Within two minutes, the captain had been taken down. The party had taken few wounds overall, the worse one being when Karl was knocked out of his Stealth, and Tiana and Alyx had them put to rights within a few seconds once the battle was over.
~ ~ ~
Eddie and the combined groups went into the room the Elites had come out of. There was another door back there and he assumed it led out into the courtyard. When they'd approached the barracks they'd discovered that it was actually a set of four buildings, nearly identical, placed within a set of walls.
When they walked out into the courtyard, they heard the sounds of fighting coming from the other three buildings already.
“Guess a few of those other groups came along too,” Eddie said, then he shuddered, hearing a familiar cackle. “I know at least one of the others that are out here too, that's Coops' group. Hearing his wizard just gives me the chills, you know?”
Dominic nodded fervent agreement while the others stopped to listen for what Eddie was referring to. When they heard it, several sets of eyes widened and he got even more nods of agreement.
“Looks like the barracks here are covered,” Charles said. “Where to next?”
“Wolf pens or palace?” Eddie asked. “Did we identify any other buildings that might be good for us at our level? The barracks were a little low, surprisingly.”
“That just means there are other places for the higher levels, ones we didn't see or just haven't been to yet,” Charles replied. “How about the wolf pens though? Something like this, I wouldn't be surprised if whoever rules the town from the palace would be able to call in reinforcements if they haven't been destroyed already.”
“Yeah, so let's leave the palace for last then?” Eddie said.
“We can, but someone might beat us to it,” Charles replied.
Eddie shrugged.
“So be it. We're not the highest levels around so if we don't get there, hopefully someone higher level does.”
“Wolf pit then?” Charles asked. “Maybe take a look around and see if we find anything else out of the ordinary that might get summoned as adds? Assuming I'm correct, of course.”
“Wolf pit,” Eddie said.
The two groups headed out of the compound, the sounds of the continuing fights in the remaining barracks buildings fading as they left.
As they approached the Wolf pit they heard the howls of the wolves in question.
“Um, do we have any idea how many there are?” Eddie asked.
Charles shook his head.
“Sorry, nope. Let's go take a look.”
“Let's send Stalker and Karl to take look instead, shall we?” Eddie asked.
Charles nodded.
“Yes, good plan. Sorry, I get a bit carried away in the middle of adventures and fights sometimes.”
“Karl?” Eddie said, as Charles called on Stalker.
A few minutes and they were back.
“Maybe twenty or twenty-five wolves by themselves,” Karl said. “About ten wolf riders all saddled up and ready to go. Plus five goblins that seem to be the wolf tenders.”
“But,” Stalker added, “all twenty-five wolves that aren't ridden are on leads and in a small area.”
He eyed Tamshir and Dominic, raising his eyebrows.
“Ought to be easy for synergistic spell-casting from our wizards,” Stalker finished.
“Alright then,” Charles said. “Where will the riders come out?”
“A ramp comes right up this side, see the gate?” Stalker said, gesturing. “Either there or the one on the opposite side.”
“Okay then, we block this trail. If they come around we just go inside there and close the gate so they can't take us in a charge,” Charles said. “Otherwise, we deal with it as we go. Ready?”
They moved in, Tamshir beginning her cast as soon as she saw the bottom of the pit. A whirlwind of dust arose, encompassing the unridden wolves. As soon as the dust appeared, Dominic began his own spell. By the time he was done, the whirlwind was about ten feet high, and it rapidly burst into flames when Dominic's spell struck.
“I've got the one with the whip,” Becky said, gesturing with her snake staff.
Evidently the snake conjured was dependent on the users' level because the massive snake that appeared behind the goblin and started slithering down towards it was easily four or five times the size of the ones he'd seen her summon previously.
Eddie had his bow up and was waiting for the wolf riders to show up. Currently he didn't dare try to fire towards where he thought they were because there was a flaming whirlwind in the way. If the arrow weren't knocked off course it was sure to be burned up if he tried.
As soon as the riders started up the slope, he started firing. It looked like the gate had a remote opener since it started to swing wide as the wolf riders charged. Eddie was firing at the mounted goblins as opposed to the wolves themselves. Unlike the wolf riders among the orcs, who had used the orcish swords, these goblins had short lances. Short for a lance was still almost six feet though and Eddie didn't want them coming anywhere near his group, so he fired as rapidly as he could.
Ephram was firing along with him and it wasn't long before Tamshir and Dominic were slinging spells towards the riders as well. In the end, only three of the riders made it to the top, although seven of the wolves did. Charles stood firm in front of the riders, having crouched down and grounded his shield firmly. On one side Allie did the same, but Jern had stayed standing. Now there was a solid line of shields, all at approximately the same height, blocking the gate that the wolf riders were aiming for.
Each rider chose one tank. The one charging Charles went up and over, his lance acting like the pole in a pole vault when he struck the tank's shield. Eddie had seen the glow that flashed over Charles moments before impact and he assumed there was a skill at work there.
Allie was bowled over when the wolf rider hit her, but the goblin was also dismounted by the impact. Jern, on the other hand, simply stepped to the side and slammed the tip of the lance with his hammer, driving it into the ground. Unlike Charles, Jern was still on his feet, so he was already moving when his goblin ended up vaulting over his lance. When the goblin hit the ground, Jern took advantage of his target's stunned state to make sure it would never get up again.
The wolves were snapping and biting at anyone they could reach, and they'd been less constrained by the tanks, leaping this way and that to get around them. Eddie, sword in hand, found the fight against the wolves much simpler than his last one now that he'd raised his short swords skill higher. It helped that this time Lucky was as big as, or even bigger than, the wolves since Becky had enlarged the two pets again when the first one wore off.
The melee was brief, bloody, and decidedly in the pair of groups favor. The only surprise was when the fighting stopped and Eddie checked on everyone. Becky was now mounted on a wolf, the tack having already been on it from its previous rider. She grinned at him and gave him a wink.
“He just wanted a friend is all,” she said.
Eddie shook his head, knowing that she desperately wanted as many pets in game as she could get.
Good for her, it'll be a nice bonus above and beyond what we get for the raid, assuming we're successful, he thought.
Three of the five wolf tending goblins were dead, the other two having disappeared somewhere in the middle of the fight. The three that had gone down were all due to Becky's snake, which was now lying in the bottom of the pit, three distinct bulges showing in its body.
She rode down the ramp and dismissed the snake, dismounted, and bent over the bodies. They'd been looting right along but hadn't found anything anyone really wanted, until now.
Becky straightened with a “Whoop!” holding the whip that she'd found on one of the corpses.
“Awesome,” she called out. “Not really my style to whip the animals, but this whip will give me a +5 to Animal Training if I'm holding it. My Animal Friendship boosts that also, so this might let me train s
ome more pets.”
Eddie shook his head, happy that she'd found something she wanted, other than the wolf. He was already dreading Paul accusing him of somehow getting it for Becky or encouraging her in doing so.
Dominic spoke up, asking for a bit of rest time to regen his mana, so the entire group took a seat, keeping an eye out as they rested. They took fifteen minutes, Dominic explaining that he wasn't low, but that if they ran into something tough, he wanted his mana full. Tamshir nodded agreement to that when he said it.
While they sat, Eddie chatted with Charles.
“I'm most worried about shamans. They've got to have some, right? What would they have? A mage tower, a steam lodge, I don't even know what we should look for,” Eddie said.
Charles shrugged.
“I think we've got a couple of options,” he said. “We can go start working on the palace, or we can walk the streets looking for the more rare buildings and see what they're for. I can make an argument for either, but I think we ought to ask the group.”
After discussion, they decided that they had the time to walk around the town some. Sure that they'd end up in several fights, they adjusted their positioning so they had a tank in front, another in back, and one to the side. Against Eddie's wishes, Tiana took the second side since she had more health and better armor than Alyx.
Sure enough, as they moved through the town they came across a number of minor encounters, none taking more than a minute to resolve. Until the sound of a horn blasted out over the entire town. A moment later they saw a group of goblins moving at top speed. They couldn't intercept them since they were one street over, but it was obvious that they were headed to the palace.
“So,” Eddie said. “Does clearing these areas not help or what? I saw a couple of wolf riders in that group, along with another Elite Goblin Warrior and some goblins with the armor the troops from the barracks were wearing.”
“Maybe they just weren't all at the sites when we cleared them, maybe there are other barracks and wolf pits around,” Charles replied. “Or maybe you're right with your guess and it doesn't matter if we clean them out, they'll still show up as adds. I don't know.”
“I'm thinking we should just head for the palace then,” Eddie said. “No need to waste more time. It's not like we're getting lots of experience out here and no-one's close to leveling, so...”
They discussed it for a minute, then moved over to the road the goblins had used to get to the palace. It was a long boulevard that ran straight to the palace's front doors. Even from here they could see that there'd been a lot of fighting out front. Corpses, both goblin and player, were scattered about the open area in front of the palace. Even now, two more goblins, of the elite variety, stepped out of the palace and took up a position guarding the palace doors.
~ ~ ~
They took on their normal combat formation as they approached the palace. Charles stepped towards the doors first and one of the elite goblins held up a hand. He was wearing a full chainmail hauberk with a full helm, holding a longsword in one hand and a tower shield in the other. The other one was identically equipped.
“None shall pass,” he intoned.
“What?” Charles said.
“None shall pass,” the goblin repeated.
Charles shook his head.
“Let me guess, you move for no man?” he said.
The elite goblin simply stared at him.
“Alright, ranged will start. When they move out from the door, tanks surround them. We're three on two for the front line, so we've got the edge,” Charles said. “Go!”
Eddie was firing right off the bat. He held off on the special arrows for now, but between him and Ephram there were quite a few normal ones flying. Single target spells from Tamshir and Dominic were mixed in as well, and Tiana started casting also, tossing some minor speed buffs on the tanks.
Eddie paused an arrow briefly to Evaluate their opponents.
Elite Goblin Guard (male):
Type: Monster
Level: 15
Armor: 90
Health 578 (+/-)
Attack: 85
This Elite Goblin Guard has been assigned the duty of preventing adventurers from entering the palace.
“Elite Guards,” Eddie called out. “A little stronger all around from the captain we dropped earlier.”
That was when he started pulling out his special arrows. The additional health of the guards, along with their higher armor and attack meant they'd take longer to put down and they'd do more damage in the meanwhile, so he wanted to help put them down more quickly.
He started in with a Biting arrow, then followed it with Arcing arrows. He and Ephram were working on the same guard, and Eddie was sure it must have some resistances since if it hadn't it should've dropped by now. It took a while, almost twice as long as he thought it should, but it eventually dropped.
The tanks were taking a beating though and Tiana and Alyx were kept busy throwing out heals. The elite guards hit like a truck and were armored up like one as well. So when the first one dropped, Eddie was sure he heard a sigh of relief from one of the tanks on the front line.
The tanks changed position, surrounding the remaining guard, and from there the fight grew easier. Eddie switched back to his normal arrows since Charles was doing a very good job of temporarily stunning the remaining guard over and over. A couple of minutes later, the fight was over.
This time Charles was the first to kneel and loot.
“Aha!” he called out, stowing his current shield and strapping on the one he'd looted from the goblin. “A shield upgrade. Been a while since I had one as good as I did when we went for Rotthorpe.””
At those words Allie knelt down to the other corpse and a moment later was switching out her shield as well.
“Longsword anyone?” she asked.
“No thanks, I'll keep the one I got from the guard as a backup for my existing one, but I don't need a third,” Charles answered. “They aren't quite as good as the one Delgar made me, but close at least.”
“Did either of them have the full chainmail?” Tiana asked. “It might be an upgrade for the light mail I've got.”
Charles shook his head, but Allie drew out a chainmail hauberk and handed it over.
“Would you?” Tiana asked Eddie, handing him the new one and, after a moment to remove it, her old one.
“Oh yeah, this new one will give you about ten more armor, plus a point of strength,” Eddie said, handing them back.
Tiana shrugged into the full suit of chainmail.
“Anything else before we go in?” she asked.
Charles looked around and then shook his head when no-one objected.
“Alright, let's see what we've got in here,” Charles said.
~ ~ ~
Chapter Seven
Aaron's phone rang. He picked it up quickly, noting that it was Lydia.
“Now,” she said as soon as he'd acknowledged that he was on the line.
His hand came down on the command he'd typed out and left sitting on one monitor. Their program started, the first part of it hitting the damaged firewall in Greenshaw's head with an even larger overload of data then Loki's attack on it. As soon as the firewall dropped, they surged a variety of viruses into the cerebral computer, eating up all of its resources almost instantly.
Once the virus payload was delivered, the seven routers that Greenshaw's cerebral implant could access all dropped simultaneously leaving him with no connection. From there, Aaron watched. AI-L had been spiked when he hit the command, but now it dropped to below its normal level of activity. He watched carefully, his tracking program not finding any connections from it that didn't go directly to the game.
A ping from a message on one of his other monitors caught his attention.
Internal World Message – AI-F to Aaron Opman:
Aaron, Loki's splinters are draining me. You need to allocate those resources to them as soon as you can.
It took him a coupl
e of seconds to switch gears and move over to that program.
Internal World Message – Aaron Opman to AI-F:
On it, Freyja. I'll start with the script that can do some of them and then start assigning all the ones I need to do by hand after it runs.
Internal World Message – AI-F to Aaron Opman:
As soon as you can, please. I'm sure some of the game is suffering from degraded performance by this point.
Aaron's fingers flashed as he pulled up the script he'd made and executed it. It covered about the first half of Loki's splinters. Ones that didn't need very much at all. The other half required enough resources that they had to be allocated by hand, the game wouldn't allow any sort of script to do it.
He flashed through the file he'd made, cut and pasting the commands, and then typing in the access code that gave him permission to assign that resource. Over and over he repeated that process, working his way through the list as quickly as he could. He was sure that it didn't seem that quick to Freyja though. She didn't contact him again to distract him at least.
Lydia, on the other hand, called his phone again while he was in the middle of the process.
“Did it work?” she asked.
Aaron had the phone wedged between his shoulder and side of his face. He kept typing as he talked.
“I think so.”
He spared a glance for the screen he'd been tracking the progress of their program on.
“Don't see anything to indicate he made it out. Surprisingly, I don't even see anything indicating that he tried to make it out either,” Aaron said. “Gotta go though, I'm in that massive resource allocation phase that I have to do by hand.”
“Call me when you're done,” Lydia said.
“Will do.”
Ruler Light Online five Page 8
