I’ve had some genuinely exhilarating gaming moments before, like the time my WoW guild took down Illidan Stormrage on our first attempt with just a sliver of us left standing, fighting to the bitter end, or the first time I bumped into a Deathclaw in Fallout 3. The opening of Skyrim, despite how agonizingly long and boring it’s gotten over the years as I re-rolled characters again and again, had my heart pounding the first time as Alduin roared his flaming screams into my headset, and I’m not sure anything has ever made me as twitchy as trying to run through the spider-centaur infested caverns of the Ruins of Kunark to get to the level 20 leveling zone while trying desperately not to get pinned, killed, and corpse-camped by level 40 nasties with several months worth of gear on the line.

That was all kid stuff compared to the situation I now found myself in.

The oppressive gloom of the dungeon crowded in on the edges of my vision while my heart pounded at the knowledge that I was actually, physically trapped in a stone pit with a shrieking, nightmare hell-beast. I could feel the dank air currents twist around me in response to the waving motions of the boss’s oily, shuddering tentacles, carrying rank scents of tar and sulfur that sent my nose twitching in disgust. All of the other smells of the dungeon, dust and stone and dry old bones and cracked leather and cold, ancient slime were so thick that I could nearly taste them, and I licked my cracked lips and blinked against the ill wind that even still howled around us while the last of the shade wolves dove into their pit-boss master. My HUD finally identified the creature as it completed it’s grotesque accumulation:

Shadow Horror

LVL: 6* | Boss

???

The weight of my shield hung heavy on my muscled forearm. The soft padding of my plate armor’s interior rested against my sweat-soaked bark-textured skin, and the leather of my crude sword’s pommel twisted easily in my hand as I confirmed my grip. I’d told Victor it was just a game, and it was a game—obviously—but there was a lot of truth in his words. This was the realest game I’d ever played, real beyond my wildest imagining of the possible. However we’d arrived, wherever this was, I needed to take this seriously and become better—or else I’d wind up as food for the slavering, shrieking horror in front of me, and if not this one, then the next. My sister needed me, but this group needed me too.

“Save your mana!” I called out as I began to stalk forward. “Victor, Haley, rotate cast and meditate while we figure out how to fight this thing once I get its attention! Paige, you’re on heals. Trees, off-heal. Don’t dump mana on lightning yet. Daniel, with me, but for god’s sake be careful!”

Gamer instincts kicked in, and everyone obeyed their tank. Daniel stepped in to flank me as we advanced slowly, and Victor summoned his water elemental and immediately sat to meditate while Haley held her arcane missiles at the ready. Paige and Trees stood by, weapons ready. We needed to probe the Shadow Horror a bit before unleashing, especially with how little mana everyone had at this level, since we’d already seen these shadow things behave in unpredictable ways.

The horror now began to move, oozing eagerly toward us in a slow roll while Daniel and I picked up speed, and I crashed into it with my shield and lopped off a tentacle as I summoned my golden smite bolt into the middle of it. The matte darkness cut easily, like soft flesh, and the tentacle writhed by itself, flopping around on the ground despite the separation. The glowing eyes winced and the mouth contorted into a grimace as my bolt crashed into the middle of its—body? Head?—but if it was stunned, I saw no sign of it. My shield bash had done little, only moving its body around, and several tentacles snapped toward me while Daniel struck again and again with his saber, severing more of them. The movements of his arms almost seemed to blur, and I realized he had to be using a skill of some kind.

As several of the tentacles latched onto my armor, sinking slightly beneath the surface of it just like the jaws of the shade wolves and burning despite my bark-protected skin, I called out: “Mages, attack! See if it’s vulnerable to anything.”

Victor’s little elemental was already charging in to hammer at the tentacles, and Haley’s arcane missiles thumped into the roiling surface one after another, prompting hisses from the creature that sort of sounded painful, though it was hard to tell. When Victor lobbed a firebolt, though, it provoked an immediate reaction: at the point of impact, the beast’s skin caught flame, and it released my limbs and twisted away while it beat at the fire, though it also snapped at Daniel and he narrowly avoided losing a limb to the wicked fangs.

“Try ice too, Haley!” I shouted.

“Got it!”

Haley’s ice bolt slammed into it, chilling its side—it didn’t appear to like being frozen much, but Victor’s spell had had a much more dramatic effect.

“More fire, whoever has it!” I ordered, bashing away a tentacle from my face while slashing at the thing’s body. My sword sank in and came out again, and I wasn’t actually sure if I had hurt it.

“Good thing I’ve got this rod,” Victor remarked, lobbing another fiery missile at the shrieking horror. Trees gestured over his wooden club and the shillelagh erupted into flame, like a torch but fiercer, and he held it at the ready.

Meanwhile Daniel and I had continued striking at the acidic, burning tentacles instead of cutting the body uselessly, lopping them off one after the other and paring the horror down like an oversized bush. The ground was littered with burning, writhing masses of darkness, and the thrashing creature’s toothy snaps were always a moment too slow for our reflexes. I’d lost less than 10% of my health and Daniel was in similar condition—Paige hadn’t broken a sweat, and the boss was shrieking and burning and dying. This was all very encouraging, but it also didn’t feel right.

“Why is this so easy?” I muttered. “Isn’t this supposed to be a boss?”

As if on cue—or maybe because the thing was looking really ragged—the horror suddenly screamed, drew into itself, and barrel rolled backward half a dozen steps. Daniel and I drew up in surprise, and Haley and Victor both did the sensible thing and immediately dropped to meditate. Then the Shadow Horror flexed and separated… into four smaller shadow horrors, each with a horrifying set of teeth. Each of them broke off toward a different player, skittering quickly in different directions.

As Daniel groaned and leapt, rolling to confront the one beelining for the mages, Haley quipped: “You just had to say something, didn’t you?”

“Shut up and fight!” Victor growled, lurching back up and focusing his magic on the one that had slid past us. I managed to intercept another and suddenly I was facing two of the growling little creatures that I had no real idea how I was supposed to fight. The tentacles were smaller and finer on the mini-horrors, as I thought of them, and while I struck them again and again with my blade, they just kept savagely attacking. At least now my hacks seemed to do something, judging by the purple energy flowing off of them with each strike, just like the wolves had done. One bounced off the ground and clamped his razor-sharp fangs around my sword arm, and I roared in pain and shook my hand while I kicked the other one hard and sent it rolling back. There was no time to watch the others as I whacked my little arm attachment again and again with my shield, trying to shake him off, and finally spent another smite to knock him back down to the ground. The other one leapt onto my back now, acid tentacles snaking and burning around my neck while he chewed painfully at my back, but I didn’t turn away from the one I’d already stunned. Instead I followed him down, cutting savagely, and felt a burst of satisfaction when the little asshole finally shuddered and dissipated.

Then I stabbed back at the one behind me, choking me and sliding burning tendrils around my neck, and used my sword to pry him off and fling him into the nearby wall. As he smacked into the weathered stone, dust shook off the cracks, and he split yet again into two smaller horrors, the size of tiny dogs. “Fucking christ,” I growled, taking a quick glance around. Sure enough, the rest had all split as well, and the group now faced six more little horrors, smaller than the last. They were about the size of Victor’s elemental now, which had been wrestling with one of them until it finally succumbed to the gnashing teeth.

“You need to focus fire! Assist Victor!” I yelled, but everyone was so busy staying alive I wasn’t sure they heard me.

My group hadn’t been doing as well as I had—the acid was painful and the teeth cut deep even with plate armor. I was at 50% health and Daniel was as well, only because Paige had focused healing beams on him, but Victor and Haley were standing back to back trying to keep their horrors at bay with fire and ice, both marred by acid burns, and Trees struggled at Paige’s side to keep a nasty, snapping beast that had rolled off Daniel away from her with his flaming cudgel, his left arm busily bathing himself in a green nimbus of healing energy to counteract the savage bites on his legs.

Desperately wishing I had some kind of AoE taunt, I ignored the two horrors rolling toward me and rushed to help my mages.

“Low on mana!” Paige screamed, splitting her healing beam across both hands to help Victor and Daniel recover from staggering bites that sank into them as the agile little horrors flopped about. “Out of mana!” cried Trees.

I yanked a flaming, tentacled baby horror off Victor and cut it in half while it tried to eat my hand, and Daniel slew another, whirling in a haze of purple energy while the creatures snapped and growled at him, tentacles lashing. I glanced around the battlefield in a panic, trying to decide what to do next. I should have known better than to think that a level 6 boss monster would be easy for a party of level 1 characters. Things were getting dire: Daniel was now down to 40% and so was Victor, both bleeding and smoking from their wounds, and Hailey wasn’t much better. Paige was the only one without any damage, and Trees, despite his valiant battle with the flaming cudgel, had taken some bad wounds and was sitting uneasily at 30% health—leather was not very effective against those shadow teeth, and acid burned bark almost as easily as flesh.

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“Heal Trees!” I ordered Paige, laid a quick healing hand on Victor, and then lunged toward the one fighting the healers. But Paige’s golden beam cut off suddenly, and her face turned grey as she yelled, “Out of mana!” She raised her staff and tried to wail on the little black blob assaulting Trees, which had tentacles latched onto both his legs and teeth hungrily ripping at his bark. He was having trouble hitting it properly from that angle, and as it tore another bloody chunk out of his thigh, he screamed in pain and dropped to 23%. Suddenly, each of the little black blobs shrieked in delight and sped toward Trees.

“No!” I cried, chasing after the three that peeled away from me and the mages. Daniel lurched into action and managed to pin his to the ground with a saber through the middle. He repeatedly stabbed at it with his parrying dagger, growling at the burning tentacles whipping his face. But the other three slammed into Trees from behind while Paige hopped back, horrified. Trees hadn’t seen them coming and fell to the ground beneath this new assault, and the four horrors ripped his bark-covered body to shreds like a pack of hungry piranhas gobbling down hunks of bloody flesh, while covering him from head to toe in their greedy, sucking tendrils.

I reached Trees just as Paige collected herself enough to step in and start swinging her staff, and I dropped to my knees and lashed out with my sword while sticking my hand into the churning center to use my last 10 mana trying to keep Trees alive, despite the burning and gnashing I suffered. My heal landed, popping Trees back up to 30%, but it wasn’t enough to stop their frenzy now that they were close to dropping him. Haley and Victor dumped their mana, blasting one of the creatures to smithereens in a single moment, and Paige and I beat another one into purple remnants with our weapons, but not before the remaining two feeding creatures flayed the screaming druid to 20%, 12%, 3%, and finally -7% before bursting away from him in different directions, seemingly energized by their meal.

Paige collapsed onto the shredded, dying body of Trees, ashen-faced, trying to staunch wounds over vital organs with her robe and succeeding only in staining it with a deep, spreading crimson. Her eyes were very wide as she muttered, “Stay with us, stay with us, please Trees…”, but I knew even as Trees ticked down another 1% from blood loss that the only possible way to save him was to finish the battle and get some mana back for either me or Paige. Daniel’s horror had escaped his saber, finally, and danced with him now on the ground while he tried to defend himself with the dagger.

“For fuck’s sake, assist me!” I shouted, racing to help Daniel. Haley pumped another three missiles into the little creature beside him and between that and my sword blow we finished it. The other two horrors split targets, one leaping at Victor and one at me. Victor lit his on fire and whacked at it while it tried to eat his leg, and I skewered mine mid-leap, bashed it against my shield, and flung it onto the ground where Daniel sliced through it with his saber and dissipated it into purple energy. All four of us attacked Victor’s horror with whatever abilities remained to us, and we pounded it into submission, slaying it with Victor at only 4% health remaining and leaning heavily on his staff to keep himself standing. Scrolling across my HUD came a congratulatory message, as the swirling purple energy coalesced into a scattering of shadowplasm beads:

Killed: Shadow Horror. XP +200.

Dropped: Shadowplasm (20).

Congratulations on reaching Level 2, Michael Peters! You have 5 new points to assign to your statistics.

Daniel was at 25%, I was at 20%, and Haley was at 35%. We’d all barely survived, and now that the battle was over, our health and mana began to tick up agonizingly slowly. Paige was hunched over Trees’ smoking body, rocking him gently, and a whining, desperate sound came from his savaged throat while the fingers of his left hand twitched weakly. I too fell to my knees beside him, trying to assess the damage. It looked hopeless. If I hadn’t seen what magic could do in this game, I would have thought him beyond recovery, but my mana was regenerating too slowly. His fingers stopped twitching as he sank further, dropping to -9%.

“Someone heal him!” Haley cried helplessly.

“Don’t you think I would if I could?” Paige snapped. She scrunched her eyes closed and held her hands tightly wrapped around his dying body, gathering him up in the hem of her robes. “Heal, heal, fucking heal beam, god damn it! I have 6 mana and need 10 to cast it.” I had the same problem—only 3 mana, and ticking up at a measly 1.5 every six seconds. I kneeled and held Trees’ cold right hand, listening as his gasps came slower and slower. The others gathered silently around us. Paige began to cry.

Then he took one final gasping, rattling wheeze in, exhaled it as blood flowed down the grooves in his rough, bark-textured chin, and did not take another. My identifier bead updated:

Trees

LVL 1 Druid

[Dead]

We all bowed our heads while Paige continued to cry. Approximately 12 seconds after Trees died, Paige’s hands erupted into golden light and she bathed his body in it from head to toe, still sobbing, but nothing changed. His mangled form remained just as it was. When her mana ran out again, she sobbed harder and slammed her fists on his chest.

I touched her gently on the shoulder. “We have to go,” I murmured. The room had cleared of shade wolves and seemed lighter than it had upon our entry, but I didn’t know how long it might be before they returned. We needed to retreat, regroup, and think about everything we’d learned. It was clear that it was too dangerous for us here in our current state, level 2 or not.

“And not even any loot,” Victor grumbled, though his heart wasn’t in it.

Haley just stared at Trees, unblinking.

Daniel pointed and spoke quietly, sounding exhausted and dejected. “There’s loot.”

A hidden room had been revealed in the middle of the pit wall, exposing a large, ornate chest amid three statues. Haley, Victor, and Daniel shared a look, while I drew Paige to her feet. She came willingly, her tears drying, though she couldn’t take her eyes off the body at her feet.

“Let’s get it and go,” I said.

“It seems kind of…” Daniel said hesitantly.

“Ghoulish?” Paige offered quietly.

“We need every advantage we can get,” Victor said. “Don’t be stupid just because someone died. This is all on her.” He pointed at Haley, whose shoulders slumped.

“Not just her,” Paige snapped, with a pointed look at Victor. “We should have left as soon as we found her instead of playing childish dueling games.”

“Victor is right,” Haley said quietly, her eyes downcast. “It is my fault.”

“Shut up, all of you!” I snapped. “Let’s get the fucking treasure and go! Jesus. We’ll deal with this later.”

“What do we do with his body?” asked Daniel. It started fading as he asked the question, leaving behind the druid leathers and the oak cudgel he’d carried. At the center of his loot pile was a small, silver token with his name imprinted on it.

Paige left the starting gear but slipped the token into her pouch and then set her jaw, forcing the last of her sobs to subside with some effort.

Victor turned quietly to make for the loot chest, but I stopped him with a sharp word. “No. Let me. It could be trapped, and you’re still injured.”

He nodded and I strode up to it, inspecting it carefully. It was more of a box than a chest, with no visible lock and worked in a dark, brassy metal. It sat on a small, raised platform, coming up to about waist height, and the deep grey stone statues that flanked it on three sides were each quite sinister looking: one was a dragon coiled around a carved pillar with blood-red ruby eyes, one a grim knight with his visor down and a two handed sword lifted over his head with the pommel of his sword jet-black onyx, and a final third an indistinct swirl of shadow and rough detail that made my stomach twist when I looked at it, and it gleamed in places with every hue of the rainbow, though filtered through an oily black sheen.

If there was a way I could detect traps, I didn’t see it—or any traps. I poked at each of statues and the chest with my sword, and then carefully slid the blade into the crack to pry it open from a few feet away. I lifted the lid and then hopped back. Nothing happened. Not wanting to waste any more time, I walked up and flung it open. There were three pieces of gear inside.

Steel Longsword [Magic]

1H Slashing

8-16 Dmg

- Strength +5

Oak Staff [Magic]

2H Blunt

4-9 Dmg

- Spirit +3

Steel Shield [Magic]

T1/H

- Vitality +3

For a moment I was confused as to how to carry so many weapons without a backpack, but as soon as I touched the sword it shrank to a manageable size in my hand and vanished, materializing on my list of items that suddenly came up once more on my HUD, and different from the others in that it had a small picture of itself there too. Curious, I tried to will my crude iron sword into there, and it vanished also, gaining a small picture of itself beside the listing in my HUD. I pulled them back out by just reaching for them, plucking them out of the air in front of me, and noted that they didn’t return to full size until I willed it.

I returned to my group to distribute the tiny treasures, taking the shield for myself while handing the sword to Daniel and the staff to Paige. Both accepted. No one objected.

“Doesn’t seem like much for someone’s life, does it?” Daniel remarked sadly. No one replied.

We all turned to go, and then something stopped me. A cold whisper rolling across my neck that prickled my shoulder blades, like something just out of earshot.

…Michael…Chosen…

I stopped as my group climbed the ramp. Haley glanced back at me. “Michael?”

I stood staring back at the looted chest. Something was wrong. Something just felt wrong.

“Hang on,” I said, crossing back to the exposed room.

“What are you doing?” Victor demanded.

“Michael!” Paige called. “We need to go.”

“Just a second.” I knew they were right. There was no reason for me to investigate—we had our treasure and the body of our friend, and we needed to leave now. But I couldn’t seem to help it as I returned to the room with three statues and inspected each of them again.

“What is it?” Haley asked the others.

“I don’t like this,” Paige said quietly.

All three statues were mesmerizing and fascinating in their own way. At another time, in another place, I might have spent a while inspecting each of them just out of curiosity at the amazing craftsmanship and lifelike detail of the stone carvings. But now, it was the dark red ruby eyes of the dragon carving that called to me. They seemed to flicker with an inner light, taunting me and daring me to stare into them. I knew this was all wrong, and I just couldn’t stop.

…yes…come…

“I’m getting him,” Daniel said.

All the others were waiting for me at the top of the ramp, but I couldn’t break away. All I could see was the ruby eyes. Red, red, and more red. A thousand miles of crimson light. A shimmering sea of blood on the shores of a strange, dark-hued planet. They filled my eyes and my mind and the whole of my spirit, crowding out conscious thought.

“What’s wrong with him?” I heard someone distantly cry. Pounding footfalls echoed in my ears, as though muffled through layers of cotton.

My entire being danced to the sweet melody of the red light that suffused my soul. My sword and shield clattered to the ground. I hardly felt them go.

And then there was nothing.