Rogue Evolution Read online

  “Oh. Shit.” He trashed that one and started putting together another to replace it.

  “No big deal, it’s fine,” Chaz said in a smarmy voice. “I’m sure the hungry customer doesn’t mind waiting while you remake something that should’ve been done five minutes ago.”

  “Be more passive-aggressive about it, Chaz,” Scott said, cranking the press back down again. “That makes it cook faster.”

  “All I’m saying is, this is a simple job. If you pay even the smallest amount of attention in the first place, you only have to make something once.”

  “Until the next car orders the exact same thing.”

  “That’s not the point—”

  “Look, Chaz, I’m feeling really attacked right now.” Scott pressed a hand to his chest like one of those touchy-feely wusses. “I’m thinking I might have to file a complaint of bullying in the workplace. So unless you want a permanent mark in your HR file, maybe don’t be a dick.”

  A shadow crossed Chaz’s face. Scott smirked. He’d known the threat would hit hard. Chaz was a Taco Bell lifer. Thirty-four, with no other prospects and on the fast track for day-shift manager. Headed for the Big Show, the douche liked to say. The tediousness of it made Scott want to barf. It was so plain and boring compared to Hearthworld. That was the worst part about VR, Scott supposed. The sheer badassery of grinding mobs, leveling up, and spamming spells against buttmunches like Bro-Fro put into perspective exactly how shitty the real world was. In Hearthworld Scott was everything. Right now, his avatar PwnrBwner_OG, was trending third on seedFeed because people couldn’t stop talking about Bad_Karma and how epically he’d been played.

  Meanwhile, here in the real world, he was grilling quesadillas for a carful of stoners with less remaining brain cells than Scott had in his pinky. Bullshit was what it was.

  “No one would believe you if you filed a hostile work environment complaint,” Chaz said, though he sounded less sure than he had a moment before. “You’re a total shit and everyone knows it.”

  Scott shrugged and bagged up the quesadilla. “Yeah, but I have nothing to lose and you do. Is that really a risk you’re willing to take, Chaz?”

  He watched as the wheels cranked to life in Chaz’s head—just how bad would a mark in his file affect his chances at promotion? After a beat, the dumpy supervisor deflated, folding in on himself as he scowled down at the tacos in his plastic-gloved hands. Without a word, Chaz retreated deeper into the kitchen, capitulating like a little bitch.

  Score one for Scott.

  Around two-thirty the late movie over at the Cineplex let out and the stoner rush hit. Eight cars piled up at the drive-thru, wanting their buck burritos with extra nacho cheese and cinnamon twists, and instead of doing something useful like dropping chalupas in the fryer, Chaz just stood around breathing down Scott’s neck making sure he wasn’t mouthing off to the customers. Wasn’t it just a wonderful life when he could spend eight hours slinging taco meat for minimum wage instead of farming a metric shit ton of gold and leveling his new Rajthorne the Mighty Warding Prayer?

  “Earth to Bayani.” Chaz was snapping his fingers again, back with a vengeance. “Extra-large rainbow suicide. The customer’s waiting.”

  Scott grabbed one bucket-sized cup and shoved it under each of the Mountain Dew fountains, letting all sixteen flavors mix and mingle into a single brownish-colored slush. He slapped a lid on it and took the abomination to the window.

  Outside, a carful of dudes his age were squirming around in their seats and trying not to giggle like little girls.

  “One extra-large suicide,” Scott said, leaning out to hand them the drink. “Wish it was mine.”

  A long-haired kid in the back snorted like he’d just heard somebody rip one in an elevator. His driver buddy reached out and took the cup, face contorted as he tried to hold back a laugh.

  “You want it,” the driver said, taking the lid off and looking down at the brown liquid, then up at Scott, “you got it, dude. Bombshell!” The dipshit howled, the other passengers squealing with giddy laughter as he pitched the cup back at Scott as hard as he could.

  Scott threw up his hands and cussed at the top of his lungs, instinctively squeezing his eyes shut as he braced for impact.

  He heard the cup smash and the Mountain Dew splash and ice cubes clatter while the assholes in the car burnt rubber out of there. Beside him, Chaz gasped.

  Scott heard it all play out like a track on half speed, but he didn’t feel it. Not a drop.

  Reluctantly, he opened his eyes. For a split second, he saw a translucent blue tower shield as tall as he was floating in front of him, attached to his outstretched palms with two thin strands of light. Then it was gone.

  Slack jawed, Scott turned his hands over, staring at his palms in confusion.

  Ice skittered across the floor, and Chaz made a sound halfway between a gasp and a shout.

  “Those... those punks!” He was drenched in soda from the top of his standard-issue Taco Bell visor to the nonslip soles of his sneakers.

  Chaz shook his hands and arms, flicking droplets of sixteen-flavor blend everywhere. Scott backed up, but a drop got on the Bell monogram of his uniform shirt. He grimaced down at it.

  “You!” Chaz’s face twisted with hatred. “This is your fault! I told you to be nicer to the customers, but did you listen? No, you always have to be an asshole! Do you think you’re cool? Do you think you’re funny? Well, news flash, Bayani, you’re not. You’re the worst employee we have—”

  “Even worse than Raeanna?” Scott asked, his sarcasm kicking in on autopilot. “Miss Cough Cough, I’m Conveniently Sick on My Birthday?”

  Chaz’s wet face turned red. “At least when she shows up to work, she’s friendly! You’re a dick from the time you clock in until the time you clock out! The customers complain about you, the rest of us have to suffer through you—”

  The overnight manager went on reading the riot act at the top of his lungs. If he’d seen that blue light, he sure as hell didn’t act like it. Scott was almost willing to dismiss the whole thing as a trick of the light or an overactive imagination after spending so much time in Hearthworld... but there was his uniform to consider. Scott had been directly in the line of fire, taking up most of the window when the dickbrain threw the drink, but his uniform was still clean and dry, while Chaz was just fucking drenched in every flavor of Mountain Dew known to man—including several flavors that should’ve been outlawed as war crimes against humanity like Mango Rager and Screamin’ Acacia Fury.

  Yeah, there was no getting around the dry uniform. That shield or light or whatever it was had really been there.

  Scott tuned out Chaz’s rant and frowned down at his empty palms, trying to figure out what the balls it meant.

  Endless Distractions

  ROARK VON GRAF, BETTER known in Hearthworld as Roark the Griefer, Dungeon Lord of the Cruel Citadel and founder of the Troll Nation, leaned over his anvil, etching runes into a Peerless Wakizashi with precise strokes. The sweltering air was filled with the ring of hammers, the grating of rasps, the hiss of quenching troughs, and the rumble of customers and Smithing apprentices in the front half of the blacksmith’s shop. Trolls from every evolutionary path—all covered in heavy leather aprons and wielding tongs or hammers—animated the smithy with life and purpose.

  There were over fifteen apprentices now, and their work was the lifeblood of Troll Nation; the specialty items forged in the Cruel Citadel drew legions of mobs from all across Hearthworld.

  It was good and necessary work.

  Work Roark was trying fervently to ignore.

  The space between his private smithy and the front of the blacksmith’s shop was open by necessity—without proper ventilation, the heavy gasses released by the molten metals would kill them all in short order—but today, like many days, he wished it wasn’t. The racket. The cacophony of voices. All clamoring for attention inside his head. Roark steeled his resolve, pushed the tsunami of distractions to the back o
f his mind, and focused completely on the task at hand. Sweat dripped off the tip of his nose and onto the face of the weapon, marring the glimmering blade. He wiped it away with a quick swipe of a handy polishing rag and returned to etching.

  Though he had defeated Bad_Karma and gained the allegiance of several powerful Dungeon Lords in doing so, Roark didn’t have the time to rest. The victory, though sweet, had come at the cost of revealing many of the tactics he relied upon. In the short time since the hero had died, the details of Roark’s cursed heads had spread from the myriad of Bad_Karma acolytes to every hero and mob in Hearthworld. Worse, it wasn’t only the heads that had lost their effectiveness—his transportation plates were common knowledge now as well. When Roark had wondered aloud how in the seven hells full parties of heroes were being transported to the same floor, Griff had taken him to a page in his grimoire marked with a ribbon labeled WikiLore. This, apparently, was a repository for all the discovered knowledge in Hearthworld, a library anyone could access, and it had pages dedicated to the Cruel Citadel.

  Which, of course, meant that Lowen had access to pages of information on the Cruel Citadel as well.

  The heroes had become quite smitten with Roark and his modest dungeon over the past few weeks. Even more so since the unlikely demise of Bad_Karma. They had mapped out nearly every inch of every floor—barring the Troll Nation Marketplace—recorded spells that muffled or even counteracted the effects of Roark’s cursed heads, and detailed the assortment of Cursed weapons the Trolls now carried and how to avoid being killed when looting them. The portal plates had their own subsection dedicated to their layout, level restrictions, and the best team builds so that all members of your party would be transported to the same end location.

  Even varying the plates and their locations was no use. As soon as Roark made a change, the new information was added to the WikiLore pages. If Roark hadn’t recognized the names of the heroes his Trolls had just killed on the misspelled and grammatically ludicrous updates, he would have thought the pages updated themselves by some sort of sophisticated divination sorcery.

  With all of his secrets on display for the whole of Hearthworld to see, Roark knew he had to come up with something completely new. Something Lowen would never see coming.

  The problem was, he felt like he’d fallen into a creative rut. Even the bloody Curse Chain he was working on felt like a variation on the dozens he’d created since gaining the ability.

  For a moment, Mac’s throaty snoring grew loud enough to break Roark’s concentration. The Young Turtle Dragon lay with his armored belly flat against the glowing bricks of Roark’s forge, soaking up the heat. The scaly monster scratched at his beard with one claw-tipped forepaw, then rolled over and scooted himself backward to press his spiked shell against the bricks.

  Keeping his back and front evenly warmed was the extent of the silly beast’s concerns. Roark couldn’t decide whether this meant that Mac was too dim to understand the depth of trouble the Citadel faced if Lowen attacked now or that Mac was so brilliant that he had figured out the secret to existence.

  It was a question for wiser philosophers than him. Roark returned to his work on the Wakizashi.

  Trying to keep his maneuvering a step ahead of the heroes was exhausting and wildly ineffective. It certainly wouldn’t hold water against that overwriting ass, Lowen. No, what Roark needed was a breakthrough. A paradigm shift. The only problem was, as soon as he began to cover new ground and make any real progress—

  “Dungeon Lord!” A level 2 Changeling loped into the forge, pitching and rolling with its clumsy, uneven gait, scraggy arms flailing. “Dungeon Lord, help!”

  With a sigh of frustration, Roark set the Peerless Wakizashi on his workbench with a bang.

  “What is it now?” he asked a little more harshly than he’d intended to. He would never succeed in outsmarting Lowen with so many cursed interruptions, and there were always interruptions. Some urgent piece of business that only he could solve—or so everyone would have him believe.

  The Changeling scampered back a step, tucking its bald blue head back against its shoulders like a turtle.

  Roark gritted his serrated teeth. At times he forgot that his Jotnar Infernali form cut an intimidating figure to the low-level Trolls. Though he’d started out in Hearthworld as scrawny and awkward as they were, he was now nearly twelve feet tall with razor-sharp obsidian talons, spiked demonic wings, and thick obsidian horns curling around each side of his head. When he’d leveled up, Roark had done what he could to return his appearance to normal, but he was still a towering, rangy Dungeon Lord covered in glowing violet tattoos of power. The Changeling might as well have been an ant under the heel of a rhinoceros.

  He tried to soften his expression. “What’s the matter, Buke?”

  The Changeling scurried forward again, bobbing his head in deference.

  “Fighting in the marketplace, Dungeon Lord! The Witchdoctors and the Paragons are trying to curse one another to pieces again!”

  “Where the bloody hells are Ick and Yevin?” The Witchdoctors and Paragons were their students—they should have been the ones to deal with this.

  “Can’t find either one, Dungeon Lord,” Buke said, cringing back a step as he shook his head.

  Roark scowled.

  “Come on, Mac,” he called as he grabbed the upper half of his Peerless Leathers.

  The Young Turtle Dragon chirped grumpily at the interruption to his basking, but rolled to his feet and followed Roark out of the blacksmith’s shop.

  Roark shivered as he strode through the streets of the marketplace. He’d removed his stifling leathers while he worked to counter the baking heat of the forge, but out in the open air, his sweat had already turned icy. He shrugged into the light armor, and residual heat soaked into his ghostly pale skin.

  “Hullo, Dungeon Lord!”

  “Greetingsssss, Dungeon Lord!”

  “Everything all right, Dungeon Lord?”

  Throughout the marketplace, sociable mobs and NPCs of all stripes called out to him, while many of the more withdrawn creatures and races pointed and whispered to their shopping companions. Dybuks, Blood Leeches, Naga, sentient rocks and crystals from the Gardens of the Deep. NPCs of all four humanoid races. Enormous faceless Mind Mantids, smoky Void Djinns, and wolf-bear-man hybrids that walked on two legs with their long, muscular arms trailing on the floor like enormous apes. Beings from all of the allied dungeons and NPCs who had relocated to the Troll Nation, all out doing their daily shopping. In the shops and stalls lining the streets, Trolls and trainers hawked their wares, haggled with customers, or plied their trades.

  The scene changed drastically, however, as Roark came around the corner to the street where both the Arcane Paragon and the Witchdoctor of Night Magick’s schools were housed.

  Both schools and the surrounding shops were burning, colorful flames dancing, plumes of smoke rising up toward the ruffled undersides of the enormous bioluminescent fungus that towered over the marketplace. Magick users of both Night and Light Magicks screamed curses and hurled spells at one another, casting with little regard for the bystanders who might be injured. Severed limbs leaked blood into the dust. Off to the right, a half-elf, half-parsnip creature pulled himself across the ground with one arm and one leg. A carpet of enormous bloated toads hopped around underfoot, vomiting up pools of rainbow-colored slime.

  As Roark watched, arms folded, a scowl etched on his face, a Witchdoctor student mid-cast stepped into one of the pools. Her leg immediately dissolved to the knee. That should have been the end of it for her, but no. Rather than drop her spell, she ratcheted up her insectile throat-singing, calling down a brilliant beam of moonlight on a nearby Paragon student, whose flesh promptly began to melt away under invisible flames.

  Roark scowled. The chaos and destruction were bad enough, but the fact that this was the third time in under a week that fighting had broken out between the two factions made his blood boil.

  “Enough!” snappe
d Roark. His shout echoed through the street, stopping the toads and a few of the combatants in their tracks.

  [Congratulations, you have unlocked Intimidation Level 2. With Intimidation, beings with an Intelligence of less than .25 x your Intelligence suffer Fright for 45 seconds. Sometimes a big enough bark is all you need...]

  Unfortunately, it wasn’t all Roark needed this time. Being magick users, many of the participants of this battle had leveled their Intelligence too high for him to stop them with simple Intimidation.

  Striding into the center of the fray, he cast Infernal Healing on the area, giving back the Infernally aligned creatures ten times his own character level in Health, then tore open a Mass Heal scroll he’d looted from a hero’s corpse and restored those creatures with other alignments. A low-level fireball clipped him in the back of the right wing, nipping at his filigreed Health vial, but he ignored it.

  Grabbing his Initiate’s Spell book, he scribbled out a Level 4 Sound of Silence spell, then cast it on the area. Light flared, and shouted curses and undulating throat-singing within a thirty-foot radius immediately died—cut off as though by a razor’s edge. Silvery beams of deadly moonlight and lethal blasts of multicolored light winked out.

  On top of this, he fired off one of his pre-inscribed spells: a Level 6 Major Paralyzing spell.

  [All opponents in a fifteen-foot radius with less than .25 x caster’s Dexterity become instantly paralyzed for 30 seconds.]

  Luckily for Roark, no one else in this magical battle had invested as heavily as he had in Dexterity. The remaining combatants froze in place.

  All except for a pair of Yevin’s Arcane Paragon students who happened to be just outside the boundaries of the spell when Roark cast it—a sentient rock person and a human NPC. Neither seemed to have noticed that the Dungeon Lord had stepped in to quash the fighting, and both had expressions of rage twisting their faces. The human stabbed a Maple Wand into the ribs of a Paralyzed Witchdoctor, while the chunk of rock raised one enormous granite arm and swung it like a club at the Paralyzed Witchdoctor’s head.