“Rattle big black bones in the danger zone.

  There’s a rumblin’ groan down below.”

  - T. Waits, Underground

  CHAR

  No sense being modest: Char was a hero.

  He was also one of a dozen players who had crossed the Field of Sorrows and now stood at the precipice of a swirling black pit. From this vantage, it was like staring down a tornado from the top, a whirlpool of sludge and glittering dust.

  And as the game’s highest ranking storm guard, it was Char’s responsibility to keep everyone safe from what lurked below.

  The entrance to the Void Burrow sat at the base of the Stonewall Bluffs, which meant there was no way forward and no way back except through a landscape that was already repopulating with mud hoppers.

  The constant thud of waves crashing against the other side of the bluffs was nearly deafening this close to their rocky wall, but if you angled your head just right toward the Field of Sorrows, you could hear the slurping of a thousand wriggling hatchlings, munching their way through a corpse buffet. Their accelerated metabolism would ensure they reached adulthood in plenty of time to make dessert out of any stragglers.

  Looking at the warriors, mages, aegises, and hunters, each with their own specializations, gathered around him, Char had one recurring thought:

  It wasn’t nearly enough.

  “We doing this or what?” The question came from Gallup, the aerial barbarian next to him.

  “Have you been down the Void Burrow before?” Char asked.

  The barbarian, a chiseled man wearing oxenfox hide and little else, looked offended by the question. “Yeah. In a different body, but I know the ropes.”

  The unstated, but understood, message buried in that answer was: I used to have a higher level character, but Bask deleted him. Thanks for bringing it up.

  “Great, you can hold the back line, then. I’ll take point.”

  Another voice spoke up, this time from a tall woman with patches of iridescent scales along her skin. Daggers made from serpents’ teeth were strapped to her thigh with black leather. “I’ll use my boys to help cover the rear, too. Make sure we don’t have anything sneak up on us.”

  Char glanced at her collection of “boys”—battle-scarred mud hoppers swaying hypnotically in unison behind her—and then at her ID block.

  It was impressive she’d made it this far, but low fifties was going to have a difficult time down there. She probably already knew that, though, so he merely nodded and said, “The marrow crabs are gonna chew your pals up pretty quick. As soon as that happens, slide into the middle and let Gallup protect you. We’ll need everyone as healthy as possible when we get to Bask.”

  “Did I miss the vote to elect you raid leader?” Mammon asked from the opposite side of the pool. The bone bender’s emaciated body was covered in skeletal armor and, just in case that wasn’t enough of a goth cliche, he’d added a black cloak hemmed with witchcraft sigils. With a raised eyebrow, Mammon offered a less-than-subtle glance at the undead monstrosity beside him.

  The centipede that Char had, to his immense satisfaction, previously crushed underfoot was now upgraded to a twenty foot long writhing mass of suckered tentacles and gnashing teeth. As annoying as Mammon was, there was no denying his ability.

  He was also, by definition, the highest level in the group.

  Only one character in Silverdawn was permitted to hold the vaunted rank of “Level 100” at any given time, and there were only two ways to break the level 99 barrier.

  The first was the passive approach: simply wait for the current top player to be deleted by a Leyline Guardian. When that happened, the game would promote a level 99 player to the top of the hierarchy. The criteria for choosing the replacement was a secret, but everyone had their own theories. Layton, for instance, was pretty sure the selection was totally random. What else would explain picking this dork to be top dog?

  Random or otherwise, Mammon had been chosen as the new level 100 after Cerberus met her untimely end at the hands of the Leyline Guardian whose lair they stood above at this very moment. Maybe the bone bender would suffer the same fate today. Wouldn’t that be a lovely surprise?

  For those players who weren’t patient enough to wait, there was a second option:

  Defeat the reigning champ in solo combat.

  This was, admittedly, an intriguing proposal, but there was a catch: if you challenged a level 100 player and lost, you dropped all the way back down to first level. A humiliating penalty, to say the least. As the saying went: if you aim for the king, you’d best not miss.

  So, for now, like it or not (and Char very much did not), if he and the others were going to have any chance at victory, they’d need Mammon’s help.

  “No votes. Just offering suggestions, pal,” he raised his hands. “You’ve done this more than the rest of us combined. If you’ve got thoughts, let’s hear ‘em.”

  The unstated, but he certainly hoped understood, message buried in that answer was: You’ve had your ass kicked by Bask more than anyone else here, loser.

  “Relax. We all know what to do, fellas. And there’s less than forty minutes ‘til reset.” Another voice that Char knew very well. And, unlike the Dark Dipshit, this one he was excited to hear.

  He turned to face the gorgeous mage in crimson robes, veins glowing faintly beneath her skin like trails of neon, and took a moment to relish her ID block.

  The red “Intimate” tag meant they’d agreed to accept each other’s sexual advances. And boy, had they ever. If only the real world was so straightforward, he could stop joining intramural co-ed sports teams in the hopes of getting laid.

  Silverdawn wasn’t the first hyper-reality sex simulator—the porn industry had jumped into that market with both feet ages ago—but it was the most realistic. In fact, whole communities of players chose to forego the sword and sorcery schtick and spent all their time sampling the game’s well-stocked and wildly diverse brothels.

  Who could blame them? Why choose awkward silences and fumbling attempts to unfasten bra straps when you could be a sexual stallion with perfect abs?

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  Char didn’t care about whatever other options were wandering the Eleven Kingdoms, though; he only had eyes for this particularly intoxicating sanguine sculptor. He winked at her and she winked back, which was all he needed for a green light to get this party started.

  With an exaggerated gesture, he extended a hand toward the swirling pit and smiled at Mammon. “After you, Archdick.”

  QUARTZ

  It was an overlooked fact, but a fact nonetheless: Quartz was a hero.

  And right now, her heroic duty was to conserve Spirit, so she worked her way to the middle of the group, offering Char a faint brush of her hands as she passed.

  She’d occasionally wondered what he was like outside of Silverdawn, but they’d never spoken of their lives beyond the boundaries of the game.

  That anonymity was by design. Silverdawn had a “full immersion” requirement and it manipulated non-game discourse in real time. You might try to say “Philadelphia,” but Silverdawn would translate it to one of the Kingdom’s capital cities. And if you pushed the limits too much, you were likely to get yourself booted or even banned.

  She didn’t even know what language Char spoke in real life or what his actual voice sounded like since all audio was translated into the listener’s native tongue. In fact, he might not even be a “he” outside of the content cube.

  But she never lingered on any of that for too long. In here, Char was just a handsome boy in a world brimming with beautiful people of every conceivable race and gender. No need to fixate on any particular one for too long. Recently, in fact, she’d been spending a lot of time with an especially kinky set of twins in the Octavio Kingdom.

  Besides, her immediate future was crammed full of bigger concerns. While everyone else positioned themselves and readied spells, Quartz took in her surroundings. She’d been in the Void Burrow before—any high level player worth their salt had—but it never failed to creep her out.

  The area’s design was, at its core, a simple tunnel, fifteen feet wide and stretching into darkness in both directions. The only exits were the swirling portal currently overhead and, at the end of the tunnel, a doorway to Bask.

  But that simplicity came with a huge caveat: the door wasn’t always on the same end, which meant there was no way to know if you were headed the wrong way until you'd reached a blank wall. That was frustrating, to be sure, but wasn’t the creepy part. That description applied to literally everything else about this place.

  The Void Burrow was lined with crystal hands that snagged anyone who ventured too close. A low chorus of moans came from just beyond the earthen walls, as if the souls of everyone who’d died in these tunnels were trapped in the bedrock. And the floor was littered with the twisted and broken skeletons of children.

  From somewhere up ahead, she heard Mammon say, “Go as far as you can, child. Your final death shall be our inspiration.”

  It was a ludicrous pronouncement; the bone bender was milking his celebrity status. And to be fair, he was unquestionably a Silverdawn VIP. Many of the players here had only ever seen his name at the top of the level board but never met him in person. So the opportunity to fight alongside the Big Kahuna was a pretty big deal.

  But their hushed whispers and furtive glances also underscored Mammon’s more sinister reputation. Recently, rumors had swirled of a nasty habit involving the murder of lower level characters. Not just your typical kill, either, but somehow fully deleting them from the game, as if he were a Leyline Guardian.

  It was ridiculous, of course, but the reputation had stuck, which meant that for some of these players, being with Mammon in this pitch black tunnel probably felt like exploring a cave with Jack the Ripper.

  Quartz, however, merely found all that posturing and rumor-milling tedious. Just like she viewed Mammon’s never-ending pissing match with Char pointless and trite. She was the best player between the three of them. The one deserving of all the star-struck gawking. The rightful heir to Level 100.

  But just like her real world boss, the game had passed her over for promotion when Cerberus was killed. She couldn’t do anything about Mr. Singh’s tendency to give raises based on how high your skirt was hiked. But here in Silverdawn, she could set things right.

  And tonight that’s exactly what she intended to do.

  The ground shook as Mammon’s undead minion squeezed through the tunnel and the group followed. Normally on a dungeon crawl, she would have cast a GloWorm spell by now, but bright light sent the monstrosities roaming this tunnel into a frenzy, so she let the Void Burrow remain dark except for the scattered glow of magical weapons and armor.

  The only sounds were nervous breathing, the crunch of bones underfoot, and the ever-present ethereal moans.

  A hulking werewolf with a striped tail marched in front of Quartz, broad shoulders stooped low beneath the tunnel’s ceiling. Unlike most fantasy games, Silverdawn required all its players to start as human characters, restricting elves, dwarves, and other such races to NPCs. But there were plenty of opportunities for modifications, such as Mammon’s zombification, or—in the case of the player ahead of Quartz—lycanthropy.

  The ID block identified her as:

  Wow, somehow an even worse name than Killswitch. Quartz was about to ask if she’d picked up any scents when a shout of surprise rang out from the rear, too far away to be someone in line. Probably the low-level snake charmer who’d stupidly volunteered to hang back and keep watch with her “recruited” mud hoppers.

  Surely, someone was going to help—

  “Leave her be. She’s dead weight anyhow.” Wikkid grunted, sensing Quartz’s indecision.

  Quartz might have said the same of a giant wolf-woman forced to fight in cramped quarters, but instead she just sighed, closed her eyes, and called up the command terminal.

  >> AWAITING INSTRUCTION [QUARTZ]

  “Time until reboot.”

  >> THIRTY-EIGHT MINUTES NINETEEN SECONDS

  Another shout, this time with less surprise and more panic.

  Maybe Wikkid was right to leave the rookie behind. Charm spells wouldn’t work on a Guardian anyhow. Then again, having more players at the end of the tunnels meant more opportunities to distract Bask, and Quartz was going to need every extra second she could get to pull off her plan.

  She patted the vial in her belt pouch. If she didn’t get to use it today, the update would probably set her back months. Maybe longer.

  Fuck.

  “Cruor Jump.”

  She drew a deep breath, held it, and sank.

  For a moment everything was red.

  When she re-emerged, it was beside a mud hopper, frantically clawing at its own face in an effort to pry off a greenish-orange scorpion.

  Except of course it wasn’t a scorpion.

  The foot-long thorax was her first clue. Another was the twin tails, poison beading at their tips like sap. All of which would be bad enough, but the real kicker, and the primary reason Quartz hated this fucking tunnel, was the face.

  Between its twitching mandibles was the head of a doll with porcelain skin, unblinking eyes, and a lock of blonde hair. Tears streamed down its cherub cheeks and collected in lips that were perpetually pursed as if suckling an invisible teat. Whoever came up with this thing’s design desperately needed to see a therapist.

  The marrow crab shredded the mud hopper, tossing strips of flesh into the air like confetti.

  And where there was one…

  Dozens covered the floor and walls, filling the air with a cacophony of lip smacks as they carved salty trails through the shattered bone carpet.

  “EveryRose,” Quartz whispered and long thorns grew from her skin. By the time the first crab reached her legs, she was covered in razor sharp blades.

  “Oh, thank god. I thought you were the Dream Creeper.”

  The voice came from Quartz’s left, and when she looked over, the ID tag put a name to the beleaguered snake charmer: Apostle.

  “The what?”

  Apostle held aloft a Glowstone, casting sharply angled shadows across a moving blanket of marrow crabs. Judging by the scattered collection of broken stingers and mandibles, her hoppers had put up a good fight, but now the bugs encircled Apostle’s light, pincers waving hungrily.

  The snake charmer half-smiled with a mix of embarrassment and fear. “Nothing. Never mind. I talk too much when I’m nervous. How’s it going?”

  “Fucking peachy. Stay put,” Quartz barked. “I’ll come to you and teleport us out of here.”

  She tried a running jump, but the momentum stopped as quickly as it had begun and her feet landed only a few inches from where they’d left the ground. With a surprised grunt, she twisted to see a crystal hand clamped down on her robe.

  She’d emerged too close to the wall; a careless mistake in a place where even the slightest miscalculation could get you killed.

  Adding insult to injury, it wasn't just any robe in the crystal hand’s clutches. These were the Sacrificial Robes of Nephilim, which she’d taken from a nasty little Leyline Guardian deep inside Stokerville Mountain. She could teleport away, of course, but that would mean leaving behind one of Silverdawn’s most uniquely powerful items.

  “Fuck,” she said, in case there was any question as to her feelings on the subject. “Any chance you have a telepor-tato.”

  “Is that a real thing?” Apostle asked. “No way is that a real thing.”

  Perfect. Thanks to this talkative idiot and her own reckless stupidity, Quartz was going to spend the game’s remaining minutes hanging from the wall like a goddamn overcoat instead of ascending to her rightful place atop the Silverdawn food chain.

  “Change of plans,” she said, offering Apostle her most pointed glare. “Slit your wrists.”

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