by Pavel Kornev
I shrank back. “What’s that all about? I won’t have to fight the Lord of Decay! I’m neutral to him!”
The Lord High Steward laughed. “Just show us what you can do!”
This was just a game for them. Only a game. I had no choice but to accept their rules.
“One moment,” I turned to the sorcerers. “Get on with it.”
At first, nothing happened. Then I felt the energy coursing from them. My power reading soared. I stealthed up, not bothering to warn them. Although it came as an unpleasant surprise to the Duke, he promptly reacted, cracking his fiery whip.
Leap!
The spell threw me over the burning lash. I gave him a slap on the shoulder, the brief tap heating my gauntlet up so much that it burned my fingers.
I wouldn’t want to get into a clinch with this fire-breathing dude! I recoiled, uncertain of how he might react to having lost so quickly.
He took another swing with his fiery lash — which blinked and expired. Not for very long, unfortunately. His magic energy stocks which had been depleted by my spell were already starting to regenerate. Soon, the Duke’s magic power was completely restored.
“You didn’t block me!” he exclaimed, sounding disappointed.
“I didn’t say I would. I said I’d siphon off your energy, and that’s what I did.”
“You have any idea of the Lord of Decay’s energy regeneration rate?”
I made a helpless gesture. “Well, if you don’t need me…”
“Enough!” the Lord High Steward said. “It’s still better than nothing. That might give us a chance to smoke the bastard before his energy regenerates enough for him to retaliate.”
“As you say,” the Duke grumbled. “I’m washing my hands of the whole thing.”
Ignoring his words, the Lord High Steward turned back to me. “We’ll need you tomorrow midday game time by the Tower of Decay. Don’t you dare be late.”
“How do I get there?”
He flung me a portal scroll. “Come alone. Any questions?”
I smirked. “Not really.”
I cast Bone Path and dropped straight into a grave that opened up under my feet.
But instead of the bone forest, I found myself standing in pitch blackness. I was hovering in a boundless sea of gloom.
A chuckle came from everywhere and nowhere at once.
“So you decided to cheat the system?” a smarmy voice asked.
Had I been alive, I would have broken out in a sweat. But even so, I struggled to maintain my cool.
“What are you on about?” I shouted into the darkness. “I play as I can!”
The gloom thickened, forming an even darker face. “Do you really think that the XP you’ll get for killing the Lord of Decay will be enough to bring you up to level 100?” the Angel of Darkness asked.
A wave of relief swept over me. Still, I feigned blatant dissatisfaction. “You think it’s not gonna be enough?”
The patron angel of the Spawn of Darkness laughed. “Tomorrow, the clan is sending at least a couple of hundred of their best warriors into battle. Per head, there won’t be that much XP if you spread it out.”
“Survivors will get slightly more than the others,” I said.
“Exactly my point,” the angel said, drawing closer to me. “What are you up to?”
Now it was my turn to laugh. “Do you really think I’m going to put them under fire? Don’t get me wrong, I’d have loved to, provided it served some purpose. But how do you expect me to smoke the Lord of Decay on my own? Even without his magic, he’s still a force to be reckoned with. Somehow I don’t think many will survive the fight. Which means that my share of XP might be quite significant.”
Darkness thickened, forming the rest of his body. The Angel transfixed me with his glare. “Any overly accelerated leveling at this stage is premature,” he said doggedly. “You haven’t been in the game long enough.”
That’s when I realized that I would be killed. The moment I’d stripped the Lord of Decay of his energy, I’d be dead meat.
Provided they had enough time. Of which I wasn’t at all sure.
“Bullshit!” I exploded. “I’ve been hanging around here for the last two months!”
“That’s not enough.”
“All right,” I gasped, calming down a little. “Very well. Just remember that I can’t die.”
“Why not?” the Angel asked.
“Because some bastards stole my skull. If I die, I’ll go straight to Inferno and respawn there time after time, non-stop. Is that clear enough for you?”
With a chuckle, the Angel drew away from me. “Sounds like a good test of one’s mental stability.”
“You think it does?” I roared. “So what chances do you think I have of passing it? How about we think about that for a change? What’s gonna happen to your freakin’ project if I lose my marbles? Because I know I will! Try to put yourself in my shoes!”
My furious rebuke seemed to have had some kind of effect. The Angel frowned, hesitating.
“Tell me,” he finally demanded. “I need to know everything right from the start.”
Time was one thing I had plenty of, so I proceeded to give him a very detailed account of Garth’s (a.k.a. Barth’s) and my past.
He listened to me, then rubbed his chin in thought. “The company’s policy is to ensure its customers enjoy the most comprehensive experience in full immersion possible. Which is why we enforce the “one player, one character” concept. Still, seeing as each player’s situation may vary, the admins tend to be lax regarding those customers who wish to bend the rules slightly. After all, not everyone can afford to start all over from scratch in case their leveling strategy goes awry.”
“Does that mean that nothing can be done?” I interrupted him.
He winced. “I didn’t say that. There’re no penalties in place for any such infringement. What they can do, however, is delete the earlier character and reintroduce his property back into the game. All such duplications are automatically tracked down and deleted if above level 24.”
“But Garth is much higher than that!”
“Exactly. I won’t even have to overreach my authority. All I need to do is tweak the current scanning settings a little…”
The Angel closed his eyes. After a pause, he continued,
“Barth Firefist has been deleted from the character database. But your skull wasn’t among his possessions.”
“Of course it wasn’t!” I exploded. “The skull is still in the fire trap! Can’t you untether my respawn point from it?”
“No.”
Shit! Even the news that Garth had lost his precious Paladin alter ego didn’t bring me any joy anymore. Revenge is good but I’d rather take the money… of rather, get my skull back.
“So what am I supposed to do now?”
He shrugged. “Try not to die. But even if you do, it’s not a disaster. Your Elf girlfriend can locate your respawn point and retrieve the skull. You haven’t broken up with her, have you?”
“No, I haven’t,” I grumbled, mulling over his words. He had a point there.
“Death will only mean the start of a new quest,” the Angel smiled, “but if you want to delay it, then you shouldn’t be too greedy. I suggest you leave the Kingdom of the Dead as soon as you sort out the Lord of Decay. In that case, I’ll make sure that the Spawn live up to their obligations.”
“Sounds like a deal.”
“What do you want?”
I raised my right arm. “Restore my arm’s mobility, and we have a deal.”
“Stick to your part of the deal, and I’ll stick to mine.”
The Angel snapped his fingers. The darkness dissipated, releasing me. I dropped into a void, directly onto my throne.
What a bastard! He thought he’d cornered me, didn’t he? Well, that remained to be seen.
I reached for Neo’s amulet, ripped the chain from it and started turning it in my fingers. No, sir, it wasn’t quite over yet…
CLINK!
MY FINGERS sent Neo’s amulet spinning into the air. It landed in my hand heads up.
Clink! This time it landed tails up, showing the phoenix.
Clink!
Time after time, my fingers flicked the amulet into the air while my thoughts tripped in unison with it.
Should I take the risk or should I play it safe? Should I go all-in or should I accept Neo’s plan?
Would we be able to handle the Lord of Decay on our own? And even if we would, was it a good idea to get the kid involved into something this dubious? Would it be wise to force a clash between a barely nascent order and the most powerful Dark clan? Wouldn’t I be doing Neo a disservice?
And more importantly, what would I get out of it?
The risks were quite considerable while the slightest mistake could have fatal consequences for me.
This wasn’t a game. Not for me, anyway. For everybody else, maybe.
I clenched the black amulet in my hand and sat bolt upright on the throne. The crypt’s atmosphere was too relaxing. It put me off my guard. Which was something I couldn’t afford.
Enough pondering. Now it was time to act.
I slid Neo’s medallion into my pocket, climbed to my feet and pulled out the portal scroll I’d received from the Duke of Inferno. I didn’t say goodbye to anyone. It wasn’t worth it — and I didn’t want to see anyone, anyway. I’d already given Isabella the message from the Angel of Darkness. And I had nothing much to say to all the others. It’s not easy to befriend people for whom all this was just make-belief while for myself it was all for real.
Neo? What, befriending a piece of program code?
Having said that… why not? At least it was real for him too. I should see him before leaving. Unfortunately, he would start harping on about attacking the Lord of Decay again — and I wasn’t yet ready to give him any kind of definite answer.
The whole situation seemed to be too ambiguous. Everything could pan out in a number of different ways, and I really didn’t want to give him any premature hope. But if we managed to put the Spawn’s nose out of joint…
With a wicked smile, I broke the seal on the scroll.
Space warped, pulling me into a bottomless void, then spewed me out into the square in front of the Tower of Decay.
Its deathly-pale bulk lined with myriads of bones reached out to the sky before me. The orderly ranks of the Spawn of Darkness lined up behind me against a backdrop of palaces lying in ruins. There, the Spawn’s tanks — warriors in full armor hung with amulets — were already preparing to meet the enemy’s first and most crushing assault. Behind their backs a heaving crowd of motley Barbarians and knights in shiny armor was arrayed. Paladins dispelled the gloom of the cloudy day with their fiery auras; countless archers and crossbowmen were busy checking their gear. Rogues kept a low profile, their ghostly shadows slipping imperceptibly through the crowd; priests stood in small groups scattered all through the troops. Not to mention wizards who were also there in force. The clan had plenty of casters of every possible school and development branch, from necromancers and demonologists to pyromancers and elemental mages. The sheer power they exuded made one feel like some insignificant bug. They could grind you into the dust before you could say your own name. They would just obliterate you…
This wasn’t “a couple hundred of their best warriors”! This must have been at least five hundred! What’s with the cast of Ben-Hur?
Then I turned my gaze to the gaping hole of the Tower’s smashed gates, and my hair stood on end. Deadmen don’t feel fear — and in any case, what did I have to fear in my virtual prison apart from my corporal death in the real world? Still, the hair-raising nightmare that haunted the tower could get to anyone.
Darkness, horror and decay ruled the place. Weak sunrays expired, unable to penetrate it. The air rippled, heavy with the palpable effluvia of hopelessness and death.
Abandon hope all ye who enter here?
Oh, yes. I felt like a little boy about to look under the bed for a bogeyman or to take a peek into a cannibal’s cave. It took all of my willpower not to shrink back.
I couldn’t. They shouldn’t see my weakness. If the Spawn aborted the whole operation…
This thought worried me much more the Lord of Decay and this display of his otherworldly strength. I forced myself to stand tall with my chin up.
I would not give up. I was going to make it.
Actually… what the hell were we waiting for?
Feeling slightly confused, I turned back again. Just as I did so, a group of about fifty warriors materialized on an empty patch of land. All of them level 90+, wearing unique armor and carrying legendary weapons. Their powerful magic shields made the air around them quiver; their priests’ blessings made my skin itch.
The clan’s top brass looked even more intimidating than their whole army. The Lord High Steward thrust his black sword in the air.
“Darkness! Darkness! Darkness!” echoed over the square.
My ears rang; their battle cry throbbed in my temples, setting my teeth on edge.
What’s with all the yelling?
Several pillars of dark light struck the ground. Priests began to generously share their energy with all the others, activating shields and casting regeneration spells. I wasn’t watching them because I saw the Duke of Inferno leave the group. As he approached me, I could sense the heat radiated by his armor made of pure flame.
How he wasn’t being roasted within it was beyond me. I failed to suppress a chuckle.
The Duke must have heard it as he tilted his head to the side. “Do you think we can’t get it done without you, deadman?”
“Not at all,” I replied, and I meant it. “But I’m the only person who can help you cheat the system.”
“You mean the quest?” he made a face. “It’s only hearsay!”
I ignored his remark. “How about we get down to business?”
Normally, I didn’t mind a bit of small talk but now I could barely keep myself in check. Everything inside me was screaming: Quick! Quick! Get on with it!
Let’s do it! We needed to take one final step which would deny us any chance of retreat.
I was buoyed with hope and excitement, struggling to preserve my usual cool nonchalance. As usual, my mask saved my bacon.
The Duke stared at me, hesitant. “There’re lots of valuables in the Tower,” he warned me. “They’re all ours. If you touch any of them, it’ll mean the end of the deal.”
“My parents taught me to keep my fingers to myself,” I answered sarcastically.
“Good. Be a good boy, and no one will get hurt.”
The Duke raised his hand. Immediately a group of about thirty mages surrounded us. A couple of them were top players, all the others levels 80 to 85. I was quite happy with this ratio.
“Go!” the Duke waved his arm to signal the start of the battle, then turned to his clanmates. “You all know what to do!”
I pulled out Neo’s amulet, flipped it into the air, caught it and stared at the outline of a phoenix on its side. I flung it again. This time, it landed smooth side up. Much better.
All eyes were on me; no one attempted to conceal their curiosity. I decided not to try their patience any longer than necessary.
Retinue!
One after the other, wizards and sorcerers began accepting my invitations. The Duke was the only one who declined it.
An Elf demonologist cringed in disgust. “An oath of allegiance? You’re not serious, are you?”
And still he followed suit with the others.
I did a quick appraisal of the energy available to me, then nodded to the Duke. “Everything’s fine!”
“Get on with it, then!” he shouted, apparently not even thinking of leaving. “On your bike!”
I had a fleeting thought that a backup like this might be enough to take on the Lord of Decay himself, but the temptation wasn’t too hard to overcome.
Suzerain!
I snapped my fingers. Everybody around me dropped dead. A fleeting exertion of my willpower had been enough to turn these human beings undead, wresting from them their vitality, magic energy and most importantly, XP.
My new power flooded through me like a river, immediately transforming both my body and soul. My flesh fell away; my back exploded, forming a pair of bony wings; my hands grew a set of frightful claws; my head elongated, distorting my face beyond belief.
