by Natalie Grey
“Oh, God,” Freon wheezed. “He’s so serious. And so tiny.”
“I hate you all,” Kevin said, his statement of annoyance delivered in a perky, squeaky voice that did nothing to stop the rest of them from howling with laughter. “All of you. I mean it.”
“Do you guys hear something?” Gracie asked innocently. “Kinda high-pitched?”
“I will kill you,” Kevin muttered, causing the rest of the group to burst out laughing again. “You know what? I give up. It was going to be a sweet moment, but you all ruined it.”
“He was going to ask us all to join the Lollipop Guild,” Jay guessed.
“Just you try running that dungeon without a summoner! You’ll be sorry.” Kevin shook one tiny Piskie fist in Jay’s direction.
“Speaking of which…” Gracie broke in before Jay could retaliate, “we should get ready. Everyone, go get some water, get a snack, whatever. We have,” she checked the timer “eighteen minutes on the timer, and Demon Syndicate is going to be able to go again before we do. I don’t know if they’re going to try…”
Jay met her eyes. “But we have to be ready,” he finished. “Callista’s right. Everyone meet back here in ten, all right? Go get some food, stretch your legs. Then we’re running this again.”
“You heard the man. Go, go, go!” Gracie threw him a thumbs-up and took off her headset, then looked over to meet Alex’s eyes. “Ready to fail again in front of the whole world?”
“You know it.” Alex snatched up his phone. “I’m gonna run to the deli and get us sandwiches, and— Huh.”
“What?” Gracie looked at him.
“I have a message,” Alex said. “From the waitress where we went to lunch the other day.”
Gracie suddenly became very absorbed with taking off her armbands. “Oh, cool. You ask her out?”
“No,” Alex said. “No, I didn’t. Wonder how she got my number?”
“Maybe,” Gracie said, “she’s a witch.” She gave him an innocent look and disappeared into the kitchen to get a glass of water. “Probably best not to think about it too hard,” she called over her shoulder.
“Uh-huh.” Alex disappeared, trying to look grumpy, but Gracie could hear the smile in his voice.
“Thad.” Evan Klein, Brightstar’s liaison on the premises, was there as soon as Thad took off his helmet. “We are so, so sorry.” He looked around at all of them, shaking his head and running a hand through his sandy brown hair. “So sorry,” he repeated. “Thad, do you have a moment to talk?”
Thad looked at Jamie, who shrugged. The other man looked as bewildered as Thad felt.
He’d logged out, absolutely sure he was going to lose this sponsorship, and now Brightstar was apologizing to him?
“What’s up?” he asked cautiously as they got to the other side of the room. The rest of the team was milling around, all of them very obviously not looking in the direction of Thad and Evan.
“Long story short?” Evan heaved a sigh. “Heads are rolling at Dragon Soul, I can tell you that much. We got a call from the lead developers after the first boss telling us that there had been some ‘miscommunication.’”
Thad raised a single eyebrow.
“Tom had the same response.” Evan shook his head. “It was some bullshit. They were trying to cover their asses, but they know they fucked up. In the end, they said it was being ‘taken care of.’ In the meantime, they’ll be sending along a few in-game perks, and they definitely owe us one. But…here’s the good part.”
“Right.” Thad gave him a skeptical look. “The good part.”
“Seriously.” Evan still looked a bit tense, though. “The fact that you wiped dispelled a lot of suspicions.”
“What?” Thad frowned at him. “What are you talking about?”
“Oh.” Evan closed his eyes for a moment. “You don’t know. Of course. Shit.” He hunched his shoulders and crossed his arms over his chest. “All right, here’s the deal. Another team went in right after you, and one of them said on live mic that your team going in with that weird configuration suggested that you’d been tipped off.”
Thad swallowed. It had been a risk, of course, but Dragon Soul had assured them that the problems would be taken care of.
“Then you reached the first boss and nearly wiped,” Evan said, “and clearly weren’t prepared for…what do you call it? Where you bring a character back to life.”
“Rezzing.”
“Right. So the fact that you couldn’t…rez? Rez. That caught you off guard, and then you all went down on the final boss.” He rubbed his chin. “Honestly, from a PR perspective, it might be the best thing that could have happened. Would have been nice to have a heads-up, though.” He shook his head. “We could have played it off.”
Thad shook his head. He didn’t give a damn about the PR ramifications right now. What he wanted was to get back in there and win.
“I’m going to go get a drink of water,” he said. “Any other surprises lurking in there that they told you about?”
“They swore there weren’t any,” Evan said, holding up both hands as if to absolve himself of any responsibility.
The gesture hardly inspired confidence, Thad thought.
He made his way for the door, rolling his eyes in annoyance when Jamie hurried after him. He didn’t want to be placating people right now. He wanted to be letting his rage simmer.
“What?” he asked shortly.
“Well?” Jamie asked. “What’s going on?”
“What’s going on is, Dragon Soul fucked us over,” Thad said with feeling. “Brightstar has them sweating, though.” He couldn’t keep the satisfaction out of his voice.
“So you’re okay,” Jamie said.
Thad stopped for a moment to look at him. Jamie had been worried about him. Now he felt bad for being annoyed. “Yeah. I’m okay. Thanks.” He tried to think of something to say. “Oh, we’ll be going back in, so tell everyone to take a bathroom break or whatever if they need one, right? Get Porto and Harkness to respec into fire, and replace Lura with Fajj.”
“Right.” Jamie gave him a nod and hurried away.
Ten minutes later, feeling fresh and filled with a new determination to smash some faces in, Thad adjusted the straps on his hands and put his headset back on.
“All right, team, we gambled last time, and we didn’t quite make it.” He knew Dragon Soul was listening, and he knew that they heard the accusation in his voice. “But we got damned close, and now we know what we’re up against. Let’s get back in there and fuck some shit up, okay?”
The team was cheering as Thad put them into the queue and the world dissolved into ether. When they appeared on the desolate moonscape once again, he felt a surge of satisfaction.
“All right, let’s—”
“Uh, boss?” Jamie sounded panicked.
“What now?” Thad tossed his character a scornful look, then stopped dead because he could see what.
They hadn’t been allowed to bring their own gear in this time.
“What the fuck?” said the Demon Syndicate tank. “What the hell? Bring up the specs on what everyone’s wearing. Jesus Christ.”
Sam settled back in his chair with a tiny smile.
As far as he was concerned, he’d given Demon Syndicate their one shot, and it had been more than they deserved.
And, since he was pretty damned certain he was going to be fired in the next hour or so, he was out of fucks to give. He leaned back in his chair, smiled at the screen, and wished he had a beer.
“Guys? Guys. Guys!” Jay’s voice cut through the hubbub.
“What’s up?” Gracie asked him.
“So, Demon Syndicate loaded in again as soon as they could,” Jay said.
“Sure.” Gracie sighed. She had expected that, after all. Pure stupidity would be too much to ask for.
“Aaaaand it turns out that ‘use your own gear’ thing was only for a first attempt,” Jay said. “The second time you go in, you get preset armor. Which means...�
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Gracie felt her heart leap. “We’re on an even footing again. Holy hell. Okay, everyone, get ready. We are loading in the second that counter hits zero.”
Chapter Thirty
A spear of ice pierced the center of a fire elemental and it screamed, dissolving in a ripple of magic that shuddered through the air around it. Flaming coals scattered to the ground, its body lying among the ashes of its fellow elementals. The Demon Syndicate team hesitated, gazing solemnly at the corpse.
“Move,” Thad snapped.
When Demon Syndicate had loaded in again, there had been no one else attempting a run, but it was only a matter of time before someone was on their tail—and they were doing the run in shitty dungeon armor.
That meant Thad didn't have time for them to stand around caring about pixelated elementals. He didn’t even have time to savor the fact that Callista’s group had wiped spectacularly. They’d barely made it for a minute.
Only now they knew what they were up against, and they had the same gear as Thad’s team. He looked at Porto, who was waiting for a cooldown.
“I said move,” Thad said, deeply annoyed now. “We can’t afford to waste time on the trash mobs. Jesus Christ.”
Porto tried to stammer out an excuse, but Thad wasn’t in the mood to listen to it. He did the pull himself, running toward the next patrol as he felt his heart pound with anger. Evan said that failing in front of everyone last time had been good—at least PR-wise—but Thad hated feeling like an idiot. He did not intend to fail again.
He whirled into motion as he reached the elementals, wielding the unfamiliar sword with distaste. It had an elemental enchant, at least, but he missed his own weapon.
Wasn’t the whole point of these games that you could be whoever you wanted?
“Thad! Thad, watch out for the patrol!” Jamie’s yell cut through his internal monologue, but it was too late. Thad heard the hiss as the group aggroed and hurled themselves into the fray. “Fuck,” Jamie hissed. “Fuck fuck fuck! Kronos, you and Iko slow them. Thad, get out of there!”
He had zero interest in looking like a weak idiot who was getting rescued by his healer, but his health bar was dipping so he didn’t have much choice at this point. Gritting his teeth, Thad made one last double-handed strike and withdrew with a growl of annoyance.
The elementals followed him with grim determination, and Thad felt the absolute fury of someone losing a fight with an inanimate object. This was a game, for fuck’s sake. Who couldn’t win a simple game?
“Keep running!” Jamie called.
Thad complied, still annoyed. His health bar was climbing, but not as fast as he was used to. That was what they got for running this instance with one healer. It wasn’t like it was a surprise.
He still didn’t like it.
Nor was he pleased when the mages took down the patrol. Somehow, having other people clean up the mess made it worse.
He had to get his head on straight, or he was going to be responsible for this attempt going down in flames. He paused for a moment, reaching up under his headset to wipe the sweat off his forehead.
In his head, he pictured the glittering screen that announced the month-first run. He’d seen it three times now, and he was hooked. He’d listened to people dissect his play style online, and he’d read the posts about him on the forums. If he did it a fourth time, especially after Dragon Soul had screwed them over like this, he’d be untouchable. Brightstar wouldn’t even think of getting rid of him.
He looked around at the rest of them. “Let’s go.”
The elementals clawed at Gracie and shrieked, their mouths stretched wide to show the white-hot cores within. They swarmed her, and it was hard not to think of them as being motivated by vengeance. After all, the corpses of their fellow elementals were scattered across the landscape.
But Gracie told herself that these beings wanted to wipe out life on Elakara. They were carrying a grudge for battles that were long since finished and forgotten. They wanted revenge for those who didn’t cling to the old scores.
And she wasn’t about to let them destroy the cities she had fallen in love with, seek vengeance on the people within, and let their violence spill out to consume the fae and the kobolds as well.
I protect my own. Her lips moved silently as she fought.
“Gracie! Patrol to your right!” Jay’s call cut through her battle haze, and Gracie slid out of the way with practiced ease. She called a thank you as she whirled, redoubling her efforts to take down the group they were fighting before the patrol reached them.
They didn’t quite make it, and good-natured groans resounded through the group as the patrol aggroed with a rattling hiss.
“It couldn’t just be easy!” Gracie called, mock-annoyed.
“Well, you know, given that you’re trying to do the crazy thing and cut across the dangerous part of the zone? Probably not.” Lakhesis chuckled, her panting coming over the chat in the background as she cleaned up the last of the first group.
“We,” Gracie corrected. “We’re doing the crazy thing.”
“I see you’re getting accustomed to management,” Alex said. He loosed several arrows. “To add to your repertoire, may I suggest, ‘Think outside the box,’ ‘Streamline,’ and ‘Scrum?’”
“What does ‘scrum’ mean?” Gracie asked, shooting him a glance as she did a shock blast to make sure all of the new group was firmly focused on her.
“You know, I don’t think anyone knows,” Alan chimed in. “We all just use it, and no one’s sure enough of the meaning to call anyone else on it when we think they’re using it wrong.”
Gracie snorted with amusement. “Yeah, but is it a noun or a verb?”
“I told you, no one knows. Now, stand still so I can heal you.” His character gave an impressive flourish as she did her big heal. “And don’t keep pulling like that if you expect me to keep you alive.”
“Yessir.” Gracie laughed. “All right, everyone, ready for the first boss?”
“Hell yeah, we are.” Kevin had summoned his fire elemental and reached almost straight up to fist-bump Alex, whose arrows were flaming worrisomely near his hair. Video-game physics, Gracie thought. By now, with all that ice and fire flying around, they should all be completely hairless.
The thought of everyone without eyebrows made her snicker.
“All right.” She eased onto the open void and blew her breath out. “Boy, this just never gets any less terrifying. Come on, people, let’s get moving. Demon Syndicate was ahead of us going in, and they probably aren’t loitering around.”
“They’re catching up,” Micah murmured to Sam. Tall and lanky, with dark hair and a strong nose, he was one of the Dragon Soul’s first employees. Unlike some of the others, he’d always been nice to Sam. He had a way of explaining things that didn’t rely too heavily on jargon, and he never complained when he had to clarify a term.
Now he nodded to the two screens. “I’ve been tracking what time they went past different checkpoints. Demon Syndicate started out about eighteen minutes ahead. Now they’re only about ten and a half minutes ahead.”
“So it paid off,” Sam said quietly. “Her cutting across the bottom of the map like that.”
“Yep,” Micah said blandly. “Almost like someone designed it to reward risk-takers.”
Sam looked at him, but Micah was staring at the screens with only the faintest hint of a smile playing around his mouth. Sam grinned, but as he turned his gaze back to the screens, a flicker of motion caught his eye. He turned to see Dan watching from the back of the room, his gaze unreadable.
Sam waited, hoping Dan would look at him, but the other man disappeared without a word.
Worse, to Sam’s mind, was the fact that Dan didn’t look the slightest bit worried.
The first boss didn’t stand a chance. As he readied the blast of icy magic, Porto and Harkness began raining fire down at once. Thad let them go, creeping forward slowly and waiting for each wall of ice to appear bef
ore he advanced. With the fire raining down, the boss was forced into a defensive spell pattern and couldn’t spare the casting time to attack Thad.
A few more advances and a few more steps… Thad made his way carefully up the hill. The boss wasn’t going down quickly since they only had two fire mages and the rest were throwing random arcane spells, but they’d tipped the balance enough that the outcome of the fight appeared inevitable.
Good. He felt the savage satisfaction of someone who had cracked a code. Eight mages, two fire and six frost.
He reached the boss and felt his lip curl in a sneer as he leveled his strongest attack. The Aosi staggered, his casting interrupted. Fire was eating away at him and he screamed in fury, turning to throw his spells at Thad.
“I will not let you past me! You will not murder the general!”
Thad rolled his eyes as he attacked. He had no time for the theatrics and the acting. He forced the boss back, his chest heaving with effort and his sword angling up as he slashed, and the boss was driven away, unable to cast his spells or fight back.
As a last stand, despairing, he gave a shriek and threw his arms out as he began to pulse with light. A glowing circle appeared on the ground.
“Thad!” Jamie yelled.
Thad took off, running like hell for the edge of the glowing circle. He had played MMOs since he was a kid and he had always loved the adrenaline rush of a fight, but none of the games had been like this. He was here, his world narrowed to the single line on the floor and the knowledge that a spell was cast, inevitable, unstoppable—
He skidded out of range as the boss was consumed in a ball of light. The explosion ripped through the entire hill, sending light shooting skyward and ice crystals flying out. They thudded harmlessly to the ground mere feet from where Thad was standing.
There was a pause, and then the whole team burst out laughing. It was nervous laughter, but they had made it. They were winning again, and they were making up time.
