by Oliver Mayes
Lillian turned so violently in the saddle that the horse almost veered off the road.
“Are you serious? Why didn’t you say so? Is that going to be a problem?”
Damien thought about it. He still had 10 soul energy with which to summon new units. For Lillian’s plan, he could…. yes, that should work. He still couldn’t help being a little annoyed.
“I was trying to! If you remember, you were pretty adamant I needed to get rid of them. It should be fine, if things go as you said. Not ideal, you know? Just... fine.”
Lillian groaned and set her eyes ahead again, shaking her head.
“I’m sorry your class is weird, all right? We only ran through your combat abilities yesterday, I didn’t know it worked like that. I just assumed it…. ah, screw it. It doesn’t make any difference, it would have taken too long to avoid the guard posts if we brought your demons along. We’ll just have to do our best.”
The road curved left, but rather than following it Lillian led them straight into the trees. They reached the mountain range at the edge of the zone and drew to a stop. Damien jumped clear as Lillian wheeled the horse round to set on her way again.
“Follow the wall and you’ll find it. Stay in the trees until I give you the signal.”
She didn’t wait for a reply before spurring her horse back to the road. Damien set off ahead, keeping the rock face on his right as Noigel perched on his shoulder. After a few minutes' jog, Damien started to pick out spots of gray in between the trees ahead of them.
Despite the abundance of resources the forest provided, this outpost had been built from stone. The craftsmanship was well thought through: the wall slanted forward ever so slightly and was a smooth surface with no gaps in the mortar, making it almost impossible to scale by conventional means. Rising Tide had really pushed the boat out on this one, although they’d saved on time and resources by incorporating the mountain range into the back wall.
A circular parapet overhanging the wall provided excellent line of sight up and down the length of the barrier. It would be a perfect platform for ranged heroes to shoot down anyone foolish enough to attempt the climb. If there had been anyone stationed there, at least.
Damien needed to get higher. Fortunately, this was a trick he already knew. He sent Noigel up to find a decent vantage point, waiting for the thumbs up. Then he Demon Gated, his hand instinctively tightening around the top of the trunk Noigel had been holding a moment earlier.
He was still a long way from the outer wall, much too far to jump, but the tree was high enough for him to see into the base. While Noigel returned to his side, he scouted out the hidden compound in front of him.
Lillian’s intel had been good. Only a single level 33 ranger stood on the parapet overlooking the main gate. An inner wall divided the waiting room into two sections. The front was built less like the military outpost Damien had envisioned and more like a funfair with vendors and stalls, full of NPCs easily recognizable by their green names. They were idling away at each other in the absence of anyone to buy their wares.
In the center was a huge open courtyard offering a variety of activities: there were fighting rings for duels, training dummies to test your damage with, target practice ranges and even a racing track. Damien could see why players would spend time here. The customized shops were a luxury feature and the courtyard offered plenty of good training and fun rolled into one.
Right now, there were only two players using the facilities: a level 32 mage testing his spell rotation on a training dummy and a level 30 assassin backstabbing the one in the next lane, surreptitiously looking over to see whose damage numbers were higher while feigning disinterest.
Damien was jolted back into the moment when he spotted Lillian riding out of the trees toward the main gate. He lost sight of her behind the wall, but the ranger stood up and moved to the edge of his parapet.
Damien couldn’t hear what they were saying from this distance, but the ranger was shaking his head and waving her away. That hadn’t been the plan. Lillian was supposed to ride inside and cause a scene so Damien could do his part uninterrupted. This was not going well.
The argument continued for a full minute before the ranger pantomimed her crying, flipped a swift finger over the wall and turned his back on her. So, they weren’t even inside yet and already Lillian’s plan was fraying around the edges.
At least she’d been right about the lack of defenses. As long as nobody else showed up while he was working, Damien could do his part first and worry about Lillian’s later.
He tore his eyes away from the front gate and twisted his head past the inner wall all the way to the back, where Lillian had said the core buildings would be. The Guild House was a fortified bunker, set in the middle of the back wall at the safest point in the base. The Gathering Hub was out in front of it, a circular ring of floating stones with a portal stone resting in the middle. That was his first objective.
Damien pointed at it and Noigel flew straight from the branch, maintaining his height until he was over the wall and then swooping down towards the Gathering Hub. Damien was keeping an eye on his surroundings, making sure nobody else happened to show up and spot him, when a resounding crash from the entrance turned all eyes in that direction.
The main gate was wood reinforced with iron, but the right-hand panel had caved inward and the timber bar holding it closed splintered. The ranger ran to the edge of his parapet, looking down just in time to witness the creation of a matching dent on the other side of the gate. He drew his bow, loosed an arrow downward and was nocking the next when another blow tore the doors apart. The wooden beam lay in two pieces, the cracked doorframe showering the alcove with splinters.
The mage and rogue had stopped what they were doing, moving toward the intrusion. They paused when Lillian stepped through, her Divine Might active and Hammertime’s war hammer twirling between her fingers. It seemed she’d had some practice with it since she acquired it from Damien. The players hesitated for a moment when she stepped through the breach. Then the assassin ran in, daggers drawn, and the mage started channeling mana.
Damien shook himself. Lillian had managed to cause the distraction after all. Now he was on the clock.
He looked to Noigel and found him hiding behind the portal stone – with good reason. Two more players, a dual-wielding warrior and a priest, had come running out of the Guild House on their way to defend the front gate.
Damien hesitated.
Five against one was a little much for someone to handle in a straightforward fight, even for a paladin. If Lillian died, Damien wouldn’t be able to handle them by himself without the element of surprise. He looked back to the battle and saw it had already taken a turn for the worse.
The assassin had vanished into thin air and Lillian had returned to using her sword and shield, the latter of which she was trapped behind as the mage cast a churning beam of raw red energy at her. In the instant Damien looked, the assassin reappeared in her blind spot, running at full tilt.
She’d locked herself up guarding against the Arcane Beam and left herself exposed to the assassin’s attack. Why had she done that? What was she thinking? They all found out together seconds later.
As the assassin committed, her shield started to glow brightly. Then it pulsed and a broad beam of red mana, a perfect reflection of the one cast against her only twice as strong, blasted back toward the mage. ‘Repent’. A trait granting Paladins a spell reflection skill with a full minute cooldown, usually passed over in preference of something more useful for PvE. Yet it had contributed a great deal to Lillian earning her nickname. Engulfed in a stream of his own empowered, vaporizing energy, the mage obligingly disintegrated.
The assassin was still in mid-leap, his daggers raised high to penetrate Lillian’s heavy armor, when the rim of her newly available shield whirled around and struck him directly in the throat. His body stretched out under its surface, his arms helplessly pinioned over his head, as Lillian delivered a knee to the b
ase of his spine that folded him in half. His body bounced on the ground, then was pinned to it by her sword, which she drove through his leather jerkin, into the earth, down to the hilt.
The entire maneuver had taken three seconds from start to finish.
Two players were dead. It was surgical.
Damien reconsidered Lillian’s need for assistance.
Yeah. She’s probably fine.
The remaining guards had rounded the inner wall and reached the courtyard. Damien Demon Gated into the ring of stones marking out the teleportation zone and immediately pointed at the ground to summon a succubus. A new player could arrive at any moment and he was completely defenseless. Ten seconds had never seemed so long.
The succubus leapt from her portal and picked up Damien’s intention immediately, landing at the base of the portal stone and raking her claws through the runes covering its surface.
A health bar appeared showing the structural damage being inflicted. The Gathering Hub had 1000 durability points, but the succubus was only inflicting 14 damage with each rune she scratched out.
Noigel returned to help her as Damien used his last 3 soul energy to summon a hell hound. The spell was almost complete when a luminescent blue sphere cracked into existence within the ring of stones and a player started to materialize inside it.
This wasn’t going to be pretty.
They’d be fully formed in just a few moments and the sphere would render them immune to all damage before then. Damien immediately had his succubus turn to face them and start casting her Chaotic Bolt. Rather than adopting a combat stance, Noigel crouched behind the port sphere on his hands and knees.
The summoned hound and the player arrived simultaneously, a level 33 heavily armored warrior with a two-handed war-axe strapped to his back. Not a good opponent to have at close quarters.
He looked curiously between Damien and the succubus, his hands reaching out to conjure his weapon into his grasp, before the Chaotic Bolt pelted into his face at point blank range. The warrior stumbled backward and tripped over Noigel.
Damien took no chances.
As the hound moved in to engage, his succubus cast Circle of Hell under the warrior. Damien neatly stepped out of the area of effect as it formed, just in time for Noigel, the hound and the succubus to gang up on him as his armor was reduced and the damage over time took effect. Noigel leapt onto his face while the succubus slotted her claws into gaps in the prone player’s plate mail, mitigating the damage reduction it provided even further. The hound latched onto his arm and wrestled it to the floor, igniting to inflict extra damage.
The heavily armored warrior was stuck on his back like a turtle, Noigel was preventing him from guarding against the succubus with his free arm by sitting on his face, the hound savaging his other arm prevented him from equipping his two-handed weapon, he was on fire of both the regular and infernal variety and his armor value had been cut in half. By the time he wrenched Noigel off with his free hand, inflicting more damage on himself in the process, he was already well on his way to the big Gathering Hub in the sky. He resorted to repeatedly punching the hell hound in the head, fracturing the armored plates and inflicting severe damage despite the awful circumstances, but didn’t manage to take it down before he finally, mercifully, succumbed to his wounds. It was a bad way to go.
Had he been able to equip his weapon things might have turned out differently, but Damien didn’t feel like giving his enemies a sporting chance; he was fighting on their turf. This was a war. He’d promised it, now he was delivering.
With the warrior vanquished, the demons returned to the task of destroying the portal stone. The Circle of Hell had done minor structural damage as well, an unexpected bonus. Damien had received a good chunk of experience and 3 soul energy for the warrior’s grisly death, which he turned into imps as fast as he could.
By the time he’d finished summoning the second imp, the portal stone still had over 234 left of its durability. He needed to destroy this thing before Aetherius and his party left the dungeon.
If they were properly organized, they’d have already heard about the attack and would be hightailing it to the dungeon entrance so they could teleport back. The fastest of them would be here in, what, three minutes?
This wasn’t going fast enough.
Damien summoned the third imp and the succubus used up most of her remaining mana to cast Bloodlust, speeding up the group further. Damien joined in too, scratching through the symbols with the tips of his blades. His daggers weren’t designed for this kind of target, but he could repair them at his demon forge when he got home.
After a lot of excruciating work, the Gathering Hub was reduced to a state of utter entropy, where it would be as easy to start rebuilding it from scratch as it would to repair the damage done. It had zero durability.
Damien got a good chunk of experience for disabling a high-level enemy structure. His XP bar had returned to zero following his death, but after an afternoon of grinding, killing a higher-level player and now an act of sabotage, it was starting to look well fed again. It had risen back to 18482/28000.
Better yet, he’d bought them valuable time.
The nearest Rising Tide outpost to this one was a ten-minute ride away. If he helped Lillian finish off the last players, they’d have officially taken control of the settlement.
Damien ran around the inner wall and into the courtyard, his minions fanning out behind him. Lillian was in a standoff against the warrior, deflecting the wide sweeps of his dual axes with her sword while the ranger peppered her with arrows from the parapet above. Her Divine Might had run out and a nearby priest was keeping Lillian's adversary at full health and stamina, allowing him to make dangerous lunges without worrying about the consequences.
Damien allocated his targets. He sent the succubus to distract the ranger, along with two of the imps. The hound and another imp went to help Lillian with her warrior problem. Noigel he sent out last, diverting him around the outside to land lightly behind the priest.
Damien Demon Gated and performed a textbook dual dagger execution: one dagger through the heart via the back and the other drawn across the throat. At least Shankyou had taught him something. His damage was more than high enough for the double sneak critical combination to translate into instant death.
All eyes fell on him as the priest’s life signs vanished. The ranger had already dealt with his succubus from a distance and was taking aim at the imps as the priest fell. Now he turned and fired a rapid volley of three twisting, armor-penetrating arrows toward the new threat – ignoring the two imps closing in on his position.
Damien’s kill had activated Rift Walker: resetting the cooldown on Demon Gate.
He used it again, swapping positions and momentum with the imp that had been closest to his target. Unfortunately, in his haste to avoid the arrows, he hadn’t entirely thought this maneuver through: the imp had been flying through the air, straight towards his enemy. The ranger turned his head at the sound of Damien’s scream, his intense concentration replaced with utter bewilderment. The bow was swiveling round when the two collided, the ranger hitting the parapet hard and skidding across it on his back with Damien on top.
Damien was only slightly more prepared for the collision than his foe. The extra half second was crucial. He jumped up and stuck his knee on the ranger’s chest, holding him still and pinning his off-hand to the floor as he squirmed. He’d withdrawn the Striking Dagger from his enemy’s chest for the second time when the ranger’s right hand lunged upwards, holding a dagger of his own. He’d kept it out of sight by his side while he swapped weapons, using the time to find a critical point: an open section at Damien’s core which his Leather Bindings did not quite cover.
The dagger plunged into it, up and under Damien’s ribcage. Then, to his mounting horror, the ranger twisted it and drove it still deeper. The damage was much higher than it should have been. It wasn’t just a regular attack, it was a melee ability. Damien dropped his weapons
and grabbed the ranger’s wrist with both hands before he could do any more damage. His foe still had half his health after the collision and two hits, Damien had been reduced to less than 30% by the frightening technique. The wound was bleeding and his health was still dropping. Even with both hands against one, it was a struggle to stop his enemy from withdrawing the blade to strike again. Damien had brought his wisdom stat to a knife fight.
He was still locked in the losing stalemate when his wisdom stat paid off. The second imp crashed into the ranger’s forearm head first, mouth open wide, and bit down. Hard. In the distance, drawing closer very quickly, Noigel was having what could only be described as a rage-fit. The other two imps were closer and arrived first. They clamped down with their teeth, clawing frantically and screaming shrilly, even with their mouths full. Damien clung to the ranger’s dagger hand, trying to hold it steady as his foe kicked and yelled. Noigel finally arrived at maximum volume before doing his best hell hound impersonation: biting down on the ranger’s throat.
The ranger finally stopped yelling and his hand went limp. Damien tossed it away. With the XP from the priest and ranger, Damien rose to level 29 and his health was blissfully restored.
It had been a close-run thing. Wings on the imps had proven invaluable on multiple occasions. Without numbers and the element of surprise, occultists might be the squishiest melee class in history.
Below him, Lillian had dealt with the warrior. Without his healer, he couldn’t handle her alone. The hound lay dead, unfortunately, a clear axe wound through its head. The NPC vendors had already boarded up their shops to wait for the situation to pass.
For now, at least, the outpost was theirs.
“You took your time,” grumbled Lillian as she looted the warrior. “Did you finish destroying the Hub?”
Damien decided it would be better not to share just how close to death he’d come. Lillian was under enough stress already. So was he. He played it cool.
“Sorry it took so long,” he shouted down from the parapet. “I can’t stab structures in the back.”
