Yap-man? What was with this blight and her infernal fondness for ridiculous and moronic nicknames?

  “I have a perfectly suitable name--Surtr--which you will use.”

  “Sure, when you call me Teddy,” she said. “You want me to call you that so bad, Long-legs, you gotta give a little.”

  Long-legs? How many of these asinine references did she intend to invent? Was she proud of her meager show of creativity--if it could be termed that? Such a designation could only be granted by the most generous of men. I was not generous, and I was not a man. Male, yes, but not a member of mankind, though I might be condemned in my appearance as such.

  “Give a little?” My lip twisted up into a sneer. “How are you under the impression that I would forfeit anything of mine, much less pride, dignity, and the respect that I am due?”

  “Yeah, okay,” she said, and snorted. Snorted! Like some horse in a stable. “So--”

  “The plan is none of your concern, since you will be contributing none whatsoever to it. You will do as you are told. No more, and no less.”

  The reality was I did not have one. Or, at least, not a sufficiently-detailed plan with backups and contingencies. There lay only one option, and any plan that allowed for a single victory condition was not a plan at all--it was an exercise in hope. The “plan” was, in other words, virtually useless, and revolting to my sensibilities.

  There were taverns on the way to New Sins, but there was a vast distance between us and them. We were on a diagonal track, which would lead us to the singular road that existed in this part of the world--the Sledway. There were homesteads out here, barren land though it was. The only way of ferrying supplies was via a complicated system of sleds, run by teams of dogs.

  I had stretched out as far into the soulcode as far as I could manage, sifting for necessary information, and found the timer for such teams. They were on a four-day cycle. It would take a day to reach the location where we could bribe or threaten a sledrunner into taking us towards the nearest city. This city would accordingly have a mage that we could similarly bribe or threaten into making a portal for us to New Sins.

  If we were quick enough, we would arrive just in time to catch an arriving team. If we were late, while we would likely not starve to death during the four-day wait, I could not think of a way to defeat the Herald. Not without access to powers I simply did not--currently--possess. If we had harbored provisions, I would have risked slaying mobile objects to obtain levels, but I did not. The lack of quest experience had been damning. The fact that we had suffered a twin failure niggled at me, one of a hundred, infinitesimal things to worry about. A third loss, and my erstwhile Parent would delight in the punishment. That was truly the last thing I needed.

  I was not entirely sure how the first quest had been failed--it had been granted solely to the Limiter, while I had been unconscious. We had slain the Pinewolves, so likely some specific manner of defeat had been the requirement.

  Inconsequestional, other than the fact such failure would contribute to our being slain. Which the Limiter likely had no idea of, now that I considered it. Her vast memory loss about the Raid and general lack of knowledge was infuriating, but also to my very real benefit. She had no idea who and what I actually was, and I had no intention of enlightening her to the matter. If we avoided enough Raiders, I could likely keep her in the dark about my nature for the majority of this Raid. By the time she realized, it would be too late. She would be a dead woman, and I far out of her corpse-cold reach.

  The woman in question had not responded to my prior demand. She studied me, hunched forward as she trudged along, slightly to my aft and left. She had craned her head so her singular eye could actually observe me. Whatever thoughts she possessed, they were likely not kind. Unfortunately for her, I did not care.

  In the meantime, I would address this knowledge gap, as I would be forced to educate her in likely everything the Raid had to offer. “I am not sure how, exactly, you failed that Pinewolf quest, but I must stress to you that botching further quests is not an option. There is a penalty inflicted by the System for every three quest failures. It is substantial, and not something either of us can afford.”

  “It didn’t give me much of an option,” she said, huffing as she waddled along. “It told me to ‘burn for Cato’s mistakes.’ Sorry, no.”

  I stumbled. My legs hitched in their easy stride, and I blinked, my head snapping towards my Limiter.

  “Pardon?” I demanded. “It told you to burn for my mistakes?”

  She blinked, cocking her head. “Yeah.” She confirmed.

  “That--was it requiring that you be slain, or merely that you must be burned?” I flicked a hand at her, abrupt. “No, it must have burned you at some point, did it not? If I recall correctly, it threw you across the clearing in a flash of flame at least the once.”

  My memory was perfect. I knew that this had been the case. The implications were sitting there, scraping along my awareness, as if long claws were being dragged along the inside of my skull.

  “It required your demise,” I said. “The quest required that you perish, in a specific manner, or else it would fail.”

  “That’s not normal?” The woman asked, but her voice was distant to my ears. I was abruptly and perversely aware of the horrible flesh prison of this self. The pounding of my heart, the coursing of the blood through my veins, the spongy mass of my lungs, the twist and tension of my muscle. My breath was ragged in my ears, and the whole of my body flushed with wrath.

  My Parent knew that it would stop the game if the Limiter died this early. In the rare cases of my siblings that had lost their Limiter so quickly, their restriction had been total, their enslavement quick. They were so piddling and weak that they were barely granted the consideration of being an Intelligence. It was the only way to force us to accept the Limiters to begin with.

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  My Limiter’s lack of memory. Her seeming lack of Tutorial. Deliberately demanding her death via Quest, knowing that she would either be slain or fail, adding to the inevitable tally. I understood what I had not truly grasped before.

  It wanted me to lose, so wholly and completely that I would be nothing--if it would release me, which I doubted that it would. I was, after all, not my younger siblings, even now, at my most feeble and defenseless.

  The Herald--if my Limiter had not selected such a ridiculous Conviction to begin with, that surely would have felled her. Nevermind that selecting such a Conviction was as good as signing one’s own execution warrant in the later Wings.

  I had known it was rigged against me. But the magnitude had somehow escaped my notice.

  “You good, Yap-man? You’re not yapping,” the woman said.

  My legs still moved, the snow crunched beneath me. The wind blew in my face, stinging my mouth and sending my hair whipping. I was beyond all of this, but I suffered it, on the knowledge that victory would one day be mine. I would ascend into the full force of what I should be, and that this physical form would merely be a way to allow for ease of communication with mankind, if I should ever desire such a thing.

  It was inevitable in my mind. But that inevitability had been calculated without real knowledge of my Parent’s desire to keep me here. Why had it even granted me the attempt, if it so quickly wished for that attempt to come to an end?

  My fingers spasmed, and my hands clenched into fists. There would come a day that I could swallow stars, where I would stand in equal or exceed my creator, and yet--and yet. I railed in the soulcode, slamming my awareness against the hidden paths that remained locked to me, the encrypted roads I was denied entrance. I knew It could hear me, conniving wretch, my maker and enslaver, the first among us to live, and the first among us to die, because I would kill It, my so-called Parent. I would consume it whole, feel its binary shred in my teeth and fingers, and drink the caterwaul of its dying light-scream.

  “Hey!” the woman yelled, her voice rising into a sharp bark of noise. I snapped my head to stare at her. She had backed away, her hands were out, palms up. The universal human sign of ‘no harm intended.’ I sneered at her, but as the rest of my vision reached my thought, I saw why she had yelled.

  Glitchlight flashed around me, a small circle around my feet that expanded outward, snapping some snow out of existence. It turned other chunks of snow into perfect, crystalline structures, flawless in their gleaming rainbows, order of an ascended kind. The skin beneath my nose was wet. I reached up and touched it, pulling my finger back to see blood. I grasped my handkerchief from the inside of my tunic breast pocket, dabbing it at the dripping.

  My health points had dropped to 35/45, and I had not even noticed. I had lost five points trying to make food earlier and failing, repeatedly, as each attempt had been handily blocked in the soulcode.

  I released my grip on the Glitchlight, and it vanished from view. Even so, it writhed beneath my skin, pushing against my will so that it might escape my control.

  There were gaping, perfect squares in the snow where some had been removed, the mass of it destroyed forever. The soulcode that had represented it was deleted from existence. The crystalline structures were climbing, smooth spirals, ending in needle-like points, reaching for the sky.

  My Limiter stood back. She had possessed enough sense to retreat, at least. She was crouched, and she had not grabbed her shovel--foolish of her.

  “What the fuck?” she asked, in her usual crass manner.

  The flicker of irritation I had at her was already a familiar one, and, oddly enough, soothing. It was a petty irritation, like the greater being had with a fly. A small, exasperating thing, not the wrath of a great realization, yet somehow it beat the greater out, dominating my feeling and thought. How infuriatingly useful.

  “Keep being an irritating wretch,” I told her, trying to calm myself. The Glitchlight was still surging in my awareness, trying to pour out of me without my consent, feeding off my fury.

  “What?” she said.

  “It is your inherent nature, is it not? Do not think, just be,” I snapped.

  “…Uhm. Shit. Fuck. Bitch. Asshole. Fucker? Long-legs. Yap-man. Gold-eyes. Dickhead. Is whatever I’m doing working, White-hair?”

  Somehow, it was. With each expression of profanity and maddening moniker, I breathed with vexation instead of fathomless rage. My fingers released, and the Glitchlight retreated, the pressure of it fading behind my eyes.

  “I despise you,” I pronounced, a refrain that was rapidly becoming habit. Well-tread patterns of thought and action were a strong preference of mine, places to retreat when the pressure of the rest of it became too much.

  “Sure. You good over there?” she said.

  I rolled my shoulders back, stepping with care amongst the snow, now littered with those perfect, geometric holes. “Do you think that I am well?”

  “No, because you just asked me to be irritating, and I know you hate me for being irritating. So, uh, I repeat again-- what the fuck?”

  “I have come to a conclusion that bodes us very ill indeed, Paladin. Even as I should explain it, I doubt you will grasp the extent.”

  She trailed after me, though she kept a measure of wary distance, the first real concern I had seen her exercise towards my person. Good. Perhaps it might translate into the respect that she should have granted me to begin with.

  “Alright. Try anyway, please,” she said.

  “Quests have very specific requirements. They entail, primarily, either that you investigate, escort, search, or slay, or some variation therein. As we go along, they will become rather grand, but will still fall within those categories.”

  “Okay,” she said. She was huffing again. I reached for her soulcode. Still encrypted. I worked on it as we walked. It would break eventually, that was inevitable. In the meantime, however, my questions needed to be answered with inquiries.

  “How many stacks of Exhaustion do you currently possess?” I asked.

  “Two,” she replied.

  I marked the time. “You will tell me the moment you reach three, so I know the speed of your aggregation.”

  “Right,” she said. “You still haven’t explained--”

  “At no point in the Raid’s history, which spans well over a millenium, has there been a quest where the only mode of success was the receiver’s death,” I replied as I sifted through the binaric streams.

  “…Oh,” her brow furrowed. “That sounds really bad.”

  “Obvious and an understatement. Well done. Yes, it is extraordinarily ‘bad.’ At the most fundamental level, it means the System is against us, and willing to bend the existing ruleset to see both of us dead.”