They had a few hours to get ready, and Sunny slept through all of it, which felt like an even greater betrayal.

  To be safe, Otter bedecked Rua in a new poncho, using her Thread of Sanctuary to give a little extra protection. In exchange, Rua introduced Otter to her armory, which wasn’t as impressive as it sounded. For a house so rge, Otter expected Rua to be loaded, and while she was certainly well off, she wasn’t oozing wealth. The armory in question was about the size of a walk-in closet, and had racks decorating the walls holding up various armaments.

  The weapon of choice for the Siyan people seemed to be hatches and spears, but there were shortswords, javelins, daggers, and bows as well. One spot on the wall was conspicuously empty, a space for something rge. Rua made a concerted effort not to look at it, so Otter didn’t ask. If Rua wanted to talk about it, she would.

  Otter helped herself to a few throwing knives, each reminiscent of a kunai. They all had a ring in pce of a pommel, ideal for attaching one of her Threads to. She was a far cry from throwing fireballs and wreaking destruction with area of effect damage, but she was definitely turning out to be dangerous in her own right.

  Rua picked up a pair of shortswords and a hatchet, and then selected leather harnesses for both of them to be able to sheathe and hold their new weapons. No more looping weapons into belts and hoping for the best for them, they were going to march in both style and safety.

  They had a light breakfast. Enough food to make sure they had energy for what was to come, but not too much so that if, for some reason Holt visited some kind of horror on them, they wouldn’t have too much to empty from their stomachs. Otter had to shudder at the thought of eating her first soul crystal, taken directly from Nightmare’s still-warm heart.

  Otter didn’t bring anything else, but Rua wore her backpack over one shoulder. Why she was bringing it went unexpined, and Otter wasn’t curious enough to question it.

  A few minutes before the appointed time, they both responded to Holt’s message, accepting the invite. Almost instantaneously, they were transported over.

  There was the same blurring, melting of reality itself as everything shifted, and suddenly they were somewhere else. No sense of movement or dispcement. Just the unsettling feeling of being somewhere, and watching it all get wiped away in a smear as if the setting itself was washed away, to reveal another location underneath.

  Holt’s arena had changed. Before, it’d been a wannabe Roman affair, a tribute to the cssics and a very clear ripoff of the Colosseum. Now it was half the size it used to be, making it so people had to be closer to one another. The benches were no longer simple stone, but now wood, carved with floral patterns and sporting cushions and back support. A minor concession to comfort, but something that’d make it more difficult to vault or leap over them in the event of a fight. A small countermeasure in the event of another rebellion.

  Holt was smarter than Otter liked to credit him. Not a lot smarter, but still not quite as dumb as a post and twice as mad as a goose that had just been fed a ghost pepper in lieu of some kind of berry. Probably someone he paid had come up with the idea. That was more likely.

  Holt’s little viewing gallery was gone. Instead, he sat in the middle of the arena on his throne on top of a raised dais in the middle of the arena. He was wearing a toga, and had one leg kicked up and resting over the arm of his gaudy chair, his crown askance, and a pair of sungsses over his eyes.

  Otter didn’t need to see the bottle in his hand to know he’d been drinking, but she also wasn’t fooled by the act. If he were completely inebriated, he probably wouldn’t have been able to transport them into the arena.

  Unless someone else was transporting them.

  That thought sent a chill through Otter. What if Holt had a whole team of underlings inside this world, all with Pacts of their own, having farmed up stats before the ‘beta’ even started?

  Or did he? Something about that felt off. No NDA would be able to keep this secret. A whole new world, complete with magic, that you could somehow travel to with a piece of tech Ashes2 made? Someone would be salivating at the thought of leaking that info.

  All along, she’d assumed he’d had a team backing him in the real world, watching out for him, running interference. But how many psychopaths would he need to employ to keep the operation going? How many guilty consciences would he need to suppress?

  The more Otter thought about it, the less it made sense.

  Did he have a team backing him, which would enable him to do a lot of the nonsense that he was getting away with? Holt wasn’t an inventor, an innovator, he was just the money guy. He needed people to back him to set this whole thing up.

  But at the same time, the more people he had, the more likely it was to fall apart before things had ever escated to this level. Who would go along with Holt’s pn to gather up a group of streamers and then subject them to a death game? Why even do it in the first pce?

  Did she run into any employees before jacking into the game? She focused, thinking, trying to remember. Her driver had pulled up to Ashes2 headquarters, a security guard had cleared them in. There’d been someone at the front desk, and…

  Rua nudged Otter, breaking her out of her thoughts.

  “Sami’s over there,” she said.

  Otter looked over, and sure enough, looking even increasingly more like a wreck. Her normally perfect hair was disheveled, her skin was caked with dirt, where it hadn’t been streaked by sweat. Her clothes weren’t much better. They sported some new tears, the cuts a little too clean to be done by anything outside of a bde, accompanied by telltale blood stains.

  It didn’t take long for Sami to join them, who gnced from one to the other incredulously. “You checked your messages?”

  “I do more often than you think,” Otter said defensively.

  “Lie,” Rua said, flicking Otter across the nose.

  “Ow. Sorry, sugar cookie. I’ll make it up to you ter?”

  “No, you’ll make it up to Sami,” Rua said. “The two of you need to talk things out. Better now, than before she gets to the Isnds, and we find out the hard way if the two of you can reconcile or not.”

  Otter stood a little straighter. It felt like an icicle had just jabbed her in the heart.

  “Uhm, what?”

  “This ridiculous feud of yours. The bickering, the back and forth, the ‘do they still have feelings for one another or not?’ It ends now. I assume you’re both adults. It is time you act like it.”

  Sami’s expression turned downright predatory. “She makes a good point.”

  Otter looked away and clenched her fists. She drew in a shuddering breath. She thought she’d had more time. She’d been holding onto this for two long years, and hadn't told anyone. Just quietly disappeared.

  “I don’t think Holt’s going to appreciate us hijacking whatever this is in order to, uh, air out our drama.”

  Rua got that annoyed expression she tended to get whenever sounds came from Otter’s facial area and made a series of gestures at the air. She was operating her menu, and while her navigation was halting and unfamiliar, it was far more proficient than it had been whenever Otter had shown her in the past how to do things.

  “Holt,” Rua said, “Otter and Sami need some time to… Yes. Now. They just need to talk. It’ll be private. No, you can’t mediate. That’s what I’m for.”

  Down below, Holt was busy talking at a screen that only he would be able to see. Rua wasn’t bluffing. She was actually doing this.

  “An hour. I ask for an hour,” she said. “You haven’t teleported everyone in. Just take your time about it.”

  A long pause.

  “Fine. I’ll tell you who Sunny is. No, you can’t talk to her. You will stay away from her. No, I won’t tell you how Otter keeps ‘breaking your game.’ No, she doesn’t pn to keep doing it. But if you want, we can always revisit that ter.”

  “Tell him I will recruit every single hot chick I can find to form a harem and turn this MMO into a godamn dating sim, and he can go fuck himself,” Otter said over Rua’s shoulder.

  “Yes, she is very annoying,” Rua said. “It’s very endearing, though. Yes. Agreed. One week, we can manage that, I believe.”

  “My harem will not be denied!” Otter called.

  “Yes, I can control her,” Rua said with a sigh. “Ignore her, you should know as well as I that she talks too much. Are we in agreement?”

  Apparently, Holt was, because Rua nodded a moment ter, and she turned to them both.

  “Did you really just make a deal with Holt?” Sami asked.

  “One week of Otter not adding anyone else into his game. I’m not sure if he actually cares that she’s doing it, I think he just wants time to figure out how she is.”

  “How are you doing that anyway?”

  Otter snorted. “You think I’m gonna say that out loud in enemy territory?”

  “Point.” Sami drummed her fingers along the pommel of her sword, and then sat down at one of the benches. “Well? We probably always needed couples’ therapy. Better now than never.”

  DorenWinslowe