She took a deep breath, sweat dripping down her cheek as her eyes closed and opened again slowly in jaded exhaustion.  Her bright eyes were never more than half-opened, and the flame within them was not one of consciousness.  She was disgusted, dying, drowning in a sea of incoherency.  Tears never would form in her eyes; rather she sat there calmly, jumping back from his dead body, lifting the sword over her shoulder as she turned to face the monster.  It had no material form…  That monster had metallic armor acting as its skin, towering the size of an average house with a black orb in the middle showing where to attack.  The horn against its forehead extended outward as a sinful attempt to mimic a unicorn’s elegance.

She knew from the beginning that she had been too late.  She knew that moment when she was looking down into the water and she felt that pang in her chest, that feeling of a hundred sirens crying as they were crucified, she knew then that he had died.  At that time, her fingers had done nothing more than rise to her chest and grasp onto the necklace around it.  “Phantasma is supposed to be a game,” she had heard one of the voices behind her murmur.  Things like that, dying on the battlefield…passing out and not awakening…that was only supposed to be a daydream.

“Have you seen him…?” she had asked a girl on the street, a warrior that had fallen asleep, a cat, a bug, the sky, the buildings…never to receive an answer until a butterfly fluttered its wings at her words.  It had always been something she acknowledged, that she was alone in her fears and at once she would come to arms alone.

Just an error in a flawless program, because none of the bugs could ever be solved, while the error wasn’t fatal to the entire system, it did, in fact, leave users paralyzed.  The girl had known at that moment that this was the case and had immediately taken to arms, lifting her wand as she crossed the mountains, the deserts, the various false landscapes to get to the fallen man.

Now that she looked back on it, it hadn’t seemed so obvious.  Something about it…made the world fall apart.  Standing firmly as she cast that curative magic one last time, as she watched the way the body remained limp, covered in blood, uncreative…she knew.  Her eyes caught that metallic armor, that skin, those spherical forms that glowed in the artificial night sky, and an apathetic anger raged through her veins.  Passing in the moment, she was unaware of the way her fingers had pulled those two swords away from the sheaths on his dead corpse, lifting them threateningly into the air as she heard the sound of people approaching behind her.

The girl from the street, that sleeping warrior, a boy with a cat tail and ears, a small glowing bug, the sky above, the ruined buildings that surrounded them, and a swarm of butterflies that stood before them.  “A gift from ALEM!  A gift from the only true god!” the girl from the street had shouted into the night sky, lifting her weapons with a glowing golden aura surrounding her, crests burning into her skin.  “Paralysis will be avenged…!”

The girl had already moved to run after the monster, that same glowing light surrounding her, though she was too short to reach the center of the monster, that glowing core.  The bolts against its armored flesh shimmered in that moonlight, and just as her eyes became more determined than any others within Phantasma, thousands of butterflies with their blues and purples connected to her slender, pale back, carrying her into the air with the wind blowing past her long light hair with its sky-tinted streaks through her bangs.

“This isn’t a game…  In a game, there couldn’t be love.  No, Phantasma is the true reality.  That outside world…  It’s just a joke, something to keep us from seeing the passion of true living.  Every droning moment…that’s that world, but this one…Phantasma and ALEM will lead us to truth…”

Truth…

Post Notes: This is the beginning of a cyberpunk and fantasy story…  I hope it turns out well, so wish me luck, oh…and I love comments just like everyone else, especially constructive criticism since my friends all lie to me to boost my ego…  Thank you for reading!