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Red Rian - 2

While looking in the mirror, I undid the clasps on the back of my cuirass,[1] and it fell to the floor with a thud. It was the heaviest of my possessions, and, so far, hadn’t done much to protect me. I would have to do my best to guard my flanks, as I’d learnt from today’s injury. After stripping off the leather tunic, and inspecting my naked skin, I found that, besides the stains of dried blood, some mine own and the rest from the bandits, there wasn’t even a scar left behind from the nasty wound Red Rian had gifted me with. These healing potions were no joke, and if I could craft such items through alchemy, then it truly made me want to locate Father Adam’s map.

I eyed my reflection in the mirror for a while, but no matter how much I tried to bring up the shape-changing menu from the day before, all that stared back at me was my mirrored self. It seems I’m locked out of altering my appearance… I noted, somewhat regretfully, realising that I was now stuck looking like myself. Any thoughts of altering my appearance to escape attention were now meaningless.

The boots were kind of a pain to get off my feet, as my sweat had created a perfect seal to keep them welded onto my skin, but that still wasn’t anything compared to when I tried to pull the tight trousers off. As I lay on the floor, my legs tangled within the stubborn pants, I considered using my sword to cut them along the seam and just buy a new pair the following day, however, as I’d discarded my starting outfit, that would require me to walk half-naked to the marketplace… so I persevered.

After five minutes of continuous struggling, I got the trousers off and quickly slipped into the warm bath that awaited me in the corner of the room. As I lay in the water, I realised my own stupidity. I could easily have unequipped my clothes through the inventory menu…

I really need to learn to properly utilise the powers given to me by this fantastical place…

A frothy jug of beer had been set careless on top of my bed, and next to it a bowl of stew teetered dangerously on the edge. It was a simple and effective dinner that I looked forward to devouring, so long as it didn’t tip off the side and spill onto the floor. A side-effect of all the fighting was that I was absolutely starving, and I’d probably have to find a way to bring food with me, so I didn’t end up keeling over on the road back to the city.

Something I hadn’t considered until now, was how strange it was to feel hunger and being able to sate that hunger in this fabricated world. After all, if any mortal wound could be healed in an instant, surely hunger could be done away with.

I hadn’t experienced the need to go to the toilet yet, so I doubted it was part of this world’s design, which, to be honest, was something I was glad I didn’t need to deal with. But the exclusion seemed peculiar when everything else mimicked the real world to such an obsessive degree. Perhaps this Watcher God wasn’t a fan of spying on his Guinea Pigs relieving themselves all over his creation?

I leaned back in the tub and sighed pleasantly. It made me wonder what other pleasures you could feel in this world.[2] Granted, I didn’t really feel like seeking out a stranger to test the limits of this realm with, but maybe, if I met the right person, it’d be different?

When I’d scrubbed myself clean, I used the leftover bathwater to rinse my cuirass, though I didn’t wash the tunic, trousers, or boots, as I would likely need them for whatever was happening tonight, and there was no way they’d dry in time.

Wait. Why am I applying logic to this?

I dunked the rest of my equipment in there and, after I pulled them out, they dried within minutes. It was kind of scary how easily I kept forgetting that this world wasn’t like Earth, as it looked and felt almost identical, with only a few signs that it wasn’t.

Exhausted and sore, I lay down on my bed, lightly draping the blanket over myself like a loose second skin. The fabric against my naked body felt just like it should. This Twisted Deity who had brought us here had at least accomplished that much. It was a shame that it was overshadowed by the perverse design that served as a perpetual limbo, torturing real people for its Creator’s sick entertainment.

Something that then struck me was that, if every person in this realm had been brought here from the real world, how had people we’d known responded? Surely the disappearance of hundreds, thousands, or however many real people existed in this place, would’ve created a distinguishable pattern that could be detected. Did this Watcher God simply not care if it disturbed the fabric of reality by mass transporting people away from Earth, or did it have some sort of solution to keep people from noticing? Like, had all of us who’d been brought here been replaced with identical replicas, like some cosmic horror type situation? Or maybe, given its proclivity to mess with memories, had the Watcher erased our existence from Earth, by selectively removing any-and-all proof of our existence, going so far as to make our own families and friends forget us?

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

Of course, all of these theories were simply conjecture based on nothing, and I doubted the Twisted God who held our fate in its hands would be very forthcoming with answers, even if it deigned to return to us some of the memories it had stolen.

Even with such disturbing thoughts floating around in my head, I still managed to fall asleep. In my dreams there was nothing but darkness.

The town bell sounded over-and-over. I awoke with a shock and bolted upright in my bed. I couldn’t have slept for more than a few hours at most.

A glow, bright orange with red mixed in, fell across the floor from the window in the wall. The sky outside was pitch-black, but the distant parts of the Village were clad in a deeper kind of darkness: black smoke. The orange light came from the fires in that same area, and already a heavy beat of drums started building in the air.

I put on my armour, which had been discarded by the foot of the bed and near the bathtub. I would need to find looser pants after this fight, as it wouldn’t do to spend five minutes putting on everything, especially not whenever I was in a hurry.[3] I even equipped the cloak, which was the only thing I’d actually stored in my inventory. Right now, getting recognised really didn’t matter.

Because it seemed like the heroic thing to do, I flung open the window and leapt from the sill onto the roof of a nearby one-story building.

Once outside, a banner flashed before me, “Now entering Stage ‘Raid on the Forgotten Village’.”

From the rooftop, I ran across the uneven tiles towards the opposite end of the city where fires roared and screams rang out across the night sky. Though I was still far from the fires, I could taste the burnt wood in my mouth with every rapid breath and smell the fragrance of immolation on the wind.

When I neared the marketplace, I jumped from the roof of a flower shop and landed on the hard cobblestones, my legs absorbing the impact easily.

A little beyond the marketplace, fire had engulfed several buildings, and the familiar Red Runner Bandits, whose brethren I’d slaughtered the day before, were fighting the locals in the streets and the market, their bloodthirsty faces lit up by the crimson glow. There were a lot of the slate-grey and black-veined monstrosities amongst them.

Up ahead, I saw Captain Tabian fending off two attackers at once. He was wearing rugged plate armour, but no helm. A unique, stained, yellow sash was tied around his waist and he looked like a mixture between a knight and a mercenary, though it wasn’t a bad look. He wielded nothing but a shortsword, but with such an aura of confidence that it was hard not to be impressed. Three more bandits came at him and I decided to intervene, felling two in a single slash, and with the remaining three trapped between myself and the Captain they were soon disposed of as well.

“Thanks for the help, Traveller. You really saved me there,” the Captain acknowledged. “I’ve heard from my men that Red Rian is seeking the one who cut off his arm further up, amidst the flames.”

“Got it,” I replied briefly, and left the Captain behind to guard the marketplace.

After rounding a corner and then another, I was at the mouth of a long street with burning houses on either side of me. A high-pitch voice hailed me from a nearby ruined house, “Raven! Over here!”

Is that Jakob?

As I neared, I barely recognised him in his full soldier’s uniform of a white tabard over chainmail. Though I knew it was him, since he went helmless like the Captain. Aside from his height and lack of helmet, he looked almost identical to the annoying guard outside the Soldiers’ Camp. I wondered if he had acquired his armour from the Quartermaster by actually joining the army. His brown curls and gaunt face looked completely different in the light of the fires, as if he’d become another person by putting on his battle-gear.

“Jakob, I have to ask you something.” There was something I needed to know, if we were going to take down Red Rian together.

“What is it?” He looked at me as if I was the only thing in his world. It was putting me off slightly, mostly because I wasn’t used to that kind of attention. I got the feeling that before coming here, back in the real world, I’d been very shy or introverted.

“When you fought Red Rian at the Hideout did you also cut off his arm?”

“I never fought him. He fled after I killed half the bandits in stealth.”

“Hmm,” I hummed in response. I hadn’t considered using stealth… “Do you think we’ll each see a different version of him?”

“This is supposed to be instanced to just the four of us who recently cleared the Hideout, and I guess it might use the latest clear of the Hideout as the determining factor for how this fight will turn out, which means we should all see the Red Rian you saw.”

“What do you mean by instanced?”

“It means that we are in the same city as before, but only those of us meeting the specific requirements see this version, and everyone who have yet to clear this Stage just see the original version. It’s meant to be a forced-group Stage.” That explained why the streets were mostly deserted, with the exception of the few Husks I’d seen, such as Captain Tabian and the locals in the market. This was the parallel dimension thing that Kerebor had mentioned and which I hadn’t really understood at the time.

“Incoming!” Jakob suddenly warned.

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[1] Which was a finicky process, let me tell you…

[2] Don’t you dare judge me!

[3] Or I could do the smart thing and simply store my things in my inventory next time…