— CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE —

  Fritz Pushes a Man Off a Cliff

  -Fritz-

  "Oh my god, is he dead?!"

  I stared into the pitch black chasm where Leo had fallen. Percy and Yunica stood beside me at the broken gap in the railing.

  The jungle below erupted into a cacophony - birds screeched, beasts roared, and rocks clattered against the cliffside. Each smack of rockfall sent Leo's health bar on my HUD staggering down a notch, but it settled around 25%. He was alive - for now. Until the mobs got to him.

  "I'll get him." Percy stated flatly. The kid took a running start and jumped through the gap in the railing. Falling into one of the rope ladders that hung underneath the city, he swung and climbed down into the depths.

  Suddenly, the jungle lit up like the Fourth of July - gouts of flame streaked through the underbrush. Animal howls pierced the night. A flock of singed birds burst from the canopy, flapping frantically up through the town to escape the inferno.

  After a minute, Percy came clambering back up the ladder, a battered and charred Leo struggling to keep pace behind him. Percy swung up then dragged Leo onto the city's lowest tier, and Leo collapsed against the rocky wall, chest heaving.

  "Sorry about that!" I called over. "You, uh, look great! You okay?"

  Leo lifted a shaky thumb's up.

  "I believe morning would be a better time for this." Yunica suggested dryly.

  "Good idea." I agreed.

  "Thirded!" Leo wheezed, his voice raspy with smoke.

  ---

  Bright and early in the morning, we were trundling down the road toward the mines. Now that her wounds had regenerated, I finally got a good look at Yunica. She wore a long, trench coat-like jacket over simple traveling clothes that made her wiry frame look larger and more intimidating than it was. Her brown hair was cut straight and blunt - very mute and practical.

  Our first stop was her campsite from the night before - she had to abandon her things when the bandits ambushed her.

  Before we could get there, though, Percy asked, "So why two rifles?"

  Yunica, who had been staring distractedly at the distant sky, blinked. "Hm? Oh." She unslung the weapons and held them out for him to see. "This one shoots bullets, and this one shoots magic. More complete coverage without needing a second class. And with how long the reload time is, it's better to swap than wait, I find."

  Percy nodded. "Oh, so the reload cooldown is per weapon?"

  "Per weapon class." Yunica clarified. "This is an MD-rifle - mana-discharge. And this one's BP - black powder. Firing either of these will put any MD or BP rifle in the game on cooldown."

  "Could I see the MD for a second?" he asked.

  Yunica passed him the gun. The kid pointed to a cluster of boulders beside the road. "There's our target."

  He took aim and pulled the trigger. With a crystalline ring, a small red bead streaked through the air and struck the rock, exploding in a small whorl of flames. Percy quickly re-cocked the hammer and fired twice more. Both shots went high. The fourth pull clicked empty.

  Putting the spent rifle in a belt pouch, Percy withdrew it a second later and handed it back to Yunica. "Swap." he said simply.

  She traded him the black powder gun and took the MD. They both aimed downrange and loosed a volley of three shots each. All of Yunica's struck precisely on the scorched divot left by Percy's first shot.

  Percy returned the BP rifle, and Yunica snapped off another three rounds.

  "Hey, how come you don't need to use the belt-unequip trick to trade your weapons?" I asked.

  Yunica glanced over at me. "Oh, that's smart unequip - it's in the options menu. Automatically unequips and drops equipment if it leaves your body. It starts off for weapons and on for armor. Have you ever taken your shoes off or changed before bed?"

  I nodded slowly. "Oh, now that you mention it, yeah. Huh. I should look through the options menu one of these days."

  "I told you about that in the tutorial, Fritz." Percy said. "That's how that dupe glitch worked."

  "Man, you think I remember that long ago?!"

  Percy shook his head and started fiddling with his inventory, equipping and unequipping various weapons. "Fascinating." he murmured. "With proper discipline, you could arm multiple people with the same handful of weapons."

  I smirked. "You can't go five minutes without breaking a mechanic, can you?"

  "Systems are made to be explored and utilized."

  Leo, who had been silently watching the target practice, piped up. "So can you get guns in other elements than fire?"

  "No need." Yunica replied. She showed us the safety on the side of the MD-rifle. It had multiple settings marked with different elemental symbols. Flicking between them caused a shimmer of colored energy to flicker down the barrel - red for fire, blue for ice, purple for lightning, etc. "You need the Rifleman class to use them, but it's all there in one."

  "Rifleman, huh? That's not a difficult one to get." Percy said.

  I asked, "Don't you have enough to do already with all your magic classes?"

  "I'd like to get all the classes eventually." Percy said with a shrug. "We're not short on time, and you never know when a niche skill will come in handy."

  Suddenly, Yunica shouted, "Stop! Take cover! There!" She pointed urgently to an outcropping of rocks just off the road.

  I yanked the reins, swerving the wagon into the boulders.

  Standing on the rim of the wagon, Yunica peered over one of the rocks. She unslung one of her rifles and looked through the scope. "I thought so. Here." She went into her inventory and spawned a pair of binoculars, handing them to me. "See that dark spot?"

  "Is that a bird?" I squinted.

  "That's what I thought when I saw it yesterday."

  I looked at it through the binoculars and adjusted the focus. It wasn't a bird at all, but a white winged horse - a pegasus, gliding in lazy circles. And there was a person on its back - must be a scout. "Is that a player mount?" I wondered aloud.

  Leo asked, "There are flying mounts in this game?"

  I passed him the binoculars and he took a look, bouncing with excitement. "Cool! Where do you get them?"

  "I don't think these people are going to donate that info to the Protectorate." I said.

  Percy, being too short to see over the boulders, had wandered over to the road's edge to survey our surroundings. "We should get off the surface roads." he advised.

  I turned to Yunica. "How much did you leave at your camp?"

  "Just the tent and bedroll. Nothing I can't replace."

  "Then we'll have to skip it." I hopped down and began unhitching Caesar's Palace and locking up the wagon. We hid it in the rocks, then descended into the dense jungle below, leaving the gorge-top highway behind.

  The undergrowth was thick and alive with the calls of tropical birds. We pushed through the foliage, stepping carefully to avoid disturbing any predators. A few times, dark shadows passed overhead, but they never seemed to notice us.

  It looked like the Fringe didn't post lookouts on the low paths, so it was a clean walk into the Celestial Quarries. The open ground there was a little more dicey, but there were plenty of old landslides and stray boulders to duck between as we made our way toward the mine.

  The operation spanned a bulbous corner of the valley, cut wide by the former open-pit mine. All along the slope, NPCs toiled away, mining and hauling wheelbarrows of ore while players in dark gear patrolled and observed their progress. We gathered behind a pile of fallen rocks, using the binoculars to get a closer look.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Zooming in, I could make out the text floating above the players' heads. "Bad Charlotte," I read, "is that a Fringe guild?"

  "We could ask someone in the Capital to check." Percy suggested.

  Yunica gave a slight shrug, her rifle still trained on the distant figures. "Does it matter who they are?"

  "I guess not." Fringe or no, slavers were slavers. I opened my menu and switched to camera mode, snapping a few photos for evidence. The zoom and resolution were pretty garbage, but it was better than nothing, and I didn't want to get closer.

  Leo asked, "What are they mining? There's no way there's that many resource nodes there."

  Percy said, "There's a small chance to get ore while digging in the ground. It's not as efficient as a normal node gathering run, but when the labor is being provided by a farm of computers, you can offset efficiency with scale. I wonder - do NPCs need to eat and sleep? They act like it, but is there a hard requirement? Will they actually starve to death? Players won't starve, and we only need to sleep because that's part of our physical biology."

  "Save that question for later, Perce." I told him. "What's our plan here?"

  Yunica, counting through her scope, said, "We're outnumbered six to one, but the slavers are outnumbered, what, four to one? If we can get the miners to help, we can overwhelm them."

  "Sure." Percy agreed. "But how do we make contact? Slip in, pretend to work, and hope they don't notice our nameplates?"

  "Darkness will help." Yunica said. "Let's see what they do at night; maybe they'll let their guard down."

  So we hunkered down amidst the boulders. The sun slowly crawled toward the valley wall, and the valley floor fell into the shadows. The overseers lit torches, but the glow of sunset lingered overhead for several more hours.

  ---

  (Percival)

  At sunset, whether out of necessity or because the Fringe couldn't watch them as closely in the darkness, the miners stopped their work and trudged back toward the camp, shoulders slumped.

  The Fringe had set up in what looked like an abandoned mining camp a short ways up the canyon. Ramshackle wooden buildings huddled around a central courtyard, the whole place surrounded by a decrepit palisade fence.

  Once full darkness blanketed the canyon, we emerged from our hiding spots and climbed up to a vantage point on the canyon wall to spy over the palisade into the camp.

  A few Fringe stood watch at the front gate, and the central yard crackled with dim activity around a roaring campfire. The Fringe had claimed the majority of the buildings for themselves, with notably more spacious accommodations than what they provided the NPC miners, who were packed like sardines into a single bunkhouse.

  In order to preserve our cover, we split up. Yunica and I, the smaller two, snuck closer while Fritz and Leo stayed back to make a distraction in case we got caught.

  We crept down the incline, darting between cover until we came right up against the rough-hewn wall of the palisade. There were no holes, and only the one entrance.

  Huddled near a dark corner, Yunica knelt and pulled a small pocket knife from her belt. She tried to wedge it between two of the thick logs to pry them apart, but as rotten as they were, she could only chip at the surface.

  As she worked futilely at the logs, I walked along the base of the canyon's slope, searching for a spot where the ground rose above the top of the wall. I found one spot at the back - but it was in full view of the campfire in the courtyard. No way to climb up there undetected.

  I returned to Yunica. She sighed and pocketed her knife. "You see any way in?"

  "Not any obvious ones." I shook my head.

  Yunica pursed her lips, then tilted her head like an owl. "Here, I've got it. Let me borrow your robe."

  I slowly slipped my arms out of the sleeves. "My robe?"

  She nodded impatiently and motioned for me to hand it over. I passed it to her, instantly shivering. Fritz was right - it did get nippy after dark out there.

  Yunica unslung her MD rifle from her back and wrapped my robe around its body, leaving only the end of the barrel and scope exposed. "That'll take care of any light from the shot," she explained, "but it might still make some sound. Wave frantically if you hear anything move inside the camp." She looked at me seriously. "And keep your head down."

  I nodded, then ducked into a little nest of boulders as Yunica crept off into the darkness, away from the camp. Then, in the distance, a faint shattering rang out, like the tinkling of broken crystal. A muted thump sounded against the palisade logs. Two more followed.

  I listened closely. No response from inside.

  Yunica materialized out of the shadows. "Did you hear anything?"

  Taking my robe back and putting it on, I shook my head. "No, we're good. What did you do?"

  She said nothing, waving me to creep closer to the palisade. I could just make out three rough chunks of stone protruding from the weathered wood, spaced out like a ladder.

  I reached out and poked one. It was fused solidly into the log, unmovable. "Is that what earth-based rifle shots do?"

  Yunica nodded as she tested her weight on the lowest handhold. It held firm as she began to climb. "Yes."

  "Now that's handy; Rifleman is definitely moving up on my list."

  Yunica paused at the top of the wall, scanning the interior of the camp. After a moment, she said, "It's clear." She vaulted over the palisade and dropped out of sight. I followed, scaling the improvised stone ladder and swinging my legs over the top.

  I landed quietly next to Yunica in a dark, narrow alley between the NPCs' decrepit bunkhouse and the wall. A single Fringe guard slouched by the front door of the bunkhouse. And while he was wistfully watching the rest of the guys get sloshed and laugh around the fire, he was still blocking our entrance. Luckily, the planks of the building were poorly fitted, with gaps showing here and there, and they were even more poorly maintained. Yunica pulled out her pocket knife and examined the wall. Selecting a thin, crumbling slat, she carefully sawed through it, creating an opening just wide enough for us to peek and whisper through.

  She tapped on the wall. The murmur of hushed conversation within paused. After a moment, a gruff, hoarse voice asked, "Hello?"

  I wasn't sure what to say; Fritz usually handled the talking. "Hey. You, uh, in a bit of a pickle?"

  "A pickle?!" the man repeated incredulously.

  Yunica gently slid me aside and leaned close to the gap. "We saw what was happening at the mine, and we wanted to help. Do you want to get out of here?"

  The man's reply was immediate and emphatic. "These maniacs came into our village, killed the mayor and anyone who tried to resist, then forced us to come out here! Of course we want out!"

  I glanced over at the Fringe raiders shoving each other and laughing drunkenly in the firelight. "It looks like most of them are good and drunk right now. Can you use that?"

  The man sighed heavily. "I don't know about that. They make us turn in our pickaxes at the end of the day. Those are the only things we could possibly use as weapons, and they're locked up in the mine."

  "I've got about a dozen-odd weapons on me." I said, patting my belt pouches.

  "That won't be enough." the man replied. "But... we have a cache of weapons back in the village. Hunting bows and woodsman's axes, things like that."

  "We have a wagon." Yunica said. "If we can bring your weapons here and start the fight, will you join in?"

  "Of course!" the man replied without hesitation.

  "Then we'll stash what weapons we can out in the mine and distribute the rest from the wagon when the time comes. The signal... will be a gunshot." she said.

  "Got it. I'll spread the word." The man paused. "I... I don't know what to say. I didn't know what was going to happen to us. I thought..." His voice choked with emotion.

  "Don't worry about it." Yunica reassured him. "I couldn't sleep if I knew I'd walked away from this. Where is your village?"

  The man gave us the location. I quickly relayed the information to Fritz and Leo through the group chat, and they headed out to fetch the wagon and make their way out there.

  Meanwhile, Yunica and I found an empty crate and lugged it over to the palisade wall. Climbing atop it, we managed to scramble back over the wall and drop down into the canyon. Once out of the camp, we scouted out the mine, looking for a good spot to stash our surplus weapons.

  I surveyed the mine's layout, trying to picture the coming battle. The high ledges would be perfect for archers. Then those fighting hand-to-hand would take the lower ground. And we could supplement our arsenal with whatever weapons the slavers had on hand. But even with the villagers' help, a straight-up fight would be risky. We needed to strike hard and fast, cut the head off before it could strike back. Then there was those pegasi - flying was a massive advantage against our limited weaponry. As I brought that up in the group chat, Yunica responded.

  [Yunica]: I can handle the first part - shoot whoever's in charge.

  [Percival]: Is one bullet enough to kill? How strong are they?

  [Yunica]: They're decent, but at the end of the day, they are a kind of basic attack. The projectile is so small it can't cut any body parts off, but have you ever hit your head and gotten that dazed feeling? Well, a bullet is very good at that - instant concussion. One tap, and you're out for hours.

  [Percival]: Alright; then that will be our opening shot. Now what about the pegasi? Can you shoot their wings out?

  [Yunica]: Possibly, but I only have a few shots.

  [Percival]: I'll try and take them out with spells then.

  [Leonard]: We've gotten to the village and are gathering all the weapons we can find. It's mostly tools and old military stuff, but there's a few hunting bows. Will they help?

  [Percival]: It'll have to do.

  [Yunica]: Which one of you is the best shot?

  [Percival]: Not me. We've tested this.

  [Leonard]: I doubt it's me.

  [Fritz Carlton]: Eh, I'm not great, but I know I'm better than Percy.

  [Yunica]: I'm going to leave my BP rifle up at the top of the mine. Fritz, take it and coordinate the first shot with me. After that, we can meet up and trade off guns.

  [Percival]: Double the rate of fire.

  [Yunica]: Exactly.

  [Fritz Carlton]: Hey, I'll give it a go, but don't expect a hit.

  [Leonard]: Can anyone else drive the wagon?

  [Percival]: Anyone can as long as there's a horse hooked up to it. I can handle it.

  [Fritz Carlton]: We're on our way now. Still a few hours to sunrise. Man, I wish I had a coffee.

  [Yunica]: I have plenty.

  [Fritz Carlton]: You're a goddamn saint.

  ---

  -Fritz-

  The sun rose over the canyon, perfectly aligned for its rays to fall down the mine's length. The miners trudged out of the camp in a line, prodded along by the Fringe slavers, who bashed them with weapon butts. The prisoners dispersed across the mine, retrieving picks from the bins and getting to work with weary resignation. A few hesitated, examining something hidden, but no alarm was raised. It was just a normal day of work.

  High up in the valley wall, nestled in an outcropping of rocks with my rifle leaning against my shoulder. I gulped down a fresh mug of joe. A familiar jolt of energy shuddered through me and I grinned. Aw yeah, took me right back to those all-nighters before exams. Setting the empty mug aside, I picked up my rifle and flicked off the safety. Showtime.

  I scanned over the guards through the scope, searching for the head honcho. There - a guy strutting along the line, barking orders and cracking skulls. And conveniently close to my side of the range.

  [Fritz Carlton]: Got my target - burly guy, crew cut, sleeveless shirt.

  [Yunica]: Ok. Shoot at your ready; I'll pile on.

  I zeroed in on his head, finger on the trigger. Just needed him to stop squirming for one second ... right there. Deep breath. And-

  Something blocked my view. A scruffy mop of brown hair popped up in my scope, obscuring the target. Leo, peeking out of cover to get ready to charge.

  *Bang!* The rifle kicked against my shoulder.