SAVE POINT 25

Rosabella

I, honestly, wasn't sure Joy and I had much in common, but, trudging after the girl up the steep slopes of these craggy mountains, I realized we shared one important thing: spades of determination. And we'd both dug deep for it.

My muddy boots slammed into the hard, rock ground with each step. Really, we'd been 'climbing' instead of 'hiking'—hoisting ourselves upward. My thighs burned from the effort, and my palms stung with far too many cuts and scrapes from these sharp rocks. My neck sizzled from the unrelenting sun beating down overhead. We probably shouldn't be attempting a trek like this at the hottest crest in the day... My breath came in staggering spurts—rushing in my ears which had been popping for the last twenty minutes—as sweat made me swipe at my forehead again. ...And, to be frank, I was starting to wonder when the 'downhill' part of this journey began.

[-7 HP, 62/107]

Coughs raked through my body. I wiped the black blood on the edge of my sleeve which had become dark and wet from the repeated motion.

Joy paused, tilting her chin back towards me but not exactly looking at me. The toe of her boot wedged against a steep incline, "If you have to take a break, we can take a break."

It was the first thing she'd said to me the entire climb...and almost sounded...nice? She held a round canteen extended toward me. I took in a shaky breath, monitoring how it scraped up my windpipe. The act of breathing felt like a rusty wheel—not completely broken, but definitely catching in some areas it shouldn't. My head was light and dizzy. If only this darkness would give me a break! I'd been carefully rationing the root powder—

"Last thing I need is you slipping and falling off the face of this dimension. You're the only one who can fix The Game. Take the damn water."

And there was the Joy I knew. I gritted my teeth together, grabbing the canteen from her with less gratefulness than I probably should show.

I watched the pink-haired girl's eyes scan the horizon as I tipped the canteen back and cold water drenched my lips. She knew these mountains—every ridge and peak, even without a map. I wasn’t sure how she knew it, but I'd noticed her careful direction: ‘around this tree, not that one, up that ridge, not the other’. Her eyes were always sweeping the ground, nearly like looking for clues. And she'd gotten us up this far. I looked down beyond my toes. Bits of rubble scattered down the rock face when I shuffled my boots, plinking against the solid, steep slope downwards. Below, ridges leveled out to meadow, seeming far away and flat in comparison to the height we'd climbed.

"Mind your feet," Joy grumbled, "that ledge is slippery."

...And there she was almost sounding helpful again. She had the strangest lock secured over her heart. I was pretty sure there was no key, and she was the only one who could pick it. I handed her the canteen back, "Thank—"

But the ground began to rumble.

Shake.

I leapt away from the edge, my hands bracing against the cliff face. Joy's alarmed eyes scanned the mountain above us warily, darting, afterwards, to the valley. "Not again," she grumbled under her breath as the wavering settled.

And we were left.

Still.

Breathless. …And more disturbed than either of us wanted to admit.

The Darkness? Was it rattling The Game world again? I shook my hands out, finally feeling safe enough to unlock my knees. I glanced over at Joy, tucking my hair behind my ear as I gathered myself to start climbing again, "You want my opinion?"

"Not really," Joy griped, reaching for a ledge above her. The flat tone of her voice told me she was telling the truth, but I didn't care.

I wanted to talk about it. I wasn’t sure if it was because we hadn't been talking about anything on this trek so far, and it was because I wanted to reach across this invisible brick wall that'd been spacing us at least two feet apart up this entire mountain or what but… But I was fucking going to tell her my opinion.

"I think the tremors are coming from the valley—" I alleged, "where the nerds are—"

"You think the nerds are creating darkness?" Joy questioned pointedly, her perfectly-arched eyebrows creasing as a snort of disbelief parted her lips, "Because this is what the darkness tremors felt like when our world started to go to shit before—"

Rosabella.

I whipped around, towards the path behind us, but it was just us on this trail. I spun back around, a piece of hair catching in my mouth which I quickly batted away, "Joy, did you say something?"

"I mean besides about the darkness I'm trying to tell you about?" the girl huffed.

"Did you say my name?" I interrupted her.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

But her face was blank and empty, "No."

...And I believed her, so...so, I had to be going crazy. Plus, it might have been my imagination, but the voice sounded...like my voice...

Pardon the pun, but this heat, elevation and darkness stuff really needed to go take a hike. It'd been two hours since my last dose of root powder, and I was hoping I could stretch it at least for another forty minutes.

"You want my opinion?" Joy chuckled saucily, spinning on her heel and throwing her pink hair over her shoulder as she started upward again, "Those nerds aren't capable of creating darkness." Was it just me or was there a little more than a condescending vibe to her words?

"They got into our dimension, didn't they?" I argued back, feeling like I was carrying the torch for a million geeks around the world right now, "They literally figured out how to jump dimensions."

Joy held one pointed finger over her shoulder so I could see it, "One word: Prickgada."

"Three words," I countered, just as quickly, "Nerds. Are. Smart. I mean, nerds are doctors, mathematicians, freaking rocket scientists! I wouldn't underestimate them—"

"More than three words," Joy spat sourly, her voice filled with I-told-you-so, "Don't play a game you're going to lose. In case you've forgotten, I'm armed with fourteen knives."

"Thirteen," I corrected, swiping one from the back pocket of her satchel. Her mouth dropped open abruptly from the movement. "I forgot to grab one when we left," I admitted, tucking the commandeered weapon in my belt.

I heard the pink-haired girl grumble something under her breath about a sissy bitch. It just made me crack a little bit of a smile as I prepared to hoist myself over a rock opening—

"Let go."

Seriously? She was still on this kick?! “I’m not going to let it go,” I huffed, “I’ll check the Game Damage Point stats to prove it to you. The nerds and the darkness are connected.” I swiped the GDP up with one finger.

[GDP – 64/100]

Current Gamer Population

340 Million

Current Darken Population

14 Million

Darken To Gamer Ratio

~41.18%

Darkness Cover

58/100

Dilapidation Cover

70/100

Aha! I’d been right!

I spun to face her, jubilant, but Joy’s face, and her crossed arms below, just held pure annoyance. “No, let go,” she repeated. "If you release your unexperienced, white-knuckle grip on that top rock, you'll slide down the ridge," the girl informed me tersely. "Do you want to reach the Dark Woods in two hours or two days?" Point taken, but, just so she knew, I’d been right about the darkness. Wait… The girl was telling me I had to...

Let go???

With far too much resistance—apparently, I WAS a control freak after all—I shimmied myself to the middle of the rock gap, closed my eyes and pried my fingers off the—

My stomach dropped.

I dropped.

Literally.

My side and arms scraped fast against the dirt slope, jarring my bones and neck—painful—oof!

I landed.

[-1 HP, 61/107]

On two feet. The shock of the abrupt landing soaked of into my knees. I was—okay?

[System Reward: Damn, You Made That Look Easy +5 XP, 1124/1200]

I glanced up and noticed the dirt slide overhead I’d just shot down. It was an opening in the rocks—mostly smooth on the sides and just large enough for a human to pass through. Brilliant. Maybe I should start trusting the girl more.

"Move," she spat from above, her voice echoing in the rock enclosure and her pink hair dangling down in the opening as she peered over the ledge, "Unless you wanna play bowling with your balls."

I'd never stepped to the side quicker.

Like an agile panther, Joy landed easily on her feet beside me. And I noticed she hadn’t lost any HP—what? Annoying.

"What's with this place?" I asked shakily. It’d barely taken me one minute to realize that this part of the forest was different than the rest. The bases of the trees were burned black here, and torched shards of the trunks split upward like something else had taken an axe to them. No green. No growth. Only dusty ash and dirt underfoot. And in the air—like I was breathing death and...quiet.

Everything was silent: no movement, no birdsong. It was a dark forest, yes, but sounded more like a desert—not even a wind. Where the fuck were we?

"Better if you don't know," Joy said solemnly, brushing past me to charge into what was probably the next long leg of our hike.

I trailed behind the girl feeling stupid and small. She didn't want to answer my question about the place? Obviously, that meant it was bad and/or dangerous... "...I'd really, honestly, rather know," I told her—trying to sound confident and fearless when the statement was because I was currently neither of those things. I couldn’t help it, my eyes trailed over us, searching for Kenchee, dragons or…something out here that most definitely was going to eat us.

"Well, I'd honestly rather not tell you," Joy barked back, "Let's move. We're too exposed out in the open."

...And it didn't look like I was going to get my answer. But that didn't mean I was going to stop trying. The soles of my boots stumbled after the pink-haired girl who had definitely increased her determined pace; the ground was rocky and uneven lumps under the rubber of my soles, and a strange mist rose from the dirt, coiling around my ankles and giving me a definitive chill even in this heat.

"What are we running from? Darken?" I pestered, elevating my voice so she could hear me even from two paces ahead, "Dragons—?"

"Keep your damn voice down," Joy hissed, irately, rearing on me like a snake as she twisted around, "we're running from shadows, shadows of men and shadows of warriors. If you want them to find us, keep hollering."

Whoa. It was serious.

I clammed up, zippering my mouth shut as my eyes zigzagged across the rows of burnt trees around us—all lined up like offerings. I just hoped we weren't next.

Suddenly, each footfall sounded loud—echoing in the silence.

Each stick breaking.

Each wheezing breath.

What was out here? Had it already seen us? Heard us? —Smelled us? I was about to open my mouth to ask the system—

"Get down!" Joy suddenly snarled. She came at me like a bear. Her hand wrapped around my protesting lips as she wrestled me, like a kid, to the ground. And we panted together behind a huge log—like one body. Our hearts hammering together. Our eyes sharing tense glances. Even as her sweaty palm pressed into my compliant mouth.

What was it? What had the plucky girl so shaken?

I was about to spit out her hand.

I was about to spit out her hand and ask her, right there when I turned my head...

And my heart stopped.

Dead.

In terror.

Because the decaying face of a Darken woman, crusted in blood and moss, sniffed just centimeters from my nose. Her yellow eyes bulged as she locked pupils with me.

And she screamed.

Shrill.

Eardrum-blasting.

FUCK.