Two miles from the dungeon, Nika, was watching the entrance through binoculars with her team of six. The Hashashins were all dressed in their standard uniforms: black hoodies, carnivalmasks on their faces, leather armor with many straps, hidden throwing knives, and short swords with curved blades.
“Those jerks couldn't think of anything better than sit there? Taking turns?”
“Finding the easiest but most effective way is a talent,” replied the one with a smiling mask on his face with a yellow highlight of lips and eyelids.
“Who’s on watch now?”
“Military commander Hebanyac.”
“Does anyone know anything about him?”
“I heard he never takes his helmet off his head. Apparently, his face is disfigured. He's also awfully dumb and nobody likes him except for Yleen.”
“Why don't we try to fool him? The other two, the smarter ones, are offline.”
Nika put the binoculars in her bag and said:
“Let's try. If it won’t work, we’ll do what Latludious said. Keep track of how long each of them sits on duty. On Hebanyac’s second watch, we'll make our move.”
***
Rdrag returned to the game and did not find Hebanyac at his post. The military commander was online.
“Where are you?” The healer wrote in the group chat.
The military commander emerged from the cavernous darkness and, bowing his head to the side, stared at him and said:
“Hi. Three hours flew by.”
“What have you been doing?”
“Me?”
“No, me!”
“I don't know what you were doing.”
“Don't bullshit me. What were you doing in there?”
“I asked myself a question, how do I make sure I don't get killed? The answer: hide in the shadows. If the Hashashins don’t know that we are guarding the entrance, they will surely show up, then I would take a screenshot and follow them.”
Rdrag glanced demonstratively at the two tents in front of the entrance. Hebanyac cried out something like an "Oops!" sound and said:
“You can hide them inside. Pretend to go after them.”
Rdrag looked at him and turned his back and looked at the distant forest of Elgoreombdon. At its green bands of Dormel oaks and the black of Hessataule trees. The heavenly expanse of the planet Thalak was covered with a gray veil. There, on the horizon, at the junction of the two worlds, where the gray-blue clouds had not reached here yet, rivers of liquid gold like sunlight could still pierce through.
“Did you fall asleep?” Rdrag brought out Hebanyac with his vile and nauseating squeak.
“Go offline already. Let me enjoy the view.”
The military commander saluted at attention and went inside the black tunnel and set up his tent and protective field.
When Mercyaa arrived at the post, Rdrag suggested that he camps next to Hebanyac.
“It's a shame we didn't do that from the beginning.”
Yleen wrote to Mercyaa his thoughts and the events while he was online. Yes, Top Secret players are suspicious, but that, alas, is no proof. The manager opened a notebook and made a small tree of events, in which he wrote all the available information. In addition, he updated the map and noticed how the passages of the dungeon were opening. After a while he read about the battle with the shadow monster, then Hebanyac returned and asked him if everything was okay?
“Yes,” he answered in a tired voice. “I'm going to get some sleep.”
“It's still day now.”
“It's day at your place; at mine, it's the middle of the night.”
Hebanyac sat in the tunnel and watched the light at the exit, gray and dim, from a reclining position. A draught blew into his back, spewing a ghastly smell from its gut as if the walls were covered with decomposing corpses. The military commander plugged in a portable gas mask (an optional feature of high officers’ helmets) and inhaled clean air from a canister the size of his index finger that hung from his belt pouch. One capsule would last about three hours. He placed the FN Scar-L next to him on the ground, keeping the safety on.
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After forty minutes, he got completely boring. He opened his HUD, found a mini-card game based on Guns and Magic, and began to kill time. It was of course of no practical use, but in the second hour, he saw his level bar go up by 0.3%.
“Oh-la-la!” he exclaimed. “Somebody’s going to abuse a bug!”
Hebanyac closed his eyes and dozed off to increase his magic parameter and did not notice when a second-level girl appeared at the entrance with a flower of the Elg’cahl variety in her hand. Nickname: Bebetsy, one of the thousand employees of the famous courier guild FartsTravel. She placed the gift at the entrance and sat down next to the snoring military commander and shook his shoulder. He woke up and jumped up and screamed:
“Murdering! Help!”
The girl jumped back with a dazed look and fell down.
“Ah,” said Hebanyac, looking at his guest, “I thought somebody was here to kill me.”
“No, sir,” she answered in a sweet, contrasting voice. “I'm from the courier service. An anonymous parcel from an admirer of yours.”
“An admirer? I have admirers? Where is the parcel?”
Bebetsy got up and ran to the exit and held her breath and came back with a flower.
“This is for you.”
She held out the Elg’cahl. Hebanyac studied the gift. It was a flower with five blue leaves, with white in the centre.
“I wonder...” he pondered.
Bebetsy nodded and took her leave and ran for the exit, feeling like she was running out of air. The military commander was mortified and thought, I wish they had left a note or at least sent a message in PM, I would have gladly answered for such a cause. So, what if it's a flower? A gift is a gift, it's still nice. He put Elg’cahl on the ground, sat down himself, put his arms around his legs and admired what was going on, and smacked his lips in pleasure.
Rdrag came out of the tent and saw the picture.
“Um...” he began. “I got back early... Where did you find that flower?”
“A courier brought it. She said it’s from an admirer. Look how beautiful it is!”
Rdrag picked up the flower and sniffed it and immediately fell unconscious. Hebanyac looked at him.
“Oops!”
He took out a lighter and spelled the gift on fire.
“Yeah. I'm going to have to do an extra three hours.”
Hebanyac lay down on the ground and changed the air capsule and turned on the card game again, and fell asleep while at it. Half an hour later, a man dressed in a black hoodie and wearing a carnival mask of a sad tragedian appeared at the entrance. The first thing he did was to check on Rdrag’s body. Asleep. The second, too, from the snoring, he could tell. The third-level player with the alias Nevernah took a grain out of his bag and placed it under the ground and watered it down. His hands shook. There was sweat on his forehead. He wiped his forehead and turned to leave, glancing at his watch, when suddenly he felt the touch of someone's hand on his shoulder.
Before Nevernah could turn around, he heard the crunch of his limbs breaking. He fell, veins bursting in his eyes. A horrible pain ran a sharp pulse through his entire body. The in-game HUD opened with red warning signs: Your legs are broken. Critical damage. Arms broken. Open wound. Critical Damage. Disconnect from the game in five minutes. In front of him, in the darkness, Nevernah saw the military commander, who with a slight movement of his hand pressed a button and removed his helmet. The half-dead guy managed to see if only for a second, what the others could not: the beard and hair on Hebanyac's face were whiter than white. The frightening bright red color of his eyes. Wrinkled white skin affected by cancerous tumors. There was a strange device in his mouth. In front of him was an elderly albino in the flesh.
“It's time to plunge into the world of illusion,” Hebanyac said in a voice that was rough and unnatural to him.
Nevernah lost consciousness for a moment, and when he opened his eyes again, he saw his leg tied to a stretched tree branch in the same tunnel, only much wider and higher than before. He fidgeted, tried to free himself. It was of no use. His eyes widened; his lips quivered. Hebanyac stood before him. His helmet hid his face, but Nevernah knew that he was smiling.
“Where are we? What happened?” he asked.
There was no answer.
“I wouldn't want to die,” he went on stammering. “You see, I can't die, I made a mistake, I understand, but you're a military commander, you're supposed to be fair, noble, give second chances and all that...”
Hebanyac sat down next to him and said:
“Now you're going to see hell in the game of Guns and Magic.”
Nevernah turned on the short moments feature in the HUD, and a timer appeared in the lower right corner, counting down ten seconds.
“I don't advise you to kill me. I'll post everything on the forum. You'll get banned.”
Hebanyac exhaled and started whistling the tunes of some positive song. Nevernah opened the tab with the saved videos to make sure everything was working. There was nothing but darkness on the recording. He turned it on again. The result was the same. Screenshot. Nothing. His mouth dropped open, he mumbled:
“D... do... don't,” he said. “I'm not even in their guild.”
Hebanyac kept on whistling a song.
“I'll tell you everything, let me go!”
Nevernah saw a long katana materialize from nowhere at the trunk of a tree. The military commander, relaxed and calm, went towards it, took the blade out of its sheath, and checked the sharpness of the blade with his thumb.
“You're a fucking lunatic, you have some screws loose in the head! You won't get away with it!”
Hebanyac walked up to his victim and stabbed him in the throat with his katana. Nevernah began to choke on blood. He was not dead; his head was not completely severed. The pain was indescribable. The mind could not take the strain. His eyes blurred and he wanted to say something, but instead, he let out a couple of wheezes. The last thing he saw was the military commander cutting off the rope of a stretched tree branch and the warning in the HUD on the black screen: “Death by unknown causes.”
The branch acted as a sling. The neck muscles tore, and the head tore away from the body and flew out of the tunnel in an arc, as if it had been launched by a trebuchet, with a bloody trail in the air. In seconds it had travelled two miles and landed near the cobblestones where Nika and her group were hiding. The mercenaries turned around and saw the upper part of Nevernah's body roll past and turn to ash.
“Jesus Christ,” one of them shouted, covering his mouth with the palm of his hand.
“Maybe we underestimated Hebanyac,” said another.
“Not maybe. We sure did,” answered Nika.
She opened the map. There was not a single player with a PK debuff nearby. She gritted her teeth and asked:
“What the hell is going on?”