Immortal Shrine

The dozen soldiers who served as the Grand Master's bodyguards leaped into position to defend their lord.

They raised their halberds and shields menacingly, forming a barrier between the Grand Master and the six white-masked, white-armored assassins who had revealed themselves in the middle of the NPC crowd. "Run, My Lord!" called the captain of the guards. "We'll hold these bastards off while we can!"

Ignatius and Siegmund were standing a short distance away, at the edge of the crowd. The Heavenly Executioners and the Grand Master's guards were about equal distances away from the two of them. "What shall we do, my friend!?" Siegmund asked in an excited tone. "Shall we attack these troublemakers alongside the city guards, or shall we do what we can to defend this Grand Master fellow against any further attacks?"

The game was using Ignatius's companion to deliver a story prompt. If the Onion Knight hadn't been there, it would have used some other nearby NPC instead.

"You join the guards," said Ignatius. "I'll help the Grand Master."

"As you say, my friend!" Siegmund replied heroically. As civilian NPCs screamed in terror and ran in all directions, Siegmund leaped triumphantly at the assassins, who had each drawn a long knife which shimmered with impossible rainbow light. Unarmored, wielding his huge claymore, the Onion Knight roared a war cry as he sent a heavy slash at the closest assassin.

The enemy backstepped out of the way, then stepped forward in the blink of an eye, driving his knife into Siegmund's unprotected eye socket.

The Onion Knight collapsed to the ground, instantly killed. Meanwhile, the city guards began a fight which was designed to take about thirty seconds before they, too, would all be killed by the six assassins.

Ignatius winced at Siegmund's immediate death, but he'd known that would happen. It was fine. The Onion Knight was clumsy and unskilled, serving mostly as a tank in actual combat… and only when he was fully equipped. On a lower difficulty, Siegmund wouldn't have been able to land a solid attack on any assassin, but he could've tanked several attacks even without his armor.

Armor which Ignatius had taken before the fight began.

This entire sequence of attacks happened in barely two seconds. At the same time, the Grand Master shouted to Ignatius, "Follow me to the Shrine of the Immortals! It's our only hope! You must protect me while I use my Immortal blood to awaken Sarexia's Gauntlets!"

"On it," Ignatius said from inside the bulbous armor. Without waiting for the Grand Master, he ran as fast as he could toward the beautiful, ancient temple in the heart of the city—the Shrine of the Immortals. It was a two-story temple of solid stone covered with billions of tiny glass tiles, each of which was a different color. They shone like an otherworldly rainbow in even the slightest bit of light, and especially so at this time, when the sun's rays fell directly upon the temple.

The refracted and reflected rainbow sunbeams lit up a pathway from the city's main road to the temple's entrance, as though fate had prepared this exact moment for Ignatius to enter.

Since this moment was a carefully designed story mission, "fate" just meant "the developers."

It was pretty visually impressive, and Ignatius appreciated the shimmering, wavering light as he sprinted through the huge stone doors into the cool darkness inside the shrine.

Ignatius had left Siegmund behind to immediately die to make this a much more simple process. The addition of companions to a story mission could subtly alter events and NPC AI enough that it might no longer be perfectly predictable. In fact, Siegmund's charge had been a simple example of this. Though the story mission's scripting meant that the assassins and guards would immediately start fighting, one of the assassins had held back for a moment to kill the Onion Knight before attacking his usual target.

The Heavenly Executioners were so powerful that the guards would definitely still die. It might just take them a few seconds longer now.

Once he was inside the Shrine of the Immortals, Ignatius ran to the center of the stone chamber. An altar of lumpy, cold iron rose from the center of the tiled floor, and a stained-glass window shone rainbow light upon it. A pair of gemstone-crusted bronze gauntlets were half-embedded into the lumpy iron, as though someone had used them to grasp a glob of molten metal and then left them there while the metal cooled.

These were [✵Sarexia's Gauntlets], the legendary and ancient weapons of Brightlord Sarexia, one of Brightlord Temporix's ancient companions in the game lore.

In the story, there were once many Brightlords—one for each player class, and then a few more who were important to the story. Each of the player class Brightlords was a human who had awakened incredible power and become an Immortal. In this story mission, which was slightly different for each class, the player would enter the Shrine of the Immortals and find the weapon which their own class's Brightlord had once wielded.

Ignatius opened the game's chat console and typed a certain command into it, though he didn't yet hit the return key. Then he slid his hands into the gauntlets, though they weren't usable yet. "Come on!" he growled. "Move yourself, old man. Seriously, if a player runs past an NPC, they should be able to run to catch up!"

The story, of course, assumed that the people who had just started playing the game wouldn't know where the Immortal Shrine was located in the City of Stomrus. The player was intended to follow the Grand Master as he fled the Heavenly Executioners, following behind him and finding the temple just as the murderous NPCs began to catch up from behind. Since Ignatius had sprinted ahead to save whatever time he could, the morbidly obese Grand Master had fallen a bit behind.

Finally, the Grand Master's gasping voice came from the entrance to the temple. "Ah, you've found it, brave Monk! Please, for the sake of the whole mortal world, I beg that you guard me with your life as I take on the burden of Sarexia's Gauntlets! As I have a little Immortal blood, I can wield them for a short while… though it may cost me my life. If only the true Immortal emperor was still with us!"

Then he took a few steps through the door—

A look of agony crossed the Grand Master's face as a glittering rainbow blade sprouted from his chest.

Blood sprayed the sacred stone floor within the temple, steaming in the shaft of sunlight which streamed in over the Grand Master's shoulder.

"All hope is lost," he whispered, and slumped to the ground.

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," Ignatius said with a sigh. "Can we get on with it, please?"

The six Heavenly Executioners stepped through the door in silence, their white leather armor and white ceramic masks somehow completely untouched by the blood of their victims. Their leader held his long knife up in the shaft of sunlight, watching as the Grand Master's blood magically absorbed into its surface. He turned his masked face toward Ignatius. "No witnesses," he said in a smooth voice like a violin.

The Grand Master, lying face down on the floor at the assassins' feet, slowly raised his head to give Ignatius a look of hope. "If there is any chance," he said, "and chance that you are the one I have been searching for… the one foretold… please…"

The assassins' leader hurled his knife downward into the Grand Master's skull.

The Immortal light faded from the dead man's head, which slid down on the impaling blade to lie motionless on the cold stone.

At that moment, a prompt appeared above the iron-embedded gauntlets.

GAME: The Grand Master saw something surprising in you… the power of old. Awaken, Immortal!

[✵Sarexia's Gauntlets] heated up around Ignatius's fists, and a shimmering glow consumed his body. He flexed the muscles of his arms, and the iron shattered as he pulled his gauntleted fists free.

Then, as the Heavenly Executioners rushed forward to attack him, Ignatius did something that any onlooker would have found very peculiar.

He'd had the game's console window open this whole time. The text he'd entered before had been "/unequip", and he finally hit the return key.

The gauntlets of ancient power vanished from his hands and fell to the ground.

And, though the developers hadn't intended for this to be possible, Ignatius picked the gauntlets up again and deposited them into his inventory.

He did this just as the Heavenly Executioners reached him, striking him six times at once with their rainbow knives.

The stolen Onion Knight armor gave Ignatius a huge amount of defense. On this difficulty level, it was just enough time to perform all these steps before his HP dropped to 0.

GAME: YOU DIED.