by A. J. Markam
“All right!” Slothfart hooted. “Let’s go eff up some skeletons!”
We set off from the mining camp in a convoy of our own, traveling single file through the rugged hills outside of the mining camp.
The entire time, Slothfart complained about not having a mount.
“As soon as I reach Level 20, the first thing I’m doing is going and buying a horse, swear to God.”
“That’s what we’re all doing,” Jen said. “Complaining about it isn’t going to make it happen any faster.”
That didn’t stop him, though. Only an ice blast did.
“Okay, okay,” the orc complained as he cracked ice off his chain mail.
About a mile away from the mine, we found the necromancers’ camp.
As soon as we saw it, we found the highest bluff we could and crawled up to the edge of it so we could spy on our enemies.
At the bottom of the canyon, a series of small caves dotted the rocky walls. Eerie red lights pulsed within the caves’ shadows.
Out in the open air, trolls dressed in black robes waved enchanted staffs, and swirls of black mist trailed through the air.
“Hey, Rich, it’s your peeps!” Slothfart said. “Think you can talk them into lining up all orderly-like so we can kill them all at once?”
“I doubt it. But feel free to try.”
Besides the trolls, there were lots of skeletons – LOTS. Hundreds of them. They walked around the camp, hunched over like grumpy old men, clutching rusted maces, wooden clubs, and whatever broken weapons they could find.
They kind of just shambled around aimlessly. Then they would stop, stare blindly into space – and start the whole process over again. Shuffle, shuffle. Pause. Shuffle shuffle.
I selected one just to see what kind of hit points it had. Not many at all – 50.
Only problem was, there were at least 500 of them – and more were coming out of the caves every minute.
“Great,” Slothfart mumbled. “Basically this is a big-ass hornet’s nest just waiting for us to kick it.”
“What you think about sending Jimmy down there in Stealth?” Jen said. “He can target the Ossuaries. Russell, you and Seth can draw the skeletons’ aggro away from the caves, and I’ll send some ice storms down to wipe out as many of them as I can. Richard will stay up here with me and heal you guys from a distance.”
“What about the necromancers?” Slothfart asked.
“They shouldn’t go after you if you don’t attack them. If they do, I’ll pick them off from up here.”
“Sounds good to me,” Russell said happily.
“I guess,” Slothfart muttered, not at all happily.
“Where are the Ossuaries?” I asked.
“In the caves,” Jen said, pointing. “Anything skeletons come out of, those are the ones with the Dark Ossuaries.”
“Uh, maybe this is a stupid question – ”
“There’s no such thing as a stupid question, Jimmy,” Richard said. “Unless Russell or Seth is asking it.”
As if on cue, the two started up a comedy routine.
“What happens if you get scared ‘half to death’ twice?” Slothfart asked.
“If it’s tourist season, why can’t we shoot them?” Russell grinned.
“If one synchronized swimmer drowns, do the others drown too?”
“Isn’t Disney World just a people trap operated by a mouse?”
“If you were a genie and you asked, ‘I wish that you wouldn’t grant me this wish,’ what would happen?”
“You just HAD to get them started, didn’t you,” Jennifer said to Richard.
“Okay, NOT a stupid question,” I said. “What do Dark Ossuaries look like?”
“Like Hannibal Lecter decided to build a teepee out of some dead dudes,” Slothfart said, “and put some effed-up Christmas lights in there to boot.”
“…okay…”
“Seth’s not far off,” Jen said. “You’ll know it when you see it. They’re not hard to destroy, though. Just toss a grenade at it, get the hell out, and you’re golden.”
“How many of them are there?”
“We each got three grenades, which means there are probably three Ossuaries. The game always gives each member of the group an equal shot at taking them out. And, like I said, if I couldn’t take them out with my Ice Storm spell, we’d have to use the grenades to wipe out as many of the skeletons as we could.”
“Okay,” I said nervously.
“You’ll do great. You handled those bandits and the two-headed wolves just fine – this’ll be a snap.” She turned to the others and said, “Everybody give one grenade to Jimmy.”
“Why? I thought I only need three.”
“Just in case.”
“You better take out as many skeletons as possible,” Slothfart told her as he reached into his bag.
“It’ll be fine,” she reassured him. “Not a problem.”
“Now there you go with the famous last words,” Richard muttered as he handed over one of his grenades.
45
I separated from the rest of the group, wound my way down a dirt path, and came out in the bottom of the ravine while still in Stealth.
Once I was at eye level with the skeletons, my perception of things changed drastically. From way up above, it looked like a messy situation. But when you were down on the ground and eye-level with the mobs, it was nothing but a sea of skulls and bones. I started to freak out a little bit imagining them all rushing me at once.
Fortunately, I didn’t have to take any of them on. Slothfart and Russell started yelling over on the other side of the canyon, drawing all of the skeletons’ attention.
“Hey boneheads! Over here!”
“Hey, you skinless wankers! Over here, you dickless gits!”
The skeleton started surging in their direction. The sea of bones parted, and I suddenly had a direct path. The troll necromancers were easily avoidable.
As I ran for the nearest cave, I heard a crackling sound from up above, and then ice spears began raining down and slamming into the crowd of skeletons. I looked back to see femurs and skulls flying everywhere as the ice storm took out dozens of mobs at one time.
Unfortunately, either the attack or the sudden depletion of numbers cranked up the Dark Ossuaries to 11.
Just as I got to the cave – which a second ago had only been putting out one or two skeletons a minute – a bright red light flared inside, and suddenly five skeletons rushed out at the same time.
I wasn’t expecting that, and I didn’t have time to react. One brushed up against me, and suddenly I was out of Stealth.
That was all it took. The skeletons were suddenly all around me, swinging their cudgels and stabbing me with their rusty knives – and five more were joining them every second.
A single Backstab would take out one of my attackers instantly, but another four would leap into its place.
Five, nine, thirteen – seventeen skeletons were attacking me within four seconds, with more on the way.
My hit points were dropping rapidly.
Not knowing where the hell I would Resurrect, I did the only sensible thing I knew: I ran.
I started out at a normal run, but I could feel the daggers and clubs slamming into my back. That’s when I hit Fleet Foot and bolted across the canyon as fast as possible.
As I ran across the ravine, giant swirls of purple energy spiraled down from the cliff and suffused my entire body.
My hit points restored, I kept on running until I reached the safety of the hills.
When I got back up to the top of the bluff, Richard was busy healing Russell and Slothfart at a furious pace, and Jen was battling a couple of necromancers who had decided to attack her from ground level.
Jennifer asked over her shoulder, “Why are you back here?!”
“They started coming out of the cave like they were shooting out of a fire hose!”
“Well get back down there! We don’t have any other choice – you’re it!
If you don’t knock those things out, our entire group is going to wipe!”
Crap.
I went into Stealth, turned back around, then made my way again to the bottom of the ravine. I crept along as carefully as I could, watching as ice rained down on the necromancers and their skeleton hordes. 300 feet away, Slothfart and Russell were cursing as they kept getting slammed by wave after wave of attackers.
I snuck up close to the cave again, careful to stay out of the steady stream of skeletons spewing out of the cave mouth.
Slothfart wasn’t wrong about bone generators looking like a serial killer’s teepee. This one was about six feet tall, with a series of leg and arm bones arranged in a triangular shape. They were interlocked and woven in and around each other, or maybe held together through some supernatural means. Skulls circled the base, and a single one topped the teepee like the crowning ornament on a Christmas tree from hell. An evil red light glowed within the latticework of the bones, and out of the red glare jumped newly formed skeletons, as though summoned out of thin air.
Every time there was a little in the stream of skeletons coming out of the cave, I would start to go inside – but then a new group would come hurtling out, and I would duck back over to the side, out of the way. Since I was in Stealth, they ignored me. Instead, they raced into battle with poor Russell and Slothfart.
I was wondering what the hell to do when I realized, You know, grenades are made to be tossed. You could just blindly THROW one in there and see what happens.
Why not, I thought to myself, and pulled a grenade out of my bag.
It was a simple enough device. You just pulled the iron key completely out of the grenade, then tossed it.
So that’s what I did: I pulled the pin, waited until there was a small gap in the running skeletons, then darted out in front of the cave and threw the grenade in.
I immediately got slammed into by a skeleton and popped out of Stealth.
Crap, I thought as a new swarm of clattering boneheads jumped on top of me. This SUCKS!
Fleet Foot still was in cooldown – I had at least another three minutes to go. I thought about using Extreme Dodge, but that would only help me for ten seconds.
I was preparing myself for a respawn when suddenly the grenade went off.
BOOM!
The explosion sent a shockwave out of the cave that slammed into me like a physical force.
Suddenly every skeleton kicking my ass turned into a pile of disconnected bones. As I jumped up from the ground, tibias and femurs fell off me like a pile of pickup sticks.
Inside the cave, the smoke was too thick to see much – but what I did see was a bunch of charred, broken bones littering the floor of the cave.
What I didn’t see was even better: no more teepee, no more red lights, no more skeletons materializing out of thin air.
I looked around and saw that a third of the skeletons out on the field of battle had completely fallen apart, too.
“Way to go Jimmy!” Jen yelled from the bluff above.
I grinned, then went back into Stealth, intent on doing it again.
The second Dark Ossuary was a little harder because the cave was right next to one of the troll necromancers. I got past him with no problem. It was only after I threw the grenade into the cave and got bumped by one of the skeletons that the trouble began.
As soon as I came out of Stealth, the necromancer turned around and started wailing on me with black flashes of energy. Add in the five or six skeletons jumping up and down on me like I was a trampoline, and I was dangerously in the red zone within seconds.
A purple blast from Richard brought me back up to survival range.
A second later the grenade exploded, the Dark Ossuary blew apart, and the skeletons on top of me dissolved into matchsticks.
Also, half of the remaining skeletons out in the canyon suddenly collapsed, making Slothfart and Russell’s lives much easier.
Another purple swoosh of light completely topped off my hit points – but the necromancer was still pounding on me hard.
I knew if I ran away, he would still take long-distance shots at me.
A good offense is the best defense, right?
So I rushed him as I yelled out to my friends, “A little help?!”
Suddenly a blast of ice slammed into the necromancer from behind. Since I hadn’t inflicted any damage on him yet, Jen had drawn his aggro, which meant he turned around to face her –
Leaving me with a clear shot at his back.
I backstabbed him three times before he was able to attack me again. Two more blasts of black light ripped through my body, leaving me feeling like I was being electrocuted – but Richard counterbalanced them with a couple more swirls of healing energy. One more shot from Jen and two more Vicious Strikes from me, and the troll went down.
The last cave was a breeze. I threw the grenade, then used Dodge to make sure that the skeletons couldn’t get a hold on me. Once they were dead – along with every other skeleton in the canyon – I deliberately flung myself at the nearest necromancer, and was able to kill him with only a tiny bit of help from Jen.
From there, I went back into Stealth and started running around helping Slothfart and Russell mop up the remaining necromancers.
At the end of it all, as we were looting the bodies, the rest of the team congratulated me.
“Damn!” Slothfart said. “Somebody improved since the last time I saw him in action!”
“I told you he was kicking ass!” Russell said proudly, and whacked me on the butt like a basketball teammate.
“I won’t assault you on your derrière,” Richard said as he patted me lightly on the shoulder, “but the sentiment is the same.”
“Great job,” Jen said with a smile. That was the best compliment I could’ve had by far.
And that was my first experience with legions of trash mobs.
46
Another thing stood out during our time on the quest: Tunnellers.
The dwarves were not the only ones working in the mines. In fact, they had help from a race I’d only seen once before, back when I was first selecting my character.
Tunnelers were rat-faced creatures with sharp claws. They stood about as high as a dwarf, and they had the power of speech – which I guess makes sense, if players could choose them as characters.
There was an entire quest where we had to get from the main mine to another cavern that had been sealed off, and we had a tunneller as a guide. He could dig his way through dirt incredibly quick. Solid rock had to be tackled by the dwarves, but anything that was loosely packed or crumbly could be handled by a tunneller.
The quest was fairly standard. A bunch of goblins had invaded a neighboring cavern the dwarves wanted to mine, and we were the hired guns who helped clean out the opposing force. At one point after the battle was over we found ourselves in a beautiful cavern of pink crystals. In the light of our torches, it glowed like a cathedral built out of rose-hued quartz.
I was looking around in wonder, not watching where I was walking, when I stepped on something soft.
“Watch it!” a voice snarled.
I jumped back and whipped out my daggers in alarm.
“Dammit, what the hell?!” the voice snapped. “You tell people not to step on you, next thing you know they’re pullin’ a knife on you!”
Our entire group gathered around. In the center of our circle was a tunneller – except he didn’t wear the drab uniform that most of the other mine workers did. His outfit was top-notch: a heavy-duty cloth jumpsuit with multiple tool belts and bags attached to it, along with a vicious-looking pick that gleamed and sparkled in the torchlight. He wore a miner’s hat, and when he flicked it with his finger, a stone set in the middle of the forehead glowed as brightly as a spotlight.
“Did you get separated from the dwarves?” Jennifer asked.
“What, you think I work for those schmoes?” the rat said in a New York accent. “Hell no. I’m my own man.”
�
�I think you mean your own rat,” Russell said with a good-natured grin.
“Ha, ha,” the rat said without laughing. “You’re one to talk, Short Green and Ugly. You look like one of my dumps after I ate a pint of guacamole.”
When there wasn’t alcohol as a reward – like with the dwarves in the convoy – Russell didn’t abide insults quite as stoically.
“Why you soddin’ bugger – ”
Jen held Russell back but putting her mage’s staff across his chest.
“Ooh, a limey,” the rat snickered unpleasantly. “No wonder you’re green and bumpy.”
“Are you a player?” Jen asked.
“Of course I’m a player. What, do I sound like an NPC to you?”
“You sound like an asshole,” Slothfart said.
“You look like an asshole with a bad case of hemorrhoids, Sphincter Face.”
“You little – ”
“What are you doing here?” Jen said, trying to stay on topic.
“Well, I was lying back and enjoying a nap until Corpse Boy here stepped on my tail.”
“Okay, why are you here?”
“What’s it to you, Sugar Tits?”
Russell and Slothfart both chortled. “Sugar Tits…”
Jen narrowed her eyes. “Hey guys – I think this rodent is actually an enemy mob. Attack on three – one, two – ”
“Hold on, hold on!” the rat exclaimed, then scowled at us. “Big freakin’ bullies…”
“I’m waiting,” Jen snapped.
The rat waved his hand around at the crystalline walls. “You see all this? Roseacite. Crafting reagent. Twenty silver an ounce – more than three gold per pound. And this place is the freakin’ motherlode.”
“So you mine it and sell it?” Jen asked.
