The Once King

by Rachel Aaron

  Contents

  Title Page

  Content Warning

  Chapter 1 - Tina

  Chapter 2 - James

  Chapter 3 - Tina

  Chapter 4 - James

  Chapter 5 - Tina

  Chapter 6 - James

  Chapter 7 - Tina

  Chapter 8 - James

  Chapter 9 - Tina

  Chapter 10 - James

  Chapter 11 - Tina

  Chapter 12 - James

  Chapter 13 - Tina

  Chapter 14 - James and Tina

  Chapter 15 - Tina and James

  Chapter 16 - James and Tina

  Epilogue

  The End

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  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Forever Fantasy Online:

  The Once King

  Book 3 of 3

  By Rachel Aaron and Travis Bach

  Leylia’s secret could unite them all or lead them to an eternity of undeath.

  After the loss of Bastion, everyone who’s not a zombie has holed up in FFO’s sole remaining safe haven: the lowbie town of Windy Lake. But the undead armies never rest, and it’s only a matter of time before the Once King’s forces come to crush what’s left of life in this world.

  But Tina, James, and the rest of the players are facing a crisis of their own. After so long in this world, their human bodies are dying on the other side. If they don’t find a way home soon, they may have nothing to go back to. With time running out in two worlds, Tina and James face a horrible choice: do they spend their final days looking for a way to get back to their old bodies, or join the NPCs to fight for their new ones. But just when things look impossible, James learns a secret that might change everything. Only one catch: to pull it off, they’re going to have to fight one raid boss no one, not even Tina, has ever beaten.

  The Once King.

  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!

  Chapter 1

  Tina

  Tina Anderson, aka Roxxy, aka guild leader of the Roughnecks Mercenary Company—or what was left of it—woke up in the shallow ditch of churned dirt she’d made for herself before passing out.

  She came to with a wince, reaching up with stone fingers to brush the dust out of her lashes, which she just now noticed were made of copper wire just like her hair and sharp as little needles. Wincing again, Tina rolled onto her back to face the day, which was much darker than she’d expected. Several confused seconds later, her sleepy brain realized this was because she wasn’t looking at the sky. She was staring at a wall of stretched hide. Someone had erected a tent over her while she slept. They’d also covered her in a blanket, which her fitful sleep had tied into a knot at her feet, though not before it had gotten covered in the greenish-gray mud made from her silvery blood mixing with the fine yellow soil.

  Scowling at the mess, Tina grabbed the already ruined blanket and started scrubbing the remaining blood-mud off her armor and skin. There was a staggering amount of it, but thanks to the magical first aid the healers had poured into her, her body felt fine. Her stone limbs were supple and strong when she moved them, her core centered and still as a cave pillar.

  Too bad the same couldn’t be said for the rest of her.

  Hands over her face to block the gray-white glare of the sun through the canvas, Tina flopped back into her dust wallow with enough force to shake the ground. The only reason she didn’t dig herself even deeper in was because it wouldn’t make a difference. No amount of dirt could block yesterday’s failures. She’d failed to save Bastion City. She’d failed to find them a way home. She’d gotten them to safety, but too many people had died and been left behind. People who were never coming back. And to top it all off, she’d managed to have a giant public breakup with a guy she’d never actually been dating in the first place.

  That last one had to be the shittiest world-first ever. Just remembering the look on SilentBlayde’s face as she’d yelled at him made Tina want to burrow into the ground forever, but she didn’t have the luxury of self-pity. She didn’t know what time it was, but she could hear people moving around outside her tent. Clearly, her raid was awake, which meant she needed to be, too. So with that, Tina scrubbed the dust off her stonekin’s chiseled face one more time, picked up her shield, and pushed back the tent flap to face the day.

  The blinding day. Tina blinked in the glaring light, her emerald eyes turning the sunlight into a painfully bright rainbow that eventually condensed into a dusty field of tents and hundreds of players in dirty but still brightly glowing armor. There was so much to see, her dazzled brain didn’t know what to make of it all for a moment. Then she remembered. Thanks to James, they’d evacuated everyone from Bastion to Windy Lake, the jubatus starter town in the Savanna zone. When she’d passed out yesterday afternoon, their camp had been a mob squatting in the sunbaked field that served as the town’s festival grounds. Now the scrubby grassland had been transformed into a tent city big enough for all the Roughnecks, Trade Company, and Red Sands guilds. A short walk away at the lake’s edge, masses of low-level players huddled beneath large open-sided pavilions like refugees.

  No, not like. Were. They were refugees, all of them. Even the Roughnecks sitting around her were covered in ash and blood, their eyes vacant and haunted as they stared at their weapons or mechanically ate their rations. She was watching them just as bleakly when someone cleared their throat beside her.

  Tina jumped, nearly knocking her tent over as she whirled to see Zen sitting cross-legged in the dusty grass right next to her tent flap. The elf looked exhausted, her normally luminous complexion dull and sunken with fatigue. Even her magically perfect leaf-green hair was limp, the curls weighed down by dust and blood as she brushed them away from her face to look at Tina.

  “Get enough sleep?”

  “Yeah,” Tina said after a moment, kneeling back down. “Thanks to you.” The end of yesterday had been a mess of pain, heartbreak, and fear, but she still clearly remembered Zen offering to guard her sleep, a gift whose true value she was only now realizing. “Thank you for staying up to keep order. It must have been rough.”

  Zen shrugged. “I’m used to it. I worked a twelve-for-three night shift at the ER for ten years. Though I’m glad you’re awake now for different reasons. Frank and I have been trying to keep a lid on things, but the whole damn world has been waiting for you with bated breath.”

  Tina looked around at the subdued camp. “Really?”

  “They�
��re too tired right now to make as big a stink as they want,” Zen explained. “But people are upset. We took a hell of a beating yesterday, and it’s brought a lot of issues to the surface. Specifically, people are arguing about what to do next.”

  “Seems reasonable.” If she’d hadn’t been too hung up on the past to think about the future, she’d have been worried about that too.

  “Just because it’s reasonable doesn’t mean it’s not a problem,” the Ranger said quietly, her voice even more serious than usual. “We all chose to do the right thing yesterday and make peace because we weren’t willing to kill everyone to get our way, but that was yesterday. Today’s today, and people are starting to realize that we’re stuck on the losing side of a fight the majority of the Roughnecks want nothing to do with. We made it to safety, but the Savanna’s not that far from Bastion. It’s only a matter of time before the Once King sends his army here to finish the job.”

  “And people don’t want to fight that again,” Tina finished, nodding. “I get it. I never want to see another skeleton again, either. But—”

  “It’s not just that they don’t want to fight. This isn’t our battle. We were supposed to be going home, not fighting a war.”

  “Finding a way home has always been the goal,” Tina argued. “It still is, but we can’t find a portal home when we’re getting hammered by an undead army. Surely people understand that.”

  “They do understand,” Zen said. “That’s why no one’s broken ranks yet. But while everyone was fine with fighting for Bastion, we’re not in Bastion anymore. There’s a lot of people pointing out—not incorrectly—that fighting here doesn’t get us home. There’s also a sizable group of people who don’t want to go home at all. Frank, SB, Anders…I could go on, but you get the idea. They want to stay and stop the Once King before his army wipes what’s left of Bastion off the map and this whole continent falls to the undead.”

  Tina closed her eyes. This was way too heavy to deal with first thing in the morning. “Can we stop him?”

  “I have no idea,” Zen admitted. “But Bastion is—was—the biggest, strongest kingdom in this world. We’re looking at a very real tipping point in history here. It’s not bragging to say that the Roughnecks are the strongest military force left. If we decide to leave, the king’s remaining forces don’t stand a chance.”

  “So the fate of the world depends on us?” Tina grumbled, scrubbing her hands over her stone face. “Damn, Zen. Lay it on a little harder.”

  “I’m just telling you the facts.”

  “I know, but it’s not like we have a choice in this. If us leaving is going to get everyone killed, then we have to stay and fight. It’s not like we know how to get home right now anyway. There’s no harm in sticking around to save the world before we figure out how to leave it.”

  The issue seemed pretty cut and dried, but Zen was shaking her head.

  “What?”

  “Do you want to go back home, Tina?”

  “Of course I want to go home!” What kind of question was that? Just because certain elves who should not be named wanted to stay didn’t mean she was considering it. She was sick of being a rock. She wanted to be human again, to eat pizza and hug her mom and swim in a lake without sinking to the bottom. But just because there was nothing for her here anymore didn’t mean she was willing to let the Once King turn this whole world into the Deadlands. Yet when she said as much to Zen—minus the bit about heartbreak, of course—the Ranger only looked more dour.

  “I think your heart is in the right place,” the Ranger said. “But we might not have the luxury of getting everything we want. Did you live alone back in the real world?”

  Tina shook her head. “I have roommates.” Four of them, all just as broke as she was and crammed into a three-bedroom apartment to save on rent.

  “That’s good,” Zen said, looking genuinely relieved. “They’ve probably already found your body and gotten you to a hospital, then. I live by myself.” She tilted her head back to stare up at the bright sky. “We’ve already estimated there’s roughly a ten-to-one time difference between this world and our own. That’s a generous margin, but it still adds up. As of this morning, we’ve been trapped here for seven days. How long has my body been lying in my bed at home without food, water, or going to the bathroom? Sixteen hours? More?”

  “Oh shit,” Tina breathed, eyes going wide. “Are you dying?”

  “Not yet,” Zen said. “It takes more than one day for a healthy body to start having problems, but when I logged in to raid with you, I’d just started a three-day break. That means it’ll be at least four days before someone notices I’m missing, and probably several more before they get worried enough to come looking for me. What state will I be in then?”

  She’d asked the question, but her grim expression was all the answer Tina needed.

  “It’s not just me, either,” Zen went on. “There are probably plenty of other people here who live alone or in bad circumstances or who are in weak health. Even for those in good positions, we have no way of knowing what’s happening to our bodies on the other side. Some may already be dead. Point is: we’re all on a timer. The longer a body stays in a coma, the less chance there is of coming out. If we want to go home, we have to get a move on. The longer we spend here, the more we risk not having bodies to go home to.”

  Tina cursed under her breath. She’d been so caught up in the emergencies in front of her, she hadn’t even thought about what might be happening to the her she couldn’t see. What if those days fighting to save lives in Bastion had been the few hours too many for their bodies back home?

  “I wish we’d realized this sooner.”

  “Several of us have actually been worried about it for a while,” Zen said honestly. “But you were already doing everything you could to get us home, so there was no point in harping on it. Now though…”

  Now they had to choose. The Roughnecks were the best fighting force in the world. Tina had already known that, of course, but they’d proved it to everyone else yesterday when they’d taken on every undead boss in the game minus the Once King himself. If they said “screw this mess” and set out to search for a way home, they’d effectively be dooming everyone who stayed behind, including the players who didn’t want to go back. Including SilentBlayde. If they did stay, though, there was still no guarantee they’d win. The Once King’s army had kicked their asses in Bastion, and that was when they’d had a castle to fall back to. Out here they had nothing but grass and tents. If they fought again, people would die. Maybe everyone. If they went looking for a way back and couldn’t find one, though, they’d be stuck wandering in a world filled with undead. Any way Tina imagined it, her people died. What the hell was she supposed to do?

  “It’s a pickle,” Zen said at her panicked expression. “I’m sorry to dump this on you so soon after you and Silent—that is, I know you’re dealing with your own problems right now, but we need you to make a decision. We’ve been through a lot together, and that’s kept things civil so far, but if you don’t give an order soon, the raid’s going to split between those who want to fight and those who want to run, and none of us are going to survive if that happens.”

  Zen didn’t have to tell Tina what would happen if their raid fell apart. It had been her greatest fear since this shitfest had started. Like hell was she letting it happen now, after everything they’d accomplished together. She just wished she knew which goal she was aiming them toward.

  “Thanks for the heads-up, Zen,” she said, rising to her feet.

  “Just wanted to make sure you had the full situation before someone jumped on you,” Zen replied, standing up as well. “Like I said, the whole world’s been waiting for you to wake up. For what it’s worth, though, the raid’s held together this long. Debates have gotten heated, but I haven’t had to shut down any real altercations. So long as you don’t make any rash, unilateral decisions that stomp all over people’s feelings, I think we stand a good chance at keepin
g things together.”

  “As if I’d ever—”

  Zen’s eyebrow arched so fast, Tina couldn’t even finish that sentence. “I will steadfastly avoid doing anything of the sort,” she said instead.

  “That’s all I can ask,” the Ranger replied, pointed ears drooping as her mouth opened in a huge yawn. “And with that out of the way, I’m going to bed. I’ve been chasing people away from your tent all night. I’ve said my piece. Ball’s in your court now, Roxxy. Don’t drop it.”

  “I won’t,” Tina promised. “Thanks again, Zen. One more thing before you sack out, though.”

  “Yes?”

  She opened her mouth then froze. She was about to tell Zen to forget about it when her brain blurted the words out anyway. “Is SB okay?”

  She hated herself as she asked, but she didn’t take the words back. Running the guild when she wasn’t around was SilentBlayde’s job, one he normally took very seriously. If Zen had been riding herd on people all night, that meant SB hadn’t been around to do it, and while Tina was determined not to waste any more feelings on someone who clearly didn’t give a shit about them, worrying over Haruto was a habit she couldn’t just drop overnight.

  “Not that I care where he spends his time,” she clarified, twisting her armored hands together. “It’s just not like him to abandon his responsibilities. If he’s in trouble, I want to know, just as I would for anyone else in the raid.”

  Zen’s expression showed that that excuse wasn’t flying at all. “Of course he’s not okay,” she said with her usual bluntness. “But I saw James drag him off, so he’s in good hands. Let his friends worry about him. You worry about us.”

  “Right,” Tina said in a small voice. “Sorry.”

  Zen waved the apology away and crawled into the tent, curling her long, lithe body into the stonekin-shaped ditch Tina had left in the middle. She was asleep the moment she hit the ground. Tina paused just long enough to tuck the slightly muddy blanket around her narrow shoulders before slipping back outside, feeling like an idiot.