Memory Leak

He hit Level 20 in the ruins of the old capital, which the game had called Ashenvale and which turned out, in reality, to be a city that had actually existed, actually fallen, and was still mourned by the inhabitants who'd watched it go.

The ruins stretched for two miles. He ran them for three days straight — Sira at his back, Dag at his flank, Cressida managing his HP like a human fuel tank. The System had started customizing encounters the moment the Layer Two alert went up, and the customization was specific and unpleasant: every dungeon now had archers, because it had identified his poor evasion rating. Every enemy had slightly more HP than the base stat would suggest. Twice, passages that should have been clear had collapsed behind them.

He'd started using Arcane Bolt properly by Level 16 — the INT scaling was high enough by then that he could kill a standard enemy in two casts, and with the Iron Shard Amulet boosting his cast speed, he could maintain distance in most fights. He wasn't good at this. He was efficient at it, which was different.

On the morning of Level 20, he sat on a fallen column in the ruins and ate trail food and opened his journal.

The entries were getting shorter. Not because he was writing less — because there was less to write.

Mother: laugh in restaurants. Does not apologize enough. Has a garden. Something about the garden is important. Cannot retrieve.

High school: attended. Made no lasting friends. This is okay I think. There were some good teachers. Cannot name them.

First time I played Aegis: Tuesday night. I know this because I wrote it before. Do not remember the feeling of it anymore.

Warehouse: I worked there. The hours are irretrievable.

He looked at the journal. He looked at the first page, where he'd written BRENNAN. GET BRENNAN OUT. DON'T FORGET THIS.

Still there. He remembered Brennan. He remembered the goal.

Some things the System couldn't take — or hadn't, yet. The things he actively reinforced, read every day, traced with his finger. Whether that was memory or habit, he wasn't sure the distinction mattered.

Sira sat beside him on the column.

"You don't have to tell me how you are," she said.

"Level 20," he said. "I know what that costs."

He'd told her about the memory mechanic after Level 7. She'd been quiet for a long time and then had said: We didn't know that. We didn't know it worked like that. We thought you would be — intact.

He'd told her it was fine.

It wasn't fine. It was a price he was paying because the math said he had to and because there were 847 players who'd been here once and left and one player who'd come in and gotten stuck, and Ethan was the only one who'd stayed.

The Level 20 notification arrived mid-breakfast.

╔══════════════════════════════╗ ║ LEVEL UP! ║ ║ KAEL_STORMHAND: LVL 19→20 ║ ║ MILESTONE REACHED ║ ║ HP MAX: +15 ║ ║ MP MAX: +20 ║ ║ NEW SKILL UNLOCKED: ║ ║ [ARCANE SURGE] — Passive ║ ║ INT bonus × 1.5 on crits ║ ║ Skill Points: +2 ║ ╚══════════════════════════════╝

The warmth. The wave. And then the reaching.

He found the gap almost immediately.

His apartment. He'd been holding the shape of it — one bedroom, kitchen to the left. Now even the shape was gone. He pressed on the memory and found nothing. Not even the sense of having had it.

He wrote: I had an apartment. I don't know where. Do not forget: you lived somewhere.

Sira was watching him.

"My apartment," he said. "The whole thing."

She put a hand on his arm. He let her.

[ SYSTEM — AEGIS ONLINE ] Player KAEL_STORMHAND: LVL 20 Threat Assessment: HIGH Counter-Protocol: ENGAGED Assigned Predator: — — —

The new notification sat in the corner of his vision for ten seconds and then didn't dissolve. It stayed.

"That's new," he said.

Sira read it. Her expression shifted. "A Predator is —"

The ground shook.

Not an earthquake. Something moving underground, moving toward them, heavy and deliberate. The ruins around them went quiet — the ambient creature sounds, the distant wolf-class enemies, the birds that the world's designers had seeded in the environment to make it feel alive. All of it silent.

From the northern end of the ruins, something emerged.

It was roughly humanoid. Roughly. Bigger than any boss he'd fought. Its design was wrong — like the System had assembled it from enemy parts, taking the worst attributes of each type: the stone-hard plating of the constructs, the speed of the wolf-class, the ranged attack module of the archers, all assembled into something that had no name in any guide he'd ever read.

[ SYSTEM PREDATOR — LVL 40 ] HP: ████████████████████ Special: PLAYER-TARGETED Weakness: Unknown

Level 40. He was Level 20.

"Run," Sira said.

They ran.

The Predator moved faster than anything that size should move — the System had clearly tuned it. It demolished a wall that they ducked behind. It had a ranged attack that he took in the back while sprinting and felt as a spike of cold through his spine.

[ HP: 31/76 ]

Dag got between them and the Predator, taking two hits that would have killed Ethan outright. Cressida was already shouting a heal over her shoulder while running. Sira had gone vertical, up a crumbled facade, leading them onto the rooftops.

They ran for two miles, Sira taking them through passages the Predator couldn't fit through, over rooftops it couldn't reach. It stayed on their trail. It was patient. The System had given it patience.

They made it to the edge of the ruins and the forest beyond, and only then did the Predator stop at the treeline. Not because it couldn't follow. Because the System, apparently, had geographic limits on its enforcement assets. For now.

Ethan sat in the forest and looked at his stats.

╔══════════════════════════════╗ ║ KAEL_STORMHAND — LVL 20 ║ ║ HP: 24/76 MP: 18/95 ║ ║ STATUS: HUNTED ║ ╚══════════════════════════════╝

STATUS: HUNTED. That was new.

He looked at Dag, who had three deep impact wounds that Cressida was working on. He looked at Sira, who was watching the treeline with the focused calm of someone who'd been at war for a long time without calling it that.

He opened the journal. He wrote:

Level 20. The System knows I'm real now. It sent something that doesn't have a name.

I need 30 more levels to reach the Core. I've lost most of the first 30 years of my life.

I don't know what 30 more levels costs. I don't know what I'll have left when I get there.

The thing I'm most afraid of is arriving at Level 50 and not remembering why I came.

He paused. Added:

BRENNAN. GET BRENNAN OUT. DON'T FORGET THIS.

He looked at the name. He pressed his thumb to the ink.

Then he looked at Sira. "We need a route to Veldhaven that avoids open ground."

She was already spreading the map.

"I've had one planned for three years," she said. "I was just waiting for someone to need it."

He stood. His legs were stronger at Level 20 than they'd been at Level 1. His body was becoming the character, filling in, the borrowed frame starting to feel like his own. He couldn't decide if that was a good sign or a bad one.

He closed the journal and put it in his pack, over his heart.

"Then let's move," he said.

The forest was dark and the System's Predator was at the treeline and somewhere beneath a city he'd never seen, there was a door that needed to be opened.

He had thirty levels to go, and a name to remember, and the world was watching.