Light Online Book Three: Leader

by Tom Larcombe

  “Maybe go to where we were the other day, see if it's louder there?” he said, after a few moments.

  Jern and Charles led the way, both with their shields out. Between the two of them they could easily block the entire passage if they needed to. Lucky was staying close to Eddie, apparently not comfortable with being in the tunnels.

  “I think this is it,” Charles said a minute later.

  When everyone went quiet again, the noise was louder. Also, it seemed to primarily come from a single corridor.

  “That way,” Eddie said, pointing.

  They followed the passage, stopping at intersections. One of Charles' party marked each intersection with an arrow pointing back the way they came, using chalk to mark it well over everyone's heads so it wouldn't get smudged accidentally. Eddie made a mental note to get some chalk to keep on him for future adventures.

  Finally, it sounded like they were nearly on top of the miners. Charles motioned for everyone to stop, then made a hand gesture. The man who'd been asking all the questions before came up to him and Charles said something to him very softly. A moment later he shimmered and disappeared. Eddie was used to seeing a shimmer in the air when Karl was stealthed and moving, but he saw nothing now.

  I bet it's because we're still in two parties and I'm not part of his, Eddie thought.

  Less than a minute later the man was back and speaking to Charles. After he was done Charles came back to Eddie.

  “Problem,” he said softly. “There are orcs alright, but the actual miners are prisoners. There are four humans and three goblins in a chain gang. They're the one swinging the picks. There's an orcish overseer and then several orcish warriors watching them. I don't know about your guys, but mine aren't going to want to kill the prisoners, so we'll need to be careful of them.”

  ~ ~ ~

  Chapter Twelve

  Aaron woke with a start and it took him a moment to realize where was. He'd been expecting the rough wooden walls of the inn room he'd been sleeping in for the past month. It took a few seconds to process that he was home, out of the game, in his real room.

  He started his morning routine, but it felt wrong. There were no adventurers to toss a friendly wave to across the room. His food wasn't nearly of the same quality he'd grown used to once Liv took over Eddie's kitchen, but what hit him hardest was that coffee was back to tasting the way it always had in the real world. In the game it tasted very nearly as good as it smelled while grinding and brewing.

  He drank it down anyhow, knowing that he'd need the caffeine to get moving. With a look around his apartment, he finished getting ready and headed in to work.

  At least there'll be some other people around there, he thought.

  As that thought percolated through his brain he stopped and did a double take.

  Wait, what? Since when do I care if there are other people around? I've never been the most social of people.

  Despite his thoughts and protestations, he knew that it was true. In his time in game, listening to all the adventurers as part of his job, he'd also joined in on many conversations that weren't started by him fishing for issues that might need fixing. He'd enjoyed it too, he'd actually enjoyed talking with them.

  Hah! We'll approach this scientifically. Was it the setting, the types of people that go into the game, or was it just me appreciating company. I can certainly test if it was number three, and if it wasn't, I'll figure out a way to test the other two.

  Now satisfied that he was closer to his normal mindset, he grabbed his jacket and headed into work.

  It wasn't until lunch time that he had a chance to test his ideas. He'd always gotten along with his team, so that wasn't a valid test, but during lunch he actually went to the company cafeteria. After grabbing lunch, he took a seat at a table that was only partially occupied and waited for his chance to jump into the conversation.

  He got a couple of odd looks since he was rarely in the cafeteria, but he'd been with the company long enough that the people at the table he sat down at had seen him around and vaguely recognized him.

  Aaron sat there silently for a few minutes as the others talked about things he wasn't familiar with, sports teams, current fashions, and the like. Soon enough the conversation moved on to their jobs. Here Aaron felt on more solid ground. Once they began with some minor complaints about their jobs, it almost felt like he was back in the game.

  He stepped into the conversation, adding a couple of vague comments about the company's demands on his time, and how they liked to pigeonhole people who could do so much more if they were allowed.

  That broke the dam and soon enough he was fully engrossed in the conversation, making mental notes to see if there were things that could be done about some of their complaints that sounded valid. There was, of course, the traditional litany of things like: my boss is an ass to me, they expect too much of me, my co-worker is so lazy I have to pick up his slack so my team doesn't look bad, and other things like that. At the same time there were a number of what he felt were valid complaints: software they were expected to use that was so obsolete as to be virtually useless, a printer so bad that the person complaining had started printing to one on another floor just to be sure they got their print job run, members of the internal IT team that were so incompetent that they must've been hired due to nepotism.

  Some of those really are problems, he thought. I wonder who should be responsible for fixing things like that. Maybe Cynthia can tell me and I can pass those problems along?

  He glanced at the clock on the wall of the cafeteria and was shocked to find that his allotted time for lunch was over in another five minutes.

  “Crap, look at the time. Sorry guys, I've got to go, my lunch is about over,” Aaron said.

  He stood and realized that he'd eaten all his food at some point during the conversation.

  “Talk to you later,” he said.

  He got one good-bye and a couple of waves as he was walking off. He dumped his trash and exited the cafeteria with a smile on his face. As he was heading back to his area he stopped dead in the hall.

  What the hell, he thought. I was always pretty good at talking to players in game when needed, but I didn't really like it. Now, though, I just enjoyed talking with people I barely know. When did I start becoming a people person?

  ~ ~ ~

  Eddie stared at Charles, reminded that not everyone shared his own style of play.

  “We don't want to hurt them either, so extra careful with the missiles and no AOE spells?” he said.

  Charles gave a brisk nod.

  “My guy says the orcish warriors are about the same level as the orcs on the mountain, but the overseer is lower. You want your group on him?”

  “What levels are we talking about?” Eddie asked.

  “Sixteen and seventeen on the warriors, twelve for the overseer.”

  Eddie gulped slightly. Intellectually he'd known that everything in the mine was going to be over his groups levels, but faced with the actual fact his nervousness grew.

  Oh come one, our entire group on one level twelve? I think we can manage that, he thought.

  “Okay, going to group channel for our assignments,” he said to Charles.

  [group chat: Eddie – Alright, we've got three orcs. Our group gets the overseer, Charles' group gets the two warriors since they're higher level. No AOE spells, there are prisoners, also careful with missile fire for the same reason. Charles will signal when we start, tanks in front.]

  He got a series of brief acknowledgments on the group channel, then looked to Charles. It took a few moments of waiting, but then Charles caught his gaze and nodded. Eddie motioned to Jern who stepped up to the front. Then, on Charles' signal, the two stepped around the corner and started advancing.

  Their standard formations were larger than normal, but both groups used the same general setup. So the next people to step around the corner were Tiana, Karl, and the rogue who had asked all the questions earlier. Then the other casters followed
, Dominic plus two women from Charles' group. One was a healer and the other another mage like Dominic, except not specced to fire.

  The final three around the corner were Eddie, Tiana, and an archer from Charles' group. Eddie felt slightly bad, he'd been introduced to all of Charles' group and promptly forgot most of their names. So now he thought of them by their gender or class. He made a note to ask Charles their names again and make more of an effort to remember them.

  “Lucky, keep an eye behind us to make sure nothing sneaks up, okay?” Eddie said.

  The bobcat chuffed, turned around, and planted her butt on the floor. Her head shifted slightly and Eddie was sure she was scanning the tunnel behind them.

  By the time Eddie was around the corner, the tanks were nearly to the orcs and had been spotted. Eddie, worried that his group's pride was about to be stung by the higher level group killing their two orcs before his group killed one, immediately nocked an Arcing arrow and targeted the overseer.

  It's a lot easier to fight orcs with Jern as a tank than it is to fight the goblins. The orcs are much taller than him while the goblins are smaller. Makes it much easier to target the opponents, Eddie thought.

  He drew his arrow back and fired. The overseer was carrying a whip and wearing what looked like a leather tunic with strips of metal reinforcing it here and there. He targeted a strip of metal and released. His hand shifted slightly as he released the string, but he didn't try to stop it, he knew that was the game compensating for his agility and would probably mean that he'd hit his shot, even if he wouldn't have before.

  The arrow struck the overseer and a brilliant flash lit the corridor. The prisoners cried out in fear and threw themselves to the floor. The other orcs were distracted as well, but since Charles' party was also looking around to see what had happened, they didn't have to pay for their inattention.

  “What was that?” Charles called out, loud enough to be heard over the battle.

  “Arcing arrow, an electric arrow attack,” Eddie called back, although it didn't look like Charles heard him.

  He saw Charles muttering something as the other group leader turned his focus back on his targets.

  “Whatever it was, warn a guy next time, okay?” Charles yelled.

  Eddie blushed, but he saw that the overseer was already heavily wounded from his arrow, plus Allie's, and a couple of hammer strikes from Jern. He nocked a normal arrow next, he had quite a few of the Arcing arrows put together, but he didn't think they'd actually need them for this fight.

  Both he and Allie struck with their arrows again and a moment later Karl shimmered into view behind the overseer as he plunged both his swords into the orc's back. The orc staggered from that and a few seconds later, after he took another strike from Jern's hammer and two more arrows, he started to fall. Karl took the opportunity to land another strike and the overseer was definitely dead.

  Eddie looked over to see how Charles' group was doing. Charles was holding the attention of both the orcish warriors, but the rest of his group was focusing on just one of them.

  “Want an assist?” Eddie yelled.

  “We got it,” Charles replied.

  A moment later the rogue from Charles' group appeared behind the wounded orc that Charles' group was working on and the orc dropped.

  “Damn,” Karl said, just barely loud enough for Eddie to hear. “I wonder what his backstab multiplier is?”

  Once they were only working on a single orcish warrior, they overwhelmed it quickly. Charles had a stunning skill with his shield, but it left him open for a second or two after using it so he had held off on it until he was only holding the focus of a single opponent.

  “What was that flash?” Charles asked, looking pointedly at Dominic.

  Dominic held his hands up, palms out.

  “No clue,” he said, pointing at Eddie, “ask him, it was his arrow that did it. I was as shocked as everyone else.”

  “Not as shocked as the overseer,” Eddie said, by way of explanation.

  When he realized that no-one except Tiana had understood him, he sighed. At least she was smirking.

  “I can imbue my arrows with my Arc spell. I didn't expect the flash either though, I just thought they'd deliver the shock.”

  “Wait, you're telling me you waited for now to test a new ability?” Charles asked.

  Eddie nodded.

  “I didn't want to waste any. I've got a few, but each one takes like a third of my mana to imbue, so I can't do a lot of them.”

  “You've got... a few? I thought you could only imbue arrows just before release,” the archer from Charles' group said.

  “Maybe imbue is the wrong word? I can add the Arc spell to the arrow as I make it and then store it until I need it. I suppose it might wear off after a while, but that one was probably a couple of days old at least.”

  The other archer stared at him.

  “You've got to be kidding me, right? That's like an enchant, not an imbue.”

  Charles shook his head.

  “Yeah, don't worry about it Ephram. This is Eddie, he breaks stuff all over the place.”

  Eddie held out three of his Arcing arrows towards Ephram as a peace offering.

  “Here, have a few. You can try them out, we'll see if they work for anyone or just me,” Eddie said.

  Ephram's eyes lit up.

  “Are you sure about that?”

  Eddie checked his inventory where another twenty-one Arcing arrows resided.

  “Yeah, I'm sure. I've got some more and it'll be good to know if they work for anyone or not.”

  Ephram hurriedly took the arrows and tucked them away in his quiver.

  “Gonna save these for the boss, assuming there is one,” he said. “Even if the Arc won't work for me, they're still broadheads.”

  Eddie turned and pointedly looked at the prisoners. They were all still cringing back against the wall.

  “We should probably take care of them,” Eddie said.

  Allie stepped forward, her hand on the hilt of her sword.

  “I'll take care of a couple of them,” she said.

  “Allie,” Eddie said.

  She turned to look at him and he shook his head.

  “They don't even look like the ones from the Forest of Fools. They were slaves and they've had their options taken from them. Used and forced to do what I'm sure they didn't want to do. Sound familiar?”

  Allie's face twisted up for a moment, but she removed her hand from her sword.

  “Don't ask me to do anything with them though, that's too much,” she said.

  Charles stared at Eddie who simply mouthed 'later' at him, then turned to Karl, but Karl was off talking to Allie.

  “Seems my scout is otherwise engaged. Can your rogue unlock those chains? I wish we had a way to communicate with the goblins first though.”

  “Stalker, unlock the chains on the humans first?” Charles said. “Tamshir, you speak goblin, right?”

  Eddie stared as the female mage from Charles' team stepped up.

  “A little, I'm not fluent or anything,” she said.

  “Can you tell those guys that we aren't going to hurt them? That we're going to take the chains off of them?”

  She turned to the goblins and a brutal sequence of sounds came from her mouth. Eddie was pretty sure he'd have a sore throat for days if he'd forced his throat to work that way, but the goblins seemed to understand her. They relaxed a little, but responded in the same throat-twisting language.

  She turned back to Charles and started to speak, but was caught by a coughing fit.

  “Damn, I hate that language,” she said when she'd stopped coughing. “They want to know what's going to happen to them.”

  “We'll set them free, of course,” Charles said.

  She turned and strained her throat again, producing more of the guttural throat-twisting words. The goblins, when she'd stopped speaking, started shrinking against the wall and screeching words that certainly sounded a lot like negation.r />
  “Uh, boss? I don't think they like that idea,” she said.

  Charles rolled his eyes as she spoke.

  “Got any better ones?” he asked Tamshir.

  “I've got one,” Eddie said. “Well, maybe. It depends on their answer. Tamshir, could you ask them if they'd like to keep mining, but get paid for it? Be free, but do the same job they've been doing. Tell them I'll pay them copper coins and food to keep mining and deliver what they mine to the entrance. Also tell them I'll supply much better equipment than this.”

  Eddie kicked the primitive pickax made of wood and stone that laid on the ground in front of him.

  “Um, I'll try. Like I said, I don't speak a lot of goblin, but I'll try to get the general idea across. That is, if it's okay with you Charles.”

  Charles stared at Eddie.

  “You're going to take advantage of them?” he said.

  “Nope. I bet if you ask them you'll find out that the only thing they know how to do is mine. I'm going to make sure they're well fed, give them the equipment they need to do the job right, and treat them like any other employee,” Eddie replied.

  And hope that they count towards the population of the Meadowlands and count as my employees, he thought. Although really, this should probably be part of the Hammertop Mountains, but the name of the mine has the Meadowlands in it, so...

  Tamshir grunted out a few more words in goblin and the small goblins started nodding in earnest.

  “He's right, the only thing they know how to do is mine,” she said.

  Cool, so they nod their heads for positive, just like people. Plus, I thought I saw some head shaking going on when they were protesting being set free, so negative is the same also, Eddie thought. It's a start for communication at least.

  “Go ahead and ask them if they want to mine, but be free and get paid for doing it,” Charles said with a sigh.

  He turned to Eddie.

  “And here I am, supporting you in another one of your crazy schemes. At least I'll get a share of the profits on this one,” Charles said.