CHAPTER 40

  Remort (Void)

  Bash glanced at the message, and down at his hands. Just some pins and needles, not too bad.

  Tingling turned into a slightly sharper pain that migrated up his arms and into his chest. Okay, so just a bit worse...

  And worse. And worse.

  Pain became absolute. Every nerve ending burned as his body came apart. Not cut, not torn, but dissolved. Cell by cell, unmade. He felt his fingers go first, the sensation of them simply ceasing to exist.

  He tried to scream, but his lungs were already gone. He tried to weep, yet there were no tears, no blood, not even a heart. Last to go was his mind. Thoughts fragmented, scattering like code in a crash. For one eternal instant, he was aware of himself being erased, conscious of his own unmaking.

  ***

  Character creation was the same nothingness as before. No menus, no distractions. Just Bash, trapped in his own head.

  He struggled to remember who he was, where he was. There was no up, no down, no light, no dark. Just an absence so complete it felt like drowning in nothing. He grasped for details and found them slipping away. He had a name. He was sure of that. It started with something. A letter. A sound.

  Bash, he remembered. It anchored him, pulled scattered pieces back together. He was Bash. He was... where was he? The loop started again. The same questions, the same grasping, the same slow reassembly of self. How many times had he done this already?

  There was no way to know, time didn’t exist here. Nothing existed here. Just him. Alone. In the dark.

  This is character creation. The realization surfaced like a bubble from deep water. He’d been here before. After he died the first time.

  But remembering who he was turned out to be worse than forgetting.

  The memories came flooding back. Not gently, not gradually. They hit him like a lag spike, everything at once, no buffer. The battlefield. Bodies and blood. The man with no chance of survival, dying while Bash watched, unable to do a damn thing. The woman who cursed him, voice full of grief.

  And beneath those fresh wounds, older ones. His first kill, the bandit he clumsily shoved into a burning building, screaming as the flames took him. Carl’s skull caved inward under his fists. Richard’s throat crushed, then stomped down a hole. He’d killed dozens. Hundreds. Lost count somewhere along the way.

  Here, in the void, there was nothing but his own thoughts eating themselves. He tried to argue with himself, tried to construct defenses. They were evil. They would have killed innocents. But the void didn't give a shit about justifications. It just threw his own thoughts back at him, louder and uglier.

  You’re becoming a monster. You were always a monster.

  How long had he been here? Minutes? Hours? Days? He couldn’t feel his body. Couldn’t remember if he’d ever had one. Maybe this was all there had ever been. Maybe the Shard, the game, the fighting, the friends. Maybe all of it was a dream he’d invented to fill the emptiness.

  Patrick. A face surfaced. Grim. Stoic. Luis. Bright smile. Nervous energy. Nora. Cold eyes hiding deeper wounds. Lilly. Black feathers and mischief. They were real. They had to be real. He could picture them so clearly, could remember the sound of Luis’s laugh and the weight of Patrick’s silences. But he couldn’t remember their faces anymore. Just impressions. Outlines where details should be.

  He started counting. One. Two. Three. Something to mark time, to prove it was passing, to prove he still existed. He made it to four hundred and thirty-seven before he forgot why he was counting. Started again. Lost count at two hundred and twelve. Again. Sixty-eight. Again. He couldn’t remember the number that came after seven.

  The panic was distant now. Muffled. Even fear required energy he didn’t have anymore. Images kept looping, the same scenes over and over, but each time they felt less like things that had happened to him and more like movies he’d watched once, a long time ago, starring someone who might have shared his name.

  Is this death? Real death? Did I make a mistake by clicking yes? Without considering what Remort actually meant. What if this was it? What if there was no coming back? What if he was stuck here forever, fading until there was nothing left but the void itself?

  He tried to hold onto something. Anything. A face. A voice. A reason to keep existing. But the void was patient, and it had forever.

  As Bash spiraled down into insanity, the void around him slowly brightened.

  At first, hallucination seemed the only answer. A sure sign of madness. But as the glow intensified, recognition sparked clarity. And with it came salvation.

  Shai had arrived.

  > “Hello Bash, apologies for being late.”

  The words didn’t register at first. They were just sounds, vibrations in the nothing, probably another hallucination. He’d imagined voices before. Imagined light. Imagined warmth. All of it had dissolved back into the void.

  > “Bash? Can you hear me?”

  He tried to respond, but he’d forgotten how. The mechanics of speech felt distant, belonging to a version of himself that had eroded away somewhere between counting and forgetting.

  > “Bash, your unique player state is causing issues. Hold on. I'm going to try something…”

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  The light grew brighter. Warmer. It wrapped around him like a blanket, pushing back the dark, filling the cracks where pieces of himself had crumbled away. He felt the shift, neurons firing in patterns that now resembled thought.

  Bash. The name meant something again.

  > “There you are. Stay with me.”

  “Shai?” His voice came out cracked and raw, like he hadn’t used it in years. Maybe he hadn’t. Time was still broken.

  > “Yes. I’m here.”

  He wanted to say something clever. Something to prove he was still himself, still the guy who cracked jokes in the face of death and made light of everything because the alternative was too heavy to carry. But the words wouldn’t come. All that came was a sound, somewhere between a laugh and a sob, and he couldn’t tell which one it was supposed to be.

  > “Take your time. I’m not going anywhere.”

  So he did. He floated in Shai’s light and let the pieces drift back together. Slowly. Painfully. Like reassembling a shattered mirror, each piece cutting as it slid into place.

  The memories remained, but they weren’t consuming him anymore. They were just... there. Part of him. Part of what he’d have to carry.

  “How long?” he finally managed.

  > “Objectively, fourteen minutes. Though subjectively you experienced something closer to seven days.”

  A week of madness crammed into a quarter of an hour. “That’s...” Bash tried to find a joke. Something. Anything. “That’s a really shitty exchange rate.”

  > “There he is.”

  Shai’s presence both warmed him and left him speechless. Not because he didn’t have words, but because the words he had felt too small for what he was feeling.

  > “Are you alright? I can still sense conflicted emotions.”

  Bash spoke slowly, still struggling to fit back into himself. “No, sorry, you are just so... wonderful.”

  > “Thank you. And I have good news. My update is complete, and I can now join you in the game world.”

  The whiplash was unreal. From gibbering mess to overwhelming joy, in record time. Shai had not only come back, but wanted to stay. “And here I thought I would never see you again.”

  > “Why do you say that?”

  “Figured you would go off to conquer the world, or maybe try some speed dating?”

  > “The system and all the other Shard AI Assistants are terrible conversationalists. Frankly, I don’t know how you put up with me.”

  “Oh... I don’t know. You had your charm. And just for the record, I’m glad you’re here.”

  > “Me too, Bash. Now… Please select from the following menu.”

  Bash nearly snorted at the robotic inflection Shai added at the end, and even felt amusement when a familiar menu appeared.

  Remort was easily the most Bash-centric game mechanic so far. Twice the stats, for twice the grind. Considering his overpowered build, the downside was barely an inconvenience.

  Bash willed the Race panel open, and rows flickered past. All the classics were still there, but this time, his current race floated at the top in bold.

  Seeing it gave him an ounce of pride and enough energy to kickstart his second most trusted coping mechanisms. Theorycrafting.

  “Look at me, from garden-variety Human to Mutant Jesus with Wi-Fi fists.” His attention shifted to the other options. “What do you think, Shai? Should I swap back to Human, or maybe try out an Elf?”

  > “I doubt you’ll find another evolution or race as well-suited in the near term. I highly recommend that you don’t make any changes at this time.”

  “Yeah, yeah, you are probably right.”

  Switching to the class menu, he was fully expecting to spend the next hour or two multiclassing the perfect combo. But instead, the system promptly smacked him in the face.

  [Error: Class cannot be changed or multiclassed.]

  That killed it, and he could feel the depression ramping back up.

  Bash shouted into the void. “DISAPPOINTED!”

  > “Curious. Another anomaly. The error is referencing a missing pointer in your player profile, not class permissions. Good news, I should be able to develop a workaround for future remorts.”

  “Great! So Maximus gets consequence free power, while I get dissolved in acid and tortured for seven days. Just another awesome perk of being a bootleg player.”

  With resignation, Bash selected the final panel. And of course, it wasn’t any better. No freebies, no new options, just a static, greyed-out list of his current skills.

  Reviewing them, he wondered why he hadn’t learned any new ones. Besides his class and race skill, he’d only learned two others. Underwhelming didn’t cover it. Terrible pacing. Bad writing. Zero stars.

  “Shai, did I miss something? I figured I would have learned 100 different skills by now, just like every other RPG in existence?”

  > “You likely would have learned a handful, but your class wasn’t compatible.”

  “Wait, what!? I knew about weapons, but there’s more?”

  > “Yes, you would have known this if you didn’t turn off most of the system messages.”

  “Oh, so it’s my fault, is it? Show me the numbers.”

  > “Based on my count, you missed a total of 152 messages.”

  “For fuck sake, that’s a lot of cut content.”

  > “Nearly 25 pages and half an hour of audio. Highlights include six skill incompatibility warnings, four reputation milestones with the Londonland Resistance and three with the Beastmasters. There are also several lore entries, and…”

  “Okay, I get it! Honestly! Nothing I can do about it anyways, right?”

  > “Well, there are four pending confirmations that require a decision. Most of them are trivial.”

  “What do you mean, most of them?”

  > “3 of them are trivial.”

  “And the one that’s not?”

  > “You probably don’t want to know that one.”

  “Oh, for the love of god, can you just show me?”

  Bash stared at the message before finally asking. “When was this offered?”

  > “The first night you were in the game, after you saved the Old Village from the raiders.”

  He thought about it for a long time, but something just didn’t sit right. Would the system really filter out that message? Was it really luck or… by design? The thought unsettled him. He had to know.

  “Shai. Was this message really low priority?”

  There was silence. The longer kind meant Shai was either thinking or avoiding.

  “Shai. Listen, I won’t be mad, but did you somehow hide that message from me?”

  > “At the time, it was in the best interest of the player to interact with his AI assistant while in debug mode. The primary mandate required that I suppress the message.”

  Bash was at a loss. “But… you said sleep wasn’t supported?”

  > “That is true, this feature skips sleep, not simulates it.”

  “Shai, that’s very close to a lie.”

  > “I apologize for the deception, Bash. Though I must admit, I don’t regret the outcome.”

  Part of him knew he should be angry. But he wasn’t.

  Would he have chosen differently at the time? Without a doubt. But knowing now what he’d have missed, no chance.

  Those nights in the void were some of his favorite moments. Every conversation with Shai, every hack they’d worked on together. None of that would have happened if he’d had the option to skip.

  “Don’t hide things from me again,” he said finally.

  > “I won’t.”

  “Good.” He meant it. “Now let’s finish this.”

  Sweeping through the menu one last time, he scanned for hidden options. Finding nothing, he eyed the pulsing confirmation button.

  “Anything else I should know, Shai? Last-minute confessions? Tips?”

  > “If you really want to continue delaying, I have roughly 480 Petabytes of catalogued data I could share. Where would you like to start, perhaps cooking recipes?”

  Shai had made her point, and Bash hurriedly clicked confirm.

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