The Renegades

by Vasily Mahanenko

  At first we were forced to walk in a file one after the other—the width of the fissure didn’t allow anything more. After that, the walls began to spread bit by bit and we finally emerged into a wide clearing that reminded me somewhat of an ancient coliseum. The skeletons of various creatures clad in rusted armor and tattered, faded clothing only intensified this resemblance.

  “Looks like a real melee took place here,” Chip whistled, carefully stepping over a crested helm of bronze with an orc’s skull still in it.

  “We have company,” Reed distracted me from my examination of these ancient artifacts.

  Looking in the indicated direction, I saw a ghostly figure standing over one of the skeletons. The mighty warrior was about the size of the pirc. He was leaning against a battle axe and looking in the distance, paying us absolutely no attention.

  Ghost of a Fallen Warrior. Level 40.

  The inscription was red.

  “Is it time to brawl?” Chip asked with some doubt in his voice and shifted the halberd in his paws.

  “Doubt it. There should be another way.”

  “Scaling the canyon is a waste of time,” the pirc announced with finality. “We’d need gear to do that.”

  “This is strange…” I looked around in hopes of finding a clue. “A quest issued by a bard for bards or parties that have a bard. And then suddenly a trial by combat. Is the moral supposed to be that ‘in the end, the sword decides?’”

  “A dead man,” Reed reminded. “We are looking at a dead man. Maybe he is the one who can read the book?”

  “Reed, you’re a genius! I’ll try it out right away.”

  “Eh, not so fast,” Chip restrained me. “Let me go first: If he strikes me down, it won’t be a great loss.”

  “It’s only a game, Pavel. If he clocks me, we’ll at least gauge his damage and aggro-radius.”

  “All right,” the pirc agreed with a sour look.

  I pulled out the mysterious journal from my bag, opened it to the first page and holding it a bit like a shield walked toward the ghost.

  “Excuse me,” I called when there were ten meters between us. “Are you familiar with the name Cypro? Do you know what this says here?”

  The ghost looked in my direction, studied me through his helm’s eye slits and then slowly and even a bit leisurely brought down his axe…

  Attention! Respawn Penalty: -30% XP.

  Quest updated: Road to Nowhere (Third trial failed). Two attempts remaining. To try the third trial one more time, speak the words: ‘I want to try again.’

  You have died. Enter Barliona again in 12 hours.

  “Good talk, good talk,” I muttered, climbing out of my cocoon.

  The guys would call me in ten minutes.

  “Briefly put, we tried our best,” Pavel reported in his strange voice. “You should’ve seen it! Our little Reed grabbed his music stand and tried to bash the ghost with it.”

  “How’d it go?”

  “Predictably,” Pavel sighed, “and fatally.”

  “The music stand is made of iron,” Reed explained shyly, “and legend has it that ghosts are afraid of iron.”

  “This one turned out pretty unafraid.” I could tell that Pavel was yawning. “Or perhaps he hasn’t read the legends.”

  “How did you die?”

  “I tried to run up to the stiff that the ghost gladiator was standing over and chop the bones in half.”

  “Did you make it?”

  “Uh-huh. While our fearless leek brandished his music stand, I hammered the dusty bones. I’m not sure whether the ghost was insulted by such sacrilege or whether the bones weren’t even his, but he wiped me out with a single blow. Didn’t even have the courtesy to break a sweat…”

  “Damn it…Any other options?”

  “Tomorrow is another day,” Pavel yawned again. “We can chew it over then. I’m going to take counsel from my pillow.”

  “We need to tell Sloe that we have to reschedule our raid,” Reed reminded. “We won’t have time to respawn.”

  “Send him a message,” I asked. “I’ll go for a walk and clear my mind. Maybe, I’ll hang out with the guys and they’ll slip me some idea.”

  “Cool. Until tomorrow, everyone.”

  When I returned to the game, I made a beeline for the library. First of all, I had just remembered that I owed Tell the buff I’d promised. Secondly, I had promised Lapushock and some rogue named Blades_of_Grass that I’d play something for them in the same library. It’s not that I really wanted to go there, but the promise I made weighed on me and it was easier to do it and strike it off my list than deal with the guilt. Sending Chip, Reed and Sloe letters, I headed to the library. There, I encountered Tell, Lapushock and a few dozen others. Some were practicing their crafts, but many were languishing aimlessly as yesterday.

  “Hey,” I greeted Tell. “I had to go yesterday and forgot to give you the buff I promised. I’ve returned to pay my debt.”

  “Ah. That’s cool of you,” he said. “Does the buff last long?”

  “Let me see here…” I froze for a bit, pulling up the buff description and making some educated guesstimates. Charisma 3, Fame 3, plus one…“Seven hours.”

  “Not bad,” Tell approved. “Buff away.”

  “A sec.”

  I invited him to my party and then did the same for Lapushock and Blades_of_Grass.

  “You requested a song yesterday, correct?”

  “I thought you forgot,” Lapushock replied with surprise.

  “Debts must be paid.”

  When the party was complete, I thought for a little about what I should sing. For some reason, I recalled the ballad of a bard who lived in the twentieth century. Maybe it was all the books around us, or maybe it was the game itself.

  Amid the melted candles and vespers,

  The wartime prizes and the peacetime fires,

  Bookish youth lived without knowledge of battles,

  Languishing in their juvenile desires…

  The players around us stopped staring off into nothing and began to listen. For most of them, the song was unfamiliar: Despite the undoubted talent of the bard, his voice wasn’t well-suited to singing and his songs were about serious matters that kept them out of the mass media which the subsequent generations had grown up on. It was a ballad of bookish children who only knew the history someone else had made. Over a century had elapsed since it had been written, and yet even now every listener recognized herself in its verses. And even though our generation had spent its childhood in virtual reality, each verse penetrated right into our souls.

  And even though my voice was very different from the original’s and the lute didn’t quite fit the song, my cover struck home for the players. Everyone came away satisfied. And no one wanted to argue. They listened to the ballad in silence and even the NPC librarian peeked out of his hermitage. The last words were sung but no one wanted to break the silence and one girl was even wiping away a tear.

  A new system notification popped up but I swiped it away. I didn’t feel like reading anything about more skills just right now.

  “Powerful stuff,” one of the players said at last. “Is it yours?”

  “Nah. It’s a translation of a Vysotsky song.”

  “I’m gonna go download it,” muttered a player and his avatar dissolved into thin air. Another six or so followed on his heels. The radio DJs don’t play the right stuff—the people want something real and profound…

  “Sing us something else, will you?” the impressionable girl asked.

  “After that ballad, it’s better to stay in silence,” I warned and someone nodded their head in agreement. There’s not much that can rival the power of Vysotsky’s songs—perhaps only Dylan and Gardel. “If you want to listen some more, I’m going to play every day on the Market Branch, around 3 p.m. server time. Come on by.”

  No one else bothered me, so I disbanded the party, left the library and spent some time wandering around the Tree city, trying to under
stand what it was that the long-departed bard had added to his song that to this day managed to move minds and hearts.

  The system notification twinkling at the edge of my vision finally drew my attention.

  You have increased your Fame stat. Total: 4.

  Attention! You have unlocked a new ability: ‘Inspiration.’

  Your performance inspires your audience, increasing the chance of crafting a more valuable item by (0.2 × Fame)%, not to exceed 30%. You may simultaneously target (Charisma) targets with Inspiration. The effect’s duration is equal to the duration of the performance. Cost of performance: None. Range: Variable. The target must be able to hear the performance.

  Heck of an inspiration this…I’m not sure about the whole skill growth thing, but at the moment what I wanted was to create something as real as Vystosky’s songs. Without a further thought, I turned onto the Market Branch, reached the store of Master Pirus, greeted him curtly, grabbed an instrument from the rack without looking, sat right down on the floor and went on working on the melody that had practically formed itself in my mind. Pirus didn’t bother me, listening pensively as the new music was born from my fingers.

  The guys came by an hour and a half later. We decided to level up first and only then attempt the Tenth’s trial.

  “We’ll follow the earlier plan,” Sloe assumed his accepted leadership role. Chip unfurled a map that glowed with white spots and began to confer with the necromancer about where the enemy might be. “Last time, we encountered the recon party here—in the northwest. They told us that the south was safe which means that they had already combed that quadrant.”

  The pirc nodded and made a mark on his map.

  “We can assume that they are moving in the standard way, in an expanding spiral. In that case they’ve managed to pass here and here and should move eastward from where we met them. We’ll head further west and theoretically slip through to the Arras.”

  “And we’ll be able to chart a new area while we’re at it,” Chip added, pleased. He gingerly rolled his map up again.

  “Uh-huh, and then we can sell it for some extra cash out in the larger world,” I agreed, having already gotten used to the relatively easy income in Barliona.

  “We have to first reach that larger world,” the necromancer sighed.

  “We’ll reach it,” the pirc waved his paw. “By the way, we’ve wrangled up some supplies for the trip here…” he announced and produced the rings of Constitution we had acquired earlier.

  “Oh! Now that’s useful!” Sloe said happily, one by one slipping the rings on his fingers. “Hmm…” He coughed, staring nowhere in particular. “So that’s how it is…What a crappy penalty. I figured that once I gear up, I’ll be a bit fatter…Eh, I guess we’ll have to grind Constitution. What do I owe you for the rings?”

  “You don’t owe anything,” Chip was even taken aback by the offer. “Accept them as a gift from a brother in arms.”

  A simple smile appeared on Reed’s expressive and honest face and he briefly thanked the pirc, while Sloe frowned:

  “Well, I didn’t come here empty-handed either.”

  Saying this, he produced three capes from his inventory in the manner of a magician. They looked like local ware: improbable constructions of large oblong leaves, attached to one another in some mysterious manner.

  “Yeah—they have their own sewing technique here,” the necromancer confirmed, intercepting my look. “The only thing is that I didn’t consider the penalties and crafted them to boost Const as much as possible.”

  “No big deal,” I shrugged, putting on the cape. “Once we level up, the Constitution we get from the gear will go up too.”

  “I look like a cotton bud,” Chip complained. The new cape really did bear a resemblance here: something white and puffy, sticking out from between the leaves.

  “It’s okay. At least you’re a fat cotton bud,” Sloe cheered him up.

  “That’s right…Fluffy,” I added wryly, recalling all the vivid monikers that the chattering pirc had bestowed upon me.

  “Who asked you, Arugula?” the pirc gibed without any ill feeling and, concluding our traditional repartee, we headed out onto our journey.

  This time around, the trip was easier: The tactics were all worked out more or less, the Intellect was a smidge higher (and in Reed’s case more than a smidge), and thanks to his carpentry, the pirc’s Strength and Constitution were higher as well. On top of this, there were less aggressive monsters around the Tree: The other players were slowly becoming accustomed to leveling up in adverse conditions and the pirc tanks trickling in to the Tree were making this task easier.

  Heading more west than last time, we traveled the same distance as yesterday without much problem. We were more cautious this time too. We tried to make less noise and spoke in a whisper. Either we were sufficiently careful or the search party had headed further east as we had assumed, but we didn’t end up meeting a single player along our way. Instead, we discovered something interesting.

  “What is this? The barrens?” Chip asked quietly, standing at the edge of a blighted portion of the forest. Right at his boots the green grass became dark and bristled with thorns amid which clumps of dark fog curled. The trees changed here too, causing the blighted area to look dour and foreboding. Here and there, hedges of deformed thorn bushes formed a kind of maze.

  “Looks like a quest,” Sloe voiced the logical conclusion. “Too bad we don’t have it in our logs.”

  “Actually…” I said, opened my quest journal and shared Eben’s quest with the rest of the party.

  “Will you look at that!” the necromancer muttered, having read the quest description. “Where’d you manage to come up with a rare scenario with a scaling item as a reward?”

  “And while you’re at it, tell us what a scaling item is,” the pirc added. “Do they scale to my body type or something? I’m not into fashion that much. I’ll be happy if it’s ugly too.”

  “Being a bard, I received additional information, started asking the NPCs about it and ended up receiving this quest. A scaling item, as I understood from the fora, is when an item’s stats increase with each level the character gains and you don’t have to change items as you level up—the item grows with you…”

  “Cool,” nodded Chip.

  “It isn’t simply cool. It’s straight up awesome. Items like that cost tens if not hundreds of thousands of gold, and that’s if you have good reputation with the Thricinians.”

  “Thricinians? What are they, like the local equivalent of leprechauns?” the pirc asked.

  “It’s a faction that sells these kinds of items. All right, what are we going to do?”

  Reed, who had been silent this entire time, shrugged and suggested: “Go on?”

  “Eh, no. Not right away,” Chip stopped him.

  Looking around, he picked up a large stone and hurled it into the midst of the brambles. Nothing visible happened and in reply to our inquiring looks, the pirc explained:

  “What if there’s some kind of minefield around here?”

  He snapped off a branch from a nearby tree and prodded the blighted ground with it. The leaves on the branch immediately curled up and died.

  “I don’t know what’s up, but I’m not really raring to get in there…” Sloe muttered pensively.

  “Oh come on!” I protested. “This is a game. Onwards to adventure!”

  Before anyone could stop me with some intelligent or reasoned argument, I stepped forward. And why not? You only live as many times as you respawn in this place. Dying ain’t that scary.

  You have entered the blighted part of the forest. -50% to all stats. +50% to strength of all blighted creatures. -1% to max HP for every minute you spend on blighted ground.

  “And where are you going against good advice?” Chip, who had stepped after me, grumbled.

  “I told you—onwards to adventure! Our motto is stupidity and courage!” I replied glibly and for the sake of curiosity returned to the gre
en grass. The debuff instantly vanished and my max HP returned to its previous value, though my current HP remained diminished.

  “What’s over there?” the necromancer interrupted Chip who had begun to read the debuff description.

  “A debuff,” I replied laconically. “It cuts stats by half and buffs blighted beasts.”

  “Sucks,” Sloe summarized, also crossing the border. “Now any mob will take us out with one hit, even with our new gear.”

  “You all maybe. Me—good luck,” our tank objected bravely. “With the new gear, I’m still fatter than yesterday, so I’ll be all right. And our dear little bit of chlorophyll slipped me some healing potions. I won’t die.”

  “By the way, that’s right!” I remembered and pulled out the potions I had bought. “I forgot to hand out the medkits.”

  “I feel myself utterly indebted to you,” Reed muttered with embarrassment.

  “Don’t stress it. When you become the greatest musician of Barliona, you’ll remember us with a kind word,” I assured him. “Plus we have this bloody little business going here in which we regularly kill each other, so there aren’t any particular problems with money.”

  “Huh?” Reed asked, baffled.

  “I’ll explain later,” Sloe promised. “Right. We don’t have a lot of time on research. First of all, the debuff is having its effect. Second of all we need to reach the Arras to get the money and equipment from my guildmates. We can deal with the quest afterwards. I propose that we look around quickly to see what’s what here and then head onward toward the Arras.”

  “I second the speaker before me,” Chip agreed with this option.

  There weren’t any objections and we began to march among the grass submerged in the grim fog.

  Razor-sharp thorns rip your footwear. -2 durability to shoes. Current durability: 78 / 80.

  “Damn,” Sloe voiced what everyone was thinking. “To complete the quest, someone will have to learn how to repair gear. Otherwise we’ll be left first without footwear and later without feet.”