Mia’s second step came faster than the first.
The system had control of her legs.
Sound drained from the square.
Weapon fire, collapsing brick, the cries from the evacuation bridge—all of it fell behind the white point forming in the starbeast’s throat.
He Xinyi had not yet seen the attack.
Her stream switched itself to a cinematic angle and framed Mia running out of the wreckage toward her.
[NO WAY.
SCRIPTED DEATH SCENE.] [IS THIS WHERE THEY SHOT THE 2.0 TRAILER?] [FORTY-SEVEN STEPS IS TAKING THE HIT FOR THE STREAMER!] A line assembled in Mia’s throat.
“Your journey is not yet over.
Please allow me to provide one final—” She bit down on her tongue.
Blood filled her mouth, warm and metallic.
The last two words broke apart.
The system had labeled Xinyi a key player and turned the guide’s death into a reward for her.
Mia looked past the bright outline around the streamer.
The evacuation bridge ran directly behind her.
More than three hundred residents crowded its span.
The piercing shot would pass through Xinyi first, then travel the length of the bridge.
Mia could not change direction.
Her right hand still belonged to her.
She drove her cane into the edge of a loose maintenance cover.
Tasha had chalked an X there half an hour earlier.
The service level below had been cleared.
One of its three load pins had rusted through, and a heavy impact could make the cover lose collision long enough to drop anything standing on it.
Mia had meant to repair it after the assault.
She struck it with her shoulder.
The first hit did nothing.
Her legs kept carrying her toward Xinyi.
Her free arm rose, reaching for the pose in the script.
Mia hit the cover again.
The shaft of her cane split near the hook.
The white light inside the starbeast narrowed to a single point.
On the third impact, she called the saved glitch.
The load pin remained in the physical world.
For half a second, the system failed to recognize it.
The cover vanished beneath both women.
Xinyi managed half a curse before Mia caught her coat and dragged her down.
The starbeast fired.
White light passed over the opening.
It destroyed the streaming eye and took the top rail off the evacuation bridge.
Its angle dipped with the falling target and drove the rest of the blast into the empty service level.
The shock wave knocked residents from their feet, but the beam did not pass through them.
The livestream became a field of static.
Skyglass’s slow-motion sequence ended in the middle of a frame.
Mia and Xinyi struck an exhaust pipe six feet below the street, rolled from it, and landed in standing water.
Something inside Mia’s left knee made a dry sound.
Pain arrived a fraction later, fine and bright, running from the joint into her hip.
[KEY STORY ACTION FAILED.] [NPC-GH-GUIDE-01 HAS DEVIATED FROM SCHEDULED DEATH CINEMATIC.] [ROLLBACK INDEX: 8%.] [ANOMALY RISK: HIGH.] Xinyi pushed herself onto her elbows and coughed water.
Her health bar had narrowed to a red thread.
“Did you just save me?” she asked.
Mia spat blood into the dark water.
“I moved the shot away from the evacuation bridge.” Xinyi stared at her for a second.
“That wasn’t what I asked.” Steam shrieked from a split pipe above them.
The access door had buckled inward, and the temperature in the service chamber was already rising.
“We need to open that door,” Mia said.
Xinyi gave one short laugh, then pressed an arm to her ribs.
The laugh stopped.
Mia braced a hand against the pipe and tried to stand.
Her left leg did not answer.
The forced cinematic had protected her face and uniform for the camera.
The fall had twisted her knee sideways.
Beneath the skin, bone pressed up in a hard ridge.
When she shifted her weight, nausea washed the service chamber gray.
A paid-repair menu opened in front of Xinyi.
She confirmed the purchase.
Blue light moved through her body, setting her ribs and restoring her health bar in three seconds.
She looked at Mia’s leg.
“Where’s your repair menu?” “I don’t have one,” Mia said.
“Can an NPC shop heal you?” Xinyi asked.
“No,” Mia said.
Xinyi wiped water from her face.
“If you die, how long until you respawn?” Mia used the pipe to pull herself upright.
“I may not respawn.” The system allowed the words through.
Perhaps may was uncertain enough.
Perhaps official monitoring was still occupied with the failed cinematic.
Xinyi’s hand dropped from her menu.
“What does that mean?” “I don’t know,” Mia said.
“Right now, I can’t walk out without help.” Together they forced the access door open two inches.
Warped steel scraped the floor.
Hot vapor poured through the gap and blistered the paint from its frame.
Mia’s leg folded when she tried to push again.
Xinyi turned and crouched in front of her.
“Get on.” “Carrying me will slow you down,” Mia said.
“I know,” Xinyi said.
“You could be killed,” Mia said.
Xinyi looked back at her.
“I get up again.
You don’t know if you do, and I need the rest of this on record.
Get on.” Mia did not move toward her.
“If you keep recording, I need the conditions stated first.” Xinyi looked back over one shoulder.
Sweat had plastered loose hair across her cheek.
“We’re under a broken steam line.” “Yes,” Mia said.
For a moment, Xinyi’s mouth tightened.
Then she tapped the bracelet at her wrist and opened a local recording channel.
“Original timestamps stay attached,” she said.
“I won’t cut your answer about refusing the death scene.
I won’t publish the service-level exits or resident locations where White Crown can use them.” “Keep an uncompressed copy offline,” Mia said.
“Agreed.
Now get on my back,” Xinyi said.
Mia put her arms around Xinyi’s shoulders.
The player’s coat was soaked through and smelled of hot metal, lake water, and the sharp citrus gel used in paid repairs.
Xinyi got them through the door.
The piercing shot had melted a straight tunnel through the service level.
Steel had run down the walls and hardened in silver-black folds.
Every few yards, a joint popped as it cooled.
There was no light except the dim red of Xinyi’s bracelet and the white afterimage still burning in Mia’s vision.
“You were still setting terms down there,” Xinyi said as she walked.
“Do you expect every player to sell you out?” “White Crown is receiving rewards for killing rare NPCs,” Mia said.
“I’m a player too,” Xinyi said.
“That’s why I asked what you would do,” Mia said.
Xinyi adjusted Mia’s weight.
Her boots slipped once on the wet steel.
“Keep that part in the recording?” “Yes,” Mia said.
Near the end of the melted passage, Xinyi’s shoulder touched an object the attack had failed to delete.
A translucent camera marker opened in front of them.
[SHOT THREE: GUIDE SMILES AND CONFIRMS SHE HAS NO REGRETS.] [SHOT FOUR: PLAYER RECEIVES GREYLIGHT EMBER.] [SHOT FIVE: RESIDENT POPULATION ENTERS GRIEF IDLE STATE.] Xinyi stopped walking.
“They scheduled how the residents grieve?” she asked.
“Yes,” Mia said.
“And your death drops an item,” Xinyi said.
“Yes,” Mia said.
Xinyi raised her bracelet and recorded the entire marker.
She moved slowly enough to capture the object ID and every line of the unfinished sequence.
“I’m keeping this out of the official promotion,” she said.
Mia checked the red recording light.
“Please save a second copy before you submit anything.” “You could say thank you,” Xinyi said.
“Thank you,” Mia said.
“Please make the copy.” Xinyi breathed out through her nose and started walking again.
She did not turn the recording off.
The passage narrowed.
Mia felt each uneven step through the damaged knee.
She counted them to make sure time remained continuous.
Twenty-eight.
Twenty-nine.
Thirty.
“Why did the system force you into the shot?” Xinyi asked.
“My death increases the event’s completion rating,” Mia said.
“Who decided that?” Xinyi asked.
“I don’t know,” Mia said.
Xinyi ducked beneath a bent conduit.
“Do you want to die?” “No,” Mia said.
The word came without a title, an apology, or a service phrase.
Xinyi missed a step.
Mia tightened her hold until the player found her footing again.
She had never been permitted to answer that question.
She had expected refusal to require a reason long enough for the system to examine.
No was only one syllable.
It left nothing for the script to complete.
Metal rang ahead of them.
Tasha called Mia’s name from the other side of the blocked exit.
A cutting wheel bit through the door and sprayed sparks into the passage.
In their light, Tasha saw the angle of Mia’s knee.
She stopped speaking.
The wheel resumed a second later.
Tasha widened the opening, reached through, and told the defense workers behind her to bring a stretcher.
By the time they carried Mia into the street, White Crown had driven the starbeast back beyond the wall.
The first-kill announcement spread across the sky in letters of gold.
It cast warm light over roofless homes and the bodies laid beside the evacuation bridge.
The dead had been arranged in rows because rows left a path for stretchers.
Residents moved between them with lanterns held low, lifting a hand, recognizing a boot, or turning back before they reached the next face.
Some bodies still carried the things they had packed for the drill: a wrapped heel of bread, a child’s second mitten, a key tied to the wrist with blue thread.
One woman had brought a packet of seeds inside her coat.
The paper had split when she fell, and tiny black grains clung to the blood at her collar.
Nobody nearby was speaking about percentages.
A furnace worker knelt beside his brother and tried three times to close the man’s tool case.
A bent screwdriver kept catching in the hinge.
On the fourth attempt, he removed it, wiped it on his sleeve, and placed it carefully in his own pocket.
Then he closed the case.
The gold announcement brightened for its second display cycle.
White Crown’s crest turned above the scene.
Every polished point of it shone across the wet road, and the puddles around the bodies answered with the same expensive light.
[WHITE CROWN GUILD HAS COMPLETED THE FIRST KILL OF GH-EVENT-09!] [RESIDENT LOSS: 4.8%.] [PLAYER REVIVALS: 317.] [PAID CONVERSION RATE: EXCELLENT.] Four point eight percent.
The decimal covered 1,104 people who would not stand again.
Mia lay on the stretcher and watched the kerosene seller sitting at the edge of the wreckage.
He still held the burned bread basket.
Lin Qi knelt nearby, wrapping cloth around a survivor’s arm.
No quest marker had appeared above her.
The old man had been waiting for his son when the attack began.
Now he watched every member of the outer-wall guard come through the triage line.
Each time a dark uniform appeared, he pushed himself halfway upright.
Each time it belonged to someone else, he settled back down without asking a question.
The basket remained on his knees.
Under the soot, its handle had been repaired with a strip of red cloth.
Mia had seen that color once before, tied around the wrist of the guard who bought lamp oil from him at the end of each night shift.
She could not see the man’s face from the stretcher.
She could see his fingers rubbing the same clean patch into the burned handle.
The evacuation had saved most of Grayharbor.
There were still three bowls waiting in a kitchen on Kiln Street.
A monitoring panel completed its final update above Mia, invisible to everyone else.
[RECOMMENDATION UPDATED: REPLACE HOTFIX WITH VIRUS REMOVAL.] Tasha could not see the message, but she saw Mia looking at it.
“What did they call you this time?” Tasha asked.
“A virus,” Mia said.
Tasha shifted her grip on the stretcher.
“Let them wait.
I’m setting your knee first.” Mia closed her eyes and opened them again.
The same section of ruined roof remained above her.
No time had vanished.
“Add two lines to the incident report,” she said.
“The story action occurred without my consent.
The death sequence was not completed.” “I’ll write them,” Tasha said.
Later, the report left the fields marked smiles without regret and acts voluntarily blank.
Tasha did not enter zeroes or cross them out.
The white spaces remained among the dense black text, clear in every public rubbing taken from the page.
He Xinyi preserved the raw camera marker.
The report preserved the missing consent.
Residents carried copies of both away from the ruined gate before Skyglass could decide what the night had meant.