by A. J. Markam
That is, if I ever made it out of here alive.
So, seeing as I wasn’t logging out anytime soon, I put my time to good use: playing the game and leveling up.
We went on a series of quests, and temporarily joined a group doing some dungeon diving. I got new cloth armor and some trinkets that gave me increased critical strike. I nearly doubled my intellect, and managed to level up all the way to 9.
Along the way I got a couple of new abilities. Mana Conversion let me trade in 25% of my remaining Health and gain back 20% of my total Mana. It was great for when I was in a really hard battle and ran out of Mana, which left me unable to cast spells – like that time when I fought the bandits. Now I could refill my Mana, then Soul Suck some sad sap to rebuild my hit points.
I also got Terrify - the ability to strike overwhelming fear in an enemy and send them running for the hills for 30 seconds. It worked pretty well when I was surrounded by four or five assailants and Alaria and Stig were overwhelmed.
Another awesome ability was Doomsday – a curse that dealt hundreds of points of damage after 20 seconds had elapsed. I thought it sucked at first because it didn’t do anything upfront, but then I realized that I could hit every single one of my enemies with Doomsday, then Darkfire. At the end of 20 seconds, half of them would drop dead, and the others would just barely be hanging on. Most could be finished off with a couple of fireballs from Alaria or a single Darkbolt from me.
In addition, Alaria and Stig got their own abilities upgraded. Stig’s fireballs got more and more powerful, to the point where he was actually something of a threat. He also got the ability to teleport in puffs of smoke around a target, so he could dodge physical attacks more easily.
Alaria got her Fire Whip – which was something to behold. Watching her flick embers off the tip with a supersonic CRACK was pretty wild.
And she started to fly. At first she looked more like a chicken – a red-hued, incredibly sexy chicken – that could only fly for short distances. But even that was enough to confound some of our enemies.
Events continued like that, with us picking up new quests, but there was always the unfulfilled one that lingered at the bottom of my quest window.
I asked Alaria one day, “Are we getting closer to your next ex-master?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes,” she said, then changed the subject.
I didn’t press her. If she was uncomfortable with going after the next guy, there had to be a reason, and I wasn’t going to pry.
In the end, though, I needn’t have worried. We didn’t have to go after the ex-master.
He came to us... or at least his hired gun did.
28
We were in a jungle-like region with rocky cliffs, beautiful flowering vines growing over everything, raging waterfalls, and 1000% humidity.
I had thought that getting stabbed with a sword was about the worst thing that could happen – until I started sweating buckets in the jungle. Then I learned exactly what the videogame’s real version of Hell was.
Alaria, of course, wasn’t bothered by the heat at all. Since she was a creature of fire, the extra heat wasn’t anything – and humidity didn’t bother her in the slightest. Apparently it dissipated in the immediate space around her body. She really was the epitome of the saying ‘Women don’t perspire, they glisten’ – except she didn’t even glisten. She radiated.
The foliage was sparse enough that we could walk just about anywhere, although to take shortcuts I sometimes had Alaria and Stig blast our way through the vines and brambles.
We picked up a quest hunting giant anacondas from a shady elf who used them to create magical boots. Then we ran into a tribe of amphibian creatures that wanted to shrink our heads. Not exactly the most fun I’d ever had in the game.
The one consolation was that there were these red berries as big as plums that grew on certain vines. It was like biting into an overripe tomato, except the tomatoes tasted like peppermint, sweet and minty.
Not only that, but the fruit gave a buff of +5 to hit points for ten minutes. Plus they kept me hydrated. Best of all, they eliminated any discomfort from the humidity. As soon as you bit into one, a cool sensation would spread from the fruit into every part of your body, rendering you temporarily unaffected by the mugginess for at least a couple minutes.
Needless to say, I ate my weight in berries several times over.
Stig was enjoying them, too – not necessarily because he cared about the humidity, but because he liked the taste. So it was me and my imp stomping through the jungle, smacking and slobbering on overripe fruit.
Alaria complained the entire time.
“Could you guys NOT make those slurping sounds?” she asked, annoyed. “Seriously, it’s like you’re eating a bowl of soup with a leaky spoon.”
“What, like this?” I asked as I slurped a mouthful of juice out of the overripe flesh.
She cast a withering gaze at me. “Yes. Exactly like that.”
“Kind of hard not to,” I said with a big grin and juice running down my chin.
I was delighted at her annoyance. Alaria loved teasing me and putting me in a perpetual state of blue balls, so I had to take my petty vengeance wherever I could find it.
She curled her lip in disgust. “You look like a pig feeding in a trough of slop.”
“Just practicing my oral sex technique,” I joked, then gave a particularly long, juicy slurp.
She winced and grimaced in pain. “GODDESS I did not need that image in my brain.”
“Oh, you’d love it, baby,” I said as I slurped some more.
She fixed me with a look of abject hatred. “No I would NOT. I would rather let you stick it in, than look at your insipid face doing that to my nether regions.”
I laughed. “I’d be perfectly happy sticking it in.”
“That’ll happen when the Seven Hells all freeze over.”
“Then I guess I’ll just have to keep practicing for all the other ladies,” I grinned, and sluuurrrrped.
If looks could kill, hers would have time-traveled and murdered me in my crib. “If you ever do that around other women, then you better start practicing your techniques on cucumbers, because that’s all you’re ever going to get.”
“Awkward,” Stig announced loudly.
I was annoyed at Alaria, but rather than come back with a verbal taunt, I just gave another loud, liquid slurp.
“Stop!” she yelled, her shoulders hunched up in pain.
I stopped. “That really bothers you, doesn’t it?”
She shuddered like she had just stuck her hand in a bucket of something particularly nasty. “Did you just now figure that out?”
“You know, I met a girl once who couldn’t stand the word ‘moist.’”
Alaria looked at me, puzzled. “Why?”
“I don’t know. She didn’t have an explanation for it. She just couldn’t stand the word ‘moist.’ Every time somebody said it, she would shudder like you just did.”
“Then I have every sympathy for her.”
“The only problem is, once people figured it out, that’s all they would say around her. They would talk about the moist chicken, the moist cake, how the muffins were so moist – ”
“I’m sure your little jibes didn’t make her muffin moist,” Alaria snorted.
“So this really bothers you, huh?” I said, gesturing with the fruit.
“Yes.”
I shook my head in resignation. “That’s too bad,” I said, and noisily took another slurping bite out of it.
“Oh my GODDESS!” she shrieked, and stomped away from me. “I didn’t realize I had a toddler for a new master!”
I snorted with laughter. “No, see, the toddler would have to be spoon-fed – like this – ”
All of a sudden, the branches off to Alaria’s right rustled. At first I thought it was the wind, but I didn’t feel even the slightest breeze – and none of the other branches had been disturbed.
“Anaconda!” I yelled, though I couldn’t see anything yet.
It wasn’t an unreasonable assumption. We had been fighting the snakes for the past day, and they did tend to lurk in the undergrowth.
Alaria turned around in alarm. “Where?”
Except it wasn’t an anaconda.
It was something far worse.
I heard it first: the whoosh that always accompanied someone coming out of invisibility.
A figure suddenly materialized out of nowhere, dressed in black from head to toe with a dagger in each hand.
He then proceeded to stab Alaria ten times in the space of two seconds.
It was like watching motor pistons cycling back and forth, with the horrible sound effects of someone stabbing raw meat.
“Alaria!” I screamed, and immediately began to cast a Darkbolt – but before I could get off the shot, the dark figure was gone, invisible again.
Alaria collapsed to the ground on her back, her eyes wide in shock, her mouth open in a silent scream of agony.
She wasn’t dead, though I could see that almost a third of her hit points had been taken off within mere seconds.
I raced over to her side and immediately cast Self-Sacrifice, blue light pouring from my outstretched palm into her midriff.
The jagged wounds began to close, then disappeared completely as her hit points returned to normal. My own hit points dropped by a quarter, but began to gradually creep back up again.
“What was that?” she gasped.
“A Rogue,” I said grimly, then looked over at my imp staring at me in helplessness. “Stig – if you see anything coming at us, hit it with a fireball and shout out where it is.”
“You got it, boss.”
I helped Alaria to her feet.
“What the hell is a Rogue doing out here?” she asked.
“I have no idea,” I said, which was the truth.
We weren’t on a quest that involved a Rogue, so that was out.
I thought about Player vs. Player for a second, but I didn’t have those settings turned on. I hated having to deal with some high-level asshole attacking me while I was just about to finish a quest, so I always kept the option deactivated.
And if the guy was playing in PVP mode, why the hell did he go after her instead of me? It made no sense.
My question was immediately answered by the game itself when a window appeared.
Tap That Ass-assin
Someone is trying to kill your succubus! Unveil the assassin and stop him before he succeeds!
1500 XP
10 Silver
I didn’t even have time to groan at the pun.
Why the hell was an assassin after us?
Alaria looked around worriedly. “We should get out of – ”
Before she could complete her sentence, I heard the telltale whoosh.
Then the Rogue stabbed her again from behind, this time right in the kidneys.
It didn’t register immediately in my brain, because all I saw was her scream and arch her back in pain. She was between me and the Rogue, so I didn’t realize what had happened until it was too late.
Stig fired off a fireball just as I had instructed, but missed. “Behind her!” he croaked.
Alaria collapsed into my arms again. As she buckled and fell, I caught a glimpse of the Rogue’s face – glowing white eyes inside a ninja-style mask. Then he disappeared again.
I cast Self-Sacrifice again to raise her hit points back to normal.
Unfortunately, now my Health was down around 70%.
“What the hell?!” Alaria yelled angrily as she summoned a fireball in each hand.
I turned around and put my back to hers – or at least my back to her wings. I yelled at Stig, “Good job – now get over here!”
The three of us stood like that, back to back, waiting for the would-be murderer to show himself again.
Nothing happened.
“Why isn’t he attacking?” Alaria seethed.
“Because he knows we have to wait for him to come out of cloaking,” I said. “He can basically just sit and wait forever.”
“What should we do?”
My mind ticked through the possibilities.
Rogues were a real bitch to fight. Actually, I take that back – high level Rogues were a bitch to fight. Whenever low-level Rogues were in combat, they were forced to come out of stealth and couldn’t go back in until someone was dead, which made it a lot easier to fight them.
But with higher-level Rogues, they could flit in and out of stealth, attacking people left and right as long as the Rogue never got directly hit. I only knew this from tangling with some friends in PVP. I’d never played a Rogue before, only Hunters and Warriors.
So what did I know about Rogues?
They would sometimes disturb their surroundings – like how I had seen the underbrush move slightly, probably nudged by him as he passed by.
What could we do that would put us in the best position to see him coming?
Especially when we couldn’t see him at all?
Water.
“We need to find a river,” I said. “Preferably a shallow pond or stream, something we can move fast in.”
“Why?”
“He’s not Jesus, so he can’t walk on water – which means we’ll be able to see him coming from 10 to 15 feet away, at least.”
Alaria frowned. “Who’s Jesus?”
“A guy who could walk on water.”
“A Mage?”
“Just find us something with that sixth sense of yours!”
“Okay,” she agreed, then pointed. “There’s something that way.”
“All right, everybody, stick close. Run on three – one, two, three!”
We set off through the jungle, running as fast as we could. I kept my eyes peeled around me, wondering if the guy would show up in front of us and risk a face-to-face fight –
He didn’t.
I was pretty sure, though, that I saw tree branches high above us bending and shaking under the weight of some invisible force.
The bastard was up in the trees.
Since I couldn’t target him without seeing him – or stopping to cast my spells – I just kept on running.
“I don’t understand,” I huffed and puffed as we ran along. “He’s tried to kill you twice – but if he does, I’ll just re-summon you again! It’s absolutely pointless for him to go after you without trying to get to me first!”
“Not unless he wants to do away with me entirely,” Alaria said as she ran.
“I just said that there’s no way can do that!”
“Actually, there is,” she said grimly.
I stared at her. “What are you talking about?”
“If he gets me down to my last bit of strength and is able to cut the collar off my neck, he can make sure I can’t come back to you.”
“You mean I can’t summon you?”
“You could forge a new collar and summon another succubus – just not me. I am bound to this collar until you release me, so if he takes it…”
I stared at her. “Are you sure?” I asked in amazement.
“Seeing as it’s happened to me a couple of times over the last hundred years, yes, I’m sure,” she barked.
The game had only existed for about five or six years now, so anything she ‘remembered’ was just programmed into her mind by the programmers.
But still – I’d never read about anything like this in the gaming forums before!
“Why would he want to separate you from me?” I asked.
“Either for personal reasons – or because somebody hired him to do it.”
“What happens if he gets the collar?”
“Whoever controls the collar controls me. So either I stay in limbo until I am called again, or he could deliver the collar to another warlock, who could use it to enslave me. All that matters is whether they have the collar or not.” Her tone turned sour. “Look at it this way – if he succeeds, you won�
�t have to put up with me anymore.”
“Screw that,” I snapped. “He messes with you, he messes with me.”
It was true. No matter how much Alaria annoyed me sometimes – no matter how much effort she put into teasing me – I had grown extremely attached to her.
And not just because of her looks.
…although I couldn’t say that had absolutely nothing to do with it.
We made it to the river. Unfortunately, it was absolutely the wrong kind of river. Deep with swift waters. God only knows what was waiting under the surface for us. I could imagine us getting in there and being swarmed by crocodiles or some sort of piranha-like fish. At least for now, there was nothing visible on the sandy banks that could kill us.
‘Visible’ being the key word.
But at least there was one good thing: the Rogue couldn’t attack us from the water. We would see him coming a mile away.
“Stig,” I commanded, “watch our backs. If you see anything come up out of the river, attack it and shout.”
“You got it, boss.”
“I can’t wait until I can fly again,” Alaria muttered. “Then we could just soar up out of this mess and leave it all behind.”
“For right now, let’s just make sure you stick around until you can fly again,” I said.
We were in a bad spot, just not quite as bad as before. The Rogue couldn’t attack us from the rear, what with all the water. He could jump down from the trees on top of her, but that would give away his position entirely. No, he had to approach us from the front, but he wouldn’t do that. He was going to wait us out until we put ourselves in a vulnerable position.
What sucked was we had no idea how patient this guy was. If he wanted to wait all day, he could. And there was no guarantee that if we made it back to a town alive, he wouldn’t just stalk us there and kill us.
We stood still and silent, listening to the birds cawing and the frogs chirping and the trees sighing in the wind. None of us spoke – it was like we were waiting for death.
Soon enough, the cooling debuff from my berries ran out.
I noticed it when the sweat started dripping into my eyes
“Man, I’m going to need to get another one of those berries soon,” I muttered.
