by Aaron Jay
I dashed around the fighters that Pulling looked to have under control and went for the Mage. I focused on trying to interrupt his cast. I swung at his hands, which were making arcane gestures, and tried to slam a fist into his throat.
Enough had gone wrong with his casting under my not so gentle interruption that his spell failed spectacularly. A brilliant flash of light erupted from around the both of us as arcane power loosened the mage’s control. Wind blasted out in a ring, raising dust that further blinded all of us, friend and foe alike.
The mage was under some sort of stunned effect from the spell backlash, so even mostly blinded and out-leveled I was able to take him out. My sword hacked randomly into him through the flashes in my sight. That was good enough. I must have hit something vital because he grunted and collapsed. I waved away the game notices that sprang up.
I should have said all of us were blinded except Pulling. She had somehow managed to keep her vision. She grabbed the rangers and then me, and the four of us stumbled along further into the hills.
My eyes were still tearing up but the flashes of light and colored shapes that filled my field of view were disappearing. The others were doing even better. One of the rangers grabbed my free arm and together with Pulling they half dragged, half led me up the hillside. Our pace picked up.
It was an open question how long it would take the Eastmans to bring in reinforcements. If a high enough leveled mage or someone with a scroll could get a summons off, we could be neck high in Eastmans in minutes.
If Pulling’s people could win this skirmish or at least keep them from getting off any casts like that, we would have at least a few hours to lose ourselves up in the wilderness beyond Quartzite and the mines.
All we could do was put distance behind us and try to get far enough away so that I could once again play without interference.
The sounds of battle and spells exploding faded as we made our break into the wilds. My eyesight recovered enough that I could make better time without the help. I shook their hands off and we kept fleeing.
The hillside was covered in a mix of thicket, short brush, and low-slung trees. This dry hill country wasn’t great for hiding. We needed to keep to folds in the land because the trees weren’t tall enough to hide behind. I knew this because I could easily make out the pair of Eastman melee types waiting to capture me.
Our two rangers were in their element here. Shooting downhill in wild country with minimal cover against close combat types was their bread and butter. We didn’t even bother slowing down.
As glad as I was to see how easily these Eastmans were taken down, I realized that pretty soon I’d be the melee type being picked off by some Eastman archers. There was nothing for it but to make as much distance as we could before the Eastmans tracked us down.
The sound of my breath puffing in my ears dominated my attention. Pulling and the two rangers were higher level than me and were all specced heavily for agility. They set a pace that I found punishing. The rangers clearly had a number of skills that let them traverse wild terrain more easily.
I’m not complaining. I’m just pointing out that I was the weak link. Too bad I was the one the Eastmans were hunting. Otherwise, the other three could have ditched me and made better time.
The rangers took turns breaking trail and covering our six. I tried to follow in their exact steps. I noticed that rocks never shifted under the rangers’ feet. The underbrush always had more of a passage and fewer thorns where they passed.
The temptation to look backwards and see if any Eastmans were staring back from the ridgeline was overwhelming. But I needed to stay focused on making the best time I could. Looking back to find something I couldn’t do anything about was just a waste of energy that I needed for my legs and lungs.
We made it to the top of the next ridge. The younger of the two rangers, whose name I still didn’t know, turned back and knelt over our back-trail. I was thinking of him as Pretty Boy. He cupped his hands in front of his mouth. For half a minute he whispered into them and then spread his hands, releasing whatever words of power he had just captured.
A shimmer or perhaps a breeze of something spread from his hands back along the trail of our flight. It was subtle, but I could see that the evidence of our passage was being erased. Footprints were removed. The plants I had bruised as I pushed past them were healed and repaired. A bit of scree that I had dislodged was placed into its original, precarious balance.
“Get below the fucking ridge. If those assholes see us, that spell was fucking pointless,” said the ranger I decided to call Beard-o.
We crouched and hustled down into the next fold in the land.
“Trap the backtrail?’ said Pretty Boy.
“Don’t. The traps may slow pursuit, but will act as a set of bread crumbs,” ordered Pulling.
I would have asked for their names but making unnecessary noise seemed like a bad idea as we fled. Also, I didn’t have the breath to spare. We continued to flee, making the best time that I could manage.
As my stamina fell, my focus shrank. All I cared about was my next few steps. I tried to match my steps ever more perfectly to the ranger ahead of me. It was Pretty Boy at the moment.
I began to see why he stepped one place instead of another. He would avoid small dips in the hillside so he never gave up hard-won altitude. There was a grain to the way the underbrush grew. Whether it was caused by rain, wind or something else, there was a pattern to the scrub that drove his decisions about how to push past them.
For the next two hours we pushed along with the same routine. At the top of each rise, Pretty Boy or Beard-o would cast a spell to clear our tracks. I’d take these few moments to catch my breath and try to get my stamina back.
By the time the sun had fully set, we had made it through five hills and valleys.
My focus on all the woodscraft, which had started as just a game to distract myself from how hard it was to keep up with the rest of the group, was rewarded with a notice.
You have begun learning the skill:
Survival- 23% complete
Just like other training programs, having the Ranger’s example to learn from allowed me to start developing another skill. There was something darkly funny about the idea that I was 23% surviving. What was the other 77% of me doing? If I got to 100% survival, maybe I’d be able to avoid being captured by the horde of Eastmans Tasha was unleashing.
It was getting too dark to see. There was a half moon low over the horizon but it didn’t give enough light to make our way safely.
Moreover, nights held far more dangers in the form of monsters and random encounters. So far, the mobs we had passed were low enough level that they were happy to leave us in peace as we hurried by. There had been a couple of creatures we had to circle past, but not by huge distances.
At night the rules changed. The levels of the monsters rose and the game might unleash a random encounter on anyone not in a camp. Even setting a camp might not protect you from something stumbling across you while it was out looking for a midnight snack.
I was just about to enable my Eyes of the Hunter when Pretty Boy turned to me.
“The rest of us have low light abilities. Take this, you will need it,” he said, handing me a few scrolls of Darkvision.
I thought about correcting him about my capabilities, but I didn’t even know his name. I owed him and the rest of the people who had just stuck their thumbs in the Eastmans’ eyes on my behalf. If the Party was able to identify them, they were looking at a lot of payback. But I had learned my lesson from Jude. If I hadn’t told him I was playing in Quartzite I wouldn’t be in this mess. No more stupid naivete. All info would be divulged on a need-to-know basis.
“Thanks. What do you want for them?” I asked.
“Just take it,” he said.
“Look, I appreciate what you are doing for me. I’ll try to make good on what I owe you all after I win my bet, but there is no reason I can’t also pay for a scroll.”
“Miles. I’m worried that you don’t properly understand the odds against you. You have the Eastmans and all their allies after you. You got the GMs happy to stick the boot in. From what Pulling told me, Brady isn’t your fan. Are you in any position to stick on pride? You are going to need every copper you got before this is all over,” Pretty Boy said.
“When you are as screwed as I am all you have is… well, I wouldn’t call it pride. But I want to play on my own terms. So how much?”
Beard-o chimed in. He looked a bit pissed.
“Kid, take the goddamned scroll. I stuck my dick into this hornet’s nest to help you win. If you don’t beat that stuck up Eastman bitch of a princess, what did I just fuck myself for?”
“No. How much?” I asked Pretty Boy again.
“Stubborn idiot,” Beard-o said, but I could tell he liked that I didn’t just roll over and accept the gift.
Pretty Boy waited to see if I would come to my senses.
“Five hundred gold,” he said finally.
It was well below market price, so he was still trying to help me out, but not so low I could keep arguing about it under the circumstances. I gave him the money.
“I’m Miles Boone. You guys already knew that, of course. Thanks for all this,” I said.
“Rex Barin. You’re welcome,” said Pretty Boy, or as I now knew, Rex Barin. He gave me a big, white-toothed smile.
“Brian Vultan,” said Beard-o. “Been waiting most of my life for someone to kick the Party in the balls. I was beginning to think it would never happen.”
I was glad to know their names. It felt rude to be thinking of them with the nicknames I had dropped on them. In my defense, I had been fleeing for my life at the time.
All these people were willing to fight the Party and follow me out into the wilderness.
You never know how good you have it. Before, I had been struggling with the fear of a lifetime of slavery. Now I had a bunch of other people counting on me too. The prospect of screwing up other people’s lives gave me more anxiety than the trouble I had made for myself.
Was my bet really that big a deal? There was no way I was going to tell the people helping me that I didn’t think their sacrifices--even if I won--would change much. In the end, it didn’t matter if they did or not.
My dad told me about some guy whose name I can’t remember, who played as a monk. I do remember what he said though, “Here I stand. I can do no other.” Monks are always crazy. Who would play with such terrible equipment restrictions?
Anyway, I had no idea what would happen with my bet. Maybe my dad was smart enough to know. All I knew was that the Party system had become corrupt and I had to do as I had to. Who was I to tell these other players any different?
“Ok. Well, I can keep going now,” I said.
Pulling came out of stealth. She had been tailing a bit behind covering our back-trail.
“I counted three light sources behind us and off to the south. Those are just the groups who don’t have some other means of seeing at night,” she reported.
“How far back?” asked Beard-o, I mean Vultan.
“Not far enough. About the rise before last. We can’t assume they are the fastest group either.”
With that we took off. Night was our friend. The Eastman forces searching for us had to go slowly enough to make sure they didn’t miss us in the dark. We could scramble on at my best pace.
There was one other limiting factor to our speed. The number of mobs out in the dark had at least tripled. Not only that, under the moonlight the mobs had all gotten swole. Their levels had jumped up and so had their aggro radii with them.
Now and again, way back in the distance, I could hear the sound of what had to be Eastmans fighting mobs. The battles were scarily brief. I didn’t think it was because the monsters had wiped the Eastmans out in a flash. This kept me pushing my pace.
It was inevitable that at some point in the night our vigilance or our luck would fail us. The first I knew we were under attack was a leathery set of wings clubbing me about the head and a pair of teeth sinking into my left cheek.
“Giant bats,” hissed Barin.
“No spells with sound or light effects,” said Pulling.
Vultan didn’t bother to say anything. He just started working his bow. I did my best not to scream as I clawed the bat off my face. The thing wasn’t particularly strong but there were a bunch of them. I broke the wing of the one in my hands and then dropped and stomped on it. Two more swooped at me and raked me with their claws.
Pulling was quick enough that she could stab them as they came in on her. The two rangers seemed to have some sort of skill that made wild animals avoid targeting them.
This left me once again as the weak link, and the colony of bats was quick to grasp this point. They swarmed me. I dashed over to one of the short scrub trees that made up the bulk of these woods. Its twisted trunk and gnarled branches gave me a little protection. The bats could only come at me with any speed from the front. I turtled up and went all defense.
Slashes and punctures were driving my health down when Pulling came in and started blocking their attack from the front. The two rangers steadily thinned them out as they could.
This was the quietest combat I had ever been in. The bats looked like they shrieked as they were stabbed or skewered but their voices were above our audible range. I did my best to muffle my pain down to winces and grunts. Other than my suppressed misery, the battle only sounded like the thump and twang of bowstrings and the flutter of wings. Pulling was silent death.
One advantage of soloing was that I never had to feel self-conscious about my game. No one witnessed all my screw-ups. Of course, I had no one to share triumphs with either.
Now, I was in a group where I was the least capable. Not because I was a worse player. In the end, levels will tell. I’d have felt embarrassed if I wasn’t distracted by the swarm of bats.
I was down to about a third of my hit points when we finally cleared the colony.
I sat on the ground wiped out.
Pulling gave a short, sharp hiss. Once she had the rangers’ attention, she first pointed to Vultan and then to her eyes. Finally, she marked out an arc of 180 degrees. He took off into the surrounding darkness.
She then sent Barin out with the same gestures to cover the rest of the area.
I just sat there and did my best to stop bleeding.
In about fifteen minutes the two rangers came back. Barin whispered, “Clear.” Vultan’s hushed report said a group of Eastmans were heading vaguely toward our location but he didn’t think they had been drawn by the sound of our fight. It was just our bad luck.
The three threw the corpses of the bats into a thicket. I started to loot them but Vultan stopped me. We couldn’t spare the time or the mess.
Then they did their trick to clear tracks. This time the signs of the battle were more than the spell could handle. The ground was disturbed and blood--mine and the bats’--was spattered here and there. If the Eastmans’ spot check went well, they would know we had been here. After that they could concentrate their searches in a much smaller area. Those bats might get their revenge on us if they clued the Eastmans in about where to look.
“As good as it will fucking get,” said Vultan.
“We better keep moving. Miles, you able to keep going?” asked Pulling.
“Sure,” I said. It wasn’t exactly a lie, but standing brought a rush of dizziness.
We made off again into the night. My pace was slower than before. Thank goodness for game recovery. I would have healed faster sitting, but even moving at my best clip my wounds healed and the dizziness which plagued me faded.
By the time the sky to the east lightened with the dawn, our pace was back to my previous best.
“So, any chance you can tell us the fucking plan now, Patty?” asked Vultan.
Vultan cursing like a sailor didn’t bother Pulling. But she gritted her teeth when he called her Patty. I’d have to remembe
r that for some time when I wanted to get under her skin.
She thought about it for a minute.
“The more time goes by without the Eastmans knowing where Miles is, the bigger the area grows that they need to search for him,” began Pulling.
“They have the members of wannabes to search a pretty fucking huge area,” said Vultan.
“Just stay on your toes. In about two days we should be all good,” said Pulling.
The two rangers exchanged glances as they tried to figure out what the plan was.
“That’s all you are going to tell us about the plan?” asked Barin.
“That is all you need to know,” reminded Pulling.
“What if you get fucking ganked? What fucking then?” said Vultan.
“Then do what Boone tells you to do.”
“And if he dies?”
“Well, then the whole operation is screwed, isn’t it?” she sighed.
“It doesn’t have to be. Why don’t we all reset our bind points to here? If something happens, we can rendezvous back here and try again at whatever it is you have planned for tomorrow,” suggested Barin.
“You really ok with that Barin? Right now, if you get into it with the Eastmans and die, you are out. You bind here and you can only get away from them the hard way.”
“In for a penny, in for a pound,” he replied.
We looked at Vultan. He stared back.
“Fuck that,” he said flatly.
I laughed. Frankly, Vultan made a lot more sense to me than Barin did.
Pulling and I exchanged a look.
“Not as big a deal for me. I’m still a GM. The Eastmans are going to think twice before fucking with one of us. The higher ups can’t throw me to the Eastmans without getting some blowback. The only people the GMs aren’t supposed to screw for the Party are us fellow GMs. I’m in.”
I thought it over, but in the end rejected the idea.
