“Doubtful,” Roark replied, pulling a bulky plate away and inspecting his handiwork. “Bad_Karma doesn’t seem like the kind of man to share credit with anyone. It would wound his pride to ask for help of any sort. Though I have been wrong about him before, so I have a backup plan.” He tapped the plate. “That’s where this comes in,” Roark said, moving the unfinished plate to the workbench and laying it beside her hip. She didn’t scoot over to give him more room.
“Only heroes over level 49 will be transported into the room,” she read.
“And since he’s the only hero in Hearthworld at level 50,” Roark replied with a grin, “he’s the only one that will be able to access the room.”
“No matter who he brings as backup, they’ll pass over without being affected.” Randy’s eyes shone with admiration as he inspected the plate. “It’s genius.”
“Sure, it’s bloody brilliant considering how well your first fight with Bad_Karma went. And that was with Ick support casting on your side.” Zyra pulled a sack of coins from her Inventory and tested its weight. “I think I’ll find Kaz and see if he feels like going double or nothing. I could use a new set of Titration Pipes for my shop.”
Roark glanced up from the plate, locking on the place he was certain her purple and green eyes sat hidden in the shadows of her hood. “This is only the first step, Zyra. Like I said, I have a plan. How about you make your wager with me this time. If you win, I’ll buy you all the Titration Pipes and Alchemy equipment you desire.”
“And if that isn’t what I truly desire from you?” she asked, her dusky voice sending chills down his spine.
Roark could feel the intensity of her gaze boring into him.
“Then hope I win,” he said with a smirk.
“Oh, gag me!” PwnrBwner broke in.
Zyra perked up visibly and said over Roark’s shoulder, “Thought you’d never ask. I just invented a lovely poison called Screaming Silence that’s perfect for you. I haven’t tested it on anyone yet, but the effect is supposed to be immediate and incredibly painful.”
“Anything but more of this”—the High Combat Cleric pointed back and forth between Roark and Zyra—“whatever the crap this is.”
“All right,” Roark snapped, leaving the workbench and selecting a set of black Peerless Leather Armor, Gloves, and Boots from the armory chest in the corner. “You’re both equally annoying. Can we get on with the matter at hand?”
“Sure, if you guys can stop eye-sexting each other for a few seconds,” PwnrBwner said. He hooked a thumb at the Arboreal Herald. “You’re making Randy uncomfortable.”
Randy held up his hands, his cheeks coloring brighter red than the heat of the forge could account for. “I’m not—I mean, as long as she’s not just some preprogrammed—uh, that is... If I still thought you were a modder, I would’ve been really upset with you using her for...” He shook his head. “You know what, never mind. I’m not uncomfortable. That’s the point.”
Shaking his head, Roark turned toward the door. He would need to use the Enchanting Table in his study for the next bit of work. Before he could leave, however, a Changeling apprentice scurried in, leading Griff into the forge, followed by a bacon-bearing Kaz.
“Aw, hells yes, it’s bacon time.” PwnrBwner went straight for the Mighty Gourmet’s proffered platter and began scarfing down the crispy rashers. He sighed in appreciation. “Damn, dude.”
Kaz beamed. “It is the most delicious meat that Kaz has learned of so far. He cannot see why Gry Feliri and Jordan Bamsey did not include whole chapters on it.”
The weapons trainer skirted around them, eyeing PwnrBwner suspiciously with his one good eye, and joined Roark at the workbench. “You were lookin’ for me, Griefer?”
Roark nodded. “I have a plan to take down Bad_Karma, but it’s going to require a lot of moving pieces to come together at once.” He pulled a portal scroll and handed it to Griff. “And I need you to go back to Frostrime. Pwnr, you know your part. Zyra, I had a question for you. Is there any chance to craft a poison that isn’t actually a poison? You mentioned earlier a substance called Clotwart, which might temporarily counteract his immunity. Instead of mixing that with a poison, would it somehow be possible to add it to a healing potion of sorts?”
The hooded Reaver froze, her body unnaturally rigid. “He’s immune to poison, but Clotwart technically isn’t a poison. It’s an additive. He’ll reject the Clotwart inside a poison, but inside a Health potion?” She shook her head. “It’s a bit of a long shot, but it’s possible. It’ll take some time, but I’ll get working on it now.” Her voice sounded sharp and deadly as a razor blade.
“Brilliant,” Roark said with a genuine smile. “Now, Randy, any chance you know how to work a forge?”
The Herald dipped his head. “Fifteenth level Blacksmith actually, and a level 10 Enchanter.”
“Perfect,” Roark replied. He pulled out a variety of blueprints. “Then I need you to get working immediately. I’ll need about thirty of these, and all primed for curses—so only use the best metal and the best gemstones.”
He handed them over and headed for the door.
“Sure,” Randy said, confusion filling his face as he shuffled through the blueprints. “But what are you going to do?”
Roark stopped mid-stride.
“Me? I need to get the second floor prepped for our guest, and then I need to see a man about a Selkie.”
Bro_Fo Bait
SCOTT BAYANI FOUND Bro_Fo and the poor saps his big brother Bad_Karma had paid to finish the power-leveling job in the One-Eyed Unicorn. It hadn’t taken a lot of detective work to find them; Karma and the OGs in the guild had actually made a deal a while back with the owner, and now everybody in good standing with their guild got a discount on drinks and food from the Unicorn. Not potions, though. Even Karma’s influence had its limits.
Scott scanned their little group as he walked over. Looked like TankieMcTankerson and BarryCuda the Blackguard Rogue had stuck it out so far to level 19 with the little asswipe. Mark_Proper_the_Third was long gone, proving what Scott always suspected—that Mark was the only one in that group with half a brain.
“Fancy meeting you all here,” Scott said, yanking out a chair and sitting by Tankie uninvited. “How’d that raid on the citadel go?”
BarryCuda made a fart sound and gave him a thumbs-down.
“Because these losers couldn’t keep up with me,” Bro_Fo sneered. “I lost like four levels and my Ultimate Carry Greaves.”
“I told you it transported you to a different level than us,” Tankie said, tapping her thumbnail against her beer stein. “There wasn’t any keeping up involved.”
“Okay, sure,” Bro_Fo said in that snotty little brat teenage voice that made Scott want to knock his helmet off his head.
“Hang on,” Scott said. “You guys didn’t go in the front way, did you? That’s suicide.”
Tankie glanced sidelong at him. “There’s only one way in.”
“If that’s true, then what way did I just go in?” Scott said. “Because I walked right into the final floor and fought the boss without having to go through all the teleportation and Troll cheating bullshit.”
“Sounds like you were dreaming,” Tankie said, going back to her beer.
“The hell I was. Check this shit out.” He PMed her a screenshot of himself and Roark locked in some epic-looking combat. The timestamp in the corner showed it as only three hours earlier. “I’d have hooked up with you guys earlier, but I had to wait to respawn. The dickface pulled some lame auto-targeting weapon on me at the last second.”
“Auto-targeting?” Bro_Fo leaned in.
“Yeah,” Scott said. “He’s supposed to be the dungeon boss, so he made himself a piece of badass loot to boss it with. It’s a total cheat, though. The kind of item that would automatically make like anybody the best player in Hearthworld.”
Scott watched the wheels turn in the little brat’s head. He was thinking how when a dungeon boss died, they d
ropped all their loot, and how a guy who had to pay people to help him power-level could go from loser to best player on the server if he just so happened to pick said overpowered loot up.
“Guys,” Bro_Fo said. “I want to go back to the Cruel Citadel. You can show us the back way in, right, Pwnr?”
“Yeah, sure, but there’s no way us three are gonna be able to kill this boss alone,” Scott said.
“I can message Yakonoclast, Frond, and Country_n_Vestern and have them meet us there. We might need... nah...” Bro_Fo shook his head, and Scott could tell he was trying to keep the party small so he wouldn’t potentially lose the auto-targeting weapon to somebody stronger than him. “No, six of you guys will have to be enough.”
“Well, all right,” Scott said, “but it has to be in the next hour or so. I’ve got to work all weekend, so I won’t be back online until Monday.”
It was almost too easy. Bro_Fo stood up, his chair scraping along the wooden floor.
“Let’s go,” he said, eyes shining with greed. He looked around their table. “Does anybody have a portal scroll?”
BarryCuda slammed his forehead down on the table.
Tankie sighed. “I do. But we’re going to need a shitton of Health potions. I’m not going back in there without a stock.”
“Like it matters,” BarryCuda said, his voice muffled against the tabletop.
Scott had to hide his smirk. Barry was right, it wouldn’t matter.
“We’ll get some on the way,” Bro_Fo snapped, his voice cracking with urgency. “Come on, move your asses or you’re not getting those five large Drake promised you.”
“Hey man, I’m not going anywhere unless I get paid up front,” Scott said. After his walkout earlier, it would be suspicious if he didn’t have any objections.
“The fuck you’re not.” Bro_Fo leaned down in Scott’s face, bracing both hands on the table. “If I tell Bad_Karma that you refused to do what I say, he’ll throw you out of the guild. Just see how much hate spam you get then. Oh yeah, and all the PvP you take from my seed followers. Hope you like respawning, loser, because it’ll be all you do in Hearthworld from now on.”
Scott’s lip curled up in a contemptuous snarl he didn’t have to fake. As if he needed another reason to hate this little shit.
“Fine,” he growled. “Whatever. It’s bullshit, but whatever. Let’s just go get your stupid Health potions so we can kill this asshole Griefer already.”
They followed him out of the tavern and through the streets to the marketplace. It took about ten minutes altogether to get everybody stocked on third-tier Health potions. Then they made their way to the fountain court, already lit up with shimmering violet portals. The other three members of their party met them on the eastern side of the fountain, where the spray reached the farthest because of the breeze.
Scott could feel the misting droplets speckling his cheeks, cool and comforting. This was about to be very, very fun.
If Mark_Proper_the_Third had been with them, Scott might’ve almost felt bad about leading them into the trap because Mark was a good guy and he’d gone along with the first raid on the Cruel Citadel when Scott had been out for Roark’s blood. But when Scott had sent the notice out for guild members to help him crush the Griefer, Karma had done a hard pass and jerkwad sycophants like Tankie and BarryCuda had passed, too, because suddenly a good ol’ fashioned dungeon raid wasn’t cool enough anymore. If Karma had gone—or any of his high-level hangers-on—Scott could’ve slapped Roark down.
Well, in about thirty minutes, they could all suck on it. Karma most of all, but definitely Tankie and BarryCuda, too.
“Everybody ready?” Tankie asked.
BarryCuda pulled his weapons and shook his head.
“Popping off.” Tankie cast the portal scroll, adding another tear in space to the several existing ones scattered all around them. She stood back and indicated the violet shimmer with both hands, like one of those prize ladies from that old game, except in heavy plate mail rather than a skintight evening dress.
Bro_Fo jumped through first, and Scott followed close behind, pretending to want to protect him and make back that five-G paycheck he’d forfeited when he left them the first time.
Cold air rushed around them, ruffling their hair and chilling them pleasantly. Scott stepped out of the portal and into the graveyard along the west wall of the Cruel Citadel’s aboveground ruins. [Shambling Revenants] roved between the tombstones, moaning low in their throats while Scott grabbed his Unique Mace of Elemental Culmination and went to work. Blue lightning arced between its razor-sharp flanges as he put down Shambling Revenant after Shambling Revenant. The Griefer hadn’t mentioned slaughtering a graveyard full of low-level mobs, but Scott didn’t mind making the judgment call himself.
One by one, the rest of the raid team filtered through the portal and joined the fight. Pretty soon, they had killed everything in the graveyard.
“Come on, it’s this way,” Scott said, leading them to the yawning mouth of a mausoleum. Its stone door had been knocked off its hinges sometime in the distant past, way back when the devs were still building the place from the one-zero up.
Bro_Fo kept right on his heels the whole way, even as Scott ducked into the near pitch-black darkness of the mausoleum.
“Yep, this is it,” Scott said, pretending to reach for something on the wall, just in case that little shit had dark vision or something.
Click!
“What the hell?” A torch appeared in Bro_Fo’s right hand as he tugged at the metal collar around his throat with his left. “Is this some kind of trap?”
“Yeah,” Scott said. “Duh.”
As he said it, Bro_Fo pulled his Fulgurite Sword and tried to rush Scott. But the collar yanked him back, sitting him down on the dust and cobweb-covered floor with a thud.
“That’s not going to work, mate,” Roark the Griefer said, appearing as Randy dropped the concealment. He held up the Lightning Rod. “For as long as you’ve got that collar on, this decides where you go, and right now the answer is ‘not far.’”
“It’s a trap!” Bro_Fo bellowed out the door for his hired guild mercs. “Kill everybody, guys! Strafe this place!”
Shouts and the sound of combat filtered in from outside. Lights flashed fire-orange, ice-blue, and a nasty yellow as spells were cast. Then, just as fast as it had started, everything went silent.
That Troll assassin hottie came into the mausoleum followed by a horde of big ugly tank Trolls and little scrawny spell caster types. She dropped an armload of severed heads on the floor. Yakonoclast, Tankie, Frond, Country_n_Vestern, and BarryCuda. They rolled right up to Bro_Fo’s feet. He eeped and jumped back a step before the collar jerked him back.
“How you like my new guild, assface?” Scott could feel the big, shit-eating grin as it stretched across his face. “Now, let’s talk about who you can call to actually get you out of this mess.”
Karma’s a Bitch
“ALL RIGHT, KIDDIES,” Drake Carmichael, aka Bad_Karma, said as he waded through the tidal slime of Bloodleech Grotto. “We’re out here on the northeastern coast of Hearthworld, about five klicks outside of Wargentine Shores, about to go after the”—he checked his active quests for the name—“Ancient Claddagh of the Fleeing Light. It’s supposed to be with some deeb named Ishri the Cunning. One assumes ol’ Ishri’s the chief of this lovely abode, and there’s a whole storyline about him once being a man whose beloved committed suicide. It’s all very Romeo and Juliet, but you peeps can look that up in the WikiLore on your own time if you’re into backstory. Me, I’m into one-shotting some bosses.”
Down in the corner of his HUD, Drake could check the number of viewers watching his livestream via seedFeed. He glanced at it surreptitiously as he ducked under a stalactite glowing green with Filthy Nitre. Ticking up over twelve thousand. Not even close to the number of followers he had, but give the diehards a minute to get the notification that he was live and his numbers would soar.
Even
as he thought this, the ones column started reeling, then the tens and hundreds, driving to twenty thousand at a headlong rush. They rounded a hundred grand a few seconds later. Drake grinned. He was soloing tonight, like he did every Thursday, and his fans loved that. If he didn’t hit a solid mil before he logged off, he’d eat his Lifeblood Billhooked Polearm. Heck, give it another five minutes and his followers would probably crash the feed like they did last month when he hit up that world-first new release Rogs of the Great Plains expansion pack dungeon.
“It’s Thursday night, kiddies, and you know what that means,” Drake said, giving his polearm a twirl. “Karma’s going solo. That’s right, nobody but you, me, and What’s-His-Nuts, the bloodleech guy. Ishri.”
He paused at the mouth of an open room. Inside a trio of low-level [Face Suckers] were waiting for a player to come in and draw their aggro.
“Looks like we’ve got mobs up ahead. Nothing too big yet. What’d’ya say we just wade right in there and—”
The Live Call ping sounded in his ear and a little thumbnail of Darren’s face appeared in the upper right corner of Drake’s vision along with the tag [Bro_Fo]. The smile froze on Drake’s face. That little dickbrain! He knew Drake was livestreaming right now. He was totally trying to mooch off Bad_Karma’s viewers, again.
Darren was only two years younger than Drake, but the little wad was always copying him and following him around. He’d even followed Drake into Hearthworld and set up his whole gaming account because he couldn’t be bothered to find a personality of his own.
He should hang up on Darren and teach him a hard lesson. But... on the other hand... if Darren had found something really, supremely cool or rare, Bad_Karma’s viewers would go apeshit over that. He really should check just to rule it out.
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