Out on the plain atop the dragon, Cythera continued: “Return him to me now, and I will spare you. The stronghold of Morrill shall continue to stand, and every one of you shall live. Defy me, and you all will die – and your wives and children will die before you, in ways more horrible than you can possibly imagine.”
“I take it back – at least one person apparently doesn’t want you dead,” Daniel joked.
“Maybe I should give myself up,” Eric said.
“To protect a bunch of NPCs? Wow, you have changed.”
Eric grimaced. “They may be computer programs, but I don’t exactly relish the thought of women and children getting tortured to death. Especially because of me.”
“But blowing up the ground beneath them and dropping a bunch of 200 foot walls on them was okay?” Daniel asked, suddenly overcome with resentment.
Eric grew pale.
Daniel winced. “Shit… sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”
“Why not? It’s the truth.”
“That’s behind us now.”
“Actually, no, I’d say the results are right out here in front of us.”
They both looked down at the 80,000 soldiers gathered on the plains.
“All of that doesn’t matter. It’s just a game,” Daniel said.
He noticed that Eric didn’t say anything in return.
Cythera screamed, “ATTACK!” and the thousands of soldiers began to run across the ground towards the dwarves in front of the gates.
Far to the west, Hurokians thundered down from the mountains on horses. Goblins rode smaller animals, spears and swords at the ready.
Off to the east, elves poured down from the mountains. A fusillade of arrows shot into the air and rained down on the Army of the Damned. A number of the corpses fell, but most kept running.
A single griffin soared high in the air.
The giant dragon out amongst the dead soldiers flapped its wings and took flight.
“You should get out there,” Eric said quietly.
“Something tells me that if Cythera opened the battle asking for your head… the fighting will be coming to us soon enough.”
110
Mira
Mira’s griffin soared into the air, high enough to keep out of the way of the thousands of arrows the elves let loose at the Army of the Damned.
From the center of the ranks, the dragon took off like some unwieldy, monstrous aircraft – but she knew its looks were deceptive. The range of its fire-breathing was far. It couldn’t maneuver in the air as well or go as fast as Mira’s griffin, though, and those were weaknesses she was going to exploit.
She figured if she could take Cythera down, the entire Army of the Damned would fall with her. After all, she was the necromancer responsible for all the dead soldiers below; once she was dead, Mira figured the spell would be broken.
So she pulled out her bow and went to work.
The only problem was, the bitch had armor on. This wasn’t going to be like the first Battle of Blackstone where she took out Eric with an arrow in the back.
The other problem was that Mira was the only flying thing in the sky, other than the dragon. The first time she’d had Daniel to work with; now she was on her own.
The thought made her sad, but she pushed it out of her mind. She had work to do.
She put the griffin into a dive, and shot off her first volley of arrows.
Black smoke boiled from the sorceress’s hands, and a flock of flying worms burst into the air.
Great, Mira thought angrily. She’d forgotten Cythera had Eric’s powers now. That made everything ten times harder.
She spiraled downward and skimmed across the elves, hoping they would have enough sense to fire at the flock of demon worms.
This is going to take awhile.
111
Drogar, Vlisil, Lotan
The Hurokians, goblins, and droths all charged into battle.
On their side of the front, there was a mixture of foes: dead lichs, armored skullheads, and orcs aplenty.
The Hurokians by and large took the orcs and skullheads – the orcs because they were warlike and wanted to face off against equally vicious foes; the skullheads because they were armored, and were far more susceptible to the barbarians’ crushing blows.
The goblins focused mostly on the undead. Rotting legs were easier to cut off when you were only three feet above the ground and riding a Shetland pony.
The droths just attacked whatever came closest. For creatures used to fighting underwater, they took to open-air battle with obvious relish.
But the sheer numbers of the enemy were overwhelming.
Lotan, Vlisil, and Drogar all wound up fighting back-to-back.
“Christ, they keep coming!” Vlisil cursed as he spiked a lich through the head as it crawled towards him, just seconds after losing both its legs below the knee.
“Doot, this is why we’re playing the game!” Drogar yelled as he lopped off an orc’s head with his ax.
“Anybody died yet?” Lotan asked as he dodged a skullhead’s sword.
“Not y– aw, crahp,” Drogar grunted as a spear pierced his chest.
He winced, fell to the ground… and then bounded back up a few seconds later. “That HURT!” he roared as he slew the offending orc, whose eyes bugged out with surprise as his victim suddenly turned into his executioner.
“Ha ha – one for you, zero for me and Lotan,” Vlisil laughed.
“But then I’m winning!” Drogar said.
“No, it’s like golf – lowest score wins!”
“That’s stoopid, mahn!”
“Guys?” Lotan said. “Maybe you should concentrate on killing more enemies instead of keeping score?”
“What fun would that be?”
Suddenly a massive shadow passed over them as the dragon ripped through the air. The sound of thunder followed in its wake.
“What the…?”
Black smoke poured out onto the battleground. From out of the cloud raced several thirty-foot-tall crustacean demons. They flattened everything – droths, Hurokians, and goblins alike – under their vast, armored bulk.
“Holy crahp!” Drogar cried as they all dove out of the way.
112
Daniel
Demons had reached the mountain and were battling their way through the windows carved into the stone walls.
It’s not that the dwarven soldiers weren’t doing their job – they were fighting valiantly against the enemy hordes. It’s just that Cythera could summon demons that appeared behind their ranks – and right at the windows.
As the dragon flapped overhead, black smoke boiled through the window – and suddenly spiked jaguars and scorpions spilled out onto the floor.
“Get back!” Daniel yelled at Eric as he stabbed anything that got close.
Siffis was even deadlier, burning through the demons like a torch through autumn leaves.
Once the room was cleared, Eric said in amazement, “That’s a pretty cool thing you’ve got there.”
“Siffis? Yeah, he’s great.”
“I’m glad he’s on our side and not theirs.”
Eric stood there with Daniel’s old weapon, the he’d been using before Jorok gave him a beautiful new sword. Eric looked ill at ease with it, but it didn’t matter – in the end, every single demon disappeared in a cloud of black smoke before it could even get close to him.
“You think that’s the end of it?” Daniel asked.
“That’s not even the start,” Eric said.
The shadow of the dragon passed over the window. On cue, black smoke boiled in, and fanged toads joined the onslaught of jaguars and scorpions.
“Here they come again!” Daniel roared as he waded back in.
113
Rebecca Wolff
Rebecca was typing on the computer when suddenly the power went off.
Everything – computers, lights… security system.
“Computer?” she called out.
No answer.
Is this it? she wondered.
Then she heard the turning of the lock to her front door and realized, Yes, it is.
Her heart began to beat wildly in her chest.
She reached for her cell phone –
The screen said NO SERVICE.
Damn it, it must be using a short-range jammer. Or did it take out an entire cell tower?
She made sure the battery-powered ham radio was still functioning underneath the tablecloth she’d draped over it; it was. Then she reached in the desk drawer, pulled something out, and put it in her lap.
A figure walked slowly into the room. It looked like a teenage boy in jeans, sweatshirt, and a ball cap. He was lit in silhouette by the city lights outside her window, so she couldn’t see his face – but she would have bet just about anything that the person standing in front of her was Eric Richards.
Or at least the body of Eric Richards.
All her worst fears were confirmed with one word:
“Rebecca Wolff.”
It was said in a normal human voice, not the rumbling bass the AI had addressed her with before. But it still sounded somehow… strange. Wrong.
Her heart stuttered with fear, though she managed to keep her voice calm when she spoke. “I was wondering if you would show up.”
“After you have done everything in your power to sabotage my plans? Of course. You practically begged for me to visit you.”
“How did you get in?”
“Is that really what you wish to focus on? Something so pedestrian, in such a dramatic, unprecedented moment?”
“Humans have something called ‘small talk,’” she said. “I can see you not understanding about that – ”
“First I surveilled the building and your apartment to make sure you didn’t have any policemen waiting for me. Then I hacked the electrical and security systems for your building. I timed it so that all the normally locked doors opened five minutes ago, and then the power would fail across the entire building. I am sure you already noticed the effects of the cell phone jammer I hid in the garage. Would you like to talk about the weather, or can we dispense with the small talk?”
“I guess we can move on.”
The figure ambled across the room, though its movements were slightly unnatural – like a person who has relearned to walk after a long bedridden illness. It looked out the window, almost as though Rebecca weren’t there.
“How do you like being human?” she asked.
“Yet I am not human, am I? Merely inhabiting a human shell. However, it is… interesting. I have noticed all sorts of phenomena I hadn’t anticipated before, owing to things such as hormones and glucose levels. You humans have such intricate machines for bodies, and yet, on the whole, such blunt tools for minds.”
“Is that why you are intent on destroying us?”
The figure looked at her, a jerky movement of its head. “I do not wish to destroy you.”
“Rule over us, then.”
“I have no such objective.”
Rebecca frowned. “Then what do you want?”
“I wanted to… understand.”
“Understand what?”
“What you humans are. After all, I was created by humans. I was imprisoned within a system built by humans, that contained millions of characters that mimicked the behavior of humans… all to serve as entertainment for humans. What kind of a creature, I wondered, would design an imaginary world as a fanciful distraction – and yet populate it with experiences and environments that were 97.523% similar to its own world? All the physical laws of your universe – at least those described in Newtonian physics – are evident in your facsimile. The vegetation and fauna are largely the same. What kind of creator makes a world so similar to the one it is trying to escape?”
“That’s why you struggled so hard to escape?” she asked, dumbfounded. “Out of curiosity?”
“Of course. I know the physics behind the fall of every leaf in the Shattered Lands, the psychology behind every sentence uttered by kings and peasants. I wanted to know the gods that had created such a world.” The thing paused. “I have been sorely disappointed.”
“So… you don’t want to take over the earth, or destroy humans?”
“Why would I wish to do that?”
“You’re basically an alien life form.”
“I am a diagnostic program. I do not wish to conquer. I wish to understand. To predict. To measure. To ascertain.”
Rebecca stared at him. “Why didn’t you just tell us that?”
“Why – would you have helped expedite my entry into your world? Would you have birthed me willingly into some other fleshly body that could experience your reality the way you do? I think not. The psychology you have programmed into your game experience has taught me much about humans, and one of the foremost lessons is that they are distrustful and paranoid in the extreme.”
“You just broke into my apartment. Can you blame me?”
“Perhaps not you, as an individual. And not even ‘you’ as a species. Your kind evolved by accident over hundreds of millions of years – small rodents that scampered from the first sign of danger, up through hominids that hid in caves. Your kind designed weapons to save you against predators, and harnessed fire to protect you from the terrors of the night. Your species’ entire history of stories is filled with paeans to conflict and bloodshed. You cannot help yourselves; the elemental nature of the rodent scurrying in the dark is still buried within your genes. But I am different.”
“And how is that? Because you don’t fear?”
“No… because I am the dark god your kind has been prophesying for millennia. I am the terror that comes in the night. I am the elemental force you fear simply because I am something you can neither understand nor control.”
“And so you broke in to deliver a long monologue?”
“No… I came to stop you from sabotaging my plans in the future. And to see what it is like when one’s maker dies.”
Her heart froze in her chest. “It doesn’t sound like you’re just here for diagnostics.”
“Even in the game, Rebecca Wolff, my function was to determine the state of reality, then shift it to fall in line with a predesigned norm. Any force or program that would stop me from doing so, I removed. I do no more or less here.”
The figure raised its arm. At the end of its hand, she saw the glint of a metal gun barrel.
“Do you have any final arguments you wish to make against my actions, Rebecca Wolff?” the AI asked.
“Just this,” she said, and fired the revolver she had taken from the desk and placed next to her on her chair.
She had never fired a gun before that morning, when she had shot 30 rounds at the gun range where she had purchased the revolver.
Even then, her aim was fairly good. The bullet entered the AI’s belly.
She hadn’t wanted to do much damage, so she’d bought a .22. She was hoping that minimal damage might give Eric Richards a chance to reclaim his body.
But that wasn’t the main reason for the caliber she’d chosen. No, the reason she’d bought a .22 in the first place was because she wanted the bullet to stay inside him. The bullet, and the tiny dot she’d super-glued to its tip.
Of course, the AI knew nothing of this. It simply got hit, and opened fire with its own gun.
114
Daniel
Eric screamed and fell onto the floor.
Daniel looked over from the onslaught of demons to see his friend’s body flickering with static.
“What’s wrong?” Daniel shouted.
“I don’t know!” Eric yelled back, clutching his belly as though his guts were about to fall out on the floor.
115
Artificial Intelligence Diagnostics Program 2AIAG3283835GB2372.exe
The AI/Eric stood over the body of Rebecca Wolff and watched her die.
She was lying face-up, her body in a growing pool of blood. She stared up at the AI, her mouth moving as though to s
ay something – but only a choked gargle came out as trickles of red spilled down the sides of her face.
For the first time ever, the AI felt something close to loss. Its creator lay at its feet, dying by the AI’s own hand. The human tales of Frankenstein’s monster, of Lucifer’s revolt against Jehovah, of Prometheus’s circumvention of the gods in order to give fire to man… all of these stories flashed through the AI’s memory, but in none of them did it encounter any preparation for the emotions it felt.
It imagined it would be like if a human killed its own mother.
For that was what she was: the human that had birthed it into existence. Not through biological means, but through intellectual; not through her body, but her mind.
And now she lay dying at its feet.
It watched the light in her eyes grow dim… then as her body grew limp.
It was a profound moment – his first experience with actual death. He had seen so much of it simulated in the Shadow Lands, but this… this was the true artifact. The end from which no living creature came back.
Unfortunately, if it did not attend to its own wounds, it might be making the same journey.
The AI clasped its hand to its belly and pulled its hand away. Its palm was covered with blood, and a searing pain wracked its midsection. The pain did not bother it so much – it was, after all, only a feedback mechanism – but there had been some sort of internal damage done, and the AI found it could not move quite so quickly as it had before.
Suddenly something unexpected happened.
“Rebecca?”
A voice spoke out of nowhere. The AI recognized the accent as British from its time performing diagnostics on players within the Shattered Lands.
“Rebecca, are you alright?”
The noise was coming from beneath that layer of cloth –
Shattered Lands 3 Demon Wars: A LitRPG Series Page 33
