The moment he heard the voice, Josh swung round. On the opposite side of the road from the forest was a small copse, and in the middle of that was a campsite. A small fire burned in a fire pit, although it gave off almost no smoke, which was partly why Josh had missed it. Hobbled nearby were two horses. One was clearly a warhorse, a big, muscled thing as tall as Josh at its shoulder, with hooves the size of dinner plates and feathery fetlocks. The second was a smaller horse, with sweat patches on its back that showed it had only recently been relieved of its saddle.

Sitting by the fire was the owner of the voice, and presumably also the owner of the horses.

He was a man in his mid to late twenties, with a homely face and sticky out ears. Like Josh, he wore a short scruffy beard, but the resemblance ended there. Instead of rocking the medieval hobo look, he wore a well-fitting brigandine, with a skirt of chainmail peeping from beneath it. He had a helmet sitting on the ground beside him, and sported armoured shoulder pads, bracers and greaves. Propped up beside him, within easy reach, was a two-handed sword with no scabbard.

He had a tough, world-weary air about him, and there were scratches and dents on his gear that, even though they had been polished or repaired, showed he was no stranger to fighting.

He looked like he would eat Varian for breakfast.

Josh’s ears replayed the question the man had asked him, and he felt his breath hitch. He’d asked if Josh had any cigarettes. He was an outlander, and unless cigarettes were common here, which Josh hadn’t seen any sign of so far, it looked like he had worked out that Josh was an outlander too.

He was waiting for Josh to reply.

“Er...” Josh said. “Do I look like I have any fags on me?”

The man shrugged.

“You never know. Not had a fooking smoke for seven fooking years, mate.” He had a strong Birmingham accent.

“You’ve been here for seven years?”

Spiralia Online had only been released for three. The man squinted at him.

“How long you been here?”

Josh calculated back.

“A week? No, eight days.”

The man snorted. Josh realised he would be able to see his new acquaintance’s character sheet, and focused.

[Fuck You

Hedge Knight

Level 37

Player rank: 98

Gladiator rank: 12

Kills: 382 | Deaths 27

Karma: -14,600]

Ulp, Josh thought. Hedge Knight Guy had already made him as an outlander. Josh hastily toggled his hidden status off, just so that it would be extremely clear that his level was far too low to offer Hedge Knight Guy any experience. It was Josh’s only defence. If the guy wanted to kill him, or worse, kill him permanently and take his player core, there was likely nothing Josh could do about it.

“Um,” he said. “I’m Josh.”

“I can fooking read, mate,” the man said.

“What should I call you?”

“Rob. Fook me, level fooking 8? What the fook you doing all the way up here?”

Josh had already gathered that every second word out of Rob’s mouth would be obscene. He explained about not checking his character sheet and missing the quest for Leybeck. Rob’s response was similar to that of Varian’s group.

“Probably just as well, mate.”

“Because of the Storm King?” Josh asked.

Rob’s opinion of the Storm King was unprintable, and required the use of multiple words beginning with 'f' and ‘c’. He appeared to feel very strongly about it.

While the tide of profanity washed over him, Josh considered what he should do. A large part of him urged him to bid Rob a polite farewell, and scoot up the road as fast as he could. A small part of him wanted to sit down and ask questions. If Rob had been here for seven years, then he must know a lot about the world.

A clear picture of Rob was emerging, however. Josh could already tell he was not the kind of person who dissembled. If Rob was going to kill Josh or harvest his player core, he would just do it. He wouldn’t lull Josh into a false sense of security and try to trick him, the way Varian had.

“Um … just to check … are you planning to kill me?” Josh asked. To be on the safe side, he added, “Either temporarily or permanently?”

Rob didn’t seem surprised by the question.

“Are you planning go round stabbing people in the back like a slippery little tosser?”

Josh blinked.

“No.” He thought a bit and added, “Not unless it’s in self-defence.”

“Well good luck with that,” Rob said caustically. “Sit down, mate, I’m not going to kill you.”

Josh cautiously arranged himself on the other side of the campfire. He had so many questions. He had to be careful though, because he strongly suspected that Rob was not the kind of person who had much patience for a lot of questions.

He should start with the most important one.

“The last group of outlanders I met were a bit more, uh, murdery,” he said. “I overheard them talking about harvesting player cores. Is that … is that the thing that kills outlanders permanently?”

Rob gave him a hard look.

“You bin here eight days. How do you know so much about player cores and permadeath?”

Josh explained how he had worked it out from the recycled class slots, and from all the things Varian’s group had said and done. About halfway through the explanation he saw Rob’s eyes start to glaze over, in a way that people’s eyes sometimes did after prolonged contact with Josh. He hastily condensed the points he’d been trying to make.

“Look, it’s obvious that there are two types of permadeath, one that recycles player cores and releases them back to the Guardian, and one where the core is harvested and stays in the world. How does the first one happen?”

“Beats me, mate,” Rob said unhelpfully.

Josh searched his mind for the name of the assassin Varian’s gang had talked about, the one that they had described as having been ‘iced.’ His core had been released and made available again by the Guardian for Josh’s character selection, but had been taken by a fellow kidnap victim before Josh could select it. Kenway! That was it.

“So, what happened to Kenway then?” Josh asked. “He was an assassin, right?”

Rob stared at Josh.

“Kenway got permed?”

“I assume you don’t mean he had his hair done?”

“Permed means perma-killed, you twozzer.”

“Varian’s gang talked about it happening.”

“Huh. Must of bin when I was up north. Couldn’t of happened to a nicer bloke. Tell you what, mate, the ones that get permed are always absolute fooking raving loony fooking bastards. So don’t be a raving loony bastard and you’ll be fine.”

“But how does it happen? Do they get killed in any particular way?”

Rob shook his head. His hand went automatically to the pouch at his hip, and he fumbled inside, bringing out a white cylinder.

“They die and they don’t come back. Never met any fooker who had the least fooking idea.” He paused, and added, “Met a bunch of fookers who thought they had some fooking idea and decided I fooking well needed to hear all about it, but what the fook do they know?”

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Josh was distracted by the cigarette Rob had taken out.

“Why did you ask me for a cigarette if you already have one?” Josh asked, non-plussed, as Rob lit up. Rob seemed enraged by the question.

“This? This is a fooking two inches of absolute shit. This, mate, is a fooking herbal fooking cigarette. Do you see what this fooking world had done to me? It’s turned me into a fooking hipster. Herbie the fooking Hipster, that’s me.”

Anyone less like a hipster was hard to imagine. Rob inhaled deeply and expelled a cloud of smoke redolent of chamomile, rosemary, sage, and cloves.

“There’s no tobacco in this world at all?” Josh asked.

“Never fooking found any. Anyone who can point me in the direction of a roll of baccy, I will worship the goddamn ground they fooking walk on.”

“Noted,” Josh said.

While this conversation had been going on, Rob had been roasting a whole pheasant on a spit over his campfire. On being asked, he gave the feathers to Josh, along with a few choice words of commiseration when he found out what Josh’s class did. Josh hoped that Rob would also decide to offer him some of the pheasant meat once it was done cooking.

“I was planning to stay under level 10,” Josh told him. “I thought I would try to blend as a local until I can grind my attributes up, and level up all at once.”

Rob roundly condemned this as a terrible idea. Not only would Josh lose any unapplied experience if he died, he wouldn’t get any practice at using his higher level skills, and permanently staying at a lower level would just make him vulnerable.

“I’m a plumassier,” Josh said dryly. “Does it matter all that much?”

“Everythin’ can be used for combat, mate.” Rob then relented. “But to be fair, you don’t actually need your class to get good. Nothing to stop you learning skills the old-fashioned way, right?” He nodded at the bow that Josh had put beside him. “Having a class just makes shit quicker and easier, like you're instantly learning something that would take you a year or ten years.”

Josh absorbed this advice. If that was the case … his reason for visiting the druid grove was doubly important. It meant there was hope, because he could acquire combat skills, at least to defend himself with. He thought about the way he had just walked right past a man, two horses, a campfire, and a roasting pheasant without noticing any of them, and decided he should probably start with situational awareness.

Unconsciously Josh rubbed at the raw patch on his inner forearm, where the bow string had scraped his skin. It was going to be a lot of painful hard work.

“Do you think I can pass for a local, though?” he asked. “You realised instantly. How did you know?”

Rob gave him a look.

“The fact that you was singing a Katy Perry song was a bit of a clue, mate.”

Josh’s mouth fell open.

“Oh.” Fuck. He hadn’t even realised.

“To be fair, if I hadn’t heard you doing that I might not of known.”

Why couldn’t Josh have been singing something edgier and more manly, like Eminem or something? He’d been singing Dark Horse, he realised, probably because he’d been thinking about his plan to pretend to be a local. He decided to move the conversation hastily onto another subject.

“Is it common for locals to be able to do magic?”

He was disappointed when Rob shook his head.

“The moment any poor fooker shows any talent for magic the nob heads are down on them like a ton of bricks.”

“What happens?”

“They get sucked up into the fooking system, mate, working for the fooking nobs.”

Josh wasn’t sure that his disguise would pass muster under that kind of scrutiny. His heart sank. It meant that he would have to hide his outlander status and his ability to do magic.

And then Rob added, “Mind you, anyone can do charms. I can fooking do charms and I’ve got as much fooking magic as a fooking brick.”

Josh relaxed. Charms referred to small utility spells created by mages, usually written out on an amulet or a spell scroll. That, he could work with.

Next question: “Why is everyone I’ve come across so far so desperate for experience?”

“Because the world is more badly fooked than a prostitute doing buy one get one free in a—.”

“But how did that happen?” Josh interrupted, before Rob could complete his metaphor.

“How the hell should I know, mate? It were like this when I arrived. There I was, brand new shiny fooking hero, looking for monsters to slay, only there weren’t no fooking monsters. They’d all fookin bin wiped out.”

He’d obviously found other ways to gain experience instead.

“How did you get here, if you don’t mind me asking?”

Rob didn’t seem to mind the question at all. He’d been on holiday in Thailand with a bunch of mates, but had eaten something that disagreed with him and spent two days in bed playing a mobile game on a borrowed smartphone.

“It were called Sea Spire and it were about fooking pirates,” Rob said.

There were other games that kidnapped people?

“The Seamount!” Josh sat up. “It’s the pirate city. It’s here too? Did you get an immortality quest?”

“To be honest, mate, I was fooking out of it at the time. I’ve no idea.”

Rob didn’t seem to think his family would have noticed his disappearance.

“Fell out with me old man,” he told Josh. “Had an argument with me girlfriend before I went off to Thailand. Me fooking mates were as drunk as fook twenty-three hours out of twenty-four. They probably thought I pissed off back home.”

He seemed philosophically resigned to wandering around Six Spires for the rest of his life, and displayed more grief at the recent loss of his dog, who had died last year, than he did for his family and friends on Earth. At least on Six Spires, Rob said, he got to kill tossers on a regular basis, often more than once.

At the mention of his dog, something visibly occurred to him.

“Did you get your lost dog quest yet, mate?”

“My what?” Josh stared.

“That’s how I got me dog. It were an abandoned mutt, came across her when I first got here. Some complete fooking dickheads had been torturing the poor fooking thing.” This led to a side rant, in which the ratio of swearwords to normal words doubled, a story which culminated in three men beaten to within an inch of their lives, and Rob the owner of the mutt in question.

“But you got a quest for it?”

Rob shook his head.

“Did I fook? Fooking system don’t care about fooking dogs. This is something different, mate. Everyone gets a lost dog when they first come here.”

“I haven’t seen any dogs.”

Rob admitted that it wouldn’t necessarily be a dog. A kid, maybe, he said, or an old lady or something.

Mother Gwn! Josh related the tale to Rob, who nodded.

“Sounds like that was it, mate.”

“How do you know it’s a quest?

Rob shrugged.

“Cos it’s weird, right? Everyone gets something like it. But what the fook do I know?”

The quest, if quest it was, seemed to give no experience, nor offer rewards, except, Rob said, if you helped, if you did what was right, you got help in return. Josh still wasn’t sure who had helped who the most in his meeting with Mother Gwyn, but decided to think about that later. He moved on to his next question.

“How else do I stop someone killing me to take my class?” Josh asked. “What should I look out for?”

Rob had lots of colourful advice to offer on this subject.

“Don’t go anywhere near the fooking Order of Up Their Own Arses So Fooking Hard Their Heads Come Out Their Fooking Mouths.” On being asked to clarify, he admitted that the official name was actually the Order of the Unyielding. He also recommended avoiding the Church of the Common Covenant, although it took Josh a couple of tries to get the genuine designation out of him, after it had been stripped of all other adjectives beginning with ‘c.’ Rob ended this advice with, “Oh, and whatever you do don’t have anything to do with the Queen of the Fooking Fairies.”

“Oh,” Josh said. “Actually, we already met.”

At this, Rob jolted upright.

“You what?”

After Josh had described his encounter with her, Rob gave it as his opinion that Josh was one lucky fooker.

“What do you want with the Queen?” Josh asked guardedly.

It turned out that Rob was after Charral, rather than the Queen, because the former had a habit of harvesting players—she had perma-killed, as he put it, fook-loads of people.

“That is one rabid fooking bitch, mate, and I’m going to fooking put her down if it’s the last thing I do.”

Charral nearly perma-killed me, Josh thought, staring at the campfire with wide eyes. And then the Queen had stopped her.

Rob jolted Josh out of his reverie by quizzing him on every detail he remembered about the Trooping Fey. Which stone circle had they come out of, which direction had they travelled in, had there been any indication of their purpose? Rob’s morose calm had disappeared. Instead, he jiggled his knee impatiently, and looked south along the road several times, as if he couldn’t wait to be gone.

Once they’d finished sharing the pheasant meat, Rob stood up and started loading his gear onto the horses.

“The gate might still be open,” he told Josh, as he mounted the horse he had referred to as a palfrey. “If I can get into fooking fairyland I can get close enough to nail that bitch once and for all.”

Josh hadn’t asked Rob about the Dreamer!

“Hey, have you heard of the Dreamer?”

“What’s that?” Rob said as he mounted up.

“The Dreamer,” Josh repeated.

“Not a fooking clue, mate.”

“Oh,” Josh said. “Okay. Thanks. Er, Good luck.”

Rob nodded at him.

“Thanks, mate.” A thought occurred to him, and he cut a second dead pheasant from where it had been hanging from one of the saddle bags. “Here have this.” Josh took the pheasant. “And this.” Rob chucked something else at Josh, and when he caught it, it was a heavy leather pouch which clinked.

Money!

“Stay safe, alright?” With that Rob clapped his heels to his horse’s side and was gone in a clatter of hooves.

“You too!” Josh called after him.

He would have liked to ask more questions, but Rob obviously had places to be. Josh looked down at the leather purse in his hand. When he opened it, it proved to be full of small copper coins, with a handful of silver ones in between.

He had no idea what any of it was worth, but still, money.

By the next day, Josh had managed to find a friendly farmhouse, and was the proud possessor of a new blanket (one silver), a sheep’s fleece (ten copper pennies), woolly socks (two pennies), a needle and thread (one penny), a tallow candle (one penny), some sheets of notepaper (three pennies), and a small bottle of ink made from charcoal and oak gall (two pennies).

He had also cut a strip off the bottom of his tunic, and had spent the rest of the day inexpertly sewing himself a money belt, with individual pockets for each of the remaining coins, which he was planning to wear under his clothes. He didn’t want another greedy guard to go delving in his backpack and swipe it all.

He also had a backpack full of food (five pennies). This was in addition to the pheasant, which he was proud to have plucked and pulled himself. He had shoved a stick through it and was attempting to spit roast it on the fire. This was proving difficult, however, because whenever he turned the branch the pheasant carcass didn’t turn with it—the stick just rotated inside it. He obviously had a lot to learn about campfire cooking.

He knew that finding the druid grove would take time. He had no maps of the forest, and there were no roads through it. It wasn’t the kind of carefully pollarded and cultivated woodland he was used to from home either—the undergrowth was thick and tangled, and in many places impassable.

What he did know was that the grove was beside a stream, with a waterfall running into a wide, round pool. The entrance to the grove was through the waterfall. This meant that all he needed to do was to trace the streams through the woods until he came to the right waterfall.

Had the druids abandoned their grove, or were they just in hiding? If the latter, they might not appreciate Josh’s interference.

Well, he would cross that bridge when he came to it.