Glory to the Brave (Ascend Online Book 4)

by Luke Chmilenko

  “Marc, we don’t have time, and I’m sure that they’ll have coffee—” Peter stated urgently, the words practically flying out of his mouth until a loud ding sounded and cut him off.

  Launching into motion as soon as I heard the noise, I picked up the now-full carafe and poured it into an oversized travel mug that I had waiting on the counter. Once the pot was empty, I reached out towards a small jar of sugar, not even bothering to measure how much I was adding to the coffee and dumping roughly half of its contents into my drink. Continuing on autopilot, I completed the mix, pouring in a copious amount of cream before snapping a lid onto the mug’s top.

  “Okay, now I’m ready,” I announced, grabbing the travel mug and giving it shake as I moved to leave the kitchen.

  “Geez, Marc, that has to taste like diabetes with that much sugar in it,” Peter commented, glancing down at the massive forty-ounce container in my hand while holding out my jacket.

  “You mean delicious,” I replied tiredly, throwing my coat on and following the man out of the suite as we rushed towards the elevator, which thankfully took seconds to arrive. Managing to take a healthy sip from my coffee while we descended, I felt the liquid begin to work its magic, slowly clearing the cobwebs from my brain.

  Its doors opening with a chime, Peter didn’t waste any time in speeding out of the elevator the second he was able to, his fingers tapping on his phone as he moved, leaving me struggling to keep up in my still semi-asleep state. Crossing through the CTI lobby in a blur, it seemed like seconds before we were entering a waiting car, barely feeling the still brisk April air in the process.

  “Quiet mode,” Peter told the car as the door closed behind me, never looking up from his phone. “I’m sending a text to Paul to let him know that we’re running a bit late.”

  “Thanks,” I replied, taking another long sip from my cup as the vehicle began to move and merged into traffic. “Hopefully, I’ll be more awake by the time we get there.”

  “I’m surprised you sleep at all if you’re drinking coffee like that,” Peter said dryly as he continued to type out a message on his phone, pausing to rub his own eyes which were outlined by twin dark circles.

  Unfortunately, our rest day today had been anything but that so far, starting itself off in a wild panic when I realized that the alarm that I thought I had set this morning hadn’t gone off, leaving me waking up and staring at my watch twenty minutes before both Peter and I were supposed to be at our regular meeting at Ætherworld Productions. The chaos that had followed afterward involved both Peter and I scrambling to get ready, the both of us needing to shower and clean up after spending ten straight days logged into Ascend Online. The only saving grace amid all the rush was that Deckard, Heron, and Zach had all opted to go home last night to sleep in their own beds, leaving us to only contend with a few muffled curses from Misha, along with a pair of thrown pillows as we got ready.

  “It’s either the coffee or finding more time to sleep,” I replied, taking another long sip from my mug and then giving it another shake to stir up the sugar that hadn’t managed to dissolve yet. “And it’s not like we’ve had time to be idle the last couple days.”

  “No, I guess not,” Peter admitted as he dropped his phone in his lap and leaned backward in his seat to stretch while letting out another large yawn. “Anything from the group chat? I haven’t even looked this morning yet.”

  “Me either actually, let me check,” I replied as I reflexively reached into my pocket, pulled out my phone, and brought up the chat, skimming over the handful of updates that had been left by Cassius, Thorne, and Dunedin.

  “Looks like routine stuff,” I said after having had a chance to fully skim through the text. “Léandre is sending some more supplies towards Shadow’s Fall by wagon with Thorne and the lizards escorting it, and Dunedin is taking all the hands he can get for logging today. Meanwhile, Cassius says that all is still quiet on his end of things.”

  “Phew, that’s good news at least,” Peter replied with relief. “For some reason, I was expecting something to go to hell the minute that we logged off.”

  “The day’s still early,” I said dryly, feeling the caffeine finally permeate into my brain and gradually sharpen my vision. “There’s plenty of time left for something to go wrong.”

  “Well,” Peter grunted, casting a pointed glance at me. “Someone is sure feeling cheery today.”

  “Eh,” I replied non-committally as I drank more of my coffee. “With everything that’s happened to us so far, I like to think I’m being realistic at this point.”

  “Be that as it may, your realism is harshing my optimism,” Peter countered. “So drink more of your magic bean juice, fast, because I’m going to need positive Marcus around today.”

  “With how much sugar and caffeine is in this drink, my bet is you’re probably going to end up with anxious and twitchy Marcus,” I said, offering the man a tired smile as I toasted him mockingly with my cup.

  “So a regular day then,” Peter stated without missing a beat, his head bobbing in a nod. “I’m used to working with that.”

  “Very funny,” I said, any chance I had for a more creative retort vanishing as we came to a stop, the short journey between the CTI building and the Ætherworld Productions office already complete.

  Exiting the car, Peter and I wasted no time standing around, rushing into the building and towards our meeting, the sprint through the lobby and subsequent elevator ride passing by in a blur until I was myself pushing open the frosted glass door that led into the Ætherworld Productions suite.

  Only to find myself being greeted by a loud shout as I stepped through the doorway.

  “Marcus! Peter! You’re here!” Paul’s excited voice thundered through the air, followed closely behind by the sound of moving feet as the producer rushed over to greet us, having been waiting by the door for our arrival with a coffee mug in hand.

  “Sorry we’re late,” I replied, only to have the man wave my apologies away dismissively.

  “Oh, geez, don’t worry about that! I know all too well how hard you guys are working!” he exclaimed excitedly, motioning for us to follow him. “Come on over to my office. We can sit and talk there. I have some snacks ready too in case you haven’t eaten.”

  “Nothing but coffee so far,” I said appreciatively, giving the receptionist seated behind the desk a wave as we moved to follow the man, passing through the now-immaculate reception area, all traces of the renovations that we’d seen last month completely finished.

  Walking down a hall, it didn’t take us long to reach our destination, Paul opening a door that had his name on it and ushering us inside before closing it behind him. Glancing around the large office curiously, I spotted four large leather chairs placed strategically around a large coffee table which happened to have a box of doughnuts and pastries on top of it. Making a beeline for one of the chairs, I continued my inspection of the area, my eyes sliding off the plain, unadorned cream-colored walls before landing on a large screen that had been mounted onto it.

  Only to be met by the bright yellow eyes of the Beast as it glared back at me, its tooth-filled maw causing a shiver of fear to crawl up my spine.

  “O-oh!” I said as I reflexively came to a stop, unable to hide my flinch at the unexpected sight and the memories that came flooding back with it. “It’s been a while since I’ve seen him.”

  “N-not long enough by far,” Peter agreed, sharing the same unease that had affected me. “Though I think he’ll be guest-starring in my dreams for a few nights now.”

  “Oh, shit! I’m sorry about that, guys!” Paul exclaimed from behind me as he raced across the room towards a wooden desk with two large monitors on top of it, doing something that resulted in the screen blanking itself. “I didn’t even think how seeing that would unsettle you two after needing to deal with the real thing! I was touching up the editing before you came.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I replied, it being my turn to wave away Paul’
s apology. “Just caught us off guard, that’s all. Besides, we should have expected it. Today’s the big day after all, isn’t it?”

  “It is!” Paul replied, his earlier enthusiasm returning as he came back around the desk, waving a hand at the chairs. “Please sit and help yourself to whatever you want. Can I get you guys anything else before we get into things?”

  “Nah, I’m all right,” Peter replied as he and I both sat down and grabbed a doughnut each.

  “Same here,” I added before taking a healthy bite out of my pastry and savoring the sugar that came with it. Thanks to the VR diet, the last thing I needed to worry about now was getting fat from what I ate anymore.

  “Great!” Paul exclaimed, picking up a tablet from the desk before moving to sit down across from Peter and me with visible excitement. “So, like you said, today’s the day when your big showdown in the Twilight Grove becomes available for streaming, and between us, I think it is absolutely going to kill it when it goes live tonight! There’s no doubt in my mind that you guys are going to keep climbing the rankings, especially with CTI introducing rank categories starting this month and evening out the playing field a bit.”

  “Well, that’s good to hear!” I said with a smile before catching on to the second part of Paul’s news. “What exactly are they changing with the rankings, though? I thought they just tracked popularity?”

  “They do,” he replied with a frown. “And unfortunately, that’s the problem. They made the system a bit too literal, and certain…let’s call them entrepreneurs, have taken advantage of that. Here, let me show you an example.”

  Paul paused for a second to work on his tablet, tapping and swiping at it before the wall-mounted screen flickered back on and an image appeared.

  “Whoa,” Peter gasped from beside me as we both stared at the screen in surprise. “I, uh, wow.”

  “Yeah…” I agreed, feeling my eyes widen as I found myself staring at a completely naked elf on the screen who was being embraced from behind by a large and muscular werewolf, his arms and hands conveniently covering everything of interest. A somewhat creative-looking title at the bottom of the image read “Luna’s Passion”, followed by the phrase “Updated Daily” in smaller letters directly beneath it.

  “Welcome to the era of truly immersive virtual reality porn,” Paul declared, sensing that neither Peter nor I was about to say anything else before swiping through a handful of other examples no less risqué than the first, eventually ending on one aptly titled “Dryads Gone Wyld”. “Where the only limit is your imagination, and then some.”

  “S-so, it seems,” I said, finally finding my voice and forcing my eyes to look at Paul. “But how does that affect rankings, exactly?”

  “Exactly how you think it would,” he stated with a snort. “Turns out that a lot of people are really interested in VR porn and Ascend Online by extension.”

  “And why wouldn’t they be?” Peter asked. “You can log on into a fantasy world where you’re young, fit, sexy, and can do whatever you want with little consequence. I can see how that would catch on.”

  “Oh, that it sure did,” Paul agreed, setting the tablet down as he reached for his coffee mug. “To the point where it started to dominate the top rankings and push the mainstream feeds down, which as you can imagine annoyed people who weren’t looking for something sexy to watch. So, to combat that, the new changes that CTI is introducing this month are pulling out VR porn and a few other stream styles into their own categories, where they can be properly filtered if need be and compete against similar listings.”

  “That makes sense,” I agreed with a nod, my eyes flitting over at the screen briefly as I spoke before turning back towards Paul. “So, with all those adjustments going on, how are we ranking?”

  “Extremely well, all things considered,” he answered without a moment’s hesitation. “You’ve dropped a little bit in rank since we last spoke to nine-hundred and eleven but considering that easily half of the feeds in the top thousand are pure smut, you’re still thriving under pretty intense competition. If it weren’t for all the porn, I figure you’d probably be ranked somewhere in the high to mid five hundreds.”

  “Damn, that’s pretty great then!” Peter exclaimed with relief, glancing over towards me with excitement. “I was starting to get worried there!”

  “Well, stop worrying,” Paul said with a large grin breaking out on his face, “because I think that once we air this new feed highlighting your fight against two raid bosses back to back along with the first recorded display of ritual magic, people aren’t going to be able to get enough of it. Hell, I’ll be shocked if you guys don’t crack the top hundred, even if it’s only for a short while.”

  “That would be something,” I replied in what I hoped was a calm voice, despite feeling my heart quicken with excitement.

  “Indeed,” Paul agreed, his smile not changing in the slightest as he reached into his jacket to pull out a folded piece of paper and handed it to me. “And on that note, these are your earnings for the month of March.”

  Taking the paper from the man, I felt an involuntary tremble shoot up my hand as I touched it, remembering the mind-bogglingly large number that had been February’s earnings. Turning over the paper in my hand, I paused for a second before unfolding it and reading through all the numbers on the page. Eyes widening as I reached the final total, written in bold at the bottom of the paper, I felt my already racing heart suddenly begin to thunder in my ears, followed by my skin going cold. No longer seeing anything as my mind blanked, I passed the paper over towards Peter wordlessly, stunned at the number that I’d just read.

  One million, one-hundred and twenty-nine thousand, six hundred and fifty-seven dollars…and twenty-four cents, I repeated, the number that I’d seen on the paper having burned a hole into my brain in the few seconds that I’d been staring at it. I had gone into the meeting knowing that our payout for March was going to be fairly healthy, given our steadily growing audience and the content that we’d managed to release so far, but this? This payout was something that I expected after the feed with the Beast and the shoggoth went live, not now.

  “Hm,” I heard Peter’s voice break through the silence that had fallen over the room. “Yeah, that seems about right.”

  “‘That seems about right?’” I repeated slowly, my eyes growing even wider as I snapped my head towards Peter. “You expected that we’d make this much?!”

  “Now that we have the guild incorporated and everything?” Peter asked, giving me a questioning look as if I were stupid. “Yeah. We’re paying about half the amount in taxes than we did with our first payout, and when we’re talking about this amount of money that makes a huge difference.”

  “No shit,” I snorted, waving a hand at the paper. “Why didn’t you say something before, then? This is huge!”

  “What do you mean? I did! I told you that our tax-rate was going to drop to—” Peter began to explain before I held out my hands, cutting him off.

  “And you lost me again as soon as you said, ‘tax-rate’,” I said shaking my head, now vaguely recalling tuning out of a conversation a couple weeks earlier where Peter had tried to explain Virtus’s finances in reality to me. “But okay, I believe you now.”

  “The guild will definitely be happy with it once we distribute the shares,” Peter said waving the sheet of paper with a smile on his face. “Even the recruits will get a decent chunk.”

  “That they will,” I agreed with a grin, realizing that money wasn’t going to be a problem for us or anyone in Virtus anytime soon.

  As part of making sure that everyone in the guild got paid for their contribution to our collaborative feed, we’d come up with a share system that split the profits between the members of the guild. This way, everyone felt that their efforts were valued and also provided a consistent incentive for people to continually improve their characters or fill specific roles that we needed within both the guild and Aldford. In the case of the recruits, they typica
lly started off with a half-share while on probation, our way of seeing if they meshed into the guild’s culture before giving them more responsibility and pay, with the more established guild members getting a full share, or like in our cases, substantially more. I was sure that we would eventually have to adjust the system as we continued to grow, but for the time being, it served our needs, and everyone was happy.

  “I’m really happy to hear that you’re both satisfied with the payout,” Paul said with a cheerful chuckle at our reactions, reminding us that he was still in the room. “I’m expecting that both April and May are going to be equally exciting, especially when you tell me how this war with Carver is going and how we can start priming the viewers for that.”

  “Oh, it’s going to take some priming, all right,” I said, a sudden frown crossing my face as I turned to look back towards the man. “Because these last couple of days on our end took a bit of a turn that we weren’t expecting.”

  “A bad one?” Paul prompted with a note of concern in his voice, seeing the expression on my face.

  “We don’t know yet,” Peter answered. “Maybe confusing, annoying, worrying, and relieving are the best words to describe it.”

  “Huh,” the producer grunted, giving us a shrug. “Well, we’ll just have to roll with it then. What’s going on?”

  “In short, we don’t know,” I said, going on to fill Paul in on everything that had happened in the last few days, having sent the man a brief overview in the middle of last week to keep him in the loop. “Then all of yesterday we pretty much spent crating more supplies to Shadow’s Fall and scouting the forest where we saw the tracks from the settlement leading to, but we didn’t find any solid leads before we ran out of time and had to log off.”

  “More like kicked off,” Peter corrected, trying to hide a small yawn that crept across his face as he spoke. “We played until the game forced us out early this morning, then crawled into bed after.”

  “I see,” Paul said as he absorbed everything that we’d told him. “I can definitely see that all being a bit frustrating from your point of view, but that might actually be a bit of a blessing when it comes to the viewers. We’ve had a handful of comments that the feeds have been a bit too combat-focused lately, and I’m wondering if there is a case of fatigue slowly growing.”