The Happytime Pizza game room was gone, replaced by a throne room that looked an awful lot like a live-action version of the 8-bit one in the final stage of Ninja Princess. The teenage Halliday morphed into the masked, black-clad ninja Kazamaru, who to my eyes looked exactly like Sh? Kosugi in Revenge of the Ninja back in 1983.
I glanced down at my avatar and saw that my own appearance had changed too. I still appeared to be a girl, but now I was dressed in a flowing tunic made of red silk, with gold piping and a Chinese dragon stitched onto each sleeve.
I was also holding a sword in my right hand, and in its mirrored surface I could see that I was no longer wearing Kira Underwood’s face. My avatar had changed into a live-action representation of Princess Kurumi—and the creator of this simulation had chosen to make me look exactly like Elsa Yeung in Challenge of the Lady Ninja, also from 1983.
“？‘Reclaim her castle and face her imposter,’？” Shoto recited. “This is it! Kick his ass, Princess!”
I nodded, then lunged forward and did as Shoto instructed—I kicked Kazamaru’s ass.
Thankfully, the mechanics of ONI-based combat were more or less identical to old-school haptic-rig combat. You didn’t have to physically perform any of your avatar’s complex special moves and powered attacks yourself unless you wanted to. Instead, you could use a simple hand gesture or voice command to make your avatar execute a move or an attack. The only difference was, when you were using an ONI, you could feel your avatar’s body movements as it automatically carried out these actions, so for a few seconds, it felt like you were moving on autopilot.
I was prepared for a brutal fight, but whoever had programmed this challenge had made Princess Kurumi a lot tougher than her knockoff male counterpart, who barely put up a fight. He only managed to land one or two hits before I knocked his life-meter down to nothing, with a steady barrage of throwing knives.
When I reduced his life bar to just 1 percent, the words FINISH HIM appeared floating in the air between us for a moment. When they vanished, I dispatched Kazamaru with one final roundhouse kick to the head. The last sliver of his life bar turned red—but he didn’t die. Instead, the manly, black-clad ninja master abruptly fell to his knees and began to cry, then vanished in a cloud of smoke a few seconds later.
When it dissipated, I saw the Second Shard floating there in front of me.
I reached for it, wondering if I was about to experience another “flashback.” And as my fingers wrapped around it…
* * *
I was back inside the body of seventeen-year-old Kira Underwood, and now teenage Ogden Morrow was standing in front of me, holding my hands in his. It was dark, and we were standing on a grassy hill bathed in moonlight, overlooking the tiny Middletown skyline in the distance. Og was placing a silver necklace in my hands—the same necklace from Kira’s jewelry box that had transformed into the First Shard—just as he whispered the words “I love you,” for what I knew must be the very first time.
Og had written about this moment in his autobiography, too, I realized. But he hadn’t described it in any detail, or given the time and place it occurred.
I felt my body starting to tremble as Kira reacted to what her future husband had just told her…
* * *
…And then I was back inside my own avatar’s skin. I was back on Kodama, standing next to Aech and Shoto in front of the Ninja Princess portal. It looked as though my avatar had just been ejected from it. When I looked down, I saw the Second Shard lying in my open palm. It was another multifaceted blue crystal, nearly identical to the first one in size and appearance.
Shoto and Aech both threw their arms around me. “You did it!”
“No,” I said. “We did it. I couldn’t have done it without your help.”
I held out both of my fists and they each bumped one of them and silently nodded.
“That final challenge was insane, right?” Shoto said. “I mean, why would Halliday want you to kill the teenage version of himself?”
“That’s gotta be some serious self-hatred happening there,” Aech said. “Maybe he finally realized what a dick he was to Kira, and to Og?”
I couldn’t focus on what they were saying. I was still reeling from the flashback I’d just experienced. Another of Kira Underwood’s private memories, rendered with a detail and intensity that should’ve been impossible. Just what in the name of Crom was going on here?
I didn’t have time to stop and ponder the possibilities. We had shards to collect and absolutely no time to spare.