Chapter 51. In the Air Tonight

  Respawn Timer: 3 hours 59 minutes 59 seconds

  The next four hours were grueling in a way that I hadn’t experienced since joining IO. I sat in my room. I played my drums. I ate. I fidgeted. I searched the Botcorp website for clues to a connection with Clarity. Yet, my anxiety kept me from being productive or using my time strategically. Thoughts spun and spun. After some time, I fell asleep, exhausted. When Sofia woke me up, I entered the pod with a weight on my shoulders that I had messed everything up.

  Would you like to respawn at the nearest spawn point? Yes/No.

  Clarity had killed us in seconds. We couldn’t even defend ourselves. And Janica… was she gone now? If I died first, maybe she could be resummoned.

  I chose “yes”.

  I appeared on a metal floor. Metal bars surrounded me on all sides. A cage. The first thing I did was activate Spiritual Embodiment. I needed to know if Janica had died for real. It didn’t work. I looked for the debuff that should show a timer of how long I had to summon her back. It wasn’t there. My breathing got faster, an d I felt m yself get dizzy.

  I sat down. Or fell down. I leaned against the metal bars. Something felt wrong, beyond the panic. I was exhausted, like I was moving in slow motion. Think. I looked at my advanced statistics.

  Health: 95/95

  Stamina 0/95

  Mana 105/105

  Resource Regeneration -7 per second

  There it was. I had negative stamina. I looked at the tooltip.

  Hex of Exhaustion. Stamina and Mana Regeneration reduced by 10 per second.

  Spiritual Embodiment took two stamina per second to maintain. The good thing was that I no longer had a time limit to summon her back like I did with the previous version of the spell. But the per-second cost might explain why I couldn’t summon Janica. I prayed this was the case. If I had caused her death… no. I couldn’t think about that right now. I had to get out of this cage. Had to get back to Clarity and beat him. The reality of the situation hit me. I looked at my statistics again. I had lost fourteen levels. My health and mana had been cut in half. Five percent crit was missing. Sixty stamina.

  I looked back at my statistics.

  I screamed, the weight of my situation overwhelming me. The act of releasing the rage felt good, but made me dizzy. I laid down and breathed. The absence of stamina made any physical action result in a weariness that lasted for seconds. I closed my eyes as tight as I could, but it didn’t stop tears from coming down.

  “Warren, is that you?” A familiar voice.

  I let my head fall to my right. A familiar face, looking at me through his own cage. Henry.

  “Don’t move too quickly or you’ll pass out,” he said. “There’s a Hex Generator in the room, drawing our energy.”

  “A what?” I asked through lethargic lips.

  “If you don’t move too much, it’s better,” he said. “I’ve been here for days. Well, kinda. Most of the time I spent logged out.” He talked slowly, breathing between phrases. “Waiting for something to happen… so I could reroll another character. It sucks to just sit here… waiting. I contacted the development team a bunch of times. Finally got through. They’re shutting the dungeon down. But my character… our characters… will be stuck here. And the policy…”

  “Is that you only get one character… ever,” a voice said from my other side.

  I turned. Arthur sat in the cage to my left. “You,” I said.

  He nodded. “Seems like we’re all done in IO,” he said. “Trapped in cages, waiting for the end.”

  “All?” I managed.

  “Our whole team,” Arthur said. “Christian. Thomas. Rowan. Cassandra. The boss trapped us hours ago. I keep logging in… hoping something has changed. Or to experience this world… a little more before it’s over. Even in a cage.”

  “It’s useless,” Henry said. “We can’t even… send messages in game.”

  This was too much. I had waited for hours to respawn, but the weight of my situation felt so heavy that I couldn’t be here a second longer. “I need to go.”

  You logged out of Integration Online.

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  “So you’re just going to give up?” Sofia asked.

  “What choice do I have? Unless the developers change their terms of service.”

  “You need to contact them,” Sofia said.

  “And provide what proof?” I asked. “We can’t take screenshots or record the game in any way. Plus, Henry already contacted them. They’re shutting the entire dungeon down to prevent theft, so that solves the problem for them.” I walked into my room, slamming the door behind me.

  Sofia opened it. “This might be the wrong time to tell you, but you can’t mope around. You’re going to have to get a job. I used all the money we had to buy that inn, which is going to be worthless when they shut the dungeon down and all the adventurers leave town. I’m gonna eat some breakfast and then go salvage what I can.” She shut the door.

  I picked up my drumsticks and sat down. I put my headphones on and fired up my old set list. This was my stage, my escape. A selection of songs that had helped me push down the hurt since my parents’ death. A concert of pain, betrayal, depression, and self reliance. My hands were fury. My wrists, a blur of release.

  As I progressed through my songs, I let my frustration out. I had been so close to what Sofia and I needed. A way to get ahead. Steady jobs. Somehow, thinking about financial stability while drumming to “Thunderstruck” by AC/DC gave me a sense of dissonance. Like trying to smile while weeping. I skipped the song, hoping to find a song to fit my mood. I put on “In the Air Tonight” by Phil Collins. Perhaps the song with the greatest drum introduction of all time. Phil somehow waits over half the song to start rocking out. When he does, you can’t help but play along with him. The song is about pure evil.

  Well I was there and I saw what you did.

  ? I saw it with my own two eyes.

  ? So you can wipe off that grin.

  ? I know where you’ve been.

  ? It’s all been a pack of lies.

  Like Clarity. Not some bad guy who has some complicated reason for doing wrong. Clarity invaded IO to steal data. I didn’t know why or how he tied himself to the dungeon. But he wasn’t a normal boss. He trapped people in his dungeon. Played mind games. Set Janica and I against each other and did psychological testing on us. Made up children’s stories about me.

  What was it like growing up? What do you care most about? What is your greatest fear?

  He had pulled out some of my darkest memories. I told Clarity about my parents. About living in poverty. About Sofia. About not wanting to let her down.

  And then Clarity had used these things against me. I was sure of it. The librarian had warned me.

  “So she gave Warren a choice. Behind one door was all the candy that he could carry in his bag, but he could never come back again to the tower. Behind the other door was a key to the store room where she kept all of the sweets. He could use that key to take as much as he wanted forever. But t here was a catch. If Warren ever ate a single piece of this candy, his key would disappear forever. Of course, Warren didn’t know this.”

  It didn’t take a genius to see the lesson here. Clarity had given me a choice. Had planted the shortcut right in my path. He knew that I would find it. Knew that I couldn’t resist trying to take everything for myself. All I had to do was go get other people, share the portal, and defeat Clarity as a group. But I didn’t. Clarity knew that I wouldn’t. He was in my head. He somehow knew me better than I knew me.

  And that was a problem.

  It wasn’t the first time. After my parents died, kids knew how to get under my skin. It was easy. Find my weakness, exploit it. Just like Tony, my sewing factory nemesis. He could say one thing and send me into a spiral.

  I needed to get stronger or people would take advantage of me. I had tried, of course. I had pushed people away. Had put up barriers. I kept to myself. I didn’t even trust Rowan and Cassandra with information. I hadn’t told them about my Integrator Passive or let them see the real me. I didn’t trust them to join my party or to forgive me. I hadn’t even told Janica the real reason that I needed to defeat Clarity.

  I heard Phil Collins belt out the words, “The hurt doesn’t show, but the pain still grows. It’s no stranger to you and me,” the line when the song ramps up, and I pounded the drums with Phil— ba-bom ba-bom ba-bom ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-bom . The image of killing Arthur and his friends flashed in my memory. Of hitting Christian in the back of his head with the middle of my staff. It was my fault that Arthur and I hated each other. Not his. Not because he was some rich asshole. But because I had betrayed him and his friends. They trusted me. Even carried me through that dungeon because they wanted to recruit me to their guild. Then I literally killed them. They should despise me. I deserved it. That was me being strong. That was me protecting myself. And what had it led to? People didn’t trust me. I had possibly gotten Janica killed. I had reset my Job levels back to one. I had gotten myself trapped with no way out, restricted from ever playing the game again. I had come full circle. From the sewing factory, to IO, then back to the sewing factory. From loneliness, to friendship, and back to loneliness.

  This wasn’t a result of taking risks or opening up. In the few times that I had allowed myself to put my security on the line, I had gotten into all kinds of fun and even made a real connection with people who I really liked. I had made enough money to thrive. I had learned how to craft leather goods. I had become a pretty badass fighter.

  Maybe what I needed wasn’t strength. Maybe what I needed was the opposite. Openness, perhaps. Saying too much instead of too little. Telling people who I was and what I wanted. Taking risks. Allowing them to know me.

  This scared me, of course. Terrified me, really. But I had tried the path of strength and stoicism. Tried to play it safe. Tried to protect my heart.. And it didn’t work. Since my time in IO, I had actually had some fun. Lived a little. Found friends. Now that I knew what that was like, I couldn’t go back. Even if it meant taking risks.

  I knew who I wanted to be, kind of. I definitely didn’t know how. I had never been good at trusting others. At least, not since my parents' death.

  But what did any of this matter? My character was stuck in a dungeon. In a cage. If I had stamina and mana, I might have a shot at getting out. Arthur might be able to bend the bars open. Or I might be able to summon Janica.

  Clarity had set the room up with some kind of a device that reduced everyone's regeneration below zero.

  There was something there. An idea swirling around, not quite solid. Just vapors looking to condense.

  I set down my drumsticks. I needed to try something. Probably wouldn’t work. I ran into the other room. “Sofia! Are you in yet? I need the pod.”

  No answer. I ran to check the pod. She wasn't there. I breathed out, relieved.

  “What are you doing?” she asked. She sat in the kitchen, headphones on, eating eggs.

  “I don’t know how to fix this yet,” I said. “But maybe.”

  She waved her hand at me, telling me to go. “Good luck,” she said.

  You logged into Integration Online.