Clan Dominance - the Sleepless Ones 2

by Dem Mikhailov

  “What do you think, Ros?”

  “It doesn’t work like that. I can’t give you any advice on such matters. And you know more than me, anyway.”

  A heavy silence filled the air again — or, to be precise, me and my partner fell silent, while the location did everything to do its name justice. Strained screeching, muffled mumbling, screams, and happy giggling; a mishmash of sound that was heavy on the mind. It felt like a tour of a lunatic asylum.

  “Ros...” Kyre couldn’t hold it in anymore. “Tell me! Shall we go forward or back?”

  “Kyre, you’re kidding me, right? I’ve told you I didn’t want to take any decisions. I’m just a hired gun.”

  “Ros!”

  “Well, damn! OK, here’s my advice — we go back to the coast of love and start leveling up. The reconnaissance gave us no results, and we haven’t seen any mobs or gotten any substantial information concerning the dangers waiting for us here. We’ll need to level up, explore the love location, and see what might be inside those few houses and the windmill. We may find useful scrolls or equipment — or a local who’d fill us in on this field of ashes. It’ll definitely take a lot of time, but there’s nothing to be done about it. Am I clear enough?”

  “You are,” Kyre nodded, listening attentively; I was doing everything to avoid looking at her bloodied face in the meantime.

  “So?”

  “We’re heading forward. Toward the ice peak.”

  Before I could object, Kyre lowered her head stubbornly and headed onward, descending the crumbling slope of ashes carefully.

  Well... She was in command, after all.

  I shrugged and followed, placing the staff behind my back and pulling out another scroll from my pocket.

  Chapter Seven

  The Death of a Competitor. The Power of Love. A Friend’s Betrayal, and the Werewolf’s Angry Howl.

  THERE WERE NO PROBLEMS with descending — or, rather, falling down — the vertical wall had still been far away once our feet started to slip and we were drawn forward relentlessly, along with a large portion of compressed ash. For a second, I tried to go against the flow, but then I got spun over, lost my balance, tumbled close to Kyre, then we were both shot across the edge of the abyss with a short sound that really resembled a scornful spit. It only took a short fall until an unexpectedly soft landing. The ever-present pad of ash gave us a soft landing, burying us at the same time — we were covered up to our heads, and I could see nothing for a while as I worked with my arms and legs as hard as I could to “surface.”

  Kyre had gotten there before me; her body was sticking out of the moving mass of gray. I looked around me and found ourselves inside a shallow-sloped pile some nine feet high at the most. I was closer to the edge, and, having moved aside a little, found firm ground under my feet easily, whereas Kyre was still struggling, getting closer to me inch by inch.

  “Give me your hand!” I shouted, and pulled the girl toward me, grabbing her by the fingers. “Hot damn! I wish someone had told me I’d need to take a dive into a pile of ashes...

  “Would you have refused?” Kyre asked hoarsely, grabbing me by the shoulders and pushing further.

  “I don’t think so,” I chuckled. “Hold on; let me get a better foothold and I’ll push you out.

  “Right. But my armor is in a better condition, and Defense has grown by a few points. Push!”

  “And we’re on!” My partner got closer to me once I pulled her again through the loose mass of ash; she was almost out. “How did Defense grow, I wonder?”

  “The ash here is strange,” Kyre explained, breathing heavily, waving a shiny chain mail gauntlet before me. “It’s not like up there. The armor is polished shiny now. They’re made of metal, after all... But the effect isn’t completely positive. Gimme your hand. There we go...”

  A few seconds later, we were free again. Relatively so — the layer of ash reached up to our knees, and both the skies and the steep slopes kept showering us with more.

  “There’s no way back now,” I had to state the obvious again. “Yeah... A single mistake or something like that...”

  “In that case, let’s try not to make any mistakes,” Kyre said with a nonchalant look.

  “We already did when we took an amusement ride down this slope” was what I’d been meaning to say, but I managed to hold it back, smiling as broadly as I could and nodding toward the ice peak that had become much closer.

  “We’re supposed to go in that direction, aren’t we?”

  “Sure, let’s go. Change your jacket, though. Your pants, too... I can see the diaper.”

  “What?” I stared at my jacket in surprise. “What?!!”

  I was virtually dressed in rags. Worn-through, dusty, tattered rags. The jacket, recently new, had turned to shreds barely held together by a few threads and a prayer. The pants were decorated with brand new holes, huge ones, revealing filthy feet. I pulled my leg out of the ash with a pained groan, only to see that my tall boots had had their soles peeled off and were now grinning like a crocodile. Defense was nearly down to zero; nearly every item of my equipment had gotten worn through almost completely. Even the scarf was covered in small holes and no longer gave any stat bonuses; I hadn’t even managed to study the gift I’d received. And I’ve only had these things on for less than a day. What the hell?

  As I was regarding my body dressed in these pitiful rags, the jacket, a glorious garment only just recently, made an ugly crack and fell off my shoulders into the ash, where it disappeared. The pointy hat, which had also become tattered and worn through, quickly followed.

  “What the hell?” I yelled, picking up our precious scrolls as fast as I could.

  “It’s the ash,” Kyre explained in a measured voice, observing my pants falling apart and away from my body as I walked. “You’d never make it as a stripper, mind you.”

  “Kyre! What the... Oh, hell!” the pants vanished, too, and I found myself wearing nothing but a scarf, knee-high boots, and a diaper of the purest white — the only things I had left were the indestructible pack and the staff behind my back.

  Kyre laughed like mad.

  “Kyre! This ain’t funny! Why am I naked while you’re wearing shiny armor?” I checked the contents of the pack feverishly, and exhaled with relief. All the stuff was still there.

  “Well, at least you still have your boots left... Oops... Not anymore. It’s the ash, Ros. It’s some sort of abrasive substance. It eats away metal gradually, but leather and cloth become destroyed at once. One could call this an aggressive environment negatively affecting...”

  “Kyre, you’d better shut up, or I’ll affect you negatively right now! With my staff across your stupid head! Damn! Damn! I've had more than enough events for one day!”

  “Is it my fault? And, in general, if we linger here longer, my armor will also get eaten away — the Defense is already going down, and it’s good that I still have some left. Get dressed and let’s get going.

  “No way! I have some old stuff in the backpack, but I’m not getting dressed now. Let’s find a place where there’s none of this damn ash first.”

  “OK, let’s move on. Incidentally, have you noticed it?”

  “Eh?”

  “No one is attacking me anymore; your nickname is green again, too.”

  “That’s right... Yours glows a peaceful green, too, and I have full HP. We seem to have made it through another challenge. But your face is still covered in blood and cuts.

  “And you have the same ugly grin. Right on; as someone with the most Defense, I’ll go in front. Keep some ten paces back, and keep the top-tier healing scroll ready.”

  “I will. I have Fire Torrent in my other hand, so if someone appears, they’ll really regret it. There’s a chilly breeze here, too — look at the size of the waves on that ash’s surface. It could be the cold from that icy rock. How far away is it? Got an estimate?”

  “We’re almost there; some twenty or thirty minutes if we walk fast. Hey, what’s t
hat? Ros! Take a look!”

  I jerked my head in the direction she’d shown me and noticed a small oblong protrusion on the surface of the ash — a motionless hill with waves of ash rolling quietly over it, with a faintly familiar silvery spark glowing inside.

  “I don’t get it,” I replied softly, my hand with the scroll in front of me. “Is it a mob lying in wait for us to come closer?”

  “It could be. Stand over there; I’ll go and check,” my partner had her weapons and shield at the ready as she moved forward cautiously, approaching the strange protrusion that had not been reacting to her actions in any way. Three steps left. Then two. Then one. Could it just be a rock?”

  “Take a look, Ros! The body of a dead player... The nickname is Myrne Sureblade. Ros! It's an NPC, right?”

  “Get away from there!” I yelled, panicked, spinning around, my eyes scanning the lugubrious greyness. Nothing but ash. But it could provide ideal shelter. “Get away!”

  It was too late.

  The ash surface cracked right behind Kyre’s back, popping and revealing a tall male figure covered in shiny metal from head to foot. He had a short wand in his right hand, and a tower shield in his left, its edges looking rough, as though someone had been chewing on them. The face was covered in a full helm with the design of a tiger showing its fangs in anger upon it, but the nickname could be read easily — Grume the Hammer.

  “Behind you! Kyre! Duck!”

  Without saying a word, Grume made a gesture with his right hand; a lightning bolt of pure white shot out of the wand, hissing. Kyre reacted instantly; she’d turned around before I could even warn her and covered herself with a shield. But she hadn’t needed to, since it wasn’t the shield that stopped the lightning. It simply froze in mid-air, and Grume became rigid like a statue.

  “What the...” Grume said hoarsely, amazed, applying every effort he could to get free from the invisible grip.

  No one answered — Kyre was still covering herself with a shield as she moved away from the frozen lightning, and I was pointing the hand with the scroll toward her aggressor, thinking of how to get the bastard guaranteed without killing my own partner. We obviously didn’t feel like conversing or pondering this — eliminating the enemy came first.

  The voice that rang from the morbid grey clouds was deafening; a female voice, but it sounded like that of a cat about to take its claws on a date with your face.

  “A man who raises his hand to a woman deserves nothing but death! The hissing turned into a deranged scream. “A painful death! Death!”

  The lightning frozen in midair started to glow, twisted itself sideways, and made a beeline for the clouds stretching out above our head.

  With a peal of thunder, forked lightning lit up the sky in zigzags, flying through the air with a dry rustle and hitting Grume the Hammer, who’d been trying to move convulsively, right on the helmet. The flash that followed blinded me for a moment; once I got my eyesight back, all I could see was a blob of silver mist falling to the ground and gray clouds of ash in the sky.

  “Hot damn! Holy shit!” I wheezed, turning to a petrified Kyre. “What if our recent altercation had gotten into a battle? And I would have kicked you or hit you with my staff, for example?”

  “Didn’t you hear? You have to treat women properly!” Kyre said in a condescending tone, but her voice revealed a certain distress. “It makes sense in general — we’re exploring her soul and her strongest emotions now.”

  “So that was Myrthe’s voice? It didn’t sound particularly friendly. She doesn’t like men attacking women, either, I concluded, walking toward the dead body of Grume the Hammer. “We could have messed up seriously. I wonder how these guys ended up here... Or, rather, why. They’d lost the tournament. Did they get reborn again? Most likely. Freaking maniacs.”

  I sat down by the blob of mist, stuck my hands in it, and started to rummage through the things that had been inside; there were quite a few. I got distracted for a second and asked,

  “Kyre, take a look what Myrne has.”

  “I can’t! I’m a paladin, after all. Although... I could take a look, I suppose.”

  “Doesn’t matter; I’ll take care of it myself.”

  Kyre didn’t reject the favor done to her or complain about it this time. Paladins are strictly forbidden to loot bodies; one of the numerous rules complex enough to make the Paladin class more popular with clan players than loners. They were only allowed to take the armor from an enemy killed by their own hand; battle trophies were battle trophies. However, if you found a “corpse” full of valuable loot, you were forbidden from taking anything. Your karma — or whatever they had — would fall instantly.

  However, I didn’t have to bother about my karma at all. But we should go through Grume’s corpse first... as soon as my jaw, which had dropped deep into the ashes, returned to its proper place.

  There were vials, jars, and bottles of every shape and hue. Healing and boosting alchemy, and quality stuff, too — just what the highest-level players have. Fourteen scrolls... Oddly, there was only battle magic there. Poison Mist, Avalanche, Fire Torrent, Dark Tornado, Acid Maelstrom, Thunderer’s Summon, Blizzard... Enough for any occasion.

  There was excellent Level 70 equipment — unfortunately, all made of metal and with bonuses to Strength. But the helmet, which had survived, looked nice and could be sold for a pretty penny at some auction. I opened my pack and dumped all our loot in, praying for enough strength to carry it all. It was a good thing that alchemical stuff weighed little, and the scrolls were practically weightless.

  Most importantly... What could this thing be?

  Thunderer. A steel wand.

  Type: weapon/single-handed

  Minimum level required: 50.

  Description: This seemingly nondescript piece of metal contains the destructive power of the thundering skies. A single gesture will hit your enemy with a bolt of lightning capable of destroying anything that’s in its way!

  Item class: Rare.

  Uses: 36/100

  Creator: Master Siebtes Vogel.

  “We’re in trouble... Something ain’t right,” I said, rising to my feet.

  “Myrne has weapons, some alchemy stuff, and four battle scrolls. I‘ve taken them all,” Kyre said as she approached, looking at the staff I’d been holding in my hand without much interest. “And what kind of trouble is that exactly?”

  “You had to loot the corpse, didn’t you? I can’t even...”

  “Tell me about the trouble.”

  “These guys came well-prepared. We’re nowhere near their league that way. Top-class alchemy, scrolls, and wands... Incidentally, did Myrne have a wand?” Kyre shook her head, and I continued. “But there’s a real mismatch here: they’ve got fourteen scrolls and a huge bunch of vials here. And the wand only has thirty-six charges out of a hundred. Are you getting me?”

  “They’ve been in a fight with someone.”

  “That's right. And Myrne didn’t survive the war.”

  “Could they have fought each other? We... I almost attacked you that time, remember?”

  “And spent a bunch of scrolls and lots of charges from the wand? Highly unlikely. It’s not like they’re cyborgs or anything; a single hit from a top-level scroll would be more than enough.”

  “We could go on guessing forever, Ros. Let’s go.”

  “Let’s go, you say? You being... Oh, never mind. Let’s”

  Having waited for Kyre to take another ten paces, I followed her closely, with a sack on my back, a diaper loincloth, and a scroll in each hand. The rest was stashed away in the pack safely, where the loot would not be in danger of getting destroyed by the abrasive ash.

  The silvery blobs of mist left from our dead competitors were far behind, with nothing but an expanse of snow in front of us. Our destination looked like a hill made of snow with shallow slopes and with an ugly icicle stuck in the middle. The wind blowing into our faces had a tang of ice.

  I felt completely discombobulat
ed by that point, but I wasn’t trying to make sense of things. I didn't care much. It may have been interesting at first, but by that time I felt really weary.

  I had my own goals; Kyre had hers. I was but a freelancer hired for a quest couple. There wasn’t much left to do. It would all end soon, and I would fall asleep. And tomorrow... Tomorrow would be another day.

  * * *

  We covered half the distance to our final destination without any troubles. There were patches of hoarfrost on the ash underneath our feet, and a few snowflakes flying through the air. I was actually happy about it — all the grayness around me was beginning to get seriously boring.

  Then the ash started to move. Not that it had been immobile before — there were small waves, ripples, and tiny vortices appearing on its surface, but the next time I lowered my eyes, I noticed small pulsating points looking like fountains the size of my little finger. I stopped to look around, and started to get more and more concerned as the strange phenomena surrounded us from every direction.