Cannons roared as the first boats hit the beach. I couldn't see our attackers. A rain of arrows fell from the sky, plocking into the sand all around. The first couple boats full of alien miners were struck by cannonballs and blasted out of the water. Some of the miners tried to swim for shore, only to be pierced by the raining arrows.

We had split up into our two boats, with Team Mongoose, Bill, Bob, and Sage in one, and Grandpa and me in the other with Team Ragtag. "Keep your heads down!" I shouted over the noise of the cannon barrage. "When we hit the beach, run forward! Don't waste time trying to figure out where they're shooting from. Just get up the beach as fast as possible, and we'll assess then. Remember, you'll respawn in a graveyard. We'll coordinate once we're past the beach."

Team Ragtag responded with whimpers or moans, bent low in the boat.

Our boat ran aground. I leapt over the gunwale and splashed into ankle-deep water. Arrows whizzed down all around me. I ducked my head, holding my arm up to shield it, and charged forward. As soon as I was on the sand, I engaged Fastest Gun in the West and dashed up the beach.

This barrage was designed to break up our party, to get some of us killed and out of position, and to disorient us. The more of us made it through the barrage, the better off we'd be. I couldn't waste time worrying about my teammates. My own skin was what mattered.

The soft sand of the beach gave way to matted dune grass. I plowed through it, over the top of the dune, and down the other side, before my wild forward momentum died out. Immediately, I dropped to the ground and rolled, then lifted my head and peered around.

The cannons fired. They were behind me. I raised up a little farther, trying to spot the nearest cannon. It fired again, close by, but I couldn't see it. Maybe it was invisible, or maybe the system just made it so that I couldn't see where they were.

I started crawling forward carefully, looking for the next set of danger and watching my minimap. It was a jumble of blue dots. I zoomed in close enough so I could pick out the green ones.

At least no one was red yet. No one was actively trying to kill me and my team, other than the system itself. A trio of green dots converged on me.

I got to my feet as Tall Smith, Jones, and Brown joined me. "Where's Sage and Grandpa?" I asked. "Where's the rest of your team?"

"Smith didn't make it," Tall Smith said brusquely. "We'll pick him up at the graveyard. I don't know where Black is."

A second later, Sage popped out of the brush, followed by Annie, Lakshmi, Lara, and Mitch. Lara was looking very pleased. "Minivan worked like a charm," she said. "Bill got hit right before I could cast, and I don’t know where Bob or Ice Spice went."

I pinged Grandpa. Are you there?

I got no reply. I had a sickening feeling in my stomach. "We've got to keep moving," I said. "As soon as the other teams regroup, they're going to start making us targets. We've got to move inland. We'll gather up our stragglers when we can." I pointed in the direction of the so-called treasure. It was to our east, eight miles away. My map wasn't big enough to show it, but I suspected it would be past the cities.

We were on the far west side of the island. Its long, skinny body stretched away from us. The day was cloudy, and I couldn't make out the volcano from here. I expected we would have to reach it before we found our destination. From what I could tell on the map on our ship, the twin cities were closer to the volcano than to this side of the island. Charybdis was on the north shore, Scylla in the south, with a mile-wide strip of jungle in between them.

We had marked our best guess as to the location of the graveyards on a shared team map, and would update those once we learned more precise details.

We were equidistant between two probable graveyards, so I didn't know which one our lost party members would spawn at.

I made a judgment call and took us southeast into the jungle. We plunged in. Birds hooted and chirped. Monkeys swung overhead, howling to each other. A snake slithered along a branch as I walked underneath.

By now, I was sure that Grandpa, as well as the two Mongeese, and Bill and Bob were temporarily dead. Ice Spice was still alive, but had gotten badly separated. He was somehow nearly half a mile north of us, trying to make his way toward us, but finding dozens of enemies in between.

There were something over 150 teams on this map, each with 15 combat-capable miners. That was well over 2,000 potential enemies running around the woods with us. We needed to get farther ahead, but not so far that we couldn't retrieve our people.

"All right," I told everyone. "We keep moving forward, and hopefully we gather up the missing when the graveyard respawn goes off. If you get killed, and you're not near us when you come back, start heading toward us and get as far as you can. Your goal is to get far enough away from the graveyard that if you die again, you're sent to the next graveyard along. It'll be slow and laborious, but eventually you'll catch up."

"Roger," Tall Smith said. "Sounds straightforward. Remember, we only need to get one of us to the marked location in order to qualify for level 2."

"But if one of those teams out there kills all of us at the same time, we lose. We're done," I warned.

We made our cautious way through the trees. I watched my mini-map trying to steer as a path between dots. I had to expect that the other teams out there had tracking of their own.

The beach had definitely thinned out our numbers. If my team had taken average casualties, there would be hundreds spawning in the nearest graveyards in another 23 minutes. I wanted us to be east of the graveyard by then, if at all possible.

A particularly loud bird trilled unseen overhead, then fell quiet. I felt a prickling on the back of my neck. I checked my mini-map. No dots near us. "Everyone stay alert," I snapped, just as the pair of black-clad space elves appeared in the midst of our group.

At the same time, six red dots surrounded us. I instantly cast Call ‘em Out, while Sage threw her Mucking Out the Stalls behind us, tying down two of the assaulters. Team Mongoose had their miniguns out and were firing wildly, not caring about their aim as their bullets passed harmlessly by fellow party members.

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I targeted the closest space elf and hit him with Trick Shot, then ducked as the two in the middle attacked me. They were wielding a pair of curved swords like scimitars and came barreling in at me, seemingly uncaring of their own safety.

Lara threw a cloud of orange smoke bombs behind us, filling the area Sage had mucked up with smoke. I focused on the pair of elves in front of me. I shot one with Barrage, then reloaded and fired again. Their health ticked down. They had me surrounded, attacking from my left and my right. I had no way to block their swords.

I ducked back from a thrusting attack. It sliced through the loose sleeve of my coat, tearing a three-inch long hole. Team Mongoose concentrated their fire on that one and dropped him.

The other one slashed hard at me. He struck my right arm with his sword. The blade slid off my jacket but dealt 15 points of crushing damage to me and made my hand fall open, dropping my gun to the jungle floor. I used Quick Draw to call it back to my hand and fired at the elf.

Another pair of elves ran through the smoke, coughing and covered in stinky muck. They had long pole arms with shining energy blades. They charged at us with their weapons outstretched.

Lara stepped in front of Mitch to throw another pair of grenades at them, and took a blade straight through the chest. It drained her health down to 30/130 points and left her with an Eviscerated debuff. Sage threw a Raise Your Spirits at her while Lakshmi cast [Soothing Thoughts]. Lara’s health went up a bit, but the debuff was still there, eating away at her by twenty points a minute.

I fired, using whatever skills seemed to make sense, Reloading as quickly as I could drop a Barrage into an elf.The jungle was a mad confusing scramble as we fought a seemingly insane enemy.

Then suddenly they were gone. The last of the elves fell to the ground and despawned. Sage let out a whoop, "We got 'em!"

"Stay alert," I said. "There might be other camouflaged people out there. Sitrep!"

"Eight of them, two of us," Smith reported grimly. "We lost Black and Lara."

I swore. I hadn't seen Lara die. That left us down 6. I checked our respawn timer. Still 17 minutes to go. "Let's keep moving," I said. "That fight attracted a lot of noise and we're hurting now. Spread out. I don't want us walking into any traps."

I sent Jones ahead. As an army scout, he had a skill, [Detect Landmines], that would reveal the presence of certain kinds of traps, but unfortunately, not all of them. I stayed in the middle, letting Tall Smith and Brown bring up the rear.

Lakshmi and Annie were subdued. Lara was a friend of theirs, and I knew seeing her violently killed had to hurt. I steeled myself and kept us moving forward. "Whatever happens, we've got to stay alive," I said. "That doesn't mean don't work together or don't cover for each other. It means don't take stupid risks. As long as one of us is alive when the 30 minutes is up, we're still in the game."

I had a couple of pending message notifications. I checked, hoping one was from Grandpa, but nothing. I guess when you were dead, you couldn't talk. There was a message from Juana and another from Veda, both of which I would look at later when I had time. There was also a message from Mak’gar, the orc I had partied with the night before. It said, I’m putting together a chat for those I trust to be honorable opponents. Would you care to join?

I replied back, I’m in.

A minute later, an invite lit up. I accepted. The chat channel was labeled "Honorable Hunters of Hispana." There were about 15 of us there. Makgar said, Honorable enemies, this is Shad Williams, who showed great honor and cunning during our assault of his outpost.

Greetings, someone said.

Howdy. Glad to be here.

Jones sent my team a priority message. Someone's coming. Fall back

I held up my hand, and everyone paused. We ducked down into the bushes. Jones cast his camouflage over all of us. It would be effective against any team that didn't specifically have a camouflage-piercing spell.

We waited with bated breath as the red dots came nearer and nearer. I wondered why they were already red, since they hadn't attacked us and we hadn't attacked them, unless they were the rest of the space elves?

There were eight of the dots. As the leader came into view, I understood. It was a Grignarian with a "TriStar Unlimited" tag floating over his head. They were the ones we had raided.

I sent a message toteam chat. I guess we made a permanent enemy there.

Let's jump out and take them, Sage said. I'm still mad about them melting your arm.

We don't know if there's more of them, and we don't need an unnecessary fight right now.

Oh, come on! Let's knock them out of the game!

They're already angry enough at us. I had a quick though and sent a message to the Honorable Hunters. Got a pack of those Grignarians over by me.

Squid faces? Let’s take ‘em! Will you share coordinates?

Hell yeah! Sign me up!

You're the native team, aren't you? You guys have been doing good work.

I saw some bootleg vids of you back on the hub.

Uh, yeah, thanks, I replied. I was going to have to ask Veda about those bootleg videos and what exactly was being said about us. If I send the location, you’ll know where we are.

Share with the chat. We will agree to make no attack on your people for one hour, Mak’gar said. Or the others will hunt down and eliminate the violators.

Well, I’d been wanting to win friends and make allies. I shared my location.

That is very near to us, one of the people in chat, whose name was An’kar, replied. It sounded like the space orc names I'd heard, so maybe they were allies of Firebrand.

Us as well, replied Silver Fox. Shad Williams, would your people join an attack on the Grignarians?

Is there a way to temporarily tag you guys as friendlies so we don't accidentally kill each other?

Yes, I'll send you a private message.

I told my team, "We've got a temporary alliance thanks to those orcs who attacked us the other day, the Firebrands. It’s some of their friends. They'll show up on our map now as green for the next eight hours."

"The orcs who attacked us?" Mitch asked incredulously. "The ones I blew up?"

"Apparently we made a good impression. I'll take it. We might be joining an ambush with some others here in a minute."

"What are you talking about?" Tall Smith replied.

"Just give me a minute." I switched back to the impromptu alliance and exchanged a few quick messages with Ankar and Silver Fox. We hashed out a simple plan.

"All right," I said to my team after we’d finished. "So, in just a minute, the Grignarians are going to walk into an ambush. Our job is to make sure they can't retreat. Be careful. They have this nasty melt-your-flesh-off weapon," I told the members of Ragtag who had not been along on our raid of the Grignarians’ stockpile.

The red dots were about 100 yards ahead of us now, going slow. Now, my chat contact said.

"Now," I repeated to my team, and we rushed forward. There was a clearing up ahead where Silver Fox's team had sprung their trap. Spiderwebs hung between the trunks of the trees in the clearing. The Grignarians had entered the clearing only to find their way forward blocked.

An’kar’s people were in the treetops, pelting them with arrows. They were orcs, as I’d suspected. Their arrows exploded when they hit the tentacle-faced aliens, taking big chunks with them.

The Grignarians reformed their limbs quickly when one was blown off, shifting some of their mass from their torso into another limb. With each limb they lost, they grew smaller. They also stank like the gross burning fluid they had used to kill me back on their island. I could see why they weren't popular party guests.

Two of them were attempting to retreat, probably seeing there was no winning this fight and trying to avoid total party kill. "Our turn," I told my team.

Mitch threw out a series of small darts, something that looked like caltrops, that stuck in the trees near the Grignarians. Then he snapped his fingers and the caltrops exploded, knocking the trees down right into the path of the Grignarians, crushing one of the two.

It oozed out from underneath onto our side of the tree and began reforming. I shot it through one creepy, unblinking eye. It squealed, its tentacles wriggling in pain as I shot it again. We took it down and then what remained of Team Mongoose leapt the log and fired into the other trapped Grignarian. It despawned a few seconds later.

"Clear here!" someone shouted from up ahead.

"Let's go say hi."