Immortal Paladin

144 The Long Echo

The memory didn’t end.

It shifted again, seamlessly, as if flipping to the next chapter in a story already written but now being read aloud with fresh eyes. The field of poppies faded. The lavender sky turned to grey. And when the light returned, I saw it.

Me.

Or at least, him.

David_69.

I stood on a ruined bridge beneath a shattered moon, decked in the full Paladin kit from my late-game loadout: Radiant Fang, Iron Mercy cloak, and that dumb over-leveled shield I used to call the Pancake of Justice.

And across from me stood Alice.

But not the Alice I knew now. This was her at her most untrusting. Her most dangerous. Rosy hair stained darker by blood. Fangs bared. Cloak of shadows billowing behind her like wings of ink. The two stared each other down like fated rivals.

“You hunt vampires?” she hissed. “You call yourself holy, yet you swing your blade blindly. Do you not know who I am? Do you know my story? Do you know my pain? How dare you look down on me?!”

David, me, didn’t back down. He gritted his teeth and leveled his sword. “You kill people!”

“I kill monsters!”

“Then we’re no different. But I still have to take you in.”

And that’s when the fighting started. Honestly, that wasn’t how I remembered what happened. Instead, I remembered the meeting with more whining on her part and me cussing my heart out as I chugged on an energy drink, and my game avatar chugging on potions.

It wasn’t just a clash of swords and spells. It was a fight for one’s ideals. So yeah, it was a tough fight. Of course, David_69 had his own ideals. As for me, I was just there for a different reason. Flame met void. Steel clashed against shadow. Light and dark coiled, wrapped, tore each other apart, and reformed again.

I watched the battle from outside my body, detached and ghostlike, but I remembered every move. Every parry, and every counterspell. I remembered how hard that fight had been and how long it lasted.

What I didn’t remember back then was how hurt Alice looked when we first spoke.

“You don’t understand,” she had said mid-fight, bleeding from her side. “Every Champion comes at me swinging. I expect it. I brace for it.”

David scowled, blade raised. “You’re an enemy of the Realm!”

She laughed bitterly. “Of course I am. What kind of world lets people like me live?”

“But do I really have to fight you?” asked David with a pained expression. "Yes, I see your point... but..."

It was at that moment that I started to realize, watching from the outside, just how real this was. Even now, LLO remained distant from me. Of course, I get the xianxia elements and have come to accept it, but the world of LLO? Back then, in Lost Legends Online, I thought it was just amazing writing. Just some dynamic NPC with a branching dialogue tree and a rare drop table. Alice was famous among the community. Half the player base hated her. The other half was obsessed.

And I? I was one among the obsessed. The one who... she spoke to, not just fought. I tried hard to look for a dialogue option, so I raised my Speech Stat as much as possible before that fateful encounter.

“Why do we fight?” I asked. “Just surrender!”

“Kill me,” she answered. “And I will find peace.”

She even acknowledged it now, standing beside me in the echo of that battle. Her ghost-like form watched the reenactment unfold with me.

“That was… life-changing,” she murmured.

“You mean the fight?” I asked.

She shook her head. “Meeting you.”

I looked at her, and for a moment, I forgot we were walking through her soul.

She continued, “Most Champions… Immortal Souls, as your lot called them… only saw me as a monster. They’d draw their blades before I even opened my mouth. Didn’t matter what I said. But you were different.”

“Uuuh…” I nodded. “Yeah… makes sense.”

Technically, I drew blades first before I started talking. The cut-scene demanded it after all. The memory flickered again, another scene stitched into this dreamlike tapestry of her soul. Same bridge. Same moon, but less shattered now, as if remembering softened even the sky’s wounds.

The fight had dragged on for nearly twenty minutes, real-time. Most PvP duels didn’t last a third of that. We weren’t just throwing numbers at each other. We were talking. And not like two players bantering over headsets. No, this was deeper and layered. Alice wasn’t just an NPC with a hot character model and OP vampire stats. She felt real. Her dialogue didn’t follow standard scripting patterns. Her lines changed depending on how I moved, when I spoke, even how much damage I took.

It wasn’t just programming. It was like she knew.

At one point, I tried to cheese her with a terrain exploit, some busted ledge jump combo I’d seen in a forum video, but she laughed.

“Oh no,” she’d said, sidestepping the trick like she’d seen it a thousand times. “Not that again. Champions always try that rock-hop thing. Did someone on your ‘chat board’ suggest it?”

That line hit me like a glitch to the fucking gut. Most players would complain how dialogues like that would ruin immersion. But LLO's players weren't 'most' players. I was the same. Alice knew. Or at least, she knew enough. LLO’s world wasn’t supposed to break immersion like that. And yet, there she was… sounding like she half-understood what a player was, what a forum was, what a cheese strat was.

“What are you?” My character asked mid-fight, breath ragged, shield cracked, and Radiant Fang glowing at half-durability.

Her eyes gleamed like blood-stained garnets. “I’m someone the gods forgot. I was a daughter of light once. A Holy Woman. Now I live in the dark and pretend not to miss the sun. Now, kill me, wandering adjudicator! Deliver me!”

That was the turning point. Not just in the fight, but in the questline. We didn’t end it with emptying each other's HP. It ended by choice. My choice. It was truly a miracle. Something at that time regretted being unable to take a record of.

“I don’t want to kill you,” I’d said finally, lowering my weapon. "Please... not like this..."

“Then what do you want, Paladin?”

“I want to understand you. To help.”

She’d gone quiet for a long time. The wind howled between us, carrying motes of ash from a world forever burning. Then she said, “Find a cure. Free me from this curse. And in return… I’ll teach you the one thing your light has never given you.”

That was how the Exalted Renewal quest began. Back then, I thought it was just a prestige-line hidden unlock. Maybe a faith-locked Paladin passive, or a bugged interaction between Warlock and Priest legacy paths. But now, standing beside Alice in this echo of memory, I understood something I didn’t before.

It wasn’t a bug. It wasn’t a feature.

It was her choice.

The system hadn’t assigned her to give me that skill. She had chosen to teach me.

Back then, I hadn’t known how any of it worked. The NPCs of LLO… they weren’t normal. They spoke like they lived in some fantasy realm, sure, but their word choices always had this offbeat quality to them. They didn’t say “level up,” but they’d talk about “refining their Path” or “advancing their Soul Brand.” They didn’t say “Class”—they said “Calling.” EXP was “Karmic Light.” Dungeons were “Wounds in the World.” It wasn’t just flavor text. It felt real. Too real.

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

Even now, watching the scene replay from the inside of Alice’s soul, I could hear it in her voice.

“You think this world is simple,” she spat as she bled across broken stone. “You think there’s black and white. Good and evil. But everything here is dying slowly. Some of us just decided to die faster. I want to die! But you refuse to let me die! So choose, stab your sword through my heart and save me, or let me suffer despair with the lie you call hope!"

I remembered how I’d paused. How I had genuinely hesitated, sword half-lowered. Maybe it was a trick? But it couldn't be a trick. I wanted to believe she was telling the truth. “You don’t have to die,” I said. “You’re smart. You’re strong. Just… surrender. We can find a way to fix this.”

Her expression twisted like I’d slapped her. “Fix? Fix?!” And then, softer: “You think I haven’t tried? Give me a clear answer!”

That was when I made her the offer.

“I’ll do it,” I said unconsciously into the mic, feeling caught in the moment. “I’ll find a way to cure your vampirism. I’ll grind whatever questline it takes. I’ll burn all my mats, spend all my tokens, reroll my damn build if I have to.”

She blinked. For once, no biting retort came. No spell. No sudden strike. Instead, she said, “If you mean that… I’ll teach you something. Something lost to time. A skill once taught to me when I still wore white robes and carried a sun-marked scepter.”

“Wait, you’re talking about…”

“Exalted Renewal,” she whispered. “I will teach it to you. Now. Let's do it now.”

Even hearing the name gave me chills. Back then, I thought it was just another cool, overdramatic spell name. But it wasn’t. It was an Ultimate Skill. One of the old legacy ones, from the early patches of LLO that people barely remembered.

But that wasn’t the problem.

Alice was talking to me via the headset.

I remembered the interface… flickering, almost reluctant to let it happen. But it did happen.

Exalted Renewal

[Paladin Legacy / Ultimate Skill]

“Requires death to activate. Fully consumes the user’s Divine Soul to resurrect with one final burst of divine energy. All conditions must be met. Cannot be triggered by external resurrection effects. Death comes to us all, but some get a pass until Death decides you have had enough."

The confirmation window appeared like a divine decree, written in gold-edged script.

But the cost? It was steep.

To learn it, I had to sacrifice skills. Not just dump points like normal, but permanently recycle them. I let go of three Divine Word series abilities: Word of Radiance, Word of Binding, and Word of Mercy. Each one had gotten me through nightmare dungeons and solo runs. They were pretty useful in PvP too. They weren’t just numbers. They were part of my identity as a Paladin, so it hurt when I gave them up.

Alice hadn’t even blinked when I told her I was ready.

We stood together in the ruined sanctum, just past the bridge, her stronghold, if the game’s HUD was to be believed. She raised her hand, and I felt the ritual start. Symbols carved themselves in blood through the air, looping in runes I didn’t recognize but somehow understood.

“This is a Blood Pact,” she said. “Not just a mere quest binding. If you break it, truly break it, you won’t just die.”

“I’ll become your thrall.”

She didn’t deny it.

“You will lose your mind. Your will. You’ll become the thing I fought so hard not to be. And then you will serve me… until you fulfill your end of the bargain.”

I hesitated only a second, then said, “I’m in.”

I remembered the sound of her voice when she whispered the final word to seal the pact. A kind of mournful acceptance. Not hopeful. Just tired. Like someone who had been disappointed too many times to believe anymore, but who still dared, just once more.

The memory shifted again.

And this time… it burned.

I found myself in the sky. No bridge. No Alice. Just a sun that flickered like a dying candle over a broken landscape. Glitched textures, missing assets, monsters frozen in T-poses, or twitching spasms. LLO was falling apart.

This was the end.

I remembered it, vividly now. The week the servers started hemorrhaging players. People logged off and never came back. Skill trees bugged out. Certain abilities wouldn’t activate. Crafting failed unpredictably. Some quests locked permanently. Even movement started to break, avatars clipping through geometry or falling forever into the void.

The devs had gone silent. The subreddit turned into a graveyard of bug reports and conspiracy posts. Most players called it an unbalanced mess and bailed. But the ones who stayed? We weren’t there for gameplay anymore. We were there for the NPCs. Because somehow, even as the rest of the world collapsed, they didn’t break. They mourned. They panicked. They held funerals for villages that despawned, which later was found out got wrecked by angels. They cried when their scripted gods stopped answering prayers. They remembered me, even across play sessions, even if I created new accounts.

They’d ask:

“Where have you been?”

“Have you come to help?”

“Please… don’t leave us again.”

That was why it had a cult following, why people were so obsessed. And why, when I died, truly died, in the game, not from a glitch or logout timeout, but perma-death at some virus bugged-out eldritch hands, something broke in more than just the system.

The memory pulled me forward. Faster now.

I saw Alice again. Not as a boss. Not even as a quest-giver. Joan was with her, looking the same as the day I met her in the game. Then Alice turned toward the broken dungeon where I fought an eldritch abomination, and began weaving a spell. One the game had never logged. One that didn’t exist in any datamine.

A Soul-Seeking Rite.

I watched, stunned, as she and Joan gathered mana and tore a portal from where I had my last fight in the world of LLO.

The memory kept shifting.

I saw them after. Lost. Wandering.

The language was a nightmare for them. No interface. No auto-translations. They had no idea where I’d gone or what world they’d landed in. I watched Alice try to barter with a passing merchant by drawing runes in the dirt. Watched her cry when she realized the locals couldn’t understand anything she was saying. Joan had tried to write out spell glyphs, but even those twisted midair, this world rejected their systems.

And yet, they kept going.

Day by day, town by town.

Looking for me.

Joan refused to feed for weeks. Alice pawned old gear to buy food and information. A floating skull: ancient, lecherous, and far too interested in Alice’s “unusual soul structure”, eventually began translating and teaching them the local tongue. Slowly. Painfully. They suffered. But they endured.

Now, here, in the remnants of Alice’s soul, I stood beside her and watched it all again. Watched as she walked through a world that didn’t want her, again, just to find me. She didn’t say anything. But she didn’t need to.

I turned to her, voice quiet. 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝕨𝕖𝗯𝚗𝚘𝕧𝕖𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝕞

“I’m sorry you went through all of that.”

"Don't mind me," She shrugged. “I was the one chasing a ghost.”

“You weren’t,” I said. “You found me.”

For a moment, she smiled. A real one. Not the bitter, crooked one she used to wear. Then she reached out and placed her hand gently over my heart. “You still have it,” she said. “The spark. The one that makes you worth dying for.”

“Hey now, I might get the wrong idea,” I looked at her, stunned. “Moreover, I thought I was the one who was supposed to die for you.”

The memory pressed on, bleeding from one moment to the next like ink across parchment. The world dissolved into ash and starlight, and the world shifted again. I found myself above it, distant and bodiless, watching like a silent god peering into a page already written.

Darkness. Trees. Mist that curled like smoke.

The Black Forest.

Even now, in dreamlike recall, I felt the heavy, pressing weight of the place… like the air was thick with secrets. I remembered fighting with them side by side. We’d won, eventually. If you could call surviving winning. The thing dissipated into glitch-light, leaving the forest silent again. The three of them limped out, two in soul, one in body.

The memory shifted again.

The Great Desert.

Endless dunes stretched beneath a white-hot sky, but the sand didn’t scorch… No, it pulsed with heat like a heartbeat. The three wandered, clothes ragged, and Lu Gao half-starved. They found the village by accident… Sandthorn, the oasis hidden in the lee of a ridge-like dune, with palm roofs and soft-spoken people who asked no questions.

Alice and Joan, or rather Aili Si and Cho An, as the locals called them now, managed to adapt to the village rather well. Lu Gao, of course, kept his own name… nobody ever tried to rename him.

They stayed. They settled. And I... watched.

It had felt like years since I’d seen them like this. Not just surviving, but living. Alice trained Lu Gao in actual martial drills, correcting his footwork, running him through movements using a sand-worn staff. At night, they sat by the communal fire and listened to the elders tell stories, using the few words they’d managed to pick up.

The villagers adored Joan. They whispered of her kindness, her strength. How she could sing and lull children to sleep. They brought her flowers. Dried dates. Laughter.

And then the sky broke.

It started with one angel. Then three. Then more.

They appeared in the dunes like statues, as if remembering they used to be gods. Wings too bright. Eyes too empty. Heaven’s software wrapped in something too clean, like sterilized death.

I saw Alice’s panic the moment she recognized them.

She didn’t hesitate.

She forced a scroll into Lu Gao’s hand, forcing him to teleport. He tried to resist, tried to stay, but the spell was already unraveling beneath his feet.

The teleportation tore him away.

She turned. The angels hovered over Sandthorn now.

I saw her choices.

I watched as she fought. Fire, shadow, light, illusions… all of it. She summoned spells I didn’t recognize, cracked the sky, and collapsed two of them with a demonized version of the chant from her Holy Woman days. But they multiplied, absorbing the villagers they touched. With every life taken, they grew stronger, cleaner, and more mechanical.

And Alice…

She made the only choice she could.

She began killing the villagers herself.

Clean, merciful strikes. Magic that unmade them faster than the angels could claim them. Her face was stained with tears and blood. Her voice trembled with every invocation.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I wanted to save you.”

Her hands shook. Her soul splintered. But she didn’t stop.

She killed them all.

Only ashes remained.

And the angels left her alone.

In the dream space, I turned to her. The ghost beside me. The echo of her. She didn’t look at me. She stared at the scene like she could still smell the fire, still feel the heat on her skin.

“I didn’t want to do it,” she said finally. Her voice cracked.

“I know.”

“No one else would’ve understood.”

“I do.”

She finally turned to me. Her eyes, so often sharp, looked tired. “Do you hate me for it?”

“No,” I whispered. “I think… I think you saved them.”

That was the truth of it.

Even now, this world was cruel. The rules were different. The stakes were higher. And Alice—Aili Si—had done what no Paladin, no Champion, and no so-called hero could have done. She sacrificed her own peace to protect their souls.

The memory shimmered, fading.

She had waited for me.

Through black forests, cursed beasts, broken language, and holy monsters…

She had waited.

And I was finally here.