Killstreak Book One

by Stuart Thaman

  Nothing happened.

  The four-armed beast laughed, its voice so loud that Kadorax had to cover his ears to keep the pain at bay.

  “Teleport!” the assassin tried again. Still, his feet remained firmly planted on the temple’s stone floor.

  “Shadow Step!”

  Nothing.

  “Fade!”

  Nothing.

  Kadorax flew through his list of mystic abilities, searching for something that might work in the boss encounter. He settled on Smoke Leap, a low-level ability designed to vault him upward and forward by about thirty feet while leaving behind a decoy made of smoke, but the ability did not function properly. Something blocked it.

  “You cannot run, puny human,” the massive boss taunted. “No one can escape their own grave.”

  Kadorax had encountered enemies in the past with similar magic-preventing abilities. Typically, the dampening field was generated by an enchanted ring or amulet worn by the user, but the towering beast featured nothing of the sort.

  “Slaughtering Surge!” Kadorax finally yelled, bringing a fresh wave of adrenaline to his arms and legs.

  Syzak summoned forth a shell of protective energy around the assassin, and then a burst of brilliant light shot from the snake-man’s wand. The spell landed on the boss’ head, but it did not have the intended effect of blinding the creature. In fact, it didn’t appear to have any effect whatsoever.

  When Kadorax reached the horned beast, it was ready for him. Arm after heavy arm came hammering down into the temple floor like boulders dislodged in a landslide. Each strike was enough to turn Kadorax into dust, and his Expert Reflexes were all that kept him alive. Swerving between the arms, the assassin brought his dripping blade of shadows in with all the strength he had left in his body, slashing furiously at the creature’s exoskeleton covering its segmented right leg.

  Kadorax’s blade clicked loudly off the boss’ armor. From his position between the beast’s legs, he could just barely see into the room from where the horned thing had emerged, and it was full to the ceiling with treasure—more than the assassin had ever seen before. Piles of glittering gold shone in the torchlight, and iron-banded chests were stacked in neat rows as far in as he could see.

  Breaking his greed-fueled reverie, a huge hand swept Kadorax up from the ground, crushing all the air from his lungs. On the ground, Syzak used every ounce of obscure arcane knowledge he had to rain blow after blow on the creature, though none of them had any visible effect. Even spells like Void Prison, an incredibly high-level magical assault designed to immobilize even the most magic-immune foes, simply did not succeed.

  The boss brought Kadorax up to its huge maw. “I am your undoing, human!” it yelled. Its breath smelled rotten and old, like the beast had been chained in its prison for hundreds of years with nothing but dead adventurers to fill its belly.

  Kadorax saw a hint of yellow coming down from the top of his vision. It was his experience total—the amount the boss was about to claim for itself. “I’ll see you at the spawn, my friend,” the assassin called to Syzak, his voice shaking.

  The snake-man nodded. “In the next life,” he answered. “In the next life…”

  Laughing all the while, the dungeon boss squeezed. It didn’t need to activate any ability, and it didn’t even bother to watch. In an instant, Kadorax’s chest caved in on his organs, squishing the life from his body like a bug caught beneath the hoof of a horse.

  Chapter 2

  Kadorax awoke with a splitting headache. He was naked, covered by only the barest of roughspun sheets, and he was terribly cold. Somewhere nearby, he heard the sounds of a noisy inn filtering through the poorly constructed walls and door. When he sat up, his head spun like he’d been drinking all night. Kadorax had only died in Agglor one time before, and it had been exactly the same. More than two decades ago, when he had been relatively new to the world, he had been scouting a rocky cliffside in the service of a nobleman, and his foot had slipped, sending him to his death on the ground below. The next day he had awoken in a different town, in a different part of Agglor he had never seen before. For whatever reason, respawning imparted the most brutal of hangovers.

  Back on Earth, a place that amounted to little more than a distant memory in Kadorax’s mind, he had been someone else. He couldn’t remember his family from that time or even what he had looked like, only that he had been an avid gamer, and then one morning had awoken with a splitting migraine—in Agglor. Respawning sent shreds of his old life that still remained locked in his brain flooding back to the forefront. He felt the vague notion that he had been married in his past life, and he wondered if his wife still missed him. After first awakening in Agglor, he had spent several years determined to make it back. And then the memories had begun to fade, and he had given himself fully to the world, embracing its structure and chaos, becoming one of its masters.

  Now Kadorax would have to begin anew. Level one. No class. No talents. No specializations. He tested his arms, flexing them in multiple directions, and the muscle felt puny beneath his skin. The same, however, could not be said for the layer of fat ringing his midsection.

  “My lord?” a groggy voice broke through Kadorax’s contemplation.

  “Syzak?”

  The snake-man groaned. “It was horrible,” he went on. “That thing ate you, and then it trapped me in a corner of the temple… Then it squished me under its foot.”

  Kadorax shook the image from his head. “It’s over now, Syzak. And don’t call me your lord. I’m just a commoner, a level one like everyone else.”

  Syzak’s head peeked around the corner of the doorway. “Will you choose to be an assassin again?” he asked.

  No answer came quickly to Kadorax’s lips. In his first life on Agglor, he had been a mystic, using arcane and shamanistic magic to bend the rules of the universe to his bidding. But then something as mundane as a slippery rock had sent him spiraling to his death. That was when he had decided to embrace the life of a sure-footed assassin, and he had excelled in every possible way.

  “What do you think that thing was?” he asked, rubbing his temples with his palms. His shaggy hair was in his eyes, something he hadn’t experienced in twenty years or more, and he looked around for a blade to shear it away from his head. Of course, he found no such weapon. The room’s only furniture other than the straw bed on which he sat was a dresser, and inside he knew he would find a cheap set of clothing wholly inadequate for the elements outside.

  Syzak thought a moment before answering. “Some sort of minotaur? It had horns. But all those eyes? And why would the jackals be charged with its defense?” he wondered aloud.

  “Damn dogheads…” Kadorax muttered. Every spell and ability he had known as a level seventy-two assassin hybrid classed with a mystic had been erased from his memory, but his old habits and thoughts were as strong as ever.

  Reading Kadorax’s eyes, Syzak felt a queasy lump growing in his own throat. “You aren’t thinking of fighting that thing again, are you?” he asked.

  “Of course I am!” the former assassin answered. “Did you see that loot? The treasure room? Leagues beyond anything we’ve ever earned before!”

  Syzak let out a pained sigh. His eyes still showed a heavy dose of fear, like memories of the horned jackal beast wouldn’t leave him alone.

  Kadorax threw off the simple sheet and made his way to the wooden dresser against the near wall. There were pants and a shirt in the uppermost drawer, and the second held a belt with a small leather pouch attached to it by heavy thread. There weren’t even any shoes, and by the feel of the room, he had respawned somewhere very cold.

  “I don’t think I’ll go assassin again, Syzak,” Kadorax said. “My blade didn’t even put a scratch on that thing’s armor. I’ll need something else.”

  The snake-man looked genuinely surprised. “You were an assassin for so long. That’s all I can think of you as.”

  Kadorax nodded. “Yeah, but we need something different. And b
efore we figure out any of that, we just need to learn what that stupid thing is. Once we know what can kill it, we can decide on classes.”

  For a moment, Syzak looked a bit perplexed. “You have no other aspirations?” he asked.

  “What else is there? We can’t go home. Success in Agglor only comes in two forms: loot and levels,” Kadorax answered. “Whatever that boss is, it’s the biggest thing we’ve ever seen, and so is the loot chamber. I’m going after it.”

  Syzak let out a long exhale, which sounded tiny and almost like a squeal coming from his snake mouth. “I suppose you’re right,” he said after a while.

  “You don’t have to follow me,” the human reminded him. Kadorax had taken the sheet from his bed and wrapped it around his shoulders like a cape, trying in vain to keep some of the biting cold at bay. Being exothermic, the snake-man was even worse off, shivering uncontrollably in the doorway.

  “Please don’t abandon me…” Syzak whispered out of reflex.

  “You were my pet snake back on Earth, Syzak. I’d never abandon you, but you are free to choose your own path here. I won’t have you as my slave,” Kadorax said with the hint of a laugh.

  Despite the reassurance, Syzak remained deflated and nervous.

  “Let’s get some food and find a lord,” Kadorax said before his companion could add anything else. “And we certainly need some more clothes. You look ridiculous.”

  Downstairs, the inn was only marginally warmer. A low fire burned in one corner with a pot of boiling meat hanging above it, and the front door didn’t close very well, so a constant draft came from underneath the wood. A bit of frost clung to the room’s only window. The center of the room was filled with small tables, each with two chairs, and each with only one occupant. The people, as far as Kadorax knew, were class trainers that he would only get to see once. He recognized the assassin immediately as a tall woman in all black casually spinning a small dagger on the table in front of her. Some of the others were hard to guess.

  Before selecting a class, Kadorax turned to the barkeep, a portly old man with cataracts, few teeth, and even less hair. The last time Kadorax had respawned, the barkeep in that particular establishment had been a real person, and he hoped the same was true of the old man before him now.

  “We need some information, if you have it,” Kadorax said.

  The barkeep looked the poorly clothed pair up and down before replying. “What is it you’re after?” he asked with a gruff voice.

  “Any news?” Kadorax casually offered.

  “Other than the Gar’kesh showing up?”

  “Ha,” Kadorax laughed. “A Gar’kesh doesn’t have four arms, horns, and a huge row of eyes, does it?”

  “Aye,” the barkeep answered.

  Kadorax shook his head with a smile on his face. “Well, that was remarkably easy.”

  “You met your demise at its hand, didn’t you?” the man asked. He grabbed a stone mug from a shelf behind him to pour a beer.

  “You’re a perceptive one,” Kadorax confirmed. He pulled up the barkeep’s character sheet and saw the man was a fifth-level bard with inordinately high insight. Kadorax figured the barkeep had some sort of magical item enhancing his abilities, but the classless civilian no longer had any spell capable of detecting it.

  “Everyone dying these days has the same story. The Gar’kesh is killing whole villages at a time. A bunch of jackals tried to imprison it, but they never came back. The thing must’ve killed them when it broke free.”

  Syzak leaned in close over the bar, his beady eyes nervously shifting side to side. “How long has it been since the Gar’kesh awoke?” he asked.

  The barkeep looked away in contemplation. “Two weeks? Three? Maybe a little more, I’m not sure. News travels slowly over the Boneridge Mountains,” the barkeep explained.

  “Over the mountains?” Kadorax asked incredulously. The Boneridge Mountains were huge, beyond imposing, and the only pass was so heavily guarded and taxed that movement from one side of the range to the other was basically impossible.

  “Aye, you’re on the west,” the old man added.

  “No wonder it’s so cold,” Syzak said with a shiver.

  “Go on and get your classes sorted out, and I’ll let you eat a little before we close.” The man took a long swig of the dark beer he had poured, then turned away from the pair to attend to the meat cooking over the fire.

  “And what can kill a Gar’kesh?” Kadorax asked after him.

  The barkeep shrugged. “The jackals thought they could, or maybe they had been the ones to summon it. Jackal raids have been increasing in frequency, according to the latest rumors,” he said. “Apparently the Priorate Knights have allied themselves with the Blackened Blades and the Miners’ Union. They’re all set to head out in search of Atticus Willowshade, should the old warlock still be alive. The king seems to think he’ll have the answer.”

  “A warlock…” Kadorax mused. Warlocks were outcasts by nature, shunned by most civilized societies for a myriad of very valid reasons. Kadorax had only met a handful of warlocks in his previous life, and every one of them had struck him as unnervingly strange. Atticus had a reputation among the warlocks as one of their champions—a god even—though he’d earned his mantle through numerous acts of unspeakable evil. The only reason the king hadn’t sent an army to slaughter the man was because he feared it would fail. All the rumors about Atticus varied to some degree, but they all came together on two points—that the warlock was immortal, and that the warlock was never to be trifled with.

  Kadorax scanned the room for the warlock trainer, an uneasy knot growing in his stomach, and his eyes settled on the most bizarre humanoid he had ever seen. The trainer was a grotesque amalgamation of a reptile and a skeleton, with bony protrusions breaking forth from scales all over its body.

  “No wonder no one ever goes warlock,” Syzak said. “Don’t tell me that’s your plan.”

  “Um, I think I’ll pass,” Kadorax answered. The trainers were arranged in a purposeful pattern ranging from magical to martial, and the two trainers nearest the warlock were both clad in dark colors with little bones dangling from their hair. It looked a bit dramatic and overblown, but it definitely reinforced the stereotype that any magic dealing with death or the dead was evil.

  “What do you train?” Kadorax asked, dropping himself into a cold wooden chair opposite a dapper-looking elf in all black with a dark leather top hat, bone earrings dangling on the sides of his face.

  The elf beamed at Kadorax. “Hello, traveler! I am Nearblight the Elf, a necromancer. I can teach you to command the dead, shape their bones, and bend the dark essences to your whim.” The elf’s happy countenance didn’t align well with his grim visage.

  “Controlling bones? That sounds pretty cool,” Kadorax said more to himself than anyone else.

  “I don’t know,” Syzak added. “What are the drawbacks?”

  Right on cue, the elf continued, “Disadvantages include weakness to fire, weakness to charm, an inability to take most other classes as a hybrid, and a strong social stigma.”

  “Well, that might not be too bad. Could I hybrid class as a warlock?” Kadorax asked.

  “Yes, adventurer.”

  “Not bad!”

  Syzak didn’t look too certain. “Being a social outcast will make everything more difficult,” he said. “I don’t know…”

  Kadorax turned to an equally dark-clad woman at the next table. “And your class?”

  She turned to meet his gaze, her eyes full of excitement. “Hello, traveler! I am Banemaw the Hungry, a bastion of chaos incarnate. I can teach you to scourge your enemies, lay waste to countless foes with wave after wave of hellfire, and bend lesser creatures to your will with a mere thought.”

  “Ka—” Syzak started with panic in his voice, but he didn’t get more than a single syllable out before he was interrupted.

  “Hell yes!” Kadorax shouted, sliding over to the woman’s table. “Count me in!”

&nbs
p; The woman smiled even more, extending her pale, dainty hand for Kadorax to shake. When their skin connected, Kadorax felt a surge of energy jolt through his arm toward his heart, and a little bit of blackened mist rose up from their clasped hands like a signature sealing a pact.

  “Welcome, fellow bastion of chaos incarnate! It is good to meet another of my kind,” the woman went on.

  “What would go well with… whatever the hell you are?” Syzak asked, his snake eyes wide.

  “Another shaman?” Kadorax replied, barely paying him any attention. His full attention was on the woman before him.

  “As a bastion of chaos incarnate, you’ll need to know just a few things,” she continued with a cute little chuckle. “First, you will be able to use abilities and cast spells from the schools of fire, darkness, chaos, and domination. Second, a bastion of chaos incarnate is proficient with either a whip, a greatsword, or a spear. Third, a bastion of chaos incarnate must always wear heavy armor in battle.”

  “Must?” Kadorax asked. He had always preferred light bits of leather and not getting hit over the knights and paladins clanking around in heavy steel plates.

  “Yes, adventurer,” the woman said with a cheerful nod. “In order to complete the training, a metal soul rod will be implanted in your chest. A bastion of chaos incarnate must protect their soul rod at all costs, for to destroy it would mean death. Is this information useful to you, traveler?”

  Kadorax felt his face going white.

  “Good luck with that,” Syzak sarcastically chided, moving away toward another trainer. The snake-man slapped his human friend on the shoulder as he left.

  “In my chest?” he gasped. Kadorax’s assassin training had required a bunch of balancing studies and discourses on stealth, along with a lengthy introduction to meditation—which he had never once used. Surgery felt like a bit much.

  “To know chaos is to understand pain, adventurer,” Banemaw said. “You must become a master of both. Are you ready to begin?”

  Kadorax leaned back in his wooden chair. Suddenly, the cold chill in the air didn’t seem too bad. “Yeah, I guess I am,” he finally said.