Somnia Online by K.T. Hanna (reading strategies book txt) 📕

of respect, and turned his attention back to the action, clearly done with the conversation.

Sinister frowned; Murmur could feel it against her arm. “But they’re not NPCs, are they, Mur?” she whispered.

Murmur hugged her blood mage tighter. “No, they’re not.”

She watched. Knowing what they were doing had to be impossible, and yet wasn’t Somnia, wasn’t Murmur’s situation impossible too?

I will keep you safe, Murmur. Always.

If Murmur hadn’t heard it, she wouldn’t have thought it was Somnia, because the world was gaining slightly more solid a form, and her eyes were focused on the center-point of the power, just like all the others.

It grew brighter, and then brighter still, so much that everyone had to shade their eyes. And then the humming added to it, like the sort heard from an electrical power station nearby.

It glowed so much it was loud, and Murmur couldn’t keep her eyes on it.

In one massive surge of brilliance, Michael screamed out, was cut short, and disappeared. And then suddenly all there was was bright, bright white.

Everywhere.

 

System Status - loading…

It flickered across her vision in rays of gold and silver, flickering like old static radio waves. Murmur blinked at the words, and beyond them at the scorch marks in the stone, and the prone bodies of her guild members and friends. The system was definitely not still loading for her. She was there, inside the apparently rebooting world.

Beyond the circle, on the other side of it, Somnia knelt on the ground with all the others who’d been tethered through the rune. All of the allies, the people she’d met in the game world and befriended. But since their forms were also prone, they didn’t appear to be as on top of things as Somnia was.

Murmur turned over her hands, and realized they were there, and so was she, but something had changed with the HUD overlay. It was there, but paler, less intrusive and easier to overlook if she didn’t focus intently. She hugged herself and looked around frantically, only to find Sinister on the ground a few feet away. Her panic lessened, and she took a few seconds to just breathe.

This wasn’t Somnia as she’d known it, not as anyone had known it. The differences were already there, just out of her reach. Just like the rest of her guild. All of them lay there, breathing in this world, but probably booted out of the game. Murmur wasn’t sure. Had it just let them hang in the limbo it had sent them into after the Ruins of Curet? Or had everyone just decided to choose now to take a pee or snack break?

Still trying to fight through the disorienting confusion she felt, Murmur turned back toward Sinister, trying to make sure she was okay. Her eyes were closed, but her chest rose and fell…not that that should matter, should it?

Murmur paused, looking around for the rest of the raid. But the only people she saw were Masha, Risk, Karn, and Cardishan. Mostly the people who’d been affected by Jirald, so she had to assume they’d tinkered with their own headgear too. They were unconscious just like the rest of her guild.

Her head hurt a bit, like she’d had a bad night’s sleep, but she knew she hadn’t slept. Snowy licked her hand and whined, as if he was concerned about something, but she couldn’t tell what. She looked at him, semi-worried that he was here. If the system was in the process of rebooting, then shouldn’t he also be doing so? Then she glanced over at Somnia and the rest of her allies as they picked themselves up and shook themselves off.

Accessing her guild interface, she frowned. Had a portion of the players been booted from the system and yet some of them hadn’t? She was extremely confused.

Wait a minute.

Murmur’s thoughts weren’t reaching Somnia right then, but upon a second glance around, every single person who was there, she knew to have an altered headset. Murmur stumbled, and barely avoided falling down. She shot her mother an immediate message.

Mom. Mom!

But there was no answer. Maybe she hadn’t waited long enough, but usually her mother replied within a short window of time. Surely, she’d exceeded it. There was so much threatening to spiral her. The coma, her headgear, the excessive pain she experienced in the game upon death. Not requiring a headset to enter the fucking game. And that came back to her—that fact all by itself even as she’d told her mother and Sinister.

I don’t seem to need a headset to enter the game.

She remembered the experiment so loud and vividly…if the system was down or still rebooting like the friendly neighborhood message had told her, how was the world still here? She knew how she was there if the world was up, but what about the others? Had her stupid idea to connect with Somnia and make their defeating Michael easier trapped their minds in a damned game?

“Murmur?”

She whirled around to see Somnia standing—perhaps “swaying” might have been a better term. Even with all her worries, she was happy to see an actual person…as much as Somnia seemed to be a person. She hugged her. Though she did notice that Somnia wasn’t completely solid, so the action was awkward.

“Still getting a hold on this new form.”

“New form?” Murmur did a double take and backed up a step as all the pieces seemed to fall into place. “You’re complete now? Like a real girl. No more wooden puppets, eh?”

Somnia cocked her head to the side. “I get the reference, but you do know I was never a puppet, right?”

Murmur chuckled nervously, worried at the hysteria she could feel building at the back of her mind. “Som, what did you do?”

Somnia blinked, and for the first time Murmur realized that her eyes flitted through a variety of different colors, never quite settling on one. “I removed the threat. He can no longer harm those people in here, and he can no longer harm anyone