"The Sacking of Dragon Keep" was listed in my bracelet interface as the Main Quest with objectives like Rescue Villagers 0/10, Slay Undead 6/20 listed underneath. I mostly didn't pay attention to them because I was less following their instructions than basic human decency. I saw villagers getting murdered by skeletons or zombies, I blasted the skeletons and zombies. I saw skeletons and zombies just shambling around, I still blasted them since I was pretty sure there weren't examples of the undead just minding their own business in the world of Mokosh. It was more Dawn of the Dead than Twilight.

One thing I didn't bother with was using my sword during any of these encounters. I had a level 1 "Basic Sword" in my inventory, and I took it out to give some practice swings, but it didn't do anything other than make me feel like I was going to fall over. I didn't even know why I had a sword as a Sorcerer, but I supposed it was because Garland was a master swordsman as well as a wizard in the books. He was also a master thief. Literary accuracy had to take a backseat to game balance, I guess.

Thankfully, I wasn't running into any issues so far despite my lost hit points. Arcane Fire was my go-to, one might say only move, and working fine if I stayed out of the clutches of the supernatural beasties rampaging through the town. It helped to think of all of this as a video game because I didn't want to think of these being real people having their home attacked and being slaughtered. The bodies on the ground certainly looked real enough.

"Do you ever feel guilty using Arcane Fire so extensively?" Jon asked, flying beside me.

"No," I said.

"I mean, it's a bit like Indiana Jones and the Swordsman," Jon said, referencing Raiders of the Lost Ark. "It's basically like owning a gun in a world full of swords and spears."

"There's also like a hundred of them and one of me," I said, really hoping none of the dragons in the sky flew down to kill me. I was depending on the fact they were probably just background material for the opening level. Mind you, at any point, this entire "video game" could go off the rails too because I was pretty sure that Weis' writing absolutely loved unexpected turnabouts. There were no less than five chapters in the first book where perspective characters were set up only to end up dying horribly without fanfare.

"Fine-fine," Jon said. "Anyway, you're doing fine. Albeit, your timing on this level sucks. I was able to speedrun it in like five minutes and that was my first and only try."

I was about to ask Jon how the hell he could speedrun his way through a nightmare like this when I heard battle from nearby. That was when my attention was drawn down an alleyway where a woman was fighting off no less than three undead warriors at once. These ones looking a lot tougher and better armored than the typical members of the horde I'd been fighting.

The woman was dressed in a set of red leather armor that was form-fitting but not quite as ridiculous as you'd see in Hollywood, covered in metal scales with a kerchief around her lower face. Bright red hair was hanging out down around her shoulders that was a different shade than just about everyone else I'd seen so far in this place of predominately blonde and brunette peasantry. She also had a bow on her back that was smaller than any normal example of the weapon I'd seen in real life. I recognized it as Lightbringer, her rune weapon from the novels that never ran out of mystical arrows.

The warrior woman moved with a kind of inhuman grace that you only saw in martial arts movies, slashing the creatures she was facing with a curved katana-like blade in one hand and a shorter Western sword in her other hand. The strange mixture of weapons didn't inhibit her from parrying, stabbing, slashing, and even somersaulting over one of the creatures before decapitating it from behind. It was a display of fighting prowess that was beyond anything I would have imagined myself capable of at any level. I instantly knew who she was.

Jon, by contrast, was decidedly less than impressed. "I hate these opening cutscenes. They always make the companions look incredibly badass but then they nerf them to be the exact same level as you."

"Ania Rose," I said, with the kind of fanboyish awe you might hear other geeks refer to Mary Jane Watson Parker or Lady Lara Croft.

Yes, those fictional crushes that boys develop at a certain age on women in media that signal that girls were no longer icky but were still entirely in the realm of fantasy. My mentor in coding had a poster of Slave Bikini Leia in his office, before HR had made him take it down, and the rather uncomfortable moment of oversharing where he said that Return of the Jedi had ushered him into puberty.

"Seriously?" Jon said, looking at me. "Tell me, you're not a fanboy."

I grimaced. "Err, of course not."

But that was a bold-faced lie and we both knew it. In the case of Ania Rose, I'd been about the same age as the actress they'd cast for Garland's foster sister in the original live action show for the FAN channel (before it became FYN for copyright reasons). I'd developed more than a little crush on her during my socially awkward years and bonded with the character both onscreen as well as her book counterpart. So much so that I, and a legion of other young men, had ignored how weird it was that one of Garland's two primary love interests was the girl he was raised with. Something that, as an adopted son of my family, I could absolutely confirm was not a thing that happened in real life.

It shouldn't have surprised me to find out she was the first companion in the game since she was a wildly popular character with the fanbase. Both male and female. Indeed, apparently Weis had received death threats for some of the horror show he'd put her through in Book 3 where she'd ended up losing her father, tortured, her female elvish lover executed, and her head shaved. Something that had caused her actress to almost quit the show over since she'd been trying to get into romantic comedies. The fact she'd ended up some kind of weird Slavic ninja and the only female Dark Undermaster didn't really improve things in fan's eyes.

"Yeah, well wanting is better than having," Jon said, sounding surprisingly salty. "She may look good but she's a real bitch. Her writers must have watched way too much anime growing up. Verbal abuse is not sexy."

I wanted to punch my raven companion in the beak. Admittedly, not every writer had been able to capture Weis' character voices in the licensed material. There was a reason a lot of fans preferred the Dragon Queen or even secondary characters like Lady Agata Rose.

No, I wasn't counting slash writers either.

Before I had a chance of saying something, I saw Ania finish off the remaining skeleton warrior and pulled out her bow before aiming at me. A glowing arrow appeared and flew out, zipping over my shoulder and striking a skeleton warrior silently coming up behind me.

"That is such a cheap movie trick," Jon said, resettling on my shoulder and raising a wing. "Undead don't sneak! We totally would have heard him coming."

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

"Oh, shut up, bird brain," Ania said, surprising me by responding to Jon. I hadn't known that other people could hear and understand him. "Go peck out someone's eyes."

That made me assume the 'cut scene' or whatever was going on was over and I could respond. Knowing I was Garland in this universe put me on the spot and I tried to figure out what to say or do. The Mark of the Champion wasn't giving me any dialogue options, which I supposed was a blessing. I tried to adopt Garland's trademark growl and remember how he talked. "Err, hello, sister. It is good to see you again. I am, uh, here."

Ania narrowed her eyes. "You're another off-worlder from Earth. Sent here by Larry C.C. Weis to try to save the world. Except, he's probably sent you here with absolutely no skill in combat or equipment that would let you do it. Oh, and everyone is going to react to you like you're my dead brother."

I blinked. "Huh. I did not see that coming."

"Me neither," Jon said, looking at me then her. "Was this in the script? I really should have been paying more attention to what all the NPCs were saying."

I wanted to bring up that he'd mentioned that other people here were aware but was too busy focusing on Ania. "Oh, well, hi."

Ania looked away annoyed and lifted her right arm, revealing another Mark of the Champion. "I managed to recover one of these from a dead Garland copy. Since then, I know when the world repeats its loops. This is like the seventh or eighth time I've seen Dragon Keep and Crossroad sacked."

"You've escaped The Matrix!" I blurted out.

Jon, of course, was more focused on other things. "That better not be my bracelet! I had like fifty Pwiffle cards accumulated, including the dirty ones!"

Ania rolled her eyes. "Such a wonderful set of champions that Weis has sent us."

"By the way, is that like an Anglicization?" Jon asked. "Like, shouldn't his name be Laurencjusz or something? Also, Weis is German. Also, is he from our world or yours? I probably should have been investigating this in-between getting laid."

"I see your Spirit Guide is a wonderful source of information," Ania said. "Come on, we need to get to the castle. To answer your unspoken question, no, when the world resets, people don't come back from the dead. New people wander in to resettle as if in a trance. The world has been getting more vacant and empty each failure of previous champions. The Dark Undermasters are almost extinct, and the Old Gods are on the brink of escaping. Then our world will die and yours will soon follow."

"Hey, no pressure," I nodded. "Lead the way."

"Hey! Don't follow the NPCs! The NPCs follow you," Jon said.

I shook my head at Jon's behavior. Then again, I couldn't really blame him. This was an insane situation and if his way of coping was dismissing everyone around him as 'just' video game characters then I couldn't hardly blame him. Except, I very much could. Everyone here seemed real and without any proof that I'd gone insane (which probably was more likely), it was best to treat everyone as real.

Mind you, it helped I was following a pretty girl and someone who seemed like they knew what the hell they were doing. If that sounded like a less than heroic attitude, well, it was about my last three relationships. Working for Epic DungoneeringTM hadn't left much time for dating, and I admitted, it had also beaten a lot of my sense of initiative out of me. If that insultingly low WIS score was accurate, and I feared it was, I suspected it was because I'd become "conflict adverse" out of a desire to get along to get along. A trait that had led me to signing a contract with a shady as shit dark fantasy author who was apparently accepting human sacrifices from my employers.

I had no idea what I would do should I actually get back to the "real" world because I wasn't sure what even could be done. Report them to the police? FBI? Men in Black? I'm sorry, officer, but I was tricked into putting on the One Bracelet of Sauron by my hand puppet obsessed boss and her chief minion as part of an evil ritual. That was even assuming I was able to get back to my old life.

Unless I managed to figure out a way to escape soon, I'd probably end up being reported as a missing person and eventually considered dead. I hadn't noticed Jon Snowan disappearing and apparently plenty of other coworkers over the past few years had been disappeared. Who would even miss me back in my "old" life? My parents? Yeah. My sister? We'd spoken maybe once in the past three months. Friends? Girlfriends? I'd sacrificed all of them on the altar of being the absolute best corporate drone I could be.

Crap.

Maybe I deserved to be here.

"Follow my lead and try not to get killed," Ania said, lifting her bow and firing down at another group of skeleton warriors. "We need to get to the Skull King before he kills Lord Emberly."

Piotr Emberly was one of the main supporting characters of the series, being Garland's mentor and one of the few remaining veteran Undermasters. "Wait, Lord Emberly dies in the new book?"

One of the skeleton warriors charged at us, only for me to hit it with arcane fire. Unlike the earlier skeletons, though, it didn't immediately die and started charging again. I managed to blast it apart with a second blast, though. Yeah, that was how it was going to be it seemed. There were going to be increasingly tougher enemies as we moved along.

Ania shot me a glare that told me that my reference wasn't appreciated. "Not if we can help it. I've managed to prevent him from getting killed each time but it's always close."

"It's a scripted event," Jon said. "I wouldn't worry about it."

"The script is not set," Ania said, shaking her head. "I've lived through multiple loops, you haven't. Whatever the way things were supposed to be, they get worse each time. I don't know what my world is to yours, some kind of play or fiction, but it's becoming influenced by the Old Gods. Whatever was meant to happen isn't happening"

"Great, so it's not just Eldritch Souls," Jon said, citing one of my favorite video games that Larry C.C. Weis had written for. "We're now incorporating Alan Wake nonsense."

"What kind of changes are we talking about?" I asked.

Ania finished off the last of the skeleton warriors. "Garland being dead for example."

She'd mentioned that earlier and I thought back to The Princes of Sorrow, the previous book. Garland had been killed by a group of traitorous Undermasters and everyone had assumed he was going to get himself resurrected because, well, there was no book series without him. Everyone had assumed he'd get resurrected by blood sorcery or some other contrived method. Certainly, that was what the show had gone with, and most people assumed the video games would too.

But what if it hadn't been Larry's intent? What if he had decided to stick to his guns and keep Garland dead? He'd made his bones as a writer with shocking deaths of other main characters after all. No, that didn't make any sense. Or did it? Also, if this wasn't the world he created by writing but an actual place, did his writer intent make any difference whatsoever? Or was the fact that Weis was sending "heroes" into this world to make up for the fact that its actual champion was dead. Dammit, I needed something to distract me from this metaphysical nonsense.

"I'm sorry," I said, surprising myself. "I know he was important to you, Ania."

"You have no idea, imposter," Ania said.

Yeah, we weren't going to be friends any time soon.

That was when we came to the town square of Crossroad village at the foot of the entrance to Dragon Keep. Dragon Keep was an immense castle, even more so now that we'd traveled closer to it. It was a lot larger and more grandiose than the ones in the show or even the previous games where engine limitations had prevented it from being realized like it had been in the text.

Supposedly, it had been constructed by giants during the ancient days when the gods had walked among men. It had been used by Perun to breed dragons and house them for war against Veles' armies of the dead. That was before they'd all been corrupted into the zmei. In the first book, after Lord Rose had been executed, the surviving Rose family had vowed to retake it only for the Undermasters to end up making it their new headquarters. Thus, they could never return home.

The former family holding of the Rose family had been gutted by dragon fire, though, and the armies involved. The ancient statues of the guardian wyrms around it were now cracked and broken with its defenders slaughtered to the man. Its drawbridge had been forcibly pulled down by the sight of the broken chains and shattered door.

The moat that had previously surrounded the castle had been boiled away, leaving just a massive pit that was surrounded by horrifically burned defenders that were scattered round like broken toys. Some of them were moaning and I couldn't imagine what kind of pain they were in, still alive after being essentially boiled to death.

Jesus, Superman, and Crom.

That was messed up.

"Time to face the Skull King," Jon muttered. "Oh, I should probably mention that he's invincible."

"Wait, what?" I asked, doing a double take.