Meanwhile…

Despite wearing the best armor money could buy her, Tammy still felt terribly vulnerable.

Under normal circumstances, the big comfy hoodie made her feel invincible. But even with the sleeves pulled up over her hands and her headset tucked under the hood, she wasn’t able to achieve the same sense of invisibility it gave her when she had to go outside.

And she wasn’t even on video.

At least she didn’t need to say anything yet. Fidelis was demanding everyone’s attention and silencing anyone’s interjections by either shouting them down or muting them in the voice call.

She knew it was because getting absolutely obliterated in his own guildhall had made him feel weak, and he needed to exercise the authority he still had. It was a sad exercise in insecurity, though since no one called him out on it, Tammy was reasonably sure she only recognized it because she’d behaved the same way often enough.

“Your stupid gambit,” Fidelis continued, his voice gaining volume and intensity as he went on, “is the only thing that got us killed. Got us all killed! The whole guild was lost to that harebrained scheme. Even the guildhall! Windstars bought our goddamn plot as soon as it went back on the market! Fucking Windstars!” There was a slamming sound of a fist on a desk. It was accompanied by the clatter of glass knocking against glass. “The only people who aren’t at fault for this are the ones who were dead before that stupid fucking idea cost us everything!”

“I agree with you,” Maggie said quickly, her usual shit-eating grin clearly audible in her tone. “But weren’t you alive then, too? So you’re saying you’re just as-”

Her voice abruptly cut out as Fidelis muted her as well.

Despite that, Tammy could almost feel the satisfied cackle that no doubt had the woman rolling on the floor right now. No matter how far she stepped out of line, Maggie was the one officer who was untouchable, even by Fidelis. Her crafting skills made her too important to kick, or even demote.

“We could have ended this,” Fidelis snarled, “if we’d fought together, dragged it out, and kept the guild intact. We didn’t have to demote Rumi and Leileb. The Merciless bastard could have been forced to search the whole country for them. Our guild would be intact, and - more importantly - he wouldn’t have been able to rip through Battle Orders and Intricacy yesterday!”

“What-” Nate started, and then paused, clearing his throat. “With all due respect, sir,” he started again, managing to keep his tone calm and even. “What could we have done about that? Our asses wouldn’t have been a big supplement to Intricacy’s bonkers numbers, and if he ripped through Battle Orders’s raid team as fast as they said, the only thing we could have done there would be to stand around and be more healing fodder for Clive’s Cosmic Barrette. No offense, my man.”

At the prompting of her character’s name, Tammy made her best gravelly man grunt of acknowledgement, hoping that attention wouldn’t fall on her any harder.

“We could have been a resource,” Fidelis snapped. “There are no videos, so we don’t know how close those fights might have been. They could have been turned by one extra heal. A good CC chain. A little more damage at just the right moment. But we’re all here, fucking dead because of this stupid fucking idea.”

Almost everyone who would have called out that it was Fidelis’s idea originally - and that the officers had only raised the stakes on it - was already muted. Andrew and Mel were stubborn enough that they might have said it, but the threat of being removed from the discussion entirely was enough to keep them quiet.

“But we have a second chance,” Fidelis said, taking a breath and audibly calming down. “Direct from JudoThrow. We can right our wrongs and stop this before it goes any farther.”

Tammy winced. They were getting close to her part in this. Without hitting her push-to-talk, she cleared her throat, making ready to put on her bad impression of a completely masculine manly man who was definitely a man.

“I have three zip files,” Fidelis continued. “Running the dot-exe file in them will overwrite your local data and cause your log in to enter an admin character bank. You can pick out a character powerful enough to knock that Merciless asshole right the fuck out.” Fidelis paused for dramatic effect for just long enough to make Tammy roll her eyes. “But there is a cost. Your account will be instantly spiked on logout, and you’ll lose everything. What little you still have - your Arcana, your achievements, your personal housing - will be gone. Total permaban. You’ll have to buy the battlechest again, go through a full reinstall, make a new account with a new email, and start as a naked level 1 in the tutorial all over again.”

Fidelis let that hang in the air for a moment.

The silence dragged on interminably, and Tammy could sense everyone in the room trying to fully process that cost.

A chance at revenge was enticing, but who could ever agree to the consequences?

“I won’t forget the sacrifice of the three of you who agree to accept the file,” Fidelis said at last. “Last of the Strong will be reformed, and I will make sure that every resource we can spare will go to rebuilding what you’ve lost. But it will take time. And I’m sure you all know that some things can never be fully recovered. Your lost housing can’t be restored unless we can buy it from the squatter who takes it from you, and time-restricted events are outside of our reach. But we will try.” Fidelis took another audible breath, blowing it out in a sigh. “I just need you to volunteer.”

The voice channel erupted. Mel and Andrew started complaining about needing more time to think. In the text channel, Asher and Maggie were demanding to be unmuted. Nate tried to ask questions about the specifics of the deal.

But they didn’t matter.

It was time for Tammy to play her part.

“I volunteer,” Tammy growled, speaking from her chest. “Keeping Clive’s house isn’t as important as revenge.”

Even she had to admit that she almost sounded like a man, there.

Fidelis had told her what to say, and she’d spent over an hour practicing it over and over, forcing herself to overcome months of training and over a year of habit to grumble it out in a deeper register.

It felt like such elaborate pageantry. Fidelis wanted to make it seem like there were magic words that the others could have said to get in. He didn’t want to admit that he’d made the decision before even calling the meeting. For whatever reason, it was important to him that the others believed that they’d failed some sort of test.

Tammy didn’t see the value in any of it. But she was probably just going to leave the game anyway. Playing along with Fidelis’s little power trip wasn’t going to hurt her once she uninstalled and changed all her social media profiles.

Her growled words had quieted the group enough that the next person didn’t have to speak up over the chatter of complaints and questions.

“I volunteer,” Juri said, her voice shaking with obvious anger. Though that was practically her normal tone. She just had a resting bitch voice. “Nothing would satisfy me more than actually having a fair fight with that bastard.”

“I volunteer,” Andrew said quickly, “but I just want to clarify before we do this. Are we going to-”

“Shut the fuck up, Andrew,” Fidelis roared into the chat. “I’m not looking for questions, I’m looking for sacrifice!”

“I volunteer,” Orlina said with a sigh. “If I had been a little more patient I could have ended this before he got to the guild hall. One more chance at it seriously, and I’ll fucking solo him if I have to.”

Tammy could tell instantly that Juri and Orlina had been chosen by Fidelis ahead of the meeting as well.

It made sense.

The three of them were the only officers who had been killed ahead of the eventual disaster at the guildhall. The others had all been part of the plan there.

Tammy didn’t know why Fidelis had chosen the way he had. Maybe he feared he couldn’t trust them, and they would tell the others what was going on.

“You are my three, then,” Fidelis said. “Clive, Juri, and Orlina. I’ll send you the zip files. Just open them and run the dot-exe.”

“Now hold on,” Andrew snapped. “I said I would volunteer. Doesn’t that count for-”

“You hesitated,” Fidelis snapped, suddenly enraged again. “You asked questions, you complained. These three jumped at the opportunity to make this right. They want to drag our name out of the mud! You don’t get to compare yourself to people willing to give up everything for the betterment of the guild!”

“What guild?” Mel cut in with a heavy sigh. “We’ve lost everything, Frank. The house, the vault, the bank… Someone’s probably got ten assholes to sign a charter to snipe the name.”

“So you don’t have any fucking loyalty?” Fidelis yelled. Even though the anger wasn’t directed at her, Tammy pushed herself back against her chair, huddling in her protective hoodie. “We don’t mean anything to you? This guild is supposed to be a fucking family!”

“I’ve got your fucking loyalty right here, asswipe,” Mel said. Despite the cursing, her tone was calm and even as ever. It seemed even Fidelis’s temper couldn’t ruffle her feathers. “I’m willing to do whatever is best for the guild. But don’t sit here and try to tell me I’m wrong for hesitating to drink your goddamn poison kool-aid.”

“I agree with you,” Fidelis said coldly. “I’m also willing to do whatever is best for the guild. Like this.”

There was a little musical chirping noise. Mel was kicked from the chat. Not just that, but from the whole channel.

Tammy stared at her screen, slack jawed.

Mel was his closest advisor among the officers - no matter what Andrew said - and he’d just publicly kicked her from the guild.

“Uh,” Andrew said nervously. He tried to affect his usual cavalier tone, but it was pretty obvious that he was trying to weasel his way out of consequences he knew were coming. “Fidelis. Bro. Cutie pie. I think you might be overreacting a little bit. Maybe we should calm down, have a nap, and talk about this like adults, okay?”

“This was a test,” Fidelis said. “And it couldn’t be any more clear that you failed it.”

The musical chirp came again. Andrew was gone.

“The rest of you are on thin fuckin’ ice,” Fidelis said in a much calmer tone of voice. “But being smart enough to hold your fucking tongues is a big step towards keeping your officer seat. The rest of you are dismissed for the day. Juri, Orlina, and Clive, stay in voice with me.”

He paused for a moment, and Tammy’s DM folder flashed a new message for her. She glanced over at the little previous of the message.

FrankSandbeans said:

File attachment: GAMMA_CoS_Key.ZIP

“We have an assault to plan,” Fidelis said, his tone suddenly gleefully sinister.