Elijah relayed the conversation with the admin to his friends.

  “What did she look like?” Bo asked, causing the others to look at him questioningly. He was back in his fully human form now. The taint of the ink was still there beneath the surface, but he no longer looked like a monster with their friend’s face.

  “Elijah just told us we’re completely screwed—there’s an admin who is going to be working against us. And you are more worried about what she looked like?” Benjamin asked incredulously.

  Bo shot him a look like he was an idiot. “I’m not asking if she was pretty, I’m asking what she looks like in case I know who she is.”

  “About five-foot tall, black hair pulled back into a braid, bright green eyes.” Elijah didn’t see how it would help, but he trusted Bo had a good reason if he was asking. He tried to come up with any other identifiable marks. “She had some kind of a scar under the corner of her left eye.”

  That did it for Bo; recognition shot across his face. “Crap,” he whispered, falling back into one of the bookshelves. “We’re all going to die.”

  That got everyone’s attention immediately, and they all stared at him.

  “Who is she?” Sasha finally asked, when no one else dared to do so.

  “When I worked for Shardline, I was fairly high up in the internal hierarchy. They treated the balance team well and compensated us more than fairly because we had such major control of the stuff players saw. But we weren’t the ones who had the widest access.”

  Elijah already didn’t like where Bo was going with this.

  “At the top of the developer hierarchy were the Worldkeepers. There were only ever three of them at any one time. You could consider them chief officers of the dev team. They have controls that made my access look like child’s play. They can even rewrite Fate’s code.”

  “But Fate is a goddess. She is the system—the physics and engine,” Sasha argued. She was grasping at straws, hoping that this wasn’t as bad as everything made it seem.

  “Fate is code. She’s software. And Worldkeepers have access to that code and experience in manipulating it.” Bo corrected her.

  ”And this woman,” Elijah started, his mouth felt dry and he could hear his heart pounding in his chest. “She’s a worldkeeper?”

  Bo nodded his head. “Yeah, Miss Lanigan was a worldkeeper. I don’t know how or why she was logged into the game—they rarely logged in themselves—but if it’s her, then we would be better off if you had taken her kingdom deal.”

  ”She said she can’t interfere directly with us,” Elijah whispered. “Not yet, something about not wanting Fate’s attention to be drawn to her.”

  Bo shrugged his shoulders. “Could be that she’s scared that Fate will overwrite her own programming. Or screw with Miss Lanigan’s admin tools. Based on my very limited underlying knowledge of the game code, it is possible.”

  He looked over at Elijah. “After all, Fate rewrote your controls to make it a class.”

  “So what do we do then?” Nicholas asked, he stepped into the rough semicircle they’d found themselves in, drawing everyone’s attention.

  Bo chuckled, as if he’d already given up and that fighting would be completely useless. “Kiss our butts goodbye? Pray that she doesn’t follow through with her threat to respawn us in the ocean?”

  Nicholas looked like he wanted to punch Bo. “We aren’t beat yet, Bo. And I don’t know about you, but I have no interest in living out the rest of my days in this game.”

  “Why not?” Elijah asked, surprising even himself. His thoughts solidified in his mind only moments before he spoke them. “We live in a shit hole of a world right now, and it’s only getting worse. At least here we have a chance of making it better. We have the power to help people here.”

  Nicholas turned to face Elijah, anger writ large on his face. The moment he saw Elijah’s expression, his own demeanor softened. “Look, I get why you think that. I know I’ve been lucky based solely on my inheritance, but we can make a difference in our own world. We can make it a better place to live for our children and their children. But that won’t ever happen if we’re stuck here.”

  “It’s just been one thing after another lately,” Bo responded to Nicholas, drawing the man’s attention away before he could see Elijah’s expression darken at the mention of children. “Arturus, then Tom. The Celestials halted both of them in their plans, but that isn’t an option for Lanigan. Not even the Celestials will be able to stand up to her once she can act freely.”

  “Then we work harder, work faster. If we can get out of here before she can assert full control, then it doesn’t matter what she does.” Nicholas shifted slightly, standing taller and more in charge of the situation. “Even if we fail, then nobody will be able to say that we didn’t try.”

  The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  “California,” Elijah whispered, though no one was close enough to hear him. He had to keep reminding himself that there was something waiting for him on the outside of this. Something good and worth fighting for.

  ”Nicholas is right,” he said, moving to stand beside the party leader. “We have to try, even if there might not be any hope for us, we have to try.”

  Nicholas turned to him and smiled, putting a hand on Elijah’s shoulder and giving it a gentle squeeze. “There is always hope; we just have to find it.”

  Bo rolled his eyes. “Fine, so what’s the plan?”

  “As much as I hate to say it; the Dragontooth questline is off the table. At least for now. I don’t think Lanigan can track us, not yet, but she knew we were coming here.” Elijah hated he had to put off the final act of his class quest, but if this dungeon had been any indication, Lanigan could make the Fort nearly impossible for them to complete without getting much stronger first.

  “We fought together well enough during this dungeon. I say we move up our plan to take on the wandering bosses.” Sasha moved in closer, giving a smile to the two men.

  “Yeah,” Elijah whispered. “Yeah, that’s what we’ll do, but I need you four to do something for me first. I need you guys to teleport out of here. We can meet by the sea.”

  “What are you going to be doing?”

  Elijah tried to smile at Sasha, to convey that everything was going to be alright, but it wasn’t what he felt. “I never told you guys how I eliminated the Reaper Lair. How I managed to destroy the dungeon.”

  It terrified him they would see him as a monster; Bo already knew but had recommended he keep the specifics a secret. He laid it all out on the line, the way he had gained the sliver that led to his Core Guardian sub-class by interacting with the dungeon core of the dev room, how he’d ripped the damaged Hearth Forge core out of the Reaper Lair and communicated with it. How he felt the love that the cores had for players and how that could lead to them being mistreated. How he had torn the sentient core in half, killing its AI.

  The party listened in rapt silence at Elijah’s words, Bo chiming in from time to time to give clarifying details from his perspective of the events or background knowledge he had from his time as a developer.

  When he was done, Sasha shook his head at him. “Every time I think I have you figured out, you throw something like this at us,” Sasha sighed. There was no anger in her voice, just a weary tiredness.

  Elijah just shrugged his shoulders. “Just makes me more interesting, right?”

  She rolled her eyes at him. “Alright Benjamin. Open the portal, let’s get going.”

  His friends filed out one by one. The Bitters tried to leave too, but he stopped them. “Not you guys. Need you here in case something goes wrong.”

  “Ah, boss just want us have brutal death,” Bitter Root complained, but he stepped away from the portal. He could see Bitter Bat watching Sasha as she crossed through the barrier of the shimmering bubble. The bat-like creature seemed to have a crush on her, which was alarming, but also very far down on his list of things he wanted to deal with right now.

  Benjamin’s teleport bubble popped as the mage went through, leaving Elijah alone in the Library. The core still hummed in its place to the far end of the room.

  ”Core? Can you still hear me?”

  The orb’s hum increased in pitch for a brief moment before settling back down to the normal background level. He took that to mean that it could hear him.

  He glanced at the error message he’d had sitting in the corner of his vision for the past several minutes.

  [Error]

  Reality Warp may not affect Dungeon Cores until reaching Legendary-tier.

  He had expected nothing to even come up, but when this had appeared, he’d gotten an idea.

  “I know you wanted me to kill you, but there’s another option here. Somehow we might be able to fix you, but it’s going to be awhile before I can do that. I don’t know if this will work, but I think it’s a better option than killing you outright.”

  The hum returned, the same pitch and tone as before, implying that the core was willing to take him up on his offer.

  “Bitter Root, come over here.”

  The goblin ran over and looked up at the sphere, his eyes going wide as he got close.

  Elijah focused on the core. “I need you to enter the sleep of change. I’m going to have to make some changes, and I think it would be better if you were asleep before this. Full disclosure, I don’t know for certain this is going to work, and if it doesn’t…”

  His words trailed off, unable to continue that train of thought. He didn’t want to have to kill the Core; it had done nothing wrong and had been manipulated. At the same time his heart hurt for the Hearth Forge core. He’d been unaware of the extent of his powers back when he’d interacted with it. If this worked, that would mean that he wouldn’t have had to kill that core either.

  He wasn’t sure which was worse.

  The core dulled, its deep red glow fading until it was more reminiscent of a giant marble.

  “Alright, it’s asleep. Put your hands on it and keep trying to put it into your inventory, Bitter Root,” Elijah told the familiar. “It probably won’t work at first, but don’t stop trying unless I tell you to do so.”

  The goblin placed his hand on the core and Elijah could sense that he was trying, but with the core not being a true item—more similar to an environmental object—it didn’t want to enter Root’s inventory.

  Elijah grabbed at the code streaming between Bitter Root and the Core with his Reality Awareness; he could feel a headache coming on. The game didn’t want him to do what he was trying to do, and he honestly didn’t blame it. Regardless of that fact, doing this was the only way he could ensure that the core would survive. He didn’t trust this Lanigan woman to leave it be after it had failed to run Elijah and his friends off.

  And he wasn’t about to leave it to her mercy.

  The headache shot through his head like a lightning bolt. His eyes burned and he could taste blood. Every nerve in his skull was firing off pain signals, but he refused to stop trying. The game could kill him if it didn’t want him to do this, but his health pool wasn’t even dropping. Not yet anyway.

  Finally he felt something break within the game’s higher-level code, and the core vanished, hopefully into his familiar’s inventory. He collapsed to the ground, blood running down his face from a nosebleed, and waited for the dungeon to collapse.

  [DEATH]

  You have died!

  Time to respawn: 120 seconds.