by Rachel Aaron
“Hey, you didn’t know,” SilentBlayde said gently. “But do we have any food for Neko? If the old eating and drinking mechanics still work, then she might be able to eat to recover her mana pool.”
Tina shook her head. “We’ve all eaten it already. Twenty loaves of bread split between thirty-nine people goes fast, and there’s nothing edible in this wasteland. Just bones and dust.” She kicked the ashen dirt at their feet.
“What about conjured food?” SB asked, his eyes brightening. “I’ve always wanted to know what mana cake tasted like!”
“Good call,” Tina said. “Let’s see.”
They jogged together back to the raid and snagged a Sorcerer named Bobinator. Five minutes of conjuring later, and everyone was holding a piping-hot mana cake. Mouths watered at the fluffy white cupcakes, which were each as big as Tina’s fist and topped with whirls of pink frosting. Tina could smell the sweetness of their sugar on the air, but she didn’t have mana, so she restrained herself from eating one, which might have been the hardest thing she’d ever had to do.
“How’s it taste?” she asked hungrily.
“Sooo goood,” Neko moaned around a mouthful of frosting. “And I certainly feel better!”
“Yeah, but the Bobinator over there looks worse for it,” said SB, pointing at the Sorcerer, who was lying flat on the ground, chest heaving and face pale.
Tina sighed. “Looks like we’re shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic.”
“Nothing else you could be doing,” Frank said, walking over to join them. “No matter where you go, the law of conservation of energy still applies.”
“What do you mean?” Tina asked.
“Well,” Frank said, his thick Southern accent making the word sound more like wheel. “I don’t know much about mana, but there’s nowhere in the universe where you can get something for nothing. Once you take out the video-game part, it makes sense that it’d become impossible for someone to make something out of his energy that gives another person more energy than he put in.”
That did make a depressing amount of sense. “There goes our last good idea,” Tina said, kicking a rock. “I’m so stupid. I should have been prioritizing food for the healers this whole time.” She shook her head angrily. “We’ll just have to deal. At this point, we’ll make it, or we won’t. As simple as that.”
None of the others looked happy about that. “We can’t keep going like this,” SB said quietly as Frank pulled the Bobinator back to his feet. “If we get in a serious fight, all of our healers might be OOM before we finish.”
“I know,” Tina snapped.
SB flinched at her harsh tone, and Tina cringed.
“Sorry,” she said. “But stopping’s not an option. We’ll just have to make it work until we get somewhere with food. Once we get to the Order’s fortress, things will be better. It can’t be that much farther. We just have to push through.”
“Right,” SilentBlayde said, but he didn’t sound convinced. Honestly, Tina wasn’t, either, but there was really was nothing else to do but keep going, so she climbed on top of a rock to address the raid.
The faces that looked up when she clanged her shield for attention were tired, dusty, and miserable, and Tina was about to make it worse. Knowing that made her feel like a villain, but there was nothing for it. This was the reality, so Tina cleared her throat of gravel and started explaining the new rules of food, healing, mana recovery, and ammunition.
Many of the spell casters nodded, as though she were confirming something they’d all suspected. The Rangers, however, looked shocked, peering over their shoulders in alarm at the half-empty quivers on their backs.
“I know,” Tina said when they looked at her in panic. “I wish I’d figured this out earlier, too. But it is what it is. Until we solve our mana and ammo problem, though, all casters, Rangers, and anyone else who uses mana or consumable items won’t be fighting unless I specifically order you to. This includes Assassin special abilities like throwing knives and poisons. Instead, we’re gonna rely on the melee fighters—people whose abilities don’t use up limited resources—to deal with any monsters we run into.”
This announcement was met with a lot of cries of “No fair!” and “Boring!” and Tina’s glare hardened.
“It’s not about fun anymore!” she bellowed. “Maybe you haven’t noticed, but shit got real! If we use up our ammo and mana on stupid crap, then we risk having no mana or arrows if we have to face that.”
She pointed at the now barely visible plume of dust rising from the Once King’s army, many miles behind them, and the whole raid began to grumble.
“Who cares about that thing?” someone shouted.
“Yeah! It’s slow as hell!” another yelled.
“This sucks!”
Tina banged on her shield. “Stop bitching!” she yelled. “This isn’t going to last forever. We just have to make it across the zone to the Order of the Golden Sun’s fortress. Many of us have legendary status with the Order. We should be able to walk in, get resupplied, and kick the dust of this place from our heels as we walk through the portal to Bastion. Once we make it back to the city, you can go do whatever you want, but right now, we have to stay together and stay alive, and the way we do that is by getting out of the Deadlands before Grel’Darm the Colossal catches us.”
“So what?” said a Berserker. It was the same asshole with the black hair and ridiculously oversize ax that had given her trouble before, and Tina glared at him murderously.
“So what what?”
“So what if Grel catches us?” the Berserker said, stepping to the front of the crowd. “You guys have him on farm status, right?”
“The Roughnecks do,” Tina said. “But you’re not my core raiders. With a random group like this, untrained, with limited mana and ammo, we’ll be wiped out for sure.”
“So what?” the Berserker said again, tilting his head back to look her in the eyes. “Wiping sucks, but the graveyard’s right over there. Who knows? If we all die, maybe he’ll break aggro and go back to the mountain. Even if he doesn’t, fighting’s better than another hour on your death march.”
There was some discreet applause at this, and Tina clenched her jaw. She didn’t know the Berserker’s name without nameplates, but she’d seen him fight enough now to know that he was a meathead who never got his position right, ignored orders, hit the other melee with his sweep attacks, and had generally failed at everything Tina had asked of him far. But what really annoyed her wasn’t that she was having to deal with this asshole. It was that the Berserker seemed to have a lot of support in the crowd.
All around him, tired raiders were nodding. Tina couldn’t comprehend why. After experiencing the very real pain of this new world, why anyone would want to risk dying rather than running made zero sense to her. She wasn’t about to let this moron’s contagious idiocy get them killed, though, so she hopped down off the rock.
“Fine, asshole,” she said, drawing her sword. “You want to get us all killed? You first. Prove that the graveyard works, or shut up and march.”
Her opponent carefully unfastened his ax. When it was free, he grabbed it in both hands, flexing his Atlas-sized shoulders beneath his plate-and-mail armor. “Fat chance, bitch. I’m not here to give you a show. I’m just saying we should man up and go kill the bastard that we came here today to fight instead of running like little bitch cowards.”
“Right,” Tina said flatly. “And the chance that we might permanently die in the process didn’t even cross your mind. We’ve already lost—” She froze, her shame trapping the perfect comeback in her throat. Now would have been a great time to bring up the Sorcerer she’d let die back at the Dead Mountain, but using the poor nameless player as evidence for someone as stupid as the Berserker was being felt like an insult to his memory, and it didn’t help that Tina was in no hurry to admit her failures to this meathead. Even if she had been, she didn’t think it would do any good. This guy’s problems clearly had nothing to do with facts, nor did the ample
evidence that this was not the old FFO seem to bother any of the players agreeing with him.
“I bet we pop right back up at the graveyard,” he went on, propping his ax on the ground. “Lots of game stuff still works. Why not that?”
“Because a lot of other game stuff doesn’t work,” Tina snapped. “I’m not going to let you risk everyone’s lives just because you’re bored. It takes a special kind of asshole to gamble other people like that.”
“Better an asshole than a bossy bitch,” he spat back at her. “You’re so busy playing commander, I bet you don’t even know my name yet.”
There were some corroborating oohs from the crowd, and Tina winced. She didn’t know his name, mostly because she’d been too busy to find out. If she’d been less angry, this would have been a good place to grudgingly apologize and ask, but Tina’s capacity for being reasonable had been thinning with every foot she’d had to shove this raid down the road. Now that she was being taunted by the asshole at the heart of it, her patience had gone from thin to nonexistent.
“I don’t have a clue what your name is,” she growled. “And I don’t give a shit. I only bother learning the names of people I want to know. Not some stands-in-fire, hits-your-friends, bullheaded moron. You’re so bad at this shit, I bet you bought that gear you’re wearing.”
“You really are a fucking Care Bear tank if you don’t know what this is!” he cried, holding up his giant ax for her to see. “I got this shit the man’s way, by kicking other players’ asses!”
Just when Tina thought she couldn’t get any madder, he pushed her to new heights. “You son of a bitch!” she yelled, shaking the ground in her fury. “You came to a raid in PVP gear? That shit’s worthless unless you’re dueling other players! Did you think we were just going to carry your lazy ass through the dungeon?”
The Berserker sneered. “Gear doesn’t matter. It’s how well I fight that counts.”
“I’ve seen how well you fight,” Tina snarled. “You’re better off relying on gear.”
“Oh yeah? Bring it and see.” He looked her straight in the eyes. “Cunt.”
Chapter 6
James
“You put us in a difficult position.”
James began to sweat. Across the lodge, Arbati was hunched over the still form of his sister, glaring at James as if he needed only a hint of the elder’s approval before ripping James’s throat out. But Gray Fang gave no such order. She just sat there, staring at James through the rising pipe smoke with yellow, considering eyes.
“I don’t understand most of what you just said,” she admitted. “But I know the sound of truth when I hear it.”
“Grandmother!” Arbati hissed, but the old cheetah woman held up her hand.
“I believe you when you say you wish to help us,” she went on, keeping her eyes locked on James. “But as much as I want to save Lilac, I cannot ask a player for help. You have done too much, hurt too many for too long. There is nothing that will make my people trust one of your kind after eighty years of suffering. All I want is for you to be gone from our lands before you cause any more trouble.”
James slumped. Banished to the savanna, it was, then. At least he wouldn’t have to fight his way out of the village now, so that was something, but it still felt like he’d failed. Even in his pretend home, they thought he was more trouble than he was worth.
He was getting good and depressed about that when Gray Fang said, “Unless.”
James froze. “Unless what?”
The old woman’s eyes grew sly. “Unless you were willing to change,” she said, leaning forward on her pillow. “We could never accept a player’s help after all your kind has done, but if you were no longer a player—if you became one of us—there would be no such trouble.”
“Become one of you?” James repeated, glancing at Arbati, who looked ready to explode. “How?”
“You just said how much you respected my people,” Gray Fang reminded him. “If that is true, I will allow you to petition to join the Four Clans.”
“Grandmother, no!” Arbati said, horrified. “A player among the clans? It would be an insult!”
“If he’s one of us, he won’t be a player anymore,” the elder pointed out, giving him a weighty look before turning back to James. “I will set you a trial by which you may prove yourself worthy. If you pass, and if you can find someone who is willing to sponsor you, then you will become one of the Four Clans the same as if you were born in our village.”
James couldn’t believe his ears. “I would love to join the clans,” he said. “But didn’t you just say you wanted me gone?”
“I would like nothing better,” Gray Fang replied with stinging honesty. “But for Lilac to survive eighty years of nightmare only to die now, in the first moments of our freedom…” She shook her head. “It is too bitter. If you are even half as powerful as you claim, I cannot afford to reject your help, and this is the only way I know to make my people accept it.”
“I’ll do it,” James said immediately. “What’s my trial?”
The elder looked down at the jubatus girl on the stretcher. “Save my granddaughter. If you can smash the orb of the lich in Red Canyon before the next dawn breaks, we will welcome you as one of our own. If your power is truly what you say, then it should be an easy task. But if you have lied, and Lilac becomes undead, you will be named an enemy of the clans and hunted to the ends of the savanna. Those are the terms of the trial. Do you accept?”
She said that like a threat, but James felt a rush of relief. Joining the village of Windy Lake was a better possibility than he’d known to hope for. In one night’s work, he could go from hated outsider to hero of the village. Not only would he save the place he’d come to think of as home, but he’d earn himself a haven. Somewhere he could be safe in this new, confusing world that hated him and all his kind. That sounded like a miracle after the events of this morning, and James bowed his head. “Thank you, Elder Gray Fang,” he said humbly. “I accept the trial.”
The elder nodded, but her hard scowl remained. “I hope you succeed for Lilac’s sake, but don’t think this will fix everything. Joining the clans will not erase our anger. All it will do is grant you the rights of a clanship and make it harder for any jubatus to abuse you, at least in obvious ways. In return, you will accept the responsibilities of our community and be bound by clan law. This is not a free ticket. We all help each other around here. Life on the savanna is neither easy nor peaceful.”
James had quested in this zone long enough to know that much, but he had his own stipulation. “I’m okay with all of that,” he said. “And I’m happy to help however I can, with Lilac or here in the village, but I still need the freedom to search for a way back home. So long as I can do that in addition to my clan duties, there’s no problem.”
“We can work it out,” Gray Fang said. “Honestly, everyone will be much happier to see you go back to your own people rather than trying to fit in around here. But we’ve wasted enough time fighting each other. Come.”
The old cheetah lady gestured for him to approach. Cautiously, James obeyed, walking forward and lowering himself until he was kneeling in front of her. When he was still, she reached for the mask covering his face, crumbling the already cracked clay with the barest touch of her fingers.
“There,” she said, brushing the dust from his fur. “Do not make me regret this.”
“I won’t,” James promised, blinking as his full magical sight came rushing back. “Thank you.”
She nodded curtly and stood up, turning to her grandson, who’d been watching their conversation like it was a horror movie. “Cut him free.”
Growling so loudly it echoed off the lodge’s rafters, Arbati obeyed, cutting the leather strap that bound James’s hands with a slash of his long knife. When he was free, Gray Fang led them both outside, where, to James’s surprise, a large crowd was waiting in the square. Their hushed conversations dropped off as the elder emerged, then fell to dead silence when James
came out behind her, unmasked and unbound.
“I cannot cure Scout Lilac,” Gray Fang announced to the gathered jubatus. “Her wound is cursed by magics I cannot touch. As in the Nightmare, the Poisoned Patrol event proceeds beyond our control, but we are no longer bound to be helpless.” She waved her hand at James standing behind her. “This player wishes to join our tribe. After judging his character, I have accepted his petition on the condition that he use his power to defeat the undead at Red Canyon and save Lilac Clawborn from undeath.”
The crowd began to hiss.
“We cannot accept this!” cried an old jubatus at the front, a scarred warrior whose muscular body still looked quite capable of ripping James apart despite his graying fur. “You’d trust one of the monsters who enslaved us with saving my daughter? And welcome it into our village?” He spat on the dusty ground. “You know that thing is not the jubatus that it appears to be. We should kill it now, before it does something worse!”
The naked hatred in his voice made James take a step back, but Gray Fang didn’t look intimidated in the least. She just leveled the same quiet, implacable gaze on Lilac’s father that she’d used on James. “I feel the same as you,” she said calmly. “But we cannot afford to let the hate of the past blind us to the needs of the present. If Lilac is to live, we need to send someone with a player’s power. If this James wishes to prove himself by saving our child, we should give him a chance.”
“A chance to betray us!” cried Lilac’s father. “He is unknown, untrustworthy, and dangerous! We don’t even need him.” He looked proudly up at Arbati. “My son can lead our warriors to victory!”
The crowd began to nod in agreement, and Gray Fang’s mouth pressed into a hard line. But though James could see her plotting how best to defend her decision, there was no time to go through all of this again. The sun was already high in the sky, and he owed the elder for taking a chance on him, so before she could say a word, James came to his own defense.
“You do need me, because you guys can’t win this alone.”
