Metamorphosis Online Complete Series Boxed Set; A Gamelit Fantasy RGP Novel: You Need A Bigger Sword, The New Queen Rises, Reign With Axe & Shield

by Natalie Grey

  “But we don’t know where that will be,” Dhruv pointed out.

  Dan groaned.

  To his surprise, Dhruv didn’t look displeased. Instead, the other man was smiling slightly. “He’s losing it,” Dhruv said. “He knew we were keeping an eye on her, and he still risked letting us know he was in there.” His tone turned gloating. “He never could control his temper. I don’t know why we were worried.”

  “We were worried because he’s a vengeful asshole and the odds are pretty high of him burning the whole thing down if this doesn’t go his way,” Dan shot back.

  Dhruv’s careless smile evaporated, and he sighed. He nodded. “Right.”

  “We need to pick a side,” Dan stated.

  Dhruv gave him a heavy-lidded smile. “I’m guessing you have opinions.”

  “Yes. Unfortunately, they conflict.” Dan stood up and stretched before starting to pace. If he kept sitting, he was going to fall asleep. “She’s demonstrably less dangerous than he is. She doesn’t know the architecture of the game, she can’t access the databases, and just from a statistical likelihood standpoint, she’s not as much of a fucking psychopath as Harry is.”

  Dhruv started laughing. “It would be a really big coincidence if she was,” he agreed. He took a squeeze toy from Dan’s desk and started throwing it up in the air and catching it. “But?”

  “But we can’t figure out how to get rid of her powers, and if her losing a fight to Harry could accomplish that, we’d have a shot of getting rid of two problems at once.” Dan looked over his shoulder as he paced.

  “You really like risky plans, don’t you?” Dhruv rolled his eyes.

  “No, I by far prefer situations where there don’t need to be risky plans.” Dan sat down. “But here we find ourselves.” He heaved a sigh and tracked the squeeze toy as Dhruv kept throwing it.

  “I have a question,” Dhruv said. He caught the squeeze toy and didn’t throw it again, his eyes locking on Dan’s. “Why did you stick around? Here, I mean. When everything started to go to hell, why not just bail? Harry wasn’t your roommate. You didn’t really care about the game.”

  Dan felt his pride prickle. Dhruv was needling him, but there was no way to know if he was going for that or just being blunt.

  And Dan didn’t particularly like his answer to this.

  “Fine. No, I didn’t care,” he said, “in terms of what it was. You two were the ones who cared about it that way. But I put a lot of work in. I deserved more than to be shoved out just because he felt like his idea should trump me making it real. I didn’t want him to win.”

  Dhruv laughed. “I wondered,” he admitted. “You don’t advertise it, but you have a temper. You’re more than happy to stand aside and let someone else win—unless they screw you over. Then you dig in your heels, and there is no moving you.”

  “Yeah, well.” Dan forced a smile. “If we could not do a deep-dive into my psyche, that would be great. It’s not like you’re especially rational when it comes to these things.”

  “I am.” Dhruv’s smile disappeared. He leaned forward, intent now. “I am very, very rational. Metamorphosis is important.”

  Dan frowned. “I’m not saying it’s not important—”

  “No, I mean, to the world.”

  Dan paused. Dhruv wasn’t much for hyperbole, so all Dan could think was that this was a deadpan joke of some kind. After all, it had all the hallmarks of a really bad one—or maybe a B movie script.

  C movie, really.

  But Dhruv didn’t crack a smile. “You don’t get it,” he said seriously. “And that’s fine. You’ve always just wanted to make the game good and keep it running, and you’ve been a good partner for that. But the game is important for what it is.”

  “And what is that, exactly?” He was still pretty sure this was a joke. Dan settled back in his chair and frowned.

  Dhruv sighed. “A moral testing ground,” he said finally.

  “Que?”

  “Don’t make jokes. I’m serious. Do you know why people read books? Why they play games, watch movies? Why humans like stories?”

  “Let’s say no.” Dan had never really thought about that.

  “Because they teach us how to survive,” Dhruv said. “It’s how we pass down knowledge to one another. How you are going to make it through a battle or a storm, or whatever. You learn from stories. But now that we have video games, people can do something new: they can test things. They can see why we don’t do certain things. They can start a war and see how much devastation it causes. They can stab someone in the back and feel the guilt.”

  Dan’s frown deepened. He had never thought about this.

  “Have you ever wanted something?” Dhruv asked him, “Really wanted it, but it was something you shouldn’t have? A crush on your brother’s girlfriend? Hell, craving some food you were allergic to?”

  Dan shrugged. “Yeah.”

  “And maybe you didn’t do anything because you thought through the implications and realized it was a bad idea?”

  “Yeah, but that didn’t always work.”

  “Exactly.” Dhruv stabbed his finger at the desk. “And that’s why this is important. We set up a world that we weren’t messing with. They could do what they wanted. They could make alliances. They could break them. They could start wars. And Harry wants to mess with that. He wants to control it, because he can’t accept that people fantasize about doing things they’d never do in real life. Things they shouldn’t do in real life, and would be less likely to do if they could watch them play out.”

  Dan considered this, and he nodded. “So you two weren’t just fighting about a game,” he said finally.

  “No,” Dhruv said. “We were never just fighting about a game. He wanted to try to control people, and I wanted to let them learn that they didn’t actually want to do terrible things.”

  Dan didn’t say anything.

  “So?” Dhruv asked.

  “I’m thinking.” Dan looked out the window. He was very tired now. He just wanted this to be over. But that was the way someone thought just before they lost, and he was not going to lose to Harry. “Can you remember which areas Harry worked on?” he asked Dhruv. “Before we decide what to do, we should get as much information as we can. We have to know where Harry and Callista might fight next, and go from there.”

  As for the rest, he’d be turning it over in his head. But he knew one thing for sure: if someone were to try to control the world and control people’s choices, he damned sure wouldn’t want it to be Harry.

  He swiveled over to his laptop and typed up a quick message, and instead of the evasive response he expected, there was a knock on his office door a few moments later.

  “Come in.” Dan tilted his head to the side as Sam slipped into the room.

  He knew Sam didn’t approve of what the two of them were doing. It wasn’t difficult to tell, although Dan had tolerated it. Sam rarely slid into outright rebellion, and he was a popular manager. Firing Jay had been difficult enough. Fire Sam and they might lose half their GMs.

  “Yes?” Dan asked.

  “You said you wanted to know all of the areas Harry worked on?” Sam asked.

  “Yes.” Dan tilted his head to the side as Sam hesitated.

  “I wasn’t here when Harry was here,” Sam said finally. “I would normally just ask someone on the team for help, but they’re a bit nervous with everything that’s been going on.”

  “Ah.” Dan looked at Dhruv. Neither of them had worked in ways that intersected Harry’s work very much, even at the end. Now they were both regretting it. “I’ll handle finding the information, then,” he told Sam.

  Sam hesitated again. “If I might make a suggestion,” he began quietly. He seemed to be steeling himself for a fight.

  “Yes?” Dan didn’t bother to make his voice welcoming. He wasn’t in the mood for an argument right now.

  “She might be willing to help you,” Sam said finally. He twisted his hands together and then blew ou
t a long breath to steady himself. He looked at Dan, resigned. “She submitted a ticket when this all started. She thought it was a glitch. We’re assuming she’s out to screw us when the ones demanding special treatment are actually Demon Syndicate—”

  “Enough.” Dan’s voice rose. He hated that, but he wanted this to end. He forced a smile. “Thank you for your input, but this decision is made.”

  Sam left silently.

  “Was he right?” Dan asked.

  “No.” Dhruv shrugged. “It’s not like we’re doing anything to her, and we make money how we make money. If he doesn’t like it, he can leave.”

  “That’s what I’m worried about,” Dan muttered. He went back to searching the database, throwing one last raised eyebrow in Dhruv’s direction. “So, are you going to help me find Harry’s code or are you just going to sit there and talk about morals?”

  “There’s the Dan I know,” Dhruv said with a grin. He stood up with a sigh. “I’ll go start looking.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Gracie looked at the expanse of paper on the kitchen table and frowned. She’d been meticulous about planning her run of Yesuan’s Haunt, but she knew that it was useless. Anxiety was a constant throb in the background of her mind.

  Had she not planned well enough? It was possible. She paced around the outside edge of the table, looking down at the hand-drawn map. She’d recreated it from the information available online, and had come up with the best ways to defeat every known mob, patrol, and boss in the place.

  None of them were particularly tricky, but there was one dilemma she couldn’t resolve: Caspian. Dathok’s trial run as an assassin had shown that DPS was where his talents truly lay. He had a real talent for knowing when and how to strike, and he had a natural affinity for creating combos.

  With Caspian on board to back up Alan, the team was much more solid. Now that they knew Caspian was from Demon Syndicate, that was hardly a surprise, though.

  Bringing Dathok back in as their secondary healer would make them weaker, and likelier to wipe and lose the quest for good, but using Caspian was like waiting for someone to stab her in the back. She still hadn’t said anything to him, not wanting Demon Syndicate or Dragon Soul to know she was onto them.

  Or that was what she told herself. In reality, she hadn’t spoken to Caspian because she was hurt. They’d helped him, run dungeons with him, gathered crafting materials, and talked about game philosophy.

  No wonder he’d seemed to fit in so well. It hadn’t been because he was a good fit. It was because he was doing anything he could to earn their trust.

  She rubbed her head and tried to clear her mind by going through the raid again step by step. Yesuan had been banished to spend eternity alone, but he had managed to draw creatures of darkness to him over the eons: imps, spectres, and even the fallen angels who had made the Aosi and were determined to see them prevail.

  The first part of the run was designed to test reflexes, pitting the team against the booby traps Yesuan had surrounded himself with. Some were mechanized defenders, hurling insults in automated voices, and some were effects that dealt damage to those standing in certain areas, or wounds that the healers must scramble to deal with before the next trap. Even when you knew the patterns, they could be difficult to execute.

  After that, the team would find themselves dealing with Oryxa, a succubus who had joined his cause for reasons unknown. Gracie, who tried to learn the lore behind a dungeon without hearing any particular spoilers or seeing the boss’s cinematics, was particularly interested in Oryxa. She knew why Yesuan had fallen to darkness, but why were the creatures of darkness helping him?

  She’d know soon, she supposed. She just wished she could spend her time looking forward to this, knowing that if the team wiped, it would be no big deal rather than knowing that if they wiped, she might lose something that had transformed her life.

  The founders of Dragon Soul had tried to screw her again and again. If she lost the protection Harry had unintentionally given her, she might be banned from the game.

  She couldn’t let that happen.

  She hunched her shoulders as she stared at the rest of the papers. She knew them by heart. A trail of imps and minor demons would lead to Yesuan, and he was flanked by two fallen angels. It was impossible to destroy Yesuan without killing both of the angels first, but Yesuan would continue to attack the group while they burned the angels down, meaning that it was imperative both to finish that stage of the fight quickly and to interrupt his attacks.

  Caspian had an ability that could interrupt another healer’s spell-casting.

  Gracie shook her head, then looked at the door with a sigh. If Alex were here, they could bat ideas back and forth over a pizza or some Thai food, and he could give her his opinion on whether or not to trust Caspian.

  But Alex, of course, wasn’t here. He was off, moving on with his life and being a successful adult while Gracie sat alone in the dark and stressed about playing video games.

  She rubbed her forehead and sighed. Every day she got a little closer to packing all of her stuff up, hiring a moving truck, and going…

  She didn’t know where she would go.

  But at times like these, it didn’t seem like a terrible idea.

  “Bingo,” Dhruv said three hours later.

  He had tracked down every email he could find that mentioned Harry’s work. Some were complaints from associates, mentioning that Harry was a pain to work with and wouldn’t take their suggestions. Some were from Harry, annoyed about the “incompetence” of those same employees. One or two were the rare written acknowledgment between Dan and Dhruv, still carefully coded, that they were giving Harry fake projects to keep him out of their hair.

  Or, at least, that was what they had thought they were doing. In reality, they had wound up giving him free rein to put this quest line in the game.

  The emails that made him stop for a moment were the oldest ones, the ones that had been full of excitement and ideas. Back at the start, it had been all late nights in the dorm room, sandwiches smuggled out of the dining hall and sodas from the vending machine, and then a barely-furnished apartment with whole cases of ramen in the corner of the main room and mattresses on the floor with clothes piled beside them, staying up until all hours to sketch out their ideas for zones and bosses.

  In those days, the difference in their two world views hadn’t seemed insurmountable. They’d even thought it was good, in a way—that no matter what people came to the game to find, they’d find it. Although they tended to yell when they debated, it had all been in good fun.

  Dhruv sat back in his chair, his brow furrowed. If he were honest with himself, he’d have to say that he genuinely missed Harry. The man could be an asshole, but damn if he didn’t make every project more fun.

  And they wouldn’t be here if Harry hadn’t dreamed up Metamorphosis Online.

  Dhruv shook his head. Harry had given them something useful, yes, but the friendship was gone. Harry had decided it was his way or the highway. He hadn’t left Dan and Dhruv any other choice than to do things this way.

  Now Dhruv’s only real option was to use Harry’s words against him.

  So he’d spent his time combing back through the things Harry had spoken about—the ideas about whether superior beings could ever be an effective tool for gods to use? Leadership should be a figurehead or something to unite the people against.

  It was that last one that provided the necessary clue. Only one zone explored the idea that the best leader might be one who was universally hated, and that zone was Yesuan’s Haunt. And there, lurking in the battle scripts, Dhruv found it: the piece that would allow Harry to get in and control the quest.

  And what they could use to cut him off once he’d served his purpose.

  Dhruv smiled sadly as he typed out a message to Dan. He’d almost enjoyed this cat-and-mouse game they were playing, although he would never tell Dan that, and now it was drawing to a close.

  All thi
ngs must end, however.

  Jamie wrapped a towel around his waist and dried his hair, running his fingers through it afterward to smooth it back out. He hadn’t been keeping up with his usual routine in the past few weeks, and his hair was longer than it had been in years. He’d shaved today for the first time in a while, and although his face now felt more familiar, the bare skin was oddly itchy.

  He headed back to his room, jumping when he opened the door to find Thad slouched in the desk chair.

  Thad gave him a nod and stood. “I’ll go so you can get dressed, but I just wanted you to know to be quick. Dragon Soul has something they want you to do.”

  Jamie groaned but nodded. “I’ll be glad when this is over,” he said in response to Thad’s questioning look. “I’m really over it.”

  “Yeah,” Thad agreed. “I get that. Seems like we’re getting there, though. Anyway, I’ll see you in the conference room.”

  He left, whistling, and Jamie changed as quickly as he could without thinking about anything at all. He didn’t want to guess what they were going to have him do. Get Callista on tape saying she was breaking the rules, maybe?

  He shook his head. Even though he clung to the belief that she must be lying, he didn’t like deceiving her and her team. He just wanted this to be done.

  When he arrived at the conference room with a granola bar and a mug of lukewarm coffee, two of the BrightStar team were there with Thad. Evan gave Jamie a nod, and Evan’s boss, Frank, also nodded brusquely, although he barely looked up from his paperwork. Frank had made no secret of the fact that he didn’t like sponsoring a competitive gaming team, and he was always doing other business during these meetings.

  On the screen were two of the three Dragon Soul founders, who Jamie had never seen in the flesh before. They had done calls, but never a video chat. He was surprised to see how young the two men looked. They must be worth millions of dollars apiece at this point and had to be pushing forty, but they had a youthful look to them.

  “You’re Jamie?” Dhruv asked. “Thank you for your help so far.”