by L. E. Price
“You figured wrong. C’mon, let’s get out of the flow of traffic.”
Woody cut a path through the crowd and Jake followed in his wake. They found an open spot by the back wall, just enough room to lower their voices and talk in confidence.
“Worst weapon in the game, next to throwing darts,” Woody told him, “and at least you can dip darts in poison. They were modeled by a dev with an obvious cowboy fetish, and he lavished a ton of detail on the physics simulation.”
“That sounds like a good thing.”
“Sure,” Woody said, “if you know how to use one in real life. If you don’t, and I’m guessing you don’t, you’re either going to trip yourself, whack yourself across the back of the head with it, or send it flying in the opposite direction of your target. It’s a pure skill-based weapon, and even if you land a hit, the best you’re going to do is knock your target over. As opposed to, you know, killing them. Anyway, it’s not the end of the world, but anyone who sees you carrying that thing around is gonna assume you’re a total newbie. Badge of shame, man. Ditch it.”
Not necessarily a bad thing. Jake had been underestimated plenty of times, and more often than not, it ended up working in his favor. He decided to keep the weapon slung over his shoulder, at least for the time being.
“Ran into a couple of guys on the way here, apparently friends of Trev— of Trevanian’s,” Jake said. “I overheard some seriously weird conversation, too. What do you know about a ‘sea dragon’? I tried checking the codex like you showed me, but I came up empty.”
Woody’s eyes went wide. He waved his hand across his throat, making a slashing gesture.
“Not here,” he said. “Outside. Later.”
Jake thought he’d been doing a good job so far, navigating the invisible rules of Paradise Clash’s culture. Until now. The look on Wally’s face told him he’d just stepped on a land mine. So did the shadow that fell across the floor, a long and slender cloak cast in silhouette by the crackling hearth-fire.
Jake turned, standing toe-to-toe with the androgynous young man from the back table. His eyes, black as his cloak, were carved from ice. One slender, pale hand rested gently on his rapier’s hilt. The hand-guard was forged from serpentine coils of silver.
“It isn’t in your codex,” the young man said, “because the sea dragon does not exist.”
Jake had thirty pounds on the kid, easy, but that didn’t stop him from trying to muscle the message across. He had gotten into Jake’s personal space like a professional thug, and he wasn’t going anywhere.
“Thanks,” Jake said. “Good to know.”
“Say it.” The man’s lips tightened into a razor-thin line. “Say ‘it doesn’t exist.’ So that I know you understand.”
Woody stepped up, trying to get between them, but not trying that hard. “Hey, Ichiro, he didn’t mean anything by it—”
Ichiro pushed his thumb against the rapier’s hilt. It jutted an inch from its scabbard, baring steel that swirled with frozen blue currents of light.
10.
Jake wasn’t afraid of Ichiro or his magic sword. After all, Woody had already told him the stakes: if he died here and now, all he’d lose was a little dignity. He’d lose a lot more than that if he groveled in front of a bully. He was looking for a creative way to tell Ichiro to pound sand, but Woody’s face stopped him cold.
Woody was afraid. He was treating this like a real-life altercation, a barroom brawl in the making where people might really get hurt or dead. Maybe he was just roleplaying, but it didn’t feel that way to Jake. Something had him spooked. Better to be careful, then, until he figured out the score.
Behind Ichiro, his three friends watched with silent, stony faces from their table, all eyes on Jake. One was a girl with delicately pointed ears, maybe fourteen or so, in a yellow dress with its hem woven to resemble a flower’s drooping petals. Pinpoint emeralds glittered from a silver tiara on her brow. Another was a minotaur, half man and half bull, with a battle-ax the size of Texas slung across his back and his dark leathery skin pitted with countless scars. The third was a human, tall, gaunt, his greasy black hair worn in a severe widow’s peak. Voluminous robes of jade swallowed his frail form, and he drummed his long, yellowed fingernails on the table with an air of resigned irritation. A ring clung to each bony finger, each ring faceted with a different color and cut of gemstone.
Jake looked back to Ichiro. He kept his body language casual, open, trying to defuse a fight before it started.
“Hey, my bad. Look, why don’t I buy the next round for you and your buddies over there? No hard feelings.”
Ichiro didn’t answer. He stared through Jake and a mile past him.
“He’s new, okay?” Woody said. He tugged Jake’s sleeve, pulling him a step back. “I’ll talk to him. Look. Look at this. He picked the bolas. You know he doesn’t know his rear end from a hole in the ground.”
That seemed to mollify him. A little. Ichiro gave a tiny nod, still staring at Jake while he answered Woody.
“Talk to your friend.”
With that, he turned on his heel and strode back to the table. Jake puffed his cheeks, letting out the breath he’d been holding.
“You know,” he said, “I didn’t like jerks like him back in high school, and I graduated a long time ago. Not keen on going back. You want to explain why the cool kids’ table over there got all mad at me?”
Woody gave a sidelong nod toward the table, careful not to make eye contact.
“That’s the Elect. They’re a guild, just the four of them, and they’ve been together since Paradise Clash launched. I mean, they’re the guild as far as most old-timers are concerned.”
“Ascension guild?” Jake asked.
“Raiders, mostly, but they’ll take any challenge.” Woody eyed the door. “No idea why they’re in freakin’ Dutton of all places. This is beyond slumming it. Anyway, they take on raids designed for sixteen, even thirty-two players at once. Like I said, just the four of them. And they win. Rumor is, they’re special forces in real life. Navy SEALs, maybe.”
“You were afraid the pretty-boy was going to stab you and…what, you lose some experience points and drop your shiny new palimpsest of healing?”
Woody stared at him. He blinked. Jake shrugged.
“What?” Jake said. “I skimmed one of your strategy guides this afternoon. I know what a palimpsest is.”
“They could cost me more than a few XP,” Woody said. “Think in terms of social currency. The Elect are rock stars in here. If they blacklist somebody, that somebody stays blacklisted. No friends, no party invitations, no guild invites either. Nobody wants to get on their bad side.”
“So, I wasn’t wrong,” Jake said. “They’re the mean girls at the cool-kids table.”
“Well, mean girl, anyway, and three mean guys. But they’re really not mean, you just hit a nerve with the…thing you mentioned.”
“About that.”
“Yeah, about that.” Woody pulled Jake a little further from the table, making sure they were out of earshot. “Ichiro’s not wrong. The sea dragon isn’t a monster. It’s a name some players made up for a glitch in the system.”
“What, like, a bug?”
“Half bug, half urban legend. Back when the game launched, a guild of explorers set out to chart the bottom of the Salinas Sea, just for the bragging rights. Turns out, it can’t be done. The seabed is deeper than you can reach without drowning, even with the best swimming gear and protective magic you can get. But two of the players who made the deepest dives said, just before they had to turn back to the surface, they saw something down there. Something down in the dark, in the cold, deeper than anyone could dive. Something massive.”
The glow of the hearth-fire, warm against Jake’s back, faded to a crawling chill. The din of conversation went muffled, as if he had plugs of cotton in his ears, replaced by a low and distant hum.
“The sea dragon,” he said, softer than he intended to.
Woody shot
a nervous glance past Jake’s shoulder. “Yeah. People figured it was a new monster in development, maybe a raid boss or something, but the developers said there wasn’t anything down there. They never expected players to dive as deep as they did. According to them, the bottom of the Salinas is totally empty.”
“Could they have been lying?”
Rhetorical question. Everybody lied. Woody looked like he took the denial as gospel truth, though.
“No chance. The devs love teasing new stuff, and even if it was an accidental reveal, they’re notorious for spinning mistakes into actual plot for the game. Remember what I told you about the god who glitched out of her realm? Anyway, they took the opposite tack: absolutely nothing down there, no sea dragon, never was, forget it happened because it didn’t happen.”
“I’m guessing,” Jake said, “that digging their heels in just made people more determined to find some answers.”
“You got that right. But when more people dove down there, the sightings stopped. Those particular sightings stopped. That’s when it got weird. Here and there, every once in a while, players started catching glimpses of something that looked a hell of a lot like a dragon — scales, wings, big — in water, out of the corners of their eyes. I mean, in ponds, fountains, at least once in the curve of a water glass. Like it was peering out at them for a second, watching them. Then it would just…disappear.”
“How many of these sightings were legit?” Jake asked.
“Charitably,” Woody said, “I’d estimate one in five, and the rest were people jumping on the bandwagon for attention or just delusional. Ever since then, ‘dragon hunting’ has become a niche hobby. Most hunters think there’s some legacy code buried in the game, like an Easter egg, causing the sightings. So, they dig into the code as much as they can — sometimes with highly illegal tools — to chase the dragon down. Very white-hat, as hackers go, but SDS doesn’t like it one bit. Remember, there are entire miniature economies, not to mention Vegas gambling, riding on the game’s integrity. Good intentions or not, dragon hunters upset the applecart.”
Jake shot a glance over his shoulder. Ichiro was deep in conversation with his buddies, and none of them were looking his way.
“And what crawled up his ass? Does he work for the company?”
“Uh-uh. Insider trading laws, remember? SDS employees can only come into the game as GMs, so they get the big honking halo and have their every move recorded. Same goes for family members and romantic partners. No fun allowed.” Woody followed Jake’s gaze. “The Elect are more or less the self-appointed defenders of roleplaying. They don’t like people breaking character in public, and they really don’t like it when folks bring in non-canon plots. Word from on high is that the sea dragon isn’t real, has never been real, and will never be real, so they stamp down hard on people claiming otherwise. Ichiro in particular gets a little aggressive about this stuff.”
“A little,” Jake echoed.
Before Woody could respond, a new arrival grabbed hold of his arm and clung like a lamprey. He was a slight man, with dusky skin and sharply pointed ears, and a cord of glimmering silver belted the waist of his black velvet robe.
“We should go,” he said.
“Hey,” Woody said, “Larin! Just the man I was looking for. You joined up with the Crewe of Dreams last week, right? I want you to meet a new friend of mine—”
“Jacius,” Jake said. “Jacius of Cam’s Den.”
“Yeah, hey, great to meet you, we’ll hang out sometime.” He turned back to Woody. “Lollers are coming. A raiding party just poofed through a portal at the edge of town, and they’re headed this way.”
Woody’s fat lips broke into a wide and eager grin. “Now that explains why the Elect are here. I couldn’t figure out why they were slumming in Dutton tonight.”
“They are?” The dark-skinned elf leaned to one side, looking past him to the corner table. “Oh. Okay. Forget my initial advice. Let’s stay and watch.”
“Someone help me out here,” Jake said.
Woody looked like he’d just stepped on a thumbtack. He took a deep breath.
“I hoped this wouldn’t come up. We’ve been having some…problems, lately. You remember what I taught you about the ascension quest, right?”
“Sure. Win, you get to be a god.”
“There’s this grid community, a message board, it’s called PufferNet. Don’t go there, it sucks.”
“Is this like the Cybele fan-art thing?” Jake asked. “Because I’ll tell ya, I did look that up, and you’re right, I wish I hadn’t.”
“It’s worse. Picture a community of bored teenagers and really sad adults who are only happy when they get to take a dump on things other people enjoy. They spend all day trying to be shocking and edgy. Thankfully, usually just at each other.”
“Until last month,” Larin added, glaring at the tavern doors. “Turns out they’d been running a stealth operation for over a year. They formed an ascension guild called the League of LOL.”
He pronounced it el-oh-el. Jake tilted his head. “These guys don’t sound like they’d be into the whole roleplaying deal.”
Larin kept watching the exit.
“Wait for it,” he said.
The tavern doors swung wide, and a hush fell over the room. Not by choice. Jake tried to speak but his words died, silent, in the motionless air. A gang of cloaked figures, maybe two dozen, flooded in and stood packed shoulder-to-shoulder at the doorway, blocking the way out. Save for their leader, they all wore masks of black leather, features stitched with rough golden cord to resemble grotesque smiley-faces.
The man in front was tall, spindly, gripping a thick book in his gloved hands. His features were exaggerated, eyes sunken and his cheekbones protruding, his chin a spike of bone, every proportion stretched to the breaking point. Beside him, one of the masked figures performed an elaborate dance with his fingertips. Jake felt the silent air swirl in time with his gestures, and he guessed that was the source of the unnatural hush. Some kind of spell, keeping the patrons from talking.
The leader’s voice boomed across the tavern, and he raised the book high above his head.
“Greetings, nerds! You have been chosen to receive the holy scripture of our god, the one true god, Chairman Roofle Mao! Anyone attempting to leave will be killed, and your dead faces shall receive the divine blessing of my anointed nutsack.”
Jake looked at Woody. He couldn’t make a sound, but he still mouthed the words, “You have got to be kidding me.” Woody responded with a helpless shrug.
“Scripture the first,” the leader called out, opening his book. “This is not real. You are stupid nerds playing a stupid nerd video game. Your fat, diabetic bodies are wasting away in your mom’s basement while real life passes you by. Scripture the second. You are embarrassing. Kill yourselves.”
The squeal of a chair scraping back on flagstone broke the magical stillness. Then three others did the same. The crowds parted in silence to make room for Ichiro and his companions as they strode across the tavern floor.
11.
“You have committed an error,” Ichiro said softly, his voice almost apologetic.
Then his rapier lashed from its scabbard, glowing with ice-blue light, and cut the preacher in half. The blade sliced through his stomach and kept going, Ichiro twisting his grip as he turned the sweep into a driving lunge and rammed the blood-slick blade through the eye of a smiley-face mask.
The minotaur charged into the fray like a wrecking ball, fists flying, sending the Lollers scattering like bowling balls. One jumped out of his way, staggering into the path of the teenager in the flower-petal dress. She put a hand to her lips, giggled, and blew a kiss. Fairy dust swirled through the air, washed over the masked man — and froze him solid, coated in a sheen of glimmering ice. The minotaur’s fist crashed through the back of his head and shattered him like a porcelain doll.
On the opposite side of the fight, the fourth member of the Elect had his brow furrowed in concen
tration, open hands poised as three cultists ran straight at him. He twisted his fingers, murmured something under his breath, and a wave of road-kill stench washed across the room. Jake felt his stomach clench, like he was standing over an open sewer main on a hot summer day. Three robes and three masks billowed to the tavern floor. Whatever they had been underneath, nothing was left of them but puddles of vomit-yellow sludge, oozing out across the flagstones.
Ichiro was a spinning top, carving his way through the melee, cutting the Lollers down left and right. Jake didn’t miss how the four coordinated their every move. The apparent chaos was under their absolute control from the first strike to the last. The teenager hurled a brace of leaf-shaped throwing knives, driving attackers away from Ichiro’s back. The minotaur’s brutal force was honed by the sorcerer’s coordination, as the gaunt man with the widow’s peak called out targets in a terse, monosyllabic code-language.
The last Loller slammed against the tavern wall with the point of Ichiro’s sword pressed to the hollow of his throat. He froze there, drenched in sweat, fingers digging into the peeling plaster like a drowning man clutching a life preserver.
“Listen and understand,” Ichiro said. “Our allies have infiltrated your guild. We have access to your communications channels. We have access to your schedule. As of now, these ‘tavern raids’ are over. Because every time you attempt one, we will be there, waiting for you. Every time. Day, night, weekday, weekend, we will be waiting for you. And this is how it will end.”
He shoved the blade forward. Then he twisted it, ripping it free, and the last body hit the floor in a curtain of blood-spatter garnets. The magical silence broke, but all the same, nobody said a word.
The Elect turned to face the room, standing side by side, and Ichiro calmly wiped his sword down with a folded cloth. He wasn’t even out of breath.
“We apologize for that vulgar display,” he said. “As you are no doubt aware, the Lollers are resurrecting at this very moment, at the standing stones just outside of Dutton. The…less intelligent of their ilk will no doubt return here again and again for the rest of the night, hoping to cause what disruption they may.”