I was alone.
“I—I don’t know,” I said, my voice quivering slightly.
Snap out of it! My inner voice shouted at me. I clenched my fists at my sides, closed my eyes and tried to focus. The Dark World felt somehow even more real than it had suddenly. Wintermute had left me, without explanation, and there was no telling if he would be back.
“Well, what did Wintermute say?” Curafin asked. “Did he hook you up with some sweet powers?”
“No,” I replied, slowly shaking my head. “He—he had nothing for me, and then he just…vanished.”
“Vanished?” Kodiak asked, taking a step forward. “What are you talking about?”
“I said he vanished, all right!” I cried out, feeling tears well up in my eyes. I quickly turned around and slammed my fist into the tree, using the pain to distract me. “He’s gone! He gave me nothing and then he left! I don’t know what’s going on, okay?”
No one said anything. I hated myself for letting this little outburst happen, but I was losing it. I hadn’t realized until now just how much pressure I’d been putting on myself. Singlehandedly, I was going to save everyone from the Dark World? Rescue the server?
I wasn’t even max level. I couldn’t even take on the Dokkalfar Legionnaire on my own, what I was I going to do about the Lord of the Flame keeping guard over the entrance to Sheol? I’d leapt without leaping, rooted my Wellspring device and dived back into the very world Jack had died to help us escape from.
Someone came up behind me and put a hand on my shoulder. I heard Kodiak’s voice whisper in my ear.
“You’re doing fine,” he told me. “It’s not easy being the leader. But we’re all with you. Just know that.”
I sniffed and wiped my eyes with the back of my hand before turning around. He was smiling at me, causing me to smile back. I don’t know what I was thinking, but I threw my arms around him and hugged him, just briefly, before letting him go. When I pulled back, he looked like someone had thrown a bucket of slushy in his face.
“Thanks,” I said awkwardly as I stepped past him to the others. “I uh…don’t know what Wintermute’s plan is, but I think we should keep going. If I can find Vayde, he can help us. We were good friends back in Carrethen. And staying around here won’t do us any good.”
“Sounds good, boss.” Sabotenda grinned as he leaned casually on his halberd. I glanced at Curafin, still slightly embarrassed by my emotional outburst, but he simply tilted his chin up and in solidarity. Their support was something I hadn’t even known I’d needed, and slowly, I felt the fire inside me beginning to grow.
“Let’s move out!” I said, turning to leave. But before I could, Curafin stopped me.
“Oh, by the way,” he said, stepping in front of me. “While you were in there doing your admin thing, Sabotenda portaled me down into the pit so I could loot the Legionnaire.”
“Anything good?” I asked.
“How about these?” he replied, tossing something into my inventory. I quickly opened it up and found a set of boots and inspected them.
Ghostly Leather Boots—Armor level 350. +10 bonus to Coordination.
“Oh, snap!” I exclaimed. “What was he doing with these!?”
“Random drop.” Sabotenda shrugged. “I don’t think you’ll be complaining.”
“Hell no,” I laughed. Despite the armor set I’d taken from the Houndmaster, I was still wearing a starter pair of boots that had an armor level of 15. The vendor in Cara hadn’t sold anything better, and somehow, nothing had dropped until now.
“These actually rock,” I said with delight as I equipped them. They even looked great, with a rich reddish colored leather striped with dark black stitching. They weren’t the same color as the Houndmaster’s set, but they didn’t clash either. “Also, my Coordination is 330 now…”
“Badass, Jane,” Kodiak said as he stepped up beside me and admired my new piece.
“Thanks,” I chuckled, then turned and looked in the direction of the forest’s edge. “We better get moving if we ever want to reach that city…what’s it called again?”
“City of Jahannan,” he replied. “It’s…quite the place.”
“How so?”
Kodiak’s eyes narrowed as though he was recalling a very intense memory. “Well, for starters, it’s completely impossible to navigate—like five different mazes, all made independently of one another, then smashed into each other. Ash falls from the sky, there’s countless different types of Undead, casters and melee, and traps everywhere.”
“Sounds like a blast!” Sabotenda joked. I smiled.
“How far are we?” I asked.
“A couple of hours maybe.”
“Well, we better get moving.”
41
The Wastes
We set off, making our way through what was left of the Forgotten Grove. I heard a Bellringer somewhere but didn’t bother dealing with him. The mist was thinning out and it wasn’t long before we found ourselves on the edge of the trees staring out at the landscape beyond.
“Gorgeous,” Sabotenda said sarcastically.
“Oh, I wish I could take a picture,” I added.
“The Wastes,” Kodiak announced. And he was right.
The land in front of us looked as though it had been shattered by a giant’s mallet. Huge spires of stone jutted out at random, while other sections seemed to have collapsed inwards like a sinkhole. Giant boulders dotted the landscape as though they’d crashed down from space, and the only vegetation were low skeletal bushes without leaves that snaked like vines through any crack, crevice or hole they could find.
There was no grass, no green, only dusty yellow sand the color of decades old paint that had faded in the sun. Here and there, I could see figures moving, but they were too far away to make out.
“What are those things?” I asked.
“Old Men of the Wastes,” he replied. “And Prowlers. Nasty level 90 stuff. No armor really, just tattered robes, and they may look like they move slow, but when you get up close, they’re faster than a hummingbird and have these big stone axes that sort of look like boomerangs that they’ll crack you over the head with.”
“Lovely,” I replied. “I don’t suppose they drop anything good.”
Kodiak chuckled and shook his head. “Unless you like tattered scraps of fabric?”
“This just keeps getting better and better,” I grumbled, starting off down the rocky slope.
It was day, but you could hardly tell with the clouds that rippled through the sky. They seemed a slightly different color in the Wastes, slightly more purple, which created a dramatic contrast with the ground below. Our feet kicked up so much dust as we went that I almost prayed for rain to beat it all down again.
It was slow going, with the terrain almost impossible to easily navigate, and I had to keep reminding everyone to stick together and stop splitting up and taking different routes around the obstacles that lay in our path.
If this was real life, I’d have been terrified to break an ankle either by stepping in a crack, slipping off the edge of a rock or catching my foot on one of the vine like plants that clung to the stone at our feet.
“What I wouldn’t give for a nice mount or a flight path,” Curafin said as his foot slipped through a pile of stone, almost causing him to topple over. “Or maybe a portal route.”
“No portals in this area that I could find,” Kodiak said with a sigh.
“Did you look over the whole area?” Sabotenda asked.
“Not the whole area,” he replied. “But I don’t think there is one, and I don’t think it’s a good time to start looking.”
“Just think of it like hiking,” I joked. “With a few…deadly, stone-club wielding monsters trying to kill us!”
“Well, once we get a little closer and come up over that ridge, you’ll be able to see the city.”
We pressed on and soon came up against our first group of enemies. Two Old Men of the Wastes and a Prowler. The men were just
as Kodiak had described them; gaunt, hollowed out and vacant, mumbling to themselves as they paced aimlessly about a small crevice through the rock, blocking our path. The Prowler was built like a man, but moved on all fours and made me think of a spider. He wore only a brown loincloth and his skin was dry and cracked like the shell of a hardboiled egg. I inspected them.
Old Man of the Waste—Level 95.
Wastes Prowler—Level 92.
“Just the stone clubs?” I asked Kodiak. “No magic or crazy special attacks?”
“Not that I remember,” he replied. “But I didn’t exactly spend a lot of time here. Just remember—they are fast once they aggro.”
“Got it,” I replied, drawing my bow and taking aim at the Prowler. “Let’s take down the little one first and then get the Old Men.”
I let my arrow fly, striking the Prowler in the leg. The damage was really good, almost taking him down below half. Beside me, Curafin cast Menace on one of the Old Men as they both went on high alert, spinning around to face us.
I fired again as the Prowler leapt towards us, and Kodiak was right, he was blindingly fast and was on me before I had a chance to equip my daggers.
His health was low, but he started pummeling me so fast I could barely keep up. For every blow I managed to dodge, two hit me, steadily draining my health. Luckily, I wasn’t alone.
Sabotenda drove his halberd into the Prowler’s side, spearing him against a rock. He cried out and tried to free himself, but before he could, Curafin and Kodiak jumped in together and finished him off. With a horrible death scream, the Prowler vanished.
Hearing a sound behind me, I spun around and in a single movement drew my daggers and barely managed to deflect a blow from one of the Old Men’s stone axe. It was a single piece of stone that had been polished and carved into a long blade that expanded towards the end, where it curved slightly into a bulbous tip.
The second Old Man leapt at me with such speed I had no chance. The thick tip slammed into my temple, hammering me down into the ground. My head ringing, I rolled backwards onto my feet and activated Rush.
The rest of my group engaged.
“This one first!” Curafin cried out, driving his fiery sword into the debuffed man. His blade struck true, and the flames ignited the Old Man’s worn robe. He cried out as the fire spread, starting to burn away at his health.
“Kodiak!” I cried out, fending off as many blows from my attacker as I could. “Get this guy’s attention!”
Kodiak quickly turned back to me and leapt onto the Old Man’s back, driving his dagger into his neck. The Old Man flailed wildly, knocking Kodiak to the ground, but it was all I needed to recover. I took a step back, swapped to my bow, and fired at the debuffed man, scoring a massive hit that brought him down to critical. Another few hits from Sabotenda and he was finished.
“Here we go, boys!” I cried out, but was silenced as something heavy slammed into my back, slamming me forward into a face plant in the dirt. A huge chunk of my health was missing as I rolled onto my back and looked around to see what had hit me. To my total surprise, the remaining Old Man was holding an enormous boulder over his head, at least three times his size, something that looked completely impossible for him to lift.
“Oh, shit!” I cried out as he wound up for another throw. I managed to get to my feet before he blasted the rock at me, shattering it against the stone behind me. I stumbled forward, almost falling again as my foot caught in a bush in front of me, then leapt forward over a small crack and landed on the other side.
I heard the sound of Menace being cast again but then Sabotenda cried out and turned to see the Old Man slam an enormous rock into his face, blasting off a quarter of his health.
I scrambled up a pile of fallen rock and hurled myself off the top, both blades aimed straight down at the Old Man. He didn’t have time to turn before my blades struck true. I followed up immediately with Ambush and ripped him to shreds. Curafin drove his hot steel home into the man’s back as he tried to attack me, carving off the remaining sliver of health. The vicious, impossibly strong man collapsed and burst into flames.
“Damn!” Kodiak exclaimed. “Never seen them do that before!”
“Do what?” I joked. “Throw ten ton rocks around like they were baseballs?”
Everyone laughed and grabbed the junk loot the men had dropped.
“Hey, Jane,” Kodiak said, stepping up to my side. “Did you look up there yet?”
“Up where?” I asked, following his finger. When I saw what he was talking about, my jaw almost fell off.
42
The City of Jahannan
Ahead of us, hanging above the Wastes at the top of a sheer rock face, was an enormous city, so complex in its structure that it took me a minute to take it all in.
Enormous towers dominated its architecture, with flying buttresses and bridges from building to building high up in the air. Smaller structures filled in the gaps, with chipped and shattered stone shingles clinging desperately onto their sloped roofs. As I stared, a thick sheet sloughed off one of them and spilled off the edge of the cliff into the wastes below.
A group of enormous bat-like creatures circled the highest tower like a team of aerial guards, and I could see movement in the shadows of the city, but it was impossible to make out what they were. The city itself was grey with undertones of shadowy blue, and from seemingly nowhere, a silver grey light raked across the buildings, giving the whole place an eerie glow.
“Wow,” I said simply. I was stunned. There was so much going on with the city that it was almost impossible to take it all in. Unlike other areas in Carrethen I’d seen, it was infinitely more complex. “How did I never know about this place before?”
“Honestly, I don’t think it was in Call of Carrethen,” Kodiak told me.
I turned to him. “Say what?”
“Seriously,” he replied. “I never saw it during retail, and never heard anyone talk about it either.”
“So you’re saying that this is unique to the Dark World?”
“Would that really surprise you?” He shrugged. “This whole place is screwy. Wouldn’t surprise me if Wintermute’s backup somehow unlocked some old parts of the game that never made it into retail, or some stuff that was going to be released in future patches.”
“Expansions maybe,” Sabotenda suggested. “DLC.”
I sighed heavily as I looked up at the fortress as it stood high above us, dominating the sky. It definitely looked amazing, and normally I’d have been down to explore every inch of the place and discover all of its secrets, but for now, all it was was another obstacle in my journey back to Jack.
“So, how do we get up?” I asked.
“There’s these sketchy elevators at the base of the cliff,” Kodiak said. “Like those huge ones in the Barrens. Ever play World of Warcraft?”
“Well, yeah,” I chuckled. “It’s a classic.”
We started off towards the cliff, doing our best to avoid any more groups of Old Men of the Wastes or Prowlers, but of course had to deal with a few more fights before we approached the wall. Sabotenda was closing in on 80, and Kodiak was pretty far through 83.
I still had a long way to go until 128. I couldn’t help but think that if I was ever going to progress into the 200s, I was going to have to go do some leveling on my own. But that could wait. For now, we had a single objective: find Vayde, and that meant getting through Jahannan in one piece.
Sabotenda drove his halberd into a Prowler to finish him off as I looked ahead at the thick gulch that lay before us at the base of the cliff. A few rickety wooden bridges led to a set of even more shoddy looking lifts that led up to Jahannan, but the depth of the chasm was enough to make anyone’s head spin. I tried to peer over the edge and get a look at the bottom, but it just disappeared into blackness, and I couldn’t help but hear Norman’s twisted voice in my mind.
Lost forever in the Electronic Void…
Shaking my head, I turned to my group.
&n
bsp; “You guys ready to go?” I asked as Sabotenda looted a pile of Pareals from his fallen foe. “Don’t suppose you can just portal us up there, Sab?”
Sab glanced up the impossible height of the cliff and shook his head. “Nah, this thing’s got a pretty short range. Like…5 yards.”
“Yeah, I don’t think that’ll cut it,” Kodiak smirked.
“Those bridges look like those toothpick ones you make in physics class,” Curafin remarked, staring skeptically at the one in front of us. I chuckled. He was right. Those things would never pass code in the real world, and seemed like the perfect place to trap someone, by luring them out into the middle then slashing one of the ropes and watching them plummet to their deaths.
“Well, as we learned from those Old Men and their hulk-like strength, looks can be deceiving,” I said with my sage-like wisdom. I threw Sabotenda a silly wink and took a step forward onto the bridge.
The whole thing creaked so bad and swayed beneath my foot that I instantly stepped off.
“What was that about looks being deceiving, Jane?” Sabotenda joked. I flashed him a look of disapproval and turned back to the bridge. This time, I walked confidently forward, ignoring the swaying and sounds of wood shifting as though it was about to break beneath my feet.
“See?” I laughed, turning to face them. “This isn’t bad—”
Something roared above me, and I looked up as something massive swooped down on me, its enormous wings blotting out the sky.
A dragon!
Its enormous mouth opened, displaying thick teeth the size of small buildings. It beat its wings with such force that the air spun around me and slammed me down onto the shoddy planks of the bridge.
“Jane!” Kodiak cried out as the dragon swooped past me, narrowly missing the ropes securing the bridge to the cliff, and banked hard up into the air over the wastes. I looked up and saw it starting to circle back.
Lord of the Flame: A LitRPG novel (Call of Carrethen Book 2) Page 19
