The Survivors Part 1
The Massacre
Brian McGoldrick
The Survivors Part 1
The Massacre
Brian McGoldrick
Amazon Edition
Copyright © 2017 by Brian McGoldrick
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living, dead, or undead, is purely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author or publisher.
Edition: April 2017
Contents
Title Page
Book Summary
The First Day
The Second Day
The Third Day
The Fourth Day
The Last Day
Book Summary: The Survivors Part 1
The Massacre
Thorrin Hammerfist is one of The Damned, players of the VRMMORPG (Virtual Reality Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) Taereun: Battleground of the Damned. Along with tens of thousands of other players, in a world other than Earth, his mind and soul have been imprisoned in the body of his character. Tasked by The Nameless God with freeing his own body from the dungeons beneath the city of Have, they have searched and fought for nearly twelve years. Along with everyone else, Thorrin has lost more people he has considered friends than he wants to count. Like many of the other Damned, Thorrin is close to burning out.
After their long struggle, The Damned have reached what they believe to be the zone where they will find Haven, but Haven is nowhere in sight. Never a unified force, The Damned are on the edge of fragmenting, and groups have already set out on their own in search of Haven.
As the remaining Damned rest and prepare for their final march toward Haven, unknown to them, an orc horde of over half a million warriors is fast approaching. In the coming battle, with their very existence on the line, how many more friends will they lose? What prices will be paid for a chance at survival? Who will survive the massacre?
The First Day
The Great Fuck Over Day 4,181
Here Lies
Talon
A Man Who Was Slain By
Those He Fought For
Those He Defended
Stabbed Him In The Back
Damn you, Talon. Why did you have to let those ungrateful bastards kill you? More than eleven years we fought for the chance to send everyone home. You only fought for that faithless bitch that hated your guts because you felt you owed her father. Why did you have to turn your back to them? A sense of tiredness fills me as the words Talon will never hear go through my mind.
It has only been three days since those bastard Bohemian Cats murdered Talon, but his tombstone is still a veritable monument. Dacbold outdid himself. I owe him for carving this in such a short time.
I don't need to look around to know how few people are here. The players mostly hated and feared Talon. Only a few from my guild and Connor's guild are here. No one else cares enough to pay their respects to the man that fought for them for eleven years. Most of them do not know how much of our intelligence came from Talon's scouting. He was almost always alone in enemy territory. Even if he did not do it to spare them, he still saved the lives of hundreds if not thousands of them. Humans are such ungrateful bastards.
For the first time since The Great Fuck Over began, I'm tired. Even with all the hardships and the deaths, I thrived on the adventure. But now, I lost the one man I wanted to save more than any other. He deserved a chance to live without being hated by the very people who should have been grateful to him, and all he got was being murdered by the friends of the worthless cunt he was trying to protect.
According to all our intelligence reports, this should be what most of the players think is the zone where Haven lies. If only they knew the truth, most of them would go bat-shit crazy. Still, we have almost succeeded. Now, we just need to reach Haven and see if that bastard of a self-proclaimed God's body is really there or not. As tired as I feel, I cannot relax yet. There is still the last push, and it will be a longer push than most of them imagine.
Once everyone is freed, if I'm still alive in this amazing body, I'll be free to explore. Damn it all, Talon. You were supposed to survive so that I could drag you along on a great adventure.
“Thorrin, what now?” Nessa's voice is hoarse. The fool girl has been crying off and on since she saw Talon's body.
“Go back to your boyfriend, before he gets all bent out of shape. You've been giving Talon the cold shoulder for eleven years. You even shacked up with that punk, because you were mad at Talon. It's too late to get all weepy now.” My voice sounds as tired as I feel.
Nessa really doesn't deserve that, but she made her choices and should live with them. Talon was probably happy about her choice, if you can call being relieved that she would be less likely to be a target for Menton being happy. He probably never understood how the girl really felt. When it comes to a girl not hating him, he was the densest son of a bitch I've ever seen. Even if a human and Half-Dvergar probably would never have worked out, Nessa might have been able to get Talon to open up and live. Damn it all; it's too late now.
I turn around and meet everyone's stares, at least, the people here. Even though several thousand people came to pay their respects to Talon, only fourteen are from the ranks of the players: seven people from Thorrin's Hammers, my guild; five from Connor's King of Taereun. I'm the thirteenth, and there is one surprise mourner, Kamehameha, who I had always though hated and feared Talon. All the rest of the mourners are from our mercenaries. The players seemed flabbergasted when they saw how many of the mercenaries came to pay their respects to Talon.
Most people would think Connor's face is calm, but after knowing him for over fifty years on Earth, long before we started playing Taereun, it is obvious that he is angry. Connor was a Marine like I was, but he was from the generation that had to fight in W's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. More than anyone I have ever known, he values loyal comrades in arms. Entirely too many of the mercenaries have similar expressions. They are all men that survived ugly battles, because of Talon's actions.
There are around thirty thousand of the players that survived to reach this point. Another fifteen thousand or so are still based out of Emer. They never took part in The Nameless' quest, and I cannot blame them for being scared. Maybe forty-five thousand out of what most people estimated was somewhere between seventy-five and ninety thousand that were taken by The Nameless are still alive. I had a good look at that Chamber of Transition and thought there might have been over ninety thousand of us, but none of us know for certain. In the chaos at the beginning, we never made any accurate head counts before a lot of them disappeared on their own or in small groups, but after eleven years, around half of us are dead. Among our dead, probably a third were killed in our own internecine conflicts, just like Talon.
I take a deep breath and release it slowly. The dead are dead, and I have to fight for the living.
“Thank you for coming, everyone. There are some things I need to take care of tonight, but tomorrow morning, I'm holding a meeting. Everyone here is welcome and spread the word to anyone you know that you think will be interested as well. There is some information that all of you need to be made aware of before we make plans.”
Connor glances around. “More than a third of our forces have already taken off on their own. Everyone is in a huge rush to find Haven and finish this.”
“Hmph. They won't be finding it anytime soon. I need to
confirm things with the other Dvergar, but we should still be quite a distance from Haven.”
Connor's eyes narrow, as he stares at me. “I know you like playing some things close to the vest but don't play games with us.”
I make a calming gesture toward Connor. “Don't get excited. Until I confirm things with the other Dvergar, I don't want to start wild rumors. I've been a bit distracted for the past few days, because of what's happened. We'll be letting everyone know what we know in the morning.”
Connor has a slight frown as he turns away. “I'll spread the word about the meeting.”
“Thank you.”
As Connor and the rest of Talon's mourners leave, I stare at the massive structure to the south, the Labyrinth of Yggr. About four miles offshore, it is embedded in the ocean floor. In places, piles of rubble including boulders the size of skyscrapers rise up along its sides. More or less decahedral in shape, the outer shell has thousands of spires that dwarf any building ever built by man, sticking out more than a mile from the Labyrinth's main surface. I do not know how big it is, but it is no smaller than fifty miles in diameter and probably closer to a hundred. Apparently, it was constructed from stone, but I have no idea what that stone is. It barely reflects any light, making it appear blackish-grey in color.
A few miles to the east of our location, a causeway runs from the shore to the Labyrinth. Being built from blocks of granite about 10 yards square, the causeway is more than two hundred feet wide, and it leads to the massive gates we used to exit the Labyrinth.
We spent more than eleven years inside that thing. It seems impossible to believe, more like completely insane, but that structure contains thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of dimensions. Each one is unique, and many seem to be miniature universes.
The Nameless God tore our minds and souls from our Earth bodies and dropped us into the bodies we thought of as our characters. He gave us a mission to find and free his body from Haven if we wanted to get back to our real bodies. For eleven and a half years, we searched, negotiated, and fought our way through the Lands of Despair. Even if only a few us know it, we should finally be on the surface of Taereun proper.
Most of the players are acting like we are home free. The camp looks more like a victory party than bivouac in hostile territory. Tomorrow, I have to get through to them just how dangerous this last stretch of our quest will be. If they do not get their heads out of their asses, they'll survive long enough to go home again.
* * * * *
Seven Possessed Fallen Dvergar in a shitty cave, and not one of us is a lord let alone a king. We are all Makers, but none of us really understands what a Maker actually is. We have three Smiths, two Jewelers, and two Artificers. Even though we can craft Items of Power, we do it more by rote than anything, using the skills and memories of our bodies. Where we've made improvements, it's by trial and error and guesswork. We can see patterns and identify some of their characteristics, but we don't know what they really mean. Still compared to when Taereun was a game, we are orders of magnitude better. It almost me makes laugh, but the situation isn't something that is all that funny. Everything is different from when Taereun was a game, but nothing has changed.
“You're certain that constellation is the Southern Cross?”
Dacbold gives me a flat stare. He's a master at using no expression to display discontent or contempt. For a man who seldom has much to say, outside of bickering with Farnulf that is, he can say more with a look than anyone I've ever met, but when he speak, it's always worth listening. “I may not have a degree in astronomy, but I spent most of my life staring at stars through telescopes for fun. A lot of the stars don't match up with Earth constellations, but that one is definitely the Southern Cross. The red star is Gacrux, and you can see the Coalsack Nebula below it.”
Even if anyone overhears our conversation, we're not worried about it. Besides the seven of us, there isn't a single person, Damned or mercenary, that understands Battle Cant. I have no idea why the Dvergar language was named Battle Cant. From what the seven of us can piece together from the memories of the bodies we're inhabiting, the Dvergar were created by the Dragons as a race of warrior-slaves. Maybe the Dragons gave their language the name Battle Cant.
“So, we were right, and this really is a duplicate world to Earth.” Ahlred is staring at the ground beneath his feet.
Dacbold laughs. “A duplicate? Yeah, it's sort of a duplicate. If you can call a world ten to twelve times the diameter of Earth a duplicate, then sure, it's a duplicate.”
None of us are particularly happy. We're royally fucked, and we know it.
"That would mean that if Haven is roughly five or six hundred Earth miles up the West coast of South America from us, it's really about six or seven thousand miles away on this world."
Dacbold rubs his eyes like he's a tired old man. “That could take us years. We have no clue what obstacles lie between us and Haven.”
Cwichelm snorts. “Orc hordes. DokkAlfar outposts. Probably a few dozen human city-states. Do I need to continue?”
BOOM! BOOM! Crack-BOOM!
Wihtred's head snaps around to look at the cave entrance. “What's that?”
None of us respond. In our hearts, we can all guess, but no one wants to be the one to say it out loud.
*Is anyone in the north or northeast end of the camp?* My question is voiced in the guild channel.
A chorus of negative answers fills the guild channel.
*Everyone gather at Talon's grave. I'll let you know what to do once we have a better idea of what is happening.*
After The Great Fuck Over started, we learned a lot more about how Patterning works compared to our time in the game. Whether it's guild bracelets, party charms, or whisper charms, we, the Dvergar and a few others, learned how to improve them, but we kept the distribution limited to guilds and people who we trusted. From the beginning, the divides among the players were too deep for us to give our new work to groups like Thug Horde and their allies.
Danleib pulls out a small clockwork bird. It looks like a sparrow, but every time I see it, I am reminded of the owl in Clash of the Titans. Being almost a century old movie, most people have never heard of it, but my human body was over a century old. The Earth I remember from my younger days was already long gone by the time of The Great Fuck Over.
As the clockwork bird flies off toward the northeast, Danleib sets a device on the ground. Made out of a bronze colored metal, much like the bird, the device has an octagonal base that is four or five inches high and about an inch less in cross section. On top of the base sits a crystal as clear as the finest glass, with hundreds of facets. With a quiet humming noise, an image appears above the device. About three feet in diameter, the image is nearly as clear as my own vision of the scene would be.
The stone ridges to the north and the valley between the ridges in the northeast made the backdrop for the image. In the lower third of the image, our camp rolled past as the clockwork bird flew toward the northeast. Smoke and flame rise into the sky from the north and northeast sides of the camp, which is devolving into chaos. The players are running around like chickens with their heads cut off. It looks more like a scene from our first couple of months of The Great Fuck Over, than something that should be happening now.
The sounds of screams and yells drift from the bronze device. Mixed in with them, voices, calling out orders, are audible.
“RUN!”
“Don't Run!”
“STAND AND FIGHT!”
“Form a line, you cowardly fucks!”
Marauding among the fires, thousands of humanoid figures become visible. They look like they're half ape and half pig, with a quarter human thrown in as if it was done just to make you feel disgusted. Their foreheads slope down to heavy brow bones, with bushy brows over squinty little pig-like eyes. Heavy fanged jaws protrude like muzzle with big wet nostrils snuffling nostrils above their mouths. Their skin colors range from light grey to dark grey and light brown to dark brown. The
y're orcs, but they're bigger and more vicious looking than most of the orcs in the Battleground of the Damned or the Lands of Despair. With the shortest one over six and a half feet tall, they have massive builds that rival our own bulk as Dvergar. These aren't the descendants of cast off runts like we encountered in the Battleground of the Damned and the Lands of Despair. These are real horde orcs.
“Those aren't outcast mercenaries. Those orcs are part of a real horde.” Farnulf's voice holds a tone of resignation.
BOOM!
“What the fuck is that? It sounded like it came from the Labyrinth.” Wihtred is staring at the causeway some four or five miles to the east.
Cwichelm takes out a contraption that looks like a pair of binoculars with extra tubes attached to them. Putting them to his eyes, he stares at the causeway and the Labyrinth for a few moments.
“Damn! It looks like the gates are closed!”
“Can you see any sign of the guard detachment we left inside the Transition Chamber?”
Cwichelm looks at me, shaking his head. “There's no one on the causeway.”
“I get the feeling that this was planned.” Dacbold making an offhand comment is unusual. He must be getting pissed.
“Planned by who?” Farnulf looks like he's ready to start an argument. Anytime Dacbold takes a stance, Farnulf tends to take an opposite stance. Before The Great Fuck Over, they were friends on Earth for over forty years, and the two of them sometimes bicker and fight like a pair of old women.
“Have you seen Thug Horde in the past couple days?”
None of us respond to Dacbold, but we look around at one another. My concern and anger are mirrored on the faces of the other Dvergar.
Even though he tried to be subtle, to be able to deny culpability, Menton has tried to endanger and destroy any person or guild that did not follow his lead. For eleven years, we put up with it to avoid losing the guilds and players that were not part of Thug Horde but thought that Thug Horde's size and organization made them indispensable. There were two to three dozen guilds that could rival or exceed Thug Horde's numbers, so I will never understand why The Nameless only entrapped Thug Horde from among the major guilds.
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