Arriving back in the Temple of Fate in Klade so quickly wasn’t what he’d been hoping for when he had headed out with his friends.

  He was lucky compared to the other players in the game, that he could remove his own Death Sickness. The few moments between his respawn and adjusting the timer were plenty to remind him why he didn’t just let it run its course like the rest of the players in the game had to do.

  Death sucked even without the debuff. It was bad enough that he felt his body being crushed beneath the weight of stones as the dungeon collapsed on him, or feeling the life slowly being choked from his body as he drowned, or the time fire magic had immolated him.

  He used to think, before he’d gotten his own pod, that death had no meaning in a game where you could just respawn. That was the general consensus of most people who had never played Lordship of Sorcery. They didn’t know the horror that was feeling a blade slowly penetrate your chest and drive itself into your heart. He’d signed up for this, even if he’d never intended to be trapped in a world that wanted you dead.

  He pulled himself from the bed and summoned his armor around him before summoning Bitter Root.

  “Do you still have it?” he asked the familiar.

  Root nodded his head and held out a hand.

  “Just leave it in your inventory. I don’t know how much damage we did to it by pulling that little stunt. So I don’t want to pull it out until we are ready to heal it.”

  “What Boss plan when heal core?” Root asked.

  Elijah shrugged his shoulders. “Can’t say that I really had much of a plan.”

  He summoned Larry, Curly and Moe and sent them out through the window, figuring he should use the few moments he had here to scout out the city and make sure everything was still normal here. The fact that an admin was online meant that nowhere was entirely safe anymore.

  “I just didn’t want to have to kill another Core. Maybe we can build a dungeon of our own for it to control?”

  “Or kill gobbo home core? Need new Big Badda Boss Babe.”

  Elijah, who had been focusing his senses on the scouts, stopped and turned to Bitter Root. “What do you mean you need a new Boss Babe?”

  The goblin shrugged. “When Boss kill Boss Babe, Gobbos gonna need new one. Unless Boss wanna be Boss Babe.”

  Elijah let out a slow breath of relief. He’d worried that another player had completed the redemption quest by killing the Boss Babe. The six Celestials, Tom, and now the admin were more than enough to deal with without adding an unknown player achieving Celestial-tier to the mix.

  The harsh truth was that once Elijah killed the Big Badda Boss Babe, he would be only a short time away from becoming Celestial-tier himself. And once he made it there, this game would end. He’d save everyone from their imprisonment. Likely the game’s servers would shut down following their escape, and Bitter Root, the other familiars, the Core, and even Kara would no longer exist.

  ”We’ll burn that bridge when we get there, Root,” Elijah said, patting the goblin’s head.

  He turned his attention to the quest floating in his vision.

  [Quest Completed]

  The Library at the End

  Description: You have defeated the Undying Library. Never again shall the Librarian threaten the subjects of the Dragontooth Kingdom. You are now one step closer to cleansing the Blood Oath Throne. All hail the Dragontooth King.

  With it came a nice little dump of two hundred experience points. Between killing the Librarian and completing the quest, he was now not only well into level twenty-nine, but was only a handful of points away from reaching level thirty, and with it his next upgrade for his utility specialization.

  Two points into dexterity and a single point into constitution. That put his dexterity at a nice even thirty, and the extra point of health wouldn’t hurt. Even though both of the last two times he’d died his health hadn’t mattered.

  He was about to teleport to the edge of the inner sea to meet back up with his friends when he felt a familiar magic surround him. Bitter Root growled at something behind him, but he didn’t even need to turn around to know what it was.

  “Hi, Annika,” he grumbled.

  “Are you still mad at me?” she asked, hurt obvious in her voice. He didn’t have time for her nonsense.

  “If I said I was, would you leave me alone?”

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  A different voice from behind him made him whirl around, activating his Batwing Blade. “She’s just my ride, ignore her.”

  Arturus was there, standing next to his bed where Annika sat comfortably. He eyed Elijah’s Batwing Blade cautiously, no doubt remembering how Elijah had killed him in their confrontation in the water-filled crater.

  “I didn’t come here to fight,” Arturus said, putting his hands up.

  That didn’t matter to Elijah. He’d seen how quickly the Celestial could move. The Necro Drifter could cross the distance between them in the blink of an eye. He should teleport away now and not give Arturus the chance.

  “I’m only here at Annika’s request to give you an update on the Tom situation.”

  Elijah didn’t answer or lower his weapon; instead he took several steps back towards the door before summoning Bitter Dryad and Bat. Their presence made him feel safer, even if they wouldn’t hold up against the might of the man. Once he felt slightly safer, he gave a nod.

  Arturus rolled his eyes. “Tom is collecting an army of his own, some of the more unhinged members of the Reapers Guild, though we’ve been unable to determine exactly where he’s gathering them at.”

  “It’s almost like providing a safe space for psychos and sociopaths was a bad idea,” Elijah growled.

  “It’s a game, Elijah. Or at least it was before the glitch.” His eyes were cold, though the way he said the word ‘glitch’ made it obvious that he suspected Elijah had something to do with their entrapment. Arturus had been there in the dev room the day that Elijah had broken the game.

  “I need to know something, Arturus,” Elijah said, remembering the Hearth Forge’s memories. “Back when you set up your lair, did you have an admin’s help with modifying the dungeon core?”

  Annika’s eyes shot up in surprise, and it seemed like she wanted to butt into the conversation, but Arturus cut her off before she could. “Yes, though how you could know that is quite interesting to me indeed.”

  “I connected to the core thanks to my class, it shared memories with me before I destroyed your lair.” Arturus smirked, he hadn’t known that Elijah had been directly involved in that fiasco, even though he’d suspected it, so hearing the Reality Warper confirm it settled some debate in his mind. “I need to know who it was, which admin helped you to break that core?”

  “And why would you need to know that?”

  “Because,” Elijah took a deep breath. “Tom and you aren’t the highest priority threats to escaping the game anymore. There is a rogue admin out there. One who is refusing to use their tools to log people out of the game.”

  Arturus sat on the edge of the bed next to Annika, defeat crossing his face. “Forgive me, you can imagine this news is quite a shock,” he said as he tried to regain his composure. “It can’t be the same admin, I can tell you that much. The admin who helped me died several years ago.”

  That confirmed the nagging doubt in Elijah’s mind that it had been Bob, or Alan as Bo had called him, who had been the one to help Arturus. The man didn’t seem to have the guts needed to do something so reckless from his admin account, but it also ruled out Lanigan as the one to have helped. How far did the corruption from the developers go?

  Alan used his position on the balance team to give his Bob alt character an advantage. Lanigan was as power-hungry and mad as Elijah had always feared Arturus was. And there was a third, unknown admin who had used their position to set Arturus up to be the secret big bad for the last few years.

  “What are we going to do?” Annika asked, her voice tinged with fear.

  “At the moment, she told me that there isn’t anything she can do to directly interfere. She’s afraid that Fate, or the game’s higher AI, will notice her and take action. I don’t know if there is anything we can do to stop her, but as the Celestial-tier players, you two and the others have the best chance if there is any way.”

  The room fell silent for several moments as the two of them tried to come to terms with what Elijah had told them.

  Finally Annika stood and nodded to Elijah. “We’ll do what we can, but if there is an admin who has their actual tools running around, I don’t know how much we can do. We’re not going to be able to trap them like you did with Arturus’ reapers.”

  “Speaking of which…” Arturus said, glaring at Elijah.

  “No,” Elijah said, shaking his head but remaining focused on the man. “I’m still not releasing your army. The last thing we need right now is more sociopaths running around causing trouble for people.”

  Arturus deflated. “You realize that I could have prevented all this if you simply gave me your power. I can free us, Elijah.”

  There was a soft, almost pleading tone to Arturus’ voice. He could almost believe that the man would follow through with his claims, but Arturus was a master manipulator. He’d been manipulating people from behind the scenes for his ‘stream’ for years. That wasn’t something Elijah could risk, not when being trapped in this game forever was a genuine threat should Arturus be lying.

  “Help me defeat this admin and we’ll talk, Arturus. I still don’t trust you that you aren’t wanting it for your own self-serving needs.”

  Arturus seemed to deflate, but made no move to push the issue. Elijah’s familiars moved in close to him, and he activated his teleport spell, keeping an eye on the two Celestials in the room as the bats sprang up from his shadow and enveloped him. When he last teleported this close to the mad celestial, the man grabbed him, and he had to shift his target. That whole situation had led to both of them dying beneath the waters of the Nethy crater.

  Those memories flashed through his mind again, reminding Elijah of the trauma of drowning once more. Thankfully, Arturus did not try to stop him this time, and Elijah teleported unharmed into the fields west of the crater. His friends were already there, looking concerned over what had taken Elijah so long.

  “Did it work?” Bo asked as Elijah moved over to join their little impromptu campsite.

  “Yeah,” Elijah answered. “The dungeon is gone. Collapsed in on me when the core was…”

  He stopped mid-sentence. He didn’t want to lie to his friends, but right now he didn’t feel comfortable announcing that he had put it into his familiar’s inventory. Yet another secret he was keeping from his friends, but this time he had good reasons. As if he’d ever considered any of the reasons he’d had for keeping a secret from them to be anything less than a good reason. He only hoped that they’d continue to be as understanding as they had been in the past when, and if, they ever found out what he had actually done.

  “Boss need tell friends about pretty lady and mean guy.” Bitter Root broke the awkward silence that had fallen over the camp.

  “Right,” Elijah answered, thankful for the distraction. “Annika and Arturus met me in the temple when I respawned.”