“Fiancé?” I said and glanced at Anna.
“Kincaid, can you please just fuck off?” said Anna.
Rather than do so, the tall mage inspected me and Trinity with amusement. He came to stand before me and smirked at my armor, scoffed at my weapons, then he shook his head and glanced at Anna.
“Are you done playing with your new boy toy? We have work to do.” He turned from me and started toward his dragon. “Come on, Anastasia.”
“Didn’t you hear the woman?” I said as I performed the hand gestures and conjured Magic Bolt. The magic was wild, powerful. I could feel it coursing through my arm, waiting to be unleashed. “She said fuck off.”
Kincaid stopped dead and slowly turned around to glare at me.
I didn’t give him time. Instead, I shot out my hands and unleashed my new spell. The dagger-thin bolt of magic shot across the stone in a blur and hit Kincaid right in the chest. The explosion that followed should have turned the mage to ash, but to my horror he was still standing there when the smoke cleared.
I wasn’t sure what I had expected to happen, but that wasn’t it.
“What was that?” he asked me with a grin as his silver robes shimmered with the absorbed power. “Magic bolt? Not bad. Do you want to see what it looks like when a real mage performs the spell?”
“Kincaid leave him alone,” said Anna. “Look, if you want to go somewhere and talk, then we can talk. Just leave my guild mates out of it.”
“Guildmates?” he said with a cocked brow. He stormed over to her, but Trinity blocked his way.
“Don’t you dare touch—” said the Trinity, but before she could finish Kincaid hit her with a blast from his palm that exploded through her chest, lifted her off her feet, and slammed her into the rock face.
“You fucking asshole!” I screamed and tried to unleash another Magic Bolt, but suddenly someone grabbed my hand, and a heartbeat later a grinning assassin stuck a dagger in my right kidney. My cloth armor tore with barely a sound, and the blade sunk deep into my skin.
I dropped to one knee, gasping, as the assassin put a knife to my throat and yanked my head back.
Kincaid grabbed Anna’s left arm, ripped back the sleeves of her robe, and pointed at the blazing sword tattooed on her forearm.
“That’s the Lightbringer brand,” he said to her. “And your vow cannot be broken.”
“Take a hint, we’re done.” said Anna. “If you keep harassing me I’m going to--”
“Do what? This game is open PVP. The mods don’t give a shit.”
“We broke up three weeks ago,” said Anna. “And I think I was pretty clear about how I felt. Why can’t you just let it go?”
“Yeah dude,” I croaked. “Let it go.”
Kincaid turned his ire from Anna to me, just as I had hoped. He strode over to me and slowly performed the gestures to conjure a fireball. The spell grew in his right hand as he cocked it back, but he held it there, grinning. Then he placed his hand on my forehead as I struggled against the assassin holding me.
“You know what, Loverboy? You’re now a marked man. You’re fucked. You could have just kept your mouth shut, let me talk to my fiancé—”
“Ex,” I corrected him.
His nostrils flared and the heat against my forehead intensified.
“Tell me, Sammy. Have you ever felt a fireball go off at close range? Say, right against your fucking skull?”
“No,” I said. “But I’ve felt your ex’s mouth on my cock.”
The warlock in his guild snickered, and Kincaid’s eyes narrowed dangerously.
“You see, Kin,” I croaked. “I’ve got what the girls like to call the magic stick. It’s my special ability, and every time I have sex, I level, and so does the lucky lady. So, you can blow my head off. You can track us down and gank us all you want, because to level back again, all I gotta do is make sweet love to your ex over there.”
“Shut the fuck up!” he said through clenched teeth.
“Just get the hell out of here,” I said. “Before you make an in-game enemy that you don’t want to have.”
“Get a load of this guy,” Kincaid said to his guild mates and glanced over his shoulder, but none of them were laughing with him anymore.
“I’m warning you, dude,” I said as I glared up at him. “You’re what, level 20? I’ll be there in three days tops. In a week I’ll be a level 25, and you’ll have gone up to 21 if you’re lucky. If you don’t leave now, and stop stalking Anna, you’ll wish we never met. I’ll make it my mission to gank your ass down to level 1, then I’ll let you stay there, everyday fearing when I’ll kill you again and cast you down to the underworld for good. And then, when your rich parents buy you in again...I’ll be there. I’ll find out your new name. I’ll find your new avatar, and I’ll make you my bitch. Perhaps you can serve in my court when I take this whole goddamned realm and become king. Maybe you could be my jester.”
I saw real fear in Kincaid’s eyes, and we all waited for the man to seal his own fate. He glanced at his guild mates, but none of them met his eyes. He looked to Anna, and she offered him a sympathetic shrug. Then he looked to me, and whatever logic might have been working its way into his brain fled the moment our eyes met.
“Bring it on, asshole,” he said, before blowing my head off with a fireball.
Chapter 11
“Hey Ember,” I said to the ghost sitting on the angel statue’s head.
“Sam!” she yelled and floated down to me. “What happened? Where are the others?”
“I guess I pissed Kincaid off a bit too much or scared him. Either way, he killed me, and now I think that he might do something to Anna.”
“What do you mean?”
I didn’t answer, because just then Trinity appeared.
“He took her,” she said frantically as she floated over to us.
“What do you mean?” I asked. I knew damn well what she meant, I just didn’t want it to be true.
“He kidnapped her. I saw him loading her on his dragon before that creepy witch doctor ripped my heart out.”
“Jesus, I’m sorry Trin. That must have hurt like hell.”
“Nah,” she said. “My special ability is to turn off pain during fights. Didn’t I tell you all that?”
“No, you didn’t,” said Ember.
“Look, we’ve got to focus,” I said. “We’ve got to figure out how to get Anna back.”
“First things first,” said Ember as she floated before me. “We need to get back to our bodies.”
“You think they’re going to be waiting for us?” I asked, not wanting to get ganked as soon as I respawned.
“I saw them fly away,” said Trinity. “Come on.”
She zipped out of the cemetery like a comet, and Ember and I followed close behind. When I had been a ghost before I hadn’t known where my body was, but this time I knew the lay of the land, and I shot up the ridge from the cemetery in the valley in about five seconds.
Once we came to the ridge I dove into my body, and I sat up and took in a shocked breath.
About one second later I noticed that I was completely naked, and so were the girls.
“Those assholes took everything!” said Trinity as she got up and hugged herself.
Ember shivered beside her, and I tried to focus on not freezing, rather than their perky frozen nipples.
“Come on,” said Ember. “We need to get back to the hideout before we freeze to death.”
Naked and shivering, the three of us started the arduous journey back around the ridge to home base. I thought for sure we would freeze to death before we got there, and we almost did. By the time the cave entrance came into view I couldn’t feel my fingers, and my health was down to 23%.
Then, to further my annoyance, Dr. Marks suddenly appeared in the mouth of the cave, along with a hologram of my parents in his open palm.
“Jesus!” I said as I covered my junk.”
“Sammy? Is that you?” my mother asked. “Honey why are yo
u all blue in the lips. You look like you’re freezing!”
My dad’s eyes had moved to Ember and Trinity, and he looked like a deer caught in the headlights as he stared at their naked, quivering forms. They both dove behind a wide pine bough and my dad snapped out of it.
“What the hell…” he said mystified.
“Sammy are you in trouble again?” My mother asked.
“Not a good time guys, you’re going to have to visit me later. I need to get inside before I die.”
“Die?” my mother screamed.
“My dad turned to the doctor, which was hilarious given that the doctor held both of my miniature parents in his palm.
“What kind of shit show are you running!” my father demanded.
“My mistake,” said Dr. Marks. “I need to end this communication. Please wait for me outside my office.”
“What the hell, man?” I asked Dr. Marks as I ran for the cave entrance. “Come on! Trin, Em!”
We hurried into our hideout, and Dr. Marks came meandering in a few seconds after we had all covered up with blankets from the beds.
“Looks like you’ve gotten yourself out of jail without my help,” said Dr. Marks as he buffed us all with a spell that warmed our bones and returned us to full health.
“Who’s he?” Trinity asked me.
“My Doctor,” I said, before squaring on Dr. Marks. “Listen, can you give me some warning before my parents visit?”
“I did, you must have missed it.”
I checked my interface, and sure enough, there it was blinking in the top left corner. I faintly recalled seeing it while bantering with Kincaid.
“Listen, Doc, my friend has been kidnapped by another player. Is there anything you can do? I mean, kidnapping has to be against the rules of the game, right?”
“What player has been kidnapped?” he asked.
“Anna. She’s a human priestess.”
“Kidnapped by whom?”
“Kincaid, level 20 mage.”
The doctor’s eyes flashed with recognition and something akin to surprise. “Hmm,” he said as he swiped aside something on his interface. “Well, you know, she can always log off.”
“Log off?” I said. “That’s your answer? Look, Kincaid is like her ex fiancé or something. This is real world animosity we’re talking about. He ganked the group, killed the three of us, and kidnapped our guild mate. Are you telling me that this is all part of the game?”
“What I am telling you,” said the doctor. “Is that it sounds like what your girlfriend needs more than corporate intervention, is a knight in shining armor. Come on! Where’s your sense of adventure?”
“If you say something about a damsel in distress, Imma kick you in the balls,” Trinity told him with a firm folding of the arms and a loose bobbing of the head.
“So kidnapping is part of the game, and it should be looked at as a fun quest?” said Ember.
“Have you reported the kidnapping to the in-game lawmen?” Dr. Marks asked. “The NPCs take their jobs quite seriously.”
“It’s kind of hard to report a crime to the NPC guards when you’re wanted,” I said.
“Ah, yes,” the doctor murmured as he swiped through his interface. “You are wanted for disturbing the peace and personally attacking four guards inside the jailhouse in Riverton.”
“That wasn’t my fault, it was that dickhead Kincaid.”
“Well, seems to me like you better take care of this Kincaid character. I wish I could help, but I must be going. Good luck, Sam, I hope you get your friend back.”
“Doctor, wait!” I said, but he suddenly disappeared.
“Great, now what?” said Ember.
“I say we get leveling,” said Trinity. “The only way we’re going to free Anna is if we level up to like 25 and go kick his ass.”
“That’ll take too long,” Ember said. “Hey, maybe we can ransom Anna. If we could defeat Mad Morgan and get your gold back, we could offer the money to Kincaid to leave her alone.”
“Not going to happen,” I told her “That dude’s an asshole. But I do think it’s a good idea to take out Mad Morgan and get my gold back. Then maybe we can pay some higher-level players to go kick Kincaid’s ass.”
“I like that,” Ember said as she rummaged through her things. “But it isn’t going to be easy to take out Mad Morgan. “He’s what, a level 15 or something? And he’s got five people in his posse.”
“Not to mention, we don’t have our healer anymore,” said Trinity.
“We’ll figure it out,” I said. “First things first, we need to get to a city or a town and get to our bank vaults. “I’m assuming you two have armor, weapons, and money stashed.”
“Of course,” said Ember. “But we sure as hell can’t go to Riverton.”
“No, we’re going to have to visit the dwarf city and hope for the best,” I said.
Ember pulled a bundle of old cloth robes out of one of the bags she had laying around the hideout, and although they were nothing compared to the robes that I had lost to Kincaid, it was better than venturing through the mountains naked. Ember also had a bunch of furry coats that she had looted from the nearby wildlife during her time in the mountains, and there were enough old boots in her horde of crappy loot for us all to find a pair that fit.
“We’re so going to die before we reach the dwarf city,” said Trinity. She looked nothing like the warrior that I knew her to be in the low-level cloth robes. She glanced down at the old rusty short sword in her right hand and gave a sigh.
“We still have our spells,” I said.
“I’ve also got some minor health and mana potions around here somewhere too,” said Ember.
Once we were as ready as we were ever going to be, we headed out into the waning light of day and headed west along the ridge once more. The snow had stopped falling, and the wind had died down as well.
We stuck to the path and ignored the creatures on the slopes and in the trees, not wanting to get into any more trouble. In our current condition we would have been lucky to take out a level 15 bear, and if we died out here we would all drop another level.
“We’re about halfway there,” said Ember as we came around the west wide of the mountain and beheld a sea of white spires that stretched off to the north as far as I could see. She pointed down toward the valley between two mountains. “You see those gilded gates? That’s the entrance to the dwarf city. But I know another way in, one without guards. Follow me.”
Trinity and I followed Ember around the mountain face to the east side, and she ventured off the path about halfway down and disappeared behind a big boulder.
“In here,” she said from beneath the rock.
The boulder hid a large hole set behind a thick oak trunk, and I had all I could do to squeeze through. Once I did, I dropped a few feet into an earthen tunnel. I helped Trinity through, and Ember lit an enchanted torch with but a word.
“This way,” she whispered, and led us to the right, down a narrow tunnel littered with roots and worms and dirt.
After about ten minutes of scuttling through small spaces, and creeping over soft and oozing mysteries that smelled fowl when they burst beneath our weight, loud voices began to reach us there in the subterranean depths. Ember stopped in front of an iron grate set in the stone to our right, and I crept up next to her to spy the scene. The angle was bad, but we appeared to be under a table. All I could see were boots and ankles, but it appeared that there was a pretty good-sized crowd gathered around the many tables. I realized quickly that I must have been looking at a market.
“I’ll go first and make sure the coast is clear,” said Ember, and she cast her cloaking spell.
She pushed the grate off its mooring, careful not to let it fall on the stone floor, and silently squeezed through the hole. A moment later she gave us the all-clear, and I followed Trinity out of the tunnel on my hands and knees. We came out under a table, and Ember ushered us over to one end.
“All clear,” she s
aid as she held back the table cloth.
Trinity and I popped up beside Ember, and hardly any of the gathered people took notice. They were too busy looking at the many wares. I noticed that most of the people in the market were real players, and most of them were a higher level than I was.
“This way,” said Ember, and she led us through the crowd, deeper into the wide chamber.
I craned my neck back to take in the grandeur of the mammoth dwarven chamber. The ornately carved columns spiraled up into the deep gloom of the ceiling, which curved down to meet walls hung with giant paintings depicting dwarves battling monsters, kings of old, and unnamed heroes. Along the walls on the side nearest us were several shops. Ember had led us out of the tunnel between two shops, and the table that we had clambered out from under was covered in fine furs.
The crowd was made up of mostly dwarves, and there were hundreds of them. There were some humans, as well as elves, trolls, halflings, furries, and several other, more rare races.
Ember stopped in front of a group of bank vaults, and we all grabbed our stored gear and what money we had put away. I still had some of the gold that Anna had lent me, and I would need every copper penny to get some decent armor.
We had begun to gain some strange looks dressed in our shabby clothes, but once we changed into better armor we blended into the crowd easily. After withdrawing our goods from the bank vault, we shopped around for weapons and other enchanted items that would help us defeat Mad Morgan and the Creepers. Ember had nearly 100 gold in her vault, and she spent over ten on traps, smoke bombs, and other tools of her trade. I picked up a ring that would increase my fireball by 25%, and with a small loan from Ember, I bought a blue, level 11 robe that would increase my mana by 10%, and also give me +10% spell damage. We bought about a dozen health and mana potions, since we wouldn’t have a healer when we faced Morgan.
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