A new box appeared in his vision.
[Class Discovered]
Dungeon Core Guardian
The box immediately vanished, and in its place appeared an error message that he had seen before when he’d absorbed the Dragontooth King class. This one was just a Journeyman tier class, but unlocking more abilities was exactly what Elijah wanted.
[Debug Menu]
Merge Class?
1. Yes
2. No
The base of his skull felt like it caught fire the moment he accepted the prompt. The same pain as when he’d become more than just a Reality Warper. When the pain finally subsided, he looked at his stats but didn’t notice any difference.
“Well, that’s disappointing,” he muttered to himself, turning his attention to the party chat that had started to blink.
Sasha > Elijah? Are you awake yet? The guys and I respawned in Nethy.
He looked around the room. It appeared exactly the same as the last time he’d respawned, but he wasn’t sure if this was Nethy, Raystown, or somewhere else.
Elijah > I’m awake. Not sure where I am, getting up now.
He slowly stood up from the bed, blinking his eyes heavily to get over the pain he had been feeling just moments ago. The sound of voices answered swiftly his question about his location. Tom and Arturus’ voices, to be exact. They were yelling commands, and Elijah figured this temple was probably crawling with Reapers. He didn’t want to test whether safe room rules applied, even if they couldn’t attack him; he figured they’d be able to capture him and imprison him.
He channeled his mana and selected the Nethy temple as the target for his ‘Dragontooth Teleport’. As the bats began swarming around him, the door to his room burst open. Tom lunged at him just as the bats obscured his vision completely and carried him off to Nethy.
He stumbled as the bats teleported him into the Temple of Fate. The spell felt wrong even though he’d made that trip once before. He wondered what had changed this time, even as his team came running up to him. They looked the worse for wear, and Sasha looked like she was about to puke. He knew she was dealing with the after effects of mana drain and the death sickness. He felt bad for her and wished he could do something for her. Once he reached Celestial, he’d be able to affect other players, but until then he could only remove his own sickness.
“Guys. I think I messed up.” His eyes darted to the error message still hovering in his vision, taunting him.
Nicholas nodded his head, but put his hand up, looking around at all the surrounding players. There was a glut of players filling the hall of the temple. It felt like too many to Elijah. “Benjamin, teleport. Our mansion here in the city.”
Benjamin nodded. Elijah could see how worn out the man was, but he still stepped back and formed the spell. They all stepped through, Elijah remembering why he preferred his own teleport power as the nausea set in.
His party took it even harder, already feeling the effects of nausea from the death sickness. He helped them into comfortable positions on the couch and chairs before slumping down next to Benjamin on a couch.
“Do you guys see it too?” Nicholas asked, his eyes darting up and to the left as he spoke.
“Yeah, an error message saying logout is disabled?” Benjamin asked, burying his face in his hands.
“It was the core. I was able to access it with my Reality Warp power, but it was bugged. Corrupt, I think?”
“You shouldn’t have been able to access the core at all. That not only requires admin-level control but also access to a special module the devs had to physically install on their pods.” Bo growled, staring at him with anger in his eyes, though Elijah couldn’t understand why.
“I don’t know what to tell you. I still don’t fully understand the nature of my class.”
“Bullshit!” Bo shouted, standing up and crossing the room to Elijah. Bo stuck his finger in his face. “You start the game and get continuously lucky—a rare start, a unique class, surviving a glitched-out library and coming out of it with new abilities. Now you can access dungeon cores? I don’t believe it. So who are you? I know the devs, and I’ve never met you before.”
Elijah stood and pushed Bo back hard. “I don’t know what you are talking about, but I’m not going to let you stand here and accuse me of being someone I’m not, or whatever it is you are saying.” Elijah hollered back at him. He was furious, but couldn’t place exactly why.
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“Oh? And we’re just supposed to believe that you can do something that only developers can do? You’re just some guy who can access controls you shouldn’t be playing around with? Fess up, Elijah, you’ve got access to a developer pod, so either you’re a thief or an admin.”
If Nicholas hadn’t gotten between them, Elijah would have tested just how far he could push the game’s safe zone. He was raging mad at being called either a liar or a thief. “I’m not a thief. I had to save for years to be able to afford a second-hand pod. So I will not let you call me a thief!”
Bo stopped.
“A second-hand pod? Shit, dude. Let me guess, you live somewhere in the Midwest of America.”
His casual tone was a shock to Elijah. “What does that have to do with anything?” He asked through gritted teeth.
Bo just looked at him, stunned into silence for a moment.
Then Bo laughed, an uproarious belly laugh that caused him to fall back into his chair. Sasha looked at him with concern, Benjamin and Nicholas looked at him with confusion, and Elijah glared with anger.
Finally, Bo pulled himself together enough to speak. “Man, I guess you are lucky both in game and out of game. Or maybe your out of game luck is the reason you’re so lucky here.”
Nicholas pushed Elijah back towards the couch, and he let himself slump back down onto the cushion. “Okay Bo, you’ve had your laugh. Now explain.” Nicholas’ voice was stern as he turned to look at the rogue.
Bo gave them all a wicked grin. “Shardline Games, the developers, had a studio based out of Indiana, Shardline Midwest. It shut down last month. The head studio hired an outside team to uninstall the developer packages from the pods before shipping them off to refurbishers. My guess? I’d guess they screwed up and missed one. One that our friend Elijah here purchased.”
“How the hell do you know all this?” Elijah barked at him, his anger still unabated.
“Come on, Elijah. You’re smart; you haven’t figured it out yet?”
Sasha groaned from her place on one couch. She was lying down with her arm draped over her eyes. “Do you guys have to keep yelling? Isn’t it obvious? He’s one of them. A developer. That’s why he knew where the dev room was.”
Bo grinned and pointed a finger at her. “Ten points for the actress. Who said beauty can’t come with brains? I was, was, a developer. I worked at Shardline Midwest before it shut down. Used the nice little severance package they gave me to buy a pod of my own. A new one.”
Elijah’s eyes twitched towards the error message in his vision again. “So if you’re a developer, what’s the error message we’re seeing mean?”
“It means we’re fucked. Utterly and completely screwed unless one of the admins happened to be working overnight and logged into the game.” Bo said with a grin on his face that belied the seriousness of the situation. “Nobody can log in, and nobody can log out. Not until that corrupted error is cleared up, and I’ve never seen that message freeze for this long.”
“Can’t they just log us out from outside of the game?”
“Nope, that’s not the way it’s set up. This game is designed, created, and run all within the virtual engine of the game itself. It’s designed that way to make for a more streamlined process.”
“Did they not plan for this kind of thing? That seems incredibly reckless of them.” Sasha asked, her arm coming away from her face to stare at them.
“They did; the AI is supposed to log everyone out in the event of something like this happening. Which obviously didn’t happen.”
“Well, if we can’t log out, surely the developers can trace the IP of everyone logged in and send someone to go in and disconnect them from the pod,” Elijah suggested.
Sasha sat bolt upright, glaring at him. He looked around and noticed everyone had stunned expressions on their faces.
“What?”
“You didn’t read the big warning sticker stuck to the glass explaining exactly what happens if you are forcefully removed from the pod?” Sasha hissed at him. He shrunk back, feeling irrationally upset with himself that he’d said something so concerning to her.
“Remember guys, he bought a refurb pod. He probably didn’t have the sticker.” Bo came to his rescue, in stark contrast to the aggressive and angry way he’d been treating Elijah mere moments ago. “Being physically removed from the pod while still in-game is a fate worse than death, Elijah.”
“Why, what happens?”
Sasha stood from her couch and moved to sit between Elijah and Benjamin. She rested her head on his shoulder, and he had to fight back an obvious grin. “Your mind gets trapped in the game. You won’t even know it until you try to log out. You essentially become a digital ghost. Stuck forever in the game, forced to play it until someone shuts down the server.”
His heart sank at her words. The softness of her voice, the sheer terror that underlined the words. He looked at the rest of the party. The expressions they wore made Sasha’s grim words even more real.
“Only way out now is a forced log out, but that’s incredibly unlikely since it has to be done by someone with admin tools. The devs can’t even communicate with the AI to come up with a solution while it’s in this state. They’ll wake up in the morning to find themselves locked out of all of their external tools and unable to login.”
“So we’re trapped, unless one of them happened to be logged into their admin account when the glitch happened?” Benjamin asked, his voice hollow.
“No,” Elijah answered before he realized it was even him talking. “My class, my skill—if I can make it to Celestial-tier then I can use it on other players. One option I had when I looked at myself in the menu was ‘Force Logout’.”
“Celestial-tier? The tier that only six people in the game's history have attained? Sure Elijah, it’ll be so easy to get there.” Bo answered, rolling his eyes.
Nicholas shot him a dirty look. “It isn’t the most convenient option, but it’s the only option we have right now.”
“Plus, Elijah already has the ability to earn a Celestial Relic thanks to his tutorial quest.” Sasha answered, her voice weak with exhaustion.
“So? That’s what we’re doing now? We’re going to spend who knows how long working to get Elijah levelled up to level 99 so he can get the relic and ascend to Celestial?” Bo asked, though his voice sounded like it was full of disbelief.
Nicholas glared at him again. “Do we have a better option? Right now, Elijah is our best bet for getting out of here.”
Bo grinned again, though this time it was a grin that made it obvious that he agreed with Nicholas’ assessment of the situation. “Alright, good. I just wanted to make sure everyone was aware of how hard this was going to be and the stakes we’re looking at.”
“We’ll get you to level 99, but then you’ll have to do the redemption questline on your own. You’ve got thousands if not millions of lives in your hands here, Elijah.”
Elijah nodded his head at Bo; he could feel the winds of fate shifting. What had started off with him just wanting to experience the game firsthand had turned into a rescue mission to save the very people he had just trapped in the game.
Sasha curled in closer to him. “Whatever we plan on doing, we can do it after we’ve all had time to rest and recover.”
Elijah couldn’t help but agree with her. By his own internal clock, it was the middle of the night. It had been late when they first entered the cemetery, and the events since then made it seem like it had been hours ago.
He desperately needed sleep, and so did his party.