by D. Rus
He microported to his Arsenal and began carefully selecting his gear. The best of the best, the items he'd personally taken from defeated Higher Demons' bodies or exchanged for dozens of cartloads of chitin from his choicest Flesh Eaters — those that shed the strongest armor in the whole of Inferno.
He opened a spatial pocket. His beclawed fingers became gentle and dexterous as he felt for his biggest treasures — things he couldn't entrust to any amount of locks. Unique elixirs that could momentarily raise you to just one level below the gods; one-off artifacts he'd been saving for a rainy day; a fat manuscript of magic scrolls. Few of them would impress a regular AlterWorld player as something grandiose or overly original, but when used by a creature of Inferno, they defied stereotypes. And in this situation, surprising could mean winning.
The astral messenger flared through the sky, dying an especially torturous death while filling the spectrum of waves — those of light, sound and magic — with the return message. His challenge had been accepted. The combat would last until one of the fighters' complete disembodiment.
Asmodeus frowned. This was so unlike the usually cautious Verenus. Could he have his own share of deadly tricks in his own secret treasury? Surely he had to realize that Asmodeus would use every trump card he had — for he had nothing left to lose. At that moment, he had twelve such trump cards stashed up both his sleeves. Verenus had better beware!
They met in the middle of the battlefield, the stares of their respective armies prodding them in the back. Verenus was defiantly calm — and Asmodeus tense and restless before the deciding combat. As he approached his enemy, a yet unknown feeling of despair froze his heart solid, for he recognized his opponent's armor. A full set of the legendary Mirror of Pain that used to belong to Nebiros, the field marshal of Hell's army. How come? It couldn't exist in this world! Was it really a full set? The breastplate, the helmet, the greaves and the gauntlets maybe — but did he have the bracelets?
Breaking the unwritten dueling etiquette while still sticking to official formalities, Asmodeus reached deep into his stocks, scooping up a generous handful of mana to hit his enemy with a direct Ashes of Darkness. Simple as a crowbar but impressive enough, this was the equivalent of one rune bursting with mana. Parrying it wasn't a good idea: it would break both your arm and the shield on it, dealing serious injury to your astral channels.
With a nonchalant glint of his feline eyes, Verenus shattered the formula halfway, releasing its energy. Which was a shame because it contained one nasty fool trap. He didn't try to avoid the direction of the attack or change its coordinates, either. He simply met the spell with his chest.
A deadly scythe hissed over the enemy army. Thirty throats gasped as thirty warriors crumbled to dust, forever losing any chance of an afterlife. The Mirror of Pain had proved to be a full set indeed, redirecting the damage from the armor bearer to his subordinates. Who were legion.
Asmodeus cast a desperate glance over the thousand-strong crowd behind Verenus' back. He scowled in response to his enemy's goat-like laughter, then stuffed his mouth full of the chosen vials. His teeth crunched the glass as he choked on the razor-sharp shards. He just didn't have the ten extra heartbeats to unhurriedly drink them. His speeding mind reached for control charms, switching all available mana flows over to himself, while he broke the seals on the booster scrolls.
Charge! And to hell with it all!
* * *
The castle was hell incarnate. Its every corner was crawling with zombie mice and other rather smelly critters, followed by cheers and tears: the former from those who'd managed to raise a micro pet and the latter from everybody else — and not only the children, either. Somehow the kids had failed to master putting the raised pets back to rest. I got a funny feeling they simply didn't want it bad enough. The mice kept getting out of control scattering into every nook and cranny only to fall prey to the happy hell hound puppies, the second generation of which were actually born in the castle.
A new link of necro life was trying to fit into the food chain.
My inbox pinged, distracting me from my intellectual ponderings over nature's cycle of fuckups. The sender's VIP status had allowed him to get through the default filter I'd recently installed, Thank you for contacting me. Please leave a message.
Aha! My millionaire customer! The likes of him were always welcome! This was a Korean representative of the clan who'd recently bought one of my Portal to Inferno scrolls. Did they want another one? It could be arranged. After all, my treasury had proven to be not as bottomless as I'd believed.
We really needed our own Mr. Simonov. When it came to keeping an eye on the clan's property, Durin in his role of thrifty quartermaster was pure gold. But he was no bookkeeping whiz. He simply wasn't cut out to juggle numbers. It was true that this zombie dwarf knew every coin in the treasury blindfolded, but that wasn't enough. We needed our own financial genius, and had the Vets not been such valuable allies, I'd have poached their treasurer a long time ago.
Besides, the bank had withdrawn the latest castle payment a week prematurely. Was it the last goodbye from the spiteful admins — or had AlterWorld's economy indeed lost the plot? I just didn't know.
On top of that, another delegation of the insatiable dwarves had recently demanded to see me. Waving a fat stack of bills and complaining of the high cost of work and building materials, they'd given my bank account another workout. All my appeals to Aulë and the summoning of Durin had done very little to cool down the delegation's fervor. I'd managed to talk the price down a little — but even steel has its breaking point. I had apparently managed to discover, by trial and error, a certain pricing limit below which no living dwarf would agree, whether hung, drawn, quartered or anathemized.
The dwarves had soon left, drooling greedily as they lugged away another two million gold. The Koreans, however, proved a trickier job.
The kids were in shit. Their reckless cavalry attack had been smashed flat against the first tank they'd met. Some strategists. What had they been thinking, gate crashing an unknown demon's dominion? Okay, me, I'd have done it for sure, but the Koreans? Apparently, the kids didn't know when to stop when playing this new and unknown game — so they'd paid the price.
Forty of their permas were now captured by Asmodeus. Their graves had never appeared in the castle's cemetery. Occasional groaning and weeping had sometimes made it through to the clan's chat, freezing the clan members' blood in their veins and driving the prisoners' friends and relatives hysterical.
Regular players had been luckier. They'd been faced with a black screen, a forced logout and a system message:
Your character has been captured! Now you can either turn to your friends for help or wait for your capturer's death. Alternatively, you can contact the AlterWorld Shop and purchase Guaranteed Freedom, which allows you to reunite with your avatar for as little as 100 gold.
But once the players followed the link, they were faced with the following error page:
We are sorry. For reasons of the site's upcoming nationalization, all services are unavailable.
Warning! If you choose to play the game, it is your decision made at your own risk. The AlterWorld Corporation waives all responsibility for any potential moral, financial or physical damage to you or your avatar. God help you!
All this had hit the Koreans hard. Having lost almost a hundred men, the Gimhae clan was now turning into a shapeless demoralized heap like a torn sugar bag.
It wasn't that I was so particularly worried about them. On the contrary: ever since the memorable Chinese raid, the sight of their Anime-styled eyes — wide open or cunningly squinted — gave me the shivers.
But politics is all about counterweights. And we needed new allies really badly. Facing the Chinese giant alone wouldn't be a wise thing to do. We'd had some positive developments as the Japanese cluster had already expressed its satisfaction with the results of our Russian Campaign. The more militant among them were already suggesting they try to repeat our su
ccess, appealing to their countrymen's samurai spirit and exaggerating the amount of our battle spoils tenfold.
They'd sent us a few cautiously worded congratulations, followed by an exchange of rather neutral diplomatic messages as both parties were trying to suss the other out. I had a funny feeling that if those samurai spirits ever made their minds up to attack, we could expect to be invited as potential experts or even allies. That was worth considering.
Judging by the newsfeeds, the Asians were currently at the forefront of the political arena. They were the ones constantly mentioned as the main players in certain global events whenever there was a city taken, new lands discovered or an epic quest completed. Diligent, insistent and tenacious like terriers, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Koreans and other smaller but equally determined nations had begun to spread, subjecting the neighboring lands to their rule.
Soon their spheres of influence had begun to overlap, causing tension. The game developers hadn't given much thought to AlterWorld's geography, sweeping the entire Asian cluster to one side of the enormous Frontier, thus dividing it from the European lands and virtually dooming it to an unavoidable war.
There were a few other points that spoke in favor of helping the Koreans.
Firstly, topping up my long-suffering treasury. Gone were the days of Max the computer guy who'd puffed up with pride at his just-above-average earnings. Now I was a duke, a local lord with his own army, lands and a whopping big castle. All this absorbed gold like water, pushing me to new expansionist escapades. In our troubled times, relying on pure economy for a cash flow bordered on suicidal. Sad as it may sound, one captured castle could pay for years of hard crafting work.
Secondly, I desperately needed a good scuffle, preferably with an awe-inspiring enemy. My fifteen top Ear Cutters that I'd gotten for mere peanuts were now serving as guiding beacons on the road to my clan's incredible strength. The night I'd spent with Mona Lisa had melted the deep-space ice that had bound my heart after the name-giving session. The Creator's spark in my soul was once again burning hot, subconsciously attracting some of the smarter NPCs.
And what could be cooler than an Inferno scuffle?
I gave the Korean guy my preliminary consent and promised to be back in touch within the hour. Then I called a staff meeting to mull over the raid idea with the few members of my micro HQ. Speaking in order of rank, all of my officers supported the idea. Even any potential problems with Asmodeus didn't put them off. Only Dennis the Analyst wrinkled his nose which made him look like an enormous cat.
I nodded in synch with his thoughts, "We're not going to assault Asmodeus blindly like a bunch of idiots. Even if it does come to a head, we'll keep all permas in the rear and only send the NPCs into battle. That'll give them a chance to write their names in gold in our Hall of Fame. Same goes for everyone! Keep an eye on your men. Don't let their enthusiasm get the better of them. Siam, I want you to draft a message for the Vets. It's not a good thing to alert them at a moment's notice. We really should offer them an occasional share of our pie, too."
I paused for a second, assessing the call-up potential of all the parties involved. "The op starts in five hours. Make sure we don't repeat the same fuckup as the last time! Only the old-timers. The portal to Inferno will be set up at the Remote Post next to Tianlong's fortress. Dennis, I want you to run it past the Koreans. Seeing as this is a rescue mission, we won't be charging them for it but we'll be the ones in control and we'll be getting all the loot. It's their people we're out to rescue, after all, and we're doing it all at our expense. Don't accept any objections. I don't even think there'll be any. The kids aren't in a position to haggle."
The following unhurried preparation proved much easier than a general alarm. Although it too had its rushed moments, but it was nothing like the hell we'd raised the last time. The techs habitually swore under their breath as they rolled the heavy golems out of their hangars and began tapping their hammers, changing their weapons and gear to the latest recommended standards. They'd had plenty of time to study the logs of the last battle, circling the best-working damage schemes in red, and were now exercising their creativity as they put the thoroughly and very expensively repaired techno monsters back together.
The Cursed Castle battle had cost me indeed. There'd been no loot, as whatever gear the enemy fighters had lost had become my warriors' lawful trophies. This, by the way, is one of the biggest stimuli to join a clan: legitimate PK. Where else can you expect to smoke your opponent and strip him of his prized artifact while keeping your reputation intact? The only other place you could do this sort of thing was in the arena provided the rules had been tweaked to allow it.
So all in all, our clan treasury had suffered somewhat. Then again, what clan was I talking about? Everything that it owned had come out of my very own pocket. The ten-percent tax had only just begun to trickle in, making me want to weep at its miserable flow.
Having said that, I'd also gained a considerable number of freebies in terms of reputation, experience and new diplomatic connections. Not even to mention the boost our alliance had received in acquiring a powerful vassal with his own small army together with a good hundred and fifty new member applications. Cryl was now spitting venom, forced to stay behind and go through them, looking into the applicants' respective life stories. In any case, his level didn't answer the raid's objective. It was about time I took my staff rats out into the field to do some quality strategic leveling. We had a lot of catching up to do. All this paper-pushing was gradually turning us into dead weight — and that applied to me too.
I just hoped Cryl was going to feel a bit better when he heard about my plans to replace him with Orcus who'd recently joined our motley crew. My young "cloak and dagger" wasn't that ambitious. He much preferred going into battle and spending his spare time with his Junior High sweetheart, Lena.
But as for Orcus... he'd proved to be a true godsend. This was a mature wolf who knew the secret service inside out and couldn't wait to sink his teeth into his old profession. Yes, I risked a lot hiring him as is, without all the proper real-life checks. In doing so I was entirely trusting my gut feeling and Fuckyall's recommendation. Missing such an opportunity would have been madness. It's not every day a real special-service wolfhound falls into your lap.
The Vets took seconds to reply to my invitation to join the raid. Predictably, it was an affirmative. They must have already had a knee-jerk decision-making mechanism: Max's path was strewn with loot and excitement so it was always worth tagging along with his party.
The Children of Night HQ was the first to port to the Remote Post, together with a covering group and a dozen freshly hired bodyguard trolls under Snowie's command. The stationary portal behind our backs stayed open, unhurriedly sucking gold out of my pocket and letting through the stooping golems.
Our allies had refused our help in setting up navigational beacons, thus hinting at them having their own. Indeed, soon an amazing emerald green guest portal unfolded next to our standard-issue one. I turned a quizzical stare to Siam, my analyst, who was known to pump megabytes of newsfeeds through his memory on a daily basis.
"That's the latest wizard fad," he commented. "The ultimate in cool, meant to demonstrate your control over your element. One of them had stumbled across a few variables in the basic spell. By changing its verbal and visual components and varying the mana flow one can alter the desirable effect to a certain degree. At the moment, the wizzies are fooling around with it simply changing the portal's appearance. But that's only the beginning."
"What do you mean by the visual component?"
"Well you know, all those rituals and charms and other bells and whistles."
I shook my head. "They call it progress! If it goes like this, very soon we'll be dancing shamanic dances with a tambourine, howling some teeth-chattering mantras just to cast a simple portal."
"If it's a portal to earth, why not. The players seem to be gingerly pushing the limits set by the game developers. It['s pre
tty obvious they're not quite yet sure what they can do, which is why they keep relying on all sorts of crutches. Just give them a bit of time — or wait for the new generation to grow up. Everything's gonna be totally different. Look at our kids! Whoever doesn't yet have a zombie pet is considered uncool! Every single one of them is casting: rogues and clerics, tanks even!"
I shuddered. God forbid. The desperate squeaking of honking green zombie mice had already started to infuriate everyone older than ten years of age. Talking of which. In the last three weeks, my kindergarten had grown a lot. Screwyall's progress was especially impressive, but then his situation was different. If it went on like this, in another two or three years' time the kids would be old enough to get driving licenses. Having said that... no, probably not. They would probably pause in certain periods of psychological comfort and security. For boys it could be the age of six, ten and sixteen years old. The girls, I wasn't really sure. Their truly alien mentality was a mystery to me. I just hoped that AlterWorld's soil offered little food for those sissies so widespread on Earth these days, giving my boys a chance to grow beyond an eternal seventeen-year-old wuss.
At a signal from their ever-watchful pointmen, the guest portal started disgorging the Vets' never-ending formations. They cheered to us, nodding their respect at the sight of the heavy war golems and casting surprised glances at Tianlong. No wonder: the once-emaciated dragon had considerably beefed up on Macaria's free boost channel. His once-yellow bones now sparkled a bright celestial blue. According to our guards, they'd sighted quite a few instants of his tail twitching — which immediately stopped once the dragon noticed their watching him.
