by Harry Nix
He turned to me, drawing his bowstring back slightly.
“I’ll make you a deal, in respect to our friend Elora here. Take off everything you’re wearing and you’ll walk out of here naked but alive. Leave the staff and the bag.”
Now this douche was really starting to piss me off.
“Leave your weapons and go, and I’ll let you live,” I said. I brought up my staff, ready to hit Bolt.
“Wrong answer sunshine,” Mancer said.
He shot his arrow just as I hit Bolt, talking about a third of my mana. The lightning poured out of my hands, ran up the staff and zapped from the end. It grounded on the metal tip of the arrow. There was an enormous crack as it split away from the shaft and went spinning off into the trees.
For a moment we both watched it fly up into the air, astonished. On the one hand it was good—I hadn’t been shot with an arrow. On the other, Mancer was unharmed.
“Fight!” roared Scarlet, shouldering past me to hurl a fireball.
Okay, she had fire spells apparently. I’d been thinking along those lines, figuring she was from a fiery hell of some kind. Had Lucy plucked it out of my mind and made her that way?
The fireball got everyone moving as it hit Mancer in the chest and knocked him on to his back. I started spamming Bolt, switching between William and Mancer. This was my first fight against real enemies and so I didn’t know the best strategy yet—focus fire on a single enemy or spread it around. Sometimes if you spread it around you aggroed enemies who otherwise would have stood back, waiting their turn, like some dodgy martial arts movies where the bad guys attack one by one.
Elora was standing still, holding her chakram, seemingly deciding whether to join the battle or not so I ignored her for now.
Mancer got to his feet but Scarlet hit him with another fireball. There was a loud twang as his bowstring snapped. Without a pause he dropped it on the ground and pulled out a rusted short sword. I hit him with Bolt again and watched with satisfaction the electricity climb up his armor and over his face. The shocking effect was minor, but it still gave us a slight edge.
I was about to hit him again when William came charging in. He’d obviously realized he’d needed to close the distance and get into melee range.
I shot him with a Bolt but it just hit his sword and dissipated harmlessly. He swung the rusty sword at me and connected.
A rusty sword is a blunt sword, which was probably the only thing saving me from instant death. I was only wearing graveyard rags.
Instead of having my left arm hacked off, it was like being hit with an iron bar in my left shoulder. Translation: it hurt like fuck but didn’t break the skin. Still, I lost a decent chunk of health straight up.
I dived away from him to get some distance and pretty much stepped on Ori. He was still streaming the light fantastic though and didn’t notice. Bolt was still on cooldown, so as William charged, I did the only thing I could think of.
I hurled Ori at him.
The little ink demon didn’t weigh much, so he had a good bit of speed going when he crashed into William.
The game must have had some sick sense of humor because, from the angle of the collision, I’m pretty sure William got two ink demon nuts to the face.
It damn sure stopped his charge.
He swatted Ori away to the ground and finally the demon came back to this reality... sorta.
“Penguin! Penguin! No!” Ori shrieked, bolting up from the grass. He was staring at William in abject terror. Then his hands moved in some complicated pattern and two things happened at once:
Half his health bar vanished.
Ori liquefied and shot up to wrap around William’s head and neck, leaving a wet trail behind him.
William’s roared and started blindly swinging his sword around, flailing at the black ink that was attempting to choke him.
Whatever Ori had hit him with was damn powerful. As I looked across, Choke appeared and text spooled down beneath it.
Ori’s liquid and humans are mostly liquid but they also drink liquid through a tube that’s right next to the breathing tube. So get Ori liquid in the breathing tube and you get choke. Higher levels unlock advanced abilities.
I moved back and turned to where Scarlet and Mancer were trading blows. Somehow Mancer had lost his short sword and was down to his fists. He was punching at Scarlet but she was ducking and weaving like a pro.
I was about to hit Bolt when a world of pain burst from the side of my head and I went down on one knee. It felt like I’d been hit with a frying pan. There was even a loud metal BOOOOOOIIIINNNNGG that echoed through the forest.
Elora deftly caught the chakram that came flying back to her hand. STUNNED flashed up in my vision along with a ten-second timer. I tried to move but it was like struggling through cold molasses. My Bolt icon was grayed out too.
I saw Elora look at me and then gently shake her head. What was she doing?
In front of me, Scarlet dodged a punch and then shoved Mancer back with two hands in the chest. It was enough to give her about a foot of space.
Even in the midst of battle I was still with it enough to see that Scarlet was looking damn good. That body under that graveyard dress.
But then she must have used an ability on Mancer.
Even though she’d clearly taken a few shots to the face (one eye was swelling up and there was blood trickling from the corner of her mouth), she was suddenly extraordinarily beautiful. I wanted to do nothing more than stare at her all day long. Those lips, those eyes, the perfect structure of her face. That blood, it was so goddamn hot and beautiful and all I wanted.
From the corner of my eye I saw Elora’s jaw sag open as the spell or whatever hit her.
Mancer was helpless before it. He dropped his hands and swayed like he was drunk.
Despite the fact Scarlet was down to less than half her health, she was still moving fast. She closed the gap between them, grabbed Mancer’s short sword from the ground and in one rising move drove it up into his throat and into his head.
Instakill.
A golden light shot up from his body into the air and I saw the experience bar inch along.
I suddenly found myself able to move again and not completely infatuated with Scarlet. As Mancer’s lifeless corpse toppled to the ground, I spun around and shot Bolt after Bolt into William.
Ori was still wrapped around his throat but now turning solid. William managed to get a hand to him and toss him off, splattering him against a tree. Ori was up again in a flash, throwing inkballs the size of grapes at him from his fingertips. It may have been my imagination but he appeared to shrink as he was doing this.
Scarlet joined in, throwing a fireball and a moment later William crashed to the ground, dead. More gold rose up and added to my experience total.
The three of us turned to face Elora but she was gone, vanished into the forest.
“We should chase her. She could bring others,” Scarlet said. Her normally green eyes now had tiny flames dancing in them.
I shook my head. The three of us were all below fifty percent health. Besides, Elora had only attacked once, and it appeared it was so Scarlet could hit Mancer with some sort of entrancement ability. My arm was killing me where William had chopped it.
“Let her go. I don’t think she liked these two anyway. Plus, we need to heal.”
Scarlet grumbled to herself but the fire in her eyes went out.
I checked the bodies but didn’t come up with much. Five coppers between them. Mancer’s short sword was firmly lodged in his skull and I gave up trying to pull it out.
Normally in the early part of a game you’d loot everything, even it was worth next to nothing, just to build your stash of money. As I looked over their armor, I decided to do exactly this—although I had no idea where I’d be able to sell it or what it was worth.
But they were both wearing leather armor that had seen far better days. It wasn’t like clothing you could slip on and off. Each piece was laced up wi
th leather and by the look of it, they’d been living in their armor for a long time.
After struggling to undo the lacing, I gave up and tried to use William’s blunt sword. As I hacked and swore, Ori sat against a nearby tree, arms wrapped out his knees murmuring nonsense to himself. I occasionally heard penguin but otherwise had no idea what he was doing.
“Is this going to take much longer?” Scarlet demanded after about a half-hour.
Our health had replenished and our wounds were gone, although she still had the outline of a black eye. My arm was still faintly throbbing.
I looked at my small pile of crappy leather armor I’d managed to collect. There wasn’t a single piece you could wear without replacing the lacing. The bits that had come off William were blackened with soot from Scarlet’s fireballs.
“Okay, fine, let’s go,” I said.
I scooped up the lot of it and stuffed it into my bag. It was weird watching whole pieces of armor drop into the bag and then vanish into the black. In my action bar I saw little icons appear as each piece landed. My heart sank as I saw the word DESTROYED appear next to each one. That was a sure sign they’d be worth zero.
I finished packing away the armor and William’s rusted sword (that at least might be worth something) before I walked over to Ori.
“Penguins, they come, they come and they look like that but they’re not that are they?” he said, babbling.
“Ori, you’re high. There aren’t any penguins.”
He looked up at me. His pupils were still dilated but somewhat coming back to normal (for him, at least).
“Okay, okay, no penguins, bad, bad,” he said and got to his feet.
“What do you have against penguins anyway?” I asked him as I led us out of the clearing, leaving two dead bodies behind.
He looked up at me solemnly.
“They look like butlers but they’re not butlers, are they?”
I nearly laughed aloud but then saw Scarlet gently shaking her head.
“No, they’re not butlers, Ori,” I said to the little ink demon.
7
We set off marching down the rutted track alongside the forest. Ori was silent and so was Scarlet so I used the time to go through every menu I could find.
When I’d looked before, I’d seen there were no statistical details. No intelligence, charisma, any of that. But the game was offering me More Luck! as the text went. Maybe Lucy was only showing me a cut-down amount of information.
But no matter what I looked at, there was only descriptive text. The only numbers listed were levels; my own, Scarlet’s and Ori’s. We were all level two. Scarlet had Fireball and something called Pure Desire, which I guess is what she used on Mancer. Ori had Choke and Inkball. I had Bolt and the ability to summon Scarlet and Ori, although I wasn’t sure how that worked. I guessed they could die and I could bring them back but there was no info on any restrictions there.
Scarlet and Ori were walking a little in front of me. I cupped my hand to my mouth so they couldn’t hear me and whispered “Show me stat numbers,” to myself.
“What was that?” Ori asked, turning around and walking backward so he could talk to me.
“Just talking aloud,” I said.
He spun on the spot without a word and kept walking. He was sometimes leaving ink footprints as he went but they quickly soaked into the ground.
I checked through menus but there was no change.
As we walked I tried everything I could think of to get some numbers. My best guess was maybe I’d swiped away some status or something that had appeared. Maybe Lucy had interpreted that as me not wanting to know?
I’d played plenty of games like this. Instead of giving you numbers so you went out grinding killing rabbits or whatever, you just had levels and the story leveled you up at the appropriate moments.
Maybe the game knew me, was reading my mind as I suspected. I have in the past been a little obsessed with min-maxing so it was taking that chance away. It had just ambushed us with an attack as I was planning out what spells and abilities Scarlet and Ori should have.
We continued marching, me beginning to ponder that this had become a walking simulator.
Don’t get me wrong—the quality of the simulation was still spectacular. There was a gentle breeze, butterflies, the sound of leaves rustling. Even the dried mud in the cracks of the wheel ruts looked incredible. It was relaxing.
Was Lucy monitoring me as I walked? If I enjoyed this too much would it suddenly cut combat and this would turn into a giant walk in the forest only?
I had no real way to measure time but I could feel it moving along as we walked. Just as I was thinking about going into the forest again to make something happen, I saw the path ahead change from dirt to paved.
We stopped at the transition and I noticed Scarlet was biting a nail, looking around, worried.
“Is there some danger?” I was ready to hit Bolt the moment anything showed its face.
“No, it’s not that... there used to be more forest. I don’t know why it’s thinning out here. This path is new, also.”
“They’re always making new things. Find a really good dealer who’ll get you super high and then get sent back to the hells? Next time you come back you’re working with his kid and your favorite head shop is gone,” Ori said. He seemed to have ended his mushroom trip.
“Is it a long time between summons?”
“Sometimes. Especially if you keep getting knocked off the top of the list.”
Now Ori was sober he seemed glum. I don’t know what hell was like but surely here was better than it?
“Bron’s shouldn’t be much farther,” Scarlet finally said.
We stepped on to the path and kept moving, our pace greatly improved. Ahead the path diverged from the woods and climbed a hill. The sky over the other side of the hill was smudged brown with the smoke of a thousand fires. It had to be a city.
As we climbed the hill, both Ori and Scarlet seemed to grow sadder. Scarlet was practically hugging herself, waves of anxiety radiating off her.
“What’s wrong?”
She shook her head and then looked over at the thinning forest in the distance across the grassy hills.
“There should be trees here. This was forest. I don’t know how they cut them all down so quickly. This city...”
“Maybe Bron will know,” I said, for lack of anything else. Maybe the designers or Lucy had changed something and Scarlet remembered how it had been?
“What about you?” I asked Ori.
“I can feel my family trapped here. I don’t like it.”
“Ink demons in bottles?”
“Yeah, and other things.”
At the top of the hill the hazy smudge in the air turned out to be smoke from countless woodfires, hovering over a city. It stretched out from the base of the hill, sprawling in a depression. Most of the trees around it had been cut down and the land was bare. The city itself looked like the classic medieval game city: lot of ramshackle buildings, a colorful market, narrow roads in some areas and wide in others. There were larger marble buildings clustered together on the higher side of the city, looking over the rest.
Stretching out behind the city was an enormous mine, cut down into the ground. Behind that rose white cliffs and atop them sat a castle. Even from a distance I could see shimmers of gold engraved into the walls. A river wound down to the city on the other side. Going in it was blue and clean. Coming out it was down to a trickle and muddy brown. The place teemed with beings. I say beings and not people because even from a distance I could see they weren’t all human.
There was a steady flow in and out of the mines, carts trundling along. The land behind it stretched out to the horizon. Wherever we were, it was far away from a sea or ocean.
I checked my map as we started down the hill and saw it had filled in. It had even marked where we’d killed the bandits and also the quests I’d accepted. I saw a tiny note stuck near where Mancer and William had died. It opened
as I looked at it.
Mancer and William
Hungry kids facing starvation so they turn to the only thing that will save them: crime. Beaten and forced that way by older men, abused by them, is it any surprise they find themselves behind a sword or blade or a club robbing just to eat? It was their choice to rob was it? Have you been hungry? I mean, truly hungry. The kind of hunger that tears at you. The kind that wastes you away. No, of course you haven’t. That wasn’t people you fought but Famine wearing them like puppets. But you killed them all the same regardless.
The depression writer was back again but still, it stung me. I’d negotiated Augustus away from killing the moles, at least temporarily. Had I missed the opportunity to do the same with Mancer and William?
“It’s just make-believe, don’t take it so seriously,” I muttered to myself.
Ori spun around again, walking backward.
“Everything is make-believe. Laws, rules, societies. Who rules over whom. What can be done to anyone and what the punishment is. It’s all make-believe, but you should take it seriously,” he said before spinning around again. He and Scarlet were talking now, although it seemed she wasn’t saying much.
I pushed the note about Mancer and William away, trying to forget that we’d just left them there in the forest to rot away or as food for flies and whatever else. It was the reality of this place that was getting to me. It didn’t feel like a game so I wasn’t treating it like a game.
I clenched my staff as I followed my demoness and demon down to the city. I had a bag of stuff to sell, five coppers taken from the dead and surely there would be quests to pick up here to get me started on making six gold. I checked my bag again and saw Reginald’s matted corpse in there, sans paws. Maybe I could sell that too. It’s a game, not real. For a brief moment I wondered if I could have absorbed any blood from the bodies with my staff and what that might do.
It took us some time to make it down to the city, the afternoon trending to dusk. The road was paved but switchbacked. We passed a few carts coming up the hill but there weren’t many. It seemed most of the traffic was on the roads leading out the other side of the city. The people on the carts coming our direction were people people. Humans, I should say. A few appeared to be farmers, their carts pulled by a single horse or beleaguered donkey. They all cast wary glances my way but then stoically looked straight ahead as we passed them. The final cart, pulled by two fine brown horses had a boy sitting in the back. He was playing with a jar that appeared to have fireflies in it. As we passed, the kid shook the jar, the sparks inside glowing. His father was behind the reins, carefully not looking at us.
