Three months. He’d promised three months… and he’d delivered.

  The Sapper II was ready. She’d gone from a rough cube covered in black foam and numerous spokes, to a smooth hull, with all but the rear covered with seamless stealth plating that could mimic the stellar light levels with perfection.

  Tiny hatches with similar plating covered thrusters, point defense lasers and needlers, and the hatches for missiles.

  This version was both much bulkier than the Sapper I, as well as far tougher; a direct hit from a dragon’s breath would evaporate the stealth plating, but only get rid of some of the foam beneath unless it was an extended attack.

  Armament-wise, she was better equipped as well. Mixed point-defenses, multiple forward-facing heavy guns, bunches of missile tubes for both defense and attack…. A total of 65, condensed into four banks instead of dozens of scattered tubes each with its own auto-loader, and then the 5 tubes built to launch drones. Not quite as good as he’d planned… but he’d run out of parts after fixing the Auto-loaders repeatedly, and ordered more so they could maintain what he kept later.

  She was also… far slower. Even with the bigger engines, she was unusually dense for her size. If it got into a race, and she needed to outrun someone in realspace? She was screwed. It would also take longer to get places in darkspace.

  He could fix that… with even bigger engines, and a bigger reactor. At which point she would essentially be a Destroyer, and he’d be pushing the limits of what he could expect to handle without a proper crew.

  The whole experience had been dozens of lessons in why you didn’t run ships like this on your own…. And if it weren’t for the assistance of some of the Skulls personnel, he wouldn’t have been able to do it in time. They’d handled quite a bit of the finishing touches, especially the point defenses, as he worked on drones.

  Now…. one last thing before they left. A raid.

  He’d missed the last one. This should be…. Interesting.

  ***

  The art of simulation had been incredible before humanity had become sufficiently advanced to convert a brain into a, theoretically, eternal chunk of hardware. Now that people could live inside one permanently… everything felt real. Not just real… sensations could be more intense than the real world.

  Every time Kyle loaded in as ‘Mastermind’, he was reminded of the feelings; the way this body might be the weakest out of his friend group, but things possible here were still incredible. He could see more clearly, make out distinct scents… the limitations of genetic engineering didn’t apply here.

  For his friends, who had been living inside this world for the past five years, he could only imagine how they felt about the real world.

  This world had a ‘level cap’; an upper limit to how powerful people could get; that a dedicated player would reach after about a year and a half. He and all his friends were there. At that point, it was a matter of finding cool gear, acquiring bonuses from controlling territory and completing challenges…

  When they were younger, he was the party ‘Leader’. He’d picked a class that let him give buffs to others, and debuffs to enemies; and then summon packs of monsters, both golems and undead. He could give the same buffs to his allies; placing markers that would make his allies faster as they moved towards them to help escape or advance. Ones to buff defenses. Ones to augment attack.

  When the rest had died, and moved on to living in this fantasy world full-time, they’d reached a point that they could do awesome things together… but were still better when he was there to buff them.

  He was about ninety percent sure getting a replacement commander had been talked about. But… they’d never done so.

  For them, this raid was excitement. Their faction had conquered a country ruled by Minotaurs, and a nearby nation was getting ready to counter-invade to liberate them. They’d invested so much time and effort into it that it really mattered for them…

  Which made Kyle feel a bit bad about how little he cared. Still. He did his best. Applied his buffs to his allies, focused with precision, used his two different tiers of summons to absorb damage and debuff enemies.

  He wasn’t certain whether that made him better, or worse. He was certain that if it weren’t for the level cap, his friends would be so far beyond him that it’d be useless.

  On the other hand… as much as he didn’t make a big deal about the game anymore, his friends made real-world credits for completing missions. Not as much as any sort of real, dangerous, work, but plenty enough. So he wasn’t going to let this one fail.

  ***

  There were twelve groups, ranging from three to a dozen members, approaching the target… and over six hundred NPCs. Which… might not be the best way to describe them.

  These entities could think, problem-solve, and if you were to upload one into a real-world body, they’d be so close to an actual person that the Directorate would likely destroy them and kill you for making them.

  Every one of those entities had a home, family, its own motivation for being here….. And they were steadily working on making them as real as possible without breaking the law. And… he was probably breaking it himself.

  Best not think about that.

  He didn’t know many of the groups; but the recognized him, as they arrived at the rendezvous point. Thor; in his in-game avatar of Bjorn the Barbarian; stepped forward, enormous axe strapped to his back.

  “Fair met. The Warden Conquerors shall emerge victorious once more this day thanks to our strength of arms!”

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  One of the other leaders; completely covered in enruned armor, with a hooded grey cloak over it, shook his head. “I don’t like our odds. I give us… a one in four shot. One in three if we can take them by surprise, but…. Not much chance of that.”

  He glanced at Kyle, and nodded. “Good to have you, Mastermind. You up our odds slightly. Wasn’t sure you’d really be here.”

  “Ahh, you know me. Off in the void… where I’ll be taking my companions, for a time… but I’m here when they need me.”

  The rune-covered knight shook his head. “Hopefully not for too long. The NPC versions of you that take over when you’re out aren’t nearly as good. Can’t use your ultimate, not as proactive in a fight… still. We win this one, and we’ll be in a good position for the next year or so.”

  Kyle chuckled. “Actually, there’s a bit of good news in that regard. My ultimate has a one-week minimum cooldown, but the longer you go without using it… up to ten weeks… the stronger it gets. You know how every debuff of the same type you apply gets slightly less effective, to keep you from flatlining the enemy?”

  Thor studied him for a moment. “...What did you do?”

  “I did a bit of research. The Doom-Skulls debuff attack speed and strength.The first ten of them give a decent effect, and they give some effect up until twenty, past that its almost nothing. Then the Plague Rats do the same to Resistance and Regeneration, though they give a smaller debuff, and cap at thirty-seven. Both have virtually no real attacks, and the AoE isn’t all that big. But….. I’ve picked nine different kinds of debuffing pets. Just having them in the fight will make the enemy miserable in so many ways, but I can’t summon enough to max-out the debuffs.”

  He looked up at the massive fortress atop the mountain that the groups were about to attack. “But when I trigger my ultimate, I make an extra copy of each of them. And if I let it charge for ten weeks, which I have? Five copies of each of them. So…. I can flatline every single major attribute within an AoE. Focus down the Paladins and the Monks, and we can clear it.”

  The knight nodded. “Well. That increases our odds quite a bit. Anything you need from us to keep it working?”

  “Any area-of-effect ally buffs you can manage to stack on mine… and kill the enemies with tons of AoE. If that Ogre fucker with all the blizzard spells is here, focus on him. Even debuffed all to hell he could wipe all of the minions in maybe forty-five seconds with his ‘Eternal Wrath of the Frost Moon’ ultimate, it deals a certain minimum damage no matter what.”

  The group nodded. They were excited. Thor, Sherry, Barry, Elise. They had been working on this for years.. And for Kyle, he’d just dropped in a few hours at a time to make sure he kept building charges for those rare raids he could get involved in.

  As the raid proceeded; and they worked their way through the perimeter as quietly as possible.. He could see, and feel, the way they reacted. As if it were a real fight, with real stakes, not just money.

  The excitement they felt when it came time to fight the boss; and he triggered his maxed-out Ultimate ability, turning his swarm of minions into an army to swamp the boss and his guards; was almost infectious.

  But… it was purely surface-level for him. He liked watching them having so much fun. But it was all fake. A game. He wasn’t sure if his detachment from the whole thing made him better or worse at it, but he was able to direct the swarm, the packs of debuffing minions and the handful of tanks, focusing them on the main boss himself, and on the entryways; where the different parties of the raid were creating deathtraps for incoming rival players.

  With absolute precision, he triggered his buffs. Focusing on Thor, whose damage in his rage was the second-highest in the raid, and a sniper from one of the other teams whose rapid-fire arrow volleys seemed to always nail the target with perfect precision.

  He barely paid attention to the boss at all, instead watching the icons for his allies buffs, the timers, their health bars…

  Thor, he actually had to be careful with. He actually did more damage the lower his health was, so he’d get pissed if he got ‘saved’ at the wrong time… so as the berserker’s health dwindled, he had his allies draw closer… and right as it reached 1%, he triggered one of his own special attacks…

  And then one of Kyle’s clockwork minions leapt, grabbing him and interposing itself as the boss; some sort of manticore creature with a knight riding atop it; launched a volley of poisonous barbs; almost shattering the minion, but giving Thor time to launch one last strike… before his allies starting focusing on healing him again.

  That final surge had just about done it. The Manticore had died… and all that was left was finishing off its much weaker, less dangerous, rider.

  It was weird. He could feel the cold of a stray ice blast; that damned Ogre had started off his Ultimate power, only to be crushed mid-cast; he could feel when a stray manticore barb had pierced his fairly fragile armor, and the pain as it slid free.

  The simulation was almost perfect. It actually hurt worse than his broken arm while it was in, and the poison was working through his fake digital body… but he knew it wasn’t real.

  And soon enough…. The battle was over. The conquerors victorious. The attempt to bring the Minotaurs back in on the other side of the war crushed, for now.

  He gave his team a congratulatory hug… which all of them piled in on… and finally… it was over. He could disconnect. Leave his avatar here under NPC control… and get back to the real world.

  What really mattered.

  ***

  His friends were still incoming. Their bodies had been on the surface, to get absolutely perfect reaction time, since the local server was hosted on Ash herself, in a server farm on the south pole. So here and now…

  He was running through the checklist.

  The maintenance bots; he had 32 of them now; had swept the entire ship, inside and out, multiple times. He’d reviewed the video footage in detail, and even pieced together a complete 3D model of the ship, taken by direct camera view; and then adjusted the next pattern to catch a few missing spots.

  The walls were all smooth. There were indicator lights to show if there were flow problems, shorts, or issues. Tiny holes where you could feed an optic cable through to visually check for issues without removing a plate.

  Everything was perfect. From the drones he’d built; based on the ideas he and Billy had from her first flight; the banks of missiles, both for point-defense and for attacks; the railguns. The plasma beamer.

  If he had to fight that same dragon again, he could launch a single volley of the railguns, the needlers, the flak missiles… and shatter off enough scales to hurt or even kill it immediately… and then skewer its softer underbelly with the plasma weapon and more railgun slugs.

  And while its own first attack would ruin all the stealth plating? The layer beneath would mean he would retain full functionality until, at the earliest, the second attack.

  If they did their job properly, no dragon would get close. But even if they got surprised? They should be able to handle it.

  As he checked the plumbing in the officer’s quarters one last time, he nodded to himself… everything was ready. He wouldn’t be going alone this time… and this time, it would be people he could trust, and equipment that he’d improved after the last trip out revealed all the flaws.

  He watched the approach of the shuttle carrying his friends to the dock. It was almost time. They were going to actually go dragon-hunting.

  This was so much better than that stupid game, not that he could tell his friends that.