“It is called a Dimensional Pocket, Your Magnificence,” a guy in colorful robes with a bright purple peaked hat perched on his head was telling Necromancer Greg.
They were in some sort of bazaar, inside a tent; he could hear a lot of hustle and bustle outside, although only Greg and the used carpet salesman were inside. The guy with the funny hat was showing him a pyramid-shaped object made of gold, with incredibly detailed carvings all over its surface, some of them identical to the ones on the metal disk he had used as a teleport pad. To Hawke’s Mana Sight, the device was glowing with power, and the magical pattern floating around it was a smaller but perfect match to the illusion linked to Greg’s mind.
“Once you create the setting – anything you imagine, as long as it can be contained within a two-hundred-foot radius, can exist there – all you need to do is attune the teleportation disk to yourself. You will always have a bolt hole which your enemies cannot find, and live there in luxury for as long as you want.”
“How much?”
“As you know, such things cannot be had for gold or platinum, Your Magnificence. Four Soul Shards.”
“Three.”
“Three, and your High Fae slave. She seeks only your death, and you will find little joy in her company. I, on the other hand, can make good use of her.”
“Yeah, she’s not fun to have around anymore. Done.”
Hawke speeded up the memory movie again: Greg arrived at the Sunset Range, killed a bunch of Arachnoids, took a trip into the Labyrinth downstairs, came back, found a Mana Node, and formed a Stronghold bound to it. He played the last forty-odd years back and forth until he saw the Necromancer set up the pyramid on the floor of his laboratory. The pyramid glowed brightly and the metal circle – the teleport pad – appeared underneath it. Greg stepped on it, the pyramid clutched tightly in his hands: his vision wavered, turned dark, and then –
Then the illusion began again, but Hawke saw through it, and in the process, figured out what had happened, and what was happening in the real world. He had enough time to prepare a few insta-cast spells before Timeless Mind expired. The slow-time thing started to speed up and he ‘saw’ the illusionary Necromancer almost finish his torture spell – but Hawke’s pre-cast Twilight Step went off before that happened.
He landed in a heap inside of a pyramid-shaped space. A small pyramid, about fifteen feet wide. The golden pyramid he had seen in the vision was floating in the center, each point aligned with one of the room’s corners. Off to one side were the Necromancer and Eegor, trapped in some sort of energy cocoon, dreaming that they were inside a great mansion and having a great time torturing Hawke. An energy polyhedron – it looked a bit like a twenty-sided die – floating nearby must be the Stronghold’s Core. And Hawke’s Mana Sight confirmed that a funky-looking carved pattern on the ground was the Necromancer’s respawn point.
The trinket merchant had tricked Greg. He had sold him a Dimensional Pocket, sure, but it had been a cheapo model. The dimension was a tiny space floating who knew where. The ‘palatial splendor’ was an illusion that played inside Greg’s head as he and anybody he took there were trapped in some kind of stasis. They could dream about eating, drinking and being merry, all at a much lower Mana cost than you would need to create the real thing. Hawke had broken free from his stasis field, and now…
“I’m not trapped here with you, buddy. You’re trapped here with me.”
<… don’t you dare!> Saturnxy finished some sentence Hawke had missed during his mind trip.
Hawke reached into his inventory and pulled out a tankard of beer he’d been saving for a happy occasion. “It’s going to be a bit of a long story.”
* * *
“And there he is,” Hawke concluded, pointing at the smaller figure in the two energy cocoons. “I just need to figure out what to do with him.”
“And whenever he comes out thinking he spent his time inside eating the best food he could imagine, he won’t feel hungry half an hour later. That’s a great con job that merchant pulled on him.”
“So we break him out of stasis, kill him, wait a few hours, kill him again, rinse and repeat.”
“Eegor/Igor. Yes. Imagine creating a zombie just so you can hear the exact same joke from some old movie for fifty years. This guy is a total psycho.”
“All right, let’s work on Igor.”
Hawke carefully examined the stasis field around the hunchbacked zombie. It was a spell, but none of its elements matched anything in Hawke’s list. It used completely unfamiliar styles of magic. After running a pattern match through every bit of magic he knew, he got a disappointing message:
Identify Spell Failed
Annoying as hell. Stasis took you out of time, didn’t it? And he had a time-oriented ability. Which meant…
“Is there such a thing as Time Magic?” he asked Saturnyx.
“I love you too.”
“As I do you. But yes. Time is one of the seven Primal Forces. For your edification, I will enumerate them: Four Tethered Forces, each balanced by an opposite: Celestial and Infernal; Chaos and Order. And then the three Untethered Forces, without a counterpart: Mind, Soul, and Time.>
“I’ve seen Infernal magic, and I speak the Celestial language. Is that for angels?”
“You are a Celestial? And the magic that created you uses Celestial Forces?”
That was an interesting tidbit of information, but it wasn’t very useful for solving their current situation. Hawke turned his Mana Sight back onto Eegor’s stasis field an compared it to the patterns of Timeless Mind. Sure enough, he found parts that matched. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough to figure out what the unknown bits of codes did. Okay, ID’ing the spell wasn’t going to happen. He turned to the most basic part: the source of the stasis field’s power. A Mana conduit fed energy to the cocoon from the gold pyramid in the center. If he messed with that, it could cause the spell to fail.
“We call that exploding, but yeah, I get your point. I will put all my shields up, and ready your Elemental Dome in case things go wrong.”
After setting up his precautions, Hawke began to pour Mana into the energy conduit feeding the spell. At first, nothing happened. He kept a steady output, five Mana per second, turning it up to ten per second after a hundred Mana had gone in. At around two hundred Mana, the energy cocoon around Igor began to change colors. Some of the patterns began to unravel; Hawke thought he could see cracks forming in the energy construct.
“Here we go,” he said, turned Elemental Dome on and sent another hundred Mana into the field.
The results were immediate, but not impressive. The cocoon shrunk into a tiny dot and disappeared with a loud pop. Implosion instead of explosion. A moment later, a loot bag showed up over the empty spot where Igor had been.
For slaying your foe, you have earned: 10 Experience (1 diverted towards Leadership; 1 divert
ed towards Node Mastery).
Current XP/Next Level: 17,234/18,000. Leadership XP: 12,412/15,000
Current Node Mastery XP/Next Level: 2,875/3,000
You have found: 2 gold, 1 silver.
You have found 1 Mana Potion
“Twelve XP? Come on!”
“How about when I backstab someone? It’s just as easy.”
“So I’m getting bupkis for killing Greg. That’s annoying.”
“Okay, that’s fair.”
Forty-Eight
Killing Necromancer Greg the first time was as easy as imploding poor Igor. Hawke flushed three hundred Mana into the stasis field, and the Necromancer vanished with a pop. The rewards were equally unimpressive:
For slaying your foe, you have earned: 240 Experience (30 diverted towards Leadership; 30 diverted towards Node Mastery).
Current XP/Next Level: 17,454/18,000. Leadership XP: 12,442/15,000
Current Node Mastery XP/Next Level: 2,905/3,000
You have found: 3 gold, 8 silver.
You have found 1 Health Potion, 1 Mana Potion
“Well, I cheated, so I probably got more stuff than I deserved,” Hawke told himself as he prepared to cheat some more. The Stronghold Core was floating a few feet away. Now that its owner was dead, if only temporarily, maybe he could take it over. He reached towards the floating polyhedron.
You have accessed: Stronghold Core (Undeath): Death Spire (Level 12)
Do you wish to claim Stronghold Core: Death Spire? Y/N
“Yes,” he said.
The glowing shape began to glow more intensely, and Hawke felt it resist his will. The damn device didn’t want to be accessed. Greg wasn’t perma-dead, after all, so the Core wasn’t exactly unclaimed. Using Mana Sight, he was able to study it more closely. The first thing that struck him was how much energy was bound into it. Thousands of Mana were wrapped into the holographic construct. And unlike the Mana Nodes and the Town Core, the Stronghold was alive! He saw a mind at work inside the energy structure. It was some sort of spiritual entity, one attuned to Undeath, which included patterns from the true elements of Darkness, Death and Life. It regarded him with cold hostility. The Core didn’t like the living. From the Undeath entity’s perspective, even the Necromancer was an enemy.
Sorry, Count Chocula. I’m taking over.
Hawke felt the entity begin to back off, intimidated by the Celestial being linked to his mind. He kept pushing until his energy field forged a link with the Core that only death could break. The Undeath being inside the Core was now a part of him, a dark presence that weighed on his soul. That was going to be a problem in the future, but the important thing was, he had taken the Necromancer’s playpen away from him.
Congratulations! You Have Claimed: Level 12 Stronghold Core (Undeath)
You have gained a Title: Lord of the Dead
Title Inactive: Prerequisites not met. Missing Prerequisites: Death Magic, Undeath Magic. Unlock those Schools of Magic to activate your Title.
Warning: The Stronghold Core: Death Spire has been removed from its previously assigned location. None of its enchantments can be activated until it is returned or relocated.
Do you wish to relocate the Stronghold? Y/N
Hawke immediately selected ‘No.’
Warning! If Stronghold Core is not returned to its assigned location in seventy-two hours, the Stronghold will collapse and all its buildings and upgrades will be lost. Time Remaining: 71 hours, 57 minutes.
Hawke put the Core in his inventory. “Will that stop the clock?” he asked Saturnyx.
“That was my Plan B, but thanks for pointing it out.”
Since he was trapped inside the pocket dimension until the dead bastard came back in a few hours, Hawke spent some of the idle time meditating and working on his Mana Channeling abilities. He had a pending Quest:
QUEST: Mana Channeler III
You awakened one of the Seven Chakras in your body. Now you must awaken the other six to move onto the next stage.
Rewards: 500 Experience per Chakra awakened, 1,000 upon finishing the quest; +10% to Mana Capacity and +1 to Mana Regeneration per minute for each Chakra awakened; additional Rewards will be granted by each Chakra, based on its unique qualities.
Failure Penalties: If the quest is abandoned or refused, you will not be able to advance your Mana Channeling until you find a teacher.
He had accepted it, of course. Increasing his Mana Pool by ten percent per Chakra was more than enough incentive to spend days on end doing Forward Seeing-Eye Dog or any other Yoga posture you cared to name. But the past weeks had been so crazy he hadn’t had a couple of hours to himself to work on the Quest.
“Like keeping two – now three – women happy. Are you complaining?”
“Thank you. You have been delightful too. But that fun took up a lot of time, when I wasn’t fixing water pumps or learning how to manage a town, or trying to organize an expedition to kill a Necromancer. And then there were all the damn meetings. Now let me concentrate.”
He spent the next three hours working on his groin Chakra, because the other easy option was on his butt and he figured the groin might have better potential applications. A couple of failed attempts soon taught him that playing with that area had severely painful consequences. The way of the Mana Channeler was never easy. Annoyed and feeling like he’d taken a couple of kicks to the family jewels, Hawke readied himself to welcome back the Necromancer.
Greg dropped onto the ground on his hands and knees, naked; all the stuff that hadn’t been destroyed in the implosion was probably in his inventory. Without his clothes, Gregory looked even more monstrous. His body was grossly misshapen, covered with patches of different-toned skin and sections of muscle and bone that had been clearly grafted on. There were even metal plates protecting his vital organs, visible despite being covered by layers of skin and fat. Ugly and probably hard to kill.
“What? Wha…?” the Lord of the Death gasped. The shock of dying while in the midst of an illusion had to be confusing as hell. And Hawke didn’t give him a chance to recover.
Backstab. The swords encountered far more resistance than Hawke had expected; the body mods on the Necromancer’s body gave him better protection than a suit of armor. Against the Fury-enhanced Masterwork blades, it wasn’t enough, however; the double critical hits nearly depleted Greg’s 960 Health. The Necromancer only had time to summon his magical lab coat from his inventory before Hawke stabbed him in the neck for another critical, which finished him off. That was the second time.
For slaying your foe, you have earned: 400 Experience (50 diverted towards Leadership; 500 diverted towards Node Mastery).
Congratulations! You are now a Level Three Node Master! New Node Mastery Abilities available!
Current XP/Next Level: 17,854/18,000. Leadership XP: 12,492/15,000
Current Node Mastery XP/Next Level: 2,955/5,000
You have found: 12 gold, 7 silver.
You have found 1 Health Potion, 1 Mana Potion, 1 Rejuvenation Potion
“That’s nice,” Hawke said. He checked on the new Node abilities available:
Greater Node Empowerment: You can access up to 50 Mana per Node level every day, from every Node you control, anywhere you are. This Mana can be used for City, Town, Stronghold or Proving Ground Projects.
Node Sight: You can observe the surroundings of a Node under your control by spending 10 Mana. This ability has no range limit, but must be cast separately for each Node you wish to observe.
Create Guardian: You can create an Elite Elemental Guardian to prevent intruders from accessing the Node. This requires a permanent sacrifice equal to 2 Mana per Node level. The Guardian must be from the Element the Node is Attuned to, and has a level equal to the Node’s level; this can be increased by sacrificing an additional 2 Mana per Guardian level, up to the Master’s level.
He picked Node Sight. Knowing what was going on in the places he controlled could come in handy, he decided as he checked on his new loot. Rejuvenation Potions restored ten percent of his Health, Mana and Endurance instantly and restored another ten perfect each over ten seconds. Pretty handy stuff to have around. Hawke ate some of his travel rations and took some time to play with his new Inscription ability. He needed to prepare a fitting welcome for Greg.
The third time, the Necromancer came out of respawn ready to fight.
Forty-Nine
Lord of the Dead: A LitRPG Saga (The Eternal Journey Book 2) Page 28
