Metamorphosis Online Complete Series Boxed Set; A Gamelit Fantasy RGP Novel: You Need A Bigger Sword, The New Queen Rises, Reign With Axe & Shield

by Natalie Grey

  Gracie looked over quickly, emoting a smile, and there was a round of cheers and greetings. “Anders! Good to see you.”

  Jay’s character gave a flourishing bow. “Hello, all. From the way I suddenly found myself wearing a tabard, I figured I might find you all here.”

  “You look good,” Chowder said. “Not as good as me, of course…”

  “Does anyone look as good as you?” Jay asked philosophically. He slung an arm around Chowder’s shoulders.

  “No one answer that,” Chowder ordered, pointing around at all of them. “Anyway, where are you taking us?”

  “Oh, nowhere special.” Jay made a show of inspecting his clothing for dust, an especially ostentatious gesture given that in-game clothes never got dirty. “Just…the edge of the world.”

  “Oooooh,” the rest of the team said in unison.

  Each zone in Metamorphosis Online was bounded in various creative ways so that players could see the “world” stretching away endlessly in all directions, but could only play in a certain area.

  Lately, however, there had been rumors flying around that there was a way to get all the way to the edge of one zone and walk out into nothingness. Some people said the game’s moderators hung out there, and others said that the step into the void was actually part of the game’s lore.

  Whatever the reality, there were a lot of videos online of people searching for the edge…and none of them finding it.

  Part of Gracie wanted to protest that they shouldn’t try to go places they weren’t authorized for, but a larger part of her wanted to explore.

  Game glitches were always funny, for one thing.

  For another, the game developers already hated her through no fault of her own, so in her considered opinion, they could suck a bag of dicks.

  “Let’s go,” she said, holding one thumb up, the other hand pointing out. “Lead on, Anders.”

  Jay had his character gesture toward the door and led the gaggle of guildmates out into the street. As he walked, however, he opened a private channel to Gracie.

  “Hey, so keep your eyes open when we get out there. Let’s just say there’s a particular reason I wanted to go to this zone.”

  “Really?” Gracie’s interest spiked.

  “Yeah.” Jay sounded like he could barely contain his excitement. “Harry mentioned that he’d initially put some stuff out in the void, and he wasn’t sure we’d be able to access it the way he’d intended, but we should definitely look. He said if they didn’t find the quest, then they probably haven’t found this stuff.”

  “Hmm.” In the real world, Gracie wrinkled her nose. Their characters were striding down the street, surrounded by colorful flags and buildings all jumbled together in differing sizes, while NPCs hawked goods and active characters turned to watch this new guild…and the floating golden 1 over Gracie’s head.

  That 1 indicated that she was now at the top of the global Top 10, the highest-ranked players, and earning a considerable payout each month instead of paying to play. The other 9 players on the list were all members of sponsored guilds, and Gracie’s heading on the list had made her a celebrity in-game.

  It was the reason Dragon Soul Productions didn’t like her very much right now, and all of it was due to the interference of one of the founders, a now-ousted man named Harry.

  Harry had built a quest that boosted a certain player’s ranking, and Gracie had managed to start the quest before anyone else. What other advantages it conferred, she wasn’t sure. No one seemed to know. What they did know was that the other guilds and sponsors in the Top 10 didn’t want her waltzing in and stealing their spotlight.

  She could really care less from a rankings standpoint, Gracie reflected, but now she wanted to stay number 1 out of sheer spite.

  Jay led them to the loading tower for the airship, a dizzy open platform covered in luxurious couches and carpets. NPC butlers stood around the edges, holding trays of various beverages and elegant, fantastical snacks, and a magical shield held the wind at bay, glimmering faintly in the corners of Gracie’s vision.

  As usual, she plunked herself down in the very center of the platform and did her best not to look around. Lakhesis and Alex were at the edge, trying to jump out onto one of the many elegant metal wings. Both of them thought it was hilarious to see the game world rushing by thousands of feet below, but the mere thought made Gracie shudder.

  “Hey.” Jay sat his character down next to hers. He had brought two crystal flutes of a purple liqueur, and he handed one over.

  Gracie held it up to the light. “What do you think this tastes like? I’m picturing lavender, which…isn’t really appetizing?” She laughed. “It’s so pretty, though.”

  “Cotton candy,” Jay predicted. “With a kick.”

  “Sounds about right.” Gracie had her character take a sip. “Damn, I actually swallowed. It looks so real.”

  Jay laughed. “So, glad to have some time before we get there. Harry’s been asking about you.”

  Gracie stilled. She took a deep breath and said nothing.

  “I haven’t told him much,” Jay said hastily. “I know it makes you uncomfortable.”

  “It does,” Gracie agreed. “I just wish I knew why.”

  When Harry had contacted Jay, it had made sense. After all, Jay had once worked for Dragon Soul Productions and had been fired for refusing to help them cut Gracie’s character out of the game. Like Harry, he had a grudge, and unlike Harry, he had up-to-date knowledge of the game. Harry had offered his help to Gracie and Jay so that Gracie could get all the way through the hidden quest before the game’s current owners could figure out how to stop her.

  “I feel like a pawn in someone else’s game,” she said finally.

  Jay drew in a breath to make a retort but held it back. There was a pause, and then he sighed. “Yeah. I get that. I…”

  “Maybe it’s that it always sounded like he was such an asshole,” Gracie continued.

  Jay burst out laughing. “Uh, yeah. Yeah, he really was. All of his secretaries quit, he made the junior developers cry on the regular—all that jazz. If he hadn’t been a brilliant programmer, he wouldn’t have kept his job for as long as he did. Metamorphosis is what it is because of Harry, in large part. It was his idea; the others just helped. And they helped a lot, but…” He shrugged and looked out at the clouds rushing by. “I guess I just want the window into all of it, you know?”

  “I know,” Gracie assured him. The airship was descending now, haptics shuddering in what she considered a far too realistic depiction of landing. “I get why you’re interested, Jay. That’s not what makes me worry. What I don’t like is wondering whether Harry’s trying to use us to nuke the game somehow.”

  “I have wondered that,” Jay admitted. “And I like to think we’ll be able to see something like that coming. More than that, I feel like if that were his goal, he could have come up with better ways to do it. If he was good enough to weave this quest in without them being able to find it, he could easily crash the servers and make the game fail.”

  “That’s true, I guess.” Gracie stood up as the airship landed. “Well, we’ll just play it by ear.”

  “Best kind of plan,” Jay agreed. He followed Gracie across the deck to look out at the Twilight Sea. “And even if we don’t find it, at least this zone is a gorgeous place to spend some time.”

  He was right. The town of Night’s Edge lay on the edge of a sheltered cove, its buildings shrouded in perpetual twilight. The sun was always on the edge of the horizon here, spilling golden light like a pathway across the sea while the sky above faded to purple. An archipelago of islands stretched away to the north, and Jay pointed to them.

  “That’s where we’re headed. All we have to do is fight our way through a few covens of merfolk, and we’re good to go.”

  Gracie laughed and jumped down from the airship, but her laugh turned into a shriek when it started to ascend again. Even knowing that she wasn’t really falling, she felt her hear
t lurch.

  “Son of a bitch. Ugh, I hate heights. All right, everyone, come on! Let’s go find the edge of the world.”

  “Sir?” Sam stuck his head around the door of Dan’s office. “You wanted to see me?”

  “Yes.” Dan looked at Dhruv, who was lounging against the wall with his customary surly expression. Not for the first time, Sam reflected on how different the two remaining founders of Dragon Soul Productions were. Dan was mild-mannered and took pains to be polite, while Dhruv was prone to snapping at employees, and never held back on sharing his bad moods.

  The thing was, you could always count on Dhruv to play it straight with you, and he was much more inclined to forgive and forget than Dan was. Sam always forgot that, and he told himself again that he really needed to keep it in mind.

  Dan settled back in his chair and assessed Sam with a long glance. “I know you and Jay were…close.”

  “Somewhat,” Sam said cautiously. “We had worked together for a while. I wouldn’t say we had any particular friendship.” He wished he knew where this was going. Was he getting fired?

  “You had managed him for a while,” Dan said. “You were familiar with his work.”

  Sam nodded wordlessly. Either a yes or a no could be dangerous right now.

  “So you would be able to follow his trail,” Dan said, “if we were to set you to follow him? What we’re planning to do is leave a backdoor open in the system for him to access it.”

  Dhruv cleared his throat.

  Dan ignored him. “We want you to keep an eye on what he does. We’ll be running frequent backups, so we’ll be able to reload if he does anything big, but we mostly want to see where he goes.”

  Sam blinked. “You’re… I’m sorry, you hired Jay back—”

  “No,” Dan said shortly. “We think he may be well placed to figure out the scope of what Harry inserted, however, and we’ve given him access to the database.”

  Dhruv shook his head once, and Sam realized that the two founders were at odds over this plan. He opened his mouth to speak, but there was a ding and Dan leaned forward to look at his computer. His face changed, suddenly alert and unsettlingly predatory.

  “They’re in Night’s Edge,” he said to Dhruv. To Sam, he gave a brief nod of dismissal.

  Sam hesitated, then left. Neither of them was paying the slightest attention to him anymore, and he frowned as he walked out.

  What were they up to?

  And did he actually want to help them?

  Chapter Two

  “Hey, Callista,” Lakhesis called.

  “What’s up?” Gracie’s character emerged out of the sea next to Jay and waded onto the shore of a tiny island. This was one of the few times when the unreality of the game world came into focus: characters emerging from the sea in full plate mail, their hair not even damp, not tripped up by the waves that swirled around them.

  Gracie found Lakhesis amongst the group and tilted her head curiously.

  “You always know the lore, right?” Lakhesis asked. “There’s gotta be something about this place? Unmoving sun and filled with merfolk?”

  “There is a cool backstory.” Gracie put up with a goodly amount of teasing for caring about the lore so much, but because she knew the group was joking, she still liked to wax poetic about the characters and places in the game. “Everyone up for it?”

  “Hell, yeah,” Freon said. The frost mage was wading out of the water next to Ushanas, the guild’s fire mage. “We all rely on you to talk to the eighty-five NPCs you need to interrogate to get the whole story. No one else does that.”

  “Excuse you,” Dathok said. As the guild’s backup healer, the Ocru male wore cloth robes that looked ridiculous on his tall, muscled frame. “I happen to know a thing or two about this zone.”

  “Oh?” Gracie sounded excited, and Jay smiled. This was one of the things he liked best about her. She wasn’t threatened when someone else shared her interests. She looked at it as a chance to learn. “What did you read?”

  “Well, you start with the general backstory. You tell these things better.” Dathok made his way over the rocks and toward the other shore. “I’ll pick up after— Oh, shit.”

  “Merfolk!” Freon shouted. There was a burst of ice magic ahead, and the cloth-clad members of the group ran back toward them.

  “Fys!” Gracie called. She had taken off at the first hiss of the merfolk, and she unsheathed her massive shimmering sword as she ran. “Summon your Ifrit!”

  “Way ahead of you!” Kevin called. A flaming demon charged into battle behind the main melee group, swiping at the merfolk with flaming claws. “No, don’t step in the water, you stupid thing! Goddammit!”

  Jay was chuckling as he reached his first target and slammed his fist into it. The mermaid gave a shriek and started trying to cast a spell, but Jay kicked and punched to interrupt her casting. He gave a snort of laughter.

  “What?” Gracie called.

  “I just… I’m punching a mermaid! What a day.” He roundhouse-kicked her in the head and nodded in satisfaction when she collapsed. “Feels kinda wrong to beat the crap out of spellcasters, though.”

  “They didn’t have to start shit,” Kevin called. “You don’t see me going around pissing off giants, do you?”

  “Everyone’s a giant compared to you,” Jay told him.

  “Shut up, or I’ll hex your shins.”

  They dispatched the merfolk in short order and collected opals and coins from the corpses, along with a wicked-looking dagger that Mirra and Dathok squabbled over good-naturedly.

  “So,” Gracie said as they swam out toward the next island. “The Twilight Sea. It’s been frozen in twilight since the war between the merfolk and the Aosi.”

  “The Aosi?” Jay asked, surprised. He knew that the various non-playing races had fought one another and that the playing races had done the same, but he hadn’t realized there had been wars between the playing and non-playing races.

  “Yes, after the races were scattered,” Gracie said. “The Aosi were created to bring peace, remember? They totally sucked at it, but they still thought they were better than everyone else. So they got to this zone, waltzed in, and told the merfolk they were here to run everything. The merfolk? Well, let’s just say they weren’t thrilled by that idea.”

  “The Aosi did just want the land,” Dathok pointed out. “And the merfolk would have the water.”

  “It’s still fucking rude,” Gracie said. “And they did say they were going to rule the whole thing.”

  “I mean, that’s true.” Dathok gave an elaborate shrug.

  “Anyways,” Gracie said, mimicking the gesture, “the whole fucking situation went into meltdown, and before long, there was a holy war going on, because that’s clearly what the situation needed. The Aosi were blowing up the merfolks’ temples, and the merfolk were blowing up their own temples for some reason.”

  “That was the part I heard about!” Dathok said, enthusiastically. “I had a beer with this grizzled old sailor, and—”

  “Wait, a real beer?” Jay tried to picture that scene.

  “No, an NPC. In-game beer. Actually, I was drinking actual beer at the time.” Dathok waved his hands. “Anyway, the Aosi told them that they were part of the end-times prophecy in the merfolk legends, so the merfolk needed to listen to them, right? There had been stories that angels would come to Elakara and, I don’t know, save everyone or something. The Aosi had the bright idea of claiming they were the angels.”

  Gracie murmured, “When someone asks if you’re a god, you say yes.”

  “Precisely,” Dathok agreed. “Well, the merfolk thought about this, and apparently they decided that if the Aosi were the angels, the whole thing was probably crap, so they burned it all down, metaphorically speaking. They created a whole different religion, and blew up all the old temples.”

  “Oh, shit,” Alex commented. “That’s hardcore.”

  “Hell, yeah. So they’re probably not too glad to see an Aosi show up
with a big sword,” Dathok pointed out.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Gracie muttered. She strode across the beach and yelled toward the water, “Just FYI, I’m not here for a fight, so leave me alone and I’ll return the favor, okay?”

  There was no answer.

  “That should work,” Alex said drily.

  “Oh, absolutely,” Jay agreed. “It’s one of the cheat codes. I should know.”

  The group snickered.

  “So how did it wind up as twilight?” Alan asked.

  “Ah, that,” Gracie said. “The Aosi cursed the merfolk. They said their days were numbered, and they would live on the edge of night forever, perpetually going into darkness and never again seeing the sunlight filtering through the water.”

  Even she sounded a bit uncomfortable now, and she paused as they waded once more into the dark waters to head to the next island. None of them spoke as they swam, and it was only when they were clambering onto the sand that she said in a low voice, “I know these things aren’t real, but sometimes I can’t help but be sad about them anyway.”

  Jay realized she had said that last part only to him, and he looked at her and nodded. “I know what you mean,” he said quietly. “One of our writers once said to me that stories like this are about using lies to tell the truth. No one in the real world has ever cursed someone to eternal twilight, but it’s true, in a way.”

  Gracie nodded.

  Up ahead, Alex and Lakhesis were trying to scramble up a hillside, and they were getting nowhere. A long line of jagged rocks stretched in one direction, and in the others, the magical barriers of a merfolk city could be seen.

  “This way,” Jay said cheerfully. He looped around the beach to where the rocks were and studied them. There was a small ledge…aha. There. He hopped up, remembering the steps from the various videos he had watched. All of them had followed different routes, and all of them had cut off a few steps up.

  He’d noticed something different, however—one of Harry’s calling cards, as it were. The man had liked to hide doors, and Jay was fairly certain that there was a hidden portal under one of the ledges that people had been trying to get on top of.