Saffie was overcome by a sensation she had never experienced before. She wasn’t sure what she had been expecting, but it wasn’t this. It was like the entire game was flowing into and out of her at once. Lines and lines of programming code cascaded through her consciousness, so fast she could barely read any of them. She tried to slow things down, to find some kind of focus, and the rapidly changing text began to pause for a moment on different, random lines.

“NO!” Jade screamed.

Saffie could feel Jade’s power over her trying to pull her arm out of the Onyx, but the knock to Jade’s head was still affecting the amount of control she had. It was coming in waves now instead of a constant force. Saffie clenched, using all of her strength to keep her arm in place, and she concentrated as hard as she could to remember the original line that Jade had changed.

And then a single line formed very clearly in front of her:

PlayerControl (assignToPlayer=JadeSakata/count=all)

That was it.

Using all of the mental strength Saffie could muster, she willed the line to change back to its original form.

With a pop, it reverted to:

PlayerControl (individual)

Immediately Saffie felt Jade’s power over her movements diminish, but she couldn’t celebrate yet. She needed to find the other line of code; the one that allowed Jade to kill players in real life using her in-game weapons and powers, but saffie could sense that Jade was lifting her arm in her direction.

“EVERSEAL!” Jade screamed.

Saffie ripped her arm out of the Onyx a millisecond before Jade’s spell connected with it, and a new egg casing materialised around the open vortex, sealing it shut. If she had been a moment later, it would have sliced her hand off. There was no telling what kind of power the game, and Jade, would have had in that situation.

Saffie clawed at the shell to get back into the Onyx, but it was no use.

Jade was storming towards her. There was no more time to try to change the second line of code.

Without another moment of hesitation, Saffie grabbed the sealed Onyx and threw it into the open door of her dad’s quadcopter, where it landed on the passenger seat.

“Go, dad, go!” she shouted, and the quadcopter swooped away, speeding into the night.

“What have you DONE?” Jade raged.

Before Saffie could feel any sense of relief about the Onyx disappearing into the night sky, Jade was bounding towards her with her katana held high.

Saffie dive-rolled out of the way, and the blade struck the platform with a clang.

It was then that Saffie noticed that her and Jade were no longer alone on the rooftop. Other players, now having regained control of their own bodies, had made their way up to get their revenge on Jade, and were battling Jade’s followers to get to her.

Jade had noticed them as well. She looked back at Saffie, and it was the first time Saffie had ever seen a morsel of fear in those eyes.

This was Saffie’s chance to strike.

She extended her arms to perform the movements required for a Scorch. She had performed the spell so many times since that first battle all the way back in the park against the growlem that she could now get the flames to catch in a fraction of the time. She was going to set Jade ablaze.

“Scor-” she started.

“Suspend in Time!”

Immediately Saffie felt everything seize up. Even the digital flames in her palms had become a freeze-frame.

But it hadn’t been Jade who had cast the spell. It had been a male voice.

A manic grin spread across Jade’s face, and she turned away from Saffie, firing a few spells at some other players who were advancing on her from the left.

Slowly, the caster of the time suspension spell came around from behind Saffie and stood in front of her.

It was Liam, and he was furious.

“You dare to attack your God?”

Saffie wanted to scream at him that Jade was no God of hers, but everything including her mouth was frozen in place.

With a vicious snarl, Liam drew his silver arrow and raised it. He pressed a button on its shaft, just like he had done to break the original Onyx shell, and the arrowhead began spinning. He was going to drive it into Saffie’s chest, and she had no way of escape.

But just as Liam made to strike, a purple wisp of smoke swooshed past, and the arrow was gone from his hand.

“What?” Liam said, examining his empty fingers, then he spun to his right.

In another whoosh of purple smoke, Cora appeared holding the arrow in her own hand. She had tears streaming from her eyes.

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“Cora,” Liam said calmly. “Hand my weapon back to me.”

But Cora held onto the arrow, its head still spinning.

“I did that once,” she said, her voice cracking with raw emotion. “I’m not going to make the same mistake again.”

With that, Cora plunged the arrow into Liam’s chest, twisting it as it dug deeper and deeper.

Liam’s wide eyes bore into Cora’s as his health depleted, and eventually he sank to the tarmac, deep in Morrowsleep.

Wiping her tears away, Cora pulled a small gadget from her robes and pressed it to Saffie’s arm. Immediately Saffie felt the time suspension spell vanish.

“I need to go free Nate too,” Cora said quickly.

All Saffie could do was nod in her exhausted state as Cora ran off.

The rooftop was now a total battleground, and Saffie couldn’t tell whose side was winning. Hundreds of players had returned and were facing off against Jade’s followers. It seemed that Jade’s followers were more powerful than the majority of the other players, but these players outnumbered them, making it an even fight.

Saffie glanced around for Jade. In the whole battle, Jade was the only one whose in-game abilities could kill someone in real life. If she didn’t eliminate her from the game now, it would only be a matter of time before more would die.

There she was, right in the centre of the platform, blasting players away from her with Pulse and Pummel spells.

Saffie pelted towards the platform and dived onto it, hurling a strong water spell in Jade’s direction. Octavius noticed Saffie first, but Acorn pounced and grappled him to the ground at the same time that the water spell connected with Jade’s back, soaking her and making her stumble.

Jade spun around, her hair and robes dripping, and her eyes wild with fury, but Saffie wasted no time in following her spell up with another.

“Thunderstroke!”

A bolt of lightning struck Jade, causing her body to seize up.

“Nice one, Saff!” came a distant shout. It had come from Ashmi, who Saffie could see had just taken out one of Jade’s followers on the other side of the rooftop, and was quickly advancing on another.

Saffie glanced at Jade’s health bar. Casting a lightning spell on her when she’d been soaking wet from the water spell had done exactly what she’d hoped - tripled the damage. Jade was now at about 75% health.

“Windstorm!” Saffie snapped, criss-crossing her arms, then sending out a roaring cyclone.

But Jade swiped her hand at it and the swirling wind was immediately transformed into a mere breeze. Before Saffie could try another offensive spell, Jade made a gesture Saffie had never seen before and was hit by a multicoloured burst of energy.

Saffie expected to be knocked back or feel some kind of impact, but all she felt was a strange fizzing all over her body. She looked up at her health bar. The spell hadn’t done any damage.

“Go ahead,” Jade shouted manically, throwing her arms out either side of her and storming towards Saffie. “Throw another spell at me!”

Saffie didn’t know what Jade was up to, but she couldn’t waste the opportunity. She made a rotating motion with her arms and sent the swirling fireballs of a Scorch. As the flames engulfed Jade, she just began laughing like a lunatic. The fire wasn’t hurting her at all, and more importantly, her life had only depleted by a tiny fraction.

“I’ve put you under a power reduction enchantment,” Jade boasted. “Now every single one of your spells is as weak as your pathetic, little ‘Ice Shot.’ You would have to cast thousands of spells to defeat me.”

“Disenchant!” Saffie said, slapping her hand to the middle of her own chest in an attempt to remove Jade’s enchantment, but she could sense that the removal hadn’t worked.

Jade shook her head tauntingly.

“Even your disenchants have been weakened. You’re powerless against me, Saffie Sparkes.”

Saffie glanced around desperately, and her heart skipped a beat.

The tide was turning. More players had now joined the fight against Jade’s followers, and one player in particular was tearing through them with his golden dagger - Nate. Saffie felt butterflies in her stomach as Nate caught her eye and flashed her a smile.

“It’s not me you need to worry about,” Saffie said to Jade, and Jade surveyed the crowd. One by one, Jade’s followers fell, and as Nate flipped over the last one and drove his dagger into his back, all eyes turned to the platform on which Jade and Saffie stood.

And then players began running.

Everyone was going to swarm Jade.

Jade let out a tormented scream and swung her arms in a wild motion. Saffie at first thought she was casting some kind of offensive spell out at the crowd, but a barrier began forming over the platform like a dome, shutting Jade and Saffie in, and everyone else out.

As the crowd hit the translucent barrier, they bounced back, some falling over, others banging it with their fists. Saffie could see that Nate was driving his dagger into it, trying to cut a hole in it, but it wasn’t getting through. She could also see Ruben on the other side of the dome, throwing caustic potions at it, but even with all of his alchemy expertise they weren’t able to make a dent.

Jade slowly turned her head back to Saffie, and Saffie could tell by the look in her eyes that this was it. Jade had lost everything, and and the only thing remaining for her was revenge.

“I had everything under control,” she said through closed teeth. “And you RUINED it!”

Saffie raised her arm in an attempt to cast something protective on herself, but Jade shouted “Lethargy!”

Saffie’s entire body suddenly felt like lead, and she dropped to her knees from her own weight, with her arms slumping either side of her. Acorn too made as much of a growl as he could, but his little legs gave way underneath him, and he could only lie there, exhausted.

“I won’t… let you… kill me,” Saffie forced herself to say, though she knew she was completely powerless against Jade at this point.

“You think I’m going to kill you?” Jade goaded. “No, I’m not going to kill you. You deserve something worse than death for what you’ve done. A lifetime of insufferable pain.” Jade looked at Octavius, then back at Saffie with a sinister grin on her face. “I’m going to infuse the excruciate spell with Eternity Ink. You will spend the rest of your life in crippling pain. So much pain, you will beg for death.”

With Jade’s malice-filled eyes locked on Saffie’s, she raised her right hand in the direction of her panion.

“Excruciate,” Jade commanded, and Octavius seized up just like he had done in the restaurant, while Eternity Ink started bleeding out of the poor creature.

Saffie could only watch in her depleted state as the liquid floated through the air towards Jade. As it reached her open palm, it began bubbling just above it as it merged with the spell, creating a horrible, black, swirling mass that was getting larger and larger.

And then…

The flow of ink stopped.

Jade frowned, and looked at Octavius.

“Excruciate,” she said again, and Octavius began squealing even louder, writhing in even more pain, but nothing else would come out of him. There was nothing left. Jade had extracted every last drop from him.

With a few final twitches, Octavius’s convulsions stopped altogether, and he began sinking slowly to the platform.

Jade had done the unthinkable. She had killed her own panion.

There was deathly silence, even from outside of the barrier dome.

Everyone stared in, their mouths hanging open at what they had just witnessed. As far as Saffie knew, nobody had ever killed their own panion before. Nobody knew what that meant.

Until now.

Jade’s eyes widened in horror as Octavius dispersed into glowing embers, and suddenly, her health bar started plummeting.

“No, no, no, NO!” Jade cried.

Suddenly she keeled over in agony, her sword dropping out of her hand and clanging on the platform. It was like every ounce of pain she had ever inflicted on Octavius was now repeating on her in one, concentrated attack.

As Jade screamed, her health eroding away bit-by-bit, the barrier began cracking and breaking apart.

When Jade’s health bar stopped depleting, it was just a fraction away from nothing. She was hanging onto consciousness by a thread.

Wheezing, Jade slowly raised her head so she was face-to face with Saffie.

“This… is for… my uncle,” Saffie said, then extended a shaking arm and opened her hand.

“Ice shot.”

With that, a single icicle burst out of Saffie’s palm and pierced Jade’s stomach.

With her eyes still locked on Saffie’s, Jade’s final morsel of health disintegrated, and she slumped into a heap, defeated.