Cyber Mortality

Chapter 42:

"I don't think I can continue on," DeNyle moans and falls down into the grass. "We've been walking for two days. Where is this dungeon supposed to be?"

"I guess we can rest here," Rocky sighs and plops down beside him.

"I'm so hungry," DeNyle mutters and looks in his backpack.

"We ate the last of our food this morning, Nyle," I sigh and watch him fruitlessly search through his bag.

"What do we do then? My stomach is rumbling..."

"We will have to go to a town and find some food," Rocky says and pulls a piece of paper out of his backpack. He unfolds it on the ground to show us a map of Cliffton. It's around the size of Alaska. X's dot the map from the locations we have searched so far, but it's only a small fraction of the map. "There's a town about five miles that way," Rocky points toward the north. "Maybe someone there has heard something about the dungeon."

After another five minutes of resting, we pick ourselves up and head north.

"When we first entered this game I was super excited by all of the trees and stuff, but now they just keep going and going." I groan while trying to keep in step with DeNyle.

"Yeah I know what you mean," he mutters. "I feel like we've been in this forest for years."

"It's only been two days," Rocky shoots over his shoulder. "I would hope you can survive long enough to not die."

"At least we aren't wearing our armor right now," I smile at DeNyle. "Think of how much more work that would take trudging through this forest."

"Why can't we just teleport there?" DeNyle questions.

"Because I haven't been there," Rocky explains. "I could teleport us to our cabin or one of the larger cities, but this is just a small town."

A cool breeze rips through the trees and lifts the hair on my neck. I glance up and notice dark clouds rolling across the sky.

"I think it's about to rain," As soon as the words leave my mouth a raindrop splats across my forehead.

"Oh, great," Jez moans and pulls the hood of her cloak over her head.

I equip my cloak and pull it over my head. I pinch it tightly with my hands in front of me so the wind can't get in. Then it starts to downpour. The rain falls in torrents so thick it is hard to see five steps ahead. Annoyed with the pounding rain which has begun to soak my cloak, I reach one of my hands out and draw on my magic. I imagine a large umbrella of air stretching over us and mint floods my mouth. A swirling mass of air sends water flying in every direction, but away from us.

"Why didn't you do that earlier?" Jez snarls and shakes out her soaked cloak. "I'm soaked through!"

"I didn't think to try it until right now," I shoot back before returning my focus to maintaining the wind spiral above our heads. As I watch the spiral, my thoughts travel back to a conversation I had had with Zephyr during training.

"You mentioned your master the other day? Where are they?" I inquire while taking a break from levitating.

"She doesn't play Cyber Mortality anymore," his face grows dark.

"Why not?"

"She was the first wind mage," he says softly. "She was a beta tester for the game before it came out two years ago. She was really free-spirited when I first met her and we fought in the battle of Kapsis against an army of monsters. But after that something changed. She started to experiment with wind magic in new ways, but they weren't good ways. She threw all of her time into her experiments and it wasn't long before I found her little secret. She would lure people in with the promise of teaching them wind magic, but then she would test out her new ideas on them."

"New ideas? Like what?" I gaze at him softly, happy that he is finally opening up to me a bit.

"What I have been teaching you is magic outward of yourself and others. How to influence the air around you, but she twisted that and started to mess with the air inside of people. She could suck the air out of their lungs, making them suffocate before they died." He shudders at the thought and clenches his jaw. "She seemed almost possessed. I knew I had to do something so I got her banned from the game. There are two sides to every kind of magic depending on how you decide to use it. She went down a destructive path and had to be stopped."

"Whatcha thinking about?" DeNyle bumps my shoulder and I focus back on the present.

"Something that Zephyr said to me," I sigh. "About the woman who trained him in wind magic. Do you think this game can affect you psychologically?"

"I don't think this is a game anymore," DeNyle shrugs. "We used to not mind killing other players, but now we would be actually murdering someone. I'm sure that could affect you psychologically."

"We're all trapped here," I shake my head. "Why would anyone want to kill someone else?"

"We're not in the real world anymore. Killing people here doesn't have the same consequences," he says. "There's no government or police force. No one making laws. You can do whatever you want here. You can use magic! We can tell ourselves that this isn't real, but we can die now. The stakes are so much higher."

"Then what do we do?" I question. My concentration fumbles as my body starts to feel weary from controlling the wind for ten minutes. The spiral of wind disappears and then rain falls on us once again.

"We can sit back and hope someone else beats the game, which would be the easy way. We could accept that this is our lives now and live here. Or we could find those relics, which would be the dangerous path, but if we want to get back to the real world we have to win. You have to win to save your Mom." DeNyle clasps my arm reassuringly. "We have to win to survive."