Everything happened in slow motion at this point.
Mama bearadillo had begun to lift up onto her hind legs to engage me when Aya dropped in front of her.
Ghost limbs, again, I thought as I dove out of the way, dropping the cub from my hands.
Aya met the bearadillo’s swipe with her buster sword, and while she didn’t connect with its paw, she did connect with one of its claws, sending the finger and nail flying.
The angry mama bellowed, her eyes filling with unmitigated rage.
As soon as I was back to my feet, I gave Lady C. the signal, and just as we planned, she lifted her hand in the air, a white mist cycloning out of her palm.
“Aya! Bomb Cyclone coming your way!”
Aya backflipped over a swipe from the mama bearadillo, hit the ground, and used her ghost limbs to pull her up into the trees.
The whirling snow flurries hit the mama bearadillo, and as they spun around her, she cried out in anger and agony.
“Aya, Bounce!”
Using her position in the trees, Aya came down hard next to the mama bearadillo, causing a mini explosion that rocketed the creature off its feet.
“Now!”
As the cyclone filtered away, Aya stood strong, her huge weapon held at the snarling creature’s neck. The cub came running towards its mother, and once it reached her, it started scratching its paws against the ground in an attempt to get under her body.
I approached the mama bearadillo with Lady C. at my side, her swords drawn, just in case something happened.
As the web of light formed between my fingertips, I took an offensive pose, brought my arm back, and captured the next member of our fighting party.
The two instantly disappeared, and I felt a great pressure lift from my chest. “We did it,” I whispered, a smiled aimed at Aya and Lady C. “Great work, you two. That was much, much easier than the first time we tried to get these two. Now, let’s get back to my place and go to the Dojo.”
Chapter Ten: Party Time, Excellent
My roommate, Alex, was asleep on the couch when I got home. On the coffee table in front of him sat a half-eaten slice of pizza. The walk over had been brief, and it mostly revolved around Aya teasing me about the song I’d sung to the bearadillo cub, and Lady C. complimenting me.
“Your roommate is a pig,” Aya said as she walked over to him. With her back to me, she bent over in front of the slice of pizza and sniffed it. “Pig food, I think.”
“I’m just happy to be home,” Lady C. said as she passed by me. I opened my bedroom door, ducked under the pipe cutting through my room, and fell onto my bed.
The right wall of my room was covered by screen printed gig posters. I looked over at them as I recalled some of the concerts and the artists who had made the posters. Our band, Linens, had played a ton of shows.
There were some posters selling towels; others going for that Soviet vibe and a play on words; another with a half-naked woman with her shirt barely covering her chest and the word ‘Linens’ tattooed across her chest; one that imagined our name as if it were a constellation; and a particularly strange one made of blackened stains on a white tablecloth.
We were a New York indie rock band. Our stuff had to be avant-garde to fit the stereotype.
“And now we’re a two piece,” I said to myself.
Iris had hinted that she wanted to do more music with me, and I definitely wanted to do more with her, but we’d probably need to change our name.
Besides, the name ‘Linens’ was kind of dumb anyway.
We had two albums out, and it generated some royalties from sales, but not that much, and the royalties from music subscription sites barely came in as a few dollars per month. We hadn’t even spoken to our label in the last month.
We needed something new.
Lady C. plopped down on the bed next to me. “Were you napping? You should take your glasses off if you’re going to sleep.”
“No, I was thinking,” I said as I rolled onto my back and put my arms under my head. She placed her head in the nook of my armpit. “We’re cuddling now?”
“I thought we were going to the Dojo, not staring at your band posters recalling a time that you were half the man you are today,” she said softly.
“Half the man I am today?”
Her head still in the nook of my armpit, Lady C. looked up at me and smiled. “Just look at you now: you’re about to win this tournament and you have three close female friends. Were you that lucky a week ago? It doesn’t seem like women ever came here.”
“That, I can agree with,” Aya said. She stood before the band posters looking them over, clearly not impressed.
“Um, yeah, let’s log in.”
Mentioning the phrase caused the Monster Hunt app to flash.
Lady C. was suddenly gone, as was Aya, giving me a moment of peace and quiet. I lay there for a second longer, looking at the gig posters.
I missed playing music.
It’d only been a few days, but I already felt my chops slipping away from me. From this thought, I replayed what had happened in our band’s practice space for the thousandth time.
Could I have avoided the sucker punch? Likely not, but seeing Lady C. and Aya move so quickly had poisoned my brain, making me think that I possessed those types of powers too.
You’re only human, I reminded myself as I set up my NV Visor. Leave the battling to the Huntresses.
The link Iris sent me earlier came into view as soon as I placed the visor over my head. Focusing on it activated an explosion of color on my pane of vision.
Congratulations, you have entered your first tournament! Click here to learn more about tournament rules.
A new window appeared, letting me know that my fighting party had been registered, and giving me the rules for the tournament.
Nothing out of the ordinary, aside from the fact that the tournament had no wild card rounds and a message stating that players were allowed to purchase battlegrounds that worked to their advantage.
With our place in the tournament logged and our time given, I relaxed onto my bed and waited for my NV Visor to take effect.
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
I spawned in the field in front of the Dojo’s quarters.
The sky above me was dark, streaked with stars and blips of light purple. A dark blue undertone had taken shape in the western sky, the borders of which reached the purple and created a hue that made me instantly feel calm.
Level up!
Aya and Lady C.’s updated stats came and I briefly scanned through them.
Since I still had access to GoogleFace within my Dojo, something that had only become available over the last eight years once neuronal physicists figured out how to allow a person to surf the internet from within a Proxima world, I performed a quick search on Monster Hunt tokens to get a better understanding of what I could do with them. Iris had mentioned something, but I wanted to be clear.
Monster Hunt tokens are randomly dropped in tournaments and in real time captures. The tokens can be traded for rare items, mythcrea, or exchanged for money. Alphas and their Hunters level up through tokens, and an Alpha can also sacrifice tokens to trade, enter a tournament, or place a wager. Doing so can adversely affect the Alpha’s level. Tokens can also be saved and used to purchase entry into EverLife.
Focusing on ‘EverLife’ gave me the description I’d been meaning to look up.
EverLife is the most exclusive Proxima world in the Proxima Galaxy. Created in the 2080s, EverLife serves as a vehicle for the NPCs from flourishing and extinguished Proxima worlds. A living Proxima World that is modified by users, there are twelve realms tied to the twelve spell classes used in Monster Hunt. Once a person is granted access to EverLife, their Dojo is permanently connected to one of these realms.
Damn, I thought as I turned to my Fighting Party. Everyone was there – Altsoba, Fujin, Magnus, Ophelia and now the bearadillo.
Altsoba, the Skin-Walker, was the first to speak. “Have you acq
uired my mirrors?”
“No, but I did get a final member for our first fighting party. Everyone meet Mama Bearadillo.”
The towering beast looked at the others just as her cub slipped out from underneath her. Seeing the cub immediately caused me to hum a bit from the Little Bear song I’d made up in the park.
The cub glanced to its mother, and with a simple nod, she encouraged it to move over to me.
The cub came forward, sniffed my hand, licked it, and moved back to its mother.
I am glad to join your Fighting Party, a voice said in my head.
“You’re ...telepathic?”
I am now your familiar.
“I know the space isn’t much,” I said as I waved my hand at the meadow behind the track. “But it will grow.”
I am sure.
“And is this what I should call you, Rose?”
Yes, Rose, and my cub’s name is Gobi.
“Great. Everyone, this is Rose.”
Aya stepped next to me and greeted everyone. “Today is our day to win,” she told the others, cutting straight to the chase.
“And what do we get if we win?” asked Ophelia the Lich.
She shrugged. “We get better stuff at the Dojo, but you already knew that. Any specific requests?” she asked. “Chase here will hook us up. He’s willing to buy us anything.”
“Aya…”
“He’s really trying hard to make this place better,” Lady C. interrupted, “but we are very limited in what we can do right now in terms of training.”
“We can fight each other,” Magnus said.
“We can, but we also want to save some of our energy for the tournament tonight. I do suggest that we work on formations,” Lady C. said. “Chase, do you agree?”
“Definitely, okay, so Rose, you’re up front.”
The bearadillo nodded her head. I will do my best.
“Your role is to ravage and engage the biggest member of their party. If the biggest enemy is a magic caster, focus on the next largest non-magic user. Your class is Terra which is ...”
“Earth-based,” Lady C. said, before a prompt could tell me the same thing.
“Thanks. Um…” Focusing on her special skills – Roll Charge, Slide Spike, and Beary Bite – formed an additional window on my viewing pane.
The phrase “Roll Charge” spawned a video on my pane of view. In the footage, Rose jumped, curled midair and hit the ground. Like Sonic the Hedgehog, she rolled forward, tearing through the soil as she advances.
The “Slide Spike” video began with her charging at an enemy. She slid, lifted one paw, hit an invisible barrier, and then came down hard with the paw, using her forward momentum to sweeten the blow.
Her final special skill, “Beary Bite” was pretty awesome. Rather than a normal bite, her jaw unhinged, allowing her to take a bite three times the size of a normal chomp.
“Great stuff,” I told her after I’d reviewed her skills. “Use the Roll Charge ability to help a teammate in need. The others, use at your discretion. Your Beary Bite skill may also intimidate enemies, which is a good thing.”
As you wish.
“Altsoba,” I said, turning to the Skin-Walker. Her stats appeared before me.
“Since your main class is algo…” Focusing on the word expanded the abbreviation. “Ah, algorithmic magic, and your subclass is psychologically based, I want you to focus on staying back and confusing the enemies.”
“That will be easy for me,” she said. Altsoba was intimidating as hell, beautiful too, with her dark skin, soulless eyes, and black hair. As she looked at me, her form started to change to that of Iris.
“Knock it off,” I told her as I began reviewing her special abilities.
Her first skill, “Morph,” was pretty much self-explanatory. Altsoba was able to morph into most things, including smaller stationary objects such as a potted plant.
I watched the video play for her second skill, “Fear Inducer.” This one was similar to
“Morph,” but focused exclusively on things that would bring terror to an opponent.
Her third skill, “Possess,” was one that I hadn’t expected from her. In the video that played, a small rabbit hopped in front of her. Focusing on the rabbit, Altsoba took over its body, evident in the fact the rabbit’s eyes flashed black.
“Trauma Mock” was another skill that would really help us. With this spell, she focused on an enemy’s weakness and exploited it. Her ability to partially tap into people’s minds made it much more powerful, allowing her to focus on their inner fears or desires.
“This is great, Altsoba,” I finally said.
“I’m glad I have pleased you. Now, buy me my mirrors.”
With that she turned away, allowing Fujin, the Japanese wind god, to approach.
Fujin bowed and once he looked back up at me, lightning flashed behind his eyes. He had the face of a demon, but up close he didn’t seem as scary as he did when on the battlefield. His stats appeared.
His first skill, “Winter Gust,” was what you’d expect from the skill’s name. It did, however, have the ability to freeze an opponent, which could prove handy.
His second skill was one that was pretty sweet. While “Death Wind” sounded like it would add some sort of toxicity to the air around an opponent, it did the exact opposite. As the dummy NPC in the video was hit by the spell, they began choking to death.
Nice, I thought as I reviewed the feed again. It suffocates an enemy.
His final skill, “Toxic Tornado,” created a tornado filled with sharp debris capable of striking multiple opponents. It was good to have something that would attack a large group, especially if we were going against a fighting party of seven people.
“Toxic Tornado is a great opener,” I finally told him. “I want you to open a few of our battles with this.”
He nodded, bowed his head again, and stepped back.
Magnus the Fext stepped up holding hands with Ophelia the Lich. His stats flashed before me:
Hovering over the word Sana told me it meant healing. “That’s right, you’re an interesting combination,” I told him.
“What do you mean?” he asked, his voice foreign and mysterious.
“Your main class is healing, subclass is death magic. Kind of a best of both worlds thing going on here.”
A window popped up showing me his first special move. “Death Sword” was an attack which cursed the opponent, taking their HP with each moment that passed.
Not bad, I thought as I checked out his second skill, “Party Heal,” which used the magic derived from his Sana class to heal everyone in the party.
His third skill, “HP Drain,” was pretty self-explanatory: it took life away from the opponent and gave it to him, a vampiric move if there ever was one.
Magnus, the bottom portion of his face concealed by a thick black scarf, looked me over. The purple of his eyes intensified as he stared into what felt like my digital soul. His eyes suddenly softened. “Thank you for allowing us to fight with you.”
“It is my pleasure.” I said as I turned to the Lich. Ophelia. She was a much lower level than Magnus, but her magic was strong, especially her fireball skill.
“Fireball” was exactly what I expected it to be, and it was tied to her subclass of Ignis. As the video played on the pop-up window, a fireball rimmed in white and purple formed in her hands, growing with intensity as she charged it. It did a ton of damage upon impact, and it also had a burn affect which continued until the opponent nullified the spell’s effect.
“Raise Dead” looked pretty awesome. The only issue, which I was able figure out from an additional popup, was that she couldn’t cast it on opponents more than two levels higher than her.
Still, it looked useful. A necromancer was always a good thing to have around.
Her final base specialty, “Sigil Curse,” took a little clarifying for me to truly understand. The prompts passed over the screen and I read them quickly, finally realizing that the skil
l wasn’t for an opponent per se, it was for an Alpha.
“A spell you can cast on another human player?” I said as Lady C. wrapped her arm around my shoulder. “Hey,” I told her under my breath, “I’m a little busy here.” She didn’t let go, and as she stood there, her sheathed sword pressed into my side.
“The Sigil Curse allows her to target an actual player and exploit the Fighting Party’s weakness,” Lady C. explained, still with her arm around my shoulder. “This spell, which can only be used once per fight, reveals details about the party’s vulnerability. If there is a vulnerability for fire, for example, she will be able to tell us this.”
“And how will we share the information?”
Lady C. removed her arm and pointed at her eyes. “It will appear here, on your eyes.”
“Ah, on my pane of vision. Got it. Great stuff, everyone. Ophelia, I want you to cast that at the beginning of every fight. You’re a lower level than the others, so focus on laying down fireballs and raising the dead if they are close to your level.”
I turned to Magnus, her counterpart.
“And I want you to be the on the second line of defense alongside Aya and Lady Cassandra. To review: Rose is on the front line; Magnus, Aya, Lady C. on the second; Ophelia on the third. Fujin will be our floater. Altsoba too.”
The wind god smiled.
“I thought you’d like that. And Altsoba?”
“Yes?” she asked, her face expressionless.
“You can do some backup floating as well. I know you need to get closer to really exploit our opponents, but I want them to be hacked down to size a bit first.” I rubbed my hands together. “That’s it, everyone. Aya, Lady C., I’m going back to New York to meet up with Iris.”
“We want to come,” Aya said.
“Subway ride.”
“Okay, maybe we’ll wait until you arrive.” The Thulean approached me and placed a hand on my shoulder. “Now is your chance to try something with Iris, if you’d like.”
I took her hand, giving her a smirk in the process. “That’s not at all what this is about.”
Monster Hunt NYC: A Fantasy Harem Adventure Page 10
