Kiki clomped right in close and peered up at me under her long lashes. I braced myself for a tongue-lashing to go with that intense look. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes, reached out with a tentative hand to grab my sleeve, then the words poured out in a flood.

  “ThatwasreallyniceofyouthankyouDaniel.”

  That’s what she said. Her brow remained furrowed in a strange sort of scowl and her expression didn’t soften, but that’s what she said. Curiously, I was probably the least surprised by the unexpected outburst; everyone else gawked at her like she’d just revealed a simple solution to Fermat’s last theorem.

  “I’m really not such a bad guy, you know,” I said.

  “I never said you were!” she blustered. “Oh, just...never mind.” She tossed her hair and spun on her heel before stomping away, shaking her head and muttering to herself.

  “Right,” I said, watching her go. Then I turned to Tiff, who was grinning broadly, and said, “Are you good to hold the fort here?”

  The smile vanished. “Where are you going?”

  “I’m gonna go talk to Achmed and the Ninjas.”

  “Ohh.” Her eyes darted again to my pistols. Perhaps she was feeling nervous about not having my firepower available in case things went awry with the folks in the dome.

  “Lianna can stay here and help stand guard. I shouldn’t be long, and she has the means to contact me if you need me.”

  “Handy,” she said. “I can’t see where she’s hiding a bat symbol spotlight in that getup, though. Or did you recreate cellphones here too?”

  “Something like that,” I said, which I thought would make her laugh, but instead she got very serious.

  “Daniel,” she said hesitantly, “can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  Tiff looked me straight in the eyes. “Are you really a Player?”

  That was even more unexpected than Kiki being nice.

  “What else would I be?”

  “I dunno. Maybe, like, a game admin planted among us to help us along?”

  “Planted among you? Let me get this straight: you’re asking if I’m an imposter?”

  She chuckled. “Yeah, I guess.”

  “Why would you think that?”

  She gave me a do-you-really-need-to-ask look.

  “I assure you,” I said, “I am the same as you.”

  Tiff looked at me for a long moment. She was probably trying to figure out if she still trusted me. She must’ve decided she did, because she nodded once and the smile was back. “Then I remain glad you’re on our side.”

  “Well, here’s the thing, Tiff. I’m on everyone’s side.”

  “If you say so.”

  I still had bees following Legion and Ninja through the Citadel, so it was a simple matter of opening a portal to where Achmed was waiting out the one hour timer for capturing another token.

  Team Legion had experienced a bit of a setback while we were taking care of matters by the dome. A demon patrol had wandered by one of the three groups of Legionnaires capturing rooms, and the other groups had been forced to abandon the progress they’d made on capturing their tokens to go save them. They’d routed the demons without any personnel losses of their own, but they had only been able to collect the one additional token as a result.

  I could never tell Achmed this but I was secretly happy about it. The more tokens other teams had, the more hesitant they’d be to go along with the ten-way tie. Well, nine-way: Team Happy had been wiped out by Overgeared, and Lianna and I were going to take second place. I didn’t go straight there, however, before I dropped in on the Legion there was something I wanted to do first.

  I took my portal to the place I thought most likely to contain a secret door into the black tower, if there was one. After a few frustrating minutes of trying without success to find anything even after using a bunch of powers, I eventually said “screw it” and used a different power to turn myself immaterial and phase through the wall itself. Where there’s a will.

  I pressed my face against the wall and met with no resistance, my phased head simply passed through to the other side. I poked out just far enough to see what was there, then immediately pulled back, praying that none of the many many demons on the other side saw me.

  During my brief peek I had seen an enormous round room that must have been the entire bottom floor of the tower. A magic circle formation built into the very mosaic of the floor tiles took up nearly the entire floor area. The split second I had to take everything in wasn’t long enough for me to figure out what sort of formation it was, but I had a pretty good idea of what it might be. And it was a big magic circle, which made it particularly worrisome.

  Close to the wall on opposite sides of the room there were round platforms raised about one step above floor level, with matching circular openings in the ceiling about thirty feet overhead. My first assumption was that they were some kind of magic elevator because there were no doors or stairs anywhere to be seen.

  Even with my innate adventurer’s speed-counting ability (not a real thing but I’ve always found it funny in D&D how you can immediately know the number of enemies the moment you encounter them, as well as the number of gold pieces in a pile of treasure, which are always convenient round numbers) I couldn’t tell you how many demons there were bustling around there, but it was a lot. My preference was to not face them just yet.

  Annabelle had said the quest was to liberate the Citadel from the Demon King, and the game we were playing was to control rooms and take tokens. I couldn’t see how controlling rooms would save the Citadel, but then again Annabelle did not say that the game necessarily had anything to do with the quest. Was the tower the hidden quest, or was it the real quest and there was a further secret that unlocked the hidden title quest?

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  I started to get excited, but this wasn’t the time to investigate, we could do that later. I had to resolve the inter-team conflict first. Reluctantly, I left the secret room behind the wall and portaled over to where Achmed was.

  “Hello strangers,” I said when I stepped through, startling the assembled Legionnaires. I had quite a few weapons pointed at me before they realized who it was.

  “Daniel?” Achmed said. “Why are you...how are you...you know what? Never mind. Nice to see you, bud.” He held out his fist and I bumped it.

  “The Spice girls say hi,” I said. “I was just with them.”

  His expression brightened visibly. “Yeah? How’s Tiff doing?”

  Look at that goofy grin. Someone had a crush. Not that I blamed him, Tiff was definitely crush-worthy. But I remembered the way I’d seen her looking at Lianna and wondered if Achmed stood a chance with the formidable Spice Captain. There was a good chance he was playing for the wrong team, but maybe Tiff had broad tastes.

  I gave Achmed the bullet points of what had gone down so far. By the time I was done, the Legionnaires were all gaping slack-jawed at me.

  “So what do you think?” I said. “Willing to share top spot with everyone else?”

  “Do you really think you can make that work?” Achmed said.

  “I’ve been told I can be very persuasive,” I said.

  He laughed. “If you’re confident, then we’re in. Of course we’re in.”

  Confident? Me? I suppose I was. What a strange feeling.

  “Fantastic. Thanks for trusting me.”

  “Dude. Of course.”

  “You’re the best,” I said. “Okay, now I have to convince Team Ninja.”

  “Need any help?” Achmed said.

  “Actually, that’d be great.”

  Achmed turned to his Vice-Captain. “Owen, you collect the others and head back down to the dome.”

  “Here,” I said, “let me save you the trip.” I opened a portal through which Tiff, Lianna, and Kiki could be seen watching the dome. We all filed through and shared updates. So far there had been nothing from Team Droog inside the dome, and when I checked in on my bee spies I learned that the Droogs were taking a page from the Overgeared playbook.

  They’d decided to wait for Invictus to arrive so they could both ambush Lianna and me when we showed up, then do the same when Team Maple Leaf came. With us out of the way, they figured they could waltz through the Citadel and use the combined power of their two teams to eradicate everyone else. With no competition left, they could leisurely capture all the tokens without any worries.

  It wasn’t a bad plan, though it was doomed to fail. It was good for us, though, because it meant that it would be a while before we’d have to concern ourselves with them and could take our time preparing for the inevitable confrontation. The next step in that preparation was Team Ninja.

  I opened another portal to Team Ninja’s location. They were still divided into three groups, so I chose the one with their leader, a Japanese woman around my age named Ai Momochi. Then Achmed and I stepped through.

  I’d been hoping that negotiations with them would go as smoothly as they had with everyone else, especially with Achmed there to help smooth things out and vouch for me, but it was not to be. In retrospect, the shock of seeing us waltz out of a magic portal into their room probably didn’t help our case.

  Nearly three hours into the quest, Team Ninja had already acquired six tokens and were well on their way to getting three more. As Ai saw it, they had no reason to join the alliance because they would soon have a quarter of all the tokens themselves, and she didn’t see how anyone else could possibly steal first place from them.

  I gave them a reality check. I narrated the events that had transpired in and around the dome since they left it. How Team Happy had been entirely wiped out. How Team Spice had allied with us, and how Team N3m3s1s had switched sides and helped us capture all of Teams Karma and Overgeared. How the Droogs were trapped in the dome, soon to be joined by Invictus. And how Team Maple Leaf were on their way and would surely agree to join us as well.

  “What I don’t get is how you know all this,” Ai said to me, “or how you’re even here. And I don’t mean just how you got to this room, you’re not even supposed to begin the quest until after Invictus does. Care to explain?”

  “I can’t tell you that,” I said.

  “You’re not making a great case for yourself,” Ai said. “If you can’t even share details like that I don’t see why we should share the top spot. And what about Maple Leaf? Aren’t they going to show up and get jumped by Invictus and the Droogs? How do you plan to deal with that?”

  “I can’t tell you that either,” I said.

  Ai shook her head and sighed. “Well what can you tell me?”

  “I can tell you that it’s better for everyone if you decide to share first place with everyone else.”

  “Better for everyone else, you mean. Especially for you. There’s no way you could capture enough rooms to win with just the two of you. So yeah, no thanks. It doesn’t seem like a better deal for us,” Ai said.

  Achmed cut into the conversation. “I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” he said, “given the alternative.”

  Ai gave him a hard stare. “That kind of sounds like a threat, Achmed. I thought we had a better relationship than that.”

  “It’s not a threat, it’s the game, Ai. Forget about the alliance for a second. Did you really think the other teams will roll over and let you win? Taking rooms isn’t the only way to get tokens.”

  “So you’re saying that you’ll kill us and take our tokens if we don’t join you?”

  “We would really prefer not to,” I said, then explained fatality factors. “We’re already looking at the probability of a quarter of Team Happy not respawning because Overgeared wiped them out. I’d like to finish this without anyone else die-dieing.”

  “It’s a nice sentiment, but how realistic is it?” Ai said.

  “You did hear how he managed to capture two entire teams without anyone getting killed, right?” Ached said.

  “Yeah, but he had three other teams helping him.”

  “And with my Legion it’s four, and when Maple Leaf comes he’s going to have at least five other teams on his side, possibly more if Overgeared, Karma, Invictus, and the Droogs choose to participate,” Achmed said.

  “Like they would,” Ai snorted. “Those guys hate Daniel.”

  “I’m not overly fond of them either,” I said, “but I’m looking at the bigger picture and I hope they’re not too narrow-minded to do the same. The fact is they can join us and get the rewards for coming in first, or they can watch us take it all and walk away with no rewards at all,” I said. “What would you choose?”

  “Fortunately, I don’t have to,” Ai said. “I’m already going to have enough tokens to win. I have no intention of giving them up willingly, which means you’ll have to kill us all to get them. And I know you won’t do that because you don’t want the death-death of another Player on your hands.”

  “You are mistaken,” I said, “about many things.”

  Up next: Nobody gets me