Chapter 36 - A Place of Revelry (Patreon)

“And so the curtain falls.”

“I say it’s about bloody time.” The second voice huffed. “Still think it’s ridiculous he survived that bear attack at Level 4. What were the odds, one-in-a hundred thousand?”

“Roughly,” a third voice responded. “But his chances of being chosen were about 1 in 2 billion, so I’d say karma is still not in his favor.”

“If you say so,” the second voice sighed. Its owner turned his head to another. “Outliers upon outliers. Are you sure you weren’t using your coin to adjust odds in his favor?”

“I have told you. Literally. Thousands of times. That I can’t do that.” The fourth voice was long-suffering, bordering on upset. “No one can control the whims of circumstance. Those who try will wish they never had. I can see the strings of fate, sometimes, but I cannot grab hold of them and make them dance as I could a puppet.”

“You already know that he knows that,” the third voice said, giggling. “He’s just annoyed because he lost so much Influence on bad bets.”

“Should we be worried about the #*@$&@#()*$?” The first voice interjected his concern before the banter could continue. “They’ve been growing bolder as of late. Spreading their pestilent wings wider.”

They considered thoughtfully.

“I think all will be well,” the third voice said. “We should be done soon enough, and at that point the matter will have solved itself.”

She turned to the owner of a sixth voice, who up until this point, had been silent. “By the by, is something the matter? You’re usually not so reticent.”

The sixth voice hesitated. “The Human is dead, correct?”

“Excessively so.”

“...Can you check? His soul hasn’t returned to me yet.”

Silence.

They looked down. And proceeded to jerk back, shocked at what they saw.

“Kismet. Flip the coin. Flip the coin right now.”

The coin went up, flipped around several times, hit the table, and landed right on its edge.

More silence.

“What does that even mean?”

–

Reconstitution Complete!

The message was the first thing Rob saw when he awoke. It was the only message he saw – all the prior ones, previously saved in the system logs, had vanished.

Just like his clothes. Rob was currently wearing his birthday suit as he lay on his back and basked in the afternoon sun. He might have stayed there for a time, but a pebble was digging into his ass. He sat up shakily, still getting his bearings, and observed the trail of destruction left by the Blight’s curtain call. A twenty-foot-wide spherical line had punched through the Village as the laser shot forward – the devastation extended so far that you could see through a newly-made hole in the barricade and out into Ixatan. Everything in its path had been annihilated, wiped clean from existence.

I’m pretty sure I was too. His memory was fuzzy, but he remembered that much. Hard to forget the instant your body was vaporized. Of course, he also remembered losing an arm, and it was back to normal like the sight of blood pumping out of a stump had been only a bad dream. And he remembered-

With a start, Rob opened his Party List. Or tried to – it was gone. A bolt of panic struck him until he realized that Alia and Tarric’s deaths hadn’t removed them from the Party last time he’d checked, and that the Invitations he was sending everyone else weren’t going out because you could only invite someone to a Party who was in close proximity. It wasn’t that everyone had died; he just wasn’t in the Party anymore. For...some reason.

But that was okay. It meant that the rest were still alive. Potentially. He couldn’t check on them, so for all he knew, something had happened. But they could also be perfectly fine. There was hope.

There wasn’t hope for Alia, or Tarric, or Riardin.

Rob’s throat started to choke up. Before he knew it, he was crying. There was no one around to judge, no one to make a comment of scorn or support. Just him, and his grief, welling up from within like a bursting geyser.

A few minutes later, he wiped his reddened eyes and stood up. He could tell that he still had tears left in him, but for now he would keep them on standby. There were too many things to do. He had to find his friends, figure out how he survived, check his Character Sheet, scavenge some clothes…

But before all that, he had some very important business to take care of.

Rob looked upwards, naked as the day he was born, raised his arms, and gave the sky a two-fingered salute – one finger in the middle of each hand.

“I lived, bitch.”