Chaos Year 3, Day 109, 8:33 pm.

40 minutes ago, in the square-shaped chamber.

"So I'm the only one stuck here in the end?" I mumbled, as my vision clouded up and everything appeared fuzzy.

The small compartment crowded with my squad members just a few moments ago, looked so huge suddenly. And the stone sculptures' intense glares all around the room gave me chills down my spine making all my hairs stand straight along with my furry tail. 

But that was not the real problem.

It's like God is picking on me.

I never hated it when my classmates at school bullied me. In fact, they all called me the red-haired cursed child in elementary school, even the teachers behind my back. It didn't bother me that much either when that old creepy man stalked me for a while back in 8th grade. 

However, being alone, I truly hated it more than anything else. 

I enter Chaos world everyday just to get rid of this loneliness. Yet, here I am left all alone in the middle of nowhere inside the game.

If only Mii-chan were more friendly. 

My ears drooped down and my legs suddenly gave up, dropping me down onto the cold stone floor.

"Senpai, won't you come and save me…like always?" 

I gazed at the stone door, hoping it would open up, and on the other side, Senpai would be standing there smiling at me. But nothing happened, only the torches at the corners kept flickering, creating an eerie ambiance in the room.

Of course, nothing like that will happen. I sighed.

Senpai would want me to accept the fact and face the problem on my own anyway. 

He once said, "If you hate loneliness, you gotta find yourself the companionship that you desire so much. No one is gonna come along and fill in to cure your loneliness on their own. Get on your feet and seek that warmth going forward."

I stood up, wiping my wet eyes and cheeks with my long sleeves. Then I spread my arms into the air and slapped both my cheeks at the same time. "There's no way I'll succumb to my own hell. I'll find them out myself."

Then I called out to my support AI, "Mii-chan, I need your help." 

Everyone had a built-in support AI to help the players inside Chaos. Only the player could communicate to his personal AI. For this reason especially, Senpai introduced me to this game. Even if I had found no other players to play with, I would still have my AI together with me always. 

But apparently, Mii-chan was kind of the proud loner type. So we didn't really get along. 

Yet another God's cruel joke. 

"What is it?" A system window screen appeared in front of me and there showed a short-haired girl in the last days of her teenage years.

"Umm, We need to get out of here first." I carefully spoke. "If you have any idea about that, it would really help me out."

Mii-chan had the obligation to help me whenever I needed it. However, I had to be careful about not ticking her off, or else things would get a bit harsh.

"Hell if I know. I'm not familiar with this place. You don't have the map either." She scowled, folding her arms.

"Well then let's search for clues. Two pairs of eyes are better than one, right?"

"Alright." She switched herself off letting out a small breath. Then she initiated the Incognito Mode. Thus she could view the world around me freely even without the screen popping up. 

Senpai says his support AI almost always stays in Incognito Mode, watching whatever goes on and helping however she can. 

But why is Mii-chan so different? 

She rarely interacted with me unprompted. She neither watched over me nor showed any interest in whatever I did.

We looked around the chamber for a few minutes but found nothing noteworthy. The room was pretty much empty except for those statues sticking out of the walls. There were exactly 12 statues, each different from the others and they all looked ghastly.

Something inside me warned me not to approach these statues, and every time I eyed them directly, my heart got agitated as if something bad would happen any moment now.

"Oi! Look over there, on the wall behind you." Mii-chan's sudden voice startled me, almost making me jump out. She spoke from the video screen that just popped up in front of me. "Look closely, there are some letters written there."

"Wall?" Turning back, A wall full of stone carvings came into view. Before I regarded them as nonsense designs, but after staring at them for a while I did spot some letters scattered across the wall. "What about the other walls?" 

One by one I checked the others and found letters carved on all four of the walls.

Then I visualized the letters from each wall before me in order to make sense of them.

W-L-M-A-F-N-A-O

D-Z-O-C-R-R-D-O-A-I-E

U-T-A-E-D-A-T-S-H-E

R-M-A-A-L-E-C-E-I-R-E-C-T

I moved my hands around in the air, interchanging and replacing the visualized letters.

"Have you finally gone crazy from all that 'lonely' shits?" Mii-chan frowned, gaping her mouth.

Ah right, Watching me move my hands around in the air would certainly seem crazy from others' perspectives.

"I'm just taking the letters from each wall and trying to create words or sentences using them." I smiled glancing at the window screen. This was the first time Mii-chan ever showed any interest in whatever I did. "These words must be the hints I need to open the door of this chamber."

"Whatever." Losing interest, she switched herself off immediately.

Ah, I thought this is the moment we start mingling. Sigh… Anyway, this isn't the time for moping around about that. I need to solve the puzzle fast and go find the others.

In my childhood days, I used to solve all kinds of word puzzles to kill time. And finally, today that skill came into use. It took me about 20 minutes to figure them all out. "Okay, so the hints are FLOW MANA, ZODIAC ORDER, STATUE HEAD and CREATE MIRACLE."

Organizing the letters of that last wall was the hardest, yet the message it contains is the most useless one. I shook my head sideways in disappointment.

"So that means, I have to flow mana into those statue heads. But what does that 'zodiac order' mean?" I mumbled processing my thoughts. 

Just about then, my eyes fell on one of the statues' heads. 

Wait, the zodiac order? That means… 

Right away, I checked all the other statues and realized these 12 statues were actually all the Chinese zodiac animals. I couldn't discern them properly before, because of that uneasy feeling I got looking at them, since they had horrendous appearances and misshapen body structures. 

"So there comes the 'zodiac order'. I need to channel my mana into these animal statues one by one in the Chinese zodiac order."

Wasting no time, I approached the statue of the first animal in the zodiac cycle, the Rat. As I stepped closer the uneasy feeling grew more inside me. And my feet stopped moving soon from the unknown fear. I started spiraling again. 

Is this about my past? Am I scared to move forward because I'm all alone? The more I want to escape my past, the more I get tangled up in it. Sometimes I just wonder why God is so cruel to me. 

No no… Andrea, snap out of it. you have no time to think about those right now. Senpai believes in you, so move your damn legs.

I shook my head and tail violently to get rid of those unnecessary thoughts and forced my way forward. 

Reaching the rat statue, I put my left hand on the cold surface of the rat's head. "Infuse Wind Element."

A sudden gust of wind blew in a circle under my hand and blasted outwards, tingling my furry ears and tail. The mana then flowed into the rat statue, which glowed white for a moment before going back to the normal dark stone shade again. 

But right then suddenly the eyes of the rat glowed bright red.

"Eiik!" I shrieked watching the ghastly sight and tumbled backward onto the floor. Fwaaa my heart almost flew out.

Sitting on the floor, I tried to calm myself down, putting my left hand over my chest. Senpai would have patted my head if he were here right now. I touched my head and ears but it didn't feel nearly as good as it would if he did it.

After a while, I stood up and went toward the other statues. Ox, Tiger, Rabbit, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Goat, Monkey, Rooster, Dog and finally Pig. One by one I activated all of the statues, pouring mana into them.

As soon as I activated the last statue, all of them started glowing together. The white glow grew more intense rapidly, and filled the whole room in bright white light, forcing me to cover my eyes. Eventually, the glow faded, turning the chamber back into the dusky cold it once was, lit with fluttering firelight. 

Opening my eyes, I saw cracks all over the statues and steam flowing out of them.

"What's going on?" I pondered. "Why isn't the door opening?"

I solved the puzzle, right? Then why? Just what went wrong? Did the door got stuck? How do I fix that? Ugh, I'm going crazy.

Crack! Crash! Boom!

An abrupt deafening sound thundered across the room, as my view got obstructed once again, but this time it was the dust and smoke shrouding the whole chamber.

"Cough! Cough! Urgh…" Immediately I brought out a stone I keep in my inventory for situations like this, and muttered, "Infuse Wind element." 

The spell generated a gust of wind, which blasted away the smoke around me.

However, the scene waiting for me behind the fog shuddered my heart, freezing my whole body. 

All the statues broke into pieces and in front of each, there were hideous rotting monsters, glaring at me intensely with their bright red eyes. 

Did they come out of the statues?

I couldn't even squeak a sound out, as they approached me slowly. There were 12 of them, twice my size, and here I was all alone, a cornered little kitten.

And I couldn't do anything even if I wanted, since I was just a wind mage, specialized for support. I couldn't possibly defeat even one of them, let alone all 12 of these monsters. And I couldn't escape either, since the door was still shut tight.

I closed my eyes and gritted my teeth, as three of the monsters in my front lifted their weapons to strike me down. 

Monsters screeching, crackling noises of stones, thumping sounds of feet hitting the floor, all kinds of sounds mixing together created a unique cacophony. But soon my senses shut themselves down, as no sound reached my ears and no smell of rotting flesh tickled my nose anymore. 

Only one thought remained inside me. Senpai...

A few seconds passed, yet nothing happened. Did he really…? 

I lifted my eyelids slowly and saw thick golden hair swaying in front of me. But that hair was not completely golden, as dark red blood tarnished the purity of the hair. The same hot blood also sprew onto my face and drenched the floor under us, rolling over to my feet.

Annette-san? 

I could not believe my eyes, as I watched Annette-san's body crumbling down onto the floor. Her body had several large and deep slashing wounds from which red blood kept gushing out. 

Unable to take it anymore, my mind went blank, as my consciousness drifted off to the dark nothingness.