Last Bastion

by Rachel Aaron

  Contents

  Title Page

  Content Warning

  Prologue

  Chapter 1 - Tina

  Chapter 2 - James

  Chapter 3 - Tina

  Chapter 4 - James and Tina

  Chapter 5 - James

  Chapter 6 - Tina

  Chapter 7 - James

  Chapter 8 - Tina

  Chapter 9 - Haruto

  Chapter 10 - James

  Chapter 11 - Tina

  Chapter 12 - James

  Chapter 13 - Tina

  Chapter 14 - James

  Chapter 15 - Tina

  Chapter 16 - James

  Chapter 17 - Tina

  Chapter 18 - James and Tina

  Chapter 19 - James

  Chapter 20 - Tina

  Chapter 21 - James

  Chapter 22 - Tina

  Chapter 23 - James

  Chapter 24 - Tina and James

  The End

  Glossary of Terms

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  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  About the Authors

  Forever Fantasy Online:

  Last Bastion

  Book 2 of 3

  By Rachel Aaron and Travis Bach

  Bastion was supposed to mean safety. It was supposed to mean a break from fighting for their lives and a chance to talk to someone who might actually know what's going on. Access to their gold and some beer would have been nice, too.

  They got none of those things. When Tina and James arrive in the capital, they find a city on fire in more ways than one. Players and non-players hunt each other in the streets, while the king who controls the city's all-powerful artifact cowers from the chaos in his castle. Desperate to warn somebody about the Once King's coming invasion, James wants to try to talk to the king anyway, while Tina just wants to meet the royal portal keepers who might be able to send them home.

  It shouldn't be hard to get an army of the world's best-geared players through one city, but when they discover that the captain of the Royal Knights has been massacring low-level players in revenge disguised as justice, James and Tina will have to decide which is more important: the lives of their fellow gamers, or the stability of their new world's last great city. Both choices deserve a champion, but with the Once King's armies closing in, taking the wrong side may doom everyone to an eternity as slaves to the Ghostfire.

  Content Warning

  A note from Rachel Aaron

  This a book about gamers. The characters talk like gamers, think like gamers, and act like gamers, which--as any gamer knows--is sometimes not very well. As such, this book will contain far more cursing, sexual situations, prejudice, and blood than my novels usually do.

  That said, it's still us. Travis and I do not tolerate hate in our fiction any more than we do in real life. Just because a character says/does something awful does not mean that we agree with it, or that that person will not have to pay for their actions. This book deals with difficult issues many real people face, and we tried our best to give those issues the gravitas and realism they deserve. We might not have done everything perfectly, but Travis and I did our best to get it right.

  The FFO series is our love letter to the online games we played obsessively for years. We wanted to show the amazing strength and resourcefulness of the gaming community without painting over its pitfalls. This book reflects that, and we hope that you love it as much as we do.

  Thank you for reading and enjoy the story!

  Prologue

  Six years ago.

  Why do they all have to be so much taller than me?

  Tina Anderson, aged fifteen, glared at the wall of yakking high school boys blocking the sidewalk to the school bus loading zone. Normally, she could have cut through the grass to get around, but the rain was pouring like a wall beyond the roofed walkway. If she didn't want mud up to her knees, the sidewalk was her only option.

  "Excuse me," Tina said, tapping on the barrier of backpacks.

  No response.

  "Excuse me," she said a bit louder, glancing nervously at the line of yellow buses, which were starting to edge forward. "I need to get to the--"

  Before she could finish, one of the boys turned around suddenly and walked straight into her. Since he had a good eleven inches and eighty pounds on her, the impact sent Tina flying. She managed to catch herself before she went sprawling butt-first into the mud, but one of her sneakers still slipped in, flooding her foot with warm, slimy water.

  "Watch where you're going, kid!" the boy yelled as he shoved past her.

  "We were in the same class, idiot!" Tina yelled back, but the boy was already jogging away. Glaring at his retreating back, Tina shook off her soggy foot and plunged into the gap he'd left in the wall of backpacks, shoving her way through the mob to the pickup zone.

  Just in time to see her school bus drive off without her.

  "Wait!" she cried, diving into the rain. She ran down the sidewalk, waving her arms, but the driver must not have seen her, because the nacho-cheese-colored vehicle just picked up speed, leaving her soaked and panting at the end of the school's driveway.

  Cursing the red taillights as they vanished into the rain, Tina turned around and started trudging back up the flooded road to the dubious shelter of the covered sidewalk. This wasn't the first time the bus driver hadn't seen or remembered her, but the fact that it had happened today, on the last day of school, felt like a personal insult from the universe. All she wanted was to get home so she could log into Forever Fantasy Online and play until exhaustion forced her to stop. Was that too much to ask?

  Refusing to admit defeat, Tina shook the rain off her backpack and dug out her smartphone to message her mom.

  I missed the bus, she typed. I know you're working, but it's the last day of school, and it's pouring rain. Can you or Dad come get me, please? I'll do the dishes to make up for it.

  Satisfied she'd offered sufficient bribery, Tina pulled up a book on her phone and settled against a post to wait. Thirty minutes later, she'd finished her book and there was still no reply from her mother. Frustrated, she messaged again and sent a text to her dad as well this time.

  Another thirty minutes crawled by. The school's pickup line was long since empty, leaving Tina alone with the pounding rain and a low battery symbol. She checked her messages for the millionth time, but they all showed as delivered. There was just no answer.

  Heaving an enormous sigh, Tina pushed herself off the pole. In hindsight, she knew a mid-afternoon reply was a lot to ask of her busy parents. They'd been working overtime like crazy this year to pay for her brother's college tuition. They probably weren't even looking at their phones right now, but she didn't want to wait out here alone until they got home and noticed she was missing.

  Going to wait in the library, she texted her mom. Pick me up after work?

  Putting her phone away, Tina waved goodbye to Mrs. Hamilton in the front office window. The principal's secretary gave her the merest flip of a hand in acknowledgment. Adults-who-didn't-care pacified, Tina pulled the tiny emergency umbrella out of her bag and set out into the Seattle rain. Her still-damp sneakers were instantly soaked through again, but she consoled herself with the reminder that school was actually over. Starting tomorrow, she could binge FFO as much as she wanted. Compared to that, losing one afternoon wasn't such a big deal. Her parents had picked her up from the library before. She just had to kill time until they got off work at six, and then the whole evening would be hers.

  That thought was almost enough
to cheer her up as she squished her way onto the main road, tilting her umbrella sideways to block the spray from the cars driving past.

  ***

  Four hours later, Tina was officially panicking. She'd made it to the public library just fine, but it was nearly eight-thirty now and there was still no reply from her parents. As the second child, Tina was used to being ignored, but this was ridiculous. Even her busy, distracted parents were never this bad.

  Something horrible must have happened while she was at school. Her thoughts went immediately to her uncle Vernon, who'd been in the hospital for skin cancer. Maybe his operation had gone wrong. Or maybe there'd been an accident, something that left her parents unable to text her back. She was racing through all the worst-case scenarios when her phone buzzed in her hands.

  Tina snatched it to her ear. "Dad!" she cried desperately. "Are you okay?"

  "What?" her father replied, his voice tired and distracted. "I'm fine, but you picked a hell of day to miss the bus."

  "What's wrong?" Tina demanded. "Where have you been?"

  "I'm sorry, Tina," he said, ignoring her questions. "But I can't come get you right now. I'm going to call a ride share to take you home, okay?"

  "Why?" she asked frantically. "Is Mom okay? Did something happen to Uncle Vernon? What's going on?"

  Her dad fell silent for a moment, building her dread even higher.

  "It's your brother," he said at last. "He called this morning and told us he was coming home for the summer."

  Tina's heart stopped. "Is James hurt?"

  "He's fine," her dad assured her. "But something happened at the university. James won't tell us what, and he's really down about it. Your mom and I are driving out to the airport to pick him up right now, and then we're going to take him to dinner at Lucas's Bistro to cheer him up. There are leftovers in the fridge, so you should be all set for dinner, but I need you to get the air mattress out of the attic when you get home so James has somewhere to sleep tonight. Also..."

  The list of chores kept going, but Tina wasn't listening anymore. She couldn't decide what made her more upset. There was just so much.

  James was feeling down, so he'd just decided to fly home to be pampered by Mom and Dad? After three god-awfully expensive years of college, James was terribly behind in his classes, mostly because he played FFO all the time. Tina did, too, but she still managed to do her homework.

  James had been slowly sliding into slackerdom ever since he'd gotten into the FFO early beta, but things had gotten really bad this year, like fail-all-your-classes bad. He'd promised at Christmas that he'd make up the courses this summer, but apparently Tina was the only member of the family who remembered that detail. Given how hard they were working to pay for his stupid fancy education, you'd think their parents would be taking his possibly flunking out more seriously, but no. As always, James was their precious baby. All he had to do was say he was feeling "down," and their parents dropped everything to comfort him. They were even taking him out to one of the best French restaurants in the city, and she was supposed to eat leftovers and make his bed for him?

  "Tina, are you listening?"

  She was so angry it took three tries to unclench her jaw enough to answer. She wasn't entirely sure what she said, but her dad didn't seem to be listening, anyway, so she just hung up, dumping her battered old phone into her soggy backpack. She shoved herself out of the library chair and stomped over to put up the book she'd been nervously half reading. When she tried to put it back on the shelf where it belonged, though, she couldn't reach. At four feet nine inches, she was just too short, and the stool she'd used earlier was nowhere to be found.

  That was the final straw. Tina burst into tears. She just started sobbing right there between the stacks. It was loud enough that the other patrons turned to look, which only made everything so, so much worse. After shoving the book onto the return cart, Tina grabbed her backpack and fled, pulling her the damp strands of her tangled brown hair to shield her face as she raced down the rubberized stairs toward the library doors.

  ***

  Things only went downhill from there.

  The first weekend of Tina's summer vacation was spent un-renovating her mother's new art studio back into a bedroom for James. Her parents were supposed to be helping, but they'd had an emergency at work, which meant the whole job had fallen on Tina.

  Since it was his room, fixing it up should have been James's responsibility, but other than a few brief interactions on the way to their house's single bathroom, Tina hadn't seen her brother at all. He'd looked terrible when she had seen him, all sunken eyes and pale skin, but any sympathy Tina might have felt was destroyed by the fact that James spent every waking moment lying on their parents' bed, playing FFO instead of helping her. When she pointed this out to their parents, though, they'd just told her to stop being childish. And then they'd taken James out for dinner. Again.

  By the third day, Tina didn't even care anymore. She just wanted the work to be over. Thankfully, the morning of the fourth day, her mother had finally declared the bedroom fit for her darling, leaving Tina free to do what she wanted, which was to run down the hall to her own room and flop on her bed to finally play some FFO.

  All of her anger and resentment vanished the moment she put on her VR headset. FFO's brassy, repetitive loading music was the most glorious thing she'd ever heard when the updates finally finished and she was able to log in. All that was left now was to decide who she wanted to be.

  There were a lot of options. Despite playing FFO obsessively for a year, Tina had yet to find a character she really liked. She had one of almost every class, but she hadn't leveled any of them up to max. The best she had was a level forty-five elven Cleric named ClaraSpell. Her goal this summer was to get someone to level eighty, and as her highest character, ClaraSpell was the logical choice. When Tina moved her virtual finger to the elf's selection button, though, she paused.

  Normally, Tina liked playing a Cleric. People always wanted a healer in their group. Considering how ignored she usually was in real life, Tina relished the popularity, but she kind of regretted making ClaraSpell an elf. She'd picked the race because she'd loved how graceful their animations were, but despite setting all the character customization sliders to the minimum, ClaraSpell still looked like a busty Fantasy pinup girl. A misconception that was only made worse by the armor she was currently wearing, a combination that everyone on the forums jokingly referred to as the "Holy Harem Girl" set.

  Usually, the power the magical armor gave her was enough to make Tina overlook the constant boob talking and accidental "bumping" into her ass from other players, but she just didn't know if she was up for dealing with the harassment today. If she didn't focus, though, she'd never get a character to max level. She was still going back and forth over it when a chat window popped into the corner of her vision.

  "Hey, Tina!" her friend David's voice came over her speakers. "You logged in yet?"

  A grin spread over Tina's real face beneath the VR helmet. She wasn't even in-game yet, and David was already trying to jump the line to get her in his party. After days of being used as a mover-bot by her parents while her brother slacked, the preferential treatment felt like a drink of water in the desert.

  "Getting on right now."

  "Great. Make a new Knight and join me in Bastion."

  Tina scowled. "A Knight? Why?"

  "'Cause I need a tank, and no one else is on. Just make something and get in here."

  "Dude, I'm not making another character! I need to level Clara up."

  "You can level your Cleric anytime," he said irritably. "I need a Knight to tank the first dungeon, and you owe me for letting you have that Azure Starlight Staff the last time we did Red Canyon."

  Tina rolled her eyes. She should have known that would come back to haunt her. David never let you have anything for free.

  "Okay, okay," she said, clicking the Create New Character button. "Just give me a few minutes to make something th
at's not hideous."

  "No one cares what you look like," David scolded. "Just hit the randomize button and get in here."

  "I care," Tina snapped. "And why are you in such a rush? Even if I logged in right now, my Knight's only going be level one. The first dungeon is for level tens."

  "Don't worry," David said smugly. "I've got a ton of enhancement scrolls. We'll just pump up your health bar so you don't die every time something hits you and wing the rest."

  That sounded like a stupid plan, but Tina hadn't really wanted to level Clara, and Knight was the only class left that she hadn't tried.

  "Okay," she said with a sigh. "I'll be right in."

  "Great, just be quick about it."

  Tina rolled her eyes as the chat window closed and clicked on the Knight Class button to check out her options.

  There were a lot. Unlike Clerics, Naturalists, and Sorcerers, which were limited to the mana-using species, every race in the game could be a Knight. Tina's first thought was to just make another elf, but the chainmail bikini the level one female Knights started out wearing wasn't much better than the Holy Harem Girl set. If she didn't make an elf, though, that didn't leave many options.

  Schtumples were out. The tiny, pug-like characters were cute in a hideous, stumpy, bug-eyed way, but Tina couldn't stand the idea of her fantasy self being even shorter than her real life self. The ichthyian fish people looked gross, humans were boring, and Tina didn't want to have anything to do with the jubatus. The male models weren't so bad, but the females all looked like porny cat-girls. Total cringe.

  That left the towering stonekin race. Tina had seen them around, but the rock people were much more popular with guys than girls. She couldn't remember the last time she'd seen a female stonekin, actually. Looking at the rock lady's hulking, body-builder physique, Tina could understand why. Stonekin girls were intimidating, but that might be fun in its own way. She usually only played elves, which meant David was probably expecting the chainmail bikini. If Tina showed up as a giant stonekin, he'd freak his shit.