Thulnar was surprised to see them again. At least, he looked surprised to Kana. “Didn’t I tell you to get lost?” he spat out from his position in front of the door leading into the shack.

“Because you don’t trust that we’re here to help,” Valit said. “We were hoping this would prove our sincerity.”

She held out the pile of badges she’d collected, and Thulnar took them with a confused look. Confusion gave way to comprehension, and he shot them a sharp look. “What have you done?” he demanded.

A notification box popped up telling Kana that a member of his party was turning in a quest that he had also completed, and asking if he’d like to hand over the badges he’d gathered as well. He selected yes and they disappeared from his inventory. He got 150 XP added to his total, putting him up to three-quarters of the way to level 7.

“We’re not working with those men. We’re not part of their group. We want to stop them,” Valit told the NPC.

“Idiot, you have no idea how much worse you just made it. Alidrak isn’t going to just accept this. He’ll retaliate. He’ll take his anger out on the villagers, and those men whose friends you attacked to prove how righteous you are, they’re going to want revenge for their comrades too.”

“I… what?” Valit glanced back at Spiral and Kana. “This isn’t how it was last time.”

“By the Gods, you couldn’t have hurt this village more if you actually were working for Alidrak. All you’ve managed to do is speed up the demise of every single person living here. He’s not going to get bored now. He’s not going to let people escape. He’s going to be vindictive. And you idiots will be his first targets.”

“Must be because of the lieutenant’s badge,” Spiral said when the NPC stopped for a breath.

“Fine. You morons want to fight. You’ll need something to fight with. Take this. Go ‘save the town’ or whatever it is you think you’re doing.” Thulnar stopped and stared over their heads. A distant shout came from the far side of the village. More voices rose up in chorus. “They’re already retaliating. I have to find a way to fix this mess. Get out of my sight and try not to cause more problems.”

The quest updated from reporting back to Thulnar to defending the villagers. The spear Exodus had promised was deposited into Kana’s inventory, its stats exactly what he’d been told they would be. He decided to hang onto it for a bit. He wasn’t going to use it for the rest of the quest line, but it could be useful later on when he wanted to practice chaining attacks together without having things die instantly.

The others equipped their new gear, and together they ran across Faldsteel to find the source of the commotion. “Are we coming up to the difficulty spike you mentioned?” Kana asked while they moved.

“After the next quest. This is the one where we get Alidrak’s attention. Then the next one is his first murder attempt on us. Then he gets serious and starts sending the heavy hitters our way.”

They came to the scene of the disturbance then. A group of five men were surrounding a family. One of them had a woman by her hair as she cried. Another held a knife to a child’s neck. Two more had a man pinned down on the ground, where he was struggling to rise despite the arrow sticking out of his shoulder. The last one held a torch high and, with a sneer at the struggling villagers, tossed it through the open front door.

Villagers cried out in protest, but none of them dared move closer. Kana glanced at Valit and saw her raising the wand she’d just gotten from the last quest. “You got the one holding the child? I’ll take the two with the man and Spiral saves the woman?” he asked.

“Do it. I’ll lead,” she said. A moment later, a flashburn beam lit up the evening and struck the black manor thug, dropping half of his HP bar. She blasted the NPC again, killing him before he could hurt the child. Kana barreled into the other two thugs, killing one instantly with Nibelus and then deflecting an attack from the other one. He managed to keep his momentum going and chained the second attack and third.

With both of his targets dead, he moved on to the one who’d thrown the torch while Spiral and Valit dealt with the final thug. In a manner of seconds, they’d rescued the civilians, but the fire was already spreading. None of the NPCs were making any move to help, so Kana turned to Valit.

“Take off the bracers and shoot frost beams at it?” he half-said, half-asked.

“It… Might work?” she responded in the same tone.

Her radial menu popped up in front of her and she removed the bracers from her equipment, then fired off a series of frost beams into the interior of the burning house. They cut through the fire, but had no noticeable effect otherwise. She tried aiming at the floor where the wood was burning, but the coating of frost the spell normally left when it hit something was too thin to withstand the heat.

“Shit, that’s a no-go.” Valit equipped the bracers again. “Spiral, any ideas?”

He shrugged. “I ignored the burning buildings and let the NPCs deal with it. We’ve got to find five more encounters with the mobs to complete this step of the quest.”

“Can you guys get a bucket line from the well or something going?” Kana asked the NPCs.

“We’ll figure something out,” a woman assured him. “You go save whoever needs saving. Give those bastards hell for all of us.”

The NPCs started talking amongst themselves, but the player group didn’t stay long enough to observe. Instead, they followed the sounds of fighting until they came across a group of three villagers backed against a wall by seven more black manor thugs. Kana was the first into battle this time, and he took full advantage of how grouped up they were to chain into an arc lance that put down half of the enemies. Spiral barely even reached them before the rest dropped.

They repeated that on the third group they found, but when they ran into a fourth party of enemy combatants, the NPCs had the smart idea to immediately turn tail and run. That encounter turned into a chase around the village laced with blind ambushes as they rounded corners and tried to close the distance on the fleeing thugs.

The villagers were less than helpful. They would give contradictory information when asked which way the invading thugs had gone, were often wrong, and had a tendency to get taken hostage when a nearby thug got cornered. Usually, the group was able to rescue them without incident.

The last thug was aggressive enough that when Spiral approached, he slit his hostage’s throat. The NPC, a man who looked fifty or so, dropped to his knees and clutched at his throat. The game didn’t display that scene true to life, thankfully. There was no blood, just an HP bar that went from full to empty, some gasping and choking, and a body with the name in grey over it laying in the street.

Kana barreled into the man and drove Nibelus through him. Then there were two bodies with grey names. He glared down at the dead thug, then snapped his head up to look at Spiral and Valit. “What?” he demanded.

“You’re getting a little too into it,” Spiral said. “Don’t forget that it’s just a video game. Virtual reality, not real reality. Nobody really died.”

Kana forced himself to take a breath. His knuckles were white around the haft of Nibelus. It really was something how much effort they’d made to get so many little details right. Sometimes it was a little too accurate though. Kana didn’t look down at the body. Even without the blood, it was too close to life.

He took a few seconds to compose himself. Spiral was right. It was just a game. Kana hadn’t cost an innocent man his life by being impatient and reckless and making bad decisions. It was just a game. He kept telling himself that.

“Maybe we should take a break,” Valit said.

“It’s fine,” Kana told her.

“Are you sure?”

“I said it’s fine.”

They finished the quest in silence. Kana was distracted and not paying much attention, which was probably for the best. Once the quest log updated that they’d successfully fended off the invaders, they returned to Thulnar. The NPC had a weary, resigned slope in his shoulders. His whole posture screamed of a broken and defeated man.

Or maybe Kana was just projecting his own experiences and memories. Either way, the Thulnar they’d talked to the first few times was gone. Instead, the towering man was putting on an intimidating suit of spiked black armor. A sword hung from his belt, but the NPC’s true weapon was an enormous axe with a handle long enough to be held in two hands and a half-moon blade heavy enough to need both to hold it.

“You lot again? You don’t learn, do you? If you’re smart, you’ll head down the road and hope that Alidrak is too distracted here to keep track of you. He’ll send out his shadows next. It’s what he always does. That’s his pattern, escalation of terror. Usually he drags it out longer, but you killed that traitorous bastard Plinket.”

Thulnar stopped to laugh. “He deserved it. Alidrak turned him against me years ago. Still, he’s following the pattern. People are afraid to leave their homes. Tomorrow morning the village is going to wake up to find corpses in their beds, and they’ll learn to fear the dark.”

“How do we stop him?” Kana asked.

“You’d have to kill him, all of his lieutenants, a few key officers who might be able to hold things together, and for good measure, the majority of his foot soldiers. If enough of them got away, there’d be a dozen groups of roving brigands preying on travelers and small villages. Alidrak has a talent for collecting the scum in one place. With him gone, they’d scatter and cause a thousand problems.”

“You seem to know a lot about his methods,” Valit said. “Why is he after you?”

“You want the whole story?” Thulnar asked, sounding surprised. “I guess that makes sense. The whole point of coming here is that no one would know who I am. Maybe when this is all over, I’ll have time to tell you, if we’re all still alive. For now, let’s just say that I am a very bad person who has done a lot of very bad things over a very long life. And I’m never going to make up for that, but it’s a life I walked away from.”

Thulnar stopped talking for a bit while he strapped a few more pieces of armor into place. Kana wondered how accurate the designers had been in their depiction of a man dressing himself in field plate armor.

“Alidrak is a ghost of that old life come back to haunt me for past misdeeds. He was a rival of sorts, at least he liked to think we were on the same level.” Thulnar stopped to chuckle to himself again. “Nothing more than a pretender to the throne, truthfully. But I’m old now, weaker, and alone. He’s here for revenge, and he’s playing with his food instead of just eating it. He’ll regret that when I’m done.”

Fully armored now, he picked the enormous battle axe up and turned to face the town. “You want to help? Fine, I believe you. Idealistic fools, but I’ll use you anyway. There is a woman in charge of the Black Manor, Alidrak’s subjugation unit. Her name is Malia. She is Alidrak’s chief assassin. She’ll be the one picking victims and coordinating this phase of his conquest. You find her, and you kill her.”

“How does that help?” Kana asked.

“It cripples his administration, slows down the whole thing. Gives me more time to go after Alidrak himself. Gives a few more villagers another night of breathing they wouldn’t have otherwise. Hell, it might give you another night among the living too. I’m sure you’ve all been targeted for your interference. Assassins will be coming for you.”

Thulnar went still and peered around. “They could be watching us right now, for all we know.”

Kana knew for a fact there was at least one assassin out there somewhere, but he expected Exodus probably didn’t have his name down on his list. Then again, it was hard to tell with that player. He supposed if the assassin thought he had something to gain by player killing, he probably would. Kana was just at a loss to guess what that might be.

Unpleasant though the man was, he was undeniably effective and would no doubt make the next stage of the quest much easier to complete. It was getting late, but if Exodus hadn’t logged out for the night, he was probably out there killing enemy assassins at that moment. There might not be any left for Kana’s group to hunt.

Then again, his HUD was pointing out a human-shaped shadow lurking just overhead on the roof of the shack. Kana probably wouldn’t even have noticed the NPC up there if not for the slight creaking of the whole building when the extra weight settled onto it. Once he’d spotted the NPC though, a name plate had shown up that identified it as a black manor assassin.

Before he could say anything, the assassin leaped off the roof at Thulnar. The big man spun in place, swatted the assassin’s extended sword aside with a backhand, and grabbed the other NPC by the throat. Thulnar slammed the assassin into the ground hard enough to stun him, then took a two-handed grip on his axe and brought it down into the assassin’s chest cavity.

It was a brutal execution, one that happened so fast the assassin’s HP bar just seemed to disappear without ever draining. “Like I said, they could be watching us right now,” Thulnar commented. “You’ve got a job to do. If you really want to help, you’ll go do it.”

The NPC walked off into town, the battle axe carried in both hands. “That was more intense than I remember,” Spiral said quietly after he was gone. “This is the point where people playing by themselves usually jump ship on the quest. Enemy assassins have a tendency to spawn when you’re already in combat with something else, and Malia is holed up in an old cellar that’s got a bunch of elite guards in the house above it.”

“Are you saying you want to give up the quest line?” Valit asked.

“No, no. But it’s getting pretty late. We could pick it up tomorrow?”

“Yeah, ok. What do you think, Kana?”

“Sure. What time?”

Valit considered. “I have an appointment in the morning. Usually I log on around three.”

“That works for me,” Spiral said. “You good too?”

“Fine. We’ll call it a night then?”

“Yep! Oh, before I forget,” Valit said. She trailed off for a second, and a window popped up in front of Kana with a friend request from her. He accepted it and a second window gave him basic instructions for accessing the social interactions section of his radial window. Curious, he opened it up to see a friends list, chat log, guild status, and a few empty spaces that he didn’t have any immediate explanations for.

“We should log out at a rest area,” Spiral said. “There should be one in town.”

Together, the trio made their way to the local inn and paid 12 drol each for a room. “It gives you a well-rested buff when you log back in, plus allows you to log out immediately instead of being on a timer. If you log in the field, your character it still there, sleeping, for the next ten minutes. Chances are decent that if you’re not careful, you’ll log back in at the closest Shrine of Numa because something found you and killed you.”

“OK, good night guys. See you tomorrow at three.” Valit waved a hand, and her character disappeared.

“She’s such a chatterbox, but she’s nice enough,” Spiral said after she was gone.

Kana shrugged. “Be nice to her,” he said. “Good night.”

He selected the log out option from his radial menu, and Istrius faded from his vision. After backing from a view menu, the optical display switched back to his normal daily HUD. Jon Peld sat up slowly in his bed and tried not to wince as the movement sent pain through his chest.