Hollow Twilight - A LitRPG Novel

Chapter 11

Reid's mind was buzzing. It was always buzzing now. The night before they had logged out of the game not long after Maple destroyed a car. They hadn't even realized how much time seemed to pass. But when Reid came back, it felt like almost no time at all. He was beginning to suspect time was different in the other dimension. And if that were true, that meant infinite hours to possibly play and explore without even staying up late.

Reid stopped in his tracks. He squeezed his eyes tight and then forced them open, pulling at his eyelids with his fingers. Cold air rushed in to meet his fragile cornea. For a brief moment, a concern that you could freeze whatever it was that sat on top of your eye. It felt like a liquid, could it freeze? Could you have an eye made of ice?

Reid squeezed shut again and then pulled his eyes open. His mind settled. He was trying to get it to focus back in on his real problems, on the day he was about to get through. Yes, he didn't have a great plan about what he was going to do after high school but he could not afford to completely fail all his classes.

He had to get his mind together.

There had to be a way to have stumbled into the greatest discovery, possibly of all time, and yet resume your day to day work like nothing happened. Surely there were people out there doing stupid things and still showing up to work the next day. How did teachers do it?

Then again, did teachers party? Maybe Ms. Blanchet, she was pretty young. Like she probably went to bars or something. There was probably a day she was hungover and she still showed up for classes. But when you were hungover, was that the same as being super excited?

This was why they got Christmas vacation for so long when they were kids. There was no way Reid could've focused when he was seven, thinking about what he might get for presents the next morning. Impossible.

"Are you alright?"

Reid gagged and spun around to face Reily behind him. She seemed to be popping up more and more often. Though, Reid reminded himself, trying not to get overly excited, she did just walk this way to school. This was normal. She had asked to do exactly this, to walk and talk and he would tell her about the game and what was going on and that would be it.

"What? Yes?" Reid blinked a few times as he stammered through his answers. "Why?"

"You've just been standing here for like a minute. I thought, like, I don't know, you forgot something?"

"Oh no I..." Reid zoomed through his brain, faster than he ever had gone before.

You what? Got lost in your thoughts? Were trying to stop thinking like some sort of freak? Were pulling your eyes open to see if you could freeze your corneas? You're a genius. This is going so well.

"Yeah, I thought I forgot something," Reid finished.

"No, yes you forgot something?" Reily raised an eyebrow.

"Yes?"

"You have a weird way of answering. I thought I was supposed to be the dumb one here, remember?" Reily laughed and playfully pushed at Reid's arm. An electric bolt shot through it into his right eye. He felt a pulsing pain behind his socket, something he couldn't rectify. He did his best to ignore it.

"Maybe our last talk worked, right? Like now you're smart."

"Please," Reily answered, walking past Reid as she resumed the trip into school. He caught up and kept pace with her, his mind picking up on her steps and how they matched with his own. Sync. "We barely even talked. You can't get out of it that easy."

"So we can't just walk in silence?" Reid smiled. What was he doing? How was he doing it? That answer was far too suave, far too confident. This was cool-guy Reid coming through out of nowhere.