by Natalie Grey
“How does it feel to hack the game?” the character asked her. His nametag said Yaro, and he was a level 1.
Which meant he had no reason to be in the armory.
Which meant he was almost certainly someone’s alt, and he was here to mess with her.
Gracie narrowed her eyes and looked him over before realizing the stupidity of that. There was no way she was going to learn about this person by studying their avatar. There were no tells in the way his mouth or his eyes moved.
“I take it you have a problem with me,” she said. She kept her voice pleasant, but it took a lot of effort. De-escalate, Gracie.
“You hacked the rankings,” Yaro said. He flashed her a smile that was clearly insincere. “You’re profiting from something you didn’t earn.”
Gracie raised her chin slightly. “Did you explore the cave in the starting zone?”
There was a pause.
“Yes,” Yaro said. He looked around as if there might be an answer to this puzzle in the stained glass windows.
“Did you see a blue jewel?” Gracie asked.
“Yes.” He was sure it was a trap now, but he didn’t know how to evade it.
“Did you ask the hill warden for lore?” Gracie pressed.
He said nothing.
“Did you go through an early boss fight and try to restore the balance of the non-playing factions?” She already knew the answer, but she asked it anyway. “Did you fight bosses for whom there were no guides or previews? No? Then don’t tell me I hacked the rankings.”
Yaro said nothing, watching her.
“You’re an imposter,” he said finally. “You’re a hack. You’re claiming to be some—genius—when actually you’re nothing but lucky.”
It touched so deeply on Gracie’s fears that she instinctively wanted to lash out at him. She wanted to swing her fist and feel it connect with his jaw—
She couldn’t do that. Not here, not in this world. But she could mute him. She could ban him. The thought came to her unbidden, so tempting that she swallowed hard against the urge to do so.
When she said nothing, it seemed to anger her opponent.
“You should leave,” he told her. “You’re not wanted here. You’re don’t deserve what you have. Other people worked harder for it.”
“Who the hell do you think you are?” Caspian was at her side, making her jump. “Thad?”
“Huh?” Yaro sounded honestly confused.
“Nothing.” Caspian was clearly frustrated. “Go back to your main toon, dude. Give it up.”
“Fuck off,” Yaro said instantly. “I’m talking to Callista, not you.”
“Are you sure?” Chowder was at her other shoulder. “Because she’s a member of Red Squadron, and if you mess with one of us, you mess with all of us.”
“Guys,” Gracie admonished. “Enough.” She looked at Caspian and Chowder, meeting their eyes. To Yaro, she said, “It’s clear I’m not going to say anything to win you over, so there’s no point in continuing to talk, is there?”
“Maybe not for you,” Yaro spat. “You can’t convince me because I’m not a brainwashed idiot like those two. But you might see the truth and understand you’re not welcome here. No one wants you. No one cares about you. Leave it to the pros and go home.”
Gracie shrugged. “I’ve gotten yelled at by better people than you,” she said easily. “I don’t really care if you like me. There’s more to this than you know, and I’m not going to bother to explain it.”
Whoever Yaro was, though, he knew just how to get under her skin. Whether it was luck or some otherworldly instinct, his next words cut to the bone: “You do care,” he said venomously. “That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? Because everyone in your real life rejected you. Because they knew you were a piece of shit.”
With any other insult, Gracie’s mind would have been churning, finding retorts easily and discarding the broken logic. Is that why you’re here too? But with this, all she could do was stand frozen, her hands twitching toward the buttons that could ban this character.
They would ban the whole account. She was sure of that.
Harry didn’t do things by halves.
Do you even know how insignificant you are? The words were on the tip of her tongue as she stared him down.
“He’s not worth it,” Caspian said tightly. “Seriously, that’s word for word out of the troll playbook. Come on.”
Gracie had thought Yaro would follow them, but he didn’t—and somehow that made it worse. He stood and watched as they left, and when she met his eyes one last time, her fingers twitched again to open the menu and ban him.
You’re nothing, she thought contemptuously. And then, with a chill, she understood. Harry had always had this power over people.
He had always viewed them this way.
If she wasn’t careful, she would, too.
Chapter Ten
Gracie knew that if she allowed herself to sit and stew over her confrontation with Yaro, she would work her mind into knots.
She wasn’t Harry. She didn’t have to be Harry. If her new powers were truly going to corrupt her, she would find a way to give them up (although she had the sneaking suspicion that if she were to abandon this character and roll an alt, they would show up there as well).
In the meantime, she needed to distract herself.
“Want to run one of the battlegrounds?” she asked Caspian and Chowder. “Get a feel for what we might be looking at?”
“Sounds good.” Caspian created a party. “Which one do you want to do?”
“I don’t know.” Gracie considered, looking around at the markets of Kithara. She purposely kept herself from searching for Yaro’s face in the sparse crowd and instead looked at the sky, where birds were circling and a few clouds scudded lazily. She looked back at Caspian. “You said you’ve run some of them, right? You queue us.”
“Right.” Caspian sounded a bit nervous, and she guessed that in his old guild, he wouldn’t have been allowed to make many choices for himself.
Part of her still wanted to mistrust him, knowing that he had left the other guild behind—but a larger part of her saw that she was just worried about the new landscape of the game. Caspian had done nothing but aid them, and when push came to shove, he hadn’t sold them out or hurt them. Instead, he’d made the honest choice.
And he had come here because Red Squadron had something Demon Syndicate didn’t: camaraderie. If he hadn’t crashed with Kevin, she was sure someone else in the guild would have offered him a place.
A moment later, there was a bloop and a picture flashed up on the screen: a crumbling castle made of golden stone, built next to a small lake and grown through with brilliant green trees. The text on the screen announced it as SALADIN’S KEEP.
“That was—” Gracie began, but they were yanked through the ether the next moment. When the world cleared again, it was so bright that she squinted out of reflex. “That was fast,” she finished faintly.
“Queueing with a healer and a tank?” Caspian asked, sounding amused. “Yeah. Yeah, that’s a quick way to get into a battleground.”
Gracie laughed.
“What am I, chopped liver?” Chowder said, sounding aggrieved.
“Pretty much,” Caspian said cheerfully. A moment later he added, “You know I’m joking, right?”
“Yeah.” Chowder was laughing. “Don’t worry so much, kid. We all give each other shit around here.”
“Less shit-talking, more preparing,” Gracie said. Huge numbers had appeared in the center of the screen, counting down from thirty. “Cas, can you give us a quick idea of what we’re doing, here?”
“Oh, right.” Caspian pointed behind Gracie. A flag fluttered there, bright purple with a white sigil of a lion rampant. “That’s our flag. The other team also has a flag, so capture the flag, basically. There are two main groups you need: defense on the flag here, which might include someone stealthed or a tank—anyone who can keep people from getting very far—a
nd then offense, which will grab the opposing team’s flag and bring it back here while protecting the flag carrier. If they die, the flag goes back automatically.”
“Who’s on D?” asked someone named Jinx.
Gracie looked at her teammates, who nodded. “Caspian, Chowder, and I will stay here,” she said.
“Healer comes O,” Jinx said at once. Gracie could see the character now, a Piskie rogue who was geared up like crazy in a set of armor Gracie had never seen.
“Makes sense,” Caspian agreed. Privately, to Gracie and Chowder, he added, “Let me know if you have questions, okay? And don’t worry too much about people getting intense. You’re learning, and they can just deal with it.”
Gracie smiled and murmured a thank you, but all she could think was that Caspian didn’t know her very well yet. None of these people was going to get more intense about winning—and more annoyed with her if she screwed up—than she herself would.
START announced the game, and the offensive group took off out the newly-opened door on one side, and over the ruined, tumbled-down wall on the other.
“We should hide,” Chowder said.
“Good idea.” Gracie looked around, marveling at the shift from dungeon to battleground. In dungeons, you knew that the boss wasn’t going to notice you unless you got within a certain range. Patrols would cheerfully walk past the bodies of their dead comrades without noticing a thing.
Humans, meanwhile, were smarter.
This room must have been a great hall of some sort. The walls and ceiling were nearly destroyed, with just enough left to suggest how it had looked with a vaulted ceiling and tall, open windows. Carved wooden screens had fallen into the room, lying among the stone rubble with the broken long tables. If there had ever been cushions or curtains, they were long gone now.
The flag was on a dais at one end of the room where Gracie could only imagine a throne had stood.
“Four coming your way,” Jinx said in a business-like tone. “A rogue, two summoners, and a tank.”
“Thanks,” Gracie said. After a moment of indecision, she ran over to hide behind the remainder of a column and watched Chowder dither before darting over to stand next to the door so that he could attack the other team once they arrived.
A moment later, the six opponents streamed through the door. The two summoners were Aosi, so alike they might have been twins, while the rogue was, incongruously, an Ocru, and the tank was a Piskie.
Gracie snickered at that. There was something awesome about a shin-high tank.
Chowder wasted no time going for the summoners. They had the least armor, and when he took them down, he’d take out their pets as well. Gracie approved of that strategy, and she let him handle it while she kept her eye on the rogue and the tank.
They left the summoners behind and sprinted for the flag, and Gracie timed their approach, holding herself still. Not yet, not yet, not yet—
She burst out of hiding and charged for the flag, slamming her hand down automatically in what was usually her opening move.
Which was completely useless with human players.
Idiot! She wasted a split second berating herself before getting off a stun on the tank, but she’d taken her eye off the rogue, and a moment later, a strike hit her in the back and a green haze appeared over her screen. The rogue had used a slowing poison on her.
Gracie growled in frustration and turned to slash at the rogue, but he was already out of range again. She spun back, ready to let loose with her stun again as soon as the tank was free, but the poison made her attacks take longer, and she missed the window. Another flurry of strikes came from the rogue, and Gracie watched helplessly as the tank took off.
“Chowder! The tank!”
Chowder called an affirmation and Gracie wavered for a critical moment, trying to decide whether to attack the rogue back or head after the party.
She made the wrong choice. The rogue’s poisons were stacking, reinforcing one another, and because she hadn’t used her stuns, they’d had the opportunity to chain together some devastating combos. Her screen took on a red hue when her health dipped to ten percent, and with a couple more strikes, she was dead.
She resurrected in a nearby graveyard a moment later, cursing and at half-health, only to have the rogue appear a moment later and kill her again.
“Fucking hell!”
This time there was a thirty-second timer on her resurrection, and she swore quietly and inventively to herself about the rogue’s maternal lineage and her own stupidity until she resurrected.
There wasn’t much time left, but she put her character into a sprint and set off across the battleground at high speed. This was complicated by the fact that she wasn’t entirely sure where she was going, but she could see a large group of people on the other side of the ornamental lake, so she headed for that.
It was an all-out brawl over the two flag carriers. Gracie’s team had also managed to capture the flag but hadn’t gotten very far. Both flag carriers were doing their best to stay alive and fight off their opponents while summoners and healers stood on the sidelines and threw desperate spells, and a third group tried to cut down the various magic wielders to take out the backup.
Gracie was close when the enemy flag carrier broke away from the group and sprinted toward the keep. She planted her feet and whipped her arm around to throw her shield, just in range, and was glad to see the Piskie stumble.
Ha. I can do this after all. She pelted after them, dodging around the AoE spells flickering through the melee, and was able to land a stun on the rogue who had killed her twice.
“Payback, bitch.”
She kept running, her attention focused on the flag carrier. He was sprinting again, having gotten past the slowing part of her shield bash, and the enemy DPS closed ranks the next moment, all of them piling on Gracie at once.
Her team tried, they really did. A frost mage threw down an AoE rain of ice to slow the flag carrier, and their rogues took off to dart through the DPS and try to get to the flag carrier.
It was too late, however. The Piskie broke away and sprinted into the other headquarters, and a moment later, red letters appeared on the screen: DEFEAT.
Gracie swore, and although the battleground had a minute before it closed down, Caspian took them out of it immediately. They appeared back in Kithara with Gracie’s gear damaged and her blood pressure higher than was strictly healthy.
“I made so many mistakes,” she spat finally. “I used stupid threat strikes, I didn’t pay attention to the rogue, I—”
“Yeah,” Caspian interrupted. “Almost like it’s a whole new set of skills, huh?”
Gracie bit off her words and closed her mouth. A moment later, she mumbled, “Hmph.”
“Uh-huh,” Caspian said almost smugly. “You’re going to learn the layout, you’re going to develop instincts for PvP, and you’re going to reset your hotbar and maybe your talent tree. But it’s not going to happen on the first battleground.”
“I don’t like that,” Gracie said grumpily.
“Really? You seemed so at peace with it.” Caspian was clearly trying to keep from laughing. “Look, I’m gonna get myself some lunch. I’ll be back for more battlegrounds later.”
Gracie waved him off with a smile emote and logged out after a brief chat with Chowder. She knew rationally that she would get better at PvP as time went on. The thing was, a tank was not well suited to PvP, and she was almost certain Harry would make use of that fact.
She was going to have to get better fast.
Chapter Eleven
If he were honest, Thad had created the Piskie healer as a middle finger to the guy who was messing with him. Men who came into this game tended to go one of two ways: either their characters were big and brawny, or they were women who were attractive in an unearthly sort of way.
They didn’t generally want to be Piskies with crazy hair.
The new healer, however, made no mention of it whatsoever. He—Thad was fairly sure
it was a he—worked efficiently, barking orders at the various guild members as they went through the first boss.
“Who is this guy?” Grok asked Thad privately. “He’s not ranked. Like, at all.”
Thad looked at him. Grok tended to think along the same lines Thad did, which could be useful—but not right now, when it meant that Grok was asking questions Thad really didn’t want asked.
He didn’t have a choice, after all. They were not going to make it through the top-tier dungeons without a good healer, and neither Ixbal nor Eris was up to the task.
“He must have some skills, or he wouldn’t have that armor, right?” Hopefully, his voice sounded casual. “And it’s going well so far. I figured we could take thirty minutes to give him a job interview.”
“Fair.” Grok shrugged. “He sure likes to give orders, though.”
“Yeah.” Thad wanted to say that they’d talk about that, but he honestly wasn’t sure they would. He needed this guy, and if that meant letting him call the shots in dungeons…
This was a nightmare. He could feel his position in the guild slipping, and it seemed like everything he did to make it better in one aspect made it worse in another. He needed a more solid team, and this healer was the missing piece?
But if the Brightstar execs got word that someone else was running the show, who was to say they wouldn’t just take this new player instead of Thad?
He swallowed his fear. Just focus on right now. Just get through the month with a healer, then figure out the rest of it.
They were approaching the final boss now, walking across the void, and Thad felt a ripple of disquiet. The first time they had been here, they’d been racing the clock, already thrown into disarray by an unexpected first boss, not sure if their inside information had been at all good. Thad had believed they were walking into a trap.
And the time after that, they had just found out that they didn’t have a gear advantage anymore.
Thad, who prided himself on being a rational person, was still inclined to hate this place. There was something cursed about it for his guild. Then again, he supposed that maybe this was the stroke of luck they needed—a new healer, instead of one who was going to waltz off to join their enemy at the first opportunity.