Don't Die by Belinda Crawford

Author:Belinda Crawford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: science fantasy, science fiction, action adventure, short story, litrpg, gamelit, cyberpunk, video game, computer game, role playing, valkyrie
Publisher: Belinda Crawford

Ten hours, thirteen minutes.

She'd been in the tunnels long enough for hunger to come and go, to sense someone in the real shove a bottle against her lips and revel in the sweet warmth of water sliding down her throat.

The tunnels weren't made for Valkyries, if they'd been made at all, rather than carved out of the mountain by time and—

She mentally slapped herself. She'd been in here too long, way too long. The redline had come and gone, warnings lighting up her HUD like fireworks, the System trying to boot her out. There'd been a second when she thought it would, and she'd been both glad and alarmed at the prospect. They wouldn't harm Usha because of a System reset. It wouldn't be her fault then, they'd just have to log her back in and—

'All or Nothing, Maggie. Them's the rules.'

Then there'd been a tingle through her soles and the environment had fuzzed, just like it had during character creation, and the warnings and the failsafe had died right along with her hopes.

Three hours past the redline, the lines between reality and virtual were blurring as her neurons slowly fried. The sooner she got to the end of this damn quest the better, not just for Usha, but for her as well.

The realisation didn't make her back ache any less as she stumbled along in a hunched shuffle. The meagre light from the pebble-gem was barely enough to make out the shadows, let alone the dips and hollows of the rocky floor. Having three-toed talons instead of human-shaped feet didn't help, but at least they didn't hurt from walking on bare rock.

Shredding that knight's armour had been pretty sweet too. She was beginning to understand why people spent so much time and money hunting Valkyries down—

The ground gave way, loose stones sliding from under her talons. She flailed, tried to spread her wings for balance, felt them trapped by rocks before they were half-open, and she hit the ground hard, stars exploding in her eyes.

The ground wasn't done with her. She was sliding on her back, pain ripping through her wings, her arse, the exposed portion of her lower back. With fireworks still going off in her brain, she tried to stop her descent, reached out to grab something, anything and—

The snap of bone and then pain, roaring through her forearm, up her shoulder, wiping out the smaller agonies of torn feathers and abraded skin.

She fell and kept falling, health bar sliding a fraction lower with every bump and graze, until one rock found the back of her skull and she knew no more.

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