by Alyson Belle
His words sliced through me like knives, and a cold chill of fear began creeping up my spine. I was struggling to contain my panic, but now that I’d accepted that I couldn’t win, I was confronted with the horror of a new reality: If we were going to lose, I really might be stuck as Lacey! And for a thousand years… I couldn’t begin to conceive of what a thousand years would feel like. I wasn’t even thirty yet! Sure, I’d kind of gotten used to running around in Lacey’s avatar, having sex as a woman, and rolling my eyes while dudes stared and NPCs and players alike objectified me, talked down to me, and harassed me, but I’d never once imagined it might be permanent. It was always a temporary thing—I’d never doubted that we’d find a way to beat Vierdimin. Could I really live the rest of my days as a sex toy in Vierdimin’s private playground? He was offering me an out.
Tears formed at the corners of my eyes. I didn’t know what to do. I thought of how hard everyone had fought to bring us here and how much my friends had sacrificed in the battle against Vierdimin. The frozen faces of Jazzus and Topper flashed through my mind, and I tried to think of what Erlix would say if he were here. I knew that if I did cut a deal with Vierdimin, they’d all understand. Why be extra miserable when we were already doomed? Why resist when there was no point?
Why fight when we’d already lost?
“What do you say, Lacey? An eternity as my personal sex toy, or betray your friends and receive a small bit of mercy from me?”
He held his hand out, waiting for me to shake it.
ATTN ALL PLAYERS: Game servers will be shut down for a realm-wide restart in 1 minute. We apologize for the inconvenience.
“No.”
I uttered the word through gritted teeth. I didn’t care what Vierdimin did to me, or what he forced me to do.
His eyes widened. “No?”
I wouldn’t give in.
I wouldn’t go down without a fight.
My friends believed in me, and I couldn’t disappoint them. Not if there was even a sliver of hope.
While Kromgorn had been taunting me, I’d noticed that the short-term consumable damage shield he’d been wearing had finally faded away, and my Icy Breath caught him by surprise.
The massive half-giant tumbled head over feet toward the rear of the room, buffeted by arctic wins and slowed by a nasty cold debuff that should buy me a few extra seconds. I leapt to my feet and spun to confront the lifeless shell of the lich once more, turning my Flame Jets once again on his now-unprotected body at full blast. The unbridled destructive magic of the most powerful caster on the server roared over his flesh, ripping large chunks of the 80th-level Lich’s HP away with each passing second.
I watched as his health dropped down to 70%. 60%. 50%. Behind me, I heard a thud, like a sack of fleshy potatoes slamming into the ground, and another clatter of a sword dropping.
The Lich roared to life and leapt up from his throne, his holding his staff across his body like a magical bulwark. Vierdimin had hopped avatars again to protect himself and was back in his original body! He couldn’t hurt me as Vierdimin, but my Flame Jets winked out as he slammed a Counterspell against my magic.
ATTN ALL PLAYERS: Game servers will be shut down for a realm-wide restart in 30 seconds. Please log off now to avoid interruption. We apologize for the inconvenience.
I switched to Chain Lightning without missing a beat, sending bolts of electricity arcing through the air toward my foe, and he winced as he dropped even further to 40%. I wished I still had a stun skill available that worked on PCs, but raw damage would have to do the trick! We might be gambling on whether the server back-ups could save us, but there was no way in hell I was letting this psychopath carry me and my friends into his personal playground for an eternity of torture.
But then another Counterspell sliced through my Chain Lightning. Now both my fire and lightning-based magics were locked for 30 seconds, and I didn’t have 30 seconds to spare!
I began to frantically buffet him with more chilling wind from my Icy Breath, wishing again that I had the better spells I should have had from our guild bank, and watched as his health continued to tick down…
A third Counterspell sliced through the last of my Destruction spells and locked the cold tree for the next thirty seconds.
“How many fucking Counterspells do you have?” I wailed.
Vierdimin threw back his head and chortled with glee. “It’s the Lich class, you idiot. Extra counter slots. You should really know your enemies better before going to battle with them.”
ATTN ALL PLAYERS: Game servers will be shut down for a realm-wide restart in 10 seconds. Warden Program is now closing. Prepare for disconnect.
Vierdimin lifted his staff above his head with both hands and crowed in the wake of his imminent victory. I once more fell to my knees in utter despair. I’d failed. Over and over again I’d failed. And now I and my friends would be doomed to an eternity of misery at Vierdimin’s hands.
ATTN ALL PLAYERS: Game servers restarting in 5…
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Chapter 11
I don’t know what I’d expected—for the world to go black? For my body to tingle? I’d guessed that somehow things would feel different, but as soon as the countdown ended…
Nothing happened.
I looked around, blinking, waiting for something to change, as Vierdimin lowered his staff to the floor and tapped it on the ground, leering at me with an evil grin.
“Is that it?” I wondered out loud. “Nothing is different.”
Vierdimin’s smile dropped, and he shook his head at me. “You really are an idiot, aren’t you? Everything is different.”
He gestured around us at the castle walls. “This world? Everything you see around you? This is a copy of the game instance, running on my modified server code, just as I intended. The game is over. You’re done.”
I climbed to my feet, staring at him incredulously. “But I didn’t feel anything.”
“You don’t feel a change in the game, moron! Your consciousness is a piece of software right now. I just shifted it from the official server to my server. Allow me to demonstrate.”
He waved his staff toward me, and my jaw dropped open as my Charm skill faded from both of us. I took half a step back from the Lich. I was vulnerable to him again!
“How did you do that?” I demanded. I held my hands out and tried to cast my Flame Jets at him once again, now that his counter-silence had faded, but nothing happened.
Vierdimin tsked at me. “How are you so thick that you don’t get this yet? I’m a god here. I have GM powers on this server. And I can do anything I want. Your spells won’t work right now because I turned them off.”
He gestured again and the air thickened around me, locking me in place. The panic that had been creeping up my spine exploded through my body now. I struggled helplessly, straining my muscles against the air, feeling like a trapped animal. It was useless. It felt like he’d imprisoned me in solid stone, covering every inch of my body!
So it was true. He’d actually done it—he’d moved us to his private server, and we were his to play with for the next thousand years, at least. The reality of it dazed me, and I went limp with shock, slumping inside my hardened prison of air.
“Giving up so easily? Why ever would you do that?” Vierdimin taunted me, and then cackled evilly. He settled back onto his throne, staff resting across his lap, and regarded me with a dry smile. “You almost beat me, you know. I would have never admitted it before I’d won, but now that I have, I want you to know that you came so very close. You were quite the thorn in my side. A few moments faster, a few shorter conversations, and you might have had me. It’s amazing how well you and your friends did. If I’d ever thought I was putting myself in real danger of losing, I would have waited to help you level up and unlock the power of your class.”
“So you were behind that! How did you know what to help me do? And why do it?”
“The how was easy. Dredging the code base for hints about secret classes revealed the Sorceress unlock mechanism, just like it helped me unlock the Lich class prior to that.”
“You cheater!” I hissed. No wonder he’d known exactly where to guide me! If he was illegally trawling through the game files, it was no surprise that he’d know all kinds of things hidden from regular players.
“As for why, I’d assumed that the Lich was the most powerful class in the game. This was going to be my ultimate form—the body from which I’d rule the whole server, and the strongest player around even before my GM powers. But then I saw your little trick with your Charm skill, and I started wondering about this mystery class that no one ever played. The more I researched and thought about it, the more I realized that it was the Sorceress that was the strongest class in the game. But in order to have the most powerful Sorceress the game could support, I realized I’d need to spend quite a few levels with no way to level up except to fuck NPCs. That’s really not my style. But why should I, when I had a perverted little whore who could do my dirty work for me?”
I gasped as I realized what he was implying. “Y-you… you want Lacey? You’ve just been waiting for me to level up so you could use this body once the game cut over?”
Vierdimin raised a finger, and the most dizzying sense of disorientation assaulted me.
Suddenly I was lying on the floor, feeling very, very weird. I pushed myself to my hands and knees, feeling bulky, clumsy and just too big all over. A two-handed greatsword laid on the ground in front of me, and I blinked at it. Then I checked my HUD.
“Holy shit,” I breathed.
I was Kromgorn again! Kromgorn the level 78 Barbarian, with all of the raid quality gear that Vierdimin had acquired for him while power-leveling. It was bizarre how unfamiliar the form felt now, after so many days in Lacey’s womanly body. I’d expected the moment when I’d return to my old avatar to be so much happier for me, but everything was miserable. What good did it do me to be Kromgorn when we were stuck in the Lich’s playground.
My massive knuckles scraped the stone floor as I picked up my epic greatsword, and I clambered to my feet. A few yards away, Lacey the Courtesan unraveled her beautiful dragon wings and stretched her arms lazily above her ahead.
“Ahh, this feels wonderful,” she murmured. “I should thank you, Kromgorn. This gorgeous, female body is going to be so much more fun to rule the world with than that old, decrepit lich.”
Her dulcet laughter tinkled through the air, and I was momentarily amazed at just how ravishing she was. I hadn’t realized it from inside, but Lacey was a creature beautiful enough to stop anyone in their tracks. An unfamiliar, uncomfortable sensation tightened at my loincloth, and I blushed when I realized it was my cock stiffening—a feeling I hadn’t experienced in quite some time! And not only was she beautiful… she really was the most powerful caster in the game now. Vierdimin was right.
I watched in shock and horror as Lacey ascended the steps to the throne and bounced back into Vierdimin’s avatar long enough to hang his head and hold out the staff to her with two hands. I recognized the gesture. It was a willing equipment transfer. Then he bounced himself back into Lacey and seized the Lv. 80 Staff of Matter Manipulation. She turned back to me and thumped the staff on the ground. A deafening boom rang out, blowing out from the point of impact.
“Ahh, there we go. And now the transfer is complete. I have my key to my godlike powers. I have the most powerful avatar in the game. And I have so many people to thank, starting with you, Kromgorn. I think we need an audience for this momentous occasion, don’t you?” Lacey asked with a mischievous smirk.
She waved her hand across the room, and suddenly my friends were all there. Lacey had used her GM powers to summon them to us. They floated around me like a tribunal, suspended in the hardened air like I had been moments earlier in Lacey’s body. Jazzus and Topper were to my left, now unsuspended and shaking their heads as they came around, and Lefay and Saintly struggled to my right. I glanced behind me to see my pal Erlix in a similar bind, his eyes blazing.
“Where are we?” Jazzus asked.
“I think I know,” murmured Topper, his voice full of dread.
Saintly said nothing, his face a mask of stony silence, and Lefay, now stripped of her male glamour, sobbed quietly.
“I’m going to murder you, you big sack of—” Erlix shouted, but he was cut off as gags of air slammed into everyone’s mouths except mine. They continued to struggle in the frozen air, silently trapped, their eyes pleading.
“You six shall be henceforth known as The Forsaken,” Lacey intoned. “Tortured for eternity for the crime of daring to stand in the way of my ascension. I shall make sure your experience lives up to the title. It will not be pleasant.”
She hadn’t bothered to freeze me yet, though, and I studied her quietly. Lacey wasn’t so far away… a few yards at most.
How quickly can she activate her GM powers? I wondered, my knuckles tightening around my blade.
She kept calling herself a god, and she obviously had access to an expanded set of powers thanks to the staff, but was she really unstoppable? I knew exactly how many HP Lacey had, and it was a lot less than a Level 80 Lich in raid gear… A level 78 Barbarian should be able to burst her down in just a few blows.
I didn’t give her a chance to read my intentions. Old habits fell into place, and I activated Bull Rush, leaping across the room to crash into her with a surprise, stunning force.
But it wasn’t Lacey who was surprised. As I made contact with her body, an equal, explosive force slammed into me and sent me flying backwards. I landed on my back, ten feet away from her, and my sword skittered off into the shadows at the edges of the room.
Now the air tightened around me once again as Lacey lifted me up with a gesture, laughing uproariously. My eyes blazed, but I was trapped like a fly in amber.
“I wondered how long it was going to take you to try that. Honestly, you should have attacked me immediately, not that it would have made a difference—I just expect you to be a better player than you are, I guess. But I wanted you to see for yourself. I’m invincible here! There’s nothing you can do to me. I have the staff, so I have a GM flag. That means you can’t hurt me, can’t debuff me, can’t stun me…”
She walked right up to me, so close I could smell her cloyingly sweet breath, and tapped me on the nose. I couldn’t do anything to stop her.
“You can’t do jack, big boy. Now, since you’re all properly mollified, let’s get some real gear on this avatar. What are these boring rags?”
Lacey gestured and a mannequin appeared in front of her, with a gorgeous set of gold and purple GM gear designed for the Sorceress class, including a brilliantly embroidered caster’s hood. She dressed herself eagerly, looking twice as magnificent as I ever had—now she was truly dressed as royalty. She whirled around in a circle, laughing as her robes spun with her, and flexed her wings again.
“Ah, that’s lovely. Why have 42 Charisma when you can have 98 Charisma? This GM gear really does offer excessive stats, not that I need the help. But when it comes time to use my spells, I’m really going to enjoy torturing you and your friends with maxed-out statistics. Like this!”
Lacey snapped her fingers, and pain—real pain, not Fantasy Realms Online pain—rippled through my body in rolling waves. It was like being electrocuted! I struggled against my implacable prison, screaming in agony, for ten long seconds until Lacey snapped her fingers again and ended the sensation. I alternated between gasping lungfuls of air and dry-heaving, waiting for the post-pain sickness to fade. None of my friends were struggling anymore. They simply watched me with very wide eyes.
I shuddered and stammered. “That… shouldn’t be possible… oh god, it hurt so bad.” I wanted to sob, or throw up, or both.
Lacey smirked. “My server. My rules. You’ll find that I’ve modified the server code to allow for all kinds of interesting sensations. We have so much to explore and all the ti
me in the world to do it! The best part is you can’t even die, so we can really push the limits here. Let’s start with something easy, maybe. You like getting fucked, right? Why don’t we call up that dragon pal of yours… is Fiero his name? I can jack up his cock size a few notches and instruct him to bend you over a counter and bang you incessantly for a month or two… as Kromgorn, of course. There’s plenty of time later to stick you back in the body of some other helpless, low-level girl and really humiliate you.”
This wasn’t funny anymore, and I didn’t think Lacey was joking. This couldn’t really be how my life turned out, could it? It didn’t seem possible. It didn’t seem fair.
I swept my gaze across the despondent faces of my friends, wracking my brain to try to think of something—anything—that I could do. The Lich had tied everything up too neatly. We’d simply been outplayed. He’d countered every move I made, two steps ahead of me. Every trick the game had, he’d exploited for his benefit.
Doing things my way wasn’t working. What would Erlix tell me to do? What would Saintly suggest? The situation seemed impossible with Lacey being invulnerable and nearly all-powerful.
But she is still bound by the rules of the game, I realized. Even as a GM. Even with modified server code.
Then it came to me. My last chance. My long shot. My Hail Mary.
Bless you, bless you, Saintly, I thought to myself. The only question was whether it would work. Was the player behind Vierdimin vain enough?
“Okay,” I croaked out. “Mercy. Mercy! Please. You want to hear me grovel? You want to hear me say how amazing you are? I will! Just, please… have some pity on us.”
