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

  Because this wasn’t just about Alan anymore. This was about Callista, and about her finding some strange hack to get the game to give her extra ranking points. Jamie would bet anything that she was just pretending not to know what was going on. She was playing dumb, and the rest of her guild was falling for it.

  And he was going to take her down.

  Chapter Eleven

  Dan had built Metamorphosis Online. He had spent hours in the weeds of quest chains, scripts, conditions, and boss battles. He had fallen asleep at night with buff circles exploding behind his eyelids.

  But the game had been Harry’s dream, and after working on the details for so long, Dan had stopped noticing what the game was even like to play. The details he cared about had been player engagement, social stickiness metrics, and glitch report numbers.

  Now, as he strapped himself into a VR headset and got ready to go in, he found himself strangely excited.

  He knew that his character stats didn’t matter, but he still took his time with the character creation screen, building a male Aosi with greenish-blue skin and black eyes and hair. He rolled as a summoner, intending to deal damage with a bow and have a mortal companion.

  When he appeared in the starting zone, he was expecting to find Dhruv with his foot tapping. Instead, he had to wait a couple of minutes before the other founder appeared. To his surprise, when they started a private voice chat, the other man sounded like he was panting slightly.

  “That intro was really well done,” Dhruv said.

  “Oh.” Dan frowned. “I skipped it.”

  “You should reroll,” Dhruv said. “It’s freaking worth it. Not now,” he added sharply. “Just later sometime.”

  “Right.” Dan shifted his arms and let the VR suit adjust across his body. He supposed he would get used to it, but it still felt odd. “Okay, explain why we’re rolling characters and not coming in with the GM mods?” As GMs, they would have certain advantages like being invisible to mobs and being able to fly. As someone who had never experienced the game content in its final iteration, Dan would have felt more comfortable with that.

  “We’re retracing her steps,” Dhruv said. “And trying to figure out where the next clues are hidden. Is she the only one who can access them, for instance? And what else might he have hidden?”

  “She must be the only one who— Wait.” Dan frowned. “Jay was the one who found the armor for her.”

  “Exactly,” Dhruv said in satisfaction. “And who knows what Harry would have tagged to avoid our GM keys? Okay, come on.”

  He led the way up the sloping pathway and Dan followed, bumbling his way into a few corners and occasionally forgetting not to walk on his own. He kept having to stop and pivot rather than walk and turn at the same time, and every time he started again, he took a step forward. It took the glowing red outline of the VR area to remind him, and he was swearing under his breath by the time he realized Dhruv wasn’t in front of him anymore.

  “Where the hell are you?”

  “Backtrack,” Dhruv said.

  “That’s not exactly easy, you know.”

  “I swear, you are the most unintuitive player I have ever seen. If we had used you as quality control, we’d have the most perfect game ever made…and we’d probably also never finish it. No, stop walking! Look to your right. Your other right.” Dhruv, despite his frustration, was laughing as Dan turned the wrong way and then pivoted in a dizzying circle. “Do you have the controls inverted or something?”

  “Oh. No. And I usually do. That explains it.” Dan started trying to bring up menus and was interrupted when his character went staggering sideways, haptics shuddering. There was a snarl and the snap of teeth. “Jesus Christ!”

  “Are Americans ever not blasphemous?” Dhruv asked philosophically. “No, don’t answer, fight!”

  “I don’t know how to fight! I don’t have a companion!” Dan flailed wildly, trying to hit anything he could, and the wolf shied away from him with a yip as the haptics let him know he’d made contact. He gave a whoop.

  “There you go!” Dhruv had thrown himself into the fight, and he managed to beat one of the two wolves backward. “Just focus on that one.”

  He didn’t have time to figure out how to draw his weapon. Dhruv settled into a crouch, pleasantly surprised that his character did the same, and readied himself as the wolf charged again. He punched with all his might and followed up with a kick, and though he overbalanced, the wolf flopped over and disappeared.

  “Here, come this way,” Dhruv said. “Quickly, before anything else shows up. You’re almost dead.”

  “Crap.” Dan tried to follow, walked into a doorway twice, wound up in the corridor again, and finally made his way into the cave. “Follow you into the water?” he asked doubtfully.

  “Yeah, it cures you.”

  “Oh, good.” Dan took a step, cursed, and used the walking controls. “Still not used to it. Okay, I’m… Oh, that’s good. It gets rid of the red haze.”

  “Yep,” Dhruv agreed. He looked around. “Now, the first quest she did in this chain was after she came out of these caves, so it had to have triggered somewhere in here. Do you see anything? Anything?”

  “No,” Dan said. He pivoted painstakingly and managed to start walking with the controls. “Finally got that right. Okay, the splashing sounds are a nice touch.”

  “Uh-huh.” Dhruv was turning slowly, his Ocru face expressionless. He wasn’t really paying attention, Dan could tell.

  In his pocket, his phone buzzed. “Ugh, one moment.”

  “Focus,” Dhruv said.

  Dan wasn’t paying attention. He flipped up the headset, wondering vaguely what was happening with his character’s posture, and looked at the screen. When he saw who had emailed, he walked to one of the chairs and sat.

  A few seconds later, he heard swearing and Dhruv also flipped his headset up. “What are you doing?”

  “Jay emailed,” Dan said. He was frowning. “He has a lot of questions.”

  “Like?” Dhruv sighed. “Our characters are probably getting murdered by wolves right now.”

  “Good, that’ll give me a chance to see the intro when I reroll.”

  Dhruv gave him a look, leaning down to read over his shoulder. “Hmm,” he said contemplatively.

  Jay’s current email had an energy the others hadn’t had. Whereas before, Dan had been talking him into doing things he knew he shouldn’t be doing, controlling the encounters with a proverbial carrot on a stick, now Jay seemed to have decided to take the reins. He wanted to know why Harry had made the quest in the first place. He wanted to know what it did. He wanted to know if Harry had intended to be the one doing it.

  Alarm bells were going off in Dan’s head.

  “Knowing Harry,” Dhruv said, “that was exactly what he intended. He was going to make himself a god and then boot us. Fucker.”

  “I can’t just tell him that,” Dan argued.

  “Why not?”

  Dan struggled to find the words. “He’s asking because something happened,” he explained finally. “The momentum shifted. He has an advantage; he has a piece of information that we don’t know.”

  There was silence while the two men stared at the screen.

  “I don’t like this,” Dhruv said. “I didn’t like it to start with, and I don’t like it now. What if he’s in touch with Harry? He’s trying to back us into a corner, and you’ve given him a really good one. Claiming to be Harry means that—”

  “I never claimed to be Harry,” Dan said through numb lips. He’d been very, very careful not to do so explicitly. It was the only thing saving their asses on the legal end.

  His phone dinged again and he sighed, intending to ignore it.

  Then he saw who had sent the email and he scrolled to it. His heart was beginning to beat double-time. Dhruv read along silently, and a moment later, both of them swore under their breath.

  Things had just gotten a hell of a lot more complicated.

  Thad
was speaking to Evan when Jamie burst into the room. His face was bright. For the first time in days, he didn’t look guilty or evasive. He smiled at Thad without a trace of his now-usual apology, and he looked almost savage in his happiness.

  “Some big-ass glitch,” he said without preamble. “They’ve been having this weird thing where they go into dungeons and different bosses show up, and since then, her rank’s been climbing like crazy. They don’t know why, and they can’t find any mention of those bosses anywhere, but here’s the thing…” He now looked so pleased that he had to stop for a moment. He tipped his head back and gave a laugh. When he looked back at Thad, he spoke like he knew he was going to make the leader’s day. “They reported it to Dragon Soul. The devs know it’s a glitch, and they haven’t stopped it.”

  It took Thad a moment to put the pieces together, but when he did, he started laughing.

  “Wait,” Evan protested. “So they’re helping her? But if she reported it as a glitch—”

  Thad and Jamie exchanged looks. For the first time in days, they were a united front again. Jamie nodded to Thad to explain.

  “He’s saying that something went wrong with the rankings, and Dragon Soul has known about it for a while now, but they haven’t fixed it. They were trying to help us with the month-first to get us off the trail, maybe, but we have leverage now, because not only did they fuck that one up, they didn’t tell any of us what was going on. I bet they didn’t tell any of the other guilds, either.”

  Evan looked at them.

  “Callista has some weird advantage over all of us in the rankings,” Jamie said. “BrightStar is paying Dragon Soul’s bills, and they’re not giving you a return.” His eyes flicked sideways to Thad. How dumb is this guy?

  Thad’s mouth twitched. “I’m sure your bosses would like to know about this,” he said to Evan.

  “Oh. Right.” Evan practically ran out the door.

  Thad looked at Jamie, both of them laughing for a moment. “You seem happy,” he observed.

  “We earned where we were,” Jamie said. He stabbed his finger for emphasis. “You did,” he added. “And nothing was going our way, and now we know why: it was glitches, and it was Dragon Soul not playing straight with us. We kept telling BrightStar it wasn’t your fault, and I finally found proof.” He rubbed his face. “And now we can just…figure this out and be done with it. They’d better apologize to you.”

  Thad felt a flush of satisfaction. “BrightStar will make them.”

  “No, I mean BrightStar had better apologize to you,” Jamie said. “They’ve been treating you like shit, and they don’t have a clue what they’re talking about. You saw Evan just now.” He cast an annoyed glance at the door.

  Thad crossed his arms. He was cautiously optimistic, but he didn’t want to let Jamie off the hook just yet. The other man could have argued for Thad to be doing recon. He could have insisted to Evan’s face that BrightStar give Thad an apology.

  Thad let the silence stretch, then he gave a small nod. “Let’s go see what BrightStar is saying to Dragon Soul,” he suggested. He’d set Jamie off-balance, he could tell, and that was enough for now. Jamie needed to remember who’d brought him on board and taught him about the game.

  Dan and Dhruv, now out of their VR suits, made sure the door to Dan’s office was closed. Dan’s finger was poised to start the call to BrightStar.

  “Ready?” Dhruv asked. He shook his head. “Remember—”

  “You remember,” Dan said with an unusual burst of prickliness. “Which of us is the one who takes business calls most of the time? Let me handle this.”

  “Right.” Dhruv settled back in his chair and made an elaborate gesture to the phone.

  Dan dialed, and it wasn’t long until the VP of BrightStar’s media outreach group picked up. Lyle had initially been an easy mark, someone who’d been born in the era of print opinion columns and ads and wasn’t entirely sure what Metamorphosis Online was. Once they had convinced him that VR gaming was the next big thing, he’d given them a contract that was insanely favorable.

  Of course, he’d then gone out and learned everything he could about Metamorphosis, and he was now a more savvy investor. That was going to make this call more difficult.

  “Hello, Lyle,” Dan said. “I’m here with Dhruv.”

  “Hello,” Lyle said. Without preamble, he added, “So what’s going on with this? I have the players irate, and frankly, this is reeking of a bad investment. I didn’t say anything during the month-first run, but too many twists and turns are a bad sign.”

  Dan cursed internally. Lyle was right. This was getting too complicated, and there was the ever-present fear that things were about to go sideways. Someone would spill the beans, and—

  Well, someone already had.

  “I think you owe us an explanation,” Dan said, “as to how your players have learned of internal glitch reports.”

  There was a pause. Lyle clearly hadn’t expected Dan to come out on the offensive.

  “One of our players has been playing within the other guild,” he said finally. There was whispering, and Lyle said doubtfully, as if reading aloud, “He rolled an alt.” He didn’t seem to be sure that what he’d just said were real words.

  “Ah,” Dhruv said in satisfaction.

  “So, your players are the ones doing hole-in-corner things now,” Dan said. “Is that right? For which you were about to hold us responsible.”

  Lyle paused again. “Yes,” he said. “But are the reports accurate?”

  “That there are glitches in a game of this size?” Dan asked. “Yes. That’s why any MMORPG has an entire team of GMs devoted to addressing glitch reports. In a program this large, with this many databases and intersecting elements, there are going to be glitches. Now, quite frankly, we offered an unusual boost last month. It worked for us, and given that BrightStar has been exceedingly generous, we thought it only right to make it work for you too.”

  Lyle said nothing to that.

  “However, your players are now misrepresenting themselves in order to get information that you are trying to use to gain leverage,” Dan said. “I don’t like that, and I don’t like being blindsided by it. So here’s my deal: from now on, we are hooked in when your player is playing with the guild. We get a live feed of the information they’re getting, and we can pull the plug at any time. Are we clear?”

  There was more whispering.

  “Yes,” Lyle said finally. Dan could hear protests in the background, but Lyle didn’t address them.

  “I expect the link to be sent within the hour,” Dan said. He ended the call and looked at Dhruv. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m not exactly pleased that they’re going behind our back, but if they’ve already got someone well placed, I’d rather use that than not.”

  Dhruv nodded, and Dan smiled for the first time in what felt like days. He’d been scared for weeks now that Harry had found a way to take the game down.

  But they’d dealt with Harry before, and they were going to deal with him again.

  Chapter Twelve

  “Gracie!” There was a chorus of hellos as Gracie logged in. “Come help us with a dungeon run. We’re doing the lava one again.”

  “The real one,” Alan quipped.

  Gracie frowned. She’d told the team members not to mention to anyone what was going on, but she’d had the sense that it was a losing battle and the truth was just going to leak eventually. Alan, in particular, kept slipping.

  Which meant she really needed to come up with a plan for when it did.

  Eh, she had a little bit of time, didn’t she?

  “Sorry, guys,” she said lightly, “but Jay and I are heading off to explore a bit. Actually…Alan, why don’t you come with us? Last time, we had no healer, and it was bad news bears.” It would also keep him from running his mouth.

  “Then we won’t have a healer,” Chowder interjected.

  Gracie checked the roster. “You’ve got Caspian. Hey, Cas.”

  “Hey.
” Caspian sounded hesitant. Gracie had always gotten the sense that he was a little intimidated by her, which she thought was odd. After all, he was one of the new people who had joined based on her reputation. If anything, she’d expect him to be trying to ingratiate himself with her.

  “You up for main-healing a dungeon run?” Gracie asked him.

  “I can, uh… I can try.”

  “You can do it,” Alan said encouragingly. “You should see this guy, Gracie. He’s a natural. Real good on rotations.”

  “Well, there you go.” Gracie smiled. “Good luck, all, and be nice to the newbie healer. No stupid pulls. Looking at you, Chowder.”

  “They’re not stupid,” Chowder argued, “they’re ambitious. I believe in all of you, you see.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, believe in cooldowns and mana limits next time.” Gracie grinned as she saw Alan appear in the middle of the tavern. “All right, the three of us are going to be on a private channel, so just ping someone if you need anything.” As Alan walked over, she invited him and Jay to a party. “How’s it going?”

  “Good.” Alan waved. “How are you? Kevin mentioned he talked with you the other day. He was really vague, but it sounded like maybe the whole running-a-guild thing is stressful. You know that’s normal, right? Gamers can cause a shit-ton of drama.”

  Gracie fought down her embarrassment. Kevin hadn’t spilled her actual fears, and Alan was offering his support.

  “Luckily, I have a good group,” she said. “Even some of the newbies are coming along well. But this is all happening pretty fast, yeah. I didn’t think I was going to be a celebrity in-game. I just thought I was going to log in, punch some bears, and get shit from my family about my hobbies.”

  Alan snorted with laughter, one hand coming up to cover his character’s mouth. “Yeah, I get that. Hi, Jay.”

  “Hey.” Jay’s voice behind Gracie made her turn her head quickly, and she was glad that no one could see her blush in-game.