The falling damage he’d taken must have sobered Tardee enough to drop his falsetto and address me in a more conversational tone. He still taunted me, but at least he wasn’t performing for the cameras. “You’re spilling blood in a church? That’s blasphemy—very bad karma.”

  Mother Marteen’s interpretation of balance and revenge made me smile at the irony of Tardee’s assessment. “No. We’re in the perfect place to fight.” Ignoring my Weakness debuff, I raised my spear.

  Tardee mistook my meaning and shrugged. “I suppose. It’s cleaner than fighting outdoors.”

  Tardee made a great show of tossing his sword behind him, and it landed with a loud clang against the temple floor. A stout, ornate mace appeared in his hand. “It’s cleaner than the sewers, too. I picked up this cudgel last week from a player who found it on a wererat boss in the Grayton underground. It cleaned up well—don’t you think? You’ll be a perfect target dummy to rank up my bludgeon skill. You game for some whack-a-mole?”

  Tardee held an excellent weapon, better than anything I’d seen, but it wasn’t the right tool for the job. Maces inflicted tissue trauma beneath the armor, but I was an agile, cloth-covered pipsqueak.

  But why switch to a slow weapon like this? The short sword he’d tossed to the floor with such panache would have presented a much deadlier obstacle.

  The mace served as such an impractical weapon swap I expected a trap. Tardee lunged forward, and I dodged several clumsy attacks. The more he charged, the more he convinced me he had no skill ranks with bludgeoning weapons.

  I entered The Book of Dungeons as a gamer, but gamers don’t know how to attack with bludgeoning weapons. To RPG fans, a blunt attack provided an alternate flavor for fantasy fighting.

  Training at the academy taught me how to fight. As any trained cadet knew, bludgeoning inflicted maximum damage when striking with the tip, so attackers wanted as much distance from their opponent as possible.

  Tardee’s optimal strategy should cycle through hitting, disengaging, and recovering. But he pursued me as if brandishing a dagger. I was low-level and Weakened enough to cause almost no damage, to be sure, but Tardee’s pursuit of a showy weapon gave me the edge I needed. Despite his levels and superior gear, he played like a casual gamer and hadn’t learned to adapt to the world.

  I stopped keeping my distance when I realized Tardee wasn’t drawing me into a trap. My injured arm Weakened my thrust, but inflicting damage wasn’t my goal. I backed up from my opponent and raised my spear threateningly. Instead of engaging Tardee, I spun and tossed it at Falconeer, who didn’t see the incoming projectile.

  The distraction stopped the assassin from exploiting Charitybelle’s wavering defensive stance—a delaying tactic for crowded combat called la folla. The stalwart maneuvers proved effective in the academy but not so against Falconeer, who exploited her weaknesses and wore down her health pool.

  I whipped out my trusty old sharp knife from my first day in the game. Belden meant for me to kill rats with it, so I obliged them this once.

  Unimpressed by my blade, Tardee pressed his attack.

  I dodged his swing and jabbed him with my knife. He tried several more lunges, each with the same result.

  Tardee’s face soon flushed with frustration, and his taunts turned into curses. “How are you doing this?”

  I dodged another slow, broadcasted swing.

  As I tangled with Tardee, I heard sound effects from actions that Falconeer unloaded on Fabulosa and Charitybelle. If he killed either of my companions, our defense would collapse like a house of cards. I couldn’t see how they could keep Falconeer’s cooldowns at bay for much longer, but my inactive spells and engagement with Tardee put me in no position to help.

  Tardee kept trying to take me out with a single blow. His all-or-nothing attacks yielded nothing.

  My knife jabbed him every time he missed me.

  When he started dripping blood, he backed away and cast Rejuvenate on himself again, taking an instant to cast. It shook his ego to heal himself from fighting a player a quarter of his level.

  We re-engaged. After every missed attack, I stuck Tardee with my blade.

  He whispered to himself after every miss. “What?” “Aww—come on!” “How is this possible?”

  I maintained my close engagement. Switching to an unranked weapon type had done my opponent no favors. He couldn’t rank up bludgeoning skills if he couldn’t hit me.

  Whenever my opponent’s mace missed, I answered with a quick stab.

  Tardee muttered under his breath as I bested him in every exchange. “Come on! Come on.” After self-Rejuvenating, his health climbed to 70 percent. Level 16 still had its advantages, but his distress prevented him from thinking clearly.

  If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

  /You hit Tardee for 5 damage (1 resisted).

  /You hit Tardee for 3 damage (2 resisted).

  My advantage in this close-quarter melee became clear to Tardee, but he had no choice but to continue fighting with the mace.

  When my cooldown for Shocking Reach ended, I relented my aggression, backed off, and cast it on Falconeer behind me.

  Tardee looked grateful for the reprieve.

  Falconeer flinched when it hit, prompting Charitybelle and Fabulosa to Charge him simultaneously. The convergence of our efforts winnowed his health pool to zero.

  Falconeer’s corpse disappeared before it hit the temple’s floor.

  I stopped time with a glance at my event log.

  /Tardee misses Apache.

  /You hit Tardee for 4 damage (1 resisted)

  /Tardee misses Apache.

  /You hit Falconeer with Shocking Reach for 12 damage (2 resisted).

  /Fabulosa hits Falconeer with Charge for 40 damage (4 resisted).

  /Charitybelle hits Falconeer with Charge for 28 damage. (2 resisted).

  /Falconeer dies.

  /You received 32 experience points.

  “This is not happening!”

  Despite what he’d done to my friends, Tardee’s naked desperation made me pity him. It would have been better form to end him faster, but my conservative and methodical nature stayed impulses to overextend myself. Drawing out the battle made his defeat more embarrassing than it could have been.

  Judging by my Compression Sphere’s cooldown, barely a minute and a half had transpired since casting it. I’d scarcely processed the timeline before Fabulosa Charged Tardee.

  Charitybelle, Tardee, and I had not prepared for her endgame.

  I hadn’t seen Fabulosa fight since the arena and couldn’t compare her attacks to any form or stance. My hours of practice hadn’t diminished my respect for her natural talent. The academy instructors repeated their mantra—levels don’t matter. While combat remained a contest of skills, and mine outranked Fabulosa, her improvisation showed an alien proficiency. Her footwork transcended classifications of patterns or positions. Not only could I not replicate her performance, I didn’t think she could. Her attacks embodied unfiltered fury.

  Tardee fell on the receiving end of that passion. He blocked at her feint, opening his guard for a Thrust.

  Fabulosa drove her heel into his knee when she hesitated her next swing. She ducked beneath his cudgel when he countered. The kick Hobbled our opponent’s dominant foot, and Tardee staggered against the wall, practically helpless.

  The three of us struck in unison. Like wolves on a kill, we knocked him out of the game without a sense of honor, sport, or ceremony. It amounted to revenge in its purest form. No one uttered another word, not even Tardee, as we each performed our roles.

  When Fabulosa delivered the killing blow, Tardee disappeared, and his gear hit the floor.

  The three of us embraced in sniffles and tears. Only the statue of the pontifex witnessed the fight or its aftermath. Nothing else stirred in the temple of Our Lady of Balance.

  The Book of Dungeons was only a game, but RIP, ArtGirl, and PinkFox had become a part of our family—the closest I’d ever known. We became dinnertime companions, friends, and lovers who never considered attacking one another for the sake of The Great RPG Contest. Despite my soloist ways, I bonded with them during our year together, making me ashamed of the distance I’d maintained.

  We gathered ourselves. Without bodies to bury, we only had bags of loot to collect.

  Fabulosa broke the silence. “None of RIP’s armor or weapons are here. It doesn’t look like they looted anyone. It’s not like we carried anything valuable—we were probably too low-level for them. This mace is magic, but I’m not touching it.” She offered it to Charitybelle. “You want?”

  Charitybelle shook her head. “It ought to go to a better fighter. Patch, you ought to take it. You earned it.”

  Had I earned it? The thought of profiting from the day sickened me. I picked up the cudgel, and we left the temple together.

  We reserved a room at the inn with two beds. Charitybelle and Fabulosa took one bed, leaving me with the other. Not remembering to activate Rest and Mend testified to our numbed state of shock.

  No one made plans for tomorrow or divvied the loot.

  The belongings included three broken gray cores. The cracked crystals represented our opponents’ departure. They weren’t warm, unlike other cores, nor could we repurpose them to enhance a weapon or crafted item. The lifeless objects held no character or identity, a fitting metaphor for absent players. I dropped the worthless objects and absorbed the change in our virtual lives.

  The amnesia after waking up from The Book of Dungeons might be intentional. If virtual lifetimes of happiness or misery made adjusting to the real world difficult, blacking out memories avoided trauma and lawsuits. If the game returned its players to the real world with psychological trauma, perhaps Miros was best left forgotten.

  The Book of Dungeons wasn’t a game to me in many ways. I wasn’t trying to entertain myself or Crimson’s audience, nor did I care to become a reality show celebrity. The prize money offered me a chance to go to college. Higher education wasn’t important to everyone, but it gave me a chance to grow into the person I wanted to be. Why should I feel guilty for giving it my best shot?

  I started a fire while the girls curled up to sleep. Using flint to light kindling wasn’t as easy as I expected, but I counted it among the many things I’d learned since I started this game.

  I’d played with fire before, back in my younger days. My idea of fun involved chucking Molotov cocktails at freight trains heading to the end-of-the-lines by Great Egg Harbor Bay. Alcohol wasn’t easy for 11-year-olds to get, and it wasn’t as flammable or cinematic as movies portrayed it. It took a long time to light cloth wicks, and I learned to throw side-arm to avoid dripping the liquid on me. I learned gasoline wasn’t flammable—it was explosive. Such were the lessons of my wayward years.

  In Miros, I learned how to start fires for warmth, and my companions had greatly improved since my days in Great Egg Harbor Bay. Perhaps that’s what made me regret losing the others. Despite the gladiatorial nature of the contest, we’d become a team. We were dysfunctional and conflicted with self-interest, but what team wasn’t?

  I examined the mace that gave +2 damage. Charitybelle’s words echoed in my mind. “You earned it.”

  I’d earned it alright, but not in the complimentary way she intended.

  My focus on endgame strategies had weakened our team’s position. The Belden players had been my strength all along, and I’d been too tunnel-visioned by abstract advantages to realize it.

  Instead of enjoying the role-playing game in the spirit Crimson intended, I exploited the contest’s newbie buff to inflate my skills. If I hadn’t convinced Charitybelle to stay on campus, we would have been around level 10 and had a two-to-one advantage against the self-dubbed Hit Squad.

  How many times had my friends begged me to join them? I’d made every decision out of self-interest and broke the core rule of RPG gaming—never split the party.

  Sure, I’d gained the advantage of Applied Knowledge, but only at the cost of three allies. My virtual family had paid the price. The game offered no Mulligans or restitutions. I could only learn and move forward. But not having to face RIP, ArtGirl, and PinkFox in a battle royale didn’t make the lesson easier to swallow.

  The girls slept in one bed.

  Instead of taking the other, I sat in a chair by a fireplace and listened to the logs pop and hiss. The burning logs reminded me of spent player cores. Jagged flames tore the wood apart, consuming its identity and essence. As the fire broke its fuel into ash and smoke, I succumbed to unconsciousness.

  And I did not dream.