Blessed Combat

5 - Questions, answers and the third companion...

Apparently it seemed like Arma wasn’t the only one who was still stuck with his first task as he thought he was. Zessica was just as stuck too. She had been roaming around the hallways, picking up things she felt it was important for the task and roaming around again leaving an illusionary flame for a camera to pick up; having just as much of a fruitless search as the tall lad had.

What he had undergone earlier was a symptom of a disease known as ‘Darkness’ in the game. If a player had been in the dark for too long, it causes them to hallucinate and move at a pace of a drunkard man in his thirties. It also drives one’s sanity to the edge. Their vision gets eaten away and they wouldn’t be able to move till they find a light source. It’s a definite game over when one of the corpses finds that player and kills him or her on the spot.

She also didn’t deliberately make her surveillance camera to lose sight of her. What happened was she, like any other player in the beginning of the game, was in a separate hallway. She advanced through the dim lit hallway cautiously and stopped at a T section. She had to either take the left hallway, or the right.

Taking her time to which hallway to turn then, she turned to the left of the T section and decided to advance forth from there. However, the lantern she was holding suddenly slipped through her fingers and crashed on the ground with a deafening sound which echoed throughout the hallway. To make her luck worse, the wretched thing’s lights went out, engulfing both the girl and the camera, into darkness.

Zessica, who had was able to see the lantern rolling away from her by its tiny orange sparks that flickered then and there, chased after the old fashioned lantern groggily with her head ducked down. Once Zessica had her hands on the lantern once more, she didn’t bother turning back. Instead, she advanced forward on the right side of the T section while the surveillance camera continued to advance through the left, having no idea it was going to the wrong direction that whole time. Only when after the camera turned on its night vision feature, did it notice that the girl was ‘nowhere in sight’.

Arma felt a vein throbbing furiously at the side of his forehead when Zessica finished her tale. He kneaded his stabbing headache gently, trying to process all the absurdity in. In logical sense, it could have happened to anybody. However, for this to occur to Zessica, that was a whole another story. She was already giving people mini heart attacks just by appearing out of nowhere. It was as if disappearing was in her nature, as if she was born with it.

That’s when another question popped into his mind.

“Are you the rumoured Phantom Dancer?” Zessica stared at him as he asked that question before fixing her attention to something else; a broken shard not too far from her. To the tall lad, it seemed she was weighing her words down carefully before she answer back, to which Arma had hit the nail once again.

“No I am not” She blurted out straightforwardly, staring at her legs that were crossed underneath her.

“Oh...I see” Arma responded, having no other words to reply back with. Somewhere in the far corners of his mind, he might have hoped she was the Phantom Dancer too. It suited her in a peculiar way. Like how she sort of danced and balanced the situation, how she had gained the upper hand and controlled the game at her will and they way she disappears, it was difficult to disregard her as the legendary player even if the other people in the world wasn’t ready to accept it.

 Zessica continued to stare at her lap her hands clasped together, resting over her legs as if in a prayer. Her thumbs fiddled with each other before she added another statement that set not only Arma, but the whole audience to hushed silence.

“But I might have met him...”

Arma felt the words poked him in the head before drawing it into his ears. It took him a moment to realise what the girl had just uttered. When it did, the tall lad couldn’t help but have his eyes almost bulging out of his sockets and his jaw hung ajar in shock. It was as if she had slapped him in the face or poured ice water on him. Whichever it was, it certainly left him stupefied.