A voice crackled in my ear. “Coming your way, Ray! Forty grunts and an elite.” It was the voice of my best friend, Jeremy, as he oversaw the battle.

“Roger, Oversight,” I called back, pushing a new battery into my pulse rifle. I mentally ordered the four NPCs under my command into an arrow formation, with me at the tip. They rushed into position, rifles up.

We were standing in the center of a small cavern, three narrow paths branching in front of us, with one at our back. Our job was to cover the three paths in this bottleneck, preventing the mobs from getting to the core down the path behind us. Jeremy was on Oversight, giving him a bird’s-eye view of the entire dungeon - though I knew from experience that the fog-of-war blocked most of his vision past my position.

We heard the mobs before we saw them. The rhythmic slapping of feet on the cavern floor, the ragged breaths of the alien mobs as they raced towards us, the echoing shouts of commands from the elite as he forced his minions towards their death - it was a familiar sound, comforting, like the patter of rain on a window pane.

I bent my knees and braced the butt of my rifle into my shoulder. Our shoulder lights struggled to pierce the darkness ahead, and I squinted my eyes, looking for the suggestion of movement. I was watching the middle tunnel, while my NPCs were watching the left and right tunnels. Their detection skill was much lower than my own, but I could only track one tunnel at a time. The echoing nature of the tight caves made it difficult to identify direction just from the sounds, so we watched, and waited.

The static whine of Alpha One’s pulse rifle ramping up drew my attention to the left. He and Alpha Two were watching the leftmost tunnel, and must have spotted movement. A split second later, the scream of his weapon flew down the tunnel, the light of its passage illuminating the cave briefly. I risked a quick glance, but couldn’t determine how many mobs were approaching from that direction. The telltale whine of Alpha Four’s rifle started up, and soon added to the light and cacophony as more mobs appeared in the rightmost tunnel.

I braced, knowing that those would just be the vanguard. The elites usually preferred to send in distracting probes before committing to an all-out assault. With my team’s attention on the left and right tunnels, I was sure the elite would follow up from the middle tunnel in moments.

My only warning of movement was the glint of light from the passage of a pulse beam as it reflected on horns down the middle passage. I revved up my weapon, but a moment before the beam released, a shining wall of light filled the middle tunnel. It was a translucent shield that extended to all corners of the narrow tunnel. The light of the shield illuminated the wave of mobs hiding behind it, confirming my earlier suspicion. It was clear that the bulk of the forces were congregated behind the shield, and the suggestion of a larger mass huddled behind the mobs would assuredly be the elite.

“Alpha Two, Alpha Three, sticky bombs, then concentrate fire on tunnel two!” I shouted over the magnetic whine of the pulse rifles. The two NPCs immediately complied, reaching at their hip in almost perfect sync, and chucking the grenade-like devices down their respective tunnels. Two dull thuds sounded in unison, thick white material arcing out to entrap living and dead mobs in a spiderweb-like cloud. Alpha One and Four diligently continued suppressing fire on the side tunnels, while Two and Three turned to concentrate fire on the middle tunnel. The only way to stop the mobs and their elite was to whittle down that shield. If they broke into our cavern with their shield intact, we’d be overrun in seconds.

The shield flared blue where our pulse rifles struck, and the mobs struggled to continue their forward momentum against our weapons. Still, they managed, the bulk of nearly 20 aliens and an elite at their back, pushing them forward. They were only ten meters away when the shield started turning red, a sign that it was overheating.

I fished at my hip for a new battery as my rifle squawked at me to reload. In the precious seconds between reloads, the mobs closed the gap by another five meters. I slammed the battery into the rifle’s housing with practiced ease, and started laying into the shield once again. It was close to falling, that much was clear.

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

The sounds of sudden panic filled my ears. “Ray! T’s getting swarmed! They’re about to lose the western edge!” Jeremy shouted.

Oh, shit!

“Heard!” I shouted back, not wasting anymore time in a reply. “Alpha Two, reinforce tunnel one!” I ordered. “Alpha Four, sticky bomb tunnel three, then cover our back!” Alpha Two immediately stopped firing at the overheating shield and turned to aim down the leftmost tunnel. Alpha Four threw their sticky bomb, then turned to face the single tunnel at our back.

If T lost the western edge, then the mobs would have an easy path to our backs, and to the leftmost tunnel. I weighed my options, my finger held down on the pulse rifle as I thought. A retreat down the tunnel at our backs was risky. The mobs breaking through T’s position would trap us from that direction, and the reinforcements from tunnel one would crash on us from the other side. We’d be smushed in an anvil-and-hammer maneuver. The other option was to retreat down tunnel three on the right - the mobs were almost wiped out there, and we could use it to connect to the cave system on the eastern edge where Kink was defending. But navigating the sticky bomb residue would slow us down, and the dungeon A.I. would easily counter us by diverting additional mobs towards us from tunnel three. Same problem, really: smushed!

I had been on autopilot, my finger held tight on the trigger as I weighed the options. Suddenly, with a wet pop, the shield in tunnel two disintegrated into a gelatin-like substance, splattering the closest mobs with super-heated material that burned through their armor and skin. My rifle tore through the now undefended mobs, but the victory was short lived. Behind me, coming from our escape tunnel, the sounds of heavy feet echoed towards us.

We were surrounded.

“Back to the wall,” I ordered. Our only hope was to hold out until reinforcements could arrive. My four NPCs peeled off from the formation one-by-one, placing their backs to the nearest wall in a half-circle. I was last to move, taking the center position. “Grenades!” I shouted, and all five of us lobbed our explosives towards the tunnel entrances. The booming explosions momentarily deafened me, and when the ringing stopped, I heard Jeremy’s frantic voice in my ear.

“Kink’s position is overrun! It’s a wipe unless you can get back to the core!” he shouted.

I shook my head to myself. My four Alphas were laying into the mobs that were crawling over the corpses of their fellows, but I could see it wasn’t enough. “We’re done, Jer,” I replied.

He tsk-ed, then started laying into T on the general channel. “Goddammit T! What the fuck was that?” he berated as the aliens swarmed into the cave. Jeremy’s tirade was momentarily cut off as the mobs tore us to pieces. My vision flashed, and a message appeared:

All defenders have died. The core has been stolen - hope has been lost…

Then my vision cleared, and I appeared back at our core, the mobs and NPCs reset. The room was a large cavern, the ceiling a hundred feet high, and a football-stadium wide. There were three large tunnels leading off from the cavern. In the center of the room, just near where I had respawned, a tall pedestal stood, a head-sized gem gleaming at its top. A prompt floated above it:

All party members touch the core to begin the invasion.

Behind me, Jeremy was in a heated debate with T. They were both in the power armor of the game, their rifles slung across their back.

“T, for fuck’s sake, do I need to shove my hand up your ass and work you like a puppet?” Jeremy shouted, pantomiming his hand like he had a sock puppet on it.

“Screw you, Germy,” T said with a casual tone. We were all used to Jeremy’s tirades and handled them differently. T often chose to ignore them, while Kink would feed into it, matching Jeremy’s scathing tone until they nearly came to blows.

Me? Well, Jeremy was my best friend, so he usually put on the kid gloves when he went off on me.

When it was clear T wasn’t going to engage with Jeremy’s antics, Kink walked over to the pedestal and placed a hand on the core.

“Come on, let’s go again,” Kink said.

I shook my head. “Can’t. I’ve got work.”

Jeremy turned to me, though he was still angled towards T, like he had more to say on the matter. “Oh, work? Is that what we’re calling it now?”

“Hey, lay off,” T called over his shoulder. “Ray’s a member of the world’s oldest profession. Show some respect,” he added with a smirk.

I felt the heat rush to my face. “I’m not a sex worker!” I shouted with indignation.

“Me thinketh the lady doth protest too much,” Kink threw in, matching T’s smile.

“Screw you guys,” I said. I didn’t know why I let these assholes rile me up. Wasn’t worth my time. “Whatever, I gotta go. Catch you tomorrow.” I clicked into my menu and started the logout sequence.

“Hey, Ray!” Jeremy called. “Make sure to wash out your pod when you’re done! I hear there’s this new STD that can cross digitally now!”

The three of them cracked up at that, and I held up both middle fingers as the sequence finished and I phased out of the game.