Lord of the Dead: A LitRPG Saga (The Eternal Journey Book 2)
Page 31
“Couldn’t sleep. Weird dreams. What’s your excuse?”
“I’m on watch. Saw you sneaking out and followed you here.”
Hawke had figured he might as well take care of that bit of business before morning. It was going to be busy as hell: thirty people to awaken, all asking the same questions. Hawke was thinking about having a pre-written script handy. He dismissed the idea. It would feel fake. Better to deal with each person on an individual basis.
“It’s going to be rough, isn’t it?” Nadia said, guessing what was on his mind.
“The saddest part is, I thought we were saving more of them. It looks like the bastard had already wiped out forty or fifty Eternals, not counting the thirty-six I had to put out of their misery myself. Forty-three are left, and I don’t know how many of them are going to come back with terminal amnesia. We saved one in three, give or take. That’s not good.”
“Saturnyx is right. You think you can fix everything.”
“No. I want to fix everything. Everyone keeps reminding me I can’t.”
“I’ll help with the orientation program as much as I can.”
“I really appreciate it. That’s what this is, isn’t it? An orientation session. ‘Welcome to the Realms. This is not a game, but you may feel like you are in one.’”
“We just have to remind ourselves that it’s the first time for each of them, no matter how many times we go through it.”
“As you say, your Imperial Majesty.”
She laughed. “It’s an honorary title. The Arachnoids were created by the Fae, another of their mad chimerical experiments, but they have no desire to have another Fae creature ruling over them. They will listen to me, though, which probably saved a bunch of lives on both sides.”
“The peace agreement looked good enough. And the mining rights.”
“Korgam and the chieftains I spoke to were all willing to make compromises. The Arachnoids don’t care much for mining for some reason. Others are welcome to do it, as long as their tribes get something in return. They don’t care for raw ores but their chiefs would like to be paid in finished goods: tools, weapons, some foodstuffs – for example, they apparently love olive oil, which Orom produces.”
Hawke nodded. “Cheaper – and better, both morally and practically – to pay them off than to fight them. Trade will be good for everyone.”
“At first, Korgam wasn’t thrilled about not clearing all the spider-folk out of the mountains, but he is smart enough to understand that doing that would take years, not to mention massive bloodshed on both sides.”
“Good.”
“Anyway, my watch is over, and I already had all the sleep I’m going to have tonight. So why don’t we go somewhere quiet and have our own orientation session?” She smiled. “Saturnyx said you’ve picked up a new magic trick that she’s sure I’m going to love.”
“I think you will. Let me wake Tava up first.”
* * *
“… and if you check on your quest log, that is the question mark you will see floating off to the side, you will see your first quest there,” Hawke finished his spiel.
Instead of the desperate Quest Hawke had received on waking up, the rescued Eternals had a much easier – but also less profitable – beginner’s mission:
QUEST: Reach Civilization
After being tormented by a Necromancer, you have finally awakened and your Journey has truly begun. The Necromancer has fallen and you must reach a civilized outpost and set a Reincarnation site there.
Quest Objective: Reach a village, town or city and assign a proper area as a Reincarnation site. Until you do, you will Reincarnate in the Necromancer’s lab. Available locations can be found on your personal Map.
Rewards: 50 XP, New Reincarnation Site.
“I know this is a lot to take in, but we are all in this together,” Hawke went on. “We have food and refreshments waiting in the common area, and you can meet everyone else there. Maybe you might find somebody you knew from before. A few people already have.”
“This is crazy,” the last Eternal, a human Priest of Shining Father by the name of Olaf Goode, said. “But thank you for the whole welcoming committee thing. I’m sure most other players didn’t have it so easy.”
“The only other group I know of didn’t,” Hawke told him. “They woke up in a swamp jungle and had to fight their way out. Whoever did this to us didn’t seem to care about our well-being.”
The Priest nodded. “It does sound rather Darwinian. I hope we will be able to talk again soon. I have a lot of questions.”
Olaf seemed to be taking things much better than average. His sharp eyes looked around as he spoke, missing little. Maybe he would be an asset to the community. Or turn out to be a Kaiser Wrecker type, ready to reform society by destroying it first. Time would tell.
“We will,” Hawke said. “I’ll do a Q&A at my place when we return to Orom tomorrow. Everybody is welcome, and there will be pizza.”
As the newbie let Nadia guide him towards the common room and the refreshments table they’d set up there, Hawke slumped into an armchair. That had been brutal. Eight more people had been nearly zeroed-out. They barely knew their characters’ names and had no idea who they had been before. The remaining twenty-two had run the usual gamut of the five stages of grief: lots of denial, anger and depression, and a little bit of bargaining. A lot of crying; he had ended up taking a bunch of towels he had found in the Necromancer’s bedroom and torn them up into hankies, ready to hand them out as needed. That and the shot glasses had helped comfort a lot of the new arrivals.
A few Eternals had woken up in bodies of a different sex than they had been in real life, but they all seemed happy about it. In other cases, their new bodies now fit their original sex despite not having been created that way. Hawke supposed that the ‘system’ let you be whatever you wanted to be. It was none of his business, of course, as long as nobody was attacked for being different.
One guy had quietly listened to Hawke’s explanation, gone off into one of the unoccupied barracks, and hung himself. He had respawned back at the laboratory a few hours later, said he was fine and wouldn’t do that again, gone back out, and done it again. As it turned out, suicide removed four Identity points per death. The second time around, the death removed five Identity points, bringing it down to 2. The poor bastard no longer remembered why he’d tried to kill himself. Hawke had thought about keeping the guy locked up after his first suicide, but had decided against it.
Hawke didn’t know if that was true. All he knew was that he had been too wrung out after handling dozens of traumatized people to care much one way or another. He had taken the suicidal gamer’s word that he wouldn’t do it again, and let him go. Now he had a Dwarf Mage who had forgotten his old life. Korgam had taken him under his wing. Maybe it was for the best. If somebody hated the situation so much that they wanted to die, who was he to stop them?
But it was done. He had done what he had promised on his first day on the Realms.
Quest Completed: To Save Your Brethren
You have saved all the Eternals trapped in the Necromancer’s lair.
You have earned 4,800 Experience (+20% from Triune Goddess bonus, 600 diverted towards Leadership; 600 diverted towards Node Mastery).
You have gained: +100 Reputation from all released Eternals towards you, +100 Global Renown.
Current XP/Next Level: 5,760/30,000. Leadership XP: 14,252/15,000
Current Node Mastery XP/Next Level: 3,875/5,000
“Only twenty-four thousand XP and change to go,” Hawke said, too tired to be angry about it. “Hey, at least I didn’t lose the XP dedicated to my Leadership or Node Mastery when I died.”
“Cool,” Hawke said.
He felt drained, but there were still things
he needed to do. Like destroy the device the Necromancer had used to rip apart the souls of Eternals. Nobody was ever going to do that while he was around. After that, he had to check on the Stronghold’s two temples, and also visit the chapel of Vitara. And after that, he needed to speak to the prisoners in the tower’s cells. Nobody had done anything about them yet. He wanted to take care of those things before heading back to Orom the next day. Taking close to sixty people back to town was going to be a major undertaking, at least until they reached the main road and met several wagons he would have sent out the next morning.
The Soul Siphon was right next to the Stronghold’s Reincarnation Site for easy use. A couple of commands through his Core interface caused the mechanism to disintegrate. That was easy enough, although the disapproving feeling radiating from the sentient Core bothered him. So did the next notification:
You have found: 135 Soul Shards
WTF?
“I don’t want them! Those are people’s lives that the bastard ripped apart!”
“I hate this,” Hawke said as Nadia and Tava, with Rabbit in tow, came in.
“Hate what?”
He explained to them what had happened. They were both horrified, of course.
“Well, set them aside for now,” Nadia said. “Maybe you can help undo some of the evil that created them.”
“I have only heard Soul Shards being mentioned in songs. But you should not profit from the suffering of your fellow Eternals,” was Tava’s opinion. “If you use them, do so to benefit others.”
“I will figure out something eventually,” Hawke said with a shrug. “I want to check on the temples next.”
“I definitely must pay my respects at the chapel of Vitara,” Nadia said. “Got to show off for the home office, as it were. Still not planning on worshipping anybody, though. But maybe I should go there myself.”
“Be careful,” he told her. “The goddesses can be touchy.”
“I promise I won’t touch anything that doesn’t belong to me, get snarky with the deities, or think impure thoughts about them.”
You told her?
“I guess you’ll be fine,” Hawke grumbled. “We’ll keep in touch, though.”
He turned to Tava. “Well, let’s go check the other temples.”
Fifty-Three
The Death Temple was near the top of the tower, on the last floor still connected to the mountain by its side. A tunnel linked the ninth floor of the Spire to a large natural cavern, where a black pyramid stood.
The thirty-foot-tall structure was made of blocks of obsidian, shiny black with blue specks along its surface. A single entrance, flanked by two jackal-headed statues, led inside. From the moment he entered the cavern, Hawke felt something stirring inside the temple. Rabbit growled, his hackles rising as the Dire Bear’s instincts warned him of some danger he couldn’t see or smell. Tava put a calming hand over her pet, but her own body language showed tension. Death might be just a facet of reality with no inherent goodness or evil, but few people liked it.
“Maybe I should go in by myself,” Hawke said. “Since I am the Lord of the Dead, sorta kinda.”
“Perhaps that is wise. But say the word and Rabbit and I will come.”
He gave her a brief kiss, summoned his armor, and walked the rest of the way alone.
Inside the pyramid was an altar made of the same black stone, except black with reddish-brown swirls that made Hawke think of dried blood. A tall statue, flanked by three smaller ones, stood behind the altar and reached all the way to the ceiling. It depicted the stereotypical figure of the Grim Reaper: a hooded figure holding a scythe in its bony hands, except that under the hood there was no skull, just a pool of darkness that Hawke sensed was no sculpture but the actual Elemental substance. Using his Mana Sight would have confirmed that, but he was worried about what else he might see. He was beginning to understand that seeing too much could be dangerous.
The three smaller statues were on their knees, facing the Reaper like worshippers, or maybe defeated rivals. One looked like the jackal-headed Egyptian god Anubis; the second was a bearded man with a Greek-style helmet and a staff; and the last figure was female, with a winged helmet and long braided hair.
That was the first time Hawke had found a temple dedicated to one of the mysterious Makers. From what little he knew of them, they didn’t need or want to be worshipped, unlike the gods. The whole thing was unnerving. But what really got him was the item he spotted hanging from one of the skeletal wrists protruding from the black robes. It was sculpted of the same black stone, but the shape of a wristwatch – it looked like a Rolex or some similar kind of fancy timepiece, as a matter of fact – was unmistakable.
It didn’t make sense. Somebody from Earth had built the Realms. Somebody who might be from a time before his; most people didn’t wear wrist watches anymore. But that was only one of the many weird things about the Realms. He wasn’t a historian, but he was pretty sure the Romans hadn’t existed six thousand years ago on Earth. And yet, they had been around in the Realms for at least that long. Wrist watches hadn’t existed six thousand years ago, but one of the Makers of the Realms was wearing one. Time travel? Were the Realms in a different time? Could he ever return to Earth?
Hawke shrugged, dismissing the useless questions. The Death Temple seemed safe enough, but for the time being he would keep it off-limits to anybody without a pressing reason to go there. The important thing was that the pyramid contributed 200 Mana every day to the Stronghold. He would look into improvements later, when he had a day or two without having to deal with life or death matters. Hawke, carefully not to touch the altar or any of the statues, headed out. Something occurred to him: he had purified a Death Orb; could he purify the Temple and dedicate it to Life?
You Have Been Offered Two mutually-exclusive Quests: Choose Wisely
Quest #1: Render Honor to the Reaper
You have found a Temple dedicated to the Grim Reaper Himself. Increase its power and you will gain the favor of the Maker of Death.
Objective: Raise the Temple to Level Three.
Rewards: 5,000 Experience, 20 gold, one Epic Quality Death-Attuned Item. Unlock the Element of Death. Gain three Death spells. Gain +100 Reputation with all Death-attuned deities as well as the Grim Reaper.
Warning: Accepting this Quest will automatically reject Quest #2: Purify the Temple. Completing this Quest does not break the Tenets of the Triune Goddesses, but it will reduce your Reputation with them by 100.
Accept: Y/N?
Quest #2: Purify the Temple
As an Adept of Life, you have the means to transform this Death structure into its Elemental opposite. Doing so will gain you the enmity of all Disciples of Death, but also the favor of the Goddess Vitara and all Life-attuned deities and adepts.
Objective: Create a Life Temple on this site. The process will require you to find and bring a holy relic of Life to the Temple, undergo a Ritual of Purification, and defeat a Death Guardian.
Rewards: 3,500 Experience, 25 gold, one random Masterwork Item. Gain +100 Reputation with the Triune Goddesses.
Warning: Accepting this Quest will automatically reject Quest #1: Honor to the Reaper. It will also decrease your reputation with all Death worshippers, deities and agents by 500.
Accept: Y/N?
“Eff my life,” Hawke mutte
red. He didn’t accept either quest, leaving them on his Quest Log to decide later.
“Any suggestions?” he asked the sword as he joined Tava at the tunnel. “From either of you. Nadia, too, if she’s not too busy.”
“Yeah, I know how that goes.”
“As to your dilemma, darling,” Tava said. “I think choosing Life over Death is almost certainly the right thing to do.”
“Yeah, that is my first impulse. Which is why I’m taking time to make sure that making that choice doesn’t come back to bite me in the ass. I may be a dumbass, but I can learn not to jump before figuring out where I’m going to land.”
“Well, I don’t plan on harming any innocents. Knowing Death magic wouldn’t change that. But yeah, I’m going to think about it. I don’t want to get on the goddesses’ bad side. They’ve saved my life a bunch of times. Don’t want to get on a Maker’s bad side either, not this early in the game.”
“None of this is a game,” Tava said.
“I know. Just an expression, and not a good one, I guess.”
“Your decisions, darling, will affect the lives of many. Orom stands because of the things you did, for example.”
“The things we did, Tava. You were there too.”
They grinned at each other, remembering the fights. When it came to that, they were like peas in a pod. They both loved the thrill of putting everything on the line – and winning. It probably wasn’t a healthy attitude to have, but neither of them cared.
“Anyway, let’s check the Darkness Temple. After that, I’ll check on the prisoners. I was hoping you could help me decide what to do with them. Nadia, too, if she is done by then.”
“Of course. your Holy Eminent Lordship.”
“Lordship, now?”