Path of Exiles

         Argul did not appear outwardly remorseful about his guilt, which was all the more irksome as the troupe plodded through knee-deep snow and seething cold winds. The storm was far too audible to voice concerns, and as the hours drew on, concerns grew higher. Not because of the wolves, which Wraith and Z handled well enough on their own, or the NPC bandits, which K. Wolfe, Rhivaun, and Argul dispatched in short order, or even the tracking, which Zawind took on with admirable ease.

         It was the tension building amongst them. If Argul was truly willing to toss aside friendship for a cause that only seemed righteous to him, what other ends would he go to in the same regard? Was he so invested in the politics of the game that he had forgone some piece of his humanity? Did he truly believe in the worth of the natives to the realm?

         Or was he just playing with lives as callously as a child plays with toys?

         They had reached the forest of Lia's kidnapping and followed a slightly snowed over set of tracks deeper into the woods. The signs of struggle were clear - dragon claws against trees, blood splotches streaked across snow and terrain, and upon further travels there was a large crater of visible, muddy ground measured at about Lia's size where she must've been captured.

         "What color does Lia bleed?" Asked Zawind to no one in particular.

         At length, Z spoke up, pulling the cowl back on his protective winter cloak. "I don't think I've paid her enough attention to know. Blue maybe?"

         Argul walked passed the kneeling Zawind and did some surveying of his own. Traces of footsteps only went toward the crater, and given how the snow still fell passed the foliage of the thick and stalwart trees, it was hard to find a set of prints that went anywhere outward.

         "Puny One bleeds red like the rest of us," said the Shadow Reaver, seeming to have found something in the crater of shallow mud. "They did not have to cut her; simply subduing her would've been enough."

         Rhivaun was ahead of all of them, regarding the trees with the light of his staff's red crystal. Even the faintest trace of struggle could be seen with its ethereal glow, and yet even he seemed to be taking more than the usual few moments to comprehend what may have happened to Lia. He had forgone his winter cloak's cowl, revealing a bald head and intensely concentrated eyes. While not much of a tracker on his own, having the aid of magic helped him in more ways than just battle.

         Wraith was some distance behind, somewhere at the edge of the wood scouting their backs for would-be assailants. The first day of their travels had gone inconceivably well, and it fell to his vigilance and skill to see that the second follow suit.

         Zawind joined Rhivaun, perhaps to test his own eyes at something that the mage could have missed even with the aid of his otherworldly powers. Argul and Z exchanged words while K. Wolfe went to conduct a study of his own.

         The Breaker, Z, was glaring at Argul throughout the exchange, wondering if his planning had been flawed after all. "What happens if we don't pick up a trail?"

         "We will."

         "That doesn't answer my question, ninja."

         He gave a killing look of his own, an overflow of the bother behind being the only accused, no matter how justified the accusation. "I answered every question on the way here. The only question that needs answering is where we find a trail, not whether or not we can. How ironic is it that your tracking skills are lacking in this situation?"

         "Oh, don't even put this on me you fuck!"

         "Right, right, I'm the evil McMeanie pants who sent Puny One into this mess - a mission that, at this point, may not even succeed. Newsflash: it will fail even faster if you're all expecting a knife in the back from me, got it?"

         Having the tension thrust sorely on his shoulder, Z drew his great blade and jammed it in the snow. "I don't deal in knives, little man! If I'm going stab anything, it'll be in its front, in a place where it hurts, not where it will always kill!"

         K. Wolfe caught the conflict before it escalated, trying to keep Z at bay with an arm on his shoulder. "Don't..."

         Argul's motions could not be tracked in the heavy cloak and mask he wore, but it could be safely assumed he was moving a dagger to his hand. "You won't stop him, Magic Bro. And frankly, I wish you wouldn't."

         "Well I am!" Shouted the boy, now moving to Z's front with brows furrow in concern. "Z, just keep it together for a little longer. I'm sure we'll find something."

         That did little to placate the six-foot menace of the realm. "He sells out one of our own, comes to us for help saving her from the very predicament he put her in, and I'm supposed to keep it together? Your naivethas gone from laughable to sickening, Wolfe."

         "I thought you were friends, Z? I thought you were brothers in arms!"

         "I'm brother to no man who leaves for months and comes back only to endanger the whole lot of us. Among the many things he's done wrong is give me a long, cold, and windy walk to think over just what it is that he's gotten us all into. Even if we do somehow succeed - and frankly, the odds range anywhere from up in the air to outright suicide - how can we look this man in the face and call him friend ever again?" The warrior's words reached sphere of emotion in his chest. He was ready to bring down the assassin any moment.

         And Argul appeared all the more nonchalant as a result. "You haven't seen what I've seen, Z. None of you have. I've followed Diokles these passed months, knowing only that which I had heard from you and a few locals. To avoid interference from both you and his henchman, I logged into the realm under 'Do Not Disturb' status.

         "And in my findings, I saw something..."

         It was a thought the ninja could not quite finish without pausing. The images seemed to flush out any anger and replace it with a subtle, inward horror. Broken somewhat by the revelation of his own fears, he turned away from them both.

         Z recognized the change, only lightly turned from his tirade to consider what could frighten a man whose profession was smeared in blood. "What did you see, exactly?"

         "I saw players. Dead. Just... dead. As if they couldn't respawn."

         "Are you sure they weren't natives?"

         K. Wolfe answered before Argul gave his response. "Couldn't respawn? What did they look like?"

         "I only remember their faces, suspended in the same kind of confusion, as though asking the same question I asked: why won't you respawn?"

         "Did they say anything to you?" K. Wolfe inquired further.

         "No. All the ones I found had logged off. It seemed odd to just leave your corpse dead in the middle of an open zone. Even so, the corpses one usually finds don't have such an awful look on their faces."

         Z stepped passed the young man, grimly intrigued by the new notions. "And you think Diokles did this?"

         The ninja nodded over his shoulder. "Of this, I have no doubt. Only he would find a way to do more than simply kill a player."

         "If that's the case," said K. Wolfe. "Then those players would have to start all over with new characters."

         "That is exactly what I fear. The server databases are reported to be crowded with inactive player character names, many of which dead on log out. Diokles has found a way to do more than just kill a player; he's forcing them to start over. I can think of very few reasons why he would want to do that."

         Wolfe was at work, putting the thought processes of a mad man together like a set of horribly jagged puzzle pieces. "The more players he does it to, the further ahead he'll be in the game than those players. If he somehow gets the majority of the realm..."

         The stony, pale assassin inclined his head forward and continued, his voice somehow breaking through the harsh winds. "I came across a mid-level area full of players just randomly cut down. Fifty, maybe sixty in all, just laid out upon the grass. They had all been stabbed in the back, or severed completely in half, wearing that confused expression. Some of them even seemed annoyed, or scared."

         Z folded his arms, still resolute to find disbelief somewhere in the story. "Why haven't the GMs tried to stop him? They can obviously see this kind of anomaly on their end. By your accounts, Diokles may have already done this to more than a couple hundred players."

         "That brings to mind another thought: what if he managed to kill a GM with this ability?"

         K. Wolfe shook his head. "Their administrative rights are in their accounts, not in the characters they create."

         "That brings me a bit of relief," replied Argul. "Even so, I can say little as to why he hasn't been stopped. There'd be no place to hide from a GM."          

         Z's was standing beside the assassin then, trying to get an eye on what it was that the assassin was looking at.

         Zawind and Rhivaun were coming upon something. All three onlookers met their comrades at the base of a damaged tree. At first glance, the chipped bark and dented snow would mean little in the face of an obvious ground of struggle. What Rhivaun's staff had done was remove the tampering of a rogue mage trying to cover up a certain line of blood dotted upon the ground. Zawind deduced that the direction the blood pointed was due Southeast.

         "How do you know it doesn't go Northeast instead?" Asked Rhivaun, scratching the thin coat of facial hair at his chin with genuine curiosity.

         To which the Tempest Blade replied, "Because Northeast contains only a lake, frozen over by the snow. That area is too open for a covert base of operations. A simple scout of two could find such a place in no time."

         "I see. Let's have a better look then." Rhivaun took his place in front of all of them, standing right in front of the blood streak's northernmost direction. "Let lightning reveal all."

         The lightning mage spread both his arms out and gathered the amalgamated energies of flame and wind. Once he tethered himself to the ground with the newly made lightning, the staff suddenly went aglow with mottled power. In that same instant, a barrage of cackling thunder sent a shockwave throughout the snow. A sweep of unseen magic rushed before Rhivaun in one wide swoop, sending the ground's snow away just enough to reveal a path-like divot, leading Northeast.

         The path was as wide as Lia would be in her dragon form.

         Pulling the hood back over his head, Rhivaun nodded back at his comrades with a simple stare, thinking nothing of his accomplishment. "Zawind is correct. They took her Northeast."

         "Why didn't you do that earlier?" Asked Z.

         "Unlike you, Z, my mana can't be restored. If I simply threw Sensory Lightning out at any random direction, I'd be useless on the off chance we find the dragon girl and are given to combat." The Levin Master spared a particularly upraised eyebrow in Argul's direction.

         The warrior had not noticed. "Huh..."

         K. Wolfe had heard enough. "Then let's go get Wraith from the forest's edge. I would have Argul give you all an account of what he just told me and Z. This operation just got a bit more complicated."