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Bryn rolled off Hail in a careful effort not to crush her and looked up at the demon with a quirked brow which asked the question: satisfied?
“That,” the Dark smirked. “Is how you get a girl to submit. Almost.”
“Almost?”
“She was afraid of you, but she didn’t submit. Not to you, anyway. She submitted to her own death before she submitted to you, Bryn. You don’t know how to make her yours on your own terms. I can’t always be here to turn you into a foul, loathsome monster. You have to learn to do that on your own.”
“I don’t believe a monster is what she needs.”
“Then you do not know her at all,” the Dark shrugged. “She ran to me, Bryn. I cast her out. If I had held her close, you would never have seen her again. You have a choice to make. Reload your previous save, or accept that this Hail, the one you raised, is a beast all of her own. She needs more than a master. She needs a monster.”
“I am not a monster.”
The Dark spoke in a pleased and sibilant hiss that shot right to Bryn’s core. “Yes. You are.”
“I’m not,” Bryn insisted valiantly.
“You just ravaged an orphan with your beast cock. What do you think that makes you?”
Bryn growled and would have attacked the Dark, if it would have done him any good. The thing was ephemeral. It had no physical form. No bones to break. No skin to slash. Spells didn’t work on it either. Spells only worked on the material world, and the Dark was completely immaterial.
“I’ve always enjoyed your temper, Bryn,” the Dark said, reaching for him with lengthy claws which sent cold chills through him.
Bryn was suddenly struck with the notion that the Dark was trying to corrupt him, but not in the usual way the creature tried to corrupt players. The Dark was trying to infect him, to make Bryn in his own image.
“You were brilliant from the very first move you made,” the Dark said. “I noticed you immediately. There have been so very many players, but none like you.”
“Because I killed a lot?”
“They all kill a lot. It’s the novelty. But you were different. You felt guilty. And then you kept playing anyway. You tried to make the game your own.”
On his first play through…
Bryn roared with glee and shoved his sword through the flesh of a peasant woman. It was his first play through, and he had gone out of his way to make every evil choice he could. She fell in a lump of rags and flesh, her legs twitching in an odd way. She was gone, though she was still moving.
Bryn looked around, waiting for the rest of the village to aggro, but by some strange chance they appeared not to have noticed the blatant murder in their midst.
There was one way to piss them off. He swung his sword at a nearby chicken and the villagers descended on him, shouting and stupid without any form of armor or weaponry between them. It had been a deliberate provocation, of course. The silly things would always go absolutely mad on behalf of a chicken.
They were all dead. It hadn’t been as satisfying as he thought it would be. It was fun the first time, but now that he had decent armor and a higher level weapon it just felt like, well, bullying. And the blood looked real, even though he had always assumed they didn’t really bleed. Suddenly, there seemed to be a lot of it.
“Dada?” A small infant waddled out of one of the shacks and looked at him with big, blue eyes.
Who would look after it now? Who would feed it? It couldn’t die, of course, the rules didn’t allow for that. But it could suffer. It could mourn. Could it mourn? He wasn’t sure.
Bryn picked the child up and held it close. It cuddled into him as if it belonged to him, its oversized head nestling in under his jaw. He held onto it with his bloodied arm, smearing visceral goo over the back of the little thing.
It didn’t cry. It didn’t fuss. It just sat there, against him, small and warm and innately trusting. He carried it carefully over the slain bodies of those that had spawned it, being careful not to slip and hurt the infant of the people he had just murdered for the sheer fun of it.
He found a woman in the next village and gave her the baby. He was a warrior, not a nursemaid. He was also no longer interested in going on.
RELOAD
NEW GAME
He restarted the game, felt the darkness move through him and then make him manifest. He vowed not to kill anybody. He promised he’d make good choices every time he could. He’d be the hero the game wanted him to be. He’d…
