Finishing up, he gave us bags of gold then pulled out a rare class-based object from the Monster Hunter set for each of us. It was all boots: mine chainmail, Bomber’s plate, Infect’s leather, and cloth ones for the mages, Tissa’s satin and Crawler’s silk. The items were for level twenty, and I gave mine to Bomber for safekeeping.
Turning the reward over in his hands, Ed threw his unhappily in his bag and shouted in sincere anger:
“I will not walk around in these!”
* * *
The way the frogs croaked was somehow different. And the herons’ calls were plaintive, totally un-birdlike. But still I was surprised to encounter normal neutral animals and birds, not only the offspring of twisted game designers’ mind seeking to rip into my flesh. I even saw a realistic white stork at level twenty and its marker was also neutral, meaning it would only fight in defense.
A few hours prior, I had again used the “round trip” teleportation service, first with my skill, which randomly spat us out in the Gloomwood, then Crawler brought us all back to the hunters’ camp. The depths teleportation skill had finally gone up, and now I could pick between two possible destinations. And that reduced my chance of being taken to the wrong place by half. From there, as Tissa had once written to me, it came down to luck.
We were bashing our way through overgrown reeds and sedge, zigzagging from pack to pack, which I aggro’d with my arrows. We weren’t trying to hatch our pets, even Bomber. We just couldn’t afford to think about pets for the time being.
And so we walked into the very depths of the Mire, consuming Waterwalking Potions all the way. The stagnant fen squelched underfoot, its surface covered with duckweed, but our boots stayed dry. The potion was working exactly the way it was intended to.
“We definitely won’t see anyone here,” Infect said, panting as he ran. “It’s clear for miles around.”
“Agreed,” Bomber supported his friend, trailing behind the group. “Even high-levels don’t come out here...”
In the condensing darkness, I saw a familiar island in the distance, fringed with sparse patches of cattails and reeds.
“There’s a patch of dry land up ahead, we can take the mobs there!” I turned and shouted.
We had left mountains of enemy corpses behind us, bringing all the former Dementors up a level, but the most important thing still lay ahead. Although that depended how you looked at it. To us, in a lather and running on crumbs of energy, replenished by elixirs, it was actually behind, keeping us on our toes, nipping and biting at our heels when it got the chance.
By the time we were three miles from the hunters’ camp, the packs we encountered started aggro’ing exactly the same way as the millipedes of Little Gully. But we wanted to get further in before we did too much fighting, so we amassed a very long train of followers, all kinds of swamp life: extremely aggressive and nimble two-legged Bog Lizards, poison spitting Camouflage Toads, extremely bothersome Acid Dragonlings. And under our feet in the murky muck were Wineskin Leeches, familiar Swamp Bigheads and magical Angler Balls which glowed blue.
We ran up to the small island with a small hillock in the middle, the only dry land in the area, and climbed up to the top. I kept a bit lower down the slope to intercept the ravenous beasts. In front of me was a living river three hundred feet long and burbling with incoming monsters. But my only worry was that I simply wouldn’t be able to pull the whole seething mass onto me. The curse of the undead disregarded all laws of biology and anatomy the way it swallowed up damage, but it did obey the laws of physics. For example, if I had a couple tons of mobs on top of me, I would be... pinned down. Then only my special moves would work. The laws of physics didn’t apply to them.
And that was exactly what eventually happened. I got off around ten arrows before the mega-pack of mobs caught up to me. First, the Bog Lizards, something like thigh-high velociraptors, jumped onto me one after the next. From ten or fifteen steps out, they shot up into the air and flew forward feet-first, ready to tear me into crimson shreds with their long powerful claws. The inertia of the reptiles’ jump knocked me off my feet and I was unable to finish them off before the second wave reached me. Gobs of spit from the Camouflage Toads splatted onto me, and the dragonlings hit my decaying body with their acid breath while producing a sharp trill.
I made some room above me we a series of clobbering punches while, by some small wonder, lying down! Then I made a Stunning Kick and stood to my feet. The guys’ frames were displayed in color, but actually looking at them would mean losing time, so I just kept swinging.
The lizards went to respawn first. They had come in for close combat, so at first I was only fighting them. The water creatures couldn’t climb up on shore no matter how they tried; the toads and dragonlings were shooting from a distance as I wound up and slammed a Hammer into the elongated toothy snout of the last dinosaur, then picked up my bow.
Unfortunately, my field of vision was severely curtailed by the acidic liquid rising as steam all around me, and I was covered head to toe in the loogies of the stupid toads. They were waiting for me to kick the bucket and get overcooked to begin their feast but, if they had any brains, they would have realized long ago that their dinner was no longer coming.
“Scyth, help!”
Through the deafening cacophony of spit and breath, I heard Tissa squeal.
I loosed an arrow I already had aimed into the toothless maw of a stupid toad, which was just about to spit, then turned. A few lizards, unable to get to me, had come after Bomber, who was already on his last legs, despite the fact that Tissa was pouring all her heal into him. The warrior, hiding behind his shield, crashed his sword down on the one closest to him, but I was doubtful he was even doing fifty damage. Infect and Crawler, meanwhile, were already lying dead nearby.
An instant later, I jumped over but kept my distance, hoping my friends wouldn’t draw the attention of the ravenous horde of poison- and acid-spitting freaks. I pulled out my bow, not sparing plague energy and took one especially zealous lizard off Bomber, leaving the last, slightly wounded one for him to have fun and level his skills. The level-twenty mob would help Bomber improve his tank skills and Tissa her light magic attacks.
Then I got back to work, setting up a shooting gallery like they had at the carnival. First of all, I shot down the dragonlings, finally ridding myself of the vexing cloudy haze of acidic vapor. I tossed a gaze back and made sure Tissa had left battle mode and raised Ed and Malik. Then I got started on the toads.
By the time no more mobs remained above the water, all my clanmates were up to level fifteen, and I was just about seventeen. Tissa, long waiting for just this level, got the Hand of Vecna out of her bag. The blue wand, which we got off the Lich Hermit near the hut in the forest, was topped with a desiccated clenched fist with an extended middle finger. Gazing at it lovingly, she sang out:
“Brother finger, brother finger, where are you? Her I am, here I am! How are things?”[5] and shot up her own middle finger.
It was a funny sight. After a series of jokes, some funny and others less so, we quickly tallied our results.
“Should we call it a day?” Crawler asked, while the rest gathered loot as quickly as they could.
“No. Look there,” I pointed to a concentration of swamp creatures in the water.
Deep down and just under the surface, there were blustering leeches, bigheads and anglers, the deepest layer giving off a diffuse blue light.
“They have an average level of twenty. We could just pick them off.”
Ed mulled it over. Quickly estimating, he made a suggestion:
“Wouldn’t we be levelling too fast then? Maybe we should put it off for tomorrow?”
“I never thought I’d voluntarily refuse a free level, but I agree with Crawler,” Hung noted. “We’ve got a bit more than three weeks before the Arena. Now we know how fast we can level in the Mire and, of course, it’s more than impressive...”
“Ha! Impressive? I’d say it’s the cheapest
leveling cheat in the book of top leveling cheats!” Infect exclaimed. “Two levels in three hours! Even considering that the pace is going to fall, soon we’ll all be over twenty! Whoo!”
“Scyth,” Bomber called out. “Just so you know, there’s a crazy amount of cooking ingredients here. I’ll send you the names and you see what you can do with them. And just so you know, you can buy recipes at auc.”
“Sure, send ‘em over. But still I’m gonna pick off the stuff by the shore. Then there’s something I wanna show you...”
Sensibly, we ate our last portions of Roast Undead Rat Chitterlings, raising our skill growth speed by a thousand percent. There was no better situation for this food’s one-hour effect.
“Okay then, bigheads, leeches and balls! You’re all dead meat!” I dipped a toe into the swamp, disturbing the muck.
A second later, the water at the shore was frothing. A couple of leeches got stuck to my boot, so I took them out with a Hammer, just about panicking when I imagined that they might pull me under the muck like last time.
And from there it was a massacre. My archery skill reached level ten and I started dreaming that Conrad might have something with AoE to teach me: explosive arrows or something else for situations like this.
Shooting these creeps one by one was a long and dreary affair, but it was important. And not only because I was levelling myself and the guys. I was also nourishing a little puddle of protoplasm that glinted in the starlight. Showing the great Behemoth to the guys in this form would have been ridiculous.
After sorting through all the loot – around five greens, rare leather pants for Infect and just a mountain of culinary and alchemy ingredients – Tissa and the boys started helping me as best they could.
Ed and Tissa made the water boil with fireballs and beams of light. Malik did his best to exhaust his never-ending stock of throwing knives and Hung lazily popped off crossbow bolts. Their combat skills hadn’t dropped when their levels rolled back to ten, but they had never before had the chance to level them so long or so safely on such high-level mobs, so there were still skill-ups to be had.
We spent a lot of time at it. It was already far past midnight by the time the last flickering light in the thick murky water went out.
I had hit level eighteen, and my clanmates sixteen. They were just a smidgen away from their next as well. Crawler definitely would have, if he hadn’t died at the start and lost experience.
“Good thing these creatures are only in this part of the Mire,” he noted. “Otherwise all ranged classes would level like this.”
“Are we gonna loot them?” Bomber asked, pointing at the site of our slaughter.
“No, thanks,” I refused, imagining myself in the thick, cold swamp muck in the dark. “It’s seventy feet deep. I’m not gonna dive.”
“Ugh, too bad...” Infect sighed. “What if they dropped an epic? Damn, now I’ll be thinking about this so much I won’t be able to sleep!”
“Don’t despair, guys,” I said. “Especially you, Malik. This weekend, we can go into the Sarantapod Hive and loot some epics...”
“How?” Crawler shouted.
Intrigued, they started buzzing and stuck to me with more tenacity than the Bog Lizards, thought they didn’t get quite as close. Bomber said why:
“Scyth, maybe you should turn off the... I mean, I can see a rib and some muscle sticking out of your skin,” said Bomber, plugging his nose.
With a sniff, I winced and barely held back the urge to vomit. I was giving off the sweetish nauseating smell of rotting flesh. I deactivated the curse of the undead, shook off the dead flesh and, with a chuckle, looked at the guys, who were watching my whole body heal up with unfeigned interest. Tissa was the first to come to:
“Alex! Are we really gonna pay a grand to that fat bastard? To hell with him!”
“Well, maybe. For us, it would definitely pay off,” I declared. “But I also have another little idea. There’s something that needs checking and, if it works the way I think it will, we won’t have to pay or fight our way in.”
“Will you tell us?” she asked, showing clearly that her curiosity was a head above the rest.
“Of course. But not now. Now...” I took a few steps toward the puddle of protoplasm, turned and called them after me. “Let’s go. I want to show you something...”
“Greetings, apostle! Who have you brought for me?” Asked a voice in my head. “Allies?”
“Precisely, Sleeping one,” I answered mentally. “Can you show yourself? You need to make an impression, so let your imagination run wild!”
The puddle ran in circles, but only I noticed. The others hadn’t seen it yet, and that played into my hand. Let the appearance of the great and powerful Behemoth come as a surprise...
In complete silence, a wide column of dark mist shot up into the sky with silvery curls. Even I recoiled, it happened so suddenly. In the space of three heartbeats, the mist gathered into the gigantic figure of a god, and we were blown back in a circle several yards wide.
“A dragon!” Crawler whispered.
He tried to get up but something was holding him back.
“An angel!” Tissa said in rapture.
“An iblis!” Infect cried.
Bomber was the most original:
“Son of a bitch! What the crap is that thing?”
I then saw the same nightmarish monster as ever with vapor exuding from toothed trunks and outgrowths all over its body. But this time, it was six times taller than when we first met. I couldn’t imagine calling this either a dragon or an angel, but I already realized that Behemoth had created individualized projections of his avatar in everyone’s mind.
“I have someone I’d like you all to meet. Before you is Behemoth, the Sleeping God.”
Nobody answered me. Seemingly, he was in all their heads and mentally conversing with each of them.
“I cannot accept them as your followers, oh Sleeping one,” I lamented. “I converted some kobold outlaws and now there’s no more room.”
“That matters not,” the deity answered. “All believers are equally valuable to the Sleeping Gods whether they be slave or emperor. But it does matter that your companions are loyal to you. You are no longer alone, that’s what matters. Don’t you remember? There’s strength in unity!”
“I do remember, Sleeping one. What will happen if one of your followers dies? Will the others lose Unity power?”
“No, it can never diminish. As long as they have faith in the Sleeping Gods, our followers will be reborn and continue to power the force of Unity. But now I must bid you farewell... Supporting five avatars at once uses too much energy. Keep improving yourself. Help your friends and never say no to new converts. Even if they were once your enemies. Until we meet again, apostle...”
The voice faded, and the god dissolved into thin air. Frozen and concentrating, the faces of my classmates slowly came to life.
“But how?” Crawler suddenly dropped. “I’ll try, but...”
“What. Was. That?” Tissa asked, saying each word distinctly.
“One of the Sleeping Gods, as I said,” I called back. “What did he tell you?”
“He told me my fate is intertwined with Scyth’s, and that I should treat him as a brother,” Infect said. “As if I don’t already have enough brothers!”
Infect’s traditional Arab family was huge between his brothers, sisters and cousins of varying degrees, a fact that always made us jealous. What was more, to them, a first cousin was the same as a second, which was in turn the same as even a brother or sister. They were all just considered relatives, even a fourth cousin seven times removed.
“Becoming Malik’s brother! I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy! Over there, the older kids are always right, and the youngest are always playing lacky,” Bomber boomed. “The Sleeping one told me about the same, though. Our fates, lives, future, strength, unity... Basically we’ll have to keep hanging out with you after the sandbox, Sheppard! And don’t you go any
where without me now. God’s orders!”
“Did you realize you were seeing different projections?” I asked. “We won’t know his true form until we dedicate a temple to him...”
We spent a quarter hour recounting who saw what and what they all discussed with the deity. Then someone yawned and it spread. Hung was loudest of all, grumbling and snoring as he threw his mouth open wide. I even got him confused with Behemoth for a second.
“Let’s go. How about we go for level twenty tomorrow?” I suggested with a smile.
“I was thinking...” Ed answered. “I’m pretty confident about our levels for the Arena now. I don’t see any problems with gear either. We can always farm it and anything we don’t get, we can buy at auction. And if we really have to, we can sell the legendaries...”
Apostle of the Sleeping Gods Page 36
