“Yes, that was it!” Oliver said in excitement. “It was a magic stone of a mythical beast of an era long forgotten.”

“Some kind of bird…?” Frank asked as we looked at the drawing of a bird-like creature with a long neck and beak and long tail feathers.

“Yes. The legendary Minokawa. Said to relentlessly terrorize the lands until a hero slew it. Its magic stone was a large crystal, similar to this divine crystal, capable of producing holy water. The legends don’t say how, however…” Oliver explained.

“Huh… Can your crystal make holy water, Casey?” Frank asked.

“I… don’t think so?” She frowned. “It can purify water, I guess…”

“I don’t suppose you have the magic stone somewhere…?” I asked.

“Sadly, no… It was only a legend.” Oliver shook his head. “But perhaps we could learn something here… What if the water this crystal purified is the same holy water that we used to make the charms? It would open up some possibilities!”

We would still need some inert magic stones, though. And even if we made the charms, what could we do with them? Put them on the staff and blast both of the worlds with their effect? Wouldn’t that just have the same result as last time?

Oliver grabbed the crystal and submerged it in a bowl of water. Casey was about to walk over and instruct him on how to use the crystal when the door to the boss room suddenly opened, catching everyone’s attention.

A man in a casual outfit of sweatpants and a gray tee entered, a strangely glowing wrench in hand. He stopped as he noticed the room’s occupants and his eyes widened.

“You!” Mike snarled as he jumped to his feet. “You bastard!”

The newcomer’s eyes snapped to him, confusion on his face evident.

“What is–”

Frank’s sentence was cut off by Mike grabbing his axe and hurling it at the newcomer to the shock of everyone. The guy squawked in surprise and threw himself to the ground, dodging the axe, which buried itself into the wall next to the entrance.

Mike didn’t waste a second charging the guy, leaving us frozen in shock with no clue what was going on or what we should be doing.

“It’s one of them! One of the gods!” Oliver shouted, anger marring his features.

Oh…

That wasn’t good.

Mike reached the man, tore his axe out of the wall and readied it to slash down at him.

“Mike, wait!” I shouted to no avail.

The axe came down, but before it could connect, a bright green barrier sprung up in place, deflecting the attack, and tossing Mike himself backwards.

“Gah!”

“What the hell?!” the guy on the ground shouted as he got up, glaring at Mike, slowly lifting his wrench to do… something.

“Wait, please!” I shouted again, trying to deescalate things.

The guy looked at me and his eyes widened after a brief moment.

“What the hell is that?!”

The brief distraction was enough for Mike to recover and charge the man once more with a sideways swing of his axe, aiming to bisect him.

But the shield sprung up once more, nullifying the attack and throwing Mike across the room, while his axe flew in another direction.

“Whoa?!” Frank yelled as the axe landed right next to him.

“Mike, come on! We can still–”

“Okay, fuck this,” the newcomer suddenly said, an annoyed frown on his face.

He lifted his odd wrench, made a tapping motion in the air and then suddenly, everything in the room stopped.

I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe! And from the looks of it, nobody else could either.

He was using dev tools!

“What the hell even happened here?” the guy murmured, oblivious to our predicament.

He slowly walked across the room as my panic began to rise at the lack of oxygen. I couldn’t even bite the ruby seed to get out!

I needed to do something! I needed–

“And what even is this?” he asked as he stopped and stared at me. “Who messed with the file names? How do you even screw up like this?”

He was looking at my name.

He saw my true name.

From one second to the next, my mind went from panicking at the lack of oxygen to punishing the man for his insolence. I wasn’t even sure what exactly I was doing, but I clearly felt it. The same feeling when I got pissed at Cradence. The same feeling when Casey used the crystal on me.

I grew.

The man’s eyes widened and he jumped back as I broke out of whatever effect he had used on us.

“What the fuck?!”

He waved his wrench at me again, stopping me for a brief moment before I broke it once more.

I didn’t even hesitate. With the amount of fighting we had been doing today, the motion came to me naturally. My katana slid from its sheath, swished through the air, and decapitated the man in one fluid motion. Not even the green barrier stopped my slash, shattering against my blade like glass. His headless body crumbled into a heap, leaving behind a sideways white portal my blade had cut into reality.

The white portal quickly shrunk and vanished and the moment the man’s head hit the ground, I gasped and fell to my knees, dropping my katana.

…

What… W-what in the world had I just done?

I heard several gasps and subsequent heavy breathing as the others were released from the stopping effect.

“Holy crap… I guess that’s the difference between a real goddess and a poser,” Frank commented.

I shakily got back to my feet while pointedly ignoring the katana on the ground. At least there was no blood. Thank god for the age rating of this game.

“Renee! Are you okay?” Casey ran up to me, still heaving from the earlier suffocation.

“Yeah…” I shakily replied.

“You… turned into your true form again…”

“Yeah…”

“And then you…” She glanced at the katana.

I looked away.

“Yeah…”

“They are onto us! We have to get out now!” Michael declared.

“But they can travel around the world in an instant!” Oliver reminded him. “There would be nowhere to hide from them!”

I looked up to see everyone looking at me expectantly.

“You said you can open portals to other worlds. Could you open one right now?” Michael asked, his eyes radiating determination.

“I–”

I was about to say that I couldn’t, but remembered the white portal I had just managed to create, as well as the one in Cradence’s lab.

Could I make another one right now? Could I keep it from vanishing long enough for everyone to pass through?

Where would it even lead, though? Would it lead anywhere? I still had no idea what the white portals were.

No, it was too risky. I couldn’t experiment with the white portals now when I didn’t even know how to consciously make one.

I shook my head.

“I’m… sorry. I can only make portals in specific spots in the worlds.”

Mike grimaced.

“Where is the nearest one?”

“In the middle of the colosseum.”

“Fuck,” he swore. “We’ll have to distract the monster while you open the portal, then… Everyone! Leave anything you don’t absolutely need behind! We need to get going right away!”

Feeling the urgency, I knelt down and picked up my katana with a lot of trepidation and slid it into my sheath again, ignoring the decapitated corpse and the fact that his wrench had disappeared while I hadn’t been looking.

Even knowing that it was just a game avatar and he would respawn, I couldn’t help but shiver at what I had done. Would I have the same reaction to anyone finding out my true name? I didn’t want to accidentally kill real people in a knee-jerk response.

“Hey, Mike. You dropped your axe,” Frank said, handing the familiar axe back to the man.

“Ah, thanks–”

From one moment to the next, a new person appeared in the middle of the room without any sound or visual indication of a teleport. He wore full body armor in a really out-of-place bright pink color and held a familiar wrench in his hand.

Everyone tensed at their sudden appearance, but before anyone could do anything, I felt myself freezing once more.

Fuck! No!

This was bad!

Before I could even think of a way to fight back, the newcomer glanced at Frank and my friend disappeared, a moment later, he did the same with Casey, and finally, when his head turned to look at me, I felt the uncomfortable sensation of an RLO teleport, my body being dragged through a spacial tunnel, before being dumped at the new location.

I gasped as I hit the ground, but immediately scrambled to get up and look around.

Frank and Casey were right next to me. We were all in some sort of neon green cage, surrounded by oceans of cyan clouds of energy. Something about that energy felt strange to my senses.

I recognized this place from some screenshots on the wiki. This was the Cheater Prison. A place where the devs put any hackers and cheaters they found in lieu of banning them.

Crap.

What was going to happen now? They couldn’t… ban us, could they? We weren’t game avatars.

“Teleport out, everyone!” Frank shouted.

“Wai–”

“Ow!” Frank yelped as his ruby seed fell out of his mouth. “What the hell?!”

“Can’t teleport from here,” I said, my mind still running a thousand miles per second. “It’s the Cheater Prison.”

“No, you can’t,” a voice said from behind us.

I whirled around and saw the same person in weirdly pink armor – test armor with unfinished textures, I belatedly realized – floating outside of the cage in the cyan energy, staring us down.

“Finally caught you, hackers.”

This wasn’t good.

Maybe diplomacy would work again?