06 | DISCONNECTION

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CHAPTER SIX.

PAST | at eighteen

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PAST | at eighteen

YOU HAVE NEVER MET A MAN QUITE AS RUTHLESS AS SORA. In your few months since you've somehow stumbled upon this game, you've met many different kinds of adventurers. There's the pitiable, D-Rank adventurers who try desperately to climb the ranks using mission points, and there's the A-list junkies who think they own the world just because they're powerful as fuck. But they're fairly decent-natured—they kill monsters—they don't kill humans.

But Sora Selasta kills both.

You believe that it ties to his own personality—with his own powers. He kills those he deems are hindrances to him; he uses his necromancy abilities to make powerful adventurers into his little shadow lackeys.

("Can you resurrect them?" You asked on one occasion, out of pure morbid curiosity. "Is it possible?"

Sora had a strange look on. "...No."

"You've tried?"

"Yes, [Name]."

He sounded impatient—which he never was with you. Sora must have noticed his cutting tone, for he immediately looped an arm around you and smiled. "Sorry. Bad day today."

So you dropped the subject.)

"This guy has a pretty good ability," you kick the body in front of you, watching how it rolls down, listless, "you can take him for the shadow army thing you have going on."

The two of you attend missions together regularly. It's more of a safety thing for you, for you're still a beginner. Well, not abilities aren't a beginner thing, but your skills are. You're still a bartender, but somehow you got dragged into the whole adventurer business by Sora, who said he needed backup. Wasn't original [Name] an adventurer? You can't recall.

(You know he didn't need backup. He's lying, but you just humour him. You know how lonely power can be.)

"This must be the fifth adventurer group who tried ambushing us," Sora says lightly, unbothered by the mountain of bloodied corpses before him. "Guess we're that good, huh?"

Don't toot your own horn, you think, this is why people don't like us. But Sora deserves a right to be arrogant, right? The both of you aren't even twenty yet, and still he reigns supreme.

"Sure." You glance at the bodies. You feel the familiar unease simmering beneath you, the recoil, the disgust when you look at dead people. Actual dead people. But it helps to detach yourself from the settings of the world—you tell yourself, over and over again, that this people don't have emotions, that they aren't real. But of course, they have families to return to, and...

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