Entry One

  The Battle of Castle Why-Learnia

  I swung Bunny Bane, aka The Mighty BB, at the grey-skinned demon in front of me. It jumped back, raising a ridiculously small buckler shield to block the attack. My tome-enchanted vorpal blade smashed the shield to smithereens with a critical hit that sliced off the dude’s arm and sent it splatting into the monster next to him. The demon, quite understandably, bellowed in agony before three life-drain arrows thwacked into its exposed throat, dropping him to the dungeon floor.

  I glared back at my friend Jan’s avatar, Jantastic, as she lowered her bow. Jantastic was a Hell Fate, one of Ancient Tomes Online’s support character classes. Think obsidian armor adorned with cerulean-blue runes, ominously glowy eyes set into a pale, narrow face, and small horns poking out through goth, blue-black hair.

  “Kill thief!” I called over the ATO party chat.

  “Aww, poor hero boy,” Thomas cut in. Mommy Phillips’s pride and joy, Thomas Orlando Phillips, was my adoptive/replacement brother. Read that “B” word with air quotes. He was a chubby, curly-haired fifteen-year-old who possessed, on a good day, approximately 43.2% of my maturity level. Of further note, Thomas was born with osteogenesis imperfecta, brittle bone disease, which meant that almost any accident, like falling down or getting into a simple fender bender in a car, could literally kill him. His bones were that fragile. The disease also made it hard for him to walk, so he used a wheelchair most of the time. Don’t feel too bad for him—the moving his legs couldn’t do, his mouth more than made up for.

  “Sorry, Nate!” Jan replied, giggling. When she wasn’t paying attention, she laughed like a chipmunk. “I overcharged them an itsy-bitsy bit too much, and I think they critted too.”

  “Cha. Ya think so? Don’t know your own strength, She-Ra?” I asked.

  “Who’s She-Ra?” she asked, eliciting a shocked gasp of total shock from me. I was about to throw down some of my encyclopedic He-Manic lore when the dynamic battle music changed from a lively, invigorating battle tune to a much deeper, ominous, bass drum march-type thing.

  “Here we go,” Thomas whispered. His character, a shiny-armored dwarven tank he’d adroitly named Dirk the Devastating, bull-rushed a demonkyn next to me, knocking the creature prone. He followed it up with a battle axe infusion to the head to put the hapless mob (an unnamed minion monster) out of his misery.

  “Boss time,” I said, navigating through the convenient gap we’d made in the demon’s battle line.

  This area of the dungeon beneath Castle Wynernia, which we’d affectionately dubbed Castle Why-Learnia, was expansive. The shadowy ceiling above us had to be eighty feet up. Huge columns rose from the stone floor to support it, although an alarming number of them were cracked or totally collapsed. These demons could file an OSHA complaint that would be a real eye-opener for whoever owned the place. Liability, liability, liability.

  “Guys, mop up these dopes,” I called into my crappy headset’s crappier onboard mic. “I got the boss.”

  “No, gee, don’t risk yourself,” Thomas answered, salty as always. “Whatever shall we do if you perish in a gruesome heap of entrails and broken, disgustingly twisted extremities?”

  Before I could reply, there came a “Dibs on the sweet sword!” from Jan.

  We all laughed, with another of Jan’s chipmunk giggles sending us into further fits. Jan was my bestie for a reason. She was a sublimely chill gamer gurl with a huge heart. She was also the quintessential girl next door. Literally. She lived right next to us.

  Mr. Boss Monster, the dread lord and master of Castle Wynernia, came stomping in. Archdemon Grimchar-Something-Something was a massive, Level 85 beast of a beast, one we’d never beaten. Well, tonight was that night, the night when we’d be feasting on Grim-charbroiled burgers over a campfire and tossing back ice-cold Potions of Healing.

  I marched toward him. I was ready. All my buffs were activated, all my gear was synergized, and I’d popped all the potions that Ancient Tomes Online allowed me to take simultaneously without getting any poison debuffs. Plus, good ole Grimchar wasn’t the only Level 85er rockin’ the dungeon this night. My character, fortuNate4u, was Level 85 too, and was one of the best-equipped damage dealers gracing the ATO landscape with his presence. In summary, if Thomas and Jan would follow my freakin’ orders this time, Grimchar was going to die a horrific, quest-fulfilling death.

  That’s what I thought. Then, as Dirk the Dimwitted went sprinting past me to attack the archdemon instead of mopping up the minions behind us as I had just instructed him to do, I had a very different thought. It was a kind of murdery thought that involved toggling ATO’s friendly fire option from “Off” to “Very, Very On.”

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  “Fall back!” I yelled over the nonsensical growling sounds Thomas always made when he was concentrating on his button mashing.

  “I can help too, glory boy,” Thomas replied. Dirk swung his axe at the demon lord’s shin and roll-dodged out of the way as the monster tried to stomp on him.

  “I have this! You were supposed to stay with Jan!” I leaped, turned my jump into a double jump, and rammed Bunny Bane hilt deep into one of Grimchar’s massive, flabby, demon-man boobs. When he went to pelt me off his chest, I sliced his pinky finger off with a vorpal overcharge before leaping away. Boom Chakalaka. Beware The Mighty BB.

  Jan then let out an “Eek!” that made me cringe. I knew that Eek. I looked back to see not one, not two, but all the remaining demon minions converging on her.

  They had Jantastic, a 41st-level archer battle-cleric, hopelessly surrounded. She was pulling and releasing magical arrows as fast as she could, scoring hit after hit, but it was obvious that she needed help on the double-dub.

  Thomas saw the danger too and finally broke away from the demon lord to sprint back and help her. By the time his stubby little dwarven legs got him there, Jantastic’s health bar had fallen to forty percent, and her mana pool was nearly depleted. “Thomas, what in the ninth hell?”

  “What in the ninth hell, what? You are not my boss, Hero,” he shot back.

  Grimchar took a swipe at me and knocked me sideways into a wall for triple damage. Swearing under my breath, I slid down the dungeon wall and performed a forward roll-dodge to pop up right behind Grimchar’s right foot. I had set Bunny Bane’s overcharge to fire off upon physical contact with another being, said being being a certain soon-to-be-displeased boss-level archdemon. I connected with the monster’s Achilles tendon, and there was a satisfying gout of red spray as I sliced clean through it as he dropped to one knee.

  “Eek again!” Jan cried out. “They’re all over me!”

  “Thomas, get on it, dude. You’re the tank. Taunt them!”

  Thomas said a very bad word that Mommy Phillips would not have approved of and then, under his breath, added, “My taunt’s on cool down. I kind of tried it on Grimchar.”

  I was speechless… speechless. Taunts didn’t work on higher-level monsters, let alone level bosses. They were timer-restricted special abilities intended to attract the attention of low level creatures, keeping them away from support characters and damage dealers like Jan and me.

  “You tried what?” I knew the game’s rules in and out, and I’d explained and re-explained the intricacies of taunting to Thomas the Train Wreck many, many times.

  “Okie dokie, time to never mind all of that,” Jan said, sounding even more frantic. “Maybe we should stay together. We can kill these ones first, and then all of us could attack the boss together. Never split the par…”

  “Don’t!” I said, trying not to grit my teeth. “Do not finish that sentence.” If I heard the overused, pedantic phrase “never split the party” one more time, I would thoroughly, royally puke.

  Grimchar took another swipe at me, and I roll-dodged out of range to buy myself a couple of seconds. It was time, yet again, for me to do absolutely everything myself. I tapped a pre-mapped function key on my keyboard that activated my haptic gloves, and I bolted to my feet in real life, sending my gaming chair rolling backward to smack into my bed. I needed to take this archdemon down fast.

  It was time to pull out the heavy guns.

  Ancient Tomes players like me who had a VR headset and compatible haptic gloves had the option of going total VR and using only hand motions for moving, attacking, blocking, and casting spells. The movements for spellcasting were called “somatics.” 1st-level spells required the player to make only simple gestures, like wrist flicks and hand waves. Higher-level spells, though, required far more intricate movements. Like in old-timey VR dancing games, if you got the movements exactly right, you were granted big bonuses. If you got the somatics wrong, though, the spell could backfire on you and even kill you. Let’s just say I had spent an obscene number of hours practicing each spell’s somatics in ATO’s mage halls.

  I started moving my hands through a complex series of motions, inducing water mana, coalescing it before me, and shaping it. My mana bar began pulsing with blue light as I finished casting a waterborne spell. A dozen wickedly sharp, two-foot-long shards of ice materialized in the air in front of me and I thrust both of my hands forward. The ice barrage blasted Grimchar in the face and he reared back, clutching at his ugly mug with both of his massive, clawed hands.

  “Just need a little longer. Hold on!” I shouted. Grimchar, now partially blind, lunged toward me and tried squishing me into hero paste. I threw myself to the side. For a twenty-ton behemoth, dude was lickety-split. Luckily, so was I.

  I spun around and leaped onto his forearm. With my haptic gloves now activated, I had to conduct my swordplay in the real world to get my avatar to mirror my motions in-game. I brought my hands up over my right shoulder and slashed down and to the left. fortuNate4u copied me, and The Mighty BB lanced downward, slicing completely through the demon’s wrist.

  “He’s almost dead. Just a little bit more!”

  “Down! I’m down!” Jan shouted.

  “Thomas!” I growled. This was a party-wide quest. If any one of us died or exited the quest area, the entire party would fail. “Get her up, now!”

  I spared a glance and instantly regretted it. Thomas was backpedaling away from Jantastic, his health bar flashing a dangerous red as he bashed aside blow after blow from half a dozen mid-level hellhounds. I was simply too far away to be of any good to either of them. My only play now was to end the demon lord and complete the quest. If I did that before either of them died, we would all get credit for completing the quest and we’d never have to replay this wretched dungeon again.

  I overcharged the BB one last time as I launched my next assault, pouring in every drop of my remaining mana. It would be enough. I knew it would be enough. Five more seconds.

  Four.

  Three.

  One more critical hit and Grimchar would be vanquished.

  QUEST FAILED

  The message, blood red and in all caps, filled my vision as ATO first locked my controls and then faded to black.

  Jantastic had died.