1 – One Shot

Ashley’s second heart beat once. The impact jolted her awake.

This new heart moved an invisible energy through her body. It was a pressure she’d only ever seen as pixelated bars on the screen of her favorite game: God’s Path.

Cold blue light filled her vision. Metallic letters the size of a fridge spun slowly, their pale glow washing over the chamber walls. They were translucent. The world beyond them blurred like a waterlogged painting.

The letters spelled START in a familiar sans-serif font. Even through the fog, she recognized the rough stone walls and the faint phosphorescent moss. The Cerberus dungeon. She had cleared this dungeon at least a dozen times.

Wait. It looks so real. Am I wearing a VR headset? Cool.

She reached out. Her fingers passed through the glowing letters without resistance, disturbing nothing.

How do I get this going? Voice command?

“[Play].”

The blur snapped away. Reality crashed in.

The room was there: stone walls, rough-hewn and ancient, catching a phosphorescent light that seeped from the rock itself.

The air was cold, the taste of minerals and damp. From somewhere deeper in the dark, a sound rolled toward her. Three overlapping growls rumbled up through the floor beneath her feet.

The Cerberus room.

Yeah, I know this place. Though this heartbeat thing is new. Must be some kind of biofeedback gimmick. Fancy.

“Let’s give it a try,” she said. Her voice sounded too loud in the hollow space. “Um, how do I do this? [Light Orb]?”

A spark ignited in the air. It felt like a sudden spike of heat behind her eyes. A tiny orb of coalesced magic blinked into existence over her shoulder, illuminating the space even more.

What caught her eye was the bar on the bottom right of her view. It was familiar.

[Mana: 1999/2000]

No freaking way. That’s Celestine’s mana pool. I can almost feel it. What a piece of tech!

The bar ticked to full, then faded from view.

Ashley stretched her hands out. The skin is…

A paw stomped the cavern floor. The rock cracked beneath the weight. Black talons scraped the ground with a screech of flint on stone.

Three pit bull heads emerged from the shadows. Enormous ones, if pit bulls could be the size of elephants. Three different growls: a low rumble, a wet snarl, a high frantic snap.

[Cerberus – B Tier Monster]

Ashley’s breath hitched. The creature’s breath hit her face, hot and reeking of charred meat and old copper.

The three-headed fiend barked. Ghostly fire erupted from its jaws in violent bursts.

It coiled its haunches, ready to pounce.

“Wait. Sit down!”

The three heads tilted to the side. Ashley ignored them for a heartbeat, staring once again at her unfamiliar hand: the pale skin, the slender fingers, the nails painted gold.

The fiend did not wait. After a second of uncertainty, it bolted. The weight of its steps shook the ground beneath her.

“Bad doggo.” Ashley shrugged, her palm already forward. “[Majestic Fireball].”

The word had barely left her mouth when an ache blossomed behind her second heart, and then her veins were molten copper.

A sphere of roaring orange flame tore itself free. It shrieked through the air, trailing soot and sulfur, and slammed into the center head with the force of a battering ram.

The growling stopped. The head disappeared, liquefied by the impact.

The heat engulfed the other two on the sides, incinerating them in an instant. The monster fell, its mass scraping across the ground until it was stopped by Ashley’s foot. The two remaining heads and the upper half were nothing but black ash.

Ashley’s gaze dropped back to her hands. I’d better focus on the monster.

The smell arrived a moment later. Cooked meat. Burnt fur. It coated the back of her throat. She coughed, and the reality of it finally landed.

“Bleah. Gross.”

Ashley raised her heeled shoe from the charred remains. Gray ash dusted the black lacquered surface.

“I have to adjust the gore setting,” she said. She shook her foot, but the soot clung to the heel. “This is a bit too much.”

Ashley stepped around the dead animal. She pinched her nose shut, avoiding the dark pool spreading across the floor.

“[Stat…]”

“Well done, mistress.” The voice came from just above her head. It was smooth and slightly reverberant, as if the voice came from inside a bell. “Precise as usual. A very well-aimed shot, I must say.”

Ashley froze.

The author’s narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

“Who’s there?”

She spoke the question into silence. The dark gave nothing back: stone, the slow drip of water somewhere, the settling creak of the dead boss’s cooling body.

“Aury. Your faithful familiar. Here at your service, as always.”

“Au…ry?”

She raised her hand. Her fingers reached upward and brushed against the halo hovering over her head. A warm hum crept from her fingertips all the way to her elbow. It felt like touching a live wire wrapped in silk.

“You found me, mistress. What a pleasure to see you in action once more.”

Ashley lowered her arm.

She half-remembered the Saint quests she’d done those ages ago. The quests had awarded her equipment and skills, but the descriptions had never been clear.

The quests were a mess, balance-wise. They didn’t give experience points like the others. Instead, she had walked away with fancy loot and unquantifiable notifications regarding core activation.

None of it had ever made sense to her. She had abandoned the quest line shortly after receiving the halo. She had only kept it because it looked cool on Celestine’s skin.

“Since when do you talk?”

“I have always talked, mistress. You simply never replied. Your humble servant has praised your every triumph for all these years. I was always…”

“All right. Enough.” The words came out harder than she meant them. “It’s nice you have a voice and stuff, but this isn’t the time. This session is over. I killed the boss.”

She breathed.

“Um, how do I log off? Log out.”

Silence. Only the sizzle of the smoke rising from the corpse answered her. Nothing happened.

Why isn’t it working?

She focused on the space in front of her face. “Log off.”

The words hung there, empty. The cavern did not dissolve. The charcoaled remains of the Cerberus continued to smoke, and the heat from the cooling flesh felt far too real against her shins. Panic started as a cold crawl at the base of her spine.

“Pause. Exit. [Status].”