Last Command of the Witheld Arc 1: Rebirth

Sarah Avery Vasilias, Great House Scion, Reborn Lvl 5

Skyland

Kimi-Lim woke Sarah up a few hours later, crouching over her in the darkness of the tent. “Watch for a few hours, then wake me,” the elf reminded her. “Don’t be a hero. If there’s a monster out there, sound the alarm. Keep your anima diffuse. Monsters track your tensa and they’ll sense you if you let them.”

Sarah blinked blearily, clearing the cobwebs out of her head. The Quest screen had faded from her sight, but the decision it represented loomed large in her mind as she got up and crawled out of the tent. The fire had burned down to embers and the strange, dark, starless night had rendered everything in that strange, ultra-deep blackness peculiar to the Tutorial Realm. Sarah sat down in one of the lawn chairs she and Kimi-Lim had been sitting in earlier, rubbing sleep from her eyes as she did.

The night was cold, Sarah’s breath fogging in big clouds. She shivered, just noticing that her Training Tunic was filthy and in tatters. Whatever enchantment had made it self-repairing and self-cleaning had not been able to handle the sheer beating it had been through. Sarah sighed, it was just one more thing to add to the list. It was strange, she’d been out of the Tutorial Realm for only a few days—days which had no real meaning because of the time loop—but her memories of Earth and her longing for it had only really hit her recently. Since climbing out of the crevice onto the Skyland, her life had finally felt like it had some sort of indefinable dimension she hadn’t even realized it had been missing before.

She heard a twig crack in the jungle and she stood up abruptly, hardening her anima and retracting it within her, hiding her tensa. She manifested a blue crystalline spear and got ready to call out for Kimi-Lim. A shadowy figure emerged from the jungle, the only detail Sarah could make out was that it was fairly short and humanoid. Sarah frowned and dismissed her spear. “I think you can dispense with the theatrics, huh, Gammon? Or what is your actual name?”

Gammon’s deep voice didn’t sound surprised, “The elf told you.”

“The elf told me,” Sarah confirmed.

Gammon sat down next to her in the other chair. It didn’t creak as he sat. Sarah stared at him and felt complicated feelings for him. Anger for sure, bright and hot; that was the most obvious one. Then there was a good deal of confusion fuzzing everything up. There was a tiny bit of happiness mixed which added to the confusion quite a bit. Finally, there was a melange of other feelings effervescing through the whole mess. It left her with a weird lump in her belly that reminded her unpleasantly of indigestion.

“You look like you got kicked in the stomach,” Gammon said. “Want a tasp?”

“…Yeah.” She heard the hiss and pop of the bottlecap. She reached out and the cold bottle was placed in her hand. She took a long drink, enjoying the sweet tartness once more. “So… what’s the point of all…?” She gestured with her bottle, sloshing the drink around.

Gammon sighed. Sarah felt herself surreptitiously examining it: it sounded so real. “You’re not from here, Sarah.” Sarah made a rude sound. “No, I know that’s obvious. That’s not the point. You’re not from here, so to ease you into the concepts that this world takes for granted, you were placed in a Tutorial program that would give you the greatest chance for success. That even includes the final mission that I gave you.”

“I can see now why Kimi-Lim wants nothing to do with the System. This is… this is totally fucked.” Sarah shook her head, feeling that familiar anger boiling in her, but she wouldn’t let it control her this time. “So what would’ve happened if I’d have come back with the key? Some other bullshit reason you wouldn’t get free?”

The small man shrugged and nodded, taking a sip of tasp as he did. He belched and sighed, scratching at his belly. “Something like that, at least until you’d developed your Attributes as high as they could go and you had a significant part of your power set. Then we’d have discussed Class choices and your place in a Great House. Many other places on the Skyland can provide rich rewards—side Quests, treasures, ethershards, even SynthSkills. You’d have gotten the entire Enhanced System treatment.”

“Sounds like quite the plan.” Sarah took a long drink of tasp, feeling her face heat up, anger making her nearly choke on her drink. She swallowed and took a deep breath. Then another. She counted to ten. “I’ve had just about enough of other people deciding what’s best for me.”

“I’m literally an Artificial Intelligence designed to help you become the best Reborn you can be, all the way up to the Stone Gate. You’ve made great progress, but there’s so much more to go—”

“Enough. I’m done with following all these arcane plans made by mysterious computers for my ‘benefit.’ You don’t know me. You don’t know what I want and you’re not concerned with my priorities.”

“To find your man? What difference does it make? The time loop here will make you leave as soon as you enter only you’ll have an entire personal-infused arsenal to draw upon. There’s no advantage to leaving early and every reason to complete your training.” Gammon laughed and tossed his tasp bottle into the jungle behind him. “You’re smart, Sarah. You’ve got more potential than most Great House scions. You could go all the way to the Amethyst Gate—perhaps even Ascend—you have that kind of potential!”

“Oh my god who cares?!” Sarah burst out. “I don’t care about the potential I have. It’s not important to me and I’m not going to continue the pattern of letting people who think they know better than me how to live my life dictate what I do or who I know or anything!”

“So now you’re the expert?” Gammon said, amused. “You know less than nothing—in fact, what you think you know is actively harmful! And you think you know better how than a System that was designed to help people survive and thrive in this world how to conduct your affairs? You always thought anger was your problem; it isn’t. It’s arrogance.”

“Oh no, you’re not gonna turn this around on me,” Sarah said, narrowing her eyes. “This isn’t about me knowing better, it’s about you lying to me for years and years and making me think one thing when if I’d known all the facts, I might have chosen something else.”

“You would have died immediately.”

“Then at least it’d have been my fucking choice!” Sarah yelled. “You took that choice away from me when you lied!”

“You always could leave. I never lied about that.”

Sarah rolled her eyes, “Says you.”

“Then try it. Though I’ll give you another truth, and I’ll make it one I’ve given you before: you won’t be able to come back. Once you leave the Tutorial Realm, that’s it.” Gammon gestured at the unseen dark jungled in front of them, “If you were to leave the Tutorial Realm now and emerge in the Cataclysm mountains in the state you’re in, you’d almost certainly die within a week, probably within a couple of days.”

Sarah crossed her arms, “Kimi-Lim has a bit of a different opinion.”

“The elf is a talented ethereal meta-analyst and their break-in algorithm was impressive, but they are no combat specialist. The Cataclysm Mountains are deadly: they’re infested with powerful, unpredictable monsters. Not to mention the bandit outposts and nomadic camps teeming with orcs and goblins that are scattered like dungheaps out there.” He gestured vaguely to the world at large, “You’d get chewed up and spit out, and not even the flies would want your remains if you left now. You keep up your training though, and start taking up some of the Quests available here on the Skyland? Well, like I said, your potential is unlimited.”

Sarah was quiet for a long time. She fed a stick to the fire, stirring up the embers until flames started licking up the wood once more. The little fire provided flickering, dim light for her. She wanted to see Gammon’s face when she said what was about to say. “Gammon? Fuck. Off.”

Gammon’s paternal expression faded, to be replaced by a strangely empty, wooden expression. “Very well, Sarah Vasilias.” The voice coming out of Gammon’s mouth was not Gammon’s. It was a gender-neutral, oddly inflected voice that lacked any emotional depth. “You have elected to dismiss the System-supplied trainer. Good luck.” That had a finality to it. When Gammon stopped speaking, he disappeared as if he was never there. The bottle of tasp in Sarah’s hand also disappeared.

“Asshole,” Sarah said sourly, but couldn’t help shaking her head and chuckling at the sheer pettiness. She heard Kimi-Lim shift around in the tent and sighed. “How much did you hear?”

Kimi-Lim emerged from the tent, grinning. “You don’t think I could sleep when there’s drama happening here right under my nose, did you? I heard the whole conversation... How’d you know it was him?”

Sarah shrugged. “The timing. His appearance was too convenient to be anything but a result of some artifice. You go to bed, leaving me alone after we’d just had a conversation about how real Gammon isn’t. I’m not a genius, but I’m not dumb.”

“He’s wrong, you know.”

“About what? My potential? Or my being so much fly food the moment I set foot outside the safety of the Skyland?” Sarah laughed. “He was laying it on pretty thick, wasn’t he?”

“No, he wasn’t lying about your potential for rank. You do have that potential. But then again, so does every other Reborn. It’s why the Imperials are so hot to create more and more Reborn out of their populace.”

“Then what?” Sarah asked.

“He’s wrong about the Cataclysm Mountains. Just his use of the name ‘Cataclysm Mountains’ gives him away even if the bigoted screed about the camps of orcs and goblins ‘scattered like dungheaps’ didn’t immediately follow it.” Kimi-Lim walked over to Sarah, tossing another branch on the fire. “And he’s wrong about you dying. I’ve seen you fight your way through things that most Reborn don’t have to deal with until they’re at least Ivory rank.”

“That’s quite the change of tune from before. You and Gammon could’ve been reading from the same script before he came, and now you’re saying I’d be fine? No need to train and get more powerful?”

Kimi-Lim sighed and shrugged, “It’s easy to say that you need to train. There are monsters out there. Monsters that would eat you for breakfast and—well, you’ll always find someone or something more powerful than you out there—”

“’ There’s always a bigger fish’, as Qui-Gon Jinn used to say,” Sarah muttered.

“Who was Qui-Gon Jinn? A friend from Earth?” Kimi-Lim asked quietly.

Sarah looked up, startled, and laughed, “He was a Jedi Master from Star Wars.”

“A what?”

Sarah opened her mouth to explain, then shook her head, “Just a story—it’s nothing. Look, I’m not gonna go through with this whole insane business with Entresis the Guardian, not if I don’t have to. I want to get out of here as soon as I can!” She saw Kimi-Lim’s expression school itself into a happy smile, but she didn’t miss the glimmer of disappointment in the elf’s eyes. “Not before I help you with whatever you’re doing here. I promised and I won’t renege on it.”

Kimi-Lim nodded, but they didn’t look relieved, “Even if it means facing Entresis?”

Sarah blinked, “That’s right, you were going to Entresis too. To find a treasure, right?”

Kimi-Lim nodded, then hesitated. After a moment of indecision, they said, “Sort of. It’s a little more complicated than that.”

Sarah arched an eyebrow and shrugged, “I didn’t qualify my help when I told you I would. It’s not gonna change now.”

“I’m glad to hear that.” The light mage went quiet for a long moment. Finally, they got up and headed back to their tent. Before they ducked into the tent, they looked over their shoulder and said, “I’m grateful. We’ll talk more about what I’m looking for here and what our next move is in the morning. Now get some sleep.”

Sarah nodded and heard Kimi-Lim withdraw into the tent, settling back into their sleeping bag. She glanced up at the flat, starless sky and then back down to the small, guttering fire. She clenched her artificial fist, feeling the servos whir and hum more than hearing them. It was cold and dead, hanging off her elbow like an animate statue. Her mind insisted that she had an itch on her forearm, but it was an itch she couldn’t scratch, no matter how much she tried.