Last Bastion

by Rachel Aaron

  He looked at James as if he wanted him to agree, but James didn't know what to say. Ar'Bati did, though.

  "Where were the knights?"

  Flameboyant blinked. "The who?"

  "The Royal Knights!" Fangs snarled. "The protectors of Bastion! Brave men of integrity and uncompromising honor sworn to serve the king! Why didn't they stop this?"

  Flameboyant stared at him as though he'd started speaking another language. "Dude," he said at last. "Who do you think was slaughtering us?"

  Before James could process that, the whole raid ground to a halt as Tina raised her hand.

  Chapter 3

  Tina

  Tina had spent the last twenty minutes stewing about her brother.

  It wasn't just that he'd rezzed the Sorcerer or that he'd disobeyed orders. It wasn't even that he'd argued with her in front of her raid. It was everything. The whole Jamesy-ness of the situation. He always, always, always found a way to take something simple and screw it up. And then, when she pointed out his failings, he'd somehow turn things back around on her to make it look like it was her fault.

  Now the whole raid was probably talking about how Mega-Bitch Roxxy wasn't going to rez that poor guy, all because James couldn't wait three fucking minutes for her to secure the situation like a goddamn responsible leader. It was the broken record of her entire childhood all over again. Even trapped in another world, everything was still about what James wanted. How James felt. All Tina needed now was for their parents to show up and make a fuss over how brave he'd been to stand up to her, and the circle would be complete.

  Just thinking about it made her want to turn around and scream at him all over again. She tried to distract herself by keeping her eyes on where they were going, but that was almost worse. She'd liked Bastion well enough back in the game, but the city had been a horror show from the moment they'd stepped out of the Portal Sanctum, and it was only getting worse.

  The farther they went into the old part of town by the castle, the taller the stone buildings got, looming over the streets and cutting off her view until she felt like she was walking through a canyon. The smoke was thicker in here as well, and the silent, blackened buildings were full of shadows and hiding places. It was the perfect place for an ambush, but aside from the suicide Sorcerer, she hadn't seen a soul.

  Even SilentBlayde was quiet. She could feel him whenever he passed through her shadow. His slight touches were her only comfort on what was otherwise a horrible, paranoid march. Tina was wondering how much farther they had to walk before they reached the castle when SB's touches suddenly ceased.

  She stopped in her tracks. "Blayde?"

  A hand reached out of the shadows to grab her arm, making her jump.

  "Don't do that!" she hissed as SB came out of her shadows. Then she saw his face. "Whoa, what happened?"

  SB's blue eyes were haggard when they met hers. "Founder's Square is around the corner."

  That was a relief. The Founder's Square had been one of the main player hubs back in the game. It had been right next to the Portal Sanctum, but Bastion had been hit by the same annoying spatial expansion as everywhere else, which meant a lot more walking. Still, Founder's Square was one of the main stops on the road to the castle. It should have been good to confirm that they were headed in the right direction, but Tina didn't think anything good was coming when SB looked like that.

  "How bad is it?"

  "Bad," he whispered, reaching up to tug his mask higher over his face. "You'll see."

  She wanted to ask why he wouldn't just tell her, but she'd learned the hard way never to push with him. So instead, Tina held up her hand to stop the raid.

  "Wait here," she said as the group came to a halt. "I'm going to check ahead."

  No one argued, though Anders did step up to follow her, staff clutched nervously in his webbed hands. Technically, she should have told him to follow orders and stay back, but Tina didn't mind having a healer along, so she let him follow, holding her breath as she walked around the corner.

  And into hell.

  "Fuck," she whispered, hand shooting up to cover her mouth.

  For the most part, Founder's Square looked how she remembered. It was still huge and had the fountain in the middle with its giant statues of the heroes of the ancient Battle of Heraldsford. Oddly, the fires that had ravaged the rest of the city didn't seem to have been as bad here. The tall, elegant buildings flanking the square were still sooty, but they were mostly intact, as were the ornamental pavilions where the NPCs who sold armor tokens used to stand surrounded by swarms of bored players browsing for new gear or showing off their elite pets and mounts. It had always been a popular place, crowded and busy.

  Now it was full of bodies.

  The football field-sized square was carpeted in corpses. They were so thick on the ground, Tina could barely see the blood-drenched cobblestones. Someone had stacked them stonekin-high around the fountain, making it look as if the heroes of Heraldsford were standing knee deep in a mountain of the dead.

  Behind her, there was a horrible noise as Anders emptied his stomach. If she hadn't been subsisting on a diet of magical rocks for the last few days, Tina would have joined him. Whatever had happened here, it must have been days ago, because all the bodies were rotting. Even by her stonekin's dulled standards, the stench was horrific, overpowering even the smoke, but what really got her was the way they'd died.

  "Blayde."

  Seconds after she said his name, the Assassin stepped out of her shadow, his face pale above his mask. "Look at this," she said, kneeling down beside the body of a jubatus Knight whose throat had been slit open. "His sword is still in his sheath."

  "A lot of them are like that," SilentBlayde said, his voice shaking. "Whatever happened here, they didn't fight back."

  "I don't think they could," Tina said, moving to the next body, a Cleric with a very nice staff that was still on his back. "That's the Solace of the Sun," she muttered, eyes roving over the dead. "Glorious Plate of the Defiant, Aracneweaver's Robes, the Amulet of Discord... These are all players." Her eyes went back to the ugly knife slits that marked each throat. "No one just stands there passively and lets someone slit their throat. I bet whoever did this came through and killed them while they were collapsed during the transition."

  "They do seem to have been here for a few days, so the timing matches up," SB agreed, waving his hand at the flies that were swarming over the square like a sandstorm. "But why would someone do this?"

  "Why did the soldiers at the Order keep attack us?" Tina said darkly, looking over her shoulder at Anders, who'd finished emptying his stomach. "Go get the rest of the guild."

  "Are you sure?" SB asked quietly as the Cleric ran off. "There're other streets. We could go around."

  "No," Tina said, shaking her head. "They need to see this, and we need to search for survivors. Maybe someone managed to escape this." And if they had, maybe they could tell her who'd done it.

  There was a wave of gasps when the raid came around the corner. Several players followed Anders's lead and lost their breakfasts. Others just stood and stared glassy-eyed, unable to process the sheer magnitude of death. A few ran out into the carnage, crying out in rage and horror as they discovered the bodies of friends, even family, but the true incarnation of rage was Zen.

  Tina had never seen an elf do anything other than flow from place to place, but the dark-skinned Ranger stomped across the square to check the bodies, her lovely face as hard as steel as she turned over the bodies one by one with the cold, precise, channeled fury of a medical professional. When she'd made it through a good quarter of the square, she turned on her heel and stomped back to Tina.

  "They're all higher-level players," Zen said. "I didn't see a single body wearing gear for less than level forty five, and there's no NPCs at all. Also, look at this."

  The Ranger shoved a scrap of fabric into her hands. Tina looked down in confusion, fingering the scrap of bright-red wool. Actually red, not just bloodst
ained, and carefully lined with elegant gold-colored trim.

  "What is it?"

  "I don't know," Zen replied. "But I had to pry it from an Assassin's cold, dead hands. He was probably just aware enough to grab whoever attacked him, and a bit of their clothing ripped off in his fingers. Not that it saved him."

  Tina clenched her jaw and turned to SB, who was still hovering beside her. "Do you recognize this?"

  "It's too small to say for sure," the Assassin replied, leaning in for a closer look. "But those are the king's colors."

  That didn't bode well. "Keep looking," Tina ordered, putting the cloth in her backpack. "See if you can find anything else. And check everywhere someone could hide. Maybe we can get a witness."

  The raid nodded and fanned out. Since she didn't mind blood so much as a stonekin, Tina volunteered to check the pile by the fountain. She was gently looking through the piled corpses for any sign of life when a shout rang out across the square.

  "I found someone!"

  Her head shot up to see Zen digging at the rubble that had slid down in front of the door of a collapsed inn. "Help me!" she cried.

  A half dozen Knights and Berserkers ran over to help her clear the fallen stone. Tina charged in as well and shoveled the ash-stained white stone aside to get to the weak voices she could now hear calling from inside. It took her, Frank, and Killbox working together to heave the final bus-sized hunk of solid limestone wall out of the way, revealing the main room of the inn. The falling rocks had smashed a hole in the floorboards, and down below, huddled like dogs in the cellar, was a knot of filthy, gaunt-looking people wearing the comically mismatched armor of low-level players.

  "We're saved!" a human Ranger cried, her red-rimmed eyes wet with tears.

  "Thank you," a gaunt Assassin sobbed as Killbox reached down to pull him out.

  The Roughnecks rushed forward, lighting up the grim Founder's Square with the vibrant golds and greens as heals rained down on the battered survivors. James was there as well, adding his Naturalist spells to the mix. Tina didn't even mind that they were vastly overhealing and wasting mana. She was too busy hauling the group's lone stonekin up into the smoky sunlight.

  "Thank you," he whispered, stone voice cracking.

  "Our pleasure," Tina said, looking over her shoulder at SB. "Get these folks food and water from our supplies, please."

  "On it," the Assassin said and disappeared, then he reappeared just a few moments later with a bag and a waterskin bearing the mark of the Order of the Golden Sun.

  The players fell on the food as though they hadn't eaten in days, which was probably accurate.

  "Thank you so much," the thin Assassin who'd been pulled out first said. "I thought we were done for."

  "You're welcome," Tina said, flashing him a marble-toothed smile. "You're lucky Zen heard you down there."

  The Assassin nodded, his face haggard, like he knew just how slim that chance had been. "Did you guys find BlastBarry yet?"

  "Who?" Tina asked.

  "Whoa," Killbox said at the same time, suddenly looking up from the rocks he'd been moving to prop up the structurally unstable inn's upper story. "Did you say BlastBarry?"

  "Is he alive too?" Tina said hopefully.

  All the survivors looked down at their feet.

  "No," the Assassin whispered. "He's dead. But we wanted to find his body."

  "He's the only reason we're alive," the girl Ranger added. "He died saving us."

  "He's dead?" Killbox asked, eyes going wide. "Fuck."

  "Did you know him?" Tina asked.

  Killbox nodded, covering his face with a burly arm. "BlastBarry was in the Red Sands PVP guild with me. We did arenas together all the time. Dude was such a great asshole with his long-range fire tornado spec." His deep voice started to crack. "I can't believe he's dead."

  He fell quiet after that, and Tina put a comforting hand on his shoulder before turning back to the survivors. "Who did this?"

  "The Royal Knights," the Ranger said, baring her teeth. "Those sons of bitches started cutting throats the moment the wham-spin-wham finished. I was still stuck in sensory hell, but I heard them laughing about it. I also heard someone order them to take the low-level ones alive. They were trying to grab me when some of the players started to snap out of it."

  "A bunch of us woke up early," the thin Assassin continued, his face haggard. "I was one of them, but this isn't my main. I just started this character, so I couldn't do anything against the high-level Knights. The players who could fight back did, but we were badly outnumbered and popping up one by one. I dragged as many people as I could here to the inn, but there was a whole squad of knights out there slitting throats and grabbing people, and soon it was down to just BlastBarry. He was holding the doorway, dumping fire into the knights and screaming for everyone to get to the cellar before he ran out of mana. He took as many of the bastards out as he could, and then he blew up the inn instead of letting them take us. I heard the Royal Knights digging for a while afterward, but they eventually gave up and left us for dead. We tried to run away after that, but we're all too low-level. None of us had enough strength gear to move the rocks and get out. If you hadn't shown up..."

  His voice trailed off, and Tina put a hand on his shoulder. "Thank you for telling us."

  "I just hope you can do something about it," the Assassin replied, his red-rimmed eyes vengeful. "You guys look like serious raiders. I hope you kick the shit out of all those Royal Fuckers. I'd do it, but I'm stuck on my damn alt. There's not much I can do as a level thirty when all the knights are level eighty."

  "Well, you're all with us now," Tina said, patting him gently on the back. "So you'll get to see it if we do."

  "I'd like that," the Assassin said.

  With that, Tina left the survivors to their meal, walking back to the door where SilentBlayde and Zen were waiting. "You catch all that?"

  "We did," SB said darkly, glancing at Zen, who looked equally murderous. "Sounds like the Royal Knights were killing the ones who could fight back and taking the ones who couldn't."

  "They were probably mad about the Nightmare," Zen said. "Remember how the Order treated us? We saved their bacon, and they still acted like we were Nazis."

  "I think the Knights hate us even more," Anders said as he joined them. "Remember the April Fool's Day quest line? The whole game teamed up to humiliate and harass the Royal Knights every spring to stock up on luck potions."

  "Those quests were hilarious," SB said, then his shoulders slumped. "Not so funny now, though."

  "Being mad about pranks doesn't excuse this," Tina said hotly. "Nothing can excuse this."

  "So what are we going to do about it?" Zen said. "And what about the low-level players they took alive?"

  Before Tina could answer, someone cleared their throat behind her. When she looked over her shoulder, James was standing in her shadow.

  Just seeing him set Tina's teeth on edge. James's antics were the last thing she needed right now, and to make matters worse, he had his pet NPC in tow. The Angry Cat looked shocked by all the death, which Tina supposed was a very small mark in his favor, but he was still glowering with an attitude she absolutely did not want to deal with right now. She was about to tell James to take his circus back to Neko when he announced, "My brother has something to tell you."

  Tina was about to tell him that his brother could go to hell when SB put a hand on her arm. "Does he know anything about this?"

  "No, for I was not here," Ar'Bati replied, pulling himself taller in a futile effort to match Tina's stonekin. "But I heard others outside saying that this was the work of the Royal Knights, and I knew then I had to speak with you."

  Tina's eyes narrowed suspiciously. "Why?"

  "Because it cannot be true!" the jubatus said fiercely. "The Royal Knights are a noble order, protectors of the king himself! To be elevated to their ranks is the greatest honor in Bastion. They would never commit such atrocities!"

  "Well, they"--Tina pointed a
t the huddled survivors--"say otherwise. Are you calling them liars?"

  The cat opened his mouth, undoubtedly to say exactly that, but James got there first.

  "He's saying there must have been some kind of misunderstanding," her brother said tactfully. "And I agree. You remember how the knights were in the game. They're the quintessential Lawful Good guys of FFO. They were always on our side in every quest zone. Why would they just go crazy and kill everyone?"

  "Ask your cat," Tina snarled. "All the NPCs went nuts when the game turned real. Why should the knights be different?"

  "The Nightmare changed everything for the worse," Ar'Bati agreed. "But the Royal Knights are not murderers! It could be that some were driven mad, as I was, but you cannot condemn an entire order for the acts of a few!"

  "This was a lot more than a few," Zen said hotly, stabbing her finger out at the square full of corpses. "You think a handful of bad apples could have done all that? This was clearly a coordinated effort to kill off all of a specific group of people. Where I'm from, we call that genocide."

  "I know how bad this looks," James pleaded. "But Ar'Bati has a point. I can't vouch for the individual knights who did this, but the Royal Knighthood as a whole has always been unrelentingly good. They ran all the starter quest hubs around Bastion, and they serve the king directly." He turned to SB. "You have the 'Hand of the King' achievement, right? That means you've done all of King Gregory's quests, including the stupid lost-cat ones. You know he's not a bad guy. Do you think for a moment that he would tolerate this?"

  "I can't say," SB replied cautiously, glancing at Tina. "I know the quest text made King Gregory seem like a decent man, but does that mean anything anymore?"

  "But you have to admit that it doesn't add up," James pressed. "None of this does. It just doesn't make sense for the Royal Knights to slaughter players when we've always worked together. I'm not saying the individuals who did this aren't guilty if it's true. I'm just saying we should make an effort to investigate before we declare the one force who's always been our stalwart ally to all be evil murderers."