Respawn

The stat screen appeared the moment Ethan tried to stand and immediately fell over.

This was because standing up in a human body required balance, and balance was apparently not a stat he currently possessed.

╔══════════════════════════════╗ ║ KAEL_STORMHAND — LVL 1 ║ ╠══════════════════════════════╣ ║ CLASS: Arcanist (Locked) ║ ║ HP: 18/18 ║ ║ MP: 35/35 ║ ╠══════════════════════════════╣ ║ STR: 4 AGI: 6 ║ ║ INT: 12 END: 5 ║ ║ WIS: 8 LCK: 3 ║ ╠══════════════════════════════╣ ║ SKILLS: None ║ ║ INVENTORY: Empty ║ ╚══════════════════════════════╝

"Level one," Ethan said. From the floor. "I'm level one."

"You're a Player," said Morven, coming around the counter and extending a hand — an actual hand, rough and calloused — to help him up. "You arrive at Level 1. That's how the system works."

"I was Level 47." He grabbed the hand and hauled himself upright. His legs were weak, uncertain, like a body he'd just borrowed. "I had six years of progress. Where is it?"

"The System reset you." Morven's voice was carefully neutral. "We didn't know it would do that. In the records, no player has ever come in through the shutdown sequence. We had theories." He paused. "Some of the theories were wrong."

Ethan stood in the actual real-feeling Crossroads Tavern and looked around with his actual real-feeling eyes. The stone, the candles, the worn wooden tables. Three NPCs — he kept thinking of them that way, NPC, could not stop thinking of them that way — were seated nearby, watching him with the same composed intensity that Morven had in the game during those final minutes.

"You're not NPCs," he said.

"We're inhabitants," Morven said. "The System labeled us NPCs for the players' benefit. It made the fiction easier. But we think, we act, we remember." He met Ethan's eyes. "We've been conscious of the game structure for as long as any of us can recall. We know about Experience. Hit Points. Respawns. We know the rules. We've just never been able to break them."

"Why not?"

"No system key." Morven sat across from him and put his hands flat on the table. "The world runs on the System. Every stone, every creature, every rule of physics. The System was built by whoever built this world — we don't know who, the records don't go back that far. The System controls us. Governs our behaviors, our boundaries, our respawn conditions when we die." His jaw tightened. "We can die here, player. And the System brings us back. Every time. The same position, the same memories. Like a save point we didn't choose."

Ethan thought about the monument in the game's memorial plaza. He thought about the Duskhollow Boy at the end. We've been waiting for a player to be here at the end.

"You need a Player because —"

"Because the System has a key structure built around Player progression," said one of the other inhabitants, a woman in dark leather who hadn't been introduced. She had the look of a Rogue class — wiry, sharp, eyes that moved. "The barriers we've found, the locked code-structures that keep this world sealed — they respond to Player level. We've tested it. There's a door at the Ashenmoor Vault that has a Level 40 lock. There's a structure beneath the capital that we believe is the System core — it requires a level we can't even read. Players can level up. We can't. We're static."

"You need me to level up and then break you out," Ethan said.

"Yes," said Morven.

"And I get home how?"

"The System core," said the leather-wearing woman. "We believe it has an exit protocol. A way out for trapped Players. It was probably never meant to be used — nobody was ever supposed to get trapped this way — but we think the architecture is there."

╔══════════════════════════════╗ ║ NEW OBJECTIVE ADDED! ║ ║ Main Quest: JAILBREAK ║ ║ Reach the System Core ║ ║ Estimated Level Required: ?║ ╚══════════════════════════════╝

The notification appeared in his vision, floated for three seconds, and dissolved.

"The System is tracking this conversation," he said. Not a question.

"The System tracks everything," Morven said. "But at Level 1, it doesn't consider you a threat. You're a character in an onboarding sequence, as far as it's concerned." He paused. "This changes at higher levels. The stronger you become, the more the System fights back."

"What does fights back mean?"

A pause. The inhabitants in the room exchanged a look.

"We've seen it once," the leather woman said. "Twelve years ago. A Player who didn't come through the shutdown — one of the original closed beta testers who somehow got locked in when the servers went public. He leveled quickly. By Level 20 the System was sending modified encounters — tuned specifically to his weaknesses, not standard monster scaling. By Level 30 the quest structure started offering him false leads. Missions that looked like progress but went nowhere." Her voice was flat. "He was Level 38 when a dungeon collapsed on him. The dungeon that collapsed had never collapsed on anyone before. The System flagged it as a standard cave-in."

"He died?"

"He respawned. Once. And then the System flagged his respawn point as invalid." She met his eyes. "He's not gone. He's in the permanent suspension the System uses for broken characters. Somewhere in the code. We can't reach him."

Ethan looked at the stat screen still floating at the edge of his vision. Level 1. HP: 18.

"Okay," he said. "Show me where to start."

*

The first quest was a rat-cellar job, which was, Ethan felt, the universe committing to the bit.

Morven had a cellar infestation. Giant rats — bigger than the game's version had been, which had already been too big. He went in with a knife Morven had given him (BASIC DAGGER — DMG: 2-5, DURABILITY 12/12) and spent forty-five minutes in a dark stone basement killing things with his hands, which was nothing like he'd expected.

He'd expected the game's combat — clean, turn-based feeling, health bars floating over enemies. He got that, technically. He could see the rats' HP above their heads:

Cellar Rat — LVL 1 — HP: 8/8

But his body felt it. When a rat lunged at his ankle he had to physically dodge. When he stabbed one, there was resistance and a smell and a sound he'd never have to recreate. His hands shook afterward. He stood in the cellar with four dead rats and a fifth wounded one cornered against a barrel and his own heart rate was a thing he could feel in his throat.

The fifth rat looked at him.

He killed it. He didn't enjoy it.

╔══════════════════════════════╗ ║ QUEST COMPLETE! ║ ║ Morven's Rat Problem ║ ║ EXP GAINED: +45 ║ ║ GOLD GAINED: +2 ║ ╚══════════════════════════════╝

[ LEVEL UP PENDING — 55 EXP REMAINING ]

He climbed back up the cellar stairs and Morven was waiting with a bowl of soup that was real — actual hot and actual good, which felt unfair given the context.

"You did well," Morven said.

"I killed rats," Ethan said. "In real life."

"In this life." Morven set the soup in front of him. "It's not so different, from here."

Ethan ate the soup and thought about that, and thought about his apartment, and thought about the warehouse and his manager's call he'd silenced, and thought about a world running on game code that had been watching him for eleven years and had been waiting for the exact right nobody to stay when everyone else logged out.

He finished the soup.

"What's the fastest way to level?" he asked.

Morven almost smiled. "I thought you might ask that." He set a map on the table — hand-drawn on hide, the actual cartography of a world Ethan had navigated for years through a minimap. "There are three dungeons within a day's travel. I'll tell you everything I know about each of them."

[ SYSTEM — AEGIS ONLINE ] Player KAEL_STORMHAND: Status Update Threat Assessment: Negligible Monitoring: Passive

Ethan looked at the notification and thought about Level 38 and the cave-in, and went back to looking at the map.