Reeve forced herself to her feet despite her still-bound hands. The ring of enslaved souls had been blown backward yards and lay scattered, just beginning to rise. Reeve’s party members were already on their feet, only her Mom and Dad missing. She glanced at her logs as she ran awkwardly toward the weapon locker, which lay shattered on its side.

Impundulu summons Lightning and Thunder Clap using Self-Sacrifice Amplifier.

Reeve scanned farther down to confirm that both her parents had been killed by the attack’s AOE. Good job, Mom, she thought before wondering if her mother’s astoundingly effective sacrifice had been intentional. I’m gonna give you the benefit of the doubt on that, she thought and dropped to her knees, bent forward, and used her shoulder to push the broken side of the chest off of the weapons beneath.

“Helia’s started back this way,” Thomanji’yheri said as he stopped on the other side of the weapons pile, back to Reeve, and dropped to a cross-legged sitting position. Feeling behind himself with his bound hands, the dwarf found the grip of his broadsword, which he twisted, raising the blade to a forty-five-degree angle.

Reeve nodded in understanding and spun on her knees. She extended her hands back until she found the blade and then carefully worked its jagged edge between her palms to meet the rope, which she worked up and down the blade while looking up to assess the situation. Her eyes first found Helia and the twins, who were striding back across the plane toward the bank of the river but were still a good way off. Those companies of elves already out of the river had turned to follow Helia, and those in the river were now angling toward Reeve’s position. The enslaved souls were mostly back to their feet and closing again on the party, who had all now joined her and Thomanji’yheri at the weapons pile, save for Reeve’s not-yet-respawned parents and Bunce, who lay snarling, still tied to the carrying pole some distance from them.

“Got it!” Reeve swung her freed hands loose and leaned to grab her naginata from the pile. “Here!” The others turned their backs to her, and Reeve swung the naginata through four deft arcs, severing the bonds.

Having armed themselves, Reeve and the party turned their backs on the secondary weapons they’d left untouched in the pile and formed a small circle that faced the enslaved souls who had closed into a tight cordon. Beyond them, Reeve saw Helia and the twins and the innumerable elves who would soon overwhelm them—sea of enemies they could never hope to defeat.

“We have to focus on taking down Helia,” Reeve said. “She’s controlling all this.” She glanced in each direction. “Dawn, Dusk, can you provide whatever protection you can?” Starting to sense the approaching enslaved souls’ intentions, Reeve lowered her blade to the horizontal and took a step forward as the twins shaped mana shields around their small defensive huddle. Reeve waited for the enslaved soul to her left to begin its high attack, which she immediately parried with the shaft of her naginata before swinging the blade-end through the unguarded head of the enslaved soul directly in front of her. Her blade found the prismatic shard within, and the whitewater robe before her crumpled to the ground.

The sound of bone striking metal drew her attention momentarily to her left, where Thomanji’yheri was parrying the attacks of two enslaved souls. The same sound greeted her a moment later when she looked to the right, where Leaf’s cudgel flashed to beat back two bone swords being wielded against her.

Reading the next moves of the enslaved souls still before her, Reeve parried a slash and a stab, before thrusting the butt of her staff into the shadowy cowl to her right, the satisfying sound of shattering crystal announcing her successful strike, the robe dropping to the ground. Light glinted off of something to Reeve’s left, and a small silver dagger passed entirely through the robe of one of the enslaved souls. Reeve looked back to find the dagger’s source. Devon’s Dawn held one hand aloft, protecting the shield she had cast, but the other hand had dropped to hang loosely at her side. The half-elf looked surprised.

“They’re Enslaved Souls,” Reeve said loudly over the sounds of weapons meeting, “there’s a Prismatic Shard in their head, aim for that!”

Sensing that the enslaved soul attacking Devon’s Dusk was going to attempt a strike on Reeve’s right side while she was still turned to Dawn, Reeve raised her staff and met the unseen bone sword before it found her arm. Surveying their situation as she pushed the bone sword back, Reeve saw two areas of light beginning to form near the spots where her parents had been killed.

“Ah!” Dawn’s cry called Reeve’s attention back as the half-elf slumped to the ground on Reeve’s left. Blood dripped from the bone sword of one of the guards.

“Oh, flip,” Reeve said. “Dusk, can you maintain both shields?” Reeve held her breath as one of the enslaved souls began casting toward the party’s exposed flank where Dawn had fallen.

“I will try,” Dusk said, stepping to straddle the remainders in the weapons pile and extending one hand to either side of their party.

The enslaved soul’s spell sprouted from the air in front of it, appearing as white smoke that met the invisible shield and flowed in all directions around the party. Dark lines spread like cracks from the point where the spell had impacted the shield, and Dusk turned both hands toward the damaged defense, slumping slightly as she infused more mana.

Glancing at her logs, Reeve frowned.

Impundulu has logged out.

“What. Ever.” Reeve said, then shouted, “Hold tight, I’m going to see if my dad and I can make a break for Helia.” Reeve concentrated on sensing the enslaved souls’ intentions and bolted between where she felt the nearest two guards to be, her shaft lowered to a sideways horizontal. She passed through the mana shield and emerged from the smoke, slicing through the robe of one enslaved soul with her blade and ripping through that of the other with the butt of her shaft. She held her breath for the half-second it took to be sure she was beyond them and safe from a paralyzing cut.

With three long strides, she was to her father. Without slowing, she threw her hand against his chest where he stood, clenching his robe tight in her fist and lifting him off the ground to carry along with her.

“Ahhhhhhhhh!” Walter screamed.

“What!?”

“I’m very hairy,” Walter gasped in pain, “and you just ripped out a lot of chest hair!”

Reeve kept running. “Sorry! We’ve gotta stop Helia before she gets loose on the MMO.” Reeve glanced toward the giant ring, through which the world of the MMO server could be seen. She nearly tripped. At least a dozen players—not NPC characters or creatures, but players—had gathered on the other side of the portal between the worlds and were watching her party’s desperate fight for survival and the army of elves rising from the river. “Ohmagod.” Reeve thought she might be sick. There was a one-hundred percent chance that at least one of them was recording this all in their feed. Some of them were probably live-streaming. The weeks and weeks of embarrassment she’d endured as a result of her parents’ ineptitude in the story mode had always at least been private. That had been the one silver lining as she waited out the automatic logout purgatory. But now…everything they did was going to be live in front of anyone who wanted to watch. And who wouldn’t want to watch once they heard there was some sort of weird, unannounced event taking place involving an elf army and some kid playing with her two incompetent parents? And then, after she became a worldwide focus of ridicule, a Level 4 AI and thousands of her minions would hack the MMO server and go on to do who knows what, all because the kid and her parents couldn’t manage to kill one NPC elf.