That night was the first real chance I had to catch my metaphorical breath. The town barracks were warded against the meteor strikes, so I could go to sleep confident in my safety for the night. I didn't sleep right away, though. For a while, I stayed awake, lost in thought.

The moment I found out Mewi had been taken, I'd panicked worse than I ever had before in my life. In the real world, he was an ocean away from me, but it didn't matter to me that we'd never met physically. Sexual attraction wasn't a factor in our relationship for me--in fact, my relationship with him was part of how I realized I was ace. As far as I was concerned, him being in my life was the only thing that had made it bearable.

Not to say that I was truly content with never having been with him in person. In fact, it was my dearest wish to move to his country and spend my entire life with him. A wish that the world seemed to almost take perverse satisfaction in denying.

I'd first met him online in my later days of high school, in circumstances that were unusual even for the beginning of an online relationship. I hadn't been good at making friends, in real life OR online, but Mewi had come across to me as nothing but patient, kind, and genuine--nothing like the annoying, BSing breed that were my high school student peers. At first, we bonded over a rare mutual interest of ours, but one way or another, I found myself wanting to keep contacting him. And the more I talked to him, the more I realized what an amazing person he was. He really was kind, and patient--he seemed almost incapable of treating anything I said with suspicion or putting it in a bad light. It was as though it was impossible for anything to make him jaded, assuming the best of everyone. He was one of those people who responded to bad things by staying positive--something I was VERY incapable of.

I grew to love him, but it was a long time before I asked him to be my boyfriend. First, I wasn't sure he'd be okay with a same-sex relationship. Then, I was convinced he'd find someone he'd be happy with who he wasn't separated from by an entire ocean. But when I finally took the plunge to say the words "I love you," he reciprocated. I was stunned.

After college, my life couldn't have gone more nowhere. I was in a weird place, geographically speaking--not a small town, but not a place where employment opportunities were common. And there seemed to be absolutely nothing for someone with no experience. I was clueless about interviews, too. I couldn't even get hired to proverbially flip burgers. I despaired at ever getting my life started, and at my lowest moments, only my relationship with Mewi kept me from thinking my life wasn't even WORTH living.

I hated it. I hated still living with my parents at the age of 30, and I hated how...NORMAL my life was. How normal my WORLD was. It didn't matter to society that I was smart, it mattered far more to the people with the actual ability to give me a chance that I stayed in line, that I displayed a positive attitude and kowtowed, all things that I was basically the worst at. I had all but accepted being a pathetic NEET, and then homeless and alone once my parents were too old to support me, if the alternative meant becoming the kind of conformist I despised.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

Then, the disappearances began. By the time they'd progressed enough that people were certain enough it was happening for news articles to be posted that I actually saw, it was a week into them. And when I did find out, I was more amused than anything else. At first I thought it had to be a hoax, but the news articles multiplied as the disappearances refused to abate. I'd talked to Mewi about them as well, of course. He was a lot more worried about them than I was--before he too had gone, a coworker of his had been thought to have been one of the vanished. I'd thought that was spooky, but even he had couched telling me that it was probably a coincidence and they were probably sick and just hadn't called in or something.

When he'd disappeared, it was right in the middle of a chat roleplay session we were doing. At first, I didn't even connect his silence to the mysterious vanishings. It was hardly unheard of for him to have problems with his internet suddenly, or for him to be interrupted suddenly. Although, he usually managed a "brb" message.

As the minutes turned into over an hour, that was when I started to get worried. He hadn't sent any more messages, and his online status hadn't changed so his internet was fine. Then, around 2 hours after he went silent, his mother sent the fateful reply. It was an interesting piece of luck that they even bothered to tell me, since he never really told his parents about me. The fact that they were aware that he'd been gone for more than a little while meant that they had probably told others first, or something like that, then remembered he'd been chatting with someone as an afterthought.

So I'd never managed to truly be with him, and then just like that he was gone. Like a punchline to the cosmic joke that was my life. Well now I had a slim chance to get the last laugh, which was more than my old life, my old world, had ever given me. It was only now hitting me that there were people who cared about me back there who were probably freaking out that I'd disappeared. Would any of them be next? How far would the disappearances go, on Earth? Would the Tower take ALL of them, millions or hundreds at a time until the seven billion population was totally worn away?

I hoped not. Very few people I knew and were on good terms with would be likely to cope with being thrown into this Tutorial scenario as well as I had. I'd overheard from a soldier that "almost half the newcomers have only added to our dead." Probably, the vast majority of people of Earth would lose all their lives, the extra ones the Tower gave them and all, without even making it out of the Tutorial.

But not Mewi. There was no way Mewi was already dead. His ability to stay positive would certainly be tested more sternly by being thrown into this than it probably ever would have been back on Earth, but that ability was exactly what I knew would allow him to survive and make it to...wherever this Tower would send him, and me, once we beat its mission.

I had to believe that. I had to.