by Deck Davis
“I get what you’re saying. We need to think about who’s gonna get the best class,” said Ash.
Tony nodded. “Looking at our army fella here, he’s got a good build. Fit, muscled. I reckon that his class would be something physical, which is exactly what we’re lacking. No offence, Ash, but you ain’t Mr. Universe.”
Ash shrugged. “No need to be when you can shoot fire.”
“Are we agreed then that Chad gets the orb?”
Ellie shrugged. “I’m wary of touching that thing anyway.”
“Okay then, Chad. Pick up your big blue ball.”
Chad kneeled next to the glowing opal orb. If he was nervous at all, he didn’t show it. Instead he grabbed it with both hands. Light began to drift from it, almost mist-like, and wrapped around his hands before teasing its way up his arms, and across his chest. It began to seep into his mouth and cover his face, until soon the recruit was awash with blue mist.
Blue light suddenly spread out like the crack of horizontal lightening. It washed pulse-like through the forest, and then faded, leaving them with the normal daylight and chilly wind.
Chad didn’t look any different. He certainly hadn’t become some kind of tank-like class, that was for sure.
“Well?” said Tony.
“Give him a sec,” replied Ash. “He’ll be learning about his class and seeing his stats.”
Verto sighed, as if she was impatient with waiting. Ellie crossed one arm across her chest.
Finally, Chad opened his eyes.
“So…” said Ash. “What are you? Warrior? Barbarian?”
Chad shook his head. “The woman inside my head tells me I’m an Oathbreaker.”
“What does that mean?” said Ellie.
“I deserted my army unit after Beele went insane and I met you guys,” said Chad. “That means I broke an oath according to this holier-than-thou ass of an orb. The orb matched me up with a class and came up with Oathbreaker.”
“You didn’t desert, lad,” said Tony. “Beele had made a glop off shit out of the other guys’ minds. There was nothing you could have done.”
Chad shrugged. “I don’t know how the balls work. They made Ash a blood mage and gave you magic bullets. I think arguing over army discharge semantics is a little beyond them.”
“What can you do?” asked Ash.
“I’ve got something called Impius sense, so that when someone does an act classed as evil near me, I sense it.”
Tony looked at Ash. “Watch yourself,” he said.
“What else?” asked Ellie.
“You’re not gonna like it,” said Chad.
“Listen,” said Ash. “I’m about to be father to a human-changeling hybrid. Right now, any other news I get is right down the pecking order.”
“Lizzie says I – “
“Lizzie?”
“My mind construct. She says my other power is Sinful Act; the worse acts I do, the more powerful I get. Kind of like a chain reaction, too. Do more bad things in a row, and they add up like multipliers.”
“We should have let Ellie touched the orb,” said Tony. “At least she’d have been a fucking ranger or something like that.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Murder of Crows
They spent the rest of the day walking through the mountain. Ash kept a wary eye out for any sign of bears, trolls and goblins, but fortunately all he saw were a few hares. He shot two of them with his crossbow and then missed a third, cursing his poor aim as it scampered away.
Crossbow LVL 1proficiency increased by 20%
The sky started to darken around them. The blacker it got, the more Ash felt unsettled. He was suspicious of every sound he heard. Since they were surrounded by forests, there were plenty of birds nesting in the trees and chipping their evening songs. The question was, was Beele watching through their eyes?
“We’re not too far from leaving the mountain now,” said Tony. “What’s the plan after that?”
“We look for the mage. Can’t be too hard to find,” said Ash.
“Verto knows mage.”
Everyone turned to look at the changeling. The little green creature had been quiet for most of the journey, and she had stared at the landscape around her with wide-eyes. Ash supposed that here, everything was new to her. Did they have bears and hares in Rapto?
“Say that again, Verto,” said Ash. “You know where the mage is?”
“He lives out of the mountain. He changes things in the forest.”
“Can you guide us there?”
“Verto can, and Verto will.”
Ellie tapped Ash’s shoulder. “A word please, father-to-be.”
Ash and Ellie walked apart from the group a little.
“Something wrong?”
“I don’t trust that little frog. Something’s not right.”
“You’re telling me. Wrapping my head around being a blood mage and killing goblins was bad enough, and now she’s telling me I’m gonna be a dad to a god damn hybrid-monster-thing. I need a drink.”
“We’ll have a baby shower for you when this is over. Just keep an eye on her.”
“Trust me, I am. One foot out of place, and I’m blasting her,” he said, not completely sure he meant it.
“I would have thought you’d have considered that already.”
“It doesn’t seem right yet,” said Ash. “Call this a spiritual awakening, but I can’t bring myself to do it. And trust me, FF says things will go wrong real fast if Verto and me are separated in any way.”
“Makes me a little uneasy,” said Ellie.
“As soon as I figure out a way to get rid of her, she’s gone.”
To their right, Chad suddenly stopped walking. He looked around him, as if his attention was drawn to something. After gazing at the forest to their right, he focused on a giant knobby elm tree that stood taller than the rest.
“My Impius sense is ringing like a frigging alarm bell. Other there, in the elm. See them?”
The tree looked like a giant stick of broccoli, with dark green leaves covering the spindly branches. Ash stared for a while, then began to make out dark shapes perched on the branches. At first a couple, then more.
The more he looked the more he saw, and he realized there must have been at least fifty crows staring back at them with dark little eyes. Unlike the rest of the forest birds, these were silent. There was something unnerving about it.
Tony raised his rifle, then thought better of it. “I don’t have enough bullets to take them all down.”
“They’re either Beele’s spies, or they’re an unusually silent murder of crows,” said Ash. “Either way, an Ignis blast will scatter their asses.”
As he raised his hands and grew a flame, one of the crows fluttered silently off its perch. The rest followed it and gathered in the air above the trees, flying so close together that they looked like black mist. The swarmed together, their obsidian wings melding with the darkened sky.
He cast an Ignis flame at them, but the birds swooped downwards almost as one, and the arcane bolt fizzled out into the expanse of black sky. Taking that as a signal, the crows began flying at them.
As they got closer, Ash watched with dread as they began to transform. They grew in size until each one of the feathered-vermin was at least two feet long. Whether these were Beele’s minions of not, they were definitely not regular earth-variety crows. These little gits were from Rapto.
One crow swooped in too fast for Ash to avoid and pecked him on the shoulder. He felt a sting of pain as its sharp beak pierced his skin, and FF told him that he’d lost 20HP.
The other birds, gaining confidence, swooped on Ash and his friends.
Tony fired off a shot, and his bullet tore through a crow’s wing. The bird swirled to the side, and then plummeted to the ground.
“Gonna need a damn machine to take all these out!” he said.
Ash shot two out of them with Ignis, and as the flames spread across their wings and devoured them they became infer
nos, before crashing to the ground like squawking feathered comets. Tony shot one out of the sky while Ellie, reduced to wielding a crossbow due to lack of bullets, winged one of them with a bolt.
“There’s too many,” said Chad.
Say that again, thought Ash.
Hitting the damn things was hard enough; they might have been bigger than normal crows, but they swooped and dived too fast for him. At this rate, he’d drain his HP and have nothing to show for it but arcane fireballs flying harmlessly through the air.
Gunshots cracked and Ignis balls fizzled. Squawks of giant crows mixed with shouts of pain whenever one of the gang were pecked.
Soon, the ground was littered with fallen birds, some dead from gunshots, others thrashing as flames licked over them.
Ash tried a chain Ignis ball, but the problem was that the crows swooped and dived without warning, some of them using the trees as cover and shattering the chain. Unless they stayed in one place at the same time, there was no way for him to nail them in one shot.
Despite their best efforts, it wasn’t enough. There must have been dozens of the mutated crows on the ground now, yet a swarm of them still hovered overhead, swooping in for an attack whenever they saw a chance.
Ellie cried out as one crows gouged a wound in her neck. Chad batted away at two of them who swarmed around his head, pecking his skull and drawing blood.
Need to do something here. Ash cast Blood Share, draining life force from the dead birds to heal his friends.
Shot after shot rang out, and still they came. The birds were almost suicidal in the ferocity of their attacks, and not even Ash’s flames scared them. More fell, and yet twenty or more remained.
“I’m out of bolts,” said Ellie.
Tony reloaded his rifle. “Running low myself.”
Ammunition was scarce in the apocalypse, and much more so when they had to use it shooting birds from the sky. If only they’d stay still…
“Verto help,” announced the changeling.
Ash watched in astonishment as the changeling started to mutate. Her green skin began to bubble and became almost goo-like, before changing into a new form before him.
Verto became a giant magpie, a black and white winged bird with beady black eyes and as big as a tank.
Wow. After all he’d seen, there were still things that could surprise him.
Verto flapped her wings and produced a blast of wind so strong it almost knocked Ash over. She took to the sky and headed for the swarm of crows, flying straight into the middle. She knocked some out of the sky with flaps of her humongous wings, and stabbed others with her beak.
“Humans leave,” said Verto, as the crows swarmed her.
She was buying time for them to escape. Thanks to her tremendous size she was a match for the crows, but one by one they began to ignore Ash and the rest and instead gathered around Verto like a plague of locusts, swooping in and out with their beaks and stabbing her.
“Ash, come on!” yelled Ellie.
The other had started running. The trail away from the mountains wasn’t far now, and if they fled, they could hopefully leave the crows behind.
And yet, Ash found himself stuck to the spot.
He couldn’t leave with the rest of them; he was bonded with the changeling now, and if he went too far away, he’d lose HP and then die, and then he’d be stuck in the never ending respawn cycle FF had told him about.
“Ash!” cried Chad.
Verto shrieked as one of the crows pierced her eyeball with its beak. She hovered down a little, almost starting to plummet, but then regained herself.
“You guys run,” said Ash.
“We’re not leaving you!”
“You don’t have the luxury of choice. Get your asses out of here!”
As his friends fled and ran towards the trail, Ash faced the bird battle that was waging in the sky.
He grew a level two Ignis.
“Verto, keep them around you as long as you can. When I tell you, drop as fast as you can.”
Verto shrieked as another crow stabbed her.
“Are you listening?”
“Verto listens!”
Come on, he thought.
“Okay…drop!”
As the giant magpie plummeted downwards, the crows stopped in surprise. It was only a millisecond, but it kept them all in one place long enough for Ash to blast them with his level 2 arcane ball.
The ball hit them one by one in a chain. The flames devoured them instantly, burning their feathers and charring their bodies until they fell to the ground like pebbles tossed into water.
Level up to level to level 14!
Level up to level 15!
-HP increased to 900
-10 attribute points gained
Blood Share LVL 1 increased to 35%
Blood Concentrate LVL 1 increased to 85%
As Ash caught his breath, Verto changed her form. Her feathers began to shrink and then melt, and her black and white colors transformed into green. Gradually she morphed back into her true form. She lay on the ground, her green skin covered in peck marks made by the crows’ beaks. Green blood dribbled out on the mud.
From deep in the forest beyond, Ash heard a cacophony of squawks. It sent a shiver down his spine; there must have been hundreds of them.
He had to go, but couldn’t just leave Verto to die, even though that would be the easiest way to rid himself of his bond. He wouldn’t be killing her himself, so he wouldn’t have that on his conscience.
Then again, by leaving her, he may as well have been murdering her.
Damn it. He couldn’t do it. The Ash of just a week earlier would have left her to die, but he knew he couldn’t do that now.
He cast Blood Share and healed Verto using the dead crows. He pulled her to her feet.
I never thought I’d say this, said FF, but I’m proud of you.
“We need to move,” he said.
The squawks rose up again, a horrible orchestra of mutant crows who wanted blood. They had a head start, but would it be enough?
Ash and Verto ran down the mountain and toward the trail, where the others waited for them. Somewhere behind him, he heard the ominous flapping of wings.
“Can you change into something faster?” he asked Verto.
“Verto too weak.”
They ran as quick as they could. Just as they reached Tony and the others at the edge of the trail, Chad shouted something and pointed.
Ash turned to look. A swarm of crows were in the sky behind them, so many that they looked like a writhing black cloud.
As the crows got nearer and prepared to swoop, Tony traced a giant square in front of them, and a blue mana shield formed. It stretched up into the sky, way beyond the outline Tony had drawn. One crow swooped in, hit the shield, and electricity shivered through it, cooking its feathers. This gave the others some pause as they realized they couldn’t pass. Evidently, this murder of crows had a little more sense than the last.
“It’s bought us time,” said Tony, “But the shield’s too big. I don’t have the mana for it to stay in place long. Let’s stop screwing around and get out of here.”
None of them needed to be told twice, and together, they ran from the mountain. As they left it behind them, Ash was glad to see the back of it.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Punch Me
By the time they came off the pass and completely left the Lantern mountain range, they were like prisoners escaping from a penitentiary. Ash walked in front of the others and led the way. Hunger made his blood sugar drop and his head started to become light enough to float up into the air. Pretty soon, he was tired of walking.
Tony and the others hadn’t fared much better. After being in the army, Chad was the most physically fit of the three, and he had a more positive temperament to go with it. Even so, he had dark coffee-stain rings around his eyes, and his jokes were becoming less frequent and more forced.
Ellie had started to feel the effects of her to
bacco supply running out. Sometimes Ash would glance at her while they walked and he’d swear he could see steam coming out from her nose, and he thought that any minute she was going to breathe out a ball of fire and engulf the three of them.
