JESSIE : LEVEL 13

DAY 252 : D-DAY, FOURTHWEEK, HORUS, YEAR 1

CENTRAL 27 : VILLA 6 : CITRUS

I don’t go back inside. I will never go back inside again. I originally did it just to swipe some food from that dick. But something about this whole thing makes it taste like sludge.

So I spend the proceeding days and nights just lying here, in my bed, in the street, waiting for my MP to recover enough for another piece of Armor. Turns out, it costs resources to disassemble anything over Uncommon. Not a lot, of course. But I have a lot of stuff.

And gradually, one at a time, I work my way through literally all of the Equipment I was ever gifted. Like an addict always needing the next, shorter dopamine hit, I disassemble it all. I don’t care. I’m starting over from scratch. Well, mostly… In all the ways that matter.

I keep a good portion of my Items. The ones I don’t wear, anyway. But all the armor I didn’t make myself. All my jewelry, all my clothes but what I’m wearing now… And that’ll go too once I find an outfit to replace it. One that doesn’t come from this… Place.

The place I still can’t seem to leave. Even if I’m technically outside its walls. It’s not that I don’t want to. There’s something keeping me here. I don’t know what.

So I destroy it all. And after I’m done, I feel… Clean.

It also feels like it’s only been a few minutes. But I know better. It’s gotten dark and light and dark again a few times.

But once I’m done, I keep lying here. Just watching the clouds between the tops of a bunch of other rich people’s houses. Theoretically, there are residents and tourists and whatever I am, walking through me and complaining about it. But I still can’t hear them. And the privacy gradient or whatever makes it so I don’t even see them when they walk right through me.

So I lie right where I am and I wait until the others are up to leaving. Right now, I’m teetering on the edge of where I can bring myself to at least help them get to someone who loves them.

Because I don’t. I can’t. Thankfully, the others all seem to have whole groups of people like that. Their own little worlds that Brown snatched them from. I’m only barely comfortable leaving myself. I can’t imagine how bad it is for them. What with their normal passage through time and relative lack of having blown through half a dozen years of Debuff stacks in a day before the rest came crashing down like so many bricks to the skull.

Each sunset, dawn, midday, and midnight, the Pyramid Guards float around me for a few minutes before leaving to repeat the same thing exactly eight hours later.

Every time they do, I get the same notification.

[ FINE DEFAULTED: 128 USD — REASON: EXTENDED HIGH-TRAFFIC LOITERING ]

But I don’t care. Hard to care about much of anything right now…

The others do eventually come out. At least almost. They just hang out on the steps for a while.

Yuki’s messaging some guy named Tyrone. Based on her escalating squeals, she’s already been accepted back into her old guild.

Once they spot me and I explain my plan to escort them all home before boning the fuck out, Yuki offers to go last.

Rebecca sighs. “Alright, I guess-”

Dennise stands as straight as I’ve ever seen from the librarian. “I’ll go first”

She winces at Rebecca’s betrayed look. “I’m sorry. I still don’t want to be anywhere but at home, or with you. And I can’t even really stomach that right now. Not after…”

She shakes her head. “But I don’t trust myself alone with them… I don’t… I don’t want to see what I’ll do. I just want to go home. Can you do me this one last favor?”

Rebecca folds her arms. “What do you want from me? Help? I’m barely holding it together over here! But am I complaining? No. I’m just counting the seconds until I’m back at my family’s resort so I can collapse into a year-long coma. And you want me to protect you? From what? I can’t even protect myself!”

“Look, I’m not stupid. I can see that for myself. Just as plainly as I see that I’m not exactly stable right now. That’s why I’m informing you all beforehand that I suspect I might lose it if left alone with Red and Blue…”

Her head droops. “Jessie and Yuki… DAMN IT!!!”

Dennise SLAMS her fist into the villa wall next to the staircase.

It breaks apart.

In a panic, she scrambles to access the house menu and repair the damage to the villa, but pauses at the price screen.

She smiles.

Then she laughs. “Hey guys?”

Dennise looks at each of us to get our attention. Even me in the bed.

But there’s no need. Our attention is already wrapped.

She smiles wider. “I just got an idea.”

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

She presses the button.

The entire villa glows as the wall repairs itself.

She KICKS a bigger hole than she last punched.

Then messes with her menu for a second.

And the wall repairs itself.

So she does it again, only with a headbutt this time.

Unhinged catharsis aside, I can’t figure out what she’s doing. But then, I get it.

In the housing system, property repairs cost money. Real, actual USD needs to be spent for the System to repair private property.

And what Dennise is doing… She’s repairing the house. Not the wall. Not the entryway. The entire house…

In a trance, I get out of bed.

[ LEGENDARY WEAPON EQUIPPED: MAGATANA - 191 PHY - 149 MAG ]

“Up.”

[ MOVEMENT BLESSING: VAULT — INTENSITY: 306% ]

I don’t activate a Skill. I just swing my sword downwards.

A torrent of lava splashes over the entire property, all unauthorized momentum being absorbed by the nearby house’s shields to turn the whole thing into a funnel.

Like one of those sticky hand things on glass, all the lava I sprayed over the block with that swing gradually schlorps down onto Darreck’s beleaguered, volcanic remains of a villa.

Yuki, Dennise, and Rebecca have to step fully off the staircase so as not to get covered in the hot, slow mud. But they don’t seem to mind.

After a few minutes to enjoy the show of our prison melting from the top down, Dennise presses the button again.

The lava wasteland is replaced by a completely fresh villa.

We take turns destroying it.

Well, the three of us besides Yuki. Not that she would ever want to.

But the other two seem to take their increased number of turns as something of a consolation, if ever so slightly, for her part in keeping all four of us captive. It’s a long way from making up for it.

But I’m past blaming her for that. It’s hard to know Yuki for long and blame her for just about anything she gets roped into. But I certainly do appreciate the extra go-arounds at destroying the place.

Afterwards, I feel empty. Not a good empty or a bad empty. Just empty. Like I got a lot of stuff out of my system and now… There’s nothing left.

The other two seem to feel the same.

Yuki, apparently, has venting to do. Talking about some douche named Kirito. Apparently, he was that guy I stabbed for following us. And then Darreck and him had a talk…

I don’t need to stop time for my mind to wander.

Meanwhile, Yuki tells us about her whole relationship.

Sooner or later, she gets to the abrupt end. “One day, he came home mad. Yelled at me. He never yells at me. But he did then.”

Rebecca grunts and mumbles. “That’s it? Didn’t hit you or anything?”

Yuki absentmindedly both nods and shakes her head as she walks, making the whole thing more confusing than if she didn’t answer at all. “He found a trap. Not the ones we had. He called it ‘mine’. That only made the whole thing more confusing. And it kept getting more confusing. And scary. And… I ran. That’s when I met Darreck, who smelled so much like… Even more than him. And Darreck didn’t think my pathokinesis was creepy at all.”

Dennise grumbles. “Pathokinesis..?”

“Emotional manipulation.”

Rebecca and Dennise shudder almost in unison, devolving into mutually self-depricating giggles when they spot each other doing that.

Yuki nods. “That’s right. It was all my fault. If he didn’t find me… If I didn’t…”

Dennise puts her head down and screeches at the street. “NO!!!”

Everyone looks at her, whether they’re walking with us or not.

She ignores the kind of attention she normally shies away from to whip her head towards Yuki. “It’s NOT your fault!”

Dennise deflates a lot after those four words, but continues after a moment in a quieter voice. “None of this is any of our faults…”

Rebecca grabs her head. “I kept activating the stupid trap all last week. But without Yuki’s Skill, the brainwashing was just so obvious. It doesn’t help like it used to.”

My eyes widen at the realization they were still using those things. Apparently, I’m the only one surprised. But even that fades within the space of an extended instant. I know as well as anyone how devoted we felt towards Darreck. That was even the whole point of him keeping us. I don’t think any of us actually like him anymore. But we all remember when we did. And some of the research I read last week in bed indicated that you tend to stick to an abusive relationship when the alternative is your whole world collapsing around you.

Rebecca glares at my face screwed up at her admission. “You got a problem with that?”

I shrug. “Nah.”

She grumps to herself as she looks away. “Bullshit pause button…”

“Whatever the Admins did to him…”

Everyone looks back at me.

I grin. “He deserves worse.”

Not at all as I intended, Dennise is back to crying.

So is Yuki. “I can turn emotional volume up or down. I can’t change the channel. I was being brainwashed too, but I still… Am still, so, sooo sorry.”

Her crying only gets uglier.

The rest of us do the opposite of her apparent intent, and all come in to comfort her. Even Rebecca.

It takes real effort not to blurt out the obvious. The small amount of preference that the Devotion Debuff gave out… She turned the volume up until it basically became slavery. She was even using it on herself. Because he asked her to.

Yuki stops walking. “I swear I didn’t know…”

She falls to her knees in the middle of the road. “I thought the comfort I was increasing was genuine… I never realized… I should’ve realized… I’m so, so, so, so, so-”

I hug her tight, even as the others back away.

Yuki gulps mid-word. “Sorry… For not realizing.”

That’s the last any of us hear from her as she bawls her eyes out in the middle of the street.

After a furtive glance at each other, Rebecca and Dennise move back in.

We keep walking, supporting each other, silent besides the tears.

There isn’t much of a discussion when four becomes three. Or when three becomes two. Not even a goodbye.

They just walk into their respective buildings, and I never see them again.