The Dragon of Endless Shadows’ glowing red eyes pierced the infectious darkness that spread across the sky. Crawling its way out of the rift with leathery wings and powerful legs, it released a tremendous roar that soaked up the screams of the players far below. Utter silence fell over the Castle of Glass, and not even the wind dared to challenge the dominion of the beast.

  With a final kick of its hind legs, the monstrosity shot out of the rift. The snap of its long, forked tail as it flew free shattered the silence like a cannon shatters the calm before a battle.

  The beast dove towards the Castle of Glass from the darkening sky above. Its scales consumed the light around it, leaving only shadows in its wake.

  The gathered players below did not move. They stared up in uncomprehending terror as winged death came for them.

  “Get moving! Run! Run!” shouted Calista as she and Rain weaved through the crowd. “Rain, they aren’t moving. Shit, shit, shit!”

  Calista activated Pinga’s Redeeming Protector. Her terror was as visceral as it had been on that first night in the wilds, when the Dragon of Endless Shadows had flown overhead and blotted out the light of the moon and stars.

  They couldn’t fight it. They might as well try to dig through a mountain with a spoon.

  Calista glanced back at the stage. Judy Brass was the only one who had not fled. She clutched her gavel tightly in her hands, unmoving, her face frozen between outrage and absolute terror. Stone and abandoned her there as he fled with Edna and Cynthia towards the lobby.

  “Rain, these people need to start moving,” Calista said, desperately trying to cobble together a plan. “You got anything?”

  Rain’s palms lit with fire magic. She thrust her arm in the air, and a donut of flame erupted thirty feet around her and over the heads of nearby players. The sudden blast of light roused them from fear-induced stupors.

  “Get out of here! Spread out! Find shelter” Calista shouted into the crowd, grateful for Rain’s quick thinking. It worked. The crowd, after a precious second, suddenly switched from frozen to flight, and took off in all directions. It spread throughout the crowd, one person triggering another.

  The shadow dragon pulled out from its dive above the Castle of Glass. The hurricane-force winds from the beat of its wings as it slowed its descent shattered the windows of Freelancer Tower and peppered the inside with shards of fractured glass.

  The winds careened along the tower and blasted across the beach. Players were picked off the ground and thrown into the air. They tumbled as if they were no more than leaves in a storm.

  “Fuck!” Calista shouted as the gust flung her and Rain into the air. Grasping hold of Rain’s tailcoat and pulling her into a tight embrace, Calista activated her Talaria of Mercury for a half-second of flight to soften their landing.

  They were amongst the few who landed on their feet. The once tightly packed players were scattered along the beach, and only those with higher levels of agility were able to come out of it ready to react to what came next.

  Inhaling with the force of a jet engine, the dragon targeted the stage.

  Judy Brass stared up at the creature as it opened its maw. Shadowy fire danced within, an impossibly deep darkness that hungered for the souls of those below.

  Brass’ gavel fell from her hand. The thump as it struck the stage jarred her from her stupor.

  Brass ran to the edge of the stage and leapt off, just as the dragon belched forth a stream of dense shadow fire that covered the stage and engulfed it in a darkness so absolute that the structure seemed to disappear from the world.

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  The shadow fire licked Brass’s feet as she dove off the stage. As the flames contacted her skin, the life in her legs turned to ash. Her feet and shins faded to the deceased grey of the dead, rendered useless before she landed on the sand.

  Her scream, a frantic mix of terror and outrage, could be heard by every player on the beach.

  She did not scream alone. The billowed shadow fire broke over the stage and rolled across the beach like a tidal wave, carving a path the width of the stage through the crowd. When the fire touched sand, the sand turned to glass. As the wave fell across the players in its wake, their screams joined Brass’ as the life was torn from their bodies and hollowed them out from the inside.

  Calista watched in helpless horror as a hundred players were engulfed in death. She saw Priyanka, Mr. Fredrickson’s mistress, reach out towards her lover in desperation before the wave swept over her. Mr. Fredrickson could only stare in soul-crushing sorrow as she screamed.

  When the wave rolled out to sea, all that was left in its wake were grey, lifeless corpses lying prone on a sheet of black glass.

  They had just witnessed a sixth of their remaining coworkers wiped out in an instant.

  “Oh god,” Elmer whispered as he, Lucy, Alison, and Minerva caught up to the Huntress and the Alchemist. Calista instinctively extended her Pinga’s Redeeming Protector to them. “What… can we do?”

  They were at a loss, desperately trying to keep hold of their senses through heart-pounding fear.

  Calista tore her eyes away from the destruction the beast had wrought and forced logic and reason into her mind. She was the Battlefield Commander. It was time to act like it.

  “Elmer and Lucy, get as many players as you can out through the jungle gate,” Calista ordered, her eyes darting about the battlefield to take it all in. “The trees will provide cover. Don’t try to fight this thing. It’s beyond us.”

  Calista focused on building an army in her mind that consisted of those around her and everyone else she could think of, regardless of faction. Rain. Elmer and Alison. Lucy and Minerva. Stone, Brass, Edna and Cynthia, Mr. Fredrickson, and a hundred more that popped into her head.

  As her army came together, her Soldier’s Morale talent kicked in, and everyone within suddenly felt their attributes boosted by twenty percent.

  They would be retreating, and she knew her Coward’s Folly penalty would temporarily decrease everyone’s attributes by twenty percent when the battle was over, but it was a sacrifice she needed to make.

  Elmer clenched his hand, feeling the power flow within him. “We’re on it, Calista,” he promised, and they began to round up players and direct them to the gate.

  “Minerva, you go with them,” Calista said. “You’re still low level, and even with my boost, your attributes aren’t high enough to do any good here.”

  “My… my friends,” Minerva stammered, her eyes filled with utter sorrow.

  “I’ll keep an eye out for them,” Calista promised.

  “No… no, they were… they were in that blast. I saw them. I saw the shadows swallow them. I need to find… I need…” Minerva stammered without thought.

  “I’m… I’m sorry, Minerva. They’re… they’re dead now. Don’t let yourself join them. Get yourself to safety. Elmer?” Calista called. Elmer dashed over and scooped Minerva into his arms and headed towards the jungle gate.

  “Huntress, don’t go getting yourself killed,” Elmer shouted back as he ran, Alison tight at his side. “You’ve got a witch and an alchemist to look after.”

  Calista gave him a sad smile, then turned to Rain. “Rain, we need to… shit!”

  As the last wisps of shadow fire faded, the dragon landed with a tremendous crash on the south side of the Castle of Glass. Its weight caused the ground to shutter, as if a fifth tower had just been dropped from above. Calista and Rain stumbled, but their enhanced agility kept them on their feet.

  The Dragon of Endless Shadows rose up on its four legs, stretching its neck until its head level with the sixteen-story towers.

  Calista thoughts she caught a glimmer of amusement in its dark eyes as it surveyed the players trying to flee into the jungle. It leaned its head towards the sky and roared. Countless black tendrils spewed forth and arched in a wide circle around the Castle of Glass. The tendrils slammed to the ground, one-by-one, just inside the barricade of tightly-packed logs that the players had erected to keep the wild at bay.

  The tendrils stiffened and set, with no more than half a foot gap between each. It formed a cage, and the players found themselves trapped inside with the beast as darkness consumed midday sun.

  “So much for escaping to the jungle,” Rain said matter-of-factly as she withdrew her dagger from her inventory, its gem already filled with poison. “What about the Waypoint Pillar?”

  “Let’s hope it works,” Calista agreed. “You head there and see if it’s active. If it is, start getting everyone out. If the dragon targets you, use that pillar to get yourself to the meadow. Don’t even think about coming back.”

  “Okay,” Rain agreed, already scanning the crowd for the closest players. “What’ll you do?”

  Calista glanced up at the shattered windows of Freelancer Tower, the dragon’s head disturbingly close to their home and the little fairy girl within.

  “I’ll do what I promised Milly I would do. Protect Passi with my life.”