** Rosa **

I held my breath as the Joret Army Scout squinted at me. He looked suspicious of me, and I knew why. The body I was in wasn’t actually an Artifisuki body like it appeared. Instead, it was a Tod Sifv, a sort of Faerie Artifisuki lookalike that the designers of the game had taken from irish folklore. I was short for a normal human, about five feet tall, which was normal for a woman of both the faerie and normal versions of the race.

I had pale skin and dark purple hair. My hair, and by extension the fur on my big pointed fluffy ears and even bigger tail, was so dark it looked black in most lights, but if you put a light behind me you could see the purple in it. I’d liked the colour, and I needed a body I could use on the trips I made into Joret territory, so I’d chosen this one.

The unfortunate thing about civilisation, was that although there were way too many people involved, you still needed it. I needed it today because I didn’t have the skills to make any truly decent food, and I had been getting a little depressed with my diet of soldier’s rations recently. Sure, I could cook an amazing roast or curry outside of the game, but I didn’t exactly have all the expensive kitchen equipment in Cora. So I’d bitten the bullet and decided to make a trip into the Taeru, a huge Artifisuki Warcity.

I had to give the little furballs credit, their shit looked great. I loved the way their architecture looked, it was awe inspiring. I decided that when I was next in my pod’s home, I’d swap out the architecture for something that matched. Keep it in the mountains though of course.

“I don’t know, there’s something funny about you,” the scout said with a frown.

“I-I don’t know… I’m just a newbie. I’m blessed! Maybe that’s it?” I asked softly, feining an intimidation I did not feel. I could cut the scouts down and consume them at any time, like the useless chaff that they were.

“Yeah that’s probably it sarge, she has that real slight unsettling feel that blessed have,” one of his scouts said, piping up from where he was keeping an eye out while his boss interrogated me.

Sarge, or whatever his name was, nodded slowly, “Yeah. Gotta give you blessed some slack I guess. You’re the ones helping us fight the pags when you don’t have to after all.”

“Oh, yes… that’s me,” I smiled with mock shyness. “I’m not very good yet, but I’m learning!”

He opened his mouth to reply, but stopped when we all heard a noise. It was the all too familiar whistling, crackling sound of an accelerated arcane bolt. The type fired from a massive cannon. It streaked out of the cloud above us and arced across the sky to impact the distant Taeru. Even at this distance you could see the city rock under the impact. It looked like a heavy hit.

I was the first to speak, saying mildly, “Well that’s unfortunate.”

“Unfortunate? That probably killed people,” the sarge guy said in outrage. “Those fucking pags have another secret weapon? Already? That one came from the bloody sky!”

“No,” I chuckled darkly, my form shifting and changing into the one that had gained so much infamy lately. “I meant it was unfortunate for you lot. You see, I’m low on energy, and that looked like the herald of battle to come.”

I watched in delight as their expressions changed from outrage to delicious, succulent terror. I could smell it, the bitter savoury taste hanging in the air. The smell that I had come to crave recently. I breathed it in, licking my lips as some part of the creature that I was quivered in anticipation for the meal to come.

The first to fall was the sarge himself, my mist reaching out to take his fear without my raising a hand. I learned to feed this way a few weeks back, and it was so much easier, even if it took a little longer. He struggled for just a moment before he went limp, dying as I tore his mind apart and I sought the meal within.

The man who had spoken up in my favour just moments earlier tried to back away, only to trip on something that had been hidden in the snow. That damn snow lay over this entire region in perpetuity, there was no global warming on this world. I strode over to him, casually dodging his clumsy thrown knife. He begged as I reached down with my hand, and then stopped begging when I took what I wanted.

The others in the scouting party had frozen, as the weak willed NPCs so often did, but they came to action now. I summoned my chains to deal with them, the crescent blades acting as weights that made my next move that much easier. I flicked my wrist, my chains knowing my intent as they swung through the air and tangled around my prey. I groaned in satisfaction as I ate my fill from them while they lay helpless, their terror compounded by that inability to act against their fate.

The battle would be behind me. A field of experience and fuel that I could reap in abundance, and I needed to be there. My form exploded outwards into the creature of smoke that was my true image, and I moved swiftly in the direction of the fighting.

It took me too long to get there, but I was not late to the carnage. Pagutum was doing it again, another surge of aggression that would leave Joret reeling and in flight. Joret were weak and undisciplined. They were also a far kinder nation than Pagutum, but that didn’t help them much. In war like this, kindness was showing itself to be a weakness.

I moved to enter the snow covered field of death, when the secret weapon that the scouts had spoken of revealed itself. A dark shape descended from the ruddy, dirty clouds, resolving itself into something that resembled a ship. It was an airship, riding on currents I couldn’t see, huge spell accelerators jutting from the underside of the vessel.

It was not a pretty thing, made of dark wood and bracing steel in utilitarian lines that reminded me of the rest of Pagutum’s brutalist aesthetic. There was no blimp or ornate housings for antigrav engines that I could see either. Nothing like the real world equivalent that the rich and powerful liked to ride across the skies of Earth.

If only I could get up there. How would it feel to ride that thing to the ground, burning and broken after I had torn out whatever held it aloft? Glorious, no doubt. I resolved to find a way onto one of those things at some point. Find a way onto one, and then tear it from the sky with laughing claws.

Turning my attention back to the ground, I took my normal form, the one known as the Witch of Chains, and got to work. I took comfort in the way my chains whistled through the air as they carved through flesh. As usual, the soldiers fell by the dozens under my smoke and steel, those to either side trying to run. I used my smoke to feed every now and then, tendrils of the stuff reaching out into the minds of the most delectable morsels.

Sadly, although I could smell the fear in the other players, I couldn’t directly feed off them. Instead, they let off an aura of my fuel that would be drawn into me if I was close enough. It was meagre though, barely worth mentioning. I just killed whatever players that dared to challenge me, but those that didn’t died just the same. I just killed them all. Players lacked in fuel, but they made up for it in experience. I still had yet to acquire any ability trees, but the attribute points were more than welcome.

The battle was over far too soon however, as the walking worms of the Pagutum military arrived, along with their faster supporting mage platforms. Joret soldiers fell in their hundreds under the assault, and I was forced to hide myself in the boughs of a pine while the front swept by.

Even my callous mind was awed by the surgical ferocity of the advance. Red cavalry rode this way and that, killing as many routed blue troops as they could find. It was a massacre, plain and simple. The player guilds of the red side were even more vicious, their more mobile members ranging across and through the trees that dotted the white plains.

It had been mid afternoon when I had killed the scouts, but as the never ending procession of Pagutum’s military might paraded past, dark began to fall. It was only as the last rays of day’s light was skimming the tops of the trees that I was able to come down out of where I had been hiding.

The field before me was a mess, blood and more lay strewn in a patchwork carpet over the previously pristine snow. What white had been left after the killing stopped was now churned up by the never-ending march of men and machinery that I’d just witnessed.

The Taeru was long gone, and my chances of a good bowl of ramen with it, so there was only one thing I could do. I’d have to go back to where I’d been hiding out and move, following the battlefield as I had been doing since I’d spawned. I’d done practically nothing else, spoken to no one other than when I was in disguise. It had been calming, and some days I was able to make it through the whole twenty four hours without thinking about my family.

Which I had just failed to do today. I took my Witch form and hugged myself in comfort, holding to the sensations of the bitter cold and my breathing. I couldn’t do any of my calming exercises when I was in smoke form. Shaking, I huddled there as time seemed to pass me by. Although I hadn’t been thinking of them, when I did, it was worse than before. Like a wound that had been allowed to partially heal before it was torn open again.

Coming back into the stream of time, I realised that I must have stood there for almost half an hour while I tried to hold myself together.

I couldn’t stay here, I needed to move. So I set about going back to my camp for my things. I wasn’t really interested in rushing, however, I felt too raw for that, so I took my time. Alternating between forms as I needed them. My favourites were the fox faerie and the witch, but I had others that were useful when I needed them.

I’d set my base of operations up in a deeper part of the huge forest that comprised the entire south of Joret lands, and so it was with mild surprise when I found fresh tracks in the snow. The tracks were strange, not only because there was the odd drop of blood, but because they seemed too far apart. It was as though the person making these tracks was jumping, rather than walking across the snow.

Strange.

Bursting apart into my smoke form, I began to track them, keeping low and moving with as much stealth as I could muster. The tracks were wandering and erratic, and more than once I almost lost them due to the sheer turnabout nature of the path that my prey was taking. Who was this lost person?

I finally caught sight of my quarry as I crested a small rise. They were doing a sort of skipping limp that seemed strange and out of sync with gravity, at least to my eyes. Then I recognised them, or rather, her. The woman I’d seen a few days ago at some nameless battle. She was a player, judging by her appearance and the fact she was alive again after I’d killed her.

I couldn’t tell from back here what she looked like in any great detail, and I hadn’t gotten a good look at her on the battlefield either. I just remembered her lilac coloured hair and the way it had seemed to float, as well as those soulful eyes. They’d disarmed me for a moment, before her friend had fired a spell at me and janked me back into the battle.

Those same eyes found me almost as soon as I tried to move towards her. She was only a hundred or so meters away, but it was too far to see her reaction. I didn’t need to see it though. She telegraphed it with the way she froze, then bolted. She was scared.

Debating for a moment if it was worth hunting her down, I paused. She wouldn’t be worth any fuel, but she might be worth some experience. Plus, it was fun to stalk prey through the woods like this.

With my course of action locked in, burst into my smoke wraith form and began to move. I couldn’t do it over long distance, but my formless charge between the trees was nearing speeds of any mundane mount. I skipped across the snow like a stone across a pond, always keeping the lilac of my prey’s hair in view.

She was fast, too, however, and smart. She almost lost me once or twice with a tricky sideways dash between trees, or taking leaps off the tops of small hills to obfuscate her tracks. It was no use though. I could smell her fear. It was a tangible thing that hung ripe and potent in the air behind her. I was almost recouping the fuel I was using in the chase just with the trail of fumes she was leaving.

When she tripped as she tried to take another jump, it was over. She went skidding and tumbling through the snow to rest against the trunk of a large pine, her impact looking anything but comfortable. She scrambled into a sitting position against the tree and stared in wide eyed terror as I approached.

She was beautiful, this girl. She’d made her character well. A soft and open face stared back at me as I stepped close enough to take her with my chains. I didn’t summon them though. I was too busy staring. Her eyes were as I remembered them, only… so much more. They were inhumanly wide and full, blinking up at me the way they were.

When I took my witch form, she whimpered and closed her eyes tight, her breathing becoming even more erratic and panicked. She was hurt, I noticed, in quite a few places. Her left leg was twisted at an odd angle, and she held one arm protectively to her chest. I stepped closer still.

Her body was incredible, from what I could make of it through her outfit. The top was tight and easy to determine the shape of, but her legs were clad in simple but well made plate greaves. What an odd combination.

Drifting my eyes up from where I had been looking over her body, my breath caught when I saw the tears that trailed down her cheeks. I don’t know what it was in me that changed just there, maybe it was my softer, nurturing side finally winning out, but those tears stopped my thoughts of death and killing dead in their tracks.

What was I doing? Stalking and terrifying a poor girl like this? She was just here for fun, right? To play a game, same as I was… wait no! She was real, just another evil person. Human, out there in reality. I couldn’t trust people. People did nothing but take and demand, and when you refused, they turned to knives. Sometimes those knives were verbal… sometimes they were not.

I formed a similar knife out of my smoke, my resolve hardening along with the blade. I raised it, staring into her face, watching as it twitched and quivered in terror while she waited with closed eyes for her end. Like I had done four years ago.

My knife, and my determination shattered. No, I could not do this. I could not do this! I would not drive a knife into a real, helpless human, especially one so terrified as this. Just as my mother had done when I refused to hand the money over, that final, fateful time. I would not be my mother. I could not be the people I’d known before my time out on the farm. I wouldn’t!

My hand shaking from the battle that waged in my mind, I reached out, oh so carefully. With nervous, tentative movements, I gently cupped the girl’s cheek in the palm of my hand, and I instantly marvelled at how soft she was. The moment I touched her, she stilled from her crying, and with the first gentle gesture I had made in so many weeks, I ran a comforting thumb across the soft skin of her tear stained cheek, wiping them away.

“I’m sorry,” I murmured.