Astra squinted, then swatted her ear as the soft sounds of the room suddenly became unbearably loud for a moment. True to her word, the acolyte had brought a simple meal and clothes. She had intended to ignore the meal, but her stomach had rumbled upon smelling it. Was this a new feature to the game?

The food itself was plain, but it filled her, and afterward, Astra wandered the apartment once over, finding a well-appointed bathroom, bedroom, and office, all with views of a lush garden that looked out over the ocean.

After, she’d returned to the sitting room and sprawled on the couch, fingers laced on her belly as she stared at the ceiling.

The door opened. Twisting, Astra looked back to see Xander entering, looking... impassive and cold. “Did you have fun?” she asked sarcastically.

Xander came to stand next to her head and stared down at her. “I wish to know more about your obligations,” he said and stepped back to sit in the chair opposite.

She stared at him, watching as his hands gripped the arms of his chair, the only sign that something was going on in his head. He’d always had these little habits he did, but now that she knew he wasn’t just an AI, it was disconcerting. When she’d picked him, she’d only done so because he was pretty to look at since she knew she’d be hauling his butt around all creation for a very long time. Then again, maybe he’d always been like this, and she hadn’t noticed? However, His Iceness was annoying.

“Give me my Menu,” she said, holding her hand towards him.

“I will not,” Xander said. He pulled something else out of his pocket and placed it into her waiting hand—a vial of Holy Water.

Astra brought it closer but kept her eyes on him. The distrust was palpable. Sitting up, she folded her legs in a cross and set the bottle on the coffee table between them. “You’re acting very weird,” she said.

“Everything you do is strange,” Xander said. “But I believe I begin to understand.”

“Really?” Astra asked coyly, tipping her head. “How about you run it by me?”

Silence fell between them, and she watched Xander struggle to find the questions he wanted to ask first. “When you Log Out, you go somewhere else. Where is that?”

She shrugged. “The real world. My boring life.” She kept a close eye on him, though. What would happen if she told him he was an NPC in a game?

“This existence,” he gestured at her, “Is not your natural state.”

“Nope. It’s an avatar I control when I come here.”

“Log Out allows you to close your connection to this avatar,” Xander said.

He smelled stressed, she realized, afraid... Terrified.

“Our world is a playground for your kind,” Xander concluded.

Folding her ears down, Astra was not sure she liked how this conversation was going. “Well... yeah?”

“Then the countless lives that have been taken. The battles between Immortals... there was no point except wanton destruction.”

“Probably,” Astra admitted. “I just wanted to see the story,” she defended. “Those other Players were just jerks.”

“The... story...” Xander choked. He stood abruptly and left the room. She watched the office door close and frowned in thought.

She sat in silence, staring at the door.

Xander was acting like he was alive... aware. This was a massive update to the game if they’d suddenly given all the NPCs voices and names like this. Surely, they hadn’t named every last person in Ashguard? The weirder option was that Ashguard was a world of its own that Earth had accidentally interacted with through VR. That was downright laughable. An update didn’t explain why she couldn’t log out, though.

Astra looked at the Holy Water on the coffee table. Most of the decor in this apartment was products of her Crafting. Surely, she wasn’t so great a Player that the game admin had decided to make her Porter into a central figure in the plot. Players like Lancelot Valor or Patricia Penelope would’ve been better candidates. They’d impacted the world of Ashguard, either policing Player behavior where the game’s controls couldn’t—like Lancelot—or by protecting the NPCs from Player abuses the way Patricia had. And there were other, higher-level Healers out there, she was sure. She’d just never really heard of many since Healer Class wasn’t picked often due to lack of DPS capabilities.

Being trapped in a video game was something that only happened in stories.

However, the possibility that she was stuck worried her some. If she was stuck, what had happened to her body? Would she be forcibly disconnected when someone took the visor off her face? Would anyone even go looking for her before she started to rot? It wasn’t like she had friends who checked up on her. The QuickQ might call her if she didn’t show up for a shift, but that was probably the extent to which they’d look for her.

She didn’t like the idea of just starving to death while her mind was stuck in a VR world because while death in Ashguard wasn’t permanent for her, death on Earth certainly was. She needed to log out.

To do so, she would need Xander’s cooperation.

Picking up the vial of Holy Water, she took it with her as she followed him to the office. Xander stood with his back to the door, propped by his palms on his desk, head hung. “Then what was I?” he asked. “You chose to keep me around, yet you ignored my presence.” His fingers curled on the desk, dragging his nails across the wood.

Astra approached cautiously, setting the bottle down where he could see that she’d not used it. “You were my Porter,” she said honestly. “Xan... something strange has happened. I’m... more connected than I’ve ever felt while playing. Something has changed, and maybe not for the better. The way I’m connected to this world leaves my real body just... laying there. If I don’t go back to it, there’s a possibility I’ll die for real here. And I understand that Players weren’t the greatest influence on this world, if... if, in fact, this place is actually a real place and not a game like we all thought.”

Xander took a deep breath, held it, then let it out. “Astra Diane, you are a monster,” he told her. “Your ilk are all a blight upon this world. We have had relative peace for five hundred years, but if you are here, would that not mean that there are more?” He pushed off the desk and turned to look down at her. “For five hundred years, I have endeavored to keep the peace in this city, stabilize the government, give hope to the people that the days of senseless slaughter were over... and I am tired. But for you to brazenly admit that all this has been a game... I am unsure I can go on.”

Astra rubbed her eye with her hand, heaving a sigh. “Okay. Yeah. It’s a lot to take in,” she admitted. “But was I really that bad?”

“Anytime you fought monsters, you never seemed to give much thought to the collateral damage you caused. I appreciate that you didn’t command me to lure the monster away, but you were very slow about defeating them, and the casualties were always more than I could handle by myself. You Resurrected people after the fact but allowing them to die in the first place was cruel.”

Cringing, Astra looked away. “Okay, that’s... pretty bad.” She didn’t even remember that particular quest, which made it all the worse.

Letting her breath out, she said, “I can’t change the past, but I can change how I act in the future. That’s all I can promise.”

“If you are able to Log Out, will you leave for good?” Xander asked.

“If there are other Players, me logging out and staying out isn’t going to change anything,” Astra pointed out, then looked around. “I’d miss getting to see you. And Aesir is beautiful when it’s not on fire... and I was exploring the Southlands...” She curled her fingers into her palms. “I’m still not sure I even believe that this is more than a game.”

Shifting uncomfortably, Astra found the strength to meet his icy gaze. “Let me check my Menu?”

“Log Out would be an option in it, correct?” Xander asked. “It is not there.”

Astra felt cold. He had looked at her Menu. It wasn’t like she had any personal information there, but it felt weird knowing that someone else had looked through something only she had ever been able to touch. All her Quest Logs, her stats, the horrible mess in her Inventory... “You messed with the audio,” she said, realizing. “At least that works still. Did you see Pain Tolerance options?”

“Yes,” Xander said.

“That’s good.”

“I could not change the percentage,” he said.

“That’s not good.”

“You have a new Skill,” Xander said.

“Elemental Mastery,” Astra agreed. “Just got it. I’ll share once I get it leveled up enough. Did you want the other ones?”

“Why are they locked at one hundred?”

“They’re Skills I bought from other Players,” Astra said. “If I made a Scroll for those Skills and gave them to you, you’d only be able to level them to one hundred as well. Skills I get from the guild or a Skill Master have no cap.”

Xander nodded slightly. He seemed to have calmed down.

But the problem still hung between them: Was it or was it not a game?

* * *

She left the room, went back to the settee, and dropped onto it. After a moment, she slid sideways and sighed. She had left the Holy Water on his desk. Her Death Penalty would wear off in a few more hours anyway, but Xander appreciated the gesture. She had come to speak with him completely disarmed, despite how uncomfortable the conversation had been for them both.

Xander closed the door. He needed to think.

Her admissions explained a lot about how the Immortals had acted. They didn’t see the world of Ashguard as a real place. They entered and exited it at their convenience and obviously did not believe that the people living there, even their closest companions, were real people.

Moving to his chair, Xander sat and leaned his elbows on the desk, head bowed.

Although that didn’t explain some of her behavior towards him during those seven-plus years he’d followed her. He knew she didn’t need sleep, but sometimes he would wake up to find her curled against him. Back then... he’d been convinced that she felt miserably alone, and even though they couldn’t communicate verbally, the warmth of an embrace transcended any language barrier. He’d been glad to hold her then, especially in the small cold hours of the night.

He’d been more than glad if he was being honest with himself. A creature that couldn’t die had turned to him when she felt alone and vulnerable. Xander had never felt more powerful than in those moments, and he’d spent years searching for that euphoria after she’d died. Now that she was back... did he really want her to go? Now that the constant ache of her death had been soothed, he finally felt like he could think clearly.

What difference would it make if she did leave and never came back? Others—the less reasonable Immortals—would likely take the information that this world was alive and increase their destruction. The only way to safeguard the world would be to get rid of the Immortals entirely and prevent them from ever returning. That was certainly a tall order, considering they couldn’t be killed permanently.

Reaching over, he pulled the bottle of Holy Water closer, rolling it along its edge.

The things the Immortals could achieve, though... They could craft high-quality items in seconds that exceeded the efforts of even the most renowned master craftsman. Astra Diane’s Crafting Skills alone would destroy the market. Her other Skills were high, but she wasn’t that good compared to his. In fact, he’d surpassed her levels some time ago in the Skills she’d shared with him. The only thing she was still better at than him was Raise Undead.

Hells, the amount of Fen she had stashed would crash the economy! He had handled selling items for her in the past, and honestly, he’d been astonished at the prices she’d set. The only saving grace was that the things he sold went to other Immortals who could afford to drop two hundred thousand Fen on a couch.

More proof that Immortals don’t care about the actual value of anything.

He would give the Menu back to her. There was little point in keeping it, Xander decided. He needed her to work with him to find a way to save Ashguard from the Immortals. It was bad enough the Cursed Ones, those who had once walked beside the Immortals as glorified pack mules, were capable of so much destruction. If he could rid the world of his kind as well, Xander had to admit he would gladly do so.

Standing, he pocketed the Holy Water and headed back into the sitting room only to stop when he found Astra Diane asleep on the couch.

He had dragged himself after her for years despite how utterly exhausted he was, all because an Immortal’s energy knew no bounds. She could jog for days without rest, and he wasn’t sure what prompted her to stop and tell him to make camp, but he was grateful for it. His only consolation was that she would disappear and leave him for weeks at a time before reappearing and continuing the slog. Admittedly, the best part about traveling with her was that she made the best food. He absolutely missed her cooking.

Astra Diane snorted and kicked her foot.

She did not sleep gracefully, that was for certain.