by Natalie Grey
A battle had happened here; that much was obvious. Unrecoverable damage had been done and lives had been lost, but there was no blood or bones. The bodies here were nothing the human eye could see.
“I love this,” Gracie whispered.
They had all made their way onto the last island, and now they could see the line of flames that showed where the final boss fight would be triggered. The boss could be seen prowling around the room, a hulking figure who was half-physical and half-shadow.
“So what do we do, boss?” Jay’s voice commanded everyone’s attention as he gave Gracie a nod.
Gracie considered. “We plan for the possibility that Demon Syndicate had good intel,” she decided, “but also consider what we’ve seen so far. That means Ushanas and Freon are our top priorities. Swiftbolt, you have ice enchants for your arrows, right?”
“I do indeed,” Alex confirmed.
“I made sure to get the ice enchant on my weapon,” Lakhesis said, holding up her sword.
“I have an ice elemental,” Kevin added, his Piskie now totally dwarfed by the hulking shape of a being fashioned from blue-white ice.
“All right.” Gracie swallowed. “I don’t think we’re ever going to be more ready than we are now, so shall we head straight in?”
“Yeah!” the team chorused.
Gracie grinned at all of them and gave a flex emote. “Then let’s go save the world. Team Underdog!”
“Team Underdog!”
Thad had been absolutely certain that they would arrive at the final boss to find another trap. Another ice wielder, perhaps, or some pit on the walkway that would swallow part of the team.
He was more than a little bitter at this point. Everyone was watching them fail, and he had no idea if it was Dragon Soul who had provided bad information or if his team’s sponsors were trying to make him look bad.
If so, why? So they could replace him?
With her? The thought came to him so suddenly that his controls went a little wild and his character shuddered to a stop on the final island. No. Surely not. They wouldn’t.
They totally would, however. What if, after she turned down his offer, she’d gone to them and said she wanted to be in charge of Demon Syndicate? She was a rags-to-riches story, so she’d play well for all their publicity.
He wanted to scream with rage.
They’d set him up.
Screw them. He was going to take down this boss with seven people instead of ten just to spite them. Then he was going to make it clear to anyone who would listen that his bosses had tried to get rid of him on the sly rather than having the balls to fire him outright.
He looked at the remainder of his team.
“Stay on point,” he said. People could hear everything he said in the group channel, so they’d put strict rules in place at the start not to talk about having inside intel. “Here’s where we find out if our gamble pays off and the final boss has fire powers.”
The part about it being a gamble was truer than he wanted it to be.
The team nodded silently. Envi, who was usually the first one with a quip or a cheer, said nothing at all. The character’s arms were crossed over her chest; Thad could practically feel the worry radiating through the air.
Now he was angry. Did they think this was fun for him? Did they think he was enjoying being made a fool of for the whole internet to see?
“Have we not trained for this?” he snapped at them. “Do we not know how to use our crowd control? Do you not trust me to build threat?” For the love of God, if one of them so much as suggested that they wished they’d gone with the guild’s other lead tank, he was going to lose it. Louis was lucky, Thad thought resentfully. Just lucky. He wasn’t better than Thad.
Anyway, Thad had started this guild. If they didn’t like working with him, they could leave.
If he started to look weak now, Brightstar would smell blood in the water and Thad would be out on his ass. No more ranking. No more sponsorship. Back to working a shitty job and living in a shitty apartment.
He wasn’t going to do that.
“We’re going in," he said, his voice hard. “Envi, ready check.”
Envi stirred to life with a faint nod and initiated the ready check. Her silvery face nodded to him when everyone had checked in. They didn’t need to do one, of course, but Thad liked to think that it got people engaged and dialed in.
He took off without another word, running for the line of flames that sealed off the final boss fight from the rest of the zone.
They followed him, at least. That was something. Envi caught up, peeling off only as Thad charged into the main room. A quick glance behind him showed that the rest of the team was spreading out, ready to unleash hell in the form of ice storms.
Thad didn’t hesitate. He charged the boss at once, skipping the cinematic. He had the impression of height and a flaming color palette, but he didn’t waste his time on things that didn’t relate to the fight. The boss hefted a two-handed battle axe covered in runes, roaring in ancient Aosi, and Thad gave a feral grin as he slid under the blade to land a strike.
He danced away immediately, circling around the back of the boss so that he pivoted away from the mages. Letting off a flurry of early strikes, he watched the meter climb.
“Envi, we should be good. Just one— Holy shit.”
The ground behind the boss erupted into geysers of flame, each geyser resolving itself into a flame elemental—a wraith with the faint impression of armor. These were clearly fallen soldiers, wounds leaking white-hot flame, and they gave banshee-like shrieks.
“AOE!” Thad yelled.
The mages had already begun, however, with the honed reaction time and planned rotations they had spent months perfecting. Ice began to rain down, cold slithering across the floor, wind blowing, and crystals bursting. A blade of ice sprouted from the boss’s chest and he swung with a roar of fury.
Being vulnerable to ice magic, apparently this boss cultivated threat based on who was using ice magic. The boss’s attention was now firmly locked on the mages.
“Slow him!” Thad yelled. “Careful of threat!”
“I’ve got lowest,” called Harkness. “I’ll slow him first.” A snare appeared, ghostly chains covered in frost.
Thad used as many of his abilities as he could, burning his cooldowns with abandon. It was no use waiting to use them at some perfect moment if they were all dead by the time the perfect moment arrived.
“Come on,” he muttered to himself as he swung with all his might. Sweat was trickling down his scalp inside the headset and running along his spine, and a knot of anxiety was forming in his chest.
What other surprises were waiting? Could they even do this with seven players instead of ten?
“Come on, come on, come on, come on—” Every piece of him was focused on the boss.
“Geysers!” Envi yelled. “Thad!”
The geysers erupted around him, and the last thing Thad saw was a flare of red. The world cartwheeled crazily and froze, his lifeless body stuck in the middle of the floor.
“Fuck,” he breathed.
The team tried. He heard Envi rallying them to keep moving, stay on point, emphasize the rotation, and keep the boss slowed. There were calls about the boss’s health, which was beginning to drop and drop—
For a moment, he thought they might make it.
But it wasn’t enough. Without a tank, without the extra mages, there was no pulling this off. RUN FAILED announced red text across the center of Thad’s screen. TRY AGAIN IN 12:34.
He closed his eyes as the countdown started and tried to banish the sinking feeling in his chest. At least if they hadn’t pulled it off, he thought, there was no way the other team would.
Gracie jogged toward the line of fire that showed where the final boss fight would occur. She could see him prowling around the room, a hulking figure in armor that was glowing red-hot. Waves of heat skittered across its surface, and his Aosi skin had taken on the hues of fire,
only his eyes remaining black.
She shivered.
“Opening cinematic?” Jay asked from beside her.
“I don’t want to hold anyone up…” But she wanted to watch it so badly.
“Come on, this was already a long shot, right?” He threw out one elbow and looked at it with a sigh when it passed through her. “I keep forgetting that doesn’t work here. Anyway, let’s watch. It’s only a few seconds.”
“Right.” Gracie grinned over her shoulder. “We’re going to watch the cinematic, okay?”
There were nods and murmurs of agreement, and the next moment, she crossed the line and the world melted away.
“Betrayed,” a voice whispered, seeming to come from everywhere at once. Armies clashed around her, ghostly, locked in darkness. “Forsaken by our allies and forgotten by our leaders. Our bodies left unburied, and our legacy forgotten.”
The boss appeared: a limping Aosi who was dragging air into his lungs. His commander walked at his side, just as beaten and close to death. Fire and ash rained down around the pair.
“I could not rest,” the voice whispered. “Not while my soldiers lay unavenged. I came here to plead for their souls but found only uncaring darkness, and now my own kin would ally with the ones who struck us down? I will never allow it.”
The cinematic cleared and the boss stared Gracie down, pits of darkness where his eyes should be.
“All right, motherfucker,” Gracie whispered. “Let’s do this. Lakhesis!”
“Got it!” Gracie ran slightly to the right and Lakhesis to the left, taking the rest of the melee DPS with her. As Gracie drew close, the boss raised a giant battle axe glowing with heat and magical runes and began to slam it down.
“Shiiiiiit!” She pushed her movement to the limits and prayed, just barely making it out of the way as the axe came down. The haptics in her whole body shuddered and she gave a little gasp.
But there was no time to think. She slammed her fist on the ground for a shock blast and then grabbed her sword and angled it up. This was a video game, of course, but she took a certain satisfaction in knowing that she would have ruined this guy’s day completely if it had been a real sword.
Of course, given that it was as tall as she was, she probably couldn’t have lifted it if it were a real sword.
She swung and danced, waiting for her team to chime in, and it wasn’t long before her threat level got high enough for them to start doing damage.
Which was about when it all went to hell.
Jay had leapt in at once with his ice-enchant, and Gracie’s threat evaporated. The boss turned and slammed his axe down in one smooth motion, sending Jay scrambling for safety. There were yells as the melee team scattered, and Gracie charged in—only to have Freon’s bolt of ice hit a moment later.
Any threat she’d hoped to build up was gone, and the boss started forward with a snarl.
“DPS!” Gracie yelled desperately as the group ran after the boss.
“I’m doing zero damage,” Ushanas reported. “Goddammit!”
“Then just stay out of the way,” Gracie advised. “DPS, gimme everything you’ve got. We need to kite him away from Freon so that—”
Flame erupted around them. Teef went up in a fireball and Jay yelled as the cat’s life bar went to zero, and Lakhesis stumbled away with her health at less than half. A flame elemental swiped for Gracie with fingers made of fire and she jerked back out of the way, only to realize the boss was getting away.
Freon tried to snare him, sending icy chains to bind the boss’s feet, but there was only so long he could hold him, especially with flame elementals hemming him in. Gracie ran, despairing, trying every combo she could think of to pull threat, but it was too little and too late. With half their DPS team down, Ushanas useless, and Gracie pulling no threat, there wasn’t any way to recover.
By the time the second round of flames erupted, it was almost a relief. Gracie saw her health bar plunge, blew out her breath, and watched the failure text flash up on the screen.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“Ughhhhh.” Gracie tipped her head back and bounced back and forth on the balls of her feet, trying to blow off the tension in her shoulders. Easily half her muscles seemed to be burning with exhaustion, and between that, the sweat, and the party wipe, she was feeling more than a bit demoralized.
She hit her Home key and the dungeon dissolved around her, replaced by the ether of the portal system.
“Ughhhh,” Alex agreed. “Stop bouncing over there! It’s making me tired just hearing it. Young people are the worst.”
He managed to startle Gracie into a laugh. She stopped bouncing as her in-game home appeared around her. “Right-o. Well, I hope everyone watching got a good laugh out of that.”
“Probably,” Jay said. He sounded manifestly unconcerned.
“Do you have a Teflon-coated ego or what?” Gracie asked suspiciously. “You don’t feel the littlest bit stupid that we just wiped in front of however many hundred viewers?”
“Oh, I do,” Jay assured her. “I really, really do, don’t worry. But I also happen to have learned something that’s put me in a really good mood.”
“Oh? What’s that?” Gracie nodded to the others as they all began to appear in the pub as well, each of them with badly damaged armor and weapons. When Jay showed up, she tilted her head to the side curiously.
“It’s a good story,” Jay said. “All right, everyone, let’s get a drink. Come on, over to the bar.”
“Just tell us.” But Gracie was laughing as she trailed over to the bar with the others. Everyone got a mug of beer and made their way to the big table in the back corner, trying to coordinate who sat where.
Jay waited as they arranged themselves, then lifted his mug. “A toast.”
“Jay, so help me—”
“No, no, it’s relevant, I assure you.” Jay waited for them to raise their mugs. “A toast…to the team that’s still in the running to do a month-first clear.”
There was a moment of pure silence. In the real world, Gracie’s jaw dropped, and she heard Alex give a whoop. A thud on the floor told her he’d literally jumped for joy.
“Are you… How…” She couldn’t even form a sentence. When everything had started to go to hell in the dungeon, she’d expected it. She’d known it was a long shot, and on a tactical level, she hadn’t even minded. Getting good at something always took iterations. Going up against the unexpected while relying solely on instinct was one of the most fun challenges she could face.
But she’d been disappointed. She had wanted to win; well, she always wanted to win. And to be honest, she hadn’t liked the Demon Syndicate leader very much. She had been taking special pleasure in the idea of beating them for the title.
It had simply never occurred to her that they, with their head start and their inside knowledge, might also wipe.
“They didn’t make it,” she said finally.
“No, they didn’t.” Jay wasn’t emoting a smile, but she could hear the grin in his voice. “You see, one of this dungeon’s rules, I guess, is that anyone who dies along the way can’t be resurrected.”
“Oh, shit,” Ushanas said with feeling.
There was a general murmur of agreement and some nods.
“Well, they lost three on the first boss,” Jay said. He sounded so satisfied that Gracie found herself laughing silently. “Guess that inside knowledge they got was only for one of the two bosses, and I think I might know who was behind that.”
“I’m the only one who knows about your job,” Gracie reminded him.
“Oh, right. Hi, everyone. I’m Jay. I used to work for Dragon Soul Productions.” Jay gave a little wave. “Then I quit over them doing…well, basically, stuff like this. Them giving Demon Syndicate a heads-up. I think my boss might have had some of the same complaints. He texted me after we wiped to tell us that they also did.”
There was a long pause.
“So we’re still in the running,” Ushanas said f
inally.
“Hell yeah, we fuckin’ are,” Lakhesis rejoindered. She looked at Gracie. “And we’re gonna go again, right?”
“She might want to switch up the team,” Kevin chimed in. “I don’t know how useful I was.”
“Likewise.” Alex sounded glum.
“Whoa! Hey, now.” Gracie looked around. “We’re a team. We do this together or not at all.”
“That’s all very good to say,” Alex pointed out, “but it means those of us who aren’t bringing much to the table are going to hamstring the rest of you. There’s no reason for that.”
“Why not?” Gracie looked at him. “I’m serious. You’re thinking about it all wrong. Really, you are. It’s already a long shot, right? And why are we playing this game? Because playing it is fun. Winning it is fun, and winning is better when you earn it. I think it’s genuinely possible to beat this dungeon without some super-specialized team, and we’re going to find the way to do that.
“They can keep doing whatever the fuck they want with the rankings. They’ll be a joke, so whatever. But they made a fun game, and I say we have fun playing it. In a way, doesn’t them doing all this manipulation free us up to do whatever we want?”
There was a long silence.
“I like that,” Kevin said. “That was really… I feel like my character is getting in the way of this being a serious moment.”
A round of snickers said he was absolutely correct. He’d been standing on his chair, but still, only half of his Piskie’s face was visible over the edge of the table.
"Look, I’m just saying that it’s a really inspiring attitude that makes me want to— Goddammit, people!”
Gracie pressed a hand over her mouth, trying to hold back her laughter. Oh, God, her sides hurt. She was going to explode. She could feel the tremble as Alex rocked back and forth with silent laughter, and the rest turned their faces away…but a squeak escaped Alan’s lips, and with that, the dam burst. Everyone dissolved into laughter.