“Wait-what? What is this?” Dvorak demanded. “I got ‘Identify’ and ‘Truth’? Is that it? Is that all?”

“No.” Raphael shook his head. “I got ‘Heroism’ and ‘Smite’.”

Avina shook her head. “‘Shield of Faith’ and ‘Holy Armor’”

“Oh. Oh, I get it. Very funny.” Dvorak threw up his hands. “Avina said she wanted protection, so she gets defensive buffs. Raphael here acted like the consummate paladin, so he gets spells of holy smackdown. And me? I said I was curious. Serves me right.”

“That’s… that’s rough luck, Dvorak,” said Kyle. What a let-down after such a climactic encounter.

“Well no. It’s a great learning experience,” grumbled Dvorak. “Next time an angel gives me one wish, I’m gonna say ‘I want to win the game.’ I’ll get the ‘beat the game’ spell, right? Bam. All our problems solved.”

“Did any of you guys get spells?” Kyle asked. The other acolytes in the group shook their heads. “Huh. Too bad. It must have only given spells to the original party that triggered the orb.”

“Think we could get spells too while we’re here?” asked one, drawing another arrow. “The orb’s still there on the dias.”

“No,” said Kyle, a little too forcefully. “It’s not worth it. My mana’s gone, we’re down a member, and most of us are hurt. We’ll find some way to cheese the fight later. Maybe get an acolyte to be in a two-man party with our best fighter. Maybe have Avina and Raphael dump their buffs on whoever goes in. Don’t worry, we’ll do this first thing tomorrow.”

Grumbling, the man relented.

They carried Aubrey’s corpse about five minutes into the woods in a direction that didn’t have anything interesting, then hid the corpse under a pile of brush. Kyle put a marker in his minimap in case they needed to come back later to retrieve any items that didn’t respawn with her.

On the way back, Kyle drank a few of Dvorak’s crappy healing potions. They took the edge off the pain, but he could only drink three before getting a “stage one potion poisoning” status effect. Unsure of what that effect did, Kyle decided he’d better stop.

The trip back was uneventful, though the first half was slower than normal because the Acolytes with new spells kept trying to read while walking.

“This ‘identify’ thing might not be half bad,” Dvorak said. “Seems like while it’s active, it can stand in for any skill that gives information. Like, it can act as Monster Lore, Trapsmithing, Enchanting-”

“Wait, what?” Tobungus asked. “It lets you enchant items?”

“No, no, it just gives me the same information I’d get if I were a high level enchanter Examining the item. All it does is let me see things.” Dvorak smiled. “Take that, Kyle! Now I’ll be the master of useless trivia.” Dvorak tapped his menus, pulled out a wilted flower, and stared at it intently for a moment. “This flower,” he began, “is known as the Grange Daisy, and is uncommonly found on forests in the eastern continent. It’s four days away from expiring, has 37 quality, and…” he stopped walking abruptly. “… and it’s used in potions of fortitude.”

“Huh. Interesting,” Kyle said despite his lack of interest.

“Guys!” Dvorak said, more animated than normal. “Guys, this changes everything. This spell gives me the identification skills of a grandmaster herbalist! I can make potions now! Useful ones! Not the crap I’ve been making!”

Over the course of the next mile, Dvorak drained his meager mana casting identify on every flower and herb he happened to be carrying.

* * *

As they approached the city, Kyle saw smoke on the horizon.

“Oh, crap,” he said, dread mounting. “Not again…”

He jogged the last quarter mile. When he broke the treeline, he saw the smoking, smouldering remains of what used to be a field of blackwheat.

“Saboteurs!” Dvorak said. He retrieved his axe and shield. “I’mma identify them so hard!”

“Worse,” said Kyle. He pointed at the town. “Smoke’s coming from inside the walls. Somebody’s set fire to the town again.”

“Again?” asked Tobungus. “This doesn’t happen too often, does it?”

“Once is ‘too often’, let alone twice.” Kyle pulled out his axe. “God, I wish I had some mana.”

“Here,” Dvorak said, pushing a clay flask into Kyle’s hand. “A crappy mana potion. 1% per minute for twenty minutes. Take care, those are expensive.”

Kyle took the potion and drank it immediately. Might as well, given how slowly it worked. It tasted like weak unsweetened tea. He eyed his status, and saw his “potion poisoning” remain at stage 1. Whatever that meant.

“What happened to our militia?” asked Raphael. “Mason should have been in charge of them while Aubrey was out.”

“I hope he’s okay,” said Tobungus.

He wasn’t. Kyle found him lying dead on the road just inside the gate, with a dozen other corpses. It seemed like they took a stand at the gate, and were slain.

Behind them, the town burnt. Nearly all the wooden tier one buildings were on fire, as well as the wooden components of some of the stone tier two buildings. The apothecary in particular looked surprisingly bad. The library was untouched. It was ironic. That was the only building Kyle held a grudge against.

“Nobody looted their bodies,” Tobungus said, rolling Mason’s corpse to be face up. “A mob did this, I guess?”

“Maybe. Look at that wall,” Kyle said, pointing to the stone wall of the tier two bloomery. “There’s a huge black scorch mark on the outside wall. That’s too big to be a torch. It looks like it was hit with a fire attack of some kind.”

“So… what? A dragon then?” Tobungus opened his menus and pulled out his axe. Others followed suit. “Crap,” he said. “I forgot my shield’s gone.”

“Poor Jacob,” said Avina, surveying the line of bodies. “Look at his face.”

Kyle looked. Instead of pink dots or lines, an entire side of his face was wounded-pink. “Yeah,” Kyle said. “Some sort of fiery area of effect.”

“We know how to fight fires though, right?” Dvorak asked. “Bucket brigade? Selectively break houses? Upgrade stuff?”

“It might be too late for that,” Kyle said, jogging to the well anyway. Tobungus, Avina, and Raphael followed. The others split up, going in different directions to check on other buildings.

Kyle pulled the bucket from his inventory. Jacob was right; it was going to come in handy. “Let’s see what we can salvage. Maybe -”

Kyle, on reflex, threw himself to the side as a roar and a blast of heat came from his right.

Kyle looked up from the ground where he’d flung himself. Stepping out of the library was a familiar man.

The man smiled. He was wearing the same rough hide armor Kyle had seen him in when Mia had dumped him in a pile of ash. Only now, the man was also wearing an open-faced golden helm, a tasset made from some dull blue metal, and held a red rod with a serpent’s head in his left hand.

“You!” Kyle shouted. “Wasn’t burning our town once enough for you?”

“No,” he said. “I’m always in the mood to put arrogant bastards in their place.”

“I agree!” shouted Raphael. He charged the man.

The man held his rod in front of him, pointing the serpent’s head at Raphael. A huge torrent of flame spilled from the serpent’s gaping mouth. Raphael screamed and fell to the ground, on fire and twitching. Moments later, he stilled.

“Huh. Normally it takes more than one blast.” The man turned back to Kyle. “Wounded, are we? Did a Sansi get aggressive or something?” The man smiled sadistically.

There was nothing for it. They were outmatched. “Run!” shouted Kyle, and he scrabbled to his feet to flee.

Kyle had intended to scatter, but he found Avina happened to run the same direction as he had. Kyle found himself slowing down slightly to keep pace with the shorter girl; it somehow didn’t seem right to run faster than her, and put her behind.

They ran directly away from the man, but Kyle quickly realized that they’d run into a wall if they kept fleeing in that direction. “We’ve got to double back around,” Kyle said. “Our only chance is to get back out the gate,”

Avina nodded. She was obviously panicked, but she understood. They crept back through the maze of flaming buildings towards the front gate. As they did, they heard another blast of flame, followed shortly by a scream. Dvorak. He was down too.

When they reached the front gate, it was closed. The gate was down, the useless drawbridge up. The man was standing directly in front of the closed entrance, looking around casually and smiling, rod still in hand.

“Not this way. Come on. We’ve got to find a way to scale the wall.”

“Kyle! Kyle, I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die…”

Avina was barely coherent. Kyle had never died in this game, but everybody who had agreed it wasn’t a pleasant experience. Kyle didn’t fault the girl for her extreme anxiety. Not one bit.

“We’ll find a way out. We’ll get through this.” Kyle tried to remember if there was any way to climb up the walls. There was no wall-walk. Just a tower next to the gate. But the man would see them if they went that way, right?

“Still not playing the game, I see.” Kyle heard the man’s shouted gloat over the flames, coming from the direction of the gate. “We should be fighting. PvP exists for a reason. You’ve gotta stop pretending to be a shopkeeper.”

“We’ve got to hide,” Kyle said quietly, stowing his axe. “He’ll get bored and start looking for us. Then we can sneak around behind him and escape by climbing the tower and jumping off.” Avina nodded and started looking around.

“But then, I can understand,” the man monologued. “Why play a game you know you’ll lose? I’ve experienced that first-hand. That elf girl. Adrianne? I met her again at the crystal near Thunder Pass.”

Kyle found two barrels in the tannery that weren’t on fire. After spilling their odiferous contents, he pulled them far enough away from the building they wouldn’t catch fire, and climbed in one as Avina climbed in the other.

“The bitch beat me. Again. Killed me. Took everything except the items I soulbound with the scrolls from Wight’s Hold. And then I realized; I can’t play that game. I can’t win this competition.”

Kyle heard a war-cry, followed by a gout of flame and a scream. Tobungus. He probably tried to ambush the man while he was monologuing.

“But knew I wasn’t bad at this game,” the man continued, as though nothing had happened. “Certainly, I’m better than most. I just wasn’t the best. So I started thinking. What could I do?”

The man’s voice started to get closer. Kyle realized, in retrospect, that he may have made too much noise dragging the barrels away from the tannery. In fact, spilling the barrels would have left large puddles on the ground as well. Suddenly he felt very exposed despite being hidden in a barrel. Kyle opened his skills menu.

“I needed to find a different game to play. Something else to do with the stuff I’ve been dredging from dungeons. Something else to pass the time. And I realized; if I can’t be the hero, maybe I could be the villain. And I knew a little village that just lost its bodyguard.”

The man’s voice was closer now. They’d been found out.

“Tell me; how did you feel when you saw your friend’s corpses, Kyle?” The man’s face popped over the barrel, grinning sadistically and meeting Kyles gaze.

The mana regeneration from Dvorak’s potion was painfully slow, but Kyle had enough for a single ball of fire. He pressed the button and shoved the flame right into the man’s face.

The man screamed and clutched his face with his free hand, and Kyle bucked hard, knocking his barrel over. He scrambled out, then tipped and kicked Avina’s barrel, setting it in motion. He heard a muffled cry as she rolled away.

The man grimaced in anger and pain. His face was splotched with pink burns. He glanced towards the departing barrel.

“Fine. You want to fight? Let’s do this,” Kyle said, drawing attention towards himself. He pulled out his axe as the man turned to face him, ignoring the barrel. “How good can you be if you lost to Mia? Twice?”

“Better than you,” the man said, and pointed his rod at Kyle

Kyle dodged as best he could, but still felt scorching heat as his side was caught in the blast. Even through two levels of resilience, the pain was nearly unbearable. He ran at the man to hack at him with his axe, but the man caught the blade just under the axehead with the rod, and used his left hand to stab Kyle in the gut with a knife Kyle was sure wasn’t there moments before. Kyle doubled over and fell to the ground.

The fight was over before it began. Kyle clutched his pierced stomach with his left hand. He looked up to see the man stow his knife with alarming speed.

“You’re afraid of death. Weak. That means I can control you, Kyle.” The man grinned. “There are two buildings I left intact in your little town. The prison and your precious library. I’m a warlock, but I’m in need of spells, you see? They’re rare drops. And the charges in this rod won’t last forever.”

Kyle could see where this was going. And he thought he could see a way out of it.

“Here’s how this will work,” the man continued. “I’ll keep you in the prison. Sometimes, I’ll let you out to work in the library. You’ll make me spells. Whatever I ask. You’re my little NPC now, you understand?”

Kyle nodded obediently. “What… what do you want first? I’ve got research points. I’ve got paper on me.” He punched some buttons and withdrew a sheet of pencil and a stick of charcoal. “I know when I’m beat. Just don’t flame me.” He prayed the man was falling for it.

The man’s eyes lit with barely controlled excitement. “Can you… can you do a life drain? I don’t have spellcraft. I don’t know what this magic system is capable of.”

“It’s complicated. And it’d cost a lot of mana. The drain rune’s big. It’s a funky shape too. It’d be rough to-”

“Just do it.”

Kyle complied, opening up his spell creation interface. He put together a spell as quickly as he could, trying to maximise its effectiveness in as little time as possible. All the while, the man kept the rod trained on him.

Kyle’s interface was invisible to the man, so he typed a quick private message to Avina now that he had the chance: “man busy so run to tower now.” Hopefully that would get Avina out. There was no way to climb down the tower, but Avina could survive a 15 foot fall, right?

The man’s smile began slowly turning into a scowl. As Kyle felt his time running out, he struggled to decide how much power to put into the spell. He finally settled on a mana cost about three-fourth’s his max. He assumed that the man had ranked attunement as his stat and had a higher maximum mana than Kyle. He opened the keypad and changed the name of the spell from its default to “Life Drain.” He hit the “invent spell” button and watched his precious research points drop. Next, he started crafting a spell scroll with a sheet of paper; with it, any adept could learn the spell.

He hesitated before drawing the final line. Taking a deep breath, he squeezed his eyes shut and swiped the charcoal across the page.

Crafting spell scrolls took mana, and Kyle was nearly out. What he was missing was pulled from his HP, and he bit back a shout as the pain washed over him in a wave. When it dulled slightly, he opened his status to see his HP. Only about a fifth left.

“Here. Life drain,” Kyle said, handing the man the scroll, trying to keep his voice from trembling. “It can’t drop the subject below one HP, though. It’s just a limitation of the system. With another rank or two of spellcraft, I might be able to get around it.”

“One HP, huh? You don’t say…” The man tapped some buttons, and the scroll crumbled in the man’s grasp. His face contorted into a sadistic smirk. “I guess it’s safe to test it out, then. I owe you for that fireball…”

The man punched some buttons and raised his hand, pointing it at Kyle. Light purple smoke leaked from his fingertips.

Kyle put on his best “scared” face.

Then the man’s eyes drooped, and he fell to his knees, panting heavily.

The “Sleep” effect rune and the “Self-target” delivery rune don’t fit together very well, but when you could pump that much mana into it, it hardly mattered.

“You bastard,” the man said, stifling a yawn as he sank lower to the ground. Kyle started to stand, exultant. He had done it. He had won.

Then a blast of fire shot out of the man’s rod, catching Kyle by surprise.

Kyle heard himself scream as his entire world became nothing but searing, red-hot pain.

Then everything went black.