“Zaza…? Is that you?”
Esperanza turned around with a deliberate slowness and regarded her old friend from the corner of her eye. Part of the deliberate slowness was to ensure that she maintained control over herself, as part of her wanted to just run over and glomp Alissa and just air her grievances like she often did back in their previous world.
She knew that things were not the same here in Ephemera though.
“Heya, Allie,” replied Esperanza quietly, though loud enough for Alissa to hear given the short distance, she expected. Her old friend had grown in power, and the way her status screen looked was rather interesting as well. Level wise Esperanza still had a bit of an advantage over Alissa, due to her constant practice with her skills and the previous powerleveling hunts, but Alissa was pretty up there as well. “Long time no see.”
More interesting, however, were the implications behind the system designation that showed [Hero Lvl20 / {Truthseeker} Consecrated Warrior Lvl20 / {Pathfinder of Hidden Trails} Laurelled Lancer of Legend Lvl14] and what they meant for her old friend. Esperanza was familiar with the doubled-up classes. It was what she saw when others used a skill that covered their class with another.
Interesting that one of the summoned [Heroes] chose to hide her classes that way, though given the name of the classes in question and what they implied… Esperanza could understand why even without much thinking.
“How in the name of all that’s holy are you even here-” stammered Alissa excitedly before her excitement abated and she took a guarded stance instead, her eyes looking at Esperanza with some surprise and suspicion. “Wait… I can see some sort of alteration or illusion on you, though I can’t tell what it is. Who are you? And if you’re really Zaza, prove it. You should know how.”
“I guess this is kinda inevitable, but sure. You probably remember meeting me for the first time in the first grade of middle school, but we actually met before that, when we were still in elementary, like second grade I think?” said Esperanza as she calmly recited what she remembered. “I don’t know if you remembered it that well, but you shooed off a bully in the park and bought me an ice cream that day since I wouldn’t stop crying, then kept me company until my mom came to pick me up a while later. It was late summer.”
“Wait… that kid was you??? I had not recognized you when we met again and I don’t think I’ve ever told anyone about that story either…” noted Alissa with some surprise in her eyes. It was exactly what Esperanza did from time to time, namely mentioning things that Alissa had not realized for some reason or another, but ones she had clear recollections of. “How did you even get here? This is a whole other world for God’s sake!”
“Well… I would like you to brace yourself first before I tell you, because you are going to be upset by the time I finish talking. Maybe even consider taking a seat, up to you,” said Esperanza with some trepidation as she looked straight into Alissa’s eyes to assure her old friend that she was being very serious. Alissa responded by holding on to one of the shelves to the side with one hand. “Long story short? I was summoned together with the rest of you. Ethan and Smith are with you, right?”
“Summoned together with us? How? There were only the three of us that came out of the portal back then-” Alissa’s face distorted to a grimace as the implication of Esperanza’s words – and her own words – caught up to her mind, and she gave Esperanza a questioning, pleading look. Esperanza replied to the look with a sigh, then raised her right hand, which morphed as if it was made out of putty and formed a grotesque shape that Alissa would never forget in her life. “That thing back then was you!?”
“It was me, though in defense of myself, I admit that I was new to the body back then and could only react by its own ingrained instinct and reflexes. Found out the hard way that most of those were along the lines of ‘eat whatever troubles me’, unfortunately,” admitted Esperanza with a shake of her head. “It took me a good couple of weeks before I could even think clearly and assert myself again instead of running on instincts like a beast… though I did recall seeing you three in the distance back then.”
“How… did things end up so differently? Why were the three of us summoned here normally and just you ended up… like that?” asked Alissa after she regained her composure from the surprising revelation Esperanza had given her. Part of her wanted to be on guard, to call for help, because there remained a tinge of doubt about her old friend’s identity, especially with the rather uncertain layers that seemed to cover her, that Alissa’s skills couldn’t pierce through. “Also are you hiding something? There’s… layers over you that I can’t see through at all, despite having several skills to that purpose.”
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Yet on the other hand, the more they spoke, the more Alissa felt that this was truly her old friend before her. Perhaps more jaded-sounding than her usual cheerful demeanor, but otherwise the same girl she had known and befriended for years, despite all odds. The same wisp of a girl that did her utmost even in the poor conditions life had given her.
“That one’s a longer story, but as for the latter, I can fix that real quick, though if you don’t mind, I’d like to use another skill of mine to ensure that this remains private between us for the time being,” replied Esperanza, to which Alissa thought for a moment, then nodded and braced herself once more.
“Bueno, this skill of mind will keep prying eyes away by making us be less noticeable. I’ll show you first before including you in the skill, all right?” said Esperanza as she activated [Veil of Entropy], keeping its radius strictly around herself to show it to Alissa. After she noticed Alissa nodding to give her permission, Esperanza enlarged the skill’s radius to engulf Alissa in its effects as well. Then she dropped the part around her [Gaze Unto the Abyss] passive that prevented people from identifying her properly.
So Alissa saw her designation as a [Spark of Hope Lvl20 / Emissary of the Forgotten Lvl20 / Chronicler of Departed Souls Lvl 17] and all that implied.
“Huh… those classes are very high in rarity. Higher than my own, even,” noted Alissa with some surprise. She had not seen anyone with higher rarity classes than herself or Ethan and Joshua in Ephemera until then. “Wait… Emissary of the Forgotten… Zaza, did you… come across the previous gods or something like that? They’re the only thing that comes to mind when I think of the forgotten in the context of this world.”
“In a way, yes, but to explain it, first I need to explain other things that lead to it. I’d like you to take a seat for this, because this will likely take a while, and also to save your questions for the time being,” said Esperanza. This time Alissa listened to her and guided her to the reading area where she was earlier and took a seat there, with Esperanza sitting across the table from her.
“All right, I’ll just put it bluntly, but the main reason why things went differently for me, was that while you three got summoned ‘properly’, the summons only snagged my soul instead of my body, which in turn allowed the Old Gods, I call them Oldies, by the way, to bring me over to them before I landed here,” explained Esperanza as simply as she could. “They were also the ones to give me this body to inhabit, and you know what happened after I arrived.”
“I don’t think I could ever forget that sight, yeah. You sure made quite an… impression on everyone present back there,” replied Alissa as she made a face that was halfway between a frown and a grimace. “Wait, I remember them actually killing you back then. Did you just fake that out and then use a skill to get out of there or?”
“I have [Respawn], just like the rest of you, and the [Champions] for that matter,” replied Esperanza with a shrug of her shoulders. “I came to meet you today not just to talk about my circumstances, however, but also to warn you. You should not trust the new ‘gods’ and those who worship them too much, if what Oldies said could be trusted.”
“Do you trust them?” asked Alissa back. She had no direct experience or encounter with the Gods of Ephemera’s current Pantheon, but all the incongruencies she noticed had long made her suspicious of them, to some extent. If not the Gods themselves, then at least the clergy, as it was far too common for people to turn the words of their ‘Gods’ to serve their own benefits, sadly.
“For what’s probably the equivalent of this world’s eldritch gods, they have been surprisingly open and upfront with me so far. I can speak directly to them every week or so, perk of being their emissary and whatnot,” answered Esperanza with a firm nod. “Naturally, I won’t deny that they have a very strong motive to dislike the current pantheon and want to bring them down, but what I have observed myself matches what they said, as far as I could tell. Surely you too have noticed something that makes you doubt whatever was told to you, no?”
“Several things, yeah. All right, consider me interested so far. Tell me the gist of what these Oldies gods have to say about the situation. I’ll reserve judgement for myself though,” said Alissa with a nod as she sat down more comfortably in her seat. They kept their conversation to a low whisper to avoid others from overhearing, though given how the two of them with their high attributes could only notice the sound as a whisper, it was unlikely that others could do the same, unless they had even higher attributes than them and were nearby.
“Well, to really sum things up, the current so-called ‘gods’ were once like us, people who were summoned here from out world, though back then they were summoned then made to fight each other by opposing nations, I think you get the idea,” said Esperanza as she began her explanation. “They later got strong then overthrew their summoners, and kept climbing up until they discovered the slumbering Deities of old, and… well… Some of what they did, I bet you can imagine.”
“They cast them down and took their place as Gods, I assume,” replied Alissa with an easy guess. “You’re saying they did other things with the old… Deities then?”
“In their words, the new gods apparently butchered and dismantled some of the old Deities and constructed this… system we’re all under out of them. In the process, they also fucked up with this world’s reincarnation cycle, and as a result souls are slowly unraveling to nothingness, which is something I’ve confirmed myself, at least,” explained Esperanza. “Mind you, what Oldies asked me to do was to basically do a hard reset for this world as a whole. Destroy it so that a new one could be born out of its remnants, continuing the cycle.”
“And you played along with that request?”
“More that I’m on the lookout for alternatives, and worse comes to worse, I’d have looked for ways to at least send you three back home first, one way or another,” admitted Esperanza. “Honestly, though, the more I see of this world, the more I feel that they were telling me the truth.”
“I see… That definitely gives us something to consider…” noted Alissa with a thoughtful look. “Wait, can you roll back a bit? You said that only your soul was brought here when you were summoned. How did you know that wasn’t their doing?”
“Oh, that one’s simple,” replied Esperanza perhaps too nonchalantly. “I could believe that without much questioning because when the summoning happened, I was dying, or probably already dead.”
“You what!?”