Dungeon Lord: Abominable Creatures (The Wraith's Haunt Book 3)

by Hugo Huesca

  “This is impossible,” Young Ivan said, his voice shaking. He gave the sky a frightened look. “What in the gods’ name is going on? Is the world ending? Are Kharon and the old demons coming back to devour us?”

  “Get a grip, kid,” Costel said without taking her gaze from the fight. “And move back, you’re obstructing my view.”

  “That’s what the sky looks like when an area is saturated with Heroic-ranked—and above—scrying spells,” Lavy said quietly. “In other words, everyone who can afford to hire a Diviner is watching this fight go down. King Varon, the Militant Church, most Dungeon Lords and Regents. Everyone who is someone, and a fair share of nobodies too. Probably even some gods—those who care about human affairs, at least.” She placed a hand on Alder’s shoulder.

  “That checkered pattern is proof that we’re witnessing history,” the Bard said. “Every appearance goes straight into Bardic annals. It was visible during the final stand of Archlord Everbleed, and during Sephar’s punishment, and the last battle between Numerios and Lord Khalfair. And now we’re here to see it! Lavy, all Bards would kill for a chance like this—”

  “Well, I don’t get what has everyone so rattled,” said Costel, frowning. “Dungeon Lords kill Heroes all the time—without help, even.”

  “But Ed’s convinced two of them to switch sides!” Lavy exclaimed. “Don’t you see what it means? The Heroes are no longer the unrelenting killing machines they were! Now the Inquisition won’t know if they can trust the others!”

  “Well,” Costel said. “For killing machines, they are certainly struggling to bring down a lone Hero.”

  Lavy frowned and was about to tell the woman something biting when she realized Costel was actually right. In fact, Lavy saw how Ed clearly stepped back from a position from where he could have beheaded the Rogue.

  What’s going on? “Oh!” She turned to Alder and shook him. “He’s trying to capture him!”

  Alder turned and blinked. “What are you talking about?”

  “He’s waiting for us, you oaf! Quick, help me drag my stupid dish upstairs before the Cleric’s buffs run out!” She pushed the Bard backward into the tower despite his protest—he was clearly too taken aback by the “history in the making” opportunity to think clearly—and then turned to the guards, who had remained in place. “Wetlands, I was talking to you people as well! MOVE ALREADY!”

  We need a drone, she thought desperately as she rushed for the dish waiting in the middle of the staircase. Without drones we can’t connect the damn thing to a ley line… But Ed’s drones had vanished, hadn’t they? If Lavy failed to activate the Jamming Tower, more Heroes would pour into the plaza and she doubted Ed would manage to convince half of them to join his side this time.

  “Are there any drones left?!” Alder exclaimed as they climbed the last couple steps toward the tarp covering the dish.

  “Fuck it, I’ll do their stupid dance myself,” Lavy said as she set her hands on the tarp. She let out a sharp yelp when she saw one single drone standing behind the dish, trying its best to fulfill the last order given to it by dragging the dish all by its lonesome.

  The drone took one look at the Witch’s expression and tried to run from her, but she caught him in a tight hug and held it against her chest as forcefully as she dared without risking unsummoning it.

  “No one gets near this drone, you hear me?” she yelled at the guards behind.

  Alder and the guards carried the dish up the stairs as fast as they could, grunting as they went, the weight of the glass threatening to unbalance them with every step they took.

  Halfway up, they met with Kaga and his Monster Hunters, who had come down looking for them. “I can’t believe you two are still alive! You ran out of spells a while ago,” Kaga told them cheerfully as his men helped the overexerted humans carry the dish up the last floor. “If we survive the night, I’ll have to ask my father to make you both into honorary Haga’Anashi!”

  Kes was waiting for them in the middle of a chamber strewn with Akathunian corpses. Yumiya was tending to a wounded Monster Hunter at one side, and the Marshal had a distant look on her face that she quickly shook off when she saw Lavy’s expression.

  “What?” Kes asked her.

  “Look out the window,” Lavy told her. Then she turned to Costel. “Move those corpses out of the way! Hurry!”

  In seconds, they had rested the dish on the floorboards. Lavy set the drone in front of it. “Dance, damn you!” she urged, inches away from the imp’s face.

  The drone gulped and nervously faced the dish. With tentative steps, like someone trying to perform for the first time without any rehearsal, it began to dance.

  “Faster!” Lavy urged it. She was fully aware that everyone else was looking at her like she’d gone insane. She didn’t care. “FASTER!”

  The drone danced faster, its pink-and-purple tunic shaking madly with its frantic movements. Along the room, random debris and trashed furniture evaporated into smoky black tendrils that snaked their way through the air in synchrony with the drone’s movements. Most of the smoke disappeared down the floor, but a small tendril surrounded the tarp and consumed it to reveal the carved glass below.

  The dish stood, the smoke setting it in the correct position. A brass stand grew around the glass like vines, holding it in place. The brass kept growing until it was connected to both the floor and the ceiling. The remaining smoke flew into the glass, setting the engraved runes of its surface alight with raw energy.

  The drone’s dance reached a crescendo, and then the little creature stopped, looking tired. The smoke around the room vanished.

  “Is that it?” Alder asked. “Is it done?”

  The drone gave Lavy one worried glance and raised its shoulders while nodding over and over.

  “But nothing is happening,” Kaga pointed out.

  Lavy shook her head, a sense of dread growing in her chest. Her worse fear was coming true in front of her eyes. She had failed. “Something is wrong,” she said. “The Jamming Device didn’t activate. It should have done so by now…” She covered her mouth with her hands and took several frantic breaths. “Oh, gods. Someone needs to tell Ed!”

  As Ed and Lisa’s Cleric squared against Rylan Silverblade for another round, the Dungeon Lord shifted his gaze to the inside of the tower, moving from one view to the other in constant flashes. He needed to coordinate his attack perfectly with the Jamming Tower’s activation. At the moment, he spotted Lavy and Alder and a few others carrying the dish upstairs.

  Rylan Silverblade dashed at him and attempted an eviscerate, but Ed stepped back just as Lisa got in the way of the Rogue. The blades stopped just an inch away from the elven Cleric’s belly. At the same time, Ed circled around her and hacked at Rylan’s helmet in a shower of arcane sparks.

  Both Rogue and Dungeon Lord rained blows on each other, trying to do as much damage through their enchanted defenses and buffs as possible. Ed’s body screamed with exertion as he overused improved reflexes just to keep up with the Rogue’s speed. Every once in a while, he managed to steal another rank of Endurance from the Hero, but Ed burned through the extra energy just as fast, which only meant that both of them were slowing down at about the same time.

  Except that Ed could feel Lisa’s buffs on him starting to run out. With every strike and every parry, he grew weaker. The weight of his sword was growing to the point it felt like he was swinging a thick piece of wood, his shoulders, back, and arms screaming with the effort of every slash. Even his fingers were cramping up.

  “Eldritch edge,” he said, restarting the spell whose duration had just ended.

  It was time to end the fight. Ed switched to a view of the tower—he saw his drone dancing atop, with Lavy shouting something at it, probably encouraging and cheering it on. The sky above had turned to an impossible checkered pattern, but Ed’s mind shoved that detail away, all his focus pouring into the battle.

  That’s my cue, Ed thought, gritting his teeth. He locked blades with
Rylan Silverblade, kneed the Rogue in the belly, and struck his broken face with his elbow. Rylan stepped back, otherwise undamaged, and renewed the attack, forcing Ed backward, pushing his sword away with sudden ease—Ed roared as a red line appeared on his leg right in the open space between his armor’s plates. Rylan circled him like a bird of prey, but Lisa appeared to his side, canceling his attack and forcing him to reposition.

  Ed shifted his weight to his good leg and, and rested his back against the Cleric’s, defending against a flurry of blows so fast and savage that each successful parry threatened to tear his shoulder out of his socket. His sword was a nicked, dulled mess, and any second now Rylan would slap it out of his cramping hands.

  “Now or never, Lisa!” he yelled as the Rogue’s scimitars glowed purple. Ed and the Cleric circled each other and switched positions, with Ed facing the open plaza and Lisa facing the incoming Rogue. She rushed at the Rogue, preparing a spell as she did so. Right at that moment, Rylan Silverblade activated shadow strike again. The Rogue disappeared and then flashed back into existence in the space between Ed and Lisa, several inches off the ground, scimitars at the ready for a downward slash that Ed wouldn’t be able to block this time—

  Instead, the Dungeon Lord had already turned—he knew exactly where the Rogue would appear, after all—and had planted both feet firmly on the ground, ignoring the screams of agony of his wounded leg. He held his sword with both hands close to his body, tip aimed right at the Rogue’s gut, more of a spear than a sword.

  For an instant, it was as if the world had frozen in that moment, with the Rogue soaring toward Ed, scimitars crackling with power, and the Dungeon Lord staring him down, mouth frozen in a roar to urge his body into one last surge of strength.

  Then Lisa turned back and released her spell. The stormwind caught Rylan Silverblade from the back while he was still in the air and threw him forward with terrible violence like a leaf in a hurricane. Ed fought against the powerful wind to remain in position, back bent forward, sword at the ready, trusting in his own weight and the weight of his armor to keep him in place. Through his improved reflexes, he saw the Rogue fly toward him at impossible speed right as the Dungeon Lord’s vision became an exhausted shade of red. Ed thrust his sword with all his strength, and for an instant felt a terrible resistance as Rylan Silverblade’s enchanted leather armor tried to prevent the attack—and then a magical aftershock surrounded the Rogue and the Dungeon Lord when the armor gave and the flaming sword bit deep into the Hero’s gut, piercing all the way to the back and then out. Ed buried the sword to the hilt, and then the Rogue was upon him, embracing him as if they were lovers. They clashed and Lisa’s wind dragged them both through a confusing mess of steel, and Ed could sense how the Rogue’s inner workings tried to teleport him away just as the anti-magic runes in his sword flared to life with cold, blue light—one more second and the self-destruct mechanism would trigger with Ed right next to it, and there was no healing magic that could bring him back from being blown to pieces…

  “We need to leave,” Kes urged, grabbing at Lavy from behind and trying to drag her away from the dish.

  Tears were streaming from the Witch’s face. “No! You don’t understand,” she exclaimed. “I built this, everyone’s counting on me!”

  “It’s not your fault!” Kes told her. Since when was Lavy so stalwart? Desperation seemed to have multiplied the woman’s strength, because Kes was having trouble pulling her away. “You did your best, but now we need to evacuate the city before the rest of the Heroes arrive!” One more second and she’d just have to knock the Witch out.

  “Damn it! I built it right, I know I did!”

  “Lavy—”

  The Witch elbowed Kes in the gut. Kes blinked, more surprised than hurt, and then Lavy wriggled free. She rushed the dish, her face contorted in a paroxysm of pure unbridled rage and agonizing despair. She began to kick at the glass so hard that the brass stand shook with each strike. “I. Built. You. RIGHT!”

  Kes grimaced. Her hands were about to close on the Witch’s shoulders when, back in the metaphysical realm where the drones had connected the energy of the ley line to the essence of the Jamming Device, something clicked loose and fell into place.

  In a fraction of a second so small that it would’ve made the silence between a hummingbird’s heartbeats seem like hours, the Jamming dish went from being inert glass to the glowing white eye of an angry god. The world turned to a white flash, and Kes wanted to scream in surprise, but before her brain could even signal for her mouth to open, a magical burst exploded in a growing sphere out of the glowing eye, traveled through Kes and past her with such speed that she felt it in her bone marrow, and then she was lifted off of her feet and thrown all the way across the room against the solid wall—only by some miracle missing the window—forcing all air out of her lungs and making her see stars.

  It was only at that point that she managed to finish her surprised scream, but it came out more like a muffled groan. Then Lavy’s slender form struck against her and then the Marshal was out cold.

  Just as Kes’ feet were leaving the ground at the start of her inexorable path toward the wall, the burst had already surrounded the entirety of Undercity in a translucent sphere that saturated the air with the smell of ozone and blocked all incoming magical signals of a certain frequency. All over the world, Diviners shook their scrying devices as the sudden influx of static dulled their view.

  Every glass window in the city exploded into glinting dust beneath the twin moons. Every summoned creature was vanished back to its realm, and all as one, every Hero in Undercity collapsed immobile, spasming as their rudimentary brains demanded input that wasn’t arriving. They all either teleported out or self-destructed—all but one.

  Empress Laurel glanced at the sky, feeling her insides churn with the influx of magic saturating the city. Underneath her, Karmich and Pris stopped as they entered the escape tunnel with the cart full of survivors waiting for them. The Thieves exchanged glances filled with wonder.

  Klek and Tulip led a charge against the Wizard that had the Spider Riders and Oscor’s smugglers in their sights, but Tulip stopped short as the Wizard threw its arms up and disappeared in a flash. Klek lowered his spear, his body trembling from terror and adrenaline, and glanced backward at the distant plaza with the black tower pointing up like a finger challenging the gods.

  Bartender Max opened the cellar’s trapdoor to the burnt, still-smoking ruin of the Galleon’s Folly, and contemplated the checkered pattern of the sky above. A small, lingering flame licked the hairy man’s leg, but it did no damage, and he seemed not to notice. The bartender smiled to himself and went back under his cellar.

  After she’d circled the zone of the forest where she’d last seen the purple mist of the vampire, Alvedhra almost fell out of her griffin when she saw the city light up like a star for an instant. And she suddenly realized with growing dread that she’d made a terrible mistake by thinking that the Heroes and her fellow Inquisitors had the situation handled back there. Moments later, she’d sent Galtia a message with the Haunt’s general location, and flown back to Undercity—but by then it was too late. Undercity had rallied—bloodied but very much alive and angry, against the Inquisition. Alvedhra returned to a routing unit of the Militant Church’s survivors escaping from a suddenly hostile city and no Heroic support. She tried to reach the Charcoal Tower with her griffin again, on her own, but it was so heavily defended by then that the sky light up around her with runes and arrows, forcing her to retreat.

  We gave him a city, she thought bleakly, hours later, as she stepped along with her defeated Inquisitors through Mullecias’ magical circle. It was the first time in her lifetime that the Inquisition was forced to abandon a territory. Oh, gods above, what have we done?

  All the way across the world, King Varon rose from his chair, which threw the court’s scrying ball off the table and shattering it, much to his Diviner’s chagrin. “Gather our armies,” the King told the Knight
General next to him.

  And in Lotia and the Netherworld, both Demon Regents and Dungeon Lords alike rose with blazing eyes as their scrying devices showed Lord Edward Wright struggle to his feet, covered in wounds, armor so dented it was barely recognizable, cape torn to shreds and more brown than green, the last dredges of the Cleric’s buffs fleeing from his body in trails of smoke. His expression turned inscrutable as he regarded the broken shape of the Rogue at his feet, the last remaining Hero in the city, and the first one in history to be in possession of the Dark-aligned. For a single instant, then, as his Evil Eye flared, Lord Wright seemed to gaze straight at the scrying device, but by then few Dungeon Lords were still paying attention. Most were already up and gathering their seconds-in-command with greedy grins flashing across their faces.

  “Get me that Tower blueprint and that Hero,” they told their minions. “No matter the cost.”

  You have gained 235 experience points.

  Your attributes have increased. Brawn +1, Endurance +1, Spirit +1.

  Your skills have increased: Melee +2, Dungeon Engineering +2, Combat Casting +2, Leadership +5. Your aura’s energy expenditure has been reduced.

  There are new talent advancement options for you.

  There are new Dungeon Upgrades available for research.

  The Haunt’s level threat has grown enough for your enemies to know its approximate location.

  31

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Ancient Traditions

  *CONNECTION LOST. RECONNECTING… RECONNECTING…

  Ivalis Online crashed. Lisa slowly took her hands away from the keyboard. That had been intense. Probably the hardest fight she’d ever faced. How many IO players could boast that they’d taken out another player by using a Boss to do the dirty work for them? And as a healer! Her forum account was already lighting up with notifications from hundreds of threads mentioning her username as players everywhere lost their minds because of her feat.