it much, earlier, but still. He had done a little. Just enough to make Ah'Ming think he couldn't be the ghost.
Now though?
Ah'Ming's smile faltered.
"…Hey," he said more quietly. "You good?"
For a heartbeat, nothing changed.
Then, slowly, mechanically, the child's head turned.
Not toward Ah'Ming.
To the side.
The movement was wrong in a way that made his skin prickle. Too smooth. Too deliberate. Like a marionette whose strings had finally been pulled after a long pause. Like a cheese pull that was so impressive it was definitely fake, made of Elmer's glue or something. Unnatural, abnormal.
The kid's gaze fixed on something out of view. Past the smashed shelves. Past the torn stone. Toward a narrow passage half-choked by fallen books and splintered wood.
They stared.
Hard.
Insistently.
"…You want me to look over there," Ah'Ming said.
The kid didn't nod.
Didn't point.
Just kept staring, neck craned at an uncomfortable angle, eyes locked in that direction like they'd been nailed there.
Ah'Ming tried to look over. Well, not really look, since it was still pitch black. Not just an absence of light, but a system imposed limit. Maybe it truly had been an accident he could see in the first "night". Hopefully the system wouldn't try to patch that in the future.
But still, he tried to sense more in that direction.
Nothing.
Only bad vibes.
Heebie-Jeebies.
Very, very strong Heebie-Jeebies.
Ah'Ming's warning bells started up again, quieter this time but more persistent. A dull, aching clang behind his temples.
No system prompt.
No tag.
No reaction until now.
He rubbed his palms against his pants, grounding himself.
"This is how people die in horror movies," he muttered. "They follow the creepy silent child."
The kid blinked once.
Very slowly.
Still staring sideways.
Ah'Ming sighed.
"Okay," he said. "Okay. Counterpoint. If I don't follow the creepy silent child, I'll spend the rest of this instance wondering what I missed."
He glanced back at the wreckage. At the open, ruined space where shadows had learned a valuable lesson. Nothing moved. Nothing watched.
Probably.
"…You're not bait," he told the kid. "If you are, I'm going to be really annoyed."
No response.
Just to double confirm the kid was a hologram though, not like some sort of temporary ghost skill, Ah'Ming stuck his hand into the kids head. He couldn't really feel a difference, both temperature wise and also any other sign of ghost. Nothing.
Hmm.
It wasn't like the kid had shown any sort of reaction either.
Maybe…
He took a step toward the indicated passage.
The kid's shoulders relaxed. Just a fraction. So it could react! The little bugger-
Ah'Ming noticed.
"…That's not ominous at all," he said dryly, and kept walking.
The passage narrowed as he approached, books piled high on either side like walls of compressed memory. Dust puffed up with each step. The air felt colder here, heavier, like it had been holding its breath.
Behind him, the kid stayed where they were.
Ahead of him, the darkness deepened.
Ah'Ming rolled his shoulders, flexed his fingers, and walked on anyway.
When he was walking, it felt as though he were going somewhere secret to the sub-story.
the air changed.
It pressed against his skin like a current flowing the wrong way, tugging at his clothes, his hair, his breath. Each step forward felt contested, as if the space itself had opinions about him being here.
"…Rude," Ah'Ming muttered.
The floor answered by pulling.
Not a clean drag. More like a persistent suggestion, a subtle backward lean that forced his calves to burn as he compensated. Dust skittered across the stone toward the passage behind him, flowing upstream.
Then he heard it.
At first, it was nothing.
Static. A soft, shapeless hiss at the edge of perception, the kind your brain usually edits out.
But it grew.
Layer by layer, the noise resolved itself into something worse.
Metal striking metal. Wood splintering. The wet, percussive thud of bodies hitting stone. Shouts, distorted and overlapping, voices bent out of shape by distance or panic or both.
Fighting.
Real fighting.
Ah'Ming's breath hitched.
"…Nope," he said, and immediately picked up speed.
Walking became a fast walk. Fast walk became a jog. The resistance fought him harder, air shoving at his chest, floor grabbing at his boots like it wanted him to stay uninvolved.
The sounds grew louder.
Closer.
The passage widened ahead, light flickering erratically at its end. Shadows danced along the walls, jerking and colliding, silhouettes clashing in violent rhythm.
Ah'Ming leaned forward and ran.
Each step felt stolen. Earned. His muscles screamed, but adrenaline smoothed it over, sharpened him into motion. He ducked under a fallen beam, skidded around a pile of books that tried to slide back into place behind him.
The noise was deafening now.
A crash. A scream cut short. Something heavy slammed into stone with enough force to make the walls tremble.
Ah'Ming burst through the last narrow gap and into open space, lungs burning, heart hammering.
He broke into the hall at a dead run.
And nearly tripped over the entrance at the sight (not sight, but sense. You get what I mean) of it.
The center of the library had become a war zone. A fully fledged, absolute war zone.
Shadows flooded the space in heaving waves, spilling from between shelves, pouring down from the upper rails, crawling along the ceiling like spilled night. Players fought them off in uneven clusters, backs to tables, to collapsed shelves, to each other.
They were losing.
Magic flared everywhere, bright and messy and desperate.
Sometimes, power bright enough lit up the room, just for a few little seconds, before the room plunged into darkness once more.
Some people were shooting blindly, slashing blindly, fighting blindly. Those people were the most bedraggled, the most injured. Others though, probably not newbies, managed decently well. They weren't too injured, and they were still fighting back.
Not doing much damage, but it was the though that counted.
A man with skin like cracked porcelain hurled spheres of compressed air that detonated on impact, blasting shadows apart in concussive bursts that rattled the lamps. A girl with glowing runes stitched into her arms slammed her palms together, sending ribbons of violet light whipping outward like barbed wire, slicing through darkness but leaving her staggering with each cast. She might not last long. She was a funny looking light she though.
Someone with a long, serpentine tail coiled around a fallen pillar and spat liquid fire that hissed and steamed as it burned shadows away, the flames guttering weakly as their breath ran out. It lit up the room briefly, and somehow none of the books or shelves caught on fire.
Ah'Ming didn't want to even imagine if it had. The whole library, an inferno? Thank the queen, no.
Another player slammed a book shut and screamed an incantation, the pages ripping themselves free to form a temporary shield that shadows clawed through in seconds. It was pretty cool to watch.
Power everywhere.
Control though, was nowhere.
Ah'Ming's eyes snapped to the center.
Tamer stood there like the calm eye of a storm.
Two little shadows hovered at his sides, bent far down low, moving with a startling level of obedience that felt very wrong, even though Ah'Ming was looking at in from a distance. When other shadows rushed at him, the other players veered unconsciously, shielding him with their bodies, their magic, their lives. Poor things, their minds messed up like that.
No shadow touched him.
No player would let one try.
Affection and an uncomfortable mount of obedience radiated outward from the main table in invisible, suffocating waves, thick enough to choke on. People fought harder near him, screamed louder, threw themselves into danger with smiles that were a little too wide.
He wasn't in danger.
He couldn't be.
Ah'Ming's jaw tightened.
Then he saw her.
The woman.
The one from earlier. The one he'd pointed at. Accused.
She was still here.
She moved carefully, too carefully, striking down shadows while constantly repositioning, never committing fully, never getting cornered. Each attack was precise. Defensive. Cleaning up after others rather than leading the charge.
Covering her tracks.
A few players shot her looks. Suspicious glances that didn't quite harden into accusation. She'd been near the kid. She'd been near the worst of the fighting. Patterns hovered at the edge of people's thoughts.
But doubt dissolved quickly.
After all, he'd accused someone already.
And most people probably remembered it differently.
Not the woman.
The child.
A bedraggled thing. Easy to misremember. Easy to dismiss.
No way a real NPC could infiltrate them for that long, right?
Ah'Ming felt something cold settle in his stomach. It certainly wasn't egg tart.
The shadows surged again, breaking through a hastily erected barrier of glowing sigils. Someone screamed. Someone fell.
The clock ticked on.
And Ah'Ming stood at the edge of the battlefield, breath slowing, vision sharpening, watching a room full of people fight for the wrong reasons against the wrong threats.
Ah'Ming narrowed his focus.
Something about the woman… felt wrong.
She was unnatural. He couldn't pinpoint if it was skin-tone, face, body, mo-
Wait.
Once you noticed it, you couldn't unsee it.
The woman's gait was wrong. Too careful, then too fast. Her balance kept correcting itself a half-second late, like she was compensating for extra weight that shifted when it shouldn't. It was almost as if something physical inside her was trying to escape. And there, there again! When she twisted to avoid a shadow, something pushed against the fabric of her coat.
A shape.
Blocky. Angular. Hard.
Her stomach bulged for an instant, edges too straight to be flesh.
Ah'Ming's breath slowed.
First of all, ew.
Second of all…
What she had was probably the key item to the mission. The key item that they needed to find. The something of the lost? Was it? He couldn't quite remember.
|Find the [][][][] of the lost!
The system chimed, rather cheerfully. Of course it only started helping now.
It also rather made sense when looked at in combination with the setting.
The item that the boss had?
A book.
Not metaphorical. Not symbolic (or maybe it was). A literal object, stuffed somewhere it absolutely did not belong.
"…Of course," he murmured. "Boss keeps the key inside the boss."
it made sense, that the boss would keep the key mission item in the safest place possible: in themself.
He moved.
Not fast. Not yet.
He stalked forward through the chaos, weaving between overturned tables and spellfire, timing his steps with the flicker of magic and the crash of bodies. Shadows lunged at others and ignored him, or recoiled when they got too close. A few players brushed past him, eyes glassy with devotion as they surged back toward Tamer's orbit.
The woman didn't notice him until it was too late.
Ah'Ming launched himself forward, claws snapping out mid-air, aimed straight for her stomach.
She screamed.
Not a human scream.
It was unholy, a wide scream that shred the listeners ears. It sounded like it was from the depths of a bathroom in taco bell.
It ripped through the library like a blade, high and layered, carrying harmonics that made Ah'Ming's teeth ache. Everyone froze. Players. Magic. Even the shadows locked in place, their forms stiffening as if the sound had nailed them to the air.
Then the scream ended.
The shadows snapped toward Ah'Ming as one.
"All of them?" he muttered. "Wow. I feel popular."
He was kind of getting sick of getting ganged up on by little monsters. First the paper people, now shadows? What was next, goblins?
They rushed him.
Ah'Ming met them head-on.
His claws punched through the first shadow and didn't slow, ripping free and carving sideways into the next. He spun, momentum carrying him into a third, tearing it apart and hurling the remains into a cluster that dissolved on contact.
A pulse of warmth washed over him.
Buff.
He felt it settle into his muscles, sharpen his reflexes, lighten his limbs. He didn't look to confirm, but he knew exactly where it came from. Tamer, somewhere behind him, had flicked a switch. How kind of him, how amazing. Such a great guy-
AW COME ON.
Shut up, shut up brain. Evil mind magic again.
"Don't get attached," Ah'Ming muttered, then dove back in.
He vaulted off a collapsing shelf, slammed down into the floor hard enough to crack stone, and raked upward, shredding three shadows at once. Someone shouted an incantation and a lattice of glowing symbols flared briefly around him, reinforcing his strikes just long enough to matter.
It was still mostly him.
He tore. He smashed. He moved like the library was an extension of his body, using debris as cover, weapons, obstacles. A shadow tried to flank him from above and he ripped the railing down with it, sending both crashing into a heap of splintered wood.
The shadows broke.
They scattered, dissolving under relentless pressure, erased one by one until the space around him was clear, littered with fading darkness and wreckage. They all finally, disappeared.
Ah'Ming straightened, breathing hard.
His head whipped towards where the last monster was.
The woman was running.
She clutched her stomach as she fled, coat tearing as the shape inside her shifted violently, pressing outward, desperate. She didn't look back. She didn't need to.
Ah'Ming wiped shadow residue from his hands and looked up.
"…Yeah," he said, eyes tracking her escape route. "Nope. You're not leaving with that."
He stepped over the last dissolving shadow and broke into a run after her, the library groaning softly around them like it already knew how this chase was going to end.