Chapter 44: Confession

Pick any game. What’s the worst level in it?

Okay, if it’s anything where moving your character around matters, it’s probably the ice level.

But pick any role playing game.

The worst is going to be the sewer level.

A month ago, Third Eye had served one up to Lena and I. Although it wasn’t quite a sewer, and it hadn’t been that bad of a level.

A runoff tunnel descends beneath downtown Englewood, with a walkway on the side that had once been used as underground access to the shopping mall that occupied the area when I was a little kid. We, along with Miguel, had thought we’d deciphered some ARG clues that led to the tunnel. Whether we’d been right about the clues or not, it proved to be a fruitful expedition. I’d acquired my Water Reactant down there.

Two things had gone wrong, though. First, we couldn’t press all the way into the tunnel because of a locked gate. Second, when we gave up and turned to leave, the very Water I ended up absorbing first slammed into ex-player Miguel and knocked him into the drainage ditch.

It should have been our first indication that Third Eye could affect the real world – he’d certainly believed so – but at the time, we’d felt just enough ambiguity to convince ourselves he’d fallen on his own.

On our way out, we’d encountered... something. Something gleaming in the darkness, always just out of the range of our light. Something sloshing in the drainage ditch Miguel and I staggered out of.

It might’ve been a monster, although I couldn’t imagine it was anything like the creature we’d faced in the construction site. There wasn’t any Third Eye warning trying to keep us away.

It might’ve been another Daimon. Maybe one attuned to Water rather than Fire.

Or it might’ve been something we hadn’t encountered yet. The glimpses we’d seen looked metallic. Were there Iron Daimons?

The glimpses looked yellowish. Were there Gold Daimons? We knew Gold existed in the game as a Refinement, something neither Lena nor I had.

Whatever we’d encountered down there, we hadn’t gone back to look for it. Some of the reasons we’d delayed had been reasonable. Some of them had been fearful. And some of our fears had been reasonable.

After last night, though, it didn’t matter why we hadn’t gone back to a place that might contain a rare resource. Only that we hadn’t, and that we needed to.

So naturally, the first thing we did when we got out of the apartment was agree to put it off.

We did walk past the entrance to the tunnel. Through the shadow of the weird, wonderful bank building that looked like Third Eye put a flying saucer on top of it, but which I’ve been seeing for my entire life. Down to the little park crammed into the greenbelt between the traffic on Hampden and the strip malls of Englewood downtown.

Along the metal railing, painted black, that Miguel had been hurled over by my Water before I was able to control it.

We paused and surveyed the drainage ditch.

“Doesn’t look too full,” Lena said.

“More than last time,” I said.

“Well,” she said. “It’s not like we’re planning to wade through it.”

“I don’t recall that we were planning to wade last time, either.”

She poked my arm. “Is this you wanting to call off the expedition?”

“Absolutely.” Before she could object, I spread my palms over the railing. “But I’m not going to.”

“We do need to wait for nightfall, though,” she said. “Less prying eyes, and the snow will be refreezing, so there’s basically no chance we’ll get hit with an IRL flash flood.”

The ditch was supposed to catch runoff, and the heavy snow we’d had since our first expedition had been our most reasonable excuse to avoid the tunnel. Lena was right, though; after a week of dry weather, at night, that risk was basically gone.

“Which,” I said, “just leaves whatever Third Eye put down there.”

She dropped her voice to a whisper, which probably didn’t make us seem less suspicious. Fortunately, we were the only people on the greenbelt. “Also, the fact that we’re planning to sneak into an underground tunnel right beneath the police station.”

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I ran my fingers through my hair. “Do you think we should be going to the police station, instead?”

“To what? Report Mask?”

I nodded.

Lena shook her head. “And tell them what? That we think he’s doing something to people because they’re not reporting it when he invades them in a game? That we couldn’t pick him out of a lineup in a million years, because all we’ve seen is his outfit? That we don’t even know if he’s actually a he? Although seriously, he’s like, six inches taller than you. Totally a dude.”

I grimaced. “You’re probably right.”

“The only way we have anything to say to the cops is if we tell all about Third Eye, and instead of locking us up for making a false report or shipping us off to Area 51, they take us seriously and agree to help.”

“There, you’re definitely right,” I said. “I guess technically, even if the Englewood cops believed us about Third Eye and took the time to study every aspect of the game, we still wouldn’t have anything more than circumstantial evidence that Mask is doing more than playing hard in the intended fashion.”

Lena scowled and reached back to pull Bernie from his harness. She squeezed him and kissed the new patch she’d sewn on his back. His happy burble restored her smile.

“I’m not about to start up a fan club for this asshole,” I said. “For now, though, I just want to get to a point where we can beat them.”

“Sounds like a plan.” Her voice was muffled by Bernie’s back.

After a moment, she held him out and I tucked him back into his harness.

While we headed for the ramp out of the greenbelt, I asked, “Have you thought at all how you’re going to handle him?”

“Bernie?” she asked.

I nodded.

“He was fine,” she said. “But it’s like our HP. Stuff doesn’t hurt us, but it still hurts, you know?”

I shuddered. I couldn’t quite hold on to my memory of what jumping from the railing had felt like, but then, I couldn’t entirely forget it, either. “So you don’t want him to fight with you?”

“I can’t ask him to,” Lena said. “I pretend to talk to Bernie, and I think I’ve gotten pretty good at reading his mood, but it’s not like I can explain why I’m getting into a match and get him to agree whether he wants to fight beside me.”

“What about invasions?” I asked.

Lena had been walking beside me and a little behind, so I only caught a glimpse of her out of the corner of my eye. Still, it looked to me like she flinched.

“I think that’s fine,” she said. “Defending against invasions. It is. Right?”

“You know Bernie would want to protect you,” I said. “It’s probably part of why Third Eye Productions put Daimons in the game.”

“Yeah.”

We’d needed to discuss it, because I needed to know what resources we were bringing to bear and which ones were worth pursuing if we got a lead. Still, I felt like I’d brought the mood down somehow.

I reached back and gave her arm a pat. “So much for being a Daimon Master as your class, huh?”

She sighed. “It would’ve been super cool, but I’m not gonna do that to actual animals, even if they are created by the game somehow. Not if I’m arranging PVP, or in a tournament, or...”

She stopped walking, lingering on the ramp below me.

I turned back to her and leaned on the railing. “What’s up?”

Quietly, she said, “I lied about where I was going last night. And I didn’t tell you how the fight with that guy – with Mask – started.”

I waited.

“When you and Benji started arguing,” she said, “I just wanted to burn off some frustration. I thought I’d head up north and see if I couldn’t get some payback in Matt’s hunting grounds.”

I tried to keep my face neutral, but I’m sure I frowned. “You were going to invade him?”

Lena hugged her arms. “I probably would’ve given up before I got to University Park. It’s not like I had a good way of finding him, anyway. That was my plan, though, yeah. Burn off some stress. Get some XP back.”

“Whether that was the right thing to do or not,” I said, “you’d have been screwed if somebody recorded you invading after what we’ve said in our videos.”

“Every YouTuber has got to have her tearful confession arc, right?” Lena’s laugh sounded shrill, forced. “I knew it was a bad idea. It ended up being a worse one than I expected.”

“Because somebody else got to you first,” I said.

She nodded. “And... this is the other reason I don’t think we’ve got any grounds to go to the cops about Mask.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I think you think he just ambushed me,” Lena said. “He didn’t. He stepped out of the shadows in front of me and called me out.”

“He challenged you?” I scowled when I realized she’d sucked me into her assumptions about Mask’s identity. For once in my life, though, I swallowed a pedantic correction.

“He knew my username.” Lena shook her head. “No. I’m sure that’s not it. He knew my channel. Straight up called me ‘The Magnificent Ashbird.’”

Like Zhizhi had said, Lena was one of the most famous Third Eye players out there. Which explained why Mask had been poking around our apartment in the first place. If they thought of themselves as a top player, Lena had made herself an obvious target to test their skills against.

“Then what?” I asked.

“He said he admired my work, and asked if it was just for show or if I was a real player.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “You turned around and didn’t engage?”

“Oh, I expertly deescalated the conflict.” Lena looked out over the greenbelt. “I think I said something like, ‘fucking try me.’”

I probably shouldn’t have, but I laughed. I stepped back down the ramp and put my hands on her arms. “You must’ve seemed pretty badass.”

One of her hands slid up to cover one of mine. “Right up until he started kicking my ass, and attacking Bernie. Then I freaked out and called you.”

“That’s what we’re scouting for,” I said.

She looked up and blinked.

“Next time one of us gets challenged,” I said, “we’re both going to be as badass as you seemed.”