Legacy to Zero

43: There Is Another Way

Lars

As I fired up An End Alight, I let out a sigh of relief. The game's loading screen spun in circles in time with the chiming music coming through my headphones, showing a marble castle surrounded by spears of shadow and light, the location where the game had started.

My controller sat on my desk while I selected to continue my multiplayer mission. Taylor's player icon pinged at the bottom of my screen telling me she'd started playing too. Dex's followed her.

When I dropped in, I remembered what we were doing—we'd stopped halfway through a boss to grind our levels some more, and now we were doing missions.

"Hey," Taylor said as soon as my voice chat started up. "Been a while!"

"I know, I know." I laughed. After all, I'd been away so long that she'd levelled her character beyond mine.

She dropped some armour for me. It slotted into my inventory, and I investigated. She couldn't use it as it was for the wrong class; it increased my accuracy by a decent number more than what I was wearing currently. "Got this loot for you. It also just looks cool."

"Oh, sweet. For the boss?"

"Yeah! I'm stacking so, so many consumables." She clacked against the keyboard to make her avatar shoot me a peace sign. "I'm getting us through this thing single-handedly, if I have to."

I smiled. The armour shone bright purple on my character. "That's probably what's going to happen." And by probably, I mean definitely.

She led me around the area, showing me through some of the quests I could complete myself. We trekked through the rolling fields to reunite two NPCs, which meant fighting off two spirits. It took some arrow-firing before I collected the loot.

Her character hopped along the field until her muffed voice broke away for a second, presumably to greet Dex, who I could faintly hear in the background. "Aww, thank you for the tea," she said as his character bubbled into view beside us.

Now that we were all ready, Taylor paraded us to the next quest—collecting items for a village NPC who would trade them for better upgrades. When we were done, she said, "Let's stop at the tavern there. Mostly so I can chug my tea."

Dex snorted. "Fair enough. I should probably grab a snack."

"Did you just get back from work?" I asked.

"I had a couple of minutes." He thought about it for a moment. "I'm actually not done for the day. Got another job later."

My finger hung over the stick of my controller. "Dude. Get food. Jeez."

With the shuffle of movement, he departed, leaving his idle character for me to push to the tavern. At the beginning of the game, it had been the source of most of our quests, and now it transformed into a space for our characters to replenish our health bars.

Taylor sprinted to a tiny table near the hearth, which crackled in my headphones as I drew closer. We sat—which was more like a crouch—while she sipped her tea. She asked how I was doing, and how my time at Prismatrix was going, although the name became prosecutrix for her.

My brows knitted together. "Is that like how aviatrix is a female pilot? A female prosecutor?"

"I have no idea," she said. "It's funny, though, because when I looked it up, that was the only result I got. I think that's why it's stuck in my head."