Game of Light

Chapter 8 - A Mistake

A Mistake

After an uneventful remainder of her hike, Light finally arrived in Main. The dawn lit up the streets and Light was hungry and exhausted. So instead of immediately finding Venus as she had originally planned, she sat down at the outdoor café in the center square she had visited in her last login. Light realized that its name was “Gossip” and suddenly laughed internally: No wonder the waiters there were so friendly about information.

“Oh, it’s you again!” The waiter exclaimed, after Light again ordered a large number of items on the menu. “I was hoping to see you!”

The waiter was a tall and lanky specimen of the Human race. He had a broad, flat face, and when he smiled, his left canine tooth stuck out immensely, giving him the appearance of a good tempered snake.

“Why's that?” Light asked, startled by his interest in her.

“Well, I have an update on the character ‘Light’,” The waiter said, grinning.

Oh gosh!, Light thought, If there’s one thing I really don’t want to hear about now, it’s myself. Light really did not understand how people could fawn over themselves. She decided the only way to get him to stop pestering her about it was to get it over with fast.

“What about him?” she asked, trying to sound interested.

“Well first of all, Light is a she.” Light’s heart froze. How the hell did he know that about her?

“And second of all, she’s gotten higher on the List.” Now this was news, she thought, ogling the grinning bobcat before her.

“She has?” Light asked, wondering if she had misheard him.

“Yup, she’s jumped up a whole lot. She’s at rank 82 now.” He sat down opposite to her. “And you know how it is when you’re fast at climbing the food chain. There are players trying to find her.” He smiled and scootched his chair closer to her “So watch out Light,” he whispered.

He stood up abruptly, leaving her wide-eyed, shocked and feeling completely lost. What the heck? Why did he-? How did he-? Light didn’t know. Just when she had decided that the waiter was completely harmless, he had come up behind her and stabbed her with a knife. Do waiters always know the identity of their guests?, she wondered. No that’s impossible, she thought, The game’s supposed to be 90% reality (The leftover ten percent being the fact that monsters randomly attack you). Normal waiters don’t know your name if you haven’t told it to them. But then again this guy wasn’t a normal waiter – he was the dreaded species of a gossip, and that explained it. She sighed. I hope no one else knows that I’m the Light he was talking about.

A steaming bowl of soup was set before her nose, and soon the rest of her small café table was cluttered with dishes of varying size, shape and color. Light relaxed. The only time she could relax was while eating. It was her sanctuary. Whatever unlucky bastard disturbed her during her period of peace would surely be sliced in two.

And thus when at the moment Light put a spoon filled to the brim with soup to her lips, her mouth watering in anticipation of its pleasant goodness, an axe hacked through the porcelain of her bowl, spilling the piping hot liquid all over the table and making her drop her spoon, she was pissed.

In a split second Light pulled out Hookeye and swung it in a circle around her. Sure enough, the guy, whose face she had never even before, was out of the picture. But it seemed, judging by the grim and angry faces of a group of about two dozen players she saw when she was fully turned around, that he hadn’t been alone. Oh shit, she thought, I’m outnumbered. Maybe I can get out of this situation diplomatically. She lowered Hookeye and asked the group what they wanted from her. A very proud looking man in his thirties stepped forward and sneered.

“As a list player, you don’t play very fair do you? Maybe you should just step down from the title and leave the List to the men who truly deserve it.” He and his lackeys laughed.

“Fair, you say?” Light asked, smiling innocently. “I don’t see how what you are doing is very fair either, Mr. Twenty-against-one.” The man’s face turned sour.

There goes my diplomatic solution, Light thought grudgingly, but they totally deserve it! Light raised her sword up to attacking position and systematically sliced out. It seemed that Mr. Unfair had decided that this fight was below him and had sent his dogs against her instead. Well, she was not going to let him leave this battle unscathed. Though she called it a battle, it was a pretty one-sided affair. Light was angry enough that she didn’t have to concentrate on the people she was killing – they had all been Warriors.

The man who stood in front of her now, however, would prove to be more difficult. He looked nice enough: Brown hair, blue eyes, light complexion, slightly upward-tilted lips. But that wasn’t what Light was concentrating on. Her eyes were rooted on the ball of white magic forming in his hands. She knew loosely from Magic Lore that white magic was pretty powerful. Since she had only brushed over that chapter of “Other for Dummies”, which she was regretting, she didn’t know exactly how powerful it was. She guessed that the best time to attack was when the spell was still forming.

Light drove Hookeye right about where the Sorcerer’s heart should have been, which coincidentally was exactly where the spell was expanding. Light’s eyes went wide. Ready for impact, she told herself, ready to be blasted to bits. When Hookeye pierced the spell, however, there was no explosion. The Sorcerer himself looked exceedingly surprised before the blade drove through his body and he faded away with a painful sounding cry. The spell stayed there in the air for a second and was then sucked into Hookeye.

Huh!?!, Light thought confused, That’s not what was supposed to happen. I thought the spell was gonna go ‘boom’. In her shock Light’s speech abilities were reduced to those of a six-year-old. I don understand! Hookeye suddenly blazed up in white. The magic seemed to vibrate through the sword. It was humming contentedly.

Light got ripped back into the battle with a stab of pain on her left side. She slashed at her attacker. The man froze over, turned blue and disappeared. Oh, so this is what the spell was supposed to do, Light thought, still not really sure how the heck it had managed to be sucked into her sword. Maybe Hookeye had even more specialties than she thought.

“Hookeye,” she whispered to her sword. “Is there any way to release that spell at one time?”

“Say ‘Release’.” It answered gleefully.

Easy enough, Light thought, building up momentum, by spinning around. “Release!” she yelled towards Hookeye. Suddenly she was alone in the square, surrounded by the ice shells of the people who had been fighting with her or going about their daily routines.

Oops, Light thought guiltily. I killed all of them.