“Liam?!” said Saffie. A barrage of thoughts were suddenly racing through her mind. “Liam who? I don’t even know any Liams!”

“Don’t lie to me!” Cora raged, and for the first time Saffie saw a weakness behind Cora’s enchanted eyes. “You’ve consistently resisted my truth seeking spell, but I’m going to get the truth out of you one way or another. What have you done with Liam?”

Saffie’s mind was reeling so much she felt like a dozen sentences were going to come spilling out of her mouth at the same time, but she forced herself to narrow them down.

“That’s what you were doing all those times? Trying to suck some kind of truth out of me?!”

“Yes, and if you don’t tell me, I will use something I vowed never to use to get you to talk. Are you familiar with the… Excruciate spell?”

Saffie felt the blood drain out of her face. She had indeed heard of the Excruciate spell. It was something players only spoke of in hushed tones at the Mage’s Guild; one of the darkest spells in the Dark Magic section of the Great Spellbook, it was known for inflicting torturous pain on its target.

“You wouldn’t…” Saffie said in barely more than a whisper.

“I swear I’ll do it if you don’t talk,” Cora replied, stepping backwards and raising her hand at Saffie’s chest, poised like a claw.

“Please!” Saffie begged. “Listen to me! I honestly have no idea who Liam is or why you think I’ve taken him from you, but I’m willing to help! Just tell me why you think I have him!”

Cora took a deep breath through gritted teeth.

“On the tenth of July, I went hunting Rockbottoms at Chislehurst Caves with my best friend Liam O’Sullivan. We split up to place traps, but when I returned to our rendezvous point, he was nowhere to be seen. I searched those caves for hours, but Liam was well and truly gone. I knew he would never abandon me like that. He had to have been abducted by someone. So I did a Source Scan.”

Saffie shook her head, feeling even more confused than ever.

“I have no idea what a Source Scan is,” she said.

“A Source Scan is the deepest scan there is. It’s able to reveal parts of the game’s source code, including the Overworld identification numbers that are assigned to players when they join. Liam’s abductor fled the caves too quickly to have left behind an echo of their full OIN, but too slowly to have left behind nothing. That’s right, my scan caught the last six digits. At first, my radar didn’t pick up any culprits in central London, but after a week of searching, it matched those last six digits with a player at the Mage’s Guild. That player… was you.”

“That’s what you’ve based this on?!” Saffie gasped. “The last six digits of some number?! It’s obviously just a coincidence that I happen to share the last six digits with another player!”

“Six digits is enough!” Cora snapped.

“Wait!” said Saffie, as a key piece of information pushed itself to the forefront of her mind. “I can prove that it wasn’t me that abducted your friend!”

“How?” Cora demanded.

“I didn’t join Overworld until the seventeenth of July,” Saffie said frantically. “If you’re saying these identification numbers are assigned to players when they join the game, I wouldn’t have been assigned one until that date! The day you were up in the rafters of the Mage’s Guild trying to suck the truth out of me - that was only my second day in the game!”

“You’re lying,” Cora insisted, though there was no conviction in her voice.

“Do one of your deep scans on me right now!” Saffie urged. “There has to be some information in there that tells you when I joined Overworld. You’ll see, I swear!”

Cora held her hand where it was, trembling with fury, and muttered something under her breath, then her eyes began darting back and forth, reading text that was only visible to her. When her eyes stopped moving, there were a few moments of silence before she turned away sharply and punched the bookshelf to the left of her, making it shudder and drop a few real books.

“You see?” Saffie said, relief flooding every part of her body. “I only joined Overworld because someone cast a sleeping spell strong enough to put my uncle Dax in a coma, and I need to perform a counterspell to wake him up.”

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

Cora turned her head slowly back to face Saffie.

“Dax?” she said, straightening up. “Not Dax Farrow?”

Saffie’s heart skipped a beat.

“You… know my uncle?”

But Cora didn’t answer. Instead, she started pacing back and forth, looking lost in her own thoughts.

“First Liam, now Dax? Whoever did it is targeting glitch hunters. I’ll probably be next.”

“Glitch hunters?” said Saffie.

Cora stopped pacing and rested her back against one of the bookcases, pulling a silver arrow out of her robes.

“We kind of live on the edge of the game, hunting for glitches,” she said, twirling the arrow between her fingers. “We specialise in forbidden scans - ones that can locate things that aren’t technically supposed to exist; overpowered weapons, botched potions, messed up spells, you get the picture.”

“Is that what that weird projectile you threw at me was?” Saffie said curiously. “A glitched spell?”

“Arak Vaar?”

Saffie flinched a little, hoping another one wasn’t about to fly in her direction.

“Another player had cast a series of fire, ice, water, and lightning spells at a spell resistant barrier in Shoreditch, but the game glitched and created a ball of energy made up of all those elements. I was able to extract the damaged code and create my own spell from it. I decided to name it Arak Vaar after a spell from my favourite book as a kid.”

“I thought it had a weird name,” said Saffie.

“It’s better than the boring ones the game gives us,” Cora retorted.

“I’m not saying it’s a bad name!” Saffie said. “It’s a really cool na- wait - you’re saying Dax is a glitch hunter, like you? He was… cheating?”

“We’re not cheats!” Cora insisted. “It’s what everyone thinks, but… it’s not like that. We simply seek out and exploit… mistakes. Those mistakes are always going to exist. We make the most of them.”

“Did you know Dax well?” Saffie asked hopefully, but Cora shook her head.

“Only by reputation in the glitch hunting community. He kept to himself most of the time, but we all kind of know who’s who. You say someone cast a sleeping spell on him. Did you see who it was?”

“No, they were too quick,” Saffie admitted. “When you started stalking me, I made the assumption it had been you.”

Cora stared at her own reflection in the tip of the arrow.

“Dax must have discovered something. Something big. Did he say anything to you before it happened?”

“Yeah,” said Saffie. “He asked me to take a weapon to the Oracle.”

“A weapon?” said Cora, narrowing her eyes at Saffie. “What kind of weapon?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never seen it. It was… stolen from his apartment. All I know is it’s called the Onyx.”

Cora stumbled away from the bookcase with a few unsteady steps, as if she’d just been stabbed in the heart.

“What is it?” Saffie asked her. “Why did Dax want me to imbue it with extra power at the Oracle?”

At these words Cora let out a short, incredulous laugh in which there was no trace of humour.

“Imbue it with extra power? Is that what you think he wanted you to do? The Onyx isn’t a weapon. At least not in the traditional sense. The Onyx is a name we glitch hunters gave to a theoretical ultimate glitch - a glitch that breaks the game so much that the source code cannot only be seen, but be… modified. Do you know how dangerous that could be in the hands of the wrong person?”

Saffie breathed in and out heavily, the gravity of the situation truly sinking in.

“You’re right about the Oracle imbuing weapons, items, and other things with extra power,” Cora said. “But glitches? Many glitch hunters have tried upgrading their glitched gear at the Oracle, and you know what happens? The oracle removes the glitch. Dax didn’t want you to give the Onyx extra power. He wanted you… to destroy it.”

Saffie swallowed hard.

“What am I going to do?” she said.

“You say you can wake Dax with a counterspell?”

“As soon as I gain access to it, yes.”

Cora nodded curtly.

“Focus all of your attention on that. Dax probably knew who was after the Onyx. The best chance we have of finding out who it was is talking to him.”

Before Saffie could even nod, Cora reached out and grabbed the back of her hair, pressing their foreheads together. She held Saffie firmly in place while a now familiar sensation coursed through Saffie’s body and a line of text appeared in the top left of her vision.

You are now connected to CORA through Overworld Messenger.

“I wish people would stop doing that,” Saffie said, but Cora didn’t even crack a smile.

“When Dax wakes up, message me right away,” Cora said, turning away from Saffie and pacing out of the aisle.

“Wait - where are you go-”

But in a whoosh of Vesper’s smoke, Cora vanished.

Saffie bent down and stroked Acorn, then she reached for an Evergreen potion to restore some of the damage she had taken from Cora’s various attacks, but when she felt the sharp edge of broken glass, she realised the bottle had gotten smashed somewhere along the way without her noticing.

“Open Spellbook to Restorative Spells,” Saffie said, and her spellbook materialised in front of her.

As she ran her finger down the options she had for replenishing her health, she stopped as she noticed something about the right edge of the paper. It had a slight glow to it, which Saffie had learned over time meant that at least one new spell had been added to her book in the direction of the glow.

Saffie’s heart began hammering in her chest as she remembered that the Mind Magic Section was in that direction.

“Please,” she said, whipping through the pages rapidly. “Please be the counterspell.”

As she reached the end of the Time Magic section, she tried to calm herself down, not wanting to get her hopes up just as she had done so many times before just to be disappointed again, but she couldn’t help it.

Holding her breath, she pinched the frayed, bottom right corner of the page and slowly turned to the Mind Magic section.

There, at the bottom of the list, was:

(NEW) Unburdened Mind

Reverses the effects of:

Smoke Your Name, Kerfuddle, and Vulture’s Weep.

She had done it.

It was time to wake Dax up.