With no sun and no way to tell time, we wandered the caverns for hours, Akilah drawing chalk marks in the cold glare of her glowstone. We had a few more chance encounters: a scorpion thing that Jake crowed over for reagents, a smaller broodmother with babies we stomped into despawn, and a millipede, its venom confiscated for Jake’s magetech voodoo.

  I got a couple [Slick Carapace Plate], for armor crafting. I figured I’d take it back to the city and see if they were worth commissioning into armor.

  We stopped in a chamber big enough to be a room, bubbling off the side of a passage we were following. Akilah set her glowstone down and leaned up against the wall, head rocking back to rest. With a long sigh, she muttered, “We could go on for days like this.”

  “Eww,” Elora replied, dropping to sit cross-legged beside her.

  Jake paused at the stone archway and glanced around. I leaned inside, just past the clearance, glancing around for a spot to sprawl when he poked me with a claw-tipped finger. I arched a brow at him, turning his way.

  “I gotta pee, but I don’t want to go alone,” he whispered.

  My eye twitched.

  Peeing was one of those deeply personal things I still felt weird about. The convenience of a male’s body in that regard? Amazing. Still a little jolting—my memories and my body didn’t always align. As much as I’d integrated with the avatar I’d chosen, the fact that we had to do any biological things annoyed me. We were programs, for fuck’s sake.

  Down here, there were no public restrooms or even the privy-type things the orcs had. Outhouses were a place where you did your business, and no one bothered you.

  I nodded, and glanced at the other two. Jake rightfully didn’t want to go alone, so of course he asked me. I gestured towards the passage we’d been down.

  “Alright,” I muttered, my skin crawling with self-consciousness.

  He clattered down the hallway. I followed at a distance and waited, considering my situation as I leaned against the striated wall. I listened for any whispers or clicks that would warn of any potential danger and decided I’d painted myself into a corner, somehow.

  I hadn’t told anyone about who I was, because in my mind, it didn’t matter. Rationally, it didn’t. But this awkwardness I felt, following this kid into the dark to protect him while he was vulnerable because he thought I was something I wasn’t, made me realize something: would they feel like I lied to them, somehow?

  My eyes closed against my stupidity. Why was I setting myself up with hypotheticals? How could they feel betrayed when I didn’t know anything about their life on Earth before this, either? Just. Stop.

  My eyes snapped open at Jake’s signature footfalls, and I pushed off the wall to go back.

  He smoothed his sash and asked, “You gotta go?”

  “I’m good for a little longer,” I muttered, turning away.

  The big bad Tank was pee-shy. Hopefully that wouldn’t bite me in the ass, someday.

  We returned to the alcove to find Elora napping, her head on Akilah’s thigh. The mage sat very still, but her eyes flicked this way and that, reading something on an aspect screen I couldn’t see.

  Hunkered down near the door, I laid my sword across my knees in case something snuck up on us, until Jake patted my shoulder and pointed at the uneven floor. “I’ll watch.”

  I tipped my chin at him and slid out of the way, stretching out on the cold stone. I couldn’t imagine how Elora could sleep on this. Then again, maybe it wasn’t about comfort. Exhaustion was tugging at all of us.

  The fights were brief, but caution eclipsed the spikes of stress and action, and never let up. We used party chat or soft whispers, always on alert against an ambush or signs that an enemy was near. None of us were used to it.

  A blip appeared in the bottom right corner of my HUD. 21:09… 21:10. I turned on my side and caught the smug curve of Akilah’s lips, eyes closed as if she was asleep. I rolled to my back and grinned at the jagged ceiling. She’d made us a clock.

  “Nice,” Jake whispered from his spot at the door.

  About an hour later, when we’d pushed on, Elora’s voice startled me in party chat.

  Elora: “Guys? Something weird, ahead. I hear sounds of a fight.”

  “Can you get closer without being seen?”

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  Akilah: “Keep talking; tell us what you see.”

  A moment of painful silence passed as we crept along the passage. Jake tried to tiptoe on his clompy hooves. In another situation, I would have been cracking up, but I couldn’t feel the mirth as the two of them snuck along ahead of me.

  Elora’s voice filled my head.

  “Okay, I see two people, and a big… thing. This place is wack, guys. I did not expect this—it was called the Den, right?”

  Suspense made my head pound. I flexed my fingers around Baneheart’s hilt and slid past Akilah and Jake. As quickly as I could, I slipped along down the winding passage to where light drew a blinding slash of a line against the wall. I squinted against the glare as I edged around the rough curve of rock.

  Into a completely different world.

  The rocky tunnel that we’d been wandering through was gone. The space that opened before me was massive—bigger than the warehouse I used to work in. The ceiling loomed far above. Light came from everywhere. The walls pulsed and flickered with lines and patterns reminiscent of the vortex of code behind the aspect screen’s GUI.

  Plasma fire flashed at the far side of the Den—but I was struck dumb, standing there like a mouth-breathing idiot.

  The floor was cluttered with scattered objects, components, and NPC mannequins in different states of despawn. Globes floated overhead, each filled with drifting symbols that swam like goldfish. A globe drifted toward one of the walls and sank into a funnel of light, the glow shifting from white to green. It dispersed, as if the walls were only windows and the code had somewhere else to be, vanishing to points in the depths.

  Elora hid behind a platform, crouched under the unmoving form of a skeleton as lights from the platform pulsed, filling in the bones. Constructing something…

  “Hsst!” Elora was looking at me with exasperation.

  I shook my head free of wonder and ran in a crouch to hide behind her, not quite daring to touch the platform. There were rows of them down there. It was a mad scientist’s laboratory. Without scientists.

  It floated above the platforms—a thing that my poor mind could only describe as an aberration. Its branched limbs unfolded like antennae made of filaments and light, flickering as if it struggled to keep its form. Its head turned, its lens-like eyes sweeping over broken constructs. Where it looked, broken NPCs writhed as if in agony before dissolving.

  A plasma bolt sheared one of the limbs away, and it thrashed a length of—fiber optic cable?—at the attackers.

  “The hell is that?” I whispered, tracking the two engaged in battle. The taller one was methodical in his movements, rifle to his shoulder. The other, smaller one was waving her hands around like she was casting a spell. A half-formed anklyosaur-looking thing hobbled up to swing its armored tail at the platform the construct hovered over.

  Jake, that motherfucker, put his hand on my shoulder. I stiffened, nearly punching him on reflex.

  “Heh, internet guy’s worst nightmare,” he said, totally unaware that he almost got laid out.

  I glanced at him, hovering over my shoulder like I was hovering over Elora, and growled, “When did you get stealthy?”

  “Shh!” Akilah hissed, crouching beside us.

  The two were holding their own, despite the construct decimating anything they threw up against it. The green-haired girl was doing some kind of technomancy, forcing the NPC shells to lurch at the platform with jerky, uncoordinated attacks. The rifleman was precise, but there must have been some kind of magnetic shielding protecting the core structure of the cable monster. Plasma bounced off a lens, ricocheting off into the wall.

  The wall absorbed it. Like it was nothing.

  I tensed, looking for a way to jump in until Akilah poked me with the butt of her staff. She flicked her gaze up to the fight and murmured, “Just wait. They’re okay, it’s not our fight, and we can learn by watching.”

  “There you go being reasonable,” I mumbled, rolling my eyes. She was right.

  When did I take up the hothead flag? Right, when I picked a half-orc avatar. I sighed and settled in to watch things unfold.

  My HUD gave me the basics on the cable beast. Its nameplate was blank above it, on my HUD the code was rendered unreadable from distortion. Whatever it was, it had no name or classification. It had a HP bar, and that was it.

  It didn’t belong in the System and yet, somehow, there it was, flinging needles of light as the two who dodged and danced around it, lashing them with filaments when they got close enough to reach.

  They’d burned it down to half its HP and then it glitched out. Vanished for a millisecond.

  I nearly stood up, then light flared on the platform.

  It was back—changed. The core form was the same, but this time it had full HP and plates of metal whirled around it, adding further protection from their ranged attacks.

  “Oh,” Elora sighed, her hopeful crouch slumping against the platform.

  I thought they’d beat it, but no. It just came back even meaner than before. Super.

  I shot a glance over at Akilah. She shook her head, still grimly staring at the new iteration of the cable monster. I sighed and rubbed my forehead with my sword’s crossguard in frustration.

  Were we going to fight this thing, or sit here all day?

  I fought against the urge to smash thoughtlessly into danger. The plates around the cable monster spun, light strobing from behind them as they closed in— the construct flickered, the core of the monster exposed as cables gapped outward. The plates pulsed and then slammed together to create a shell.

  It whipped a spray of luminescent plasma from above in a rain of death around it.

  “Now! Now, go now, Dath!” Akilah cried as she surged to her feet, running.

  I lunged up, the war drum of my heart in my ears. Game on.

  -ARCHIVE-