by Natalie Grey
She didn’t think she wanted the quest to exist. It wasn’t that the idea of being a god didn’t appeal—in fact, it appealed a lot—but Gracie wasn’t sure she should have that kind of power. And despite the fact that Harry had created this world, she was very sure that he shouldn’t have that kind of power.
Jay was not going to like this.
She shook her head and refocused. She would deal with that later.
“Everyone, remember to be nice,” Alan said. “We have Cas on board as backup healer, so let’s not make this a terrifying experience for him.”
“Really, I’m fine.” Caspian sounded a bit prickly, and Gracie smiled. She often got the sense that Caspian was being very reserved, and it was always nice when a bit of his true self peeked through. In this case, she completely understood the feeling of being annoyed when people tried to go easy on her.
“I’m with Cas,” Dathok rumbled. “This is my first time running a dungeon as DPS, so let’s pull everything and see where it goes.”
Gracie snorted. “Man, when healers go bad, they really go bad. Someone keep an eye on Dathok and make sure he doesn’t go entirely to the dark side.”
“On it,” Chowder said.
Jay leaned over to Gracie. “We’re doomed,” he said seriously.
Gracie snorted. “All right. Now, if I recall correctly, the first parts of the dungeon went the normal way, right? We fed the altars, then fought the various demon whatsits that appeared?”
“Yeah.”
Gracie bounced on the balls of her feet. Now that she was actually thinking of dropping the quest, her heart was racing. “I want to try something new this time.” Her voice sounded weird in her own head. She could only hope the voice filter masked it.
“Oh?” Everyone looked at her.
“You mean, other than having a new alt healer and having your old alt healer be a rogue?” Dathok clarified.
Gracie forced a laugh. “Yeah. I’m going to try generating threat a bit differently. I had a hunch about some combos that might work.”
In reality, she was sure that all of the combos she was dreaming up would fail miserably, and it was going to be hellish to spend the whole run doing the exact wrong thing. It was like someone dragging their nails down a chalkboard.
But it would set her up perfectly to lose when the boss showed up. She swallowed, nodded to herself, and got ready.
By the end of this, she was going to be just another normal player. Her rank would go back to normal, and she’d have Jay erase the quest and tell Harry to resolve his differences with Dan and Dhruv in some other way. She wouldn’t have lost anything, she told herself. Not really. She’d just have to go back to having a job.
A shitty job dealing blackjack.
Spending time with coworkers who looked at her funny when she talked about video games.
Without waiting any longer, she started to run toward the first altar. If she was going to do this, she should just do it. As she ran, she let her mind drift. It was her personal belief that Harry had set the pieces of his quest in the zones and encounters that meant the most to him out of all the game lore, so why had Harry put part of the quest here in this dungeon?
This was a place where the gods had come to worship, and they had perpetrated all manner of cruelty in order to do so. Gracie almost wondered if their sacrifices hadn’t been so much warm, living bodies as entire wars, famines, and plagues.
Was Harry making a point to himself about the perils of power? About how even gods would inevitably look for more and sink into depravity? Or was he just making a ham-handed point about Dan and Dhruv? Gracie rolled her eyes. With Harry, it really could be either.
The problem was, she got a sense that if he weren’t so used to people rushing to placate him, he would probably be a pretty cool person to hang out with.
The first enemy appeared—a figure they could barely see, twisting in agony over the pristine white altar. It shrieked at all of them, “You refuse to give the sacrifice?”
So far, the same. Gracie held her position as the rest of the party fanned out to surround the altar.
“Then I will choose from among you.”
This time Gracie didn’t bother to correct it. She rushed it, luring it down with a flurry of smaller attacks and beginning an unusual rotation. She felt herself slipping into her usual combos, always wanting to build threat with her tried-and-true methods.
But she had to sell this. She had to make them buy it, so instead, when she felt the itch of wrongness in her head, she went toward it.
Last time she had done a very specific set of combos, burning the boss down with quick DPS, using Freon’s magic to root it in place while it did an AoE spell, and then doing the last portion of the burn. This time she didn’t burn it down as quickly, and she realized that its AoE was on a timer, not tied to the levels of its life. That meant they had to go through the process of dancing out of range over and over again, and each time, someone or other would take a fair amount of damage.
She let herself get lost in the fight. She would lay down a few attacks, then let the others circle in. Dathok was replacing Alex tonight, his stealthy crouch hilarious in something the size of a male Ocru. Fys sent arcane bolts whizzing through the air, her fire demon roaring and slashing at the god on the altar. Jay was practically a blur, compensating for Gracie’s changed attacks with different ones of his own.
Gracie tried not to feel guilty. He wasn’t asking her what was up even though she wasn’t up to her usual standard. She wanted to tell him what she was really doing.
But he would try to talk her out of it.
She also realized just how long this was going to take if she kept fighting so poorly. She was used to the fights already being over, and between Dathok being new to DPS and Gracie failing to hold threat, this was taking significantly longer than usual. Gracie watched the boss’s health bar creep down, trying to lose herself in the muscle burn.
She couldn’t let them wipe yet, so she ended up drawing the fight to a close with a few of her usual combos.
As they paused to regain their health, she felt an unexpected surge of anxiety, looking at the relatively short time left on the dungeon clock. It just felt wrong to play this way.
It was Alan who contacted her privately, his character looking in the other direction so that no one would guess they were talking.
“Everything okay?” he asked cautiously.
“Yeah, sorry,” Gracie lied. “I’m so close to making this combo work. I’ve run the numbers a billion times. It just has some weird timing.”
“Okay.” Alan didn’t sound quite convinced, but he didn’t argue with her either. He laid down a mass heal-over-time spell and switched briefly to the party channel. “Everyone in the glowing circle, thank you.” To Gracie, he said, “Kind of hard on Caspian, though.”
“Eh, the kid seems up to it.” Caspian was doing remarkably well, Gracie had to say. His time playing WoW must have stood him in very good stead. “Anyway, what better time to break him in? Nice low-stakes…”
“Right.” Alan gave a little laugh. “So this is how we haze people now, huh? Run a terrible dungeon and let them think they just failed to hold it together?”
“It’s a legit form of trolling, and I won’t hear another word against it.” Gracie laughed. “Okay, we’re all healed. Hang in there, buddy.”
She didn’t wait for Alan to respond. She walked to place the gem, the relic of the demon’s body, in a depression on the edge of the island. The stones that formed the next path rose soundlessly out of the dark water and Gracie started across them.
This time, because she was looking for it, she saw the faint movement in the darkness: the lake monster, the one she had fought before. Her heart quickened. She could let the monster kill her, couldn’t she? Yes. It had killed Ushanas rather spectacularly last time.
More islands lay in their way, and Gracie began to find patterns she could use to just barely keep the fights going. She could hear the re
st of the DPS panting, and the magic users were running on empty by the time they came to the main island.
They had to be, of course. Gracie kept them going, knowing that each minute she dragged the fights out was one less minute they had to regain health and mana. One less chance they would have to save the final boss fight as she took it in the wrong direction. This team was good. She didn’t want anyone pulling a Hail Mary at the last moment.
“We should rest up,” Alan said quietly.
“No time.” Gracie took off, running for the line of fire that would close off the portal. There was silence, but people fell in behind her. She thought she saw Jay and Alan exchange looks out of the corner of her eye. She wondered what they were thinking.
Maybe that all of her success had been luck, and she’d lost whatever spark of inspiration was keeping her going?
The thought rankled more than it should have. She wanted to tell them that she was messing up on purpose. That was just leftover pride from her childhood, though, she figured. She’d never been the golden child, and she’d spent years trying to gain her parents’ respect.
And then years doing exactly what they didn’t want her to do.
“Real mature, Gracie,” she muttered to herself.
When the eel slithered out of the lake, she felt a wave of satisfaction, quickly drowned only by a wave of sadness. Sadness? She shook her head. She wanted to end this.
“Everyone stay back while I get threat!” she called. “I want to try out that combo again. Eighty-fifth time’s the charm!”
She’d die, and this would all be over.
But the lake monster didn’t close the group in. Instead, it left a gap through which the giant returned. The whip of fire was curled loosely in one hand, and the kelp of his beard dripped on the ground.
The giant stared at her. It had not enclosed them in a bubble this time, and Gracie dropped her sword tip down, approaching him.
“It’s you,” she said quietly.
“Why did you come back?” Harry asked her. His character had no expression, but she could deduce from his voice that his eyes were narrowed.
“Why did you choose this zone?” Gracie asked him instead.
“Immortality makes a fetish of death.”
“Miss me with that philosophical bullshit and speak plainly.” Gracie brought her sword up again. “And fight me, goddammit.”
In answer, Harry let the whip flick out.
“Gracie—” Jay’s voice said in her ear.
Gracie shut down the channel without answering. She began to circle, her eyes fixed on Harry.
“Do you not see?” Harry asked her. “I’m disappointed.”
“Yeah, well, neither of us exactly planned on me being your protege, did we? So maybe you got stuck with a dud.” Gracie smiled humorlessly. She danced into range, attacked, and headed out a touch too slowly, feeling the haptics shudder and watching her life bar take a hit. “Close the rest of them out. Let’s do this with just us.”
Harry held up one hand, and the bubble came up to seal them in. Gracie could see the others circling.
“Dragon Soul is watching,” he said.
“You noticed that, did you?” Gracie asked him. “So you have a big audience. You love that, don’t you?” She wanted to piss him off, but it definitely helped that she meant all the words she was hurling at him. “Tell us what grand, deep reasons you had for putting part of the quest here?”
The whip lashed at her, and this time she was reminded that Harry had dreamed this world from nothing. He was quick. It was his territory.
“Deprived of mortality, the gods lost their reason to be,” he said. “What exists in a world without death? What is there to fear? Nothing. And so they became monsters, trying to make an ally of the one thing they most feared, and the one thing they craved. In their weakness, they inflicted all manner of torture on others. They savored the screams, and dreamed themselves in the place of the offerings.”
Dude, this is fucked up. Gracie wondered if any of the rest of them could hear the monologue.
“And what is a player in this world?” Harry asked. “A god. They cannot die, so they too descend to the level of beasts and monsters. I told you the truth, Callista. I fear what humans will become in a world where they may inflict pain without consequence.”
“Then maybe you shouldn’t have built that world,” Gracie told him. She shook her head once, a hard jerk. “And maybe you shouldn’t be wasting your time with Jay and me when you can apparently get into the game’s framework just fine on your own.”
“What?” She had thrown Harry off. He stopped, forgetting to attack.
Gracie landed a rather harder blow than she’d intended. She headed back out of range and watched.
“Who is Jay?” Harry asked.
Gracie narrowed her eyes, but she didn’t drop her sword. “I don’t know what you call him. The…” Guy you’re using to get into the game. She bit the words off. If Dragon Soul was listening, she didn’t want them to know what she was going to say.
“They can’t hear us right now,” Harry told her as if reading her mind.
“Why are you using Jay to get into the database if you’re able to do things like this?” Gracie demanded. “What do you think Jay can do to unravel the quest if you can’t?”
“I don’t understand.” Harry looked at her. “I’ve been trying to get you unhooked from the quest, yes, but I made that next to impossible. You have to die in one of the quest segments in order for that to happen.” He snapped the whip at her again.
“So that’s why you’re here,” Gracie said. “Well, let me tell you, you’re welcome to it. Kill me. I don’t want this. Just promise me you’ll leave Jay out of it, and the rest of the guild, too.”
“For the last time, I don’t know who Jay is!”
And then it snapped into place. Gracie’s jaw dropped. “Son of a bitch!”
“Let’s get this over with.” Harry lashed at her with the whip.
Gracie rolled to the side, just out of the way of the whip. “Stop for a second. Just stop!”
“You said you wanted me to kill you.” Harry readied another strike.
“But don’t you see?” Gracie demanded. “Jay hasn’t been talking to you at all, has he? They’ve been using him to keep track of our progress. Dan and Dhruv are pretending to be you. He’s been talking to you.”
Harry laughed. “I’m surprised Dan had the balls for that, but he always was clever. It was just executing on his own plans that he was too scared to do.”
“Yeah, well—” Gracie rolled out of the way of another strike. “Goddammit, stop for a second! I need to think.”
“You’ll have plenty of time to think,” Harry said, “when this is over. Stand still. After all, this won’t hurt a bit.”
But now, in this split second, anger blazed to life in her chest and Gracie found the will to stay in the game. She didn’t want Harry to have the power, and right now, she was more than willing to be the queen bitch that was a thorn in the side of Dragon Soul.
They’d been fucking with her for weeks, and she was going to make them pay.
Chapter Sixteen
Something had been off since the beginning of the run. Jay had noticed Gracie’s nervous mannerisms and her overall reticence, and above all, her failure to pull off the feats she usually accomplished with ease. It wasn’t like her to fail, and it was even more unlike her to fail repeatedly when other people were involved.
It was almost like she wanted the dungeon to fail, he reflected.
Or maybe it was exactly like she wanted the dungeon to fail. He realized that in the moment that she went charging into the final boss fight, not waiting for cooldowns. She’d set it up so that there wasn’t time for them to wait, and there wasn’t time for anyone to pull out a last-second save. She hadn’t messed up and hamstrung them by accident, she’d done it a hundred percent on purpose so they couldn’t help her.
What she was trying to do, Jay couldn’t gue
ss. He knew there were things she hadn’t told him about her conversation with Harry. When she came back, she’d been sober, reserved, and almost guilty. No matter how Jay pushed, knowing that he knew more of the backstory than she did, he hadn’t been able to convince her that she should share it.
Beyond anything, he was afraid that she was giving up. That she was giving the quest back to Harry.
Harry didn’t deserve it. Jay wanted to scream. Gracie might not want the role she’d been given. She might not think she was the best one for it, but he would rather have her in power than any of the founders of Dragon Soul.
But it was her choice, and he took a deep breath and made his own.
He would help her. Whatever she was doing, he would help her.
He watched as the giant climbed out of the lake and approached. The snake wasn’t attacking them yet, although he could see its head swaying in the darkness. Gracie and the giant spoke, their words not quite audible.
“Uh, Anders?” Lakhesis sounded unsure. “You want me going for that tail?”
“Is this what happened last time?” Jay heard Caspian ask. Alan silently shook his head.
“Everyone wait,” Jay said. He fought the urge to explain. “Wait for my signal. This may not be a battle, but I want Team 2 ready to go for the tail at my mark, okay?”
There was a chorus of assent. Team 2 was Lakhesis, Chowder, Ushanas, Caspian, and Dathok. All of them readied themselves, and although several of them looked at Jay, none seemed ready to force the issue of what, exactly, was going on.
That was good, since he didn’t have a clue what to say.
He watched, his chest tightening, as Gracie rolled out of the way of the strikes and the bubble came up. She was moving more slowly than she could, taking damage she could easily have avoided.
And then the tenor of it changed. He could see her posture take on the tension of a fight, hear her yelling, even if he couldn’t make out the words. She was trying to stop the fight from progressing now, but he couldn’t imagine why.
