The last half-dozen times Csongor had checked, he had seen nothing on Marlon’s screen that looked remotely like a virtual sword and sorcery world. Instead it had been countless overlapping panes containing ramified orc charts, bar graphs, fluctuating statistical displays, and scrolling columns of chat. All that was gone now, replaced by something that looked a little more like it: a melee at the throat of a narrow pass between foothills. Several members of Marlon’s army—not the main group, but one of his flank guards—had been attacked as they forded a stream that ran through the pass. It looked like a carefully laid ambush, and half a dozen of them were already lying dead in the shallows. But reinforcements were hurtling into the combat zone on land, in the air, and over the water, engaging the ambushers in many single combats that merged and divided as one fighter came to the aid of another, then wheeled about to contend with some new threat.