Hunters of Arkhart- Battle Mage

by Vic Connor

  Altaf is going to a conference in a few weeks, a techie convention in Mumbai where he is to give a talk on behalf of his company. But they are all gamers, he tells her. “Every single one of them, from the interns right up to the CEOs… And everyone I speak to is asking the same thing: who is this guy?” He tells her the conference is a write-off; who the hell cares about the latest gadget, the new line of code, this permutation of some game or whatever, when Arkhart—the only game in town that really matters—is being owned by some anonymous, jumped-up battle mage who refuses to act like the low level he is.

  “I mean, the way he goes on, you would expect him to be a bloody level fifty or something,” Altaf exclaims. “He certainly fights like one!”

  He got together a couple of times with his colleagues to discuss the presentation, but they got no work done, he tells her. There are rumors that Aremos’ old warband are being sent invitation after invitation for chats and battles and quests—anything to get hold of them so the question can be posed to them: WHO IS AREMOS?

  “But his old teammates aren’t talking,” Altaf says. “They say they have parted ways with Aremos, but don’t want to give out his personal details. They won’t even give a hint of who he is. Imagine that!”

  Altaf calms down just long enough to ask Somera about school, about her classes, about her fellow students… But even then, he keeps much of the conversation rooted in how the school is reacting, how her fellow students are processing what has been going on.

  “Yeah, there were posters up all over today,” Somera tells him. “Everyone wants to know. But not even the Pixel or Lynch execs know who he is, apparently.”

  “Bullsh—” Altaf swears, before apologizing. “I’m just so het up,” he admits. “Everyone is. I mean, really—who the hell is this guy?”

  He doesn’t remember, she thinks: he helped her to design Aremos two years ago. He made the battle mage. While Altaf didn’t name him, he gave him his looks, though Aremos has changed a little in the intervening years. And, as much as she loves Altaf, she knows what he is like: It would never cross his mind that Aremos the Great could ever really be his little sister. Even though the mage’s name is just her own name written backwards.

  Somera smiles to herself. “Well,” she replies, “maybe we’ll find out who he is someday. Maybe someday soon.”

  “Fat chance,” Altaf laughs. They chat for a little while more and Altaf manages to calm down long enough to tell her that he has been home recently and everything is good there—“Same as ever, really.” He tells her about work and they chat about the future, about how she hopes to fit into the industry, about his own work in coding, and then he has to go.

  “None of my colleagues are bloody working, everyone is playing the bloody game. So I had better go and get it done.” He laughs. “Anyway, see you soon, sis. Take care.”

  Somera bids him farewell, closes Skype and logs into her rig straight away, her heart pounding. She will head for Sanguis first, so as to rescue Meredith’s soul before retrieving her body in Arkhart. She doesn’t know how it will work the other way around, and she has no desire to found out. To rescue a lifeless, soulless cadaver isn’t her idea of a good time. If she can destroy the demon in Arkhart and then infuse the body with life once more, she’ll be much happier.

  The opening screen flashes up and Somera puts on her headset, getting ready.

  Aremos awakens, refreshed after his long sleep. The mountains stand silent around him, and the sky above shows a ruddy sunset, blood-red and glowing faintly. The clearing he’s in is open and well lit, the surrounding forest, dark-looking, lies thick and brooding yet separate from his place of rest.

  The mountains are silent. As he stands and looks around, he senses something is wrong. The mountains should be alive with animals and creatures. The woodlands are usually so hectic with dark magic and warped, hideous creatures, he can hear the cacophony from a mile off. He shouldn’t be able to walk more than five minutes in any direction without coming across some sort of ill, some form of evil… And yet, the silence hangs oppressive. It presses in on him.

  And the sky, he thinks, looking up. It’s indeed blood red. There are great rents in the atmosphere, long gashes from the edges of which crimson pixels have begun to drop quite freely in a shower. The sky is cut, Aremos thinks: Sanguis is wounded. That’s no mere sunset… The sky itself has been damaged. It’s bleeding.

  He immediately withdraws into himself and views the map of Sanguis, bringing it up front and center in his vision. There is smoke everywhere, impromptu and deathly, vast battles raging all over. What in Arkhart’s name is going on? he wonders.

  He must find the dreadnought Nikë; he must find out what is happening.

  Aremos steps out of his portal at the foot of Nikë’s town on the vast plain of Flos Nocte. It’s usually creepily quiet here, in a land of death and decay. Yet as Aremos appears, chaos surrounds him. The sky above the mountains has been cut to ribbons: Here, it is burning. Incandescent flames appear to be licking up and over the very atmosphere itself. Pillars of fire stand along the horizon. They are Biblical whirlwinds, tornados of evil, sorcerous flame. They stride across the plains twenty miles away, burning and mutilating, cracking the very ground itself.

  Aremos equips his Second Sight and zooms in a little on the tornados, bringing them into clearer, closer view. As he watches, demons begin to manifest around the flaming pillars, dancing in their light. Winged monstrosities the size of dragons fly large against the burning sky. Smaller furies flap around them in great swarms, searching out targets, on the hunt for the mortals of the land.

  Other creatures walk the earth. Far off still, though closer than the tornados themselves, Aremos can see an army of monsters and trolls, hideously warped and disfigured, clearly in thrall to the demons. They stride toward the town, several miles off yet gaining ground. Mutilated, malformed beasts walk amongst them, as do their demonic leaders, themselves astride great beasts of nightmarish proportions.

  Aremos probes the magical presence of the area. As he’d suspected, it’s saturated with black magic and demonic power, making him feel slightly ill. He turns from the chaos and runs up into the town, wherein wild shades, terrified AI warriors and townsfolk, and human, player-led characters seem to be losing their minds, panicking at the unprecedented, out-of-control presence of darkness in their midst.

  Ignoring them as best he can, Aremos runs through them, swerving and ducking as they jabber away in their terror, until he reaches the charnel house in Crookbeak Lane. He sprints up to the high gates, barging through and running into the mausoleum itself. The unquiet dead inside seem to share the same fear as everyone else.

  “The end appears to have come, Aremos the Great,” Nikë greets him, turning to face the battle mage as Aremos collapses, out of breath, his eyes wide. Five other dreadnoughts are present, all of them gaunt and cowled. They stand in a circle around the deep pit of skulls, and above the pit a hologram plays out, displaying scenes from all over Arkhart. Everywhere, every map, every realm, is raging as demonic beasts materialize, shirking their bounds and attacking en masse.

  “What is it? What can we do?” Aremos asks, stuttering.

  “This is the one you told us about?” one of the other dreadnoughts asks. She’s a tall, slim woman with long, white hair and eyes of a bright, startling yellow. She turns her gaze onto Aremos and he feels his entire profile being digested, looked over and judged.

  “He is,” Nikë replies, nodding, smiling at Aremos. “I believe he will make a great regent in the coming fight.”

  “Well then,” a deep-voiced, androgynous-looking dreadnought says, stepping forward. “What are we waiting for?” The dreadnoughts all nod their agreement and Nikë approaches Aremos.

  “We need to talk,” Nikë tells him. Aremos looks over to the other dreadnoughts. All four are staring at him, fascination etched into their faces alongside their worry for the world they have built... But they are growing dim as Aremos is growing light, their v
oices are fading as Nikë waves his hand. The light enters Aremos’ own eyes and he blinks. He squints. Everything else turns to dark shadows. The whole mausoleum turns to darkness, blotting into one black mass until all Aremos can see is himself and Nikë, standing before him and dripping with power.

  There’s a wrench, and Aremos understands they’ve been suspended briefly in a subprogram.

  “We are outside the main game now,” Nikë explains. The power around him dies down and the darkness subsists, leaving nothing but an emptiness. There is a floor on which to stand, a floor of black pixels, and nothing else. “A little pocket all to ourselves.”

  “What has happened?” Aremos asks again. “What’s going on?”

  “Back out there?” The dreadnought shrugs. “A glitch in the system.”

  “A glitch?” Aremos echoes, disbelieving. “It looks like the apocalypse.”

  “Oh, yes.” Nikë nods. “It’s a rather large glitch. Those are all demons spawning from a program one of us made for an experiment, stored on a server, blocked from the main game. Bound in hell, if you like.”

  “But they broke out?”

  “Yes,” Nikë confirms. “She intended to create an even more difficult mod than Sanguis, but she made an unfortunate mistake in…” It seems to Aremos that Nikë was about to tell him a secret, a potentially explosive one, but stopped himself just short of it. “… in … the firewall code, and her program has attacked our world. These monsters are all progressively generated. There is no telling what they’re going to do, what each will look or play like, how much power they’ll wield… They will all be different, and they will keep coming until we can end it, randomly spawned by a self-repeating, cyclical program. For now, they’re killing everyone, and no one can escape them.”

  “Can you fix it?” asks Aremos.

  “Sort of…” Nikë says slowly.

  “Sort of?”

  “We built this world in order to bring about consequences,” Nikë reminds him. “You die here, you stay dead. If your controller, your spirit, wants to carry on, they’ll need to go on without you, building a new avatar. There’s no reset button, no return—whoever those demons kill will be erased from the game, whatever they wreck will stay that way.”

  “Can everyone not just exit?”

  “I’m afraid not. Or rather, they can, but their avatars will remain, inactive and vulnerable. They seem unable to save their progress and dematerialize, as is usual. The monsters have already cleared a fifth of the servers’ saved characters this way.

  “We’re fixing the issue,” Nikë adds calmly. “In this world, the dreadnoughts are active, recoding it to limit the damage. In the other world, our programmers and engineers are repairing the glitch. But we need time.”

  “How much time?” Aremos demands.

  “I don’t know,” Nikë admits. “Hours, maybe many hours… This is meticulous work, thousands of lines of code to verify and possibly rewrite. It’s hard to say.”

  “And in the meantime? Can you not just shelter everyone in a pocket like this one?” he asks, gesturing at the space they are standing in.

  “No.” Nikë shakes his head sadly. “It would take too long to set up, and there’s no guarantee that the monsters will not be able to access these pockets.”

  “Well, then.” Aremos sighs, setting himself with resolve to whatever is asked of him. “What are we to do?”

  Nikë smiles. “Well, that’s where you come in, Aremos.” He reaches out his hand and Aremos feels the familiar sensation of XP building in him. But it’s more, it’s like in Arkhart when he defeated the wyvern, so much XP that he nearly blacks out.

  It hits him all at once and he swells with power. He levels up, gaining one, two, three … seven levels in total, hitting thirty-nine in one go.

  “Now, the Nightmare Shade you stole will work wonders without killing you,” Nikë tells him, smiling with the knowledge of his protégé’s misdemeanors. “And you can buy new powers. Do so, equip yourself for a long battle. There’s much fighting ahead of you, tonight.”

  He waves a hand once more and a suit of Silverthread mail appears on a wooden mannequin. A red amulet hangs around the mannequin’s neck, pulsing with powerful wards, and circlets of black iron clasp its wrists, inscribed with red glowing runes. “This will keep you alive,” Nikë says. “The mail and the amulet will keep you safe from all but the harshest attacks. The circlets will increase the strength of your casting.” Then he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a ring—the ruby ring he wore as the vampire lord. “And this will keep your power levels up.” He passes the ring to Aremos. “Your magical power will replenish at five times the usual speed.

  “Use this all well,” he advises. “Go after the biggest monsters you can find. Distract the hordes, keep them around you and whomever you can rally around you. The power of all five dreadnoughts is with you tonight.”

  “And you?” Aremos asks. “What will you be doing?”

  “Repairing the fabric of reality.” Nikë smiles, before fading away.

  The dark bubble around Aremos fades and he passes from consciousness for a few seconds. The next thing he knows, he stands at the base of the hill outside of town, fully dressed in his new gear. The horde approaches, a mile or so away, a whole army of demonic beasts and their minions marching toward him across the open landscape. He’s all that stands before them and the town and his heart beats wildly in his chest.

  Aremos brings up his fact sheet, and takes a hard look at his much-improved characteristics:

  Level: 39

  Unallocated XP: 1274

  HP: 625 / 625

  Magical Power: 890 / 890

  Agility: 68

  Melee Weapon Skill: 42

  Ballistic Accuracy: 43

  Damage: 68

  Resistance: 49

  Morale: 85

  Core Skills: Battle mage

  “Well, then,” he says, and he uses the last few minutes before the battle is joined to go shopping.

  Chapter Twelve

  The host roars toward Aremos. This open plain surrounding Nikë’s town, the Flos Nocte, the midnight flowers, is named for the darkness of the burned sky and the black flowers which grow for miles in every direction. Aremos logs himself into the chatrooms, where panic is written in every window, every feed, and he writes a simple message onto the central board.

  “I am Aremos and my final stand is here, in the Flos Nocte,” he types. “Come, join me—we can see the night out together.”

  Having done so, he begins to put some combos in place, connecting spells with one another to cause maximum damage and dramatic effect: If I am to be the rallying point, may I blaze, he thinks. He’ll need to show the others in Sanguis that there is resistance indeed against these foul demons.

  He lines up five sequences, intending to release them shortly, and then he comes to the moment he has most feared. The horde is nearly upon him and he stands alone, facing them with the town to his back. No time to mope, though, he tells himself, and he throws his arms wide, gathering the white magic from the winds around him to his aid, gathering beast magic from the black flowers and ghastly landscape of the Flos Nocte. He even brings in some of his newly-learned telepathy and some fire magic he picked up as a beginner: The spells he casts come out intricate and powerful, and they take his full focus as he juggles the many strands of each.

  First, he throws his full magic bar worth of power into a Time Warp, combining it with elements of fire magic. The Staff of Adamant glows white hot and a barrier forms around Aremos, glowing with flame. He gestures, pushing outward, and the barrier explodes, sending a shockwave rippling across the battlefield.

  Those demons who resist the Time Warp come off badly. They push through, shrugging it off, only to be met with Aremos’ fire crackling all around them. White flame crawls over their skin, shredding the lesser beasts to the bone, injuring even some of the larger, mightier demons. The front five ranks of the charge are blasted with the blaze, a dozen or s
o dying on the spot. The rest, those who give in to the Time Warp, grow sluggish, moving at a quarter of their usual pace, outside of time as their kin burn around them.

  The charge is slowed as the affected ranks freeze; those behind either trample into them or are forced to break formation and surge around them. It stops them from crushing into Aremos, and buys him some time to wreak havoc before he’s met and overcome.

  Next, he aims the Staff of Adamant into the sky and releases three great bolts of flaming energy. They fly high like rockets before descending, falling slowly and hitting the rear ranks of the demonic horde. Erupting, each launches a dozen beasts into the air, wounding them badly. But Aremos isn’t finished. He reaches into the flame, extending his consciousness and telekinetically grasping the fire in his hand. He infuses the flames with yet more power, his magic bar filling as soon as it empties thanks to the ruby ring, and they grow into great pillars, almost as large as those flaming tornadoes on the horizon. They whirl and begin to move about, chewing through the ranks they pass over, throwing down the odd blazing fireball to explode against the ground. Aremos maintains his concentration within those pillars and fills them with white magic, replacing the regular fire with white flame, doing more and ever more damage.

  But as he opens his eyes, he sees that it is to no avail. He has killed nearly a hundred smaller demons in just a few seconds, but for each one that Aremos kills, more sprout up, generating constantly. And amongst their number, all but unscathed by his attacks, loom the bigger monsters, some as large as dragons.

  Five seconds to go until the Time Warp is over… Aremos rams the Staff of Adamant into the ground, channeling his fury once more, his desperation and his frustration, his sense of despair, all funneling through his staff and into the broken stone ground of the Flos Nocte itself. Those creepers reawaken, the ground begins to rumble, and a straight line rushes out from Aremos toward the center of the front rank, the earth splitting and opening as his power rushes out. Scores of demonic infantry fall into the maw, shrieking their own rage as the ground swallows them. More go down to the vines and roots that spill out of the maw, pulling them in, ripping them apart, impaling them and binding them for others to trample. At the same time, Aremos sends cascading waves of lightning and fire over them, uniting his combos to devastating effect for his enemy.