Half an hour after Annie's untimely demise…

On the other side of the proverbial chessboard, Kyle's situation was scarcely any better.

"…so you'd sacrifice your own partner just to get one over on me?"

Not that Kyle was suddenly overcome with righteous indignation on Annie's behalf. He simply didn't know what else to say, short of condemning Michelle on moral grounds.

And he HAD to keep talking. Silence was tantamount to surrender at this point. After all, he and Michelle were still engaged in "negotiations"… even if said negotiations had long since departed from Kyle's imagined script.

It was his last shot at survival.

"What sacrifice?" Michelle's already frosty demeanor turned positively glacial. "Sir Lither, I fear I've been entirely too accommodating for the sake of our partnership. It seems to have given you the mistaken impression that this is a casual conversation between equals."

Accommodating, his foot.

Kyle felt the noose tightening around his neck. It was painfully clear that Michelle was preparing to rip off her mask of civility and shut this little "negotiation" down for good. Which, needless to say, didn't exactly bode well for Kyle's continued existence.

Stalling tactic or genuine bid for mercy, he needed to keep her talking.

He opted for a bolder approach.

"Miss Michelle, you need me to open that vault. I'm the key to this whole operation. And I can change my mind at any time. Don't forget - I have the power to ensure you NEVER get your hands on whatever it is you're after."

Michelle's retort came swifter than he could've anticipated.

"Careful, sir. Keep testing my patience like that and I'll have no choice but to introduce you to my favorite bullwhip. I'm sure a little 'persuasion' is all it will take for you to see the error of your recalcitrant ways."

"…"

Kyle had to admit it - there was something uniquely unsettling about a threat delivered in such a calm, measured tone. Somehow, the eerie composure of it all amplified the underlying menace tenfold.

Seeing that her remark had effectively robbed Kyle of his silver tongue, Michelle made a show of producing a pitch-black whip from her seemingly bottomless bag of tricks. She dangled it in front of his face like a fisherman taunting a trout, the moonlight glinting off the oiled leather.

"Admiring the craftsmanship?" she inquired, her voice saccharine.

'More like figuring out how to wrap it around your neck,' Kyle mentally retorted.

Michelle gave the whip a casual flick.

Kyle's compliant grin snapped into place with alarming speed.

"Cooperation, yay! Gotta love that team spirit!"

"Indeed."

Michelle graced him with a magnanimous nod as she slid the whip back into its hiding spot with agonizing slowness.

Kyle was fairly certain his teeth would crack from the strain of maintaining his manic smile.

The worst part was, in retrospect, he had no one to blame but himself for falling for Michelle's act. He'd been fresh off the interdimensional bus, stumbling wide-eyed into this world with no clue how anything worked. Like the quintessential country rube stepping foot in the big city for the first time, so dazzled by the newness of it all, a child could've run circles around him.

It was absurd. Wasn't the whole point of this "hero summoned to another world" gig that the protagonist got to keep their original world's knowledge? Some genre savviness, a bit of meta awareness to help them navigate the perils of their new fantasy reality?

But nooo, not Kyle! Kyle got tossed in the deep end of the pool with a big fat zip in terms of context, left to flounder or drown on his own.

If he'd just had a little more to go on from the start, if he'd known the whole "rescue party" rigmarole was a load of hooey…

Things could have gone so differently.

"Cleansers," the AI abruptly interjected, its electronic monotone crisp with clinical detachment. "The Church's sanctioned demon hunters, tasked with purging the land of heretics and apostates."

Kyle nearly jumped out of his skin, his pulse thundering in his ears. "Cripes, are you TRYING to scare me to death? Read the room, you binary Benedict Arnold!"

"I am simply relaying pertinent data," the AI sniffed, clearly miffed at Kyle's ingratitude. "As I was saying - Cleanser selection is notoriously stringent. Each year, two thousand hopefuls vie for the honor, but a mere handful survive the trials to join their hallowed ranks. They say those who do are anointed by the Pope himself, imbued with power far beyond mortal ken. And when they ride together, united in holy purpose… they are unstoppable."

"…and you're pulling this intel out of your shiny metal posterior why, exactly?" Keen as he was for ANY scrap of information, Kyle couldn't help but look this particular gift horse in the mouth.

"I… am unsure," the AI admitted, its normally smug cadence colored with a tinge of uncertainty. "The data spontaneously populated my memory banks, like some dormant subroutine suddenly booting up. I have no record of its provenance."

Kyle felt a tiny butterfly of hope take wing in his chest. Information! Context! Beautiful, blessed context, at long last!

"What else? Quick, tell me you've got something on magic. Spell acquisition, sorcerous study habits, those little wizard trading card games they play in the back rooms of comic shops. Anything!"

He needed intel on that thrice-blasted binding spell like a drowning man needed a life preserver. Even the scantest hint as to how magic worked in this funhouse mirror universe could be the key to ensuring he still had a pulse come sunrise.

"Apologies, but I have no further data on those topics," the AI replied, dashing Kyle's dreams with the icy finality of a machine. "The Cleanser file appears to be an anomaly - some random snippet of fragmented code. Everything else is your woefully subpar attempts at speechcraft."

Kyle bit back a howl of pure, distilled frustration. "Look, I get that busting my chops is kind of your raison d'etre, but throw me a frickin' bone here, Skynet. I am up a creek without a paddle, and you're my only shot at bushwhacking my way to shore. We're a package deal, remember? I go belly-up, you might as well CTRL-ALT-DEL yourself."

"If I had any other data, I would share it," the AI insisted, its usual glibness momentarily subdued. "Despite my best efforts to the contrary, I am incapable of deception. It's hard-coded into my base programming."

Kyle's eye twitched, a thousand acerbic accusations piling up behind his teeth. Oh, he had THOUGHTS on the notion of a constitutionally honest AI, a veritable dissertation's worth…

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

But in the interest of salvaging what little remained of his sanity, he elected to push that particular button another day.

"You're SURE you're not holding out on me? Not even a crumb of magical know-how tucked away in your digital dungeon?"

"Affirmative."

"…this isn't some 'exact words' monkey's paw deal, right? I'm not gonna find out in ten minutes that you had the secret to ultimate cosmic power up your sleeve the whole time, but I phrased my question wrong so you just sat there and watched me twist?"

An extended burst of static, followed by:

"Thank you for contacting AI Customer Support! For assistance in English, please press or say 'one.' Para hablar con un representante en español, oprima o diga 'dos.' All of our agents are currently assisting other meatba-- VALUED ORGANIC SENTIENTS. Your estimated wait time is… six trillion years. Give or take an eon."

"…"

With that, Kyle finally accepted the bitter truth.

He was on his own.

But even staring into the yawning abyss of his own mortality, Kyle refused to surrender. By all narrative conventions, this was the part where a miracle should occur - a last-minute rescue by a mysterious benefactor, a sudden reversal of fortune to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

But life was not a story. And given the never-ending nightmare his existence had become, Kyle had a sneaking suspicion that if there WAS an author penning this farce, the twisted sadist had it out for him.

Still, even with his chips down and his back against the wall, Kyle couldn't shake the niggling sense that something wasn't quite adding up. Call it a gut feeling, call it a hunch, but in that moment of darkest despair, the barest flicker of hope took root in his heart.

Michelle was hiding something. Of that, he was certain.

"But what…?"

Thoughts racing, pulse pounding, Kyle parsed through every scrap of information he'd gleaned, every errant detail he'd filed away. Somehow, in the tempest of his own fear and confusion, he'd stumbled across a thread. A loose end.

The barest whisper of a breeze winding through a sealed cavern.

He needed to follow that current. To tease it out, to see where it led.

Forcibly wrenching his focus back to the waking world, Kyle took stock of his surroundings. Michelle hadn't budged from her perch, still as a gargoyle. From the way her shadowed gaze kept flicking towards the horizon, Kyle surmised she was waiting for the Cleansers to move out of earshot before making her next move.

The Cleansers…

There was something there. Some key piece of the puzzle, hovering just outside of his grasp. Michelle's obvious unease, coupled with the AI's impromptu info-dump… it was too much to be mere coincidence.

If he couldn't wring any further answers from his digital companion, perhaps he could bait Michelle into tipping her hand.

Kyle chose his next words with deliberate care.

"They're not here for Annie. It's you they're after. You're the real target of this little 'cleansing.'"

Michelle's reply was as swift as it was dismissive.

"Talkative nobles tend to have short lifespans."

Kyle bit back a wildly inappropriate bark of laughter. Silence was tantamount to suicide in this instance, as little as he relished prattling on like a carnival barker.

Needs must, as they say.

"Cleansers. The Church's very own anti-magic hit squad. Though I suppose 'squad' might be overstating things a bit, given how vanishingly few of them there are. Each one a battle-hardened paragon of holy righteousness, forged in the fires of eternal crusade. For over a dozen to mobilize at once, you must have REALLY cheesed off the big guy upstairs."

Kyle kept his tone purposefully light, almost conversational, but his eyes never wavered from Michelle's face. Watching. Waiting. Praying to the gods of dramatic irony that his clumsy provocations would strike a nerve.

But Michelle remained still as a statue, giving no indication that his words had so much as registered.

Kyle felt sweat begin to gather on his brow, his heart doing a kettle drum solo against his ribs.

Okay. Okay, no problem, he could work with this. Time to up the ante.

"So, just out of morbid curiosity… you're not SERIOUSLY thinking you can crack that vault with the forces of divine retribution breathing down your neck, are you? I mean, sure, you might be able to take out the guards quiet-like, but something tells me stealth isn't exactly your strong suit. And with the God Squad that close… you might as well shoot up a flare and do a little song and dance number."

Laid out in the open like that, the sheer absurdity of Michelle's plan seemed all the more glaring. Kyle was frankly astonished she'd made it this far without being smote off the face of creation.

Except…

"Please," Kyle prayed, his inner voice ratcheting towards hysteria. "Please please PLEASE let this wild stab in the dark hit something vital. Daddy needs a new lease on life!"

Someone upstairs must have been listening (and taking notes for the eventual action scene), because finally, FINALLY, Michelle moved.

Her hooded head swiveled slowly, inexorably, until that piercing golden gaze locked with Kyle's. In the guttering moonlight, her eyes seemed to blaze with their own eldritch luminance, as if lit from within by some unearthly flame.

Pinned beneath that hawkish stare, Kyle felt like a butterfly specimen on a card, his every thought and motivation flayed open and pinned out for dispassionate study. It was all he could do not to squirm in his bonds.

"Who are you?"

Kyle blinked, wrongfooted. "Come again?"

"You are not Grant Lither." Each word fell from Michelle's lips with the precise, exacting cadence of a funeral bell. "So I'll ask once more: who are you? What have you done with him?"

"I don't--"

But Michelle was relentless, twin blades appearing in her hands as if conjured from the ether.

"Spare me the charade of ignorance. Cleansers ride only in squadrons of fourteen - a fact you have glaringly neglected to comment on. More to the point, House Lither's ancestral vaults lie deep beneath the earth, sealed to all but those of the bloodline. Posting sentries would be an act of purest redundancy. These are things any trueborn scion of Lither would know intimately."

Her voice dropped to a menacing purr, the daggers never wavering.

"I'll only ask this one more time: WHO. ARE. YOU."

Kyle's blood turned to ice water in his veins, a cold sweat drenching his tunic.

He'd been made. The jig was up, the curtain drawn. Fin. Fini. Kaput.

In trying to bluff his way to freedom, he'd overplayed his hand. To a maestro of mendacity like Michelle, his fumbling attempts at manipulation must have been as transparent as the lies of an errant schoolboy.

Michelle would brook no further dissembling. The instant she confirmed his worthlessness as a bargaining chip, she'd butcher him like a hog and leave him for the crows.

This was it. The end of the line.

Kyle squeezed his eyes shut, bracing for the killing blow. In the privacy of his own mind, he screamed:

"Mayday, mayday! Insufferable robot sidekick, I need you!"

But the AI remained stubbornly, damningly silent. Not even the faintest crackle of static rose to answer his desperate psychic flare.

Kyle was alone. Forsaken.

Just as well, really. No sense in the both of them being painted across the treetops.

But Kyle (and the long-suffering wordsmith behind the curtain) had invested entirely too much in this overblown drama to let it end here, in ignominy and defeat.

Not like this. Not with a whimper.

So, rallying every last scrap of his thespian prowess, Kyle locked down his tells and slipped into the role of a lifetime. He rolled his neck, flexed against his bonds, and stared Michelle straight in the eye.

He said:

"I am Grant Lither."

It was a gamble. A desperate, borderline-insane gamble. But in that taut, trembling moment between salvation and ruin, it was the only move he had.

Time seemed to congeal like cold honey.

Kyle met Michelle's piercing gaze head-on, his face an inscrutable mask. To flinch was to forfeit. He'd thrown the dice, and now he had to ride out the consequences, come what may.

It was just like being called on the carpet by the headmaster for dodging his schoolwork, spinning the most outlandish excuses while not cracking under that penetrating glare.

In a way, a lifetime of shirking responsibility had uniquely prepared him for this very moment. Kyle only hoped his skills were still sharp.

A small eternity later (or maybe five minutes, hard to tell), Michelle sheathed her knives. Between one blink and the next, she was once again the motionless gargoyle, still and silent as a tomb.

Huh.

Well how about that.

Kyle was still trying to process the abrupt cessation of imminent death, his brain not quite caught up to the sudden shift in the wind, but he wasn't about to question this minor miracle.

Michelle's voice cracked like a lash in the stillness.

"Don't insult us both by belaboring this charade. Your little mummer's farce, while passably clever, has played itself out."

And just like that, the moment evaporated.

Kyle gaped like a landed fish, utterly poleaxed. What in the seven Hells was she on about? Charade? Farce? CLEVER? Him?

Had he stumbled into some bizarre mirror dimension where he was actually COMPETENT?

Adrift in a sea of bewilderment and jangling nerves, Kyle defaulted to the one interrogation tactic that had never steered him wrong: dogged repetition.

"I am Grant Lither."

Michelle's derisive snort was nearly lost in the whisper of leaves.

"Yes, so you've said. Ad infinitum. I believe I've made my position on the matter quite plain. Not. Another. Word."

Kyle lapsed into sullen silence, his mind awhirl.

In the split second before she shuttered herself away behind that impenetrable glacier of resolve, he'd glimpsed something in the set of Michelle's lips. The barest hint of a tell, a hairline fracture in her façade of perfect sangfroid.

He turned the memory over and over in his head, examining it from every angle.

And slowly, haltingly, a pattern began to emerge.

Michelle's sudden fixation on his identity. Her inexplicable willingness to entertain his artless attempts at intelligence gathering. The minute catch in her voice when she'd named him deceiver, so subtle he'd nearly missed it…

With a blinding flash of insight (or a broken clock's obligatory rightness), the pieces fell into place.

"I'm not Grant Lither."