“It would have been good to dig ditches and pile the dirt into earth ramparts around the camp,” Marko said as he watched the Volunteers settle down. “Better still to drive sharp stakes into the ramparts, forming a wall of sorts. That is how a real army camps for the night, in a small fort of its making.”
“We’re a long way from being an army,” Hawke admitted, cursing himself for not thinking of that earlier. It was too dark and too late to do it now. “Next time you see me slacking off, let me know. I’m learning on the job, too.”
“Yes, sir. Truth to tell, it only occurred to me after the Ranger found us a place to camp, and one hour till sundown is not enough time to set up a proper’s Legionnaire’s base. And I have never built one myself. Only heard of them, from some old veterans of the Legions.”
Hawke remembered some stuff about how Roman armies built their forts from a YouTube video he had seen. Maybe between him and Marko they could come up with a decent fortification. And of course, he had his own Wikipedia at hand.
You said ‘erection’ on purpose.
Hawke set up a watch schedule, and put himself in for the middle watch.
The attack happened just before he was up.
Thirty
Hawke sat up and kicked himself off his sleeping bag. “Undead!” he shouted.
Saturnyx could sense the critters from a hundred yards away. Unless they could move faster than cars, covering that distance should give his people some time to prepare. As he summoned his armor from its inventory slot, Hawke saw Egg, the Dwarven Priest, begin to cast a spell, probably his Blessing of Gaon, which would help protect everyone from the fear effects several types of Undead could trigger in people. Sleeping Volunteers struggled to their feet and worked in pairs to put their mail shirts back on. You could sleep in armor, but only if you wanted little to no rest. The six men on watch, along with Nadia and Tava, were arranged in three groups covering the slopes leading up. The nearby river protected their western flank, although the Auric was only a hundred feet wide or so at the ford, and enemy archers or magicians could easily attack the camp from the other side.
Hawke looked across the river; his Dark Vision spotted half a dozen floating figures, pale and shimmering in the moonlight. Wraiths.
Wraith Servitor (Undead)
Level 7 Ghost
Health 105 Mana 175 Endurance 140
The Servitors weren’t elites, but even regular minions could mess up the camp by casting spells from range. He called Tava over to deal with them and hit the closest one with a Bolt of Twilight that exploded it like a punctured balloon. The Ranger destroyed another one with a single shot of her new bow. The rest of the Wraiths stopped moving forward and began spellcasting; unfortunately for them, they were still in range. Two more were destroyed before they could finish their spells. The last survivors stopped casting and tried to escape, but Tava got them both.
“Arachnoids!” Nadia shouted from the north side. Her words were followed by a crackling sound like an ice machine turned all the way to eleven. She was welcoming the attackers with Ice Shards, a cone spell that inflicted 8-64 points of damage. The spell was followed by the twang of a couple of crossbows and the buzzing screeches of pain that wounded Arachnoids made.
“More on this side!” Korgam shouted from the south. Crommen was singing one of his Battle Bard spells, increasing everyone’s courage and strength. Egg had already blessed everyone. A giant boulder came crashing down onto the rushing eight-legged figures. That had to be the work of Taggan, the Dwarven Stone Mystic.
Hawke rushed to the side being watched by only two Volunteers. Since he was linked to both his Party and Korgam’s, he could see that the Dwarves were forming on one side of the rise, and Rabbit and Marko had come to Nadia and Alba’s sector to the north. That left the east, and Hawke spotted a dozen Arachnoids rushing up towards the camp.
Murk Arachnoid
Level 5 Warrior
Health 60 Mana 30 Endurance 50
He raised a hand and fired off Dazzling Lights. The blinding flash struck the nocturnal spider-people with almost physical force, freezing them on their tracks and making them crash against each other. They never saw the Burning Light energy cone that enveloped and consumed most of them, killing them instantly. A couple of Shamans at the bottom of the slope had been out of range of Hawke’s spell. They cast their own combat magic, hitting him with two giant thorn-shaped missiles that reduced his Bulwark of Light by a couple dozen points. He killed the low-level spellcasters with a couple of Hammers. The Necromancer wasn’t sending his varsity to this game.
As quickly as the attack had begun, it stopped. A few Arachnoids scurried off into the dark. Hawke and Tava left the camp, looking for survivors. They found only bodies. Forty-odd Arachnoids and a dozen Wraiths had died in the attack.
For defeating your foes, you have earned 58 Experience (7 diverted towards Leadership; 7 diverted towards Node Mastery).
Current XP/Next Level: 6,287/16,000. Leadership XP: 5,571/6,000
Current Node Mastery XP/Next Level: 1,007/3,000
He checked on the Volunteers. Only a few had been hurt, and Egg and Gosto had healed them already. Many of them looked at him in awe. He found the attention a bit embarrassing.
“This was just a test,” he told them. “Greggy is trying to get a feel for our strength. I think we impressed him, but don’t think it’s going to be this easy next time.”
“Yessir,” they replied in a chorus.
“Carry on.”
The Party Interface showed him that everybody was back to full Health; checking on the status of twenty-five people, not to mention the five in Korgam’s linked party, was turning out to be a pain in the ass, but he’d rather have too much information than too little. The interface was designed to highlight anyone badly hurt in red; that should be warning enough for him or another healer to take care of the wounded before it was too late.
“Back to sleep, kiddies!” Marko ordered. “We still have a job to do tomorrow, and we wake up before sunrise. Go get some rest now. That’s an order.”
* * *
Early next morning, they reached the ford. A bunch of boulders and accumulated silt, combined with the slower flow of the river on a relatively flat stretch, had created an area where the water was barely waist high and the current weak enough not to knock someone off their feet unless they were both clumsy and unlucky. Hawke went ahead with Tava and Rabbit, dragging ropes that they secured on the other side. They checked for any ambushes and when they found none, they had the Volunteers take off their armor, hold on to the two ropes they had strung across, and walk on over. Korgam’s band kept watch from the east bank until everyone else had crossed, and then they followed.
“Weird that they didn’t hit us at the ford,” Hawke wondered after everyone was on the west side of the river. “We were pretty exposed there.”
Cheerful as always, Hawke thought as the group rested for a bit before pushing on.
They followed a rough path that cut through the increasingly rocky terrain. It looked like the remains of an old road after decades of neglect had their way with it. It was aimed more or less towards the mountain where the Necromancer’s tower was, so they stayed on in, with Hawke and Tava leading the way and checking for signs of ambushes or traps. From some of the stories his brother had told him, that sort of terrain was great for setting up IEDs or having snipers tag you from the high hills overlooking the path. He kept Enlightenment turned on whenever it wasn’t on cooldown, and kept a flying
pet up to watch from above as often as possible.
They made it a couple of miles down the road when the Harpies finally showed up. Lots of them. Hawke counted almost forty winged shapes diving from the clouds as he ordered people to take what little cover they could find and waited for the critters to come into range.
Mummified Huntresses (Undead)
Level 4 Harpy
Health 52 Mana 60 Endurance 48
Each critter carried a ten-pound rock in its chicken-like legs. They released them from hundreds of feet up as they dived, each time aimed at one of the figures they saw on the ground. Even so, none of the rocks hit anybody, although there were a few close calls. The rain of rocks was followed by a flight of arrows and lightning bolts. By then, however, the mummies were close enough to be engaged by a few spells and Tava’s recurved bow, and the monsters began to drop out of the sky. Some Volunteers fired their crossbow as well, with zero results. Finally, Egg unleased Mass Blast Undead and wiped out over twenty fliers in a single blast of white light. A handful of survivors escaped.
For defeating your foes, you have earned 20 Experience (2 diverted towards Leadership; 2 diverted towards Node Mastery).
Current XP/Next Level: 6,307/16,000. Leadership XP: 5,573/6,000
Current Node Mastery XP/Next Level: 1,009/3,000
Two men were wounded, one by a Harpy’s arrow, the other by a lightning bolt, neither fatally. That would have gone different if they Volunteers hadn’t been raised to first level; Hawke mentally patted himself on the back for choosing Generalship I for his party. After healing everyone and taking a few minutes off to rest, the small army continued its advance. Shortly before noon, they reached the mountains.
Now all they had to do was figure a way to get in.
Thirty-One
“And that’s the only way inside that you know of,” Korgam said, pointing at the doorway, sixty foot up on a sheer cliffside. The Dwarf didn’t call Hawke a dumbass, but by his tone he probably wanted to.
“It’s the only way I found. When I woke up, I was already inside the mountain,” Hawke explained.
He and the Dwarf were on top of a rocky hill, two hundred yards away from the chapel’s exit. From that distance, the doorway was little more than a dot on the rocky surface. Far above it, Domort’s ivory-colored tower reached up, half of it embedded on the side of the mountain, the rest poking out like a monster’s claw.
“It leads to a chapel of the Olympian gods, mostly dedicated to Vitara.”
“But even with scaling equipment, thirty of us, most of us human, will never make it there.”
‘Yeah, there is that.”
Hawke had thought the cliff face might not be as bad as it had looked to him when he jumped into the river. As it turned out, it was worse; the mountain wall must have been smoothed by magic. The Adventurers might make it there, assuming the enemy didn’t do anything to stop them, but the Volunteers sure wouldn’t. Luckily, that wasn’t their only option.
“There are alternate routes, but the map I have is almost a thousand years old. My friend – she gave me the info – is trying to figure out how much things have changed.”
“And who is this friend?” Egg asked as he came up behind them.
The Priest had never fully warmed up to Hawke after discovering his secret class, and he suspected the Twilight Templar of concealing a bunch of additional secrets. The fact that Egg was right didn’t help any.
Hawke sighed. “She is a spirit that lives in my sword. I found her in one of the tunnels, and she helped me escape the Necromancer’s mountain. Her previous wielder entered the mountain through another route. We just have to find it.”
Egg frowned, but before he could speak, Korgam held up his hand. “We need not know more, do we, Egg?”
“If the spirit is an Undead one, we would.”
“You have cast Mass Blast Undead a bunch of times with me around. I think you would have noticed if my swords went up in flames.”
Let’s save that for another time, Hawke told the sword.
“The sword was wielded by a great hero who carried it into the mountains,” he continued out loud. “Since the easy way in turned out not to be easy at all, I will need to explore the area a little more until she finds one of the entrances she used back then. From what she tells me, they went back and forth several times.”
“We have eight hours of sunlight,” he said. “We’ll set up a defensible camp, dig in, and I, Tava and Rabbit will go scouting. The rest of you can hold the camp until we return. If it’s not too late, we’ll go into the mountain as soon as I come back. Otherwise, we’ll head in tomorrow.”
“And if you find no other entrances?”
“In that case, I guess Egg and Taggard will have to use their Tunnel spells until we get somewhere. We’ll call it Plan C.”
* * *
“Dwarves seem to be a dour folk,” Tava commented as she and her Dire Bear accompanied Hawke on his search for a way in. “Which is funny, since Dorrham is always quick with a laugh and joke, back at the Copper Kettle.”
“Korgam is okay. He just didn’t find my suggestion amusing. And he is right. Without a clear direction, they could be throwing around Tunnel spells for days without hitting nothing but more solid rock. And they can’t just aim them up, either, not withing risking having a whole chunk of mountain come down on them. We need to figure out at least a place to aim for.”
They were wandering around the hilly ground around the mountain, trying to find a landmark to jog Saturnyx’s memories. A lot had changed in the past thousand years; Hawke could attest to that, having come out of a chapel expecting to find a stone staircase leading down, only to find that the staircase was gone and he had to leap sixty feet into frothing rapids to escape.
“I think I would have remembered an apology.”
“Sure,” Hawke said. He and Tava exchanged a smile and continued wandering through the hills.
The place was nearly barren; scraggly and thorny bushes and the rare malnourished tree comprised most of the foliage. There were few animals around, mostly some kind of iguana and a few bugs. Rabbit grunted before absently snapping his jaws on an oversized but unlucky dragonfly that flittered too close to the bear. Unless you were into rock-climbing, this was nobody’s idea of a tourist destination.
“Where?”
Hawke followed the sword’s directions and soon discovered a clearly artificial wall on the side of the mountain, hidden behind several large rocks and other obstacles. Hawke had to push away some boulders. Doing so would have required a work crew and earthmoving equipment on Earth, but his Strength 45 handled it easily enough. The cleared entrance was carved into the rock and shaped like the outline of a door, complete with fake support pillars on either side. He had seen that kind of entryway before. They opened up when the right magical conditions were met.
“What’s wrong with it?”
“What are you talking about?�
��
* * *
They spent the rest of the day looking for an alternative, but found nothing and made it back to the camp as the sun began to set.
Marko had done his best to build a Roman-style military camp. The Volunteers, with a lot of help from the Dwarves, had dug a ditch and used the dirt to set up an earth berm all around the campsite, leaving only one clear path into it, and even gotten a few dozen stakes cut and mounted all around. The barrier wouldn’t stop attackers but should slow them down. Now that they were so close to the Necromancer’s Stronghold, a night attack was nearly certain.
The group leaders had a meeting over dinner. Hawke used the two hot cauldrons he had left for dinner. Nadia’s would provide two more hot meals before they had to resort to regular rations. That was the only good thing about the meeting. From the grim looks in the Dwarves’ faces as he described his discovery, they understood what going into a Labyrinth meant.
The Arbiters, for whatever reason, loved to place hidden locations commonly known as Proving Grounds all over the Realms. Adventurers risked their lives to defeat the monsters dwelling in the Grounds to gain wealth, power, and glory. The smallest of those were Lairs. Hawke had run through two of those and gotten killed three times along the way. Dungeons were larger than Lairs, with dozens of chambers and two to five bosses, each protecting a particular piece of treasure, as well as a Dungeon Master that could handle all but the most powerful and well-equipped parties at its given level. Only the most powerful parties dared to confront Dungeon Masters; the rest just cleared the easier chambers and left the Dungeon to regenerate.
And then there were Labyrinths.
Lord of the Dead: A LitRPG Saga (The Eternal Journey Book 2) Page 18
