by Alyson Belle
He produced a rolled scroll from his bag and laid it out on the table. Lee grabbed it and closed his eyes, and after a moment the scroll faded away.
“You want me to cast it now?” he asked.
Topper nodded. “Target all of us. The item should be the nearest Lv. 80 Staff of Matter Manipulation.”
Lee smiled. “Easy. Man, Vierdimin is going to be furious when he finds out how easily you all tracked him down. I’m impressed. This might be the biggest misstep he’s ever made.”
“It hasn’t exactly been easy,” I grumbled.
Lee ignored me, closing his eyes and whispering a quick incantation. He glowed with a purple light, and then suddenly a new buff flashed onto my HUD called Detect Object. Suddenly, I knew exactly where the nearest Lv. 80 Staff of Matter Manipulation was. It was like a solid line drawn straight from my head, in my minds eye, to a specific destination. I could see from their expressions that everyone else was experiencing the same thing.
“You have got to be kidding me,” Topper muttered.
I groaned.
Vierdimin was hiding in the most obvious place possible, and the last place we would have thought to look for him: The illusionary line leading us to his staff pointed us right to the middle of the Plains of Woe, where the Secret Order guildhouse was located. He must have returned their after he fled from the plains during our last battle.
“Right in plain sight,” Topper complained, shaking his head in disgust. “I feel so dumb.”
“Yeah, but he could have been anywhere!” I protested. “Now we know where to find him. Are we ready to round up the guild for another all-out assault?”
“What’s to stop him just from gating out when we arrive?” Saintly asked.
“We’re doing it right this time,” Topper growled. “We have long-cooldown guild skills designed for large scale PvP that can lock down gating and mounted flight. I don’t usually use them because it locks us down too, and you never want to risk losing your gear like that. But we’re playing for keeps right now. It’s time to fight with everything we’ve got. I’ll activate the skills as soon as we enter the zone to ensure he can’t run away.”
I’d known about those skills, and hated the idea of using them for exactly the reasons Topper mentioned. But I knew he was right. We may as well risk everything when the alternative was being stuck in the game forever.
“So we go round up all of our guildies and head to the Plains of Woe?” I asked.
Topper had begun to nod his agreement, but a sudden outburst from Saintly distracted both of us.
“Oh, shit. Oh no oh no oh no.”
His eyes had glazed over a little, and I wasn’t sure what he was talking about—but then I saw it too, scrolling across the bottom of my HUD.
ATTN ALL PLAYERS: Game servers will be shut down for a realm-wide restart in 30 minutes. We apologize for the inconvenience.
“God damn it,” I breathed. “Looks like Iciez wasn’t kidding about that political pressure. They finally caved. What do we do now?”
Topper’s face was grim. “No time to find our guildies. I updated the guild MOTD, and if they see the message, maybe they’ll head for the Plains of Woe as well. But we need to strike for Vierdimin, strike hard, and strike now, before the warden program comes down and he can copy us over to his private server.”
He whirled in place, his golden cloak spinning behind him, and headed for the inn door with an urgency to his step I’d rarely seen from the Paladin. I gathered up my things, grabbed Lee’s arm, and scrambled to follow him, with Saintly running behind us.
As we raced through Jaiden’s Crossing toward the sky docks where we could use our flying mounts, at the bottom of my HUD, the message scrolled past again, ticking down: Game servers will be shut down for a realm-wide restart in 29 minutes. We apologize for the inconvenience.
I grunted and ran faster. There was no time to lose…
Chapter 9
We flew as fast as we could and touched down for the second time that week in the Plains of Woe. My eyes swept over the familiar grey territory, with its twisted black trees reaching up toward a reddish-black sky of churning clouds. The debris and bodies from our last battle had faded, the items and NPCs decaying unlooted and unclaimed in the mostly-empty server, but with the lack of an ongoing battle it seemed even more dismal now than it had the last time. I’d barely come out on top—it had been a lucky break, really. A quirk of my class. This time, however, I was a different woman than I’d been when last I’d strode across these blighted lands and battled the The Secret Order. Now I’d be able to really help my friends. My body blazed with the raw energy of my newly acquired talents, and I knew that even though I was ten levels lower than him, there was no way the Lich would be able to stand up to my talents in a confrontation where he’d be unable to hurt me. He wasn’t a god yet!
As soon as we landed at the edge of the zone line, Topper activated his guild leader PvP skills and locked the zone for the confrontation. A chill settled over me. This would be it, then. Less than 25 minutes to go before the servers came down, and no one would be teleporting away or escaping on their flying mounts. If Vierdimin wanted to be an in-game god, he’d have to stop us in a man to man fight (or man to woman, in my case). And it wouldn’t just be me I was fighting for—it was for Topper and Jazzus and Lee and all my other guildies. It was for Erlix and Saintly. It was even for Haxor and Vierdimin’s stupid lieutenants, as much as I hated them, who didn’t realize what they were getting themselves into. This wasn’t a fight I intended to lose.
“Everyone get your buffs up,” Saintly suggested.
Everyone quickly laid down their best stat-enhancing buffs on everyone else in the group, making us even stronger than we already were. Paladins, Clerics, and Wizards were three of the best buff classes in the game, so there as something for everyone: a HP boost, an AC boost, an intelligence boost, and a mana boost. Lee even had a line of Charisma-buffing spells that he’d never intended to have to use, but now it came in handy to raise my already godly Charisma from 32 to 42!
“What kind of insane spell gives a 10-point stat boost to a primary casting stat?” Lee muttered.
“We didn’t have the Sorceress class when that spell got coded,” Saintly said defensively. “To be fair, it’s really, really hard to unlock Charisma as a casting stat.”
That was true. I was still the only class I’d heard of that used Charisma to do anything other than influence NPCs. It probably was pretty balanced to allow large Charisma bonuses under normal circumstances, and either way, I was glad for it now. I wanted all the benefits I could get before going into a fight with the Lich himself!
ATTN ALL PLAYERS: Game servers will be shut down for a realm-wide restart in 21 minutes. We apologize for the inconvenience.
“Enough talk,” Topper growled. “Let’s go.”
The four of us marched across the plain. We were a small force, but possibly the strongest single party left on the server. A level 75 Paladin, a level 72 Cleric, a level 70 Wizard, and the icing on the cake: A level 70 Sorceress, the most powerful caster in the game, and totally untouchable by Vierdimin thanks to my still-present Charm skill that served as the best shield possible against the whole of the Secret Order. It felt good. We might only have twenty minutes, but I was confident it would be enough time to find him and stop his mischief. It had to be.
But all of my confidence vanished as we crested a hill and saw what Vierdimin had prepared for us. My heart sank into my stomach, and I looked to Topper in desperation.
“Motherfucker,” he breathed. Neither Saintly nor Lee looked any happier than he did.
In the mile or so between us and Vierdimin’s guild house stretched an entire army of NPC foes. It wasn’t only the same NPCs that Vierdimin had hired for the last battle—oh, no. There were orcs and kobolds and ogres, but also elementals and dryads and elves. Human brigands, northern yetis, and monstrous creatures from the outer realms. The assembled horde created a living fortress of in-gam
e monsters encircling the Secret Order’s tower and protecting Vierdimin from exactly the type of 12th hour push we were making now. Their levels ran the gamut from insignificant teens to high-60 named NPCs, which was about the level where they stopped being available to hire.
I could see by the variety that he hadn’t been picky—he’d been focusing on numbers, grabbing whoever was convenient for him at the easiest price possible. That’s what must have been keeping him so busy while his cronies kept us occupied. He had to have been all over the game world, striking deals with NPC leaders to come to his aid when called.
How could he have paid the price for all these NPC contracts? I wondered. The cost must have been astronomical.
But then I remembered our plundered guild bank, robbed by my own former avatar. Vierdimin wasn’t paying them with his money. He was using ours. It must have cost every gold coin we had, and then some. He’d probably vendored the contents of our guild bank to have even more gold to spend.
“What do we do now?” asked Lee.
I shared another look with Topper, and both of us nodded.
“The only thing we can do,” I replied.
Topper slammed his visor down. “We fight.”
“Or we die trying,” I finished.
“We don’t need to kill them all,” Saintly observed. “We just need to punch a hole in the crowd and get Lacey through to the tower. She’s the only one who can safely fight Vierdimin, anyway, right? We can do this!”
Lee looked as skeptical as I felt inside, but I’d meant what I said. We had to try, no matter how hopeless it looked. Our friends were relying on us. We were all relying on each other. Saintly was right—all we had to do was get me to the tower. Surely we could do that in under 20 minutes, right? If we couldn’t, who could?
Topper roared, held his flaming sword aloft, and rushed to meet our foes, and the other three of us swiftly followed.
I hadn’t often gotten to see high-level players totally unleash their powers. Normally you wanted to play conservatively and hold a little back for emergencies, but this time we went all-in as we worked to carve a corridor through Vierdimin’s army of contract NPCs. Watching my friends unload all of their firepower was a thing of sheer, destructive beauty.
Lee demonstrated the unfettered power of a raid-geared wizard as he blew massive holes in our enemies’ forces: his eyes glowed with red-hot death beams that swept across their ranks as he hurled lance after lance of icy destruction into the larger NPCs, shattering them into shards on impact, and meteors rained from the sky, leaving circular walls of fire in their wake. His force shields deflected arrows and blades alike, and the smell of burnt fur and flesh quickly filled the air wherever he directed his attention.
Topper’s dance of death was as fluid and majestic as ever, swinging his fiery, epic sword in wide arcs that flung dead bodies of struck enemies out like rag dolls wherever it didn’t simply cleave them in two. His golden judgments slammed down upon his foes ceaselessly, and cleansing fire radiated out from his armor with each step he took.
Even Saintly made an impressive show, keeping all four of our health bars topped off with green and gold showers of healing energy and cleansing the debuffs from when our foes did break through, and then using his excess mana to silence, stun, and force-nuke the casters that got close enough to us to try to make mischief.
As for me, I was a demon on the battlefield: my destructive magic radiated out from my fingertips as aggressively as Lee’s, and I also Charmed new NPC pets with impunity and sent them to battle their foes until they fell, when I’d claim another. I dazzled swaths of enemies with Vejazzle, stunned the orc king himself with my Motorboat, and used my Sexy Shadow to hurl double the number of lightning bolts, Flame Jets, and icy wind breaths through the ranks of our enemies.
But for every foe who fell, it seemed there was always another NPC ready to step in and take their place. There were just too many of them, no matter how powerful we were and how quickly we felled them. We were pushing through their forces, but not quickly enough to reach Vierdimin in time!
I knew I had to do something. My friends were already giving it their all, but I still had one trick left in my bag I’d been holding back. I’d never tried it before because of the excessively long cooldown, but it was now or never.
“Dragon Rage!” I roared, activating my secret class ability.
Instantly, my body underwent an explosive series of changes: My wings erupted from my back with an audible crack, and my skin turned golden, scaly, and as hard as Fiero’s had been. My fingertips curved into claws, and my legs elongated and shifted into three-toed wicked talons as my feminine body exploded with tough, sinewy muscles. I could feel raw, magical energy crackling through me at an unprecedented rate, and I knew that for the next two minutes, I would be a god of destruction.
I’d wanted to save this for my battle with Vierdimin, but I had to reach him in order to have that battle in the first place… I couldn’t afford to waste another moment.
Now with my new, invincible scales and incredibly destructive spells, I shouldered past Topper and led the way aggressively into the thick of the enemy forces, radiating an unceasing wave of Chain Lightning and lashing out with a Flame Jet three times the size and intensity of my previous ones. I roared arctic sheets of ice and snow onto my enemies with my Icy Breath, and raked any foes foolish enough to draw close to me with the razor-sharp talons at my feet.
With the awesome destructive powers of the Dragonkin sorcerers at my disposal, we carved through their forces like a hot knife through butter, clearing twice the distance we had before I’d transformed.
ATTN ALL PLAYERS: Game servers will be shut down for a realm-wide restart in 11 minutes. We apologize for the inconvenience.
As the updated server shutdown message flashed across my HUD, my Dragon Rage buff began to blink, and then it faded away entirely. It had been two minutes, and that was my last hidden talent. We’d slain our way through two thirds of Vierdimin’s army, but we still had a third of his assembled forced to go through, only eleven minutes to do it, and everyone was running low on mana. Glancing back, I could see despair creeping across the faces of my allies, even as we struggled onward through the throng without slowing our pace.
“We’re not going to make it!” Lee cried, calling down another shower of meteors onto a nearby group of dryads.
“Push harder!” Topper demanded.
We did, and Saintly even began lashing out with his hammer, adding a small bit of physical DPS to our group’s assault in a fit of desperation, but it was obvious to everyone that the situation was grim.
“Watch out behind us!” Saintly cried suddenly.
I heard a distant, savage roar, and I whirled around to see a rolling disturbance in the ranks of foes that had closed behind our tiny group. Monsters squawked and yelled and dove out of the way, as whatever was causing it rushed toward us at a massive speed through the assembled horde, accompanied by a clamor of clashing steel and the shrieks of trampled enemies. It was some kind of huge beast! Not a dragon, even, but a… a dinosaur?
Oh shit, I thought as the creature’s giant, floating name above its head resolved: It was a Tyrannosaurus Rex, Lv. 75, probably acquired from The Lost Continent!
I cursed and gritted my teeth, readying a new set of spells to unleash on the massive beast. It was an elite mob, and I knew it would be sporting impressive resistances as good as any dragon, along with especially nasty combat stats. If we didn’t have a healer with us, it might have even given Topper pause. This was the last thing we needed to be dealing with right now.
But before I could blow it to smithereens, it ducked down and closed its long-fanged jaws on the head of of an especially large and surly level 65 enemy yeti, dispatching him with a sickening CHOMP.
I blinked at it in surprise and took a step back, lowering my hands. Why was it fighting the other monsters?
In fact, now I saw what the whole wake of clashing, yawling, clamoring noise was: an e
ntire wedge-shaped host of new NPCs, doing battle with Vierdimin’s forces behind the T-Rex.
“What the hell is going on?” Lee asked.
The monster turned sideways, and a shrill cry of greeting reached my ears.
“Helllllooooooo Goldie! Nice rack. Has it gotten bigger, or does it just look better wrapped in those sweet, revealing bandages?”
Sitting atop the T-Rex on a ragged, leather saddle was Erlix, my halfling companion who’d been killed and sent back to his bind point by the ogre Wugduz. Overwhelming relief flooded through me as I released my prepared spells and literally jumped up and down with joy. I’d never been so happy to see someone in my whole entire life as I was now, even if he was a disgusting little pervert.
“Erlix! Oh man, I was so worried about you!” I shook my head in disbelief at my goofy friend. If he was on the ground, instead of riding a giant lizard, I would have rushed over to hug him! “Where on Earth did you get a dinosaur?”
The beast chomped another few enemies while Erlix laughed, easily keeping his balance on the creature’s back.
“We’re not on Earth, you silly treasure ho. But it turns out you can hire a lot of NPCs—and a dinosaur!—when you’re hoarding the proceeds of a multi-level marketing sex scheme. When I died, I retrieved the money and started going around closing deals, figuring it might come in handy for us down the line. Then the server message popped up, and I decided I couldn’t wait for your ass to fight Vierdimin. I thought I’d wreck up his castle with my T-Rex here and taunt him till he came out of hiding. But hey, you’re here now! We can wreck his things together.”
“Hey, guys?” Topper said through his visor, cutting down another few enemies with a sizzling slice of his holy blade. “Reunion later. Erlix, we’re glad to have you back. Punch us through to the castle, please! We don’t have time for this shit.”
