So she got it, honestly, and she even felt kinda guilty for coming along on this raid, if only because Nil was so adamant that they make the defenders’ lives miserable while taking out their settlement. But it wasn’t like she could switch sides now, so when the hissed words rippled through the group, calling the climbers to prepare to scale the cliffs and for everyone else to gather at the mouth of the tunnel, she laid her hands on the rough granite and searched out incut ledges that provided decent grip.
“Now,” Nil’s god-voice boomed across the landscape.
Ashley jumped and actually looked up in panic even though she knew the signal had come through external voice chat. After taking a deep breath to still her nerves, she started climbing.
The cliff was maybe 150 feet tall, a fatal drop even for someone with her skill level in Tumbling. Even so, she reached the top in less than a minute or two, gaining the rim before the wall shook as the charges exploded. Throwing a leg over, she quickly jumped to her feet and looked side to side for Stonehaven’s guards.
Ashley yelped in surprise when, not ten feet away, she saw the mottled black-and-pink flesh of what appeared to be a…demon? The creature had dropped to a crouch, planting a clawed forefoot on the top of the cliff, and small wings flapped as it tried to keep its balance. As it looked over the edge, no doubt spotting the raid group filing into the newly blasted tunnel, it snarled.
Ashley raced forward, grabbed the demon by one of its stubby horns, and dragged her dagger across its throat before it could raise an alarm. Dashing forward in search of cover, she scanned the rest of the clifftop for further sentries.
She shook her head in confusion when she spotted two more demons. One had cupped claw-tipped fingers around its mouth and was calling down into the settlement.
She slowed when she realized something was seriously wrong here. Ashley’s thoughts whirled as she tried to figure out what was going on. Had Devon formed an alliance with demons? That hardly seemed like something she would do. Dropping to a crouch and using her Meld with Shadows ability—for all the good it might do in such an exposed position—Ashley leaned over the far edge of the cliff and peered down into Stonehaven.
Okay, so something strange was definitely going on. Not only were Stonehaven’s front gates standing wide open, but also the settlement seemed to be nearly deserted.
And those few NPCs that were inside the walls weren’t human; they too were demons.
Before she could try to get some kind of warning down to the others, the rest of the guild burst from a dust-filled tunnel at the foot of the cliff. With a roar, raiders streamed into the settlement and started running for what Ashley assumed were assigned positions.
A popup appeared in her vision.
Stonehaven’s ownership is now: Contested (2%)
Tailoring Workshop: Contested (10%)
Shrine to Veia: Contested (15%)
Simple Cabin: Contested (25%)
Simple Cabin: Contested (32%)
Inner Keep: Contested (2%)
The list went on and on, scrolling through what seemed to be most of the buildings in the settlement. Next to that window was a second informational popup.
To claim this settlement, you must move all structures from a contested to a captured state. Once the settlement has been fully captured, you must hold it without contest for forty-eight hours. Once those requirements have been met, Stonehaven will belong to the Blood-soaked Blades, Leader: Nil.
Chapter Forty-Nine
SITTING ON THE throne was like riding a rocket into space. Devon felt like her bones were being shaken apart, like her teeth were rattling out of her jaw. At the same time, she wasn’t even moving. Power gushed through her in an uncontrollable torrent, like lightning roaring through her from her toes to the crown of her head.
It was all she could do to hang on and not be blasted into bits. Yet somehow, she was managing to dip her mind into that raging river and deflect just a fraction of the stream onto a side pathway that split and surged down the connection between her Stone Guardians and the throne.
Through her bond with the golems, she felt the energy lance from their eye sockets, turning demons to charred husks wherever the beams struck. Still, the power offered more. One by one, the guardians began to collect the streams of energy, forming them into great shields, scintillating domes that arched over the giants’ heads. Within the hemispheres, power gathered and condensed until Devon felt as if the pressure might crush the golems. And then, abruptly, shields gave way one after another. The blast waves raced out from each of her giants, rolling over the city and savanna. The surges left buildings and players and NPCs untouched, but where the concussion passed through demonic ranks, Ishildar’s enemies disintegrated, exploding in clouds of dust.
Still, the geyser of power flowed through her, and the bulk of the magical energy swirled up to form a massive funnel cloud overhead. It was a tornado of light, an immense construct that spanned the heavens.
Gritting her teeth and clinging tight to the arms of the throne, Devon shouted with the effort of just keeping the golems working toward her goal. She didn’t and couldn’t instruct them in how to use the streaming energy for Ishildar’s defense. But they were made for this purpose, constructed in ancient times to stand against dark forces. Slowly but surely, they advanced toward the edge of the city, lasering clouds of imps from the sky as they formed more blast waves.
The demon army faltered, and some of the squads began to make tentative retreats.
Faintly, Devon could hear the battle cries of her human, mistwalker, dwarven, and felsen forces as they first hesitated, then climbed down from the bulwark and pushed the advance, mopping up small pockets of wounded demons that had somehow survived the Guardians’ attacks.
As the horde drew back, a discordant shriek rose from the rear ranks of the demon army. Through the eyes of her golems, Devon saw Archdemon Gaviroth rise from the palanquin in which he’d been borne by around a score of demon thralls. He stood to a height that seemed impossible given the being she’d seen before, and a cloud of red-tinged smoke began to pour from the monster, billowing around the archdemon and over his head. Lightning flashed within the rapidly growing storm, and all around, demons began to take heart. Once again, they began a forward march.
Tendrils of smoke and flickering bolts of lightning swirled and lanced from the billowing cloud, striking groups of demons. They seemed to grant a buff, because now, when impaled by the rays of light from Devon’s Guardians, the demons took much longer to die. And still, the archdemon summoned his storm.
In the middle of the savanna where hellfire had melted the player camp, and farther south where the Ziggurat of the Damned stood in the Grukluk Swamp, Devon could sense angry red pools of demonic power, and dimly, she felt them feeding the archdemon. Through the deeper perception offered by the magic raging through her, she intuitively knew that the ziggurat matched—perhaps even surpassed—the Veian Temple in strength, and that only the power in the Throne of the Ancients had a chance of overcoming it.
And distantly, she perceived lines of darkness shooting from the ziggurat, cutting through the mortal realm and connecting the base to other loci where the demon forces, commanded by other archdemon generals, had gained footholds on the continent.
She attempted to get a count, but when she focused on each ray of darkness, it was as if it darted away from her perception.
There were more armies, but as to the number and strength, she had no idea.
And it might not matter because, with a massive roar, Archdemon Gaviroth unleashed the power he’d been condensing.
Darkness rushed out from the roiling storm. As it rolled over the horde, each demon became surrounded by an angry red nimbus. And when the infernal magic washed over her Stone Guardians, their light was abruptly snuffed, all power stolen from within them, and their connections to the throne were severed. Devon’s bond with the golems dimmed but didn’t quite fade. She could still perceiv
e the scene, but the stone giants had no energy to obey her commands.
With angry shrieks, the demons’ march became frenzied, and Devon’s small force shouted in panic as they raced back for the bulwark.
Still, the torrent gushed through Devon, threatening to tear her to bits.
The power was there, but it was all she could do to simply be the conduit, the channel that allowed it into the world. As for controlling it, might as well stand in a canyon beneath a failing dam and hope she could hold back the water.
But what choice did she have? She tried releasing one arm of the throne, grabbing for the Greenscale Pendant in hopes she could activate Ishildar’s Call and resurrect the connection between golems and throne.
She nearly lost her mind as the power pounded her psyche, and it took everything she could muster to get her hand back on the solid marble arm.
The demons once again crossed the border into Ishildar, now screeching and howling and easily toppling walls with blows from their newly strengthened limbs.
Devon could feel the tendons in her neck standing out like cables as she fought to wrap her awareness around the throne’s power. It might be too much for her, but she was the city’s only chance.
With a shriek, she let go of the mental barrier she’d maintained, the shield between power and mind that held her together. The torrent caught Devon up and threw her along in the current, rocketing her awareness up into the unfathomable storm of power cycling above the city.
She tried to get some sort of grip, tried to orient, and finally gave up and allowed her mind to fragment, spreading wide through the cyclone of magic. For just an instant, she understood its shape, could fathom what it might be to command that much energy.
She grabbed for the power, and it was like trying to keep hold of a massive, thrashing eel from a Greek myth, a muscular, slippery beast that she could scarcely grip, much less guide. It was like grabbing the end of a writhing firehose and hoping not to be thrown into the nearby blaze.
Devon held for as long as she could, and in that moment she conveyed her desire to Ishildar’s ancient power.
She wanted the demons defeated. The enemies of Ishildar and Stonehaven dead. Just…gone.
Time lurched, and reality shuddered. Devon, fragmented and tattered, existed in strobing flashes. And then suddenly, she felt her awareness condense, sucked back together as her body was violently ejected from the throne.
Chapter Fifty
SIDES HEAVING, DEVON stopped at a street corner and dug into her Sparklebomb Backpack. Her inventory screen opened, and she focused, grimacing, on the Jungle Energy Potion she’d considered giving to Greel during their swamp trek. The little pot dropped into her hand, the gritty, earthenware ceramic rough against her palm.
When she pulled the cork loose, the smell nearly made her gag. Her tongue seemed to swell up in preemptive protest. But her Fatigue bar was flashing—92%. She plugged her nose and poured the potion contents into her mouth, and before she could second-guess herself, swallowed the tonic in a single gulp. Her eyes went wide as her stomach clenched, sending the concoction halfway back up her esophagus.
She swallowed, hard, then gagged and coughed and desperately fished for her Everfull Waterskin. After a handful of deep swallows, the taste of compost-laced motor oil wasn’t entirely gone from her palate, but she didn’t think she was going to barf.
Her Fatigue bar flashed one last time, then steadily emptied until it was only 45% full. Good enough.
“You know,” Bob said. “As a largely abstract being, I’m glad I don’t need to ingest substances to alter my statistics. For all the attention you mortals seem to pay to this eating and drinking hobby, I can’t say that the experience as a whole seems all that pleasant.”
“You haven’t tried chocolate.”
Of course, just thinking about eating right now—even a delicious bon-bon—brought a fresh wave of rebellion from her stomach, so Devon hurriedly slung her backpack into place between her shoulder blades and started jogging again.
During her flashes of perception while melded with the storm, she’d felt the eradication of the demon horde, ranks and ranks of monsters disintegrating as the enormous funnel cloud touched down and raged over the plain, cutting larger and larger swaths from the army. Her bones remembered the rattling and shaking of the earth as the storm tore at it, the crust fracturing under the force of the suction. Though she’d been both more and less than human at the time, a disembodied, fragmented awareness melded to an uncontrollable magical force, parts of her mind remembered seeing massive blocks of earth lifted from the surface to hover above the landscape in those last moments. She recalled a final, infinite split-second when time seemed to have stopped, the world frozen in surreal, suspended animation. Crumbs of earth and stone had halted where they’d been dribbling from the underside of the lifted sections of the savanna. Demons had looked up at the cycling storm, masks of terror on their faces.
And then, the surge, the final, ear-shattering thunderclap. Power fell on the earth like a thousand hammer strikes, utterly extinguishing the demon presence in the region.
She knew it was over, the battle for Ishildar won. But at the same time, she couldn’t shake the feeling that something was amiss. In the last moments of her connection with the storm, she’d felt something slip sideways. A lurch of uncontrolled energy. Devon knew the theory of wild magic. With the good came the bad, or at least the unexpected. And she worried that it wouldn’t all be good news when she arrived back at Temple Square.
And she couldn’t forget there was still the player raid to contend with. Her mind rebelled, hating to think of Jeremy’s betrayal, but she hadn’t heard anything from Chen since he’d told her he planned to raise a posse.
She ran with her mini-map up to avoid wrong turns, and as her little map blip drew near to the location pin for the square, she kept her ear cocked for sounds of battle or celebration or…anything really.
The Temple District was oddly silent.
Devon forced more energy into her legs, her boots pounding the stone pavement.
Along the northern border of the area Jarleck had fortified, the bulwark was lower than in other exposures, between six and eight feet high. She scanned the top of the rubble heap for defenders but saw no one. The wall here would have been sparsely guarded given the demons’ approach from the south, but the absence of fighters gave Devon hope. Maybe the worries of a player raid had turned out to be unfounded. Maybe, after such a tremendous battle against an overwhelming force, her followers and allies were taking some well-earned rest.
She spotted a point where the bulwark’s outer wall wasn’t too steep, and she quickly climbed to the top.
Halting on the earthen path that had been packed into the top of the wall, she looked down into the square and surrounding streets. Devon froze as she took stock of the situation.
Scattered about the square, players sat on crates and stone blocks and in some cases, cross-legged on the ground. They rested elbows on their knees, kept their heads bowed as if in complete exhaustion. In the quadrant where the Skevalli refugees had congregated, there was a little more movement as the non-combatants slowly went about their chores. A few of the diminutive felsen were crouched on their heels, their voices a somber burble as they spoke in their native tongue. Devon caught small snatches of the conversation, but she only had a few skill points in Felsen Language, and she couldn’t piece any meaning together.
The scene struck her as far too subdued. She’d expected to find a victory celebration or fresh preparations to fend off a player attack, but not this.
All at once, the realization slapped her like a wet towel to the face. Where was everyone else? Altogether, there were maybe one hundred players and around sixty or seventy NPCs in the square. Before the attack, the entire refugee population of Stonehaven had been crammed into the area as well.
Explanations flashed through her mind, one after another. The demons had targeted Stonehav
en’s NPCs specifically, wiping out every one of her followers. Or maybe, with the demons gone, the citizens had rushed to reclaim their homes. That wouldn’t be so bad. It would be good, really, even if she’d imagined she’d be the one to lead them back.
But the first explanation didn’t really hold up. To entirely wipe out Stonehaven’s population, the tradespeople especially, the demons would have needed to breach the bulwark. She saw no signs of that, and she doubted the Skevalli and felsen would have come through unscathed in that case.
As for the latter idea, as hopeful as it was, the mood in the square didn’t fit. And she seriously doubted the players would have let innocent NPCs leave the fortified area unaccompanied.
As she started down the inner slope of the bulwark, she accidentally kicked free a small stone that tumbled down to the square. The clatter brought players’ heads up, and some jumped to their feet.
Shadows emerged from behind the row of pillars at the edge of the Veian Temple, and familiar figures stepped down the stairs. Hailey walked beside Emerson, followed by Chen, Torald, and Jeremy. Owen was a somewhat-shadowy presence at the back of the group.
Devon’s gaze shot to Jeremy, then darted to Chen.
“The raid?”
Chen pressed his lips together. “Long story. But we don’t need to worry about them.”
“Wait, what?”
“I screwed up,” Jeremy said. “Should have told you my plan.”
“Which was?”
“At first it was just a contingency. I thought I could figure out how to use them based on the conditions when they arrived. I planned to tell you once I had them near enough to matter. But then they attacked your Skevalli friends, and stuff just got out of control. I figured I’d better redeem myself by turning the plan into a success before I admitted the massacre was basically my fault.” He shrugged. “Anyway. I know ‘sorry’ isn’t good enough.”
Throne of the Ancients: A LitRPG Adventure (Stonehaven League Book 6) Page 27
