by Rachel Aaron
"Speak, Captain Hightower," Gregory said, gripping the bridge railing to keep himself upright.
"Your Highness!" the captain cried, his face showing his desperation. "I led your soldiers to the Room of Arrivals to arrest Portal Keeper Star Fall as you ordered, but we could not get inside! The traitorous elf had already turned our barrier against player portals into a ward against the living. We tried to breach it, but the magic was too strong, and now I fear we are too late!"
A chill went down James's spine. "That feeling just now," he gasped, lurching toward the captain. "That wasn't gravity going nuts. That was a portal being opened! A big one!"
As if it had been waiting for him to give the cue, the whole city began to shake. Stone crashed in the distance as buildings collapsed, then the bright, sunny air was split by a gut-wrenching metal-on-metal screech. It was a noise anyone who'd raided the Dead Mountain Fortress knew by heart, even James. That was the sound the Once King's elite skeletons made when they spotted a player.
"Shit!" Tina swore behind him.
"Well, well," said a voice in his mind. "Would you look at that."
James jumped into the air with a yelp. For a terrifying second, he was convinced that the Once King was speaking inside his head. Then an enormous shadow passed over their heads, and James realized that wasn't it at all. The words didn't come from the undead. They came from Xthr.
The massive Bird flew over them like a supertanker, the wind from his wings blasting the men in the plaza to the ground before it swept over the river to land on the roof of Trainers' Hall. The giant beams split as the monster's claws dug in, and for a second, James thought the whole place was going to collapse under the Bird's weight. But Tina had chosen her fortress well. The stone hall creaked and groaned, but it held, serving as a perch for Xthr as the ancient Bird extended his long neck until his bus-sized head was hovering in the air just above the king.
"Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony." Xthr chuckled, his glittering crystal eyes flicking toward the north of the city. "The Once King has saved you, Gregory Heraldsford. When you first called me here, I thought I was going to get out of this without having to do more than endure the hateful light of the sun. Now, though, it appears you haven't wasted your line's ancient favor after all." The Bird flashed them a sharp-toothed, shadow-wreathed smile. "I'm sad to say that you won't go down as the most foolish king in Bastion's history, though you may still be known as its last."
"Can you not save us from this?" King Gregory cried.
Xthr lifted his massive head to peer over the city toward the plumes of dust James could now see rising from the northern side. "I'm afraid not. As the fourth born of all creation, I am greater than any one sent against you but not all of them together."
"All?" James shouted. "How many is all?"
The Bird swiveled its huge head back down to give him a scathing look, then an image shoved its way into his head. James gasped as his vision vanished, replaced by an enormously wide-angle view so terrifyingly high above the city, it could only have come from the Bird itself.
"Behold," Xthr whispered, "your enemy."
James stared in horror. From this high, he could see all of Bastion laid out beneath him like a tapestry, including the stately dome of the Room of Arrivals, which had been blown wide open. Sitting on the broken stone were two Birds. They were smaller than Xthr but still enormous--enormous and wrong. Their giant, reptilian bodies were rotting beneath the swirling shadows, and their crystalline eyes burned with the haunting blue-white light of the ghostfire.
There was quite a lot of ghostfire, actually. Beneath the zombie Birds, the exploded shell of the Room of Arrivals was full of movement. There was so much of it, James's first thought was that it was some kind of attack, a spell to flood the room and burn out the enemy, but that wasn't it at all. As he stared at the blue-white flames, James realized he was looking at a portal--one giant ghostfire portal that took up the massive building's entire floor.
He was still trying to wrap his head around that when dozens more portals--normal-sized ones cast by the same sort of portal scroll James and Ar'Bati had taken from the lich and used to get to Bastion--opened all around what was left of the Room of Arrivals. His stomach churned with each new gateway, but the constant feeling of gravity flipping out from under him was nothing compared to the terror that clenched him from ears to tail as the river of undead began to flow through.
Armored skeletons, unarmored zombies, plague dogs, and archers shambled forward by the legion. With them came packs of giant undead war boars and wolves, their rotting flesh held together by metal plates and their empty eyes filled with the ghostfire. Whole armies of the Dead Mountain Fortress's two-skull skeleton knights were climbing out of the giant ghostfire portal in the floor, and behind them came even more horrific enemies: packs of three-skull dungeon patrols and undead bats the size of cars. Every undead enemy in the game seemed to be crawling over itself to flood out of the Room of Arrivals into Bastion, but the most terrifying thing of all was the giant skeletal hand that reached out of the massive ghostfire portal in the floor, gripping the floor to pull the body upright before Xthr took his vision back.
"And now you know your death," the Bird said, shaking his huge head sadly. "Pray to your Sun that the King himself does not take the field. I fought him many times when the sky was still warm but never more than to a draw."
"Then all is lost?" Gregory said, despairing.
The Bird answered with a roar that shook the stone. Even the undead stopped as the deep, primal bellow echoed through the city, then Xthr spread his wings and took to the sky. "All has been lost many times, but still we fly on!"
The Bird roared again, and across the city, two more ghostly cries rose in answer. "My brothers cry to be set free," Xthr said, looking down on them from high above. "Draw your Dawnblade, foolish king! This will be a fight more desperate than even Heraldsford itself! Now is the time to make good on the promise of your sacred line. Raise the shield of the Bastion, and let us fly once more to war!"
With that, the Bird took off with a scream, streaking across the sky to intercept his undead brothers, who were already flying in with claws ready. There was a screech of tearing metal as they crashed together, but James didn't have time to see how the fight turned out. He was already turning to the king.
"Raise the Bastion!"
"I... I don't know if I can!" Gregory said, his face ghostly pale. "I already used up most of its power keeping it up for two days!"
James cursed under his breath. He'd known that would come back to bite them, but there was no point in I-told-you-sos. The screams of the undead were clear from all the way across the city. If they didn't get moving to stop them, there'd be no Bastion left to save.
"But how?" the king asked when James told him this. "You saw the Bird's vision! There are armies of undead, creatures from the Dead Mountain itself. How can we fight that?"
James was opening his mouth to answer when Tina beat him to it.
"With an army of your own, duh."
Gregory and James both whirled around to see the stonekin staring them down, a defiant sneer on her perfectly carved face. "Have you forgotten your own deal already?" Tina taunted, lifting her chin. "The whole point of the Forlorn Hope was to have players fight the undead in Bastion's name. Well, the undead are here, which means I guess I owe you an apology, James."
James nodded shakily. "Can you fight them?"
Tina gave him the cockiest look he'd ever seen. "Who the hell do you think we are? We're the Roughnecks. We chew up Dead Mountain monsters for breakfast." She turned back to the king. "It's time for you to see the top-shelf quality of what you've bought. All you have to do is give the word, and we'll get your city back for you. But when it's done, we're free. Deal?"
She stuck her hand out in a stabbing motion, and Gregory grabbed it.
"Deal," he said, shaking frantically. "Save Bastion from the undead, and I will count your duty to the Forlorn Hope fulfille
d."
"Good enough for me," Tina said, dropping his hand as she raised her voice to a deafening bellow. "Roughnecks, on me! We got work to do!"
Players scrambled to obey as Tina led them off the bridge, her face set in a mask of determination James recognized from her raiding days. That terrified him, because unlike raiding, there were no second chances here. A wipe in this situation meant death. Worse than death--with all that ghostfire flying around, dying in this fight could mean losing your soul to the Once King. If those blue-white sparks got into a player's body, they'd rise again as undead. James couldn't let his sister face that alone, so with a final look at Gregory, James left the king's side and raced to hers, sprinting with the rest of the Roughnecks as the city filled with the clatter of bone.
Chapter 22
Tina
Tina ran through the bloody streets toward the sound of battle. Behind her, she could hear the rest of the Roughnecks shouting at each other to keep up, but only one person actually did.
"What's the plan, T?" James asked, running up jubatus-style on all fours beside her.
"Find the undead. Beat them until they stop moving."
"That's not a plan!" James scolded her. "That's just angry fighting."
Tina rolled her eyes. "Fine, plan me, then."
Her brother stumbled in surprise at the request and fell behind for a second before racing back to her side. "O-Okay, then," he said, frowning as he thought the situation through.
Tina was happy to let him do the work. Her mind wasn't a happy place right now. The less time she spent using it, the better off she'd be. She just wanted to beat something into tiny, tiny pieces so she wouldn't have to notice how empty her shadow felt without SB inside it.
"The Once King's been planning this invasion since the Deadlands opened," James said at last. "And he's only gotten more freedom since the game became real, so I think it's safe to assume that he's sent all his big guns. The royal castle is the only place in the city that's defensible against the really big bosses, so I say we fort up there. Most of the civilian population and all the player prisoners Malakai didn't bring down here are already in the Diplomatic Quarter right next door, so it shouldn't take long at all to move them, but we'll need to evacuate all of your people from Camp Comeback. I think the best way to do that is to use the Royal Mile. It goes straight through the city to the castle, and it's got the most room to fight while still being narrow enough to keep the enemy from attacking us all at once. Once we get everyone inside, King Gregory can reactivate the Bastion to protect us."
Tina snorted. "Can he reactivate the Bastion?"
"There should be some power left," James said, though he didn't sound certain to her. "But the castle's a huge fortress with only a few key doors to defend. Even without the Bastion, we should be able to hold out there for a little while. Either way, it's the best plan I've got. We just need the Roughnecks to keep the undead back long enough to get everyone inside."
"We'll do that," Tina said, looking down at her brother. "Now get off the front lines. You're out of mana, and there's no time to recover."
She expected James to balk at that, but he just nodded. "I'll be with the king!" he called as he peeled off. "Come find me later at the castle!"
Tina waved at her brother as he vanished into the stream of players. The moment he was gone from her side, CincoDeMurder stepped up to take his place.
"All right, Tina," the Berserker said, puffing with the effort of keeping up with her huge strides. "What are we doing?"
"Roughnecks will take the big bosses," Tina replied. "You guys keep the small fry off of us. We'll take and hold the Royal Mile to make a safe corridor for everyone to evacuate to the castle."
"Got it," he said. "I like simple plans. Though you might want to add 'don't die' to the list. Might be kind of important."
He grinned at his own joke, but Tina didn't grin back. It wasn't that she didn't appreciate the gallows humor. She just didn't feel much like smiling or worrying about staying alive. Honestly, it all just felt like too much work right now. If it wouldn't have made her a quitter, she'd have charged right into the thickest part of the undead and gone out in a blaze of glory. That image fit her current dark mood nicely, but if she went down, there would be no good tanks left, and Tina was too much of a raid leader to tolerate that.
"Just make sure we don't get swarmed," she told Cinco. "I know all of the Dead Mountain bosses by heart, but a lot of them have stupid, complicated fight mechanics, and we're not in their normal rooms. We're going to have to pay extra attention if we don't want to get creamed, and we can't do that if a bunch of crappy zombies are gnawing on our healers. Just keep us clear. We'll handle the rest."
Cinco saluted and blew her a kiss before falling back to the rest of his Red Sands. Satisfied the Berserker would do his part, Tina turned back to the road and kept running--alone. The high sun overhead turned her shadow into a black pool at her feet, but nothing was inside it. She was reminding herself that was a good thing when the road she'd been sprinting down opened into a plaza, and the bank came into view.
The giant stone building still had its golden doors locked tight, only now they'd been reinforced with a shimmering golden raid-level ward. The army of level-eighty-one two-skull golems that had been standing out front the first time Tina's raid had passed by was nowhere to be seen, probably because the bank schtumples had pulled them all back inside, which was a shitty thing to do. The schtumples might not like the players, but they were all against the Once King, and an elite golem army would have been really freaking useful right now.
"Cowards!" she yelled at the sealed golden doors as she ran past. "You think you're safe in there? Come out and join the fight!"
As always, nothing answered. Sneering in disgust, Tina kept running, following the roads that wound through the sprawling city like roots until she reached the Royal Mile, the wide road that cut north and south through Bastion like a highway. Looking up it, Tina could see all the way to the castle gates. The Bastion was still flickering at the top of its highest tower, but the magical artifact's glow was much dimmer than the first time Tina had stepped out onto the Royal Mile a few days ago, and that made her nervous. Forting up in the castle wouldn't do much good if the king didn't have enough oomph left to keep the undead off them after they got in.
"Fucking Malakai," she muttered under her breath as she led her players around the bend onto the Royal Mile, which was still scattered with debris from the army's march on Camp Comeback. "Fucking waste of fucking magical artifacts on fucking bullshit."
Discordant shrieks tore through the air above her, and Tina instinctively lifted her shield to cover her head as the two undead Birds swept by like jetliners, bathing the elegant limestone buildings that fronted the Royal Mile in purple fire. They roared in triumph, their empty ghostfire eyes dancing as the three-block swath of the city to Tina's left erupted into shadowy flames. They were coming around for another pass when the whole sky darkened, and Xthr came in like a storm front, blasting them with dark fire of his own. Smoking, rotting scales fell from the sky like car-sized, blade-sharp hail as the attack sent the lesser Birds screeching and tumbling.
One of the falling scales almost ran Tina through, forcing her to jump to the side before she was crushed. "Goddamn space dragons!" she yelled, shaking her fist at the Birds as the aerial battle moved off. She was looking back to make sure no one else had gotten hit when she heard something crash on the road ahead of her.
Tina whirled around, shield up, then she skidded to a stop. A few hundred feet up the Royal Mile, something was kicking its way through the buildings the undead Birds had just flamed. A giant club bashed the corner off a shadow-flame-covered tavern as she watched, then a twenty-foot-tall skeleton emerged from a side street. Stomping down the rubble with its massive boots, it turned its ghostfire eyes on Tina and screamed, breaking what little glass remained with an earsplitting--and eerily familiar--roar.
"Holy Toledo!" Frank said, his metal boot
s throwing up sparks as he skidded to a halt beside Tina. "Grel'Darm's back?"
"That's not Grel'Darm," Tina said, nodding at the skeleton's head, which was only as tall as the rooftops. "Grel was eighty feet tall. That's his mini version, Prototype-GD. He was a special boss event during the Deadlands' opening. He's ten levels lower than Grel and only a four-skull."
Frank's hunched shoulders relaxed. "Oh, well, that don't sound too bad."
"He still sucks," Tina said. "He's weaker, but he still has all the same abilities Grel had, and he's got friends."
Sure enough, smaller undead were already pouring through the hole Prototype-GD had left in the burning buildings. The skeletal archers started shooting at the raiders as soon as they came around the corner, forcing Tina and Frank to put their shields up. She was about to yell for Zen to put the small fry down when a whole group of players thundered past with CincoDeMurder in the lead.
"Red Sands, hooo!" Cinco yelled, brandishing his spear as he crashed into the first line of zombies. The rest of his guild followed suit, bashing and smashing the smaller undead into bone chips while their casters and Rangers rained down death on the undead that were still trying to get out of the side street. Prototype-GD watched them in dumb confusion for several seconds before his ghostfire eyes flared, and he lifted his club. He was about to bash Cinco on the head when Tina pegged him square in the jaw with a broken paving stone, knocking out a tooth.
"Hey, Ugly!" she bellowed. "Your fight's over here!"
With a roar that shook the street, Prototype-GD forgot all about Cinco and started toward her, his giant boots cracking the street as he lumbered forward.
So grateful to have properly stupid enemies that responded to taunts again, Tina lifted her sword. "Roughnecks, charge!"
She pounded forward as she finished, bracing her shield in front of her like the cattle guard on a train as she closed the final distance between her and the boss. Screeching like a band saw, the twenty-foot giant raised its club over its head with both hands, its ghostfire eyes blazing.
