Quest for Vengeance

by Benjamin Douglas

  Now, you may be a decent gamer. You may consider yourself a SUP4 L33t player, king of the mobs, slayer of goblins and lay-er of foblins. I don’t know. Maybe you’re really that cool. But no matter who you are, trust me. You will never, ever be as cool as my kid sister taking on a fucking rock spirit golem mini-boss with nothing but her bare fucking hands.

  Gamers everywhere will:

  Think themselves accurs’d they were not here,

  And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks

  That fought with her.

  She roared like a bear and charged, running full tilt and ducking under another of its deadly arm-swings. Then she leapt up onto that arm, and, pulling herself up stone by stone, climbed the rocky edifice of its body. The thing roared and tried to swat her away, but agility was not its strong suit. She pulled and pried rocks and pebbles free, throwing them to the ground. It pulled them back to itself. She wasn’t doing any permanent damage; it could obviously heal far faster than she could hurt it. But she bought me time.

  I couldn’t see the fire Fangs described because I lacked some skill he had, probably a racial trait. I vaguely recalled that mongrels used a different, more bestial kind of magic. All my power was tied up in mana, and this creature was a spirit golem. Luckily for me, I happened to have a couple of very potent sources of spirit magic on my person. I gazed at the Eternal Torch still in my hand. Activating Mana Sight wouldn’t do any good. What I needed was a spirit equivalent, but how was I supposed to get it? There were no scrolls here. No one to teach me.

  “Fangs!” I yelled. “How do you do it?”

  “Do what?”

  “See the flames?”

  He shrugged. “I just do!”

  Helpful.

  What had Sophia told me about mongrel magic back in character selection? Man. That was forever ago. I was sure she hadn’t said anything about spirit. At least, not in a way that had equated it with mana. Maybe if she had, I would have considered going that route. After all, Fangs wasn’t so bad. But at the time, she had made it sound like they were all a bunch of animals, just hungry beasts who didn’t care about anything but—

  Blood and guts. Their magic came from blood and guts.

  I wheeled around to face Gemma, my apparent mage adept. “Gemma! Cut me again!”

  “Are you sure?”

  I nodded. “Get me good, just try not to make it a crit. I need a body shot. Here.” I lifted my filty tunic and bared my taut, lean elven stomach. “Cut me open here.”

  Her eyes widened with worry. “Are you sure that—”

  “Oh for fuck’s sake,” Nemo spat, coming up from behind me. He brought his Elder M&M around and sank its blade into my obliques, ripping it across and opening my belly.

  “GAAAAAAHHHH!”

  The pain was unreal, it was so real. My HP immediately shot down below half, and I recieved angry warnings about friendly fire, a bleeding debuff, and an infection debuff. Shit. So much for not dying. I’d better make it count, I figured.

  I took the Eternal Torch and sank its fiery tip into the wound, gasping with pain and losing another 20HP. I blacked out for a moment and nearly fell on my face, but Nemo, still beside me, steadied me.

  “Gideon!” Gemma raced to me and sank to her knees, looking with horror at my open body, as if she could will the wound shut.

  Blood and guts and fire.

  The fire of the torch flared an angry red, as if my blood had caught and was one with the flame. Then, as I watched, red flames sprang to life all along the body of the golem.

  Racial Trait Unlocked: Spirit Sight

  You’re a bit of a rulebreaker, aren’t you? Spirit magic is inherently a racial trait of mongrels, whose chaotic alignment eclipses even your own dark alignment for pure ruthlessness. But somehow you have managed to uncover a secret path to this forbidden knowledge. Continued use of Spirit Sight may lead to sub-traited skill trees. But be careful. You are not a mongrel. Do not let the fire consume you!

  If there’d been time to celebrate or even reflect a little, I think I would have just fallen on the ground in shock. That was the most badass thing, by far, that could have happened. But there was no time at all. Now that I could see the golem’s magic, I still had to figure out what to do about it.

  I pulled the torch free and began to turn.

  “Don’t you fucking move!”

  I looked down and saw Gemma still kneeling in front of me, her hands stretched over my stomach, her eyes closed tight in concentration. I had to face the golem. Now. I expected I would bleed out in seconds.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “What does it look like? I’m playing guitar!”

  “What??”

  She opened her eyes. “I’m healing you, dumbass! Now stand still!”

  “Oh. Wait. What?” I activated Mana Sight to see what she was up to. And gasped.

  She was amazing.

  Multiple threads of mana dripping great, heavy drops of my precious lifeforce came together as I watched. Gemma moved her hands back and forth, going over my stomach again and again. Some of the threads she repaired stayed repaired. Some did not, and she had to come back to them. Mana was still eking out and evaporating, but not nearly as much as when Nemo had made the terrible gash.

  “Shit!” Glitch yelled. I snapped out of Mana Sight and looked up to see the last thing we needed. More mobs.

  “Surround our mages!” Fangs yelled. “Protect them!”

  “Fuck that!” Glitch yelled again, breaking free of the ring they’d begun to form around Gemma and me. Fangs growled at him, but there was no time to stop him. A fool is a fool.

  A pack of mid-sized Night Weavers had come running to the sound, no doubt aggro’d by the tumult of the fight between Angie and the golem. I looked her way. Or maybe they’d been triggered as a second boss phase? It did look as though she’d managed to pull more rocks away than when last I’d looked. As if prompted by my thoughts, the golem roared and moved unexpectedly quickly, finally catching Angie with its rudimentary hand and tossing her from its body. She flew through the air like a football and smashed into the base of one of the columns. Her eyes were closed.

  “ANGIE!” I yelled, wrenching my body in her direction.

  “Gideon!” Gemma said, “I’m not done!”

  I pulled her up by the arms. “You have to heal her! You have to!”

  “But you… you’re still bleeding!”

  I looked at the wound. It was an imperfect, incomplete job, but it was good enough. I would live. “I’ll be fine. I can work the mana too. But Angie is our tank, and my sister. We need her. I need her.”

  She didn’t look happy to abandon me before finishing, but she nodded and ran to Angie’s motionless body.

  “Ranged!” Fangs yelled. I saw Jane dodge out from behind him, slipping the tip of her spear into one of the Night Weaver’s many eyes. It screeched and backed away, but not before Fangs stepped into melee range and followed up with a swift M&M stab in the face.

  “Come back and fight, you trecherous shit!” Nemo yelled after Glitch, who was hiding behind a column from the Weavers. The kid shook his head and brought a finger to his mouth as if to shush us. “I will not be quiet,” Nemo said. “Here!” He picked up a loose pebble and chucked it in Glitch’s direction. “There you go, you bunch of eight-legged sons of bitches! Fresh meat, just over there!” He threw another pebble at Glitch’s feet. The kid closed his eyes and whimpered.

  “Cut the shit, Nemo!” Jane yelled.

  “I’ll stop if he comes back and mans his post! Got an opening right here, kid!”

  “I can’t!” Glitch sobbed. “I can’t. I’m sorry!” He turned and ran.

  Bad move.

  Another wave of oversized spider mobs cut off his retreat and swarmed him, wrapping his body in silk and sinking their venemous fangs into him again and again.

  I tried—and failed—not to listen to his screams.

  All around me my partymates were fending off monsters and t
aking hits. For me.

  It was now or never.

  I concentrated on the flames of the torch, still crimson red, and emptied my mind. I reached out to them, watching them dance, and tried what Gemma had said. What she had hinted at. I let them touch the flames in me, let them dance together.

  I found resonance.

  Passive Skill Unlocked: Spirit Manipulation

  Just like any other mystical energy, spirit can be shaped, channeled, and weilded. Congratulations! You have unlocked the skill: Spirit Manipulation. It will take a long time for you to be a true master of spirit, but everyone starts somewhere. Spirit Manipulation is a passive skill that can only be leveled through use. You’ve taken the first steps on a road of great power, but remember that spirit can burn till nothing remains. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

  Skill: Spirit Manipulation

  Type: Passive

  Level: 1 (scalable)

  Effect: 5% increase in ability to manipulate spirit from user’s body; 3% increase in ability to manipulate spirit from environment

  I opened my eyes and smiled. The golem had approached me, unharried by everyone else busy with the Night Weavers. A faint hollow growl emenated from its stone body.

  “Come get some, bitch.”

  Holding the torch aloft, I screamed, a wild battle-cry, and made the spirit fire in my body agitate the spirit fire in the torch. The golem paused a moment, considering, then stumbled forward to attack. I ran to meet it.

  I pulled my arm back, then thrust it forward, stabbing with the torch as if it were a great, flaming dagger. The fire met fire, and I sent a wave of resonance up my arm, through the torch, and into the golem’s body. The dialogue box that popped into my vision blinked red instead of the usual soft blue:

  Error! Trail Skill Overload. Racial Trait unprocessed. Coding error 4385$5%$2@8???

  A bunch more coded gobbledyguck followed and I wiped the message away. Error? What error? I thought I’d just get a notification that I’d dealt damage. Maybe scored a crit if I was really lucky.

  “Guuuh… Gid?”

  I turned to the sound of Angie’s voice and saw her sitting up against the pillar, looking pale and weak, but alive. Gemma was moving her hands over her body in a familiar pattern. Pretty sweet that she’d obviosly unlocked a healing skill.

  “Angie!” I wanted to run to them. To tell her it was ok. But I still had a flaming mini-boss on the other end of the torch in my hand.

  And the flames were burning brighter.

  The light increased until it threatened to blind me. As it did, it was joined by a high, keening sound, an unearthly wail that bounced around in the chamber and in my skull. The golem tried to move but was held fast. By my torch? By me? The error message flashed red again. Shit. What now?

  The light and the sound rose rapidly together to a decisive point, then hung, suspended, for a moment, before everything exploded.

  I mean, everything.

  The golem, yes. The torch. Also me. Angie. Gemma. The rest of our party. The spiders they were fighting. The columns. The ceiling, walls, floor—the air itself caught on white-hot fire and zapped into pure, chaotic energy. It was like standing at ground zero during a nuclear strike. One big, brilliant ball of death.

  We were gone.

  CHAPTER 14:

  AND FIRE

  _________________

  “Get him! Hold him!”

  Everything hurt. More than usual, even. I was shot out of the white nothingness, through the runestone, and onto the cavern floor. Half the party was already there. We were surrounded by Newlanders. The Noose, it seemed, was tightening. I coughed, wiping spittle from my chin as two of them pulled me up and wrested my hand away, pressing my arms behind my back.

  Notifications rolled into my line of sight and I pushed them away.

  “Well, well. If it isn’t the little taco. Hiya, bud. Remember me?”

  I glared at the speaker. It was Tommy.

  “I wondered when you’d show up,” I drawled weakly. “Your friends’ hospitalty is a little… lacking.”

  He laughed and looked at the wood-elf who stood stoic as ever, his bow over his shoulder. “You hear that, Dolan? Our guest here has an issue with the hospitality you provide!”

  “I’m shocked,” Dolan said.

  “What an ugly bunch of misfits.” Jess, the she-elf, strolled out from behind Tommy, twirling a dagger in each hand and eyeing us disapprovingly. “Did we really bring these in for you, Dole? They seem… I don’t know. Sub-average.”

  Angie came clattering from the runestone’s watery face to the ground with a thud.

  “Oh!” Jess said, circling back to her. “Now hang on, here’s a familiar face. I think I remember this one. You have a name, ogress?”

  “Go to hell,” Angie sputtered.

  “Now, now,” Tommy said. “That’s not very nice. Here you are, complaining about our hospitality, when it’s clear that you’re the ones in need of a little refresher course in how to behave.” Without warning he threw a deep right hook into my gut, winding me but not taking quite as much HP as I would have expected.

  “Oh! Oh my!” He laughed. “You have grown so strong! Did you get this strong in my mines? I don’t know. Come here, Jess, have a look at this one. What do you think? Is that just the product of Hard Labor, or is something else going on here?”

  Jess shrugged. “Why don’t you let me cut a few fingers and toes off and we’ll see what they have to say.”

  Fangs fell out of the runestone. Then Gemma. I glanced around. Jane, Meatloaf, and Nemo were on the ground too, looking no better than the rest of us. That was everyone. No—Glitch was missing. I frowned. What if he hadn’t been caught in the explosion? I’d assumed he’d been killed by Night Weavers, but what if…

  A horrible chill swept through my gut. What if he’d been taken alive? To feed on? If they’d made it past the radius of the explosion, he could be alive for… well, I didn’t know for how long.

  Man. I couldn’t think of a worse way to go.

  Tommy snapped his fingers in front of my face. “Hey. Hey! Tiny taco! I’m talking to you!”

  “His name,” growled Nemo, struggling to his knees, “is Chipdip.”

  “Oh ho! It speaks!” Tommy raised a foot to stomp on Nemo, but Nemo caught it in his hands and twisted Tommy’s leg. “You little pig-fucker! You’ll die for that!” The sword was in Nemo’s gut before Tommy finished the sentence.

  The dwarf, spitting blood, caught my eye. “Burn them all,” he gurgled, then passed out on the floor to bleed to death.

  “Burn me?” Tommy got in my face, his spittle landing in my eyes. “Did he say burn me? How you gonna do that, dipshit? You some kinda mage now, that it?” He raised his voice. “That what you’ve been up to while you’ve been squatting, a bunch of ungrateful, good-for-nothing lowbies, in my caves, eating my food, and stealing my fucking treasure? MY DUNGEON???”

  How did he…?

  The escaped guard.

  Goddammit.

  Something inside me died. Hope? I don’t know. For a brief window, Hero Online had been more than breaking rocks and eating stale bread and sleeping on a stone floor in a tiny cell with four other guys. For a brief, all-too-brief window, it had been fun. And after all I’d endured since logging in, that dungeon… it had been a lifeline. It had been hope. A reason to go on. A dream for what could be.

  Now I was watching that dream die.

  “Well?” He hit me again. In the face. Then in the gut. I doubled over, taking a deeper hit to my HP and catching a Winded debuff that chiseled some more at agility, stamina, and strength.

  “Get him up,” he said brusquely. “Get him up. Now!”

  No sooner had they stood me up than he punched me in the face again. Blood spurted from my nose and I crumpled, sagging in the arms of the players who held me up.

  Meatloaf—bless his heart. His hairy, cholesteral-laden heart. Meatloaf charged in and tried to lay a punch of his own on Tommy, but Dolan nocked and lo
osed an arrow in the blink of an eye, with unerring accuracy. The haft lodged in Meatloaf’s neck and the man fell to his knees, then his face, dying swiftly.

  “Ah, he’s worthless,” Tommy said, waving me off. The players let me go and I fell on my face. “What about you, sweetheart?” He strode over to Gemma. A couple of his grunts pulled her up just as they had done with me. “That’s a cute avatar. Think you’d let a fella take it out for a spin? I know you’ve been sleeping on bare stone. I’ve got a real feather bed. Down fucking feathers. Just think of it.”

  She spat in his face.

  “Hmm.” He wiped it away with his hand and flcked it to the floor. Then he punched her in the gut, too.

  “Here’s the thing,” he said, backing up to speak to all of us. “We know about the dungeon. We always have. Now you probably think it’s yours because you have squatter’s rights or something, but the thing is, it isn’t. It’s ours. It has always been ours. We own the fucking land beneath which it lies hidden. So here’s what’s going to happen. Whichever one of you pathetic little piss-ants breaks first and tells me where the entrance is, I promise to not to have slowly tortured to death over and over for the next week. The rest of you, too bad. Your fate is sealed. So. Who’s it gonna be?”

  I blinked back tears of pain, looking up at my partymates. Those who remained.

  Jane. Fangs. Gemma.

  Angie.

  I hadn’t known the others long. Hell, I didn’t know anything about them in real life. They could have been played by anyone. People I knew. Old friends. Coworkers. Or not. People from completely different backgrounds, people I would never have occasion to speak or interact with on the outside. Maybe Gemma was a grandmother. Maybe Jane was a plumber. Maybe Fangs was a 13-year old girl.

  Whatever. It didn’t matter. I knew them here, and here was all that mattered anymore. And in here, they were my party. They had my back, and I had theirs. In that dungeon, when things had gone to shit, they’d all trusted me to lead them and to make the right decisions. They’d trusted me to do what I’d been doing all along—to think outside the box, throw shit at the wall, make something—anything—happen, even if it quite literally ended up blowing up in my face.