It was the middle of the night, everyone healed but tired, the Celestial Divine almost assuredly sitting and just waiting for dawn to break before descending upon us with all of their unspent might.
And here we were dragging our lanky selves over to greet them.
My drill sergeant had always called me an idiot. It made me smile to think what new and colorful names he’d have for me if he learned about all of this.
Hina walked to my left, her eyes shifting back and forth, a jumpy little rabbit. The fear was real, but anyone messing with her would be surprised to find talons under that fluff.
And everything else was set. The messages I’d gotten from Ice, Sug and Dragon suggested that those guys had formed squads out of the marketplace folk and then put them into the best tactical positions they could find.
So long as they weren’t discovered, that’d work in our favor when talk came to snarl.
The pathway to their camp was a highway, pitted and cracked in the fighting of the siege. Hina had said that they would have been swept away instantly had the attacking forces worked together. Instead, sensing victory, they all backstabbed each other at roughly the same time, turning into each other with such ferocity that all forces involved had to withdraw.
I could see the truth of the story in the asphalt. Cratered, melted, scorched and exploded, some of the gleaming street lamps were out, or else bent at strange angles. Disregarding the street lamps, it looked more like a lunar landscape than a city road.
A few draconian figures shifted, standing within sight but behind a piled wall of rubble and salvage.
“Heya!” one yelled, his hand up. He was well-armored in something that wouldn’t have been amiss in medieval Japan, but the red scales glinted here and there, a ceramic sheen where they shone through the gaps in his armor. At his hip rode what had to be a katana. But in his arms was cradled a shotgun, wooden stock and double-barreled. “We were told we might expect visitors.”
I froze. Had someone been captured?
“We come from Heso Marketplace to negotiate a truce,” Hina said. Her voice rang out strong in the cool night, her face showed no hint of nervousness. Lady had acting chops, I had to hand her that.
The draconian laughed. “A surrender is more like it. Were told you all beat down the Nightclub Ninjas. What’s left of ya? A couple of robot prozzies and this dude?” He elbowed the other in the ribs of his mail, but the second one seemed a lot less at ease. He stood rigid, casting his gaze about them.
“You two come alone, eh?” the second asked, settling on me rather than Hina. “This ain’t no sort of trick?”
I narrowed my eyes. “You don’t trust me?”
The draconian nodded. “Listen, bub. It don’t make no sense. You see, I been here since it all changed. I been through my share of crap and a couple of underpowered npcs marching up our way without support don’t make no sense at all.”
He peered more closely at me.
“What’s up with you? Why ain’t you goin’ all stink-eyed and weird? You broken or something?”
I chuckled. “How long has it been since you’ve seen real humans? I mean, other than your buddy at camp?”
His eyes went wide. “Holy balls above! You got to be kidding me. Is it just you? Hold on, listen. Name’s Roger. Me and my bud, Tony — er, hold on, game name Tyranthraxus, we thought we might be the last ones here. We been looking!”
Hina was watching us, her eyes slightly glazed, as was Tony’s guard companion. I thumbed over at them. “How about you lead us into the camp and we talk about everything there. These NPCs get a little wigged out when you talk game in front of them. Might be better if we make the peace treaty first, then talk game out of ear shot.”
Roger nodded, then turned to his NPC colleague. “Dude’s legit. Let’s take them up to the head honcho, get this show on the road, hey?”
The NPC soldier stood, glancing between us, then raised his shotgun. “You all go ahead and I’ll keep to the rear, make sure there aren’t any stragglers.”
I raised an eyebrow, looking to Roger, and he shrugged. “Our leader runs a tight ship, what can I say?”
Armed man behind us, dragon-skinned human in the lead, we set off to head further into the camp. I wondered whether to trust them all. The surprise on Roger’s ugly drac face seemed genuine, but how often had humans ganked other humans in this system? I wasn’t sure but I had a guess, and the guess didn’t paint a nice picture of humanity as a whole.
I’d trust him, but I’d keep my eye on him as well.
As we got nearer to their base camp, we began to see silken tents laid out in formal rows. At first there were little groupings of them. Three tents here. Five there. Urine-smelling buckets at their fore. But gradually we began to run into platoon sizes. Groups of fifteen of them, five by three, a draconian soldier grumbling and marching around each of their perimeters on obvious roving patrol.
It was an impressive setup. I reached out as we passed one and felt the sheer smoothness of the tent fabric. It was, frankly, superior to anything I’d ever slept in out in the desert. Or anywhere for that matter. It felt like something a billionaire would purchase for a quick visit to nature on his super private jungle island.
“Where did you guys get the gear?” I asked Roger.
He smiled, baring a mouth full of triangular, carnivorous fangs. “Believe it or not, we at the Celestial Divine craft the stuff. Not available on the market at all unless we sell it to Calamari first. Or, used to be, we could hawk the stuff down at Heso Market. But I have a feeling there ain’t gonna be much activity there anymore.”
I smirked. “Calamari is quite the character, don’t you think?”
Roger laughed. “Dude, I don’t know what is going on in that little wet lump of a mind. One second singing, the next screaming your name. Reminds me of my ex-girlfriend.”
We shared tales of the real world, and our existence before the gamepocalypse as we made our way through the tent city. I learned that Roger and Tony had been running a pizza shop, of all things, and that at night they were members of a sort of amateur Chippendales club. From the sounds of things, they’d had a decent life. But when the game started, all the other humans in the area were gone and they were in something called a Chaos Zone.
At that moment we got closer together and started talking, NPCs be damned. I needed to know more.
“It was crazy, man. Like I’d just been wiped from the planet and was hanging around in heaven. Or, maybe hell. The system or god or whatever, its got this whole line of pictures in front of me. None of them human. And there’s all of this text on each one. When I stare at a picture, I’m told all about the critter inside it and asked if I want to be one.”
I peeked around, checking on our NPCs. They were just ambling away, not a care in the world. Our surroundings had improved as well. No longer was the area filled with rubble and husks of a broken city.
This was a place that had seen none of the horrors of battlefield combat and shined with the pride of being a central hubbub of activity.
“So, all of this?” I asked, waving at the city around us. “This is a Chaos Zone?”
“Naw man. Tony and I both picked the same dragon man picture without even knowin’. Great minds, ya know. And then we appeared in this cave in the mountain. Which was strange cause there ain’t nothing like that around here.”
A light bulb lit in my brain. A few of them, actually, as that wet lump of processor went to work putting it all together.
“Where were you when this all started?” I asked him.
His face contorted, a red-scaled mix of confusion and dawning horror.
“New York, New York, hey? I mean, buddy, that’s where everything begins.” He made a playful jab at my ribs, but I could see on his face that he knew. He knew and the fact of it scared the hell out of him.
“Colorado Springs. Probably that mountain was Pike’s Peak.” He stared. “Yeah, and it sounds like the system was making you into a monster-race or something like that. Probably that cave was meant to be a dungeon. I really don’t have it all figured out yet. Just know my selection screen was different, and most of the monster stuff was locked out.”
“So we got ripped apart, made into monsters, and put somewhere for someone to ice us?” he asked. “Jesus. No wonder there ain’t no ocean round here. Been lookin’, you know.”
We both stopped talking, lost in our own thoughts, marching forward with brain gears whirring along until, suddenly, I noticed the greatest tent I’d even seen. A mixture of violet and midnight blue, the thing was a massive pavilion and all over it was embroidered the long snakelike figures of Chinese dragons.
“What the hell?” I managed to mutter, my tongue seemingly more surprised than my eyes.
Roger laughed. “Yeah. I’m a dragon man and yet it had the same effect on me when I first saw it. Come on in, we’ll meet the boss.”
I checked back to Hina, seeing that she was simply staring at the structure, her mouth tight and pensive. Shotgun NPC dude was next to her, still cradling his shotgun. As Roger pulled us forward, he simply turned away from us and began walking back to his post.
Walking up a path of clean white stepping stones, seemingly laid into the pavement of the city recently, we passed hanging banners, all made from the same material as the tent. Each presented some legendary feat.
One of them showed a snakelike dragon wearing a crown devouring a line of men who clearly bore rifles.
“Uh, hey, Roger, your boss, he’s like you, right?”
The man chuckled. “Tony and I, we ain’t had anyone to share this crap with. Don’t make me spill the beans. Let it be a surprise, hey?”
I felt my danger sense go to high alert. I wasn’t worried about betrayal, but I was worried about that tent. Yep. Boss was going to be a real life dragon. Not a European Cyber Dragon like Chuck either, I bet. This was going to be a magic with poison fangs that swam around through the air in shapes like the infinity symbol of that yin yang and I was going to have to sit through a bunch of long-winded bull crap that all amounted to something like ‘be good to each other’ or ‘the early bird gets the worm’.
Roger reached the tent flaps and pulled them open, staring eagerly into my face as Hina and I ducked on through.
What greeted us wasn’t the wizened-bearded draconian Confucius that I expected. Instead, floating through the sky, and giving orders to what must have been a dozen bearded draconians in long, flowing robes was the pinkest and most fluorescent being I had ever encountered.
“Hello, human!” she said brightly. “I understand you have come to make peace. And to pay obeisance to your new empress.”
