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

have time to do more testing. In fact, she was quite certain they had even less time than she’d originally thought.

Numbers danced in front of her eyes, brackets and equations and coding and everything that made her vision swim until she was sure her brain would bleed out of her ears. But it didn’t, and it wouldn’t.

Just a thought from her mind, and the anti-virus would launch. The AIs were already moving around making sure it would also work from inside the completed coding via anchor spots. Shayla didn’t completely understand how they were doing anything from within the world, but she was positive they knew what they were doing.

“You know you just have to say the word now, right?” Laria sat on her desk, chomping on a donut with a mischievous smile on her face. The deep worry lines were gone, like this bit of hope had made all the difference to her.

“Yeah, trust me, I know.” Shayla found it easier to smile herself with her friend so infectious. “Look…you realize this could blow up in our faces, right?”

Laria shrugged. “I’m okay with that. If we do nothing, it’ll be worse. Either way, we’re probably doomed.” She said it in such a cheerful manner that Shayla had to laugh.

“Well, I guess we’ve got nothing to lose, then.” Shayla leaned forward, putting her elbows on the desk and let her head fall into her hands. This was it. Either she blew the servers up immediately, she was going to have to wait and see how much damage they did, or the worst-case scenario — nothing happened at all. Frankly, she wasn’t entirely sure which of the options she preferred. But it was better to get it over and done with anyway.

Closing her eyes, she allowed the system to release the files and activate them.

Slowly, she opened them. Nothing in the office was smoking, so that was probably a positive sign, right? “It’s done.”

Laria nodded slowly, and David sat there sipping on his probably cold by now coffee. Shayla felt like she should feel better about this, like everything should be falling into place, but instead, it was more like they were waiting for the clock to tick down on a bomb in the system.

 

Loot from the Anemomight was better than Murmur expected. Usually Fable got most of theirs at the end of the dungeon because the quest finished and compounded their rewards, but this had been a straight-out non-riddle-based dungeon fight for once, and it yielded only a few nice pieces of armor. They were better upgrades for the other guilds, and so Risk and Masha appeared momentarily mollified. Or at least to not want to melt her very bones with their gazes.

She glanced down at her own gear, perfectly happy with it. Both Mellow and Cardishan made that weird potion that fixed and cleaned things and left them with that awesome buff. Still, though. Murmur hated sitting around after a boss fight. She wanted to get moving straight away. It was eating up all of her self-control to not just nudge the entire raid into getting their shit together.

But she took a breath and centered herself. She shouldn’t be acting out like that; after all, she’d fused with the system, and if she paid attention to her own emotional and mental vibrations as they echoed through the system, she could feel elements of Somnia just out of her reach, begging her to get in tune with them.

“I’m proud of you.” Veranol was suddenly beside her, but she’d felt him approach. If she let herself float, she could feel every single presence in the world. It was almost overwhelming.

Snowy seemed to be laughing at her with the way his tongue lolled out of his mouth as she searched for words to answer Veranol. “Thanks?” She eventually chose. He’d seemed pretty bloody angry at her earlier, not that she could blame him. She’d been a fool. Even if some of it was due to getashi poisoning as both she and Sinister suspected.

“I mean it. I can see you thinking about it. You’ve never been all that good at hiding your emotions from your expression. It’s just taken me a little longer to get used to it with the whole alien features thing happening.” He grinned at her, and Murmur felt the tension loosening in her shoulders.

“Anyway, I just wanted to say that I’m proud of your for recognizing what you were doing, and for making a conscientious effort to refrain from doing it again.” He pushed himself away from the wall she was leaning against and nodded. “Yep. We knew what you were doing, but sometimes I think getting caught up in the raid and your own good intentions that you just lost sight for a bit. Remember, we don’t expect you to be able to right everything at once. It is a skill that begs to be abused. But I’m really glad you’re putting in as much effort as you are.”

“Thanks.” This time Mur appreciated it even more, because she understood better. Still half-lost in the vastness that was Somnia, she smiled. “It’s amazing what I can see and sense now I’m not busy trying to take care of everyone else’s feelings.”

He paused for a moment and then smiled. “Good.”

Then he walked away, and Murmur was distinctly reminded of her father and couldn’t help smiling. But the expression froze on her face when she looked over and saw Masha watching her with undeniable hatred. It leaked past his expression, its tendrils attempting to snake into her brain. She didn’t expect to feel as bad about that as she did. It punched her in the gut, and all she could do was wonder just what she had done.

When he walked away, he joined Risk, Jirald and Neriad, one of Exodus’s healers. From the way they stood with their backs to her, to the expressions she saw on their faces, and the fact that Jirald was a member of that