1

The transition to the realms was brief in real-time. It was a dreamy state that elicited feelings of contentment and happiness for most of the team members.

Except for Harper. She found herself back on Nuclear Nights. She had disposed of Bigfoot Bjorn and Silo. The only competitors left were the noobs, but there were a lot of them and they were all slow-moving zombies.

Gonna be easy pickings, she thought. She blasted the closest zombie, and it lit up like a torch. The zombie noob, a guy who went by the name of AwesomeAndrew537, continued toward her. Harper expected that. The zombies were easy to vanquish, but they took a long time to snuff out. They were big trouble if they got close to you, as their touch would change your status to cursed and poisoned. Then, of course, there was the chewing-your-flesh-off part. But if you kept your distance, their hit points just continued dwindling.

A rotted hand settled onto her shoulder.

Harper spun around and saw her dead sister. Megan’s blue eyes were now a milky gray. The corpse raised its other arm and placed it on Harper’s other shoulder, pulling her close. Harper’s fingers loosened, and she dropped the plasma rifle.

The Megan-thing struggled to open its mouth, but its lips were fused together by years of decay. Harper watched as its jaws opened and skin stretched where her sister’s mouth used to be. The lips suddenly ripped apart with a snapping sound, flinging pieces of skin at her. Harper recoiled in horror as a black tongue fell out of the monster’s mouth.

“Maaaaaarpber…” the thing croaked. The smell of old rot drifted from its yawning mouth. Harper became oblivious to the noobs battling around her. The game no longer mattered. “Maaaaaaaaaaarper…” it moaned, “issen…” Its fingers tightened painfully on her shoulders. One eye swiveled while the other eyeball stared fixedly ahead. “Ebbb him aboubbhra me abbs…. bhrameeee abbs…” the thing urged. The zombie shook Harper’s shoulders. “Bhrameeeeabbbbsssss!” The Megan-thing rocked her violently, repeating its weird chant. Its fingers curled in and pierced her skin. Harper felt warm blood trickle down her shoulders. She looked down and saw it flow into a strange scar just below her collarbone. Where did I get that scar? she thought.

Harper struggled to pull away from the zombie. The Megan-thing gripped her tightly. She twisted her body to loosen its grasp, but the thing held her like a vice. Although it had stopped moaning the chant, the creature continued to shake her.

Abruptly, the red clouds behind the zombie’s face became white. Harper felt her feet leave the ground as she soared with the ghoul into a bleachened sky. She felt a dizzying vertigo as they hung suspended in their macabre dance, spinning higher. Then the sky became intensely bright, and the zombie’s face changed. Its pale, soulless eyes transformed to a deep brown color Harper faintly recognized. The monster’s head morphed into the panic-stricken face of Angie Richards. She was shaking Harper and urging her to wake up, but a thundering noise in the background drowned out Angie’s words.

Harper felt groggy, half-asleep, but she glanced around and realized she was on the floor of the landing zone. That was when she realized what the noise was. Someone was screaming.

2

“Aaaaah! Aaaaaaaaaah!”

Damon opened his eyes. He felt drugged, but his training took over, willing him to concentrate. It sounded like Zack screaming. He sat up on the cold floor and looked around. The women were laying on the floor near him. But they were not screaming. In front, he saw a long pedestal with a blue orb hovering five feet above it. The screaming was coming from the other side of the pedestal. Damon jumped up and immediately reached for the pedestal as the effects of the transfer swayed him. He staggered drunkenly around the pedestal and saw Zack.

Zack, the orc, was massive and covered with a thick layer of brown skin.

Is that what I look like? Damon thought hazily.

Zack had an enormous wound across his left forearm, from his elbow to his hand. His eyes were bulging and his mouth drew back in a grimace of pain. He struggled to cover the wound with his right hand, but blood was squirting through. “Help me, Damon, help me!” he screamed.

Damon scanned the room for anything he could use as a tourniquet. On the floor, the other members were still regaining consciousness—all except for Angie, who was rushing over. “Ang, pull that belt from Miguel’s armor. Over there!” He knelt beside Zack.

Zack’s tan color was turning pale. There was blood all over his plate armor. “Help me, man. Help me,” Zack pleaded weakly.

Damon wrapped his big hands around Zack’s forearm and squeezed. The blood loss slowed, but he could still feel warm blood gushing through his fingers. Zack’s skin was cold. Damon could smell the sick metallic scent of blood in the air. Angie arrived with the belt. Damon yanked it from her and wrapped a loop at the top of Zack’s arm. He pulled the belt, holding Zack’s arm against his leg. “Ang, can you wake up one of the gamers?” he asked.

She turned and ran to Harper. Damon glanced at Zack, who was now moaning from the pain. “Stay with me, buddy.”

“I wool,” Zack slurred.

In the background, he could hear a distracting noise. He looked up and saw that it was Walker, coming through the speakers. “… have to send him back…” Walker urged. Damon ignored the operations director and turned to Harper, who had just arrived. “Is there anything you can do? Magic? Anything?”

“Yes, yes, give me a moment.” She paused, accessing her menu.

Basic Heal

MP: 10

HP: 17

RANGE: 10m

RANK: Novice

COOLDOWN: 1 sec

DESCRIPTION: Heals 33% in Intelligence stat

Defense Buff

MP: .75/sec

HP: --

RANGE: 30m

RANK: Progressive

COOLDOWN: 5 sec

DESCRIPTION: Boosts Constitution and Endurance stat 25%

Offense Buff

MP: .75/sec

HP: --

RANGE: 30m

RANK: Progressive

COOLDOWN: 5 sec

DESCRIPTION: Boosts Strength and Dexterity stat 25%

Firefly

MP: .1/sec

HP: --

RANGE: 10m

RANK: Progressive

COOLDOWN: 5 sec

DESCRIPTION: A luminous firefly

Fire Scorch

MP: 2/sec

HP: --

RANGE: 25m

RANK: Progressive

COOLDOWN: 10 sec

DESCRIPTION: Targeted fire energy

Harper raised her arm and pointed it at Zack.

Damon and Angie watched in astonishment as blue light jetted from Harper’s fingers to Zack’s arm. The light swirled around his forearm before seeping under his skin. Zack moaned with relief, his head sagging, but Harper knew it was a temporary measure. Blood was still streaming from the wound. She turned to Angie. “We need to wake up all of the humans. They’ll have higher mana points, but start with Janna.”

Angie returned to the women’s group. Walker was still imploring them over the speakers. Damon glared at the video feed. The operations director had his hands on the control panel, his face contorted with panic. Rage surged through Damon’s body as he held his stricken friend. “Walker! Shut the fuck up!” he bellowed.

Walker’s reaction would have been funny at any other time. A spooked expression broke over his face as he stumbled backward, almost tripping.

Angie returned with Janna. Harper grabbed the nurse’s arms. “Listen to me carefully. Think… no, say the word ‘spells.’”

Janna said the word, and her eyes widened in amazement as the menu appeared for her.

“Tell me all the healing spells you have,” Harper said, hoping the stocky nurse would have better spells than she did. As Janna looked over her spells, Harper sent another Basic Heal to Zack.

“Just Basic Heal,” Janna said apologetically.

Harper sighed. “Cast it. Just point at Zack’s injury and say the words.”

Janna raised her arm and cast the spell. The same blue light sparked from her finger. Janna blurted a startled “Oh!” and took a step back. Zack moaned with relief.

Angie returned with the rest of the humans, Brett and Miguel. Harper noticed out of the corner of her eye that Brett smirked when he saw Zack’s condition. “Janna, show Brett how to cast the spell,” she instructed.

Harper addressed the humans. “Listen, I want each of you to cast Basic Heal just once. You need to save your MP for what’s next.” As they cast their spells, she turned to Damon and Zack. “Here comes the rough part, boys. Damon, we need to cauterize his wound. I want you to haul Zack over to the pedestal, keep that belt tight, and lay the wounded part of his arm across the surface, facing up.” Damon nodded and started dragging Zack.

Harper turned to Janna, Brett, Miguel, and Angie. “You guys take the left flank of the pedestal, I’ll take the right. As soon as I cast my spell, I want you to cast Basic Heal again. Right after me, okay?” They nodded. “Then keep casting that same spell. You’ll have to wait for the one-second cooldown, but otherwise, just keep at it until you deplete your mana. Do you understand?” They nodded again. The Marines were waiting by the pedestal.

Harper approached Zack. “This is going to hurt a lot, but you have to keep your arm as still as possible. Can you do that?” Zack nodded wearily. Harper turned to Damon. “In a moment,” she whispered, “when I’m ready to cast my spell, lean away from his arm.” She took a step back and called up the Fire Scorch spell. She looked at Damon and Zack, then the four humans. They looked ready.

Harper wielded Fire Scorch. She felt warm energy course through her arm, then a torrent of red fire blasted Zack’s arm. He screamed as flames flickered across the surface of his arm.

Harper yelled at the group to unleash their Basic Heal spells. Four streams of blue mana converged onto Zack’s arm and seemed to momentarily push back the force of the fire spell. The healing spells ended.

“Again!” Harper screamed.

As the fire burned Zack’s arm, Damon felt like he was standing next to a raging bonfire. Zack continued screaming. Smoke started billowing from his scorched forearm. Brett appeared disgusted as the scent of burnt flesh floated his way. The blue healing spells continued to rain down onto Zack’s arm from the group on the far side of the pedestal. Harper was down to her last few seconds of Fire Scorch, but it appeared to have worked. The blood had stopped. She ended the spell.

Damon loosened the belt, and Zack slumped to the floor, turning over onto his right side.

3

The old Damon was back. He ran to the video screen and screamed, “Walker! What the fuck did you do? I thought you fucks had this under control!”

On the screen, Walker stammered, trying to maintain a sense of decorum. “M-m-m-Mr. Williams. I-I-I understand your frustration, buh, but this was unforeseen,” he said apologetically. “We haven’t performed a large-scale transfer like this before, and the feedback was completely unpredictable. Mr. Kassian overreacted to the noise. If he had only remained still, he would have—”

Damon snatched a shield from the wall and threw it at the screen. Walker flinched as the shield crashed into the display, splintering its surface. In the background, Angie moved slowly toward Damon. “Overreacted? Overreacted!” Damon screamed. “You’re just lucky I’m not there right now. You little piece of… you almost killed Zack!” He felt someone tugging at his massive arm and knew it was Angie.

“Calm down, Damo,” she soothed. “This isn’t helping.”

Damon ignored her for the time being. “And the next time you see an emergency like that, shut the fuck up unless you have something constructive to say! What fucking good was it going to do to send him back?”

Walker regained his composure and flashed an icy smile. He pushed a lever on the control panel. The camera veered away from Walker and panned to show the interior of the transfer room. It zoomed in closer to one pod. Damon saw something laying on the right side of the pod and realized it was the remains of Zack’s forearm. The gray flesh lay in a pool of coagulated blood. “You see, my hot-headed friend, we could have sewn his forearm back on,” Walker said coldly.

4

While Zack snoozed by the pedestal, the other members cast healing spells on him. His hit points had regenerated, but the arm still needed work. Over the hour, Zack’s arm transformed from steaming and charred flesh to a deformed appendage covered with scar tissue.

Afterward, they sat in a circle with their new weapons, recovering their MP. “Holy hemorrhage, he’s probably lost some use in that arm,” Janna said with a Brooklyn accent as she inspected her leather brigandine armor.

“Yup. I think you’re right,” Emma said solemnly. Her blonde hair remained unchanged, but the rest of Emma’s body got the full Grimalkin feline makeover. Under her chain mail, her skin was coated with fine blue and gray hairs. She had human fingers, but now they had thick pads and retractable claws.

“Whatever you say, pussycat,” Brett joked. No one laughed.

Harper stared at Brett, wondering about the smirk she’d witnessed earlier. Like the other humans, Brett’s features resembled what he looked like before the transfer. His skin was tougher and his eyes were bigger, but his facial features remained the same.

“He’ll be alright,” Angie said. “Zack is right-handed, anyway. He’ll adapt.”

Damon, who was lying on the cold floor to lower his blood pressure, nodded. The orcs had the most extraordinary change. They’d grown two extra feet, which in Damon’s case made him over eight feet tall. They had a ton of muscle and two fanged overbites that protruded from the bottom of their lips. Angie guessed Damon would clock in at around four to five hundred pounds now.

“You know, what happened to Zack,” Miguel muttered, “that could’ve happened to all of us, maybe even worse.”

The group agreed.

“Yeah, now we can’t trust them,” Janna said emphatically.

“We’re going to have to,” Damon said. He was sitting up now, looking over his clipeus shield. “In fourteen days, we have to go back.”

“Hopefully with the big prize,” Angie added.

“I don’t care if we find Harris,” Janna said. “After my fourteen days are over, I’m not coming back here. Not after seeing what happened to Zack.”

“You won’t get your money,” Ethan said.

Janna hesitated. “I don’t care. I like my body parts where they are, thank you very much.” The group laughed, but the mood remained somber. The cracked video screen loomed over them, showing the control room. Walker and the politicians were gone. Just one tech remained, and he was working on a computer at the side of the console. It didn’t occur to anyone that Walker might still be in the room, off-camera, listening to their deliberations.

5

Damon urged the team to awaken Zack. “Daylight is fading and we don’t know where we’re going to end up camping for the night,” he told them. They shook the big warrior out of his slumber. He cursed and said his arm ached, but he got to his feet.

Before departing, Miguel insisted the group needed a crash course on their visual interfaces, so the team formed a semicircle around Harper and Miguel. “Let’s start with the defaults,” he said. “Your basic stats are on the periphery of your field of vision. The stat on your left shows your current hit points; the one beside it is your max HP. Right now, they’re all showing the same number, but the first stat will go down as you receive hits.” Miguel looked at the group mischievously. “Let me give you a demonstration.” He walked up to Brett and punched him in the arm.

“Hey! What the hell?” the big nurse yelled, rubbing his arm.

Miguel chuckled. “Brett, look at your hit points now and tell us what you see.”

“Hey! Thanks a lot, Miguel! It says 30 out of 31 points now.”

Miguel grinned. “Don’t worry. You have an HPR of .4 per second. You’ll regenerate that hit point back in a couple more seconds.” Miguel had the group pull up their menus to have a glimpse through them. He explained that the cooldown numbers represent how long they needed to wait before casting the same spell. At that point, the team wanted to move on.

Harper raised her hands. “There’s one more thing.” She grinned at Miguel, then opened her mouth as if to speak.

I think we should try the telepathy!

The group’s reaction was instant. Janna and Brett clutched at each other and fell over. Jordan leaped into the air. The rest of the group laughed. Harper placed her hands on her hips and leaned forward. Yeah, that’s right, you lame-brains! I guess you should’ve paid more attention at the briefing! The recruits roared again.

Miguel waved his arms theatrically and sent his own thought. Yes, you better listen to her. You don’t want her to pull a Carrie on you!

“That’s telekinesis, silly,” Harper whispered.

Okay, can we move on to the rest, now? Ethan telepathed. The two mages agreed. They showed the group how to turn off the telepathy via their main settings. Harper explained their default abilities, such as Creature Description and Object Description. The recruits tried out their newly acquired spells. Finally, the mages showed them how to store their items, weapons, and armor in their inventories. “And with that,” Miguel finished, “I think we can move onto the realms.”

The portal room was enormous and circular. A small square pedestal was in the middle but, curiously, it didn’t have an orb floating over it. From the pedestal, the room fanned out into twenty-five colored triangular divisions. An orange division led to the portal room entrance. The other twenty-four wedge shapes were split off in groupings of three for each of the eight realms.

Three vertical portals stood at the end of each realm. One marked the entrance to the realm itself, and the other two granted access to the two dungeons of each realm. Simple hieroglyphics were painted above the wall at the end of each realm. The colors for each realm were green for earth, blue for water, red for fire, white for ice, purple for sky, black for horror, silver for divine, and gold for time.

“Oh my god, he’s still in the earth realm!” Miguel shouted. The group glanced at him, bewildered.

“What?” Ethan asked.

Miguel ran up the green path of the earth portal. “It’s the only one shimmering! All the others are disabled,” he said, pointing at the other portals.

“He’s right,” Harper exclaimed. The group surveyed the portals and saw the difference. The main earth portal was a shimmering kaleidoscope of colors, undulating from white to green to silver. The other portals were opaque.

“Yes, goddamn, yes!” Ethan yelled as he clutched his brother. They both started jumping, grinning from ear to ear; one a huge, tan-colored behemoth, the other a human covered in cat fur. The excitement was infectious.

“He hasn’t even made it to the end of the first dungeon!” Harper said, laughing. She knocked her hand against one of the opaque earth dungeon portals. It made a hollow metal sound.

“Oh man, this is too beautiful,” Brett said. “We can be done in no time and still get the money.”

At the back of the group, by the entry portal, Damon and Angie exchanged a worried glance. It is too good to be true, he thought, and we still might find Harris dead.

“Let’s go back and tell Walker!” Ethan said.

Behind him, Damon quietly spoke. “Let’s not.” Ethan spun around and leered at Damon. The two orcs locked eyes. “And why the hell not?” Ethan yelled.

Angie’s chain mail clinked as she pushed Ethan back. “Because we can’t trust Walker,” she answered.

“Bullshit to that!” Ethan shouted.

“No, Ethan, she’s right,” Miguel said. “And it’s not just what happened to Zack. I don’t trust him either.” The mage looked around at the group. “And I don’t think I’m the only one.” Emma, Harper, Zack, Janna, and even Jordan nodded.

Damon and Angie stood by the door, their arms across their chests, blocking entry. “The only thing we have to trust Walker for is getting us back,” Damon said. “Aside from that, we should keep all information and progress to ourselves.”

Ethan lowered his head and sighed, resigned to the group decision.

“Then let’s get going,” Jordan said. Harper shook her head.

Ethan lifted his enormous arms toward the ceiling. “Damn it, what now?”

“One final bit of strategy: we should move forward as, sort of, regiments,” she said, glancing to Damon. “Zack, Damon and Ethan lead the way as the warrior class. They will use their melee weapons first. The hunters—Angie, Emma, and Jordan—should follow behind them. They can enter the fray with their swords, but they can also strike from the perimeter with their bows and throwing knives. The next row should be the mages, Miguel and I; we can be very precise with our spells.”

She turned to Janna and Brett. “Finally, you two will bring up the rear as the healers. Watch for anything coming up from behind and have your trilances ready. Most importantly, you’ll be performing the lion’s share of the healing spells. Be ready for that.”

Damon and Angie were smiling. “I told you,” he whispered to Angie. The three orcs walked to the front of the group and the rest lined up in formation behind them. They walked along the green path to the earth realm portals. Zack looked up and pointed at the hieroglyphics painted above them. One was the image of a tree, the second looked like a six-pointed star, and the third was a large boulder. “They have to mean something,” he said, rubbing his mangled left arm.

“I’ll be damned if I know,” Damon said quietly.

“You’d think Walker could’ve informed us about these,” Ethan growled, understanding more the group’s mistrust of the operations director.

Damon grunted and glanced at Harper. “Do we just walk through these?” She nodded. Damon extended his arm through the portal, up to his elbow. His forearm vanished into the portal, accompanied by a slight buzzing sound. A mild breeze fluttered across his skin. He pulled his arm back and turned to the members. “Everybody, watch out for each other once we’re in there.” He grinned. “And keep walking once you’re on the other side so we don’t bump into each other.” Then he turned and walked through the portal, leaving the known world behind him.