Chapter 3: Confrontation

"Is there anything concerning you, my lord?"

He turned to face whoever had spoken.

Hundreds of books were randomly placed on every plane surface of the room, making it nearly impossible to even see the floor. Small piles of magic items rose up from the chaos accumulated through the years, obstructing any sort of passage that could connect his desk to the entrance door. Beside it, standing in the only tidy square meter of floor, there was his NPC as usual.

He couldn't see anyone who might have spoken.

He answered to the void mostly out of habit.

"No. Just an hunch."

He was about to turn his attention back on the table when something completely unexpected happened.

"Can I do anything to be of use, my lord?"

The same voice as before asked another question. The NPC asked the question.

A game character made out of code and data had done something it was not programmed to do.

He took a second look at her. She was a young girl just out of her teens, with deep blue eyes and brown hairs gathered in long twin tails by two black ribbons. She was wearing a long dark red dress, covered by a black robe decorated with golden details; and she was looking at him with a deeply concerned expression.

It took him quite a few moments to realize the situation. A question had been asked; he needed to answer.

He desperately thought of something to say. Anything would have been better than remaining in silence. Right now he needed to remain alone for a moment to reorder his thoughts. After a short hesitation, he broke the silence saying the first thing he could think of.

"I'd like something to eat."

The girl made a surprised expression, he had surely messed something up. Why did he ask for food in the first place? What was he even thinking? Anything would have been better than that.

"As you wish, my lord."

She bowed slightly at him and left the room, closing the door behind her.

Once alone with himself and still confused by what had just happened, he immediately clambered toward a mirror-like magical item on top of a pile and looked at himself. He was wearing a long black robe that covered his entire body; only the hands and the head were visible.

His hands were deep black, ending in sharp nails that were too similar to claws to be human's. On his back he felt two large objects attacked to his body; a pair of wings, remaining closed to not hinder his movements but ready to be used at any moment. His head was a mixture of the ones of a human and a crow; it was longer and narrower than a human's, and it had an extremely short beak and frontal yellow eyes.

Several marks shined on him; a spherical one broken by straight lines over his left eye, together with one made by multiple curved lines in a spiral on his right hand, were the only ones visible, but he could feel more on his body.

Except for the face and his hands, he was able to feel feathers all over himself. At first he hesitated, but it was impossible to not recognize the creature reflected in the mirror. The familiar monster he saw in the reflection was his game avatar.

He was about to scream when he heard steps outside the room approaching the door. He left the mirror and moved back the desk as quickly as the piles of items and books allowed. When the girl returned in the room, he pretended to have spent the entire time reading a book he grabbed at random.

"I beg your forgiveness for making you wait, my lord. The chefs have already begun preparing your meal and it will be brought to you the moment it is up to your standards.", said the girl bowing.

Up to his standards? Just who did she believed him to be? And how did she manage to do everything that fast?

He decided to answer in a way he hoped to be appropriate and, more importantly, short in order to avoid missteps.

"Very well." he said while lifting his gaze from the upside down volume and facing her.

A proud expression suddenly appeared on her face.

"Your every wish is my command."

She returned where she was standing earlier and fixed again her gaze upon him.

There were many things he desired to do. He wanted to scream for example, or cry, or slam his head against something hard or do any of the theatrical things people usually does when they are desperate or in panic. But he couldn't. The girl's presence in the room was forcing him to maintain his composure. Had he been alone he definitely wouldn't have found the mental strength to maintain a calm façade.

He looked at the window behind him. Outside it was dark, but there was no way he wouldn't be able to recognize what was outside the room. It was the Killian's flying castle; their guild base, as well as his location the moment the game ended.

He was in the game. He was actually in the game. It wasn't like a delayed shut down or anything like that. His body felt real, and so everything around him. It was something he often fantasized about, but he never brought himself to think it could actually happen. He thought about it more like a novel scenario, not a real option. But apparently there he was. He was in the game and his NPCs came to life. They seemed to believe him their lord, or at the very least the girl in front of him did.

He had to know more about the situation, more than what he could discover remaining in his room. As such, there was only one place it made sense to go.

His hands were shaking. He tried to bite his lips to calm himself down, but now that he had a beak for mouth it was no longer possible. He moved his arms behind his back and gripped his fists to pluck up courage, but he could still feel his wings trembling on his back.

He looked toward the girl. She was still standing in the same identical position she was when he first spoke to her a few minutes ago.

"…"

He realized he didn't remembered her name only after they made eye contact, and now she was looking at him and waiting for his words. He hadn't been under that much pressure in years.

That wasn't the moment to panic. He had to improvise. She called him "my lord" multiple times and obeyed a command; he would try to role-play his way out of it as well as avoiding the "name" subject. It was the best thing to do, or at least he hoped so.

"I desire to visit the library."

The girl bowed once more.

"As you wish, my lord. I shall escort you there."

He had hoped to go alone, but now he was stuck with someone observing his every move. Had he remembered anything about the girl other than levels and fighting abilities he might have been able to convince her to leave him alone, but he couldn't recall anything about her background.

The girl opened the door for him and they left the room. As she was leading him to the library, he thought about how he got to the situation he was in. They were all working for the guild leader's project until just before midnight and they finished it about ten minutes before the log out. Everyone said their farewells to the others and most of them logged out. He decided to remain until the very end, and now was there. Hopefully there might have been someone else that waited for the shut down like him. If it was so, then he might not be alone.

Regardless of what the situation was, he had to know more about it. Understanding the problem is the first step to find the solution. In the library his guild kept important and extremely useful items and NPCs. It was there that they went when they needed to gather intelligence about the surrounding area. This time it might not have been for a quest or to repel intruders, but it still was the best place he could think of given the situation.

The two of them kept moving through the hallways. The walls were adorned with colossal paintings illustrating salient phases of Yggdrasil's lore. Extremely finely crafted furniture placed against the walls made him wonder how such delicate objects could even exist without breaking. Even though he always thought the game to be extremely realistic, everything he was seeing was extremely more detailed than he remembered.

They went on until a large door became visible. The only way to describe it was massive. It was so huge that he felt intimidated by its sheer size. On both sides there were two white capes, the highest leveled spawn the guild was able to produce.

They had reached the library's entrance.

He kept following he girl until they arrived a couple of steps from the guards. Compared to how he felt when the NPC beside him had been able to speak and move freely, the fact that the four guards were as still as statues made him uncomfortable.

The girl made a half step forward and addressed them.

"Lord Govan Lune desires to enter the library. Open the door."

The white capes slightly tilted their heads forward in a bow and then touched with their hands the glyphs carved in the wall behind.

The door slowly opened, revealing them the sea of books that was beyond. The white capes stood on the sides and waited for them to pass through.

Once they stepped through, he saw monumental bookshelves filled with a nearly uncountable amount of books. From the dome in the ceiling it was possible to see the stars above, and an incredible chandelier representing the real world's solar system produced so much light that he would have been briefly blinded by its radiance had he been in his real body.

Even though the average rooms in the castle were about four meters tall and all were extremely spacious to allow inside combat, they paled in comparison with the library. The ceiling was thirty meters from the ground and the shelves were displayed to make impossible determining the room's actual size. They were only a few meters shorter than the ceiling, with many spiral staircases as the only way to reach the higher sections.

When they projected it, the objective was to make anyone inside feel overwhelmed and disoriented. Now that he was seeing the fruit of their work with his own eyes for the first time, the result was way superior to what they had first planned for.

His guild wasn't among the bigger ones, but it wasn't small either. Before the shutdown announcement they counted 157 members, and everyone had contributed to strengthen the base.

Every member had projected at least a couple of rooms or a few NPCs.

Some worked together to make combined project, like the one in front of him; others implemented smaller private ideas on their own, a few implemented someone else's idea by adding details or NPCs; sometimes people just bought space and gave it to others.

Because of that, the guild base had been an incredible mess.

Once they stopped to create new rooms, they spent months rearranging them to make everything more ordinate. They found a way to include everyone's projects and to make them effective to the guild base; they then filled the empty zones left with standard rooms.

The final result was more like a court rather than a castle.

While he was lost in his thoughts, an old looking figure falteringly approached him and respectfully bowed.

"My lord! What brings you here at such a late hour? How can this humble servant of yours be of any use?"

His pleasantly surprised voice was feeble, hard to tell if it was because of their location or due to his age. Looking at his fragile figure, he felt like the elder's bones would have broken under his own weight hadn't it been for the wooden cane he was holding onto. The scarce hairs had left him partially bald, with untrimmed eyebrows and a small goatee coming down his chin. Dozens of wrinkles covered the serene expression on his face, with semi closed blue eyes calmly looking at him and two pointed ears identifying him as a part of the elven race.

"I have come to see the weavers."

The head librarian nodded at the words and slowly begun to walk, helping himself with his cane while leading the way toward their destination.

As they proceeded through the immense forest of bookshelves, he found himself wondering just how many books each of them contained. Hundreds? Thousands? Or perhaps even more?

Their guild was called "Kings of Azoth", though they usually shortened it in "Azoth". They formed the guild with the purpose of exploring all the worlds and discovering every secret of the game, as such the name "Kings of Azoth" served the purpose of reminding them that their ultimate goal was knowledge. They completed every quest they had found and never threw anything away. This lead to them amassing a needlessly huge amount of items they had no use for. Books constituted a good portion of such items; basically every time you killed a monster with wizard levels, in the drops, you were likely find at least one book item. Someone once suggested just keeping a couple of copies of every book and selling the rest, but in the end a better idea had been chosen.

After slowly following the head librarian for many minutes, their destination finally appeared in front of them. It was a large empty area at the crossroad of two shelves, and in the middle of it there were three figures working together. They were wearing three identical dark robes that concealed everything that was below, the hands were the only visible things that emerged from their clothes. Hadn't it been for the different symbols on the mask they were wearing, differentiating them would have likely been impossible.

One of them was sitting at a reel, while the other two were working with a loom. Those instruments were needlessly elaborate and exaggeratedly decorated, to the point where functionality was probably sacrificed for appearance's sake.

They were the weavers.

They didn't seemed to notice their arrival; they kept their gazes focused on the job they were performing without ever looking elsewhere.

He didn't wanted to disturb them, but he needed to ask them about the situation. He had however no idea of how to attract their attention.

The head librarian solved the problem for him, softly hitting the floor with the tip of his cane. The three figures shifter their attention toward the source of the sound and finally noticed the three of them.

As they recognized him among the visitors, they stood up and bowed at him.

Up to that moment, every person he had met had bowed; it was too unusual for him to be kept in such high regard. It wasn't unpleasant, but it still felt strange.

The weaver that was sitting at the loom stepped forward and spoke first.

"My lord, you do us honor in coming here."

"We are ready to obey your commands."

"How can we be of use?"

Govan Lune was briefly dumbfounded by how they spoke one sentence each. He hoped with all his heart that it was still possible to read the character's background profiles from the thrones room. Then he proceeded with his question.

"Not too long ago, around midnight, an unknown change occurred to the castle and all its inhabitants. What can you tell me about it?"

The three weavers answered in the same way as they did before, without even needing to consult each other. He found himself wondering if they had prepared themselves before or if they were just improvising.

"We felt nothing my lord, but something has indeed happened."

"In the divination we just performed we discovered that our surroundings have changed."

"We were trying to confirm the situation around us, but we still haven't been able to produce results."

So that meant the change wasn't limited only to himself, the castle and the NPCs; but the surrounding area had also been altered.

"On which world are we?"

For the first time the weavers hesitated before answering.

"… My lord…"

"We cannot identify the world we are currently in."

"It seems we have entered a different and unknown world."

That wasn't good news. If he had been in the game, he was confidant he would have been able to avoid dangers with no problems. But if he was in a new world that he knew nothing about, he might get killed without even having time to react.

There was one other thing he needed to know at all costs. Was he alone?

"How many of my comrades have followed us in this new world?"

The three deeply bowed as one. He could almost feel the uneasiness coming from them.

"We ask for your forgiveness, my lord."

"Our power does not suffice to locate the great kings."

"We are unable to execute your order."

It was true. Now that he though about it, he made an impossible request. The weavers were three NPCs with both identical equipment and levels, specialized in information magic and data gathering. Because of their levels in the [Norn] race, they had the [Keeper of fate] racial ability that boosted information magic to an impressive degree. The same applied also for the [Prophet] and [Watcher] classes, as well as all of their other levels. But even though they gave them a total of two divine-class items to boost beyond limit their magic, it still was him and his friends the ones that programmed them; they had individually developed specific countermeasures ever since the weavers first proved their potential.

There were still methods to bypass their countermeasures, but they required time.

Govan Lune placed a hand below his vest and grabbed the golden medallion they used to communicate.

"Cast a [Widened heightened magic: Locate named object] on this medallion."

He felt extremely embarrassed speaking in game terms with people outside his friends. Since he was in the guild base it had felt natural for him and he did so without thinking, but that was a terrible idea.

Luckily the weavers bowed and the one in the front took the item with both hands, like if she was afraid of ruining it. The norns then returned to their divine items and begun chanting the long list of spells necessary for a well executed divination. The medallion shined and the ritual begun. The one moving the reel constantly produced an ethereal and semitransparent string, which another grabbed and placed in the loom.

[Locate named object] was one of the most annoying spells an information-specialized magic caster could master. It allowed to find all objects in an area with the same original name as the one of a given object touched by the caster. It was just a second level spell, not even a very strong one, and considering how many different items there were it could rarely be used for anything different than tracking a stolen item.

It was however an entirely different matter if you knew the enemy's equipment and possessed even a single copy of one of his items. Players could shield themselves from information magic, but the same result was extremely hard to replicate for the individual objects one carried. By using meta-magic abilities to raise the spell's tier up to 10th and widening the AOE, it becomes a terrible threat.

The only downsides of the ritual are that it is still based on a second-tier spell; as such it could only give the item's location. The time needed for the ritual to be completed also rose proportionally with the scanned area. Using the same synergy for similar situations in the past had easily required more than two hours.

He could have just used the item to call one of his comrades, but he chose not to due to the absurd situation he was in. The medallion functioned similarly to a phone; one would connect to the other and allow communication, but there was no way to know if the call would be answered or if the other wasn't in a situation which didn't allowed him to speak. Considering he could potentially have to call each and every one of his friends, the NPCs might react unpredictably.

For now it was better to see how many of his friends there were and then figure out who to call based on where he was.

While he was watching the weavers working with the ethereal string with hypnotic precision, he realized that he could have to remain standing for hours.

He felt that it would be too unnatural for him, for anyone, to just stand in the middle of a room waiting for hours. He needed something to do until the ritual was finished.

He shifted once more his attention toward the bookshelves around him. He was in the guild's library; he would just do what he always came there to do.

He turned to face the head librarian.

"Fetch me a copy of all the books concerning magic theory."

The old elf bowed and helping himself with his cane he slowly accompanied him toward a massive wooden table.

Govan Lune sat down and observed the head librarian slowly raising in front of him the hand not holding the cane. He extended two fingers, pointing them toward the ceiling, and then an intense green light enveloped his hand.

All around the library, books begun to emit a faint greenish light in response to the librarian's ability. They then left their places on the shelves and begun to float in the air, flying toward them from every corner of the room.

He always found the flight of countless books something spectacular. It was like if an immense flock of paper birds had come to life and begun to fly around to, in the end, position themselves in ordinate piles on the table.

It reminded him once more why they choose to keep all the books in a library-like room instead of selling them.

The head librarian was one of the lv100 NPCs created to guard key positions against enemy attacks. He had five levels in the [High librarian] job class, which gave him the [Move books: V] skill.

That class was rarely if ever picked by anyone; and as the group of secret-hungry people their guild was made of, they had been eager to discover its hidden potential.

In the end, it had proved itself to actually be disadvantageous for a player, since it heavily relied on the amount of book items in the area; but for battles with the appropriate field conditions, it was a powerful class. Literally able to turn a sea of useless items in a single, huge and lethal weapon, able to quickly crush unprepared intruders like flies. It basically was extremely high-level telekinesis strengthened by the use of books as a medium.

They decided to design the head librarian as a weak elderly person, easily able to blend in the room filled with other similar-looking lower leveled NPCs. Any invader which had ever thought of him as a background decoration had reached zero HP without even being able to put up a fight, attacked from all directions and completely unable to identify his opponent.

The ability the elf was currently using was a lower variant of that skill, [Move books: II]. It allowed to select and move just the books with previously given tags or through common criterions, like title and author, moving them to a selected location.

The guild used the head librarian both as a trap and search engine.

Once the books were all placed on the table, all in ordinate piles and with the titles facing him, Govan Lune turned toward the elf.

"You have done an excellent job."

The head librarian deeply bowed, facing the ground.

"I'm unworthy of such praises, my lord. I have merely used the power bestowed upon me by the great kings."

Even if he was denying his merits, it was impossible to not notice the flattered tone of his voice.

"You may now return to perform your duties."

The head librarian slowly left, going to do what he could only assume was monitoring and defending the library.

Govan Lune then looked around. The weavers were still working on the ritual, some of the librarians NPCs were casting spells on the books to increase their resistance and, behind him, the twin-tailed girl was still looking at him, ready to swiftly execute every command.

He knew it was in good faith, but being stared for so long had begun to give him some problems; she did it continuously since midnight. He had to make her go doing something else.

"Go inform the chefs of my new location."

The girl smiled proudly.

"Do not worry, my lord. The job of a servant is to satisfy her master every desire before he voices it. Your meal will be presented to you wherever you desire to be."

When? How?

Why couldn't she just leave him alone for a second?

He sighed internally and looked at the book's titles.

Peculiar characteristic of all book items was the lore text. Each one of them contained some chapters written to give depth to the game world. There were many people that enjoyed spending hours just reading them.

However the ones in front of him didn't contain the story of Yggdrasil, but how the designers explained the functioning of a fictional system of magic in a video game.

He sighted internally thinking of what he was actually about to do and then he looked at the titles.

"Advanced spiritual abjuration" from master Abdel Oran, of the black tower.

"Inner workings of elemental conjuration" from Virgil, of the west.

"Parallel calling for inter-planar evocation" from Master Edmund Dates, scholar of Oz.

"Arcane divination theory" from Missa van Eyck, priestess of Mer.

"Fundamentals of epic enchantment magic" from Azur, the eternal walker.

"Glossary of black curses" from lord Belier, of Alderman.

"Studies on necromancy" from count Kudus, protector of the bimadian wastelands.

"Ectoplasmic illusion theory" from Jace, master of the mist citadel.

"Magic for dummies" from Noobslayer666

He paused for a second over the last volume.

It was indeed possible for a player to write and share books, but why there was one like that in the library? He grabbed the volume and opened it at the first page. If it was just a troll, he wanted to waste no time on it; but whatever there was in, he had way more chances to understand it rather than all the other books on the table.

He read the index and the introduction. Then he quickly proceeded through the chapters one after the other. Apparently it was some sort of summary made by reading the game lore. He had already read the descriptions behind his own spells in the past, but that was the first time he actually read the general explanation the developers gave for magic.

The book was filled with data and information of every kind; the author even bothered to include some drawings and tables every couple of pages. Govan spent a long time reading it, with the immovable girl's gaze constantly on his back and lifting his eyes only to check the divination's progress.

Reading in the absolute silence of the library was strange. The only sounds he could hear were the pages he was turning, the spells casted by the librarians and the weavers working at the reel. He wondered if they could hear him breath; in the unbelievable silence that enveloped the room, his exhalations seemed audible in every corner of the library.

Once he finally got to the last page, the weavers were proceeding with the ritual, skillfully crafting the tapestry that would display the map showing the divination's result. Using the [Loom of destiny] made the casting time longer, but he still remembered how surprised he felt when he first discovered the area they were actually able to cover.

He closed the book and quickly glimpsed at the twin-tailed girl behind him.

She was still there, eyes always locked on him. However she wasn't alone anymore, beside her there were six other girls. He recognized them instantly; they were castle maids.

A couple of years ago, a few of the other guild members were obsessed with an item they found in the cash shop store. It allowed bringing real world photos in the game to speed up customization, so they used it to make lots of low-leveled NPCs with the faces of actresses, models and the likes.

The situation quickly escalated, and it got completely out of hand when they decided to make one NPC for every cute girl they found on the net; when the guild master placed them on the guild's "Customization ban list", they had already cost the guild almost two hundreds levels in useless NPCs, half of which were mere lv1.

Luckily in the guild meeting they managed to somewhat solve the problem by making them stay all around the base dressed as maids, nothing more than background decorations.

Many guild members were philosophical about it and found nice being surrounded by many actresses in the history of Hollywood, but the ones more focused in competitive play never digested the idea of how much was wasted over them.

He looked at the twin-tailed girl, unsure of the reason why the castle maids were beside her. As soon as he made eye contact, they all bowed at him.

"My lord. Your meal has arrived."

The maids proceeded toward him and placed the food on an empty area of the table. He wondered just how much time did they waited for him to finish reading, as well as how they arrived without him hearing their steps.

The maids uncovered the trays and an exceptional aroma filled the air. The girl immediately proceeded with describing the dinner's composition.

"My lord. The chefs have prepared an appetizer of caviar canapé, followed by black emperor rice. Next, there is a silver dragon steak with mandragora's salad and leviathan breaded in breadcrumbs. After, there will also be strawberry ice-cream prepared with celestial chimera's milk and a relic quality espresso."

He didn't know what to say, when he asked for food he was thinking more of a sandwich. He took one of the many forks that hoped with all his heart wasn't made of anything more expensive than silver and tried the appetizers. At first he found it weird to eat with a beak, but as soon as he tasted the food he felt overwhelmed by an explosion of flavors.

The maids, as well as the twin-tailed girl, were all looking at him, anxious and eager to hear his opinion.

However he wasn't good with words, so he decided to stick to the "speak as little as possible" plan.

"It's delicious."

They struggled to contain sighs of relief as they finally relaxed, expressing their thanks while bowing once more.

Since midnight, everything around him felt way too exaggerated. He had never received that much attention before. It made him feel… important.

As he ate the most delicious meal of his entire life, he mentally repeated all he read in the book. He managed to get the basis and to understand how magic worked according with the book's logic, but he had yet to cast any spell. He had to try with something easy first, something that could be considered appropriate for whatever the NPCs believed him to be able of and that wouldn't cause any problem if he failed.

Far away from him, a book on the table got his attention. "Fundamentals of telekinetic manipulation" from Mabel Roland, scholar of the southern castle.

Well, it sounded like a good point to start from.

[Silent telekinesis]

In the game, silent spells had the purpose to make sneak attacks, reduce casting time and cast spells in conditions in which the caster couldn't speak; right now, he wholeheartedly thanked the developers for the mechanic's introduction. He had no idea what he would have done if he were to shout a spell's name and then nothing happened.

Casting the spell was way easier than he thought; he felt like if his mind was touching the whole area around him. He could sense his surroundings using what he could only describe as long psychic hands touching everything around him.

He mentally grabbed the book, and watched it floating in the air toward him. He looked at the volume, now firmly in his hands.

He had successfully casted his first spell.

He decided to test the spell's functioning by performing a more complicated task. In the game it only allowed to lift or damage opponents, but now that he was in a different world he wanted to know if the spell had a wider range of options.

He grabbed multiple books and made them float around him, opening them ad flipping through the pages; the spell worked smoothly, exactly like he desired. In the game it would have never been possible to manipulate an object to such degree without damaging it, and now he was doing so with multiple items at the same time. The control he had over the spell felt… incredible. He had never felt that powerful before. He was actually able to use magic; one of his wildest dreams had come true. He was a wizard.

While he was enjoying his newfound powers, a familiar sound broke the silence of the library. It was something he had already heard before, a sound he knew.

He looked in the direction it was coming from and saw his golden medallion, still used by the weavers to locate his guild mates, but now covered with a pale light.

Someone was trying to contact him. Someone else was there. Someone from his guild.

He reached for the medallion and once he held it in his hands the light moved to form a somewhat humanoid shape on it.

The creature that appeared was a cloud of darkness from which, through great effort, was possible to glimpse an expressionless mask. He could somehow distinguish the overall shape of a cloak, but looking at it was the same as looking at a dark cloud of smoke in a humanoid shape. Even though it wasn't a common sight, it wasn't unfamiliar.

"Raal Saar, is that you?"

The one on the other side of the call didn't answer him right away. He had the sensation he was being studied. It however disappeared in mere seconds, and the answer swiftly came.

"Yes, it's me."

He felt like if a great weight had finally disappeared from his shoulders. There was at least someone else there he knew, a guild member and a friend. He had so many questions to ask, so many things to say.

There was however one major obstacle between him and a normal conversation. He looked behind him and saw with the corner of his eye the twin tailed girl together with the castle maids bowing to his friend's projection.

Even though the norns were still working, his every move was being watched.

The conversation was going to be hard. He needed to be careful about how he behaved in front of them while, at the same time, sharing information with his friend.

"I am currently in the castle's library, together with my attendant. What is your current location?"

He hoped that was enough to make Raal Saar get a gist of the situation they were in.

The answer arrived after his friend pondered for a short moment. He now sounded even more cautious than before.

"… My current location is still unknown. I am within five minutes of fast flight south from a sea; the same goes for a large fortified city. Below me there is an extremely wide forest in a mountainous terrain, there are no visible landmarks. To the east there is a mountain range that continue to the south. To the west the forest continues as far as I can see, though the terrain become more uniform further away from my position.

Do you have a way to locate me?"

That wasn't good. The only person he had been able to contact so far was lost somewhere in a world they knew nothing about. He had to make him return there as soon as possible.

"I have already ordered the weavers to locate all of us through our medallions. Once we have located you, I will cast a [Gate] on your position so that you can join us."

Raal Saar nodded, or at least he seemed to do so in the magical darkness; it was hard to understand. But at least he looked all right, and he seemed to have already figured out how to use his game abilities as well.

As he was thinking so, he saw his friend quickly watching behind. He faced Govan Lune once more and rapidly ended the call.

"I have to go, someone is approaching at sustained speed and I have no way to verify his intentions. Come as soon as you can, I will be waiting for you."

Then, the light disappeared from the medallion and silence fell in the room before he could even ask him anything else.


Raal Saar interrupted the communication and hid the medallion below his cloak. He then looked once more behind him, toward the quickly approaching figure in the far distance.

Since the moment of his arrival he had already seen it a total of three times, but the one currently flying in his direction was far larger than any of the others; and above everything else, alive.

The sculpture in the city's inner ring had indeed proved itself to be the most accurate of the three, but a mere representation couldn't fully convey the presence transmitted by the original.

The four-legged beast was a mixture between a mammal and a reptile, with paws protected by scales and the rest of the body covered with thick fur. The huge bat-like wings violently pushed down air with their every motion, producing a wind so powerful that felt like it could sweep away the forest below. Two massive deer-like horns were rising from the head like millenary trees, his back protected by a forest of smaller horns. The long tail was continuously shifting to balance his flight, working together with a second pair of smaller wings positioned behind the primary ones. The eyes were so intense that seemed to be shining of a reddish light, constantly fixed on him as the dragon rapidly flew in his direction.

His most striking characteristic was however the sheer size. Assuming the dragon had been with the four paws on the ground, he would probably still be at least twenty meters tall. He was unsure about his length, probably twice the height, but the wingspan was above sixty meters.

The building-sized creature closed the distance as Raal Saar remained where he stood. If he were to fly away, the dragon was likely to chase after him; he was already too close for him to escape. He had better chances remaining there immobile and observing how the situation would unfold.

The dragon slowed down as he got closer. Once the two of them were so close to each other that he could feel the bursts of wind caused by his wings, the creature had completely halted.

Using his massive wings to maintain himself into the air while forcing his body to maintain the position, the dragon thoroughly examined him with inquisitive gaze. He was studying him, evaluating whether to attack or not.

Regardless of how much he personally disliked the option, his best chance to survive was to try communicating with the dragon.

If such a powerful predator thought like an animal, then the very existence of cities would have been impossible. Instead of all gathering in a crowded place which offered no protection from above, humans would had better chances to survive if they scattered all around the forest or lived in caves. Since cities both existed and had some form of contact with the creature in front of him, the most logical deduction was for the dragon to be able and perhaps willing to communicate with the humans.

Back in the city everyone spoke in the same language as him, however that meant little. If communicating with the dragon was possible only due to intermediaries, he would end up in a terrible situation. That being the case, he would have to run away from him as fast as he could.

The fact that he wasn't devoured instantly was already a good sign, but every second he didn't acted was a second the dragon had to change his mind.

He remembered the way everyone that morning had greeted the governor, the auctioneer's words regarding dragons and everything he had ever read about introducing oneself. He mimicked them and dressed the dragon in a way he hoped to be correct.

"Greetings, great lord. What do I owe the honor of your presence?"

The creature kept watching him for what he felt like the longest ten seconds of his entire life, but then something resembling a somewhat interested expression appeared on the dragon's face.

"I do not recall ever seeing you in my territory, little one. Who are you?"

The dragon's voice was deep and powerful; with the clear and precise tone of those used to having others execute their every command. Quite surprisingly, it sounded extremely human. It hadn't the bestial and fearsome inflection someone would expect from such a fearsome beast.

Raal Saar held a sight of relief; he wasn't bowing in front of a savage beast about to devour him. He had established a communication and avoided being eaten alive. It wasn't much, but he thought of that as a success considering the alternatives.

The creature had however ignored his question and begun to interrogate him instead, but it was too early to give up on the conversation. In front of him there was likely the most knowledgeable being imaginable, and he was speaking with him. He believed that, even in such delicate situation, he could get information from the dragon without endangering himself. Any piece of information had the potential to be vital.

"Forgive my rudeness, great lord. I am called Raal Saar, nothing more than a traveler who has lost his way. How is this wonderful land named?"

To direct the conversation where he wanted, he first needed to figure out the dragon's personality. He both needed to keep the dragon talking to understand how he thought and also to make him answer at least one of his questions. If the dragon answered to anything, regardless of how trivial the question, it meant he acknowledged him as his interlocutor. And an interlocutor, unlike an interrogated, was less likely to be seen as food.

"A most peculiar traveler to not know the land you fly upon."

Even though the monster kept asking questions while refusing to answer, he wasn't at least ignoring what he said.

The dragon wanted answers? Fine. The longer the conversation went on, the better it was for him. For the time being he would see how the conversation proceeded while answering every question, at least as long as the information he gave wouldn't put him in more danger than he already was.

"I came from an island far away from here, great lord. I am not knowledgeable about these lands and I have yet to meet the ones that inhabit them."

A declaration of ignorance; someone that knows nothing about you it's hardly a threat. If the dragon felt it was safer to dispose of him, he would undoubtedly do so.

Something about him gave the impression of having great knowledge; there might have been a slight chance he wanted to display it. He wasn't hoping for a complete explanation, but maybe the dragon could be tempted to let something important slip just to observe his reaction.

"A distant island you say? Interesting indeed. And how is this island named?"

The dragon's clear voice carried dangerous words.

Had he answered the truth and stated a country of the real world, the dragon could have attacked him not recognizing the place. Had he answered with a made up name that wasn't able to convince the dragon, the result would have been the same. He knew only a few names of that world's countries, but claiming to be from wherever the Slane Theocracy was might trigger in the dragon any kind of reaction; the risks of doing so outweighed by far the benefits.

There was only one alternative left. He had to make a bet.

From the little which was revealed in the conversation, he had been able to grasp a few aspects of the dragon's character. It was far from what he would consider enough for attempting such a dangerous gamble, but the conversation was heading in a direction he couldn't afford.

He hoped to be right and made his bet.

"It's called Asgard, great lord. Have you heard of its glorious history?"

The bet was on the dragon not knowing the geography of all that world's countries, not be willing to admit it and not calling him a liar.

The dragon had repeatedly referred to the place they were in as his territory, so there were good chances he didn't knew much about areas which didn't affected him directly.

He had also already met people like him in his own world. People whose pride was so great they would never admit to be lacking in any field. There were far more of them than one would imagine, and the dragon gave the same feeling as them.

And at last, what he was saying was truth, from a certain point of view. He "was" from Asgard.

Lie detectors were, quite ironically, nothing more than machines that read the body's condition. Expert liars and confidant individuals could trick them as easily as they could trick other people. Even if the dragon had keen senses sharp to the point of being supernatural, he couldn't determine anything as long as there was nothing to read.

There were a total of three variables he couldn't control. If he were to be wrong on even one, the situation would go far beyond irreparable. The odds weren't in his favor.

The question in his mind now was… How much had he been able to understand of a mythical creature's personality that legends said to easily be centuries old?

"I see."

Up to that moment the dragon had answered his questions by asking more, but his answer was now different. It was vague, open to many interpretations. It lacked the attitude of the previous ones. For him, it was the proof his theories were somehow correct.

The creature flying in front of him was superb, proud and unwilling to admit any kind of inferiority. As long as he didn't exaggerated on those points, he could attempt to direct the conversation away from dangerous topics.

The balance had begun to slowly shift in his favor.

He waited for the dragon to make the next move. Normally that would have been the best moment to ask a question, when the dragon was most likely let something important slip out of his jaws, but he still knew too little about him; if things went poorly, being attacked would be a more than probable outcome.

In the end, after a rather long moment of silence, the dragon resumed with the interrogation.

"What species do you belong to, little one?"

"I am a member of the Oni race, great lord. Are there others of my kind in your domain?"

The questions he could ask were strictly tied to the topics the dragon brought up. If he were to ask question regarding unrelated arguments he would undoubtedly be ignored, assuming he was that lucky. This was the only way he could at least try to obtain some information.

"No, little one. There are not others like you here."

…He did it. He finally managed to make the dragon answer one of his questions, even an important one. He was the only oni there; as such, it was unlikely anyone knew about the species at all. It gave him little insight about who inhabited the land, but at least it gave him the possibility to speak about himself with a much boarder margin of error. There was a slight chance he was lying, but it was extremely unlikely for him to do so on such an easily verifiable matter.

"How long has it been since you have entered my territory, little one?"

"I have just arrived this night, great lord. I rested in the forest for a few hours and departed shortly after the sun rose."

He needed another chance to ask a question. The situation was finally improving. If he went on like that, he would shortly be able to get more information.

"I have not seen you enter, little one. How did you come in without me noticing? And why have you left your island?"

The only answer to that question was the truth. Or at least the parts that didn't involved virtual reality, video games, computers and anything created after the first industrial revolution.

"I have not chosen to enter your domain without you being aware of it, great lord. The reason of my presence here is unknown even to myself. Before even realizing what was happening, I have been dragged into your land. Has what happened to me already happened before?"

That was the most important question he could ask. If the dragon had any idea of the situation he was in or if he had to find the answer by himself.

After he made his question, silence fell between them.

The dragon's expression slowly changed, as did the distance between them.

He was getting closer.

Raal Saar had no idea of what emotion was now displayed on the deer-alligator-like face. It might have meant anything, but one thing was certain. The dragon knew something that he did not.

"It has."

In those two words, Raal Saar saw many of the unspoken signals he had learned to recognize. He knew way too well what the dragon meant; he was far easier to read than he had initially guessed, but now that gave him little comfort.

Within the magical darkness that surrounded him, he reached for the daggers below his cloak. His lack of information had caused him to say something the dragon was not supposed to hear; now he could only prepare himself to deal with the consequences of his choices.

"Once. About a century ago."

The dragon was now only twenty meters away from him, and the distance kept decreasing every time the immense wings moved.

"One last question for you, little one. The darkness that surrounds you… is it magic?"

The daggers were tight in his hands, the dragon only ten meters away.

More than four thousand meters below him, a large portion of the forest was being shaken by the powerful movements of the dragon's wings.

He looked thought his mask, directly in the pair of reddish glowing eyes. They seemed even brighter then before.

"…Yes."

It all happened within a second. The moment the dragon opened his jaws and an intense flare appeared down his throat, Raal interrupted the effect of [Shadow glide V]. With nothing left to sustaining him, the gravity immediately pulled him toward the forest at exponential speed; while the sky above him was being dyed in red flames.

The combined effects of gravity, the strong wind produced by the dragon's wings pushing air down and a swiftly reactivated [Shadow glide V] made him reach the forest below nearly instantly.

Once he was close enough to the ground, he activated the [Death shadow] class skill and became ethereal.

He swiftly changed direction with an angle that should have been impossible for anything traveling at that speed and flew parallel to the ground, like if his body was completely free from inertia. He then flew just a couple of meters below the trees' top, passing through obstacles in a straight line while being covered by the vegetation.

When the dragon's fire breath ended, he begun to look for the corpse. Nothing was standing in front of him, nothing was falling and nothing was burning. It didn't took him long to realize the enemy had evaded his attack and was now nowhere to be seen. He had to prevent his escape.

The dragon faced toward the sky and opened once more his jaws. The immense horns on his head and back begun to shine of a blinding light, producing countless small orbs of light around him. Then they meld in a large sphere in front of him.

Once it was completed the dragon breathed fire once more, pushing the now flaming sphere high above.

It took just a couple of seconds for the globe to explode. From it, a massive cascade of fire and light fell on the ground. It would have encircled a vast portion of the forest in a few moments. Both of them were about to be trapped by an immense magical flaming barrier.

Raal Saar was able to realize what was happening only when he saw the glowing wall falling in front of him, too far away from him to outrun it. He saw the wall incinerating everything within ten meters from it as it fell, leaving behind nothing but burning cinder and the ashes of anything too close to it. He could feel the immense heat it produced that far away even in his ethereal form. He already knew he couldn't pass through it.

He decided to fly back, moving through the trees while avoiding to proceed in a straight line. It was imperative not to be found by the dragon at all costs.

While constantly moving from one place to the other, he made the point of the situation. He was trapped in a barrier with a dragon that wanted him dead for reasons he didn't bothered to explain. There was a slight chance that he could defeat the dragon, but entering a fight in the current situation was a terrible idea.

Even though in the game he had defeated larger opponents during some boss battles, they were all bound to follow game patterns. Every time he had also been in a party, with the experience of multiple previous battles against them and his own life never being at stakes.

Since he was in his game body there was a chance that death wasn't a permanent condition, but the risk wasn't worth the try.

His best option was to risk being spotted while teleporting away.

He activated a teleportation skill and selected as the target the sculpture he saw in the forest. He saw the world around him briefly blur and in an instant refocus on a different sight, but it wasn't the one he had focused on. He reflexively jumped in the direction opposite to where the heat was coming from. The barrier had prevented him from teleporting away.

He could only deal with it in the same way he dealt with the previous one; finding a weak spot, make a breach and escape from there. The fairy queen's barrier took him over forty minutes to analyze, this one was likely to take even more. He stared at it to make the [Greater detect weak spot] ability start and mentally prepared himself for a long waiting.

He wasn't used to curse when things didn't went as planned, but that moment he couldn't help to mentally do so.

The barrier was shrinking.

After vowing to find a countermeasure against high-level barriers if he ever managed to make it out alive, he looked up toward the dragon.

He was searching the surroundings, still looking for him. He wouldn't stop until he found him, and the barrier kept reducing the places he could hide. Time was against him.

The next best option he thought of didn't even resemble a good idea. Kill the caster to break the spell.

He studied the dragon. His chances of victory were around 20%, optimistic estimation.

He had seen it sometimes in online gameplays, player winning boss battles alone. Run, hit, escape and repeat; that was the strategy. With his classes and skills he could be able to do the same; in Yggdrasil defeating a boss like that was likely impossible, but that dragon wasn't an yggdrasilian monster.

The double activation of the class skill [Shadow poison V] covered both daggers with a dark aura; he activated the speed and damage increasing skills, casted [Greater invisibility] together with [Greater silence] and took a deep breath. Then, while trying his best to keep his mind as clear as possible, he flew toward his enemy at extreme speed.

Even if it would take a great amount of time for the [Greater detect weak spot] class skill to work on a newly encountered enemy, there were a couple of easily recognizable weak spots that members of the same species shared. The most common among dragons were the middle of the throat, the back of the head, the left side of the chest, the lower part of the stomach and the ones he found the most effective of all; the eyes.

[Shadow poison] was a class skill that allowed a shadow assassin to produce a unique poison directly from the shadows a few times per day. It dealt damage over time and gained more effects according with the variant used. If the lowest version was used it would decrease the victim field of view, while the highest version would completely block all senses that relied on the infected area. Poison's efficiency heavily relied on the target's size, as well as other factors such as race and classes. Against a colossal dragon, poison's efficiency was incredibly low; but its additional effect would still influence the dragon if used properly.

He was approaching at an incredible speed. When he was about a dozen of meters away from the eyes, he interrupted the [Death shadow] skill to return material. In the following instants he covered the remaining distance, pierced the dragon right eye with both blades and flew away toward the top of the barrier, putting as much distance as possible between the two them.

The difference between the silence and the greater silence spells usually confused the new players. Silence prevents the target from producing any sound, while greater silence negate all the sounds in an area. This made silence a better choice for espionage since it allowed the things around the player to produce sound themselves, allowing him to spy on other's conversations and preventing something else to reveal his presence by not producing a sound it should. But greater silence had an advantage over its counterpart. At the cost of temporarily making the user deaf, it gave him immunity from sound based effects. Raal Saar was sure that if he hadn't chosen the greater version, the dragon's scream would have been the last thing he had ever heard.

The birds that were trying to fly away from the burning forest fell to the ground immediately after the furious monster shouted all his hatred; all crushed by the power of his screams.

The previously red glowing eye was now painfully closed, blackened by the dark blood spurting out of it. The eyelid was already black, infected by the shadow poison. The black stain was slowly taking over the entire area around the eye, stopping only after having spread over a third of the head.

The dragon's last eye was reflecting all the inner rage the legendary creature felt. He opened his jaws and begun to breath fire all around him, furiously trying to hit the target in his rage.

Raal Saar was able to easily dodge the deadly flames both thanks to the randomness of the target-less attacks and to the great distance there was between him and their source.

He allowed his sight to briefly shift over the weapons; thick viscous dragon blood turned black covered them. It was the first time he had ever stabbed anyone; to be precise, it was the first time he had ever hurt a living creature larger than an insect.

He looked at the pain he had caused, at the consequences of his actions, at the creature he had caused to forever loose an eye.

Gameplay, boss battle, skill, class, effect. Before the attack he was just thinking about it all in game terms, but seeing the consequences of what he had done made him realize just how real that world was.

He placed his hand in the dark hole that was the inventory and took out of it a scroll. When he let it fall, it opened and burned in a bluish fire; confirming that the contained spell had successfully been activated. Under the influence of [Sound immunity], he interrupted the [Greater silence] substituting it with [Silence]. Not being able to hear in battle had more downsides than merits.

The dragon was still screaming in rage, throwing flames all around him. The forest was now completely on fire and he could hear the cries of the animals struggling to escape the flames.

Smoke was rising all around them and accumulating within the barrier. Breathing it didn't seem to be problematic for him, but if all the oxygen were to burn he would have nothing left to breath. He made up his mind. The dragon was the one that attacked first and undoubtedly still desired to kill him; he would go through it until the end.

He activated once more [Shadow poison V] on both blades. He had a limit of fifteen daily uses; four had already been used on the white fairy queen after he used [Midnight call], other four were already used in the current battle. After the second assault, he would have just seven more uses before running out.

He approached the dragon from above while moving in circles and quickly changing direction. If he managed to strike at the second eye the dragon would be completely blind, after that his chances of winning would drastically increase.

However he had to close the distance to re enter melee range, it would become harder to dodge his attacks the closer he got.

He flew while remaining on the blinded side of the dragon's vision. Even though he was invisible, he had long learned to never place too much faith into it.

The beast was turning around while keeping to breath fire, interrupting the attacks only to inhale.

As he got closer, the heat became extreme. He waited for the current flaming breath to end. When the dragon stopped the attack to inhale, he flew above the head and then quickly stabbed the second eye.

He hadn't heard the dragon's first scream because of [Greater silence], and the following ones were reduced in intensity as the hatred and pain were slowly mitigating; but he heard that one. The spell he used protected his body from taking sound damage and even reduced all the sounds above a certain level; but regardless of it all, the shout was far beyond anything he had ever heard. So powerful he felt the ground shaking.

Both the dragon's eyes were now black and covered in dark blood. The blinded creature had now become completely possessed by rage. Nothing in him even resembled the majestic dragon he had conversed with; he was nothing more than a bloodthirsty beast.

This time Raal Saar hadn't distanced himself too much from his enemy. He activated two more uses of the [Shadow poison V] and flew to the back of the dragon's head, where his ears were.

He was getting used to combat; it felt more and more like in the game with every moment that passed. He pierced in rapid succession his two targets and flew away from the beast. The poison quickly infected the area and covered in black what was left of the dragon's head.

The dragon had lost all the senses in the head. No sight, no hearing, no smell, no taste and most important of all, no sense of balance.

The fire-breathing monster soon struggled to maintain his position. The wings became uncoordinated, the tail moved in directions that did little to keep the balance and the paws desperately shifted in midair.

The body slightly tilted toward left. The beast unwittingly moved in that direction, gaining speed and loosing height.

Then, he fell. The dragon plummeted for hundreds of meters, without even understanding what was happening. He continued to scream throughout the entire fall; maybe rage, maybe fear.

He deafeningly crashed into the burning ground. Derbies and broken trees flew away, propelled by the unbelievable power of the impact.

High in the sky, Raal Saar briefly contemplated how much damage such a massive creature had taken from thousands meters of fall.

The beast was on one side. One horn was damaged, the other completely severed. Many of the smaller ones on the back were completely shattered, though they all seemed shorter than what he remembered them to be. The paws were bent to an angle that was impossible for both mammals and reptiles; most of the bones were likely broken if not shattered. The large wings were pierced in several places, with the broken points of the trees visible in each of the rips.

The fire wasn't burning him, the blood pool forming in the crater served at the very least that purpose.

He looked at the flaming light barrier around him. It was still active, but it produced way less heat than before and it had stopped shrinking. The dying flame of a dying dragon.

Raal Saar interrupted all the activated abilities except for [Shadow glide V] to not waste any more skill use than necessary. He would need them to react to other unforeseen events if something were to happen before Govan Lune got there.

While he was staring at the weakened barrier, looking for a breach to escape from, the fallen dragon was exhaling his last breaths. Most of his senses were useless, but the sense of touch was still working, mostly. He could feel the ground below him, the warm liquid slowly covering his body, the sharp pain that engulfed him, the cold crawling up his limbs.

He had fallen, he was injured to the point of not being able to move and he would soon drown in his own blood.

He had always considered magic to be his most valuable resource, but before that moment his mind had always failed to conceive the possibility of his own end.

He refused to die.

The damaged horns begun to glow, and so did the many broken pieces that had been shattered around. Thousands of small light orbs were rising from the ground, and once the area was filled with them, they completely covered the dragon.

Raal Saar realized something was amiss only when the barrier regained its original intensity and begun to shrink once more. It took him just a second to realize what was happening.

When he turned to face the dragon, he only saw an immense wall of reddish flames going toward him. He tried to fly away, outrunning the flames and hiding in a safe location, but it was already too late. The flames completely enveloped him before he could gain enough speed.

In the beginning he felt nothing. No heat, no pain. Nothing.

Then, the nervous system flood his brain with signals all at once. The pain was way beyond anything he had ever experienced. The heat was oppressing; when he inhaled he felt his lungs burning, leaving an aftertaste of his melting flesh. If previously [Greater silence] prevented him to hear the dragon's scream of pain, this time it was [Silence] that took away from the monster the declaration of agony he was so eager to savor.

He soundlessly fell on the ground, rolling over the uneven surface and hitting rocks and burned trees until a hole was merciful enough to stop his fall.

There was not a single point of his body that wasn't in pure, absolute, intense, overwhelming pain. He had read about fourth-degree burns; a slightly lucid corner of his mind was raising the hypothesis of having his entire body covered in them.

It was the first time he felt true pain. Before coming to that world, everything he had been through was bearable. But the pain he just experienced, the fire that was melting away his flesh, was so far beyond anything he had ever felt that he could hardly grasp the extent of the damage.

His gaming self would have merely checked the remaining HP. Comparing his stats with what he assumed the dragon to have and taking into account both his racial weakness to fire and the damage suffered in the fall, he would have estimated to be between 20% and 15%. But even though his rational and calculator mindsets were still present, there was something else which now dominated his consciousness.

The will to kill.

The desire to end a life; desire born after experiencing the worst pain imaginable and surviving. The fundamental purpose behind the very act of killing that no game could ever truly pass to the player; the actual desire to see the victim die.

The pain was finally freeing him from the hesitation he had previously only tried to ignore. He now had no compassion whatsoever toward the beast; no doubt about the reasons behind the dragon motives. The fire, together with his flesh, had completely burned away from him any trace of empathy.

He rose on his feet. His items rubbing on the burned skin at his every movement kept him drowning in a constant sea of pain.

The dragon was looking for his corpse in the place he fell. He hadn't been able to see where he ended up after being hit.

He hadn't even a scratch on him. Both the eyes and the ears were as good as when they first met. Even the scars on his wings had disappeared. Though he remembered the horns to be larger.

Below the mask, Raal Saar endured the pain caused by what was left of his lips curving into a smile. Whatever the dragon did to completely heal himself, he had to pay a price for it.

Raal Saar was an assassin, not a magic caster. He had however managed to obtain a rare race, the [Black oni]. There were six oni variants; each one possessed a unique racial ability. The one of the black's variant was [Illusory eye], which allowed a limited use of magic. The limit of known spells was the player's level, though it could be increased with a certain cash shop item. It also greatly limited the variety of learnable spells, allowing only spells from the [Illusion] list. But regardless of the limitations, being able to use magic in a fight brought incredible advantages; especially considering it was even possible to apply meta-magical class bonuses to those spells.

"[Resilient illusion: Delusional iron maiden]"

The dragon was slowly walking while facing the ground, still searching for the burned corpse; assuming there was something left for him to find. Then everything went dark.

It all happened so fast that it took him a long moment to realize what was going on. His vision was completely obstructed, his entire body unable to move in the slightest. He felt long metal spikes piercing his flesh all over his body. Every movement he made caused the spikes to pierce deeper in him, making blood pour out.

He was trapped.

Rage spread through him once more, the assassin lived. He resolved himself to find a way out through sheer force. He ignored the spikes piercing his body and slammed his back against the walls with all his might, producing however no result. As he kept slamming against it over and over, the wounds kept multiplying at every attempt. The blood was pouring out uncontrollably, but he kept struggling through the pain. He had to break free as soon as he could.

Raal Saar looked at the beast trying to escape his illusion. The "resilient" meta-magic skill made it twice as hard to disbelieve an illusion, and until he could do so, he was trapped in it.

The spell he selected made the target believe to be in an indestructible iron maiden, restricting all his movements and obstructing most senses.

As an additional effect, every action taken by the target would cause a loss of HP, though the illusion couldn't actually inflict damage. The target only believed to be loosing health; it was the same as [False data: Life], but the one being deceived was the one reading his health.

There also was an automatic "fear" status for everyone trapped in the illusion that would increase over time until reaching "insanity", but the dragon seemed to have immunity from fear.

In a few words, the dragon was out of the fight until he either disbelieved the illusion or Raal Saar became unable to maintain it.

It wasn't an illusion he liked to use. Even though blocking all movements from a single target while making him believe to be suffering damage and preventing him from gathering information was an undoubtedly powerful CC, it was effective only if very few people knew about it. It consumed way too much mana for every second it was active, and it would break automatically at the first hit or effect suffered by the target. An ally could just use a weak attack to free someone trapped in it.

He had only a single hit on the dragon. But he had already planned how to regain the advantage in a single move.

When the fight had begun and the barrier started to burn the forest down, something that didn't existed in the game appeared. The smoke.

Apparently the barrier didn't allow it to leave the area, and since the dragon had lit the entire forest on fire there now was an incredible amount of smoke; smoke trapped at the top of the barrier.

Throughout the fight it kept accumulating and it had slowly formed a dome above them, a huge dark dome that blocked out the sun's rays and reduced the light of the flames. The visibility inside the barrier had steadily kept dropping since the beginning of the fight, and now it was dark enough for him to bring the fight where it was him that held the advantage.

With his mana reserves quickly being depleted by his illusion, he activated his skill.

"[Dark world portal]"

Inside the huge shadow they were in, a black stain dropped into existence. It grew larger and larger, until it became only a great hole from which no light could escape. The portal through the dark world had opened below them, and everything in the area was dragged in it: him, the dragon, the broken trees and everything else that had the misfortune to be trapped in the barrier.

Once they reached the other world, the dragon had already been freed from the illusion. The two of them were now in front of each other, surrounded by the absolute darkness of the distorted space.

Raal Saar looked at the area around him. The dragon's barrier was able to penetrate even through the dark world. It was so similar to the last skill of the white fairy queen he felt rather annoyed.

He dismissed the though and focused on the situation at hand. Even though he wanted nothing more than to kill the dragon, he was perfectly aware that he had just managed to obtain the advantage by a slight margin. Given his situation, a single misstep was all that separated survival from death.

[Darkvision] and [True Seeing] wouldn't work in there. One would need highly advanced senses which specializes against magical darkness in order to see normally in the dark world, such as [Blindsight] or [Shadow eyes]. Every form of light would quickly be absorbed, however that dimension couldn't negate the source itself.

The fight had shifted in the battlefield most advantageous for him. He was finally able to fight at his fullest potential.

Raal Saar rose in the air and activated the damage increasing skills. He flew straight toward the dragon, pierced the shadow-poisoned spiral blade in his neck and flew away as fast as he arrived.

The dragon shouted in anger and breathed fire once more; blindly attacking an opponent he could not see which was hiding in a world he could not sense. Despite the dragon being far from dead, Saar couldn't help but feel a sliver of satisfaction from his agony.

While the poison was still spreading, the monster felt a second cut in his neck. Then a third attack to his chest, followed by a fourth one his right eye. He responded to each of them by shouting and breathing fire, but it was all fruitless. All the dragon could sense was the pain from the unknown poison spreading in his body, the empty darkness he was in and the growing anger within him.

After shouting and randomly attacking pushed by anger and hatred, the dragon came to the realization that, for the first time in his lifetime, he was bound to lose. The way he had always crushed his enemies was no longer an effective option.

He had to change his approach.

He interrupted his attacks. He tried his best to quiet the violent storm of emotions within him and begun to analyze the situation with a calmer mind.

Then, for the first time since the beginning of the fight, he spoke.

"You crawl well, assassin. How about showing me how you fight?!"

There was a moment of silence. The dragon's voice, even though he was trying not to show it, betrayed the pain caused by the poison flowing in his veins. He had been stabbed multiple times, always with poisoned blades.

Before, he held both the field and the time advantages. But now, he was surrounded by darkness, unable to cause any harm to his opponent and the combined action of poison and attacks might have killed him before the barrier could do so to his opponent; and they both knew it. What he needed now was to find a way to hit his opponent, even once, and terminating the fight.

The answer came quickly. A fast piercing blow flying in one of his posterior paws, right on the joint.

The dragon must have had an unbelievably low opinion of others. Raal knew to have the advantage, and he wasn't willing to give it up for something as stupid as honor.

Assuming that since the moment the dragon healed himself he had also completely gotten rid of all the shadow poison, he currently had been injected five times; three of which in areas that would spread the infection quickly through his body. Poison worked badly against his opponent, but that didn't mean it was useless. Enough doses of poison would affect anyone that hadn't some form of immunity, and the shadow poison wasn't to be underestimated.

However, there still was a large problem with his current situation. The dragon was able to completely heal back to full health in a problematically brief amount of time. Assuming his hypothesis was right, to heal he needed to pay something represented by the horns; which meant there was a limited number of usages.

There was a possibility for him to defeat the dragon, but the timing to do so had to be perfect and he needed to wait for the precise moment to act. Until then, all he could do was avoid being spotted and keep damaging his opponent.

He opened the inventory and took out of it a vial with written "3. 23x2 D/m", which contained a greenish viscous liquid. As he kept moving in midair, he opened the vial and poured its content on his blade.

His every movement kept causing him incredible pain due to his burns, but he was somehow keeping it under control. He couldn't afford to slow down or be distracted when his life was on the line.

He had a racial high regeneration ability which allowed him to quickly regain large amounts of HPs. Considering the emphasis his character build had on speed and stealth, he usually could just remain hidden until it was safe to attack again; but this time around most of the damage he had suffered was from the fire breath, so his regeneration was out of the equation.

He would have to bear the pain for the entire fight, but he would make sure his opponent would do the same.

He flew toward the dragon and stabbed him in the stomach. The dragon raised a paw to prevent him from escaping, but he was able to easily dodge it. Thanks to the passive skill [Shadow meld V], he had complete cover in darkness from whomever he wished. Since it bent shadows around him to make a protective aura, it bypassed all kind of senses; even magical ones.

Most of his strongest skills and tactics relied on the darkness in the area, which made him extremely powerful if he fought in the dark world. Even back in the game, he was considered a fearsome opponent in the dark.

While struggling to hide the pain caused by the new poison and the damaged limb, the dragon attempted once more to pinpoint his location by making him speak.

"You had many questions before, assassin. Why don't you ask something now? My knowledge is vast…"

A moment of silence followed the dragon's words. Saar weighted the proposal, he desired answers almost as much as he wanted to kill him; but he was no fool.

Even though that was his first actual fight, in the game he had become experienced in combat and PvP. His opponents had tried to make him talk more times than he could remember, and each time they tried he found that the most effective tactic was to give them what they asked for.

"Why have you attacked me?"

The dragon immediately looked toward the source of Saar's voice. It came from an area where he could smell cinder and hear the crackling sound of his fire, as well as panicked animals cowering in fear in the darkness.

He threw an extremely wide wall of fire in that direction, enveloping in flames over a third of the area inside the barrier. It was an attack way more powerful than the others up to that moment; behind it there were all his anger and determination.

But even before the flames could quiet down, something sharp and painful penetrated his shoulder and something else lacerated his left wing. The pain was terrible.

Saar placed back in the inventory the vials he was holding and took out some more.

[Ghost sound] was one of the most basic spells one could learn, literally the lowest leveled illusion. It could do little more than distracting an unprepared opponent by reproducing a prerecorded sound in a specific area, but in PvP the advantage of that brief distraction was invaluable. It was surprising how often people would just attack in the direction he activated the spell in and open themselves to counterattacks.

However he felt a little surprised the dragon actually fell for his trick. In tournaments and in some of the most entertaining fights he had ever took part in, his opponents would be extremely wary of such a big misstep.

Either the dragon wasn't used to battles, or he was so desperate to find him that he couldn't reason clearly anymore.

Once the new poisons were on the daggers, he flew behind the dragon. He then used [Ghost sound] once more.

Selecting which sound to use had become an entirely mental process; as such he just needed to think the next message. He then selected an area on the other side of the dragon to be its source.

"Were you so afraid that you wanted to end this in a sneak attack? Wasn't I the one supposed to crawl?"

Successfully taunting an opponent was rather hard. All the people he usually fought against, including himself, would either ignore the adversary or wouldn't care at all. Unless you knew a lot about someone, lowering his skills through speech alone was very rare.

The dragon however wasn't used to contain his anger and ignore offenses; therefore he was extremely bad at it.

"I am the Wilderness dragon lord. Supreme ruler of these lands. Show yourself coward, and fight me with honor."

The curved blade cut through the leather of his other wing, rendering it completely unusable.

While the dragon was roaring in anger and pain, Raal Saar took the final step to make him completely lose any resemblance of self-control.

"These are not your lands, this is the dark world. Wherever darkness rules, so do I. Here you are no king. This is my reign. Now prostrate yourself and beg for mercy!"

The dragon's face distorted itself in a feral expression. He was so utterly enraged that he had become completely unrecognizable. He had fell so deeply into fury that he had became just a bloodthirsty beast.

He charged in front of him, keeping his head low so that the horns would trample over anything in his way. He breathed fire to the top of his lungs, lighting on fire everything inside the barrier. His lucidity was completely gone.

"I will kill you! I will torture you for the rest of eternity and make you regret having ever been born!"

Flames were now engulfing everything within the barrier, the sound of fire quickly taking over the cries of the few surviving animals; but there wasn't any non-magical light that could ever pierce the absolute darkness that that world was.

Saar kept on attacking him with poisoned blades whenever he had the occasion to do so, and considering he had completely forsaken defense, there were many.

However, regardless of how much poison he was using, the raging beast kept moving.

Poisons dealt damage over time. Using the same poison multiple times would extend the period of time it would deal damage, while using multiple different poisons would deal more damage from many sources all at once for a shorter period.

He kept changing poisons and keeping in mind which ones had still effect. He was privileging the ones that dealt many damages over a short period, taking a lot of HP as quickly as possible through repeated attacks. But regardless of how much damage he was dealing, it seemed that the dragon was able to keep up with all of it.

Earlier he had only been able to severely damage him by making him fall for thousands of meters. Just how resistant was he?

Any player or NPC with that many poisons in him and no way to fight them off would have died within minutes, but regardless of how much time was passing the dragon was still mostly unaffected. He had so much HP that he could only compare him to the game's bosses. If the dragon had that level of HP defenses and resistance, he could only defeat him if he was able to execute his strategy flawlessly.

Even though the dragon kept raging on, the barrier was still shrinking. Flying around in a smaller and smaller space, with fire all around him and his body in extreme pain was getting increasingly harder. He could not get distracted. He couldn't afford it.

In the dark world people would usually loose the sense of time. In the game he often checked the clock, but there the only way he had to keep track of time was to count his heartbeats. Thanks to his new body, they were surprisingly regular.

Finally, after a prolonged battle and when the space available was running out, what he had been waiting for the entire fight happened. The [Greater detect weak spot] passive class skill activated on the dragon lord. He finally saw the large stains appear on the creature's body. Now the strategy could finally advance to the next phase.

He completely stopped all his attacks.

A couple of minutes later, the barrier was even smaller and the dragon was still furiously striking down everything around him. It took him a lot of time to finally realize he hadn't been attacked in the last few minutes.

The dragon interrupted his furious rampage, his mind still trying to process what had happened. He was bleeding and greatly damaged, in a world in which he could not see.

Around him there was absolute silence, broken only by the surrounding flames burning what was left of the trees and animals that had been dragged there with him.

He smelled the air, trying to find any hint about the death of the one that enraged him to the point of becoming a mere beast. He could smell burned corpses and blood, but there was no way to tell which one belonged to him. He hadn't been able to sense him even once since the battle shifted in that world, and now the only presence he could feel was his own.

Like before, the oni was nowhere to be found.

However, the attacks had ended.

Had he killed him?

Like before, Raal Saar was betting on how much he understood the dragon's character. This time, he won if the dragon believed to have killed him in his rampage. He would have preferred to back his strategy up with an illusory copy of himself being found and killed, but the [Resilient illusion: Delusional iron maiden] had drained so much mana that anything he could produce would never pass for real for more than a couple of seconds.

This time there was however one difference from his previous bet, this time he had a much clearer picture of the opponent's character. The dragon lord would have likely attempted to somehow understand wherever he was alive or not, but after a couple of attempts he would have just left that world. Assuming he had a way to do so.

The dragon made a couple of steps in the dark, searching for traces. As the rage was slowly leaving his body, he felt his head spinning and a sense of fatigue spreading through him.

He smelled the surrounding area. On one hand, it was unlikely to kill such an annoying opponent while aimlessly raging around. But when he saw no other option that was exactly what he had tried to do.

If he could find the corpse he would have the proof to his demise, but for all he knew it might have fallen in the flames and got turned to ashes; or have been obliterated by the barrier. He didn't even know if onis were a species that left a corpse upon dying to begin with.

When they got dragged in that world, everything that was in the area had also followed them. Right now he couldn't even tell apart trees' ashes from animals' ashes.

Raal Saar gripped his daggers tightly. In the end, it was all about how overconfident the dragon was. Would he assume he had just killed him without any strategy or would he attempt some tactics to find him?

Personally, he might search in the dark world for centuries for all he cared, but Saar still had to deal with the barrier.

The dragon lord of Wilderness kept moving around the area, testing the ground with his paws and tensing up whenever a burning log fell on the ground. He painstakingly smelled the air, determined to not let any detail slip.

Then, after the most accurate search he had ever saw, his horns glowed. Hundreds orbs of light formed from his jaws and floated in front of him.

They positioned themselves to form a straight line, taller than the dragon himself. Then it begun to spin, quickly gaining speed at every rotation, until only a wide disk of light was visible in front of the dragon.

From the center of the disk, a small hole appeared; and through it, the world they came from was once more visible.

The hole became larger and larger, until it grew enough to match the size of the disk. The dragon had created a portal to escape from the dark world, but the process was both extremely slow and caused the dragon's horns to get shorter.

The dragon shifted his head to the side, attempting one last time to discern if Saar had actually died.

He slowly looked back at the portal, and then he left the dark world.

Raal Saar chose not to return through the dragon's portal. Even though the dragon had mainly fought using his fire breath and physical attacks, he had also clearly shown to posses powerful magical abilities, abilities which were used three times over the battle; the barrier, the full recovery and the dimensional portal.

This was the first time he had actually saw him casting the spell, but it wasn't like anything he had ever heard of in the game.

There were good chances the portal would affect him differently rather than the dragon. Considering how long it remained open after his passage, it was very likely to be an attempt to verify if he had died or not. Most portal-based teleportation spells from the game notified the caster of how many people had crossed them.

Saar's opponent was a dragon, a member of the strongest species in the game. He seemed ancient, likely many centuries old. It was impossible for anyone to have survived that long without some amount of talent and skill, and it was also impossible for someone that ancient to not be experienced.

He might have been short tempered, impatient, aggressive, violent, proud, overconfident and short sighted, but nothing of what he had done so far could be called stupid.

He would move cautiously until the very end.

Saar opened his own [Dark world portal], using the darkness created by the smoke in the other world to open the passage.

Once he left, nothing was moving anymore. The fire kept burning everything to ashes, and then died down. The dark world finally returned to his original state: dead, silent and void.

After passing through it and having emerged from a shadow, he checked the current situation.

The dragon was less than a hundred meters from him, facing his own portal and carefully inspecting it with his last eye. He was ready to attack anyone that might cross it the very moment something would begin to pass through.

He remained there for about a minute. A minute Saar felt like an hour, with the barrier shrinking every second and his body still screaming in pain. He suppressed his impatience and waited along with the dragon, the moment to strike had yet to come.

The dragon was greatly wounded; half blinded, bleeding from all over his body and the lack of breathable air seemed to have begun to give him some problem.

The portal begun to close, following the steps that led to his formation in the opposite order. The passage shrunk upon disappearing, the disk of light slowed down and the orbs scattered all around the area. Saar quickly moved to evade them.

The dragon kept himself ready to attack throughout the entire duration of the process. It was only a few moments after the portal was completely dispelled that he finally seemed to relax.

The dragon then looked at the barrier. It had kept shrinking for the entire battle, and now there was barely enough space for him to fully open his wings.

The barrier halted. The flames extinguished themselves, revealing an impenetrable wall of light that encircled everything. It was so bright that it was almost painful to watch. And then, the light dissolved.

The barrier had finally disappeared, letting the smoke and the heat leave the area. Fresher air filled with oxygen immediately blew in, while the impossibly high temperature nearly immediately returned to livable levels.

Saar instinctively took in a breath of fresh air and looked around. Everywhere around them there was nothing but destruction. Inside the barrier there was what little was left of the burned forest: a few roots protected by the ground, rocks and cinder; but where the barrier had passed there was nothing at all.

Beyond the small circle they were in, there was only black burned land for as far as the eye could see. There were no trees, no rocks, and no lakes. There was absolutely nothing that suggested a forest having ever existed there. Only pitch black land, with small hills and depressions constituting everything that could be seen.

He was free.

He was finally free.

He could fly away concealed by invisibility, he could teleport away, he could even return in the dark world and go on the opposite side of the world if he wanted; but he waited right where he was.

His eyes were fixed on a small spot on the left of the dragon's neck, glowing of a light stronger than all the others revealed by his skill; the weakest spot. The excruciating pain had kept reminding him for the entire fight of what he had to do before leaving.

The dragon inhaled the fresh air. The muscles on his face relaxed, leaving behind an expression that was perhaps satisfaction. He then exhaled a sigh of relief, his lips curving in a smile.

The horns glowed, reducing their size once more. The light orbs flowed out of his jaws, spiraling in the area around him. They begun to move, floating in circles around the dragon. As the orbs begun to shine brighter, many of them flew toward him; covering the area they touched with a glowing aura.

Now.

That was the moment.

"[Delayed perception field]"

After spending what little was left of his mana on a last illusion, he tightened the grip over his curved blade and used its daily special ability.

Everything stopped. The world went silent. The orbs of light, the wind, the fire as well as the dragon and everything else froze in place. It was like being trapped inside photography.

Mentally counting the seconds, he flew toward the immobile dragon.

The [Will of Kronos], a divine item that three times per day allowed to stop time in the same way as the [Time stop] spell. It also had other effects, like speed and agility boosts and being a countermeasure for an opponent's [Time stop]; but the ability to stop time was one of every player's best aces, especially since it wasn't expected from a non magic-caster character.

Since the [Delayed perception field] had been cast before the moment in which the time was stopped, once the time resumed it would still be active. This meant he had five seconds to use the [True assassin] most powerful passive skill, [death attack].

Striking someone in a weak spot would normally just grant large damage bonuses, but for a [True assassin] it was even more advantageous. After having dealt the attack, there was a slight chance for the target to suffer an instant death effect. This was slightly different from normal necromancy spells, as it could work even on lifeless enemies like golems.

An algorithm would calculate the success of a death attack based on many factors, like the current HP of the target, the level difference, buffs and de-buffs, how much damage was dealt in the last attack, how many members of that race the assassin had killed before, which weak-spot had been used and many others.

Saar had experimented countless hours with the skill to decipher the algorithm, and was now able to trigger the instant death effect by putting all the variables in his favor before the attack.

In this battle he had to wait for a long time before using it since he did not knew where exactly the weak spots were. And even though he had killed many other dragons before, the skill only checked the highest racial levels of the target; which meant he had to fight against the precise species to increase his chances. He was surely also higher leveled than him.

But even though he couldn't count on those variables, he had managed to put all the others in his favor. He was attacking while concealed. Several different poisons had infected the target, each carrying powerful long lasting de-buffs. The dragon was under an illusion and had suffered much damage over the fight. The death attack was also being carried out in the weak spot that would result in the highest amount of damage possible.

And most important of all, striking a mage in the middle of a spell not only greatly increased the odds of triggering the instant death effect, but also neutralized the spell itself.

The greatest weakness of magic was that people could cast only one spell at once. Most players bypassed the problem using appropriate meta-magic abilities, which by consuming more mana improved the spell, or by getting levels which granted class restricted racial spells, or by first casting spells which could be maintained over time and then the others; but casting the wrong spell in the wrong moment would cause the defeat of a player in any competitive match.

If he attacked the dragon while he was casting a spell, by the time he could interrupt the spell and switch to a better one he would have already been dead.

He was now in front of the dragon, mentally counting how many seconds he had left.

During the last day of the server he had already used the time stopping special ability two times, which meant he had only a single attempt. He could not afford mistakes in the execution.

A stab of pain cleared his mind from all the thoughts.

He inhaled, keeping the air inside for five seconds before releasing it.

He looked around.

The empty wasteland they were in lacked any form of possible threat for the following step.

He looked back at the dragon.

He focused completely on him.

In that moment, nothing else existed.

Twenty-two seconds left.

He placed his spiral blade's point a few centimeters away from the middle of the dragon's weak spot. It was a small area placed between two scales, on a closer look they weren't perfectly aligned. And they were exactly where the carotid would have been in a mammal.

Fourteen seconds.

He looked at the poison on his blade, carefully selected when the dragon was raging in the dark world. It would deal an extremely high amount of damage in an extremely short period, greatly damaging every non-magical material it came in contact with. It was basically an acid rather than a poison.

Six seconds.

He readied himself to strike the weak spot with all his might. All that was left was to wait and be ready.

Three seconds.

Two seconds.

One.

Time returned normal. The altered dragon's perception didn't allowed to properly process what was happening. He pushed the blade in the spot highlighted by the skill. The scale moved to the side with no resistance. The blade penetrated his neck with extreme ease.

The dragon remained unmoving. A long moment permeated by absolute silence enveloped the two, with the light orbs aimlessly scattering around. Only the cracking fire and the faint sound of the wind stood as proofs that the time had resumed.

Then, he fell. It wasn't anything spectacular. It wasn't supposed to be. He just fell.

Saar looked at what was left of the first being he had ever killed. The lifeless body on the ground was the source of a small waterfall of blood. He wasn't moving, he wasn't breathing; what moments ago was an existence capable of thought and self-awareness was now but an object at his feet, fundamentally no different from a water balloon with a hole in it.

The light orbs flying in random directions aimlessly collided with anything in the area. He made sure to not touch any of them; he wanted no more surprises from the dragon or his magic.

He looked more carefully at the carcass in front of him. His skill couldn't detect any weak spot or vital sign; he was nothing more than a puppet whose strings had been cut.

After such a long and furious fight, the quietness of the empty area around him felt almost unreal.

He could hear the wind. No more endless screams of anger, no flames bringing uncontrolled destruction all around him, no more animal cowering in fear. Just the wind.

The battle was over.

He had won.

Saar returned with his feet on the ground and slowly walked toward the body.

There was one last thing to do before leaving.

He kept observing, analyzing, looking for something. Something he had the right to take.

After a short while, a semi-transparent sphere gradually begun to form above the dragon corpse. It was completely different from the light orbs that had been used to cast the spells.

It was over half a meter in diameter. Instead of emanating light, it was surrounded by some sort of intense steam. It was like if a small sun was forming in front of him.

That was the dragon lord's soul.

In Yggdrasil there were a few rare classes that granted the [Soul Dealer] skill. If someone with said ability was nearby a recently departed creature, he could claim the soul as his own.

How the players decided to use the acquired souls largely depended according to the class which had granted them the skill; but from the moment the soul was claimed, all resurrection spells and abilities used on the target would automatically fail.

A stab of pain interrupted his flow of thoughts. Now that his life wasn't anymore on the line, the pain was becoming less and less bearable by the second.

He proceeded toward the sphere. Since when it had begun to form, it still hadn't stopped increasing in size. The souls of the [Forest's banes] couldn't even compare to it, and it had already grew larger than the [White fairy queen]'s. It was simply massive, way larger than the ones of other level 100 players. It grew over one meter before finally stabilizing. It was the largest soul he had ever seen, comparable only to some dungeon bosses.

He raised both hands toward it, struggling to ignore the pain caused by the motion.

He would devour the soul. A black oni eating a soul would replenish both HP and mana up to a quarter of the maximum value the target had for those stats, as well as receiving other extremely useful short-term benefits.

Once he did it, he would regain the mana he lost in the battle and use it to leave the area before someone else could arrive; and he would hopefully remove the fourth degree burns, ending the pain and letting his racial regeneration bring him back to full health.

He looked once more at the soul. What he was about to do was considered blasphemy and taboo in basically every religion which had ever existed.

He swallowed.

He slowly raised his hand.

He touched the soul with his palm.

The soul shrunk.

Every time he had devoured a soul in the game, the benefits had all immediately activated all at once. This time however, something didn't go as usual. He had yet to claim the soul.

When in a situation that could potentially cause harm, functional sentient being's bodies all react in the same way: fear.

Sacrificing control and precision, fear allows taking much quicker actions that could save their own lives. In the same way as a prey immediately flee at the sight of a predator and a person withdraw his hand at the sight of a blade falling on it; Saar swiftly jumped away at the sight of the soul shrinking. Doing so, he managed to dodge the thousands of light orbs that exploded out of it.

He landed on the burned empty area several dozens of meters away from the soul, but it required him three other jumps to fully escape the storm of light orbs that was devouring the area.

In front of him, the light storm was so dense that it had become a massive ever-expanding globe engulfing everything in its way.

Once the light storm disappeared, less than ten seconds had passed. Where moments ago there was the soul, now stood the greatest of his fears. The wilderness dragon lord, unscratched and smiling, looking exactly in his direction with white glowing eyes.

Run.

Every cell of his body was screaming the same message.

He turned away and flew as fast as he could. He had to go beyond the burned territory to escape the reach of a new potential barrier.

He had nothing left. There were no more ways to fight his opponent and he was in a terribly disadvantageous position.

All he could do now was escaping.

He still had his rings concealing him. He just needed to leave the area, hide in the forest and wait for a bit of mana to return. Then he could just escape everywhere he wanted through the dark world. If he could just reach the forest before the next barrier was used he would be safe.

As he turned back and begun to fly away, an incredible pain enveloped his back. The world around him quickly begun to spin, and before he could realize what was going on he had fallen to the ground.

The pain he felt wasn't from his burns. Something had hit him.

He struggled to return back on his feet.

Instinctively, he looked at the dragon; his eyes were glowing, and they weren't just looking in his direction; they were looking right at him. He was now able to bypass his invisibility.

His horns shone once more and the light orbs formed a small sphere in front of him. It was small, extremely small. It was slightly smaller than a human fist.

Then, in a fraction of a second, the dragon threw it at him.

It was an unbelievably fast attack, which moved much faster than him. However, it was traveling in a straight line, and the sphere had a rather small size. As long as he saw the attack coming, he could evade it.

He moved to the side, placing himself outside the attack trajectory. The attack, however, moved as well.

Saar understood what was happening and immediately rose a couple o meters in the air, flying toward the forest as fast as he could. When he looked behind him, the glowing sphere was still following. Deep within him, he knew it would not stop.

He begun to fly as close as possible to the ground, so close that he could touch it with his arms, but the sphere didn't collide either.

As it was getting closer and closer, he kept thinking of ways to elude a homing attack. If nothing of what he could do would save him, he would everything he could to minimize the damages.

He finally decided to fly in a straight line, doing everything in his power to travel as fast as possible. The difference in speed between them had to be minimal.

The sphere was getting closer and closer. The moment before the attack could hit him, he turned to face it while flying backward and crossed his daggers in front of him to parry the blow as best as he could.

The collision was way stronger than expected. Regardless of how much he tried to absorb the damage, he was blown away and fell once more to the ground.

As he was rising, he saw the dragon lord create another sphere in front of him.

The attacks were weak, so weak that even someone with defenses as low as his would require multiple shots to be defeated, even if greatly damaged. However the dragon had made the tactical choice to give up on power and exclusively select attacks that could deal even a tiny amount of sure damages.

Had he kept performing the usual attacks, Saar could have dodged everything from that distance. But the dragon had realized that a few sure damages many times were a better alternative than a great amount never.

He hadn't enough HP to survive the attack. He had no way to avoid it. The huge empty area he was in offered nothing to hide behind or to use as cover. He had used all his mana and his best skills, what now remained wasn't enough to accomplish anything meaningful.

The dragon lord had found a way to see him and had begun to make attacks that he couldn't avoid. Skills stealth and evasion, the only things that kept him alive during fights, were now impossible to use.

In the extremely short time he had left, Saar thought about every possible outcome to every possible action that he could take. Now that he was watching death in the eyes, his brain was processing faster than ever before.

In the cruelly short amount of time between the moment when the dragon lord created the sphere and when it left his jaws, he had thought and evaluated every strategy, tactic, alternative and trick he knew. Every single one of them, despite minor variations, produced the same outcome: death.

In his final moments, he felt almost like if the world was slowing down. All the events of the last hours came back to his mind. The last thing he ate before logging in, the cat sitting on his chair, the book open on his desk less than twenty pages to the end, the hours spent collecting data crystals on the last day for the guild leader's project. It seemed like everything he could think of in his last moment was trivial.

Then, midnight.

The new world. The stars. Magic. The flights. The dragon.

He saw the entire battle unfolding in front of him once more. He had indeed made many mistakes.

Why even in his final moments was he analyzing data? Old habits truly die hard.

The sphere was now halfway through its path. How much time had it been? Five seconds? Less?

It didn't mattered. Not anymore.

He closed his eyes.

He could hear the noise of the incoming attack, the sound of the wind and… something he couldn't properly describe behind him.

He was unsure of the reason why he bothered to open his eyes at his very end. Maybe because, subconsciously, he was unwilling to give up on life until he exhaled his last breath; or maybe he was just curious. But regardless of the reason, the first thing he saw once his eyes opened was a girl jumping in front of him.

She was just out of her teens, with long brown hairs gathered in twin-tails by two black ribbons. She was wearing a gold and red battle-mage's armor and was wielding a familiar looking elaborated black staff that ended in a spiral shape. He immediately recognized the symbol of his guild on her armor.

She quickly raised her staff and chanted.

"[Quickened spell: Greater arcane wall]"

In a flash of light a greenish barrier appeared around them, barely in time to block the glowing sphere smashing against it. From the point of the collision, a web of cracks quickly spread over most of the barrier. It gave him the impression of being inside a bubble of glass, just one touch away from falling to pieces. But regardless of the barrier's damages, the sphere disappeared without causing any harm.

The dragon had seen the mysterious girl arrive and save his opponent. He seemed to be lost in his thoughts, evaluating the implication behind enemies reinforces; and doing so cost him time.

The girl immediately faced toward Saar, looking at him with her deep blue eyes. Then she bowed.

"Lord Raal Saar, lord Govan Lune sent me to support your retreat."

He looked behind. Two meters away from him, inside the greater arcane wall, he saw the elliptical amalgamation of purple energy and darkness which indicated one end of a [Gate].

He looked back at the dragon lord of wilderness. His contemplation had ended and was now preparing another attack, one that would be powerful enough to penetrate the barrier.

He looked at the young girl in front of him, fully equipped for battle and specialized as a caster.

He looked at the size of the dragon's horns, smaller due to the spells he used.

He though of how the battle had proceeded so far, how much damage he had suffered, the burns all over his body and how the dragon was now back to full health.

The terrain condition, the number advantage, the level difference. The thought of one last offense with the support of the caster crossed his mind. He weighted them all with his desire of vengeance, and then he decided.

He opened his inventory and retrieved the last item he had obtained, the [Crown of pale silver]. He placed it on his head, looked at the dragon one last time and activated its special ability.

In a corner of his mind, the dragon lord of wilderness's location appeared with crystalline clarity.

Then, he turned his back at him. He faced the portal, and went through.

Once he was gone, the girl rose from her bowing position.

She walked toward the portal, gave one last hateful look at the dragon, and then disappeared through the gate; leaving behind her the screams of anger and the incoming dragon's attack.


The walls were adorned with paintings of incredible quality, fine woven tapestry and countless weapons of all kinds and shapes. Windows let the sunlight illuminate their path, together with the many chandeliers enchanted with [Continual light] hanging down the ceiling.

Govan Lune was walking down the hallways accompanied by his entourage, composed of five NPCs. In front of them, always a couple of steps behind him, there was the twin-tailed girl. When she went to rescue his friend, he had a chance to check his old notes and read her name. Neraal.

When the two of them crossed the gate, he felt he was about to throw up. The smell of burned flesh had spread throughout the entire room even before they had completely entered. He felt nauseated by the mere thought of how he must have looked below the mask.

He had wanted to ask him countless questions about what had happened to him. When the divination had finally activated he saw a giant sphere of fire. Then it disappeared and inside se saw his friend fighting a dragon. A dragon. There were dragons out there. And when he had arrived he was covered in blood. Just what had happened to him?

However, before he had the chance to say anything, a castle maid had arrived with a message from the guild master. Which lead back to the reason why he was now walking down that hallway.

They were about to have an emergency meeting to discuss the situation.

The hallway felt eternal, but a long walk was probably what he needed to reorder his thoughts.

When they finally reached the hallway's end, he saw a large and massive door, crafted out of precious magical wood and reinforced with an exquisite decoration made out of legendary game's metal. It was guarded by four NPCs, equipped with golden full plate armors and two double-handed long swords on each of their sides.

The armors covered the entirety of the body, the helmets barely allowed to see their eyes. They all wore magical enchanted white capes that gave them endless stamina, high resistance to mind affecting skills and denied the need to eat and sleep.

They were rather intimidating to look at.

They stood guarding the door with crossed arms, unmoving to the point that one could easily mistake them for statues. They were the highest leveled spawns inside Killian's flying castle, the white capes.

He stopped a couple of meters away from them. They all respectfully bowed as one. The movements were so precise that they seemed to be each other's reflection.

In the corner of the room, several other NPCs were waiting. They were divided in six smaller groups of about five members each. Some of their faces were somewhat familiar.

As the guild master's message stated, they had to leave their entourages outside and enter alone.

The white capes stepped aside, freeing the passage as the door slowly opened before him.

He looked in front of him, and he entered the room.