by Oliver Mayes
Stat points: 5
Experience: 28,650/110,000
Soul Summon Limit: 45/45 Soul Reserve: 10/10
His agility, intelligence and wisdom had only marginally increased. His strength, constitution and endurance had skyrocketed. In terms of raw stats, he was effectively in a Nine-Tenths of the Lore-buffed possessed incubus’s body, on top of all his own character stats. Although he did not appear to be wearing his armor, the stats from it were still applied. Between the armor’s defense and the stats, he’d take the stats any day. He promptly put his 5 stat points into wisdom, hoping his Soul Summon Limit would remain at 45 even when his Embodiment wasn’t active, and continued browsing.
He was surprised his agility hadn’t increased much, given the obvious buff to his attacks. His weapon was agility-based for damage, not strength-based. Nor did his stat page do anything to explain the health regeneration he was getting. He turned to his ability page and got a surprise. Pride had its own category at the bottom of the Demonology section, only visible when it was activated.
First Deadly Sin – Pride
What can men do against such reckless hate?
Might Makes Right: All problems are solvable through the liberal application of brute force. All your attacks and abilities factor strength into their damage in addition to their standard damage calculation. E.g.: Chaotic Bolt Damage: (Int) + (Str) x 0.2
Narcissistic Rage: “No one heals himself by wounding another.” – St. Ambrose, who never met the Embodiment of Pride. The regular Enrage doubles your strength and stamina when your health falls below half. With Narcissistic Rage, your attacks also gain a 10% Life-steal effect for 10 seconds, siphoning inflicted damage back to you as healing.
Single-Mindedness: The regular Charge doubles your movement speed for 10 seconds with no stamina drain and increases the damage of the first attack made in proportion to your movement speed. With Single-Mindedness, your movement speed is doubled again and the damage of your first attack is increased accordingly.
Stagnation: While in your Embodiment of Sin form, you will not gain experience from any source. Soul energy will be calculated independently and may still be collected.
Ah. Damien could see why the combat had gone in his favor, despite not setting it up properly. He was broken. If this was what broken looked like, he didn’t want fixing. Even without knowing what his abilities were he’d still laid waste. How much worse would it be when he was using them effectively, and in tandem? Much. Much worse.
This was a double-edged sword: Archimonde was similarly overpowered. Pride’s abilities were derivative of his incubus abilities, or more likely vice-versa, from a lore standpoint. It stood to reason he could gain some insight into Archimonde by looking into the consumer abilities. If the model held, Archimonde would have a stronger version of whatever it was they could do. It was a shame he’d been too busy testing his own abilities to look into the consumer abilities in depth. He’d have to test that later.
The only negative was ‘Stagnation’. He wouldn’t be able to gain experience while using this. Shame. That would’ve been too easy, huh? He could still farm souls, though, so this would work well for bringing his Soul Summon Limit back up or as an emergency button if he was about to die. That would reduce the inconveniences of dying very nicely while also making that scenario less likely.
Damien had gotten what he came for and more besides. It was time to head back. He opened a portal to the Gateway he’d borrowed off Scorepeeus63 and sent his consumers and imps through first. He followed them in afterwards, immediately killing an imp on arrival by not watching where he put his feet.
The room had been pretty full before but now it looked like a beehive. It was chock-full from top to bottom with imps. Several hundred of them, at least. Most of them were on the floor, dragging resources to the fully constructed Tier III Demon Forge. Those that had wings were flying in and out of the room at speed, those coming back bringing more iron and those leaving presumably going to get more.
The consumer was bent over the forge, working tirelessly despite the appalling conditions. Succubi lined the walls, firing off synchronized Bloodlusts that sent the entire room into a frenzy. Three of them were positioned in front of the consumer. When one started channeling a spell, the consumer opened its mouth wide to accept the donation of mana before continuing on with its endless work.
It appeared that all the occultists had gathered their best building teams to help Scorepeeus63’s construction efforts. That would explain why the Tier III Demon Forge had been completed so quickly. Damien had thought it would still be under construction by the time he returned, but instead they’d grouped together and set all their minions on it at once. This was an interesting benefit of them cooperating rather than killing each other. On the downside, Damien could scarcely breathe without inhaling imps. He sent out a very clear instruction to every minion in the room.
Everyone stop.
All the imps landed on the floor, creating a three-imp-thick carpet. Damien turned and was greeted by a gaggle of occultists. Greeted was not quite the right word: ogled. Absorbed. Disbelieved. Then, as Scorepeeus63 dropped to his knees, worshiped. His eyes rolled back into his head from pure excitement, his hands thrown into the air in ecstasy, Scorepeeus63 screeched out his adulation in a broken falsetto chime:
“Alllllll haillllll the Daaaaark Looooord!”
Then he threw himself at the floor, palms against the ground. That’s all it took. The rest of them immediately got on their knees and followed Scorepeeus63’s example. The cult had an established narrative, which was much easier to stick to than putting their own narratives together. The narrative was and always had been Damien. Him showing up as a giant demon in their base and taking control of all their minions simultaneously had not weakened that narrative.
This was the perfect opportunity for Damien to make a munificent display for his own gain. He picked out the highest-level occultists and shuffled their minions around for them where necessary, swapping out his five consumers for three succubi and nineteen more imps.
“Everyone who I gave consumers to, head back to your bases. We’re fighting Archimonde and Magnitude today, so I’ll be visiting all your bases to upgrade your Demon Forges. Then we’ll start building minion equipment. Don’t let anyone outside the Council of Nine know what we’re doing or what I look like, I want the advantage of surprise. We have less than six hours. Put messages on the board if you have any questions and I’ll try to answer them.”
He started channeling a new portal, intending to return to the Downward Spiral. Only ‘Daemien’s Gateway’, which was actually Scorepeeus63’s Gateway that he’d borrowed, and ‘Fields of Eternity’ were available. Annoying, but fixable. He trudged over to Scorepeeus63, the imp carpet parting at his advance.
“I formally transfer ownership of my Gateway to Scorepeeus63. Can you make me a portal back to the Downward Spiral, please?”
Ten seconds later, the portal was active. Damien sent all his new minions through before stopping himself in the nick of time. There wasn’t much point in telling the Council of Nine to be careful if he waltzed into an occultist trial as the Embodiment of Pride ten seconds later. He put his hand over his heart and canceled the form. No soul energy refunded. Shame, but not the end of the world. His Soul Summon Limit had remained at 45 following his investment into wisdom, even after the Embodiment was canceled. Excellent.
Damien ushered the minions into his base as quickly as possible. Noigel was still working on the Gateway, though construction ground to a halt when Damien appeared with three succubi in tow.
“Your reward is waiting for you, Noigel. I’ll need you to finish the Gateway first, up to second tier, so I can give the one I’m using back to its rightful owner. Then I’ll need enough soul energy to fill a Tier III Soul Well. I’ll be here for a few minutes, talking to Bart, so make the most of the imps while you have them. The faster it’s all done, the faster you get your reward. Chop-chop.”
He
walked out, taking all three succubi with him. He made it halfway to Bartholomew before Noigel’s screams exceeded any fury that had come from him before. It was enough to make Damien wince and appeared to offend Bartholomew even more. Damien had some slight reparations to make.
“Bartholomew. Hello. I’ve tested the Embodiment I got, after the torture session you signed me up for. It’s...it’s quite good. I feel as though, maybe, leaving you to put up with Noigel’s noise all this time might not have been entirely fair.”
“You think, do you? I hadn’t noticed.”
“That’s very funny, Bartholomew. Har-har. Is there some way we can block the entrance so you don’t have to put up with the noise?”
“Why, yes. I can seal it shut with everyone inside. I’d have done it earlier but you told me not to interfere with your base. It appeared that making me and all my initiates endure it was by design, so I didn’t wish to invoke your ire by going against your instruction.”
Damien thought about it. Once Noigel had finished the Gateway he’d be able to Portal directly in. It would be strange but functional.
“Sure, let me finish off my Gateway first and you can seal the entrance. And Bartholomew? Thank you. But next time, keep me in the loop? I might’ve taken the whole thing a bit better if you’d let me know what the plan was.”
“You’re my superior now, you need not ask such a thing. The ends justified the means, did they not?”
“Maybe. I guess we’ll find out when we see what the ends look like.”
29
Quadruple Jeopardy
The Frozen Forest was firmly under Lillian’s control by noon. Having officially decreed Carlisle-Elites as ‘Enemies of the Realm’ and exiled them from her domain, any would-be defectors responding to Magnitude’s recruitment drive would be forced to travel through the zone to physically find Carlisle-Elite members to induct them into their guild. Lillian’s first priority was to remove that option. While she couldn’t build a wall spanning the width of an entire zone in a single day, she had Godhammer, the newly reconvened Rising Tide and fifty Queen’s Guard at her disposal.
Men fight with troops. Children fight with buildings. Lillian knew the strategic importance of both.
It had taken hours to clear out the Frozen Forest, a slow but inevitable process. Lillian could neither make her groups too small nor spread them too far apart, or else she’d invite a counterattack. She and her Queen’s Guard were the most hardcore party by some margin and had taken the vanguard. The resurrection and healing abilities of her five embedded priests made taking them down next to impossible without improbably high sustained damage, which they were more than capable of returning in kind. Magnitude saw the writing on the wall and pulled all his incursion troops out of the zone.
With eyes on the no-man’s land in front of Magnitude’s wall, handpicked anti-scout teams from Godhammer and Rising Tide combed the forest in shifts. They were tasked to find players who hadn’t got the memo, scouts who were hiding to provide intel or Carlisle-Elite parties who’d logged out with the intention of logging in again to attack from the rear. Tracks left in the snow meant such groups would be detected quickly and converged on soon after, if they were foolish enough to attempt such a thing. Lillian was leaving nothing to chance.
With the front line secured on both sides, the Empire NPC craftsmen came to the fore. First they built a joint encampment within the tree cover, a double-sized Tier I base that could be thrown together in under an hour. There was no shortage of timber to use for construction material, though the rocks for their Portal Stones had to be dug up, transported or both. They needed more rocks than that, though, because the scale of this conflict demanded they employ a tactic that had never been very popular. Siege weaponry.
The option had always been available, a tab in the Construction menu of every guild leader. Most had tried it once or twice before they understood it offered more problems than solutions: any siege weaponry constructed had to be transported, which was slow, difficult, boring and left the convoy vulnerable. Building it on site took time and was an invitation for the guild headquarters under ‘siege’ to swarm out while the attackers were focused on building. It’s not worth much to break down a wall unless you can handle whatever’s behind it. Equally, it’s not worth much to build a wall unless you can prevent people from destroying it. It was usually easier to nuke the front gate with spells, gunpowder or brute force, even factoring in casualties, than it was to try and coerce impatient players into the work and preparation required for a long siege.
However, this situation merited siege engines’ use, as the top of Magnitude’s wall was out of range of conventional weaponry from the ground. Lillian wasn’t sure if they’d be able to destroy the wall itself. If not, they’d at least provide the ability to fire back at the people manning it. She set Andrew and Hammertime to crafting as many siege engines as possible while she went online to harass more guilds into joining them.
She’d only been messaging for a few minutes when she heard Hammertime and Andrew arguing with each other. This time sounded a bit more heated than usual, which was saying something. Despite being smaller, Andrew was the louder of the pair. What he had to say explained the volume.
“Lillian made you Warmaster! You represent our military strategy. So why are you building catapults?”
He could not be serious. Lillian closed her menu and made her way around the campsite, her first Queen’s Guard team forming up on her wherever she turned. It was Andrew who’d insisted she keep one group on her at all times. He’d posited, sensibly and calmly, that the easiest way for Magnitude to win this would be by killing her before the battle began. The same Andrew was now spitting over the beginnings of a catapult. He was serious. Even worse, Hammertime was defending his choice.
“—half as much time to build and nearly half the resources, because it doesn’t need the massive counterweight. That means we don’t waste time bri—”
“It doesn’t matter if it takes less time and less resources if the end product is COMPLETELY USELESS! How can— Lillian! Tell this idiot that trebuchets are the superior siege engine!”
“That idiot is my Warmaster and I’ll thank you to address him properly in front of our combined forces. You’re the Court Wizard, not the court jester. Keep it civil.”
Andrew wrung his hands.
“But Lillian, he’s building catapults! It’s like he wants us to fail!”
“I know. I’ll talk to him. I’m less concerned with his choice of weaponry than your lack of tact. Come on, Andrew, we’re all on the same team here. Hammertime, walk with me please.”
She escorted Hammertime out of earshot, then immediately wheeled on him.
“Okay, dude. What the hell? I know we didn’t use siege engines very often but catapults? Really?”
“They’re much simpler to make, I used them effectively several times, that’s my choice.”
“Hammertime, I didn’t make you my Warmaster out of sympathy or to say sorry or anything. I made you Warmaster because you deserve it. You’re a smart guy and your heart’s in the right place. So watching you build catapults is a real kick in the teeth.”
“Aetherius is building trebuchets, I’m building catapults. He can sit in the back and lob stuff from the back line, feeling all smug about it. Meanwhile, I’ll run the much more mobile catapults in to destroy the front gate with a concentrated barrage. We’ll see who’s an idiot then!”
“Hammertime, I can’t let you do this. I want to give you autonomy to do as you see fit, but this is so black and white I just can’t. A trebuchet can launch a 90kg projectile over 300 meters, with surprising accuracy. A catapult manages about half that, from less than half the distance. Assuming it gets within firing distance, which won’t happen because they’ll be the target priority. Please change the catapults to trebuchets so we have sustained supporting fire.”
“Sorry, Lillian, I’m standing my ground on this one. We have to destroy the gate and a catapult rush is
our best chance of doing that. Aetherius insulted me to my face, in front of both our guilds. I have to show him the error of his ways.”
Lillian licked her lips and stared up at the tree canopy, contemplating. There wasn’t any point in having Hammertime as her Warmaster if she couldn’t let him know what was going on.
“Andrew was wrong to talk to you like that. I’ll talk to him in private, like I’m talking to you in private. It’s no excuse, but he’s under excruciating pressure: Magnitude is his older brother. Magnitude also killed him on the day Aetherium fell. He stole everything in Rising Tide’s vault and used it to build this wall.”
“You’re joking.”
“I wish. Keep it to yourself. He was holding together pretty well, until he saw you building catapults. Let me put this in perspective for you: we’ll get one chance at destroying this wall, and you, the Warmaster I’ve appointed despite our personal grievances, are insisting on catapults instead of trebuchets. When both Andrew and I are telling you, me slightly more politely than him, that they don’t work.”
Hammertime scratched the back of his head.
“Are you really sure catapults won’t work? They always worked for me.”
“You used them twice, and from what I saw of those battles they were window dressing. This is important, Hammertime, important enough to get upset about. If you insist on building catapults, I’ll have you stake your reputation on it. I’ll change your title from ‘Warmaster’ to ‘Lord Catapult’. If it goes well, it will be an enormous compliment. If it goes the way Andrew and I expect it to, don’t say we didn’t warn you. Carry on.”
She walked further away, far enough not to hear the boys if they went back to bickering, and returned to private messaging each of the guild leaders in turn. It was no good just posting it on her own wall or in the forums, they’d just pretend not to see it. She had to call them out individually.
