Chương 1: Bow God Zephyr

The folder slid across the black marble table. Jack smiled as he pushed it toward me; the same smile that made sponsors think he was the glamorous Jack 'Ryder' Goldmane, the lancer prodigy of Avalon, the golden boy of the scene. Behind him, our team's greatest moments played on the wall-sized screen: three world championships, undefeated runs, my arrow punching through three players in last year's finals. None of the clips showed Jack diving too deep and dying alone.

None showed Killian chasing kills until our formation collapsed, or Jessica losing control of her summons at the worst possible time. Mistakes that Jack blamed me for.

"You should read it before we move on," Jack said. I was still occupying the captain's seat, although by then the chair didn't feel like mine anymore, and Ace stood behind me, hands curled into fists.

"There is no moving on from this, Jack."

"There is," Jack replied, barely glancing at him.

"Just without Sebastian." The folder was full of legal text, but I didn't need to read every line to understand the shape of it. Jack and his lackeys combined their shares. The team I had built after my parents died, the team that had given me something to hold onto when everything else fell apart, no longer belonged to me. Ace leaned over my shoulder.

"Then we leave. Seb, Cassie and I walk. You can keep the brand, and choke on it." For the first time, Jack's smile slipped.

"You could try," he said.

"You and Seb might even survive it. But your sister? A substitute breaching contract, forfeiting revenue, getting blacklisted before she ever gets a real starting position? Cassie would have no future in VR esports." Ace went still, and that was when I knew Jack had won.

The team might have been carried to multiple victories by me being Bow God Zephyr, but it was built on the funding of the Goldmane family, and our contracts had been written when we were kids desperate enough to sign anything that got us into the league. And Jack had clearly spent the last few weeks trying to find every leverage he had.

"I'll step down," I said.

"No," Ace snapped. I appreciated his support, but it was not his decision.

"I sell my shares," I continued.

"Sign whatever you want. In return, Ace and Cassie leave on their own terms. Full payouts, no penalties, no hidden traps in the fine print." Jack's smile returned.

"Sign a non-compete," he said, "and the deal is on." There it was. Selling my shares for cents on the dollar, surrendering Avalon to him — those were icing on the cake. Zephyr gone, the Bow God buried, and him on Valhalla's throne, without me to oppose him from another team. If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation. That was the real prize. I signed. The ink spread across the page like blood, and the room went black.

I woke up with my shirt stuck to my back and my heart hammering. For a moment, I couldn't even move. The ceiling above me was dark, the rest of the room barely visible in the weak light coming through the curtains. Rain tapped softly against the window. No glass panels, no black marble, no former teammates around. I lifted myself up slowly, wiping the sweat off my face.

"Brilliant," I muttered. It had happened five years ago, but the nightmares didn't seem to stop. The clock on the nightstand read 05: 12. I threw the blanket aside and walked to the bathroom, the tiles uncomfortably cold under my feet. The light above the mirror flickered once before settling, and I made a mental note to replace it when I had the time.

Then I just stood there with both hands on the sink, trying to stabilize my breathing, waiting for the last pieces of the dream to crawl back into whatever hole they came from. The man in the mirror had seen better days. My hair was darker than back then, and I was taller, too, but my eyes were still the same pitch-black pair that watched Jack take Avalon from me. The pale skin had gotten even paler since I moved to Scotland, and despite being twenty-three, the dark circles under my eyes didn't do me justice.

I splashed cold water on my face, and the shock helped. My phone buzzed on the counter, and for half a second, I thought it might be Ace again. It wasn't. [GODSREALM EARLY ACCESS BEGINS TODAY — NEW WORLD ENTERPRISES PREPARES FOR VALHALLA'S TRUE SUCCESSOR] Godsrealm was supposed to be a VR MMORPG, so I wasn't sure how it could be a successor to a pure PvP game, but semantics like that didn't really matter to me. Valhalla's shutdown after season six had hit the world like a natural disaster.

Millions of players, countless professional teams, entire sponsorship ecosystems, and NWE had simply told everyone to pack up because they were building something better. A new realm, they'd called it. Virtual reality indistinguishable from actual reality. Eclipsing Valhalla's glory tenfold. Ace had messaged me two months ago, right after the major Godsrealm announcement, but I hadn't replied yet.

I put the phone down, jumped in the shower, then brushed my teeth, changed into training clothes, and decided that if my brain insisted on dragging me through old misery before sunrise, I might as well do something productive with the morning. The drive to the archery range was quiet. By the time I arrived, the sky had turned dull blue, and the rain had softened into mist. I unlocked a practice area, set down my case, and assembled my bow — a standard recurve with about a fifty-pound draw weight — with ease.

The system panel lit up. Archery range initiating… Target ascension initialized. Targets set for: 30m, 50m, 60m, 70m, 80m… I rolled my shoulders, checked my quiver the way Dad had taught me, and took position. Bull's eye! Bull's eye! Bull's eye! Bull's eye! Bull's eye! Five perfect shots in a couple of minutes would have been a good start for a professional athlete, but at this point, missing would have taken more effort from me.

I kept going for nearly an hour, trying different distances, different pacing, timed events, rapid sequences, even a few awkward-angle shots that would have made Dad — Zachary Quill, four times Olympic gold medalist for the UK — raise an eyebrow before being unable to hide how impressed he was. By the end, sweat had gathered at the back of my neck again, but this was the clean kind, earned by work instead of dragged out of me by a nightmare.

I was retrieving arrows when I caught my reflection in the glass surface of the protective wall, and I noted, with a satisfied nod, that with a bow in my hand, at least I looked like myself. I slid the arrows back into the quiver, then glanced toward the entrance as tires crunched over the wet gravel outside, and a black SUV stopped by the range. A tall, broad man in a tailored, matte suit stepped out of the vehicle.

He had curly, brown hair and a neatly kept beard, and, for some reason, a pair of RayBan aviators on despite the complete absence of the sun. That was fast, I sighed. It was Ace, of course.