No Respawn

Theo’s arms are locked round my neck and he’s laughing because I’ve cracked his heel on the rim of the pod again.

There are very few people I would do manual labour for, but my brother Theo is at the top of that short list.

“Careful with the merchandise, Nell,” he says.

“The merchandise has put on weight,” I tell him fondly as I lower him onto the gel bed.

I lift his legs in, one at a time, straightening the left one where it likes to turn in. I've had two years of practice. I could do this with my eyes shut, and on bad nights I have.

Theo was injured in a car accident that wasn't his fault and has been paralysed ever since.

He grins up at me through the open lid. It’s the grin he had at nine, the one that talked me into a second pudding and a fake sick note and, once, a kitten we couldn’t afford.

“Partners,” he says. “You promised.”

Theo is also one of the only people I would participate in this challenge for. I'm a gamer, I've always been a gamer, but speedrunning is my thing. Not RPGs, nothing like ASCENT. And certainly not with this kind of advanced technology.

ASCENT is like nothing the world has ever seen before, completely immersive gameplay. The second you're in the pod and connected, the game is said to become real.

“I promised to log in. I never promised to carry you.”

“In there you won’t have to.”

That lands somewhere under my ribs and stays. I seal his lid, check the drip line, check the seal again. His heart rate glows on the side panel, steady and smug. Then I climb into the pod beside his, because a million dollars clears his debts with enough left for a wheelchair that doesn’t squeak, and because I have never once said no to him.

The lid hisses shut. The dark is total.

Then it isn’t.

Rain hits my face first. Cold, fine, needling rain, the kind that gets under your collar and stays there. I’m standing on a plank walkway above grey water. The planks give under my boots, wet and slightly soft, and the air tastes of lantern smoke and rot.

I bite the inside of my cheek. It hurts. Real hurt, not simulated, copper taste and all.

“Okay,” I say out loud. “Okay, that’s a lot.”

The Drowned Village sprawls out on every side. Stilt houses leaning into each other like drunks, rope bridges sagging between them. Paper lanterns scatter the area, bobbing on poles so that the whole place glows a sick, pretty amber.

Players are popping into existence around me with soft blue flashes, gasping, swearing, laughing.

Every one of them has a little banner hanging above their head. Handle: level, class, a row of red hearts.

Mine says Carver, the name I’ve raced under for six years, then Level 1, Duelist, and ten hearts.

None of the banners say Theo Carver. He typed in his whole name, because he’s Theo and he wants to be famous.

Spawns are random. I read the terms. Knowing that doesn’t stop me from turning a full circle on the walkway, then climbing onto a barrel for height, then shouting his name into the rain like an idiot until a woman in a bright green robe tells me to shut up.

Fine. Floor 1 is big, but it isn’t infinite. He’ll be looking for me too, probably while complaining that I’m slow.

I spend the first forty minutes learning the place. Where the walkways dead-end. Which ladders are quicker than the stairs. The eel pens on the east side, the bell tower in the middle, the black mere to the north where nobody’s going yet because the water there doesn’t move. At fifty-two minutes, I open my menu to check the map scale and see the logout option.

It’s grey.

I tap it. Nothing. I tap it again, because I’m a person and that’s what people do.

[Logout unavailable.]

Somebody screams in the village square. Then a lot of somebodies, and the screaming turns into a roar, two thousand voices all trying the same button. I run toward the noise, because that’s where the information will be.

The square is a floating platform of tarred boards crammed shoulder to shoulder. A man is on his knees, jabbing at the air. A girl is crying with her whole body. Somebody has started a rumour that it’s a server fault, and somebody else is already shouting that it isn’t.

Then the sky goes silver.

Words unspool across the clouds, letters as tall as houses, and a voice speaks them inside my skull. Calm and polite.

[Good evening, players. Logout has been disabled. The only exit from ASCENT is the defeat of the Hollow King on Floor 10. When the Hollow King falls, every player will be logged out. Death in ASCENT will trigger the shutdown of the player’s life support. The launch prize of $1,000,000 still stands. Thank you for playing.]

The silver fades. The rain carries on.

For about three seconds, nobody makes a sound. Then the square tears itself apart.

I stay very still and do the maths, because maths doesn’t panic. Forty thousand players. Ten floors. One door at the top. Time runs ten to one in here; one real day is ten game days. Pods are rated for about a month before a body starts to fail, so call it three hundred days in here, give or take, to climb ten floors and kill a king nobody has seen.

Theo’s pod ran hot in every fitting test. His body fights the machines. Give or take does a lot of work in that context.

I pull up the timer overlay I set up before launch, the one I use for every run, and pin it to the top corner of my vision. Small white numbers. Hours, minutes, seconds. I zero it.

00:00:00.

Okay. Plan. If Theo's on this floor, I can hunt for him for days and miss him by a street. If I climb, he’ll climb too, because he’s Theo. The way to find him is the way up.

The way up is defeating the Mire Warden.

Nothing moves on the black mere, and the stillness is wrong. Even the rain seems to fall slower over it. I lie flat on the roof of a gutted stilt house at the water’s edge, cheek on wet thatch, and watch.

The Mire Warden is a heap of reeds and drowned timber the size of a bus, half-sunk in the middle of the mere, with an old ship’s lantern burning inside its chest like a heart. It hasn’t noticed me.

Good. I’m not here to fight it.

I’m here to learn its pattern, write down every swing, and come back when I can win.

I watched the press demo eleven times. Three sweeps, a slam, a pause where it drags itself forward. One health bar. Sloppy design, honestly. I’ve already found two places to stand where the slam can’t reach.

Rain drips off the eaves beside my face. I count the drops to keep my breathing level.

00:58:14.

Somebody walks into the mere.

He doesn’t creep. He wades straight in up to his knees, tall and dressed in black that’s gone thin and shiny at the seams, dragging a greatsword so dark it eats the lantern light. The Warden turns. Water pours off it in sheets.

It sweeps. He isn’t there. It sweeps again and he’s inside its reach, cutting, and every cut pulls a thread of red light out of the monster and into the black blade. The Warden’s health bar drops in chunks. It slams. He’s already on the far side of it, already swinging.

Thirty-one seconds. I count them. The health bar hits empty.

I sit up, because it’s over.

The stranger doesn’t relax. He wades sideways, four exact steps, to a rotted post sticking out of the water, and plants his feet beside it. Then he waits, sword low, his back to the corpse.

The Warden’s lantern goes out.

Every lantern in the village goes out with it. The whole Drowned Village drops into black, and the water of the mere starts to rise, and something underneath the reeds tears the dead Warden open from the inside.

A hundred little lights blink on along its body like eyes. A second health bar slams into place above it, completely full.

There was no second health bar in the demo.

It comes up out of the water and lunges at the place he was standing a second ago, and he’s already turning. The black sword goes in under the row of lights, right where the thing’s head joins its body. Once. Twice. He drags it down.

The second bar empties.

[Mire Warden defeated by: Ash.]

The lanterns flicker back to life one by one, all across the village, and somewhere behind me a crowd starts cheering without knowing why.

He knew. Before the lights went out, he walked to that post. He knew where it would surface, and he stood with his back to it, because he knew it couldn’t reach him there.

The stranger pulls his sword free and lets the pale thing sink. Then he turns, slowly, and looks up through the rain, straight at my rooftop. At me. As if he’s known I was there since the second I lay down.

His banner hangs above his head in the lantern light. A row of hearts with a thin red flicker running through it like a crack in glass. Ash.

Where his level should be, there’s nothing at all.

He holds my gaze for one long second. Then he turns his back on me and walks away across the black water without a word.