Citadel of Smoke: A LitRPG and GameLit Adventure (Stonehaven League Book 4)

by Carrie Summers

  Now she felt almost dead inside.

  Torald winked. “Not as unpleasant as a shrieking banshee wisp thing. But not fun either.”

  Devon swallowed. Hard. “No.”

  With that, the ice holding Torald’s legs shattered, and he dashed forward. A heavy blow from his longsword sliced into her leg, and her knee buckled. Blood sprayed as 105 of her hitpoints vanished. She staggered, fumbling her dagger up as she glanced at her HUD for information on how long the Stillness debuff would last.

  Devon mouthed a curse. 45 more seconds. A lifetime with a heavily armed paladin on the attack. She slashed feebly at his elbow where a gap between the heavy steel plates of his armor revealed mere chainmail. Her blade bounced off the metal rings.

  You have gained a skill point: +1 One-handed Slashing.

  A for effort.

  Torald smirked as he swung again. Hard. Devon managed to dodge but realized too late that the attack had been a trap. Torald deftly stepped to change his momentum and brought his blade overhead in one graceful swoop. There was nothing Devon could do as the two-handed sword descended and landed in the crease where her neck and shoulder met.

  But the pain didn’t come, not even the muted discomfort that the game used to simulate injury

  Devon realized she’d screwed her eyes shut, and she opened them tentatively.

  “Yield?” Torald asked. “I’d hate for you to have to repair a gash in that nice-looking doublet.”

  She sighed and nodded. Moments later, the dull ache in her leg eased as the clerics sent healing energy into her body.

  Grinning, Torald removed his blade and slid it into his scabbard. “Dueling’s got different gameplay than NPC fights. Plus, seems like you haven’t had much chance to party up with other players. Hard to know what their strengths are.”

  Devon wasn’t sure she wanted to stand here while he tried to make her feel better despite her pathetic showing. But since he was just trying to be nice, it would be rude to stalk off. She sighed as she sheathed her dagger, trying to come up with something to say to deflect attention from her trouncing.

  The scream from the edge of camp shattered her thoughts. Whirling, she saw chaos.

  And darkness.

  Chapter Fourteen

  DEVON RUSHED TOWARD the edge of the camp as pavilions and roasting spits toppled, and players yelled to one another in an attempt to organize. She assumed the attackers were demons and steeled herself to face reminders of her upcoming transformation. It wasn’t until she was halfway across the trampled area that her nose caught up with the situation.

  Why did it suddenly smell like pond water?

  The ground shook as strange animal howls and squeals rolled across the camp. Devon’s steps slowed as she watched one of the attackers, a humanoid figure clad in some sort of sleek furs, take a wide stance. It yelled something incomprehensible in a voice that wasn’t quite human, then began to…morph.

  Moments later, an enormous beaver stood in its place, yellowed teeth a foot long chomping the air. With a long-clawed paw, it snatched one of the poles supporting a shade tent and, like some kind of freaky woodchuck thing, reduced it to sawdust in the space of ten seconds.

  “Fricking were-beavers or something?” Devon asked aloud, shaking her head in exasperation. “Come on.”

  “And otters and muskrats,” a player said as she ran by and dropped a buff spell on Devon. As the effect took hold, Devon’s skin seemed to harden. She glanced at the icon tooltip in hopes it was something good, but then sighed and shook her head. Seeing as King Beaver—or whatever it was—had just swiped a player from the ground and chewed through the screaming human’s leg, Devon seriously doubted a tier 1 Stoneskin would do a whole hell of a lot of good.

  A pop-up sprang into view.

  Torald is inviting you to a group.

  Accept? Y/N

  Devon accepted, and four character status windows popped onto her interface. Aside from the paladin, she was grouped with a brawler, a cleric, and the druid, Magda, with the disconcerting Heartwood spell. Glancing across the camp, she realized her group members glowed faintly, something she hadn’t experienced before. They were forming up near the attacking force’s flank, Torald and the brawler, a beefy woman clad in leather and chain, standing ahead of the other two party members. The tanks looked ready to intercept any beasts that detached from the algae-scented horde.

  A horde that was really quite disturbing. The player who’d buffed her had been right. Whatever kind of weird army this was, it was, well, weird. Like something from a fur trapper’s nightmare. The attackers, ranging in size from Chihuahua-sized muskrats to the gargantuan beaver seemed to be shifters, transforming into bipeds that weren’t quite human. With skin a dull-gray and eyes flat like sharks’, the humanoid forms ranged in size as well, but with less variance. Strangely, the beasts seemed to have a hard time controlling their polymorphism. As a squad of otters swarmed from the grass, their limbs kept elongating and shrinking, shifting between furred and fur-clad as their faces morphed between vaguely human and animal.

  “We’re at the edge of the grass!” Torald called. His voice pierced the din, louder than the shouts of players she wasn’t grouped with.

  “Got it! I see your glow.”

  “Glow?” he asked. “Okay, whatever that is.”

  Huh? Did that mean the other players didn’t see an aura around the group members?

  Devon shrugged as she started running toward the group. Maybe it was a perk from her newfound Perception skill.

  She sprinted past the gargantuan were-beaver, cringing as its claws whooshed past her arm. A shrieking muskrat-thing leapt for her, latching teeth into the butt of her hide pants, and she swatted it away. As it hit the ground, the beast shifted toward its pygmy humanoid shape, then regained its four legs and shrieked at her with hate-filled eyes.

  She was tempted to finish the creepy thing off before joining her group but shook her head and whirled.

  Straight into the flat of the beaver’s colossal tail. The smack sent her flying, jaw rattling, and carved off 55 hitpoints.

  She landed on the muskrat. Hard.

  You have slain a Muskratton (awakened).

  You receive 500 experience!

  Devon clambered off the crushed carcass, now a revolting amalgamation of humanoid and rodent features.

  “Awakened Muskratton? Who comes up with this stuff?” she muttered to herself as she raced to the group. With a glance over her shoulder, she used Combat Assessment on the giant beaver.

  Beaver Morphlord - Level 22 (awakened).

  Health: 1785/1785

  Mana: 342/342

  Devon shook her head and kept running. As she fell in behind the tanks, Torald nodded and stepped forward.

  “Let the divine light fill me and my comrades. For Veia’s honor!” He cast his arms wide, mail gauntlets raised in appeal. A wave of energy rushed out from the man and into the group, and a buff icon appeared.

  “Is that a paladin thing?” Devon asked. “Some kind of fetish for the dramatic?”

  She glanced at the buff icon. The spell had raised her Constitution by 7—a nice increase—and it granted resistance against blood magic and darkness-based damage.

  Magda laughed. “It’s part of the Paladin class features. They basically have to role-play to activate their abilities.”

  Devon grimaced. “And they know this before they choose their class?”

  The druid shrugged. “Takes all kinds, right?”

  Torald and the brawler sprinted forward to confront a seething mass of otter-things that slid over one another and struck unexpectedly, their slick hides and sinuous motion making targeting difficult. The paladin swung hard with his mace and connected with the mass. But it was like trying to land a punch in a vat full of wet grapes. Furry bodies squirted from underneath the weapon’s head.

  Devon cast Freeze on the mass of otters, hoping to put a stop to their obnoxious writhing. The spel
l connected and splashed, and three Otter Pops dropped out of the heap, whiskers shattering as they clattered to the ground.

  Torald nodded in appreciation as he booted one of the frozen mammals away from the horde, then slammed it with his mace. Its health fell by half, and Devon finished it off with a Flamestrike.

  She jerked in surprise as, with a crackle and bang, the ice casing around one of the frozen animals shattered early. The otter-thing shrieked as it flipped onto four weirdly morphing legs and launched a flying leap toward her.

  Devon fired off a Combat Assessment.

  Otterkin (awakened) - Level 18

  Health: 487/487

  Resistances: Water

  Usually avoided by humankind because of the animal’s disconcerting effect of shifting between humanoid and animal shapes, this beast has been awakened to a higher level of consciousness. Along with some demented rage. Because you haven’t fixed the problem with the awakening stones. (hint, hint).

  She mentally slapped the popup away after only skimming, seeing as there was a flying mammal headed straight for her face. Cringing, Devon got her Wicked Bone Dagger up in defense. A split-second before the fur-clad missile connected, the brawler leaped into the animal’s path and clobbered it from the air with a double-fisted strike. The woman growled and stomped down on the otterkin’s ribcage, knocking off a good chunk of health.

  Devon raised an instant-cast Shadow Puppet targeting her stark shadow cast by the sun, formed it into a linear set of spikes, and brought the row of points smashing down onto the prone beast.

  The otterkin died with a snarl.

  “Heals!” Torald shouted.

  As Devon’s eyes snapped to the group’s health bars—Torald was down to 30%—pearly light bloomed around the cleric. He extended a hand, palm up, and the glow flooded the area around the group, motes shimmering as they rose from the earth, swirled, and split into two streams that gushed into Torald and the brawler.

  “Cheater,” Magda said with a smirk. “But good recovery. What were you doing? Watching cooking videos?”

  “You’re just jealous that you actually have to target your spells at the proper person,” the cleric said. “And I was checking the football scores. Playoffs.”

  After cracking his neck, the cleric pulled out a faintly-glowing hammer and stepped toward the mass of otters. Almost as if it were an afterthought, he dropped what seemed to be a single-target heal over time on himself, the spell shimmering every couple seconds as the effect pulsed.

  “Give them a group heal that auto-targets the right people, and the clerics start thinking they should tank,” Magda muttered as her eyes started to glow. “Hope he likes bugs.”

  The druid’s Earth Swarm spell drew a circle on the ground around the writhing otters. Moments later, a blanket of ants and beetles and centipedes covered the ground before contracting into a thick mass over the otterkin.

  “It’s just gross, Magda,” Torald said.

  “But effective,” the druid said with a wink.

  Lip twitching, Torald sighed and smacked a few otters that had fallen out of the pile as he waded back into the fray.

  Strafing toward the grass, Devon tried to focus on a single target for another Flamestrike, but the movement of the otterball made it hard to get a fix. Shaking her head, she cast Freeze again, then focused her attention on one of the beasts that fell out of the pile. It was overkill, but she cast a Phoenix Fire on it anyway. So far, she hadn’t added much to the combat. So many of her abilities were situational, and her AoE attacks—those which damaged multiple mobs at once—had the little problem of sending electric ground currents into any allies in range.

  Basically, the Phoenix Fire was the only vaguely impressive-seeming ability that she could use right now, and seeing as these people were all on a quest to become her vassals, she needed to do something to make the group feel she was worth it. The damage might not be much higher than Flamestrike’s, but at least the spell was unique, a gift from the Phoenix Prince that had guarded the felsen’s sanctuary. Every level 20 Sorcerer in the game would be chain-casting Flamestrike. No one else had Phoenix Fire.

  As the otterkin squealed and snarled inside the syrupy flames, human facial features replacing the elongated snout, Devon glanced at the rest of the group.

  No one seemed to have noticed her awesome ability. Magda was doing something with a tornado of razor-sharp leaves, and the other three were in the thick of melee with the otterkin mass.

  Well, crap.

  Knowing that at this point she was acting desperate, Devon stepped back from the fight. She focused on the fire-wrapped otterkin and cast Levitate on it. As the animal rose from the earth to hang about eight feet in the air, Magda actually glanced toward it before returning her attention to another spell cast.

  But Devon wasn’t done.

  She dropped mana into another sun-cast Shadow Puppet and formed it into something like an oversized baseball bat. Squinting her eyes in concentration, she sent her puppet smacking into the floating otterkin. The flaming animal streaked over the scene and splatted into the Beaver Morphlord, coating the long-toothed beast in fire.

  The beaver spun toward her, its tail slamming through the melee and knocking combatants flat. Darkness filled its eyes as it took a massive step in her direction. She felt the air crackle as some sort of spell took hold of the monster. Muscles suddenly bulged beneath its water-repellent coat.

  Oops.

  “Uh. Incoming, I think,” Devon said, cringing. “And it just cast some kind of berserk or something.”

  Torald glanced at her then followed the direction of her gaze toward the morphlord. The thing half waddled, half ran toward them, flesh shifting between the rubbery gray skin of its human-ish manifestation and the water-dwelling rodent. A wave of algae-scented air filled the area as dozens of furry creatures broke off combat and scrambled out of the beaver’s way.

  Devon backpedaled.

  “This is gonna hurt,” Torald muttered as he detached from a trio of squealing otters and dashed to intercept.

  Within the space of two seconds, the beaver snatched the paladin with both forepaws and chewed through his neck. The cleric’s heal died in his hands, interrupted when Torald’s decapitated body fell to the ground.

  Devon closed her eyes. Yeah. So that was her fault.

  She cast a Freeze on the charging beast, but the spell shattered as soon as it had taken hold. Dropping a Wall of Ice backed by a Wall of Fire, Devon kept backpedaling.

  The monster demolished the ice wall with a slap from its tail and strode through the fire. Too panicked by the realization that she’d probably just gotten her whole group wiped, Devon missed her chance to blow up the flames with Conflagration. By the time she thought of it, the monster was past the fire, its fur steaming.

  The cleric dropped some sort of buff on her that created a shimmering barrier around her body. “Sorry in advance. Heal aggro is a bitch in this game.”

  By which he meant he didn't intend to heal her. Fine. Fair enough.

  With a look of what seemed to be pity, the druid summoned a little whirlwind and sent it into Devon. She immediately felt quicker, her feet twitching with the need to run.

  “Good luck,” Magda said.

  With a nod, Devon turned on her heels and started sprinting into the grassland. She was pretty much toast. Little question there. But at the very least, if she dragged the morphlord far enough from the camp, its Berserk might wear off before it returned.

  The ground shook with the beaver’s thundering strides. She could hear its long teeth clacking together as it raced behind her, closing the distance. Grass whipped her legs, the druid’s speed buff carrying her at least half again as fast as Devon’s usual sprint speed.

  A couple hundred yards from the camp, the vibration of the morphlord’s feet stopped. Devon’s steps faltered. Had it given up?

  Had it leashed back to the group, a game mechanic she hadn’t encountered
in Relic Online?

  She had around a second to contemplate the possibilities before the leaping Beaver Morphlord landed on top of her like a fur-and-blubber covered boulder.

  She lived through the initial hit, losing most of her health as the animal crushed her.

  Foot-long teeth bit down on her skull, cracking it like an egg.

  You have been slain by a Beaver Morphlord.

  Respawning…

  (ouch.)

  Chapter Fifteen

  “SO YEAH,” DEVON said to Torald as she sat down in the grass beside the Shrine to Veia. “My bad.”

  Her body felt exhausted, her Strength and Endurance sapped. A new debuff icon showed the death penalty affecting her character. She focused on the little image, and a popup appeared.

  Recently Deceased

  Reincarnation isn’t easy, you know. The process has taxed your body and mind.

  -5 Constitution

  -5 Strength

  -5 Agility

  -5 Charisma

  -5 Intelligence

  -5 Focus

  -5 Endurance

  -5 Bravery

  -5 Cunning

  -5 Dignity

  14:37 remaining

  “Well, if there’s ever an otterball league, you shouldn’t have a problem finding a team, slugger.” Torald was sitting a few feet away, still clutching his head. No doubt he’d relive the experience of having his neck chewed through a few times before he felt confident that his skull was securely attached.

  “I thought it would be a cool trick. Using mobs as ranged ammo.”

  “To be fair, it was kinda funny. Until that Zaa-cursed beaver went berserk. First time I’ve been one-shotted since I was level 5 or so.”

  Had he just called the beaver Zaa-cursed? As in, he was using in-game cuss words? Apparently he was taking the role-playing side of the paladin class very seriously. Devon pressed her lips together to hide her amusement. The emotion quickly died anyway.