Hirrus turned away.

He recognized that the stakes had changed.

Since arriving here, he had slaughtered everyone who stood against him. If what he’d overheard was accurate, he’d cost Intricacy their guild hall. He’d destroyed all of the Battle Orders raid team, shattering their confidence and costing the strongest adventurers in the world all of their equipment. And he’d just conquered Silent Partners’s guildhall, obliterating all of the contents of their innumerable vaults.

And the whole while, they’d all seen his face. They all knew his name.

If the Shadow Council still held sway over the king after the reset, then they would have the power to come after him. If orders from the king filtered through the Hari chain of command to him, his decision tree would bind him to obey.

Hirrus remembered the plight of the man he’d fought when he first started up the Hari path after Rumi. His decision tree had forced him to become the town drunk, driving him to misery against his will. And that man had suffered that fate by chance.

What torment could the slain adventurers inflict on Hirrus, if they came after him with intent to avenge themselves?

He couldn’t stop now.

No matter how hopeless it seemed.

And he couldn’t continue if Nidra was going to give up.

“We’re not done,” he observed. “There has to be another way.”

“I’m all ears,” Nidra said bitterly. “But I hope you don’t take offense when I say that your plans have always had only one move, and it hasn’t gotten us closer yet.”

“I know,” Hirrus said, “and that’s why I need you to not give up. What am I going to do without you? Your planning has gotten me farther, faster, and more easily than I could have gotten on my own.” He tentatively reached over and put his hand on her shoulder. “If we have lost, it is only because you have declared it so. All you have to do to keep us in the fight is to not give up.”

“I am not deciding to surrender because I have a choice,” Nidra snapped. But she didn’t move away. “I am powerless. JudoThrow doesn’t need to present himself. He’s too smart. He knows the only losing move is to play our game, and we have nothing left to force him to. If he didn’t come to save Silent Partners, he won’t come for the other guilds if we go to finish them off. He didn’t come for his closest allies, and so he has no other friend we could hold against him.”

She shook her head, falling silent for just long enough for Hirrus to wonder if she was done. “What do you expect of me? Every possible plan revolves around him making an error we have no power to force.”

“There has to be a way,” Hirrus said. “Perhaps if we can get a hold of GM-”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” a voice came suddenly from nearby. It was vaguely familiar, but it was disguised by a simultaneous warbling sound. “I got here just in time. You were about to fuck me over, man.”

Hirrus looked over to see a man in familiar red armor standing on the roof nearby. He suspected it was GM Dave, but he was holding a thin metal sheet over his face. Shaking it was making a tinny warbling sound that obscured his voice.

“What are you doing?” Nidra asked.

“It’s a long story, and I don’t have a lot of time to tell it,” the man in red armor explained. “Long story short, I bought you some more time to work. And maybe, just maybe, a chance at a better future.”

“What have you done?” Hirrus asked.

“So someone - I’m not naming any names but if the rumors are true, he is very intelligent and attractive - did something with some NPC code,” he began. He kept shaking the metal sheet in front of his face to disguise his appearance and voice, but at this point there was no way it was anyone besides GM Dave. “It’s going to take just a little bit of a delay to fish the code out. It’s nowhere near complicated enough to require them to delete anybody, but it’s going to take time to fish it out without fucking over the auction house API. And we - completely unrelated from this extremely handsome and incredible master hacker’s intent - are going to exploit it for our own ends.”

“You haven’t answered the question at all,” Nidra pointed out.

“I’ve started streaming,” GM Dave said. “With the position tracker attached to your AI, with an offset based on your current heading, I am exporting a feed. It’s on Hirrus, of course, and on about twenty or thirty other randomly-selected NPCs across the planet. Though those ones were just for some noise-to-signal ratio shit.”

“I’m not sure what’s more confusing,” Hirrus said, “what you just said, or how you could think any of what you just said made sense.”

GM Dave laughed. “Basically, a few dozen people are watching over your shoulder right now. They see what you see. Hear what you hear.”

“Why?” Nidra asked. She scooted a little bit away from Hirrus, looking at him anxiously.

“Three reasons,” GM Dave said through his warbling metal sheet. “First, because it buys some time. They won’t initiate the reset until they’ve dug out the bug that’s surfacing your feed. Second, because ten million subscribers in this game think that you guys are just little automated scripts. Like little turtles walking in circles with simple commands. Seeing you up-close like this is an opportunity to show them how real and complex you actually are. Taking out the Shadow Council stops them from treating Hari like a playground for a while. Getting the truth out can stop everyone from treating you like animals forever.”

“And the third reason?” Hirrus asked.

“Because Alric asked me to,” GM Dave said with a laugh. “And his voice can be really annoying when he wants it to be.”

Hirrus felt a little stab of sorrow at that. It was good to know that Alric existed still in some form, but the image of his death still rose unbidden to his mind.

“What does this all mean for us, then?” Nidra asked.

“Well, for one thing, it means you can’t look at me,” GM Dave said. “Or say my name. Because if they know who fucked this up for them, they’ll come to me and make me fix it faster. And then sue my ass into the next dimension. If I don’t just, you know. Never make it home from work today. If you know what I mean.”

“Alright,” Hirrus said, as that explained the metal sheet and dodgy behavior. “Anything else?”

“Well, you need to keep moving,” GM Dave said. “The stream is on a few minutes’ worth of delay, but after that, anyone who is watching will know exactly where you are, unless you’ve moved on before they can arrive. Also I wouldn’t use your transformation anymore. The critical issue that could get you deleted is if the rest of the GM team believes for even a second that you could be contagious. As long as you’re a one-off fluke, then-”

“But we’re out of options,” Nidra interrupted before GM Dave could continue. “We can’t get JudoThrow to appear. The rest of the council is dead at Hirrus’s feet. What else can we do? How can we unearth him?”

“I don’t know,” GM Dave admitted. “But I suspect that may have never been on the table. I’ve managed to confirm that JudoThrow is a special case. An account modded by one of the devs. Those mods render him untouchable, even for me. I can tell you what he’s doing, and - by extension - make it public. But I don’t know if it’ll do anything to stop him.”

“What’s he doing?” Nidra demanded. “I’ve spent so many weeks in his thrall by proxy. I have to know. What is he doing to my king?”

“Commanding him,” GM Dave said. “He has a modded event item. On activation, it binds the king to his will. It can only be used once per week, but it only needs that one use. He tells the king to follow the orders of his lackeys, and then he vanishes into the aether for another week.”

“If it comes from an item,” Hirrus said, “wouldn’t killing him destroy the item forever?”

“Yeah, but-” GM Dave began.

“You haven’t been listening,” Nidra snapped. “We can’t kill him. Not for lack of strength or will. But we physically cannot find him. You can’t kill a man who can wait forever out of your reach.”

“She’s right,” GM Dave said. Hirrus could hear the smirk through his warbling sheet of metal. “You should listen to her. After working with you both all week, I’ll be the first to say that she’s the smart one.”

He stopped and stiffened. “Uh-oh. I should, uh, be going.”

“Why?” Hirrus asked.

“You have company,” GM Dave said, before promptly vanishing.

As if on cue, the sound of shattering wood came from the house below them.