Outside Todd’s hut, I scanned the sky and the treetops for Dave, but saw nothing. He’d gone off somewhere with Feather some time ago, but I shrugged and just started walking out of town. Dave was apparently on an invisible leash. If what he’d said about his range was true, then he couldn’t go too far from me.

  I hadn’t gone far before I heard a shriek and a ruffle of feathers. The shout hadn’t sounded fearful, but I spun toward it anyway, watching as Dave half-hopped, half-flapped out of the tree line surrounding the meadow. He put me in mind of someone rushing to put pants on as they hurried out the door.

  “I’m coming, I’m coming, slow down!” he groused, finally stopping to get his stubby bird feet under him. As he launched into the air, Feather emerged from the woods behind him, her face flushed.

  She was wearing a deerskin. Nothing else.

  She met eyes with me, then turned even redder and vanished into the woods.

  “You could have warned me!” Dave said, landing unsteadily on my shoulder. “I only needed a few more seconds. A minute, tops.”

  Nausea rose up my throat. “A minute to do what?”

  “None of your business,” Dave said.

  I coughed. He was right. I didn’t want to know.

  “Where’s Flower?” I said, my voice dry. “I need him. We’ll Conscript him, then go straight to the vault.”

  “How should I know? Feather was keeping me busy. I didn’t have the spare hands to babysit her tuna-guzzling cat.”

  The thought of Dave having hands made me shudder. So did the phrase tuna guzzling.

  I sighed. “Take off, then, and look for him,” I said, turning back to the woods. “He should be around here some—”

  He was sitting right in front of me.

  I actually jumped back and even made a little shriek of my own. He hadn’t made the slightest damn sound.

  “Oh! Ah, Flower, ah, there you are,” I said.

  He rumbled.

  “I don’t have to look for him now, do I?” Dave asked.

  “Dave, fuck off.”

  “Don’t tempt me. I wasn’t finished with Feather. She has this freckle, you see, and it makes me—”

  “Don’t. Go. Anywhere,” I growled, swallowing back all kinds of creative curse words. Gathering my wits back, I knelt in front of Flower.

  “Hey, boy,” I said, like I was talking to a dog. “Thanks for everything you did for me today. I was just wondering if you want to be friends?”

  Flower stared at me. Fuck, he was big. And his eyes were eerie, the silver reflecting the moonlight like a pair of white gold wedding rings.

  “I’m, ah, going to open the Conscript screen for you,” I said. “I need you to tap ‘Yes,’ okay?”

  The cat’s eyes narrowed. Why did I get the feeling he understood me?

  I bit the inside of my cheek, then went ahead and tapped the Conscript shield icon above his head. A screen materialized between us, composed of violet light. The light should be blue in the game, but the Conduit had changed the color. It seemed a lot less friendly than the old blue had been.

  The cat glanced at the two options, Yes and No, which I could see. He made no move to interact with either of them, and instead returned his feral gaze to me.

  “Remember,” I said to Dave, my breath low, “after this, straight to the vault. No interacting with anything or anyone.”

  Dave shrugged. “Eh. It’s Feather’s loss.”

  I reached back and pulled my Bell Katana from my inventory.

  Flower’s eyes narrowed. He began to growl.

  “I’m not gonna hurt you, boy,” I said, turning the katana around so that its handle faced the cat. I lifted it up until the handle was just an inch behind the Yes option.

  “What the optional white trim along the baseboards are you doing?” Dave asked.

  I spoke through gritted teeth. “I’m playing. With. The cat.”

  I jangled the bells. They tinkled. Flower’s growling stopped, and his narrowed eyes went wide and round.

  “Yeah, kitty kitty. Just like that,” I said, bobbing the sword again. The bells clanged merrily. Flower’s pupils got bigger.

  “You have got to be kidding me,” Dave muttered, his voice next to my ear.

  More jangling. Flower raised a paw. I didn’t dare say a word now. The bells were the only sound.

  Ching ching. Flower’s tail went up. Chingle ching.

  He batted at the bells.

  His claw caught, taking the whole weapon out of my hands. It spun, somehow managing to cut me, but nothing happened. The wound opened and then closed before it bled.

  I grinned and stood up, checking my sidebar. Flower had done it. He’d batted the Yes option.

  He was officially a member of my party. That was why the sword hadn’t hurt me—because I had the friendly-fire option turned off.

  Flower himself did not seem to notice. He was very excited about the katana. I left it on the ground and ducked into the woods as he batted at it a second time, then a third.

  The sound of bells chased us into darkness.

  Fuck You Dave: You… you clever bastard.

  Remnant: Wait until you see what I’m gonna do next.

  #

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  To reach the city wall without interacting with anything, we had to slip around two wild nightpanthers and a very large deer creature with tentacles instead of antlers. That meant moving very carefully through the forest, so as not to trigger anyone’s aggro. I was pretty sure drawing them into battle counted as interacting.

  Fuck You Dave: We should have used that pear you got. On the deer thing, at least.

  Remnant: Throwable items work based off your Dex. I have none. Didn’t want to take the risk—I’d draw their attention if I threw something at them and missed.

  We’d reached the wall, and now we crouched inside the tree line and behind a tree, watching the patrols carefully. The Riftguard shouldn’t bother us as we reentered the city, but we also didn’t want to strike up any conversations, either. I’d have to run across the roofs in town just to avoid NPCs.

  But it was all necessary. FATE had told us not to interact with anyone after we’d Conscripted someone at level 46. Flower showed up on my screen now, his little avatar a picture of his head with those smoky silver eyes. He was listed as Nightpanther Juvenile, which seemed like an asshole move on the Conduit’s part. At least let them keep their damn names.

  His icon was grayed out, because he was out of range. He was still in my party; I could have up to four people, but FATE and Dave both counted while Hergvor didn’t. But when a party member went beyond a certain range, they stopped being able to share HP for kills.

  This was because, while fighting enemies as a group, sometimes a character would die. They would then resurrect back at the nearest town’s waystone, and would have to run back to rejoin the party. They’d gain no experience during that process, but it saved on time and distraction it would take to have people leaving and rejoining parties repeatedly whenever they died.

  Fuck You Dave: There! There’s a gap. Wait for it….

  We had a few seconds, and already I was spending even that much time doing something productive. I popped into my inventory, making sure the pear was still in the central slot, where it could duplicate. The Tendua had shown us the loot from the dead Hunters, and I’d checked for something better to duplicate, but the only Red grade items they’d had were torches and rat meat. I didn’t even know where they’d found rats.

  I’d been hoping for bandages—which could cure my Bleed effect—or health potions. The basic versions of those things would all be Red grade. But if those Hunters had had any, they’d used them while fighting me or the Riftguard.

  It almost seemed a waste of the glitch, to only duplicate some pears, but we were down to only one adversary now. Ten to one, he would be at the vault by the time we finished leveling up, if he wasn’t there already.

  Which meant we’d have to kill him next. And when we did, we would lose access to the glitch—so some extra pears was better than nothing.

  This had better work, FATE, I thought as I made a break for a gap in the patrols. I took a running leap, smacked into the wall, and slid down.

  Growling to myself, I flipped open my inventory again. I sorted by weapon type, found two knives, and equipped one in each hand. I double-checked on the pear’s placement again before closing the inventory.

  I then found myself with Seth’s butterfly knife in one hand (it had been classified as Red grade) and a Glass-grade Gorgo Warknife in the other. I winced when I saw that one. One good hit, and Glass items would break.

  I hastily slotted another knife in as a backup as I retreated back to the tree line to wait out the patrol again. After another five minutes, I tried again.

  The wall might have looked like rough-hewn wood, but it was smooth as a wine bottle when I came up against it. Fortunately, the knives still pierced it, probably better than they would have in real life. I stabbed into the wall like my life depended on it.

  The Glass knife held, probably because it was an item you could find on a sentient pile of rocks, but as I strained to pull myself higher, it vanished on the next stab. I gestured to retrieve my backup, and kept climbing.

  This should be harder, but the game appeared to base climbing off the Strength stat. In the original, things like climbing and running and jumping all relied on the user’s own stamina and strength, rather than on their stats. It all depended on how long they could run in place or lift weights, or on how high they could jump in real life.

  But there were no headsets, no Leap suits, in this version of Seven Keys. The rules had changed, but in this case, I couldn’t complain.

  Seth’s little knife held up pretty well, and the second Glass knife carried me two full pulls up the wall before it broke and left me swinging two feet beneath the wall top.

  I cursed, my gaze sliding left to where a Riftguard was approaching on his patrol. I tried to pull myself up using just the butterfly knife, but it chose that moment to sprout a hairline crack along the blade.

  “Here, I’ll boost you!” Dave hissed. He’d been unhelpfully standing on my shoulder this whole time, but now he prodded along to the back of my suit collar. If the friendly-fire setting had been turned on, I was pretty sure he would have drawn blood.

  “How can you boost me?” I gritted out. “You’re like, five pounds!”

  “High Strength stat, remember? Okay, on three.

  “One.

  “Two.

  “Three!”

  I heaved myself upward, both hands on Seth’s knife, and my eyes flew wide as a loud whomp noise sounded behind me. I shot up and over the edge of the wall, arms windmilling as I tried to right myself in midair, but it was useless.

  I hit the ground and started to Bleed.

  “Fuck, Dave! Warn me next time!”

  Fuck You Dave: I did say I’d give you a boost. Now keep silent; Remnant knows my strength stat just fine

  I caged a growl behind my teeth and stood up, brushing dirt off the front of my suit. The shirt was still gleaming white, despite everything that had been done to it, and the suit was pristine and unruffled. It made me think that maybe the hippies had already been dirty before they’d come here and been given their furs.

  With my health ticking down, I jogged over to the nearest house and easily climbed a pile of crates to get onto its roof. I missed Hergvor already, but we’d left him behind just to make sure we didn’t interact with him and ruin the glitch. He was currently rooted in place back at the Tendua clearing, ready to heal a partner that wasn’t there.

  I’d call him back once this was done. With a grunt, I jumped from one roof to another, headed for the bank with its one remaining statue. As the first town in the game, Radix had been constructed with new players in mind, so the whole thing was easy to climb and traverse, even for people with crap stats.

  All the roofs were low, close together, and more solid than they should have been in a real medieval town. They looked like hay, but felt like brick underfoot. There was one NPC that players could find on top of a tavern, but that was on the other side of town. We encountered no one.

  When we arrived to the bank, I hunkered down behind the remaining gargoyle, scanning the street for the second time today. The rooster-abomination-Bridget lady might be here, lying in wait for me. I knew I’d lie in wait, if I was her.

  Instead, I saw no one. That didn’t mean very much. Insight was a passive skill that rose with the Intelligence stat, or when certain spells were cast, and I had neither. It was Insight that would allow me to see an enemy in the shadows.

  I waited. Dave scouted. He found nothing, either.

  I didn’t like this.

  With a sigh, I decided to go for it. I was draining health, and the vault was the closest place to heal up. Dave had assured me over Whisper that some of the Drops I’d gained from achievements would likely contain healing potions, and anyway, the vault came with a healing pool. I didn’t have much choice, thanks to my taking fall damage from Dave’s insanely disproportionate wing-beat.

  At the same time, being back here reminded me of something. I leaned away from the gargoyle, remembering how the first gargoyle—the one I’d destroyed trying to flatten Ol’ Slimy—had suddenly changed shape and color on me. It had switched back an instant later, but for one lingering moment, it had been a lumpy pile of something brown-and-yellow.

  Without thinking too hard about it, I made the Loot gesture at the gargoyle. It vanished into my inventory.

  Neat.

  I wonder what the size constraints are on that, I thought, creeping forward to the roof’s edge. I peered over, but there was no one below me. I was pretty sure there were supposed to be guards here, but the other Hunters had probably killed and looted them during their own forays into the vault.

  “See any trip wires or traps or anything?” I asked Dave.

  “What do I look like, a hawk?”

  I scowled, then dropped down to the vault steps, whirling, one of my basic spears out and ready.

  Once again, no one. There was no way Bridget wouldn’t have laid a trap for me—wasn’t there? I tried to think back to traps that Astral-type mages could lay.

  Wait. She was Astral. That meant teleporting—

  I spun my spear around and stabbed behind me.

  Bridget was there, out of nowhere, appearing from thin air. She had a sword raised over her head—and my spear in her gut.

  She glared at me. Then she vanished.

  “Fffffuuuuu,” I breathed out, holding the bloodied spear where her stomach had been only a moment before. My heart was blasting beats like an old rap album. Adrenaline rushed under my skin.

  I felt cold, so cold. Would she have killed me with that strike? That sword had been glowing.

  “Damn fine instincts,” Dave said, his voice as shaky as I was.

  I lowered the spear and backed into the vault door. I reached behind me, pulling the handle.

  “Yeah. Instinct. That’s what that was,” I said.

  Then I slipped inside the vault.