by Rachel Aaron
“I don’t know,” Tina said honestly. “But we’ll figure it out later. Right now, we need to move.”
“Wait, so does this mean we aren’t raiding tonight?” asked a human Naturalist.
Tina put a hand over her face. “No,” she said. “Raid’s canceled so we can focus on getting out of here before we die.”
“Why don’t we just teleport out?”
Tina blinked in surprise. Of course. Why hadn’t she thought of that? “Good call!” she said, face splitting into a grin. “Sorcerers, get on it! One portal to Bastion, and let’s get the hell out of here.”
One of the Sorcerers in the front nodded and started to wave his hands around his staff. Tina watched impatiently, comparing his movements to the portal spell she remembered from the game. It was only supposed to take fifteen seconds to open the magical hole through reality that would let the whole raid step right into the continental capital of Bastion, but when her count hit fifteen, the Sorcerer was still gathering glowing magic into his hands. He kept it up for nearly a minute, gathering more and more magic until Tina could feel it humming in the air. Then all at once, he let the power go, sending a wave of loose magic crashing over the raid as he collapsed on the ground.
“I can’t!” He gasped. “It’s taking all my mana, but it won’t come together.”
Tina kicked a rock. So much for the easy way. Still, there were thirty-seven players here, not counting her and SB. If they were lucky, maybe someone’s inventory still had a summonable riding mount.
“Check your bags,” she ordered. “If we can’t open a portal, we’ll do it the old-fashioned way. I bet a dragon or a Phumbar lizard could ferry a ton of us.”
There was much scuffling as the whole raid dug into their backpacks. This was followed by much cursing as everyone realized, just as Tina had, that what had once been hundred-slot magical Bags of Holding were now just ordinary old bags, and they hadn’t gotten to choose what got tossed when the size shrank.
One person had a bag full of nets. Someone else had nothing but rocks. Another had eight severed heads. Two people had nothing but fingers, and one of the Rangers had an entire collection of ooze blobs in various colors. Then just when Tina was beginning to despair that all they had was junk and useless quest items, someone whooped in triumph and held up a set of leather riding reins.
The whole raid started clapping, and the Berserker who’d found the reins bowed before waving his arms dramatically to cast the Summon Mount spell. He finished it with a flourish, but nothing appeared in front of him. Blinking in confusion, he tried again, but the result was the same, and everyone’s eyes fell in disappointment.
“Crap,” Tina said, rubbing her stone temples. Apparently, this new version of FFO was dead set on dicking them over. But while portals and mounts seemed to be out, they still had their legs, which meant they weren’t screwed yet.
“All right,” she said loudly, getting the raid’s attention. “Looks like we’re hoofing it. Everyone get moving, and do it fast. Grel’Darm the Colossal is on his way.”
“Grel?” asked a raider. “Doesn’t he de-spawn if he leaves his room?”
“Welcome to the new world,” Tina said grimly. “There’s no more de-spawning or resetting or monsters patiently walking in circles while we figure out how to kill them. Everything can move however it wants to now, which means if we don’t move, we’re going to have even more bosses on our tail, so let’s go.”
Trusting survival instincts to take care of the rest, Tina turned and started marching up the road double time. When she looked over her shoulder, though, only the actual Roughnecks were picking up their bags to follow. The rest of the raid was still hanging back, their faces surly, and Tina clenched her fists.
“Do you not hear the undead army getting ready to march through that gate?” she bellowed, pointing at the mountain, where the pounding of boots and rattle of bones were echoing like a distant avalanche. “You got problems, we’ll handle them later. Now move!”
By the time she reached the last word, her stonekin’s deep voice was loud enough to rattle the paving stones. It was the most impressive sound she’d ever made, and it worked. No one looked happy, but all the raiders picked up their things and started trudging down the road. Tina waited until every single one had walked past before falling in behind to bring up the rear, constantly looking over her shoulder at the terrifying army she could hear but not yet see.
The last players to pass her were SilentBlayde, leading NekoBaby behind him. She opened her mouth to ask about the dead Sorcerer, but SB just shook his head.
There was no need to say more. She’d known there wasn’t much of a chance, that they had to be well past the six-minute window where Raise Ally worked, but she hadn’t completely given up hope. The moment she met SB’s eyes, though, she knew it was over. The unnamed Sorcerer was dead. Really dead. Never-coming-back dead, and she was the reason why.
A horrible tightness formed in Tina’s throat. She tried to tell herself the unknown player might still be alive in the real world. Maybe he was waking up right now and letting people know about whatever the hell that wham spin wham was. Maybe he was getting help.
Those were the happy thoughts she tried to think, but the chokehold on her neck didn’t go away, leaving her shaking and empty as she turned to bring up the rear, following SB and the huddled form of NekoBaby up the dusty, broken road.
****
For the next hour, Tina committed herself to playing the devil for everyone’s sake.
She kept them walking at a pace any normal person would have called a run. When a Naturalist stopped to sort through his backpack, she took one glance at the worthless contents and threw the entire bag into a grove of dead trees. A few minutes later, two jubatus tried to detour over to an old quest tower. She dragged both back by the literal scruffs of their necks, throwing them back into line with a deadly glare.
When a Sorcerer started juggling fire in the middle of the raid, she learned that she could use her casting interrupt—the aptly named “Gut Punch”—to shut down friendlies as well as enemies. Tina followed this up by ordering everyone not to kill themselves or others with friendly fire since abilities now seemed to obey the laws of physics rather than the targeting system.
By the time they’d cleared what she estimated was about five miles, the entire raid was giving her nasty looks, but Tina didn’t ease up. It was clear from the goofing off that they weren’t properly afraid of the army behind them. Tina supposed that made sense seeing how they’d all been unconscious during her and SB’s terrifying fight with the skeletons, but she also didn’t give a shit. If they weren’t afraid of the Dead Mountain’s monsters, she would be what they feared instead. She was determined that there’d be no new tragedies on her watch.
It didn’t help that her own fears were riding higher than ever. Tina glanced over her shoulder every five minutes, peering down the dusty gray road for signs of the enemy. Thanks to the hills, slight curves, and dips in the landscape, she never actually saw the army chasing them, but she knew they were coming. Whenever she stopped walking, she could feel Grel’Darm’s giant footsteps rumbling through the ground, blending into her frantic heartbeats as she pushed the raid to move ever faster.
It never seemed to be enough, though. The Deadlands was a long, narrow zone walled in by jagged, knife-sharp mountains that—just like the Dead Mountain itself—were a lot bigger now than they’d been in game. The road was longer, too. In FFO, a fifteen-minute jog would take you all the way from the Once King’s fortress at one end of the zone to the Order of the Golden Sun’s fortress at the other. But they’d been moving as fast as they could for an hour now, and the Dead Mountain still loomed behind them, poking up from the gray landscape like a ragged black spike. Tina was watching it nervously over her shoulder when, without warning, several of the players in front of her stopped.
“What?” she demanded. “Is something wrong?”
“Yeah, something’s wrong,” said a b
lack-haired human. “You.”
Tina narrowed her eyes. “Excuse me?”
The man crossed his arms over his chest. His very large chest. He’d clearly maxed out the character customization settings for both height and muscle, though since he was human, this meant he still had to look up at Tina’s stonekin. The two-handed ax on his back marked him as a Berserker, a melee-fighting class like Tina’s Knight, albeit one meant for dealing damage rather than taking it. He certainly looked ready to hit something as he glared up at her with an ugly sneer on his generically handsome, made-in-the-art-department face.
“I’m sick of your shit,” he spat. “You’ve had us on a death march for an hour now, ordering us around like you’re a goddamn general, but I don’t see any undead army.” He pointed at the empty road behind them. “For all we know, this whole mess is just a hack someone wrote for the lulz.”
“A hack?” Tina repeated, incredulous. “Seriously, that’s what you think this is?” She pointed up at the now-massive mountains surrounding them, their sharp peaks dusted with ash-colored snow. “Does that look like a hack to you?”
“Makes more sense than your bullshit,” the Berserker said with a shrug. “You’ve got us running around like this crap is real, but I think you’re the one who’s full of it. I bet this whole running-for-our-lives thing is just you getting your rocks off ordering around a bunch of people who aren’t in your guild.”
Tina stared at him, unbelieving. “You think I’ve just been making this up to screw with you? What the fuck, man? Did you not hear the horns?”
The Berserker shrugged his huge shoulders. “I’ve never done the Dead Mountain before. For all I know, that’s how the encounter starts.”
Tina gaped at him. “This is not the normal Dead Mountain!”
“Whatever,” he said, sneering. “I joined your stupid raid to kill some bosses and get some loot. We waited two hours for this shit before you made us run away! But I ain’t afraid of some skeletons, and I’m not taking another step down this damn road.”
She clenched her teeth. “We are not stopping.”
The Berserker lifted his chin defiantly. “Try to move me.”
Tina didn’t bother replying. The man had an open-front helmet, so there was nothing in her way as she decked him in the face with her massive fist.
It was a solid hit, but unlike the frail, cloth-wearing Anders, the Berserker was a mountain of muscle. Her punch only made him stagger, but she still got what she wanted when his eyes grew wide at the pain. Hands shaking, he reached up to dab at the trickle of blood coming down from his lip, and Tina smirked. Maybe that would finally convince him that this shit was serious. But when she opened her mouth to order him back into line, the Berserker’s face twisted in rage.
“So that’s how it’s gonna be?” he roared, flinging the blood from his fingers. “I don’t take that crap from anyone! Step and you get pwned!”
He reached for his weapon only to fumble as he discovered that ridiculous, seven-foot-long axes didn’t just “come loose” from a back harness in real life. As he struggled to get his weapon out, Tina grabbed him by the shoulders and drove her rocky knee into the chain armor covering his stomach.
He doubled over in pain, and the whole road fell silent, all the players staring in horror at the sudden violence. Tina let them look. She had a point to make.
In front of her, her victim straightened up just enough to puke. The putrid stench of his vomit filled the road, causing people to cover their mouths. That was the reaction Tina wanted, but she forced herself to keep waiting, letting the horror sink all the way in before she hammered it home.
“Does this feel like a game to you anymore?” she asked at last, her voice stony. “Does it smell like a game?”
A few players shook their heads, and Tina nodded. “That’s right. It doesn’t, because it’s not. Whatever this is, it’s real, and it’s painful. Now, we’ve got an army behind us coming for our blood. I don’t think the respawn system works, like it did in the game, and I don’t want to be the one who finds out. If you don’t either, then you’d better start marching again. Because I am getting us out of this, and anyone who’s too slow is gonna have to deal with me.”
Her words echoed across the silent pass. In front of her, the entire raid was frozen, their angry, fearful eyes locked on her. Tina fought the urge to cringe under their glares, to say she was sorry, that she didn’t like acting this way, either, but her mouth stayed shut.
She couldn’t show this mob of players weakness or hesitation. From the moment she’d decided to save these people, they’d become her responsibility. This was her raid, and if she didn’t want to lose another person, she had to keep them moving. Eventually, the others would realize this and thank her for saving their asses. Until then, Tina would do whatever it took to keep the group from falling apart.
She was still glaring the crowd into submission when SilentBlayde stepped forward.
“Come on, everyone,” he said cheerfully, clapping his hands. “Rule one of the Roughnecks: you can’t stop the Roxxy! Now let’s get rolling before she rocks someone else’s socks off.”
To Tina’s relief, people groaned at the terrible puns, and the horrible tension broke. They were still glaring at her, but with SB’s expert cajoling, the raid started moving again. Even the Berserker picked himself back up, spitting blood on the ground at Tina’s feet before shuffling down the road.
****
The next mile was relatively quiet. They still weren’t moving fast enough for Tina’s liking, but at least people had stopped trying to do things other than hike down the road. As the escapades subsided, they started to make better time. She was starting to hope they might actually reach the Order’s fortress before nightfall when she heard yells followed by an explosion from the front of the line.
“Son of a bitch!”
Tina broke into a run only to skid to a halt a few seconds later. At the front of the group, a pack of skeleton cavaliers—one of the random patrols that roamed through the Deadlands—were down on the ground being chopped to pieces by the raid’s hulking Berserkers. Axes, dirt, and bones were flying everywhere, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was the people who were on fire.
“What happened?” she cried, staring at the two Knights and SB, who were rolling around in the gray dirt, trying to put themselves out. Her first fear was that they’d been consumed by ghostfire, but the bright orange-and-red flames rising from their clothes were the wrong color to be the undead’s doing. Then she noticed the elven arrows sticking out of the Knights’ backs, and Tina’s hands curled into fists.
“Healers to the front!” she bellowed. “Get those fires out!”
A pair of white-robed Clerics stepped forward timidly. A few moments later, a shower of golden magical light fell on the road, putting out the fires and healing the players’ burns before Tina’s eyes. She was still appreciating the miracle when one of the Knights surged forward. Tina had her shield up before she realized he wasn’t going for her. He was going for the short elven Ranger who was hiding in her shadow.
“You team-killing asshole!” he yelled, grabbing at the girl. “I’m gonna stab this arrow into your back and see how you like it!”
“That’s enough,” Tina said, smacking his arm away. “It was an accident.”
“She shot me in the back!” the Knight cried, lifting his steel visor.
Tina turned to glare at the terrified elf. “What were you told about friendly fire?”
The Ranger gulped. “That it isn’t friendly?”
“Exactly,” Tina said. “We can hurt each other now, so we all have to be careful.” She said that last part extra loud, glaring at the Sorcerer who was trying to hide his smoking hands behind his back. “No big spells if friendlies are in the area, and no shooting at things when someone else is in front of you. Got it?”
The Ranger nodded rapidly, vanishing into the raid with the amazing speed possessed only by the Agility-based classes. The guil
ty Sorcerer nodded as well, shooting the angry Knight an apologetic look. The Knight took a menacing step toward him before Tina grabbed his shoulder.
“Lesson’s learned,” she said firmly, glaring down at him from Roxxy’s massive height. “Got it?”
The man opened his mouth but then thought better of it. When Tina was sure he wasn’t going to try anything stupid, she let him go. He was walking back to the other Knights in a huff when SilentBlayde appeared beside her.
“I’m sorry, Roxxy,” he said, dusting the ash off his armor. “That patrol was one-skull rated back in the game. I figured we could just nuke them and move on. It worked great, until it didn’t.”
“It’s cool, dude,” Tina said. “I’m just pissed that Ranger”—she glared pointedly at the scorch marks on SilentBlayde’s irreplaceable top-tier red-and-black armor—“and certain fire Sorcerers completely forgot what I said not half an hour ago.”
The Ranger and “certain fire Sorcerers” looked properly ashamed, and Tina shook her head. She was opening her mouth to get them marching again when she realized someone was missing.
“Wait,” she said, looking around. “Where’s DarkKnight? I told him to be the tank up here.”
“Good question,” SB said. “He wasn’t in the fight just now, so I guess it’s tanks for nothing!”
Tina rolled her eyes. She was about to organize a search party when she spotted a plate-armored shoulder sticking out from behind a dead tree just off the road. “Hang on,” she muttered angrily. “I’ll be right back.”
Her footfalls stirred up puffs of ash as she stomped toward the player in hiding. “Dammit, Jake,” she said as she rounded the tree. “You’d better have a damn good reason for deserting the front line like—”
She stopped cold. The Knight she’d assigned to be their forward tank was sitting with his back to the dead tree, visor up, tears running down his stocky face.
“Oh shit, dude,” Tina said awkwardly, her anger vanishing. She looked over her shoulder at SB, who was watching curiously from the road. “Get the raid moving! I’ll deal with this.”