by James Hunter
“Who are you?” I whispered back. My babysitters hadn’t noticed this new weirdness yet, but I didn’t want to draw their attention from whatever had happened outside the clean room. “You need to stop this attack on DECS, like, immediately. These guys aren’t your run-of-the-mill corporate security goons. This is a cartel network. They will kill you if you don’t knock it off.”
While I thought it was an extremely generous gesture on my part to warn this chick off her attack against the worst people I’d ever met, it was not an entirely selfless move. If I talked her into shutting down her system, I’d get out of this alive.
“Cartel?” she asked, and another scream caused her to look over her shoulder. Had the orc’s friends already found her hideout? Shit, I needed to finish this before the hitman killed all the enemy hackers and denied me my bounty. Before I could plead with the mystery woman on the monitor to knock it off, she turned back to the camera. Her face was still out of focus, but there was something else wrong with its outline. Her head had a strange shape, and she seemed to have horns on top of it. “You mean the Raiders Guild?”
“What are you even...” I let the words die out. This hacker was clearly insane. She’d never see the sense of what I’d told her. I would just shut her down the old-fashioned way.
I’d kept the port scan running the whole time, and it kicked up some delightful bounty. The barrage of attacks I’d launched had overloaded the enemy system’s defenses and knocked more ports open. My AI reported that several of these were network storage devices, a couple were routers, and the rest were a rat’s nest of general-purpose computers.
“You have to complete the ritual, Lord Rathokhetra,” the woman pleaded with me. She pulled back from the camera as some noise attracted her attention, then stared back at me with those mesmerizing eyes. “Please. The dungeon raiders are killing us all!”
The static cleared for a moment, and mystery girl’s face was in full focus for the first time. My heart skipped a beat at my first glimpse of the enemy hacker.
Her eyes were far too large and burned with an emerald intensity that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand at attention. Three tawny stripes of short, sleek fur swept back from each of her plump cheeks like a tiger’s stripes. Her nose had an upturned tip that was a vivid pink, and her lips were full and blood red. And those things on top of her head weren’t horns; they were pointed ears covered in fur the same color as the stripes on her cheeks. Her skin was a deep bronze that seemed to glow with vitality.
I didn’t know how it was possible for my dream girl to have intruded on my job, and I didn’t care. I wanted her to survive this. I wanted to meet her when all this was over. We could retire to a nice tropical island somewhere without acid rain and bedbugs. Hell, I’d even take the bedbugs if she was part of the package deal.
“Is this some kind of joke?” I choked out. That got the orc’s attention.
“You have eight minutes left, hacker,” he spat. There’d been no further screams, so he’d turned back into an asshole.
“This is no joke,” the cat girl whispered. She had hunkered down so close to the monitor her face was lost in shadows. She reached forward to wrap her hands around either side of the device as if she were trying to clasp my cheeks. “We need you, Lord Rathokhetra. Awaken from your slumber and save us!”
Her eyes burned into me, and I felt a desire to save her from whatever the hell was happening to her. There was something about the woman that plucked at my heartstrings, despite the fact that we were on opposite sides of this fight.
“Are you Kezakazek?” I blurted out.
“No!” she exclaimed, her face twisted with shock. “Kezakazek is leading the attack on your tomb! She is the one killing your faithful wahket.”
That wasn’t at all what I’d expected. Maybe we weren’t enemies in this battle after all. Maybe we were both getting dicked over by this rogue band of hackers. Even if the cat girl was nuts, she might have information I could use.
And I really, really wanted to save her.
“How do I complete the ritual?” I asked.
“You must open your Ark, my lord,” she whispered. “But hurry, there is little time.”
I launched a search for file names or directories with “Ark” in the name and crossed my fingers. My heart pounded in my chest as the seconds ticked away. If I followed this lunatic cat girl’s advice and it failed, I was a dead man.
Directories scrolled up my screen, and my heart caught between beats as I read the list of directory names.
***Ark of Arukanaten
***Ark of Baasrek
***Ark of Inkolana
***Ark of Panakaneket
***Ark of Rathokhetra
***Ark of Thet
She’d called me Rathokhetra, so that must be the one I needed. My fingers flew over the custom keyboard as I dove into the directory. I wanted so badly to peek at the Ark of Inkolana, but there was no time for that. Maybe there’d be a few seconds to slip in a backdoor for later.
There was only a single file in the Ark of Rathokhetra directory: Ritual.exe.
“Well, that’s a pretty fucking obvious trap,” I grumbled. The safe thing to do was scan it down to the subatomic level, but there wasn’t time.
Fuck it. You only live once.
I executed the ritual.
The hologram flickered and jittered like a monitor tuned to a scrambled network channel. The smell of cinnamon flooded my nostrils and filled my head with visions of a strange desert land.
“Yes!” the cat girl cried, and her voice was so clear and pure I whipped around in my chair to see if she’d appeared behind me.
A progress message flashed across the terminal.
***50% complete......
***60% complete......
***70% complete......
***Ritual.exe terminated. Out of memory exception.
“You have to be fucking kidding me,” I snarled.
“Three minutes, keyboard cowboy,” the orc said. He and his pals had returned to their positions in the clean room, and all of them looked ready to shoot me full of holes.
Out of memory? Fuck that. I had access to a system with memory to spare.
I held my breath and copied Ritual.exe over to DECS.
It took less than ten seconds to copy the file into a temporary directory on the system I was supposed to save. For all I knew, I was about to trigger a virus of truly epic proportions.
And I didn’t care.
If it let me save this woman, I’d take the risk.
I offered up a silent prayer and then executed Ritual.exe.
An explosion of gibberish covered the holographic display, and an eerie chorus of harps burst from the sound system. The smell of incense grew so thick in the air that I half-believed I saw wisps of smoke curl up from the tiled floor around me.
“What did you do?” the orc kidnapper barked. “What have you fucking done?”
“I’m saving your ass!” I shouted over the harps as they swelled to a crescendo.
The characters on the terminal transformed from scrambled ASCII nonsense to pictograms that glowed with golden light.
No, not pictograms.
Hieroglyphics.
My eyes drooped as the strength fled my limbs. My heart thudded slower and slower, and my blood grew cold in my veins. The golden glow faded from the glyphs, leaving behind what looked like dead, gray stone.
“He comes to us!” the cat girl shouted, her voice ecstatic.
And then a gunshot punched through the harps’ wails, and the world went black.
Continue reading to find out what happens with Clay.
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Copyright
War God’s Mantle: Underworld (Book 3) is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2019 by James A. Hunter and Shadow Alley Press, Inc.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, email the publisher, subject line “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at the email address below.
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About the Author
James A. Hunter is a man of many talents. He’s a former Marine Corps Sergeant, combat veteran, and pirate hunter (seriously). He's also a member of The Royal Order of the Shellback—because that is totally a real thing. In addition to all of that, James has also been a missionary and international aid worker in Bangkok, Thailand. His latest mission? Taking care of his two kids and writing full time. He is the author of the Yancy Lazarus Urban Fantasy series, Legend of the Treesinger, Rogue Dungeon, and the bestselling LitRPG Epic Viridian Gate Online!
Read more at James Hunter’s site.
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