Rogue Evolution

by James Hunter

  Somewhere down that way lay Daemonhold Deep and its mighty keeper, Aczol the Eternal. The ultimate prize.

  Corporate Conspiracy

  AS IT TURNED OUT, RANDY didn’t have to wait until noon for Danny to leave. The VP of Marketing cut out fifteen minutes early, striding down the hall while talking on his phone, telling someone named Sully that “It’s gonna be hella epic.”

  Randy leaned out his doorway and watched Danny’s retreating back until he disappeared around the corner into the elevator lobby.

  He stepped back into his office and checked the time. Watched the seconds tick away into minutes. Every now and then he had to remind himself to breathe. He had to wait the full fifteen minutes—had to be sure Danny was gone and not coming back unexpectedly. Maybe he really could’ve done it with his Invisibility, but this was better. Safer. This way he didn’t have to rely on results he hadn’t been able to faithfully reproduce. Admittedly, it wasn’t nearly as cool as espionage via invisibility, but results were all that really mattered in the end.

  Finally, the minutes rolled over to zero. High noon.

  “Now or never,” Randy whispered.

  Already breaking out in a cold sweat, Randy pasted what he hoped was a nonchalant smile on his face and stepped out into the hallway, heading for Danny’s plush corner office. Just regular old Randy taking a quick bathroom break after a morning hard at work. Not doing anything suspicious. Why, Randy was so plain vanilla he would never even dream of doing something risky or suspicious. People like him simply didn’t do things like this, which worked heavily to his advantage.

  The microwave in the employee lounge beeped, and Randy jumped, terror zinging along his limbs like lightning. He clutched his chest and almost beelined back for his desk. But whoever was in the lounge just added more time to the microwave and started it again.

  Randy let out a long breath. This was so much worse than facing down even the most heinously difficult creatures of Hearthworld. Another scare like that would probably stop his heart. He patted his chest, glancing down absently.

  His hand, his chest, and every other part of his body were gone. He was invisible.

  Relief swept through him. This was even better than he’d imagined. Not only was Danny gone until Monday, but no one would see Randy go into his office at all. He wished he could control the strange ability at will, but for now he didn’t plan to look this gift horse in the mouth. No siree, Bob!

  With renewed confidence, Randy marched down the hall, checked both directions for anyone who might spot Danny’s door opening and closing by itself, then let himself into the darkened room and locked the door behind him with an audible click.

  As soon as he sat down, the extra expensive leather chair conformed to his body. He had to get one of these. Arjun’s voice rang in his head, Word on the street is he’s about to get shit-canned any day. If he could afford it at his next job. Assuming anyone wanted to hire him—his resume and credentials were excellent, but he seriously doubted he’d get a glowing recommendation from anyone at Frontflip.

  Shoving those problems aside for a different day, Randy woke up Danny’s workstation and entered the password from the sticky note, still pasted to the side of his monitor. He was looking around the desk for a coffee cup or something he could use to lift a latent print and fool the fingerprint scanner like they did on spy films, but the screen flashed once and brought up the home display.

  Danny must’ve shut off print recognition for an easier login. Moron.

  Working quickly, Randy pulled up the marketing VP’s email and began searching for anything from the higher-ups or HR.

  There was a disgusting number of butt-kissing emails to Silva and the other members of the board, mostly about golf. So that was the real way to climb the social ladder. Wretched. Randy scowled and filtered out the Sent messages.

  The first one caught his eye because it contained his name. It was from Susan in HR, in response to an email from Danny asking why Randy hadn’t been fired yet.

  If someone else on the Dev team could do any better, Randy would be gone by now, but nobody’s even been able to get close to these modders. If we fire him and end up needing him to go back in, we’re screwed.

  A combination of vindication and humiliation stirred in Randy’s insides. The fact that Danny was actively advocating for his termination wasn’t exactly surprising, but he was surprised how much the betrayal hurt. He didn’t like Danny, and Danny didn’t really like him—they were far from friends—but they’d been coworkers for years. They’d even been adjacent office mates at one point, back in the old days. Still not a total shock. But seeing that everyone wanted to fire him felt like a punch to the gut. If there was a silver lining to the whole painful debacle, it was the fact that nobody else had been able to top what he’d found out for them.

  “Looks like the loser dev is way more valuable that you jerks realized,” he muttered under his breath, scrolling to the next message.

  Whatever, at least we’ll have a fall guy, Danny had sent back.

  The hair on the back of Randy’s neck stood up as he kept reading. Danny and Susan weren’t the only ones in on this thread. Farther down, higher-ups like Paula and Asif were talking about “getting this done quickly” and “making sure we get ahead of the press.”

  No problem, Danny’s reply assured them. I’ve got the release ready to feed to the news blogs. “Disgruntled employee releases rogue malware targeting massively popular VRMMO Hearthworld!”

  Michael Silva himself had responded with, I want it criminally actionable. If we do a total shutdown, we’ll lose millions in revenue. I want to see some goddamn jailtime for that kind of money.

  “No, no, no,” Randy breathed.

  This was bad. So bad. They weren’t just planning on firing him. No, the heads who ran Frontflip were literally conspiring against him. Who knew how many of his coworkers would be in on it by the end? In a company this size, there had to be a few good people who wouldn’t stand for framing somebody for a crime they didn’t commit, but if Danny and the others made it look like he was the bad guy, like he’d really done it...

  The words “total shutdown” filtered through his panic.

  The locked files.

  Randy dropped out of the email and pulled up the modder project space. Danny’s clearance gave him access to everything. All of it.

  Randy’s heart thumped maniacally, and he felt faint as he read. They were going to shut down Hearthworld for good. From what Randy could find, they had two anonymous coders from outside the company working on the protocols, making sure that when the time came to press the metaphorical red button, they wiped everything. Game over. Forever.

  Randy realized he was holding one hand over his mouth like he was trying not to vomit. His throat ached. The bad code they kept referring to, the modders and infected creatures they couldn’t delete or sequester, were Trolls like Kaz and Zyra. No matter how they had started out, those two were living, sentient, self-aware beings.

  And Frontflip was just going to delete them.

  Randy read on, numbness settling into his limbs.

  Strangely, it seemed that PwnrBwner had become a carrier for the code and was spreading it throughout the game almost faster than reporting could keep up with through sold items, player interactions, and mob killing. He was the Typhoid Mary of Hearthworld. This was a pandemic, and it had reached critical mass. They were losing control of everything, and more and more mobs—most creatures that Roark had never interacted with in even a passing fashion—were somehow catching the virus. The Jungles of Eternal Night. The Arena. Averi City. Skozhelm. The Star Iron Hills. The Vault of the Radiant Shield, of course.

  It was absolutely everywhere.

  Apparently, Frontflip had already tried deleting both PwnrBwner’s and Randy’s accounts, but the anomalous code wouldn’t allow it. Both players were locked in no matter what the devs tried to do.

  Could that have been another side effect of the Griefer making them Greater V
assals?

  Laughter in the hall made his heart skip a beat. He froze, waiting for someone to barge in and ask him what he was doing in Danny’s office, but no one did.

  How long had he been in here already? The longer he waited, the better the odds someone would discover him.

  He checked the time. Thirty minutes had already passed. He had to get out of there.

  But he would likely never get another chance like this. He had to make it count.

  Pulling up a prompt, Randy started writing lines of code at full speed, letting his anxiety carry him along, his fingers flitting over the keyboard with expert precision. Most of the time his anxiety was debilitating, but every now and then he could use it to his advantage.

  In under five minutes, he’d created a backdoor in Danny’s workstation. It took him another ten to hide it from the security sweepers and make it accessible to his home computer. Silva would never fire Danny, not with all the incriminating emails the moron—or maybe he was secretly a genius—was saving from everybody on the board. And as long as Danny was still at Frontflip, Randy would have access to the locked files and be able to keep himself and the Griefer abreast of the developments. He’d also be able to access Danny’s incriminating emails if it came to a legal battle.

  Maybe working together, Randy and Roark could figure out some kind of workaround. Or something. That was a problem for when he had a second to think. Now wasn’t about thinking, it was about action.

  He entered the last line, then put it into action.

  “Yes!” he whispered as the prompt disappeared and the home screen went back to normal.

  He’d done it. Now, it was time to—

  The door handle rattled.

  “Gotta be kidding me,” Danny’s frustrated voice muttered.

  Randy lurched across the desk, jabbing the Power Down option.

  Installing update 1 of 167. Please do not disconnect from power supply.

  Of course! Danny’s station hadn’t been shut down, it’d been left to hibernate. Was Danny dumb enough to assume it was shutting down on its own?

  Keys jingled and the lock turned.

  Randy stumbled out of the chair and glanced down at himself—panic setting in as he realized his invisibility had waned at some point since entering the room. He frantically tried to remember how he’d gone invisible before. Fear, right? Well, he was just about scared enough to wet himself, so if it didn’t work then, it never world. He held his breath, begging his limbs to go weightless and disappear.

  Slowly, his shoes started to dissolve. Then his ankles.

  The door swung open, and the lights flickered on.

  “What the fuck!” Danny jumped back against the jamb, arm cocked to throw a punch. After a second, it lowered. “Jeez, Rando, you scared the shit out of me.”

  Randy opened his mouth and shut it again, gasping like a fish out of water. Say something, say anything. Make it a joke.

  But he was too slow. Danny’s expression morphed from shock to anger.

  “What the hell are you doing in my office?” His eyes landed on the screen. The updates were at 2 of 167. “Were you fucking with my workstation?”

  “I—uh—no—I—”

  “Oh, bro.” Danny shook his head. “That’s it. You are so done.” He strode across the room and grabbed the phone off the desk. “Security’s going to throw you out on your ass so hard, you’ll be in a body cast. You’ll never work in this industry again, jackoff.”

  Randy looked from Danny, punching in security’s number, to the unattended door. All that fight or flight building up in his muscles kicked in at once, and he shot across the room.

  Danny slugged him in the stomach. The punch drove the air out of Randy’s lungs and sent what was left of his breakfast Pop-Tart spewing out onto the carpet in a chunky strawberry spray. Pain radiated out from the point of impact, dropping Randy to his knees in the puke.

  “You’re not going anywhere until security gets here, loser,” Danny sneered, lifting the phone back to his ear. “Yeah, this is Danny with Marketing. I’ve got an immediate trespass of a terminated employee. Second floor, corner office.”

  Randy swallowed a second wave of nausea and wiped a string of pinkish saliva from his bottom lip, blinking with disbelief.

  Danny had hit him. Like actually punched him. In the stomach! He hadn’t been beaten up since tenth grade, and this jerk, this meatheaded moron, had punched him so hard he’d thrown up.

  Randy staggered to his feet, the office disappearing from his vision, replaced by a curtain of bloody red.

  Into the Cairns

  HEALED, RESTED, AND full of excellent food, Roark and the others began the push deeper into the Underworld Cairns while Mac disappeared into the darkness, returning occasionally to check on Roark.

  So close to the entrance and the Jungles of Eternal Night, the dank tunnels felt spookily deserted. Almost cemeterial. Clusters of webs, no doubt courtesy of Isara’s troops, filled niches and corners, and the odd Desiccated Corpse hung from the ceiling wrapped in the silken thread. It seemed as if they were alone in this underground world.

  “Before her rise to power, my lady and the other Conquistadors conquered much of this territory in the name of the Night,” Ick explained when Zyra commented on the lack of local mobs. “This area is technically considered a wild zone and not a part of any dungeon proper. It is free range, but few mobs from below venture here anymore, knowing what grisly fate awaits them.” He gestured toward the corpse sacks dangling from high above.

  In time, however, the webbing tapered off, and the tunnels began to open up and branch off in wild directions. The first creature they saw in the Underworld Cairns was a tiny, bloody, screaming blob that reminded Roark of the entrails of a butchered hare, which had, inexplicably, gained some rudimentary form of sentience. The spidery white text floating over its head proclaimed it a [Later Blightscreamer].

  After crawling along warily so long without anything to fight, everyone was eager to attack. PwnrBwner, however, moved first.

  The Ranger-Cleric pointed a finger at the screaming ball of rabbit guts and shouted a commanding prayer in a language Roark had never heard. For a heartbeat, the Blightscreamer glowed with Divine light.

  The Blightscreamer exploded.

  “Suck it,” PwnrBwner said.

  Instinctively, Roark threw up an Infernal Shield. Blood and offal splashed against its purple light. Zyra simply Shadow Stalked to avoid the mess, bits of Blightscreamer whiffing through the inky black smoke. Kaz and Ick had neither immediate defense available to them, and a shower of gore that seemed wildly out of proportion with the size of the tiny creature rained down on them.

  “Was that Solar Glory?” Roark asked the Ranger-Cleric while the Mighty Gourmet and the Witchdoctor cleaned their faces.

  PwnrBwner nodded. “Pretty cool, right?”

  Roark wasn’t so sure. He hadn’t had the opportunity to see that particular Divine spell in action before. Now that he had, he had to suppress a shudder of revulsion and mute horror. The thought of a spell like that being used to make similar crimson showers of his Trolls was unnerving. And PwnrBwner had only leveled his Ranger-Cleric to 15 so far. What could a level 99 Malaika Herald do with a spell that powerful if one ever made it past the Curse Chains on the Citadel’s first level?

  Best to avoid that line of query for the moment.

  As they delved deeper into the cairns and farther from the Nocturnuses’ influence, the mobs came thicker and faster. Grieveflayers, Rotpaws, and infuriating ghostly creatures called Ashwraiths, which were only susceptible to damage when their edges began to glow with dark orange light but could deal out damage even while ethereal.

  The mobs in the cairns were fairly high level, all well over 30, but they came in ones and twos—never more than a trickle. And with Kaz and Zyra’s new levels and abilities, Ick’s support casting, and PwnrBwner’s Divine powers, the creatures of the Underworld hardly posed a true threat. By prior agreement, whenever possible, R
oark stepped in to land the killing blow, either with magick, blade, or Cursed head. This gained them even more Transmutation Cores that could be used on the Troll Nation troops. An excellent consolation since only PwnrBwner could earn Experience by killing the creatures.

  After a couple hours of grinding through the thick of the cairns, the mobs became scarce once more, tapering off to the merest trickle before disappearing completely. The air felt thick with heat and death. This was surely a cursed place not fit for life of any sort to dwell. Finally, the tunnel dumped them into a spacious cavern like a lost underground desert. Red sand dunes filled the cave, their surfaces rippling like water under a stiff breeze, and heat waves rose toward the arching ceiling. On a hunch, Roark checked the landscape for flying conditions. As he suspected, red updraft arrows filled the cavern. It would be excellent for an aerial battle, should it come to that.

  “The Underworld Bloodsands,” Ick said, voice more than a little awed. “Few creatures dare to venture here for fear of incurring the wrath of Aczol the Eternal.”

  “I take it we’ll find him there?” Zyra asked, gesturing with one of her four human arms at a giant keep near the center of the cavern.

  Ick nodded. “That is Daemonhold Deep, the seat of Aczol’s power.”

  They made their way down to the red dunes, Zyra Wall Walking straight down the canyon wall while PwnrBwner, Ick, and Kaz took a crude stair carved into the rockface. Roark glided down on leathery wings, which gave him a few moments alone to study the dragon’s lair.

  The keep itself was enormous. Side by side with the entirety of the Cruel Citadel, it would’ve dwarfed the Trolls’ home many times over—and that was if what could be seen above the sand was all there was. Its craggy walls sloped upward in strange embankments, the highest point growing into the ceiling of the cavern like a stalactite that had finally reached the upper limit of its cave. The more Roark looked at Daemonhold Deep, the more it reminded him of a gargantuan termite mound.