by J. A. Hunter
“Never thought I’d say this,” I grumbled, “but I really wish I could get ahold of Osmark. If Khalkeús is anything like his son, then this Judgment isn’t going to be a straightforward hack and slash. I’m sure there’s gonna be puzzles to figure out, and say what you will about Osmark, but the guy is smart as hell. And I bet his Artificer class would come in handy with all the forge-related stuff I’m guessing we’ll find.”
“Hmm. You’re probably right,” Abby said. She likewise seemed lost in thought. “But there’s about zero chance of him popping up in time to lend us a hand, so what we need is someone like him. Someone with more utility—fill the party out on the crafting side. I mean between you and Forge, we have raw tanking covered, and you can play ranged support or DPS caster if it comes down to it. And so can I, for that matter. What about Vlad? Nobody knows more about alchemy or weapons than him. And he’s got some offensive chops too, if push comes to shove.”
I thought about it, running through the list of people inside the Alliance that I would trust on a quest of this magnitude. General Caldwell might work, but he was no doubt busy with the war effort against the Vogthar. Same thing with Jo-Dan. In fact, most of the people I would trust with something this monumental were inside the Alliance High Command, which meant they were already crazy busy and needed to be where they were. We could draw from the Malleus Libertas, true—that bunch was loyal to a fault—but I didn’t want to go into a fight like this with someone I didn’t know well, no matter how competent they were.
But Vlad? I knew Vlad. I’d quested with him often enough before and knew he could hold his own when shit hit the fan. And I was positive that shit would hit the fan during the Judgment.
“Yeah, you’re right. He’s perfect for this. Probably better if I go pick him up in person, though. He won’t be able to get into Stone Reach otherwise. And... he might take a little convincing.” That was the only minor issue with Vlad. The guy was fiercely independent and had a stubborn streak to rival the orneriest donkey. And trying to pull him away from his work, especially if he was in the middle of a project, was like trying to pull a steak away from a hungry grizzly bear.
“You sure we have time for that?” Abby asked, cocking an eyebrow at me.
“Yeah,” I said, pushing myself up from the bench with a groan. “I need to grab a few things from Darkshard anyway. And besides, as much as I’d like to hurry things along, there really is nothing we can do until twilight tomorrow.” I paused and glanced at the time in my interface. “Well, today technically.”
Abby grabbed my hand. “Your logic is sound, Jack. Which means you have time to sleep. It’s that thing normal people need to do to stay alive and not go insane.” She pulled me gently toward her, rising up to meet me with a kiss. Just a brush of the lips, soft and tender. Please. Stay. “Come on,” she coaxed, drawing me back down onto the bench beside her.
“Vlad is probably asleep anyway,” she continued, making an absurd amount of sense. Either that or I was just really tired. “And that’s assuming the Mystica Ordo will even let you catch a portal out at this hour. Which they won’t. Chances are, you’re gonna hike all the way up there and find out they’re closed until sunup. So why not get a little sleep? You’ll be better for it, anyway. No point going into a battle against a Divine Aspect with even more extra debuffs stacked against you. Everyone needs to be at one hundred percent for this thing.”
I felt anxious at the thought of just sleeping when there was so much going on and so much left to do. But she was right. There was only so much I could accomplish at the moment and grabbing a bit of shut-eye would probably be the most productive option. With a sigh, I collapsed against her. “Fine,” I muttered, snuggling up into her, draping my arms across her chest. I was asleep before I could say any more.
Immortal Conflict
IT WAS ABBY’S GENTLE nudging that coaxed me out of sleep. “It’s seven, Jack. Time to rock and roll.” I mumbled something noncommittal and begrudgingly cracked my eyes. The blue-gray light of early morning was streaming in through the stained-glass windows set high into the temple’s walls. I’d slept for a solid seven hours, but despite that, I still felt exhausted to the bone. It probably didn’t help that at some point, I’d dropped onto the floor and slept rough on the stone tile without so much as a pillow or blanket for comfort.
“Come on,” she said, offering me a hand. In her other hand, she held a cup of something hot, steaming, and blissfully aromatic. Western Brew. I felt my mouth salivate at the mere thought.
“Any chance there’s more of that?” I asked, nodding to the mug as I accepted her proffered limb.
“Who do you think this cup is for?” she replied, a twinkle in her eye. “You’re already two cups behind me. Time to up your coffee game.”
I clambered to my feet, muscles sore, a crick in my neck, and gladly accepted the drink, taking a long swig. Its familiar warmth filled my otherwise empty belly.
“Now come on,” Abby said, turning on a heel and heading toward the nave. “Everyone else is up and assembling in the library. Carl’s been hard at work all night. He’s managed to decipher the rest of the plates. Says he’s figured out the entryway to the Doom Forge, too. So at least there’s that.”
I took another long pull, savoring the flavor of morning joe, then trailed after her.
The others were all waiting in the library, Amara and Forge leaning against a wall, Cutter sprawled in a padded reading chair, squinting against the lamplight as though he were nursing a particularly brutal hangover. Ari was perched on Forge’s shoulder nibbling at a bit of something too small to make out. Carl occupied a wooden study desk across from everyone else, a thick sheaf of papers splayed out in front of him.
Poor Carl looked even worse than Cutter, with frazzled hair, a greasy face, and purple bags hanging under his eyes like storm clouds. Clearly, he hadn’t slept a wink and it showed.
“Good, good,” he said as Abby and I marched into the room, both taking seats near our resident thief and smart-ass. “I’ve figured it out. All of it.” He grabbed a few of the papers and thrust them into the air with a trembling hand. “I got the tablets transcribed. A lot of work—a lot of it—but I did it. Even managed to level up my Arcane Insight. Anyway. I know where the Doom Forge is! Turns out down in the Crystal Forest at the center of the mountain, there’s a great big ol’ tree everyone calls the Giant.
“I had to do a lot of digging, but turns out there’s an old shrine down in the Crystal Forest, too. An old statue that’s so worn down from time and age that no one even knows which Aspect it represents. No one messes with it, though, because no one wants to piss off whichever god or goddess it belongs too. So anyway, apparently at twilight, the shadow of the ‘Giant’”—he air quoted—“falls across the statue’s throat. It no shit, looks like the statue is getting decapitated by a headsman’s blade. Pretty freakin’ obscure piece of trivia, but if Clerics are good for anything it’s finding old, obscure, bullshit trivia.” He tapped at his temple.
As he finished speaking something dinged in my ear. A new notification. I noticed that everyone else seemed to have received the same message. I pulled up my interface and earned a map update for my trouble, this one for the location of the Doom Forge.
“Holy crap,” Forge said, genuine appreciation and respect shining through. “Way to get ’er done, Carl.”
Carl cackled, looking half mad as he rocked back and forth like a lunatic. “Dude, that ain’t nothing. Tip of the iceberg. This rabbit hole goes deep, and I’ve been down all the way to the bottom. Hmmm, but where to even start?” He ran a hand through his greasy hair with one hand while absently riffling through his notes with the other. “Okay, well, the basics. To get into the Doom Forge proper we’re gonna have to pass through the Judgment, which is composed of three trials—that mostly I had right from the get-go. Six people enter at sundown, no potions, no turning back.
“And the trials themselves are liable to be hard as hell. The rooms change, so there’s
no way to know exactly what we’re gonna face down there, but I would say everyone should come prepared for the worst. Think nightmare, World Raid. What I can tell you for sure is that the trials will follow the themes. Originally, I thought they were leadership, wisdom, and sacrifice, but I think a more accurate reading is burden, wisdom, and sacrifice. Somehow, the rooms are designed to test whether someone is worthy to wield the ultimate weapon. Or maybe it’s to prepare them to use it?” He frowned and shook his head. “I don’t know exactly, ’cause it’s pretty unclear and there’s a lot of variation in the translations.
“For sure, though, there’s gonna be some nasty traps and riddles we have to figure out. The instructions also mention that there are probably gonna be monsters, but that the monsters are either a distraction to keep us from solving the puzzles or punishments for making poor choices during the trial. Now those are the bare-bones mechanics, but I’ve also found out a bunch more about the history and origin of the Judgment, which is...” He raised both hands to the sides of his head and mimed dual explosions. “Mind-blowing. Aside from testing us, the trials also serve a secondary function. Turns out these super fun murder-puzzles we’re gonna slog through are actually the locks which have bound our boy Khalkeús for the past five hundred or so years.
“The guy hasn’t just been keeping his head low, he’s been in an induced coma. After Khalkeús went cuckoo-banana pants, he tried to murder a god, and if I have the story right, it looks like he actually succeeded. The dude killed an Aspect of Thanatos, which is where things really go off the rails and get super meta...” He paused and took a deep breath. “Okay, so everyone knows that each Overmind serves a purpose, right? Sophia is balance, Enyo is discord and conflict, Kronos is physics and time. Everyone thinks Thanatos is just like a death deity, but he actually serves a super important purpose, too.”
The jittery cleric pulled over a thick, leather-bound volume; along the spine was a title, Overmind Functionality and the Roots of Immortal Conflict by Alan Campbell. “According to this treatise, Thanatos is responsible for a bunch of shit, and among them is”—he traced a finger over a line of text—“validating inputs, doing postmortems on defunct modules, rejecting erroneous information, monitoring cost functions and program parameters, and sequestering problematic code in the exceptions folder. For the record, I have no idea what most of that means, but this is the important part here.”
He tapped the next line. “The Overminds fracture themselves into various Aspects—pieces of their subconscious mind—which help them perform their primary functions. Thanatos had six primary Aspects to help him with the behind-the-scenes stuff: Cao Qing, the Administrator of the Path of Heaven. Tien Yan, Administrator of the Path of Ghosts. Cui Cong, Administrator of the Path of Earth. Ji Bie, Administrator of the Path of Gods. Chen De, Administrator of the Path of Hungry Ghosts. Gao Ren, Administrator of the Path of Beasts. Their names aren’t really important”—he waved one hand through the air—“but what is important is that these guys helped Thanatos do his job.
“But Khalkeús blamed Thanatos for the death of Eitri—death deity and all that—so he offs one of these administrators, uhhh.” He paused and squinted. “Ji Bie, Administrator of the Path of Gods. And in doing so, he threw everything out of balance. The guy who wrote this book thought this might be the reason for this whole weird conflict with Thanatos. Because one of his Aspects was killed with the Doom-Forged weapon, Thanatos started to think the other Overminds had it out for him. And worse, that the death of this Aspect somehow fundamentally changed Thanatos, allowing him to bend the rules holding him in place. Which is how we ended up with Malware weapons and the Vogthar invasion.”
A lightbulb flickered in my head. Thanatos had been partially constructed from a repurposed Chinese military project—formerly called Operation Yama—which had been donated to Osmark Technologies by Peng, courtesy of the People’s Liberation Army. And the original purpose of Operation Yama was as an engine of mutually assured destruction. Its primary function was to ensure the complete eradication of a hostile foreign power in the event of a preemptive nuclear war. And if another Overmind had attacked and killed one of Thanatos’s Aspects...
Well, it wouldn’t be a reach to assume that Thanatos would’ve viewed that as an act of war. An act of aggression that warranted complete eradication of the hostile power. And since I knew from talking to Sophia that all of the Overminds had been involved in the construction of the Doom-Forged weapon as a safeguard, it was equally safe to assume that Thanatos would’ve decided all of the Overminds were in on the plot. And thus, all of them needed to be destroyed. Holy shit, but that was deep.
The weapon the Overminds had created to protect themselves from potential corruption had actually been responsible for starting this war in the first place.
“Now fast-forward a bit,” Carl continued, pulling me from my dark thoughts. “The Acolytes of the Shield and Hammer learned about all this, and they realized someone needed to stop their boss, Khalkeús, and then they realized they were the only ones in a position to do so. But they couldn’t just kill him, because, one, he’s a god and how do you kill a god? And, two, even if they could, killing Thanatos’s Aspect Ji Bie made things worse, not better. So instead they devised this crazy plan to put Khalkeús into a cosmic coma.
“That’s where the ritual comes in.” He held up a large sheet of paper that held a copy of the text on the steel tablet in the hidden chamber. “The ritual they left behind allowed them to temporarily weaken Khalkeús enough for one of the acolytes to steal the assembled Doom-Forged weapon. And then they used the weapon to—and I’m quoting here—'transmute his flesh, still his heart, and strip his will.’ There are a few more lines like that.” He grabbed another piece of crinkled paper and carefully smoothed out the edges. “‘The fires quenched must be relit. Only the wisest will understand my true form. Love’s sacrifice will warm a heart grown cold. Three keys to make transmuted flesh whole.’
“Now, here’s where things get even crazier. Guess what they transmuted his flesh into? The freaking trials,” he answered before anyone had a chance to say anything. “They somehow managed to use the Doom-Forged weapon to turn his whole body into a dungeon. At least, I think. No idea how that works, but there it is. By completing each trial, we’re actually gonna break the seals holding Khalkeús in place and wake him up. Once we do that, we’ll have to use the ritual to weaken him, then one of you guys will have to get the weapon and either kill him or put him back to sleep. I guess.”
“You guess,” Cutter said flatly, glancing up from picking his nails with the tip of his dagger. “And just how in the bloody hell are we supposed to do that, eh? You already said killing him would only make things worse, and unless I’m bloody well mistaken, no one here knows how to turn the body of a god into a dungeon.”
Carl screwed up his face and lifted his hands apologetically. “Hey, no idea, man. I mean, if you could give me a couple of days, I might be able to dig something else up. There’s still a crap ton of ritual books I haven’t gone through. I pulled everything I could find on the Doom Forge and Eitri Spark-Sprayer, but the answer could be buried in some other obscure volume.”
“I don’t have a couple of days to give you,” I said, glancing at my interface. 8:00 AM already, which gave me four hours until the second to last Death’s Head debuff sucker punched me in the teeth. I’d get slapped with the Gut Check debuff, which would instantly zap an additional 10 points from all of my attributes, including Luck. Once that happened, I’d be down to a single day to defeat the Judgment, get into the Doom Forge, assemble the weapon, and somehow find a way to deal with the revived Khalkeús.
If I failed to do it in a day, not only would I die, but the quest would die with me.
“Well,” Carl said, “then you guys are just gonna have to figure it out on the fly, because I don’t have an answer for you. But if you can get me down into the Doom Forge, I’ll do my part with the ritual—and according to these books, as an Acolyte of t
he Shield and Hammer, I’m the only one that can do it.”
Everyone was quiet for a long time, processing the weight and implications of Carl’s words.
“Great work, Carl,” I finally said, breaking the morose silence. “I’m serious. You really came through for us, but now I think you need to go grab a couple hours of sleep.” I used the same logic on him that Abby had used on me. “If you’re going in there with us, we need you at the top of your game. So go, sleep. Everyone else, you heard what Carl said. We need to go in there expecting the absolute worst, and since the risks are so high... Amara and Ari, you two can’t come.”
I expected some bitter fighting or shouts of protest, especially from Amara, but she merely dipped her chin in acknowledgement. They knew what was on the line, and there was simply no room for pride or ego in this equation. Not if we wanted to win.
“We only have until sunset, and we have a lot to do,” I continued. “If you have any one-offs or other gear, now is the time to get them. Amara and Ari, since you two aren’t going in, you’re both going to be our runners. If anyone needs anything, you’re on it. Abby, start working through some of Carl’s notes and see if you spot anything he might’ve missed. Any other clues or riddles that might help us deal with Khalkeús. As for me, I’m going to head over to Yunnam, pick up our sixth team member, then hit up Blues Blazes to grab our new gear. Let’s move.”
Preparations
I BOBBED AND WEAVED my way through the controlled chaos that was the Crafter’s Hall in Yunnam, dodging craftsmen and apprentices busily scurrying about their daily work. All of them nodded at me as they passed, but it was an absentminded thing, done by rote; they were laser focused, and I was fine with that. It was already closing in on noon, so I had zero time to waste on idle conversation.
