Chapter Twenty-Nine
AS HE READ the message, Emerson’s first thought was to wonder how the heck he was going to tell Devon the news. His second thought was: what the hell? He could have sworn he’d seen Hailey’s avatar online sometime in the last day. Was he confused? Misremembering?
He reread the note.
To whom it may concern:
Thank you for your inquiry. It is with deep sadness that we at Horizons Long-term Care are writing to inform you that Hailey Landers lost her battle with a devastating illness on January 3rd, 2058.
Please cease sending pay stubs and other company communication to this address.
Sincerely,
Horizons Administration
He shook his head again. There had to be some sort of mistake. January 3rd was ten days ago. Yeah, the more he thought about it, he was sure he’d seen Hailey the Seeker-class character at least once since. He distinctly remembered walking with Devon, spotting Hailey on a bench, and commenting on how Bob was spending more time with the other woman than with Devon.
But her unexpected death—unexpected to E-Squared, at least—would explain the issue with the failed payment and HR’s inability to contact the woman.
He’d been getting ready to log in. Already, he’d laid a set of hotel towels on top of the bed because he didn’t want to get under the way-too-warm covers and wake up in a sea of his own sweat, and he definitely didn’t want to lie directly on top of the hotel comforter which was probably never washed and was likely infused with cellular material from the last one hundred guests. But now he needed to pace, so he got up and started walking a circuit of the small room.
The best explanation that covered both the notice of Hailey’s death—again, he caught himself shaking his head in disbelief. Could she really have been that sick?—and the continued presence of her avatar in the game world was that her login had somehow been hacked. But that was a huge stretch. Authentication for the game was based off hardware keys that were literally implanted in the players’ skulls. Technically, the control module could be removed and implanted in another player. It was one of the few pieces of the Entwined hardware system that could be sterilized and refurbished if you weren’t squeamish about that stuff, but the installation required an Entwined-licensed surgeon, and Emerson assumed that a random person coming in with a set of parts and asking for full implantation would raise a few flags.
Unless there were also some black-market installers out there? The tech seemed awfully new to have spawned its own illegal industry, but then, Emerson had never been all that savvy when it came to darknets and shady characters.
So…maybe?
He paused and flicked aside the curtain. The hotel room looked out over a small park with native desert plantings. Despite the mild, mid-afternoon temperatures, the park was deserted. Most people were probably at work or in school. He considered going down for a little fresh air and a chance to clear his head, but decided that would just be putting off an issue in need of urgent investigation.
Maybe he had misremembered his last Hailey sighting. That would be the easiest explanation to deal with, even if it meant that he would still have to break the news to Devon. The alternatives were a bit thornier. If Hailey were online, he’d have to verify that the letter about her death wasn’t some mistake or messed-up joke. And if that still pointed to the possibility of hacking, he guessed it would be time to alert corporate security.
Of course, the downside there was that the hacking of one of his players might put undue scrutiny on his other recruits. Not what Devon needed to deal with given the other burdens she was shouldering.
Emerson sighed and headed back to the bed. He straightened the towels and made sure there were no gaps in the protective barrier, lay down, and activated the Relic Online icon.
Chapter Thirty
AFTER TALKING TO King Kenjan, Devon had tried to dig straight into helping out with the organization efforts in the square, but she’d soon felt panic welling up and had fled the area. For just a few minutes, she’d needed to be where she couldn’t glimpse the faces of the Skevalli refugees, wouldn’t see the worried expressions worn by her Stonehaven followers. After a short break, she could head back, retake control of her emotions and confront the tasks at hand. But for now, she needed to escape and take stock.
She’d chosen a street at random, a narrow avenue that wound a gentle course through the city, taking her past building after half-ruined building. The structures seemed to loom over her. Empty windows were like dark pits, and the vacant courtyards seemed forlorn, a drastic change from the bright sense of awakening she’d imagined she’d felt from the city just a few days ago.
She ducked into one of those empty courtyards where water had just begun to trickle over the lip of a three-tiered fountain. Leaves and twigs floated in the pooling liquid and formed swirling rafts. Devon stood over the water and scooped out the dead foliage. She shook the soggy mess off her fingers, then hugged her arms over her chest.
Just one of the problems facing the Ishildar region would be enough to keep her from sleeping at night. Together, they conspired to grind her up and spit her out before destroying everything and everyone she cared about in the game. Stonehaven was occupied, the Skevalli royal settlement was the site of a recent massacre, and Ishildar’s only defense, the shield created by the Veian Temple, was threatened by the construction of a freaking ziggurat that Devon and her people had no hopes of destroying. Oh, and the Stonehaven evacuees had fled with only what they could carry. If they didn’t figure out a food supply soon, the population would starve before the demons had a chance to finish them off.
Of course, Devon’s worries weren’t limited to Stonehaven and Ishildar. She could still barely fathom the issues with Hailey’s condition and what it meant for the woman’s interaction with Emerson, not to mention the woman’s future existence.
For that matter, why was Devon even thinking about spending more time with Emerson? He was her boss. The problems there were huge. But it had been so long since she’d found anyone interesting, much less someone who kinda seemed to like her back. …If she wasn’t being a moron to think so, anyway.
Regardless, the dating issue was the kind of situation she knew she needed to think through logically, figure out if hanging out with him was worth the risk. But by the time she logged out every day, she barely had the mental capacity to feed herself, not to mention handle the other real-life stuff like getting her stupid blind fixed. Figuring out whether she should get into a long-distance relationship with her supervisor seemed way beyond her capabilities at this point.
Dropping her forehead onto the heel of her hand, Devon retreated to a small stone bench. The seat was tucked into a corner between buildings, and woody vines still clung to the walls even though their foliage had dropped off when she’d banished the Curse of Fecundity. Even so, the vines softened the burbling echoes of the fountain, wrapping her in a peaceful almost-silence. If she could just stop herself from thinking, she might be able to chill here for a few minutes and forget her problems. But she couldn’t.
So she might as well get to work on solving whichever of them she could.
First, she pulled open the settlement interface and tabbed over to examine Ishildar’s details. Beneath the overview that listed the population as zero, but with 543 temporary inhabitants—should she reassign her Stonehaven people to Ishildar? Would the game do it eventually?—there were pages and pages of information about the city’s structures. She blinked and hit a toggle to reduce the info to headers only.
Thinking back over the couple of weeks during which she’d sent scouts criss-crossing the city in search of potential advantages against the demons, she sighed. Too bad she hadn’t thought to claim management of Ishildar before ordering a random search. The settlement details might not tell her where each of the buildings were, but it would probably offer way better hints on the capabilities than the haphazard scouting had.
But d
one was done. At least she could remedy the oversight now.
First, though, she expanded the fortifications section and checked progress on the construction.
Completed:
7 x Stone Guardian
2 x Watch Tower
1 x Archer Platform with Screen
Required for advancement to Fortified Camp:
1 x Bulwark - 90%
1 x Watch Tower - 10%
3 x Archer Platform with Screen - 15%
Good. Jarleck once again had things in hand. She couldn’t help shaking her head at the list of completed defenses. It was hard to say what defense tier the Stone Guardians actually belonged to, but she could bet it would take a bunch of in-game years to build something up to that level. Kind of ridiculous when compared to the actual fortifications status. The ancient, sprawling metropolis of Ishildar was on its way to becoming a Fortified Camp, the lowliest of defense tiers.
Next, she skipped to the resources section. Devon winced. Things were not looking good there; even if they dropped to half-rations, something she would need to institute today, there would only be enough food for around three days.
Okay, so a concerted effort to secure resources was a priority. Devon made a mental note and moved on.
The main area of interest in Ishildar’s details was its structures. At least, that was her best guess on where clues to the city’s power would lie. The Veian Temple was great and all, but its apparent shielding effect couldn’t be the only reason the city had been prophesied to be a beacon of light in the fight against the demons. She flipped to the section with the most advanced buildings and scanned down until she spotted the Temple’s entry. A tooltip appeared.
Veian Temple
The most advanced structure dedicated to the creator goddess, Veia, this temple can entirely prevent intrusion by the forces of evil. The barrier created by the temple is indestructible by ordinary means. Only a Zaa-dedicated structure of equivalent advancement can counteract the shielding.
Radius: 5 kilometers
Okay, well that was good and bad. The defensive shielding was way better than she’d realized. The demons couldn’t physically reach them inside the city. Except for that whole equivalent-Zaa-structure thing. The temple description confirmed that if Archdemon Gaviroth successfully finished the ziggurat, the shield would be nullified.
She quickly scanned the rest of the list of upper-tier buildings, but once she realized there were at least seven or eight pages of them and that most were listed as partially ruined, she shook her head and closed down that tab.
Priority number two to be weighed and addressed: sorting through the list of building descriptions and finding what might be useful.
She ignored the tabs for the vassal settlements for now; the status of Chasm View was too depressing, and she pretty much knew the situation at Vulture’s Rift—around five hundred people were waiting to be evacuated. The felsen settlements wouldn’t have changed much unless one of them had come under attack, and if that had happened, she would’ve been informed.
That left Stonehaven.
Devon curled her hand into a tight fist around a handful of her Keeper’s cloak. Pressing her lips together, she opened Stonehaven’s tab.
92% contested. She didn’t really need to look further than that, but some sort of morbid curiosity made her scan the list of structures. Only the Shrine to Veia remained fully under her side’s control. Uncontested but besieged on all sides. She cocked her head while scanning the rest of the list. For some reason, the Inner Keep was still just 70% contested. Devon had a sneaking suspicion that the demons could have taken it by now if they wanted. The parties being teleported through to the shrine certainly wouldn’t head for the keep if they were making strikes into the settlement—it was too far away. The next closest building to the shrine, if she remembered right, was the Tailoring Workshop, and that was 100% under demon control.
Archdemon Gaviroth must have figured out that the Inner Keep held special significance for her. She supposed it wasn’t that hard to surmise seeing as she’d chosen the upper floor as her personal chambers. The demons probably wanted to take the keep last, a final, devastating blow.
Jaw clenching, she forced herself to take another hard look at the list of everything she’d built. Then she closed the settlement interface.
Time to call a meeting.
***
Familiar faces formed a semicircle around Devon. She stood on top of a short flight of stone steps outside a building that might have once been a residence for one of Ishildar’s aristocratic families. Or maybe it had been a guildhall for one of its artisan groups. Either way, its rooms were now vacant, and through the doorway behind her, rubble could be seen where portions of the upper story had collapsed into the lower.
Right now, the building seemed kind of like a metaphor for everything she’d hoped to build. But that was just negative thinking, and the war wasn’t over. Not yet, anyway. She took a deep breath.
“I’ll be brief. There’s too much to do for you guys to waste time listening to a pep talk or inspirational speech.” She paused to let that sink in and then launched into the meeting agenda. “I’ve been kind of a control freak, but at this point, I’ve got to hand over some responsibilities.”
She glanced at King Kenjan who stood, somber-faced, at the fringe of the gathering. The man had once again donned the clothing she’d given him, probably still thinking that the tunic and trousers had the ceremonial significance she’d claimed. Given everything he’d been through today, she felt a little guilty for lying to him about that. But at least the loincloth wouldn’t be a distraction for anyone here.
She gestured toward him. “You’ve all heard about what happened to Chasm View, I assume.” She paused and glanced around the gathering. After receiving nods of acknowledgment, she continued. “We still don’t know who attacked or why they chose Chasm View. But we’ll figure it out. Chen?”
The teenager jerked, startled. Out of reflex, he reached for his sword before realizing what he was doing and dropping his hand to his side. “Yeah?”
“I need you to do two things. First, can you get some bots running? I want something that crawls the Internet for anything mentioning the attack or the Skargill Mountains.”
Chen’s brows drew together, and he scratched at his hairline. “Sure. I think I can do that. Are you interested in just public mentions? Or do you want me to have a go at some password-protected sites?”
“Whatever you think you can do without raising alarms. I don’t want you to get in trouble.”
“Okay. And the other thing?”
“I need you to start crunching data. Everyone here should have combat logs from our altercations with the demons. If they don’t know how to find the proper files, please help them figure it out and send them to you. I want to know about any combat advantages we might have. Any gap in the demons’ abilities or chinks in their defenses. Can you do it?”
She really hadn’t needed to ask since the answer was made obvious by the delighted grin on the boy’s face. “Totally on it,” he said with a bit of a swagger.
Devon turned to Owen, acknowledging Hailey with a quick glance. “Owen and Hailey, I need you to start by looking through the settlement interface for information on Ishildar’s potential strengths. If you find anything listed, head out and use the Pattern and your truth-seeking to figure out how we access that power. I know there’s something here. We wouldn’t have had quest lines for a hundred-plus players that led to supporting me as Keeper otherwise.”
Hailey cocked her head. “The settlement interface? Oh.” Her eyes went distant as she focused on her interface. “When did this show up?”
“When I got a clue and finally accepted management of the city. Believe it or not, it was Tamara who made me realize this was a base battle and that Stonehaven wasn’t the only point we can control.”
Hailey raised her eyebrows at Tamara at the same time that Torald drap
ed an arm over the woman’s shoulder and squeezed. A wide smile spread across Tamara’s face.
Devon nodded at Hazel. “If you hadn’t been traveling with Zoe and your windsteed, would your Stealth have been high enough to avoid demon attention?”
“Yes, of course,” Hazel said. “But I couldn’t abandon them.”
“I know. I was only asking because Hezbek needs potion components.” She targeted the scout and shared the quest. “Can you help her?”
Hazel nodded and gave a quick salute. “Of course, Mayor.”
Devon turned her attention to Grey, Stonehaven’s lead hunter. “Our defenses don’t matter if we starve behind them. Can you think of any region where the hunters can secure food without traveling through demon-controlled territory?”
The hunter pressed his lips together while thinking. “There might be wild game in the Argenthal foothills. And maybe we could try scouting the Skargill chasms.”
Kenjan cleared his throat. “When we bring the citizens out from the Vulture’s Rift, we can do the scouting. Traditionally, my people have subsisted on nuts and berries and the occasional roc egg when we find an unoccupied nest, but there may well be meat sources we’ve overlooked.”
Devon nodded. “Good. We will instruct your people to forage on our way out from Vulture’s Rift.”
“We?” Dorden asked, picking up on her choice of pronoun.
Devon took a deep breath. “Yes, we. I’ll be leading the party that will escort the Skevalli to Ishildar. King Kenjan’s people suffered great losses today. Though we will never replace some of his beloved friends and family, there were a few advanced citizens among the losses at Chasm View.” She popped open the vassal settlement interface to double-check, then flicked the window away. “Vulture’s Rift has a Shrine to Veia, and as far as I know, I’m the only one who can use it.”
Throne of the Ancients: A LitRPG Adventure (Stonehaven League Book 6) Page 19