As it turned out, it was remarkably easy to follow a bunch of shambling, creaking Undead through a dark forest at night. The combination of the creaking the trees, the low murmurs and terrified moans of the captured caravanners, and the fact that most of the Skeleton Warriors apparently didn’t have any eyeballs allowed them to follow without being detected.

Connor thanked that small amount of luck as he ducked behind the latest gnarled oak on one side of the trail. Dargan did the same on the other side.

Both the adventurers felt tired but a whole lot better after quickly ransacking the only surviving wagon to find, as they had expected, some healing potions that Boudazz had stashed away. Nothing as powerful as what Hebspeth had used on them, but good enough for now.

“Ugh . . .” he heard Dargan whisper. Connor looked over to see the dwarf nodding to something on the ground. It was a foot—luckily not from one of the living. It was clearly skeletal, but it was still gross, all the same.

“They’re literally falling apart,” the dwarf said grimly, making a sign across his breast which Connor guessed was warding off evil.

“Well, they can hurry up and decompose right now, as far as I am concerned.” Connor groaned, looking down the path to where the last of the group appeared to be descending into a natural bowl in the forest. He could see some sort of ruins ahead.

“What are they going to do with them?” the dwarf hissed. They broke cover, staying low, and crept forward.

“Whatever they were going to do with you, it looks like,” Connor grumbled, and another thought struck him.

“Of course, we have yet to figure out what we are going to do when we get there,” Connor worried.

In fact, he thought to himself. What am I even doing here? The treacherous thought flashed across his mind in a moment before he firmly pushed it aside.

He had already fixed his mind on getting to the First Gate and somehow getting out of this hellish game.

Unfortunately, that means experience. As much experience as I can get, Connor reminded himself. This had become a sort of personal mantra that he had been repeating to himself ever since the Lucky Dragon.

But there was something else, he had to admit. The business of adventuring. Of knowing that a whole group of people—some of them possibly players just like him—were being rounded up and taken off to some hellish who knows what, right in front of him.

Even Connor would feel pretty terrible about himself if he left them to die like that. So, with no other option available, he creeped toward the opening in the forest where the Skeletons and their prisoners had disappeared.

“Here we go,” the half-elf grumbled, crouching by the final boulder and looking into the clearing to see that the ruins below them were simple. There were three walls of blue-black stone and at their heart was a dark opening that led into the hillside itself, into which the Skeletons were pushing the last of their captured mortals.

“Why, oh, why isn’t there like, a simple farming level or something that hands out experience?” Connor muttered out loud. The dwarf across from him, it appeared, had sharp ears because Dargan abruptly started sniggering.

“What, you’d rather be playing Cozy Ranch right now?” Dargan chuckled, referring to a particularly young, kawaii-color game popular among preteens.

Connor took one look at the open tunnel ahead of them and nodded. “Yes. I absolutely would right now!”

The last of the people had disappeared, leaving just one Skeleton to stand guard outside. Connor was very aware that the dwarf was looking at him.

“Okay,” the half-elf groaned. “I guess we’d better go be heroes then, right?”

***

Connor snuck as close as he could to the Skeleton guard using his recently leveled-up Sneak skill to its full advantage.

“Pssst!”

Dargan’s hiss rang clearly through the night-lit ruins, causing the Skeleton standing guard to turn in place and glance to the left.

Amazing it can hear without ears, Connor thought, tensing before doing his part in the plan. He slipped out from behind the broken and ruined stone wall where he had been hiding and whistled on the Skeleton’s right.

“Stttss!” The Skeleton swung back around to the sudden interloper. Connor was already striding forward and raising his ax. The Skeleton Warrior took a lunging step forward, baring its mace—and Dargan sprang from the ruined wall where he’d been hiding and brought his hammer down on the Skeleton’s back.

“Rarrgh!” Dargan roared.

There was a splintering sound as the Skeleton staggered forward, spilling ribs around it, one arm hanging uselessly at its side.

Easy, Connor snarled, swiping up the hand ax and neatly bringing it down on the Skeleton Warrior’s exposed, bony skull.

Connor attacks Skeleton Warrior with Hand Ax for 7 Health points damage. Hand Ax scores critical hit on head increasing damage by 200%. Total damage: 21 Health points. Skeleton Warrior has been killed.

Your group has been awarded 200 Experience Points for slaying Skeleton Warrior.

Experience points will be divided among all participants.

“Well, that was a whole lot simpler than I thought it was going to be!” Dargan chuckled before gesturing to the Skeleton’s fallen mace.

“You should use that. Blunt weapons seem to break apart these Boneys better than anything!” the dwarf said.

“Ugh.” Connor winced, not really wanting to heft the stolen single-handed war mace that had so recently been clutched by a corpse. But then again, he was about to go to battle with a whole lot of Undead.

“I’d do it if I were you,” said a sudden voice, one that had come from neither the dwarf nor the half-elf.

Connor spun around to see a figure walking toward them through the ruins with long white hair, delicate skin, and eyes that caught the starlight.

“Elf!” Dargan growled, lowering his hammer.

The dwarf was right. The figure striding toward them was indeed an elf, with the same moon-white hair as the Fey Warriors of Annwn. Instead of the black leathers, this elf wore deep green-and-blue clothes, tight tunic, and jerkin.

The elf was clearly female and in her hand, she held a shortbow already nocked with an arrow but pointed at the ground.

“Stand where you are, pointy!” Dargan growled. “We know your kind is attacking mortals up and down the length of Mourn!”

Hey, I’m a pointy too, Dargan! Conner winced a little. Or a half-pointy, anyway.

“I’m a mortal, too, shortstop.” The elf woman merely sighed dramatically, her shoulders shrugging in a gesture that Connor instantly recognized somehow.

“All elves are. All that crap about us living forever is just propaganda from the Elvish World,” she said, nodding once again to the mace at Connor’s feet. “And you really should pick that up, Con,” she said. “Blunt weapons do double damage to skeletons.”

“Hmm,” Connor nodded. At least she knew her stuff—

Hey, how did she know my name?!

Connor froze, looking at the elf woman standing before him. He studied the way she held herself, the way she was dismissively looking around her, at the Skeleton, and then cinching her clothing a little tighter, preparing to head into the dark right alongside them.

He knew that nonchalance. He knew that pragmatism and that complete and total self-confidence.

“Ari?” he murmured.

“Olanna Stormbow, if you please,” his friend Ari said with a shrug, already stepping toward the tunnel. “Are we going to wait all night to rescue these poor schmucks down there or what?”

“Ari!?” Connor said once again, totally unable to believe what he was seeing.

“Wait, you two know each other?” Dargan grumbled.

“Unfortunately,” Arianna—Olanna—said.

“What the hell are you doing in here? In Legends!?” Connor burst out. “Do you know that—”

“That everyone inside is now locked in and being fed by a tube?” she said. “That just yesterday, I managed to get your address to the Tokyo Game Treatment Center, and now you, Connor Breen, are being taken care of alongside some four hundred others in an ex-military warehouse?” she pointed out. “Yeah, I guess you could say I did know all that.”

“But . . . But . . . But why are you . . .” Connor spluttered, earning one of Olanna’s characteristic shrugs.

“Because you’re an idiot, and I got your message and figured you must have found a contract for the game.” she rolled her eyes. “So, I’ve got my BodyBox and an automatic alert that’ll go to my nearest Treatment Center in New York when it runs out of food . . . And I figured that you were going to need my help to stay alive until all this gets figured out.”

“You came in here for me?” Connor said, feeling suddenly very small.

Olanna said nothing, so the dwarf did instead.

“Your friend’s brave. Bat crazy, but brave,” he muttered as the trio looked at each other.

“Yes, she is.” Connor shook his head and chuckled. “Dargan, meet Ari—I mean Olanna. Olanna, meet Dargan.”

“Sorry about the pointy comment.” Dargan didn’t seem that worried. “Call it professional rivalry. You know, dwarves and elves and what have you . . .”

To Connor’s surprise—he had seen his friend eviscerate people for less, either with her words or in other game worlds—Olanna merely started laughing.

“You’re alright. Apology accepted. Now, are we going to go and earn a butt load of experience or what?”

Connor still felt dumbfounded as he looked from the elf to the dwarf, his oldest friend and his newest. They immediately stepped forward, muttering strategies and other games they’d played which might help. The two seemed to hit it off immediately, leaving Connor behind them, feeling oddly embarrassed for some reason.

He picked up the Skeleton’s war mace and hurried after them into the dark.