Emotionally wrung out from his conversation, Jay was in no mood to rally the troops and lead them onward. He put Taylor Lynn in command, and she took pity on him. She worked to communicate the way forward to all the remaining players, even though a mere fifty remained after the previous battle.

Fifty players still made a wide number to spread information to, most of whom had opinions about what to do, and the process took a significant chunk of time. The players gave Taylor Lynn more grief than they would have given Jay and far more than they would have given Lester. But Taylor Lynn cut through all of it without complaint.

A force of players was created to defend the rally point. This included a combination of strong players that could easily take down opponents and lower-leveled players who needed an experience boost. Around thirty people blocked the only side of the square with an entrance.

No massive force of Demon players and their allies appeared like the one that had assaulted their fort. Instead, small roving bands comprising less than ten players found the rally point. Every time, without waiting for reinforcements, they smashed themselves against the larger number of Elven players. Each of those small wins brought tens of thousands of experience points to the Elven forces.

As minutes turned into hours, those with the proper skills spent time finishing last-minute craftings. Sarah was included in this group, creating health and mp potions that didn’t require a full table kit.

Jay accomplished little of use as the guild sat and waited. He turned over his argument with Claire in his head. The scenario played out in his head enough times that the actual words said seemed to lose all their meaning. Then, he could no longer tell if he had the right words. But still, he replayed the scene.

The experience felt an awful lot like bashing his head against the wall, except the only injuries were to his Ego. And the wall was a moment he couldn’t push past.

For the life of him, Jay couldn’t figure out why he hadn’t seen it coming. In retrospect, it was obvious. How often did the cute girl at the counter want to go out with you in real life? How often was she interested in games herself? It’s not impossible, but that was the dangerous part. It was improbable, which was just enough to leave the door open for possibility.

Jay had made a bet, and he had lost. He understood Tumult Corp.’s motivations. That part was obvious in hindsight. The company had known more than him and used their foreknowledge to great effect. They had been aware that there would be areas only Jay could experience. The company set Claire as a confidant for those areas of hidden knowledge. It lined up. Once they had what they needed to know from Claire, Jay was no longer necessary.

But Claire still maintained the ruse.

Jay knew that he should put his focus somewhere else. That was the only strategy that would work for moving past it since that was impossible while he dwelled. Unfortunately, that day was one of those days where even something so simple seemed impossible.

On a good day, Sarah Miller would have just let Jay stew in his feelings. She had her own things to deal with. His sister wasn’t callous, but other things often called to her attention. The day of the siege was not a good day, so she did not leave him alone.

She found him under a Burlen tree, staring up at the sparkles floating off the tree. Mindlessly, Jay reached out like he could catch one of the glowing sparks. He couldn’t, they weren’t corporeal, but he tried.

“Feel any better yet?” Sarah asked simply. She moved her avatar under the tree and sat beside him, though her attention was fixed on him.

“What?” Jay asked.

“I’m asking if you feel better yet. You’ve been moping under a tree for hours, so I can only assume it’s doing wonders for your self-esteem.”

Jay let out a half-hearted chuckle, though it sounded completely fake. “At least I can be certain the tree isn’t going to betray me.”

Sarah looked up at the tree suspiciously and narrowed her eyes, making a deep show of scrutinizing it. “I’m unconvinced. I would watch your back where the tree is concerned. How are you feeling?”

“Like a ray of sunshine stabbed me in the back,” Jay said as if he were revealing a deep truth. “Like hope slapped me across the face. I feel like I just got betrayed by my girlfriend.” After a moment, he corrected himself. “Ex-girlfriend.”

Sarah fell silent. Trapped in her thoughts, she took a moment to reply. Jay found it strange since his little sister could usually talk her way out of a concrete box. Even though he hadn’t wanted to talk moments ago, he broke the silence anyway.

“Cat got your tongue?” he asked, looking over at the players defending the entrance to the rally point. They were fighting another small chunk of Demon players. Several of the players who had been below level fifty were now catching up to the rest of the guild.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

Sarah ignored his quip, which was also unlike her. “What makes you so sure that Claire was the one who told them everything that was going on?”

“That’s easy,” Jay stated bluntly. “In the face of no other suspects, it has to be her. You know—when you have eliminated impossibilities, whatever remains, no matter the improbability, is truth. Or whatever.”

“It could have been me,” Sarah pointed out. The idea was entirely nonsensical. Jay knew his sister wouldn’t betray him. She had nothing to gain from it, especially because her current treatments stemmed from his original position with Tumult. She has no reason to jeopardize that. Even setting all that aside, Sarah could be annoying. She could be unintentionally blunt or cruel. But she’d never gone out of her way to hurt Jay. In truth, much to his chagrin, she often acted like a protective older sister instead of a younger one.

“It could also have been the boogeyman,” Jay pointed out. This time, Sarah chuckled half-heartedly. “I’m serious. The possibilities are just as likely. I’ve known you, actually, your entire life. You’ve never done anything to me that would make me suspect you’re capable of something like that. Honestly, I don’t think you’ve done something like that to anyone else, either.”

“Not on purpose,” Sarah muttered, then continued louder. “But I’m still a human, Jay. I make mistakes. You know I’m being monitored; they could have seen something. I could have sent something or said something I thought was innocent, but that ultimately let them connect the dots. I mean, they could be watching right now.”

It didn’t seem likely that Sarah would be the one to pass along information, even unintentionally. For a moment, he had expected her to point the finger at Taylor Lynn as Claire had. He was glad she didn’t. That would have forced him to reevaluate his entire point of view on the day’s events. He was grateful not to be confronting that.

“I appreciate you saying that, and I know you’re coming from a place of looking out for me,” Jay said. “I just don’t see how that’s possible. I’ve been careful since I knew they could observe you as they did to me. She’s been working for them the whole time. Why would they let her go when she was right where they wanted her?”

“Maybe she chose you over whatever they asked her to do,” Sarah suggested. “Would that be so difficult for you to believe?”

Claire hadn’t wanted to discuss much of the details about her departure from Tumult Corp. Since they fired her, that wasn’t overly strange. Jay wrote it off as emotional rawness from losing her job. The more he thought about it, the more suspicious it looked. If she had somehow stood up and chosen their relationship over the company, she would have been more than willing to talk about the situation.

And then he second-guessed himself. How would it have looked to him if she had presented it that way right after it happened? She would be making herself out to be some kind of gallant defender of his, which he wouldn’t have believed. Honestly, he would have assumed she was still working for them and that the story’s purpose boiled down to winning his trust. The only reason to do that would be to set him up.

Jay’s brain rattled from spinning through the possibilities. He didn’t know if Claire was that diabolical, but that was the problem—he didn’t know her well enough. The simplest answer remained: she had sold him out.

“You’re quiet,” Sarah commented while Jay fought the whispers. “What’s on your mind?”

“I was just giving your suggestion some thought,” Jay said.

“Oh?” Sarah prompted. As they spoke, she tossed some things into a vial of still liquid. Spinning it around, the herbs dissolved into the picture, turning the color of a health potion.

Jay nodded, considering how to describe his certainty to his sister. “It’s the only thing that makes sense. She was in the perfect position for them. We already know they’re cutthroat. I wouldn’t be surprised if she got a promotion from the whole affair. She certainly had me going for a while there.

“I really liked her,” Sarah spoke, a twinge of sadness in her words.

“Me too,” Jay confirmed. He almost joked that nothing was standing between him and Taylor Lynn now, but it wasn’t funny. And truthfully, there was no way that girl would accept being his second choice after all their years of friendship. Or take second place in general.

“Should we check in with the General?” Sarah grinned, inclining her head towards Taylor Lynn. “I see people starting to get on their feet. We might be headed for the government sector.”

“Yeah,” Jay said, trying to summon some of his failing confidence. Sarcastically, he added, “I’m sure they’re all falling apart without me.”

For once, Sarah didn’t roll her eyes. That should have clued him into the words she was leaving unsaid. There was a common saying about three strikes, and that was three times she acted outside usual expectation. He wasn’t clued in, though. Instead, they walked together to speak with Taylor Lynn.

She had been hard at work collating messages across different players. Everyone had some people across other guilds on their friend lists, but there was no proper system for communicating guild leader to guild leader across various guilds. Such a resource would have been invaluable during the siege, which was more of an assault on Ilra, if such a tool had existed.

Jay spoke to Taylor Lynn for several minutes to get a proper update on what was happening. More or less, she did sound an awful lot like a General reporting to a commanding officer.

Finally, hours after the siege, players had collated enough information from other guilds through the game messaging system to build a picture of what happened. Many other small to medium-sized guilds reported similar experiences, though the attacking forces didn’t quite match the size of the one that hit Red Player’s Society.

The strangest information, however, was that the other guilds had the same experience as the Elvish Alliance guild. No members of the Red Player’s Society could get a hold of anyone on their roster, but neither could any other guild. That made for a strange situation. While it was undeniably weird, it did not create an actual problem.

The real problem was that the Elvish Alliance’s assigned role was guarding the government sector with the NPC guards.