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Squiddo squeezed her eyes shut and leaned back against the pew, stress coiling cold in her veins. Squinting up at the church ceiling, she took a breath and let it out. TemuClient, cobbled together as it was, should be wedged properly in Lifesteal’s code.
They’d worked on it for days and welded code together into the night, eating up the time where they should be sleeping to get their strength up, but they hardly slept through the night anymore anyways, so really what was the harm?
They’d finished it, though, and all there was left to do was test it. Her gaze fell back down to the air in front of her, occupied by a jumble of code and communication. She lifted her hand toward the holographic interface, blue light glinting against her skewed glasses in the otherwise dark church, and hesitated before she hastily typed out the command. Her palms shook.
/immortalToggle TheRealSquiddo
Their hand hovered over the text and they curled it into a fist and slammed it down, firing it toward the system. The text disappeared.
The effect was immediate. She pitched forward and gasped, hand shooting up to clutch at her chest, glasses slipping down her nose. Her arm pulsed and burned. She tore the sleeve of her button-up to her elbow to see the lives, little glowing nether stars crawling from her wrist up to her elbow. They seemed to tremble on her skin for a moment before settling, shining brighter than before, like little pinpricks of light. When she tilted her arm into the moonlight spilling in from the tall ornate windows, they flashed purple. Like enchantments. Like magic.
Squiddo panted, managing a breathless, astonished laugh. Oh, stars, she’d done it! She hurriedly got to her feet, rubbing the still slightly-hot skin on her arm. She needed to test the bombs, now, and if she could get far away enough she might even be able to test the nuke—
They wobbled as a spike of pain shot through their spine, hissing and grabbing onto the end of a pew for support. A faint buzzing thrummed under the skin of their back, rising slowly to an itch. Muscles began twitching in their shoulders and their breath hitched as another stab of liquid pain lanced through their bones.
“Shit,” they stammered through gritted teeth, eyes narrowed through the pain. They should—should they call someone? Was this supposed to happen? Wemmbu had never mentioned anything like this. Amy would know, right?
More pain. They tried to reach behind them to scratch at the persistent, maddening itch, and their fingers barely made contact before the itch exploded into a burn. Stars burst across their eyes and their knees buckled, slumping against the pew and trying to get breath into their lungs.
Panic spiraled into a cold wiry feeling in her chest. Was this a failsafe she’d missed? She should’ve been more thorough, but she’d been so sure that the client wasn’t exclusive to Wemmbu. Maybe all those nights spent working made her efficiency slip, loathe as she was to admit it. Another shock of pain whited out her vision and eviscerated any thoughts on the matter, focused only on the blinding, unimaginable pain in her back. It felt like drilling. It felt like digging.
She was suddenly all too aware of a pressing under her skin. Something almost foreign shifted in her back when a muscle spasm wracked her torso, jerking against her shoulder blades. It felt like it was impaling her from the inside. She felt whatever she’d eaten last—in the haze of diligent hours spent bent over code, she couldn’t even remember—come up her throat, turning her head away from her lap to vomit.
Fear shuddered through her in tandem with the pain. Was this going to kill her? Surely it would. Would it stop when she respawned? Such pathetic irony, that she’d die trying to be some dumb hero. She’d never be able to drag Ash back to the living if she herself was cast to death’s oblivion. The nether stars on her arm simmered. The sour taste in her mouth was washed away by copper, and she wiped her mouth to see it’d come away dark and shiny. Blood dribbled down her chin from her nose and air whistled through her throat as she heaved for breath.
The thing in her back twitched, and a wave of searingscorchingshredding tore at their back. They choked on a scream, the stifled sound echoing hauntingly around the empty chapel. Through the ringing and rush of blood in their ears they could hear the ripping of cloth. Suddenly, some of the fiery, trapped heat lessened, and cool air touched the thing, or one of them. They shuddered and gasped, another wave of unbearable pain tumbling over them. Surely this would kill them. They’d never hurt so much before. So why hadn’t it?
They lay on the lacquered birch floor as another instance of blessed coolness embraced a second thing, the heat and agony beginning to ever so slowly subside. It felt like an eternity before they could genuinely feel anything in their arms and legs, and even then, they prickled and hummed with adrenaline and fear.
Finally, treacherously, they tried to move and at the very least sit up. Their legs still felt like jelly, so they dug their fingernails into the wooden seat of the pew and dragged themself up so they were leaning on their elbows. All the energy was sapped from their body. Their limbs felt weighed down by lead, eyelids heavy with exhaustion.
At the hazy awareness of her tiredness, she noticed there wasn’t even really any pain anymore. Only a warmth from two points on her back, present and mildly smothering.
Slowly, she reached a hand over her shoulder to feel for the—intrusive? Extrusive?—culprit of her suffering, and felt something soft. She also felt her finger touch it from her back, because oh stars this thing had nerves and she tried to stretch the thing and found herself staring in mortifying awe at a display of dark, shiny feathers curling around her shoulder.
She startled away from the wing, but it just followed her, attached to her back as it was. Just barely in sight, right behind the alulae, sharp talons gleamed in the faint light, stained black in her blood. She felt her throat tighten as if she were about to be sick again but grit her jaw to keep it down.
She flexed its twin and felt it bump into the pew next to her, sensitive nerves dancing as if she’d just hit her elbow weirdly. She checked the hearts on her wrist and they were all shining, all full. She—Physically, she was fine. Completely unharmed. Her nose probably stopped bleeding but she couldn’t tell because it was full of blood anyway.
Turning her attention back to the wings, she brushed her fingers along some of the primaries, smearing some of that darkness away. They looked white under all the blood. She breathed out a heavy sigh, and the wings curled closer to herself almost on their own, some subconscious movement. Like if she were shifting her weight, or some other mindless action. It scared her. But she was sitting here, entirely alive and breathing and with all of her hearts intact.
Weakly, they summoned the chat interface again. There was no responding message confirming that their command had worked, so they switched to the list of players. There, in the little space beside their name, the heart symbol shimmered purple. Immortal. Just like they’d wanted. It worked.
Eyes sliding to look at the blood-soaked wings now attached to their body, part of them really wished it hadn’t.
After another few moments of collecting themselves, they pushed off the pew, swiping their glasses off the ground as they got up. They must’ve fallen somewhere in that whole ordeal. They hadn’t really been paying attention, much less been able to see through the fireworks in their eyes.
Fixing them back onto their face, they slumped a bit at the sight of the mess on the floor. There was just a puddle of blood and sick on the ground, and a quick glance at their clothes revealed them to be victims as well. They’d have to find a loom somewhere to make a new shirt and sweater, but maybe they could raid one of the abandoned bases nearby for something marginally clean in the meantime. It wasn’t like any of the scant remaining players were using it.
Shuffling across the aisle felt exponentially longer than when they’d walked in, and a little humorlessly they thought maybe they really had died, because they felt like nothing more than a zombie. Their wings dragged behind them on the floor, absolutely leaving behind a gruesome-looking trail to anyone who passed by to notice, but they really couldn’t find it in themself to care.
What business would Ro or Mapicc or Clown or anyone have in the church this late in the game? No one else would be jamming jank code into the server like a square block into a circle-shaped hole, and if they were, then they wouldn’t do it in the church. Those kinds of players always had their super secret, kitted-out bases. She was only a little jealous.
As she leaned on the archway leading outside for support, the milky gray of dawn was beginning to streak over the horizon. Below her, down the mountain, the graveyard with her friends’ names sat innocuously. Carefully, she shuttered her wings open, the motion feeling awkward and unnatural, unfit for her.
Of course it wouldn’t fit, she thought. The godhood was never hers to begin with, stolen and greedily hidden away. But she had it nonetheless. She’d make sure that graveyard stayed as small as possible.
It was the least she could do.
But stars, if Ashswag found out, he’d kill her.