We stayed wide at the waterfall to avoid pulling agro from any of the Verasyth that were pathing around the bridge. They would have been good hunting for the three of us if I’d had any armor or some bolts for my crossbow, but I didn’t want to go up against several level 80-90 monsters wearing starter cloth.

“When we get some bolts, can you guys power-level me?” Gehman asked excitedly. “This is the highest I’ve ever been, and that’s sad.”

“Of course, dude,” I replied. Groups shared experience in Call of Carrethen. Gehman was much lower level than us, and would only get a fraction of the total XP, but it would be better than whatever he’d get leveling on his own.

“Awesome,” Gehman smiled, swinging his smith’s hammer in the air, fighting an imaginary monster. “All I’ve ever fought were low level Horngrins outside Stoneburg.”

“Well, you’re going to need to work on your swing if you’re going to fight anything harder than that,” Kodiak replied, needling him a little bit.

“I know that!” Gehman protested. “Gimmie a break or I won’t upgrade any of your stuff!”

Kodiak smiled and kept his mouth shut.

“Hey, Gehman,” I said hesitantly. “Have you seen any of the others? Baltos? Jack?”

“Just Xavier and Cavey,” he replied. “But I lost them in the battle after escaping Sheol.”

“What battle?”

“The Redeeming Blood,” he replied. “A guild run by this girl Rayne. They tried taking down the Lord of the Flame,” he continued. “That’s how we managed to get out.”

“But then they attacked you?”

“Not all of us,” Gehman replied. “Just the ones who had sunken.”

“They can tell that easily?” I asked. “What if you just died once or twice? How many times do you have to die before you get to the point where…?”

“Where I was when you found me?” He asked, finishing my sentence.

I could only nod.

“It takes a while,” he muttered, shaking his head. “I couldn’t really say.”

“But you can tell even after a single death,” Kodiak added. “You just start looking…sickly. Like an undead or something.”

“But what’s the point of attacking the Sunken?” I asked. “Don’t they just die and come back again—but more sunken?”

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“Rayne and her guild have found a way to kill them,” Kodiak said grimly. “Permanently.”

Thunder clapped above us and again, the rain began to fall. We quickly made our way to the cover of a small glade of trees, thankfully devoid of any monsters. I shook the wet from my clothes the best I could, but felt the chill already beginning to sink in.

“But how can she do that?” I asked. “I thought permadeath wasn’t a thing anymore.”

“No one knows,” Kodiak shrugged. “It could all just be a rumor really—”

“It’s not a rumor,” Gehman said quickly. “I was there. I saw her do it. She has this enormous black sword. Drove it right into the guy in front of me—a Sunken. He dropped dead and exploded out of existence.”

“But you got away.”

Gehman nodded. “I’d died twice and could already feel myself turning,” he said, sounding almost ashamed. “But I managed to slip away during the battle.”

“What killed you?” I asked. “Are people fighting in Sheol?”

Gehman paused before he spoke, as though he was reliving a painful memory. “You have to understand…once people started to go Sunken…there was just no stopping it.”

The rain had become a torrential downpour, cascading from the sky in thick sheets, making it impossible to see beyond the trees of the grove where we’d taken shelter. I could feel the cold creeping into my bones, slowly but surely taking me over. I couldn’t help but wonder if that was how it felt to become one of the Sunken.

“A few people tried to escape early on,” he said, his eyes on the ground in front of him. “The Lord of the Flame killed them easily. They respawned and tried again. Then again and again and again until they were shadows of who they once were. They were Sunken, fully and completely. Then they started to attack the rest of us.”

I thought back to what had happened at Gehman’s hut, the way he mindlessly came at us without recognition or understanding, just swinging his hammer like some kind of zombie.

“It spread like a plague,” he said quietly. “We fought them off the best they could, but one person would go down, and then another, and then another. If Rayne hadn’t attacked when she did…I would have never gotten out of there.”

“You escaped,” Kodiak said. “And then you went Sunken anyway.”

Gehman burst out laughing, but it was a sad laugh, and he looks as though he was on the verge of tears. “Yup! Good ol’ Gehman! Nice guy Gehman! Tried making my way across the world to Stoneburg all on my own, Bindstone to Bindstone, dying along the way. I don’t even know where I was when I lost myself completely. Must have wandered back to my hut on autopilot. The next thing I knew; I was waking up on the ground with you standing over me.”

It hurt to picture Gehman trying to make it through the Dark World on his own, escaping Sheol only to fall victim to some other player or the corrupted monsters of what was once Carrethen. Someone as nice as him didn’t deserve such a cruel fate.

It was a very un-D-like feeling, which may have been attributable to the fact that my avatar was gone, but I felt bad for him and reached out and put a hand on his shoulder.

“You’re with us now, Gehman,” I told him. “And you don’t have to worry about going Sunken again. I’ll never let that happen.”

Slowly, he raised his eyes to mine and looked at me. After a moment, a smile formed on his face. “Yeah, how did you do that anyway?”

“Oh, man,” I laughed. “God-like powers or something like that? I don’t know. This whole ordeal makes my brain hurt.”

“So, is that the plan, then?” Gehman asked. “Get to Sheol and help the Sunken?”

“It’s more than that,” I told him. “I’m supposed to get everyone out of here and back home.”

“How do you do that?”

I smiled and shook my head. “I wish I knew.”