I don’t know how long we waited, in that broken-time place. It really didn’t matter. Versai sat on the floor, hugging her uncle’s body. Whispering to him, now and then. Shivering. I explored the building a bit. I found the safe he mentioned, but I had no idea what Versai’s birthday was. There were a few chests, loaded mostly with building supplies. Resource Packs, now. No resonance crystals, though. Nor were there any Cherished Memory fragments. Just lots and lots of resources.

Rakim looked pretty chipper about what we found, though. “Iron bars, Explosive Compound A, spring steel, charcoal, cement, I can do a ton with this. An absolute ton. These seeds are probably useless, but I can probably turn that fertilizer into explosives if we find some-”

“Yeah, no, got it. Thanks. Anything else?”

“Oh, some useless things. “Milinary Orders,” “Cutthroat Clothier Receipts,” “Noguchi, Perriand and van der Rohe Discount Flatpack Furnishings” that kind of thing.

“So… hats, clothes and furniture for the Tower.”

“Yes Sir. Like I said- useless.”

I nodded. On the one hand, she was right. None of those things were really useful in a fight. On the other hand, she was wrong. Quality of life, particularly my quality of life, would always be a valuable consideration.

Not going to lie- I miss my foam. These little slipper shoes do nothing for my arches. Not a problem yet, but it certainly would be. Besides, one chair was just not enough. I needed a queen sized bed if I was going to rough it, a king for real comfort. Some reading lights would be nice. Maybe some tasteful art. Nothing obscene, just artistic.

And if you don’t know the difference, then you’re a pervert.

The mishmash of rooms made sense now- they were probably places from around the Floating Quarter that had been mushed together. The building didn’t make sense, because outside of this dungeon, it didn’t exist.

Sensible. Just annoying. It screamed copypasta of the dumbest sort. How the hell was someone powerful enough to rip all these things out of time, but dumb enough to not grab a whole building?

I knew I was intentionally irritating myself over nothing. I didn’t want to feel… what I was feeling. Never a can to kick when you need it. I tried kicking one of the wooden-block books lying around, and nearly broke my toe. Hopping and swearing made a good diversion for a few minutes, but eventually even that passed.

That old man was Versai’s real, honest to Goddess uncle. Smart, ruthless, and utterly loving towards his nieces. But smart! My god, was he smart! He figured out how to exploit a goddamn cutscene without even knowing what one of those were. He saw the opportunity to take me hostage, figured he could leverage it to try and force a conversation, figured out the rules of the scene in a fraction of a second… smart.

He figured out how to break the rules of this world. He had a lot more time than I had to figure it out, but… a goddamn NPC mini-boss was rules lawyering. Hard to shove him back into the dolly box.

Hell, he even shifted the knife around to make sure my summons had an opportunity to free me, without actually breaking the rules of the scene. What a brilliant, ruthless man. Who looked after Versai in place of her absent dad and her piece of crap mom. Who sang along with her while she practiced playing music, and skipped stones with her, and swapped stories and gossip.

The walls were coming down hard. I knew I would have to put them up again. Disassociate. Don’t lose myself in the illusion. But Sebastian…

Sebastian loved Versai more than life itself. He saw the situation was irretrievably screwed, and rather than run and abandon the people his family was supposed to protect, he gave up everything in a final, futile struggle to save somebody. To give his daughters (in every way that mattered) a place to come home to.

Someone who could live humbly for a cause, and who could die nobly for it. A real man.

So what did that make me? End of the day, which of us was the NPC?

I spent a long time trying not to think about that. Trying not to think about what this damn game did to its victims. What it did to Versai, and to Sebastian. And to Madame, and Pammy and the Mikas and just… everyone.

Just background. Just flavor text. Just the setting. It seems real because it’s supposed to seem real. It’s supposed to hurt. They aren’t real people. They aren’t real people!

Of all the people tortured in this place, the Tower Masters were the only ones who died only once. We were, definitionally, the most expendable. The most worthless. Hard to argue with the devs there. So hard, I didn’t even want to try.

Wasn’t that just the story of my life? Sounds hard. I don’t want to try. What’s the easy alternative?

I wrapped my arms around my legs and squeezed, with my back against a wall. I just waited. Wishing I knew how not to think.

Sometime later, Versai found me. “I opened the safe. Traps. Six of them. Two pit, two fire, two tar. A thousand Rune Bones. And this.”

She held out a knife handle first, towards me. I waved it away. “You know I can’t.”

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

“Try it.”

I reached out and grabbed the handle. It felt comfortable. The blade was about seven inches long, and as wide as two fingers at the base. Straight sides swept to a very sharp point in the last few inches, with a short but strong ridge in the middle of the two sided blade. The whole thing has a sort of flattened diamond shaped profile.

It was a blade meant for stabbing. You could cut with it, but the designer clearly built around the point. You couldn’t really use it for anything but violence. Even the grip was different from cooking knives- rather than guide your hand to a pinch grip, you were clearly meant to hold it like a hammer. I could practically hear the Psycho music. Ree Ree Ree Ree REEEEEEE.

I tried to call up a stat sheet for it, and was pleasantly surprised. And annoyed.

Tower Master’s Arsenal: Commando Knife. Usable exclusively by the Tower Master. Built for discreet disposal of difficult problems, by men with an alarming love of their jobs. Undetectable while sheathed, and if the first strike is undetected, there is a certain chance it will be immediately fatal provided the target has blood. Location of the strike improves chances of a one-hit-kill.

And that was it. No discussion of rarity, no stats, nothing. Even the description said less than it seemed. I mean, I’m not a violent man, not a fighting expert, but I reckon that if you stabbed someone in the heart with a seven inch piece of steel, that would be one hundred percent fatal. You could punch up under the back of the skull, maybe? Sever the brain stem, shred the ‘ole amygdala. Sounded fatal to this terminally online guy.

A slit throat was generally a one-hit-kill without any magic support. Or so I have heard. Apparently Christopher Lee knew personally. I gave the dagger another look. I swear it looked familiar, but I couldn’t think of a single anime with a dagger quite like this off the top of my head. Or manga for that matter.

I slapped my forehead. Backstabbing! Not throat slitting, it was backstabbing. Lee did a whole demo on what it sounds like when someone is stabbed in the back, based on his experience stabbing people in the back. Stabbing professionally, not recreationally, though I guess that wouldn’t be intuitively obvious. God, English actors are weird.

“Don’t suppose it came with a manual?” I aimed for light. Don’t think I hit it.

“No.”

Definite miss. Awkward.

“Can you show me how to use it? I’m not a fighter.”

“Guess I could. Don’t really want to though.”

Fair. “Well. Wouldn’t be right now. Honestly, I think a ranged weapon would make a lot more sense for a Tower Master, even in these relic sites.”

That got a nod from her. “Yep. In the rear with the gear.”

We were quiet a moment longer. The knife felt uncannily comfortable to hold. I had misjudged it. You could hold it like a hammer in the classic “Downward Stab” position, but you could also run your thumb along the top of the hilt and stab straight forward with it. Sort of like if you were fencing or something. I don’t know what you call that grip.

I casually stabbed the wall next to me. The blade sank in two inches with no effort on my part.

“Sweet Jeebus! You see that?”

“What, the knife sticking into the wall? Yeah?” Versai clearly didn’t appreciate how strange that was.

“I put no muscle into that. None.”

“It's Sebastian’s old army knife. What did you expect?”

The silence came back, brittle this time. I wasn’t sure what to say. I pulled the knife out of the wall, wiped the blade carefully and put it back in its sheath.

“You don’t want to talk about it?”

“I don’t want to talk about it. On… several levels.”

I nodded at that. “I don’t know what the respectful thing to do here is, Versai, I really don’t. We can’t bury him. Can’t burn him. He wasn’t wrong- his death is not forever. Not here. You could think of him waiting for a rescue.”

She smiled. Still utterly beautiful, but the smile was a thin, cold thing.

“‘Rescue’ was a… well… I don’t want to talk about it. But let's say we stopped talking about rescuing people a long, long time ago.”

She blew out a long breath.

“But you don’t know that, and are trying to be nice, so thank you for that.”

I just nodded. “I won’t loot him.”

“No. You won’t.” Her expression flattened. “I did.”

“Versai-”

“That was… the master of this place, the monster known as Sebastian. He should be treated as such. He would want that. But he does… give me hope.”

I nodded at that. Smiling a little. “Anything good on him?”

“I really don’t know. Here.”

She handed me a ticket and a wide coin. The ticket was betting slip- Forty Thousand Guilders on Vinnie ‘The Violator’ Gustin in his middleweight fight against Samuel ‘Skullcrusher’ Pershing. Sebastian had gotten three to one odds too.

“Forty Thousand Guilders a lot of money?”

“Strictly speaking, it’s worthless. But when that ticket was issued?” She shrugged the best shoulders ever made. “It looks like he could afford it.”

Hah. I see what you did there. Sebastian really did teach you well.

“Got it. And the coin?”

It was a big hunk of silvery metal. Which I’m going to assume is silver, because that seems like a common thing to make coins out of, historically. Though usually they aren’t the size of an oreo, I think.

“That one I really don’t know anything about. You have a bird I don’t recognize on one side, and a mountain I don’t recognize on the other, with words I don’t recognize written around the edges. I’d say it was a medal or some kind of commemorative token more than actual currency, but that’s a complete guess on my part.”

I looked it over carefully, but couldn’t improve on what Versai had said. The bird looked more like a songbird than a raptor, with two long feathers trailing behind it. Pretty, I guess, but I’m not a bird guy. The mountain was very… mountainous. It was apparently tall? You could make out the treeline stopping midway up the slope.

I sighed and stood. “Back to the Tower, then. Time to figure out how we stop the fourth wave. Because I have a feeling about this. Something nasty is coming, and we have to be ready.”

“Yes, Tower Master.”

“Besides, it will give you a chance to vent. Violently.”

“Yes, Tower Master!”