by Rachel Aaron
Tina blew out a breath. Here went nothing. “We gotta beat the Once King to do it.”
The announcement fell like an anvil, crushing even Neko’s excitement.
“But…” someone said in the silence. “Hasn’t the Once King never been beaten? Like ever?”
“No one has ever killed him, no,” Richard said in a dry voice. “Though not from lack of trying.”
He would certainly know, Tina thought. His guild, Richard’s Inferno, had been ranked number one in the world before repeated failures at the Once King fight had torn them apart. But she wasn’t finished.
“That was before,” she said boldly. “But as we keep learning over and over, this isn’t a game now. We don’t have to play by the rules anymore. If we want to bring four, five, or six raids to the fight, we can do that! We can beat him.”
Frank raised his hand. “Uh…why do we have to kill him, again?” he asked when Tina pointed at him. “Sorry if it’s a stupid question, but how does killing a guy on the other side of the world get people home?”
“Because he’s the one who brought us here,” Tina said.
Gasps flew up from the crowd, and she raised her hands. “I know you’ve got questions, but that’s all I can say for now. Someone risked their life to tell me this info, and until I’m sure they won’t die for it, I can’t go into more detail. But what matters is that the Once King’s the one who sucked us into this mess, which means he’s the one who knows how to get us out.”
“Shouldn’t we be not killing him then?” ZeroDarkness asked.
“I didn’t say ‘kill,’” Tina pointed out. “I said ‘beat.’ Right now, the Once King has the power to send us home, he just doesn’t want to, so my plan is to storm his house and kick his ass until he changes his mind. Once we’ve got him on the ropes, we’ll negotiate how to get those of you who want to go home home. And for those of you who don’t want to leave, we’ve got you covered, too. As soon as we’ve got our exit back to Earth secure, we’re going to kill the Once King and stomp out the Great Pyre for good. No more ghostfire, no more undead, world saved.” Her face split into a grin. “You see? We don’t have to choose! We can have our way home and eat it too! All we gotta do is beat the guy we were playing this game to beat in the first place, and we get everything we want. There might even be loot!”
A cheer went up from the crowd, and Tina let out the breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. She was congratulating herself on a plan well sold when Zen raised her hand.
“What about the MDB?”
Tina winced. That was a good question. A very good question. One she didn’t have an answer to yet.
“What’s the MDB?” Frank asked, his voice exasperated. “Sorry to keep being the speed bump, but you folks use too many acronyms for me to keep up with, and that’s saying something coming from an engineer.”
“The MDB is the Million Damage Blast,” Anders explained, his ichthyian fish-eyes even rounder than usual with worry. “It’s the reason the original Roughneck raiding guild could never get the Once King past his second phase back in the game. Once he gets down to thirty percent health, he does a huge attack that hits everyone in the raid for one million damage, which is more than anyone can take. Roxxy’s the only one tough enough to survive it, and only if she blows all her cooldowns.”
“Not that it does any good,” Zen added. “Knights don’t have Raise Ally, and one tank can’t DPS the Once King down the final thirty percent by herself. That’s why no one’s ever beaten him even though the Deadlands expansion has been out for a year. No matter how well you do before it goes off, the MDB is a guaranteed wipe.”
“And now that he’s no longer constrained by the game mechanics, there’s no reason the Once King couldn’t cast it at the very beginning of the fight rather than the end,” Richard put in bleakly. “That would be the intelligent thing to do. Why fight at all when you can kill everyone facing you in one hit?”
This announcement made everyone look defeated, and Tina rushed to pull them back up before the whole raid collapsed. “The MDB is just a problem we don’t know how to solve yet,” she reminded them. “But we’ve done tons of impossible things over the last week! Remember Grel? How many impossible fights have we cheated our way through? We’ll figure it out. It won’t even be that hard. The Once King’s sent his entire army to Bastion, remember? That means he’s alone in the Dead Mountain Fortress. We can walk right in there and kill him.”
“How are we even getting back to the Dead Mountain?” someone yelled from the back.
“My brother James is already working on that,” Tina said. “We’ll find a way to make it happen, but before we do anything, we need to vote. And not by class leaders, either. This decision affects everyone, so I want everyone to have a say.”
NekoBaby snorted. “What’s there to say? We barely escaped Bastion with our lives yesterday. If that army shows up again, we’re D-E-D dead. We need to GTFO of the Savanna anyway. Might as well head back to where the good loot is.” She cracked her knuckles. “Also, I don’t know about the rest of you losers, but I owe the Once King for a few hundred thousand wipes. We Roughnecks spent four months dying to that bastard five nights a week! Saving the world’s cool and all, but I want some payback.”
“I’m in!” Killbox said excitedly. “I always wanted to be part of a world-first kill!”
“And with the removal of the game’s mechanics, it might even be possible,” Richard said, his stoic face as animated as Tina had ever seen it. “We could bring in two raids, or three! That way, even if the MDB kills the main group, the others can sweep in and finish the job while the spare healers resurrect everyone who died. The possibilities are endless now that we’re no longer constrained by arbitrary limits like group size and instanced dungeons.”
Everyone started talking excitedly after that. Tina let them. She needed the excitement and momentum if they were actually going to do the impossible. Personally, though, she agreed with Neko. There was no other choice. If they stayed here, they were almost certainly dead, and for what? Winning on the Grasslands was a temporary victory at best. Even if they smashed every last zombie, there were always more dead to raise. The Once King’s army would simply rebuild and return, and they’d have to fight all over again. If they went to the Dead Mountain, though, they had a chance to solve the problem for good and get their way home. It was win/win all around, but Tina had finally had it beaten through her stone skull that she couldn’t force her raid. If she tried to make them go a certain direction, even if it was obviously the best one, they’d fight her on principle. But if she gave them the information and waited for them to come to the same obvious conclusion she had, they’d all go along happily, thinking it was their idea.
At least, that’s what she hoped.
“Okay,” she said when the excited buzz had grown as loud as it seemed likely to go. “Time to vote. Who wants to stay here and die?”
No one raised their hands, and Tina’s lips curled into a smirk. “Who wants to kick the Once King’s ass, save the world, and win us a way home?”
There was lots of eye rolling at her choice of words, but every single hand in the crowd still shot up as high as it would go, and Tina’s smirk turned into a victorious grin. “It’s decided, then! Get your shit together and get ready to fight. Officers on me for specific instructions.”
The crowd parted like a shot. While the majority of the raiders raced around preparing for battle, the class officers—minus, again, SilentBlayde, who was replaced by ZeroDarkness, the Roughnecks’ only other Assassin—gathered in a clump around Tina.
“So what are we really going to do?” Neko asked the moment they were all together. “Not to be a buzz kill, but we couldn’t get the Once King down to thirty percent reliably even back when we were a real raiding guild. How the hell are we going to do it now? We still don’t have a full raid, and some of these people have no idea what they’re doing.” She looked pointedly at Killbox and Frank. “No offense.”
“None taken,” Frank assured her.
“We’ll figure it out,” Killbox said at the same time. “We figured Grel out.”
“Yeah, ‘cause he was big and stupid!” Neko snapped. “The Once King’s smart, and he can fly. Now that the game’s not making him stand there and let us hit him, what’s to keep him from just flapping up and blasting us from the sky? How are we even going to make a plan? It’s not like we can look up a tanking video on his new mechanics, and I doubt he’ll be polite enough to give us multiple attempts.”
“She’s not wrong,” Richard said, scowling under the glow of his eternally burning crown of flames. “We can’t assume anything from the game anymore. If we’re going to face him, we need a new strategy that uses our new strengths and makes up for our new weaknesses.”
“There’s a lot to work out,” Tina agreed, grinning at them. “But that’s what you guys are for! I want all of you to put your heads together and get me a plan to beat the Once King using the people and tools we’ve got. Cinco has already agreed to come with his Red Sands, so we’ll have at least one extra raid. You work with that. Meanwhile, I’m going to go inform the NPCs of our decision before they decide to marry anyone else off.”
Frank’s eyebrows shot up. “Marry?”
“Long story,” Tina grumbled.
“If only we had some way to practice before the fight,” Richard said, completely ignoring everything Tina had just said. “As NekoBaby astutely pointed out, the Once King won’t give us multiple shots. Whatever we do, we have to do it in one.”
Tina’s lips curled into a smile again. “I think I can help with that part,” she said. “Let me go arrange some things. You guys just focus on coming up with a plan.”
Neko saluted and squatted down next to Richard, who was already drawing diagrams in the dirt. Satisfied their survival was in the best hands possible, Tina turned around and started walking back toward the Naturalist Lodge to tell the king that the Roughnecks were all in.
***
“So let me be sure I have this correct,” King Gregory said, looking nervously across the table at Tina and Cinco, who’d already been waiting at the lodge when she’d arrived. “You want to stop this invasion by defeating the Once King, enemy of all life?”
“Yep,” Tina said. “No Once King, no ghostfire, no undead army. Problem freaking solved!”
“And what do we do in the meanwhile?” the king asked. “Even if James can find you a way to the Deadlands that won’t take months, the undead army is marching toward us at this very moment.”
“You’ll just have to turtle up and deal,” Cinco said with a shrug. “All you’ve gotta do is not die while we go out and solve the problem. Easy peasy.”
“There is nothing easy about facing a siege while outnumbered by a superior enemy!” Captain Hightower yelled. Then his eyes narrowed. “How do we know you players aren’t just running away?”
“Dude, do you want to fight the Once King?” Tina snapped. “’Cause that’s the only way this is gonna end. Even if we stayed and stomped every zombie, they’d just make more. The only way to end this for real is to cut off the snake’s head.”
“What about going home?” one of the jubatus lords asked suspiciously. “I thought you players were all about that. Now you suddenly want to face the world’s most powerful enemy for our sake? How do we know this isn’t a trick?”
“For real?” Cinco growled, his eyes narrowing dangerously. “We offer to do the impossible, and that’s your response? Do you furry fuckers want our help or not?”
“Let us worry about getting home,” Tina said pointedly, stabbing a shut up elbow into Cinco’s ribs. They’d already agreed not to say anything about the Once King’s role in bringing them here, because blabbing the truth would have put Leylia in even more danger and given the NPCs a new angle of attack. Just because they’d made peace didn’t mean everyone was buddy-buddy, and it was an easy step from “brought over by the Once King” to “agent of the Once King.” The last thing they needed was another reason for the people of this world to mistrust them, especially with what Tina was going to ask next.
“I’ll handle my people,” she told the nervous room. “But right now, our focus has to be on killing the Once King. With his army in Bastion, we’ll never get a better shot to take him out and end this for good. Our raids are the only people in the world who have a chance of actually killing him. My officers are already working on a plan, and my brother James has a way to get us to the Deadlands before the army arrives, but we’re still going to need help from you.”
“What can we do?” King Gregory replied immediately, making Tina smile. Good to know someone saw the bigger picture.
“We’re going to need supplies,” she said. “There’s nothing to eat in the Deadlands except dust and no water at all, so we’ll need all of that plus tents and wagons to haul it. We can probably pick up some things from the Order fortress, but Commander Garrond was already stretched thin when we left him three days ago, and I don’t imagine he’s restocked yet.”
“It’s not as if we’re stocked, either,” Rends Iron Hides said grumpily. “But we’ll see what we can do,” he added after a look at the king.
“Fantastic,” Tina said. “If you’ve got food and whatnot, that leaves just one thing we need before we’re ready to face the final boss.”
“What is that?” Gregory asked.
Tina grinned. “You.”
The king jerked back. “Me? Why?”
“Human-scale raid bosses are the worst to fight,” she explained. “Giants like Grel have their own issues, but at least they’re easy to hit and damage without hurting our own people. When all that power gets crammed into a person-sized package, though, the whole fight dynamic changes. Malakai almost cleaned my clock twice, and let’s be honest, the Blood General Sanguilar was too busy having fun and lording his supremacy over us yesterday to be serious. He didn’t give us half the ass kicking he could have.” Tina shuddered at the memory of those final minutes in Bastion when Sanguilar had been serious. He’d nearly killed her in one hit.
“The Once King is the strongest five-skull in existence,” she went on. “If we’re going to have a prayer of beating him, there’s no room for mistakes. Whatever plan my people come up with, we’re going to have to pull it off flawlessly on our first try. That kind of perfection requires a lot of practice, and since Your Highness also happens to be a five-skull raid boss, I’d like to train my troops with you.”
The request was barely out of her mouth before Captain Hightower shot to his feet. “Absolutely not!” he roared, getting in her face. “You want His Majesty to fight a player raid? Preposterous! You were rebels just yesterday! We cannot put our king’s life in your hands!”
Tina tried to push the four-skull captain out of her personal space unsuccessfully. “Who else are we supposed to train on? Desperate times, desperate measures, yo. Do you want us to win or not?”
“You can’t possibly—”
“I’ll do it,” Gregory said.
“Highness!”
The king shook his head. “I’ve learned my lesson, Hightower. If I hadn’t hidden in my castle after the Nightmare, the city might not have fallen to chaos. If I’d ridden out to face the players instead of letting others handle everything I found uncomfortable, I might have been able to save my knights from Malakai’s hate. If I’d been a better king, we could have faced the Once King’s invasion united and maybe triumphed. But I did none of those things, and now we are here. I will not make the same mistakes again. I will do whatever I can to ensure this grassland is not the end of Bastion.”
“But Your Highness,” Hightower begged. “Be reasonable! If any player in their number wished to kill you, you’d be handing them your head!”
“Come on, that’s just dumb,” Tina said. “If one player could down a five-skull raid boss, we wouldn’t be in this situation. Also.” She nodded at the ancient white-and-gold–robed elf sitting on the pillow to the king
’s left. “You’ve got High Sun Priest Whatshisname right there. You’re a raid boss, but he’s a raid boss healer. He can stand on the sidelines and toss heals at the king the whole time if it makes you feel better. Hell, half the Bastion army can be on standby if you want. I don’t care who’s watching so long as I get a real five-skull to train on.”
That argument seemed to mollify Captain Hightower somewhat. At least he leaned back a bit and stopped shoving his hooked nose into her chin. But his griping was quickly replaced by the high priest’s.
“I cannot,” Raffestain said, shaking his head.
“Cannot what?”
“I cannot heal His Majesty,” the golden-robed priest said somberly. “I am still too low on mana from the battle of Bastion.”
Tina couldn’t believe her ears. “Whaaat? How is that possible? Didn’t the cats feed you?”
The wrinkly old elf harrumphed. “The hospitality of Windy Lake has been more than exemplary. I have eaten and slept all I care to. That is not the issue. What is is that I was four-skull rated in your game, which means I have over ten million mana. That might sound like an infinitely deep pool, but it goes quickly when you’re healing an army, and my mana doesn’t recover any faster than a player’s no matter how much I eat and sleep.” He sighed. “It will be days before I am full again. I need to save my strength for the battle here, and not just to heal our wounded. We brought the Bastion with us, but the crystal inside is still too weakened to be used again so soon. Without it, I am the only one present who can cast the Resplendent Aegis, which may well take all the mana I have left.”
Up to this point, Tina heard just a bunch of excuses about recovery rates, but that last bit caught her attention. “Wait, the big golden anti-undead shield the Bastion put over the city was just a spell? As in something you can cast?”
The high priest nodded.
“Holy shit,” Tina said, earning herself a cutting look, which she ignored. “Can you teach my Clerics to do that? ‘Cause having my own portable version of the Bastion would be really freaking useful for when we go fight the lord of all undead.”