Ashes of the Fallen

"Maybe they leashed it and reset the boss," I muttered to myself.

Standing up, I ran back into the dungeon and made my way through the five floors until I came across the other four members of my party, alive and well in a room filled with corpses. Corpses of goblins were strewn about, fourteen to be exact, as the party was sorting through the loot. Sorting through the loot and fourteen corpses… that meant one thing, and one thing only… we did it.

There was no way that could be true.

"What took ye so long Sigurd?" asked Barik with a huge smile.

"Well, fuck that," I said out of character as I shook my head and started to grin. "You mean we managed to kill the little fucker after three of us died? You're shitting me."

"Hah, damn right we fucking did it!" cheered Ethan enthusiastically as the others joined in. "And we were the first to fucking do it too, hell yeah!"

I was still somewhat disconnected from it all.

They were yelling and cheering but it became incoherent to me as I watched the scene unfold. A part of me wanted to celebrate too, to jump up and down and shout or whatever people did when they were excited… we had the world record for this dungeon.

That made us, for a brief moment in time, somewhat special.

Sure, it wasn't a big thing, it wasn't a serious raid.

This was nothing more than the second instanced dungeon in the game, and we happened to get here first while the game was still relatively new. We were ahead of the curve and there wasn't a lot of competition at the moment… but that didn't stop us from feeling good.

Ah, but my head hurt.

I taxed my mind a bit too much, during that fight.

My brain didn't work as well as it used to and one of the lingering effects of my Post-Concussion Syndrome was mental fatigue, along with issues concerning cognitive functions of a higher order, apathy, personality change, tinnitus, and irritability to name a few. Normal things for most people, just on a whole different level… and now, I was tired. I was extremely tired, actually.

I felt exhausted.

"That was really intense though," said Ethan after he calmed down a bit.

"It was, and all I could do was watch," chimed in Alan. "Was positive, once I was out of mana, that we were going to wipe and have to restart the whole thing."

"Sigurd pretty much willed us through it," said Ethan as he gave me a pat on the shoulder. "You're pretty fucking good, you know that?"

"Huh?" I asked, a bit confused at the moment.

"You tanked all the goblins on the side, the guards included, killed them by yourself, and then picked up the chief and managed to tank without taking any damage for a good fifteen seconds," he explained, long-windedly.

That was it… fifteen seconds.

It felt like an eternity, a duel to the death that lasted at least a minute. Sure, I was aware that time was slow, it's always like that when your adrenaline is rushing. A hundred-mile per hour fastball isn't that fast when you're focused. But, only fifteen seconds… that seemed wrong.

"Is that so," I said nonchalantly.

I was having a hard time getting excited now, and actually wanted to log off.

The guys went on, talking amongst themselves for a bit as I tuned out and closed my eyes. I felt sick from overexerting and taxing myself mentally. It had happened so many times before that I recognized it the second it hit, but it had been awhile since my last episode. With the game, I never expected to have this issue.

Soon, the chatting became incessant and the flood of voices was only making my headache worse. I switched their voices off and had it auto-transcribe into text, but that too became too much. A stream of text flooded my chat box and quickly formed into a large wall of text that was simply too long.

I didn't want to read it.

They were excitedly discussing the events of the fight, filling in Barik, who had missed the end of it as he was running back. Ethan described a flurry of movements between the goblin chief and me, something they couldn't quite follow in the middle of it all going down. All Ethan did was spam his fireball over and over, even as I fell to the ground and was split like a watermelon.

Then after I died, two more fireballs hit and the chief collapsed on the spot.

If I had lived another four seconds, I could have witnessed the end.

Closing my eyes, I tried to retrace my view of the fight, but in my mind everything happened relatively slowly. I saw the attacks wind up before they were released, saw them coming and their trajectories. There was time for me to react, to move or attempt to counter, even if my body couldn't quite move as fast as I wanted.

It wasn't a flurry of movements by any sense.

Ah, it clicked.

Somehow, it slipped my mind with all of the celebrating.

"Have you guys had adrenaline rushes in-game?" I asked, butting into their conversation somewhat randomly. "Heightened senses and all, the whole shebang?"

"No, can that even happen?" Ethan questioned immediately.