by J. A. Hunter
I thrust my warhammer forward and called up Night Cyclone, aiming the deadly AoE at the portal itself, hoping to catch the three remaining acolytes in the spell. My Spirit bar plunged, bottoming out just before zero, and the air split open like a rotten melon. The chanting briefly ceased as a black cyclone tore its way through the rift, invading the room, slamming into two of the three Vogthar acolytes. The tornado picked up one Vogthar like an unruly child and pitched him into a nearby cage like a fastball.
The ritualist hit the steel bars with a resounding clang, the force of the impact bending the bars noticeably inward. He dropped to the ground, back broken, limbs akimbo.
The other chanting acolytes managed to stand their ground, but the cyclone had a little something for them as well: bolts of deadly shadow lightning, which dealt devastating damage. Cutter disappeared from view, only to reappear a moment later as he slammed both his daggers hilt-deep into a Vogthar skull. Down the ritualist went, mouth slack, a thin trail of blood leaking down his forehead. Only one acolyte remained, and though he was hurt—his HP bar strobing a vivid, angry red—he was alive.
Alive and intoning the words of the diabolic ceremony.
Not for long, though. Cutter pulled his daggers and spun, unleashing a fan of smoky blades, but Devil beat him to the punch. Just before the conjured knives landed, the Drake raced into view, his mouth enveloping the Vogthar’s head, his jaws clamping down with a meaty thud. And just like that, the acolytes were gone. All of them. Dead. I grinned, feeling a sharp burst of self-confidence at how well we’d handled the encounter. And here I’d been worried.
“Jack,” Cutter said, his voice slicing through the victory haze filling my head. “We’ve got a problem here.” He hooked a thumb toward the portal, and the grin slid from my face. We’d killed the Black Priest and the acolytes, but apparently, we hadn’t been quick enough. Not quite. The enormous portal was no longer a shifting sheet of emerald light. Now it was an opalescent semitranslucent screen, and I could see the horror waiting for us on the other side.
SIXTEEN_
Gate Hound
Beyond the opalescent portal lay a gloomy cave of dark stone, the walls weathered and worn from age. The cave seemed relatively shallow, and it wasn’t hard to see the desolate rolling hills through the nearby entrance. Those hills were covered in ashy pale dirt, dotted with patches of withered scrub grass coated with frost, and filled with stunted bone-white trees clawing at the sky like decaying corpse fingers. Not exactly a warm, friendly, inviting place.
Off in the distance, marring the horizon, were colossal twisted spires, which reached up toward a star-studded sky the color of a fading bruise.
A city.
A giant one, easily the rival to Rowanheath or even the beautiful crystalline metropolis of Ankara located deep in the heart of the Barren Sands. But this place didn’t have the vitality or functionality of Rowanheath, nor did it have the artistic majesty of Ankara. No, this was a hellish city, one handcrafted for monsters and walking nightmares.
That had to be Morsheim. Had to.
And on the rolling plains outside the city were Vogthar, an endless sea of them, ready and waiting for some cue only they knew. There were also other monstrous creatures I’d never seen before. Hordes of them: Huge beasts of ice and fire. Winged Drakes to rival Devil. Enormous cyclopes clad in furs. Dread bears as large as African elephants. And one of those monstrous creatures was stomping from the plains directly toward us, moving with an uncanny speed given its massive size. Nothing so big should be able to move so quickly.
I shuffled back, a nervous sheen of sweat breaking out on my forehead.
And here I’d been so confident of our victory.
The creature was an impossibly large hound, fifteen feet tall, ten feet wide, its body built of solid snow dotted with barbs of gleaming razor-honed ice. This thing made Devil look small and timid. It had a T. rex-sized noggin with blue ice chips for eyes and jaws big enough to swallow me whole. Black metal plates, adorned with foot-long spikes, protected its shoulders and ran along its back. Honestly, the thing looked like a cross between a M1A1 tank and something out of one of those old Mad Max films.
“Jo-Dan, is there any way to shut this thing down?” I hollered, stealing a wild look at the dungeon boss, then back at the enormous encroaching hound. “The sooner, the better,” I finished, slipping a Spirit Regen potion from my belt—I’d need to hit Vlad up and restock when we got back to Ravenkirk. Assuming we got back to Ravenkirk without dying a brutal, ugly death.
“On it,” Jo-Dan squawked, scrambling over to the portal.
He skidded to a stop and dropped to a knee, his eyeless gaze scanning the summoning circle painted onto the floor. Carefully—almost uncertainly—he reached out a gauntleted hand, tracing his fingertips along the runes inside the binding. “There,” he muttered, tapping a symbol that resembled an upside down “A” with a curlicue attached to one of the legs. “That might do it.” He pressed his hand flat against the mark, and a brilliant emerald light began to bleed from his palm, spreading like a plague along the rest of the runes and lines.
Consuming them, even as the creature thundered closer and closer.
This is fine, I assured myself. Jo-Dan would shut this thing down, we’d collect our loot, find a few clues, then beat feet back to the surface. No muss, no fuss.
“Crap,” Jo-Dan said as the light waned and crawled to a halt halfway around the circle. “It’s not working,” he screamed over one shoulder. “The portal is set.” He ripped his hand away, clutching it to his chest as though the dark magic decorating the floor had burned him. “We’re too late.” He inched away from the portal. “They’ve converted the dungeon. Whatever was here before … it’s gone now, and that”—he nodded toward the creature closing in—“is the new boss. This place belongs to him now. To him and the Vogthar.”
A tag appeared over the monster’s head as it shoved and shimmied its frame through the portal, which was almost too small to accommodate its significant bulk.
[Arctic Gate Hound]
“Everybody back,” I shouted, mind racing a million miles a second. Chances were, we could beat this creature, but it looked tougher than a platoon of Recon Marines, and there was a good chance we’d pay big for the win. Better to retreat, regroup, and come back in with a real game plan if we could. “Okay,” I barked. “Let’s get gone, now—I think he’s too big to follow through the entryway.” I spun, offering my back to the demon hound, but faltered when I saw the beefy steel doors were shut tight and locked with no discernible way to open them. Whoa boy. “Cutter, see if you can get those doors open.”
“No! Please,” a Murk Elf woman called out from one of the cages lining the wall, her hand outstretched through the bars. Most of the prisoners were curled into tight balls and passed out, likely from a combination of cold and malnutrition. But not her. She was older, her face worn and haggard, her graying hair frazzled, her arms and legs frighteningly thin. “Please, you can’t just leave us here. You can’t! That thing will kill us all.” Tears rolled down her cheeks, carving lines through the grime on her face. “You don’t know what it’s like in here—what they’ve done to us.”
My steps faltered.
I could understand what it was like in there. I’d started off V.G.O. in a cage nearly identical to that one, and if it hadn’t been for Cutter, a little luck, and some quick thinking, I could’ve ended up on one of those grisly tables, hacked to pieces as a science experiment. Suddenly, I knew retreat wasn’t an option—not unless we could get those prisoners out first. I couldn’t leave them here like this. No doubt they were NPCs, probably spawned just for this encounter, but that didn’t matter.
I stole a look at Cutter, who was crouched down in front of the steel doors, tinkering away at the lock with a set of matte-black picks. That guy was lazy, selfish, and a world-class jerk nine times out of ten, but he was also my friend and an NPC.
He was as real as the folks in those cages. If I couldn’t leave
him for dead, I couldn’t leave them either.
“Don’t worry,” I shouted, nodding at the woman. “We won’t leave you. Cutter, keep working on those locks! Jo-Dan, see if you can’t get these cages open, and tell your minion to find a back way out if there is one. And Devil”—I spun, staring at the Drake, my jaw clenched—“you’re on standby. If that thing gets through, hit it with everything you have and then some.”
Everyone broke into manic motion, hustling to obey my orders, except Devil, who just hunkered down, plumes of smoke drifting from his nostrils. Finally, a worthy foe, he sent, sounding oddly happy. Let there be blood. Oceans of it.
I dashed toward a nearby wooden table covered in saws and pliers, needles and hammers, and promptly upended the thing, sending the torture tools into the snow nearby. With a grunt, I lifted the table and hustled over to the cages, propping it on its side in front of the prisoners. The rough wood wouldn’t offer much protection against something like that Gate Hound, but anything was better than nothing. Jo-Dan was nearby, wrestling with the lock on the cage with the Murk Elf woman.
“Stand back,” the dungeon boss commanded, his characteristically warm voice suddenly cold and distant. The Murk Elf woman scooted away as Jo-Dan grasped the bars in both hands and pulled, his arms shaking under the strain. For a moment, nothing happened, but then the thick bars groaned and gave way, bowing outward until there was a narrow gap, just wide enough for the prisoner to slip through. I whistled silently under my breath—now that was strong. No doubt being a dungeon boss had a lot of drawbacks, but obviously, it had more than a few perks, too.
The ground quivered and trembled, drawing my attention away from the cages as the Gate Hound fully emerged from the portal. For a moment, everyone just stared slack-jawed at the beast in a combination of trepidation and awe. Crap, it was huge. There went our chance to escape. Now the only option left on the table was to beat this ugly thing into meat paste. “Keep working,” I said, slapping Jo-Dan on the shoulder before sprinting toward the creature with my warhammer raised.
Devil was even quicker, though. He hurled his serpentine body forward, slamming into the Hound’s side like a Mack Truck.
A hit like that would’ve broken every bone in my body, and it probably would’ve one-shotted any lesser player. The Hound, however, didn’t even budge. Not an inch. Worse, Devil bounced harmlessly away like a toddler running into a brick wall head-on. Then, before he could regroup, the Hound lifted its blocky head skyward and howled, the sound more like the roar of a hurricane than an animal’s cry. The sonic attack slapped against me, shaving off a fraction of my HP and dumping a debuff on top of my head before the battle had even properly begun:
<<<>>>
Debuffs Added
Paralyzing Fear: You are temporarily immobilized by fear! You cannot move or cast spells. Duration, 1 minute.
Frostburn: You have sustained Frostburn damage! Movement rate reduced by 25%; duration, 2 minutes. 2 pts Burn Damage/sec; duration, 30 seconds.
<<<>>>
I quickly scanned the message. Perfect, just what I needed, three seconds into a fight. That was bad, bad news, but then another combat notification appeared hard on the heels of the first:
<<<>>>
You resisted Paralyzing Fear! All Maa-Tál are immune to Morale Failure and Fear-based debuffs!
<<<>>>
A small silver lining. I glanced back at Jo-Dan, who seemed to be unaffected by the Paralyzing Fear, but Cutter and the caged prisoners were as stiff and unmoving as bronze statues. The strange attack had also knocked Devil back ten feet or so, and though the Drake wasn’t paralyzed, he reeled and wobbled, his health already down below three-quarters.
“Get Cutter to someplace safe until the paralysis wears off,” I called over my shoulder to Jo-Dan, before turning my full attention back on the formidable Gate Hound padding toward me with three giant sets of teeth bared. “You want a piece of me,” I snarled, ensuring the creature was focused entirely on me, “then come and get some.” I thrust my left hand out, fingers splayed. Umbra Flame exploded from my palm in a torrent, splashing against the creature’s snout, chipping away HP a fraction of a point at a time.
A paw, bigger than a sewer lid, flashed out through the blaze, razor-sharp claws coming straight for me. I let the fire die and threw myself into a lightning-fast front roll; the paw sailed right over me as I came up inside the creature’s guard. Its head shot in, mouth yawning wide, revealing a spike-lined gullet. I juked right, narrowly avoiding the chomping fangs. The monster was huge and powerful, but I was just too fast and nimble. I bolted right and lashed out with my warhammer, throwing my whole body into the attack and triggering Savage Blow, Crush Armor, and Black Caress all at once.
My weapon smacked into the side of its jaw with a burst of violet shadow energy. Snow and ice exploded outward as the colossal beast staggered, fighting for its balance. I didn’t give the Gate Hound a chance to recover, though. Instead, I relentlessly pressed my advantage, swinging the hammer around in a tight arc, bringing it into the underside of the beast’s chin, cutting away another fraction of the Hound’s HP. Feeling cocky, I lunged in, jabbing with the spike on top of my hammer.
That, unfortunately, was a crucial mistake.
The Hound wheeled around with incredible speed, driving an armor-covered shoulder into my chest. The blow knocked the wind from my lungs and took off another sizeable chunk of HP, but before the Hound could follow up and eviscerate me with his oversized teeth and tearing claws, Devil leaped onto his back, sinking his talons into the rigid metal, then wrapping his spike-covered tail around the Hound’s waist. The boss bucked, swayed, and rampaged like a rodeo bull desperate to throw a pesky rider, but Devil refused to budge.
Instead, the Drake arched his neck, stretched his jaws, and began pouring fire down on top of the Hound’s unprotected head—a shower of purple flame.
I grinned and pumped my fist.
Devil might’ve been a bloodthirsty murder-machine, but damned if he wasn’t my bloodthirsty murder-machine. From that proximity, the flames were devastatingly effective, a fact the Hound seemed to realize quickly. Instead of continuing its frenzied, but ineffectual, bucking, the creature lowered its head and charged the wall at full speed. The move was abrupt, and Devil couldn’t manage to get free before the Hound pitched forward and slammed its armored back into the icy cavern wall. The whole room shook from the impact, snow and ice chips raining down from overhead as the ground quivered.
The brutal, kamikaze attack hurt the Hound—his HP bar dropping perceptibly—but Devil absorbed the brunt of the damage. The beast backed away from the wall, shaking his whole body like a dog shedding water, and Devil simply fell, flopping to the floor. His wings were shredded from the icy protrusions decorating the cavern walls, and one of his back legs jutted out like a hitchhiker’s thumb, clearly broken. Honestly, he looked like a wet towel someone had half-wrung out and tossed into the dirty laundry.
It hurt just to look at Devil, and his HP loitered just above fifteen percent.
Should I recall you? I sent while padding forward.
Never, the Drake snarled in my head. Then, as though to prove a point, Devil pushed himself up on his front legs and pulled himself toward the Hound, dragging his crippled lower half through the snow like excess baggage. It was hard to watch, but if Devil wanted to finish this fight, I wasn’t about to stop him—not if I wanted to keep his goodwill, and I did. But he didn’t need to fight alone. I threw one hand forward, conjuring Umbra Bog with a whisper of will. Black tendrils of power exploded upward from the trampled and bloody snow, ensnaring the tremendous Hound.
The Hound glanced down, his lips pulled back in a vicious sneer as he pulled and fought at the strands of inky, semi-sentient goop. The tendrils seemed hard-pressed to hold him, and probably wouldn’t last for long, but for a second we had a window. Range attack, I sent to Devil while my free hand flew through the complicated gestures for Plague Burst. Light him up like a bonfire. Devil di
pped his head in reply—even that effort looked painful—then unleashed a purple blaze to rival the sun.
The Hound yowled in pain, thrashing manically, but before it could break free of the Umbra Bog’s tenuous hold, toxic yellow mist erupted from the air all around it. The noxious poison clawed at the creature, seeping into its skin, invading its lungs, and eating through the creature’s HP while simultaneously chewing through my Spirit like a hungry bear. I circled left, drawing closer to the beast—though keeping just outside Plague Burst’s range—while lobbing Umbra Bolt after Umbra Bolt into the Hound’s hideous, charbroiled face.
I downed my last Spirit Regen potion as the toxic cloud tapered off and dissipated, then quickly bolted forward before the boss had a chance to recover fully. While the beast was still reeling and wobbling from the poison attack—its life leaking slowly away as the Plague debuff worked—I slammed my hammer into its knee with devastating force, triggering Savage Blow. Ice cracked like a gunshot, and a Critical Hit flashed. In a blink, its health dropped below fifty percent, which naturally triggered a new attack.
The Hound reared up on its hind legs, offering the whole room a glimpse of its belly, which is when I saw a glaring weakness.
Most of its body was tight-packed snow or hard blue ice, and its belly was no different—except in one small area, right near its heart. A patch of the rocky ice, which served as its armor, had fallen away, revealing a nearly translucent membrane, covering a pink, beating heart. Bingo. I grinned and hurled one hand forward, an Umbra Bolt forming in my palm. But then the Hound was falling, his giant paws driving toward the earth like an asteroid punching through the atmosphere.
And I was standing at ground zero.
I backpedaled like mad, desperate to get away. The Hound’s paws hit a second later, and the whole world shook as a shock wave spread out in a circle, kicking snow into the air while simultaneously knocking me from my feet and biting off a quarter of my life. I hit the ground hard, my head snapping back, slamming into a rock protruding from the snowpack. Stars exploded across my vision as a new combat notification appeared:
