Gemblade VR chapter 8: Cursed Duality

The week passed without any major incidents, but there were quite a few close calls still as always. Most of the school still had the impression it was a good idea to mess with us as much as possible, then back off whenever a teacher or adult showed up. They were too stubborn, and their insistence that we were doing something wrong by existing was starting to get on my nerves. I wished they would spit out the problem they all had with me, but by the looks of things it wasn't going to happen anytime soon.

Thankfully the others were around, so a couple days we got to leave the school grounds for a couple minutes at least, and avoid getting into real trouble, since teachers weren't always around at lunch, which meant it was the easiest time for people to attack us. Thankfully we had an agreement going on at home, I was careful not to let the teachers see me fighting these idiots, and nobody asked questions when I got home. The one extra rule though was that I had to wear gloves to hide my bruises over my hands from constantly using them to defend myself. Hopefully I never had to go to a doctor; my wounds would be really hard to explain without causing trouble.

As always though, Friday ended with me getting involved in a fight with a bunch of people who decided ambushing me in the mini-forest around my house would be a smart idea. I heard them coming behind me, and hid up in a tree, hoping they were smart enough to leave without a fight, unfortunately I knew better. When they reached the area I was in, they all began climbing trees at random, like they had a clue what they were going to do once they found me. One was lucky (or unlucky depending on how you think of it) and chose the tree I was on, which forced me to drop down on his face, ending his participation rather early.

The rest jumped down towards me, completely ignoring the fact that I used someone else to cushion my fall, they had nothing. The attackers all stumbled forwards, and one stumbled rather close to me, causing me to kick his feet out from under him. The rest decided they were all going to try to attack me from all directions, all I had to do was slide to the side a little, and they all crashed into each other, several crashing their heads against each other. Today's decent fighter got up, and shook the pain off rather quickly, then decided to punch me.

I met his fist with my own, counting on the fact that people around here expected a block instead of punching an attack. He was good though, so there wasn't a delay between the moment our fists connected, and his next punch. This time I went a little lower, causing my fist to slam into his wrist. He still got the top of my hands though, so my knuckles stung a little. He decided to kick me too, forcing me to back up to avoid losing a leg. When he came forwards the next time, I slashed outwards to force his guard open, and then slammed my fist into his chin, forcing him to retreat, and stunning him enough for me to punch his lungs, winding him. The next hit on the back of his spine ended today's conflict.

Once I had eaten, I logged back into VR, which was starting to be the only place I could go where there wasn't faces that wanted me gone, or people who tried to help, but couldn't, seeing as they had no clue how many people existed that wanted the legendary brawler who wore the symbol of the wolf dead. Here, all that matters is being stronger than the monsters, nobody cares about what you do in reality, since this was our second reality now. I took care to look over my inventory again, even if I didn't get any new armor today, I could always sell whatever I got to merchants who would buy anything for cheap, and with the amount of practice I got, I could make cloth items so easy selling them cheap still made me a lot of GS in a day.

Today was going to be the first day I was in the second zone of the Boar wastelands, so I was hoping to find some items I could use to make something I could sell easily, seeing as Richard wasn't very likely to be able to support the massive amount of money a shop takes to keep running if all he had to sell was the same stuff anyone could make with the stuff in the first zone, which was available from the first second in the game. I heard this area had a bunch of higher strength enemies that were able to wear armor sometimes, as opposed to the pseudo armor that was on everything in the Hybrid Cave, as it was officially called.

When I reached it, I was met with a new type of enemy straight away, a bunch of thieves that seemed to be trying to ambush players by leading them into a bigger group of them. That strategy had the side effect of being completely useless when the person they were up against had no intention of running away, so I spent a good half-hour exclusively diving in to the smaller packs of thieves, and relieving them of the items they had stolen from players who entered this area, and got tricked by the strategy they employed. It wasn't long after I finished off the last of them that I ran into a group of Players harassing somebody using a grey suit of armor that looked like it was made by combining two sets of armor that were never supposed to meet. The guy being surrounded had a crest like the others though; this one a mask with two faces, one happy, one mad, and this guy had a duality crest.

The group continued to threaten the duality guy, who was standing completely still as they insulted him, like he didn't even notice the group surrounding him existed. One of them decided they would charge, and Duality pretty much grabbed the guy's wrist and punched through the guy's head, instantly killing him. The rest of them ran forwards, and duality got out a massive two-edged sword, and swung it in front of him, completely annihilating everyone who was even close to the attack. The next guy tried to run, only to have his head grabbed by duality.

"You tried to gang up on me, thinking that my curse would somehow work in your favor, but let me tell you something, the second you cowards decided to abandon your pride and attack me in a group, my victory here was already decided."

With that, Duality threw the guy into the ground, and pierced his heart. He turned around, revealing that the guy who just took on an assault group was the guy who had caused a lot of pain before, Alex. I was really hoping that he had lost the half of him that only wanted destruction, seeing as his mind had been shattered, then slowly put back together. It looked like he wasn't going to have it easy though.

"Hey Edward, what's up?" he called over to me.

"Just watched you go berserk and destroy a full group of guys without giving them a break."

"Oh yeah, the trash around here is pretty weak, and the players around here are even weaker"

"Still, don't you think killing someone who was retreating like that was a bit excessive?"

His face darkened suddenly, and his eyes took on a glazed look "it may not have been how you would do it, but why would I do it the way trash that lives by insulting does?"

So it looks like I was in a pretty bad position, if I had somehow one something that caused him to return to his state where he liked to kill everything in sight. Not like I was very surprised though; the last time his mind broke, it was almost a complete overwrite of his personality, and he had barely managed to regain his own mind. Alex readied his sword, and charged at me, sweeping his blade in a large motion, forcing me to run backwards to avoid getting cut in half. Even when I tried for a counterstrike, he kicked my blade, nearly removing it from my grip. Fortunately I still had my fist though, so I managed to punch his armor, doing at least a very small portion of his health as damage. He swung downwards, trying to take my head off for an easy win, but instead it allowed me to roll behind him and get in a slash to the back of his armor, which ended up shooting my blade way off to the side, as if the armor accelerated my movements, forcing my blade far off target, barely nicking him, but leaving me wide open for a counter attack.

He took advantage of the attack to swing at me, but it was slightly off the mark, and instead slammed into my shoulder, launching me into the ground, and reducing my HP to roughly two hundred points. When I looked up, he was already leaving, but he was back to normal

"Sorry Edward, but that's what happens when someone questions me"

A couple minutes later, Kira and Liam showed up, and I had to explain that Alex was in this world, and once again, his existence was going to cause problems for us, and now we didn't even have the ability to call him an enemy, since he simply loses his mind occasionally. Something else bothered me though, what was it in his armor that caused that specific side slash to accelerate to the point where it almost got me killed?

-end of chapter