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

  She smiled. When Alex looked at Sydney, his whole face softened. Gracie had known on some level that he was missing something, but she hadn’t realized just how much happier he could be.

  So she was smiling when she came out into the hall and saw Jay waiting for her. She took his hand as they walked and saw his curious expression.

  “Dhruv says they have something for me,” she said, with a shrug. “I don’t know what that means.” She tapped the rolled-up map against her leg with the other hand. “Shot glass of arsenic, maybe?”

  Jay snorted. “If they had one of those, it would be for Harry.”

  “That’s true. Good point.” She squeezed his hand. “Jay?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m scared.” The words came out before she could stop them. She squeezed her eyes shut, and when his arms came around her, tears leaked out. “I’m so scared.”

  “So don’t do it,” Jay said urgently. He cupped her face in both hands, his eyes searching hers. “Gracie, don’t. They said they could make it so no one was out of the game. Dan wanted to. You don’t have to put yourself in danger for this.”

  Gracie tried to laugh, but it sounded like a sob. “You know that isn’t an answer. It still leaves us with the problem—”

  “You don’t have to solve the problem!” Jay’s voice rose. He was furious, but not with her. “It was never yours to solve. You weren’t supposed to be caught up in this. Harry’s an asshole who couldn’t—”

  She put her hand on his chest, and he broke off. She gathered her courage to speak, trying her hardest not to start crying.

  She hated crying. She decided to be angry at Harry for making her cry.

  That helped her get her bearings.

  “You don’t always get to choose what you get caught up in,” Gracie stated. “That’s life, Jay. All you get to choose is what you do with that.”

  “I know,” Jay said, “but Gracie—”

  Gracie shook her head and put her fingers over his mouth. “You fought so hard to get me through that quest,” she said. “When I wanted to give it up, you told me you thought I deserved it. I doubted myself, but you never doubted me. You went to Sam and asked for his help so we could get through the run before the servers went down. Why?”

  Jay didn’t immediately answer when she took her fingers away. His eyes searched hers. “Because I thought you would be a good queen,” he said finally. He shook his head helplessly. “I thought Harry was…” He sighed and looked away. “Fundamentally misguided,” he finished finally. He looked back at her. “I believe the way he sees the world is wrong, but he set up a test that you passed for the right reasons. You cared about the world. You wanted to do the right thing.”

  Gracie nodded, smiling sadly.

  Jay realized what she meant a moment later. “No. No, Gracie, please! If you use that to justify putting yourself in danger, I’ll never forgive myself.”

  “You didn’t make it true by saying it,” Gracie pointed out. “A good leader doesn’t throw other people into danger instead of themselves. A good tank certainly doesn’t. Jay, I want to be a good leader. I’m taking the risk because this best-case scenario is the better one. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”

  Jay’s fingers clenched. “If we lose you—”

  “If you lose me, Metamorphosis will still be what it was—and you will not for a second let Harry win forever.” Gracie reached up to lay her hand on his cheek. “I know that. He may be a crazy bastard, but he was right about one thing: people will come together to defeat a tyrant.”

  Jay sighed. “Do me a favor?”

  “Sure,” Gracie said cautiously.

  Jay kissed her, his eyes closing for a long moment, and when he pulled away, he laid his forehead against hers and met her eyes. “Win,” he said.

  Gracie laughed. She couldn’t help it. She laughed and wrapped her arms around him and held on tight while he hugged her back.

  “Just a little favor, huh?” she asked.

  “Uh-huh.” Jay wrapped his arm around her, and they kept walking. He sounded smug.

  Gracie’s phone buzzed, and she pulled it out of her sweatshirt before groaning and showing the screen to Jay.

  Stop canoodling, Alex had texted. Alan is teaching people sea shanties and I’m going out of my mind.

  It was only a few minutes later that they pulled into the parking lot of Dragon Soul Productions and piled out. Most of the lights were off, and Dan was waiting for them in the lobby so that the sleepy night shift of security guards wouldn’t be overwhelmed.

  When they got up to the main level, Dan pointed down the hallway. “Dhruv is waiting for you that way,” he told Gracie. “I’ll get everyone else hooked up and your account prepped.”

  “Thanks,” Gracie said. She squeezed Jay’s hand and headed off curiously to stick her head in the door of the only office with lights on. “Hello?”

  “Hi.” Dhruv beckoned her over. “Your character is where?”

  “The temple ruins outside Kithara,” Gracie said.

  “All right, I’ll head there.” Dhruv was remotely piloting a character.

  “You can play that way?” Gracie asked, surprised.

  “Eh, it’s a bit buggy as an interface, but yeah. Made it a lot easier to test certain things.” Dhruv set his character to auto-run and brought up his inventory. “Harry’s challenge brings the two leaders to the same stats once the battle starts—same crit chance, same damage modifier, same hit points.”

  Gracie sighed and nodded.

  “It doesn’t work, though,” Dhruv said smugly, “on any future changes.”

  “Eh?” Gracie frowned down at him. She was beginning to wish she’d had some coffee when Lakhesis did.

  Dhruv, seeing her gaze light on his coffee cup, handed it up to her without comment. “If you switch your armor and weapon after the battle starts, you’ll gain an advantage,” he explained.

  “That’s cheating,” Gracie said, shocked. “The whole point of this was that—”

  “Fuck that,” Dhruv said. “You can bet your ass that Harry’s planned some dirty trick or other. Hell, this whole thing was a dirty trick. He never intended this to be fair. He only wanted it to be fair if he won, and if he didn’t win, he’d keep stacking the deck until he did. He wanted to be a dictator. I don’t want that, and neither do you.”

  Gracie swallowed.

  “This armor will bring you back to the stats you should have had with the armor and weapon you have now,” Dhruv said. “If I thought I could give you infinite hit points and a hundred percent crit and you’d take it, I would have done that. But you wouldn’t, would you?”

  “No,” Gracie said at once.

  “You know,” Dhruv told her, “there’s a very large overlap between honorable and stupid.”

  Gracie gave him a look. “Will that be all?”

  “Yes. I’ll meet you there when you get online and trade you the armor. You should have ten minutes or so to prepare before you get ported to the challenge area.” Dhruv looked at her. “You ready?”

  “As ready as I’m gonna be,” Gracie said.

  He raised an eyebrow. “Are you or aren’t you?”

  Gracie looked at the screen. She didn’t have to use the armor, she told herself. She could choose.

  And she had beaten Harry before. She would do it again.

  “I’m ready,” she told him.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Gracie had barely joined the party and completed the trade with Dhruv’s character before the challenge yanked them all through the ether to Saladin’s Keep.

  It was night there too, with moonlight catching on drifting dust in the library and illuminating the wreckage. Saladin had entertained even the most heretical scholars, keeping books on necromancy, demon summonings, atheism, new medical techniques, and more.

  In the end, a mob had come for him with a challenger at its head. Surrounded by their most elite guards, they had fought.

  Saladin had lost.
/>   This was indeed the place where unworthy kings fell.

  Gracie was not unworthy. She told herself that, although her chest was tight and her heart was pounding. On neutral ground lit up gold, she approached Harry for one last conversation. It was hard to take him seriously as a Piskie, but she knew better than to underestimate him.

  Dhruv was right. Harry would cheat if he could.

  “You took something that wasn’t yours,” Harry said. “You don’t deserve it. I will take it back tonight.”

  Gracie looked at him for a long time. She remembered his face when he had come to her apartment—desperate, anguished. “You dreamed a better king than you could have been,” she said quietly. “And for that, I thank you.”

  She turned on her heel and left without another word, returning to her team in the library. Harry did not call her back, but she felt his anger and pain following her.

  You made yourself into someone who needed to be destroyed, Gracie thought. You wrote the Yesuan quest, and somehow thought it would end differently for you.

  In the library, with the counter at two minutes, she looked at all of them and sighed. “Boy, did you all get more than you bargained for in this game!”

  Everyone burst out laughing.

  “Some of you have been here right from the start and some haven’t,” Gracie said, “but every one of you has been there to watch the weird-ass clusterfuck of this quest. I kind of hoped we were done with that bullshit now. Apparently not.” She did jazz hands.

  “Nothing worthwhile is ever that easy,” Kevin chimed in.

  Gracie smiled at him. “I just wanted to say, I appreciate more than I can say that each one of you is here, and that it is you guys who are here. I couldn’t have asked for a better group—Dathok to talk lore with, Lakhesis to tank with, Mirra to train new healers, Fys to take notes and make data-driven suggestions, Ushanas to tell me to get my head out of my ass…”

  Ushanas chuckled.

  “Every one of you has been there for me and for each other,” Gracie said. “I just—thank you.” If she said anything more, her voice was going to start shaking and they were going to know something was wrong. “Fuck ‘em up,” she finished with a laugh.

  “Red Squadron!” Chowder said.

  “Red Squadron!” Everyone chorused back.

  Gracie turned to Jay. There was so, so much more he’d done than she could ever fit in a speech, and she hoped he knew that. He nodded slightly and reached out for a fist-bump.

  Gracie took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Thirty seconds now. Her heart rate was increasing.

  You can do this, she told herself. Don’t fuck up. As the counter entered single digits, all of her attention focused on the main door, and on what she knew of her opponent.

  What she didn’t notice was Caspian waiting by one of the side doors, only to slip out as soon as the counter hit zero and the screen announced CHALLENGE STARTED.

  The counter flashed and disappeared as the doors opened. Harry watched as the team charged out into the oasis, leaving a carefully-selected team of rogues and mages to watch him.

  He waited for the explosion of communication, the calls between the teammates as they herded opponents into place and warned one another of sneak attacks. He had warned them that deaths in this battleground were permanent.

  He had failed to mention just how permanent, of course.

  The calls, however, didn’t begin. Harry sank into the shadows and waited, a frown on his face.

  “Grok,” Thad said, his voice very low. “Report.”

  “No one,” Grok replied.

  “Scan the roofs,” Thad ordered. “Don’t give into the temptation to seek them out. Be patient; make them come to us.”

  Harry nodded. Thad might be limited by his pride, but he had a good tactical mind. He wouldn’t throw players away to no purpose in this confrontation.

  He didn’t stop scanning the darkness, though. Something was coming.

  There was no way Callista had come here without a plan.

  Thad crouched in the shadow of one of the trees and narrowed his eyes. Callista’s team should be here. There was no way they had beat Thad’s team to the oasis since there had been eyes on the other door, and they’d timed the runs from both sides. The great hall was closer to the oasis than the library was, by several crucial yards.

  Which meant they were in the hallways.

  Thad wanted to smile. On the one hand, that was idiotic. Everyone knew the fastest way through the keep was via the oasis.

  On the other hand, if Callista was determined to wait them out, she actually might win at forcing them into the hallways.

  Thad ground his teeth.

  “Preacher.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I want you to scout. Do not engage. I want to know how they’re set up in those corridors so we can pick them off one by one.”

  “They’ll have to come out eventually,” Yesuan objected. “You were right the first time. Make them come to us.”

  “You don’t know Callista well, do you?” Thad asked. “I suppose I’m not surprised, given how badly she got under your skin just now.” No one but the two leaders had been at the first meeting, but they had all noticed Yesuan’s clipped responses when he came back to the great hall. Whatever Callista had said to him, it had been the last thing he wanted to hear.

  Yesuan’s stony silence was enough to give Thad a deep sense of satisfaction.

  “She will absolutely be more patient than us,” Thad said. “She will wait as long as she needs to.”

  “Then so will we,” Yesuan snapped back. “I will not lose because her team was better disciplined than my own.”

  “What if you lose because there’s an entire group of them massing to take the great hall in a rush?” Thad asked bluntly.

  Nothing.

  “Preacher, go check.”

  “Will do.” Preacher, at least, did not seem inclined to take Yesuan’s orders over Thad’s. That was something.

  Thad felt a swell of pride as he saw the rogue’s stealthed shimmer go past the main door, creeping toward one of the corridors. Callista’s team was not better disciplined than his, nor did they have the training. They didn’t know shorthand or have a cohesive idea of which side of the battlefield was left or right since they hadn’t trained on dozens of maneuvers and formations.

  There was no way she would win this.

  He waited. In some battlegrounds, stealth was paramount, which meant that someone’s voice chat could be heard by the other team if they were close enough. Not knowing the specific rules here, Thad had ordered his team not to speak unless they could be sure they were alone.

  When he heard the rustle behind him, he thought Preacher had come back, and he turned with a questioning tilt to his head.

  But it wasn’t Preacher. It was Jamie.

  Jamie had left as soon as the doors were open. He had told Jay’s team in the east hall that he would be with Lakhesis’ group, and after he got to the end of the western hallway, he waited and slipped around to the other oasis entrance.

  Despite what Gracie had considered to be extensive preparations, no one was watching out for each other, ready to send her a private message that someone else was out of position. They would simply assume that Jamie had a good reason for being somewhere else.

  Which, in his own way, he did.

  He’d thought a lot on the flight out about how this battleground was going to be structured, and he’d come to two inescapable conclusions.

  And Thad needed to know about them.

  When Thad turned around, Jamie saw the surprise in the set of his shoulders and the way he took a step back. Thad reached for his weapon as Jamie held his hands up. Now that he thought of it, all of this hinged on whether he could open a private channel to one of the enemy team, but he had bet he’d be able to.

  After all, Harry had wanted this to be as much like real combat as possible.

  “I’m not here to attack you,” Jamie said. />
  “You’re a healer,” Thad shot back, his voice dripping condescension. “What do you think you’d be able to do?”

  “That should,” Jamie said patiently, “prove my sincerity. Right?”

  After a pause, Thad shrugged. “Then why are you here?”

  “To explain the rules of the battleground,” Jamie said. “If you die in this battleground, you die.” He waited. “You’re out of the game.”

  There was a pause while Thad stared at him.

  “You’re wrong,” he said finally.

  “I’m not.” Jamie shook his head. He looked over his shoulder to where the rustle of bushes said that someone was sneaking up on him. “I came here to tell you this, because…I left, but you don’t deserve to be out of the game for someone else’s fight. There’s no way that’s all right.”

  Thad gave a tight laugh. “You want me to believe that you have my best interests at heart? You?”

  “No.” Jamie shook his head. “I want you to believe that I care enough about all of you that I’m willing to take a risk to keep you from getting banned. That’s what I want you to believe. Is that so impossible for you?”

  Thad hesitated, and Jamie knew what he was thinking. Thad liked to think in terms of black and white—Jamie wasn’t on his team anymore, so he was enemy, someone to hate. But deep down, Thad knew things were more complicated than that.

  “You’re telling me Callista told you that was the case?” Thad asked finally.

  “Yes.” Jamie didn’t waver. “There aren’t…a lot of us here.” He could feel Thad’s smile. “And I know that seems like a good opening, but is it worth it if one of you gets thrown out? If it’s you, Thad?”

  Thad hesitated now and turned away.

  “You could be lying,” he said.

  “I could be, but I’m not.” Jamie looked at him steadily. “And I told them I’d play lookout, so if you want to retreat, if you want to leave, whatever you want to do, I’ll cover for you. Do it however you want so that you can trust me.”

  Thad stepped closer. “Why shouldn’t I just kill you?” he asked. “You left. I might lose my job because of you. You stabbed me in the back.”