Gestation by John Gold (love books to read .txt) 📗

Instead of a bowstring, I use a dragon whisker yanked from the succubus’ whip. It looks great: there’s a branch sprouting with leaves, and then a glistening whisker tied up with bows on the ends.

I drag over four victims at a time and feel exhausted, mostly emotionally. There’s a feeling starting to creep up on me: is all this really okay?

The ritual itself goes by quickly, and the victims die even faster. The seal collects the energy from their souls, creating a local rift that leads to the astral from within the item. It’s crazy there. I look around to see ten islands of calm in the same place, making one big island. That’s where the battle plays out.

I shouldn’t have doubted my skills. At one point, a dozen elven arrows smack into me, and my health dips, but I’m back to normal in ten seconds. With this kind of damage resistance, I’m practically a reaper of death. I fight for three hours until there aren’t any elves left to kill. That, however, is when all kinds of different creatures, human and otherwise, start coming after me from the astral itself. They’re all pretty strong, too. They fly, crawl, and hover, some of them even inhabiting other souls. I have to use my full body fusion, my maximum running speed, my destruction spikes, enhanced strikes, and all my vampire spikes. It goes on like that for almost six hours until they retreat and let me go.

As soon as I get back from the astral, I grab the bow and stick it in my inventory. I have less than a minute to hide. I just got a message about my capsule being turned off.

∞ ∞ ∞

Eliza had to go back to the orphanage that day. Anji was a danger to himself and the people around him. Over the past six months, he’d broken more rules than the rest of her wards combined. She’d watched his recordings for three weeks running, ever since the first incident, and he’d spent most of it sitting by the fire or just spending time around his victims where nobody could see him. There was one moment where Anji was torturing his victims, and, the worst part, he just smiled and nodded to everything they said. She’d just seen the recordings from today and was shocked by the changes: Anji had started consciously going out and looking for victims for his rituals. Then, there was a moment of calm before the boy started dragging the bodies over the night before. It was sickening. Hundreds of victims, an enormous, eleven-sided seal drawn in blood, and the poor people pinned to the ground with spikes in their hands and feet. She was too late for the beginning of the ritual and couldn’t stop it once it had started, so her only option was to turn his capsule off. That required Vaalsie’s sign-off, however, and so that’s who she went to see.

The supervisor, once he’d joined the virtual space, started watching the feed from Anji’s capsule. The boy was looking at a large pentagram covered in bodies, and Vaalsie cut loose with a long, varied construction that described Anji’s origin and mental capacity. Leaving him in the virtual space, Eliza had left for the orphanage. She was able to watch what was happening in the game from her aerocar. Just at that moment, Anji headed into the astral, something that was supposed to be impossible for children. The battle was joined. Afterward, a bunch of monsters attacked him, something that hadn’t happened once since the game was launched.

When she got there, the boy was still in Project Chrysalis, still in the astral space. As soon as the battle ended, she forced a shutdown.

Anji crawled out of the capsule and looked at them with tired eyes. He’d spent 57 hours in the game; too much even for an adult. There were kids all around, ready for him to get chewed out. Vaalsie started it off.

“Anji Ganet, in view of your many violations of behavioral etiquette here in the orphanage, you have lost your access to the game reality for two months. Now go, wash up, and talk with Miss Elizabeth.”

The boy did exactly what he was told. Except, he didn’t really listen to any of it, just accepting the fact that he was being punished. He reacted to Elizabeth’s enraged speech the same way. It happened in the cafeteria without being planned out ahead of time, so they had plenty of company. Anji listened in complete indifference as he ate. Then, he went off to get some sleep, not even waiting to hear the end.

∞ ∞ ∞

Bernard was worried. As was his usual custom, he polished his dragon-bone staff, even though it was already polished to a shine. The problem was an open quest, the one he’d given Sagie in Imir. After the ritual, the boy should have been sent to Hell, and his death would have automatically closed the failed quest. But eight months had gone by, and the quest was still open. That meant he was still alive. The worst enemies are the kind who will stop at nothing to kill you, even if everything you’ve done is necessary, immoral and terrible, but necessary. It had worked for everybody else. There were ten new gods in the pantheon, and all of his brethren had been able to get away after completing the ritual. Wanderers don’t leave witnesses.

A millennium and a half had passed since people had found out about other worlds, and the gods who’d wanted to leave that world had found out how to do so from a wanderer. Dying as a god meant being reborn as a human and passing through the world of the gods to the island of freedom. That’s where the portal was.

“The answers to all your questions are on the other side.” Bernard still remembered what Idzumi had said.

First, everybody laughed at the wanderers. They cracked jokes, giving them different quests, though they gradually gathered strength. Idzumi