War Aeternus: The Beginning

by Charles Dean

  “That’s . . . That’s not right! How could it be him?” Ling seemed genuinely horrified at the proposition. “He always took such great care of me! He always treated me so well. He used to . . .”

  “What do you mean by suspects? What do you mean Ramon is a suspect? Did he do this?” The barkeep wiped his face clean as he ran behind the bar and pulled out a giant two-handed flail.

  “Honey, please, no!” the woman pleaded.

  “If he’s behind my wife going missing,” he said, his face turning solid red, “I will kill that bastard! You three, get your damn weapons!”

  The three patrons at the bar who had just been relaxing and having breakfast before Lee walked in, stood up, though with much less gusto than the barkeep. “Yeah,” one of them, a six-foot-tall guy with hair sticking up like Einstein, said. “Let’s go check it out.”

  “Look, we still don’t know he’s guilty,” Miller insisted. “We should investigate.”

  “And, if we don’t find anything, just kill him to be safe?” David offered, cracking his knuckles. “I was at the damn guy’s bar the night I was kidnapped . . . drank shots with the bastard, shots he gave me for free. Insisted they were on the house. I thought that son of a beaten Poméan was being nice. I thought he was a good guy.”

  “Wait, he gave you free rounds of drinks before you were taken?” Lee’s eyes opened up at this.

  “Yeah, wait! He bought me a dozen rounds too,” an older man in the back added. “I had just finished cutting out that new ditch, a fairly a big task for the town, and he said we’d celebrate with a round of drinks. I was passed out drunk in my bed that very night when I was taken.”

  Lee looked to Ling. “Did he do anything for you the day you were taken?”

  “Well . . .” Ling trailed off as she thought for a moment. “He bought me breakfast and then asked what I was up to. I told him that my cat was missing and where I was going to look for him . . .” Her face grew pale at the realization. “You think he set me up too?”

  “I think he set everyone up,” Lee answered with a nod. “He’d either make sure the person was plastered and asleep in a bed he had access to or chat the person up and find out exactly where they’d be.”

  Miller simply stared at Lee in silence, then he asked, “Wait, didn’t he buy us a bunch of free drinks the night before you were attacked?”

  “Yeah, he did,” Lee replied.

  “If that was the case, then why would he send us on the quest to go find and free these people if he was the guilty party?” Miller asked. “He pleaded with us to save them.”

  David was the one to answer before Lee could. “Because he probably thought you two couldn’t get it done. I mean, who in their right mind would have thought that a barracks full of forty soldiers wouldn’t be able to fend off two adventurers, or that one of you would be a god.”

  Miller frowned. “So, you think he sent us up there just because he didn’t want to have to deal with us in town and was sure we’d fail?”

  “Yeah, that’s the sum of it.” Lee twisted his mouth around like he was trying to chew on a large ball of something that smelled rotten, and he was being forced to swallow it.

  Well, I only knew the guy for a day or two, and I spent that time trying to convert or scam him depending on how you look at it, so it’s not like I should feel bad about this. But I do. “Either way, we need to go kill him and then get a map so that we can kill his boss,” Lee stated matter-of-factly. It was a done deal in his head: Ramon had to die.

  “Murder, quest item, more murder—that sounds good to me,” Miller agreed. “But it doesn’t feel right killing the barkeep.”

  “Well, think of it this way: You won’t have to pay for the beer tonight or a place to stay,” David said as he patted Miller on the back. “Now, you can just go murder happy and drink and sleep off the rest of the day.”

  “Alright, fine. Let's go kill Ramon,” Miller agreed reluctantly, his voice filled with all the resignation of a child being forced to do homework before getting to play video games.

  The rest of Lee’s followers quietly followed after Lee and Miller as they walked to Ramon's bar. Nothing had changed outside, but the air felt more still to Lee. It was like the wind had stopped, and a stale odor had crept into his mouth.

  When they finally reached Ramon’s place, they paused at the door.

  “You think he’ll be in there? You think he’ll be waiting for us, pretending as if he’s done nothing wrong or nothing happened to us?” one of the former slaves behind Lee asked.

  “Yeah. Probably.” Lee hesitantly reached for the doorknob before pulling his hand back.

  What am I going to do? They’ll expect blood, and we do need the map, but how do I control the situation? Lee quickly tried to put together a game plan. He wasn’t about to deny them their vengeance, but he didn’t want things getting out of hand and someone getting stabbed or murdered before information was obtained.

  David gave him a look and then grabbed the door in his place. “Don’t worry, it’s just one guy. We’ll be—”

  The door swung open, and Lee heard a sound.

  Click.

  You have learned the proficiency skill Trap Detection. This skill is currently at Initiate Level 1. This skill improves one’s ability to detect hidden traps.

  You have been awarded 2 Intelligence for discovering a new skill without the assistance of class trainers or a manual. Current Intelligence: 48

  Lee reacted on instinct, grabbing Ling and pushing her away from the door and out of harm’s way just as a pair of giant wooden spikes thicker than Lee’s arm shot out from behind the door and stabbed David, impaling him through one of his legs and his stomach.

  David cried out in pain as he backed up. He didn’t manage to fall backward, though, as the spikes were apparently stuck to a device that seemed to operate on a door hinge as it was forcefully attached to the wall.

  “What blasphemy is this?” Miller yelled as he grabbed David’s body and yanked it off the spikes. Miller pulled David’s prone form from the spikes and passed his body back to some of the people behind him as Lee equipped his shield to block any potential new threats. He wasn’t sure if there would be more traps, but he knew that bad things might definitely happen if they just charged through the door. They had already been fooled once, and if they let themselves be snared twice by a similar trick, it would just be akin to throwing away their own lives.

  “It’s a trap,” Lee explained as he looked around for the trigger. There it is, he thought as he spied the small metal loop at the bottom of the door frame and the tiny rope and pin that would hook into it. It was a rudimentary trap designed to use weights and counterbalances in such an obvious fashion that there was no doubt he would have noticed it last trip if it was there. “Ramon knew we were coming, and he set up a few tricks to kill us.”

  “Very perceptive of you, Herald,” Ramon responded with a smirk. He put away a cup from behind the counter before reaching down to grab a weapon. “Stating the obvious must be a new power in the narrative of your life. Perhaps, when they chronicle your pathetic joke of an existence, they can spend a few pages of your story etching out how you failed to deduce this earlier.” His tone, demeanor and everything about him had changed. He was suddenly much more reminiscent of a stereotypical British villain than a humble barkeep.

  “What can I say, you were a likable guy,” Lee replied as he searched the floor for any additional traps. There’s another one, he thought as he spied what looked like a loose floorboard. It was slightly higher than the others next to it and slightly smaller in width. “There’s another trap here,” he said to the others as he stepped over it.

  “Ah . . . I should take that as a compliment, but I’d rather you just take it as an insult for how dull and unwitting you were. That mask I was forced to wear was awful: always cajoling and comforting, always being nice and entertaining. The only benefit I received from the entire ordeal was that sometimes, out of the myriad of pathetic and
unimaginative tribulations you uneducated, mundane fools discussed, there was sometimes something interesting—a small glimmer of novelty in your repetitive lives that might have made the entire process worth a damn.” Ramon was one-hundred percent following the prescriptions for the evil villain speech.

  “But Augustus is real, and he is amazing,” Miller piped up from the side. “You’ve tried his food, and you’ve seen his miracles, so how can you doubt his greatness?”

  “Doubt him? Who says I doubt him? In fact, I probably even have some legitimate degree of faith in him. But he isn’t a god to me: he’s a devil.”

  “What?” Lee asked as he edged closer to Ramon, moving as slowly as possible so he didn’t step on any traps.

  “He’s the end of all good stories and legends. He’s the beginning of apathy. I’ve seen that book, so I’ve seen what he brings: comfort. My Herald has shown me stories, dozens of them, from other lands with other technologies . . . Stories of worlds with gadgets that one cannot fathom! There is even a land where the people are so lazy that they have a toilet that uses water to wipe for them since they can’t even be bothered. So, when he told me these stories, I thought ‘What great changes will humanity undergo?! What new yarns will they spin?’ It was only then that I realized there were none. Their stories of greatness were all fiction, lies. This town . . . With such a small population . . . They’ve gone through more interesting things in the past year than a city of a million suffered in a decade.”

  Ramon’s monologue gave them enough time to make it halfway across the room and convince Lee that he wasn’t going to run into another trap. It also afforded him the opportunity to start mentally lining up the fight in his head, so he wasn’t overly eager to cut off Ramon’s diatribe and get down to business right away.

  “I wouldn’t say that.” Lee shrugged, not buying into his narcissistic babble at all. “Technology doesn’t change the number of great adventures and stories people have to tell: it just gives them a better outlet for their time than sitting around a bar trying to impress strangers.”

  He could feel Ramon’s glare and the contempt he held for him like ice on the back of his neck. “No one will ever tell the story of that guy who fried chicken and used an automatic toilet,” Ramon droned. “They’ll only tell of the hero who saved a group of slaves or the humble barkeep who helped a great god rise from the ashes of poverty through cunning and wits. One of those stories will be told, and both of them will have been made more interesting by the lack of your god’s inventions.”

  Chapter 10

  Name: Lee

  Race: Human

  Class: Herald – None

  Level: 9

  Health: 190/190

  EXP: 1333/2000

  Primary Stats:

  Power 19(20)

  Toughness 19(20)

  Spirit 19(20)

  Secondary Stats:

  Charisma 8

  Courage 5

  Deceit 2

  Intelligence 48(50)

  Honor 1

  Faith 26

  Personal Faith 39

  Skills:

  Unarmed Combat Initiate Level 2

  Swordplay Initiate Level 3

  Sneak Initiate Level 3

  Cooking Initiate Level 1

  Trap Detection Initiate Level 1

  Divine Skills:

  Golem Sculpting Initiate Level 5

  Appreciative Drunk Initiate Level 9

  Faith Healing

  “Are we done here?” Lee asked. He had needed the extra time to come up with a plan, and Ling had needed to hear the rant in order to fully understand the betrayal, but more empty words didn’t mean much at this point to Lee. He didn’t care why Ramon had been the bad guy: he just cared that he was and that he was the only one who knew where the other Herald was. But all this talk was starting to get worse than those movies where two people were about to fight to the death, and the hero and the villain always felt like they needed to have a ten-minute monologue first. If one of us is going to die, what the heck is the point in wasting so much time? He looked around the room and realized that it was empty except for Ramon. “Do you have anything else you want to say? Like, last chance to tell me where your boss is.” He added the last bit sarcastically, unable to help himself. Wait, is he stalling? He’s stalling so that the messenger can get out. There’s no one here because the messenger has already left!

  “Oh, we’re done here,” Ramon laughed. “This is exactly where your tomb lies.”

  “Then how about we get the show on the road?” Lee smiled as he jumped over another rather obvious floor trap and rushed forward to shield-slam Ramon.

  In the process of avoiding the obvious floor traps though, he had missed the possibility of a remotely activated one. As soon as he got within five feet of Ramon, the barkeep kicked over one of the chairs.

  Click.

  The sound was as obvious this time as it had been before, and one of the floorboards moved away less than a second later to reveal another sharp spike hurtling toward Lee. Thankfully, he had transitioned into a bit-more-cautious, tank-oriented, sword-and-board style of fighting, so instead of impaling him, the spike slammed into his shield at just the right angle to change direction and continue its path upward.

  “Tch!” Ramon clicked his tongue in anger. “Clearly, you haven’t read the ending of a good book yet: the bad guy always loses. Prepare to die!” the clichéd villain shouted as he lunged forward and swung his flail at Lee.

  Lee clung to his protective wooden treasure for dear life after it had just saved him from certain death. He instinctively shoved it forward to block the spiked ball at the end of the long flail, only to have misjudged the trajectory completely. Instead of being blocked, the chain hit the surface of the shield, and the fat five-pound ball wrapped around the front and slammed into his shoulder, the spikes digging into his flesh.

  Great, ten damage already. Lee grimaced as he tried to retaliate with a stab. Unfortunately, the weight from the flail had taken away his momentum and sent him sideways at the same time, knocking him into the bar and sending his sword thrust into the empty air.

  As he was knocked around, however, he caught sight of a spear hurtling past him that plowed right into Ramon’s chest. It clearly didn’t do enough damage to cause a fatal wound, but it was enough to relieve the pressure off of Lee and force Ramon back. For a moment, the spear seemed like it had gone through Ramon entirely, as the man was pushed back into the wall behind him, but that thought was quickly dispelled as the weapon fell away.

  “Hahahaha!” Ramon chuckled, wiping a few drops of blood from his mouth as if he were the hero of a typical Asian martial arts movie. “I saw this scene playing out a few ways, but I never would have imagined this idiot’s stupidity would reach this level. Throwing away your weapon just because you think it’s safe to do so? Fool!” Ramon shouted, quickly turning to the wall and hitting another switch.

  The ceiling over the doorway collapsed, burying a girl and sealing off the entrance in the process. At the same time, a seemingly harmless closet door opened up and three Leprechauns walked out.

  “They don’t look so tough,” one with red hair observed.

  “Tough or not, we get paid the same either way. This ain’t part of our usual orders,” another with brown hair and yellow eyes added.

  “I’m expecting a pot of gold for all our work,” the green-eyed one cackled.

  Miller finally lost his cool as soon as they finished their little introduction. “Easy?! Idiot?! There is nothing stupid about hitting an enemy when there is an opening! You’re the idiot for thinking that I would only carry one spear!” he yelled, pulling five spears out of his inventory. “Let me show you the power of a man who has no scruples with buying victory in this game so long as it is purchased with evil blood!”

  Welp, Ramon, this is on you. You ticked off the bloodthirsty giant. Before the thought had even entered Lee’s head, Miller slammed one of the spears into the ground and released his dr
unken shout, changing all of Lee’s stats over to their drunken version. Miller immediately hoisted that very same spear into the air and chucked it at the redheaded Leprechaun closest to him. Unlike before, where the spear failed to pierce, this one nailed the guy right into the wall and left him pinned against the wood.

  Ling fired off two arrows, sinking one into each of the green eyes of the other Leprechaun, leaving only one remaining. Before the remaining Leprechaun could even scream in shock or respond to the rapid death of his buddies, he was hit by both an arrow in the eye and a spear right in the middle of his sternum.

  You have killed Bubblywink. Your party has been awarded 85 copper and 109 Experience. Your share of this is 43 copper and 55 Experience.

  You have killed McWoozy. Your party has been awarded 4 silver, 32 copper and 124 Experience. Your share of this is 2 silver, 16 copper and 62 Experience.

  “Well, that didn’t go as planned . . .” Ramon frowned for a moment before turning to run up the stairs. “But there’s always tomorrow!”

  “Careful when you follow!” Lee yelled out, but he didn’t heed his own advice as he charged up the stairs after the fleeing barkeep. When he reached the top of the winding staircase, he realized the entire upper floor was dark—not exactly pitch black, but rather dark in a way that a room with poor blinds near street lamps gets at night. Lee was suddenly super conscious of his surroundings and extremely wary as he tried to avoid any traps Ramon might have set. And, no more than a second into trying to find a hint of a rope or loose floorboard, he heard a click.