Occultist

by Oliver Mayes

  “Bartholomew, I can barely even speak to you at the moment because my mind is so blown by how good this gear is.”

  “I shall take that as a yes. When you are finished marveling at your gear – without a word of thanks, I might add – I shall be waiting to teach you some new skills and to assign you a trait.”

  Damien snapped out of his reverie and dashed after Bartholomew, realizing as he ran that after eight hours of game time, he was finally wearing shoes.

  “Bartholomew – master – this feels, like, the best thing anyone has ever given me. I’ll cherish it like a newborn child.”

  “Yes, indeed. Well, even I wouldn’t advise wearing newborn children. They’re far too small and it takes far too many of them to craft a garment of reasonable size.”

  The vampire grinned and lowered his face to Damien’s level.

  “First, there are new skills that I judge you competent and powerful enough to wield. I grant them to you now.”

  He tapped Damien on the head and a brief hot glow on his fingertip was followed by three new notifications.

  Summon Hell Hound Unlocked!

  Implosion Unlocked!

  Gateway Unlocked!

  Damien went into his Skills tab. He found two of the new skills in the Demonology tree.

  Summon Hell Hound: Mana: 250, Souls: 3 - You point at the ground, searing it with runes to open a portal to the demon world. After channeling for 10 seconds, the portal is opened and a hell hound arrives on the mortal plane. The hell hound will serve you until it dies or is dismissed. Hell hound stats improve every five levels.

  Implosion: Mana: 100, Cooldown: 30 seconds – You point at a summoned imp and open an unstable portal to its realm. The portal opens instantly, dismissing the imp and pulling all objects within 10 meters sharply toward its location. The force is strongest at the edge of the effect.

  Another minion, and then this very strange spell. If Damien was reading it right, it would briefly turn one of his imps into a black hole. Very nice. It seemed designed for crowd control rather than damage. The 30-second cooldown was pretty long too, and it was going to cost him an imp every time he used it as well as the mana. He was sure he’d figure out how to use it in time. There was no sign of the ‘Gateway’ spell. Maybe it was in his Maleficium skill tree?

  There was a phlegmy cough and Damien closed his menu to find Bartholomew staring directly into his face.

  “You have a worrying tendency for distraction. As I was saying, you have also become sufficiently powerful for me to grant you a trait. Are you ready?”

  Damien remembered traits from Scorpius. He’d got one at level 10 and another at level 20. The traits were specializations that gave each class unique advantages in certain fields. Damien couldn’t wait to find out what traits an occultist might have.

  “I’m ready. Show me my options.”

  “I shall grant you one of three traits. Choose wisely, as when you take one you forgo the others. The first trait will make Chaotic Bolt more volatile the longer you wait before casting it. The second trait will cause Corruption to spread to anything that comes into contact with a target affected by Corruption. The third trait will imbue your imps with wings, granting them faster movement speed and the ability to fly. Which do you choose?”

  The three choices came up in a window on Damien’s HUD. Bartholomew waited patiently in the background rather than continuing to talk, re-enforcing that Saga Online took trait allocations very seriously.

  Controlled Chaos: Chaotic Bolt’s damage increases the longer you hold it.

  Contagion: Corruption spreads by touch.

  Hell’s Angels: Your summoned imps have wings.

  Damien stared at them. It seemed these traits were all related to the starting abilities. All three of them were cool, but he’d given up on Chaotic Bolt and Corruption long ago. They were Intelligence-based and he’d put everything he had into wisdom to maximize his Soul Reserve and Soul Summon Limit.

  Even if he were still using either of them, it would be difficult not to pick Hell’s Angels. His imps would get into combat faster and he’d have more strategic options with them. Plus, they’d look absolutely epic. He cleared his throat, wanting to make sure there was no room for misunderstanding.

  “I’ve given it careful thought and I’d like to have trait three, Hell’s Angels, please.”

  There were a host of cheers behind him and Damien turned around to see his imps had locked arms and started line dancing, kicking their little legs out with joy as their tails thrashed behind them.

  Damien couldn’t help but chuckle. He’d be pretty happy if he was getting wings as well. Bartholomew raised his finger and hovered it in the air between Damien’s eyes.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  The finger connected and the imps’ cheers of joy turned to surprise. Damien looked at them and saw the trait was already taking effect. Bones grew from their shoulder blades, extending outward and upward with leathery skin stretching over them. Each fully stretched wing was about the same breadth as one of the imps it was attached to.

  Noigel didn’t wait for an order. He launched into the air and flapped the wings repeatedly to steady himself, hovering above the other two imps as his tail lashed below him for balance. He twisted slightly in mid-air and swept to a stop just above Damien’s shoulder, dropping onto it with ease.

  “It appears Noigel has reaped the rewards of your combined efforts as well. I hope he did his part in your most recent quest?”

  Damien recalled the tapping on his head that Noigel had persisted with, giving him the warning that saved his life.

  “Yeah, Noigel did great. I’m very happy with him.”

  “All that leaves are the base upgrades. Follow me.”

  As Damien obediently followed in Bart’s footsteps, he admired the striking appearance his new trait had granted his imps. The trait was something he’d overlooked. New skills were usually available from class trainers every five levels and traits came, one way or another, every ten. While he had some experience with these two aspects of Saga Online, he had no experience managing a base. He hadn’t stopped to consider how it might be improved.

  Bartholomew stood by as Damien looked his base over. After seeing the outpost that the guild had collectively built, his room seemed a little…. minimalist. The only feature in it was the Soul Well, which was essentially a dome of rocks. Maybe ‘Gateway’ wasn’t a spell at all.

  Damien opened his menu and navigated to ‘Base Schematics’. One of the previously grayed-out options had become accessible, confirming his suspicions, and the Soul Well icon was flashing as well. Damien started with the new building.

  Gateway

  Health: 250

  Description: The Gateway allows you to create a portal from your location back to the Gateway.

  Resources: 30 stone blocks, 400 mana

  It was a Portal Stone! Well, it had a different name, but it did almost exactly the same thing. Once this was built, Damien would be able to teleport back to his home base.

  Damien selected the schematic and his vision was filled with the red-shaded area it would occupy. From the outline he could see a flight of stairs leading up to a circle of floating, rune-etched stones. Awesome. He set the Gateway plan against the back wall and looked at his party to set them to the task of building it.

  The two remaining imps were taking it in turns to do increasingly large wing-assisted backflips while the wraith stared resolutely ahead. Noigel was still sitting on his shoulder. Damien decided the other three minions should be enough. It had taken a while for Noigel to warm up to him; he didn’t want to risk losing the progress he’d made.

  “Alright, you lot are collecting resources and building the Gateway. Get to it!”

  The imps smartly saluted and ran up to the wall, immediately picking out a rock embedded into the side of it and starting to dig it free. An empty progress bar showed up under the Gateway, stating that construction would take four
hours. That was a lot longer than the Soul Well had taken, but Damien supposed Bartholomew had assisted with that one by providing pre-made rubble.

  It was getting late, anyway.

  He could get some sleep and wake up to a completed building. While the two imps had leapt into action, the wraith stayed exactly where it was. Damien was surprised. It had always been so compliant before. Bartholomew coughed lightly to draw Damien’s attention before he could order it to work again.

  “Each of your minions serves a specific function in your base. The imps are your builders and can also gather resources, if they are present. The wraith has a scouting and defensive function. You tell it where to stand guard or where to patrol and it will do its best to eliminate threats.”

  Damien frowned. That might have been vaguely useful if he was making a base somewhere else, but anything that was capable of getting past Bartholomew would make short work of his wraith. He could dismiss it and use the freed space in his summon limit to get more imps to build the Gateway.

  He realized with a start that his Soul Well still only had one soul in it, so he’d only be able to bind one soul’s worth of demons to it. His Soul Reserve was at 7/7, so at least he could fix that problem right now.

  Placing his hand on the well, a command came up on his HUD.

  ‘Tap the Soul Well once for each soul you wish to embed.’

  Damien thought about it and tapped the rock twice. Each tap made his hand shimmer silver before long strands of energy twisted out of his fingertips and into the cracks in the rock. It now had three souls in total.

  Next, he dismissed the wraith, which passed through its portal without so much as a word. The soul energy was left behind in a neat orb which flew toward Damien, granting him one and a half soul energy. Damien opened his menu and went back into the Building Schematics tab. The Soul Well icon was still flashing. Damien selected it and found there was an upgrade available.

  Soul Well II

  Health: 500

  Soul Capacity: 20

  Requirements: 30 stone blocks, 10/10 Soul Well capacity

  Just when you think everything’s under control, something else comes up. If it was at all possible for both buildings to be ready by the time Damien woke up, that was what he wanted. But he only had three souls in the Soul Well and six and a half in his own Soul Reserve. He’d have to dismiss one of the imps to hit the quota.

  He looked at Noigel and thought about it. He needed everything upgraded as fast as possible, but didn’t want to offend the imp by dismissing him. That would send a bit of a mixed message. At last he came to the best compromise he could think of.

  “Noigel, you’ve done a great job today. I wanted to let you chill out for a while, but I need half a soul to upgrade the Soul Well. I’ve got to dismiss an imp. The other two will have to build all through the night. I can dismiss one of the other imps if you’d rather stay, but I reckon you’d rather I dismissed you and brought you back later. Do you want to build or be dismissed?”

  Damien was surprised when the imp responded not with his usual animated array of hand gestures, but with the same throaty whisper he’d employed to tell Damien what a loser he was that morning.

  “Damien gave Noigel wings. Noigel will help.”

  The imp hopped off Damien’s shoulder onto the ground and turned to give him a thumbs up. It was all Damien could do to snap his jaw shut before Noigel noticed. Then, without being ordered, Noigel ran up to the imps and started helping them lug the rock they’d found. The timer on the Gateway construction went from four hours to three. Damien singled out an imp that wasn’t Noigel before he lost track of which was which.

  “Good job today! You’re dismissed.”

  The imp broke off from the group, saluted sharply and leapt through the portal above him, aided by a swift beat of his new wings. The construction time went back to four hours and Damien received the last half soul he needed. He returned to the Soul Well and tapped it seven times, embedding every soul he had. On the last tap he received the notification he’d been hoping for.

  ‘Upgrade Soul Well? Yes or No?’

  He nodded eagerly, then ordered the imp helping Noigel to get to work on the Soul Well. A building timer appeared. Excellent. Both buildings would now take eight hours to complete, and should be finished by the time he got back. Bartholomew loomed over his shoulder as Damien watched the imps set about their task.

  “That’s a lot of work for two imps. Will they be all right?” Damien asked.

  “Oh my, do I detect concern? They’re literally hell-spawn, Damien. You’d be wiser to worry about yourself.”

  “Well, yeah, they might be, but they’re my hell-spawn. I need to make sure they’re in good shape and don’t hate me. Especially Noigel. Will they be good to go tomorrow?”

  “They’ll be absolutely fine. This is a considerably nicer environment than where they come from. Which do you imagine is worse? Eight hours constructing buildings or eight hours in hell? For all intents and purposes, they’re on vacation.”

  So far as Damien was concerned, the important thing was that completing the structures wasn’t going to wear his minions out or have any other adverse effects.

  “Alrighty then, that sounds great. Sorry, Bartholomew, it’s very late and I need to get back to my world. I’ll see you in the morning for more quests.”

  “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

  Bartholomew looked down at him smugly and did not offer any further guidance. Damien knew whatever it was must be important. Then he remembered he hadn’t allocated his stats. He went into the Stats tab and dumped all fifteen stat points from his last three levels into wisdom.

  With his gear taken into account, his wisdom stat had skyrocketed to 79. His Summon Limit increased by another two points, going up to 10. That gave him a fair bit of flexibility with his minion set-up, especially now he had hell hounds to test. Rather disappointingly, his Soul Reserve only went up by a single point, to 8.

  Despite putting all his points into wisdom up to level 10, in all that time Damien's Soul Reserve had only increased by three, compared to his Soul Summon Limit increasing by seven.

  “Bartholomew, why does my Soul Reserve increase so much more slowly than my Summon limit?”

  “It’s completely normal. It requires a great deal of wisdom to contain souls beyond your own and exponentially more with each extra soul you attempt to contain. It does not require quite so much to lead a group of creatures that are bound to your will. I assure you, your current Soul Reserve is abnormally high given your level of expertise.”

  “Oh. That’s good, then, I suppose. Well, thanks very much! I’m heading out, I’ll see—”

  Bartholomew shook his head and his smugness returned.

  “You’re still forgetting something. And I can guarantee you’re going to be extremely annoyed when you return in the morning if you don’t figure out what it is.”

  Damien sighed and pondered what he might be missing. His stats were all updated, his gear was equipped, he’d handed in all his quests, the imps would be building all through the night… oh.

  He checked his Summon limit and saw the imps were still bound to himself. If he logged off without binding them to the Soul Well, they’d disappear at the same time as he did and he’d come back online to find his buildings unfinished, all because of a simple mistake. This base management thing was a pain.

  “I bind all my current minions to my Soul Well.”

  Bartholomew nodded curtly as Damien’s Soul Summon Limit was allocated to his base.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Damien started the ten-second countdown to log off as Bartholomew changed tone. His levity was replaced with sudden seriousness and contemplation.

  “Although your progress was excellent today, you’ll improve more slowly from now on. At your current rate you still stand no chance of defeating Aetherius six days hence.”

  With three seconds left until logout, Damien remembered the raid schedule
and smiled.

  ‘Don’t worry. I have a plan.”

  Bartholomew had just enough time to curl an eyebrow before Damien’s vision faded and he woke up back in his pod.

  The IMBA set was finally starting to feel uncomfortable after being worn on and off for an entire day, but Damien wasn’t quite ready to take it off just yet. Without logging back in, he scrolled through the interface and found what he was looking for.

  Recordings.

  The headset had recorded everything following his fall into The Downward Spiral, when he’d first found the option in his menu. They were big chunks, each of them at least a couple of hours long. He had plenty of space to store them, but they’d need tidying up sooner or later. Not right now, though. His priority was to make sure he had the whole raid schedule, intact.

  He skipped through the footage until he found what he was looking for. It was even better than he’d hoped.

  The quality of the IMBA set recording was incredibly high. The only image he needed was the last one, where he’d stepped back and taken in the schedule in its entirety. The words and symbols stood out crystal clear on his screen. Sorted.

  As soon as he’d evaluated what he had, Damien realized he was going to go full-time player killer.

  The schedule made it possible. He knew where people would be and when. He knew they’d be distracted fighting powerful enemies. And best of all, they’d have no idea he was coming for them.

  He took a screenshot of tomorrow’s schedule entry before tilting the pod so he could stand upright in it. It had been a long, stressful day and he’d already been running around, either in his city or in his mind, for over twelve hours. Even so, he wanted to have some idea of what was next before he slept. That way, he’d wake up with purpose.

  Rising Tide was a large guild and there were an awful lot of activities listed throughout the next day. Damien checked them chronologically, cross-referencing between the schedule and the internet so he could research the different dungeons and sift through player profiles to find suitable targets. Most of the events were far out of his reach. There were either too many players or their levels were simply too damn high. Others were too far, the trip even more dangerous than killing the players due to his negative reputation with the Empire. Empire-aligned players and NPCs would likely kill him on sight.