by S. R. Witt
“Saint, I like you. This has been a good run, but I can’t keep logging these kinds of hours in-Game. I have a job, and it’s not here.”
Havelock wouldn’t meet my eyes. He cleared his throat. “I hate to admit it when Indira’s right, about anything, but I can’t keep pushing like this, kid. I don’t have a cushy office job, either. In a few hours, I’ve gotta get up and haul trash. It’s time for me to call it off.”
Cringer shook his head, and his beard rasped across his breastplate. “I don’t care about school, but if they’re all quitting, then the two of us can’t go on alone. It’d be suicide.”
Mercy said nothing, but the yawn she hid behind her clawed fingers spoke volumes.
Even Bastion kept quiet, which pissed me off to no end. Why wouldn’t he speak up and help me keep these fools moving in the right direction? His ass was on the line as much as mine.
I ground my teeth in frustration. I didn’t want to do this, but telling the truth was the only chance I had. No in-Game reason would convince Indira to go on, and if I couldn’t swing her to my side, I’d never get the others on board. The only play I had left was to tug at her heart strings.
“Look. Let me put my cards on the table. My mother is sick. She had an accident at work, and she’s been fighting off a nanite infection for over a year. If she doesn’t get her medicine, if we can’t pay the rent on her machines, she’ll die.”
The rest of the party stared at me, their faces a mixture of disbelief and guilt. Indira’s eyes burrowed into mine, unblinking. She said nothing, and her silence held the rest of them in check.
Please, I thought. Please believe me.
“Damn you, Saint.” She rubbed her eyes with the palms of her hands. “I believe you. I don’t want to, and I hate you for bringing your real world garbage into my game, but I believe you.”
“Thank you,” I said, choking with the emotion her words dragged out of my exhausted heart. “I appreciate your help. You have no idea how much it means to me.”
She waved my words away. “I don’t want to hear it. I’m pissed at you for the emotional blackmail. I’ll help you. But I have to sleep, and I have to work. You have to give me sixteen hours before we keep going.”
Cringer stretched his arms over his head and rotated his neck until it cracked like a sheet of thawing ice. “If the Ice Queen’s heart is melting, I have to be here to see that. Who knows, maybe she’ll take pity on me and answer one of my booty calls. I’ll be back in 16, kid.”
Havelock yawned and rubbed his eyes. “Okay, I can be back then, too. I want to see this through.”
Mercy nodded to me. Her eyes sparkled with unshed tears, and her relief and support shook me more than I’d expected. “Sixteen hours.”
The strength leaked out of my body when I realized I still had a team behind me. Sixteen hours was a long, long time. Maybe we’d be too late. But at least there was still a chance. That just left the logistical problems of leaving the game outside of a safe space.
The rules were crystal clear on this point. If you left Invernoth in a dangerous area, which was anywhere the game didn’t consider secure from threats, your character stayed in-Game for a random period of time. Until it left, anything could happen. Monsters could kill you, bandits could rob you, and other characters could even drag you somewhere and leave you to rot.
“I’ll stand watch until the rest of you log out, just to keep an eye on your bodies, and I’ll log back on early tomorrow to make sure the coast is clear before you all come back.” I owed them that much. “You’ll be safe until we’re all together again.”
Everyone was too tired for more talk and too emotional to stick around any longer. They closed their eyes and went to sleep. Red “AFK” placards floated above their heads, identifying them as logged out, but still vulnerable.
Bastion stuck with me after the rest had pulled the plug. “That was close,” he said. “I thought the whole thing was going to fall apart.”
Really could have used your help, I wanted to say but held my tongue. If Bastion had kept his mouth shut, he had a reason, I just didn’t feel like hearing whatever excuses he’d trot out to justify his silence. Fighting with my brother didn’t seem like a productive use of my time.
“Let’s hope the time we lose doesn’t end up costing us everything,” I said.
Bastion winced at the harsh edge to my words, and I shook my head. “Sorry. I’m tired. Go on, get out of here. I’ll keep an eye on things and make sure no one gets eaten by a wandering monster.”
“Seeya on the other side, bro.” Bastion shot me a thumb’s up and logged out.
I sat in the little cabin as snow fell outside. The wind howled like a starving wolf.
I wondered if I’d bitten off more than I could chew, and hoped we weren’t already too late.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
Bastion volunteered to keep an eye on our mom, so I could sleep and then get right back into the game. After hibernating for a solid eight hours that passed in the blink of an eye, it was time to for me to take a look-see at what was happening in Invernoth.
I expected the worst because eight hours outside of Dragon Web Online was most of two days in-Game, and there was no telling what had happened in and around the little cabin after that much time. For all I knew, Corvus and her beast-man buddies had already made it to the Crumbling Temple, taken the Burning Key, and headed back to Frosthold to claim the Burning Throne and its Dominion.
There were no goblins or other bloodthirsty monsters in the cabin with me when I logged back in, which was a good sign. The snow had stopped, and the wind no longer spat frost at the shutters or screamed through the eaves. I peeked between the cracked shutters that remained over the windows and saw nothing in front of the cabin. Out back, the hobbled horses still nibbled at the grass and seemed no worse for wear.
I hoped the game pulled them out while we were gone because it seemed cruel for them to have had to stand around waiting for us to return. Being an artificial intelligence in a game like this must be very strange. People popping in and out of existence all the time, fleeting figures moving through the world at the speed of thought while you plodded along living a life that was, to you, reality.
I tried not to think about it too hard, tried to push the game aspects out of my mind as much as possible. Wasn’t the point of a virtual reality simulation to immerse yourself in a different world instead of wondering why it wasn’t like your old one?
The fire we’d left in the hearth had long since dwindled to dull red embers. I spent a few hours gathering a big pile of dead branches from the snow outside and broke them into short chunks.
It took a while to get the fire going again, and by the time the first flames were sending smoke up the chimney, Bastion had joined me.
One second he wasn’t there, and the next he was. “All clear?” he asked.
“Yeah, surprisingly so.” I peeked out the window again. “I don’t see anything out there.”
He hunkered down by the fire and warmed his hands. “You sure this is going to work?”
Bastion’s doubt hurt. When we’d started this mess together, I relied on my brother’s experience and skills to pave the way for me. He’d planned for me to back him up, but it wasn’t working out that way. More and more of the decisions fell on my shoulders, and I didn’t like it. It was a lot more comfortable to back Bastion’s play and let him take the glory if we won or the heat if we failed.
“What do you think?” I asked.
“I don’t have much to work with. We’re all going off what you’ve told us about the Burning Throne. If you think it’s important to stop these freaks, I’m with you. I just hope they’re taking breaks when we do.”
“They can’t be playing forever,” Indira snapped, startling Bastion and me with her sudden appearance. “There are safeguards built into the game to keep players from spending every waking moment plugged in.”
She was right, but not as much as she thought. “The game encourages
eight hours of downtime a day, but there’s nothing to enforce it. You just get one of those little flashing red boxes warning you when you’ve been in the game too long.”
“Yeah, but that’s really annoying,” Cringer said as he faded into view from the shadows cast by the fire. “How could you play with one of those warning boxes flashing over half your view all the time?”
Havelock answered. “It’s a user interface thing. They could block the alerts, or have them auto-minimize. A little bit of scripting in the GUI config files and you can pretty much make the interface do whatever you want.”
We all stared at the old dwarf talking like a smart-assed script kiddy. I knew he was school-aged, but that could be anything from a couple years younger than me, to ten years old. The cognitive dissonance between what I saw and what I heard gave me a headache.
Indira hoisted her backpack onto her shoulders. “We can’t sit around all day talking about how to get the best user experience. Let’s get on the horses and ride.”
Gratitude at her insistence to get the show on the road warred with a sneaking suspicion that Indira was trying to take charge of this expedition. Now that she was committed to what we were doing, she’d want to make sure we did it the way she wanted it done.
Still, I couldn’t argue with her desire to get moving. “The horses are around back. They’re still saddled up, and it doesn’t look like they’ve suffered for it. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We need to keep a close eye out for traps or ambushes for the rest of this trip. Corvus and her allies might have a head start on us, and I’m sure they’ve used the extra time to prepare a nasty surprise or three.”
Indira shoved the door open and turned back to me, wind whipping her hair around her head like a flickering aura of golden flame. “Then I guess you better get your ass moving and scout for us.”
I caught the door before it could slam closed and ushered the rest of the team outside. Havelock elbowed me in the ribs on his way to the door and said, “I think she likes you, kid. If you get a chance, you should tap that elven ass.”
Indira was too far ahead to hear his remark, but it got laughs from the rest of the crew. Including a throaty chuckle from Mercy that hurt my feelings, more than it should have.
“Laugh it up, dickheads. I’m going to let the rest of you ride right into an ambush.”
That got even more laughs, and we spilled out of the cabin and into the snow in a much better mood than we had any right to enjoy.
There was an invading army on its way to our hometown and a ruthless enemy ahead of us. There was no telling what either of those dark forces was up to. We had no way of knowing if we’d return to find Frosthold burned to the ground or a new ruler grinding the old residents underfoot.
Still, we had a plan of action, we were all in this together, and sometimes that’s all you need. Pick a course, gather up your friends, and forge ahead.
And that’s what we did for the rest of the day. I followed the in-Game map on a path over hills and down into narrow valleys, eyes peeled for enemies or dangers ahead of us.
It was getting toward dark when Mercy pointed at something off to the side of the road. “There.”
She’d been riding ahead of the group with me for the last couple of hours, a welcome second set of eyes. I followed her over to the edge of the road to the edge of a dense forest. She slipped off her horse and slung the reins over the branch of a tree, and I followed suit. We crept through the dense undergrowth, silent as shadows, neither of us so much as disturbing the snow on the branches we slipped under and around them like a pair of ghosts.
I was about to ask her how she’d spotted anything so deep within the forest, but then I saw it, too. A campsite, or rather, a site where someone had camped. All that remained to mark it was a pile of charred sticks, some ashes on the snow, and a trickle of wood smoke leaking up through the trees to the gray sky.
“You think they were here?” I asked, voice so quiet I wasn’t sure she heard.
Mercy didn’t respond but crouched to survey our surroundings. She gestured at a broken sapling and some hastily covered tracks that were bigger than any man’s foot. “Whoever made these was too heavy to ride a horse. Sound like anyone you know?”
The dark memory of an enormous ogre wearing a death’s head helm swam up out of the darkness of my subconscious. “Yeah, they’ve got an ogre with them. There’s no way he could ride a horse.”
She peered at the snow. “They’ve got dogs with them, too, but there’s something wrong with their prints.”
“Not dogs. Wargrai. That’s the wolf-woman archer.”
Mercy shook her head. “There’s more than one. At least five of them. Maybe more.”
We hustled back to the horses, encouraged by what we’d seen, even if the number of wargrai was alarming. I handed Mercy her horse’s reins and swung up into my saddle. “If they have to walk at his pace, then they’re probably resting more often, too. We might be closer to them than we thought.”
The thought made me shiver more intensely than the cold. Corvus and her posse could be out here anywhere, hiding in the shadows and waiting for their chance to strike. We were close to them, but that meant they could be anywhere.
We rode on through the forest, eager to reach our destination and even more eager to avoid a surprise. Mercy scanned the left side of the road, and I scanned the terrain ahead and to our right. The sun was sinking, and the footing became more treacherous, slowing our horses, but the in-Game map showed me we were very close to the Crumbling Temple.
Mercy and I passed through a rusted iron gate that marked the boundary of the Temple’s territory. The snowy earth transformed into a stony road that was sheltered from the blowing snow by twin rows of massive ironwood trees. The gigantic trunks blocked the wind and snow, and their branches interlocked overhead to form a canopy that obliterated the sky and made it feel as if we were already deep inside a dungeon.
“Cozy,” I quipped, trying to deny the fear taking root deep in my heart.
It didn’t take long before we found how the Temple got its name. The road plunged over the edge of a massive sinkhole to become a narrow ledge winding its way deep into the earth like a worm through an apple core. The Crumbling Temple hunkered at the bottom of the sinkhole, it’s cracked dome glowing an ominous crimson from the ring of bonfires surrounding it.
Shadows patrolled the Temple’s perimeter, and a sonorous, droning chant from countless raised voices echoed from within its darkened heart.
My breath caught in my throat like a jagged fishbone. A stab of dread slipped between my ribs and tickled my heart. This was not what I’d expected.
Years of playing adventure games and reading fantasy novels had conditioned me to expect a crumbling, monster-haunted dungeon. In my head, the Crumbling Temple was a ruined site with maybe a handful of monster protecting its meager treasures.
What I saw down at the bottom of the sinkhole was something entirely different.
Something much worse.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
Mercy and I turned away from the Temple and headed back to round up the rest of the party. The mini-map would guide them to the Temple, but I didn’t want them to see it before I had a chance to cushion the blow. What I was going to tell them wasn’t coming in to focus, and Mercy let me ponder the problem in silence as we rode.
We crested a hill, the dying sun streaming over our shoulders, and Bastion waved at us. I raised my hand to wave back, but let it fall, perplexed by the cloud of glittering snow crystals I saw in the distance.
I leaned toward Mercy, and asked, “Any idea what that is?”
She shook her head. “Could be anything, could be nothing.”
Or, it could be some new nightmare jumping into the mix. I didn’t trust anything, not anymore, and I sure wasn’t going to take any chances when we were this close to our goal. “Split around that hill of trees over there, maybe you can get a glimpse of whatever the hell that is before it catches up to us.
Mercy shivered and huddled down into her fur cloak. The dragonborn was tough as nails, but she couldn’t handle the cold. For a moment, I thought she was going to tell me to get stuffed, but then she gave me a brisk nod and pulled her hood up tighter around her face. “All right. If I see anything, I’ll give you a signal.”
That made me chuckle. With the constant noise from the wind and the sound of our horses and the jingle of our equipment, I wouldn’t be able to hear anything. “Make it a loud one,” I said and smacked her horse on the rump.
She clutched the reins and steered the big animal away down the hill. She called back over her shoulder, “Don’t worry, you won’t miss it.”
I watched her leave, a fist of anxiety clenched around my heart. A few moments passed before the blowing snow and the shadows of the coming dusk swallowed her up. I hoped she’d be all right.
I hoped we’d all be all right.
By the time I road down to meet the rest of the group, I knew something was wrong. The rest of the team did, too. Havelock wrestled his horse up alongside me, knuckles white on the reins, teeth clenched with anxiety. “Where’s Mercy?”
I peered back the way the party had come from but still couldn’t make out whatever was back there. “She thought she heard something. Went to check it out.”
Havelock looked me up and down, then shook his head. “You sure it’s a good idea to have her out there alone this close to sundown?”
The thought had occurred to me, but I didn’t know what to do with it. I couldn’t send Havelock back there because he was tasked with keeping an eye on Cringer. If I sent Bastion, that left us with no heavy fighters in case of an ambush on the trail ahead. Indira couldn’t go, not the least of which because I didn’t trust her new attitude, but also because a wizard on her own wasn’t much use. Before she could weave a pattern to cast a spell, someone would’ve stuck a knife in her belly.
That left me, the only one of us with any capability to do real scouting, but if I left the rest of the group they’d be blind to any threats ahead of us. With no good choices, I had to stick with the plan. “Mercy’s a big girl. I’m sure if there were a problem we would’ve heard her by now.”
