Mason couldn’t believe his luck! This plan of his was working even better than he could have ever imagined. Every single player in his headquarters was kitted out in the devourer armor, and he had a couple dozen complete sets to spare. This new person was working out so well for him, his quadrant of the rebellion’s control was now fully pushing the militia back into the city.

The other leaders would have to admit that he was right, but they were being stubborn. A couple of younger players who insisted that these games don’t work like how he wants it to, and another person with grey taking up most of their hair, who fought in an actual war and was trying to run his quadrant like an actual combat unit. They didn’t want to say they were wrong, but he was close to being able to start shelling the outer walls. If they had an actual space port to launch from, he could organize fly-over attacks, but he didn’t know how to coordinate those out in the middle of nowhere.

He had more than one person recommending that he release the party doing his farming for him, but he needed them to stay there. He couldn’t let go of his hidden prize. Too much of what he was doing was based on them earning him more of the gear sets. While the other leaders had their suspicions as to how he was getting the armor, they didn’t know enough to call him out on it.

He had a few reports pulled up in front of him, about how many recruits they had, how many suits they had left over after equipping all of them in the insectoid gear, and the mission success counts for each team of people. A separate window held all of the complaints he had received, but he wasn’t paying that too much mind at the moment. He kept a window open for how much material they were able to liberate and intercept from the militia, and it was substantial, allowing him to upgrade basically every piece of gear he had, as well as his ship and land vehicle.

A call came through his social tab, and when he accepted, the person he left in charge of the dungeon base spoke to him quickly.

“Mason, you have to get down here! There’s been a mutiny, and most of the soldiers you’ve assigned have agreed that letting the yellow-eyed guy leave. He was alone, so he shouldn’t be too hard to find out here in the dusts, but we have to deal with this insubordination!” She sounded angry and very flustered, like she never thought this would happen to her.

“Make sure to keep everyone there, and give anyone who logs out the boot from the guild. We don’t need people who won’t work with us when we’re getting so close to achieving our goal.” Mason said with finality. Knowing that without Logan, things would go downhill very quickly. “I’ll send a few people out to search for him in their ships, so we can find him quicker. Don’t worry, we’ll fix this.”

—

Logan was using his movement ability to make up for the fact that he didn’t have a ship that worked, or any form of land vehicle. His stamina had been raised since the last time he walked out in these wastes, and with all of his new abilities he sped across the planet. He learned during his downtime that he could break the random extra gear he had gotten, which was enough to get him the resources to fix his ship.

That’s where he was headed now, his ship. Across the top of his visor was a compass, and there was a small icon showing the direction and distance to his ship. He was speeding along in as straight of a line as he could, trying to cross the many kilometers he had been walked away from it. He had a plan, and he would need to use his ship to get into Dust Haven, the only city on this planet. The militia needed to be broken, and the rebellion needed to break, to allow everyone the chance to do what they wanted to, instead of fighting each other without exploring space to their heart’s content.

Logan was thankful to the couple of guards that allowed him the chance to leave. They had been building resentment of Mason, since it had been four real days since they brought him on, and he had done nothing but drop off dozens upon dozens of gear pieces a few times per day, which meant that a lot of the guards cycled through and saw him and only him going in and coming out. Never speaking, they started to piece together that they weren’t defending him from the militia, they were ensuring that he couldn’t leave.

Whenever he started to hear the rumble of a ship above him, he would hide against one of the dead trees, his armor helping him to blend into the dead landscape. He waited a minute after each one, just in case they circled back around. It only took a few hours of alternating between sprinting, his teleport hopping, a jog, and his armor’s ability to fly to get back to the wreckage of his ship. He missed the feeling of being in control, and it started inside this little box.

Walking up to the hatch in the back, he pressed the access panel, which caused the hatch to hiss open. He went straight to the storage box, place a bunch of materials and extra gear inside, intending on selling it or gifting it out later. Moving to the seat, he turned it slightly and sat down heavily, enjoying the feeling of being in the flight seat again. He looked around, hoping to find something new that might help him out of this entire mess, but the starter ship had no major weapons other than the little blaster, and the armor was as close to paper as you could get on an interstellar vessel.

He reached to the console and pressed the button to activate the automatic repair sequence. It only took a few minutes for the entire ship to shift and creak, popping pieces back into place, before it sat in pristine shape on the surface of the planet. Logan started to flick the switches that would allow him to power everything up and start flying, getting a thrill from the way the entire thing started to hum underneath him.

He used the controls to lift off, pulling his landing gear into the underside. Pointing in the direction the coordinates were for Dust Haven, he quickly pulled into a parabolic arc that would take him there as quickly as he could manage. Looking at some of the guides on the forums told him that if he wanted to go faster on a planetary trip, he needed to fly up into orbit so that the atmosphere wouldn’t cause drag on his ship and slow him down.

The screen displayed a timeframe for when he should get to the coordinates he entered, so he had a few minutes before he arrived. His friends hadn’t logged back on for a while, so he was on his own for a while. He typed a message to Meghan explaining that he was able to get free, and he was heading to the city. He didn’t tell her what his plans were, only that he was getting ready for something big, and that they should try to get away from Mason and the other rebels. Logan only hesitated a moment before sending the message, hoping that she would read it soon. They had been working well together, as far as he could tell, and he didn’t want to have to find another party if he could help it.

The ship chimed, letting him know that he was approaching his destination. Taking manual control again and slowing the entire ship to a hover, Logan surveyed the landscape below. A massive city sat in the dust, the roads and other ground features almost completely hidden by the layers blown in over the years. He could see a walled section off in the distance, where the main city center was, and where all of the players and NPCs were, but that wasn’t his goal for now. He spent some time flying slowly around, looking for a large enough building that wouldn’t attract too much attention, but was still close enough to the main roadways that had been cleared for land vehicles to move to their outposts.

A section of the cityscape that looked like a residential sector spread out below him, hosting many tall apartment buildings, much like the one he used to live in before his accident. One of the apartment buildings had a parking garage attached to it, so he chose that one to operate out of for now. He flew his ship into the garage, as it wasn’t much larger than a land vehicle anyway, and parked it in such a way that it wouldn’t be seen from outside, tempting others to check out what was going on.

Logan exited the ship, blade in hand, walking toward the apartment building. He wasn’t expecting anything strange, since this place should be empty, but he knew his luck wasn’t that good. The bottom floor had a couple of banks of elevators, all of which were dead at the moment. The large windows that made up most of the walls on the ground floor were caked in dirt and dust, only providing a modest amount of light through, which was good for him, since it also meant that prying eyes would have a hard time seeing what he was up to.

Moving up the stairs, clearing each floor room by room, unit by unit, was a slow process, but Logan knew he couldn’t leave anything to chance if he wanted his plan to work. Destroying the militia on this planet, and hopefully the entire Free States network, would take quite a bit of effort, and any small detail could ruin this for him if he wasn’t careful. Everything went smoothly, but as was normal for people with bad luck, saying that meant that something was about to potentially go wrong.

The roof hatch was locked from the inside, and while that was better than the outside, it meant if he wanted to search it and make sure there wasn’t something here he didn’t want there to be, he would have to break it and hope that nobody else tried to open it. Caution was useful, but he needed to know; he used the blade in his hand to quietly slice through the metal padlock. Logan opened the door slightly, trying to see through the slit.

Voices. Laughter. The crackles of a fire. A radio playing music. He heard more than he saw, he didn’t realize how late it had gotten. Logan stayed hidden behind the door, listening to the group to try to get more information before acting. Two male voices were loudly bantering back and forth, and a female voice was singing with the song on the radio. She wasn’t bad, but Logan tried to focus on the two men.

“I can prove to you that I’m the better player here! I have a bunch of achievements, earned from great deeds!”

“Oh yeah, I bet that I have more than you! Even better, though, my ship is a rarer model! Took me four months of grinding to be able to afford it, and even after all that, I had to wait for the model to come back around in the shop.”

“Pah, I have the better armor set. More rare is good, but it’s also a higher tier!”

“Like you can get anything higher than tier two in this sector of space, you idiot. That’s the reason the high and mighty rulers of humanity keep us out here, so that they control all of the good stuff, without allowing anyone else the chance to get something even better.”

“Well, maybe someone should stick it to ‘em, show that we want to get past whatever bullshit reasons they’ve got to keep us down.” This man stood from the ratty couch he was sitting on and stumbled to the edge of the building, shouting to the city lights in the distance. “That’s right, assholes! We’re tired of your shit!”

—

Logan decided to leave the partiers alone. They wouldn’t do any harm by screaming at the city walls, and if they thought the door was still locked, they could keep their little hideout. He found one of the larger apartments three floors down and pulled out a large sphere, about the size of a basketball, made of chitin plates with a yellow glow from between the plates.

He didn’t let the prompt come up before he placed the egg on the ground in the middle of the living room, and a strange substance started to pour out of the seams to the egg. Covering the room, it hardened but didn’t become brittle. Logan could feel the pulse of life through the substance, and he instinctively understood that this is what his hive would be made from, since it wasn’t in a dust cavern like they normally were.

The egg grew a few inches every minute or so, until it was as tall as he was. Watching in awe, the plates began to lose their texture and broke apart into dust, flowing around the newly formed queen. Her head was slightly shorter than his, even when she stood completely upright, which he found odd. The other queens were much larger, but that may have been due to them being older. The queen’s eyes were the same yellow as his, which was also different. Devourers had red eyes, and his helmet was the only one that he had found that was different so far, so it must have some meaning.

As she looked around the room, she turned a full circle. Settling her eyes back on him, she used her six legs to bow to the ground, nodding her head as well, but looking back up after a moment. “Queen greets Hivelord. How may queen serve?” Her voice wasn’t unpleasant, but it was strange to hear. Logan knew it was speaking in a different language, but he could hear the words buzzing in his mind.

He stared back at her, using the six eyes on his helmet instead of his own. He thought it would work better for her to see the face of a devourer instead of human, so opting to keep his visor on made more sense. “Queen will build an army. We must destroy a city nearby.” At his words, she tilted her head to the side.

“Hivelord, first we must have biomass. Then queen uses biomass to make workers, and then workers use biomass to make warriors. We had enough for one queen from the egg, but more we must acquire.” She seemed like she wanted to be helpful, and the things she said made sense. Another wrench in the plan though, since he wanted to keep the killing as far away from here as he could. There wasn’t any other source of biological matter, though, which is what he assumed she meant.

“I will get you what you need. Stay here and keep safe.” He turned without confirming that she understood, and he raced back upstairs to the roof. The door opened quietly once more, and the loud bantering continued. The singing had stopped, though, so Logan crept out to try to see what the situation looked like.

Two couches were angles into an L shape with a table in front of both of them. There was a rusted barrel with a fire a few feet away from that, and a couple of bricks stacked on top of one another with the radio playing music sitting atop them. Each couch had a burly man, one with a shaved head and bushy beard, the other with cropped hair and a small mustache. He saw the woman sitting a ways away on the ledge, her feet dangling off the side as she looked out over the city below.

Logan snuck behind her, his skill having leveled up in the caves, and he quickly covered her mouth and stabbed his blade where her heart would be. A message prompt showed a critical hit, and it only took a minute or so before she stopped squirming. Sheathing his mandible blade, he gave a small apology, and started to haul her into the stairwell to bring back to his new queen. Hopefully this would be enough to get things kickstarted.