The boom of cannon fire shatters the air as I run atop the defense wall. Below me the sea of warring goblins is momentarily parted as the cannon balls find their marks and blow scores of goblin bodies into the air. Blacktop yells for his cannon brigade—a team of perhaps thirty miners—to reload, and the men race to stuff more cannon balls into the black iron barrels of the dozen or so siege weapons Gilly has managed to produce.

Beyond the goblins, the hulking forms of the nether trolls wade their way through their smaller kin, crushing and killing them with just as much indifference as if they were enemies. The sight is unnerving and a flush of anxiety courses through me. The walls won’t hold forever.

In fact, they probably won’t last even an hour.

I need to act fast.

“Where is he?” I ask Lady Diana with more urgency as we race across the wall together.

“He’s running towards us now,” Lady Diana says. “We’ll meet with him soon.”

Just behind me, Gilly glances over her shoulder nervously at the goblin horde. Her green eyes then snap forward with even more worry as the greater threat to our existence comes into view. King Braxus’s Army, at least two thousand strong looms across the grassy plains like a carpet of death and has already begun assaulting the eastern side of the city.

“This is not good,” she mumbles, her eyes filled with the city administration layout. “Not good at all. The wall is already down to 75%.”

“Don’t worry,” I say. “We’ll make this happen. Trust me.”

I say a quick prayer and hope I’m right.

Lady Diana stops short as the bulbous form of Lord Xavier nearly crashes into her, the fat man breathing heavily as he rests his hands on his knees. Diana raises her left hand and the glowing emerald ring on her finger causes Xavier to straighten to attention as she addresses him. “Took you long enough, you fat oaf.”

The man scowls despite the magical control being exerted over him by the green garments once worn by Lady Diana.

“Enjoy this while you can,” he says with a scowl. “My master is here and your pathetic village will soon be overrun.”

“We’ll see about that,” I say as I step towards him. I access my character menu and adjust my subclass skills, sacrificing every slot I have to load the only skill I’ll need. I hadn’t realized it at the time, but I had automatically unlocked the Ruler class as soon as I became the administrator of Brookrun Village. It was Gilly who had brought it to my attention and as I leveled Knight fighting those Nether Trolls, I leveled it as well; unlocking as many of its abilities as I could. If I was finally going to do battle with the likes of Braxus, I needed to fight fire with fire. “Now, if you don’t mind, you’re going to answer some very important questions for me.”

“You’ll get nothing—”

His words stop short as Lady Diana balls her hand into a fist and the emerald ring glows again.

“Oh I think you will,” she says with a squint of her cop eyes. “In fact, I insist.”

* * *

“Harvest the Crystal Shards?”

Carl looked back at Bruce with as much skepticism and confusion as he would expect. In truth the entire idea still sounded crazy to him as well. But it would explain a lot of Dennis’s actions.

“Cedric views these things as some kind of gods,” Bruce said. “And really, when you consider what a builder truly is, there wouldn’t be much difference from being god when within a virtual space.”

“Yeah but what do you mean by harvest?” Carl asked.

Bruce did his best to convey the half hour long conversation he’d just had with Cedric.

“The kid’s still loopy for sure,” Bruce said. “Be he kept going on about offering them, the Builders, the best of what we had. Like a sacrifice.”

Carl frowned a bit as his eyes drifted to the side in thought.

“That’s why I think he’s trying to get everyone into the Shards,” Bruce continued. “He means to sacrifice everyone.”

“To the builders? How’s that even make sense?”

“I don’t know…he kept talking about this feast. Eating people and crap. I dunno. Maybe it’s more metaphysical than literal or something but--.”

“No, no,” Carl said cutting him off. “I mean how’s that make any sense it being a sacrifice if he just offers everyone? How’s that offering the best?”

That thought made him pause. “Yeah, I’m not sure… but you see what Dennis is trying to do, don’t you? Any crisis we have, the first thing he wants to do is shove everyone into a damn stasis pods. It has to be what he’s after.”

“Hmm,” Carl said as he nodded. “Maybe he’s done it already.”

Bruce squinted. “What do you mean?”

“Well half the population live inside those things already. And voluntarily at that. But more so I’m thinking of the systems inside them.”

“I don’t follow you,” Bruce said.

“Look at it this way. If you had to sacrifice your very best, how would you go about determining who that best is?” Carl said. “You’d need some way to compare them to one another, right? To see who’s on top.”

Bruce shrugged. “Like a competition?”

“I’m thinking more like a game.”

Bruce’s stomach dropped as the implication began to unfold in his mind. “You’re right. The game worlds within the Crystal Shards are the perfect testing ground for sifting the wheat from the chaff so to speak. But you’re not thinking Dennis designed the Crystal Shards with that sole purpose in mind, are you? Right from the start?”

Carl frowned again. “Maybe not solely, but using the boss fights as a means to identify people fit for travelling to the surface was originally his idea, wasn’t it?”

Bruce’s stomach soured even further as the realization hit him. Perhaps Dennis had been sacrificing people all along. He thought of the hundred if not thousands of scouts who’d ventured to the surface after Boss fights and never returned--their bodies locked in stasis while their minds died. People like Mark Roberts. People like his sons Mike and Ryan.

People like Gilly… His throat tightened a bit.

“Dear God…” Bruce said. “Have we been blindly sacrificing them all along?”

Carl rested a hand on his shoulder, perhaps seeing the despair in his eyes. “Hey, I’m sorry… I didn’t mean to be insensitive about Gilly. I didn’t even give thought to her still being up there when I said it.”

Bruce looked skyward as even more uncertainty set in. Had he been looking in the wrong direction this entire time? He’d been so fixated on what Dennis could be up to, to impact the people of Citadel, that he never gave thought to consider what he might already be doing to affect the excursion team above. Suddenly the conversation he’d overhead took on a whole new meaning.

“You may be right,” Bruce said. “Maybe he’s not trying to deliver us into a death trap…” He tried to quell his anxiety as a feeling of helplessness set in. “Maybe that trap…is for our kids already up there.”

* * *

“Are you absolutely sure about this, Reece?”

Val Helena looks down at me with a concerned frown as she asks me the same question for what has to be the third time. My big brother is standing next to her with an equally concerned look on his face, but his concern comes across more like anger.

“That’s the dumbest damn idea you’ve come up with yet, man,” he says. He then points out across the army of soldiers assaulting the eastern defense wall below us. “Braxus has all the cards right now. What makes you think we can negotiate with him? Plus we already tried to double cross him once already. You really think he’s stupid enough to fall for it twice?”

“No,” I say. “But he probably thinks we’re stupid enough to try it twice. Or at least that’s what I’m hoping. Plus being besieged will play to our advantage right now.”

“I really don’t see how,” Val Helena says with a sigh. Her enormous body is covered in sweat and black goblin blood, the same as my brother. It’s a reminder that the two of them have been going all out trying to defend our village from the onslaught from both sides. My plan probably does sound crazy to them, but it’s actually their frank reactions that might sell the whole thing to Braxus.

“It gives everything more credibility,” I say. “Trust me. If Braxus catches even a hint that something is up, it’ll blow the whole plan.”

I’d gone over said plan with them minutes ago, right after getting all the information I needed out of Lord Xavier. With Lady Diana’s control over him, we’d gotten what I hoped was the truth: the location of where King Braxus’ really was.

“He will be locked in his antechamber,” Lord Xavier had said when Lady Diana demanded the information from him. “But you won’t be able to reach him. Only he can remove the magic seal on the door from the inside.”

With the spell over him, I don’t think Xavier is capable of actually lying, but there is a chance that Braxus actually manned up enough to come to this battlefield himself. And Xavier wouldn’t know that. But knowing who Braxus is, it’s more likely he was still all the way back in Stormwall controlling his puppet from remote control.

It still boggles me that controlling his clones from that distance was even possible, but who knew how the shards actually worked. I’m reminded of Rembrandt’s theory that those sphere we entered were actually light years away and in space somewhere. If that’s true then maybe distances have far less meaning than we think. Still I need to plan for either eventuality. Whether the real Braxus be here on this battlefield or back home in his closet, I needed the plan to succeed.

“If he’s truly back in Stormwall all bunkered down I’ll need to distract his attention long enough here for us to pinpoint him there. Gilly is getting ready to teleport the assault team to Stormwall once we’re ready. Then we’ll have to find our way to Braxus’ secret antechamber and hopefully end him for good. But if he’s actually here in Brookrun, we’ll need to somehow take him out the same way here as well.”

“My money is on that freak being in his castle,” Maxis says. “We all should just go there now and kill him.”

“No,” I say. “If he doesn’t see us all here, especially me, he’ll know something’s up. Plus, I’ve got a contingency for that too. Don’t worry. The main thing is, if he doesn’t think he’s won completely, especially over me, there’s no way he’ll come out of hiding, even back in Stormwall.”

Maxis shakes his head. “I don’t know, man. With what you’re planning, how is he not actually winning completely? You’re basically handing yourself and the entire village over to him, aren’t you?”

I don the cursed green clothing in my inventory, and my brother looks like he’s about to be sick. Then I activate my new subjob skill and suddenly there are two of me.

You use Imposter.

Abilities are halved for each imposter in existence.

Duration: 3 hours

You have reached the maximum of 1 imposter for your level.

“Like I said,” I say in double, and give my brother a twin set of grins. “You’ll just need to trust me.”