“I see.”
She wasn’t exactly buying it, even though it was the truth (albeit a heavily sanitized version). Although having busted the two of them while making out probably had something to do with her not believing them.
“Well, regardless, it’s after ten on a school night, so I think it’s time Mira gets home.”
“It’s that late?! Yeah, I should be going. Nice to meet you, Mrs. Lauer,” Mira said as she passed awkwardly between Daniel and his mother.
“You, too,” Mom said with a tiny bit of amusement.
“I’ll walk you to your car,” Daniel said.
Once they were outside, they both burst into nervous laughter.
“Oh my GOD, that was AWFUL,” Mira exclaimed.
“It wasn’t so bad. I thought she was sort of cool about it.”
“No, I mean, I didn’t want to meet your mom like that! God only knows what she thinks about me!”
Daniel hooked his arms around Mira’s waist and pulled her in close. “Who cares what she thinks?”
“I do,” Mira said as she looked worriedly at the windows. “Cut it out, she could be watching.”
“She doesn’t care.”
“I do!”
“One kiss,” he whispered in her ear.
Despite her worried expression, she giggled – then kissed him briefly on the lips before pulling away. “Tomorrow.”
Daniel sighed. “Tomorrow.”
She grinned as she got in her car, blew him a kiss, and drove away.
34
Drogar
Being the Undying One was pretty damn great.
The tribe held a feast for him after nightfall. As the entire tribe gathered around a bonfire, Drogar sat on an impromptu throne of animal skins. A dozen of the most beautiful, scantily-clad barbarian women fed him bits of roasted meat with their fingertips. He drank wine from a chalice made from a skull.
And Vark sat miserably on the grass, far away from the fire, as barbarian children threw clods of dirt at him.
The tribe had even thrown a slaughtered goat to his griffin, which – because he had died – was no longer controlled by the neural link. But he figured the goat would keep it happy until Jerome got back in contact.
As awesome as the evening was, though, he tried to keep his mind on business.
“So, do you doots know Blackstone?” Drogar asked.
All of the males in the tribe scowled and spat.
“Okay… I guess that’s a ‘yes,’” Drogar said. “Anyway, the sorcerer guy totally destroyed it.”
The barbarians began to grunt again in approval. “UNH, UNH, UNH, UNH – ”
“NO, not UNH UNH!” Drogar said angrily. “That guy is an ahss-hole!”
The tribe quieted down.
“You wish to kill this sorcerer?” the iron-grey-haired warrior asked.
“Well… actually, we need to capture him,” Drogar said.
The entire tribe – men, women, and children – all roared in anger, then spat in unison.
“Vhat?!” Drogar asked angrily.
“Hurokians do not take prisoners,” the leader sneered. “Prisoners are for the weak. Prisoners are for Slisocks.”
Again with the Slisocks.
“Well, there’ll be plenty of other people you can kill,” Drogar said. “He’s got a whole army of Hell doots – like, skeleton guys in armor.”
“Hrm,” the leader said, and all the tribe leaned in, suddenly interested.
“And they like to bring doots back from the dead and make ‘em fight,” Drogar said.
“Wait,” the leader said, amazed. “So – we can kill our enemy once… and he can come back to life so that we can kill him again?”
Drogar wasn’t sure if that was a plus or minus in the barbarians’ book.
“…uh… yeah?”
“WE CAN KILL THEM OVER AND OVER?!” the leader roared in exultation.
“Yeah, pretty much…”
“UNTIL THEY ARE GROUND TO A BLOODY PULP BENEATH OUR FEET!”
The entire tribe roared their approval.
“Okay, sure, whatever,” Drogar said as he frowned.
“UNH, UNH, UNH, UNH, UNH!”
“So, are you gonna help me or what?” Drogar asked.
“YES!” the leader yelled. “We will gather ALL the tribes of Hurok, and advance on the enemy with blood and rage in our hearts! We will march wherever you require, Undying One, so long as we may taste blood in battle and hear the despairing howls of our enemies!”
“UNH, UNH, UNH, UNH, UNH!”
“Great,” Drogar said without any enthusiasm whatsoever.
He was going to have a hard time explaining these freaks to Daniel, Mira, Lotan, and Vlisil.
But they could fight, so…
Suddenly one of the barbarian women nearest Drogar grabbed his head and forced him to look into her wild eyes. She was gorgeous, with a beautiful face and an amazing body.
“Tonight you mate with me,” she growled.
“…uhhhh… okay,” he agreed, stunned.
“NO!” another barbarian woman yelled, and physically pushed the first one out of the way. “Tonight you mate with ME!”
She was even hotter than the last one.
“Okay – cool,” Drogar said gleefully.
“NO!” another one screamed punched the second in the jaw. “He lies with ME tonight!” “NO!” a fourth screamed, and slammed the fourth in the back of the head. “Tonight he fills my loins with his battle ram!”
Suddenly there was a melee of hot barbarian women punching each other in the face, tearing off each other’s clothes, and slamming their knees into each others’ stomachs.
He’d never had a single woman want his attention this bad, much less a whole group of barbarian supermodels.
It was a little weird… but strangely hot.
Drogar looked over at the male barbarians to see if any of them were looking to kill him out of jealousy – but they were all laughing and enjoying the show.
Drogar motioned the grey-headed leader over to him.
“Uhhh… hey, nobody here’s go-ink to get mad if I spend the night with one of these chicks, are they?” Drogar asked in a low voice.
“Why would they be mad?” the leader asked, confused.
“Aren’t any of these women their wifes?” he asked. “Uh, wives?”
The leader spat contemptuously. “There is no marriage in Hurokia! Women lay with only the greatest warriors of the tribe! Only a truly great warrior mates – and he gives his seed freely to the most fierce women who will fight for him!”
“Ohhhh… cool,” Drogar said, his eyes wide.
Holy crahp, I DID choose the right race…
Suddenly one woman slammed through the crowd, punching others in the face and hurling them savagely to the ground. Within seconds all the other contestants were lying bloody on the grass, moaning and writhing in pain, with only the victor still standing.
And she was ugly as the ass-end of a baboon.
She was built like a linebacker, had more hair on her chin than any of the males, and was missing most of her teeth.
Drogar knew that because she was grinning as she pointed at him.
“Tonight you mate with ME!” she cackled.
Drogar clutched the arms of his animal hide throne in terror. “No, that’s okay, I’m goot.”
“Vagla has vanquished her rivals!” the grey-haired leader roared. “She is the strongest! Will make the best mate! Vagla is true Blood Mate!”
All the males in the tribe grunted their approval. “UNH, UNH, UNH, UNH.”
“Uh, how about that one?” Drogar said, pointing to a particularly hot woman on the ground.
The leader spat. “She is weak! Small!”
“I like weak,” Drogar protested. “I like small.”
“She is undernourished! You can put one hand around her tiny waist!”
“That’s fine!” Drogar agreed.
“No, Undying One – you must have a ma
te worthy of you! You shall have Vagla as Blood Mate!”
“UNH, UNH, UNH, UNH!”
Vagla grinned even more as she approached. She was just about to straddle Drogar’s lap when he pitched over backwards, doing a somersault over the rear of his throne in his haste to get away.
“Uh, I gotta go see about my birt!” he called out. “I’m good – go to bed Vagla!”
“NO!” she screamed, running after him. “Now we MATE!”
Drogar ran as fast as he could towards the griffin.
If sleeping with Vagla was the price of getting allies, the AI could conquer the whole damn earth for all Drogar cared.
Drogar ran towards the griffin, which had basically picked the goat’s carcass clean of meat.
“Hey!” Drogar yelled at the griffin.
It screeched and suddenly took off into the air.
“HEY! WHERE ARE YOU GO-INK?!” Drogar shrieked as the griffin flew away into the night.
In the distance, all the barbarians were grunting, “UNH, UNH, UNH, UNH,” as Vagla raced towards him in the firelight.
Got damn game, he thought in terror as he ran. Stupid Hurokian race…
35
Daniel
When Daniel woke in the morning, his first thought was, Maybe I should log into the game and see what’s happening.
After all, eight hours asleep in the real world was a couple of days in the Shattered Lands – and another eight hours would pass before he could log back in.
He thought about it for a second.
Naaah.
For the first time in quite awhile, he was looking forward to going to school.
He got there early, met Mira in the parking lot, and made out with her for a couple of minutes before the first bell rang. Thereafter, they were lovey-dovey every time they saw each other in the hallway, and snuck off at lunch for another round of PDA.
The only thing that harshed his buzz was the incessant talk about Eric. The Varidian hack had fallen off the local news, but everyone was still buzzing about Eric, wondering where he’d gone. Several kids claimed that they’d seen postings online about him being in South America, or Russia, or right there in the middle of town, holed up with an outlaw hacker collective. Eric somehow had morphed into a cross between conspiracy theories and Elvis sightings.
Every time Eric’s name got mentioned, it felt like sandpaper scraping across Daniel’s mind. All he could think about was what Eric had unleashed on the world – an AI that might potentially destroy humanity – and how he’d walked away, scot free, because the CEO of Varidian had been too scared and greedy to stop him.
Daniel was sick about hearing about Eric. He was sick of thinking about Shinzo Akiyama. And he was sick of worrying.
If the world was going to end in a technological doomsday, Daniel wanted to lose his virginity by the time it rolled around – and that’s what preoccupied him every time he snuck off into the stairwell with Mira.
The game could wait.
There was nothing he could do now, anyway.
36
Vlisil
It was a hard night.
Or at least, the aches and pains in his body told him it had been a hard night when he logged back into the game.
The first thing he saw when he opened his eyes were the goblin children staring down at him.
“AAAH!” he screeched in alarm, then winced as he sat up. His back felt bruised, and his neck felt like somebody had fused his spinal column together.
“Did you really sleep in the dirt?” the boy goblin asked.
“Where else was I supposed to sleep?” Vlisil snapped.
“In the hay.”
“I tried that! I got in the manger over there and that pony thing hit me and chased me off!”
“Who, Hobbolt? He probably thought you were trying to steal his food,” the goblin girl said, then pointed behind the house at a stack of golden bales. “But there are bundles of hay over there. You could have just spread one out and slept on that.”
“…oh.”
He hadn’t noticed the bundles because it had been night and hard to see. Plus, he’d been so caught up in sleeping in the manger that he really hadn’t looked very hard. And, to be truthful, he hadn’t really cared all that much because he’d been able to log out instead of suffering the whole night.
But he cared now as he tried to walk out the kinks in his body.
The children set about their chores. Within five minutes, the father goblin came out, saw Vlisil, and groaned.
From inside the hut the female goblin asked, “Is it still out there?”
“Unfortunately,” the father goblin answered.
“Don’t look at it, don’t talk to it, and for Harft’s sake don’t feed it,” she called out from inside.
Feeling distinctly unwelcome, Vlisil asked, “How far away is the next village?”
“Why? They won’t like you any more than we do,” the father answered as he walked around the back of the hut.
Now that pissed Vlisil off.
I don’t care if they hate me, but by God, I’m going to make them LISTEN.
So he walked into the center of the goblin village, found a discarded box, climbed up on it, and started yelling at the top of his lungs about the Sorcerer King.
In that moment of righteous anger he transformed into a street preacher, like the fire-and-brimstone wackos back in the real world who babbled on city corners about Armageddon and the Antichrist.
That raised an interesting point.
He was of the opinion that people back in the real world who preached about that stuff were crazy. Yet here he was in a video game, preaching about an Ultimate Evil to NPCs who thought he was insane.
Did that mean he was crazy? Or did it mean that maybe the weirdos in the real world were actually right?
He also wondered if the Shattered Lands had their own versions of apocalyptic religious cults. Or maybe he was doing something they’d never seen before.
Regardless, he turned himself into a first-class, grade-A pain in the ass.
He followed the townsfolk from their homesteads into the fields, babbling all the time about the tyranny of the Sorcerer King. As the male goblins worked the fields, Vlisil joined in. He scythed wheat with his sickle and helped the others tie the grain into sheaves – but he never stopped talking about the Sorcerer King and the Coming Destruction.
All of the goblins flat-out ignored him – though they did pay him several copper coins for the day’s work.
“I’ll double your pay if you promise to shut up,” the foreman said.
Vlisil refused. “No can do – I’m on a mission.”
“Wonderful,” the goblin muttered as he walked away.
After work, Vlisil went to the pub where he bought a dinner of roasted roots and a cup of bitter black beer. But now he was a paying customer, and he expounded at length about the dangers the realm faced unless they all banned together.
After his food was gone and the beer was drunk, and there were no other coins to smooth his way, there followed a replay of the previous night. The bartender whistled, and two big, burly goblins lifted Vlisil up by the elbows and escorted him outside. At least this time they set him down on his feet rather than throwing him in the dirt. Not quite the bum’s-rush, which was an improvement.
After that, Vlisil walked home. Well, back to the home of the goblin family he’d first encountered, anyway. There he cut apart a bundle of hay, spread it out, and logged out until morning – when he opened his eyes to see the goblin children staring at him and the goblin father shaking his head in disgust.
Then he did it all over again: preaching, working in the fields, getting paid, going to the pub, eating and speechifying, getting bounced once his money ran out, and sleeping in the hay.
As this went on for several days, Vlisil swore he was making progress. He was changing the hearts and minds of… whatever village this was! It would be no time at all until the goblins were converts to the cause!
/> He had to admit, though, it was slow going.
Then came the morning when he woke up to the sound of a distant horn, ugly and threatening.
He immediately sat up in the hay pile. “What is that?!”
Then he noticed something even more unusual.
Every male, female, and goblin child in the village was standing outside their earthen huts, ears extended high as they listened to the blatting horn.
His own family – the one he had first encountered, and whose hay he slept in every night – was gathered outside their front door, listening intently.
The horn stopped and started, almost like Morse code. There were minor variations in pitch, short bursts and long, all adding up to some kind of encrypted meaning.
Then the horn stopped, and all the goblins ran into their huts and slammed the doors.
“HEY!” Vlisil yelled. “You can’t solve problems by running away from them! You can’t just bury your heads in the ground and expect the world to – ”
He blathered on for a good bit, preaching about the Sorcerer King and how everyone had to join together. Nobody appeared to be listening.
Suddenly the front door of his family’s earthen hut opened up, and out stepped a fully armored goblin.
Vlisil was stunned. The father goblin looked pretty damn bad-ass, from his grey metal boots, to his chain-mailed torso, to the crested helmet atop his head. In his hand he held a spiked morning-star, with a studded ball dangling from a metal chain and staff.
The girl and boy goblin rushed past their father and out to the corral. The boy carried a leather saddle that was bigger than him. The girl carried a bridle. They opened up the wooden gate, ran over to one of the Shetland ponies, and began to saddle it up.
“Where are you going?” Vlisil asked the father.
“To war,” the goblin grunted as he walked towards the pen.
“With the sorcerer?! I TOLD you!”
“No. The Chvaroks.”
“…what?” Vlisil asked, confused. “What are Chvaroks?”
“Horrible, stinking, murderous monsters.”
Shattered Lands 3 Demon Wars Page 12
