Above the City of Threshold

3:50 P.M.

There were a few things I hadn’t realized until I was pushed out of an airplane. A human body falls a lot faster than it does in the movies. I figured I would have a second or two to look at Dendrite before I fell out of sight. In reality, I fell like a bag of hammers, and I lost sight of Dendrite the moment I fell out of the plane. I swore at the top of my lungs in the direction of the plane, but the sound of whipping air stole my words before they could reach Dendrite.

Another aspect of skydiving I wasn’t prepared for was the lack of control. Whenever I adjusted the angle of my body, it caused my trajectory downward to change in some unexpected way. Panic and inexperience caused me to try to right myself, but that simply would not work. I naturally tried to point my legs downward, but that wasn’t a stable resting position with my body’s aerodynamics.

I felt like I was re-learning how to swim by jumping into the pool. My enhanced strength and uncoordinated flailing caused me to enter a frantic tumble. I must have spun end over end more than a dozen times. The fear only grew as I realized that I was completely out of control, and I was on a terminal collision course with the ground below. Death quickly approached. If I couldn’t stop myself from spinning before I hit the ground, I could die.

Once I realized that I was in a vicious cycle, I was able to calm myself. Fear caused me to flail my arms and legs, that flailing caused me to spin, and that spinning made me afraid. I could solve my predicament, I thought, but I would have to calm down first.

I took a deep breath, and my fear disappeared. I had always been good at controlling my own fear. While it would come fast, I could at least dispel it just as quickly. Within seconds, I stopped spinning through the air, and my body naturally took on a position where my back was to the ground and my limbs were splayed outward. Slowly, I flipped my body over as if I was turning over in bed.

With my eyes now once again pointed at the ground, I saw something horrifying. I had already fallen more than half of the distance to the ground. I was close enough to the ground to see individual trees.

I grabbed the ripcord fluttering in the wind and yanked it as hard as I could. A loud fluttering sound like a tarp blowing in the wind emanated from behind me as the parachute deployed. I was pulled strongly upward, and my body was yanked into a standing position.

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My body slowed to a healthy speed, and I breathed out a sigh of relief. I didn’t want to test out whether this new body of mine could survive an impact at terminal velocity. By the time I had slowed, I could see the top of a canopy of trees less than a hundred feet below me. I had cut it a bit too close for comfort.

I looked around at the airspace around me. Perhaps, I would be able to see Dendrite or the metal crate as they descended to the ground. Unfortunately, I could not see either of their parachutes, even with my enhanced vision. There were a few clouds in the sky, and the other two parachutes must have been behind them.

My feet touched the ground, and my knees bent slightly as they absorbed the impact of the landing. The speed of landing wasn’t necessarily harmful, but it wasn’t comfortable either. It felt like I had fallen from about ten feet in the air.

One corner of the parachute came to rest atop a small tree, causing many of the parachute’s suspension lines to become tangled in the tree’s branches and trunk. I thought briefly about removing the parachute from the tree but decided against it. Instead, I unhooked the clasps securing the parachute to my chest and shrugged the parachute off my shoulders.

After stepping away from the tangle of the parachute, I knelt down and rubbed my fingers against the dirt under my feet. It had taken me a few days, but I had come back to Rubigo. The ground under my feet was the same ground that supported the other 30,000 players on the server.

Perhaps we could work together, I thought. I had mostly come to accept that peace would be impossible considering the circumstances, but a part of me held out hope that there was some unseen element that would allow for peace. Maybe there was some True Ending where the Dark Apostles wouldn’t have to die, and the Revenants wouldn’t have to be contained to the starting cities.

More likely, I thought, they would kill me and tear my key out of my chest. I sighed.

I slipped my M4 over my back and started walking. We had figured that some Apostles would be separated during the drop, so we created a system for reunification. The crates were set to release green smoke once they touched the ground. The plan was for the dropped Apostles to regroup at the crate.

My sightlines at my landing zone were blocked by tall trees. A thin layer of leaves had formed on the ground, and the leaves that still remained on the trees were orange or yellow. A gust of wind blew through the autumn forest, rustling the bright leaves and chilling my body. The jumpsuit kept me relatively warm in the cold air, but I really wanted to find the winter clothes I left in the crate soon.

I rotated in a circle and saw a house a few hundred yards away from where I had landed. The tree cover also became less obvious in that direction, so I decided to start walking that way.

After walking for about a minute, the quiet sound of tingling bells rang out in my brain. I had just received a message. I closed my eyes in order to check the message.