by Natalie Grey
The monster didn’t intend to let that happen. He went on the offensive, fiery whip lashing toward Gracie as she tried desperately to avoid it.
“Gracie!” He barely heard himself yell her name. He was running for the bubble, trying to get to her, but there was no way to get through. Inside the bubble, he heard her yell something, and the lash slammed against the edge of the enclosure, right over Jay’s face. He jerked back.
And then he heard yelling. The lake monster had closed itself into a tight circle and was preparing to attack.
“Team 2!” Lakhesis yelled. “Go! I’ll go for the head. It can fight back, so that’s where a tank is needed. Jay, come on!”
Jay gave one last look at Gracie and ran to help the rest of the team. There was no time to think about what was going on with her. All they could do was hold up their end and hope it was enough.
It was Jamie’s first dungeon run with Red Squadron, and frankly, he wasn’t impressed with what he was seeing of Callista. He’d watched the video of her month-first run, and she’d been better there. Maybe it had been a fluke.
He’d been so caught up with his smug sense of annoyance that it had taken him longer than it should to notice the looks people were giving one another. This was unusual, and after the second boss fight, Alan had opened a private channel.
“Hey,” Alan had said awkwardly. “Uh…look, just hang in there, okay?”
“What’s going on?” Jamie asked him. Alan clearly wanted to say more, and Jamie wished the other man weren’t so loyal to Callista. Go on, he thought, admit she’s not all you thought she was.
Alan hesitated. “I’ve never seen her like this,” he said finally. “It’s like she’s trying to screw up, but I can’t figure out why she’d do that. Look, I know it’s hellish to try to manage on one of your first dungeon runs, but hang in there. Trust me, no one is going to give you grief if we wipe. You’re doing a great job.”
“Right.” Jamie fought a twist of guilt. Even now, people were trying to be nice to him. Trying to reassure him.
When Alan first said that Callista was trying to screw up, Jamie had thought the man was grasping at straws, but the more he watched, the more it seemed like Alan was correct. The occasional slip-up, Jamie could understand. Everyone missed things. But Callista went unerringly in the wrong direction, keeping things in a tightly-controlled band of not-quite-good-enough that wasn’t erratic so much as remarkably consistent.
When the giant appeared out of the lake, and the lake monster, the group had murmured. They didn’t seem particularly surprised at the start. Jamie looked around in awe. He’d run the Altar of the Gods several times, and he’d thought about how terrifying it would be if something came out of the black water.
Now it had. The lake beast was huge and had glistening scales, and in the darkness high above, Jamie caught glints of something that might be eyes or might be teeth, and he felt the terrifying sense of being prey.
The giant was no less amazing, something both dead and alive, cursed and powerful.
And then everything went tits over taint, as one of Jamie’s guildmates liked to say, and he forgot anything except surviving.
“Team 2, go for the tail!” Lakhesis called.
“Cas!” Anders was charging into battle and didn’t take the time to open a private channel. “When we say run, you get out through the opening between the tail and the body. Run, do you understand?”
“Got it!” Jamie called back. He noticed that the body was swaying, and strange AoE damage he couldn’t understand was beginning to hit members of the group. “Mirra, I’m laying down my group heal!”
“Thanks!” Alan called back. “Stand by Chowder. He’ll buff you.”
Jamie moved into position gratefully, watching his health dip down in chunks, matched only barely by the heal he’d laid down.
Come on, come on, come on, come on… He shot heals at Chowder, Dathok, Ushanas, and himself—and then another, desperately, at Alan, who was trying to keep up with a larger group and was clearly thrown off by the damage coming out of nowhere.
“Thanks!” Alan called again.
“We’re almost through the tail,” Chowder yelled at the group. “Get ready to run!”
The ground was shuddering and rocking, Jamie’s haptics buzzing almost constantly, and he found himself dizzy with it. The whole room was tipping—
“Run!” Anders yelled, and the whole group took off. Chunks of stone and ribbons of fire were falling from the ceiling, and Jamie could hardly see anything. He barely managed to follow the white of Alan’s robes and gave a yell when the tail tightened behind him.
“Holy shit.” His heart was pounding.
“No time to watch,” Alan yelled. “Heal!”
Jamie fumbled opened his inventory and drank down a potion. With his mana shooting up, he could lay down more heals, all of the group clustered together and drinking potions, trading food in whatever sliver of time they had. From the panicked calls, Jamie knew this was nothing like what had happened last time.
He wanted to laugh. He couldn’t help it. This was exhilarating. He normally went into dungeons after watching extensive tutorials and training on formations. Everyone knew exactly what was going to happen and what their role was, and there was hell to pay if they didn’t follow through.
Right now, he had zero idea what was going to happen, and it was the most fun he’d ever had in Metamorphosis. He didn’t know if they were going to make it, but they were trying, and they were watching out for each other. He’d managed to keep Alan from dying back there, and he’d heard a dozen other exchanges where different players had helped one another.
There was a faint murmur of surprise, and he turned. Even Alan had stopped healing, watching what was going on inside the sphere.
Fire was roaring, the light so bright that it cast shadows into relief on the sides of the bubble: Callista, her golden armor shining like a beacon, and the giant with his whip. They were locked in battle, never stopping. Never even pausing, and Jamie wondered if they’d so much as noticed the flames all around them.
The head of the snake could be seen dipping toward the bubble, but even it could not get inside. With a shriek, it relaxed its body to let them back into the circle.
“Come on!” Jamie yelled. He led the charge back inside, running next to Anders, and he gave a whoop of joy as the DPS launched into their attacks once more.
He had no idea what was coming next, and he loved it.
“What the hell is going on?” Thad demanded. He looked at the conference call speaker for a moment before turning his attention back to the fight unfolding on the screen. “I’ve run Altar of the Gods at least a dozen times, and I have never once seen that. What the hell?”
“It’s…” one of the founders of Dragon Soul began before letting his voice trail off.
“A glitch, huh?” Thad asked. “Hell of a glitch, isn’t it? That’s not an NPC she’s fighting, and it’s not a boss. That’s a player, isn’t it?”
There was no answer, and Thad blew out his breath. He watched as Jamie threw out heals desperately, trying to keep the group alive. They were heading for a wipe, that much was unmistakable, but they were trying. Through all of the insanity, they were trying.
Thad crossed his arms, narrowed his eyes, and waited. Inside the bubble, Callista was fighting, and although they could hear everything happening on the party chat, they couldn’t hear her.
The truth came to him a moment later: neither could Dragon Soul. They hadn’t fixed this because they didn’t know what was going on. The person Callista was fighting wasn’t one of them.
So who was it?
“The quest is mine!” Harry yelled over the roar of the flames. The sound was so realistic, the heat wavering in the air, that Gracie could practically feel the flames licking at her cheek.
Gracie heard a crack and a crash from behind her and rushed him. She’d begun to see the patterns in how he moved, the speed with which he brought the whip down. Wh
en he thought he had her in his sights, he would lash to one side, driving her away, and lash again, and then lash much more quickly directly at her.
This time she was ready. With her health bar at half, she zigged left in response to his first lash, then zagged hard right, edging under the second strike and skidding towards him.
A whip wasn’t good in close quarters, and that gave her a precious few seconds. Grace spun and flung her arm out, slamming the edge of her shield into the giant’s legs. In terms of the game mechanics, a hit was a hit, but she was picturing how much it would hurt to take a shield to the kneecaps.
Hopefully, Harry was too.
“Give it up!” Harry yelled. “This isn’t yours; it came to you by mistake! It was supposed to be me!”
“Well, try not being an asshole next time!” Gracie screamed back. She circled away and gave a hiss of annoyance as she stepped into the fire. She couldn’t afford to be taking damage like that, not when she was cut off from her healers. They, she noticed, were currently dealing with what looked like total chaos outside. “And leave my team the fuck alone!”
“You shouldn’t have brought them here,” Harry said furiously. “This was between us. You knew what you had to do, and now you’re going back on it so you can keep something that isn’t yours.” The whip lashed out.
Gracie barely got the shield up in time, crouching to activate one of her protection buffs. Her arms and legs were screaming at her, but she couldn’t stop, not for a moment. She didn’t bother answering him.
She’d felt bad for all of them for a while—him, Dragon Soul, and the other guilds. They hadn’t asked for this, after all.
On the other hand, they’d repeatedly made the choice to go about all of this in literally the most fucked up way she could think of. They were messing with an entire group of people because they weren’t creative enough to think of a better way, and didn’t have enough balls to own up to the fact that it was a problem.
And like hell was she going to let them all get away with it. She knew just what would happen if she let Harry take the quest over: the founders would tear Dragon Soul apart and destroy the world she loved so much.
Fuck that.
Gracie fired off one of the combos she’d been keeping in reserve, activating her buffs as she kicked, shield-slammed, and slashed with all her might. She was close. She was so damned close to pulling this off.
“Why won’t you die?” Harry yelled at her.
She didn’t waste her breath replying. She was in her own world, feeling the breath burning in her throat and her muscles working beyond the limits of what she’d thought they could do. She wasn’t going to just back down because they wanted her to. She wasn’t going to give this up anymore.
Because now she had something to fight for.
She whirled and leapt over a patch of fire, crouched, and scanned the area quickly. An idea was forming in her head.
She was in range of Harry, laying down the groundwork before she danced sideways just in time to evade a crack of his whip. She gave a parting shot and whooped when it came up as a lucky crit. Take that, motherfucker.
He was angry now, and angry people made mistakes. Gracie felt her smile spreading cold across her face as she lured him onward, pivoting him just slightly each time she engaged. She’d nearly fallen head-first into a vat of flames—a giant crack in the floor—and now it was just behind her.
She just had to time this right. She turned and sprinted, pushing her character as hard as she could go and leaping at the last second. She was so engaged that she actually did jump, and stumbled into the red wall of the VR area.
But she’d done it. A yell of fury behind her made her turn, and she saw Harry’s health bar dipping, dipping…
He climbed out, the kelp of his beard still incongruously dripping, and she knew he was past seeing how low his health was.
She wasn’t, though. He charged her and Gracie stood her ground. She could take a hit, even a critical hit if she needed to, and he couldn’t. She waited until the last second and then she dropped, slamming her fist into the ground for a blast wave and hearing his scream of frustration as his character died.
There was a moment of silence. The bubble disappeared and the flames died, and Gracie was standing in the middle of a scorched plain, staring at the others.
They couldn’t hug, not really, but Jay was at her side in a moment, his arms wrapped through her body. They both laughed as their attempt to hug left them holding empty air.
“What the hell was that?” Jay demanded, breaking the moment. On purpose, Gracie suspected.
She stepped back and gave a laugh. “I was going to give up the quest. Let them fight it out.”
“But?” Jay crossed his arms.
“But I don’t trust any of them to be a god,” Gracie said simply. “They’d tear Metamorphosis apart. Oh, and one other thing…the person you’ve been talking to? It’s not Harry.”
“Son of a…” Jay’s character had his usual, serene expression, but she could just picture his frown in real life. “Oh, God, and now they have records that I went into the database—”
“We’ll deal with that,” Gracie said. “in the meantime, let’s get out of here. I don’t trust Harry not to come back.” She exchanged nods with Jay and waved at the rest of the group with her sword. “Let’s GTFO, guys. And Cas, good job with everything we threw at you today. Hope it wasn’t too much of a clusterfuck.”
“No.” Caspian’s voice was amused, but he also sounded almost pensive. “I, uh…I actually had a pretty good time. It was fun.”
There was a round of guffaws.
“Our kind of guy,” Chowder said, clapping Caspian on the back. “Let’s buy this dude a beer, huh?”
Gracie smiled as she teleported back, the world dissolving around her. She felt an ease she hadn’t felt in a long time. She still might not have any idea where this quest was going, but she was damned if she was going to let any of the Dragon Soul founders destroy what they’d built just to act out old grudges.
Chapter Seventeen
Red Squadron swept into one of Kithara’s smaller taverns on a high. The few other playing characters who were there pivoted to look as the group ran in, jumping on tables and doing victory dances. Kevin managed to get his character’s amarok up on one of the tables as well, and it wasn’t long before people started dancing in a circle around it.
Gracie laughed and headed to the bar. It was funny to see the bartender waiting patiently, completely unaware of the chaos going on around him. In a real bar, she reflected, they would have been kicked out by now.
“Holy crap,” a player said. They had been selling excess inventory to one of the vendors in the corner, and now they came over. “You’re Callista.”
“You think the nameplate gave it away?” Jay asked privately.
Gracie stifled a laugh. “Hi,” she said awkwardly. “Sorry for the chaos. We just did a dungeon run, and everyone’s kind of keyed up.”
“No, that’s cool. I just wanted to say hi!” The character waited awkwardly. “Uh, anyway. I’ll go. Wait! Can I get a screenshot with you?”
“Er…okay.” Gracie stood next to her, trying to decide whether or not to pose, but a second later, the player said, “Thanks!” and ran out of the tavern.
“Awww,” Jay said. “Baby’s first celebrity encounter. I think you can assume that’s going to happen a lot.”
Gracie sighed. She ordered two trays of beers and picked a mug up. “I wish these were real.”
“You have any beer at home?” Jay asked her.
“Yeah, I think so.”
“So, have a fake round here, let them all toast you, and then log off, and we’ll have a beer over Skype.”
“Sounds good.” Gracie emoted a smile at him. “All right, Fys, get that wolf off the table. What, were you born in a barn? Everyone, beers are here.”
Everyone gave a cheer and picked up one of the drinks. When Gracie lifted hers, they all followed suit.
There was a round of cheers. Caspian raised his beer, apparently shy enough that he didn’t have any words.
“Another big shout-out to Alan, who trained Cas.”
People cheered again and clinked mugs.
“Shout-out to Dathok for trying some DPS, and for all the rest of you for making a plan and adapting on the fly when everything went sideways. Lakhesis and Jay, I understand I have you to thank for getting everyone into the right places?”
Lakhesis and Jay raised their mugs.
“I am so glad I met all of you,” Gracie said sincerely. “I can’t think of a better group to discover this crazy game with.”
This time there was a louder round of cheers, so deafening that Gracie hunched her shoulders, laughing while her headset vibrated with the sound.
“I love you all,” she said after she had finished her pixelated beer, “but my legs want to kill me right now, so I’m going to go collapse on the couch. Have a good night, everyone.”
“Bye, Gracie!” people called.
“Bye, Callista,” she heard Caspian murmur. She emoted a smile at him before she logged out. After the fire and whip-lashing insanity of the Altar of Gods, it was jarring for Gracie to take off her VR helmet and find an empty, dark apartment. Of course, she thought. Alex was off with Sydney. She wished he’d been there to see that dungeon run, but she’d tell him about it later.
She had just grabbed a beer and a bag of chips when her computer started ringing. She hobbled over, whimpering in protest as her leg muscles screamed.
“I’m trying to get there. I’m trying. Oh God, it hurts. Ow. I’m coming, I swear, I promise.” She leaned over to hit the button and fell sideways onto the couch, holding the beer up to keep it from spilling.