by Natalie Grey
“Mr. Matthews.” Richard spoke so quickly after Thad did that it was clear he had not cared a whit for anything Thad said. “When you were hired, you promised to give us a dominant guild in return for our investment. Brightstar does not have a small advertising budget, but running this guild is expensive. We need to see measurable results, or we will need to iterate. To be absolutely clear, the first iteration we will attempt will be a change in leadership. Do you understand?”
Thad swallowed hard. “Yes,” he said quietly.
“Excellent. You have until the end of the month, Mr. Matthews. We expect Demon Syndicate to win the next Month First badge. If you do, we will consider continuing your contract. Thank you for being on this meeting, everyone. I will talk to you all later.”
The call ended and Thad stared at the speaker incredulously, shame heating his cheeks. He’d been treated like a child. Richard had not allowed him to say another word after the pronouncement of that ridiculous goal.
Month First. Without a top healer.
“I know you have several healers on the team,” Evan said hesitantly after a moment.
Thad’s head whipped around. Evan was always saying things like that. He didn’t understand anything about guilds or video games or even basic logic.
“If they were as good as Jamie,” Thad said, gritting his teeth, “one of them would have been our top healer. Do you understand that? And even Jamie wasn’t good enough to compete with Red Squadron. We’re up against someone who has an advantage even the game’s developers can’t get rid of. How are we supposed to win?”
Evan said nothing.
“Are you going to explain that to them?” Thad asked dangerously.
Evan looked at him now, and there was irritation in his eyes. He knew what Thad thought of him, clearly. He knew the team saw him as incompetent, bumbling, never authoritative enough to take a stand. They hadn’t exactly made it a secret of what they thought, Thad most of all. He had no time for useless people.
Now he felt the familiar annoyance warring with disquiet. He needed Evan to help him.
“You did explain it to them,” Evan said after a moment. “They did not seem to change their minds. No, I do not think I will explain it to them again.”
Thad gritted his teeth. “You’re just useless, aren’t you?” he said, his tone falsely pleasant. “No wonder we’re losing. We don’t have the resources to win.”
Evan did not rise to the bait. Instead, he smiled, and for the first time, Thad had the sense that maybe the other man did know what he was doing—and was deliberately getting under his skin.
“Nothing’s ever your fault, is it?” Evan stood and gathered his folio and pen. He gave Thad a distant smile like one might give to a very insignificant underling.
Or someone who was about to be out of a job.
“This isn’t,” Thad shot back.
“Of course not,” Evan said. “I’m sure it had nothing to do with you that your top healer decided to side with a rival guild over you. Just like it has nothing to do with you that you have no other healers good enough to take his place. I’m sure it’s all coincidence.”
He left, with Thad staring after him in quiet fury.
No one was going to help him. He saw that now. They were going to hang him out to dry and he was going to wind up as a sacrificial lamb, the first to go before they cut the program entirely.
They were going to blame him, and they wouldn’t listen to someone telling them that their expectations were wrong.
If Jamie were here…
Thad’s lip curled. If Jamie were here, Thad could just picture his strained expression. Jamie didn’t like conflict, which was why he would never make a good leader. He shied away from disputes and wanted everyone to get along.
Thad had thought Jamie made a good second in command, given that he was always willing to do the tedious work of listening to people whine and calming them down.
But the more he thought about it, the more Thad realized that Jamie had always been trouble. He said he didn’t want to lead the guild, but he had never said no when Brightstar wanted to use him for promo photos. He had never challenged Thad outright, just weaseled his way into everyone’s confidence.
Lying bastard.
Thad paced around the room. They had three other healers: Ixbal, Wentworth, and Eris.
Wentworth was out; he’d been missing his numbers for two straight weeks, and wasn’t following the training program.
That left Ixbal and Eris, both of whom had clearly been at the top of their respective guilds before, and who had failed to show the reaction times and strategic thinking necessary to be the primary healer. When shit went sideways, Jamie had always been able to prioritize effectively. The other two, not so much. They had relied on Jamie’s judgment in order to structure their own responses.
Frankly, Thad didn’t think either of them had it in him.
He left the conference room and took the back stairs to his bedroom, not wanting the rest of the guild to see him. They were all feigning concern lately, trying to placate him, and it only made him angrier.
In his room, he paced, dug his nails into his palm, and tried to think. He wanted to tip over the shelves, throw the chair, and scream his fury at Jamie, but he couldn’t let the rest of them hear. If they found out there was blood in the water…
If he was going to make this Month First, he needed a new healer, and fast. Thad sat down, pulled up one of the alt accounts he used on the message boards to look at what people were saying about the Demon Syndicate, and began researching the top-rated healers. Metamorphosis Online had not only dungeons, but also battlegrounds where players could battle one another and, while there had always been a divide between the PvE and PvP players, he wondered if he might tempt one of them to join him.
He posted a thread to draw out reactions, titled, “Do you ever think about going PvE?” In it, he pretended to be a PvP player who wanted to know about guilds and whether running dungeons could be any fun.
He refreshed the page a few times but knew he needed to give it time.
Time, of course, being the one thing he didn’t have.
His stomach growled, and he was just thinking of going to get some lunch when an email came in. He opened it, scrolled to the FROM address, and frowned.
There was none. The email had apparently come from no one.
It was only one line: I heard you might need a healer.
Thad looked at his post, then at his phone. He hesitated. This could easily be one of the other guilds.
Who is this?
The reply came almost immediately. A very, very good healer.
Character name, server, rank, Thad sent back.
Unranked.
Thad raised an eyebrow. He didn’t even bother to respond to that. No one could just assume they could waltz in without a resume and get hired.
Whoever was sending the emails seemed to sense Thad’s dubiousness. Roll a character and send me the details, and I’ll log in and show you what I can do.
Why am I rolling you a character?
They didn’t bother to respond, whoever they were, and with a sigh, Thad grabbed his phone and went to the practice room. He selected one of the lesser-used practice accounts, one that didn’t have any characters on it for this person to steal macros or hotbar setups, and rolled a level 1 Piskie healer. He logged in, ran the character through the starting zone, and then brought his own character to the same place before sending the login details.
The Piskie appeared again almost immediately. He looked around, nodded at Thad’s character, and then paused while he seemed to be bringing up several menus and sorting through them.
The pause went on for long enough that Thad crossed his arms and sighed. “I’m not waiting all day,” he informed the Piskie.
The Piskie didn’t pay attention, but a moment later, the character began to pulse, light strobing around it. Thad took an instinctive step back before realizing that the pulses of light were the
swirl of gold sparks that signaled a level change.
The character was rising to the top level. Thad gaped, and his eyebrows shot up when the low-level robes were replaced with brocade ones of gold and red. They clashed horribly with the Piskie’s green hair, but Thad wasn’t paying the slightest attention to that. This set of armor was incredibly rare. Even Jamie hadn’t had all of it.
“Now,” said the Piskie, putting the menus away, “do you believe I know my way around this game?”
“Holy shit,” Thad said bluntly. “Who are you?”
“Not important. Do you want a new healer?” The Piskie cocked his head to the side. “Word on the street is, you lost one…to Callista.”
Thad’s lip curled but he managed a smile, then realized it wasn’t translating into the game. “A rather expensive lesson in finding out who was loyal and who wasn’t. I wish it had been DPS, but we can’t be that lucky every day.” DPSs were a dime a dozen compared to healers or tanks, which meant that DPS players, even the very good ones, could be replaced relatively easily.
The Piskie chuckled.
“We do need a healer,” Thad said, “but I don’t know what you get out of that.”
“Let me handle that,” the healer said. “I’ll give you a training program for your guild that I want you all to follow—tactics and formations to learn.”
“I’m in charge of this guild,” Thad informed him coldly.
“If you don’t want me, you’re welcome to try to find another healer who can do what I do.” The Piskie didn’t sound at all worried. “This will make your guild better. Far better.”
Thad heaved a sigh. “Test run tonight,” he said. “In two hours, we’ll run through the latest content, and you’ll show me what you can do. Then I’ll think about bringing you on board and changing my training routine.”
He logged out without waiting for a response.
Two thousand miles away, Harry took off his headset and smiled. Finally, he’d found a way into the game, and a team that was used to following orders.
Thad might pretend to be in charge, but he didn’t have any other options than to rely on Harry now—and, in the end, when he realized he couldn’t win, he would do anything to punish the people who had screwed him over. He’d destroy himself willingly if Harry just pointed him in the right direction.
In Harry’s opinion, that was the true measure of power: how well you could make a person willingly work against their own interests.
Chapter Nine
“All right, I straight don’t know what’s coming down the pipeline, but we have to be geared up.” Gracie made her way through the streets of Kithara, turning sideways by instinct to avoid collisions. There weren’t any, of course, but social custom seemed to be that one still behaved as if there could be.
Gracie liked that.
“What are you thinking?” Chowder asked jokingly. “A full-on siege or just some assassins?”
Gracie reached out to thwack him. “You know what I mean.”
“Mmm,” Caspian said vaguely. Kevin was at work right now, but Caspian, of course, had nothing to do except be online. “Are you thinking PvE or PvP? Because if you don’t know, maybe we want two sets of gear.”
“Wait, what?” Gracie looked at him. “Oh, my God, the battlegrounds. I’d totally forgotten about those.”
“They’re not as popular,” Caspian said. “Some people in our group dabbled in them sometimes, but Thad wasn’t a big fan of it because of the gear repair costs.”
“People didn’t handle that on their own?” Gracie asked skeptically. They had reached a plaza that served as the informal temple area for the Piskies. Most of the buildings were cleverly made so that any race could get into them, but they still had the feel of Hobbit holes.
“Thad was very…controlling.” Caspian’s voice was tight. From the distracted way he was clipping people as he moved, Gracie could see that he was lost in thought. “He had to manage everything down to the smallest detail, which meant that he had to feel like the smartest guy in the room. And he wasn’t always, and he had a bad temper.”
“The leader should try to be the dumbest person in the room,” Gracie said emphatically. “They should be smart enough to have a good sense for when they’re being bullshitted, but other than that, they should want everyone around them to be experts. For instance, if I insisted no one could be smarter than me, we wouldn’t be considering player versus player.”
“We have to log into battlegrounds,” Chowder insisted. “They couldn’t exactly ambush us there, could they?” After a moment, he added, “I suppose we have to log into dungeons, too. Never mind.”
“No, it’s a good point. If we know it might be a trap, why log in?” Gracie chewed her lip. They were close to the armory, where players could purchase and improve gear. “It’s easy to avoid PvP. Then again, if nothing else, I think we’ve learned that we never know what the rules are for us.”
“Bingo,” Chowder said. “That’s a really good point, but this is a video game.”
“I’m aware of that, yes.” Gracie emoted a grin at him. “What’s your point?”
“I don’t know.” The Ocru shrugged his shoulders expressively. “I guess my point is, do you lose the crown if you ever die? If so, are they going to be taking hits out on you? If so, how? Otherwise, they can challenge us all day, but we don’t have to accept them. See what I mean?”
“Yeah.” Gracie considered as she entered the armory. It was a vaulted, high-ceilinged building that was clearly modeled on the cathedral of Notre Dame, although it wasn’t quite as large. She had always wondered how something so magnificent got built in a relatively new city and resolved to look up the lore later. “I think Caspian is right, though. We should consider being ready on a PvP front. After all, that’s what Harry has been going for.”
“Pssh, what can Harry do?” Chowder waved a hand, which was a surprisingly hilarious gesture in a large, muscly Ocru. “You’ve gone up against him how many times and smashed him through the floor?”
“Mmm.” Privately, Gracie wasn’t as confident as Chowder was.
Yes, Harry had some fatal flaws in his reasoning. He viewed his leadership through the lens of being innately better than everyone else, which meant he alienated anyone who might have helped him. It limited his abilities in combat, where Gracie’s team would stand with her.
But he was smart, and he knew how the game was programmed. He would able to assess her strengths and weaknesses and then set up a fight that would favor him.
She wasn’t going to underestimate him.
They crowded around the vendors and began scanning through gear. Chowder had been talking for a few weeks about the gear he wanted to get to shore up the gaps in his current set, and Gracie knew it would help him with his critical hit and his block chances.
Caspian had been more reticent about his gear, so she walked over to where he was standing.
“Finding anything good?”
He looked at her, cocking his head curiously.
“You have good instincts,” Gracie clarified, “and a good base of knowledge. I’m curious what you’ll go for.”
“You don’t have opinions?” He sounded deeply skeptical.
“I always have opinions,” Gracie retorted. “Hell, I have opinions about my roommate’s office dramas, and I know zero about the people involved, so I definitely have opinions about this. But you’re the healer, not me. Unless we all start wiping so often that we never get through dungeons, it’s not my concern.”
“I like that,” Caspian said. He sighed. “Sometimes I just wanted to try new things, you know? But Thad wasn’t having it.”
“You can always iterate with me,” Gracie assured him. “I know you won’t do it unexpectedly when we have a whole dungeon riding on it. Just tell any of us that you want to go experiment and we’ll be there to help. Hell, tell all of us, and we’ll run whatever dungeon you want.”
“I know.” Caspian sighed again. “That’s why I left Demon
Syndicate.”
Gracie bit her lip. “Are you…okay?” she asked finally.
Caspian said nothing.
“I know we’re not close,” Gracie told him. She felt insanely awkward now. “And I just bet it was hard to make the choice you made. I hope you have someone to talk to. I’m happy to be that person if you want.”
“That’s nice of you,” Caspian said equally awkwardly. “I mean it; I really appreciate that. Kevin’s been there for me.”
Gracie relaxed. With Kevin on the job, she didn’t have to worry. “Kevin’s a good guy,” she agreed, “and way too wise for his years.”
“I think…” Caspian’s voice trailed off.
“Yeah?”
“I think he’s who I want to be when I grow up.” Caspian sounded embarrassed. His character was shifting from foot to foot, shoulders hunched. “That sounds so stupid.”
“Nah, I totally get it.” Gracie smiled. “I had a teacher like that in high school. She was the best. I just wanted to grow up and be like her. I thought she had everything figured out.” She shrugged. “Now that I’m older, I think she was probably just as lost as every other adult I know, but at the time, I thought she was the coolest person ever.”
Caspian laughed. “If you’d ever seen Kevin, you’d feel the same way about him. He’s got this perfect apartment, and he’s super in shape, and he’s got a Tesla, and…yeah.”
Gracie grinned. Caspian’s hero worship was pretty adorable. “He seems like the sort of guy who wants everyone to be living their best life. I’m glad you two connected. You couldn’t find a better person to live with while you get back on your feet.”
She headed off to her vendor, smiling.
“Callista?” A character stood in front of her, an Aosi male with pale-greenish skin and silver hair.
Gracie stopped in her tracks. She didn’t like his tone, but she didn’t know what was going on, so she didn’t want to be rude. “Yes?” After all, it said her name above her head.