He flailed about for several precious seconds before he tumbled down out of the tree and hit the ground hard enough to jar his teeth and leave more than a few painful bruises; the crows chasing after him. He let out an involuntary cry as the enormous birds raked his flesh with claw and beak and he felt pain once more as they drew blood with each attack. Drawing his dagger, Harry struck back at the vicious creatures in an effort to protect himself and he started crying again as the pain continued to grow with each jab of claw and beak.
The last of the birds died several minutes later, leaving Harry surrounded by a dozens of open windows listing the number of Items, Col, and Experience Points he'd gained and copious amounts of his blood. Panting heavily, Harry stared at his bleeding arms before he glanced up at his HP Bar to find it unchanged; he'd taken no further losses to his Hit Points despite the 'injuries' that had been caused to him by the crows. The panic that he'd been struggling with since the moment he'd been caught up in the system glitch blossomed within his chest and for the first time since Harry first discovered the world of Ken no Sekai, he didn't feel the comforting sense of being home that he'd come to associate with the game world.
The world he'd come to consider home had just grown far darker than his former life ever had been.
Harry was still shaking beneath the weight of his fears when he received yet another message from Agil. This time he didn't hesitate to open the message; he desperately needed to pretend that all was right in the world, even if everything had gone all wrong. He was, after all, just a frightened little boy trapped in a deadly game with no escape. Sure, he'd managed to pretend otherwise for the first six weeks of the game thanks to his adult Avatar and the belief that the game was nothing more than one big adventure but all of that had been stripped from him in an instant.
Please stop ignoring me, James; it's Christmas Eve, we should be sitting in the pub, drinking ale, and laughing at all of the other guys making spectacles of themselves in their quest to impress the ladies. Not sitting out here freezing our asses off out in the middle of the forest dodging the local Monsters!
Harry wiped his hands on his pants to clean off the blood that covered them before he hit the reply button; his hands shaking like leaves as he truly opened up to someone for the first time in his life and poured his heart out to the one man that had been a friend to him since the day they'd met close to five weeks earlier.
I'm scared, Agil. I don't know what happened to me and I don't know how to fix it.
It hurts and I just want it to stop. This was supposed to be a game but everything
here is a lie. I was a lie and now I don't know what I am.
I know I shouldn't have lied about everything but I was just so scared you'd hate me
if you knew the truth. I just didn't want to be alone again and it was nice to pretend
that I really did have a friend.
I should have known better. I never should have been here. I never should have
pretended to be someone that I wasn't. My uncle is right, I ruin everything I touch
and I'm nothing more than a stupid, worthless freak. I only wanted to know what
it was like to be somebody other than me.
I don't know what to do and I don't want to be here anymore but I can't go back.
Harry clicked the send button without bothering to read what he'd written. He then crawled over to the tree he'd been sitting in earlier and curled up in a ball against the trunk as he tried not to see Monsters (both real and imagined) in every shadow that surrounded him; doing his best to ignore the freezing cold as the snow beneath him melted and soaked his pants. He couldn't ever remember a time when he'd ever felt so miserable; not even when he'd been locked inside of his cupboard with no food for a week because Dudley had gotten him in trouble for something he [Harry] hadn't done.
He was just in the middle of convincing himself that Agil would never want to speak to him again now that he knew that Harry had been lying to him, when he got a reply. He slowly reached out to accept the message, all the while believing it would be his only friend telling him to get lost, and nearly deleted the message by mistake due to his hands trembling both from the cold and from his out of control emotions. When he did get the message open, he had trouble reading it at first because of the tears clouding his eyes.
I'm coming, James, I already told you that I'd help you. In the mean time, you need
to tell me where you are right now! No more evasions and no more refusals. We can
sort out the rest later.
A lump formed in Harry's throat and his eyes began burning from the emotions he felt welling up inside of him. He'd thought for certain that Agil would be angry and tell him to get lost now that he knew Harry had been lying to him. So after taking a moment to calm down, he provided the requested information.
I'm stuck beneath a large nest of Carrion Crows beside a lone tree in the field to the
north of Furgrin Forest because I can't go anywhere and it's the only cover there is
out here. Please be careful, Agil, the crows have already attacked me once and they
are already regenerating.
Agil's response came back just seconds later;
Stay right where you are! We'll be there as soon as we can. If you still have your
trapping supplies and if you haven't already done so; use them to protect yourself
from the crows!
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