Clans War

by Mahanenko, Vasily

  “What do you need all these cares for, Shaman? Renounce your doubts and sorrows and return to me.”

  When it became clear that I could resist the caresses and gentleness of the water, I brought the heavy artillery to bear. The voice. So gentle, so inviting, so mesmerizing that for a few moments I forget everything that existed. There was only the voice and its calling. Leave everything? No problem. Forget it all? Right this instant! Return to the voice? Of course! I’ll only have to think of what to say to Anastaria, since…

  Anastaria! Barliona…Damn it all!

  The hallucination vanished as if it had never been. The ‘Exit’ button appeared before me again and it was only through sheer will that I managed to keep myself in Barliona. If initially my premonition had whispered quietly that I couldn’t leave, now it was screaming and waving a red flag. Something powerful was coming, something that I would like, though I still had to earn it. I had to remain. I had to hold on.

  Suddenly the water’s gentleness and care vanished. Along with its mesmerizing whisper. In their place came cold and abrupt currents which eliminated all the pleasure I had experienced earlier. The abrupt change in environment caused me to open my eyes and see the water around me roiling in motion. Several meters ahead of me, as well as all around me, the water began to embody itself, gradually adopting the form of a semitransparent water elemental. Thirty seconds elapsed and I found myself surrounded by a dense ring of nine Level 300 monsters. With eyes as red as oxygenated blood. Aggroing mobs! Progress bars were glimmering above the monsters’ heads, steadily approaching 100%. If I understand the elmentals’ transformation correctly, the bar reflects the final formation of the creatures. Right this instant, the monsters were at 82% of readiness, and with every passing moment, the distance between me and the Gray Lands was growing smaller. Dealing with nine mobs would be too much for me.

  Like hell!

  The Shaman has three hands…

  This time I didn’t bother singing out loud. The water surrounding me didn’t keep me from breathing, but it did keep trying to get into my mouth as soon as I opened it. I had to resort to doing my summoning mutely, like Kornik had taught me. The system again informed me that I’m not allowed to summon a Spirit that was beyond my rank, yet I swiped away both the notification and the system itself. I am a Shaman! The only limitation to which I would agree was my own unwillingness to do something. Everything else had to be intercepted and cut out at its root. Since I’m not allowed to work with the Spirits directly, I’ll have improvise. And how can I improvise, being a Shaman Jeweler? That’s right — only in design mode.

  Without even considering how foolish my actions were — spurred on by my sharp feeling that I was doing everything correctly and the way it needed to be done — I opened design mode. Finding myself in the middle of my well-lit creative chamber, I mentally bound one hand to one edge of the room and the other to the other edge and then abruptly brought my hands together. I’d done a similar thing when I was crafting the Pendants, so my mind didn’t bother resisting the novelty of this action. Since a completely reasonable precedent already existed — one which had caused me to end up here to begin with — then there wasn’t much to think about or consider. I needed to act.

  The room began to waver; it contracted and collapsed with a clap into a formless lump like a tablecloth that had been whipped from the table and crumpled. I was plunged into my customary and longed-for darkness, punctuated by the shelves bearing my former creations. My old design mode. I kicked the illuminated interface away from me with revulsion, causing it to roll along an invisible floor and vanish in a bright flash, and created a projection of the Water Spirit. Kalatea had once told me that Spirit summoning and crafting have nothing in common. That these things exist in different planes of reality. Well…Let’s see which one of us was wrong — the insolent Shaman who lets his premonition guide him at all occasions or the experienced ideologue and creator of our class. After all, I intend on working with the Spirits through my crafting.

  Damage taken…

  Damage taken…

  Damage taken…

  A litany of notifications began to flash past my eyes, telling me that I was taking damage and trying to distract me. Once again thanking the unknown technician who had turned off my sensory perception, I completed the creation of the Spirit and looked him over critically. Outwardly he looked like an elemental, but he was quite different — my creation had appendages. Six appendages in his lower portion, which served as his legs and about seven-eight flexible appendages throughout his body, variously appearing and vanishing along his barrel-like torso. Due to his warped face, my elemental was more of some monster than a Spirit, but to my untrained eye, the result was excellent. The Spirit should scare his enemies. If not with his actions, then at least with his face.

  The most important thing remained — I had to force my Spirit to do what I told him to. Simply put, he had to defend me from the rabid elementals who had by now managed to take my HP down to 60%. This, despite the insane amount of armor and all the magic resistance that came with it. If I had been wearing my old gear — the cocoon’s lid would long since have slid aside, releasing me to my own devices for the next twelve hours. By the way! I should really pay to shorten my respawn time. A million gold isn’t the kind of money that you’re sorry to lose six hours of gameplay over.

  Embodying the Spirit didn’t work. Whenever he acquired the required density, I realized that I had created a simple statue which would fall apart in a few seconds due to my lack of the Architect or Sculptor professions. Try as I might, design mode only created lifeless items, since that was all it knew to do. But that didn’t make me happy. I needed a result…

  You have entered the unity.

  Since nothing else occurred to me, I completely shut off my brain and began to act on pure instinct. I can’t embody the Spirit? No problem — I’ll be the Spirit myself!

  “Greetings, brother! ” A ringing voice sounded instantly in my head. At first I was taken aback, then I understood who was speaking: Spirit-Me. I was hearing those whom I had summoned! “I can’t activate your creation. Give me a way to reach it.”

  “He is weak, take me instead! ” another Spirit-Me yelled from some other part of the Universe. “No one but me will be able to control your elemental! ”

  “Me! Only me! The rest are too weak!” Dozens, hundreds, thousands of Spirit-Me’s hung over me, offering their services. All I had to do was reach out my hand, touch the entity I wanted and allow it to soak into the created Spirit through my essence. All I had to do was serve as a bridge between the world of Spirits and my world of real things…No! I won’t be a path! I am a Shaman!

  I was about to dispel the unity, since I wasn’t seeing anything useful to me here when suddenly a question occurred to me that I couldn’t answer.

  “Who are you? ” I asked, since the opportunity had presented itself. “Why can the Shamans summon you? Why weren’t you destroyed in Erebus? Why don’t you return to Chaos?”

  Like at the wave of a wand, the noise and clamor disappeared. When I began to think that the Spirits had fallen silent because of my insolence, a thousand throats spoke in unison:

  “WE ARE THOSE WHOM THEIR ANCESTORS REMEMBER! THOSE WHO EXIST BECAUSE OF OTHERS! WE ARE THE DEVOURERS OF THE ESSENCES!”

  As the Spirits spoke, each word cast me deeper and deeper into a state of utter shock. The entire logic of the Barliona afterlife I had believed in, collapsed like a house of cards. Completely and irrevocably.

  The Spirits were basically vampires. Like all mortal creatures, they had once died and their souls had been consumed by Chaos. However some essence (I didn’t really understand what it was) had remained in Barliona. Every time that someone recalled a deceased creature, he would give it a piece of his life force. In a word, if a sentient begins to live only in the past, it dies very quickly. Barliona seemed very strict about this. Furthermore, the more renowned the creature was during its life, the more life force i
ts essence received, to the point that eventually it would become conscious. Yes, it could no longer return to Barliona as a living creature, since its Spirit had already died, but the stronger essences received the ability to inhabit a dead body, turning into a Zombie. Some become Spirits for Shamans to summon, acquiring this or that power in the process. Others become phantoms, others Astral demons, and others great heroes of the past who could temporarily embody themselves in the living world. Basically, there were many options for what could happen to an essence. The main problem was to remain consistently remembered and thereby receive this life force…even if doing so meant having to kill living creatures. The main goal was to live at the expense of the living. Thence the devourers of the essences and hence…vampires.

  I couldn’t help but draw an analogy to the real world. We too remember our ancestors…And even today, people believe in ghosts, strange voices, odd howls…Blech! Enough! I didn’t come here for this!

  “In other words, you can’t become living because your souls have been absorbed by Chaos? ” The idea struck me. “What if someone managed to steal a soul from Erebus? How can it come to life in that case?”

  “THIS IS IMPOSSIBLE! IN ALL OF HISTORY, ONLY TWO CREATURES MANAGED TO ESCAPE EREBUS.”

  “If there were two, there could be more ,” I refused to surrender.

  “NO! THE DIRECT DESCENDENT OF HARRASHESS — AND THE SON OF TARTARUS AND ELUNA WHO DECIDED TO BECOME MORTAL — ARE TWO VERY UNIQUE CREATURES.”

  As Alice once cried: “Curiouser and curiouser!” What an enormous, elaborate world Barliona is! If you just look around a little, there’s no limit to what you can find…

  A lightning bolt of epiphany pierced me through my head to my toes. I understood! A Shaman cannot be a bridge or a path between two worlds. If he is, he must surrender himself and eventually he’ll cease to be a Shaman. An NPC will die; a player will lose his powers. A Shaman must serve as a guide. To guide the Spirit to the correct place and sacrifice this other creature. Until the Shaman becomes a Harbinger, he must give his own life force to summon Spirits. I was always surprised by the cost the Shamans had to pay for each summoned Spirit, and only now did I understand where my hands and feet were. As soon as a Shaman becomes a Harbinger, he is granted the ability to figure out himself and decide what is more important for him: to engage in sadomasochism, giving up his own life force for each summons, or to become a conduit, allowing the Spirits to devour other creatures. Warriors, children, animals…whoever…as long as it isn’t the Shaman himself. What a nice little class I chose to play!

  I looked at the created Spirit and yet another realization dawned on me. It wasn’t for nothing that I had entered a unity…

  I was told that the water is deceitful and tricky. Dangerous and unreliable. Pitiless and senseless. Naïve and foolish creatures! Water is the source of life! No creature can exist without it. How can someone call it terrible? No. It is the way it is. All-consuming, multiform, embracing and gentle. It’s stupid to resist this. Water can only be limited by some other form, figure or vessel. For example, the Spirit I had created…

  You have subjugated the Supreme Water Spirit. Duration of subjugation: 31 (Crafting) seconds.

  The eyes of the elemental I had created filled with a bright light as, simultaneously, my unity and design mode vanished into non-existence. I was again surrounded by enormous sheets of water — the nine elementals trying their best to kill my character — and yet a new challenger had appeared: the Spirit I had created.

  “Let them have it!”

  The system hiccupped one more time about how I had to work within the rules, but I wasn’t paying any attention to it. The battle had begun…

  “Q.E.D.” Kornik’s mocking voice tore the surrounding space in twain and suddenly I realized that I was standing in front of a great tree. The elementals and my Spirit had vanished, as if they’d never existed. Beside me stood the six Zombie guards, cautiously examining the graves at their feet, while right before me, in a lotus pose, sat Knucklear satisfied and smiling. Behind the monk’s back stood a whole detachment of Barliona’s finest NPCs: Kornik, Prontho, Nashlazar, as well as another dozen or so Shamans that I hadn’t yet met. What’s this all about?

  “I won’t waste time on pretty words,” Kornik went on. “I’ll be brief — good job and all that. I’m sad to admit it, but I no longer have the right to call you my student, just as you can no longer call me your teacher. Welcome to Barliona, Harbinger!”

  Harbinger class confirmed.

  The ‘Water Spirit Rank’ restriction has been lifted, as you will no longer need it.

  Chapter Five. The Hermit

  “Greetings, oh nemesis! Please accept my gift, Harbinger!” Nashlazar slithered over to me on her enormous tail and held out a small branch. The item was thickly decked with white berries which were as large as good-sized pearls and which hid the green leaves and the green stalk from sight. I accepted the gift automatically and immediately opened its properties. This should be a nice present! The greater my disappointment when among the properties I encountered about the most mundane thing I could have:

  Branch of White Mistletoe. Description: A present from Nashlazar. Durability: 20. Item class: Common.

  Not even a hint of some function, hidden bonuses, possible quests or other little tidbits that I loved so much. An ordinary piece of wood that even had Durability. No doubt it would wither away in the next few days. What kind of a present is this anyway?

  “Greetings to you, Dragon! Please accept my gift, Harbinger!” An elf I’d never met before followed behind Nashlazar, handing me a fern. Again no bonuses or powers. A simple branch.

  One after another, the Shamans began to come up to me, greet me and deposit their bouquets in my hands. Kornik’s was pine, Prontho’s was oak. Really quite symbolical of them — one as prickly as a hedgehog, the other as impenetrable as an oak. Is that to say that Nashlazar is actually a white and fluffy Siren? Like hell!

  “What is going on?” I exclaimed when the Shamans arranged themselves in a line, nodded one more time and vanished, leaving me one on one with a very smug-looking Knucklear. “Kornik?! What in the hell?”

  “Phew, what a dreadful lack of manners! ” the voice of the Harbinger Elf appeared in my head. It sounded so disgusted and outraged that I couldn’t help but wince. The odd thing is that I’d never imagined that Elves could be Shamans. It seemed to me like they were usually Druids, Hunters, Mages, but never Shamans. But no! Not only was there at least one Shaman among the elves, but he was a Harbinger too!

  “A cursing Shaman, what could be worse? Kornik, haven’t you told him about the Harbinger channel?” The Dwarf Harbinger echoed the Elf.

  “What do you expect from a savant who’s become Harbinger in only a year? ” the Elf spoke up again. “He’s got neither stature, nor experience, nor an ounce of respect for his senior and more experienced colleagues. A Dragon through and through!”

  “I hereby strip Mahan of his ability to communicate with Harbingers for one day. Let him reflect on his behavior, ” Nashlazar announced and the other voices fell silent. A notification flashed by, announcing that my telepathic link with the Harbingers had been blocked. All I could do was raise my eyebrows in puzzlement and ask myself: What was that? Why’d they just toss me out like some unruly kitten? What’d I do anyway? No, Shamans are definitely strange people. Their communion with the Spirits really does come at a price — some part of their sanity is lost in the process. And lost for good.

  “Are you done playing with your Shamans?” A mocking voice inquired, forcing me to look up from my examination of the horizon in search of universal justice. Knucklear. The monk was sitting in a lotus pose, slowly running a toothpick through his teeth. Once he was sure that I was looking at him, the fat man nodded to the guards, “What’d you bring these thugs here for?”

  “I want to bring them back to life. I’ve heard that you know how to do that,” I blurted out honestly, unwilling to beat around the bush. />
  “You want it?” The monk aped me. “Did you ask them? Do they actually want to become living?”

  “Of course!” replied the six guards as if on cue, while the one who was the jailer’s brother added: “We have families to return to!”

  “All right, all right! You don’t have to yell,” Knucklear frowned unhappily. “Let’s assume that you really believe that you want to return to the living, return to your previous service as guards and only remember this entire affair as some terrible dream. Am I right?”

  Six guards began to nod their assent, forcing another smirk from the monk. What did he want? NPCs never use sarcasm just like that, so there had to be some reason here. Yet I hadn’t the slightest idea what it could be!

  “Okay…Let’s do this differently. Tell me, kid,” the fat man turned to Clouter, “how do you like being able to see the affinity of other sentients? How do you like seeing their fears and secret desires. Understand what bothers and unsettles them? What’s it like being a Priest?”

  Clouter was taken aback by such a question and stared at the monk blankly. Here it is! Someone else had joined my clan of stupefied creatures. I no longer feel alone in my stupefaction.

  “You will remain a Priest as long as you remain a Zombie. I have no idea how this happened, but if you return to your previous condition, you will become a Warrior again. Are you ready for this?”

  Clouter’s eyes grew as large as saucers, he staggered from the monk, shaking his head, tripped over a root sticking out of the ground and collapsed. The fear and shock at the danger of losing his newly-acquired class, was so immense that Clouter paid no attention to the fall, trying to crawl away from the danger before him.

  “That’s what I’m talking about,” Knucklear remarked philosophically, grinning as he watched Clouter take cover behind a tree. “What are we going to do then? Six Zombies returned from Erebus, so six Spirits have inhabited our world. In order to make them living, we’ll need six bodies — and here it’s looking like someone’s getting cold feet.”