by Baron Sord
Did I even want to be here?
Did I want to kill more of these things?
How did I know the Tigers were the good guys?
How did I know the Koboglins were bad?
Because some quest alert told me so?
No, I didn’t live my life that way, and I didn’t kill people I didn’t know.
“I’m out,” I muttered to myself.
Tiygar roared in desperation, flailing and clawing as eight blue-green Koboglins weighed him down. They were stabbing and hacking away.
Shit. I couldn’t let people kill each other either.
My Health dropped another notch, edging toward 65%. If this battle didn’t end soon, I might bleed to death.
I ignored it and flipped my spear around butt first and charged, whacking Koboglins in the sides of their heads, tripping their legs up with low swings, knocking weapons out of their hands, anything I could think of to avoid stabbing them to death. Two of them I knocked out cold. Others were scrambling to grab their weapons or untangling themselves from each other. But none of them were fighting back. For the moment.
Woo-wee, Bruce Lee! You unlocked two new skills!
Stun. Level 1. An unconscious enemy can’t fight back. Increase your Strength and/or Accuracy to improve your chance of success.
Disarm. Level 1. Take your enemies weapon and you take the advantage. Increase your Strength and/or Accuracy to improve your chance of success.
+1 Accuracy!
+1 Creativity!
You bested a bunch of Koboglins on the field of battle and earned 300 XP!
+5 Good points for showing mercy.
Now that was XP I could feel good about.
The increasing pain in my hamstring was not. Health at 62%. I’m sure all the fighting wasn’t helping the blood clot the wound. It probably needed stitches anyway.
“Help me, Tiygar!” the female white tiger shouted from the big canoe. A bunch of blue-green Koboglins had her pinned down inside and more jumped into it as they pushed away from shore and started paddling.
“They’re taking her!” Tiygar yelled, freaking out. He bounded into the river, splashing up sprays of brown water.
I ran in after, ignoring the fact that my bloody hamstring was completely submerged in the dirty brown river water. Which was the more likely cause of slow death: bacterial infection or parasitic invasion? Or both? You decide. My stamina dropped to 30%, probably because of running through the waist-deep water.
All the other Koboglins dove in and swam toward the canoe.
Tiygar was a whirlwind, batting away at the Koboglins in the water and the ones in the canoe. He shouted, “Go for their paddles!”
Good plan. Using my spear, I knocked a paddle out of the hands of the nearest blue-green Koboglin. A purple Koboglin swam past me. I spun on him with my spear out, ready to whack him in the temple, but he wasn’t even looking at me. He grabbed for the side of the canoe, held on with one hand, and swung his war club at the blue-green Koboglin inside.
Hold up. It appeared they were fighting each other?
My health blinked at 60%.
I took a moment to focus and examine the purple one in the water and the blue-green one in the canoe.
Purple Koboglin Warrior
Clawtooth clan
Level: 2
Health | Stamina: 90 | 80
Mana | Mind: 0 | 50
Size: Small
Armor: 20
===============
Good | Evil: 18 | 2
Law | Chaos: 8 | 14
===============
Blue-green Koboglin Savage
Wartnose clan
Level: 1
Health | Stamina: 60 | 50
Mana | Mind: 0 | 30
Size: Small
Armor: 15
===============
Good | Evil: - | 25
Law | Chaos: - | 21
===============
I checked two more random Koboglins. One was another blue-green Wartnose savage, but the other was unique.
Moggor
Purple Koboglin Chieftain
Clawtooth clan
Level: 5
Health | Stamina: 190 | 160
Mana | Mind: 240 | 90
Size: Medium
Armor: 33
===============
Good | Evil: 88 | 3
Law | Chaos: 33 | 17
===============
Okay, I could count.
This purple Moggor dude’s goodness rating was 4x a regular purple warrior. And all the blue-green Wartnose savages had no points in Good, but plenty in Evil. If these Good-Evil ratings were accurate, the purple Koboglins were clearly good guys and the blue-green bad. Did I trust a bunch of numbers to decide who was good and who was bad? Considering the blue-green guys had the female tiger in the boat and were ready to paddle away with her, and the purple ones seemed to be helping hold the boat back, I decided I would.
“Hey, Tiger!” I yelled. “Don’t fight the purple ones! They’re trying to help us!”
“Huh?” At the moment, he had his paws around one of the purple ones, ready to bite its face off.
“The purple guys are good! I examined them! I saw their stats!”
“You sure, dawg?”
The purple Koboglin in his paws started chattering away in Koboglinese or whatever language they spoke.
“Brakka brakka, ging pomma gang!”
Meanwhile, all the blue-green ones were in the canoe and busily paddling away.
I went to work whacking away their paddles, going from one to the next. My stamina had climbed back up to about 40% from my short rest, but within seconds, it was down to 30%. It seemed to be falling faster now that my Health was down to 55%. Blood loss never helped keep your stamina up. I wasn’t sure what would happen if my Stamina hit zero. Would I die? Pass out? Or just drop on my ass? None of the options sounded good in hip deep water during a battle.
I didn’t have time to worry about it.
Several of the purple Koboglins were clambering into the canoe so they could wrestle with the blue-green ones inside.
Tiger or whatever his name was finally believed me and let go of the purple one he had and jumped into the canoe. Koboglins went flying. More rushed him so I climbed in to help. The white tiger was on her feet and fighting back.
My Stamina was down to 15%. Health at 51%. We needed to end this fight now.
“Don’t kill the purple ones!” I yelled at the white tigress.
She caught my eye and nodded and started tossing blue-green Koboglins overboard. Despite her many wounds, she had enough strength to do it, but she wasn’t going to last long.
About thirty seconds later, with the help of the purple Koboglins, we had tossed all the blue-green ones into the drink. The purple ones jumped up and cheered inside the canoe. They grabbed their crotches and showed their asses to the ones in the water while yelling Koboglin racial slurs at them, not that I could understand a word they were saying, but it was obvious.
“Good job, dawg,” Tiger said to me and patted my shoulder.
“You too, buddy.”
The female tiger was down in the bottom of the canoe on all fours, panting heavily. She couldn’t even hold her head up. Too damn tired and wounded.
I could relate.
Okay, we’d won. We were kings of this canoe mountain. But all the paddles floated in the water. What now? Guess the purple guys hadn’t thought that far ahead. Neither had I. Oh well. Let the Koboglins worry about it.
You are quite the badass, hun. You earned another 100 XP wrestling Koboglins off the boat.
Quest Complete! You helped Tiygar save his friend and made a new ally! You earned 500 XP and +5 Good points!
Welcome to Level 2! Your Health and Stamina have both increased by 10 points! You now have 6 points you can distribute on your character sheet to your attributes or skills as you see fit.
I chuckled to myself. Level 2 after 5 minutes of fighting? That would be heresy
in D&D. No wonder gamers got addicted to Reternity. At this rate, I’d be Level 10 before dinner.
The blue-green Koboglins swam to the other shore and yelled at us while the purple ones threw their spears back at them. The biggest blue-green one stared at me and shouted nonsense, pointed with a clawed finger. I examined him.
Braggak
Blue-green Koboglin Chieftain
Wartnose clan
Level: 4
Health | Stamina: 170 | 150
Mana | Mind: 190 | 70
Size: Medium
Armor: 27
===============
Good | Evil: - | 62
Law | Chaos: - | 50
===============
Oops! You are now Marked! The Wartnose Koboglin clan is now your enemy! They will go out of their way to kill you on sight. They will track you and hunt you down until they kill you and cook you and eat you. You have been warned.
+2 Fame points for helping the Clawtooth Clan!
+2 Good points for doing the right thing.
+3 Law points for helping bring order out of chaos
Great.
Now I had enemies.
Yet another thing to worry about other than saving my sister.
The Wartnose clan trudged back into the jungle, grumbling. A couple of the purple Clawtooth clan were busy swimming around the canoe gathering up the floating paddles in the river.
“Let’s pull the canoe ashore,” Tiger said.
I slid out to help. My stamina was still dropping. Down to 14%. Health was at 47%. I was exhausted. Pulling the canoe to shore took everything I had. Once it was on the pebbled shore, I sat down, my stamina at 10%. I couldn’t move. But I could watch my blood dripping out onto the river rocks below my injured leg. I touched the drops and looked at them on my fingers. Looked like real blood to me.
Tiger jumped into the boat to check on his friend.
“How is she?” I asked, gasping for air.
“Alive,” he said without much joy.
“Should we carry her out of the boat?”
“Yeah. Can you help?”
“Dude, I can’t move.” My Stamina was at 9%, Health at 44%.
One of the taller purple Koboglins pointed at the canoe. “Rumma singe, krak krak.” He waved at some of his buddies and they climbed inside to help. Then he started barking orders to the others in Koboglinese. This dude was Moggor the chieftain.
Tiger did most of the lifting, but the Koboglins helped with the female tiger’s arms and legs, lowering her over the side to several more purple Koboglins in the water who ferried her to shore and laid her down gently next to me.
Everybody gathered around the white lady tiger. She looked up at us, her eyes half closed. She looked worse than I felt, which was bad. Probably because she’d lost so much blood. It painted her fur wet red everywhere.
“How’s your health, Qoorie?” Tiger asked.
“About 10 percent,” she whispered hoarsely “And dropping. I don’t think I’m going to make it, Tiygar.”
He growled, showing his huge fangs. It was frustration, not rage.
“I feel you, man,” I muttered, mostly to myself. I didn’t want her to die either. But she’d lost gallons of blood. Her eyes weren’t focusing. Her tongue looked gray. That couldn’t be good. I kept saying to myself over and over, It’s just a game. Just a damn game. None of this is real. She’s not really going to die.
I only half-believed myself.
Moggor started waving his arms and talking to his pals. Two of them knelt down around Qoorie and started slapping a goopy salve on the smaller wounds on her arms and legs before bandaging them. But that wasn’t the real problem. Her biggest wound was a ragged gash along her belly, running from her ribcage to her back legs. Blood was leaking out way too fast. Subcutaneous fat was visible on the hanging flaps of flesh and shredded muscle tissue was exposed underneath.
She wasn’t going to make it.
Moggor knelt beside her and held his hands over the gash. There was no way Moggor could stop that much bleeding with his two little hands.
I dropped next to him and tried to pull the flaps of skin together with my fingers, but her bloody skin was too slippery and I was going to infect her wound with my dirty fingers. Not that it mattered. Based on the visible damage, she probably had severed arteries and internal bleeding, possibly damaged and torn organs. You couldn’t fix that with a Band-Aid. So holding her skin closed wouldn’t make any difference.
“Damn it!” I shouted. “We can’t let her die!”
Tiygar squeezed my shoulder with his paw. “I feel you, dawg. But they’s nothing I can do neither.”
“No!” I growled.
Moggor started chanting, his eyes closed. His hands began emitting a golden glow. He kept chanting.
Qoorie’s blood flow stopped.
Was she out of blood?
Was this it?
The golden glow intensified until it was blinding bright.
Qoorie’s skin flaps folded closed on their own. The wound sealed as if by magic. No, literally by magic. I couldn’t believe my eyes. The wound scarred a light pink, then faded away to clear pink skin. White fur grew in within seconds. The wound was completely gone.
I was blown away. In the real world, they had pretty amazing wound care technology these days, but nothing like this. Wounds like Qoorie’s still required surgery. Doctors with their hands inside her body clamping arteries and tying off veins, stitching them up with good old needles and resorbable thread and shooting her up with gallons of antibiotics to prevent infection while her body did the real work over days and weeks.
A D&D spell was one thing, but this was a fricking miracle.
I laughed.
Tiygar grinned. It was more of a grimace with those fangs of his, but he was smiling. I could see it in his eyes.
Qoorie’s face softened and she sighed. “My health is back up to 75% and holding strong. But my stamina is still down at 40%. I’ll need a long rest before I’m back up to 100%.”
“Better than dead,” Tiygar chuckled.
“What the fuck?” I gasped. I couldn’t wrap my head around this.
“He healed me,” Qoorie said quietly, smiling at Moggor.
He rested a palm on her side, patting it gently. “Kog gabba. Kog pek gabba.” He smiled up at me around his little tusky teeth.
I said, “Kog pek gabba, buddy. Definitely kog pek gabba.”
Meanwhile, my Stamina was down to 1% and my Health was at 39% because my hamstring was still bleeding.
Drip, drip, drip.
When my stamina hit zero, the world turned gray and I passed out.
—: Chapter 6 :—
Saturday, March 14th, 2037
11:01pm
The Real World
Bangkok, Thailand
People were starting to notice Emily.
She was still naked.
If she got arrested, she would be in serious trouble.
Would they believe her story that she had no idea how she wound up naked on Patpong Road? Would they draw her blood and run various drug tests? Would they find illegal narcotics in her system? She had no idea. They very well might. If they did, would they lock her up?
Yes they would.
Thailand was still under martial law and everyone was required to carry a passport or picture ID. Especially foreigners like Emily. Who were naked. And had no ID.
Did they let you call your lawyer from Thai prison?
Or did they just throw away the key and forget you existed?
Emily elbowed past two Thai women who shot her dirty looks. She stumbled up to a souvenir shop. Several headless mannequins were lined up outside. Two wore school girl outfits consisting of plaid short-shorts and white button-down tops. Next to those was a mannequin wearing a string bikini. Literally only a black string. The last wore a gold slip dress. Emily rolled it up off the mannequin and pulled it over her head in a frenzy, nearly tearing it in the rush to get it on.
“Y
ou no do dat!” A male clerk yelled, hurrying up to her, “Stop! No you dress!”
Before he could grab her, Emily ran.
Now she was a thief.
But she wasn’t a naked thief.
If she could get away, she was far less likely to be stopped by Bangkok police with this dress on.
She pushed and shoved through the crowd of tourists who now glared at her with irritation.
“Stop, you! Come back! She steal dress! Stop her!”
Emily poured on the speed. A ladyboy in a tight black dress tried to tackle her, but Emily spun out of his path and kept going.
Dozens of hands reached for her.
She dodged them all.
All but one.
Someone caught her wrist.
She yanked her arm away and ran, ran, ran.
Her only thought:
Escape.
—: Chapter 7 :—
Saturday, March 14th, 2037
Reternity Online, in-game
The Freelands
Leviathorne Rainforest
“Do we have to eat this?” I asked Tiygar.
“We be rude if we don’t,” he said.
Moggor held a flat rock in front of us. Three freshly roasted rats were laid out on it. To his credit, Moggor had his people skin them first, but it was still rats.
Who was I to complain? I left my food back with the banana tarantulas. I picked up a rat and nibbled at the leg. It wouldn’t be much of a meal.
Moggor tipped his head back and mimed holding one up by the tail and dropping it in his mouth.
Mmmm, no. I wasn’t much for bones. I nibbled away.
Moggor and several other purple Koboglins laughed at me.
Whatever.
According to Tiygar, after I passed out earlier, Moggor had done that sweet healing trick of his on my leg. It still ached, but the wound was gone. Almost good as new. Once I’d woken up, I watched everyone else get bandaged up. Then the Koboglins cooked this big group meal.
