Keerna cast a quick identify spell over the pouch. “Weird,” she said. “It’s called ‘soma,’ and it doesn’t show any properties. It’s listed as ‘extremely rare’.” She dumped all of it in the bowl.
“Save some!” Thuglar said. “It might be worth something.”
“And we might have one shot at this,” Keerna replied. She handed the bowl to Kalmond, then took a deep breath and sliced open her palm with the dagger. Squeezing her fist, she let the blood drip into the bowl. “Who’s next?”
Kalmond went next, then Thuglar. Keerna held the bowl for Thornbark, then placed the bowl inside the ring beside the dagger.
“Nothing happened,” Kalmond said.
“It said ‘crushed beneath the bowl’,” Thornbark said. He entered the circle, then turned the bowl upside down over the blade. He looked back up at his companions, then crushed the bowl beneath his hoof.
The Noble Four waited. Nothing happened. Thornbark stepped out of the circle and folded his arms across his chest. “Damn,” he said. “I thought for sure—”
Flames sprang from the circle ten feet high with a “woof” sound that came to them on hot breath. They stepped back from the ring to escape the furious heat.
“Well, that did something,” Keerna said.
“I feel kinda funny,” Thuglar said. He looked down at his hand hanging casually at his side. His fingers lengthened, then dangled and stretched, turning into a grape vine with plump purple grapes at the end of five thick stalks. “Ah, guys…” he held up his hand to his companions.
“What the…” Kalmond asked, but his voice was gone. Instead, the sound of tumbling rocks issued from his lips. He held up his hands that rapidly turned to marble.
Turning to Keerna, he watched as the sorceress dissolved into a luminous cloud, then re-formed into a figure of pure light.
Thuglar had completely transformed into an arboreal creature with tree-trunk legs, vines for arms and a thicket of briars for a chest. His head and face formed from the brambles. He pointed with his grape-cluster hands at Thornbark. The centaur reared up on his hind legs and spread white wings. He became a Pegasus with glowing fur and a sparkling silver mane.
The fire died down and in the center of the ring sat a golden chalice, studded with rubies, its brim encircled completely by small diamonds. The Noble Four lunged for it at once, touching it at the same time.
In the very next instant, they found themselves standing at the edge of town. No transportation effects, no travel notice and nothing indicated to them they had completed a quest.
“We’re at the trade center,” Thuglar said, looking down at his hands.
“Yeah, we’re all back to normal,” Keerna remarked.
“What the hell happened?” Kalmond asked. “The game just doesn’t work like that.”
“I guess it does now,” Thornbark said. “Why did we land here?”
“I don’t know.” Thuglar replied. “Let’s head to the shop and figure this out. It’ll be safe there.”
Chapter 18
One-Eye slammed four mugs down on the counter.
“Drink up, celebrate whatever mighty victory you’ve just won,” he said before pulling one out for himself—though the shopkeeper-turned-bartender’s drink was a frothing, pink concoction.
Thornbark let out a deep laugh and picked up a mug. “To great adventures, friends!” He tipped up the oversized cup and chugged deeply, the liquid spilling down his chin and trickling off the tip of his short beard. A moment later, he slammed the empty cup down. His eyes crossed slightly as he focused on something near his face. “What the hell?”
Kalmond frowned at the foaming amber liquid in his own cup. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Dammit Virgil!” Thornbark cursed. He pouted, the childish expression absurd on the chiseled face. “I just got a debuff.”
“From the drink?” Keerna asked, nudging hers away with a sidelong glance at One-Eye, who simply tapped the shrug emoticon back.
Pink touched the tips of Thornbark’s ears and he dropped his eyes. “Underage. All alcohol effects negated.”
Kalmond snorted as Thuglar burst into laughter. One-Eye just shook his head, muttering something about a waste of drink. “I already got stoned,” Kalmond said, turning a crooked smirk to Keerna.
“No,” Thuglar said, drawing a small dagger. “Stay back. No puns.” He waved the dagger menacingly and took a step back, a look of exaggerated anger screwed to his face.
“What’s wrong?” Keerna asked. “I think puns are grape.”
Thuglar put a hand to his chest and clawed at the chest plate. “Arrgh,” he groaned, “The pain…”
“That’s not nice, Keerna,” Kalmond said. “Don’t make light of our recent transformation.”
“Well, at least Thornbark isn’t horsing around,” Keerna said.
Thuglar dropped his dagger and brought both hands to his throat and made choking sounds.
“This is not cool,” Thornbark said. “You can get drunk and I can’t. It’s very elf-ish.”
Thuglar stopped his pantomime and straightened with wide eyes. The group burst out laughing in a great flood. Thornbark folded his arms across his chest and gave a satisfied smile. “It is good to be back to normal, but the feeling of being transformed was hard to beat. I guess that’s better than a drunk simulation.”
The rest of the group nodded in solemn agreement. Kalmond went for his mug again, and Keerna plucked it from his hands. She handed the mug back to One-Eye. “As fun as that might be in our… position, we can’t afford the stat loss. This fight isn’t over.” Thuglar agreed with a sharp nod of his head, all traces of mirth gone.
“Well, I guess I’m gonna have to do this the old fashioned way,” One-Eye said, accepting the drinks from Keerna and inserting them into his inventory. “I was hoping some virtual inebriation would loosen your virtual tongues.” He slammed his hands on the counter and caught their eyes, one by one. “Wha’ the hell is going on?”
Silence dropped like a rock.
“Virgil?” Kalmond called.
No one else reacted when the voice answered. “How may I assist?”
“Are the details of our… quest bound to secrecy?”
“No. All the realm will soon know who you are and what you represent.”
Kalmond wasn’t sure that was a good thing, but he shrugged it off and gave One-Eye the short version of their story. “The CEO of Plexcorp went a bit nuts,” he said. “He’s using Mylos to take over the game. There’s more, but I really shouldn’t say it.”
“Och, that slimy little…” One-Eye’s hand bunched into a fist, then, with visible effort, smoothed out flat on the counter. “And the new tech? No, don’t bother denying it. You lot move different. Like real people, or those blasted NPC characters out there acting all strange.”
Kalmond, used as he was to the veil of secrecy about Plexcorp and his job there, skipped a heartbeat. He shot a quick look around, though he knew the room was empty but for them. He’d known One-Eye long enough, knew he could be trusted. “New immersion harnesses. They let us enter the game completely, a whole new level of VR.”
One-Eye simply nodded. “And Virgil, he’s alive? I guess that’s no’ a stretch, no’ after some of the rumours flyin’ round about NPC’s. They’ve gained a life of their own, haven’t they?”
Kalmond clenched his jaw, unsure how to answer but unwilling to divulge information that could quite possibly get them all killed.
One-Eye nodded again. “Doesn’t matter how, I can see you’d rather not speak of it. I’ll do what I can to help, though. This old orc has been around since the very first open beta, you know that?”
Kalmond hadn’t. He’d known the shop-keep was a first-gen character, but that would make him about the oldest in the entire game.
“Wow,” Thuglar whispered. “Man, you old.”
“I am,” One-Eye said with a grin. “But if I need to lay down this old orc in service of the place that I call home, I’ll d
o that. You just tell me where I need to be.”
“Don’t worry,” Kalmond said. “Everything is under control. We just completed a major quest and—”
A scream pierced the air through the thick stone wall of the shop. The muffled clanging of steel on steel and the sharp cracks of spells cast brought the Noble Four to action. Steel sang as Thuglar drew his two dirks and the room flashed as Keerna’s hands raised, balls of white fire pulsing in her palms. Kalmond hefted his axe and nodded to Thornbark, bow nocked and ready. The dwarf kicked open the door.
***
Lord Mylos roared just outside the town gate as his portal cracked shut behind him. He turned to survey the instant chaos his army wrought. His minions flooded the town, attacking everything in sight, player, NPC, building or farm animal. It did not matter.
Beside the Monster Mylos, a slavering ghoul savaged an elderly quest giver, while two more ransacked his wagon. One ripped apart flower boxes in the window of a nearby building, then proceeded to shatter the glass and climb inside. Screams for help pierced the air and somewhere a goat bleated and cried out in blind agony for relief that did not come.
“The realism levels just got cranked up to eleven!” a low-level character said to his friend just before Mylos fried him to zero health with lightning bolt. His companion ran deeper into the town, away from the tidal wave of violence.
Mylos giggled, a raucous, hysterical noise that tied the chaos together like a thread made from demon gut. “Destroy, in the name of Lord Mylos! If it exists without my knowledge, it exists without my consent!”
A small shining dart burst forth from his fingers with an explosion of light, streaking across the small courtyard just inside the gate. It burrowed into anything that stood in its path—a child, her mother, their dog. Slivers of silver fire shot through the victims, bringing screams that quickly dwindled into whimpers, then silence.
Their bodies flickered out of being, complex weaves of code extinguished with barely a thought. The part of Mylos that was Gideon understood that those characters would never live again, but the brains that ran them would simply pick up another set of procedures to create new creatures. Mylos would never run out of prey, and he did not care how much pain it caused.
To his left, Mylos saw a wraith burst into a cloud of black dust. A dwarf stood, armor glittering as the burning sun wove through the shadows cast by the Great Lord’s shattered minion. As Mylos watched, the stout warrior swung his axe to fell another of his pets like cordwood. Kalmond yanked his axe from the breastbone of an ogre and advanced on the Monster Mylos. Now the screams of pain bounding through the air came from the attackers as the Noble four rallied their companions.
Mylos roared, his anger a battle cry that drew more of his army through the gate. He thrust a hand forward, sending a bolt of shadow to mark his target, imagining a blow that would bring the dwarf to his knees. The sky flashed. A bubble of light burst up around the dwarf, thwarting the Great Lord’s attack. Keerna cast the shield spell, then was swept away as she fought a retreating battle against four low-level players.
The dwarf charged as a wave of Mylos-aligned players streamed through the gate. Mylos saw twenty of his minions descend on the dwarf, who fell to more critical strikes than he could stand. He rubbed his hands together and hovered over the crowd, expending mana to do so, just to get a better angle.
Only, that did not happen. Mylos watched instead, as a blurred form streaked by the dwarf. A centaur charged by, dropping a series of snares that snapped on the ankles of the charging players, sending them tumbling to the ground. The characters behind stumbled over the fallen. A wood elf jumped down from the nearest roof and slashed at the wave that should have destroyed the dwarf once-and-for-all.
“Come and get me, asshats!” The wood elf yelled in voice chat before bounding away across the rooftops.
“Not him!” Mylos screamed. “The dwarf!” But it was too late. His undisciplined army found a more interesting target, and the dwarf disappeared into the chaos, saved from his folly by well-meaning fools.
It didn’t matter, Mylos realised. He watched the ground turn slick and darken with death, watched as his ghouls sucked the life from plants to fuel their rampage as they descended on the town. A chuckle bubbled in his chest, jerking his shoulders. Mylos landed and strode away as the laughter overtook him, leaving this petty town to wither beneath the blood-soaked hands of his new army. His mind drifted to fantasies of building a tall castle on the town’s ashes.
***
Keerna struck with one hand, then the other as white hot balls of spirit magic hurled into the raiders. She was still getting used to her new ability. This first battle after the chalice quest had changed the gameplay, somehow. Instead of voice commands, her spells flew as fast as she could think them, a boon in battle but also a risk until she adjusted.
She blasted an Evil Paladin away from a fight near the well at the center of town, where Thornbark struggled against three others. In the head of battle, Keerna wasn’t sure how she got there. She sent a blast of healing energy at Thornbark as the paladin she hit broke off and came at her. The centaur felled one of his opponents with a whirling double saber power move, then ran down the other with a trampling charge. The third, he simply decapitated from behind.
She didn’t return Thornbark’s wave of thanks, but instead sent out a concentration of healing power to assist a level 22 hunter. A higher-level soldier bore down on him. The hunter vanished, and the soldier jerked as he stepped into a well-placed decoy/teleport trap. Maybe he didn’t need that help, Keerna thought.
The hunter then reappeared, calling two other low level players who rushed in to pounce on the raider. Keerna turned away. For better or worse, she was needed elsewhere. The evil-aligned soldier’s words appeared in Keerna’s chat bubble. “This is bullshit,” he said. “Ripped to shreds by noobs.” The raider’s hitpoints dropped to zero as Keerna turned away with a satisfied smirk.
“Shouldn’t dogpile on noobs in a trade zone then, douchebag!” Replied the hunter.
She scrambled towards a trio of healers who huddled behind a pile of rubble that once was a shop. The healers shot blasts of energy into a battle raging in the street ahead. She caught a paladin by the arm and dragged him with her. He was only one of the few around without that blasted red bull’s head tag hovering over him.
“Find six fighters, now. Bring them here. Guard these healers.” She pointed at the healers.
“Who the hell put you in charge?” The paladin stopped to type out in local chat.
A concentrated rain of fireball spells poured down. Keerna pushed the paladin into the crowd of healers, then cast a shield over everyone. “Bring a mage!” she screamed at the paladin, then pushed him back into the street.
“You got it. BRB,” the paladin said, and rushed away.
A breath, warm and sickly, slid across the back of her neck. She spun, fireball at the ready. Nothing there. Keerna’s eye darted back and forth, then to the ground. Her shadow stretched out in the afternoon sun, mottling the cobblestones. There. The sight of a second, faint, rippling shadow on the ground saved her life. She launched a flaming explosive at the space above a second wavy shadow. The thief appeared as her invisibility cloak collapsed, poison dagger in hand. She met Keerna’s eyes before she tumbled forwards onto the stones and vanished, this time permanently. Keerna dipped hand down and rummaged through the player’s dropped loot.
“I’ll take that,” she muttered under her breath as she picked up the thief’s gloves.
Gauntlets of Grieving: +12 damage
The damage buff worked not just for melee combat but for spell damage, so the find was a good one. She casually discarded her spidersilk gloves, uncaring of the 5% mana loss she’d gained from the set bonus from the matching gloves and skirt. It was worth it for the extra seven spell damage, though the clunky armor didn’t match her outfit at all.
“Kalmond, where are you?” she muttered, picturing the dwarf’s face in her mind.
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“By the shop.” Kalmond said in a strained voice. The shop was close, but might as well be hundreds of yards away with all the fighting taking place around it.
“We need to get out of here. This isn’t a fight we can win, and if we die, Mylos wins,” Keerna said. Kalmond didn’t reply.
A female elf healer wearing high-level robes sidled up. “Lady Keerna, we heard about the quest. Just tell us how to help. This is bullshit. Game is all off balance! They can’t do this!”
“How?” Keerna barked. “How do you know?”
A second healer, this one a squat dwarf, stepped forwards. “Login announcement. You didn’t see it? It’s all over the world chat, too.”
Access the world chat, Keerna thought. A box of text popped up.
Announcement: World Event has begun!
The Realms are in danger. Lord Mylos has assembled an army and is using it to wreak havoc on the Nine Circles. Only the Noble Four can stop him. Help the Noble Four or Join Mylos. The choice is yours.
The words scrolled past, followed by images of her, Kalmond, Thuglar and Thornbark in action. All the scenes were from their recent chalice quest. Well, then, she thought.
“Kal, did you catch that?”
“Yeah, reading it now, while I’m trying not to die. Try to meet us at the shop.”
“No,” Keerna replied. “Come to the square. It’s defensible.” A handful of battle-weary players loped towards her, leaving behind a pile of fallen wraiths.
“Sorceress Keerna, here are the men you requested!” The paladin she’d sent away for reinforcements returned.
“‘Men’ my ass,” one of his group declared over voice chat. A female warrior stepped forward, shouldering her companions aside. “Sorceress, if you intend to keep a bunch of cloth-wearers safe, this is the worst place for it. There's a wave of enemies headed in from the a breach in the eastern wall, and reports say this lot have at least half a brain between them.”
“They'll want the high ground,” Keerna said, anticipating where the conversation would lead.
Realm of the Nine Circles: A LitRPG Novel Page 17
