She blinked a few times, trying to wrap her head around what he was saying. “But they’re still nearby, right? So still a problem. And where is everyone else?”
As her friends shuffled and glanced at each other as if trying to figure out who would speak, Devon’s chest started to tighten. Once again, she remembered wanting her enemies gone, feeling the demons wiped away, and then there’d been that sideways lurch of the throne’s power.
“I’ll speak,” Owen said, stepping forward. “We don’t know what happened to the raid. They don’t seem to be here anymore, and none are answering Jeremy’s messages—they probably realized they’d been betrayed when they found Stonehaven full of demons. They’re probably back at their spawn points—we think the tornado wiped them out when it disintegrated the demon horde.”
“So it was a tornado? I had this vision of a funnel cloud.”
Chen smirked. “Oh yeah, you could call it that. Though in the end, it was more like one of those mega-twisters from the disaster movies.”
“Okay…” Devon said. “Maybe we should just get to the bad news then.”
Owen nodded, looking grim. “It happened in the final flash. I can still see your NPCs in the pattern—they weren’t eradicated from the mortal plane like the demons were. It’s just, I don’t know where they’ve gone.”
Devon shook her head, confused. “They vanished?”
Emerson stepped forward and took her hand. “That’s not all. It might be easiest if we showed you.”
Chapter Fifty-One
THE CLOSING CREDITS started scrolling up the massive screen as music flowed from the surround-sound speakers. Outtakes from the movie’s filming were playing in small picture-in-picture windows in the corners of the screen, but Devon couldn’t focus on them. Already, she could scarcely remember what the film had been about, just that there’d been a couple of misfit city dwellers, a fashion designer and a freelance cartoonist, and they’d fallen in love at a coffee stand in a farmer’s market. Or they’d met there, anyway, and then fumbled around trying to sort out their respective neuroses before finally learning to just be themselves or something.
It wasn’t the sort of movie she usually went for, but then just going to an old-fashioned flat-screen movie was something she’d done probably less than five times in her life. Why watch a film projected thirty feet away when you could dive into a full-sensory VR experience?
Now she knew. Because sometimes it was nice to live in your own body, experience something happening outside the confines of your own skull. Especially when you had someone to enjoy it with.
She squeezed Emerson’s hand and glanced sideways at him and once again tried to push away the memory of what he’d shown her a day before in the game. After climbing a mostly stable spiral staircase up into the bell tower of one of Ishildar’s ancient buildings, they’d gazed across the savanna together.
Devon remembered Ishildar’s magic pulling blocks of earth from the ground, millions of tons of topsoil and bedrock tearing free from the surrounding crust. She remembered the final destructive flash and the sideways lurch and, vaguely, she recalled being tossed from the throne’s seat. She’d come to awareness, reconnecting with her body, maybe a minute or two later. Still, she hadn’t comprehended the actual effects of that final blast, not until she looked out over them.
Where before, the savanna had been a gently rolling landscape, pocketed with groves of acacia trees and punctured, occasionally, by stone outcrops, earthen mounds, and the ruins of the Khevshir civilization, now the landscape was a jumbled maze. Some blocks of earth had landed on edge. Others had fallen back in their natural orientation but had landed outside the socket from which they’d been torn. They now stood like square-cut mountains, the sides nearly vertical and formed of compressed earth that looked as if it would crumble if climbed.
Massive holes gaped in the terrain, some with sides already collapsing. In other places, deep, char-coated rifts carved through the landscape, creating zig-zagging and criss-crossing canyons through what had been grassland. The path of the twister, Emerson had explained.
Before she’d brought the storm down on the savanna, the journey to Stonehaven had taken between half an hour and two hours on foot, depending on how fast someone could move. Now, over the jumbled and unstable terrain, it looked as if it might take more than a day of travel.
That was, if there were a reason to travel to the site.
Both the corvid scouts and Prince Kenjan, surveying the area from Proudheart’s back, confirmed what Devon’s eyes tried to tell her. Along with the glass bowl where the player camp had stood and the Ziggurat of the Damned, Stonehaven had vanished. One of the corvids, a crow named Snicket, had witnessed the disappearance, the sites flashing white in the final, destructive storm wave. They’d vanished in an instant, winking out of existence and leaving only the scars where foundations had pocked the earth.
Stonehaven’s NPCs had disappeared at the same instant, apparently still tied to the settlement because Devon had been too shortsighted—or maybe too stubborn—to officially migrate the population to Ishildar.
As her friends and allies had helped her piece together the story, Devon had fought a panic attack—she thought she’d killed them all. Even with Owen getting in her face and reiterating, over and over, that they were still part of the pattern, she couldn’t help remembering how she’d wished her enemies gone. For a few long minutes, no reassurances had been able to convince her that the extermination of the demons hadn’t spilled over, due to wild magic, onto Stonehaven’s innocent citizens.
Finally, Emerson had nudged Owen out of the way and wrapped his avatar’s arms around her character. Taking deep breaths but not saying anything, he’d gradually brought her back to a rational state. Together with her friends, she’d sorted out an explanation.
Yes, she’d wanted her enemies gone. And apparently, Jeremy’s numbskull plan had brought the player raid into Stonehaven at just the wrong time. The throne’s magic, especially prone to unintended consequences since she didn’t meet the level requirements, had indeed swept all her enemies away. The demons had been shipped to the void, or maybe back to the hell plane—it was hard to know for sure. And the players, along with the settlement they’d just put into a contested state and the NPCs belonging to it, had been sent somewhere else.
She believed Owen when he said they were still out there. What choice did she have, really? It was the only way to keep hope alive that she might find and rescue her NPC friends. And she wouldn’t stop until she managed it.
Emerson was looking at her. She sighed when their eyes met, and he leaned over and kissed her cheek as he squeezed her hand. “I know it’s not easy to stay positive, but you’re doing a good job. I’m here, okay?”
She nodded, a faint smile curling her lips. “I know. And I know we’ll find them.”
“Damn straight. I kinda like your idea of trying to use the throne to locate them.”
She smirked. “That’s just me being selfish and trying to justify grinding out enough levels to use it safely.”
“You’ll probably need those levels to deal with the other archdemons, right? So no problem.”
Devon laughed. “Yeah, maybe. But you’re not supposed to encourage me when I want to abandon my responsibilities to go crawl through some dungeons.”
“You? Abandon responsibilities? As if.”
The final credits were rolling off the screen, and the lights in the theater were beginning to slowly turn on, pulling details from the largely empty rows of seating. Emerson dropped her hand and reached his arm over her shoulders instead, pulling her into a half-hug.
“Anyway, before I can leave Ishildar, I need to get the Skevalli set up with places to sleep and some sort of food supply. Without demons breathing down our necks, that should be pretty easy.”
Emerson smiled crookedly. “See, always thinking of the people that depend on you. I’m pretty sure you are incapable of just playing like
a normal person. I bet the only person who has logged more in-game time than you lately is Hailey. And it’s not like she has a choice.” He paused for a second, his face lighting up as he seemed to remember something. “Oh, been meaning to tell you that I was able to deal with her bank account thing. Her assets weren’t much to speak of, so with a little creative data engineering, just some tweaks to the recorded estate plan, I was able to convince her bank to reopen the account. Deposits will come through as usual, which is all E-Squared cares about. They won’t bother to check the account owner.”
“Which is?”
“A charitable trust configured to make regular donations to research institutes searching for cures for autoimmune diseases like Hailey suffered from. Qualifying institutes need to prove they’ve chosen candidates for trial therapy who can’t afford to buy the institution’s favor. Hailey’s salary isn’t enough to drastically impact research, but for the candidates chosen for therapy, it may make a difference.”
“Does she know?” Devon asked.
“I’ll tell her when I get a chance. For the time being, I’d rather focus on you. So, dinner? I’m thinking we should go out.”
“You mean you don’t want me to cook for you?”
Emerson’s eyes widened in faint alarm until he seemed to realize she was joking. “It’s not so much your cooking. More that you use your laundry for curtains. Figure we could use a night on the town.”
She laughed. “Let’s go.”
Chapter Fifty-Two
WORST WEEK EVER.
Ashley sighed as she shaded her eyes against the glare coming off the salt pan. She wasn’t sure what was worse, the fact that it was always a billion degrees in whatever godforsaken desert they’d been teleported to, or the added fact that everyone else in the guild seemed to think it was awesome. Why? They were trapped in the middle of nowhere, inhabiting a settlement they’d only attacked because they wanted to be annoying, and the only combat to be had within a day’s walk was against a bunch of scarabs and scorpions and some variety of dust elementals.
But the moment Nil had realized he could command any of the NPCs that had been teleported in, forcing them to give massages and cook meals and basically wait on the guild like a bunch of slaves, he’d set the guild up like sultans in the inner keep. No one seemed to give a shit about advancement at the moment. They were too busy eating gourmet meals—how the cook, Tom, managed to create something tasty from beetle meat was beyond her—being fanned by dwarves stripped down to their short pants, and putting back mug after mug of dwarven ale.
But they’d get tired of it eventually, and when that happened, Ashley hated to think what Nil would come up with as entertainment. Stonehaven’s citizens might be just NPCs, but cruelty, even to simulated beings, just wasn’t cool.
So before the novelty of playing Egyptian Pharaoh wore off, Ashley needed to figure out where the hell they were and how to provide a distraction. Whether that was a raid on a nearby town or—ideally—player settlement, or whether she’d manage it by luring a bunch of sandworms to attack Stonehaven, she wasn’t sure.
As for her splinter guild…yeah, no. Not a good time. Even if she could still put together a coalition, it wasn’t like she could just break off while they were trapped here with Nil’s sycophants.
So with a sigh, she took a swig of her waterskin—at least the settlement had appeared on top of an oasis…she shuddered to think what would have happened to them otherwise—and started marching into the salt flats.
“You’re fricking nuts you know, trying to level while you could be living it up.”
Her shoulders hunched as she heard Nil’s voice coming from atop the wall behind her. But Ashley didn’t look back. She kept walking into the desert.
Dear Reader,
Hi! Thank you so much for reading! I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please consider leaving a review here: Throne of the Ancients on Amazon. It helps me SO much!
So what’s next? Book 7 has a lot in store for Devon and Stonehaven. Look for it Fall 2019! For news on new releases, you can join my reader group at www.CarrieSummers.com.
If you’d like to connect with other Gamelit/LitRPG readers and author on Facebook, check out this group: Gamelit Society. And here's a place to learn about other books in the genre: LitRPG Books Group.
Thanks again!
--Carrie
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PS. Thank you to Celestian Rince for the expert edit and Jackson Tjota for the amazing cover. You guys are awesome!
PS. Another great spot to meet other fans is the LitRPG group on Facebook.
Throne of the Ancients: A LitRPG Adventure (Stonehaven League Book 6) Page 28