30. Vesper
VESPER
“Stryker,” I whisper, staring at him with wide eyes. We’d left him in the Red Bloom Court, but he’s caught up to us now, and he doesn’t look too pleased with us.
“You remember me,” he says brightly, his eyes crinkling.
“How could I not?” I ask, my fingers tightening around the Fang still in my hand. “You made quite an impression.”
“Did I?” he laughs. He takes a few deliberate steps closer. “I waited for you, you know?” he says. His eyes flick to Locke. “Both of you.”
“We . . . had an emergency,” I lie. “We had to leave quickly. I didn’t have time to let you know.”
He hums under his breath. “What an interesting lie you weave, Beastie,” he murmurs.
“Who says I’m lying?”
He grins, revealing sharp teeth, fangs that make me want to take a step back. “You asked me what my Glitch was before,” he murmurs, strolling closer.
“Run,” Cipher growls. “Do not stay here.”
But I can’t run. There’s only one way out of this section of the map and no cover. We’re going to have to disable him to get away from this alive.
“Feeling like sharing now?” I ask, tilting my head at him, playing the part. Locke is tense behind me. I can feel it. I can only hope he follows my lead.
“Perhaps,” Stryker says, coming to a stop right in front of me. His eyes trace my face, but it doesn’t feel like a caress. It feels more like he’s staking a claim.
My knuckles are white on my Fang. “You should let us go.”
His expression softens. “Should I?”
“You’re a higher Tier than us. We don’t pose much of a threat,” I point out. “Which makes us hardly a challenge. And you seem like you enjoy a challenge.”
His warm chuckle washes over me. “I do indeed, Beastie.”
Maybe we can get out of this without fighting. Maybe I can convince him to turn away. “So, you’ll let us go?”
He flashes those sharp teeth again. “I’m a Tier Five, Beastie. Do you know what that means?” I shake my head. “It means I’m the highest Tier you can be. Why do you think someone like me would be here in the Harrow, in the sections where players enter?”
I ready my blade. “Because you like helping them?”
He laughs again and reaches up a hand to touch my face. “No, Beastie,” he purrs. “Because I like to feed.”
The overwhelming depth of his power slams into me so suddenly, my knees buckle. His arms are around me, catching me before I can hit the ice. My body grows weak for two seconds and then disperses, leaving me breathless and my chest tight.
“Just a sip,” Stryker says. “I have plans for you, Beastie.” His eyes trail up to where Locke stands, his eyes wide, his hammer raised. “I cannot say the same for your friend.”
Cipher roars in my ears. I can’t hear the words he roars, but Stryker winces as if he can hear them, too.
“How interesting,” Stryker purrs, but it’s all the distraction I need.
I bring my Fang up, jamming it into his sternum and twisting. His eyes widen at the sudden burst of pain in his chest and he looks down at the sight of my blade buried there.
Immediately, I feel his power again and I shove away from him.
“Leech!” Svetlana screams. “He is a Leech! Run!”
I don’t ask what she means. The moment she says the word, I’m reminded of the menus I’d flipped through while picking my own Glitch.
I don’t remember much, but I do remember the mention of power.
Stryker has sipped from me, stealing just a bit of my life force, and being a Tier Five, he could take it all.
He could kill us without any effort at all.
I scramble away, rushing toward Locke and grabbing his arm. “Time to go!” I shout.
I risk a glance over my shoulder. Stryker is on his knees, his arms wrapped around his middle to staunch the blood flow, but his eyes are on me. He bares those sharp teeth as the penguins still alive around him start to drop and shrivel.
“Oh, fuck!” Locke shouts, seeing it happening the same time I do.
We run as fast as our legs can carry us. We’re wearing heavy gear against the cold, and I feel like I run far too slowly through the snow. Every part of me knows that we have to get away from this man before he heals. If Stryker gets his hands on us, we won’t live to the next day.
“The safehouse?” Locke asks, nodding in the direction of it.
“No,” I say, pointing toward the opening of the crater in front of us. “We’ll be safe only inside. He’ll just wait for us to leave and we’ll be trapped.”
“Get to the sea,” Cipher says. “Turn north once you break through the caldera. He will not follow you into the sea.”
I probably shouldn’t trust the system either, but he’s saved my ass a handful of times already. He clearly doesn’t want me to die. We have that in common.
“Odds?” I pant as I run, my arms pumping at my side. I keep my Fang in my hand just in case I need to use it.
“Not now,” Cipher says.
I know they’re bad. Cipher always tells me the odds. Him refusing to speak them right now means they’re bad enough he thinks it will impact my performance.
I keep looking back over my shoulder for Stryker, but I don’t see him. He’ll have to heal before he can come after us, but I don’t pretend it’ll take him that long. Tier Five’s are Ascendants, which means the bastard is from Luxe. Only the most powerful make it to Luxe.
“Faster,” Svetlana orders. “We must go faster.”
“I’m . . . running . . . as fast . . . as I .
. . can,” I wheeze as we reach the caldera opening and turn north immediately, heading back to the water expanse we passed on the way to the Broken Caldera.
To our left, bright orange trails run from the edges of the caldera, steam rising from them.
The bright orange breaks through the white snow, stone showing so that the orange and the white never touch.
“Magma is hot,” Svetlana says. “Do not touch it.”
I wasn’t going to, but some part of me contemplated it out of sheer curiosity.
Perhaps that’s why Svetlana warns me away from it.
She’s supposed to be a part of me after all, so she’d hear all my intrusive thoughts.
Which means she’s also hearing all about my attraction to the man we’re currently running from.
“Sometimes, us women make bad decisions about the men we’d like to fuck,” Svetlana responds. “Do not be ashamed, Umnitsa. I once fucked the Russian General who killed my mother. Of course, I beheaded him after. Perhaps you can do the same to the Leech one day.”
But I hear her warning. I’m not strong enough for that yet. Keep running.
The water expanse comes into view and we push ourselves harder. It’s difficult to run in the snow, my boots collapsing into it and making it harder to drag each step forward. My legs begin to burn as badly as my chest, but I still move. Even as we slow, I still push forward.
The small wooden platform comes into view before us and we aim for it.
“Get in the boat,” Cipher orders.
There are two small floating raft-like things at the platform, one larger than the other though not by enough to actually matter.
I assume that is the “boat” Cipher is talking about.
Both boats are small, barely big enough for both Locke and I, but one of them is indeed a little larger and has some sort of large mechanical contraption on the back of it. The other just has paddles in it.
“That’s mine!” someone shouts from our left and I whip my head around. There, I spy someone familiar enough to make me stumble, though we’ve never officially met.
The player from the television. The father. The one who’d been standing in line before Dox and me.
“There are two boats,” Locke hisses at him through his panting, aiming for the larger boat despite the man’s shout.
NEW ZONE UNLOCKED: Welcome to the Frostbit Sea
We reach the wooden platform at the same time, each of us aiming our weapons at each other.
My Fang is covered in frozen blood. Locke’s hammer is caked up with frozen gore.
But the man pulls out something I’ve never seen before.
It’s metal and shiny black, nothing but a handle and a weird, square shaped top with a hole on the end.
“What the fuck is that thing?” Locke asks, staring at the metal weapon the man holds.
“A pistol,” the man says, pointing it toward us.
“Is that supposed to scare us?” Locke goads him. “We don’t know what it is.”
The man grins threateningly and points the gun out to the water.
He squeezes it and a load bang rips through the air around us.
I duck and cover my ears, my eyes wide at the flash from the end of his weapon and the answering splash as the projectile hits the water.
My ears ring with the sound as it echoes across the open water.
“Does it scare you now?” the man snarls.
Locke slowly puts his hands in the air. “Hey, man. We’re not trying to start trouble. But there’s someone dangerous coming this way.” He looks at the boats. “We can share the boat. We’re friendly. I’m Locke. This is Vesper.”
Svetlana doesn’t say anything. She just watches the interaction carefully.
The man doesn’t relax. If anything, he grows more tense. “And I’m Nate. So what? I don’t need to know your names to kill you.”
I wince. “You can have the boat,” I say, looking over my shoulder. In the distance, I can see a form appear from the broken caldera. We have maybe a few minutes at best. “Just take it.”
“I am,” he growls, keeping the weapon pointed at us as he backs towards the wooden platform. “Don’t move.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Locke grumbles, looking at me worriedly.
As Nate backs up to the platform, I get flashes of memory of his “highlights.” The first time I’d seen him, he was standing in line with his wife and sick baby.
The second time I’d seen him, he’d been leaving his wife and child in this frozen nightmare, leaving her to grieve over their child, to freeze in a forever statue of a mother’s love.
She’d been fighting to give her baby a better life, and when that baby couldn’t handle the Harrow Gate, she’d given into her grief and died there with her baby.
This man left them there. He hadn’t looked back.
The next memory I have of him is watching him drag an NPC into a building, watching him assault her, watching her cry out lines that didn’t make sense for the situation, like she couldn’t deviate from the script even as she was being brutally raped.
This man doesn’t deserve to survive the Harrow.
“Humanity is brutal,” Cipher says.
“It doesn’t have to be,” I answer.
Nate looks at me with aggression. “Shut up, bitch.”
“Yes,” Cipher answers. “It does. If you are not brutal, someone else will be. It is up to you to decide which brutality survives.”
Nate hops into the larger boat and fiddles with the contraption on the back.
His fingers dance over it, searching, until he finds a handle and he pulls.
The contraption roars to life loudly and I realize it’s some sort of propulsion system.
I watch as he slowly starts to ease away from the platform.
He puts his weapon away to focus on steering only once he’s far enough away from the platform that we can’t leap onto it after him.
“Let’s go,” Locke growls, rushing onto the wooden platform and jumping into the much smaller boat. There’s going to be barely any room for the two of us. Our legs are going to have to overlap, but we situate ourselves in it and each pick up a paddle.
“I suggest you paddle fast,” Svetlana says. “The Leech is coming.”
I look over my shoulder as we push away from the platform and float into the water. We start to paddle when I get a good look at Stryker running closer. We don’t have long. We’d wasted precious minutes while Nate aimed his projectile stick at us.
“Faster!” I say. We’re still too close to the platform. He could leap and make it onto our boat. We have no idea of knowing how high his agility stat is, but considering how fast he’s running, it’s gotta be high. “Go! Go! Go!”
We paddle with all our might, pushing away from the shoreline, desperate to put distance between our boat and the Leech chasing us.
I slam the paddle into the water and push it backwards, the icy water splashing on my gloves and immediately making my fingers start to chill.
I don’t worry about it. If we don’t put enough distance between us, we’re as good as dead anyways.
Stryker slides onto the wooden platform and looks like he’s about to launch himself off it, but he pauses, his legs bent, his sharp teeth bared, and freezes.
I’m holding my breath as we still violently paddle, my eyes on his.
Slowly, achingly slow, he straightens and tucks his hands into his pockets.
He doesn’t enter the sea, and there are no more boats.
I don’t know how long it’ll take for more to respawn, but we likely have at least an hour.
Everything seems to take an hour. We’re safe. For now.
As we paddle our way out into the Frostbit Sea, Stryker stands on that platform, grins . . .
. . . and blows me a fucking kiss.