Chapter 10 - Breakthrough

  “What the hell happened?” Arlo yelled.

  Abruptly, his screen opened up, and words started to spread across the screen.

  “Not now! Turn off!”

  The screen went dark.

  He lay in darkness. Overhead, the Skiff had roared past, accompanied by the sharp hammering of its guns. The rain of hot lead hadn’t hit the target, though. Because the target had fallen into a pit.

  It hadn’t been an open hole in the ground. Nobody had been aware of it—not the Skiff pilot, not Arlo and Emery, not even the quanthor. A tremendous splintering crack had sounded, and grass and earth had tumbled down into a pit along with great planks of wood. And now they lay in darkness.

  “I can’t see,” Arlo complained.

  He spat out some dirt and squinted. Aside from the dazzling slice of daylight above, he saw nothing but silhouetted shapes he couldn’t make out. The quanthor groaned and grumbled, apparently trying to get to its feet.

  “I guess that’s what you call a breakthrough,” he muttered. “Well played. Never saw that coming.”

  Arlo fumbled around and extracted himself from clumps of dirt. He stood for a moment, breathing hard. A sudden fear overcame him. “Emery?”

  No answer.

  “Emery! Where are you? Are you okay?”

  He dropped to his knees and crawled about. How could they have become so separated? The pit was probably the size of a four-car garage, and the massive quanthor had left a roughly quanthor-sized hole in the ceiling. The stark daylight made it hard to make out the rest of the shadowed space, but the poor beast was huffing and puffing a good few yards away. And where was Emery?

  Oh God. She’s trapped underneath. She’s been crushed.

  “Talk to me!” he yelled, frantic. “Are you hurt?”

  With his heart thudding in his chest, he crawled over mounds of dirt and splintered planks. He tried at first to ignore the sound of the Skiff approaching, but when it thumped down and the engines cut off, an ominous silence fell. Even the quanthor seemed to realize the danger, and it stopped panting and lay still.

  “Emery,” Arlo hissed. “Please wake up!”

  A hand clamped onto his shoulder, and he almost jumped out of his skin. “Shh. This way.”

  Relief flooded through him. Then annoyance. “Why didn’t you say something? I was worried sick about you!”

  She gripped his shoulder harder. “Shh! Hurry.”

  In the gloom, Emery took his hand and dragged him away. They both tripped and stumbled over debris until she pulled him into what seemed to be a cavelike opening at the side of the pit.

  “What—” he started.

  She put a finger to his lips and pressed in close to his chest. “Quiet.”

  A bright beam shone down. Voices sounded. “Would you look at that! What is this?”

  None of the men seemed to know.

  “Better report it to Layton,” one suggested. “Where’d the NPCs go?”

  “They’re either dead or hidden somewhere. Look, the damn quanthor’s staring up at us. Shoot it and be done. Then get down there and find them.”

  “Why?”

  The simple question prompted a thoughtful pause. Then the leader chuckled. “You know what? I dunno.” He raised his voice. “If you’re not buried under tons of dirt or stuck with planks of wood, then hear me. You got lucky today, okay? But good luck getting out of there.”

  Laughing, the men drifted away. The Skiff’s engines started up, and Arlo’s spirits lifted. They were actually leaving? Just like that?

  “I think we did get lucky,” he whispered to Emery.

  But, an awful moment later, a rattle of gunfire nearly deafened them. Arlo and Emery slapped their hands to their ears and cried out. Amid the ruckus, the quanthor managed a mournful wail before its voice abruptly cut off. The hammering noise continued well after that, and then it suddenly went quiet.

  “Poor quanthor,” Emery mumbled.

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  “Yeah.”

  The smell of fear and death lingered in the air. Arlo’s ears rang as he hunkered on the ground with Emery pressed tight against him, almost sitting in his lap.

  It was over. The Skiff whined away into the sky.

  Slowly, Arlo extracted himself and climbed to his feet. “What is this place?”

  It turned out Emery had a notion about that. “A long time ago, this was a barn. Well, the barn was above. There was a fire, and it burned down. Years passed, and grass grew over the remains.”

  “A barn in the middle of a field?”

  She batted at him. “It’s at the edge of the field, and the old farmhouse is just through the trees. Anyway, below the barn was a basement. That’s what this is. The old barn floor must have rotted out, and we fell through it.”

  Arlo found this news uninspiring. “Screen on,” he commanded.

  When the hologram activated, it illuminated Emery in a bright white glow. But she didn’t squint or react, which he found intriguing. He could now see her clearly, yet she couldn’t see him? Certain game rules made no sense.

  In the bright light, it became obvious they stood in a recessed cubbyhole at one end of the old barn’s basement. A storage cupboard, judging by the warped shelves and unidentifiable contents.

  Arlo focused on the screen:

  Congratulations on your breakthrough. You have discovered a secret room. You may also have found the key to your next quest.

  He couldn’t help chuckling. “You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out these clues. Okay, so I think we’re looking for a key.”

  First, he had to contend with Emery’s sudden barrage of questions. “What clues? What’s a rocket scientist? How do you know we’re looking for a key? What’s this screen you keep talking about?”

  He decided to come clean—to an extent. “I’ll tell you everything, but while I talk, let’s hunt around for a key.” The task looked daunting with all the collapsed dirt and wooden planks. Maybe even impossible. But he had to remind himself that a game would always make it possible.

  Still, searching in the dark was difficult, and even though their eyes were adjusting, a flashlight would have been perfect right about now. He considered leaving his screen on, but it was almost too bright, shining at him instead of in front. He deactivated it and began fumbling around, starting at the walls.

  “I’ve been transported here,” he said, choosing his words carefully. He doubted Emery would want to know she was part of a game, merely an NPC conjured for the benefit of entertainment. “I can’t explain how, because I don’t know, but I have a device that gives me clues about my mission and what to do next. You can’t see it, though. I guess it’s meant for my eyeballs only.”

  His probing hands found a hard wall, perhaps stone or concrete. Did they have concrete in this game realm? He had no idea. Anyway, the barn had been built with a sturdy foundation and might have been left untouched for years—probably in pristine condition until just now. He came across a large wooden cupboard and pulled the squeaky doors open.

  Inside were relatively clean shelves filled with glass jars containing— He peered closer, trying to make it out in the gloom. Green beans? Ha! Every good basement had jars of green beans. Utterly useless to him, though.

  “What does the screen tell you about your mission?” Emery asked from the other side of the pit.

  “Huh? Oh, well, just that I need to get to Midway and then on to Pinnacle, where I have to make a choice to determine the future of the realm—just like you said.”

  Now that he’d spent some time in this make-believe but startlingly realistic world, the fairly typical game objective struck him as overly simplistic. What would happen if he chose wrong?

  Emery seemed to be struggling with that point too. “That fits with the old story that an outsider will appear out of the blue to restore the realm. That’s what we want. But . . . now it bothers me. What if you’re . . .”

  Arlo had been poking around in another cupboard mounted in the corner. He paused. “What if I’m what?”

  “What if you’re not up to the task? What if you fail?”

  “I, uh . . .” He thought about that and refrained from an off-the-cuff comment like ‘It’s okay, I’ll just try again another time,’ or ‘It’s only a game.’ She didn’t need to hear that.

  Damn. This place is too realistic. It’s all in my head, right? I’m plugged into a sophisticated virtual reality game. That’s all this is.

  “I’m up for the task,” he assured her. “I won’t fail.”

  Shortly after, Arlo found the key.

  He leapt on it with a triumphant cry. It was literally hanging on the wall near what had once been a set of steps leading up. Those steps had collapsed long ago, but the simple hook on the wall remained—along with a very large and surprisingly weighty metal key.

  He held it up and grinned. “This has to be it.”

  At that moment, the screen opened and displayed a new message:

  Congratulations on finding your first object! Use your key to unlock a hidden treasure.

  Arlo’s sense of triumph was almost overwhelming. “No idea what it opens,” he told Emery, “but it’ll come in handy later. That’s how games work.” He smiled. “Okay, I’m getting it now. We’re gonna crack this game before we know it.”

  Emery frowned at his use of the word ‘game,’ and he kicked himself. Pocketing the key, he pointed to some of the enormous planks and joists lying about the place. “Now we’re gonna get out of here.”

  Steering well clear of the dead quanthor, he dragged a long, broken joist out of the dirt and hauled it over to the half-staircase. This would have been far more difficult if he hadn’t eaten a couple of blue marulas earlier. After some finagling, he positioned it in such a way that the joist filled in for the missing top half of the staircase. It wanted to slide down the steps to the bottom until he pried a tread upward and used it as a stop.

  “Let’s try this,” he said with a flourish. “You first, my dear.”

  She started up the smooth surface, bent double and using her hands as well as her feet. She slipped a couple of times but tried again. Arlo found his shoes had a better grip on the wood, so when Emery slipped a third time, he instinctively planted his hands on her backside.

  “Whoa, sorry!” he said, snatching his hands away as if he’d been stung.

  She said nothing and tried again, but she kept slipping. In the end, she said, “Just push me, will you?”

  So he pushed her, and slowly but surely, they edged up the plank to the top, where they climbed into the sunshine and collapsed on the grass.

  Lying there in the peaceful morning sunlight, staring up at the blue sky, Arlo began to wonder if it would be so bad if he failed to restore the realm—whatever that meant. This was nice. So was Emery.

  But no. He couldn’t live under the constant threat of Midway on the top of the cliff, not to mention that this world was confined to a dome.

  And don’t even get me started on those shriekers . . .

  Yeah, there was no question. He had to complete his quest.