The Once King

by Rachel Aaron

  “Goddammit!” Tina yelled, stomping her feet at the unfairness of it all. “That’s fucking Protato!”

  “Who?” Cinco said, skidding to a stop next to her.

  “Asshole main tank for Six Ways From Raiding,” Tina explained quickly, pointing at the glittering wall of undead players standing where the Once King should have been. “They’re the group who was ahead of us on the Once King fight, the number-one raiding guild in the world. They must have been in here working on him when the transition hit.”

  “Ah, crapballs!” Neko swore, ears going flat as she looked at Tina. “What do we do? Six Ways outgeared us back when we were actual Roughnecks! We don’t have a prayer now!”

  “Sure you do,” Cinco said, planting his spear on the ground. “’Cause this time, you’ve got us.” He flashed Tina a bloodthirsty grin and lifted his voice. “Red Sands! It’s time to show these Care Bears that raid gear don’t mean shit for PvP!”

  “Are you serious?” Tina demanded, too shocked to be insulted. “They’re the best-geared players in the world.”

  Cinco winked at her, a bit of the old charm coming back. “Can’t loot skill, baby. Once King’s gotta be around here somewhere. Go find him and kick his ass. We got this.”

  Tina stared at him for a moment. Then she turned on her heel and started running back the way they’d come. “Red Sands has this!” she shouted at her people. “Roughnecks, follow me!”

  Behind them, arrows screamed through the air as what was left of Six Ways From Raiding launched a volley at the Red Sands. With a bellowing roar, Cinco cut the arrows out of the air while Shankfest and his two Assassin buddies appeared in the middle of the raider’s back lines, their blades sinking into the backs of the enemy healers while spells and arrows flew in all directions. It was an effective start, but Tina couldn’t stick around to see if Cinco’s raid-on-raid PvP skills were really as badass as he claimed. She was already sprinting around the corner, tearing off the main hallway into one of the Royal Quarter’s less-used side wings.

  “Where are we going?” Neko cried, running beside her on all fours, jubatus style. “This is the top of the dungeon! The only place left is the Terrace of the Great Pyre at the peak, but you can’t even get up there until the Once King breaks the ceiling when he moves to phase two!”

  “Maybe back in the game,” Tina said, turning down a hall that led out to one of the dungeon’s many huge, scenic balconies that overlooked the Deadlands. “But as I keep telling you, this isn’t a game. We make our own way now!”

  “Is that why we’re headed to Mthr’s balcony?” SilentBlayde asked, keeping up with her nimbly.

  Tina nodded. “If we can’t go through the throne room, we’ll go straight up the outside of the mountain itself. Bet old Mr. Pigeon Wings hasn’t thought of that.”

  She smirked at her own cleverness as they pelted through the arched doorway onto the football field–sized balcony that the undead Bird Mthr used to come and go from the fortress. The balcony that, since she’d watched Mthr go down fighting Xthr back in Bastion, was supposed to be empty.

  “Goddammit!” Tina cried, skidding to a halt.

  “Huh,” SB said, stopping much more gracefully beside her. “Looks like he thought of that.”

  Yet another raid of undead players stood in front of them, taking up the whole outer half of the semicircular balcony in perfect formation. It was hard to recognize the characters without their nameplates, but even with its golden sun steel turned to black Eclipsed Steel by undeath, there was no mistaking her own damn shield. That was the Sun’s Resplendent Bulwark, albeit a far less dented version than the one in Tina’s hands, and holding it was a tall human Knight with black hair that Tina would know anywhere.

  “Goddammit,” Tina swore again, sadly this time. “They got Isabella.”

  “Wait, you know her, too?” Frank said, huffing up beside her. “Dang, did you know everybody in this game?”

  This high up in the raiding ranks, everyone knew everyone, but Isabella was special. She was the only other girl besides Tina who played a DMF-level tank. She and her husband ran El Major, the guild who’d been ahead of the Roughnecks before Tina’s group beat Sanguilar and took their spot. There’d been a lot of drama over the upset, but she and Isabella had always been tight. Tina used to get drunk in real life just so she could log in and meet Izzy at Bastion’s Royal Mile Pub for drunken shit talk and gossip. Her friend had been so funny, so full of life, and now she was here, staring at Tina with eyes full of ghostfire.

  “SB,” Tina whispered, blinking the tears out of her eyes, “is there any way to—”

  She hadn’t even finished before the elf shook his head. “The ghostfire has spread completely through her. The best we can do for her now is to end this before she suffers more.”

  She’d known he was going to say that, but that didn’t make hearing it any easier. These weren’t random players like the ones in Sanguilar’s room. These were her former rivals and friends. She’d done co-raids with El Major when times were tough and attendance was low. Fighting them now, even when they were like this…It was too cruel. She refused.

  “Roughnecks!” Tina yelled, pointing her sword at the undead players. “External on the Enemy!”

  She’d never given an order like that before, but to her raid’s credit, they rolled with it.

  “Got it!” Anders yelled, and then the balcony was filled with golden light as he cried, “Sanctuary of the Four!”

  The golden shield-dome slammed down over the undead raid in the nick of time. The enemy players’ terrifying volley of spells and arrows rattled off the inside of the barrier, bouncing back to strike them instead of the Roughnecks’ HP.

  “Eight seconds, Roxxy!” Anders called.

  She nodded and turned, pointing her sword at the far end of the balcony, where the intricately carved railing met the sheer stone of the mountain itself. “Roughnecks, that way! We’re going up!”

  The raid sprinted forward. Halfway there, the golden bubble holding in the enemy raid popped. “External on the Enemy!” Tina yelled again, and the undead players were suddenly trapped inside a Circle of Thorns instead.

  “Good work! Keep them canned!” Tina yelled, ditching her backpack and slinging her shield onto her back instead. “Neko, hop on!”

  The jubatus leaped onto Tina’s shield, clinging to her like a monkey. When she was secure, Tina hopped the banister and hurled herself at the cliff, digging her armored fingers into the slick, icy stone.

  Looking up, Tina saw nothing but rock, which was exactly what she’d hoped for. The second and third phases of the Once King’s fight were held at the very top of the Dead Mountain on the Terrace of the Great Pyre, a huge, flat, circular stone courtyard that was cut like a bite into the very top of the mountain’s sword-like peak. Back in the game, the only way up was a secret stair that broke open when the Once King crashed through his ceiling at the end of phase one.

  But Tina had been up that spiral staircase many, many times. She knew it had huge panorama windows to show the passing players just how high up they were so they’d be properly terrified when they reached the top and entered the part of the fight in which the Once King could knock them off the mountain. If she remembered correctly—and assuming the vistas had been actual features of the fortress and not just art assets—one of those windows should have been right above them. Sure enough, Tina could just see the neatly laid stone bottom of the enclosed stairwell that spiraled up the mountain’s peak jutting out from the icy cliff almost a hundred feet above their heads.

  “There!” she cried, pointing up at their goal. “That’s our in. Let’s go!”

  Order given, Tina gritted her teeth and started to climb.

  It was one of the hardest things she’d ever had to do. Fear in battle was nothing compared to the terror of hanging from what was basically a sheer frozen wall by her fingers and toes. The wind tore across the cliff-face like a tornado, spattering her with ice and grit. The biggest gusts were
strong enough to physically lift her off the rock, making Tina miss her stonekin body something fierce as she hauled herself and Neko up the mountain on nothing but pure adrenaline. Whenever she couldn’t find a handhold, she used her magically augmented strength to punch one into the rock, leaving a ladder of holes for the others to follow.

  “How’re we doing?” she yelled to Neko.

  “Fuckfuckfuck!” was the Naturalist’s reply. An arrow screamed past Tina’s head a second later, making the rock next to her explode. “Fuck!” Neko yelled, whacking Tina in the head with her staff as she cast the next Circle of Thorns. “STAY PUT, YOU ASSHOLES!”

  “Good job,” Tina said, kicking her metal boot against the cliff to make a foothold.

  “Only if you don’t look down,” Neko groaned, burying her cat face in Tina’s hair.

  Tina looked down. She must have been making better progress than she’d realized, because the balcony was now far below them. Her guild was spread out over the cliff face below as everyone looked for the way up that was best suited to their body. The Agility and Strength characters were helping the casters just as she was helping Neko, but no one was having an easy time. A Sorcerer slipped as she watched, falling a good ten feet into the gray abyss below before a Ranger snagged him back onto the wall. Far below, Neko’s latest external on Isabella’s raid was already fading. A Cleric picked them up again the moment Circle of Thorns ran out, but Tina could feel their hold on the situation fraying.

  “We’re almost there!” she yelled over the wind. “Faster, people, faster!”

  Leading by example, Tina launched with her legs, jumping up the cliff to grab hold of a tiny stone crack no wider than her pinky finger. It held, thankfully, but the worst was yet to come. They were nearing the enclosed stairwell to the Terrace of the Great Pyre. This close to the peak, there wasn’t actually room to put the raid-sized spiral staircase inside the mountain, so it ran around the outside of the mountain instead, circling up the sheer peak like a stone snake. Unfortunately for them, this arrangement meant that to reach the windows, they were going to have to climb upside down across the bottom of the stairwell and then up the other side, which meant their climb was about to go from straight up a sheer cliff to dangling off an inverted ledge above a thousand-foot drop.

  “Uh, Roxxy,” NekoBaby said, her voice even higher pitched than usual as she realized what they were about to do. “Are you by any chance a skilled mountaineer?”

  “Nope,” Tina said, digging her fingers into the underside of the thick stone ledge that supported the stairs. “Just gonna beast-mode it.”

  “I hate this plan!” Neko cried, wrapping her arms around Tina’s neck.

  Fighting not to choke, Tina braced her legs and pushed them both onto the underside of the ledge. As the angle got sharper, she let go with one hand to draw her sword, stabbing the magical blade into the rock. This gave her something to hold on to, but the scariest part was coming next. Somehow, they had to go from dangling under the overhang to climbing over it.

  There was no easy way to do this, so Tina took a deep breath and winged it, holding onto her sword with one hand while she swung her body like a pendulum. After three swings, she got enough momentum to hook a metal-booted foot onto the outside wall of the enclosed stairwell. Another swing got her spare hand up there. Digging her fingers into the cracks between the huge stone slabs that protected the stairwell from the drop she was now dangling over, Tina used her new hold as leverage to wrench her sword free and stab it above her head instead.

  The first try ended with broken stone falling on her head, but the second stab went in deep, giving her a solid anchor on the stairwell’s outer wall. From there, it was just a matter of hauling herself up one handed to the window ledge. She grabbed it so hard that her metal glove left a handprint in the granite, but she didn’t slip. Neko was already clambering up her extended arm like a terrified cat, jumping through the window onto the stairs inside before turning around to help haul Tina the rest of the way.

  “That was the worst part of my life!” the Naturalist yelled as Tina flopped through the window to sprawl on the stone stairs inside. “You just gave me PTSD!”

  Tina was pretty sure that wasn’t how PTSD worked, but now wasn’t the time for definitions. They’d finally made it to the stairwell that led up the mountain to the Once King’s terrace. Now they just had to figure out how to get the rest of the raid in here, too.

  Still huffing from the effort of the climb, Tina hauled herself off her back and stuck her head back out the window, using her sword—which was still stabbed into the wall outside—as an anchor to lean her whole body out the window so she could see what was happening on the cliff below. As she’d feared, her guild had made it to the bottom of the stairs but was stalling at the ledge. The Agility classes could handle dangling upside down from sheer rock, but everyone else seemed too terrified to try, which she supposed was fair. If she wanted to get everyone up here safe and sound and ready to fight, she was going to have to think of something better than beast mode.

  “We need some rope,” she said, turning to Neko. “Don’t you do vines and shit?”

  “Way ahead of you, chica,” Neko said smugly, digging into her pack to pull out a hundred-foot coil of giant metal chains glowing with amber enchantments.

  Tina gaped at her. “You mean you were carrying those the whole time?!”

  “What?” Neko cried. “It’s not like you handed me a customs form before kidnapping me up a mountain! These are the chains Zen brought for our totally boss Once King beat-down plan. Someone had to carry them, since it’s not like the mailman was going to deliver them up here for us! And before you bitch about the added weight, I watched you lift a fully armored CincoDeFatty over your new tiny head just yesterday. You could totally handle me plus hardware.”

  Since she’d just done exactly that, Tina couldn’t say a damn thing except “Thanks” as she took the chain from Neko and started wrapping one end around the metal banister. While she secured the anchor, Neko tossed the other end of the chain out the window.

  “Heads up!”

  There was a surprised shout and a grunt of pain. Then the chain stopped swinging, and Killbox’s flushed face appeared over the ledge, his black hair soaked in nervous sweat. “This place fucking sucks!” he announced in a terrified voice, hauling himself—and the two casters clinging to his shoulders—across the final sheer few feet to dump himself through the window. “I don’t feel so bad anymore about never actually going on a DMF raid. This is some bullshit!”

  “We didn’t go this way in the game,” Tina said, bracing against the chain for extra support. “How are we doing?”

  “Everyone’s on their way up,” SilentBlayde reported, stepping out of her shadow with the perfectly unmussed appearance of someone who hadn’t just had to scale a mountain upside down. “But El Major is still coming. The moment we got too far up to keep them bottled with externals, they started coming up the cliff after us.”

  “Freaking zombies, man!” Neko cried as she helped the next batch of raiders through the window. “They never quit!”

  “Neither do we,” Tina said, handing the end of the chain to Killbox so she’d be free to go back to the window, leaning her body way out again to see—ah ha.

  “Anders!” she cried, reaching down to grab the fish man off Frank’s back. “We got zombies incoming! I need you and Neko to do that Holy Water combo thing from Bastion again.”

  “I can try,” Anders said, the gills in his neck still flaring from the terror of the climb. “But it’s really hard to do holy magic in this place. I didn’t realize just how much the cloud cover interfered until I cast Sanctuary of the Four.”

  “Just do your best,” Tina said, pushing him back toward the window. “And try not to wash any of our people off.”

  “You say that like we have fine-tuned control,” Neko grumped, giving Anders some deadly side-eye as she stepped up next to him. “But whatever. I’m awesome. We got this so long as
Fish Face doesn’t fuck it up.”

  Anders slumped, but he didn’t fight back, and Tina sighed. “Just do it,” she ordered, peering down the mountain at the ghostfire-filled raiders she could now clearly see scaling the cliff just a few hundred feet away.

  With a final glare at Anders, Neko held out her hands to summon a ball of glowing water. The Cleric waved his staff next, whispering what sounded like a deeply sincere prayer. It took a few seconds, but eventually golden light blossomed from his weapon to fill the swirling ball. Neko was hauling back to hurl the thing down the cliff like a beach ball when Tina said, “Gently.”

  Rolling her eyes, Neko nudged the golden-blue ball of magical water out the window instead, using her staff to arc the ball in midair so that it flew around the overhang where the Roughnecks were still climbing before landing like a water balloon on the cliff face just below Zen, who was bringing up the rear.

  “Any reason in particular you wanted me to go easy?” Neko asked. “Cause I could have fire-hosed them.”

  “But that would have blasted them off the cliff into a thousand-foot drop,” Tina said, holding the chain steady as the last of her raid climbed up. “El Major deserves better from us, and this was just as effective. Look.”

  Neko, Anders, and everyone else crowded to the window.

  “Damn,” Killbox said. “They’re all sliding back down!”

  Tina grinned in victory. “Holy water becomes holy ice when you blast it with freezing wind,” she said smugly, nodding at the zombie raiders as they slid all the way back down to the balcony below. “That should keep them busy long enough for us to finish this.”

  And speaking of, everyone was inside now. Zen was the last. She climbed through the window as Tina watched, hopping into the enclosed stairwell with her usual flawless grace, which meant it was time.