The Siege

by Jakob Tanner

  Something flickered in the distance. It felt like a ghost had appeared in front of us. I lifted my hand to point at the specter, but my hand barely budged. A message flickered in my HUD.

  Slow (Debuff): Slow and steady wins the race. Except when you’re fighting to the death. Movement speed decreased by 50% (Duration: 1 minute).

  What the heck? Time magic?

  A message in party chat popped up in my HUD. Even if pronouncing syllables took a jaw-wrenchingly outrageous amount of time via our slow-mo avatars, since we were in a game, complaining at normal-speed was still possible via the in-game chat.

  Will: This is serious time magic you guys. Someone appeared, killed the shadow hunters, without us even clocking it. Such is the power of a chronomancer. I only know one person powerful enough to do something like that.

  Serena: Who?

  Will didn’t even need to answer as the specter appeared in front of us, meters away on the Dead Plains. The man had a silvery ghost-like presence. It reminded me of Betina when she visited my dreams. He was a hulking man with broad shoulders. He had long blonde hair and a gruff beard and goatee. He wore rimless glasses. I recognized him straightaway. Other than the fact he was wearing badass chronomancer armor, he looked like he had in magazines I’d collected as kid.

  Konrad Takeshimi was here to kill us.

  The creator of the very game we were playing.

  14

  The party messages in my HUD stacked one after another.

  Serena: Oh boy.

  Jackson: We’re f*#ked.

  Kari: I don’t like the looks of this guy.

  Shade: Time magic, huh? So, like, you make one night at the pub last for eternity? Sounds alright, doesn’t it?

  Will: There’s no way we’re going to beat him here. We need to figure out how to stall and escape him.

  Clay: Okay step one, remove this goddamn slow debuff. Kari!

  I gestured my arms at a snail’s pace and eventually triggered status cure. It was mind-numbing watching my body move at such a sluggish pace. The relief as my arms and body swayed and moved as quickly as my thoughts was incredible. Within seconds I cast status cure on Serena, then Shade.

  “Of course,” said Shade. “You heal HER first.”

  “She’s our tank, moron,” I shouted at him.

  Jackson spun across the battlefield with a twirling karate kick. Yet there was no one in the air in front of him. He shuffled his head back and forth in confusion. “I swear he was just here.”

  The specter flickered across the battlefield, like he was electric blinking constantly. There was no way to target or hit him with an attack.

  “There he is,” shouted Serena, charge striking towards him. He was gone by the time she arrived. “What the—“

  Serena froze.

  I threw out a status cure spell towards her. The curative diamonds splashed into her body but didn’t do anything.

  “Wait, what?”

  Her skin went pale and then gray and then her whole body turned into stone. She had turned into a statue.

  I checked the game logs in my HUD to see what had been cast on her.

  Konrad Takeshimi triggers Petrify on Serena.

  “Damn,” I said. “I have status cure leveled to eleven and it can’t cure this freaking petrify move.”

  “Calm down Clay,” said Will, looking around. “This is how chronomancers win their fights. They cause chaos within the ranks of their enemies.”

  Jackson gasped like he’d taken the last breath of air he was ever going to take. The curse rippled up his body, hardening his skin into gray concrete.

  “Wow, looks like everyone is getting pretty stoned,” said Shade. “Get it? Huh, cause like—“

  Shade was suspended in animation. His tail was no longer moving. His skin and fur turned to gray stone concrete. A sculpture to be put in a museum.

  “Will, he’s knocking us off one by one, what are we going to do?”

  Will closed his eyes.

  “Will!”

  My older brother spoke calmly. “He’s given up on petrifying us. The cast time is loading on the move. Plus, there’s not enough of us now to stop him from doing whatever he likes. He must be casting scourge. The very move we saw him take out the shadow hunters with. This is bad.”

  Crap, crap, crap. If Konrad took us all out here, it means we’d respawn in three hours, most likely with a ton of Arethkarian soldiers and shadow wraiths surrounding us, ready to imprison and equip us with enslavement bracelets. Our hope of saving Illyria would be over.

  “Kari, Clay, hurry away,” said Will, calmly. “I have one move to stop him.”

  “But—“ I said.

  “Hurry back,” said Will. “I’m not worried because I know you’re behind me and have my back if my plan turns out to be idiotic.”

  I nodded my head and grabbed Kari by the arm. We dashed away. I really didn’t want blood to burst out my eyes like what happened to those shadow hunters.

  We ran away from the battle and turned around to see a huge red glow form all around Will. The blood on the ground from the shadow hunters and ourselves glowed bright in the cold gray darkness of the day. The flaming blood energy rose like evaporated dew drops forming a giant orb above Will’s head.

  Will triggers Demon Fire Meteor

  Holy crap. The move sounded as intense as it looked.

  Will swished his hands and the giant meteor of blood magic flew towards the ground. Konrad flickered into existence on the battlefield right as the giant ball of warlock energy smashed into him.

  This was it. Our last hope.

  15

  Konrad Takeshimi shattered into a million particles of ash and disappeared.

  Will turned towards us, the sheer demonic energy flowing off his back.

  Holy crap. My big bro was a badass. A throb of familial pride swelled up inside me along with a pang of jealously. I wanted to have such power myself.

  Kari and I ran back to Will to see if he was okay.

  “Did you kill him?” I said. I laughed. “Did you kill Konrad—freaking—Takeshimi.”

  Will walked away from the bloody battlefield and shook his head.

  “No. The great Konrad Takeshimi, creator of this godforsaken video game, would not be so easy to defeat.”

  “Wait, what? What do you mean you didn’t kill him?” I gasped. “He shattered into a million pieces. He looks pretty dead to me.”

  “He was too weak,” said Will. His words made me feel sick. Too weak!? He almost wiped out our entire party. “It wouldn’t be so easy to kill him in person. To unlock chronomancer, you need to unlock illusionist first. I merely destroyed one of his clones. An illusion of himself.”

  “No,” I sighed. “You’re kidding me.”

  “Nope,” said Will. “And if I was, he’d still respawn in three hours with knowledge of our whereabouts and a good guess as to where we’re going.”

  Crap. I turned over and looked at the battlefield and shook my head. Our three party members were still petrified. Frozen into stone statues. I ran up to Serena and lifted my arm to her face, touching her stone cheek. She was completely lifeless.

  “Kari,” I said. “Do you have a spell to cure this?”

  The fox-girl shook her head.

  “Will,” I said. “Do you know how to heal petrification?”

  “Petrified isn’t a normal debuff. Most status curing spells don’t cover it. How high is your status cure leveled?”

  “Level eleven. It’s my highest leveled skill.”

  “Wow and at level eleven it heals enslavement and not petrify?”

  “I guess it makes sense,” said Kari. “If petrify is a third-tier class spell, it would be kind of BS if the earliest debuff cure spell healed it with ease. Speaking from a game balance standpoint.”

  “Screw game balance,” I said. “What kind of move is this!?”

  Serena’s stone eyes stared at me. Serena would know how to heal petrify. She would have read it in one of her library
books.

  “We need to consider what we’re going to do next,” said Will. “Konrad’s going to send others after us. We need to move.”

  “What about the rest of the team?” asked Kari.

  Will opened his mouth and I cut him off. “We’re not leaving our party behind. That’s final. We’re figuring out a cure to petrify. If it means leveling our status cure spells to level 20, I’ll do it. I’m not joking.”

  “You’d sacrifice the entire mission for your three friends?” said Will. “You’d disregard all the promises you made to the citizens of Crystal Port?”

  “What, you’re calling me an asshole for caring about my friends?”

  “I’m not saying anything,” said Will. “I’m questioning the way you’re thinking. You’re thinking like Clay Hopewell, brilliant friend to Shade, Serena, and Jackson, but you’re not thinking like Clay Hopewell, leader of the Laergardian army, Solmini Mercenary Corp, and overseer of Crystal Port and all its citizens.”

  I looked away from Will. I didn’t like what he was suggesting. I sat cross-legged on the ground to think.

  “It’s like that old philosophical conundrum,” said Will, droning on in the background as I searched the A.K.O. wiki for any advice on how to heal petrify. “You’re a conductor on a speeding train and you’re about to run over three people tied to the tracks. You can change the track you turn on, but on the other track is also a person tied to the train. So what do you do? Do you change tracks?”

  Kari scratched her head. “I don’t get how that fits. In both situations you’re killing somebody, where in both our situations we’re saving people.”

  “Maybe it doesn’t fit perfectly,” said Will. “The point is this: what do you do when you’re presented with a problem with no easy choices? Or the only options are bad options?”

  I zoned Will and Kari out and then sighed in frustration. “I’ve scoured the A.K.O. wiki and I can’t find anything here on how to cure petrify.”

  “It’s not available to you because you haven’t studied enough healing magic or the history of medicine in Illyria,” said Kari.

  “You have, can you find anything?”

  “I’ve found an entry on petrify. It tells me we need to make the Stone Skin Antidote to cure it, but—“

  “Fantastic!” I said, leaping to my feet. “What’s the recipe?”

  “Uhh, it doesn’t say,” said Kari, scratching the back of her fox ear. “I guess I haven’t studied enough either.”

  “Gah,” I said. “I have one last idea.”

  I opened up my HUD and sent a message to an old friend of ours. Theobold, the court wizard in the capital of Laergard, Land’s Shield. I sent him a message, explaining the situation. He got back to me within minutes.

  Personal Message: Stone Skin Antidote

  You only ever call when you need something, huh? Petrify, you say? Yikes. You really are leveling up and getting into the wide world of high class bullshit in this game. So as you said, you need the Stone Skin Antidote. The recipe is fairly simple: boulder dust (x2), elixir of life (x1), pebbles (x3). The first and last items are easy to source. It’s the elixir of life that will give you trouble. The closest place you’d be able to find it will be in the northwestern woods near Crystal Port. A creature that spawns there will drop it for you. They’re called unicorn-bats and please, don’t ask. It was a obviously a slow day in the concept design department. Get off my back.

  –Theobold

  “Boom,” I said. “Theobold sent the recipe.”

  “And?” said Will, skeptically.

  “It’s easy to make, except for one ingredient that only drops in a forest northwest of Crystal Port.”

  “We’re two days travel from Crystal Port,” said Kari, worried.

  “Ah, but let’s not forget we live in a video game and not middle-earth my love-of-walking friends,” I said. “I can fast-travel back to Crystal Port since we’ve already been there before. Then I can hop on Gryph and fly to the forest. Get the elixir of life and then fast travel back here to the Dead Plains. Let’s say, an hour tops.”

  “Sixty minutes is all we can afford,” said Will.

  “Alright, while I go hunting, you guys work on finding pebbles and shaving off boulder dust from some of the rocks around here. And when I say you guys, I mean, you, Will. Kari—you get your cauldron and alchemic materials ready to go, so we can cook this stuff up ASAP.”

  “Alright,” I said, opening up the fast-teleport screen on my HUD. “See you guys in an hour. Message me if you need me. Alright, bye.”

  I clicked fast-teleport in my HUD and felt my body disintegrate from the Dead Plains.

  I had one hour.

  16

  I reemerged in the keep of Crystal Port to yelling and screaming.

  “Guys, I have enough problems as it is,” bellowed Raylene. “I said you guys can do what you want, but leave me out of it!” Raylene turned around and shrieked at the sight of me.

  I felt like I’d teleported into a room and conversation, I really wasn’t supposed to be in. Standing behind Raylene were two soldiers who I’d met back at the Encampment, Raylene’s home base in Solmini. Their names were Fred and Ned and they were two of the most fascinating people in A.K.O. mainly because they were able to log-out of the game. Their IRL bodies were underground in a bomb shelter in Oklahoma.

  “Uhh, Clay,” said Raylene, her eyebrows furrowing quizzically. “What are you doing here? Has something happened to Jackson? Don’t tell me you’re here to let me know he’s gone?”

  I paused. Jackson was a lifeless statue right now. Raylene would kill me if she heard something bad had happened to him. I cleared my throat. “Shade got himself into a bit of a pickle and I need to do a quick fetch quest to sort it out. Otherwise we’re fine.”

  Raylene took a long sigh. “Good. Don’t ask me how things are going here. I promise I have it under control.”

  “Wait, what do you—”

  “Hey Clay!” said Fred and Ned in unison. “We got some pretty exciting news for you. Stuff we’ve been working on in the lab.”

  “When you say lab, are you referring to your claustrophobic bomb shelter you wish you didn’t have to log-out to every night?”

  “Yeah,” said Ned. “Our lab!”

  “Okay, sure, whatever,” I said. “What about it?”

  “Well, we’ve been tinkering with some of the stuff we got down here, and well, we wouldn’t want to test it on anybody yet—in fact, we’re years away from it, but it’s something to consider for the future.”

  “Okay, spit it out,” I said. “What is it?”

  “It’s absolute insanity is what it is,” chimed Raylene.

  “We think there is a way for players such as yourself to log-out again.”

  “Um,” I said. “Last time I checked I was dead, or my body was cryogenically frozen to stop a deadly virus capable of turning me into a flesh-eating zombie if I were ever to unfreeze myself. So I don’t see myself logging-out any time soon. In fact, probably never.”

  “We can’t speak for your body,” said Fred. “But what about a reverse cognitive upload into another body?”

  “What like put my consciousness into another human being? Sounds disastrous, no?”

  “Agreed,” said Ned. “But what about a droid? The technology is already super advanced. How different would the process of uploading your mind to a video game be from uploading your mind into the body of an android?”

  I considered the unicorn-bats I had to go hunt. “Uhh, I’m really not sure.”

  “I guess the biggest concern,” said Fred. “Is how many transfers can a single consciousness take? Like, would you lose more and more pieces of yourself every time you cognitively uploaded yourself?”

  “True,” said Ned, getting excited. “The players faced potential death when they first uploaded themselves into the game. The same risks exist for reversing the process.”

  “Guys,” I said. “This is all super interesting, but I got other
things to focus on, so I’m gonna go, but get back to me when this project is done.”

  I waved goodbye to the trio and stepped out of the keep. I circled to the back. Across the sky ocean, there was a torrent of swirling clouds and patches of lightning in the distance. I summoned Gryph and climbed on his back.

  Honestly, Clay, I’m not some sort of taxi cab service you can summon whenever you please.

  Forgive me, Gryph. I thought you’d be interested. Have you ever tasted unicorn-bats?

  The giant bird stuck its tongue out and licked his beak.

  Have I? They’re incredibly delicious!

  Great. Onward to the northwestern woods!

  Gryph did a quick u-turn over the coast of the cloud ocean and around Crystal Port, avoiding any onlookers.

  We flew over fields and valleys until below us was a thick blanket of green trees. The northwestern woods. Perfect.

  Any idea where unicorn-bats live? Are they like normal bats, so in caves tucked away in the forest?

  Nah, unicorn-bats are more like birds. They hang out in the trees. There, I can smell em.

  It was Gryph’s keen sense of smell alerting him to the tasty treats below.

  Okay, remember, you can eat the unicorn-bats only after I extract the elixir of life from them, got it?

  Hrmph. Sure.

  Alright, dive in!

  Gryph descended towards the woods. I held onto his feather and conjured my ice sword in the other hand. The trees got closer and closer until pow! Scratch! Thrush! The branches and leaves scratched against my skin and we were on the forest floor. Gryph was turning his head left and right. No unicorn-bats were in sight. Low-level mushroom monsters were waddling around, but they weren’t worth our time.

  They went that way, said Gryph.

  He jumped back into the clouds and then swooped back into the forest only to find nothing again.