The enemy soul core shattering around them, Ipyo sagged as Yuri celebrated next to him.

That was the longest bot game I’ve ever played.

From the remains of the enemy base, the ground fell away into a nothingness deeper than fog of war. Ipyo grabbed Yuri’s hand instinctively; he knew where they were going next, and he didn’t want to separate again. As they fell, he caught Yuri smiling in the glow of his staff before it dissolved out of his hand.

“That was fun!” she exclaimed.

A lurching weightlessness, followed by solid ground pushing up against Ipyo’s knees blocked Ipyo from answering. Feeling returning to him, and to Yuri by the look of it, they spent some time getting re-acquainted with their old bodies.

They had been dropped on the same floating circular rock-outcropping that they had entered the Valley on. Ipyo fell on all fours as the all senses hit him at once. The chill. Poor, weak reflected light. The dust of the ground sifting away into the lethargic air. More like a memory of earth than an actual representation. Ipyo knew Deity, knew every inch of the Wrought Valley’s landscape from the mountain peaks down through the rivers and jungles and sandy shores, but wherever they had landed now, was not it.

Yuri’s hand waited by his head. Grasping it, Ipyo let her pull him up.

“How do we get out of this level?” Yuri asked.

“We don’t.”

“What do you mean?” Yuri pointed to the centrepiece of the abyss islands, a shaft of light that reached endlessly up into black expanse. “We use this like before, right? And it will take us to a different area. Isn’t that it?”

A distant island cracked apart in the sky, its snap a drop of sound in the vast void they were trapped in. The couple searched for the exact location, but the scattered rocks that lingered in the vacuum were so numerous that it quickly became pointless.

Ipyo approached Yuri and took her hands in his, surprisingly warm, the feel of her skin reproduced just right.

“I’m afraid this place is some kind of in-between, a waiting lobby between games,” he said, rubbing whorls into Yuri’s palms, “The portal will always take us to the same place. The only thing that will ever change is the Deity’s we will fight. And us too, I suppose, as we earn more currency.”

Ipyo knew what Yuri was thinking as she looked up at him, how desperate and anxious their position seemed to her, and he couldn’t explain this away. So, he closed his eyes and kissed her.

“Please,” he said, “You have to trust that I’ll figure this out.”

Locking into an embrace, their lips joined again and again. The feeling very close to lifelike, but so uncanny that they kept thrusting themselves at each other, harder and faster, wishing that this was real. But before lust crept in and their clothes were lost in the floating grey rocks, they stopped, tilting foreheads against the other like swans. Both of them knowing this wasn’t real.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

“Where are we?” Yuri cried softly.

“Safe and sound, have no fear.”

Ipyo spun to find who it was that was spying on them, only to find a wispy outline of an old man sitting on a slanted boulder. “You! The jeweller.”

Yuri widened her stance. “You’re…trapped in here with us? What do you know? Is there a way out?”

Ipyo clenched his teeth at Yuri’s assumption. Their bodies were clearly corporeal in this place, but the jeweller’s wasn’t. Still, it might sound better if Yuri were to hear it from him; “He’s the one that trapped us in here.”

The collection of wisps made a flourish, and it took Ipyo a few seconds to grasp that it was the jeweller nodding.

“So where are you keeping us?” Ipyo asked, “Our bodies?”

Yuri snatched Ipyo by the arm. “Our bodies?”

The jeweller’s form drifted closer. “As I said, you are safe and together. In fact…”

Yuri yelped. Ipyo a moment later as pain shot from his shoulder. The jeweller laughed, a gap closing and reforming in the thick, flaky wisps.

“In fact, I’m keeping a close watch, to make sure you can last in here for as long as you need.”

“The only thing we ‘need’ is a way out of here,” Yuri shouted, and rushed the old man. But her fists slipped right through the wisps, which in turn swirled back into shape, rolling towards Ipyo.

“Surely you don’t expect me to believe you two wandered into my shop by accident,” the jeweller said, “You wished to bind yourselves together, but neither of you could afford a ring. Well, here I am, offering you a chance at happiness.”

“What is he talking about, Ipyo?” Yuri asked. “Did you know about this?”

“Of course not.”

Ipyo stepped away from the oncoming wisps, but they spiralled away before him. Making a spear, the wisps pointed towards the top of the chasm. The jeweller’s transient voice boomed.

“In Deity, as you climb in ranking you will ascend through the tiers; Bronze, Silver, Gold, Emerald, Platinum –”

“-Diamond,” Ipyo finished in a whisper, Yuri running to his side.

“Diamond?” Yuri asked.

“Yes,” the jeweller said, wisps forming into a floating head. “Achieve that ranking, and you can escape with the namesake, enough to start a life together.”

Yuri squeezed Ipyo’s arm. “That’s no problem! Ipyo’s played Deity for years, he knows everything there is to know about it -trust me.”

While Yuri tugged on his arm and the disembodied fog mused, Ipyo was still staring up at the shaft of light, where the abyss presumably met the sky. But he was more transfixed at the prospective of having to get to Diamond. True, he had played Deity for years. Played hundreds of matches inside the Wrought Valley, slaughtered and been slain a thousand and more times. But, Ipyo thought as he gritted his teeth, I’ve never made it past Silver.

“Ipyo?” Yuri called again, this time with a voice stern enough for Ipyo to snap his neck back down. “You can do this, right?”

The jeweller wandered over beside them. “One person, doubtful. But with the telekinetic connection granted by this setup, you might just make it in time.”

Thankful as Ipyo was that the jeweller interrupted his hesitation, his statement worried him. “In time?” he asked, “Didn’t you say you will give us as long as we need?”

The ends of the wisps tore off, falling and dissipating in what must have been a shrug. “I can hardly keep you alive indefinitely. Good luck.”

“Wait!” Yuri shouted, the wisps turning inwards, disappearing out of their reality. “Why? What do you stand to gain from this?”

Every wisp of the jeweller’s form paused. “A good question, one I will think on myself. For the time being, suffice it to say that I had a good feeling about you two.”

With that, the jeweller’s form left the abyss. Though, Ipyo felt as though he lingered, and perhaps in the real world he did. Another minute passed until they felt that he had fully left them alone, and Ipyo’s doubts all came flooding back. He had never seen anything through to the end, never taken anything seriously long enough to be a proper expert on it, not even Deity. So how was he supposed to get them both ranked higher than millions of other players?

Still planted firmly in his chest, Yuri asked, “Where do we start?”

Ipyo hugged her tighter, cradling his chin over her head. Yuri was the only thing that ever pierced his apathy, and now that they were back together, he had to prove that she could trust him.

“We start from the bottom,” Ipyo told her.

This is my chance to do it right.