The second step was to get next to the necromancer controlling Pinebogey. I had readied Incineration for the ugly bastard. Just to make sure. I could slap him with lightning too, but I was afraid a mage at that level and a mentat to boot would have some way of neutralizing the daze effect.
I was just about to kick off my scheme when a few different things happened in the span of an instant. Another three wraiths appeared on the roofs of the buildings running along the main street. I didn’t feed any illusions that it might have been random. Seemingly, they had me surrounded. And there wasn’t enough time to think about who had detected me, the beasts or their masters. I needed to get moving. And then something else happened… Some text appeared before my eyes:
― Attention! Your time in the Labyrinth of Fright has expired!
― You may now return to your departure point!
― Would you like to cross over?
― Yes/No.
― Attention! You have 30 seconds to make a decision!
Just in the nick of time! My mouth stretched out from ear to ear. Before giving confirmation, I looked back at Pinebogey. I forgot I was under the Canopy, so I even gave him a jaunty wink but an instant later the smile started to creep off my face…
The agent of chaos was looking straight at me. There was so much grief and despair in his animal eyes it gave me the chills. I wanted to shout to him out loud. Why the Bug wasn’t he leaving?! But then I looked at the other captive mages and everything fell into place ― for some reason, none of them could accept the system’s invitation.
Thoughts started to swirl around feverishly in my head. Thirty seconds to get to the necromancer and activate incineration. Actually, what do I mean thirty seconds? It’s less now…
Not wasting even one more second, I dashed forward. I was not going to lie to myself ― I was taking a risk for the sake of a person I didn’t know in the slightest. Though, I also didn’t much believe that Pinebogey was a person exactly.
What was this? Senseless heroics? A young man’s impulse? Suicidal self-confidence? A very smart and calculating person would probably have said just that. But strange as it may have been, I was guided by my intuition. Just like back in the caverns of the Crooked Mountains when I scooped water into the toothy maw of a harn that had fallen victim to hexapod poison. Or like with Mee on the orcish steppe. I just knew I was doing the right thing.
My sudden burst of movement did not go unnoticed. The wraiths, following the command of an invisible puppet master, came shooting down to the ground.
I bared my teeth ravenously. My target was just a few steps away. I knew those brutes would not make it to me in time. I would have to consider how they were detecting me later. But now all my attention was on the necromancer controlling Pinebogey and the rest.
As I took my last step, extending my right hand with the spell ready to go, I quickly realized that this was all going to be over much faster than I anticipated. I would even have a few seconds left over to catch my breath. But at the last moment, I realized I had been underestimating my opponent. The toxic smirk he awarded me before I was abruptly sent flying a few paces to the right will stay with me for the rest of my life. They got one over on me like a country bumpkin that had somehow wandered his way into a big-city casino.
Then another powerful jolt of magic came from the left, throwing me onto the causeway and sending me skidding me a few feet on the cobbles like a ragdoll. A second necromancer had joined the party, having been diligently pretending to be blind before that. What creeps!
Muckwalker’s defensive aura absorbed all the damage, but the world went dark for an instant. And when I was able to think properly again, I saw a notification hovering before my eyes:
― Decision time has expired!
That could mean only one thing ― I had just missed my chance of returning to the Citadel of Chaos.
If someone could have read the thoughts racing through my head at that moment, they would probably have concluded that I had lost my mind. I should note that even I was surprised by my reaction. Then again, how else should a person react after losing the ability to leave a place like this? What was I supposed to be feeling? Probably despair at the fact my enemies had played their hands masterfully like expert card sharps, leaving me out in the cold. Or perhaps panicked fear. After all, the gruesome spectacle I had witnessed in the middle of town clearly did not inspire optimism. Or perhaps anger at myself for giving in to a sudden sense of pity and stranding myself while saving someone I did not know.
I should say though that none of those feelings had come to me. I felt a fleeting annoyance which very quickly gave way to utter calm and cold confidence. And on top of that, as if to dilute that ice-cold cocktail, a sense of excitement awoke within me. I gave a lopsided smile. After all this time, Gorgie was starting to rub off on me.
After the necromancer’s attack, my canopy of invisibility flew away and the wraiths, driven by someone else, came racing my way. As it turned out, there had been a third necromancer hiding in the shadows of a distant building all that time on the other side of the street. It was easy to tell he was the one controlling the advanced morphs by his tell-tale hand movements.
All that time, the death mages didn’t utter a single word. They must have had another way of communicating like Gorgie and I did.
In light of what was happening, I could say for certain which of the three was in charge of controlling the beasts and who was in charge of the prisoners. All I had left was to figure out who had detected me. Though that no longer mattered.
When I got up off the ground, I saw a doomed expression on Pinebogey’s face. I also read guilt in his eyes. Where was that coming from? He had probably already written me off as a goner. He thinks some kid is gonna die senselessly because of him. The other captives had vague traces of similar emotions on their faces, too.
But a second later, the kid they had already begun to mourn caught them all by surprise. Both the captives and their captors.
When they saw Gorgie appear out of thin air, the two groups reacted in different ways. The captives’ eyes went wide, the necromancers meanwhile were totally dazed for a few seconds, which the harn did not fail to seize upon.
Two Thorntail’s Jumps and Gorgie was behind the one controlling the wraiths. My beast was moving with such lightning speed that no one could even tell what was happening until the harn started flaying his victim alive as the unfortunate necromancer started wailing in pain. And when that happened all the death mages turned their heads looking baffled.
The morphs had forgotten about me and all ran off together to aid their master. But the necromancers had another surprise waiting for them. Probably the most unpleasant one yet. Gorgie’s attack broke the puppet masters’ concentration, which gave me a window to use my biggest trump card.
Using the Black Widow’s mask, I was able to take control of four of the beasts at once. The artifact had been telling me before that I had enough Will to subjugate the ugly bastards, but the hitch was that the necromancer had been sharing a tiny bit of his Mind with all his pets. When it all went off the rails, that advantage was quickly squandered.
Controlling the wraiths was fairly unwieldy. We didn’t have the same kind of connection as I had with Gorgie. The system simply informed me that I now had four creatures under my command and awaiting orders. I didn’t know how it worked for the necromancer, but it was enough for me. I quickly designated the remaining death mages as enemies and gave the order to attack. On top of that, just in case, I activated the spell I got for defeating the Queen of the Draks, Damage Dispersal. Now seventy percent of the damage I took would be going to the wraiths.
I had no desire to look through their characteristics either, much less the time. The subjugation effect would only be active for thirty minutes.
When the wraiths froze and, instead of attacking the scaled monster, turned on the necromancers, at first they couldn’t tell what was going on. And there was no longer anyone to clue them in. T
he former controller of the wraiths, thanks to Gorgie’s efforts, had been transformed into a well tenderized bloody cutlet.
An instant before his death, I saw a look of bewilderment on the face of one of the puppet masters. It was even like he was still trying to exercise control over the morph attacking him but, to his misfortune, I had invested too heavily into Will.
The necromancers died practically all at once. And when that happened, the street came to life in the blink of an eye. The people who had previously been walking in silence like automatons were now free. I heard shouts, rasps and wailing from all directions. The perfect single-files all jumbled together. True chaos had taken hold.
Pinebogey just stood there breathing deeply of the air of freedom. There was a happy smile playing on his bearded countenance. The other liberated mages reacted much the same way.
“Wow, you actually pulled it off!” Pinebogey exclaimed rapturously. “I’ve never seen anyone quite so reckless and crazy before! And I thank the Goddess Fortuna for that.”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” I snorted and, nodding at the column, added: “Those ugly bastards already have friends on the way here.”
Backing that up, cries of pain flew in from somewhere up ahead. The normal necromorphs must have been going after the liberated townsfolk. I glanced up at the sky. The dark cloud hovering over the palace gave a shudder and started growing larger.
“Bats!” Dobbess shouted. “They’ll be here soon!”
The goblin first dashed toward the sewer entrance, where a few of the mages I freed were already running. But when he noticed I was in no hurry, he stopped and looked at me inquisitively.
“First I need to help the Atrian,” I said and nodded at the desert native lying on the causeway.
“Just a sec,” Pinebogey stopped me. “She is wearing a disguise. A powerful mage must have gone to a lot of trouble.”
I crouched next to the girl and took a closer look. Strangely, I caught a glimpse of something familiar in her facial features. The surprise even made me rub my eyes. I looked again. No. It was just me.
“Do you think there’s a monster lurking behind her disguise?” I asked.
Pinebogey shrugged his shoulders.
“In the last hour, you’ve taken so many risks that one more or less won’t change the overall balance.”
And that was said in a tone that made it hard to tell if he was being serious or joking.
I chuckled and activated Forest’s Blessing. Once the woman received her portion of one hundred fifty regeneration, she gave a slight shudder and started breathing measuredly. The pallor on her cheeks gave way to a slight rosy glow.
Pinebogey and Dobbess were also affected. Why let a good thing go to waste? My spell could be used on up to five allies.
Whereas the goblin just nodded gratefully and looked at me yet again with respect, I saw disbelief and confusion in Pinebogey’s animal eyes. A-hem… He sure has a strange reaction to being healed.
“And now it’s time for us to get out of here,” I said. “The farther we get from the middle of town, the longer we’ll survive,”
“I can carry her,” Pinebogey offered and easily picked up the Atrian in his arms. “Lead the way!”
I nodded and, not waiting even one more second, ran toward a wide sewer entrance on the edge of the main street. The grate had already been ripped from its hinges and tossed aside. One of the liberated mages was really going for it. The intrafactional hostility, by the way, had not been forgotten, either. No one was planning on attacking anyone. But that was only for the time being…
“You know the way?” the goblin asked, now a whole step behind me. It probably looked strange from an outside perspective. A level twenty-nine mage pattering away behind a little zero, afraid of being left behind.
“I have a guide,” I answered, nodding at Gorgie next to me.
I turned around. Pinebogey was running behind us as well, gingerly toting the unconscious Atrian in his arms.
The goblin snorted and took a significant glance at the mask on my face.
“Y’know something kid… You’re full of surprises. Now I have no doubt you defeated the Black Widow.”
I shrugged my shoulders vaguely. To be frank, I didn’t give a crap what he thought. Another question was bothering me though. What to do about the wraiths? Very soon the brutes would get free and then there’d be hell to pay.
I didn’t have to rack my brains for long. Waves of basic necromorphs came flooding out of the alleys onto the main road and I ordered the wraiths to cover our retreat before diving into the dark gaping maw of the capital city sewer system. We had a bit less than fifteen minutes before my temporary pets would come to their senses.
We ran in silence. A few times we ended up passing groups of commoners, also trying to escape through the sewer system. Good thing the sewer tunnels here were so wide. There were a few places where it was big enough for two carts to pass one another easily.
The townsfolk, lacking night vision, were moving as slowly as blind kittens. In our group though, the lack of light didn’t cause any problems. The smell of crap though, which had fully soaked into everything we owned over the last half hour, did nothing to increase our desire to remain in the tunnels.
A few times, we ran into necromorphs as well. But they were pretty sluggish and most low level. Pinebogey and Dobbess called them lost children. It wasn’t hard to guess that these undead had broken off from the larger herd and been left unsupervised.
“Any ideas what to do next?” I asked Pinebogey as he trudged next to me.
“We need to find a passage to another anomaly,” he responded none-too-confidently. “And the sooner we do so the better.”
“We need to get out of here before the Rift,” the goblin concurred and shivered.
As an aside, they had supposedly both entered the Labyrinth to fight one other. Given what was happening now, that must have felt quite foolish.
“I assume you’ve been in sticky situations like this before?”
Pinebogey and Dobbess shook their heads no.
“So then how do you know about these passages and rifts?” I asked.
“From the Gatekeeper,” the goblin answered. “He’s the only one who ever got out.”
Hm… the Gatekeeper again.
“Why should we go to a different anomaly?” I asked.
“There we’ll have another chance of being invited to leave the labyrinth,” answered Pinebogey.
“One anomaly, one invitation to leave,” the goblin summarized.
“And what if we get don’t make it before the rift?” I asked.
“Unclear,” Pinebogey shrugged his shoulders. “No one has ever come back after a Rift.”
A slight chill ran down my spine.
“So all that’s left is to find this passage,” I said.
“The troll said passages all look different,” said the goblin. “Could be a regular old barn door. Or a well. Or a half-collapsed wall…”
I winced: the more they said, the gloomier I felt. I was afraid to even imagine how many walls, doors or wells there were in this city. It was like looking for a needle in a haystack. But it wasn’t as if we were going to have all day to search.
After Pinebogey saw my expression, he said:
“We’ll know it when we see it. It won’t be an entirely normal place. The Gatekeeper said you can sense lots of energy next to the passage.”
That made me think deeply. Lots of energy… Lots of energy… What if…?
I stopped dead in my tracks, which baffled my companions. Praying to all the gods at the same time, I hurried to open the description of Gunnar the Destroyer’s amulet. My heart aflutter, I checked. And a second later, with a broad smile on my face, I told it to locate the nearest Place of Power.
“Listen, Highlander, what are you doing?” the goblin carefully reached out and touched me on the shoulder.
― Attention! Search complete.
― Place of Power located
(5x). Would you like to plot a route?
Paying no mind to the goblin’s question, I agreed to the system’s suggestion. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Pinebogey setting a hand on Dobbess’ shoulder, letting him know not to bother me just yet. He was first to realize that I was groping around for something.
A few long seconds later, before my eyes appeared a map depicting five different routes. The first pointed back where we came from. I.e., downtown. Based on the size of the destination, that place of power was the biggest in the city.
I gave a lopsided smile. Nope, we will not be going there.
Labyrinth of Fright (Underdog Book #5): LitRPG Series Page 10
