In the days following the Tournament, all of Team Maple Leaf plus the five members of The Round Table had taken kung fu lessons and finally learned the skill. They all now had the green armband that allowed them to enjoy the benefits of clan membership, including living in the dorm. Things were different than they were during the Tutorial. The only thing that remained the same was my morning workout with Sigrid. My acute awareness that I was not part of the team changed everything else. I felt out of place, like I didn’t belong. It was a familiar feeling, one I’d known most of my life.
I’d started taking long walks alone to put a bit of distance between them and myself so they could bond as a team without me around. It’s not like I was being totally altruistic or anything, I got a lot out of my solo meanderings. I kept myself very busy, mostly to distract myself from the seething anger that curdled inside me more and more with every passing day. That’s because every day Team Maple Leaf had been getting team quests, all of which had specified that only team members could participate. That pissed me off. I felt like the game was conspiring to remind me daily that I was still an outsider to the very team that I myself had created.
After their quests, all they could do was talk about them. Some were events against other teams that sounded a lot like the sort of tribe-on-tribe challenges they do on Survivor, the others were all objective-based quests that involved things like defending the city against rampaging hordes of monsters. I could understand their excitement, and I tried not to let it show how envious I was. What was perhaps even worse, Arthur and his gang had all received several individual System quests. I had not. That pissed me off far more. I took it personally.
Someone’s punishing me, and I was pretty sure I knew who.
While everyone raved about how fun the quests were, and talked endlessly about all the wonderful rewards they were getting and how they were leveling up their abilities, it was a double-edged sword. Not long after the end of the tutorial, word started spreading that someone had been killed on a quest fighting against monsters, but they hadn’t come back.
They were dead. Like, dead-dead.
That’s what we ended up calling the one who didn’t come back. Dead-dead.
Stratos had warned us it could happen, but this was the first time a Player didn’t respawn and it had a subtle but noticeable effect on everyone. A lot of people had grown used to behaving a bit recklessly. After all, death hadn’t been the end. But now, our seeming immortality had been revealed as a lie. Real death was possible. The game had become that much more real.
The end of the tutorial and the emergence of team quests also introduced another new factor into the game: a leaderboard for teams. Rankings seemed entirely dependent upon team quest performance, and I was happy to see Team Maple Leaf consistently in the top three, although they never seemed able to secure the top spot. That was always occupied by a group who called themselves Team Invunctus. Troy Hobbes’s team.
Team Rankings
1. Team Invinctus 150 points
2. Team Maple Leaf 140 points
3. Team Droogs 135 points
4. Team Spice 130 points
5. Team Karma 120 points
6. Team N3m3s1s 115 points
7. Team Legion 110 points
8. Team Overgeared 100 points
9. Team Happy 90 points
10. Team Ninja 85 points
Why wasn’t there a leaderboard for Players? Did this mean that team performance was more important than individual?
Everyone else seemed obsessed with the rankings, but I did my best to ignore them. It was just another reminder that I was missing out. Stratos kept saying that being a free agent did not mean I was out of the game, that it made me free to work with any team. But how was I supposed to do that when only team members were allowed to participate in their quests?
The answer came one day when I was on one of my walks and I came across a group of Players outside the city walls, all members of Team Legion. One of them approached me, and I did a quick evaluation of him. All I saw was a bunch of [Hidden]s; he was another team builder. I didn’t remember him from the convention, but that wasn’t surprising. All the other team builders had been part of the meta-game, same as me. I did still recognize him, though: he was the Player Nina had healed after he'd been shot by an arrow in the forest.
“Hey there,” he said. “You were with that healer's group, right?"
"Hey," I said. "Yeah, I was with them. Achmed, right? I'm Daniel."
"You wouldn’t happen to be up for joining us for a quest, would you?”
Apparently, only Team Maple Leaf had been getting quests that were team-only. The other teams were allowed to have unaffiliated Players join them. Stratos at work again, living up to their promise to make things harder for the team I’d built, and for me.
Of course, I said yes. No way I was about to give up the chance to join a quest. Team Legion turned out to be a friendly bunch, although their dynamic wasn’t what I was used to. They were all guys, so there was a lot more testosterone-fuelled competition between them. Fortunately, it was all good-natured, but it took me a while to get used to the locker talk. Achmed had done a pretty good job recruiting a variety of abilities, a decent mix of close and long-range fighters, but the team lacked any useful support powers. Because Achmed had All Shall Be Revealed I couldn't see his abilities, of course, just a bunch of Hiddens.
The quest was a basic monster subjugation, fending off a horde of giant ants the size of horses who were charging the city from the Northeast. The team I was with seemed to know what they were doing, they told me this wasn’t their first rodeo. A lot of the recent team quests were like this, fending off a mob of monsters. Unfortunately, in their hurry to one-up each other and see who could take down the most enemies, Team Legion had zero coordination. Their battle strategy was pretty much every man for himself, but they had a lot of fun in the process.
In the literature, it’s very common for people to shout out the name of a power when they use it. Obviously, it’s so that the reader or viewer knows what’s going on. It wasn’t necessary to do it here, but the members of Team Legion did it anyway, for fun. They even made up their own names for specific moves. When the first of the ants hit our defensive line, it surprised me to hear them all shouting things like "Starry Sky Sword Dance" and "True-Seeking Arrow Splits The Mountain" when all they were doing was using simple sword or archery skills.
They mostly used basic combat skills, only a couple of them had a specific attack power or Affinity Control. It made me realize just how far ahead Team Maple Leaf was, and explained why Team Legion was near the bottom of the rankings. It’s not that these guys were bad, they just hadn’t developed their abilities to the same degree. Plus they seemed more interested in having fun than anything.
The initial wave of monsters was pretty weak. I took the opportunity to teach Affinity Control to some of my new comrades. I focused on the ones with basic elemental affinities, I knew from experience these were the easiest to use. They learned quickly, but of course at Novice level their attacks didn’t do anything to the ants. I encouraged them to use it anyway because experience had also taught me that powers and skills grow much quicker in real fights than when simply practicing. Each consecutive wave brought more and more ants, so there was plenty of opportunities to improve.
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We did well at first, and there was a lot of laughing and joking as the first waves of ants were put down and the Legionnaires, as they called themselves, raised their mastery of Affinity Control and came up with inventive names for their new affinity attacks. Each successive wave brought more and more of the huge insects into the battle, and the laughs eventually died out when the number of ants became overwhelming. The bugs swarmed all around us, their sheer force of numbers splitting everyone up. None of us had a health bar in the green, and a few of the guys were already into the red.
“This is a lot tougher than last time,” one of them grumbled.
“Achmed,” I shouted as I hosed down a few ants with a spray of flame from my hands, “we need to regroup or we’re toast.” He was busy smashing the carapace of the nearest ant with a spiked mace while shouting "Seven Souls Mace Mash" and didn’t hear me. “Achmed!” No use, he wasn’t listening.
Screw this. I have to get their attention myself.
I switched from Fire to Air, focusing all my energy into creating the biggest, loudest lightning bolt I could muster. There was a flash of light as electricity lanced down from the sky, forking at the last moment to zorch a group of ants, followed a split second later by a deafening crash of thunder. It did the trick. All eyes turned to see who’d done it.
“Everybody,” I shouted, “rally around Achmed!” They seemed to get the idea, and everyone fought to group together. We were completely surrounded, so I started barking instructions, telling the tankier fighters to make a defensive circle around the ones who could strike from a distance. I started handing out potions, healing the ones who were close to death and refreshing the mana of the ones who had ranged powers. Slowly, the bodies of dead ants started to pile up around us, but the bugs just kept swarming over their fallen colleagues in an endless onslaught. Slowly but steadily, our health and mana bars edged their ways down toward the red zone.
“This isn’t good,” Achmed said as he dragged one of his team members from the front line into the middle. The teammate was bleeding heavily from where an ant’s mandibles had nearly severed his leg at the knee. He was right, it wasn’t good at all. We were mostly holding our own in our little circle, but for every ant that attacked us two would scurry right past us, heading toward the city. At this rate, even if we managed to survive we were going to fail the quest.
“They’re getting past,” I said.
“Don’t worry,” Achmed said. “That always happens. We just need to hold out a bit longer until the time runs out and they’ll give up.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah. I mean, it’s what happened last time.”
He did not sound at all convincing. I risked taking a break from fighting to scan the area. I evaluated ant after ant until I finally found what I was looking for, one ant that was as big as a full-grown hippo near the back of the swarm.
Giant Ant Queen You probably don't want the royal treatment from this queen, as it usually involves getting cut up into bite sized chunks and fed to her countless babies. Powers:
Ant Invasion - Expert: Control ant minions
Cut Off Its Head Legs Come Looking For You - Expert: Extreme resiliency
More Where Those Came From - Expert: Lay eggs
Pincer Movement - Expert: Always aware of surroundings
Snicker Snack - Expert: Mandible attack
I put my hand on the shoulder of one of the tanks, the one with the biggest shield.
“What?” he said.
“Think you can forge a path for us through this crowd?”
“Probably, why?”
“There’s a queen over there. If we take her down we might just turn this around.”
“Sounds good to me.”
“Achmed,” I said. “Hold the fort, we’re going for the queen.” Then I reached over the tank’s shoulder and fanned the area in front of him like a flamethrower. “Go!” I shouted.
“Invincible Shield Plows The Field!” he shouted as he charged ahead, smashing giant bugs out of the way with his shield while I followed in his wake. Fortunately, the ants seemed more concerned with their own forward charge to bother with us, so we managed to make good headway through the crowd. As we got closer to the queen, they began to pay us more heed and started trying to actively protect their liege.
“Hold them off as best you can,” I said, chugging my last mana potion. “I’ll take her out.” He grunted acknowledgement, hacking with his sword and smashing with his shield.
I took a deep breath, and concentrated on Light. It was a gamble. Were you one of those kids who used a magnifying lens to torment insects with focused sunlight? The childhood memory of making ants scurry and sizzle that way came unbidden to my mind so I went with it and channeled my Light affinity into a makeshift laser beam.
“Burning Bug Laser Beam!” I shouted. When in Rome.
A blinding shaft of light surged at the ant queen from my fist. I kept pumping mana into it, keeping the beam slicing into her. She reared up, antennae waving frantically as the light bore through her abdomen. As her body lifted, I was able to see the most remarkable thing of all: someone was riding on her back.
I couldn’t make out much more than that it was a humanoid, straddling the queen’s thorax. I briefly considered ceasing my attack, but I figured that anyone riding an ant queen into an invasion of the city probably deserved to be lasered too, so I kept up my Light attack until I was almost out of mana.
When I finally stopped, the queen wasn’t moving anymore. A plume of dark smoke drifted up almost lazily from her body, then I saw the rider rise up from its back into the air. I caught a flash of long dark hair swirling around them and the gleam of silver eyes directing their gaze at me for a few long moments before the figure disappeared in a sparkling twinkle that reminded me of Captain Kirk getting beamed up by the Enterprise’s transporter. I could've also sworn I saw a pair of small horns protruding from under all that dark hair.
Almost at once the surge of ants subsided. The tank I hid behind had been struggling with an ant that was trying to wrest his shield from him, but the creature’s mandibles suddenly let go and the ant wandered away passively. All the remaining monsters seemed to forget we were there and started just milling about like lost children. Behind us, a cheer went up from the rest of the team.
The queen was dead, and without her guidance, the rest of the ants had lost their purpose and drive. After that, it was a simple matter of mopping up the uncoordinated and directionless masses of bugs. By the time all was said and done, three team members had been killed and the rest were close to death. My own health was down under one-quarter, and my mana was all but gone. Talk about down to the wire.
System: Quest complete - You have stopped the ants invasion
System: Bonus - You defeated the boss!
System: Distributing quest rewards - Reward Tokens - 15 (+5)
System: Bonus reward for single-handedly defeating the boss - Gold Boss Box
The mopping up took some time, but eventually all the ants were dead and the mana crystal had been pried from inside each one. While we worked, the masked NPCs came to take the dead Players’ bodies away. Afterward, Achmed and the remaining members of Team Legion came up to me.
“We would’ve been in deep shit if it wasn’t for you, Daniel. I don’t know how to thank you,” Achmed said, shaking my hand. “You really showed me we need to work together better.”
“And it’s the first time we beat a boss!” the tank who’d stormed the queen with me said.
“It was great to see you come together as a team,” I said. “It’s been an honor to work with you.”
“I feel bad, though,” Achmed said. “You used a lot of potions on us and those aren’t cheap. Is there anything we can do to repay you?”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I got this Gold Boss Box for killing the queen.”
“What’s in it?”
“Dunno. Guess I should open it, huh?”
The box appeared in front of me as a physical object. A small cube covered in stars and wrapped up in a bow. When I pulled on the bow it came apart and the box exploded in a shower of multi-colored confetti revealing one of those ridiculously huge swords. The blade tapered out from the two-handed hilt and must have been a foot and a half wide at its largest point. Both sides were jagged with dozens of sharp serrations. It looked mean, and it had the Affinity Blade power, but there was still no way I was going to use it. I asked if anyone on Team Legion wanted it, but they insisted that I should keep it. If I really didn’t want it I could always sell it, they said. I was very glad I had my special inventory and could stuff it away in a pocket dimension. I would have looked ridiculous toting the thing back into the city.
The Legionnaires weren't at all worried that some of them had been killed. They had complete confidence that they'd all come back, and insisted I join them for a celebratory drink or five after their fallen comrades had respawned. I liked these guys, but a sudden wave of anxiety swept over me and I made up a quick excuse, telling them that I’d already made plans. Then I went back to the dojo and spent the night alone, cursing my own cowardice.