Quest failed: Nobody’s Boy Toy
So, the idea was you prove to the king and queen that you would protect the Skevalli without being bound by marriage. Nobody’s feeling very well-protected right now. Also, the king and queen are no longer around to bear witness to your heroics.
“Wait, and you can’t resurrect?”
“Resurrect?”
Did he really not know? She opened the settlement interface and flipped to the population tab on the royal settlement.
Settlement: Chasm View
Population: 6
Basic NPCs
4 x Children
Advanced NPCs:
King Kenjan
Grandmother Valin
Okay, so yeah, he was advanced—and a king now. And apparently, there was another survivor. But before she could ask him about that, a memory sprang to mind. After she’d claimed Ishildar as a base and had been able to look at the populations of the vassal settlements, Chasm View had listed…what…forty-something? It must have been a complete massacre to reduce the number to six. From what she’d gathered, most of the people living there had been Kenjan’s extended family. It took her a moment to figure out what else was bothering her about the population number, but when she realized the issue, she felt sick to her stomach.
A settlement with a population of around forty was capped at the Village designation. She might not remember all the specifics of Stonehaven’s progression, but she did recall that her cap of advanced NPCs had been seven during that period. Even if resurrection were an option for some of Kenjan’s slaughtered relatives and friends, it would only be a small fraction.
Swallowing hurt, like someone had rammed an avocado pit down her esophagus. She shook her head slowly. “I just checked with the…special ledger that’s available to me as the Keeper. Prince—King Kenjan, I am so, so sorry.” She didn’t know what else to say. Words didn’t seem adequate.
He seemed to wrestle with his emotions for a moment before managing to speak in a relatively even voice. “What matters now is that I do what I can to protect the people that depend on me. They’re too vulnerable in Vulture’s Rift, especially if the”—his control slipped, and his cheek trembled—“if the attackers find their way to the bottom of the chasm. I’m able to rescue one or two people at a time, but Proudheart will need to rest soon.”
“How many are left?” she asked, realizing as she spoke that she could check the population tab for the settlement. Pulling it open, she saw there were over five hundred total citizens of Vulture’s Rift. Kenjan had probably brought just thirty or so to Ishildar. “Never mind. I see.”
“Then you can see why I must mount up and head out.”
“Wait…” She glanced around, assessing the players who were more or less idle. “Is it possible to reach Vulture’s Rift on foot? I can’t let you try to rescue every one of your people singlehandedly.” Of course, if she were able to help him bring five hundred more people here, she had no idea how they’d be fed. Maybe she could also send some dwarves to help carry supplies.
“The way is difficult, and the risk of attack by basilisks and king sidewinders is ever present, but it’s a journey of about half a day if all goes well.”
“Then let me organize a group of fighters.”
He inclined his head, and his shoulders sank in obvious relief. “I see now why Veia above blessed you with the Keeper’s mantle.”
King Kenjan is offering you a quest: Lead the Skevalli to safety
Objective: Skevalli population relocated to Ishildar.
Reward: Redemption and more responsibility. Yay.
Accept? Y/N
You know you’ve missed escort quests. Especially when the NPCs walk So. Freaking. Slowly. Yup…and if you auto-follow and grab a soda, for sure that’s when the attack will come. Have fun!
Devon accepted without hesitation. Once the entry was in her log, though, she couldn’t help wondering if the rescue was just a distracting side quest. Because really, what good would it do to bring a bunch of Skevalli commoners into Ishildar where they would likely either starve or be murdered by demons once the Ziggurat of the Damned negated the defense offered by the Veian Temple?
“You look…conflicted,” King Kenjan said.
She sighed and decided to be honest. “I’m just not sure they’ll be any safer here. I wish I could have more confidence.”
“And if I’m not mistaken, you feel responsible for carrying each of the burdens singlehandedly.”
She shrugged. “Guilty, I suppose.”
You know, there is a little concept that most people have grasped by the time they reach adulthood. It’s called delegation.
Devon brushed away the popup, but not without considering the words. Okay, so maybe she could stand to hand off some responsibilities. She’d done a decent job building up her NPC leadership, but right now, she needed more help from players. It had been a step in the right direction to allow Jeremy to start advising her on strategies for base battles. But she needed to go further.
Kenjan seemed to sense that she was working through possibilities in her head, and he stood quietly, arms hanging, fingers lightly curled near his loincloth. When she glanced at him, he nodded as if understanding that she’d made some decisions. “If you wish to send another as leader of the group traveling to Vulture’s Rift, I’m sure it will be the best choice for all of us,” he said.
She touched his arm. Reflexively, he flexed his bicep and abs, then sighed. “Sorry,” he said. “Habit.”
“It’s all right,” she said. “Will you rest while I sort out responsibilities for the coming days? Proudheart looks like he could use some…” What did griffons eat anyway? “…meat?”
Kenjan smiled faintly. “He needs a chance to hunt, that’s true. And after that, some time to digest, or he’ll get cramps. Thank you, Keeper Devon. We are fortunate to have you guiding us.”
Devon nodded in gratitude at the compliment, even if she didn’t feel like a very good leader right now. She patted Proudheart’s sleek flank then turned and walked away.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
You create: 1 x Field Rations
Ashley licked her fingers to keep from burning them, pinched a scrap of leather as added protection, and quickly tugged the jagged plate of iron from the fire. On it, a mush of oats, ham, and rehydrated vegetables steamed. Ash puffed as the makeshift platter dropped off the edge of the fire ring. The cloud swirled before coating the already-unappetizing meal in a layer of gray.
She grimaced. A pot with a lid or even some kind of skillet with curved sides would really be nice, but the whole evil-alignment thing did cause occasional problems. The idea of raiding NPC villages for the supplies she needed was usually a sound one—she hadn’t paid a copper for her armor or weapons. But attacks against villages were usually pretty freaking hectic. Not the sort of situation where she stopped to consider what kind of kitchenware she should steal. Oh, and NPCs typically weren’t walking around their homes carrying bags of holding she could loot either, so it wasn’t like she had a lot of free inventory space.
Anyway, she’d fashioned the cooking plate from a looted scrap of platemail. It worked okay, even if her food was usually burned on the underside and cold on top. And often, like today, seasoned with ash or dirt.
The platter was still too hot to touch, so she grabbed a stick and used it to push the meal farther from the fire. While waiting for it to cool, she sat back on her heels and watched the camp. Already, around half the guild had logged out, so the usual sparring and contests of stupidity—who could last the longest without a heal after taking an arrow to the eye socket, who could eat a hot coal without screaming—had settled down to a few arm wrestling competitions. At the next fire over, they’d been passing around a skin of in-game alcohol, and the results were predictable. Half the people surrounding the blaze were passed out and drooling, and the other half were involved in some inane argument about real-world sports teams.
Fortunately, something in Ashley’s expression had seemed to dissuade anyone from joining her fire, so she didn’t have to deal with the kind of crap that Nil’s followers considered fun. Especially tonight, she just wasn’t in the mood. She would rather have logged out and left her character hungry, taking the hit to her Fatigue tomorrow, than deal with their shit.
The truth was, the attack on the griffon people’s camp just wasn’t sitting right with her. Sure, it had been a decent break from the monotony of constant marching, detouring around one chasm after another and wondering whether they’d ever reach the Stonehaven area. Last time they’d attacked, they’d come in through a sane route, following an ancient roadway that approached the jungle basin through a notch in the mountains that bounded the region to the east. That had been fine. Like, maybe two days’ journey from the Eltera City region. But according to Nil’s inside informant—Jeremy was the name she kept hearing—that approach was currently unusable. Plus, it would destroy their element of surprise.
Anyway, yeah, the attack on the cliff-side camp had been a change of pace, but it had left her feeling…off. Maybe because there’d been old people there? The kids, of course, had been invulnerable. Pretty much a rule of this game world, and Ashley was grateful for that. Some gamers might laugh at her for being squeamish about murdering young NPCs, but she had a feeling most people would share her discomfort. It was a common decency thing.
Of course, Nil had bitched about their invulnerability buff. No surprise there.
Regardless, maybe it was the presence of elderly NPCs that had left her feeling so unsettled. They hadn’t been old old. Not like wheelchair-bound or anything. More like powerful-tribal-elder old. The kind of mobs that usually summoned totems that nuked the crap out of a party. At least, that’s what it had seemed like. But no amount of elder wisdom could deal with a raid force ten times larger than the entire population of the camp. The NPCs living in that village just below the canyon rim hadn’t stood a chance.
Maybe that’s what was bothering her, actually. It didn’t have anything to do with the age of the mobs. The issue was that they’d gone in and slaughtered the camp for the sake of it. Ashley’s experience bar hadn’t even budged, and as for loot, a couple of people got some jars of nut oil that were supposed to give a buff, but only if you ran around half-naked.
It was weird. This kind of thing hadn’t ever bothered her. They were just NPCs. They’d literally been created so that players could fight them. But still. Maybe the immersion was getting to her, blurring her notion of reality. Maybe she was spending too much time inside the game, the added hours causing her to lose touch.
She sighed as she carefully tested the temperature of the iron plate with a fingertip. Her meal was cool enough to eat, so she grabbed the plate by the edges and lifted it onto her lap before scooping up a bite on her index and middle fingers. As she sucked the food off her fingers—silverware: another thing it was hard to justify consuming an inventory slot for—a shadow appeared at the far side of her fire. Her eyes widened when Nil stepped into the light.
“Not drinking tonight?” he asked, slurring his words a little. He had some sort of flask in his hand, and he raised it as if in a toast.
She shook her head. “Not tonight.” Ashley never drank in-game alcohol, but mentioning that seemed like it would just antagonize him.
The guild leader sneered and dropped lazily into a cross-legged seat. He picked up a stick and poked the fire, sending a swirl of sparks toward her face. When she cringed and leaned backward, he just laughed.
“So, what did you think of the little raid today?” he asked.
Ashley swallowed and tried to look casual. Was this a trap? Rather than answer right away, she scooped another bite from her plate and sucked it off her fingers.
Fortunately, Nil liked to hear himself talk far more than he liked listening to others. After another quick swig from his flask he glanced at the stars overhead, he took a deep breath and pointed at her food. “Tier 1 cooking recipes suck. If you’re going to make your own food, you should at least level up the skill.”
Ashley felt her lip twitch in annoyance and hoped that his drunkenness and the relative darkness covered it. She needed to stay wary here because this was exactly the kind of thing Nil did when he was pissed off at someone. Saunter up acting all buddy-buddy, make some idle conversation, then curse them with some disgusting damage-over-time spell. Usually an insect swarm, but sometimes he cast this thing that made people start sprouting fungus everywhere. Then, if they actually fought back, he’d call in his lackeys to hold the person down while he cut their heart out or something. The man was sick, honestly.
Of course, the only reason he might be pissed off at her was if he’d gotten wind of her plan to splinter off and start a new guild with a hefty chunk of his followers. And if he’d actually heard that, she didn’t think he’d confront her now when half the guild was offline. He would want an audience for whatever punishment he’d cooked up.
“Trade skills aren’t really my thing,” she said with a shrug. “Takes forever to skill up to the point where they give decent buffs or gear upgrades. Just seems like I’m better off leveling if there’s no good PvP opportunities.”
“Well, you do you.” He shrugged. “Anyway, yeah, so I wanted to know what you thought of the attack. It was fun, right?”
She shrugged. “I guess. Just wish the mobs would have been a little harder.”
“See!” He grinned and pointed at her with the gnarled stick thing that was his casting focus item. “That’s what I thought. It seemed like a stupid distraction from our actual goal. But I try to be a good leader and shit and people were bored with this goddamn endless walk. So I thought, fine. Let’s take a couple of hours and clear the camp.”
“Okay…” she said, still wondering why the hell he’d decided to come sit with her.
“And I heard that people have been bitching and even talking about joining another guild. Though if I find out who is actually saying that kind of shit, they’re freaking out of this organization so fast they won’t even have time to beg for forgiveness. Anyway, yeah. I figured it couldn’t hurt to kill a few things. Raise morale. But then I hear, just this evening, that news of our freaking raid got to Devon and the Stonehaven peeps.”
“What? How?”
“I don’t know. Those griffon freaks were just some random mobs out in the middle of nowhere, but word came from our informant that the attack screwed up a whole bunch of plans. Jeremy said he'd deal with it, but he’s pissed, and he said that if we go off script again, he’s done helping us. Freaking control-freak, right? After this is over, I think I’ll have to show him how this power dynamic actually works. But for right now, we can’t lose his info, or we’re going in blind.”
“Yeah, sounds sketchy to lose him as an ally now,” Ashley said. She still had no clue why this conversation was happening. He’d just mentioned the rumor about people leaving the guild. So maybe he was trying to bait her into some kind of confession? Still, that really wasn’t his style—frankly, he wasn’t smart enough to try that kind of thing. Maybe this little chat was the typical leader thing where they were internally freaking out but couldn’t show it in front of their followers, so they chose someone off by themselves to lay their woes on. It wasn’t like she was trying to pull the woman card or anything, but it did seem like this kind of crying-on-a-shoulder thing happened to her more often than it did the male gamers she knew.
“Exactly. You know, sometimes of all the people in the guild, I feel like you really get where I’m trying to take this thing. It’s like, I don’t even have to explain my logic like I do with all those other shit heads.” He took another swig of liquor. “You sure you don’t want some?”
She shook her head. “Screws with my combat reflexes, even a day later.”
He smirked. “I feel you. And yeah, we’re actually close enough that we might drop into the Stonehaven area tomorrow. Could be we hi
t our first resistance if shit goes sideways. But it’s kind of the same issue as you eating those field rations. I get that grinding out a tier or two in cooking is boring as hell, but with the time compression stuff, we basically spend more time in game than we do in the real world. Even more if you subtract the out-of-game time that you’re sleeping and shit like that. So maybe you should consider relaxing a little. You know, enjoy the experience and shit.”
Ashley almost wanted to record the conversation to count the frequency of swear words in Nil’s speech. It was like he used them for punctuation. “Maybe I’ll have a swig or two after we take out the Stonehaven peeps,” she said.
Nil smiled and (ew) winked at her. “Maybe we’ll put back a few mugs of ale together. Just you and me.”
Oh. Gross. Was he actually into her? In-game character to in-game character? Ashley was tempted to leave the guild now. She probably would if she could roll up an alternate character, even if it meant starting over at level one, but the company was still restricting avatars to one per player. She really needed to get offline before she barfed up her dinner or something.
“Ah, shit,” she said, fumbling for some excuse. “I gotta log. Roommate just messaged me about my stupid dog. If I don’t walk him, he’ll pee all over the carpet. You’d think my roomies could just take care of it, but they’re lazy jerks.”
Nil dropped back onto an elbow as he took another big swallow of whatever swill he was drinking. “Tie the mutt up outside next time. Or better, if he can’t hold his pee, you should just give him to a shelter or something. That shit’s annoying.”
Ashley gritted her teeth to keep from saying anything else. Instead, she waved a pair of fingers while mentally pressing the logout button. What an asshole.
Throne of the Ancients: A LitRPG Adventure (Stonehaven League Book 6) Page 18
