Chapter Thirty - I say, "High", you say, "Low"

Getting up, squeezing into the bathroom, breakfast, getting dressed, it was all the same chaotic tumult as it had the day before. We were getting used to it, developing our own methods of optimisation—or thinking up new ways to cause extra chaos in Geri’s case.

Today, she had been sitting on the toilet for ten minutes, holding us all up until someone, Sam, I think, remembered that Geri didn’t need to use the toilet. Very funny. And I mean that—I didn’t use the toilet in the morning either, so I found it funny, and only Livia and Sam had to suffer.

“So, what’s on the docket for today,” Livia asked after she put her spoon down.

“Training, dungeon and moving Sam’s stuff at four,” I announced.

“Training?” Geri asked.

“Yeah, that’s what the room in front of the big shower is for…” I commented drily.

“Oh, the one with the Jane-shaped imprint in the wall,” she countered. Seemed Livia had filled her in at some point.

“Then shall we see if we can complete the collection?”

🙚⚜🙘

“Let’s not do that again,” Sam said, pointing to her black eye. She had the slowest healing of us and would have to live with it for another hour or so.

I just wanted to reply when my phone rang. It startled me. I had all callers on silent except Livia, and that wasn’t her ringtone. I pulled it out of my pocket and answered the call, not recognising the number. “Hello?”

“Hey, boss,” Kinasteria said on the other end of the connection. Oh, right I had given her the number, but never saved hers from my missed calls list. “Is Chloe with you guys?”

“No, why?”

“She didn’t show up for her shift, and that started a while ago…” Kinasteria sounded concerned.

“So she ditched you?”

“What? No, that’s impossible. She’s indentured; she can’t skip her shift intentionally. Or forget it or oversleep. She could miss the bus by accident or something like that, but it’s been over an hour…”

“Right, I didn’t think about that. You’re sure she didn’t hop on with another group just as she arrived? Could you have missed that?”

“It may be possible, but I also cannot reach her on her phone. It rings, so she has reception. And she’s still on the guild roster, so she’s not dead.”

I lowered the phone a bit from my mouth. “Livia, can you track a phone?”

“I think so? Not sure, I’d have to ask Greg,” Livia replied after a moment.

“Do so,” I told her, then, “Kinasteria, you got that?”

“Loud and clear.”

“Greg says it depends on the provider. If we’re lucky, he can do it directly, otherwise it takes some favours,” Livia informed me.

We relayed the number to him and then waited. Livia had put her phone on speaker, and I could hear a keyboard clacking.

“You’re in luck,” Greg said in his deep voice. “Got it. Hmmm, yes, last update a minute ago; this is current. It says the phone is right at Jane’s store. I hope that helps?”

“A second, Greg,” I said. “Kinasteria? Any sign of her?”

“No change. Should I search the guild and area?”

I had a bad feeling about this. “No, stay put. Greg?”

“Car’s ready as you come down,” he replied instantly.

“Perfect. Thanks. Kinasteria, we’ll be right over.”

🙚⚜🙘

Our outfits weren’t perfect, sweat-drenched and with some blood spots, but that couldn’t be helped now. We piled into the car, and Greg drove as nearly road-legally to the guild in record time.

We practically stormed in through the outside door and descended on the public wing, checking the unused office, the bathroom, the kitchen and the staff room on our way to the hall. Kinasteria shook her head as we entered.

“Could she be upstairs?” Sam asked. “How are the access settings for her role?”

“Sam, you’re a genius,” I said. “Same as yours.”

I turned around and practically flew up the stairs. I just wanted to turn towards the office wing when I noticed a blood drop right in front of the door to the huge storage room. I ripped the door open and froze.

There, just steps away from the door, lay Chloe—or her pieces. She looked as if she had been butchered by Jack the Ripper. The skin had been cut from her arms and legs with rough cuts, clearly by someone who had no idea what they were doing, and lay in strips in the huge puddle of blood around her. She had been stripped naked, and her body was covered in cuts of different depths. Her breasts had been cut off in chunks, and her belly was cut open, the intestines hanging out. Her face was practically gone, the raw bone visible, and her neck had been hacked through. The head had rolled off and lay a foot away from the body.

I wanted to wretch, to add my breakfast to the mess. There was one thing that stopped me—a system name tag floating above her head. Telling me her name and that she was level three.

“Fucking shit,” Geri screeched into my ear and tried to press by me.

“Wait,” I said quickly. “She’s still alive.”

“How? In that state?”

“Abilities,” I said absent-mindedly. Why wasn’t she healing? We had seen her knit her neck back together in minutes; at that rate, every bit of healing should be obvious. But then…

I stepped forward, careful not to slip on the blood. It was still liquid except for some spots where it got smeared into a thin layer. I bent done and carefully picked up the head off of the floor. It was warm, not having had any time to cool down. As I held it up, the ears fell off in pieces.

“Yes, the blood is still alive,” Geri said. I looked over and she was kneeling at the edge of the puddle, licking it like a dog. I ignored it. I doubted Chloe would be missing a few licks, even if she could pull it back in.

I moved over to the end the head belonged at and placed it carefully into position. It felt right as if it clicked into an invisible socket. Yet nothing happened. But why?

“She looks like she’s been tort—“ Livia said from the door, being interrupted by her stomach’s convulsions. Had she meant tortured? Yes, that’s what it looked like.

“Chloe,” I said directly next to the hole where her right ear had been before, “you are safe now. Heal yourself!”

That did it. The head snapped in place, and her spine grew back together in seconds. Other parts also started to heal, but way more slowly. It was no surprise, given that much damage.

“Geri, help me put parts back where they belong. Every bit that can heal in again, she won’t have to regrow,” I said. It sounded emotionless, my mind still concentrating on more important things than anger.

🙚⚜🙘

It took nearly an hour until Chloe drew her first breath. Kinasteria noticed it first. She had swapped with Livia and Sam, who just couldn’t take the sight.

“Chloe? Are you awake?” I asked. I suspected she was, given she had responded to my voice when she was still in parts.

A gurgle answered my question. Her mouth and throat were only now reforming.

“Take your time,” I said.

Now, we could follow the healing process with our eyes. In just a few minutes, Chloe was healed up enough the speak.

“Fuck, that hurts,” were her first words. No surprise there. “In a good way, but I’ve got enough two hours ago.” Good way? What was that supposed to mean?

“Who did that to you?” I asked, no longer able to keep my curiosity in check. Anger could come later, once Chloe was fine again.

“New girl. Ella.”

I looked at Kinasteria. She took the hint and filled in the details. “Ella Hill, 19, puppeteer. She came in early and left before the other newbies showed up. She said she had to get to work. Medium height, very long bronze hair, big hazel eyes with an orange tinge, so likely a battleform. Cropped spaghetti top with a flowery print on white, light blue tight shorts, sandals.”

“Yes, that’s her,” Chloe confirmed. “She approached me outside, asking for advice using her skills in private. I took her in the outside door with me and up here for privacy. That’s when she used her powers on me.”

“That shouldn’t be possible; there’s a guild rule against it,” I said. “Did I miss something? Kinasteria, any idea? You know the system better than me.”

Chloe coughed out clumps of blood, then continued. “I had agreed to a skill support session. Maybe that?”

“Maybe,” Kinasteria didn’t sound convinced. “Then the system wouldn’t consider the puppeteering skill an attack when agreed upon. Still doesn’t explain the, um, cutting.”

I pulled out the system pad, finally remembering it existed, and went to the member list, looking for this Ella. I tapped her name and studied my options. I could kick and ban her from the guild, but that would not help now. There was no doubt she’d attack more people outside if she wanted to.

There was no real option to mark her as “danger, stay away”, but for a handful of coins, I could broadcast a guild quest to all members. I did so.

🖹

“Emergency guild quest. Guild member Ella Hill is wanted for the torture and murder of a fellow guild member. Warning! She is a puppeteer. Do not approach unless in a group of at least 8 people. Keep a distance of at least 100 metres otherwise! Ella, give yourself up at the guild hall, and we can see if we can find a way for you to stay alive. If I have to send a search team for you, they will have kill-on-sight orders.”

It wasn’t ideal and I had to guess about the advice I was giving, but I hoped I had erred on the safe side.

“Kill on sight?” Chloe asked. Her eyes still hadn’t reformed, but the system didn’t need them as it seemed. “For me? And I’m not even dead.”

“Not for the lack of trying. Good call on suppressing your healing, by the way. I guess that stopped her from ripping you apart until you really were dead.”

“Yeah, I think I used up my luck for the next ten years. Eight ability successes in a row, nine if you count Sam’s sword. And that ability’s only “improved”. About 75% chance, the tooltip says.”

You get one stage bonus inside the guild hall as an officer or worker,” Kinasteria said. “So more like 90%.”

“Still impressive luck,” I said. “Let’s hope you don’t need it again.”

“Cross my fingers; they should be around here somewhere,” Chloe joked, but I still checked. All ten were at their places; only some fingernails were missing. The old ones showed no signs of reattaching. Maybe dead cells couldn’t do that.

🙚⚜🙘

There was a knock on the open door. I turned to see Sam’s hand in the doorway, Sam standing outside, next to it. “How’s it going?” she asked.

“Quite well,” I said. “Chloe’s awake and giving us all the info we need. Still a bit bloody in here, though.”

“Hi, Sam,” Chloe said loudly.

“Hey, Chloe, nice to hear your voice. Jane, we’ve had a look at the CCTV recordings. Ella left just seconds after we entered. She must have heard us come in, the storeroom door was open a crack.”

“Bloody fuck,” I cursed. “So close.”

“But you wouldn’t have known what she can do,” Kinasteria remarked. “Probably better this way.”

“True. Sam, did you look at the recording for inside here?”

“You’ve got three guesses. And the first one doesn’t count.”

I pulled out my system pad again. Why had I not thought about recordings? That’s what most CCTV systems were there for. If you had to have someone monitoring them at all times, they’d be pointless.

I found the feed for the storage room, then quickly scrubbed back three hours and change. Chloe had been well early for her shift. There it was. Chloe walked in, followed by Ella, looking as Kinasteria had described her. In the video feed, I couldn’t see any outright unnatural features, but her overall look also gave me the impression of a battle form. She had that carefully honed BMI look models in magazines achieved with liberal application of Photoshop, combined with an outfit that showed more skin, while still blocking off the important parts, than most people would be comfortable with.

Then, there was a moment where I think she activated her skill. She herself stood there like a statue while Chloe suddenly moved in a jerky, less coordinated way. She made Chloe pull off her clothes but had some trouble coordinating her movements. Then Chloe lay down on the floor where we had found her and closed her eyes.

I paused the video and zoomed in on Chloe’s face to confirm that, as I didn’t think I should have been able to see that on a normal CCTV feed on a handheld tablet. But I was right; her eyes were closed. Zooming in further, I could see single pores on her skin—wow, movie-style “enhance!” without having to say it. But then, I doubted the system recorded images. It most likely was rendering the event out again for me, like the replay mode of a video game.

Resetting the zoom level, I resumed playback. Chloe now went still, and Ella moved again. She extended her finger, and her fingernails turned into razor blades. Literal ones; they even had that funny hole pattern in the centre. Then Ella put one blade against her own forearm and pulled it along gently, almost lovingly. A pearly line of blooddrops welled up. What was she doing?

About 15 seconds passed where nothing happened, then the cut vanished with a magic twinkle and reformed on Chloe’s arm. Ella seemed really happy about this, even hopping like a little girl, and said something. The CCTV didn’t have sound, so I paused and asked Chloe, “After that first cut, what did she say?”

“Something about having much fun together for a long time,” Chloe replied. “Cut for cut is what she said, I think. That’s when I disabled my regeneration. I had a suspicion healing quickly would either make her angry or cut me even more.”

“Did she say anything more later?” Kinasteria asked.

“Nothing substantial. Happy outcries, I think she was satisfied that a skill of hers worked well and such. Unless you count her moaning in pleasure as talking?”

I now had a suspicion how this had gone down and didn’t restart the video but scrubbed it forward with my finger. I wasn’t interested in the minute-by-minute details of a two-hour-long gore session. What I saw at high speed confirmed that suspicion easily enough—Ella hadn’t touched Chloe with those blades a single time. She had cut herself and enjoyed it immensely. It didn’t look sexual, but I couldn’t see into her head to confirm that.

I told the others about it.

“That explains why the System didn’t intervene,” Kinasteria said. “She never attacked Chloe. She used a support spell in reverse. And cutting oneself, yeah, there’s no rule against that.”

“Can you show me?” Chloe asked. “My eyes are back, but I don’t think I have the strength to hold that device yet. Blood level still is below 10%.”

“One wouldn’t guess that from how clean the floor is,” I said under my breath, making Geri look guilty. But then, aside from some surface smear, Chloe hadn’t absorbed any of it.

I showed the recording to Chloe and she had me scrub through the first 20 minutes of it slowly. “Yeah, she’s a cutter,” she said finally. “Late stages. Becoming a player probably saved her life.”

“Um, what?” I asked, confused by those words.

“A cutter. Someone who cuts herself either for fun, to feel something, to punish herself or for any number of bad reasons. Her real body likely is so scarred she has to wear long-sleeved clothes at all times.”

“Oh, that.” Nothing I could relate to, but I had heard of it. I’d even seen girls with suspicious scars on their arms in passing but never paid it any attention. “And what’s that with the life-saving?”

“In the vid, I see her going through the stages. Fine scratches that heal easily at the beginning. Then, deeper cuts just through the skin, and so on. I think I see where she goes from stuff she has done before to ‘I wouldn’t be standing here if I did that as a human’. And that point is scary; she plunges in the razor blades to the row of holes in the middle. You don’t do that and survive for long if you don’t get a shrink lock you up for a while.”

That made me realise one important detail I had completely missed before—Ella had felt every single cut on herself before it transferred magically over to Chloe. She hadn’t been torturing Chloe at all. She’d been torturing herself. Chloe had merely been her life insurance.

“Fuck me sideways and call it a handshake. We’re really getting every nutjob in the city,” I exclaimed, regretting it instantly as some of those nutjobs could hear me.

Chloe giggled. “Indeed. But isn’t it ironic how she ran into me?”

“Because you have that death immunity?” I asked, not being able to follow her thoughts.

“That, too. No, I meant her running into probably the only player who somewhat enjoyed what she did, aside from playing the death lottery. Although it got quite boring when it got too much for me, and I turned off my pain perception.”

That had me speechless, my brain feeling like an engine with the clutch and gas pressed at the same time.

“Could be the system’s way of protecting her,” Geri said. “With no harm done and no PTSD-fuelled vendetta on your end, she is salvageable.”

“Like me,” Chloe said quietly.

My mental gears engaged again. “Shit, who’s the one needing salvaging in group two? The one who has done inexcusably bad stuff like you and Ella?”

Sam laughed from the other side of the doorway.

“What?”

“Nothing. It’s just that you see patterns in everything the system does…and you’ve been right every time so far. Gallows humour…” she explained.

I wanted to rebuke that notion, but at that point, Kinasteria’s phone rang.

“Suppressed number,” she said, holding it up.

“Put it on speaker; it could be Ella,” I said.

She did. “Guild hall, this is Kina. How can I help you,” she sang out in a professionally happy tone.

“How did you know it was me?” a female voice on the other hand asked. Kinasteria nodded. It was Ella.

“Hi, Ella,” Chloe piped up unprompted. What was she doing? “That was fun! But can we keep an eye on the bloodloss next time, please? That takes hours to replenish, and I get debuffs when it’s too low.”

Ella was silent, and I didn’t fault her. Her brain must be sizzling now. I half expected to be able to see smoke rising up in the distance.

“Ella, this is Jane. The big boss of the guild, if you will. Let me be frank here. We are used to people going bonkers when they get their powers. Yesterday Chloe made us her bitch slaves, before that, Geri tried to drink me dry and sent us into a sex orgy, the day before that, we had to resurrect someone after an emotional breakdown, on Monday Livia knocked me through a concrete wall after I showed her what my ‘pain hold’ skill can do for a solid hour. Long story short, we are not resentful, and everyone gets one chance to mess up. But that is it, one chance. You need to come in and say ‘oopsy, sorry’, then we talk about it and determine if we need to take steps to prevent you from actually murdering someone or schedule some hugs for you.”

“I need to think about this,” she said after along pause and clicked off.

“That went well,” Sam said. “No sarcasm. I mean it. A real villainess would have ranted and told you her plans of world domination.”

Kinasteria’s phone saved me from replying to that with a chime. “Text from Ella,” Kinasteria announced. “She’s willing to talk, she says, but is at work. She says she gets off at six.”

“Stalling or real?” Sam asked. Good question; I’d give it a fifty-fifty shot.

“She told me she’s a cashier when she checked in,” Kinasteria said. “That would track.”

“Let’s believe it for now, but we should be careful. I’m leaving the quest up. Kinasteria, please tell anyone who gets in that we’re handling this, and the quest is just a warning to stay away.”

“The way she looks, she’s either no cashier in no world I know, or it’s a battle form,” Chloe added. “If it’s the latter, nobody will be able to find her anyway.” Damn, the system must put some concepts into the minds of players. I couldn’t think how people would know about battleforms that well and refer to them as uniformly otherwise. That would also explain why people were handling stuff around the guild so competently on their first day.

“How’s your healing going?” I asked her. Her body looked fine already, but she was still lying flat on her back.

“Fully healed up, but low blood level debuffs me to toddler strength,” she said, wiggling her hand. “I don’t even have the strength to lift my arm. I guess another hour or so until I’m out of the debuff zone of my blood loss immunity ability. I’ll be late for my shift at the food stand downstairs.”

Right, she had mentioned something about selling sandwiches. “You work at Clayton’s?”

“Yeah. Funny, ain’t it?”

“Oh, I remember you now,” Sam said. “You sold me a bagel when we set up the guild hall.”

“That was you behind that huge and heavy box? I couldn’t tell,” Chloe said with a grin. “Weird, it didn’t strike me as weird for you to juggle that thing around like it was nothing. Must be the system hiding players from the norms. By the way, did you mean it with that compliment? I always thought of it as ‘wide’ at best.”

“I did. Your arse is gorgeous, don’t be ashamed of it,” Sam said.

I rolled my eyes. Maybe we should set up the storage room as a sex dungeon for orgies instead of making it a training room? Most of the guild would be on board with that, after all…

“I’ll be back downstairs,” Kinasteria said. “I’ll fill in Livia. Maybe she knows the centre management and can get you the day off, Chloe. I’ll ask her about that.”

“Thanks, Kina.”