Nico, along with the others, climbed into Captain Fill's boat while muffled cries of anguish and pain rose from the palace and the city below. The boat pulled away from the beach with a slight scraping of the bottom on the wet sand, and Celeste's quiet crying mingled with the sound of the waves. Nico's wounded side throbbed in sync with the rocking of the water: a warm, dull pain that shot up his side every time the boat hit a bigger wave.

  Their clothes were still wet, and Nico felt the light sea breeze sticking them to his skin, a subtle chill that penetrated right down to his bones.

  Fill had said that his boat was not far away, along the coast. The smell of salt mixed with the more human and familiar smells of his friends: sweat, leather, tired breath. In the dark, lit only by the moon, he saw them as huddled shadows, their faces barely visible in the milky light. He could hear their steady, almost synchronized breathing, and that rhythm gave him a dangerous calm: his eyelids drooped, sleep tried to pull him away despite his anxiety, despite the pain.

  When the massive silhouette of the merchant barge appeared before them, a dark belly waiting heavily on the surface of the sea, Nico had to bite the inside of his cheek to stay awake. He heard the ropes being thrown down, the low voices of the sailors, the thud of their small boat hitting the side of the larger ship. He climbed with difficulty, one step at a time, up the rope ladder, his side burning.

  Several figures welcomed them on the deck; someone murmured, “It's late, but we can offer you something to eat.”

  Nico shook his head, a gesture that was more weary than decisive. Someone else, to his right, whispered, “Thank you... but we just need to rest.”

  Captain Fill's sandpaper voice chimed in: “As agreed, we've reserved two rooms downstairs. Nothing fancy, princess,” he added, with a hint of embarrassment in his voice.

  “Fill,” Gareth said hoarsely, “they must be sheltered rooms. As agreed.” The implication was clear.

  Nico saw the dwarf's shadow nod. “The special goods storage rooms,” Fill explained, in a suggestive tone. "Two half-empty wooden compartments inside the warehouse. We've put a straw mattress in one for you and a bunk for the princess in the other. The smell isn't pleasant down there, but... if they were to inspect us while we're crossing the river delta... well, let's just say that if they find you, it's not a big deal compared to what I keep back there.“ He laughed. ”I'd have to shut up shop."

  Gareth grunted, unsurprised. “My men will sleep under the canopy at the bow. My cabin is also available, but it's too exposed.”

  “Good.” Gareth turned to the others. “We need someone to take the straw mattress and move it to the other room for Serafina, who will sleep with Nadia. The three of us will settle down on the other side.”

  Nico didn't answer; Kiah tried to mumble something about wanting to stay with Nico and Leo, but Gareth's tone brooked no argument.

  Nico, along with the others, followed a figure carrying an oil lamp down into the belly of the barge. They descended a small flight of steps and found themselves in a space that smelled of dampness, spices, and flour. The big man muttered something about a ladle of water before going to sleep. Nico, veiled in tiredness and pain, followed the procession of figures walking ahead of him.

  In the flickering light of the lanterns, he saw the man open a barrel and put something long inside it; the liquid inside the barrel sloshed when the ladle touched it. He only approached when the princess, Kiah, and the others had drunk. The taste of fresh water filled his parched mouth: he hadn't realized he was so thirsty, and when he finished, he murmured a thank you.

  They were led into the belly of the warehouse. The big man moved some crates and barrels, then opened a hidden door behind them. “Wait a second while I get the girl settled in,” the sailor muttered in a grunt. While the sailor was arranging the straw mattress in the cubicle intended for the princess and Kiah, another crew member arrived with something bulky in his hands. Gareth took it from him and passed it on, after a quick glance at Nico, Leo, Kiah, and finally Nadia.

  Nico felt the object, examining it in the flickering light of the lantern that the sailor had hung from a hook on the ceiling of the barge, and saw that it was clothing.

  “Change before you go to sleep,” Gareth said hoarsely. “It's not much, but it should do.”

  When the sailor had finished, he said something about the comfort of the beds to the two girls, and Gareth handed him a coin. The man grabbed it as quickly as a bird of prey, disappearing out of the storeroom after leaving Gareth with one lit torch and another unlit one.

  Gareth murmured a few instructions. Nico saw Celeste, or rather Princess Nadia, and Kiah close the door behind them. Then it was Leo and Nico's turn to enter their room.

  “I'm not coming in,” Gareth said, his voice low. “Close the door. I'll stay out here.” He sat down with his back against the door of Nadia and Kiah's cubicle.

  Nico murmured a “good night,” more out of courtesy than anything else, and entered the cubicle that Captain Fill had reserved for Gareth before they joined the escape. It had been an escape that Gareth had planned; he had expected the attack, and Nico, Leo, and Kiah had stumbled upon it by chance. Fortunately, he hadn't abandoned them to their fate, but had brought them into the escape plan he had devised for himself and the princess.

  The compartment was cramped, and in the flickering light of the lamp Gareth had given him, a thick, sweetish, iron-like smell clung to his throat. Nico saw rows of barrels lined up against the walls. They rested on wooden wedges, held in place by thick ropes that secured them against the ship's uprights. It was little or nothing, but at that moment it seemed almost a luxury. Exhaustion immediately enveloped him, heavy as a wet blanket.

  He felt his head getting heavier: that smell, warm and impregnated in the planks, filled his nose. He turned off the lamp and placed it on the ground, wedging it between two barrels so that it wouldn't tip over with the movement of the barge.

  He sat down in a corner, away from the barrels, next to the door. Leo did the same on the other side.

  He took off his sword and then his bow, placing them beside him. Then he removed his tunic, the uniform worn by all those who trained in the Royal Palace. He thought back to those bodies that now moved like puppets under the influence of the Nothing.

  He also took off his baggy pants and grabbed what Gareth had prepared. These clothes were certainly not meant for them: perhaps they belonged to Gareth himself, or perhaps they were something the sailors had made available.

  He picked up the first garment and, in the dark, felt it, noticing that the fabric was softer than the rough tunic he had worn during his few days at the palace. He put on the clothes without paying much attention: he was tired, worn out, and Dan's face, his smile, his strong minstrel's voice, echoed in his mind with a dull pain.

  After getting dressed, Nico finally lay down. He could hear his friend's breathing, over the sound of a barrel groaning slightly, emitting a dull wooden sound as it settled with the movement of the barge.

  “Are you okay?” Leo whispered.

  Nico grunted, a sign of agreement. It wasn't true: he wasn't fine, but he believed it would pass. His thoughts drifted elsewhere, to the fear that Leo and Kiah, after that bad experience, would decide to leave the game. He had seen their faces, very worn out.

  “Are you okay?” he asked in turn, his voice hoarse.

  Leo grunted a reply, and Nico slipped into oblivion, enveloped by darkness and that blanket of exhaustion and physical pain that now covered him, heavy and almost suffocating.

  He found himself in a desolate wasteland of black rock. The smell of sulfur hung in the air. He walked with difficulty, his clothes reduced to shreds, his bare feet hurting with every step on the sharp stones. He felt eyes sharp as blades following him from somewhere nearby, hidden among the cracks in the landscape.

  The countdown began, slow and steady. Nico moved forward with the stubborn certainty that it would all be over, that he would wake up in his bed and all that fatigue and anguish would cease to weigh on him.

  A rustling sound behind him made him turn around suddenly. Nothing. He bent down, picked up a stone from the ground, and leaned his back against a rock, waiting, while the logout countdown continued to tick away. He would be out of there shortly.

  That was just a dream. It had to be. Maybe the headset was faulty, even though Kiah had talked about a ‘simulated dream’ that was supposed to be more restful than biological sleep. He had said, 'If you don't sleep well, the problem is you, not the headset.

  But then what was his problem?

  The countdown stopped: “00:00:00.”

  Nico's eyes widened, a sudden chill in his chest. He was still there. Why hadn't the game let him out? Maybe that error in the skill and character sheet screens was a sign. Maybe the game had imprisoned them.

  He felt a shadow grow closer, dense, solid, behind him.

  “Where are you?” he shouted. “Leave me alone... I have to get out! The countdown is over!”

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  A rhythmic rumbling shook the ground. The rock trembled beneath his feet.

  Then darkness fell upon him like black, oily slime.

  The flute-like voice murmured:

  ? Exit game.

  Then there was a brief glitch, a metallic, scratchy sound, like the scream of a Nerakth, and the voice continued:

  ? Returning to reality.

  Nico took off his headset. His heart was racing, his breathing labored. He ran a hand through his sweaty hair and, still lying down, felt around on the nightstand for his cell phone. The time was the usual: eight o'clock sharp. Twelve hours of connection, exactly.

  Perhaps it had just been an impression, that feeling of being stuck in the game... or in the dream, he couldn't say.

  The rumbling he had heard in his dream repeated itself, louder, beyond the door. It was his grandmother knocking: “Well?”

  More thuds followed, and Nico imagined the old woman slapping her hand flat to make more noise.

  “Get a move on! What do you think? That just because school's out, you can sleep late?”

  Nico laughed; his grandmother had pulled him out of that nightmare. He whispered something to her and heard her shuffle off to the kitchen. He had to get up: she would be back soon.

  As usual, his body struggled to return to reality; he still had that black shadow that had surrounded him in his eyes, and that nauseating knot in his stomach, as if something were following him there.

  He took a slow breath and put his helmet back on. The usual countdown appeared immediately.

  He tried to check the settings: a black screen flashed before his eyes, full of empty entries. Empty, but no error message. Strange, he thought. Maybe the game was already decompressing the data to fix the problem, even though it seemed absurd to him that the error had appeared just as the Nothing was attacking the palace.

  He took off his helmet again and sighed irritably, waiting for his mind and body to settle before sitting down on the bed. He stood up, feeling a flu-like numbness in his bones, and a sharp pain burned his side. He lifted his shirt: a purple bruise stained his skin. He shuddered at the memory: the clash with the Nerakth, the glancing blow, and then Kiah's sphere of light that had struck down the monster.

  It occurred to him that he should tell Leo and Kiah what had happened to him. But the thought quickly faded. Even if he knew their numbers or addresses, he would never contact them. They would notice the cane. The leg. He wouldn't allow that.

  He grabbed his cane: the pain in his leg added to the rest, a tangle of real and imagined pains that now seemed to blend together.

  He needed answers. Kiah, at least as far as he could remember, always read articles about new technologies.

  He had to figure something out by evening, before reconnecting to the game.

  He walked with difficulty, looking around. CyberGlass and HoloCom ruled the roost, leaving him alone in that cacophony of city traffic and super-connections between people everywhere. He dragged his leg with difficulty; that disability had become even more hateful now that he was living a whole new life in the game. Here, in the real world, he was crushed by an existence studded only with difficulties that kept him grounded, chaining him to those rules. He would have transferred his consciousness into the game without hesitation, if it had been possible. There, he would have lived his life to the fullest.

  After a bus ride and several subway stops, Nico finally arrived at OpenDesk.

  It was a bar in the city center that presented itself as an outpost of the future: walls covered with screens, latest-generation headsets, OculGlass, GameSuit, everything necessary for those who wanted to immerse themselves in another reality.

  Not him. Too expensive. His budget was barely enough for the mandatory consumption. But, for a few extra euros, the owner offered poor people like him access to the back room, where he kept what he proudly called “computers available to the paying public.” In reality, they were glorious pieces of junk, museum pieces that made more noise than anything else.

  He slipped into a corner, away from the gaze of customers in jackets and visors. He turned on his PC.

  A crackling sound greeted him: the old jingle of a 1998 modem, like a digital ghost that refused to give up.

  Nico sighed.

  When the PC was ready to use, he opened the browser. He frowned, thinking about what to type in the search bar, then typed: “getting hurt with a headset?”

  The internet was overflowing with videos of people wearing headsets who fell, tripped, or jumped, causing harm to themselves, others, or their surroundings. He laughed heartily, but he was certain that he had not moved from his bed while connected to the game. That technology was clearly years ahead of what he was seeing. He shook his head and tried again to write: “painful stimulus to the brain that results in physical injury.”

  He shook his head: he needed to be more specific, so he added the word “headset.”

  The first article that appeared in the search results was about GameSuit: the gaming suits also used at OpenDask. The headline flashed like a warning: “GameSuit under scrutiny: physical trauma or mass hysteria?”

  Nico clicked on it.

  The author accused GameSuit, the most popular haptic suit on the market, of being responsible for most of the bruises and contusions reported by users of immersive reality.

  “The GameSuit's muscle compression and tactile response systems could be calibrated aggressively,” he argued.

  There was talk of faulty microactuators, overly responsive sensors, and haptic feedback that could even leave marks on players' skin. There were short interviews with people who swore they had hurt themselves without moving from their living rooms. The comments section was in chaos: some blamed the manufacturer, others called for a class action lawsuit, and others called the suit a weapon out of control.

  Nico stared at the screen for a few seconds, then shook his head.

  He didn't have a GameSuit. Just a headset. His headset. No suit to constrict his muscles, no actuators to strike him or compress his chest.

  Everything he had felt in the game, Corvin's blows, the wound in his side, the abrasions from the polishing of the swords, had been born inside him, exclusively in his head.

  A pure simulation, sent to his brain by the headset.

  So, if that pain could hurt him... perhaps it was because his brain allowed it.

  The idea sank into his stomach, cold and heavy.

  He had to understand how it was possible.

  Scrolling through more pages, he finally found what he was looking for: an article on neuroscience, written by a certain Alessandro Bianchi.

  The title jumped out at me: “Stimulation of the somatosensory cortex in virtual reality: neural and physiological correlates of induced trauma.”

  The tone was hypothetical, but the author seemed certain of his conclusions:

  “The headset sends stimuli to the areas of the brain responsible for pain and muscle response. If the virtual trauma is sufficiently intense or realistic, the body may react with spasms, micro-injuries, or localized congestion. In extreme cases, bruising, muscle tension, or neurovascular shock may occur. The body responds to an illusion as if it were real.”

  Nico slumped back in his chair, his hands in his hair. He had felt the realism of the game, all too keenly, but reading those lines sent a chill down his spine.

  If virtual damage automatically became real damage... then, in theory, you could even die.

  He scrolled down the page, hoping for a denial, a more rational voice saying it was impossible.

  Instead, more articles appeared.

  The first discussed “cortical hyperstimulation in new-generation immersive systems”: hypotheses on neural feedback, risks of sensory overload, and effects that are still poorly documented.

  The second was more sensationalist: “Extreme VR: when the brain can no longer distinguish between the game and real life.” The article was full of testimonials from people who said they woke up with bruises, muscle spasms, and sudden pain.

  Then there was a more technical piece, almost unreadable, but the concept remained the same: if a stimulus seems real, the brain treats it as real.

  Nico felt a weight rising in his stomach. The more he read, the more a fog thickened around his thoughts. No one claimed with certainty that virtual trauma could become real, but no one denied it with the certainty he sought.

  He ran a hand over his face.

  The old monitor flickered, and sitting in that uncomfortable chair, he realized he no longer had any certainties.

  The game was incredible, yes. More alive than his own life.

  But perhaps it wasn't just a well-constructed illusion.

  Perhaps it was something more.

  Something he could actually touch.

  He shifted in his chair, and his side gave him a sharp pain. He opened another window and typed in a series of keywords. Finally, he found Kiah's Instagram.

  Username: @techwitch.

  There were tons of photos of books, with absurd hashtags like #superepico or #techwitchapproved. For a technology lover, she had an impressive collection of paper books.

  Scrolling through, he found a photo of Kiah with a couple: her father, a distinguished man with sandy hair, looked like a businessman at first glance; her mother, beautiful, with ebony skin and perfectly styled straight hair, probably the result of hours of care, Nico thought, imagining the work required to have hair so similar to her daughter's.

  Kiah was slightly different from the game: her hair was frizzier, her nose was more upturned, perhaps prettier than the small upturned nose she had in the game. She had also changed something about her appearance: for Kiah, her nose was a correct detail, as if she had eliminated one of her own imperfections. In the game, he had eliminated his disability.

  There was a video. He clicked on it. Kiah's ringing, euphoric voice blared from the speakers, drowning out the chatter in the OpenDask.

  He quickly turned down the volume as Kiah shouted, “Hi, everyone! Guess where I am. You'll never believe it!” Smiling, she showed off her braces, and behind her was a backdrop of metal structures and white pavilions.

  “I'm at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. It's amazing! Did you know it's the biggest tech event in the world? There are 4,000 exhibitors! They'll be talking about AI, sustainability, autonomous vehicles, immersive experiences. Wooohoo!” she jumped up and down with her cell phone camera.

  “Well, I have to go now. I'll keep you posted on any news.”

  The video ended. Nico laughed. He scrolled up and down, but there were no updates. Now he knew more about Kiah than she knew about him.

  It was time to look for Leo. He typed in a series of keywords: Leo, Leonardo, Long, John, Silver, pirate, digital pirate... trying variations in English too.

  He found him. Username: Leonerd_CyberPirate. There was a tag on a Facebook photo of a smiling, motherly-looking woman, obviously his mother: reddish-blonde hair, a face dotted with freckles, a little round.

  It was a family photo: the father, balding and looking lost, was hugging the woman; four other children of varying ages, between ten and sixteen, were huddled around the couple. Leo looked exactly the same as he always did, unchanged. Nico imagined him in the game, skipping ahead through all the choices to get to the game.

  Everyone was wearing Christmas hats; a cake was on the table. Behind them, banners reading “Merry Christmas” and “Happy Birthday Mom” completed the warm and bizarre atmosphere of the scene.

  A small blade slid into his stomach, reminding him of the meager Christmases and birthdays he had experienced. He sighed, shook his head, trying to chase away the thoughts.

  He clicked on Leo's username. The page was almost empty, with few updates, mostly tags from his mother for parties, anniversaries, or holidays. Finally, he found a link. It opened a YouTube page: Leo had an account where he played all kinds of video games.

  He saw him yelling at monsters, calmly explaining how to tackle dungeons or how to rob an NPC. It was entertaining.

  He glanced at his watch. He had five minutes left on his computer time. He searched his pockets, but found nothing. He sighed at the thought of returning to the monotony of home. He was about to close everything and delete his history when his gaze fell on the article. He had to send it, but he didn't want to be seen. He didn't want Kiah or Leo to say, “Let's meet up! Let's have a drink” or “Let's go for a walk and talk about it.”

  He shook his head and closed everything. He would tell her, but on his own terms.

  He returned home. Everything was strangely quiet. He entered the kitchen: empty. On the table he found a note, written in his aunt Flora's pointed handwriting:

  My mom is upstairs with me. My minestrone from yesterday is in the fridge.

  Nico wrinkled his nose and threw the note on the table. He didn't want her leftovers. He walked down the hall to his room. Next door, the sound of the television came from his grandmother's room. He shook his head, irritated. That woman always complained about the bills, but she was the first to leave everything on.

  He entered his room. He wrinkled his nose when the pungent smell of mothballs reached his brain. The television was blaring:

  “...Following the leak of confidential documents, some NATO member countries have initiated extraordinary consultations.”

  He looked around, searching for the remote control. The commentator was shouting about ambassadors, countries exploiting the crisis to strengthen their internal position, internal investigations, and containment measures; he announced a stalemate in international negotiations and diplomatic escalations.

  He turned off the TV and closed the door behind him. With his stomach rumbling, he threw himself onto the bed, hoping evening would come soon so he could reconnect.

  [AUTHOR'S NOTE]

  To increase system stability and the dissemination of narrative data, we recommend activating the follow function to ensure continuity in receiving future logs.

  Log updated: Symptoms of interference between virtual trauma and real somatic response detected. Sensory overload phenomena.

  Log closed: The system observes, silently.