by Hugo Huesca
He stumbled when a root snagged his leather vest, and almost fell, but he managed to retain his balance. He kept running.
Burrova appeared soon after, and the view confirmed Ed’s fears.
The walls were burning. Tongues of flame as wide and tall as the wall itself raged across a quarter of them, at least the parts that Ed could see. And some of the few buildings inside the village were burning, too.
The smoke was everywhere, painting the sky a dirty black, and Ed could smell it even that distance away, along with drafts of hot air mixed with the cold currents.
He stopped for a second, caught his breath, then kept running. The fire was spreading.
Where are the guards? Surely, they must have training in case of a fire? A water-hose rune, or something? Ed knew Ivalis Online had water-themed spells, so where were the guards?
His question didn’t remain unanswered for long. As he came closer, as the smoke became thicker and the fire grew, he could see shapes scaling the west side of the palisade which hadn’t caught fire yet.
Tiny, black shapes with many legs, like a living carpet, climbing the wood like it was a horizontal surface. They were followed by bigger creatures, the size of a wolf, covered in chitin, with a long horn on their foreheads above their many eyes and snapping mandibles.
Horned spiders. They flowed out of Hoia’s edge, and the grass that separated the edge of the village was covered by the creatures, which marched like an army toward the walls.
Too far away from Ed for him to do anything but watch and try to reach the gates.
The pain in his body was forgotten. It was amazing what adrenaline could do. The young Dungeon Lord crossed the remaining distance to Burrova’s gates in a few minutes.
The gates were closed, but the bridge was lowered. He would have stopped to ponder the meaning of it, but he had no time. He reached the walls, pushed against them, confirmed they were locked from the inside, and activated his Evil Eye.
The ley lines under Burrova were brighter and more numerous than the ones at his cave, and they seemed to coalesce at the center of the village. They made summoning three drones a very easy task.
Ed called them to the spot a couple feet in front of him, past the gates, right over the main ley line. He felt them appear and saw the mist pass under the gates.
Unbar them, he commanded the drones, stepping away from the wood to let his drones work. If you can’t, then eat them.
He heard the drones struggle briefly, and then, several loud crunches in unison. Something heavy fell to the ground, and Ed hurried to push the doors open. At first, they didn’t budge, and his arms roared with the effort, but eventually he managed to crank the gates open enough for him to squeeze into the village.
The wave of heat reached him immediately. It was like stepping into the inside of a furnace. The smoke was flowing away from him, and even so, it was hard to breath and to see what he had in front of him.
He started coughing immediately.
The amount of smoke inside Burrova was insane. He knew there couldn’t be many fires inside, since there were only a few buildings. He had severely underestimated the amount of smoke even a moderate fire could produce.
After the smoke, the next thing he noticed was that no one was nearby. The place was deserted. There wasn’t a soul in sight, although that meant little in all the smoke.
At his feet was a broken basket, the vegetables it carried spilled all across the ground. They had been stepped on, smashed every which way. There were other few trinkets laying around that people had dropped in their hurry.
They tried to leave when the fire started, Ed thought. But the gates were closed. Why couldn’t they just open them from the inside?
There was an iron bar laying on the ground, behind the gates. It was used to bar the door, judging by the chain around it. Ed’s drones had eaten the door hinges that supported the bar, thus doing what the villagers hadn’t had time to.
Because something had been chasing them. The spiders? Or the mindbrood?
Someone did this on purpose, Ed thought, standing over the iron bar. The chain was damning.
But what about the guards?
He was able to answer his own question not long after. He recognized their red sashes, covered in dust. The two figures were laying on the ground, partly hidden by the palisade. They were the same two that had received him yesterday.
Their throats were slashed with straight cuts, done from behind them. Their blood caked the ground in two brownish stains.
Ed approached them and examined the corpses. Their weapons were in their scabbards, and there was only surprise and agony on their contorted faces. He closed their eyes, feeling his stomach churn.
There’s no time for puking, he decided.
It couldn’t be a coincidence. The spider attack, the fire, the mindbrood, and now this. Sabotage. Someone was trying to destroy Burrova.
Gallio had been wrong. It wasn’t Ed who Murmur was using. It was someone else.
Ed drew an iron sword out of the dead guard’s scabbard and held it firmly between his hands. He had a job to do.
“You three stay here,” he told his drones, who were dutifully waiting for his orders. “Wait until you see Alder and Lavy, then guide them to me.”
He walked into the smoke, toward the center of the village, listening for screams.
He found them, soon enough. He had been covering his nose with his woolen jacket, his new sword in his right hand, trying to keep walking in a straight line while his eyes watered.
The heat was overbearing, and the Dungeon Lord could barely think.
But the screams were there. In the distance, cropping up for a few seconds at the time, and renewing in different directions.
He moved slowly, knowing the mindbrood could be lurking anywhere. Ed barely dared to breath too hard, and it was thanks to this he heard a different kind of noise coming from somewhere to his right. Cursing, panting, and the dull sound of metal striking against something hard.
The wind changed directions, and the smoke parted. Ed passed a hand across his face to clean it—only managing to smudge it further—and looked around. He was next to the forge, and there was a fight going on inside of it. The blacksmith’s tools were strewn everywhere, and the combatants moved and charged across the building using the furniture as obstacles for their opponents.
He recognized Gallio, Vasil, and Kes, fighting side by side against a group of spider warriors. There were three of the creatures, aided by a small group of spiderlings. Kes’ cleave was keeping the small critters at bay, but Vasil and Gallio could barely handle the three warriors by themselves, even though Gallio had managed to cave in the chitin at one of the spider’s sides.
The wounded warrior retreated, hissing at Gallio as it did so, and the other two darted forward, coordinated, and their legs swooped at the two men. The Sheriff managed to dodge, but Vasil fell. Its opponent closed in, ready for the kill, while Kes and Gallio screamed a warning at the guard.
Ed charged, blade held low like a spear and his Evil Eye showering dust and ash in shades of green. As he did so, he started dropping drones everywhere, but was careful not to unsummon the ones by the gates.
The spider warrior stopped in its tracks and jumped away from Ed’s charge, but at the same time, a pair of drones appeared in violet puffs above its head. One slipped and disappeared under the monster’s legs, but the other managed to grab a hold of its horn and hang on for dear life. The spider, confused, stopped to shake it off, stumbled against a barrel of dirty water, spilled it everywhere, slipped, then crashed against an iron bench. The drone disappeared during the impact.
Before the spider could regain its footing, Gallio was towering above it, and his mace came down on its head in a perfect, violent arc. There was a crunch of chitin being splintered, and blue blood sprayed everywhere.
The surviving two warriors took a look at the sudden change in the battlefield, turned tail, and ran away and out of sight.
Ed and Kes finis
hed off the few spiderlings that stayed when their bigger sisters retreated, and then both of them reunited with Gallio and Vasil, who was nursing a long gash on his leg right under his leather greaves.
“Are you alright?” Ed asked the guard. The man gave him a sour look, spat on the ground, and nodded.
“Do you know what’s going on?” Gallio asked Ed.
“I was hoping you knew,” Ed said. “The guards at the gate are dead, and the door was barred. How did you enter?”
“We climbed,” said Kes. “We didn’t see anyone by the palisade, so we came here. There are groups of villagers running around, and we tried to gather them when these spiders attacked us.”
Ed trusted the mercenary’s words. They had a pact, after all. This meant that Gallio and Vasil hadn’t been the ones who had killed the guards.
Another batch of screams claimed his attention. These ones were close, coming from behind the forge.
“Let’s go!” exclaimed Gallio, and he charged in the direction of the sound without looking back to see if he was being followed.
“Damn it!” Kes muttered. Her sword was dripping blue and the blade was dirty with stuck pieces of chitin and guts. “He’ll get himself killed!”
“He has the right damn idea,” Ed said, then rushed after him.
“Here we go again,” the mercenary’s voice reached him, and then she passed him, and shortly after Vasil did the same.
Ed crossed a bunch of small, tight rooms that made up the interior of the forge, past tools and sheds, and then he stopped dead on his tracks. He had reached a storage area, storing mostly farm equipment and riding chairs, but also some guardsmen weaponry and armor.
If he went out there with zero combat training and only his leather jerkin as a defense, he would run out of luck sooner or later. He had to spare a few seconds to better equip himself.
He dashed toward the leather armor, which was close to him anyway, and hurried to fit himself with the greaves, a helm with a nasal guard, and the braces. He used two drones to help him tighten the straps and save himself precious seconds. He was done in under a minute.
Sword in hand, Ed ran out of the forge. The other three humans were in the middle of a side street with a mud-covered road and were pointing their weapons at a nearby group of four spider warriors.
No. Ed squinted and took a better look. The middle spider was bigger than the others—it was almost as tall as he was, and larger. It was one of the two princesses. And the group she was leading wasn’t moving from their spot because they were cutting off the escape of a terrified family that was cornered by their side of the forge building.
“Stay away from them!” Gallio yelled at the spiders, pointing at them with his mace. “Don’t you dare hurt them, or I’ll crush you all!”
“Foolish human!” the spider princess told him. “The smell of the mindbrood permeates this village! We chased it all the way here! If it feeds on enough people, it will soon grow enough to start laying eggs! Then we will all die!”
“I said—” Gallio walked toward them like a man strolling through the park, while Vasil nocked an arrow to his bow and aimed it at the princess “—stay away from them.”
While the Sheriff spoke, his left hand ruffled through a small bag tied by a string to his belt. Ed didn’t miss the polished stone that Gallio discreetly got out.
The Dungeon Lord realized what was about to happen, and turned his head to Kes.
“Go get them!” he told her, gesturing at the family. He and the mercenary began to run as Gallio raised his hand, stone at the front, and the spider warriors jumped toward the family.
Oh, shit.
The fireball crossed the air, whistling as it went, and detonated right in the middle of the monsters’ group. There was a flash of white, a deafening noise, and a wave of force caught Ed by the shoulders and smashed him against the ground while driving all the air out of his lungs.
Ed groaned, and tried to get up. His head was spinning, and he stumbled face-first into a mouthful of dirt. He tried again, succeeded, took a lungful of ash-laden air, then blinked hard to clear his vision.
There was no sight of Kes, the spiders, or the family. The fireball rune had created a huge cloud of dust which covered everything in front of him. Behind him, Vasil was struggling to stand up, his bow broken under his body.
Gallio had fared better, and was approaching Ed nonchalantly, but as he got closer, the Dungeon Lord could see the cold rage reflected in the Sheriff’s blue eyes.
“Kes?” Gallio asked him.
“She was faster than me,” Ed said. “She’s inside the cloud.”
“Let’s help her. I don’t think I killed the princess.”
But before they could reach the cloud of dust, a blood-curling scream roared behind them. It was Vasil.
Both Sheriff and Dungeon Lord turned at the same time, and found out that something had landed atop Vasil’s chest, and its prehensile mandibles were open right in front of the guard’s face. The man struggled without success to free himself, pinned to the ground by two pairs of long, thin arms and a set of powerful hind legs, which ended in claws as sharp as daggers. It was smaller than a man, but it was heavy, and had a mix of insect-like articulations with the powerful muscles of a chimpanzee.
To Ed, who had grown up with Earth’s movies and literature, the creature looked like something taken out of a Lovecraft’s love affair with H.R. Giger. And that was where comparisons ended. There were no special effects on Earth that could imitate the way the monster’s two pair of eyes furiously turned in all directions, the appearance of an entire body covered in plaques of exoskeleton as thick as a suit of armor, the way saliva flowed out of its mouth and oozed onto Vasil’s face.
“Help me!” Vasil screamed.
“Help me!” the monster screamed, in a perfect imitation of a little girl. “They’re trying to kill me!”
“It can talk!” said Ed, too stunned to even react.
“Sephar’s Bane!” said Gallio, and he rushed to produce a new rune from his bag. Too slow. Too late.
“Don’t attack me!” pleaded the monster. Its claws were digging deep holes into Vasil’s arms and shoulders, but it didn’t seem to be aware of this. It was looking straight at Gallio. “You have to help me! I woke up like this, and I’m killing so many people, and I don’t know why! Oh, gods, I can’t stop!”
Before Ed or Gallio could do anything about it, the mandibles closed around Vasil’s head, engulfing it completely. The monster made a guttural noise and shook its long-snouted head like a dog’s, its neck bulging with strength. There was a sickening, tearing noise, and as the monster’s head rose, the body of the guard fell limp to the floor, its entire head missing, a spray of blood painting the ground a dark brown and sending curls of smoke up in the air.
Ed felt a scream of terror die in his throat. The creature was looking him in the eye, and it was slowly chewing, its mouth full, a trail of blood and gore dripping out of its snout.
He could hear the crunch that Vasil’s skull made inside the monster’s engorged mouth.
At that moment, Gallio roared and raised the fireball rune. The creature moved so fast it was a blur of brown-and-black motion, charging straight at them—
This time, the explosion happened so close to Ed that he didn’t realize when the darkness overtook him.
The world was burning pain and hard surfaces. There was something hard and edged cutting his arm, painting a clear line of fiery sensation in his mind.
Ed spat out a mouthful of dirt, gagged, fought for air, breathed in as much dirt as oxygen, coughed again until he feared he was about to asphyxiate, managed to regain his composure, and opened his eyes.
He was alive, and for the looks of it, all his limbs remained were they should have been. He spat dirt again, and it came out mixed with saliva and blood. He had bitten his lip at some point.
“Fucking Gallio,” he muttered.
If Ed’s ribs weren’t broken, they would be bruised tomorrow.
He felt like a train had passed over his torso.
Slowly, memory of his last seconds of consciousness came back to him. The mindbrood.
Ed reached down and grabbed his sword, which had been under his body when he fell. It was a small miracle he had managed to only cut his arm a bit instead of skewering himself. A thin trail of blood traveled down his arm and under his leather bracers, flowing from a wound by his bicep. It wasn’t deep, but just a few inches lower and he would’ve severed the artery in his arm.
He raised the sword in front of him and took a measure of his surroundings.
The mindbrood was gone, and so was Gallio. There was a small, crater-like protrusion in the ground at the spot where the Sheriff’s fireball had hit, just a few feet away from Ed’s. Hell, perhaps the Sheriff had tried to get rid of two enemies for the price of one.
Ed was alone, except for the lifeless body of Vasil, crumpled in a heap by the forge. It looked inhuman, unrecognizable. It was hard to think that, just a few seconds ago, it had been a human being. Ed looked at it, grimaced, and turned away.
If Gallio and the mindbrood were gone, he had to find them, and finish this.
He made his way to Burrova’s center, in the direction he had last seen Kes. He was sure he would need reinforcements.
23
Chapter Twenty-Three
Hail, Spider Queen!
In the distance, he could see the governor’s house burning. Flames engulfed the entire structure, rising as much as half its length again like red arms that tried to grab the sky.
The column of black smoke was thick enough to hide the palisade of the northern section of Burrova, and the rain of ashes made Ed’s eye water with every step. Every now and then, a tiny ember smacked against his skin, gave him a jolt, made him wince.
His arms were getting tired of lugging the sword around. It was heavier than it looked. No one had ever told him about the weight. It was never an issue in the movies.
He gritted his teeth and forced himself to ignore the pain in his forearms. He didn’t need finesse to use the sword as a baseball bat. Still, he dragged the tip of the sword through the ground as he walked, to conserve energy.
