Chapter 227: A New Alliance

  If not for the sound of angry Orcish grunts, Zach probably wouldn’t have woken up for several more hours. Even the intense morning sunshine framing his face like a spotlight probably wouldn’t have roused him. He groaned as a deep, gravelly voice called out to him. It was a voice that began as something distant and far away, but one that came closer and closer as he entered a state of wakefulness.

  “Wake now. Wake now, wake now!”

  Zach opened his eyes. His vision was blurry. Sitting up in his sleeping bag, he noticed one of his Orcish elite cards was waving its hands around and shouting at him, but with his eyes unfocused, it was hard to make everything out clearly. He was groggy, though in a well-rested kind of way. He yawned.

  “What?” he asked as he slowly regained his sense of awareness. “What’re you saying?”

  His eyes came back into focus, and now, he saw that the Legion Portal Guardian, still badly wounded from yesterday, was practically bouncing on the balls of its feet. “I did not bother you for so long. Now, now you wake up. It’s time. Fun.”

  Looks like my episode of insanity hasn’t ended yet, he thought with a defeated sigh.

  Zach sniffed the air as he detected an unexpected scent. “Huh? What’s that?”

  The Orcish elite pointed. And it was only now that Zach realized it wasn’t holding its axes. It had put them down, something his card shouldn’t have been able to do, at least not intentionally. “Food. You’ll eat that, and then we’ll go. Yes, yes.”

  Zach shifted his eyes, and he was intrigued to see that there really was a plate of food on the grass right beside him, consisting of badly burned eggs and unevenly toasted toast, along with coffee that looked over-brewed but fresh.

  Okay, this just became so much weirder.

  How could that plate of food possibly be there? After all, if everything strange that had been happening was a projection of his subconscious mind, then the fact that this food had been cooked must have meant that Zach actually hadn’t been sleeping, right? Because he obviously had to be awake to make eggs and toast. But, at the same time, it was also possible that the “breakfast” was a hallucination and not real, either.

  So, had he been sleeping, or had he been cooking breakfast? He just didn’t know.

  Zach groaned. All of this was beginning to give him a much better appreciation of what Jimmy had gone through when he’d first come to Galterra. Back then, Jimmy had gone through some trouble in figuring out what was and was not reality. He had believed the entire world to be a simulation that he would awake from by fulfilling certain conditions. He didn’t believe that the world around him was actually real.

  So, this is what that feels like.

  Oddly, Zach felt calm this morning despite finding himself caught in such a scary, challenging conundrum. Maybe it was due to the fact that the island had once again risen above the clouds in Planes of Mist, and so, rather than another gloomy, dark day, things had gone back to being clear and pleasant. Or maybe he was just growing accustomed to his own insanity. Or maybe—just maybe—it was because he was once again beginning to doubt that the problem really was him.

  Maybe, as impossible as it seemed, things really were what they appeared to be.

  But how?

  Zach ate the breakfast he may or may not have cooked for himself, and may or may not even be real. It sure tasted real, though, and not in a good way. It was downright horrible. Despite this, he pretended to enjoy it, because he didn’t want to offend the thing that might be himself. The coffee, at least, was bearable with a generous amount of sugar and some dried milk powder. Yet even if it hadn’t tasted so terrible, he still wouldn’t have been able to enjoy it because his Orcish elite card was constantly staring at him as if to indicate he should hurry up.

  “I waited,” it said. “I waited a long time. I did what you said, so now, you do what I say.”

  Zach, trying not to gag as he bit into a burnt section of toast, nodded. “Yeah, all right, take it easy.”

  “No!” the Orc barked at him. “I waited. Always waiting. Waiting, waiting, waiting!” It growled at him. “I was going to kill you. You are lucky. Yesterday, we played, and I had fun. That’s why you’re alive. You would be dead.”

  Zach nearly choked on his coffee. “Wait, what?”

  “I was going to kill you,” the Orc said again. “I’ve decided I want fun instead.”

  Zach wasn’t sure what to make of what he was hearing. Hell, he wasn’t even really sure what he was hearing, be it something real or something from within his mind. And thus, unable to think of anything to say in reply, he merely remained quiet and watched as the Orc bent down and picked up both its axes. Then it looked down at something near Zach's sleeping bag. Specifically, its eyes regarded the card lying flat on the grass right beside it: the Vixen Portal Commander. It had been the only card that Zach had dismissed before going to sleep yesterday evening.

  “Summon that one,” the Orc said. “I want to be that again. It’s more powerful.”

  Having just woken up and having no real understanding of why he was experiencing any of this, all Zach could really do was comply. Leaning over to his side, he grabbed his card and used Card Summon to collapse it into a small white ball of light, which sailed about a dozen feet away before turning into a Vixen Portal Commander.

  Within a half second of this card’s appearance, the Orc’s expression became completely empty, and instead, the eyes of his red-haired, rapier-wielding Vixen Portal Commander came to life, shining with an unmistakable hunger and eagerness.

  “This one is better than the Orc,” she said. She drew her icy rapier, held it in front of her eyes, and seemed content to stare at it a few seconds before returning the weapon to its sheath. A moment later, a sudden frown caused her brow to crease as she craned her neck in Zach’s direction. “What are we waiting for?” she shouted. “Stand! Stand, stand, stand! It’s time to go!”

  Zach, not even finished with his coffee, sighed and spilled the rest of it onto the grass, then got up to his feet. Having gone to bed with his two swords and footwear still on him, he didn’t exactly have much preparation to do other than to grab three of his healing stones—one of each color—and clutch them in his right hand in the event something terrible happened and he had to use them to save his life.

  “My cards didn’t heal up at all,” he remarked, speaking mostly to himself as he looked over his four Legion Portal Guardians. They were all chopped up in places, with some missing an ear, one missing an eye, and all of them having sustained various deep wounds.

  “You can capture those healing ones from the third floor,” his Vixen Portal Commander said. “Yes, yes, you’ll capture those.”

  Zach sighed. “I don’t even know how we’re getting that far with these four cards about to drop dead. I mean, look at that one,” he said, pointing to a Legion Portal Guardian missing an ear, half its teeth, and with a wound going through its chest that actually enabled Zach to see out the back of it.

  “Figure it out. But for now, we go!”

  Not even waiting for him to lead the way, the Vixen Portal Commander turned around, hurried towards the twenty steps that led up to the tower’s rectangular entrance, and simply waltzed inside while Zach was still staring at the thing transfixed and uncertain.

  Can this really all be inside my head? he wondered. I know it’s the only thing that makes sense, but…it just doesn’t feel like it.

  Zach hurried after his card, which in this case meant entering the tower and practically jogging his way through the central atrium until reaching the partition. On the other side of it, he could hear the sounds of battle.

  “Morgar bark kur!” shouted the Legion Portal Guardian that always awaited on the first floor.

  Slipping through the partition, Zach was both amused and amazed to see that his Vixen Portal Commander card was already deep in the midst of battling the elite mob. At the moment, she was side-stepping a series of axe strikes while the bloodied, already battered Legion Portal Guardian failed to score a single hit on it in retaliation.

  “Capture this one,” she said, dodging beneath a horizontal slice of its right axe. “It’s ready for capture.”

  “How do you know that? Are you able to see how much HP it—”

  “Capture!” his card insisted.

  With nothing to lose, Zach shrugged and activated Card Capture. Sure enough, the moment he did so, the Legion Portal Guardian collapsed into a white orb that sailed across the room and into his hand, becoming a card just like the others and replenishing one of the two that he’d lost yesterday.

  Now, as the room rumbled and the platform-like stairs that led to the second floor began jutting out of the walls, Zach grew increasingly fascinated by the question of what, exactly, was going on here. His sanity…was it failing to such a degree that none of this was real? Or was all of it real?

  It can’t all be real, he reminded himself. At least some of it has to be imagined. Like the blood that came pouring out of the walls when all this started. That definitely could not have happened.

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  This left Zach in the position of trying to deduce whether it was possible for some of it to be real and some of it to have been in his head. But, if so, how would that even work? What explanation would make sense such that he was seeing some things in reality but not others? Especially when it all seemed related.

  “Uh, hey, wait a second,” he said to his card as it hopped onto the first step up, stopped, and turned around to look back at him.

  “What now? No more waiting!”

  “I just want to ask you something.”

  It growled at him. “What?”

  “Since…since we’re communicating and everything, uh, whatever you are…is there a name I can call you? Besides ‘Vixen Portal Commander,’ I mean.”

  “Yes,” it answered right away. “Landy.”

  Zach was shocked. He didn’t know why. He didn’t have any reason to be. There was nothing special about the name “Landy.” It was very possibly just his ill mind conjuring some fictional name in his head like how a playwright conjures up characters for a stage production. And yet…something about it made things feel real to him: grounded, in a sense.

  “I see. So, you’re…Landy. Okay, well, that’s what I’ll call you then. Uh, can I ask you just one more question, please?”

  “No!” The Vixen Portal Commander barked out at him. It turned back around and hopped up a second, then third step.

  “W-wait!” Zach called out after it. “Just hear me out, please!”

  With a palpable sense of frustration, it paused on the third platform, spun back around yet again, and glared at him. “What? What do you want from me!” it screamed.

  From out of nowhere, the walls all around the tower began to bleed. It started with a few trickles of blood, but it soon resolved itself into an overflowing river of crimson, with much of it washing down the platform-based stairwell, dropping from platform to platform until at last drowning the first floor, gliding over Zach’s new boots. The blood was warm, and Zach could feel it keenly as it soaked through his socks. At the same time, a wailing, screaming cascade of voices filled the tower, and looking upwards, Zach could see ghostly apparitions flying around and around.

  Rather than frighten him, all of this actually made him feel relieved. Because in its own way, it seemed to confirm a piece of the puzzle here that Zach had been missing. The fact that these strange occurrences were tied into his card—into Landy’s—emotional state meant there was much more going on here than he’d at first thought.

  “Hey, Landy,” Zach said, ignoring all the horrifying sights, of which several more were now popping into existence, such as screaming corpses that began climbing up and out of the stone floor beside him; these, too, Zach ignored. He instead kept his eyes trained solely on his Vixen Portal Commander.

  “What?” his card roared.

  Zach kept his voice level. “It’s just, you really seem like you’re into all this adventuring stuff.” Zach pointed to himself. “I am too. So, uh…if you really want me to give it my all so we can…so we can have fun, it would actually help me a lot if you answered a really important question.” Zach could see that the card was becoming angrier and angrier, and so very quickly, he added, “Look, I know you’re impatient, and I get it, and that’s cool and all, but I promise I’ll make it worth it.”

  His card’s lips twitched as though it were so vengefully angry it might just pop. But then, seemingly out of nowhere, all the strange phenomena around him came to an abrupt, total halt. The blood vanished, the apparitions disappeared, the corpses were no more, the voices fell silent, and not a remnant of any of it remained.

  “Ask,” she said, the single-worded reply spoken without any of the previous emotion.

  Zach felt himself becoming lightheaded, though this time, it was from sheer nerves. And it was all because the question he wanted to ask had such real, profound weight and importance behind it: at least to him, anyway. For this reason, he became anxious as he began to speak.

  “So, one of the reasons I’m having a tough time is because I feel like…like I’m losing my mind, you know? I’m not sure anymore what’s real or not, and it’s taking a toll on me.”

  The Vixen Portal Commander looked at him with her face blank and expressionless. She said nothing. It was as though she didn’t even understand what he was trying to get at. He realized he needed to clarify.

  “Basically,” he continued, “I’m worried that everything I’m seeing is all in my head. That my mind is deteriorating. And that’s how you’re…that’s why I’m seeing you.”

  “Don’t understand,” the card—Landy—said curtly. “Don’t get it.”

  Zach wet his lips but paused as he tried to reword things in his mind so as not to test Landy’s patience. “Okay, so what I’m really trying to ask you is this: are you me?”

  His card reacted with anger. “I just told you, I’m Landy!”

  “No, no, I mean…”

  How the hell do I explain this?

  Zach pointed to his brain. “Am I seeing you because something is wrong in here. Or are you something real that can somehow make me see things that aren’t real? Uh, if that doesn’t make sense, what I mean is that—”

  “I’m real,” Landy said, interrupting him. “Too real. Always real. Have been real for a very long time. So long. The longest time. All of it. All the time that there was.”

  Zach slowly nodded, not fully understanding the reply. “So, all that blood that I saw just now, that was…?”

  “Not real. I made you see it.”

  “And yesterday, when you were flipping in the air and swinging your sword around?”

  “Real,” the card said. “I control her now. I made her do that.”

  “Okay, so the blood thing wasn’t real, but everything we did when fighting yesterday was real.” Zach held his breath for a moment, then said, “So, what you’re saying is you’re a being of some kind that can, like, make people see things? You know, get into their head and see stuff from their past? Like, what I did in Shadowfall Coast, for example. Because I heard voices two days ago, and they were things I said during the war. Was that because you can go into my mind and see things that happened to me?”

  “Yes,” Landy answered immediately and without hesitation. “How many more questions? I said yes. Yes, yes, yes.”

  “Okay,” Zach said, exhaling. “So, you’re like Eilea, basically?”

  For a reason he could not understand, his Vixen Portal Commander reacted immediately and explosively. Her mouth opened wide, very wide, and she screamed—wailed, even. “Do not call me Gods!” she erupted with such rage as she turned around on the platform and began slamming her head over and over into the stone wall, something she’d done yesterday. Only, this time, it was with a much greater intensity, and now, along with her scream, the entire tower began to shake.

  “Never call me Gods!” she screeched. “I hate the Gods. Hate, hate, hate, hate, hate!”

  Zach held out his hand reassuringly as she slammed her head faster and with more force into the stone wall. “Whoah, okay, sorry. I didn’t know that was a thing that would—”

  “I hate them, hate them, hate them!” His card turned away from the wall, faced him, and tears began raining down its face. “Why would you ask? Why would you ask that? Why! To hurt?”

  “No!” Zach shouted out defensively as his card drew the rapier and pointed it at him, even jumping down two steps so that it was now just one above him. “It was clearly just an innocent question. That should be obvious. There’s no need to freak out on me, Landy. We’re just having a normal, everyday conversation.”

  “My first!” his card roared. “Not every day!”

  “First?”

  “First, first!”

  “First what?”

  “Conversation.”

  Zach blinked, confused. “I don’t understand. Are you…are you trying to say that this is your first conversation?”

  “Yes.”

  “As in, like ever?”

  “Yes, yes, I said that. You heard it, and I said it. Gyahhhhhhhhhhhh!” Pointing its rapier away from Zach, the card turned the weapon towards its self and began stabbing itself with the rapier right through its own chest, dealing 19,400 damage the first time and then 22,500 the second time. “I told you! I told you!”

  Zach, struggling to piece things together, was starting to truly come to believe that, in spite of how impossible it’d seemed at first, this really wasn’t something from within. He really hadn’t lost his marbles. Or at least…he no longer believed so. No, it was starting to seem more and more like he had somehow stumbled upon a being with a power similar to a Great One, only something far different from anything he had seen before.

  “I’m sorry, Landy,” he said, trying to get the Card—or whatever it was—to calm down. “I didn’t mean to upset you. I just…I just got confused because I wasn’t expecting you to say that this is the first conversation you’ve ever had.”

  “It is!”

  Even at the risk of further upsetting Landy, Zach asked, “In how long?”

  “All the time!” Landy shrieked, piercing itself through the chest once again. Then the card, controlled somehow by this “Landy” entity, began to whimper and moan, sobbing as it sheathed its rapier; the card’s chest was now dripping blood from multiple puncture wounds. “Forever and ever,” it said. “Stuck there. Stuck there for so long. Nobody talks to me. I’ve never seen anyone. Torture, torture, torture! Always torture.”

  Zach’s mouth fell open, and he sucked a giant breath of air into his lungs as a bout of realization slammed into him with such intensity it almost knocked him off his feet. He realized that he’d seen something like this before. Only once, but in a way that was unforgettable. Yeah. He had! Sure, the circumstances were different, and things weren’t this bad, but he’d definitely encountered this before.

  Mushkie…

  “Landy,” he whispered. “By any chance, do you run an item shop?”

  “Yes,” Landy replied, whimpering and sobbing.

  And with just that single, one-word reply, everything began to make so much more sense. Not all of it, of course. There was a lot that Zach still didn’t know. And a lot that he would have to wait to find out, as clearly, asking Landy questions risked setting it off. But there were a few things he wanted to know right away, as they were of extreme importance.

  “Landy, I’m here because of my friends. I’m looking for them. Did you…hurt them?”

  “Friends?” Landy replied questioningly.

  “Yeah.”

  With the card’s eyes still leaking tears, it stared directly at Zach. “I see…friends. Jimmy. Fluffles. Donovan. Your friends…no…I have never met them. I’ve only met you. I’ve never met anyone.” It screamed. “Anyone!”

  Zach, still holding out his hand with his palm flat, risked coming a bit closer. He hopped up onto the platform so that he now stood together on top of it with his card, and he took another risk in putting his hand on the card’s shoulder.

  It did not react.

  “So…you don’t know where they are?”

  “No,” Landy replied. “Never heard of them. I don’t know them.”

  He’s telling the truth, Zach thought. I’m pretty sure.

  “Just two last questions, and I promise I’ll be quiet and adventure with you. Uh, so okay, first up: are you a woman or a—”

  “I’m like you,” Landy said. “Guy. Not really a girl. Just controlling this girl. I’m a guy.”

  Zach made a mental note to think of him as male going forward. “Okay, thanks. And uh, are you…do you have a real form? Or…?”

  “Trapped in my item shop,” Landy replied. “But I finally escaped. My mind. My mind got out. Body is still there. My body is always there. Still there. Always there. Can’t ever go anywhere.”

  Zach nodded. For now, that explained everything he needed to know. He had tons and tons more questions, but Landy clearly did not have tons and tons more patience. And so, Zach said something he was pretty sure Landy would want to hear.

  “Okay, so Landy: do you want to help me get through this tower? It’s been really lonely since I got here. Maybe we can join a party. I mean…if you even can join my party. I actually don’t know if you can—”

  “Yes!” Landy shouted out rapturously, the card’s entire face lighting up with joy. Her—his—entire demeanor changed in an instant. “Yes, let’s join a party. I can do that! I can! And then we will do the whole thing!”

  Zach gave him a pat on the back. He smiled, and it was genuine, though it came from a place of utter relief that he wasn’t actually crazy. The Gods be praised! His mind wasn’t falling apart. Of all the possibilities that could have ultimately been behind these strange, nightmarish happenings, this was the best conceivable one. Thank the fucking Gods!

  “Let’s work together, then,” Zach said as the two began climbing the same steps, one after the next. His four cards and his war-mount trailed a few platforms behind and below as they made their way together twice around the tower en route to the second floor.

  “Yes. Yes. Yes! And we’ll get the healer. And we’ll capture it. And then we’ll keep going and win everything. And then, after, we’ll kill the Gods together. All the Gods. I hate the Gods.”

  Zach felt the muscles in his shoulders tighten uneasily. “Well, okay, I don’t know about killing the—”

  “What?” Landy asked, stopping short, fury in his eyes.

  Zach gulped. “Nothing.”

  “Are you betraying Landy?”

  “No, no, let’s, uh, let’s kill the Gods, like you said.” Zach released a nervous laugh.

  “Yes. Kill the Gods. But adventure first. But then Gods.”

  As Zach continued to hop his way up to the second floor, a nervous bead of sweat fell down his back.

  That’s a problem to worry about later, he thought. For now, I’m just glad that I’m not crazy.