Cecil was drowning.
Gasping for air, lungs filling up with liquid – and the world darkened once more.
Swimming in and out of consciousness, the world distorted through glass and viscous liquid.
Fear.
Terror.
Exhaustion.
Cecil relived her death a thousand times that day.
A crash of lightning, and suddenly, she can breathe once more. Tentatively, Cecil takes a breath, then several more, savoring the lightness of air. Her vision blurs as she tries to adjust to the lighting, to the sounds. Several voices are talking loudly at her, all at the same time. She tries to comprehend them, but the sounds they are making don't make sense. Thoughts scramble for attention, bombarding her exhausted mind. The sensory overload is too much for Cecil to handle, and she loses herself to darkness once more.
"Cecil. Cecil? Are you alright?" Retha's voice was the first thing that Cecil heard.
She tried to sit up, but found a headache building up and lay back down. "Yeah," she replied, eyes still closed. "I just need a bit of time."
Her panicked gasping slowed, and she focused on doing the same with her heartbeat. Concentrate on what's at hand. Push aside your fear. Conquer it.
She murmured the precious mantras that were never more than a few thoughts away in her mind.
Gingerly, she picked herself up off the ground and examined her surroundings. Retha was crouching beside her with a concerned expression, and Eremes Guile leaned against the wall, looking disinterested. Typical. Another woman – a high wizard – was standing warily to the side, and Seyren was nowhere to be found.
"Where's Seyren?" she asked, "and who might you be?"
"My name is Kathryne Keyron," the woman strode forward brusquely, extending a hand in greeting. "And I am a high wizard, which you have no doubt deduced already. All of us were imprisoned within this laboratory and, once we find the others, we must search for a way out."
"Cecil Damon," she replied, grasping the proffered hand and giving it a firm shake. "And how many others are there? There was one other knight in our party, how about yours?"
"I came alone," Kathryne answered. "But we know that there are more than just five of us."
Cecil felt as though she was missing something, and a chill crept up her back as Eremes Guile and Retha exchanged knowing glances. "How do you know that, then?"
Retha nodded at Kathryne, and she began to explain.
"There are spectres of each one of us outside of this room," she said. "And these doppelgangers are all hostile. Excluding Seyren, there's one more man imprisoned here, and by the looks of it, he's a blacksmith."
"He'll be a whitesmith now," Retha added. "If you haven't noticed, Cecil, we've all somehow transcended our classes. I'm sure you have new skills that you haven't tried out yet. Whatever they did to us, it made us stronger, faster, better."
Cecil shivered. "I don't like this. I feel like I'm not myself anymore."
"After this is all over, whoever's responsible with face divine retribution," Retha promised. "But until then, we must focus on finding the others, escaping, and staying alive. Come. Shall we go?"
Swallowing with some difficulty, Cecil nodded. She couldn't trust herself to speak, not without showing the high wizard how afraid she truly was. So she decided to say nothing.
Once outside, Cecil got her first glimpse of the doppelgangers. Ethereal and translucent, they resembled the ghosts she had once fought on one of the Church's holy missions. The only difference was that the ghosts had not had appearances identical to that of herself and her friends.
Onwards the party went, slaying doppelgangers and collecting useful gemstones and poisons, leaving a trail of unwanted loot in their wake. Surely, Cecil thought, surely Seyren or the whitesmith would spot it and come to find them
That is, if they had managed to escape their prisons. After all, she had been unable to escape her own without Kathryne's aid. But surely the whitesmith would have the brute strength to smash through his flimsy cage of glass, and Seyren…Seyren had Bowling Bash. They would be fine, she reassured herself. It would only be a matter of time until the entire party regrouped.
Behind her, she heard the scuffling sound of many feet. Turning quickly, hoping for the best but expecting the worst, her heart plummeted as she spotted dozens – no, more – of the doppelgangers. And standing in their midst was a glimmering whitesmith whose eyes sparkled with malicious intent.
Standing beside her, Kathryne cursed quietly. "It looks like we've run into our first MVP," she muttered quietly. "Everyone get ready. This one's going to be tough without any tanked close-range fighters."
"I'll engage it," Eremes stepped forward. "High Priestess Sorin, stay behind High Wizard Kathryne and Sniper Cecil and keep me buffed and healed. Kathryne and Cecil, take care of the mob monsters when they start getting too close to you, but focus your attacks on the whitesmith as much as you can. The moment he's dead, the rest will disappear."
Cecil nodded, unslinging her bow from her back and laying an arrow to the string. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Kathryne raise her arms in preparation for a storm gust and Retha begin an incantation to a Blessing.
We've all hunted MVPs before, she thought. And solo, at that. Now there are four of us. How difficult could it be to bring this one down?
With a massive clang, the whitesmith used Hammer Fall, momentarily stunning the entire party.
Cecil grimaced. Very difficult, it seemed.
A/N: Ooooh...MVP time...