by Brian Simons
I wouldn’t be able to do anything if I spent all my MP each day reviving exhausted lite plants. As much as I hated to leave my Power and Speed attributes so low, I applied all nine of my attribute points to Acuity. This more than doubled my MP to 170. Not that I’d tell the guards that. I’d use the same amount of mana each day on their lite plants, but the rest I would use for myself.
That left the question of what to do with my skills. Osmose was expensive, at three skill points for the next level, and would double the skill’s cost to 8 MP per use. It was also the gateway to more powerful plants, the bedrock of my green magic class. I unlocked it, gaining the ability to learn the essence of special common plants.
I dug through my bag. Two of the unknown plants stayed that way. The third one, however, revealed itself. I could finally learn the essence of the tightly wound vine with the heart-shaped leaves.
Spring ivy.
Next I tried to Osmose the drug I had been taking twice a day. I succeeded.
Lite.
I wasn’t sure yet that I was willing to Engraft hemlock’s poison onto the lite, but it was nice to know that I could.
Improving my Grow skill could give the whole thing away because it would speed up the rate of growth. If any of the guards noticed that, even once, they might realize that I was capable of more. I decided to leave Grow at tier 7 and improve Pollen instead. At higher levels it would cause more than a few sneezes. I needed to see how much more.
Pollen tiers 2 and 3 didn’t seem like anything special. Tier 4, however, came with this little surprise: Chance to inflict blindness 10%. Pollen 5, 6, and 7 improved that to 20%, 30%, and 40% respectively. Definitely worth the increased casting cost, which now stood at 2 MP per second.
I was a little closer to having a fully-fledged plan. I closed my eyes and, for the first night in a long time, saw nothing at all as I lay on my cot waiting for sleep to take hold.
13
I wasn’t ready for morning when it came. The guards opened the barracks door and let the morning light in, though I wasn’t sure I had properly fallen asleep at all. We lined up and received our daily dose of lite to start the day.
The leaf landed on my tongue like a drop of ambrosia. I needed to chew it after how awful the previous night was, and because the guards would suspect something was wrong if I didn’t. The nighttime routine was a reward for work well done. The morning, however, was a quick hit to stave off withdrawal and prevent the workers from becoming truly independent. I welcomed the drug nonetheless.
I landed on the beach again. I wanted to tell Nadine how badly I’ve missed her, how sorry I was for taking our lives together for granted, and how ashamed I was that I hadn’t found her yet. I couldn’t. All I could do was relive the same day we had spent together so long ago.
When a finger popped into my mouth to fish out the lite, I snapped back to reality.
As carefully as I could, I picked lite for my daily bushel, but I re-grew the leaves as I plucked to help me pick faster. I earned XP as I did that, and then I earned more when I re-grew the plants in an adjacent field that had already been plucked bare.
I could get stronger this way, but it wasn’t enough. I’d need a way to inflict damage. That meant a weapon, something better than the small knife in my inventory. I couldn’t crack into the war chests and steal a weapon for myself, but I could try to trick the guards into giving me something I could use.
On one of my trips between fields, I paused, turned my foot on its side, and dropped my body with all of my force.
Losing 32 HP was nothing. It was the sound of cracked bone and the accompanying pain that forced me to howl and drop to the ground. A guard rushed over.
“What happened?” he asked.
“I don’t know, I fell,” I said. A small debuff icon appeared above my head.
Debuff: Broken bone. Disables running until bone is healed. -60% walking speed without assistance.
“I think it’s broken,” I said.
“Shit,” the guard said.
My ankle throbbed in pain. “I can’t walk on it without crutches.”
“What does this look like, a hospital?” he asked.
“Maybe a large branch or something would cut it for now?”
The guard rolled his eyes and walked toward the front of the property. I knew there were two large trees there. I waited for him to return with a suitable branch. “Thank you,” I said. The branch was as high as my hip, so it acted more like a cane than a crutch.
“Don’t be so fucking clumsy,” he said.
I looked at the branch, and saw how little the game thought of it as a weapon.
Æmberwood Stick: Power +3.
That night, when my bunkmates were on cloud nine, I Osmosed that branch and extended my list of plants another notch.
Æmberwood.
And that was it. My walking time was reduced by my injury, but my lite picking speed had picked up once I started using my Grow skill to help myself along. I leaned on that branch for weeks until my foot healed. I was sure a healer could have fixed me up in a jiffy, but we didn’t have any at the plantation. When I could walk again, I placed the branch in my inventory.
Each night, when the other workers lay there dazed, I whittled that branch to a point with the knife I had pocketed from the last raid. I carved a smooth spot for a handle long enough to grip with both hands at once. The small knife was rusted and dull, but with patience I had whittled the blade of my new sword to a sharp edge. The wood was still sticky, but on the bright side, that would improve my grip. My hard work had modestly improved my homemade katana, even though my lack of melee abilities handicapped my ability to benefit from it fully.
Unfinished Æmberwood Sword: Power +6. Bonus +4 to Power for sword fighters.
I also gained three more levels, adding my attribute points to Speed so I could run the hell away from here. I left my skill points alone for the time being. I hadn’t decided how best to proceed yet. I would work that out in time.
Turns out, I was out of time.
One morning, much like all the others, I lined up for my morning leaf. After it was swabbed from my mouth, the guard said, “Follow me.” He led me right into the mansion. The guards lifted a thick wooden arm that crossed the double doors to a room at the back of the house.
It had been months since I set foot in the building. This time, I was under no delusion that I was an invited guest.
“Cale, friend,” Alonso said as he led me through the doorway into what looked like a small study. “I’m working on a new strain of our delightful herb and I’d like your assistance in cultivating it.” He waved the guards away and they left the room, closing the doors behind them.
This could be my chance to poison the master and free the slaves. At least, those that wanted to be freed.
“What does this new strain do?” I asked.
“It’s cross bred with a plant that stimulates speed,” he said. “Hastening the workers will improve everyone’s day. Finish up our work a little earlier.”
“Or squeeze more work out of us in the same amount of time,” I said.
“I suppose the math is right,” he said. “Either way, kindly Grow this budding beauty so we can see if our horticulture bears out.”
I stepped toward the plant. This was a dream come true. With one pestilent touch I could breed a deadly poison right here in Alonso’s mansion.
I Engrafted the hemlock’s dire properties into the drug and watched it sprout leaf after leaf. It was a blueish green, darker than the plants that surrounded the mansion. If that was my doing, I doubted Alonso would know. This was a new plant to him too.
I removed my hand when the bush was at normal adult size, reserving the rest of my MP for myself.
“I do love watching you work,” he said. “Go on.”
“That’s everything,” I said. Could he see that I had MP left? I had never seen anyone else’s MP meter, but I worried Alonso had some special abilities I didn’t know about.
/> “Take a nibble,” he said. “Don’t be shy.” He wasn’t smiling anymore.
Of course. He’d had green mages before. I should have known he wouldn’t make it this easy.
“But,” I said. “I just had some lite, I’m not sure I can handle any more.”
Alonso took a step closer. I could smell his breath. There wasn’t a trace of lite on it. He reached for the hilt of his sword and started to draw it from its sheath slowly. Was he threatening me, or preparing for battle? I moved my hand toward my inventory pouch.
The plantation master was a Level 32 Sword Fighter. He would have put all of his attribute points into Power, catapulting his HP well beyond mine, and giving him a strong arm that would kill most players in one shot. I was a Level 24 Green Mage. This was a duel I could only lose, but I’d fight if I had to. The alternative was to eat hemlock-infused super-lite.
I didn’t have time to draw my sword from my bag. A horn blared across the compound and Alonso broke his eye contact with me and looked up at the room’s only exit. The guards had thrown the doors open and looked to him for guidance.
“Not another goddamn raid,” he said, sliding his sword back into its scabbard. “Wait here. Last time my idiot guards put you in harm’s way, but they know better now. We’ll finish this when I return.”
Alonso and the guards left the house, and left me with the poisoned plant. I heard them slide the wooden plank over the double doors, trapping me inside. They expected me to wait patiently, but I couldn’t do that.
I heaved my bodyweight against the doors until they pried open an inch, then I slid my sword into the crack between them. I used it to lift the wooden barrier. Once it arced high enough, one door pushed open and I slipped out of the study.
I stalked through the house toward the open door that led from the rear of the mansion into the fields. From a window, I saw the workers gathering weapons from the guards. There were no arrows overhead though. Everyone ran along the side of the house and disappeared, so I left out the back door and rounded the corner of the mansion a safe distance behind them. I lost sight of them as they poured out into the space in front of the compound.
A terrible sound crossed the siren’s blare. It was like wind howling through trees, the kind of sound that fueled ghost stories around a campfire. I dragged a bucket toward the stone wall surrounding the plantation and turned it over. I used it as a stepstool to jump up on the side wall and stalk toward the front of the property.
This wasn’t a normal raid. This was the Stricken. It came like rolling fog along the ground, a dark miasma of legs, and arms, and faces. The people trapped in the Stricken’s onrush kicked up darkness with their feet the way a horse kicks up dust.
There must have been thirty individual people at the front of that morass, and another row behind them.
The Stricken ran headlong into the stone wall that traced the front of the compound and crashed into the metal gate at full speed. The metal clanged out but didn’t yield.
Still, the workers standing behind the main gate looked nervous. Vin said they had always been safe from the Stricken here, but the Stricken seemed to double in size since the last time I saw it. I doubted many people saw it twice and lived to tell.
The first row of dark figures crouched down and clasped their hands on the metal poles of the front gate. Shadowy shapes behind them climbed on their backs and over the gate, others leapt over the stone wall alongside it. The Stricken had breached the compound.
Alonso and his guards were slavers, but the Stricken was death incarnate. I couldn’t stand there and do nothing, so I conjured my yellow cloud. It rose from the ground like steam beneath the attackers’ feet. They ignored it as they flooded the space between the mansion and the front gate.
Gray-skinned faces with black hair and black clothes moaned and cried as they slashed at the workers with crude weapons. A few threw black balls of magic energy. Two of those heads had small debuffs showing that they had been blinded by my pollen cloud. My Pollen skill had not affected the 40% I had expected. And that was my best trick.
I hung back as a few workers fell to the ground and vanished in death. I watched one get absorbed kicking and screaming into the crowd of sullen faces. His skin grew gray and his screaming turned into soft cries, then loud sobs as he turned toward his former comrades to scratch and grab at them with his bare hands.
Vin held his mace forward, but glanced back. He caught sight of me perched on the perimeter wall and yelled, “Run, Cale!”
How could I possibly outrun the Stricken? It seemed to sweep through the countryside with unnatural speed, covering the same terrain over and over until it had wiped out all life.
My best chance at survival was to run toward the underground isolation room. If I could hide underground, the Stricken might not notice me, or might not bother with a solitary mage when there were untold numbers of other players out there to slaughter.
If Alonso survived, though, he’d come looking for me. He’d take me to task for poisoning his precious plant.
I sped along the top of the stone wall until I reached the rear of the plantation grounds, I leapt down, and I sprinted toward the distance. With 45 stamina points, I could run for 135 seconds before my energy ran out. That might be enough time to fade from the Stricken’s view, to become an indistinct blur in the distance. I had to try it. There was no future for me on that plantation now.
I didn’t particularly want Alonso to outlast that fight, but I knew he’d hang back until the end. If he went down, it would only be after all the workers and guards were slain too. I didn’t want that fate for them. And what about the people that were absorbed into the Stricken? Was there any salvation for them, or were they trapped in a permanent gloom, desperate to inflict the same endless grief on other players?
I couldn’t know. All I could do was run.
14
My stamina had run out long ago, but the Stricken was nowhere to be seen. Its wretched sounds had fallen silent once I was far enough away.
At least now I could improve my Grow skill without fear that the guards would notice. I added my three unspent skill points to Grow. At tier 8 I gained the ability to control the direction of plants as I grew them. Tier 9 let me cultivate plants whether or not I had proper soil around, and tier 10 let me Grow plants I had Osmosed whether or not I had a chunk of the plant to work with. That new independence was a boon. Grow’s casting cost had increased to 2 MP per second, but its improved speed would more than offset the cost.
I walked for two days, sweating under the sun and sweating through the night as I slept under a cloudy sky. Each morning, the cramping of my insides, the pounding in my head, the shaking of my hands, was all more than I could bear. I took a lite leaf from my bag and gave it a chew, careful to spit it out before the dream state became my reality. It was all I could do to keep up the strength to forge ahead.
The ground underfoot was dry, but it got dryer the further west I walked. I followed the sun’s path across the sky and it led me away from the sparse plants of the steppe and into a dusty nothingness that became the hard baked clay of a desert.
The only plants here were an occasional cactus. I placed a hand on one and used my Osmose skill, in case I’d ever need a desert succulent of my own. Wary of the dryness ahead, I bent down and used my rusty switchblade to shave the needles off a short, squat cactus shaped like a small barrel. I uprooted it and stowed it in my bag.
I passed a statue of a person, sitting on the ground cross-legged. His elbows rested on his thighs, his hands covered his face. As I walked I passed other statues of people in similar states of despair. Up ahead, I saw people and some kind of obelisk.
“He had a good life,” a woman’s voice said, “but he’s gone now. We all die sometime. Roger Tannen was a brave man before the Stricken slit his throat.”
“No,” cried a man on his knees. “No, no, no.”
“I’m afraid it’s true,” the woman’s voice said. I realized it came from that ob
elisk. I walked behind the crying man and saw a mouth built into the small tower. “Please cry,” it said, “it’s ok to cry.”
The man on his knees was already crying. His shoes looked like they were made of marble. The other shapes I had mistaken for people were all statues.
“Are you ok?” I asked. The man ignored me. He stared at the obelisk’s mouth with rapt attention.
“Poor Nadine Cross,” said a man’s voice. I looked left and right, but couldn’t see anyone else nearby. The obelisk shifted toward me, gliding across the sunbaked earth below it.
“Who’s there?” I asked.
The obelisk turned. The woman’s voice continued to console the crying man, but now another mouth opened from the stone. “I met her once,” the man’s voice said.
