We were a ragged bunch huddled on the thin strip of beach between high tide and the ground torn up by the weta that was now muddy soil. The water had drained quickly down into the ground.

  “Do you think they all drowned?” I asked Rose as we watched Barry hold up Mage while Ayerelia argued that severe mana depletion wasn’t something a healing spell could fix.

  “I really hope so.” She replied.

  I looked down the beach. Prince Horace was still mounted. My first thought was to wonder if his horse was enchanted my second was if I could ride it. He was checking on his men. There were so few left. A couple hundred were left of what had been over a thousand, and I had no idea how many he had started with before they came across those monstrous insects.

  And of those left, at least half were injured. I went to pat Dekka, but her head wasn’t there. I looked down, and she was small again. I sighed, the fresh, clean salty air filling my lungs. That was terrible. I flopped down in the sand beside my dog and tilted my head to the sky. Tall clouds were scudding by in an impossibly blue sky, uncaring about our mortal problems. Seabirds wheeled and cried; they too lived their own lives unbothered by ours.

  Closing my eyes, I noticed Copperbeard was muttering. It was hard to hear over the surf. I concentrated, curious.

  “This doesn’t make sense. Why didn’t we get XP?” I rolled my head to the side and opened my eyes to see the dwarf pacing up and down the sand looking off into the dirt churned camp. “I don’t like this. Maybe Mage got all the XP?” He saw me looking at him and came over.

  “Did you kill any of the weta?”

  “Yeah, a few.” I raised an eyebrow at his agitation.

  “Did you get any XP?”

  “Noo…” I said, drawing the word out and thinking. That was strange. Did it have something to do with not having the quest? But Copperbeard had the quest. Was it because he didn’t kill any weta directly? That wasn’t the way it had happened before, but with this game you never knew. “Ask Barry,” I told the bard. “I don’t have the quest, and you didn’t kill any directly. He does and did.”

  I watched as Copperbeard trotted over to Barry. As Barry shook his head, my stomach sank, and the hairs on the back of my neck rose. “Dekka, you might want to get big again.”

  She looked up at me quizzically and then back out to where the weta had been.

  “I know. But I don’t think it’s over.”

  I stood up. Dekka didn’t get big, but she also didn’t drift back off to sleep. I walked over to where my friends were now talking to the Prince in hushed tones.

  “I don’t see any more,” the prince was saying. “I believe your water mage killed most and discouraged the rest.” His tone was hopeful, but his face was not.

  “Our water mage,” Barry gestured to Mage, who was barely conscious on the sand, “didn’t get any credit for killing the weta.”

  The prince frowned. “Do you travellers, or should I say players, always get credit for kills?”

  Barry looked around at us. We nodded. This game had changed things up on me, but one thing that had been constant right from the damn lanperanas was that killing things equaled XP without exception.

  Barry answered the Prince, but I wasn’t paying attention. Dekka had caught my eye. She was on alert, looking off to the east of where the camp had been, her nose scenting the air and her hackles slowly standing. Then she got big.

  “Guys…”

  “I am not sure this is anything more than a bug,” Ayerelia was saying, which had to make no sense to an NPC.

  “Guys…”

  “Those were certainly big bugs,” the monarch agreed. “But I am not sure why-“

  I saw feelers twitching at the edges of holes near us.

  “Guys, stop talking!” I bellowed.

  They all looked to me, shocked. I pointed.

  “Well, fuck,” Rose said with resignation.

  Smaller weta than before began emerging. These were more cautious. We watched warily as they emerged from the ground and investigated the camp with tentative hops, running their antennae over the ground.

  “What are they doing?” I whispered.

  “Looking for us?” Rose suggested.

  They didn’t come for us. A few stopped and waved their feelers in our direction, but they stayed around the camp.

  What were they waiting for?

  The Prince dismounted and handed his horse off to a soldier and went to inspect our ship. I overheard him talking to an engineer, the last one left I gathered from the conversation, about the possibility of fixing the ship up enough to get us all down the coast a bit.

  The engineer said it might be possible. They could pull wood from inside the walls and try to patch the hole well enough. But he sounded doubtful.

  Prince Horace commanded it was done and called out for able-bodied hands. None of us players moved. We kept watch on the insects.

  Half an hour or more passed. The soldiers were banging in the ship, and the weta seemed to have settled around the camp, as if they were going to wait us out.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  Dekka had gotten small again and was snoozing in the sun. The soldiers were yelling because the tide was going to go out soon, and then the ship would be too far on shore even if they could get her seaworthy, when everything changed.

  “What the hell is that?” A soldier screamed.

  I snapped to attention and followed his panicked pointing.

  There on the edge of camp moving slowly was the biggest weta of them all.

  “Is that the queen?” I asked no one in particular.

  “I am pretty sure weta aren’t hive creatures.” Ayerelia said beside me.

  “Do they know that?”

  The smaller weta were swarming around the big one, touching her, stroking her with their antennae.

  [LOCAL EVENT INITIATED: THE WETA INVASION] [All participants who remain in the environs will share experience points] [Objective: Eliminate the queen 0/1]

  I smirked at the elf.

  “That is so unfair,” Rose stated. “Only the queen counts?”

  “That explains why we didn’t get any XP.”

  “Stupid fucking stingy ass game.” I swore and picked up my hammer.

  The queen was slowly but steadily heading our way. “Get the injured onto the ship!” The Prince commanded. Mage was included in their number. The rest of our group stood on the stand with the few soldiers who weren’t injured or repairing the ship and braced for the weta.

  The small ones surged ahead of their queen. I could see larger weta coming from behind the matriarch. I gave my hammer a few test swings, and then they were on us.

  I used [Mighty Swing] and flung seven of the insects flying back at their own lines. Dekka dashed in and, grabbing one by the face and crunching down, killed it immediately, then darted away from the mandibles of the ones on either side.

  Copperbeard started strumming from above us; he was on the prow of the boat.

  “Stand firm - they must stop

  Click and skitter, scuttle and hop

  Swarm from holes to bite and kill

  Speed we need to boost our skills. "

  The next swing of my hammer was so fast the air crackled. Not using a skill, I just ran forward and swung it in a circle until I got dizzy, decimating dozens of the creatures. The rage started to build. I fought it. I couldn’t lose myself, not when we were facing this many.

  Archers from on the boat loosed arrows, pinning the insects to the ground like they were in those old museum displays. Many were still alive. I ignored them they weren’t a threat anymore unless you ran into their mandibles, which that were opening and closing frantically.

  Barry was everywhere. The speed boost enhanced his already formidable speed. His knives sliced and stabbed, and then he was gone before they could get him. The assassin class didn’t seem to fit until you watched him fight. His easygoing nature disappeared into terrible competency.

  On the other side of me, Rose was controlling one of the large wetas. The other ones didn’t seem to understand about the undead. They refused to fight it, so it was rampaging unimpeded.

  The wetas were getting bites in, but Ayerelia’s healing dome was large and covered us as long as we didn’t get too far.

  “Run it light, keep it tight

  Cut and slide and stay upright

  So many, still not enough brains

  Keep ‘er moving, or join the stains. "

  Copperbeard was singing, but there was a note in his voice I hadn’t heard before. I shook my head, trying to keep it clear. The lyrics were still a bit jokey, but he sounded … desperate.

  There were dead weta all around us. I swung and used [Hit] and killed a large one that had just leapt in front of me. Its mandible had sliced my leg, thankfully my dead one. I couldn’t feel any pain, and it still worked. Stepping back, I tried to take stock of the battle.

  What I saw chased the rage away.

  Endless hopping and crawling bodies. The queen was halfway across the camp. This was truly a swarm. I had played games where you had to survive long enough to escape or get rescued, where there was no way to beat the waves of foes the game sent at you.

  No matter how many we killed, there would be more. Barry had rivulets of blood running down his arms as he couldn’t stay within the healing dome.

  I just knew when the queen reached us, time would be up.

  “How’s the ship fixing going?” I screamed up to the Prince, keeping my eyes on the swarm.

  It wasn’t the Prince but Copperbeard who answered.

  “Prince is busy, hull’s near sound

  Planks are set, and seams are bound

  We canna win, but buy him time

  Moments more to hold the line

  Cut back, and yield the ground

  Onto the ship this sand unbound."

  He saw what I did. That made sense. Dekka was circling back to the healing circle, panting heavily. I could see little flecks of blood on her real body. Some of those weta bites must have gone deep. I almost lost myself to the rage right then. How dare those fucking insects hurt my dog!

  I rushed out and smashed a few before I had to fight myself to retreat. The mass of insects had spilled out onto the sand and were trying to flank us.

  “Throw the rope over the side,” the Prince’s voice came from above.

  “We need you all to push the boat. Once it’s going, climb the rope.” He instructed us. “We’ll cover you as best we can with archers and mages.”

  As one, we turned and put our shoulders to the ship’s side. At first, all this did was push my legs deep into the sand.

  Then it moved. A tiny bit. I let myself feel the rage a bit and shoved my shoulder into the wood hard. Barry called out, ‘One, two, three, PUSH’. And we did. But it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t going to be fast enough.

  The mages and archers were doing their best, but the sea of bodies on land was rivaling the sea that we were trying to push the boat out into.

  “We don’t have enough mass.” Barry called up to the Prince. “We need more people down here.”

  He wasn’t wrong. But would they obey if ordered back out of the relative safety of the ship? They would lose their very real lives if they died here. We players, we would be back. Dying might hurt. It might be traumatic. But for us, it was temporary.

  I made a decision.

  {System Error} - @party- I am going to try to distract the weta. Get the soldiers out and pushing.

  {Barry} - Are you sure?

  {System Error} - Just do it.

  I looked down at Dekka. Her wounds had healed, and she was panting less. “Shall we go get ‘em?” I asked her. She looked up at me with eyes that understood more than a dog’s should. She wagged her tail slowly. I nodded at her and let loose the reins of rage.

  Dekka and I charged straight at the queen, heedless of the bites and bodies that buffeted us. My hammer never stopped. I was grinning as I smashed chitinous bodies. Pain blossomed and faded. The air sparkled. Healing? I fought on. I was almost at the big ugly bug!

  {Rositilda} - The ship is floating!

  I smashed another one and almost went down.

  {Rositilda} - Elizabeth head back.

  I blinked the annoying words away. That big one was only a few metres in front of me. My goal. My plan. Plan?

  {Barry} - Elizabeth! The tide is pulling us.

  {Ayerelia} - Stop hitting things and get your ass back to the ship

  {Rositilda} - Elizabeth, please!!

  Their words got through the rage. I took a deep breath. The weta were so thick they were getting in their own way. I panicked for a moment looking for Dekka. But there she was up ahead, charging for the queen.

  I smiled fondly. Best doggo.

  {System Error} - Sail without me.

  {Rositilda}- What?! No!

  {System Error} - I can’t do the quest chain. I need to play the game.

  {System Error} -I’ll be back

  It wasn’t like Dekka could climb that rope, anyway.

  And this way the NPCs wouldn’t die. No NPC mom would grieve a lost daughter, no NPC child would grow up without a dad. At least not for those on the ship. And all I had to do to save them was to start over. It seemed like such a small thing.

  I let myself rage as I fought my way forward. Keeping the weta focused on the threat to their matriarch. I was so close to my goal. Laughing, I rushed straight for the queen. I was going to hit her in her big ugly face. She was only a few feet away when one of the damn bugs bit through my leg. I felt mandibles around my neck as I went down. Smooth and hard and PRESSURE!

  CONGRATULATIONS! YOU HAVE COMPLETED THE HIDDEN QUEST - DEATH OF TH-

  And the world went black.

  CLICK YES TO CONTINUE? Y/

  Thank you so much for reading <3 You are all the best!

  - Fyffe

  To Be Continued...

  Book One is complete

  Author’s Note

  This concludes the first volume of Click Yes to Continue. It would mean a lot to me if you would leave a comment (even if you are reading this months after I post this). I am writing this story because I love it and I can't wait to take you on the rest of the journey. However I am your typical author and thrive on interaction ;)

  The next volume will start in in the second week of January.

  If you have enjoyed this please consider rating or reviewing (if you don't like it why are you still here at chapter 70?)