The Heart is a Void: Ashes to Ashes

[Replayer] kicked the large, black stone wall in frustration, but it did not budge an inch.

His Guild official, [DTMistress], had sent him a private message asking sternly why he had stepped out of Kaxil four hours ago, specifying the exact time when he had left.

He had exited the town through a backdoor in an abandoned building, in a ramshackle, empty part of the town's outskirts where barely anyone would normally see him go. If someone had seen him, he guessed that he had been placed under watch. And he might know why.

He wasn't stressed out about how to respond: by ignoring her. If she wanted to, she could try to find him. The area East of Kaxil was huge, so finding him in this specific mine in the Hunting area was unlikely. But what concerned him was that the higher-ups were keeping an eye on him now, and had probably realised that he was a deserter.

"Hey, George, how'd Distress know we left town? Any idea how much she knows?" he said to the player beside him.

"Could be the leader? I forget his name, but can't he check on players' locations, at least approximately?" [GEORGEW] replied calmly.

"Nobody seen 'im since the war, mate. Could be, but I doubt it. Look, I think they're watching us."

"You always say they watchin' us, people like you wanna live in the Da Vinci Code or somethin'? Mate, it'll be fine, worst is they'll expel us if they can."

Replayer sighed. "Look, you don't seem to understand, right? We were supposed to escort the Fountain Guild leader, and protect him. Instead, we turned tail and ran. Fountain are our Guild's biggest allies, benefactors, you think the Guild wants to piss them off? Nah, mate, they'll use us as scapegoats. That's why they told us to stay in Kaxil while they're at the meeting with other Guilds."

"Could be. But look, our Guild's small, Ripley, that's why I told you to come here. They need all hands on deck, they're not gonna throw strong players like us to the dogs."

"Mate, since we got trapped here the Guild's gone mad. Like, if one of the officials see you, then you're on patrol duty or you're escorting Fountain members between towns, we only get to still explore because we stay out of their way. What Fountain are giving them - gold, support, who knows what else - is clearly more important than what we are, I think they want to merge into Fountain as soon as possible."

"And now we've ruined that?"

"Unless they can screw us over to repent for it."

George went silent, beginning to share some of Ripley's concerns.

Although the atmosphere of their Guild's higher-ups was increasingly restrictive, George and Ripley had still managed to grow steadily by sneaking out with a few Guildmates to do quests out of sight of the towns. Since their Guild was small, it was easy to evade detection by the few, busy officials, and they had managed to develop their crafting skills heavily. This meant that they could trade with people from other Guilds at good prices, and now they had even found members of larger Guilds who took them on hunting expeditions to make traps.

While these allies of fortune wouldn't raise a finger to save them if they were blamed for the death of the Fountain leader, the Hunting area had been an excellent place for them to grow and gain resources.

Since it was fairly uncrowded, they had even got used to crossing over into unused areas, like Area E, in order to find promising spots for resources and hence build better traps. By now, they were familiar enough with the Hunting area to easily pick out safe places to cross into Area E without being caught by a Ranger, and their teams generally appreciated the valuable items they could retrieve.

Their most valuable find was a small settlement with plenty of high-quality crafting resources and tools on sale. Revisiting it again today, as the rest of their team waited by the readied traps in Area D, they were pleasantly surprised to find that levelling up past 45 had unlocked some new tools for purchase, and also given them a quest involving a disused mine nearby. They were told to retrieve eight pieces of [Kaxil Pyrite Ore] scattered through the mine.

So far, the mine had been larger than they expected. It was a maze of criss-crossing tunnels and even contained a few small pools of water. Their group had to split up in order to search the mine efficiently, with a fellow crafter named [Terabyte] journeying off on a long path to the right.

"I didn't find nothing here, you?" George groaned from a corner.

The loud echo of voices in the mines made Ripley ill at ease, it reminded him that he was still haunted by the aftermath of his actions in the war.

"No pyrite here, sad. But we do have five pieces, sure the rest is just around the corner. Why do they want fool's gold anyway, nah?"

"Said it was some rare local kind, maybe for alchemists or other strange guys."

Ripley laughed. "Yeah, never know who could be a buyer. Anyway, it is really shiny, also a bit red. Not like normal pyrite, yeah. Let's go find the rest."

This search for pyrite, like his recent embrace of crafting, soothed Ripley slightly and allowed him to focus. With rumours of real death swirling around, he found these non-combat activities calming. Even though he was a lumbering [Knight], he had thrown himself thoroughly into crafting and progressed rapidly.

They walked towards a path on the left of the room, only to find that it forked into three paths.

"This could take a while," George said. "Tell ya what, we should split up and check these more quickly. Each of us takes one side, then when you're finished come to the middle."

Ripley nodded, and walked briskly down the leftmost path, while George sauntered confidently down the rightmost one.

Ripley's path wound on for longer than he expected, curving gradually to the left. He found himself absent-mindedly glancing at DTMistress' message, afraid that the Guild officials would track him to the Hunting area. After all, they had seen him leave town when he was sure he was alone, it would be even easier for them to catch him in the Hunting Lodge where many people passed by.

And besides, he figured, this whole event was probably just theatre. Weren't DeathGang like the Hashin? He had seen his own leaders negotiate with the Hashin, to ensure safe passage for their dungeon runs. The Hashin would negotiate this for the leadership, but obviously still treat smaller players voyaging out as open season. To Ripley, they all seemed to be on essentially the same side. In fact, it wouldn't surprise him if one of the DeathGang spies who had tailed him in the forest was the one who reported his desertion to Fountain or his own Guild.

So who knows who might be spying on him?

He was still proud of his Guild, to be clear. He wore the tag of the [Gethsemane] Guild with pride. To him, it represented his close friends and their tight-knit forays into the wild, and due to the Guild's small size he knew most of the ordinary members nearby quite well. He didn't really associate the term with some aloof bureaucracy, who spent more time interacting with other Guild leaders than with their own members.

He snapped out of his tangential, stressful thoughts as he reached the end of the passage. Looking ahead, he saw a chamber which looked oddly familiar. Stepping into it, he heard a faint sound behind him like the swish of a curtain in a light breeze, but he ignored it. As light poured in from the left, he finally got a clear look at the chamber around him and realised that he had been here before.

This chamber had actually been near the entrance to the mine, and they had found a piece of pyrite ore here before. There were some stones strewn in one corner where they had rummaged through the dusty chamber and found it.

He sighed. It would make more sense now to just go back and enter the middle path, no point in exploring somewhere that had already been turned inside-out. Before turning back, he flicked back to his menu and checked the PM by DTMistress again, increasingly starting to wonder if he should go to hide in Kruxol this evening despite it seeming suspicious.

A threatening voice whispered from right behind his throat, "Did you think no-one would find you?"

Ripley froze for a moment in shock, then turned around heavily to see who had spoken. However, he saw nobody standing where the voice had spoken.

"Calm down, there's no escape," the voice snarled, now behind him in the opposite direction.

Ripley began to move, lurching forwards to try and escape down the passage he had come from. However, a low [Stunning Dagger] to the right side of his back, below the ribcage, stopped him painfully in still motion.

In seconds, he had been grabbed around the neck and stabbed harshly with a [Panoramic Strike] that messily tore into it. As he regained motion, the figure behind him began using [The Ripper], pressing the dagger tight against his throat and beginning to slice a deep gash across it. Choking on the pain, Ripley instinctively flinched away from the dagger, which quickly followed him.

As he awkwardly bent backwards and sideways out of the dagger's way, the figure behind him neatly kicked his legs out and shoved his neck gruffly to send him falling to the ground. Since he had bent himself into an awkward, off-balance pose, Ripley fell heavily.

Looking up while scrambling for his sword, he tried to get a look at his assailant. He was shocked to see that the figure standing above him was not an ordinary human, but a man with jet-black, lizard-like scales crawling across his face. From behind these scales, there was the hint of white skin and blond hair, and noble-looking, ambitious green eyes that reminded Ripley of his own.

The air around him had turned dark, as if the late afternoon light was being strangled into night. But he wasn't sure why, or if that was just his mind panicking at these dire straits.

As the man knelt down and grabbed him by the back of the neck, Ripley could feel hard, slimy, cold scales digging into his skin. He began to scream involuntarily, but felt a sharp pressure as a dagger pierced the back of his throat and mostly quieted him. He made a suffocating, faint squeal and his face lurched painfully forwards, colliding with the ground in front of him. He began to cry, and plead.

"Look, I - I can't - Guild hates me, and now -"

The figure behind him had no reaction, and instead used [The Ripper] to tear a cut across Ripley's forehead before kneeling against the back of his head to force his wounds to scrape against the hard floor. Due to the suffocating pressure against his neck, Ripley found his mind swimming strangely.

"Oppression! Oppression!" Ripley choked out frantically.

This strange outcry piqued the interest of his assailant.

The figure behind him loosened the grip around his neck, and spoke briefly. "Speak, old woman."

"Not - old woman."

"Man, sorry. From behind, you looked like an old black woman."

Ripley hesitated, unsure if he was being interrogated. He had agreed to not reveal any information about his fellow-deserters like George, and they had agreed to not tell on him either. But could he keep that promise through all this pain? He could try.

The figure kneed Ripley harshly on the back of the head, sending blood splattering across the ground as Ripley's wounded face scraped against it.

As Ripley began to groan, he heard the figure speak from above him. "Good to see you haven't gone mute. Well, will you speak now?"

"You - you're like a machine! Don't you have sympathy? Don't you have sympathy? Let me go, please. You want to know what I did during the war, you want to know about the others who ran away?"

"Is dying with dignity too much to ask?" the figure sighed. "Look, clearly you're in a confused state of mind. So you think that somebody sent me?"

"Do you - you know Distress? I mean -" Ripley choked on the hated official's name, which he couldn't bring himself to say.

"That was a more philosophical question than I was expecting. But here's an answer, at least from your perspective - your point of view. I am distress."

He lifted Ripley's upper body firmly off the ground, keeping his dagger under Ripley's throat. He continued kneeling against Ripley's head, almost hanging Ripley on the dagger. Ripley clawed desperately against the ground to avoid his neck falling squarely across the dagger's edge. In the process, his hands became increasingly numb and weak, incapable of drawing his sword or wielding it.

After twenty seconds of this, the figure relaxed his dagger hand and kneed Ripley back to the ground. Ripley was panting heavily, but managed to get some words out even though it felt like his lungs were combusting.

"Are you - DeathGang, our leaders, Fountain? Whatever, you're all the same! Devils! Devils!"

"I'm the only devil I know of," came the reply.

After a few seconds, the figure spoke again. "Anyway, I should take care of your friends now. Any last words, mon frere? What's your final message?" A few moments passed. "Well, I guess you aren't responding. So let's just say that your final message was, hm, 'change da world,' shall we? Awfully noble, that."

On saying this, the figure jerked Ripley's head straight up, and took some dust from nearby in one hand. As he sprinkled this dust in a light drizzle across Ripley's torn, heavily wounded face, Ripley felt as though rats were crawling inside his head. He tried to writhe across the floor, but his body could only bring itself to flop weakly from side to side.

Finally, the dagger sunk in for another, agonising [The Ripper] across his neck. As it curled across his neck, it transitioned into a stone cold [Silent Stab] which pierced squarely into the left of his neck. Ripley dropped dead on the ground.

Behind him, Crucis rose up quietly, satisfied to see a glut of new items in his inventory from the dead crafter. He heard footsteps approaching, as Akshel chased George through the maze-like mines. And straight to Crucis.