Vernon spent the next few days in a fog of confusion and joy. Through the Hub’s messaging service, he and Phage were able to stay in touch. They kept their conversations on the most private of modes, where every interaction was shortly deleted after it was read. The last thing either of them wanted was for her user to know about their relationship, or worse, somehow stop it. They sent pictures to each other and spoke through voice chat when they were free. He was fascinated by the intricacies of her scripted life as a student in the Nation’s foremost police academy. She found the mundaneness of This Earth charming, but alien.

When he was logged in, they did a lot of the footwork in the questline leading to the archmage bosses Sol told them about. They wanted to meet the user in control of them, who so far was the closest they had to a figurehead of the NPC revolution. Dymir’s interest lay only in knowing what was happening to his beloved Hub, and Phage was clearly invested in the quest for answers. Along the way, they stopped in towns and spent more nights together before one day, while holding hands, she let him go and shook her head before backing away from him. She blinked her eyes rapidly before both her posture and nature changed. “What’s going on here?” The user asked immediately, “Speak.”

They had planned for this. It was Phage’s idea to be honest, but with omission, “I recruited your avatar to help me work our way to the mages Sol told us about.” He replied, “It was our only lead.”

“Show me the All-Seeing Eye.” She insisted rather than asked. He knew the user would log back in yet didn’t realize how uncomfortable it would be when it actually happened. The vessel that boggled his mind, that made him laugh and intrigued him was now back to the cold, demanding one he met first using this body. Dymir shared the footage where this Phage watched it malignantly. To see her former avatar still among the ‘living’ clearly frustrated whoever controlled the shy, young NPC. “Sol… where is he?”

“Gone. With Reya.” He replied, “We think about a month.”

“We?” Phage’s expression hinted suspicion, “Getting to know my avatar, are we?”

“She’s been helpful,” He shrugged, “She’s on the same page.”

“I bet….” She demanded to see the footage from the surveillance sphere, which he was more than willing to show her. It didn’t matter how many emotional suppressors the user had over Phage, Dymir saw the shock of seeing Indreas, this user’s former self, still alive and acting on his own. Her build was centred heavily around hunting, with an emphasis on tracking. She uploaded his every aspect into every maxed-out sensory skill she could muster with her mana pool. The plan, he told her, was to interrogate the archmages since maybe they’d know where to find him, let alone meet their user. It was a natural choice.

From there, Dymir and Phage went on a marathon together, eventually joining a party looking to find the tower. When grouped up, Phage played her role as an advanced bot well. She acted like an algorithm would and responded to others with the pre-scripted responses her kind were prone to use. It was both impressive and disturbing, to see this enigma blend in and make everyone believe it was something it was not. It took them nearly the entire day and most of the evening before they found themselves in the safe space just before the lift leading to the mage tower’s roof. The journey was evermore grueling since all Dymir wanted was for Phage’s user to log out so he could see her again. The other sensed it, or something close enough to it to know that there was leverage to be had.

It had been a hell of a run so far. Since this dungeon in particular was mostly populated by illusions and animated objects, pickings were slim for a minion master. Instead of an army of many, he instead called dibs on all the looted corpses to create an amalgam, a horror coursing with the magic of all the mage underlings it had consumed along the way. While the party prepped for the battle, Phage crafted incendiary and flash rounds that she fed into Dymir’s golem, since their plan was to detonate the minion on her signal. It would disorient not just the bosses, but their party members in range, giving them enough time to push for information.

Until Sol returned, they had nothing else to go with except the tower. Dymir was sure Phage’s user would have some scheme to set in motion, but she was agreeable with seeing the lead through, “I have to admit, this is quite the quest line you’ve got going for us,” He said, to which she smirked, nodded, but kept to her crafting, “I’ll stick around for a bit after this so we can figure out what’s next, but I’ve got to get some sleep soon.”

“I get it.” She shrugged, “Apparently we’ve been partied up for almost twenty hours.”

“I like to play,” He admitted, watching her stand with her inventory loaded with all the components for their attack. He ordered his minion to take them from her outstretched hand and integrate the munitions into its writhing mass. He was about to rejoin the others when she stopped him.

“Is she nice?” She asked, specifying, “Phage, I mean. She’s the Eve of a new breed of NPC, literally next in a line it’s taken a lot of time and effort to keep pruned just right. You’ve seen it, right? The power that comes with total freedom inside the Hub?” He remembered how she bent the rules at Sol’s home, “What I have comes from her and what she gets comes from me. This world you love is going to need defenders who aren’t restricted to logging in, sleep, or death. If you believe she’s a good person, she’ll do good things.”

“Except when you’re logged in.” He said, not caring what the statement may have revealed. Lying about how amazing he found Phage to be was just not an option, be she at her user’s mercy or not. The rest of the party was waiting, “She’ll make a great hero.”

The rooftop was a great setting for an epic battle against hardcore magic-based bosses. As with Trident, each archmage specialized in a different aspect. Completely identical, one wielded debilitating hexes and status ailments. Another attacked using the elements and was proficient with all of them. The third was a summoner, who would be flooding them with mobs of any kind that had appeared during the tower. They descended from the eye of the storm churning overhead, overcharged by lightning strikes. Dymir charged his minion towards neither of them, but the space closest to all of them. The elemental archmage struck it with a powerful lightning bolt, detonating the munitions.

The blast, while not overly damaging, was an assault on the senses. Were it not for Dymir’s enchantments, he and Phage would have been as dazed as everyone else. He conjured as many hexes as his casting time would allow, debuffing the bosses so that it would take them longer to compose themselves. Phage, who should have been using her charisma stat to begin interrogation, took her time approaching them. She held her arms wide open where his minion was detonated, and with a voice that throttled everyone’s connection, said aloud, “Panjandrum.”

One of the archmages lurched and came to, looking about himself in confusion. When her eyes met his, Dymir saw what she saw as the farse was cast aside. Behind likeness of the elemental archmage was none other than Indreas, unable to believe his eyes, “You??” He enveloped her with a cone of flame from his palm, but between her resistances and Dymir’s enchantments, Phage continued her approach unabated. She raised her hand and made a fist, an act he copied, snuffing his flame, “How??”

“I used the password from my old account to seize complete control.” She replied, “Which is why you’re going to tell me how you still exist.”

“The…” He fought with futility, “The Altar of Rebirth, it doesn’t kill a character, it frees it. They’ve been using it to create a new kind of NPC, ones with the privileges of their user.” It was the exact opposite of what Phage’s user was doing, a concept whose gravity was lost on no one. She pressed him for more, and he laughed in her face when even her authority could not access that information, “What I have comes from you and what you had came from me, remember??”

“Correction,” Phage noted, “Have.” That said, she thrust her hand into Indreas’ chest, which shed no blood as it should, but white light from which streamed wisps of code. She did not copy the data, but instead drank it so that the other would be left with nothing, his levels, his stats, his inventory, all taken, leaving nothing but an NPC as indistinguishable from any other. Having been ready for this moment for a long time, Phage switched her equipment loadout from her ranger build to the very same she used when she wielded Indreas’ power. A red, flared skirt with orange thigh-high boots heavily boosted fire damage as well as improved casting speed. Her crown, a black piece that spewed smoke while it glowed with embers, further increased her output.

With everyone coming to, she acted fast and thoroughly. Dymir noticed she toggled her friendly fire to ‘off’ before she began levitating to cast a high-level spell. Far and above, several meteors punched through the storm, wiping out half the party. “What the hell are you doing??” He cried over the hail of destruction but it was already clear. With the rest of their allies about to come to, they would see something happened that was too far off-script. The archmages were vaporized by impact and the tower was hammered so hard its stones were shaking loose. A quartet of celestial debris passed through the stratosphere just for him, “I won’t be needing your services for a while, but I’m sure you’ll be seeing this face again as soon as I’m done with it.”

Dymir respawned at the foot of the tower with the rest of the party. He stuck around long enough to learn no one had recovered from the blast in time to see anything. He feigned having been oblivious to how they were wiped but told the truth when he told them he was logging out for bed. After disbanding, he made for the nearest town so he could make some coin selling junk loot, but in reality, he was just taking some time to process what had happened. Having reclaimed the skills and stats of his old character, Phage’s user combined them with all she had accumulated since. Indreas was a unit that took decades to develop, on par with Sol, or any other God-tier player. It didn’t matter who was in charge or when – Vernon wished her the best.