by Deck Davis
Cayla leaned on the turret ledge and in one deft move hopped over it and onto the roof, rattling a loose slate.
“I’m going down. You be a cowardly balwan if you like,” she said, and then took a careful route down the roof, avoiding parts where the slates looked worn enough for her to put a foot through.
Balwan, he thought, as he watched her walk away from him. Right – balwan meant cretin. Cowardly cretin, that was what she thought of his plan to let others take the hits at the beginning of the wave.
He glanced at the weavers rampaging toward the gates and then at Cayla, and he reminded himself why he was even here.
“Cayla,” he said.
She stopped. Her eyes were completely red now, their shade more blood than fire, and beautiful enough to stop his breath in his chest. She waited for him to speak.
“Gather everyone and meet me at the gates,” he said.
The Fell Lord knew he was being watched. He saw them in his peripheral vision, shadows to his left and right. Stragglers who didn’t have a guild, newbies who’d gotten caught up in the Reach as the first wave hit and had decided to see it through. Without a guild whose feathers they could burrow into for comfort, they looked to him.
And why not? He played a race that had been removed from Soulboxe years earlier because of how overpowered it was. He was only allowed to keep it because he had refused Soulboxe’s offer to compensate his bank account for the trouble, and then threatened legal action when they tried to take what he successfully argued was a product he had paid for.
The players edging close to him, near enough to feel safe without risking the Fell Lord player-killing them, were scared.
Normally, there would be no need for fear. Death was a part of Soulboxe, as much a part of a player’s life as visiting a trader or blasting away digital senses by slurping digital beer. Paladins, orcs, elves, clerics, mages all danced into death happily, because you always came back. It was a mistake that could be made, unmade, and repeated with the only consequence being a penalty from Boxe. One that could be suffered without much of a problem.
Death was only an enemy when it had finality. Take that away, and you could smile at it like an old friend.
Not anymore. Not in the Reach. The Fell Lord could smell the fear coming from the guildless men and women in his peripherals. Not because Boxe had suddenly inserted a gruesome level of bowel movement realism into the game, but because fear wasn’t invisible. People thought it was, but he knew otherwise, and he could see great wafts of it puffing out from the players' mouths and rising to the air in plumes.
And the weavers could see it too.
A tide of spiders throttled toward them now. Fell Lord saw his unwanted entourage move closer to him. He finally decided to address them. Turning to his right, he saw that a spirit archer named Gytha was closest. She had twin ponytails colored obsidian black to match the twin daggers on her belt, and the lone charcoal-black bow in her hand.
“If you’re shitting yourself so much, why don’t you go back behind the fences?” said The Fell Lord.
Gytha held his gaze. She seemed the boldest of them all, or at least there was less fear seeping from her. “Because we’re safest with you.”
“Then come closer.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“We’re outside of town now. You’ll kill us.”
“You want my protection from the weavers, but you have nothing to protect yourself from me. That’s tough. If I wanted to kill you, you’d have wasted your last breath begging for mercy a long time ago. Come on. If you want to fight alongside me, then fight.”
She didn’t move.
The Fell Lord sighed. Maybe tonight was time to break his only rule, even if it was temporary.
Decided on this, he opened the map of the Reach and focused on every player outside of the gates who didn’t belong to a guild. He sent each of them a party request.
The chiming sounds of acceptance became a melody in his ears before fading out, replaced by the racket of the weavers getting closer and closer, almost close enough to claim their first casualties.
With that, Fell Lord drew Frost Carver from the sheath on his back. It was cold to his touch, but it would have been freezing to another’s. To even wield it you needed mythical Icewind Gauntlets, and Fell Lord had to slay his way through one of the deepest labyrinths in the game to get them. The blade looked like a shard of the blackest ice, chipped into the shape of a sword and then fortified by master-level artificery. Wafts of cold air seeped from it, cooling his arm, neck, and chin.
His stragglers drew closer to him now. Most of them were levels and levels below him, although a few brandished weapons that approached decent. The majority were new questers or hadn’t raided enough dungeons to score worthy loot yet. They stared at Frost Carver with wide eyes, some in awe, others jealousy.
“Stay with me,” he told them. “You’ll get a share of the experience in every weaver I kill, and I plan on killing a lot of them. I’ll kill so many your levels will double within a few minutes. When that happens, take yourself away and spend your points and grow stronger. By the end of this battle, you’ll be real men.”
Gytha gave a pronounced cough and looked at him with half-rebuke, half-expectancy.
“…and real women,” he said, correcting himself.
With that, he raised Frost Carver and charged toward the nearest orb weaver. Even three nights into Blood Wave, he hadn’t gotten over his revulsion. They were disgusting creatures with spindly legs and fleshy bodies, their eyes ripe for popping, limbs ready for hacking.
He let manus build in him. His first strike would be Retribution of the Fallen, and it would be magnificent.
The air rushed at him, chilling his face. The tapping of thousands of weaver legs grew deafening. He heard his new fledglings to his rear, scampering behind his protection and desperate for a share in the gallons and gallons of EXP he’d earn for them.
He reached the first weaver. Its screech drilled into his eardrums and rattled his brain. He crouched, let a pincer swipe over his head, and then he struck.
Metal gleamed and light flashed as the Retribution of the Fallen burst from his blade, radiating in a wave of death and pushing the weavers around him backward. Some skittered, losing balance and righting themselves only to meet the tip of a sword or blade of an axe from the Fell Lord’s new fledglings.
“Got one!” cried a voice. It was a rogue dressed in leaf-green leathers, and he was standing with the corpse of a weaver underfoot.
War shouts sounded out. Weaver blood splattered onto the grass. Rods of fire arced over their heads and landed into the weaver ranks as the Mountmend archers unleashed volley after volley of oil-dripped and artificed arrows.
The Fell Lord hefted his sword left, carving through two weavers. He struck upward, boring through the belly of a weaver about to munch on his skull. Sweat spread on his forehead and in his armpits as he twisted left and right, feeling weaver blood splash on him, smelling their death stink.
Call this a final wave? He would carve his way through it before the sun had taken off its slippers and put its feet up for the evening.
A pincer strike found its way into a gap in his armor, ripping scorching pain down his side. The Lord snapped the pincer in half with his left hand, thrust Frost Carver with his right, driving the point of ice through the weaver’s body and pulling it out, letting a slop of blood and guts splatter onto the grass.
A woman screamed to his right. Blood drenched the left side of his face. He could taste it; hot, a hint of iron. Such detail that he’d never seen in Soulboxe before, and he felt a heat gush through him now, felt a smile widened on his face.
Imagining liquid iron floating in his bloodstream, more and more of it until it was all around his body, he commanded it to harden, and he thought the words of the Iron Blood, and yet more manus leaked from him and left a trace of its smell in the air.
A pincer hit him again, snapping on impact and formi
ng splinters that rained on the plains. A weaver leaned close, bulbous eyes touching his forehead, and it opened its mouth. A waft of rotten breath invaded his nostrils.
He flinched. He tried not to, but he couldn’t help it. It was hard for his nerves not to buckle with a vision of hate pressing close to him.
The weaver screamed at him. So close to his ear, the scream was the roar of a hurricane.
Remember the Iron Blood, he told himself, to calm down. This thing can’t hurt me.
He smiled into the weaver’s face. Eight eyes blinked in return.
A leg raised, tensed-up and the pincer dripping with venom.
Fell Lord raised his left hand, shaking off his gauntlet to show his bare skin. He grinned at the weaver.
The pincer flew at him, lashing through the wind. Fell Lord aimed his palm to it and let the pincer strike. His Iron Blood fortified, and the pincer snapped on his skin.
The weaver blinked faster. Two of its kin joined by its side.
Fell Lord struck one with Carver, sweeping through the weaver’s skin and sinew with the crackle of ice, showing barely a hint of his true strength. The other weaver leaped close, and Lord struck with the hilt this time, pumping the blow with manus so it became Strength of the Up-Top. The arachnid flew backward into the air, sailing over rows of its kin, before crashing into the center of them. Its brothers and sisters squealed and trampled over it, and more and more black eyes turned to the Fell Lord.
The joy of battle sprung in him, the feeling rushing through his veins.
A strike left, a whirlwind of a blow where he rotated his whole body, and three orb weavers died at one.
A bone-crunching thunder strike to his right, and he snapped two weavers' bones like saplings under an elephant’s foot.
The joy became a tidal wave. It spread further with every stroke of his blade, every weaver bone he snapped, every splat of blood on his armor, his face, and on the once-green grass of the plains.
The pile of corpses grew around him, their limbs intermingled, curled up, their skin slashed, eyes popped.
One fledgling, an elf mage carrying a staff twice as large as himself, climbed the pile and, on reaching the peak, held his staff aloft and shouted, “I’m the king of weaver corpse mountain!”
More fledglings had crowded closer to the Lord now. Eight or so. They saw the King of Weaver Corpse Mountain with his staff and the dead enemies beneath his feet, and they smiled. They watched the Fell Lord cut down four weavers in one particularly devastating blow, and their grins grew wider.
Gilla watched the Fell Lord carve through the weavers. There was no grace to his strikes, it was all brute power, the blade not cutting through weaver flesh but smashing through it. Some weavers froze on contact with the sword, and their chopped limbs hardened with cold and thumped onto the ground.
For the first time, she felt like this wasn’t hopeless.
“This guy is gonna kill half the horde by himself,” she said to no one, just enjoying the way hope made her words spring out of her mouth. People celebrated around her, and some of Penny’s archers even missed their turn to fire, earning a rebuke from their captain.
Gilla eyed the Fell Lord and felt the awe rise in her. I need to get this guy to join the Striders.
Four weavers jumped as one, pincers tensed. It took just one leap to reach the peak of the pile of corpses, and pincer-tips stabbed into the King of Weaver Corpse Mountain. One in his left thigh, another his belly, one stabbing through his open mouth and through the back of his throat.
The King toppled down his mountain and into the rampaging weavers behind him, disappearing in the midst of their sheer numbers, dethroned and dying.
Hope died then. A fledgling looked Fell Lord’s way, and his smile disappeared completely.
He pointed at the Lord. “Watch out!”
A shard of agony suddenly sprang in Lord’s spine. It made him stumble, before fading enough for him to balance himself.
But then a weight crashed into him. He shoved it away, only for another to wallop into his back. And another. A third, a fourth.
He was drowning under the weavers’ weight as dozens of them leaped onto him. Pincers poked holes in him again and again, each making his nerves shudder and sending tremors of pain through him.
As weaver after weaver leaped and buried him, soon the Fell Lord couldn’t see anything at all. He couldn’t hear his fledglings, couldn’t see the glow of fire arrows, couldn’t even feel the reassuring cold of Frost Carver.
His only sensation was the sickening writhing of weaver limbs above him, to his sides, all around him. The bristles on their legs scratched his skin. Slime coated his nose, chin, lips. The more he struggled, the more the weavers stabbed through each other to get at him, and he was jammed so tight he couldn’t swing his sword.
He couldn’t breathe. Fresh pain sprang up and died all over his body, flaring anew second to second.
The weavers couldn’t kill him if he was on his feet, so they’d put him to ground the only way they knew how; by burying him in sheer numbers.
If he could just summon the strength to swing Frost Carver.
But there were too many. A mountain of weavers all piled onto him.
Under that carpet of arachnids, the Fell Lord died, and Frost Carver fell from his grasp.
Warren had decided to become a vulture. Jon wouldn’t like it, but he suspected he’d angered Jon enough by leaving him in the labyrinth, that it didn’t matter. Adding fresh worries onto old ones was a fool’s game. Then he saw it, regretting of making a mistake was like turning up the heat on the food you’d already burned.
As a newly-formed vulture, he’d do what vultures did. He’d find a place to watch the wave and then wait for the others to wear down the weavers. He’d sprint in, land a blow so that he earned a share of the experience and loot points, and then dart back to safety.
Nobody would pin a medal to the chest of a guy who acted like that, but you couldn’t put ideals in your gas tank or stock your pantry with them.
He hurried through the plaza. Even if he was blind and had never been to Mountmend before, he’d know where to go - just follow the screaming and the stench of fire.
“The Fell Lord just got wiped out!” shouted a one-booted paladin, hopping by as he tried to put his other boot on. “Jesus Christ on a pogo stick to hell, did you see that?”
Before Warren could answer, the paladin stuck his foot into his boot and became a blur zooming past. Warren took just one more step before something thunderous boomed behind him. A weight barged into his shoulder, sending him spinning into a wall.
He righted himself to see a half-giant NPC, the one who sold items in the crafter’s guild, stomping toward the Mountmend gates.
Doors opened around him. Dwarves, humans, elves all stepped out from various shops. At the head of them all was Konrad, Tripp’s buddy, marching with a half-axe in each hand, artificer goggles strapped around his eyes.
A stick insect wearing a robe with the crafter’s guild hammer emblem printed on the back scurried to catch up to the procession, shouting at anyone who’d listen.
“I tell you all, this is a mistake of the highest order! Konrad is a fool. His heart is more scarred than his eyes. He’d leading you to death!”
Konrad halted. “No need to feckin’ lead them to it,” he said. “Death’s coming this way. Best thing we can do is met it halfway and persuade it to take its big feckin’ arse elsewhere.”
With that the townsfolk filed by, and Warren recognized them. Most were traders who worked out of the plaza district. There was the potion trader who looked older than an Egyptian mummy and had dry, patchy skin to match. The axesmith who walked with a limp and whose hands were a mess of scars. The Mountmend spell scroll merchant, a weasel of a man who ate chocolate like he was addicted and so always sold scrolls covered in brown stains.
But they weren’t selling anything today. Under the darkening Mountmend sky, with the last slivers of orange faded to almost nothin
g, the townsfolk had changed. Today they were an army. A joke of an army, but an army still.
Warren watched with a half-smile as they headed out of the plaza, weapons aloft, all of them singing the same song.
A warrior taller than all his kin,
Greater than most you’d see,
But what was outside hid what lay within,
What was he?
A dwarf! A dwarf!
A man of war, he dreamed of peace,
But the plains of death he did breach,
He found a nest of beasts,
He slew them all and claimed the Reach!
Gilla watched her mounted riders split up and skirt east and west around the orb weaver army. She tried to count how many weavers made up the front line and then how many rows there were, but they leaped and ducked and twisted too quickly for an accurate figure.
“How many of them do you think there are?” she asked Lamp, who she assumed was behind her.
There was no answer. Strange. Counting them seemed like just the kind of thing he’d have liked to do. But turning around, she saw that Lamp was gone. Probably out with the healers and long-range casters, preparing them for their roles in the fight.
Whatever the answer to her weaver question, whatever their true number, the word ‘army’ wouldn’t have done them justice in size or in nature. They dwarfed any army she could imagine, and they were too bestial to be called military. Military meant order, training, strategy. The weavers stabbed and bit and vomited hot, blinding blood over their foes. This was no army.
Her riders reach their position now. Four left of the weavers, four right. They rode on lions, half-dragons, great wolves, getting close as they could to the weaver flanks without drawing an attack.
Dropping to less than full speed, they began throwing sharpened poles into the ground like javelins. Diamond-tipped and so sharp they could cut the balls off a dragon, the poles stuck fast in the mud.
