by Dmitry Bilik
Underground stations kept flashing past as if they were mere dozens of yards apart. Our snapdrake took the traffic jam before the 50th Anniversary of V-Day Street in one powerful leap, ignoring the streetcars’ indignant clanging at the vehicles blocking their way. The endless rows of nine-story blocks of flats flashed past like one solid gray wall.
In less than a minute, we’d already reached Comintern Street. We cleared it in what felt like a few giant leaps and bounds, finally escaping into Freedom Street. I gulped nervously, trying to dispel the lump in my throat. We were getting ever closer.
Finally, Khalzovskaya Street. Now we had to look really hard in order not to miss the right turn. There it was, past the overhead yellow gas pipe. The gardens of the machine-building plant were still far ahead to our right. To our left lay the Koposovo Oakwood nature reserve where everything should come to a head.
After a short while, I reined my snapdrake in and jumped onto the snow-laden tarmac. The snow-cleaning equipment had never made it this far. I offered a helping hand to Arts.
“Where to now?” she asked.
“Over there,” I pointed at a clump of bare trees.
Those last few dozen yards proved to be the hardest. We immediately sank deep into the snow forcing us to lift our knees high as we walked, just like in a PE class, while taking constant looks back to make sure our enemy hadn’t yet arrived.
We’d just managed to take cover behind the trees lining a small lake when we heard a thunderous explosion. The ground literally opened up behind us.
Morbian lowered the hand with which he’d cast the spell and jumped off his snapdrake.
For some reason, I felt terribly sorry for the Grand Master. Was he okay? The ride must have really shaken him up. There you go, this was my misplaced humanism kicking in again.
If you asked me, the Horseman must have had deadlier things in his arsenal than just making a hole in the ground. In any case, he stopped bombarding the winter-bound forest and followed our tracks. It might be his sadistic urge to watch his victims suffer. Or it could be a murderer’s desire to make sure his prey was dead. I couldn’t really tell.
In any case, we had to get out of here pronto because apparently, the Horseman had no intention of trudging through the snow. A fiery aura formed around him, making the snow in his path sizzle and thaw.
That gave us a good excuse to go even further. Morbian seemed to have little or no knowledge of our world’s physics because he seemed to have forgotten about all the steam which had formed in place of the molten snow. That at least gave us a decent chance of escaping. However, it might not last.
“Do you see that lake over there?” I pointed at an elongated frozen pond.
“What about it?” Arts asked without taking her eyes off the vague silhouette of our Horseman of the Steamy Apocalypse.
“I want you to cast the most powerful thing you have. We need to break the ice.”
That was Arts’ biggest and most valuable forte in battle: she didn’t question an order. She just gave me a long look. “That’ll take most of my mana.”
“You won’t need it, anyway.”
With a curt nod, she raised her hands up to the sky. I very nearly joked, “Let’s see how your pagan gods help you now, you heretic,” but promptly reconsidered. What’s with all the stupid reckless thoughts at a moment like this? Could it be my brain trying to safeguard my poor mind from panicking by offering it stupid things to think of? Possible. In which case, I really should be careful not to let slip anything I might regret later.
In any case, it looked like the ancient pagan gods must have heard Arts’ plea. An enormous boulder — half the size of myself — dropped from above into the frozen lake, followed by several more. By the time she lowered her hands in exhaustion, the whole part of the lake nearest to us was covered in floating sheets of ice.
“A Meteor Shower,” she gasped weakly.
“I know what you mean. I had it too when I had a kidney stone problem,” I blabbed incoherently, unable to restrain my overwrought nerves. “Give me your hand. Whatever happens, don’t let it go.”
She laid her warm hand in mine. I closed my eyes and stepped onto the lake’s surface. I was already used to the fact that the Game canceled out all the conventions of the ordinary world. And still I felt quite scared.
As it turned out, I shouldn’t have been. I was standing with one foot on the water. It seemed to hold me up quite well. I moved the other foot to join it. It worked.
“Are you sure I won’t drown?”
“Absolutely,” I said.
“How do you know?”
“Just a gut feeling.”
Warily she lowered one snow-covered boot onto a gap between two floating clumps of ice and gave me a look of childish delight. Hah! Talk about easily pleased. A couple of quick miracles from up one’s sleeve were enough to keep her happy.
“Let’s go,” I said, because our self-appointed snow melting machine Morbian-1 was already drawing near.
For a while, we walked quite warily but once we felt secure enough, we broke into a run — admittedly unhurriedly, trying to step onto the seams where the ice was tearing itself apart, trying not to slip and fall. I wasn’t especially good at the “slip and fall” part but luckily, the one time when I did fall I didn’t let go of Arts’ hand.
I’d already noticed a small opening in the forest, closed in from above by a canopy of bare branches. Once we finally reached it, I dropped to my knees, gasping, and took a look around.
Great. It was a small misshapen glade of about 400 square foot, hemmed in by low bushes. A couple of trees offered good cover. This was as perfect as it could get.
“Now what?” Arts asked.
“Morbian will now have to take a detour around the lake. He can’t walk on water, can he? And once he gets here,” I pointed at the opposite side of the glade, “the show will begin. Now I want that grenade of yours, please.”
Chapter 32
IN OUR SOCIETY, commending people just isn’t considered good form. If an author writes a good book, everybody believes it normal to leave a bunch of lukewarm reviews in the vein of, “good enough to read while you commute”. And if you watch a great movie deserving all the praise under the sun, all you can manage is a skimpy “it’s okay”.
Personally, I think I have an answer to this. Russians by their very nature are afraid of “jinxing it”. They’re really unwilling to indulge in any kind of hype for fear of the thing not living up to their expectations. Just think that only a few minutes ago I’d praised Arts’ quick thinking, and now she was really slow on the uptake.
She pretended she didn’t know what I was talking about, flapping her pretty eyelashes as if implying she had nothing to do with the grenade in question. I even thought she was trying to come up with an excuse, like she’d run out of them or that those she had weren’t the right type for my purposes. Or that she’d had to sell her entire stock to some guy just before she’d left to meet up with me.
Apparently, I was wrong in my insinuations. She was just giving it some thought.
“Which one do you prefer?” she finally asked.
“Why, do you have a choice?”
“I have two. One for attack and the other for defense. But the defense one has one hell of a strike range. Big enough to hurt you as well.”
“See how easy it is? We only had to put our minds together to come up with a solution.”
“Okay.”
She reached into her bag and produced an oval-shaped grenade. It didn’t look anything special: two hemispheres, a tube and a pin. Only when you held it in your hand did you realize how powerful it really was. Which was exactly what I tried to do, reaching out for it and getting a slap on the wrists for my trouble.
“Get your mitts off! I’ll keep it with me for the time being.”
I shook my head. “It’s not your war. Just give it to me.”
“You don’t know how to use it. All you’ll do is drop it at your own feet.�
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“Hey, I’m not that ham-fisted. I know that you need to pull the pin out and then throw it. You’d better take cover. He’s not looking for you.”
“Pull the pin out!” she mocked me. ‘Show me. I want to see how you’re gonna lob it.”
“Arts, we don’t have the time!”
“Show me. Over there,” she pointed at a bush about sixty feet away.
I picked up a rock, tossing it up a few times in one hand to get used to its weight, then hurled it at the target. It wasn’t a particularly good effort. When I’d been conscripted, I’d done a much better job: despite my modest physique, I’d managed to hit the target every time. And now I was a good fifteen feet short of it.
“See what I mean?” Arts said. “You’re out of practice. You need to make sure it rolls off your fingertips. And you need to put one leg forward for support.”
“Oh, come on. It’s gonna be fine. Just tell me what I should do.”
“You should tell me your plan because I’m not going anywhere. I owe you money, don’t forget. Plus I promised to save you at least three times.”
“All right,” I said, casting anxious looks at the lake.
How do you explain a brilliant plan in a nutshell? This might actually be a good catchphrase for a lifestyle coaching course (seeing as these days you didn’t need a diploma or even basic education to claim the expertise). That would be a true golden goose! But the real reason I had to be brief was currently flying over the lake, rapidly approaching in our direction.
If I’d thought that breaking the ice might delay him, I’d been wrong all along. He’d simply used yet another awesome spell which was probably called Flight, judging by the Superman style of his advance. The only thing missing was that he wasn’t wearing his underpants on the outside. With his white hair slicked down by the wind, he resembled an ancient god — some kind of Cthulhu’s third cousin twice removed.
To tell you the truth, I was just putting on a brave face. The whole scene was quite ominous.
Morbian landed on the very edge of the glade and immediately saw the grenade in Arts’ clenched hand. He must have known what it was, or maybe he’d just guessed.
One thing he didn’t notice was the item I was clutching. It was too small to attract any attention, even with his Observation Skills.
“So you two have decided to drag it out?”
He wasn’t in a hurry to crush us to dust. Apparently, he had nothing else planned for today.
“I suppose so,” I said. “Mutual consent just doesn’t turn me on.”
“Very well,” he spread his arms wide, provoking me into action. A cheeky smile flitted across his face, making him resemble a cat who’d cornered a mouse but wasn’t yet in a hurry to kill it. He was taking his time playing with it until he got bored.
“Well, you asked for it,” I said.
It didn’t take me long to decide on a spell. Both Ice Flourish and Electric Arc were single-use. Morbian, however, was layered like an onion in protection shields.
I stretched out my hand palm up and clenched a fist, forming the Bloody Whip. Then I lashed out at him, sending the shimmering yellow shells of protection shields floating to the ground.
I didn’t pause to wonder whether I could remove them all. Nor did I panic about not making it. I just kept going at him without taking a single breather. By the time the spell had expired, I’d managed to deal him fourteen lashes — or fifteen even, because I think I’d lost count after the tenth one.
With every stroke of the lash, Morbian lost a shield. Predictably, the spell had done nothing to improve my health. For two reasons: firstly, I wasn’t wounded, and secondly, it wasn’t dealing any damage at all to the Horseman.
“Is that all?” he jeered once my summoned weapon had vanished. “I heard you were supposed to be a god slayer! Don’t disappoint me, mongrel. You’ll have to try harder.”
“You shouldn’t believe everything you hear,” I said, casting Electric Arc which predictably crumbled impotently in a cascade of flashes of light. “I’m much prettier than they say.”
“I still can’t work out how you managed to kill Janus,” Morbian said, taking a step toward me. “We met up a couple of times, and I could never get the upper hand with him. His Avatar made him really strong — and he knew how to use it, too. But you, a miserable noob, you’re just a louse who has no idea of all the intricacies of the Game — and you managed to defeat him! Don’t get me wrong, I know perfectly well how you did it. What I can’t work out is how on earth you got the powers to do it.”
I thrust my hand out as if shielding myself from him. The funny thing was, he did stop, his eyes firmly focused on me.
“There is no secret,” I said. “Just some luck and a shedload of charisma. You’d be surprised how far it can take you. The problem of some experienced Players — or even a few gods and demigods — is that they tend to believe themselves above understanding inferior creatures,” I repeated Jumping Jack’s words almost verbatim.
He didn’t get the allusion, of course — or rather, he interpreted it in his own way. “Why would I want to understand you? You’re just a Time Master who’s happened to grab his fifteen minutes of fame. Very soon you’ll perish without a trace. Why would I want to understand a half blood who has no idea what kind of Seekers are after his Avatar? Because the higher you rise, the more attention you draw to yourself. You become a powerful magnet which draws steel to itself to its own peril.”
“Does that mean you’re after the Avatar too?”
“I’ve just told you! That’s exactly why I had to meet up with Janus. But the bastard was a Destroyer god, wasn’t he? You just couldn’t touch him. So there I was, in one of the technogenic worlds minding my own business, and I got the word that Two-Face had just been killed! By a half-blood newb, of all creatures. You can’t blame me for wanting to take a look at you. So I followed you for a while. I wanted to study you. And once I’d realized that you were nothing special and you’d just had a lucky break... what a shame the winner can only take one Avatar. But you know that yourself, don’t you?”
I didn’t, but I made a mental note, all the while shaking in my sodden boots.
Morbian shrugged as if disappointed with my apparent inadequacy. He took another step forward, shortening the distance between us.
I raised my hand again. “I’m a Savior!”
“So what? You don’t have Resurrection, do you? How about Righteous Fire, Shield of the Lamb or Righteous Blow — no, eh? And now you don’t even have Walking on Water, either. The Grand Master told me almost everything about you. You have nothing left, apart from the sword and this scared girl with her grenade. She’s very welcome to throw it at me, by the way. It won’t even halve my Mantles.”
“That’s right. But as I’ve just said, your problem is that you don’t seem to be interested in the lives of inferior creatures. Did you notice that this forest looks remarkably good for this time of year? It’s as if someone invisible takes constant care of it.”
I unclenched my fist, making a show of holding Jack’s whistle with two fingers. I brought it to my lips and blew as hard as I could.
Nothing happened. The silence was absolute. Morbian paused, puzzled, then began laughing, harder and harder, until he guffawed, wiping the tears of laughter while holding his stomach with his other hand.
“Give it to me,” he finally said. “I wanna take a look.”
He made a slight motion with his hand. The whistle slid out of my fingers and flew into his grip. Morbian caught it and squinted, studying it, then crumpled it in his hand. With a crunch, its broken pieces fell to the snow.
“What’s this, some kind of summoning artifact? Who was supposed to turn up? Some infernals? Hell hounds? Drakkans?”
“Just some fluorites.”
My answer seemed to have doubled him up. Not literally, of course. He creased up, leaning his hands on his knees, apparently unable to sit up straight with laughter. He was laughing so hard he was almost
sobbing, unable to catch his breath.
“Fluorites! Oh yes! Fluorites!”
“That’s right,” I said as I sensed the barely audible buzzing of wings. “Arts, now!”
The grenade’s pin was already loose on the girl’s finger. She took a good swing and lobbed it, then leapt aside, taking cover behind a tree.
I cast another Mantle on myself.
Morbian stopped laughing. He looked down at the grenade lying by his feet and stepped on it with a look of absolute contempt.
