Ergo, since he was in Hailey’s avatar’s vicinity and he’d managed to trap her in a small geographic location, all he needed to do was analyze the information sent to his implant regarding nearby world state, and it should be trivial to isolate information relevant to Hailey’s connection.
Pretty darn clever, honestly.
He smiled to himself as he peered through a small crevice between blocks which he’d managed to bring crashing down with his berserk-style charge. Hailey was inside glaring at the destroyed wall. The chamber beyond was only about ten feet square, probably a storeroom from Ishildar’s glory days.
“I can see you, you know,” she said. “Seekers can look through walls, remember?”
Aww crap. He’d forgotten that and had assumed that the hacker would figure he’d run off to get help.
“And I also can detect when enemies and people I’m not grouped with are activating abilities. I know you brought the wall down with one of your Frenzy attacks. Seriously, what gives, dude?”
He grimaced. Worse and worse. Though if he thought about it, maybe it didn’t matter if the hacker knew Emerson was onto him or her. The edge in Hailey’s voice continued to indicate nervousness, maybe even outright fear. Within the next half an hour, Emerson should have everything he needed to back up an accusation. And seeing as the worst this thief could do was log out, an operation that definitely left network fingerprints, the evildoer was pretty much toast.
His lip twitched as he pinned the thief with an icy glare. “All right, scum, we might as well stop pretending then, huh? I know what you did, you despicable cretin.”
Hailey was silent for a moment, a bewildered expression briefly flitting across her face before her lips curled up in a snarl. “What the hell, Emerson? Don’t know what your deal is, but would you stop staring at me like that?”
Emerson was about to ask whether his steely gaze was actually making her regret her unscrupulous life choices when Hailey’s hands and eyes began to glow. A bolt of energy shot from her fingers and impaled him through the eye.
You have been afflicted with: Crippling Self-Doubt.
Combat effectiveness reduced by 15%.
“Ow,” he said even though it didn’t hurt. “Jerk.”
He cupped a hand over his eye as he stepped back from the fallen wall and glanced at the output from his network analysis. The sooner this was over with, the better. Unfortunately, there was still nothing matching network patterns associated with Hailey’s avatar, or for that matter, traffic that indicated player communication. The analysis bot should have picked up something by now.
How was the hacker managing it? What had he missed?
The sound of a deep sigh traveled through the rubble, surprisingly audible given the situation. “Look,” Hailey said. “Despite your unforgivable treatment of me, I know enough about you to understand that is not your usual behavior. Given that you seem to be accusing me of some sort of crime, and since I have no clue what you’re talking about, I think there must be some sort of misunderstanding.”
Emerson slowly removed his hand from his eye and rubbed it with a knuckle. When he blinked a few times, he still saw the purple ghost of her spell’s light, but his vision didn’t seem to be damaged. Fists clenched, he stared at the rubble. Would a hacker actually admit to doing something wrong? No. But he knew the type, and their usual posture was one of defensiveness or aggression. This attempt to reason out the situation kinda did sound like Hailey. The results of his network analysis didn’t point to a hacker either—after further data processing, the analyzer had finally managed to isolate information about a mobile entity in the proper geographical location, but there was no player-facing network connection associated with it. It was like he was looking at the pattern for an NPC. But obviously that didn’t make sense.
“Hey. What happened?”
He whirled at the sound of Devon’s voice, and his knees went a little weak with relief. He could really use some help puzzling this out. But quick on the heels of that emotion followed the realization that he’d have to tell her, here and now, that her friend had died. Unless…what about his theory that this was some kind of harassment? It still wouldn’t explain the network weirdness or Hailey’s suspicious behavior, but everything else lined up. Somewhere along the line, he’d heard players mentioning that Hailey had been the target of malicious internet comments from the griefer guild that had attacked to Stonehaven. The more he thought about it, that could make sense after all. Maybe she hadn’t actually been nervous about his presence. Maybe she’d been—justifiably, perhaps—annoyed that he’d been disrupting their investigation.
He swallowed, totally at a loss for words as his thoughts whirled.
“Hey! Is it Devon? Are you there, Devon?”
Devon turned toward the rubble heap. “Hailey? What’s going on?”
“Your friend here collapsed the wall and trapped me, and he’s been accusing me of some kind of crime. Or of something nasty, anyway. He hasn’t actually been clear.”
Emerson cringed as Devon turned her gaze on him. “Emerson? There’s got to be a misunderstanding here, right?”
“Well I did knock down the wall, but I can explain.”
“Dev, can you get me out of here? I dunno…Levitate the blocks away or something?”
Devon blinked as if she hadn’t thought of moving the rubble that way, then nodded. As her hands began to glow, Emerson dashed forward and grabbed them. “Wait.”
The light faded, and for a split-second, Devon actually looked nervous. The expression was eerily similar to that which Hailey had been making for the last few hours.
“You’re doing it, too,” he said, gesturing at her face.
“Doing what?”
“Looking nervous.”
“Uh, well, my friend’s trapped and I don’t understand why.”
Emerson took a deep breath. “Listen for just a sec. I thought Hailey’s account had been hacked and that the person was pretending to be her character. I figured I must be making the hacker nervous because of my position with E-Squared. But now I’m starting to wonder if I was just horribly confused in some way. Is there something you’re not telling me?”
Devon stared at him like a confused kitten or something, her wide eyes blinking. She chewed her lip and glanced at the fallen wall.
“Tell me what you think of Bradley Williams,” she said abruptly. “I mean, really I want you to tell Hailey. So you might want to face her.”
“Uh…why?”
“Just trust me for a second.”
The thing was, he did trust her, so Emerson slowly turned to face the rubble. “I think Bradley Williams is misguided and that he’s had too much power for too long and that he’s horribly out of touch with the needs of the game world.”
“Okay, and how is he with people… I mean, does he have humanity’s best interests in mind?”
Emerson snorted. “No. Bradley Williams has Bradley Williams’ best interests in mind.”
“And if there were something you knew, even if it related to Relic Online’s technology—if you knew about something that would be terrible for Bradley Williams to find out, what would you do?”
He turned a confused look on Devon. “Didn’t we already go through this with Owen? We only told him what we thought would be best to keep Owen and the rest of the player base safe.”
“I know,” Devon said. “But could you please just answer the question specifically? If you knew something that could be hurtful in Bradley Williams’ hands, would you tell him about it because he’s your boss?”
Emerson grimaced. “What? No. Definitely not. The truth is, lately I’ve been so disgusted with him that I want to quit working for E-Squared. Except if I do that, there’s no one around to protect the players. There’s no one around to make sure that you guys keep your jobs.” He swallowed as he looked at Devon. Okay. Time to take the plunge. “Don’t think I haven’t seriously considered it, if only because
of…because of us. I know it must be kind of nerve-wracking to think about dating your boss, Devon—I mean, not that I’m assuming anything. We can absolutely just stay friends if that’s what you prefer. But anyway, yeah. No, I mean. I wouldn’t tell Bradley something that could be harmful. The guy’s pretty much a sociopath.”
Devon seemed to need a moment to master her emotions. “We can talk about that other stuff later, and for what it’s worth, you’re not an idiot for thinking that I might be interested. Right now though, I really need Hailey’s help. We have kind of an urgent situation going on.”
She turned toward the rubble and stepped closer. “Hailey? What do you think? I’ll follow your lead here.”
She pressed her ear to one of the gaps so that Hailey could speak quietly. Emerson couldn’t hear the other woman’s words, but he could guess they aligned with Devon’s hopes based on her nods. After a moment she turned back to him. “Okay, so this really isn’t a subject for a super quick conversation, but that’s all we have time for. So…” She paused while glancing around the scene, and gestured to a bench. “Hailey hasn’t been hacked. She’s the same, somewhat short-tempered gamer she’s always been. So I’m going to let her out, and then we’ll explain as best we can. Can you trust me on that?”
“I…sure.”
Emerson shuffled to the bench while Devon once again began making the casting motions for Levitate. He felt exhausted, like he’d been hit by an emotional rogue wave or something. Or maybe by an emotional landslide like when a dump truck raises one end of its bed and lets a bunch of dirt and rocks fall out.
Anyway. Like some sort of clever metaphor that left him feeling kind of flattened or pounded or something. He was glad he wasn’t in charge of creating content for this game, that his AI managed to come up with all the quest text and stuff because describing things was hard. But deciding to trust Devon was easy. So he took a seat on the bench and waited.
Chapter Forty
“WHOA,” EMERSON SAID, his gaze distant. “I mean, jeez. Yeah, I can see why it’s complicated.” He turned to Hailey. “Are you sure? As in, you still feel self-aware and not like some sort of automaton just slaved to whatever pattern this…arcane AI cooked up?”
Hailey raised an eyebrow. “Um, well… I mean, if I were just a machine following some pattern, but I had enough meta-perspective to realize it, wouldn’t that make me self-aware anyway?”
Emerson’s mouth twisted as he pondered this. “Yeah, I guess so.” He blinked and shook his head as if still trying to come to terms with the situation. “Crazy stuff. And that’s without even considering that this whole situation was made possible by an emergent, self-creating AI.” He glanced at Bob, who had arrived during the explanation and now perched on Hailey’s shoulder.
Yeah, that was something Devon hadn’t put much thought toward, given everything else that had been occupying her mind lately. It didn’t surprise her that Emerson latched onto it, being an AI programmer and all. As much as she wanted to give him the time to process and ask more questions, a demon army would soon be marching into the city unless she could find this Throne of the Ancients and figure out how to use it to save the world. So, enough chitchat.
“Sorry to interrupt, but back to the war against the hellspawn,” she said.
Her friends turned to look at her, their expressions quickly turning businesslike. Hailey spoke first. “I know you were hoping for results, but the truth is, Owen and I weren’t making a ton of progress for a variety of reasons.” She glanced at Emerson, who blushed a little. “So we decided to split up and work through the high-priority structures methodically. The settlement interface doesn’t show locations for the buildings, so we’re trying to cover ground quickly by walking the streets and using our discovery experience notifications to know whether the structures are on the important list.”
“Well, the good news is I know what we’re looking for now. Have either of you checked out something called the Throne of the Ancients?”
Hailey shook her head slowly as her gaze went distant, no doubt due to her focus on the user interface. “I think I remember—yeah, there. It’s in the uppermost tier of buildings, but looks like neither of us has found it.”
Devon felt her shoulders slump a little. Damn. “Okay, well then—”
“Devon.”
She turned at the sound of Owen’s voice, and couldn’t help feeling a pang of guilt at the sight of his haggard appearance. Dark circles surrounded his hollow eyes, and his monk’s garb hung off a skeletal frame.
“I guess someone from the square told you I was looking for you guys?” she asked.
Her guildmate looked perplexed for a moment, then shook his head. “I finally have something from the pattern. I saw the currents change, the shifting of potential. It happened late morning.”
Devon’s pulse quickened. “That was around the time Queen Kiela mentioned the Throne of the Ancients,” she said.
Owen’s eyes widened, and his face took on more color, heightening his feverish appearance. “Yes! That’s it. If you can pull the threads together, join with the light by weaving them at the nexus—”
“Okay, great,” Devon said, cutting off the obscure explanation, “so can you tell me how to find it?”
He cocked his head and stared at the ground for a while. “No…it seems that you’re the only one who knows how to find it. The rest of us are just bystanders.”
Uh. That wasn’t very helpful. How was she supposed to single-handedly locate a single throne in the middle of a giant ruined city?
In the back of her mind, she still felt the plodding thoughts of the Stone Guardians. Could they help? As she focused on the nearest and gently asked it to approach, a popup flashed to life in her vision.
Ziggurat of the Damned has been completed.
Benefits conferred by the Veian Temple are no longer active.
She staggered as the buff icon, Ishildar’s Blessing, faded from her interface.
Crap.
“Run to the square,” she said to Emerson. “Tell them the demons are coming.”
Chapter Forty-One
“ALL RIGHT, PEOPLE,” Nil said. “I detected a few failed authentication attempts on our private forum. So I’ve wiped the history for now, and from here on in, we’re sticking with the radio silence out of game. I mean it. Not even a PM to your mom, okay? The only communication allowed is through those of us in contact with Jeremy. The latest word is that we’ll be attacking within the next hour or two, so don’t be assholes and idiots. Now let’s keep moving.”
Ashley sighed as she rolled over in the grass. The whole stupid raid group was, at the moment, belly crawling across this endless grassland because this Jeremy guy had insisted they avoid going through the old ruined city to reach their target. Apparently, Devon had some way to sense things that happened in the city’s borders, so it would just give the whole operation away. So after they’d come out of that godawful chasm and plateau area, they’d detoured around the eastern edge of Ishildar, skirting the Argenthal mountains. Now they had to approach through the fricking grassland, where there was jack-all for cover unless you were under twelve inches tall.
Or unless you belly crawled.
Regardless, they’d nearly reached the area that had been uncovered on her map the last time the guild had attacked Stonehaven, so Ashley could finally get a notion of their distance to the goal. Just a mile or two, which was a crappy amount of belly crawling, but she assumed that once they moved into the shadow of that cliff that protected Stonehaven—finally gaining some cover—they’d be able to cross the ground more quickly.
She couldn’t wait for this expedition to be over with. Already, she imagined the look on Nil’s face once, after he’d promoted her to lieutenant for executing things so perfectly on this raid, she turned around and used the promotion to recruit the final people she needed for her betrayal.
It was going to be awesome.
Even if she had to massa
cre Stonehaven’s NPC citizens and torture Devon and her player allies by spawn camping them for a couple of days.
As she crawled forward, she noticed that Nil had stopped moving. He seemed to be watching her as if waiting for her to catch up.
“Need something?” she said as she drew even with him.
Sharply cut features and a twisted mouth remained still for a long pause while he stared at her. “You take this as seriously as I do, don’t you? I can tell. It’s like…you’re so intense. I like that.”
She clenched her jaw. Was she going to have to deal with him talking to her all the way to their destination?
“Thought you might want the honor of advancing by my side,” Nil said. “It’s the best way I know to thank you for your loyalty.”
She swallowed back bile. Yeah, seemed so.
Chapter Forty-Two
TOO LATE.
Even as Devon focused on her Stone Guardians and directed them to march for the southern border of Ishildar where they could, maybe, buy the defenders just a little more time before the demons overran the city, the words ran through her mind again and again.
Too late, too late. Too late.
But she kept trying anyway. The demons wouldn’t take the city without a fight, battling the best resistance she could muster.
She put all her concentration to the task, focusing her perception on what she could see from the vantages of her golem defenders, desperately looking for tactical advantages she could use. Even so, she couldn’t shut out the sight of Owen, Hailey, and Emerson standing in a tight group near her physical body. They spoke in clipped tones, and Hailey kept asking the same question over and over. Was there nothing they could do to help Devon find the Throne of the Ancients? And every time, Owen shook his head in response. It was up to Devon now, he kept saying, his facial expression inviting no argument.
Throne of the Ancients: A LitRPG Adventure (Stonehaven League Book 6) Page 24
