The air was thick with the damp, dusty smell of time. I blinked, my vision adjusting to the dim, golden glow of the library. Towering shelves of dark, weathered wood stretched endlessly into the shadows, their edges softened by a fine layer of dust that seemed to hang suspended in the air. The last thing I remembered was attempting a Dempsey roll under the influence of vodka and Mountain Dew. I never knew it was possible to dream while blackout drunk, but here I was, standing in what looked like the world’s most ancient library, completely sober and utterly confused. I wondered if I hit my head when I went down.

  [Special entity detected]

  I froze. What the hell was that? My eyes darted around the library, but there was no one—nothing—there. Just the endless rows of books. Before I could even process what was happening, the voice spoke again:

  [Transferring ownership of tower to entity]

  “Wait, what? What are you—” I started, but the voice cut me off.

  [Transfer Successful]

  What just happened? I took a deep, concentrated breath. Where the fuck did that noise come from? Hmm? I reached up to pull at my hair, a nervous habit, but my hand was blocked by something cold and metallic. My fingers brushed against smooth, scaled metal, and it hit me like a freight train.

  I looked down. My arms were encased in the scaled gauntlets I’d earned for killing the Old Knight. My legs were clad in the Banished Knight greaves, and my chest was armored with the Beast Champion plate. And if I was wearing all of that, then… I reached up again, this time more deliberately, and felt the unmistakable contours of the Scaled Helmet. I was in full gear. My character’s gear.

  But that wasn’t all. My perspective felt… different. Higher. Broader. I glanced down at my hands—my gauntleted hands—and flexed them experimentally. They felt real. Too real. And then it dawned on me: I wasn’t just wearing the gear. I was in the gear. My body—my real body—was gone.

  I switched my breathing to manual to prevent hyperventilation. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. I’d always hated the trope where people in danger would focus on the bright side, as if optimism could magically solve everything. Desperation makes you cling to anything, even delusion, I could finally empathize.

  Alright, let’s look at the bright side. If I’m wearing this specific set—then I must still be a girl, right? I mean, my character was female. That had to count for something. “Testing, testing,” I muttered, my voice echoing slightly inside the helmet. Well, I sounded like a girl—no, a woman. That was something, at least.

  But that was it. That was all the bright thinking I could muster. My fragile positivity was quickly engulfed by the crushing weight of the unknown. If I moved an inch, if I made one wrong step, it could lead to instantaneous death. Or worse. My mind raced, spiraling into a thousand what-ifs. I needed to find a middle ground of thought, and fast. Panicking wouldn’t help.

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  Fuck it, I thought. Let’s just explore and deal with the consequences when they arise. If I stayed here, frozen in place, I’d never figure out what was going on. After some forceful numbing of the brain—shoving the fear and doubt into a corner—I forced the first step. The sound of my armored boots against the stone floor echoed through the library, loud and unnerving, but it was a start. One step. Then another. And another. Cling. Clang. Cling. Clang.

  And then I fell on my face.

  My body hit the ground like a sack of bricks, the impact reverberating through my ribs even via the armor. Pulverizing part of a bookshelf as if hit by a sledgehammer. The shelf collapsed under my weight, and a dozen ancient books spiraled to the floor, their yellowed pages fluttering like wounded birds. One smacked me square in the visor, its leather cover slapping against the metal with a wet thwack. Dust billowed up, clogging my nostrils with the smell of mildew and defeat. I just lay there, stunned. Heh… it didn’t hurt. It seemed I had to relearn how to walk.

  I hauled myself up, knees groaning—not from strain, but from the sheer weirdness of moving limbs that felt both alien and eerily precise. Before I realized, I had switched to boxing footwork. Stay light. I shuffled forward, heel-to-toe. I fought my way out of the orphanage after all.

  “Graceful,” I muttered, my voice ricocheting off the shelves like a gong. “Real fucking graceful.”

  The endless shelves blurred into a monotonous haze of leather and dust until—there. A maroon carpet materialized underfoot, its frayed edges glowing faintly in the dim light.

  A path. That was as good a direction as any, so I followed it.

  "Ah, a visitor, are you? How rare, how fleeting... Aren’t you a lost bloom adrift in strange lands? Set me free, if you would be so kind. I swear, no harm shall befall you."

  Nope. I strode away from the melodious voice as fast as I could, pretending I hadn’t heard it.

  “Hey... hey, you! Please, don’t abandon me.”

  I was about to run as fast as my mind could conceive of speed. And then it happened.

  "Weeeh... please... don't leave me!"

  I’m not quite sure whether it was instinct or something deeper, but I paused. It was the same feeling I used to get when helping out at the orphanage—a faint sense of kinship with the voice. Though, the more calculative part of my mind was screaming, You retard.

  Expecting to get mauled, I clenched my fist and turned my body stiffly—my armor lending the motion a natural, almost predestined rigor. But there was no one there. I shifted my neck without daring to blink, and still, no one appeared.

  “Down here... I'm right here!”

  And there she was, trapped in a bird cage. A furry little thing, a mouse, perhaps? She was similar, an adorable rodent. “Are you a talking mouse?” I asked.

  “I am daughter to the golden moon, Estoc. Lunaris Estoc.”

  Holy fuck, it talked. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck...