1

Except for the two Grimalkin members, Jordan and Emma, the entire team was equipped with footwear. That was a good thing. The slope was steep and the rock was slippery, so the team had to proceed slowly. That wasn’t the case for Jordan and Emma. They had thick pads on their feet and their climbing skills were much more advanced. The team would have camped closer to the cave opening had it not been for the glow that radiated from the bottom of the cavern. It intrigued them. “This place needs a dehumidifier,” Jordan quipped.

Emma giggled. She peered up at the ceiling of the cave and noticed various-sized holes in the rock’s surface. How old are those holes and what could have created them? she wondered.

What makes you think something created them? Jordan sent back.

She glanced at Jordan, who was grinning at her. Yup, I suppose it could have been erosion, she thought.

My thoughts exactly, Jordan telepathed. Emma giggled again.

As they advanced down the long cavern, the glow became brighter and the sounds of water grew louder. The orcs reached the bottom first, and they exhaled in astonishment. At the bottom of the cavern, a pool of clear water, three feet deep, glittered with the reflections of colorful light. Above the pool and dangling from the ceiling were thousands of glowworms. They flickered a brilliant blue light throughout the cave. The green algae at the sides of the pool helped to create the vibrant glow, washing the cave with iridescent blues and greens.

“Oh my god,” Harper gasped.

The team members lined up along the rim of the pool as their jaws dropped. Jordan pointed at one of the larger holes in the ceiling, which was three feet wide and tunneled into the stone as far as they could see. More glowworms were wrapped around the circumference of the hole, and they sparkled like diamonds. As the members looked around the cave, they discovered small trickles of water traveling down the cave walls and into the pool. The flat slab of rock the members stood on had been smoothed over by years of erosion. Barely audible over the trickling sounds of water, Damon whispered, “People, we have found our camp.”

2

They decided to camp at the edge of the pool. Although most of the rock was smooth, it was still a very hard surface to sleep on. They divided the group, sending Jordan, Miguel, Janna, Damon, and Ethan back up the cavern and into the forest to search for something to use as bedding.

When that group arrived at the top, they discovered it was full dark. Miguel cast Firefly and led the group into the woods. The firefly hovered three feet in front of him, following every turn he took. The spell’s .1 MP per second cost was covered by his MPR, mana point regeneration, of 1.26 per second. They found a patch of redwood trees. The redwood’s leaves were softer than the rigid needles that grew on the Douglas firs. The foliage was denser on the higher branches, so Jordan climbed up one tree with his claws stretched out. The rest of the team started pulling the lower branches.

As Ethan foraged, he felt uneasy about how quiet the area was. When the brothers were young, he and Jordan would go camping with their father. They’d learned quickly that the forest was a place full of noises, especially at night. Owls cooing, twigs snapping, and millions of insects buzzing were a regular occurrence. But in the forest, there was a strange absence of sound. All Ethan could hear were the cracks of the wood they were snapping off the tree. And that sound echoed throughout the forest. “Does anyone else find it quiet?” Ethan asked.

“Yeah, it’s spooky,” Jordan called down from his tree. Damon agreed. Janna and Miguel, who’d both grown up in urban metros and had never seen a forest, didn’t seem to mind.

“How’s the leg, Damon?” Janna asked as she pulled on a tree branch.

“It feels solid. The calf is still swollen, but the skin is healing.”

Janna sent another Basic Heal to his leg. “Your friend’s arm, it looks like a rack of barbecued ribs,” she commented.

A groan drifted down from above. “Oh, please, don’t talk about food,” Jordan pleaded, rubbing his stomach. The other four laughed.

“Zack tells me he’s lost a lot of feeling in that arm,” Damon said, returning to the conversation with Janna, “but he can still use it to balance his axe on.”

“Yeah, that’s a damn shame what happened to him,” she said. Damon felt his blood pressure rise, thinking about the events that had led to Zack’s injury. He reached for another branch, this one full of foliage, and saw the goblins.

Shocked by how quickly they appeared out of nowhere, he equipped his sword and swung. The goblins moved in unison, like they were of one mind, and easily avoided the weapon. Damon recognized that these were the same creatures as the dead one they’d found near the portal. They were small, gaunt, skeletal creatures armed with short spears and sharp pieces of bone. Nine of them lined up in a circular formation. His Creature Observation screen appeared.

GRASS GOBLIN (Level 3)

HP: 67

MP: 0

STRENGTH: 6

CONSTITUTION: 6

DEXTERITY: 8

INTELLIGENCE: 1

WISDOM: 15

XP: 29

DESCRIPTION: Resilient and fast humanoid race.

“We have company!” Damon shouted, and the rest of the group peered his way. The creature at the front of their tribe croaked, “Tock!” and the goblins fired their spears and lunged at them.

3

While Damon’s group was busy foraging, Angie, Emma, Harper, Zack, and Brett stayed at the bottom of the cave, preparing for the night. Angie dipped her hand into the iridescent pool. The water was cold, but it was clean. Better yet, nothing was living in it. Dried mud coated the members from their trek through the swamp, so she suggested they wade into the pool once the other group returned.

Sitting on the raised edge of the pool, they alternated between staring at glowworms and the tranquil pool below them. “It’s gonna be nice getting this gunk off,” Emma said, flicking a piece of dried mud off her arm.

“You know, if we take a dip in the pool,” Zack said, pulling on the fabric under his Almain Rivet armor, “our clothing will get wet and cold.”

“We’re building a fire,” Harper commented. “That should be enough to keep us warm.”

Angie shook her head. “It’ll provide some warmth, but we’re going to need to lose the metal. Then we huddle together to conserve our collective body heat. You can’t afford to be shy about this.” She glanced around at the other four. “Harper, your jack of plates armor is a mix of metal and cloth. Emma, I see the fabric underneath all that chain mail, which will have to come off.”

Emma groaned.

“Brett, you could keep that leather armor on if you shake it out well enough,” Angie continued. “Zack, you can ditch your armor and sleep in that sexy underwear you just pulled on.” The girls laughed. “One more thing. Strategically, the orcs should be peppered throughout the sleeping group. With their bigger bodies, they have more body heat to share. Other than that, the couples can stick together.”

“How convenient,” Zack teased, chuckling.

Angie smiled.

They were silent again, lost in their thoughts, and marveling at the beauty of the cave. Then Harper asked Emma about her gaming experience. She told them most of it came from first-person shooters. “I’m comfortable with the ranged weapons,” she replied, “but the sword is going to take some getting used to.”

“Emma, you’re a programmer,” Angie said. “What do you think of the glitches?”

She shuddered. “It’s like something organic… living. Like a ghost in the machine.” The other four members followed her attentively. “It’s like a virus that mutates. It becomes a variant from its original genetic structure. That’s what’s happening here. This world… whatever it is now is changing, evolving. And I don’t think we’ve seen the full extent of it. What we’ve seen so far is just the tip of the iceberg.” She equipped her nagamati sword from her inventory, gripping its long leather handle. “I’ve seen the video of the closed-door congressional hearings from eight years ago when the government shut Epiphany down,” Emma continued. “At the time, Cloud Nine lobbied to keep it open.”

She paused, glancing at the other four. “Then the news leaked about the deformities those customers developed. That sunk the ship for C9. They shut the project down that same day.” Emma swung her sword, producing a metallic whoosh sound. “And it would still be locked down if not for Harris.”

Brett, who was inspecting one of his push daggers, slammed it down on the rock, startling the other members. A stone chip plunked into the pool. “God damn it, we should go back right now,” he said, agitated. “We found Harris. His foot was hanging from that tree!”

Emma looked thoughtfully at her sword. “Don’t let the brothers hear you say that.”

“Yeah, we don’t know that for sure,” Harper added. “It could’ve been an NPC.”

Brett sneered. “And what exactly is an NPC?”

Harper glanced at the other three members, annoyed by Brett’s reaction. “It means non-player character. A being generated by the game.”

Brett stood up. “All I know is we could go back and cash our check, right now,” he grumbled, walking away from the group. Zack rose after him, but Angie placed her hand on his leg. “Let him be,” she whispered. He shook his head but eased back down. “Emma, what do you think happened to Epiphany one to fifteen?”

“Huh?”

“This is Epiphany16, right? What happened to the other fifteen?”

Emma laughed and shook her head. “It doesn’t work that way. It was probably a multiple of—”

The ground shook as a rumbling sound filled the cavern. Tiny pebbles skittered across the surface of the cave floor. The water in the pool started rippling in concentric circles. “What the…” Angie said, looking at Zack.

“It’s an earthquake!” Brett cried from behind them.

The vibrations were increasing. Large chunks of loose rock dropped from the cave walls and ceiling. Thunderous noises reverberated off the cave walls. A loud shriek cascaded down on them, accompanied by a high-pitched whine. Zack peered up at a large hole positioned along the ceiling and far wall. Inside the hole, the collective light from glowworms suddenly flickered off, leaving just darkness.

“Something is coming down that hole,” he shouted, pointing at the opening.