JULY 30, 2049
The last of the bloody pixels on Azalea’s arms faded as she glanced around the empty white space, searching for anything. She clenched her robes. The last thing she remembered was standing in the forest, searching for any sign of Javier after that brief flash of light. Then she was here, standing alone in the middle of this white void. The game might’ve kicked them out in preparation for the expansion, but the release was still a few hours out...and that also didn’t explain why she had been sent here.
She flipped her wrist, opening the menu. Everything looked just as it did back in the forest. She still had her few items, and the bit of experience she had gained from fighting the monsters in the forest with Javier. Part of her wondered what had happened to him, and if he was stuck in a similar place as herself.
Azalea sighed, reaching her hand to the back of her neck, pressing down on the skin. This was the typical method used to log themselves out of the VR headset. For a while, any game utilizing VR would just have the logout button programmed into the game itself, but after a past bug had temporarily removed the button in another game, a change was made universally. Since the logout was now built into the headset itself, there shouldn’t have been any chance of a game locking them in.
Except—she pressed her fingers into the skin again—nothing happened.
Azalea pressed her finger into the back of her neck again in a sudden panic, before repeating the process again and again and again.
She turned, searching the white nothingness. Something must have happened to the headset itself. There was no possible other explanation. Her thoughts immediately returned to that day five years ago, despite how she fought to keep herself from panicking. What if this was only happening to her? If she was the only one trapped, then was her body having another reaction?
Did this mean that she’d die again? For good, this time?
Since she had no memories of the event, it had always been easy to not worry about what had happened before. Truthfully, the rest of her family seemed to care about it much more than herself. Ayleon had been the only one to treat her like a normal person following that day. Her heart sank at the thought of her older brother. If something did happen, then she knew that he would blame himself, even though she had been the one to recklessly use the headset.
Azalea continued to search, taking a few tentative steps forward. She wouldn’t let that happen without seeing if there was a way out of this first. It was strange, looking down at more white nothingness, yet being able to walk forward as if there was a solid floor beneath her. She forced herself forward, refusing to stop. If she couldn’t log out, then she’d have to eventually stumble upon something. Hopefully. And if she couldn’t find anything, there was always the possibility that someone found her and removed the helmet.
Azalea.
The text appeared in front of her. No, she blinked, looking around the void. It wasn’t just in front of her, but in her vision. It remained there even when she closed her eyes, the text turning from a dark black to white.
“Yes?” she called out, unsure of what else to say.
The text vanished, and she was alone once more. A few seconds passed before the next message appeared, each word taking a few seconds to appear.
I failed to stop them.
Azalea blinked, the text lingering in her vision. Failed? At what? More importantly, who was sending her these messages, and how did they know her? Clearly this was the work of someone with influence over the game…but who—
It’s my fault everyone is trapped.
Trapped. She stared at the word, before glancing at her hand. The text must be referring to her being unable to logout…but it wasn’t just her? She thought back to all the players celebrating back in Ictol, having fun and partying with their friends. Even the players sitting outside of the forest, grinding the low-level mobs. If everyone was truly trapped, then how many players were stuck in a void like her?
There’s only one way out.
Her menu suddenly activated in a flurry of pixels. She held her wrist up as the screen flashed, selecting the EQUIPMENT menu by itself. Nothing changed, until a new item suddenly materialized in the at the bottom of the list.
“Cheesecake?” Azalea questioned.
You must remember.
The text disappeared, leaving her surrounded by white once more. She frowned, staring at the new item in her inventory.
“Thanks,” she grumbled. “Very helpful.”
She thought back to the last message. You must remember. It wasn’t difficult to figure out what they meant, of course. She must remember what happened on the day of her death, but what did cheesecake have to do with that, exactly?
Her body began to glow, emanating bright jade pixels just like it had done upon her arrival into the game. Was this it? Is this how she had died five years ago? She could only watch as her limbs began to disappear, staring with her legs, then her torso and arms, before finally reaching her head. Her last thought was of her brother, praying that he wouldn’t have to find her body lying lifelessly in her room, the headset still attached.
And then there was nothing.
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Azalea groaned as she rolled onto her side, her hand digging into sand. The sun was blinding as she slowly opened her eyes, and she shivered at the cool ocean water brushing against her toes.
She blinked, glancing to the side. Her small cap lay half-buried and soaked. Azalea pushed herself up onto her palms, which was rather difficult with her wet robes clinging to her. Palm trees filled the entire beach, filled with ripe coconuts. The beach was massive, stretching on for miles, with blue waves that crashed against the shore, leaving behind a white foam. The beach remained flat for the first hundred feet before rising into a hill. She couldn’t see over it, but even from here she could see the wisps of the grass growing there.
A groan to her right made her jump, and she turned to find a disoriented Javier staring at the ocean as he pushed himself up. He glanced in her direction, eyes widening in recognition.
“Lea!” He stumbled to his feet, slipping in the sand.
Azalea grabbed her cap and rose to her feet to meet him. She grasped his forearms as he stumbled again, and he shot her a thankful smile. Relief washed over her. The memory of the white void still lingered in her mind. That feeling of loss and despair. But at least she hadn’t gone through it alone.
“Are you alright?” Javier questioned. She let go of his arms as he turned to look around the beach, sweat dripping from his forehead. “I was worried when you disappeared.”
“When I disappeared?”
Javier rubbed the back of his neck. He was still dressed in his iron armor, although the darkened leather underneath clung to his body, dripping. “We had just defeated the monsters when you kinda…blinked out of existence.” He snapped his fingers for emphasis. “I thought that maybe you had left the game, but that was nothing like the typical logout effect.”
“But…that’s what happened to you?” she said. Javier gave her an odd glance. “Were you in the white void too?”
“The white void?”
They fell into silence for a few moments before Javier continued. “Are you feeling alright? I don’t know why we’re here, but if you need to take a break, just logout for a bit.”
“Logout?” She reached her hand up, fingers hesitating over the back of her neck. Azalea remembered the words from the void. Everyone is trapped. “I…don’t think we can.”
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
Javier promptly pressed on the back of his neck. His eyes widened, before lowering his hand and staring at it in disbelief. His voice was low when he spoke. “We can’t leave?”
Azalea turned away from him. There had to be some clue as to how they had ended up here, outside of the currently useless information she had received in the void. In the distance, a wall of murky, gray clouds rose from the top of the water and high into the sky. There was no way to see past it, and yet, hundreds of feet before the wall, sat a gigantic arch. It was taller than most skyscrapers she had ever seen, made of some type of pristine white rock with gold accents spiraling up to the top. Where the arch met the sea, the base was covered in green algae and a light mist.
It was both beautiful and daunting.
“What happened?” Azalea questioned eventually. Javier met her gaze, although she couldn’t tell what he was thinking. “When I...disappeared, what happened to you?”
Javier scratched the back of his head, armor clinking. “Well…I searched around the forest for a few minutes, before eventually deciding to head back into town. That’s when I was brought here.”
Their names in the bottom left corner of her vision flashed. She stared at JAVIER for a moment, before turning to the man himself. “Could you have been brought here with me because we are in the same party?”
“I suppose…” Javier slowly took a seat on the sand, brows furrowed. “This is just crazy. Forgetting the fact that we can’t logout, the discovered zones of Iadral Online are large, but none of them contain an ocean of any sort.”
“Which means we have no idea where we are.”
Javier nodded. “There was some speculation back in Ictol that the top players were finally getting close to beating the sixth boss, so the developers prepared the expansion to celebrate the unlocking of Zone Seven.”
“But you don’t think we’re in Zone Seven?” Azalea asked.
He fell silent again, and she suddenly found herself dreading his response. She knew that it had been over five years since Zone Six had been unlocked. Ever since then, the top players have been trying to reach Zone Seven without any success. Her mother had been one of the players at the forefront of the boss expeditions, having just led her guild’s most recent assault on the sixth boss only two months ago. But it had ended in a devastating defeat, just like every other attempt.
“I don’t think there’s any way to know for certain until Zone Six is beaten,” Javier said. “But I don’t think so. While each zone is independent of each other, they have always meshed in some way. Like the deserts of Zone Three that expand into Zone Four. Zone Six is full of mountains, some reaching as tall as the clouds. And as far as I can tell, there aren’t any around us.”
They both fell silent after that, Azalea unsure of what to say next. He had clearly not been sent to the white void like her, which left her even more confused. Whoever had been speaking to her obviously knew something about her lost memories that she didn’t, along with their sudden inability to logout. Still, why would they say that everyone was trapped if only Javier and herself were here?
Were they completely alone?
Suddenly, there was another blinding light, just like the one that had taken Javier back in the forest, but brighter. Much brighter. Azalea covered her eyes, although it did little to help. It seemed like it lasted an eternity, but when she was finally able to see, thousands of players suddenly began appearing on the beach. Some lay groaning half-buried in the sand, while others had been thrown into the ocean. Azalea sidestepped a man dressed in glimmering blue armor that appeared beside her feet. She went to help, but Javier stumbled into her when a player appeared and slammed into his back. It quickly became clear that like both of them, none knew why they had been brought here.
“What’s happening?!” Azalea called out, hoping that Javier would hear her. The last player finally appeared, leaving a hoard of players alone and disoriented.
Then the shouts began.
Hundreds of players desperately swam towards the shoreline, but their avatars flashed, cuts appearing across their bodies as they bled red pixels. Red streaks of light began bursting from the ocean, shooting straight into the sky. Azalea couldn’t help but think that they looked like shooting stars.
“There’s something out there,” Javier began, pushing away another player that stumbled into him. “It’s killing them!”
A few players on the beach jumped into the water to try to help the players, weapons drawn, but quickly backtracked. Azalea soon realized why, as a giant eel a hundred feet long shot out of the water, flying through the air before crashing down into the water, crushing a few swimming players.
HARROWING EEL appeared at the top of her vision as the screams grew around her. Another eel shot out of the water, lashing at a few players on the beach before coiling around one and dragging him back into the ocean, his screams being the last thing Azalea heard. The hoard of players began to scramble up the beach, pushing or shoving past anyone in their desperate attempts to escape.
The next eel shot out of the water and slammed into the sand to Azalea with a hiss. She was flung back from the force of the impact, sending sand flying through the air. Its black scales glistened, with eyes a sickly yellow. The monster seemed like it was watching her, even as it wrapped its tail around a fleeing player and flung them into the sea, right into another waiting group of eels.
“Lea!” Javier shouted. She felt herself being lifted, and soon she was standing on her feet once again. Javier was behind her, already tugging her with him. “We need to move!”
Azalea didn’t need any further prompting, and they quickly joined the crowd running away from the ocean. A player next to her drew their weapon, a dark longbow, and began to fire at one of the eels. The arrows bounced uselessly off the creature’s scales, although the attacks drew the monster away from the person it had been preparing to attack. The bowman took a few wary steps back until the eel’s tail lashed out, wrapping around them with a crunch. Azalea met their eyes, her heart stopping at their pleading gaze, but then they were gone, having been flung into the ocean.
“Keep moving!” Javier shouted. He kept pace behind her, pushing her forward. The players were just beginning to crest the top of the beach, with the sand beneath their feet changing to grass. As Azalea finally crossed over the crest of the hill, she was met with the sight of a large plains, full to the brim with luscious grass. When she felt like there was enough space between the beach and herself, she finally came to a rest, her cap still bunched up in her hand.
There were hundreds of red arcs shooting up into the sky above the ocean, where eels still thrashed in the water. Javier came to a stop beside her, watching in silence, placing one hand on her shoulder. She gave him a quick thanks in the midst of her haggard breathing.
“Where are we?” A player asked. He was panting like her, crouched over with his hands on his knees. He must have been another support class, if the elaborate blue and gold robes he wore were anything to go by. A Sorcerer, if Azalea had to guess.
“I don’t know,” another responded, although she couldn’t tell where the voice had come from. “I was in the middle of a quest, and the next thing I know I was here coughing up sand.”
Azalea glanced around the players around her. They were all clearly much higher levelled than her, and probably even Javier, dressed in all different types of equipment. The questions quickly turned away from the eels to the players that had died. The red beams arching into the sky had just begun to dissipate, leaving tiny balls of light in the sky, twinkling like tiny red stars.
“Shouldn’t they be respawning?”
The question prompted even further chatter, with even more players beginning to panic at the implications. Azalea couldn’t tear her eyes away from the stars in the sky. The text in the void hadn’t mentioned anything about players being unable to respawn, but if that was true...
Javier pulled his hand back, his expression unreadable. “So...we are unable to logout of the game…and we don’t respawn if we are killed. What kind of nightmare is this?”
A player beside them heard his comment and immediately went to try and logout. And as Azalea already knew, nothing happened when they pressed the back of their neck. This prompted more players to attempt to logout, and soon enough, every player was attempting to logout. Players began to panic, trying to figure out anyway they could to logout. Javier grasped her arm, beginning to tug her through the crowd.
“We need to get to a place where we can see more,” he said. She tried to respond, but he continued before she could. “We were sent here first for a reason. We need to see how many of us there really are, and if we can start forming a plan to start figuring things out.”
Azalea knew that she was here for a reason, but couldn’t say the same for Javier. If he had been dragged into this too because of her...she wouldn’t know what to think. But there were all the other players trapped here too. They couldn’t all be because of her...right?
Walking through the crowd proved to be much harder than she would’ve thought. With players panicking all around her, desperately trying to think of ways to exit the game or teleport back to another town, Javier had to forcefully shove his way past many of them. They were met with distasteful glances from many, but Javier ignored them all, just continuing to push his way forward. Azalea kept a tight grip on Javier’s arm, worried about becoming separated. They may have escaped the wrath of the monsters in the ocean, but the occasional red beam still burst into the sky. And if monsters weren’t attacking them any longer, then she didn’t want to think about the implications of what that meant.
A few players were clearly thinking the same as Javier. They stood up high, calling out to those around them, attempting to quell the panic. While the beach gradually sloped up into the plains, parts of the hill was higher than others—much higher. Javier led her over to a hill that stood taller than the rest, where the oceans crashed into the bottom of the cliff far below. It was completely barren beside a few lone trees, and only a few players had run all the way up here in their panicked escape.
“I can’t believe this…” he muttered.
Azalea couldn’t help but agree. Spread throughout the entirety of the plains, there must have been tens of thousands of players, just as confused and terrified as they were. Except while she had been warned about this in the void, none of others had any idea as to what was happening.
Suddenly, all the voices began to quiet as all eyes fell upon the gigantic arch far out into the ocean. Azalea just managed to make out the head of an eel break the surface near the right base of the arch. The head was gigantic, easily dwarfing the eels that had been attacking them only minutes ago. It circled around the arch, wrapping higher and higher until it finally reached the top. It must’ve been hundreds of feet long, and it still hadn’t even fully emerged from the water. Its scales shone a pure white, with lines of black trailing down its body. Even from all the way out here, she could see its gigantic, gaping maw.
In the past, she had watched videos online of players defeating each zone boss, with each having been a terrifying creature of immense strength. There was a reason why each one had taken years to defeat. But just from the sight of the creature, Azalea already knew that none of those could even hope to compare to the monster before them. A tiny blue bubble appeared at the top of her vision before it quickly expanded into one line of text.
NEPTYNE, THE RULER OF ALL SEAS.