Matt watched the shard just long enough to ensure it wouldn’t roll away after he placed it under the arcane stone. The colors around him pulsed as energy vibrated through the air around him. He spied a door on the far side of the room and rushed toward it. He figured he might have enough time to escape the blast if he hurried, but there was a nagging doubt in the back of his mind that told him he may as well just sit down and watch the explosion.

Stoffel had said it would blow everything within a five mile radius, but was that five miles in every direction like a sphere, or was it just five miles outward across the land?

Maybe he could find a tunnel or a sewer to escape through and survive.

Before he could decide on an ultimate plan of action, let alone even start to think what might be beyond the single door leading out from this chamber, someone entered the room.

A tall man with silver hair and neon pink shoes that didn’t complement his blue robes at all strode in as if he owned the place. Behind him trailed a similarly tall woman with blonde hair and white robes. The two stopped mid sentence and both turned their eyes to the dragon shard.

Crap. Neither of them had gamer tags displaying any information about them, but Matt could tell they were obviously players.

“NO WAY!” the man said in a voice that obviously belonged to a seven or eight year old boy. “Is that what I think it is?!”

Matt glanced to the shard, then back to the pair of players. How do I get out of this?

“DUDE! I’ve been looking for one of those for, like, a year!” the boy-man said.

“But, this one looks weird. Why is it pulsing like that?” the woman asked.

Matt fumbled for something to say, but all he could think about was that any second this whole room was about to be vaporized. His feet ached to run away, but his mind kept holding him back. Would these two be able to disarm the bomb? Could they teleport it away? Then again, they were both probably much, much higher level than him. How was he supposed to defeat them?

“It’s rigged to explode...” the boy-man said as a smile stretched his lips and revealed gold teeth with a pair of oversized fangs. “Wicked!”

“Explode?!” the woman said. “No, we gotta stop it! It’s under the arcane stone and...”

She looked at Matt then and her expression turned hard. Her right fingers twitched like they were in an old west standoff. Trouble was, Matt was pretty sure his level three fireball wasn’t going to do anything. If she threw a spell at him, his only chance was to dodge.

The woman pulled a wand from her robes and pointed it toward Matt. “Don’t move or I’ll--”

BLAM!

For an instant Matt thought the flash of light and resulting thunderous boom rumbling through the room was the dragon shard detonating, but as his eyes refocused he could see that he was still standing next to the arcane stone, and it in turn was still hovering and spinning over the shard. The boy-man was near the doorway, though the door itself was now closed, and to his left was a pile of bones that had once been the blond haired woman.

“Forgive my sister,” the boy-man said. “She has a way of getting in the way of business deals.”

“Business deals?” Matt echoed. “What kind of business could we have together?”

The boy-man smiled and snapped his fingers. The pulsing lights and colors froze in place, the arcane stone stopped turning. The boy-man folded his arms and grinned. “I’m a level sixty necromancer, and I recently took on a second class as a time bender.” He glanced down to the dragon shard. “Seems to me the only way we get out of here alive is if you follow me. For the next sixty seconds everything will move at one percent of its normal speed. The only exception are people I designate my allies -- and I just sent you a friend request. If you accept, you’re safe. If not, then you’ll be ejected from my protection and I will take the shard far, far away from here.”

“Why would you let me blow it up?” Matt asked.

“Are you kidding?! You brought a dragon shard to the arcane stone. The whole tower is going to erupt like a volcano. It’s going to be epic, and I want to say I had something to do with it.”

Matt thought for a second and liked what he was hearing. This would mean that others around the affected area would link the stall time spell with the moments before the explosion. Better than that, this little kid wanted to take credit for the prank. It was perfect!

“One more thing though,” the kid said. “I figure you either have another shard, or you know where to get one. So I want in on at least one more shard.”

Matt nodded, figuring he could double-cross the pipsqueak later. “Deal. I know of a goblin that has a couple more. I stole this one from him but he got away with the other two. You help me out of here, and I’ll take you to him.” Matt pointed to the dragon shard. “Thing is, we have to survive. This thing has maybe one or two minutes left after your spell stops. Can you get us far enough away?”

The kid snapped his fingers and the bones that had belonged to his sister reassembled themselves with hollow, dry clicks and snaps. The skeleton emitted a greenish yellow hue and moved to the door.

“There may be some wizards here who can counter my spell, so she’ll go first, but you’ll have to keep up with me if you want to live.”

“Deal, let’s move!”

The kid then fist pumped and put on his best Ah-nold voice. “Let’s get to da choppa!”

Matt chuckled. He loved old Arnold action flicks, even if the quote didn’t fit this world at all. The door opened and the skeleton moved with unearthly speed. The kid was only a step or two behind, and Matt was quickly catching up as they rushed up the winding stairs.

“We have to go up three levels to reach the exit!” the kid shouted.

Matt didn’t respond, he just kept focused on ascending the stairs as quickly as possible. When they reached the first landing there were seven others milling about in what appeared to be some sort of mini-library. A short, portly man was caught mid-action using both hands to flip a page that was larger than he was. A pair of guards were frozen with their staffs crossed over the entryway, seemingly to bar a tall elf woman from entering. Her haircut and thin index finger jabbing into one of the guard’s chests reminded Matt of old ‘Karen’ memes his father had shown him while growing up. The kid didn’t break his stride as he moved through the room, but he wasn’t all business either. He slung his right hand across his body and under his left arm pit in a smooth move, shooting two slime balls as he passed by the portly man. The gobs of slime landed perfectly on each of the man’s hands, effectively gluing them to the giant page. Still moving quickly toward the stairs, he scooped up an exotic looking lizard from a terrarium that sat between two pillars on one wall, and deftly draped it along the thin lady’s arm as he ducked under the crossed staffs of the two guards.

He laughed hysterically as he began to climb the stairs backwards so he could see Matt’s face. “Those guys are going to be so mad when the spell wears off. Can you imagine! Ha HA!” He giggled with such abandon, Matt couldn’t help but chuckle too as he followed the skeleton and kid around the guards in the doorway and up the set of stairs. They got half way up when the kid noticed a gnome wearing blue and gold robes who was caught in the area of effect. The kid rustled the gnome’s hair and plucked a jeweled ornament from the edge of the robes where they crossed over his chest. He giggled to himself again as he pocketed the bauble and started to take the stairs two at a time. The gnome’s eyes went wide for a moment, and then his hand started moving. It was slow at first, but then the gnome grabbed onto a wand and Matt called out to the kid.

The gnome cut through the spell and brought his hand up, but the skeleton was there in an instant and stomped the gnome into the stone stairs.

The HP bar flashed and then drained by half.

The kid turned half way around and extended his hand as though he were spider man. He shot something that looked like a greenish spear of goo from his hand and pinned the gnome through the chest. There was a puff of green smoke and then the body disintegrated.

“WOOTY-WOOTY-WOOOOOO!” The kid’s shout echoed through the stairway as the trio reached the second landing. Unlike the first, this one was void of NPCs and players. There were, however, a couple of ivory boxes at the far end of the room on a set of bookshelves. The kid turned and ran to them.

“Whoa, hey!” Matt called out. “We don’t have time for this!”

“We’re good,” the kid shouted back without so much as a glance. He started working what appeared to be a cypher lock on the first box.

“Don’t you have a spell to open that or something so we can be quick?” Matt asked. They’d made good progress, but Matt couldn’t help but think that the game would answer the kid’s Arnold quote by forcing them to relive the nuclear blast scene in a different Arnold movie. Given how real the pain felt in this game, he wasn’t exactly itching to be vaporized.

“I’m not a thief,” the kid answered. “I don’t have those kinds of spells. It wouldn’t help anyway, this box is guarded by magic. You need the cypher.”

“Do you have the cypher?” Matt pressed.

The kid shrugged. “Most of it.”

“MOST?!” Matt slapped his forehead and turned to the doorway. He figured he might as well try to make a break for it. After all, he still had the spell on his side. He started for the doorway just as two golden orbs of metal hovered in, seemingly unaffected by the stall time spell.

They hummed and clicked as they rotated in the air, then the first fired a blue bolt at the kid. Matt watched as the energy streaked across the room only to slam into some sort of invisible barrier.

“Might want to deal with those,” the kid said, his fingers still working the cypher lock.

The skeleton leapt toward the first orb. It fired a blue bolt at her and blasted her left arm when she took a swing at it. The arm separated at the elbow, but the skeleton didn’t slow. It smacked the first orb with its left arm-stub, then pushed the thing out of the room and somersaulted down to pick up her left forearm and hand.

Matt’s mouth fell open when the left hand closed into a fist and the skeleton started using her own arm as a club. She smacked the second orb with such ferocity that the orb’s top plate was crushed in and it fell from the air. It bounced on the ground twice and then rolled away, coming to a stop just inches from Matt’s feet.

“Kick it,” the kid said without missing a beat.

Matt arched a brow, but then he noticed the orb was starting to pulse red. Great, it’s going to blow up too. Matt turned to face the way they had come and kicked for all he was worth. The metal stung his foot, but the orb flew through the doorway just as a tall man approached. The man caught the orb just before it struck his face, then he lowered the orb and peered into the room.

Matt’s blood chilled in his veins and his heart skipped a beat.

There, standing before him and holding the imminently exploding orb, was the auditor that had tortured him. The two locked eyes for only a fraction of a second, and then the orb exploded and the man was thrown backwards down the stairs.

“Kid! We need to go, now!”

The kid shook his head. “Almost got it!”

Matt reached down and seized the kid’s shoulder. “No, listen, we have a very serious magic user on our tails.”

A second explosion echoed in the hallway beyond them and the skeleton returned, her left side tinged black from the explosion, but otherwise seemingly ready to fight.

A thunderous crack split the air and the room went dark.

“Nobody steals from the Red Tower!”

Matt didn’t need to see in order to recognize the voice that had interrogated him so thoroughly. He’d survived the explosion, but Matt had expected that. What to do now? A thousand thoughts ran through his head. His feet itched to flee, almost independently moving toward the exit, but in his mind he knew that it might actually be better to get caught. If he could keep the auditor occupied for two to three minutes, then the dragon shard would explode. He’d endured much longer than that the last time they met.

A violet hue outlined a figure in the doorway and then Matt felt a gentle poke in his side.

“The darkness is mine,” the kid said. “He can’t see us.”

Matt wasn’t sure he bought the notion, but he didn’t have much choice. He tiptoed away from the kid, who was outlined in a green hue similar to the aura that had been around the skeleton. The skeleton, on the other hand, was nowhere to be seen.

“Come out and play,” the auditor said. “A shame to come so close to your goal only to have it snatched away from you at the last moment.”

Matt focused on his breathing, trying to inhale and exhale silently while sliding his feet across the floor to distance himself from the kid. He knew the auditor couldn’t recognize him through the mask, so the auditor must be talking about taking whatever was inside that box. That was a good thing, since it likely meant the auditor had no idea what the real target was.

A crack of bone erupted from the darkness and the auditor recoiled as if struck by something.

“ARGH!”

A searing blue bolt of lightning struck out and for an instant the skeleton was visible through the darkness as the lightning gripped her and ripped her apart within seconds. Exploding bits of bone flew through the air as the reanimated skeleton was destroyed for good.

Matt then heard what sounded like scraping against the stone floor followed by snapping stone. The auditor’s glowing form quivered and shook as he grunted and snarled. Firebolt after firebolt erupted from the man’s hands, targeted at something near his legs and feet.

A flash of yellow split the darkness for just a moment and then there was silence in the room. No sound at all permeated the air, but the glowing auditor still fought against whatever was attacking his legs for just a moment until his body was thrown to the side, crashing against the stone wall and then slumping down.

Matt couldn’t believe it. The kid was handily trouncing the auditor! Did Matt just need a few more enchanting levels before he could effectively hunt them down as well? Did they even need the dragon shards?

Hope sprang within him and pushed a smile from onto lips, but then there was a pulse of silver that brought sound back into the room and cleared the orb of darkness.

The auditor stood and pinned the kid’s avatar to the opposite wall with a barrage of lightning. The twisted, sadistic smile on the auditor’s face was one that Matt knew only all too well. He summoned his mythic dagger and dropped into a crouch. The auditor was solely focused on the kid, and didn’t notice Matt circle behind him and approach with the Mythic Dagger. Matt reached striking distance just as the kid emitted his first screams of pain. The screams enraged Matt.

He was not letting the auditor have his way with a child.

He pounced. The Mythic Dagger slipped into the auditor’s neck and found its mark between two vertebrae. The auditor’s spell ceased and the man fell to the ground. Matt sneered and went down for a couple more stabs just to finish the job.

“Back up,” the kid said.

Matt didn’t hear him. He jabbed the knife in again and again. The kid finally pulled Matt free and then cast a spell that entangled the auditor’s corpse in a mess of thick, sickly briars that oozed putrid, foul smelling goop. The thorns pierced the auditor’s skin and the body started to turn colors.

“My spell broke,” the kid said. “When he hit me with the lightning I couldn’t keep up my time stall.”

That brought Matt back to his senses. “Can we still escape?”

The kid tugged on his sleeve and they sprinted for the far doorway. They had only just reached it when another silver pulse erupted in the room and threw them to the ground.

“There is no escape!” the auditor shouted.

Matt closed his eyes and grimaced, gripping the mythic dagger tighter in his fingers.

“Impossible!” the kid said. “That spell can’t be countered!”

“I can counter any spell!”

Matt wheeled around and threw a fireball at the auditor, who was now walking toward them as his neck wounds closed with each step and the black veins seemed to drain of the poison that the kid had inflicted with his briars. The auditor waved his hand and the fireball dissipated.

The kid got up and shouted, “All right juice-pouch, that’s it! You’re dead!” There was a flurry of green and yellow energy flying from the kid’s hands as several spells were thrown. There were yellow darts, green fireballs, and then a torrent of what looked like acid rain localized over the auditor. The auditor took everything with a smile. The darts pierced his torso, the flames ripped away clothing and bits of flesh, and the acid rain burned the auditor’s body until he resembled a smoldering, melting zombie. Still the man walked forward with his arms out.

“You have broken the Tenets of the Red Tower, and you shall die!” the auditor said. “But, not before I have some fun.” The auditor summoned a massive, gleaming spear and sneered wide with his half-melted face.

“That was everything I had left,” the kid said.

Matt locked his jaw, ready to fight through whatever pain was about to come his way and occupy the auditor for as long as necessary.

Just then, the tower trembled and thunder crashed all around them. None of them, not even the auditor, could keep their footing as the floor beneath them shifted and roiled.

“What is this?” the auditor muttered as he clambered back to his feet.

The floor split open, separating Matt and the kid from the auditor with a ten foot wide chasm that allowed them to see straight down to the dragon shard’s bright pulses.

“WHAT?!” the auditor shouted. “NO! I’ll deal with you and then I’ll remove that shard!” He cocked his arm to throw the spear, but the gleaming metal tip attracted the shard’s next pulse like a lightning rod. A silvery blue bolt of energy erupted from the shard and struck the spear. The auditor glowed red then exploded apart as the energy ripped him asunder.

“Let’s GO!” the kid shouted.

Matt turned and sprinted, laughing the whole way as they made their escape up the next flight of stairs and out to the main courtyard. Three more quakes knocked them from their feet, but they made the open air without any additional encounters.

The kid then hoisted his left hand into the air and whistled sharp and loud.

Some sort of skeletal flying creature materialized in the air nearby and swooped down to land beside the kid with a tremendous fawump!

The kid leapt atop the beast and then looked down to Matt. Matt scrambled to his feet and followed the kid as quickly as he was able. No sooner had he wrapped his arms around the kid’s waist than the skeletal beast launched into the air and took off at breathtaking speed toward the north.

The wings of bone clacked and whooshed as the body undulated beneath him. Lightning bolts shot out in every direction around them, a couple nearly blasting them from the sky. Then there was a massive rush of air fighting against them, accompanied by a strange, sucking sound.

Matt held his breath, fearing that somehow the auditor, or perhaps an archmage, had found them. When he turned around though, he saw that everything in a several hundred yard radius was bing pulled toward the tower as if a singularity was springing to life and feeding on the world around it.

“We need to go faster!” Matt shouted.

“Don’t worry!” the kid replied.

In the next instant everything went still and silent.

A blast of blinding light erupted from the tower in a vertical column that shot through the clouds above, and then there was a thunderous sound so loud that it consumed all of Matt’s thoughts as his ears first hurt, then rang, then went numb as an immense pressure rippled through him and the air around him.

The column of light then expanded like a shockwave from a nuclear blast. Buildings, trees, people, and the very land itself vaporized before his eyes as they tried to outpace the blast.

There’s no way we’re making it out of here. Matt resigned himself to the inevitable, and then he heard a strange humming noise. He turned back around to see the kid holding his left hand out, holding a portal open that was surrounded with a black and purple ring. They slipped into the portal and then it slammed shut behind them, enveloping them in total blackness.