Amelia

“Rosa, watch out!” Bia called, jumping in front of a spell obviously designed to assassinate my new girlfriend. The shield that she summoned sparkled with deep navy blue energy, and it stopped the attack cold.

Amado finished shanking some wannabe assassin and turned to look at us in the back line. “Looks like they’ve figured out what our new secret weapon is. Must’ve had someone appraising everyone over here to figure that out.”

Cycling Jazz so the spent spell cartridge was ejected, I loaded another one and took aim again. Rosa and I had a system now, there was no need for verbal communication. Her hand would gently touch me somewhere, and I’d get a buff when I fired.

This time, my shot smashed into a dense knot of Pag troops. Pink and silver lightning rippled out from the impact, scorching and debuffing as it chained through dozens of enemies. Several were disintegrated instantly, their bodies dissolving like melted marshmallows, while others were brought to their knees.

For the past two days, this’d been the routine for us. We’d go to sleep in separate beds, then I’d wake up with Rosa having crawled into mine. After that was breakfast with the crew, where the small fox girl stuck to my side and kept quiet while everyone else joked around. Then it was off to the icy battlefields, where slowly but surely, we were beginning to push the Pagutum Empire back towards their own land.

“This next one should let you fire a more basic canister repeatedly. Pick something that’ll be good rapidfire,” Rosa told me, whispering in my ear. “Too powerful and Jazz might overheat.”

Oh. Now that was exciting! Hastily, I took an explosive shot canister out of my bandolier and slotted it into my weapon. “How does this work?”

“Uh… it should refresh the charge in your canister every time you fire it,” she explained. “So just keep pulling the trigger I guess?”

“Got it.”

Taking aim at the Fear Gang where they were trying to fight their way through our players, I pulled the trigger. Jazz almost pulled herself right out of my hands, and a line of explosive magical bullets tore through their haphazard ranks.

Explosions pulled their ranks apart like I’d tear into a tender, juicy steak, except the display in front of me was decidedly on the rare side of things. A cheer went up from our people before an enemy paladin shoved a massive shield in the way. It arced out beyond the physical shield’s reach to create a red energy shield that negated any and all bullets I might fire. Negate shields were the bane of my existence.

Didn’t stop our archers, though, who put several crossbow bolts into the paladin. He grunted under the impacts, but frustratingly, the man had oodles of health.

Rosa shifted beside me, faster than I could follow, and a second later a blood red dagger ripped through the place where she’d been standing. My reaction times were not nearly fast enough to deal with the frantic action of the next few seconds.

The Mageblade Butcher was right in the middle of us, his famous negating dagger ripping through the air at a frightening speed. For all his prowess, levels, and prestige, the assassin didn’t even come close to hitting the agile fox girl as she dodged every move he made.

Finally, getting fed up with the dance they were doing, she ducked a stroke and came up inside his guard. Her own normal steel dagger flashed in her hand, and she planted it directly in his chest.

Coughing, the Butcher staggered back from her and ripped the dagger out. Already the wound was sealing— some spell or enchantment working its magic.

That was when Amado shadow-stepped behind him and planted his own, much more effective daggers right in his back. The man screamed and went down to one knee, only for Rosa to flicker forward into a spinning kick, slamming her heel right into the side of his head.

He dropped like a sack of potatoes and Amado made extremely short work of his health bar after that.

When their trump card failed to take Rosa out, the Fear Gang began to disengage, doing their best to keep their losses to a minimum. We let them go, since the day was starting to get a little long in the tooth. Personally, I was hungry for good food and some kisses.

****

“Where’d you learn to get so damn good at fighting?” Amado asked Rosa when we sat down in the dining hall.

The guild's main dining hall was probably my favourite room in the whole place. Built like some sort of old-money manor house, it had wood panelling on the walls, several heavy stone fireplaces, and soft cream carpet. The carpet was a bit of a stain magnet, but we all had some sort of cleaning spell, so it was relatively easy to fix that issue.

Rosa, looking very uncomfortable with the attention, shrugged and said, “I just spent a lot of time in VR training sims.”

“Why?” the rogue asked curiously.

Rosa shrugged again. “It was fun.”

“Maybe I should put some hours into the training sims if a caster can wreck the Butcher like that,” he laughed, pouring himself a tankard of mead from one of the many small barrels lined up on the table.

Rosa didn't reply. Instead, she pressed herself against my side and wiggled until she was comfortable. Fuck, she was so cute. I leaned my head over slightly to kiss her cheek, getting a little blush as a reward.

"You two are adorable together," Bia commented, smiling over at us from the opposite side of the large table.

A few of our other nearby guildies voiced their agreement, which forced Rosa to snuggle further into me for protection.

"I definitely agree," I told them all with a grin.

"Kinda wild how so many of us are building our lives in VR these days, though," Bia said after swallowing a mouthful of pasta. "Like, don't get me wrong, I love it in VR, but it's not what society wants from us."

"Society wants us to either be good little basic income consumers or cogs in some behemoth corporate machine, so it can get fucked," Rosa replied, reaching for her wine. "Virtual reality is still reality. It's not like the computers exist in some magical other dimension."

Bia grinned agreement at the small fox girl and raised her glass to mime a toast. "Yup. I'd live in here permanently if it were up to me. There's nothing for me outside but the shit you described."

“Exactly,” Rosa nodded.

The chatting over dinner continued, but thankfully we turned away from heavier topics. I was still mulling over the fact that my body was dying in my pod while I just happily had dinner with my guildies. It was a pretty messed up situation, especially the juxtaposition going on in my head. Like, out in reality there were at least a dozen decaying corpses within ten metres of me! How fucked was that?

Later that night, when we were doing our before-bed snuggles, Rosa perked up. “Oh! May has a lead!”

“What’s the lead?” I asked, trying to sound enthusiastic.

“She says that the body storage company you were with has four facilities,” she said, turning on the bed to face me. “One is over in Vancouver, one is in Ottawa, and one is in Toronto. The fourth one is up in northern Ontario, because the colder temperatures up there means less money spent on power for cooling all the tech. That one is also where they transfer pods that are long term even by their standards. We think your body was being transported up there when the RAIDS scan killed the managing SAI in control of the transfer.”

“Alright,” I nodded, batting at a lock of my own floating hair. “So we just follow that railroad until we find a crashed train?”

“Hopefully, but there’s a chance it might be harder to find than that,” she sighed, pulling up a VR holographic window. On the window she searched a map, and traced the line with one finger. “The train should have been noticed already. It might be a backwater route, but several trains have run along it since the scan. Some of them were manned, so the fact that it hasn’t been reported is odd.”

I grunted and frowned down at the wisp of lavender hair between my fingers. “That didn’t actually occur to me. That is really bloody strange.”

“Want to know what’s even weirder?” she asked, reaching out to put a hand on my arm. “There are zero written records of that train. Nothing. We know it existed and when it left though, because we have footage of it leaving the station from a security camera on a building several hundred metres away. Footage from closer than that is mysteriously missing.”

Now I was getting kinda angry. Someone had covered up the whole accident! Someone knew that my train had gotten fucked, and instead of going out and retrieving us, they just wiped everything. It’s not like it was even necessary to cover up their shitty scan, either. They could have just chalked the crash up to, like, mechanical failure. If I had to guess, I’d say some political bureaucrat that’d had all the empathy sucked out of him at a young age was just too lazy to actually do anything, and opted for the easy route. Fucking bastards.

“You look… and smell, angry,” Rosa whispered, moving closer. She pressed a tentative kiss to my lips, and fixed me with the most adoring little smile I’ve ever seen. “Are we going to do murder after we save you?”

Her earnest request to go on a vengeful lesbian assassination spree hit me in the feels like nothing else, and I laughed and hugged her at the same time. “Oh, my dear sweet Rosa. Fine, we’ll do a little murder.”

“As a treat?”

“As a treat.”

“But first I have to finish my rescue mission.” Rosa said with a pout.

I grinned. “It’s always good to finish dealing with your vegetables before you have any treats.”

With a gasp, Rosa thumped me on the chest with a fist. “Hey! That’s incredibly off-colour!”

“Ow!” I complained. Damn, she was strong.

“Don’t say things like that,” she told me, attempting a serious face. “We might be planning murder, but we’re not ableist okay? At least, I think it's ableist? Whatever, it doesn’t matter! The joke was still very insensitive!”

“Fine, fine… Ow! Stop poking me!”

QuietValerie

Hey friends! Hope things are going well with all my lovely readerbuns! I've been playing through Pokemon Shining Pearl recently. It's the first time I've made a concerted effort to fill out the pokedex and it's pretty fun. I really want to try Arceus too. Hopefully I'll have enough disposable income soon! Anyway uh, check out my patreon and all that jazz. Thanks for reading!