Rebirth Online 2

by Michael James Ploof

  There was no time to give warning as the demon thrust its pitchfork forward and stabbed it right through the dragon’s exposed belly. The three prongs exploded up through the dragon’s shoulders, nearly skewering Cecilia in the process. The dragon let out a heart wrenching cry and went limp as the demon yanked the pitchfork out, and we held on for dear life as the dragon began to fall like a stone. I couldn’t find the demon in the air as we spun and plummeted toward the ground, but it must have found another target. Cecilia cursed and cried for her dragon to pull up as we fell, and at the last minute she managed to level us out. The dragon’s head lolled from side to side as it tried to stay conscious and land us safely, but its lifeblood poured out as its massive heart pumped with exertion and fear, and we crashed into the demonic horde near the mountain door.

  Cecilia’s dragon went out with a fight, spewing fire as it careened into the undead army and skidded to a stop at the base of the mountain. I was violently jolted in my saddle, but the straps held, and as the smoke wafted up from the crash site, I spun my head around to see if anyone was hurt.

  The girls groaned and cursed, but they were all still alive.

  “To the door!” I yelled as I fumbled with my straps.

  We all unstrapped ourselves and scrambled down the dead dragon’s back as undead goblins, ogres, and all manner of undesirables descended upon us. There were a few hundred NPC dwarves and real-world players making a stand upon the wide steps leading up to the door, and they offered us cover as we rushed toward them.

  Once we reached the safety of the threshold, I turned and unleashed a Fireball into the advancing horde. They came on like a stampede of bulls, and indeed, there was an undead minotaur or two among them. I glanced overhead with hope that soon died as I realized that no more allies remained to police the skies, and now all the dragons that circled above were part of the undead army.

  My guildmates and I stood shoulder to shoulder with the other defenders and fought to keep the horde at bay, but suddenly a necromancer appeared among them and cast a spell on Cecilia’s fallen dragon.

  “Leave him alone you son of a bitch!” Cecilia screamed, but a heartbeat later the defeated dragon rose from the pool of blood that had been his deathbed and turned his snarling maw our way.

  I cast Scorched Earth at my feet to give the group a fire resistance buff and pulled Ember and Kit down with me as the dragon fire rolled over us. There were other mages in our group, and a few of them had cast the same spell, leaving us virtually impervious to fire. The defenders up on the battlements continued their onslaught, bombarding the horde with hundreds of spells, debuffs, enchanted arrows, spears, and even boiling tar.

  Despite our efforts, the undead army kept on coming, and soon it was clear that we wouldn’t last long outside the mountain.

  “Fall back!” the giant guardian of Aeorock cried as he leapt over us and landed among the vicious undead. They clambered up his thick legs like ants defending their mound, but he kept on fighting.

  “Come on!” I urged the girls as the horde pushed past the guardian.

  Cecilia, Trinity, Ember, Kit, and Anna raced for the door with the other defenders as I unleashed Arcane Lightning at the undead clambering up the stairs after us. I had almost made it to the door when a fifteen-foot-tall troll broke through the crowd and charged straight for me. I conjured a Fireball, which exploded against his chest, but he continued to charge and cocked back a tree-sized club.

  I brought up my fire shield in a desperate attempt to deflect the strike, but then Trinity came leaping into my field of view and took the blow instead. A moment later the giant’s head exploded under the impact of the guardian’s axe, and the big stone dwarf yelled to me, “Go!”

  Trinity had been hit hard, and she now lay in a heap to the right of the mountain door. I raced over to her and dropped to my knees on the charred stone.

  “Trinity!” I yelled, shocked by all the blood and her broken form. “Help, I need a healer!”

  A priest raced out of the now closing door and rushed to our aid, but he was suddenly incinerated by demonic flames.

  “Sam…” Trinity croaked through bloody teeth as I held her.

  “Why would you do that?” I asked as I held her.

  “I’m a tank, Loverboy, that’s my job…”

  “Trinity?”

  Her eyes held me in a dead stare, and I felt rage begin to boil inside of me. Trinity was dead, but there was no way that I was going to leave her body to these monsters. I scooped her up and raced for the door with the demonic horde hot on my heels.

  Chapter 6

  After Trinity died, my remaining guildmates and I took to the battlements to exact our revenge. I could see in their eyes that they felt the same way that I did…and I was PISSED.

  I should have been used to the idea of my friends dying every now and again. I mean, it was part of the game. But now it was different. Trinity couldn’t be resurrected, and she wouldn’t be found chilling out at the cemetery anytime soon. She was now trapped in the Underworld, and there wasn’t a damn thing that I could do to help her.

  So instead I took my frustrations out on the undead who had taken her from me.

  From the battlements I rained down Fireballs, Arcane Lightning, Magic Bolts, and set the ground aflame with Scorched Earth. When my mana drained to near zero, I guzzled down a mana potion, and when again my blue bar came close to empty, I drank another. I sucked down bottle after bottle of mana potion, lighting into my enemies with a ferocity that I seldom felt. Heads exploded, chests blew out through backs, gore splattered any who stood too close to my targets, but still the demonic horde came. Real-world players and NPCs alike desperately defended the mountain from the nightmarish onslaught, but the attacking army’s numbers were too great.

  The undead overran the battlements. Ragged-winged dragons, giant bats, and red-eyed demons rained destruction from above. Mountain trolls bombarded us with massive boulders that caused the battlements to shudder beneath our feet. Clerics and wizards tried desperately to keep the collective energy shields up, but they were slowly losing the struggle. When a two-headed giant launched a stone the size of an eighteen-wheeler, the battle took a turn for the worse for the defenders.

  The monolithic stone slab took out the entire third level of the battlements. I pulled the girls back into the alcove as the shattered battlements dropped down onto the second and continued onto the first. Dust and debris blinded us as we huddled just inside the threshold to the mountain with the others who had been quick enough to take cover.

  The vicious screams, growls, and mewling groans of the undead came closer, haunting us from the other side of the dusty veil.

  “Come on!” I yelled as I pulled Kit to her feet.

  She was tired, we all were, but we had to get into the city proper before the dwarves sealed off the battlements.

  “Fall back, defenders of Aeorock,” said the decapitated head of the guardian from beneath a pile of rubble to my right.

  “This way,” said Anna, and a shining beacon cut through the thick dust and detritus.

  We scrambled through the tunnel leading to the city as the mountain shook and rumbled. NPC dwarves were guiding the exhausted defenders out through the narrow passages, and when we finally got through, large boulders were rolled into place.

  When we stumbled out into the main hall we dropped in a heap and lay in the smoky gloom exhausted. I had never felt so tired in my life. Every fiber of my being screamed for rest. My eyes felt swollen and itchy, and my temples throbbed. The fatigue wasn’t only mental and physical, but spiritual as well. Casting so many spells for such an extended period left my mind muddled and foggy. Mana potions had given me the magical energy to continue, and health potions had kept me standing, but there was no replacing sleep.

  “I can’t do it,” said Kit as I stood on shaky legs and tried to pull her and Anna up to me.

  “We’ve got to get away from the—” Ember began to say, but a massive explosion silenced her q
uickly.

  Fire and molten stone washed over us, and had it not been for Anna’s quick thinking, we would have all been killed. The elf healer brought up a dome-shaped energy shield at the last moment, and the raging pyre blew over us harmlessly. When it died out, Anna passed out and dropped to the floor.

  I scrambled over to her and heaved her over my shoulder, calling back to the girls. “Let’s get the hell out of here!”

  Ember and Cecilia helped Kit to her feet, and together we raced across the dwarven hall toward Cecilia’s pub. Explosions continued to shake the mountain, and I turned just in time to watch the big mountain doors blow inward. Flames followed their metallic protest as they crashed to the floor, and the largest dragon I had ever seen leered at us through the hole it had created. Milky green eyes found me, and I swear the dragon grinned. It reeled back suddenly, purposefully, and inside its open maw I beheld a churning ball of green flame.

  The dragon’s head shot forward as I urged the girls toward the pub. I thought at any moment we would be incinerated and join Trinity in the depths of hell, but the flames unexpectedly winked out with a hiss.

  I snapped my head around to see what had happened, and that’s when I saw glorious sunlight pouring in through the destroyed doorway.

  “It’s the sun!” said Kit, crying tears of joy.

  We watched with shimmering eyes as the undead army that had begun pouring into the mountain went up in smoke, and soon the hall was as empty as a tomb. The girls and I then wordlessly shuffled through the pub toward Cecilia’s pad. I barely remember climbing up the stairs, and I’m not sure how I found the bed, but once I did, I didn’t wake up for 8 hours.

  I walked through the cemetery in my home town on a crisp October night. I was vaguely aware that I was dreaming, but the fear that I felt was real. The night held an eerie feeling. I sensed a hundred eyes on me, and the distinct feeling that I was not alone left the hair on my arms standing straight. The wind howled through dead trees, whose gnarled branches reached like skeletal fingers.

  “Sam!”

  The voice came from everywhere and nowhere at the same time. It was faint but urgent, close yet far away, as if spoken across the great expanse of time and space.

  “Trinity?” I said as I turned a slow circle.

  She answered in a voice like the haunted wind, calling to me pleadingly, desperately. “Sam…”

  “Trinity, I’m here!”

  The wind picked up and blew a cyclone of autumn leaves across the old headstones. An owl hooted in the distance. The trees creaked menacingly.

  And that’s when I saw the ghosts begin to rise from their graves.

  The dead and rotten corpses of humans, elves, dwarves, and furries dug themselves out of the Earth, their empty eyes instantly finding me. I tried to turn to run, but I suddenly found myself frozen where I stood.

  “SSSamssson,” they hissed in voices as ragged as their flesh. Dozens of the risen dead shuffled toward me, arms extended and heads twitching on thin necks. Some of the zombie-like creatures were missing their jaws, others were missing limbs, and a few legless abominations clawed their way toward me across the damp earth.

  “Sam, please, you’ve got to help me,” came Trinity’s pleading cry.

  I struggled to move, but I might as well have been back in my hospital bed. As the undead surrounded me, I screamed in frustration and terror. One of them grabbed ahold of my right arm and bit down deep, tearing back the flesh like a rabid dog.

  “Sam! Wake up!”

  I snapped upright in bed and grabbed ahold of the person that held me by the shoulders.

  “It’s me Sam,” said Ember. “You were having a bad dream.”

  “A dream?” I said shakily as my mind began to clear.

  “It’s okay Big Daddy,” said Kit as she wrapped her arms around me from behind and hugged me tight.

  I fell back onto the bed in the comfort of my guildmates’ arms and breathed a sigh of relief. Trinity’s voice echoed in my mind, but farther away this time. With a tap to my interface I brought up the time and was surprised to see that I had almost slept through the entire day. Glancing around at my sleepy-eyed women, I realized that they had as well.

  “Jesus,” I said as I forced myself to sit up again. “It’s two o’clock in the afternoon. The undead are going to attack again in less than five hours.”

  Kit groaned and buried her face in my lap.

  “We’re not going to survive another attack like that,” said Cecilia beside me.

  “We might as well prepare to enter the Underworld tonight,” said Ember.

  “Come on guys,” I said with as much confidence as I could fake. “Don’t lose hope.”

  “They’re right,” said Anna. “There is nowhere to go that is safe. The entire realm is being overwhelmed by the undead hordes.”

  “The programmers will figure out something,” I told her.

  Kit scoffed. “Good luck with that.”

  “There’s got to be something they can do,” I said, mentally trying to puzzle out a solution.

  My father might have been a gruff man, but he was also as stubborn as a mule. He had taught me that there was always a solution, no matter the problem, and the lesson had stuck with me.

  “Well, no matter if we survive or not, we should level,” said Ember. “It’s our best defense.”

  The girls all shared a glance, and before I could offer up my opinion, Anna leaned over and kissed me. Clothes hit the floor, and eight hands explored every inch of my body. Some of yesterday’s exhaustion still plagued me, but my body responded with enthusiasm to their groping hands.

  Ember took me in her mouth and Kit and Cecilia soon joined her as I feasted on Anna’s womanhood. Their tongues teased me until I couldn’t take it anymore, and I flipped Anna onto her back and took her urgently. My thrusts produced melodic moans of passion in Anna as I kissed Cecilia and them Ember, who offered up one of her pert violet nipples for me to tease with my mouth. I put my hands to work pleasing Cecilia and Kit, before bringing Anna to climax and taking Ember from behind.

  Five minutes later Ember clung to me as her body convulsed deliciously, and I gently laid her down and withdrew. Kit was on me in an instant, jumping onto my lap as I fell back and eagerly straddling my throbbing manhood. She cried tears of joy and clung to me as she gyrated. Sharp claws teased my chest as she arched her back and rode me urgently. She burst with teary-eyed laughter as her orgasm subsided, and she joined Ember and watched as I made love to Cecilia.

  The terror of the night before, combined with the urgency of our situation did something to the girls, and they all took another turn with me before they collectively brought me to climax with their wonderful tongues.

  I exploded into Ember’s mouth as she moaned and swallowed everything I gave her. As I lay there laughing happily and shuddering from the aftershocks, Ember sat up and grinned as she wiped her mouth.

  “You’re fucking delicious,” she said seductively.

  “You’re not so bad yourself,” I said sleepily. To my further delight, a notification came up in front of me.

  Congratulations!

  You’ve reached level 23

  New spell unlocked: Fire Vision

  See nearest trainer to learn more

  “I unlocked a new spell!” I told the girls.

  “Me too,” said Cecilia and Ember in unison. They glanced at each other and smiled.

  “So did I,” said Kit with delight as she scrolled through her interface. “Mother Nature’s Fury.”

  “Sounds pretty intense,” said Anna.

  Kit nodded excitedly.

  “Let’s get cleaned up and get to work,” I told them all. “We don’t have much time before the next attack, and I want to see if the dwarf king has a plan.”

  “If only there was a way to keep it daylight out,” said Kit. “Sunrise saved us this morning.”

  “That’s it!” I said, my mind racing.

  “What?” said Kit with a quizzical express
ion.

  “The sun,” I said. “This is a game world, right? So, I don’t see why the programmers can’t just stop the day’s progression. If night doesn’t fall, the undead won’t be able to rise.”

  “You’re right,” said Cecilia, her fox tail swaying excitedly. “All they have to do is pause the day’s cycle, then maybe they’ll have time to figure this all out.”

  “I’m going to try and contact Dr. Hamilton,” I said as I brought up my interface and tapped on the emergency contact icon.

  “What is it, Sam?” he said, looking like I had disturbed him from important work.

  “Where’s Dr. Marks?” I asked, knowing and dreading what he would say.

  “Trapped in the Underworld,” he said evenly.

  “Jesus…” I said under my breath.

  “What did he say?” Kit asked.

  I was the only one who could hear the doctor, and the girls stared at me expectantly.

  “Have the programmers figured anything out?” I asked the doctor.

  “I cannot share that information with you, Sam.”

  “I get it,” I said. “Listen, we had an idea to help stop the undead from killing everyone and sending them to the Underworld.”

  “I’m listening…”

  “Stop the sun,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Stop the sun,” I repeated. “If the programmers can stop night from falling, then the undead won’t be able to rise.”

  Doctor Hamilton was shaking his head before I was finished. “That’s extreme, Sam. A change like that could have catastrophic effects on the entire game. And if the game crashes at a time like this…well, I don’t know what might happen.”