94 NPC

Irade

May 11, 12:51 pm BT – 10:51 am UT, Somewhere In The Tian Shan Mountain Range, China

That settled it. The universe hated her.

There was no other possible explanation as to why she would meet a boy out on the mountain range right after bawling her eyes out.

On the other hand, this boy was cute. Irade was immediately drawn into his deep, black eyes that brimmed with concern. He had long lashes and thick, shapely eyebrows that went well his his defined jawline.

"Hah? Siz kim bolosiz? Teinapqaldingmu?"

Uyghur. He was speaking Uyghur to her, but she barely noticed. His voice was surprisingly light, but definitely deep.

Embarrassed, Irade looked away. Then she snuck a look back, noting that the boy was wearing modern jeans and sneakers, but with a blue woolen vest. He was also holding a bow with an arrow nocked, and had a quiver slung across his back.

Irade was surprised; for some reason, the fact that he was wearing jeans was...weird. It didn't mesh with her image of Uyghur people, or mountain people.

For a moment, Irade lingered on the boy's arms; they were toned and defined, definitely used to pulling back an arrow. She had done some archery before in school, and she remembered how difficult it had been to pull the bow back.

"Nerdin keldingiz?" he said, walking a little closer.

His voice shocked Irade out of her little fantasy. She blushed as she furiously scrambled to her feet. The boy stopped approaching her, keeping a safe distance away.

She managed to get onto her feet, then looked down at him. He looked up, and their eyes met. His gaze was warm; worried and concerned as they looked down to her arm. Or lack thereof.

Face hot, Irade did the only thing that made sense.

She ran.

She ran as fast as she could, zipping past the trees as her face burned with embarrassment. She heard the boy yell something out, but she quickly lost him.

Irade ran, trying to forget her embarrassing display. The more she thought about the boy and what he must have heard, the more she wanted to bury her face in the dirt and scream for three hundred years.

Really? Really??

Yeah, okay, she had been longing for normal life experiences, but this was not the place! Nor the time! For her to embarrass herself in front of a boy!

And he was cute too!

Aaaaaaaaah!

Frustrated, Irade ran faster. In the end, she decided to look for the river Black Wind had told her about. At least there she could at least try to drown herself.

She ran for a few minutes, before realizing that although she had a rough direction to go in, she didn't actually know where this river was. Sighing she activated [Flight] to see if she could find it from above.

She reached the top of a tree, and sat on a branch. She looked around for a bit, carefully, so as to not lose her balance and fall.

Nothing. She couldn't see much from up here. Maybe from the next tree over...

Irade eyed the jump. Suddenly curious, she decided to see if she could make the jump. If not, she could just activate [Flight], after all.

She coiled her legs, judged the distance, then kicked off the branch.

Immediately, the branch she had been on snapped. Irade flew straight to the tree she had been planning to get to, just a little too fast.

But she hadn't been the number one Finul Fantasy player for nothing.

She managed to twist her body mid-air and land feet first on the trunk, perpendicular to the ground, knees absorbing the impact. She looked around for another branch, found one immediately, calculated the amount of force she needed to get there, and kicked off once more.

This time, she managed to hit the branch she wanted to much more softly, although she still hit it with her stomach and needed to grab on. She slowly pulled herself up, thinking about how to get it right.

At the same time, she couldn't help but grin as adrenaline pumped through her veins. She had almost splattered face-first into a tree, and yet had managed to react quick enough to get out of that situation. It was the same kind of high she got from outplaying her enemies in Finul Fantasy.

She turned to the next tree, and narrowed her eyes. As she did, she seemed to be able to judge the right distance and power she needed to get there. Furthermore, based on how she jumped the past few times, she realized that she needed to account for a slight arc in her jump, so that she would be able to land on her feet.

Of course that meant balance, which Irade was having trouble with lately. But if she factored that into her calculations...

She jumped once more, to the next tree, and surprisingly, landed on the branch without any trouble. She even managed not to fall, which was weird. She looked down at where her left arm would have been, frowning.

This past week, she had been having trouble with just walking. Her balance was all off.

But she had been able to land on this branch with ease? She hadn't even used [Flight] to compensate or anything?

She tried again, jumping from tree to tree, managing to land on her feet every time. It wasn't even difficult; she just needed to focus a little and she was able to calculate how much strength, how high she needed to jump, and what angle she would need to leap from in order to get to where she wanted.

Was this because of her [Agility]? But then why didn't that help with her walking?

Then again, now that she thought about it, she was actually doing pretty well for a recent amputee. Didn't they have to go through actual physical therapy in order to to start moving properly again?

Sure, Irade was a lot worse than the average person in terms of her balance and walking and stuff right now, but for someone who just had their arm torn off? She was...probably doing pretty well? She was a teenager, she hadn't studied physical therapy, she'd just heard about it from TV and the internet.

Soon however, Irade forgot about all her questions. As she jumped from tree to tree, she began focusing more on the calculations, and all the other little details she needed to focus on in order to make the next jump. She soon started jumping from tree to tree as fast as she could, not in order to find anything or anyone, but just because she felt like it.

It was nice to feel like she was getting good at something again. She hadn't felt like this in what felt like a long time. Her magic lessons, while she had made a breakthrough yesterday, had lead to a disaster that forced them to leave the cave. She had lost her arm in the last fight against the bear-man. And before that...well...

Everything before that felt like an entire lifetime ago.

She stopped in a tree, panting as she realized that it had only been about...two months...since she first used the HUD. Had it really only been two months?

She looked up at the sky above. She had somehow managed to leap above the canopy of leaves and was able to see the sun, rising slowly above the mountains in the distance.

For a moment, she simply stood there, watching the mountain range stretch out in front of her, their snow-capped tips glistening faintly under the sun's rays. A breeze blew by, bringing along the sweet scent of mountain air as the leaves rustled below Irade.

This was all part of her home, she suddenly realized. She was in Xinjiang, the province where her parents had come from. Sure, she wasn't in the city, but this was still the closest she had been in over a decade.

She knew from class that this mountain was called Tian Shan – Heavenly Mountain – in Chinese. Did the Uyghurs have another name for it? What was it? Did they have stories about it? Legends?

Once again, Irade realized how little she knew about being Uyghur. She bit her lip, suddenly overcome with an overwhelming sense of longing, yearning.

She wanted to know. She realized for the first time that she wanted to know what this mountain was called in Uyghur.

She wanted to know who she was.

And at that moment, she heard a scream.

Startled, Irade almost fell, before activating [Flight] in order to regain her balance.

Then she heard the scream again. Irade frowned. The scream was distant, but it was very distinct. It sounded like a man's scream, but it was still definitely a scream.

Irade immediately thought of the boy she had met earlier. Involuntarily, her face became hot, but she forced down her embarrassment as she wondered if he had gotten into some sort of trouble.

If he did then...well...it wouldn't hurt to go see if she could help, would it?

She closed her eyes and activated the [Monster Map] to make sure there were no monsters in the woods that were the problem. There didn't seem to be, and with all the trees in the way, Irade wasn't able to really see the boy, or whoever had been screaming. With a sigh, she leaped down, making her way to where she remembered the scream coming from.

After a while of jumping from tree to tree, she heard the scream again, closer. Definitely a male voice, and definitely in the direction she was heading. Irade sped up, worried. Would she make it in time.

She heard the scream again. Definitely close now. She was almost there.

Suddenly, the trees ended in a small clearing, showing a river flowing downhill. A large bear was running up the river, towards the boy that Irade had met earlier, who was running for his life. Irade's heart skipped a beat as she realized that the bear was moving fast, faster than the boy. Her mental calculations showed that it would reach the boy in about ten seconds.

The boy seemed to realize this, as he nocked an arrow and turned around to face the bear. He yelled something, arms bulging as he pulled back the string, and let the arrow fly loose.

It managed to hit the bear in the head, but that only seemed to make it madder. It roared as it closed in on the boy, raising a paw to swipe at him.

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!"

The boy, not to be outdone, yelled as he nocked another arrow. This time, he would get it in the eye, straight through the skull. He let it loose, point-blank.

And missed completely.

Because the bear didn't have a head anymore.

The boy blinked, confused. Quickly, he moved back as the bear's body fell forward, revealing the one-armed girl he had met earlier.

Holding the bloody head of the bear, still attached to its spine in her one hand.

Irade blinked as she realized she was panting. She dropped the head, realizing that she had somehow managed to rip it off. She had jumped onto the bear's shoulders, then grabbed the bear by the head and pulled back. The plan was to stop it from moving to allow the boy time to escape, but it seemed like she had somehow ripped the head and spine out of its body, forcing her to do a backflip and land behind the headless body of the bear.

For a moment, the boy simply looked at his savior. Her arm was covered in blood and guts, and her clothes were torn and shredded. Her body was bruised, and her face dirty.

But her eyes.

Her eyes were sharp, piercingly clear. The boy felt like those eyes were looking into his soul.

Slowly he put his hand to his chest.

"Salam," he said, bowing slightly.

They simply stood there, in front of the river, staring at each other.

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