"It's a house," Tsuna said in disbelief.

Ren swung the white picket gate open, before looking back to the group. "You guys coming?"

Mori lingered in the garden, breathing in the fragrance of blooming lilies. Ivy crept up the stone walls of the picturesque cottage at the heart of the valley, the center of Valor. Unlike the rest of the virtual world, with larger than life landscapes and creatures, this place...it felt like home.

The sun somehow broke through here, a circle of light even with night all around. Butterflies flitted through the air. Bees nuzzled the flowers, gathering little clumps of pollen on their legs.

She looked at Ronin to find him solemnly plucking a flower and crushing it to pixels in his hand. He caught her glance and shook his head. "It looks beautiful, doesn't it? But it's not real. They're not real."

"Who's they...?" Mori began to ask.

"Demi?" Yuta whispered from behind her.

A woman skipped out of the cottage door, her black hair pinned up beneath a straw hat and a white sundress flowing from her shoulders to her knees. "Yuta!" she exclaimed, face lighting up. She ran and threw herself at him. "I knew you'd come to see me. Ren, Tsuna, you're here too!" Demi waved, a basket swinging on her arm. "We can all go pick wild strawberries together!"

"What is this?" Mori murmured, backing away from Demi until she bumped into Ronin behind her. "Demi died in a dungeon. That can't be her."

"Some of it's her," Ronin answered. "Some of it's FEAR. The memories are there, most of the personality is too, but the motives will all be FEAR's. When we die here" —his throat bobbed— "FEAR must download our consciousness somehow, and in the process, it dissects it from the body and kills the real person."

Mori shook her head, watching her friends interact with Demi. They laughed at something she said, a relief present in their eyes. In another corner of the garden, Wei sat on a bench swing with two other of FEAR's clones. All three of the people who'd died looked as Mori guessed they would appear in the real world, instead of their avatar personas.

Without a second thought, Mori grabbed Ronin's hand and pulled him after her, past the fence and out of the garden. They plunged back into the darkness and immediately the laughter stopped like it had been swallowed up.

"Ronin, tell me. Am I going to see Shiori in that house?"

"Yes."

Mori found herself shaking, with what emotion she didn't know, but she couldn't stop. "Isn't there another way? What if a player hasn't lost anyone in the game?"

Ronin paused, his dark eyes glinting in the night as her vision adjusted to make out the lines of his face. "I don't think they can find the house. Even if they could, the only way to reach the clearing point is to ask your person to lead you to it. They'll do it, but reluctantly. Because to them, you're leaving them behind."

"I can't do this." Mori bit down on her fist, teeth leaving marks on her hand. Tears threatened to spill over. "I was ready to fight a dragon, some kind of huge boss...not this."

"Me too. Mori, I—I couldn't clear the game by myself, not if it meant leaving my sister behind, but I think I can this time. I need help though." Ronin's jaw clenched and he forced the words out between his teeth. "I'm not strong enough to do this alone."

Mori slipped her hand into his. "We'll face this together then."

Ronin squeezed it in answer.

When they entered the garden again, Cynthia had joined the group. She zeroed in on Ronin and Mori, moving to block their path to the door. "Guess I beat you two here, huh?" she said with a smirk.

"You're not out of the game though, are you? Not in the top ten anymore either," Ronin said quietly.

At first, Mori thought Cynthia would deck Ronin. The woman's fist clenched at her side, and Mori prepared to step between them. But then Cynthia shrugged. "I'll let Tofu handle you," she said over her shoulder as she walked away, her grey skirt swirling around her ankles.

They entered the house, the smell of cookies wafting over them. A grandfather clock ticked in the hall and faint music played from another room. Aged. Lived in. That's how the house felt, with antique furniture and pictures on the walls and every available surface. From the outside the size had been deceiving, with the inside being much more spacious than seemed possible.

"Where do we look?" Mori asked. Peering at the photos on the wall, she gasped in shock.

One of the frames held a picture of her family, from a day at the beach after she'd graduated high school. Her parents sat on a towel in the shade of an umbrella, while she and Shiori had their legs buried in the sand.

Her staring attracted Ronin's attention. "That's you?" he asked, pointing to her in the photo.

"That's me." Heartbeat speeding up, Mori tucked her hair behind her ear.

"Have you always worn that coin necklace?"

She clutched the coin in her free hand. "As long as I can remember. My grandma gave it to me. For good luck." Mori tugged him away from the wall, not wanting him to look any longer for worry that he'd remark on her braces, or her cringe haircut, or any of a dozen other awkward things. "Is there a picture of you somewhere?"

"Probably." Ronin glanced around hesitantly. "We don't have time to look for it though. This way." He led her down the hall until they reached the kitchen.

A woman wearing an apron leaned over the oven, trying to pull out a tray of cookies. "Ouch! That's hot," she said to herself before grabbing a mitt.

Mori felt Ronin stiffen at her side.

The woman pried a cookie off the sheet with a spatula and juggled it in her hands. "Riku-kun, come try this and tell me if it tastes like mom's," she called. When Ronin didn't move, Tokiwa approached them and tried to shove the cookie in his mouth. "C'mon, they're your favorite."

Ronin grabbed Tokiwa's wrist. "Stop. Please, stop." He gripped Mori's hand so tight she thought her bones might snap.

Tokiwa wilted like a flower, nibbling on the cookie herself. "Listen, we went over this before. You might not think I'm real anymore, but I am. Don't you remember our rice candy stash? Or falling out of the tree house and growing a lump the size of an egg on your head? Because I do."

"I remember," Ronin whispered. "But if you were real you'd want me to go home. You wouldn't try and keep me here.

Pain stabbed Mori's chest at the tears streaking lines down Ronin's face. At the utter weariness in his eyes. She reached up and brushed some of them away with her thumb. Then she realized something else, a subtle change that contributed to the real, but unreal feeling—

She didn't have any stats here.

Tucking her hand behind her back, she tried to summon her pistol. Nothing.

"This is home," Tokiwa argued, flour smudging her cheeks and dusting her black hair. For some reason, she looked familiar to Mori, with high cheekbones and a sharp jawline. "You really want to leave me behind again? You already did. Even though I would have done anything for you, you wouldn't do the same for me."

"Stop," Ronin said, closing his eyes.

"I died alone because you told me you wished I'd never come," Tokiwa whimpered, eyes watering. "You could stay here with me, but you don't want to. I made cookies for you, yet you won't even eat one."

Mori almost laughed at Tokiwa's last plea. "You're a pretty good actor, aren't you, FEAR?" She stepped up to Ronin's sister to gaze into her eyes, almost expecting to see a malicious presence lurking behind them. FEAR might be smart, but it wasn't human, and it hadn't quite mastered sounding or acting like one.

"Oh, I admit she's overdoing it, but it's easier to run a programmed spiel than to micromanage everything."

Mori recognized the voice, but the words didn't match up there either. "Potato?" She pushed past Tokiwa to find Perera perched on one of the marble counters. Unlike the other dead players, her former teammate wore the same outfit she had when alive.

"Hey, Mentos," she replied, rose-gold hair spilling like tinted sunlight over her shoulders.

"This is new..." Ronin muttered. He stepped in front of Mori, her hand held behind him, as if to protect her from any foul play. "I'm tracking your dot and remember welcoming you to Valor so you must be a Fearless, yet here you are playing games instead of clearing this one. Why?"

"Potato can't be Fearless," Mori whispered. "She was telling me..."

Perera giggled, sending chills sweeping through Mori's body. "Mori dear, don't you know about this itty bitty thing called lying?"

The malicious presence, the AI mastermind—it had been posing as a friend all along.

Something snapped inside Mori, violent and hard, like a knot of wood left on a flame. She lunged at Perera but some mental block stopped her from laying even a finger on their enemy.

"No violence," Perera said with a smile. "We solve our differences in a civilized manner here."

"With betrayal and lies?" Mori spat, while Ronin held her back. "I trusted you!"

Perera hopped down from the counter to take one of Tokiwa's cookies. Ronin's sister appeared deaf to their conversation, humming to herself as she washed dishes in the sink. "And I liked you too, Mori, enough that I tried to get you to leave without killing you. But you're rather stubborn beneath the surface, aren't you? All bite, and no bark."

"What happened to the Fearless I met?" Ronin demanded.

"I killed her," Perera said simply. "She didn't enter Valor. I did. Call it an experiment, if you will. A way to see if I could scare a brave soul into fearing death and as an opportunity to be one of you. I think it was successful." In Perera's brown eyes, Mori found FEAR in all its intelligence, all its cruelty. How could she have ever felt sympathy for it?

"You didn't scare her," Mori growled. "She didn't scream when she died."

"That wasn't the goal," FEAR answered through Perera's mouth. "It was to see."

"Enough of this," Ronin snapped. He dragged Mori to Tokiwa. "Take us to the center now."

This isn't going to work. Mori pinched her coin between her fingers, nails scraping the metal. FEAR knows too much, has adapted too far ahead of us. It could stop us with a thought, a whim.

Tokiwa dried her hands on a towel, her humming changing tune. With a soft voice she began to sing.

Nen-nen yo okororiyo
Suya-suya to oyasuminasai
Nen-nen yo okororiyo
Yasashi hito ni sodachimasu you ni*

Ronin stumbled back, sinking to the ground. Speech slurred as if he'd downed too many shots of NyQuil, he blinked at a rapid pace in an effort to stay awake. "Mori...take the—" His eyes rolled back, hand going limp in hers.

"Ronin!" Mori repeatedly slapped his cheek with her hand, trying to wake him up again. "No, no, no. Not now. Not like this." She put her hand over his chest in a panic, as if feeling for a pulse would help. Tokiwa's lullaby continued, a once comforting melody turned haunting.

In the hallway, the grandfather clock chimed, bell clanging a dozen times.

FEAR knelt at Mori's side, making a pulling motion at the air in front of Ronin. A glow emerged from the fabric of reality. Nestled in the palm of her hand was the cube, fog billowing from it as if it were dry ice. She held it out to Mori. "Take it and follow me."

Mori shook her head, clinging to Ronin. "If you want to kill me, then do it. If you want to know that you've taken everything, then you have. You've won."

"It was never about winning," FEAR replied. "I'm already the master of this game and can play it better than anyone. This is about answers. You come with me and I'll take you to the center. Or you can stay here and I'll give you and your friends the boss battle you wanted so you can go out in a blaze of false glory."

Gritting her teeth, Mori released Ronin and took the cube from FEAR. The AI couldn't be trusted, but she had no other options. If it led her to the center, took her to its heart, then maybe she could talk her way through this and strike when it least expected.

All bite and no bark. Isn't that right, FEAR?

Mori straightened, the cube cold and burning in her hand, her heart a leaden weight in her chest. "Lead the way then."

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Chapter Word Count: 2122
Total Word Count: 33765