Swordsman of the Rift

by Brandon Varnell

  Or maybe she was just really quick to accept things at face value.

  “Pretty exciting, huh?” Elric asked as he came up to walk beside me as he, Vyra, and I began moving.

  “I guess,” I said with a shrug.

  We made our way out of the prairie and through a forest, and it really did seem like a forest and not just an incredibly accurate simulation. The sound of chirping reached my ears. I touched the bark and felt how rough the texture was, just like a real oak tree. As we walked, our boots crunched against twigs that snapped and broke, and I could even feel minute shifts in the terrain as I stepped on roots and small bumps in the ground.

  Brad seemed to be taking us on a very roundabout route. We swerved several times, cutting through clearings and passing over streams. I wasn’t sure where we were going, but I remembered him mentioning enemies and how he had mapped out a route that would allow us to avoid them.

  Our group eventually stopped when we reached some kind of swirling vortex. A dark eddy drifted in the air with lighter blue arcs of energy like lightning bolts drifting almost lazily out of it. It reminded me of those sci-fi shows I used to watch as a kid. As we neared this strange vortex, the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. A shiver ran down my spine.

  “Here we are,” Brad said in a voice that was way too cheerful for my liking. “This is the portal. It’ll take us to the world where our enemies are located. This particular portal leads to a secret passage in the other world. I found it when I was escaping after the world I was in got invaded by demons. They’ve only been there for a few days, so they haven’t had time to solidify their power base. Our mission is to defeat all the enemies on the other side of this world, fortify the world so no one else can take it, and make this world ours.”

  I still had no idea what any of this meant, but I understood that we were here to fight some kind of enemy. That was enough for me. Really, fighting and killing was all I could do anyway. It was fighting, killing, and not getting killed that earned me the nickname Invincible among the Marines. Of course, sometimes I wish I had died, but that was neither here nor there.

  Elric and Vyra looked about how I felt, a little uncertain now that we were finally here. I think Elric was more excited than Vyra though. Unlike Vyra, who didn’t strike me as the gamer type, I knew my acquaintance was a big fan of VR games. He tried several times to convince me to play this game called Gods End, but I could never be bothered at the time. Now here I was, geared up in some of kind super realistic virtual reality world alongside him and several others, dressed like a freaking magical swordsman, and prepared to go on what sounded like a raid on the enemy’s fortress.

  It was funny how life worked out sometimes.

  Stepping through a portal felt odd, and I mean really fucking odd. I couldn’t really describe it, but it was kinda like when you wear socks and rub them against the carpet to generate static… only this was generating static all over my body. The hairs on my arms and legs bristled. My body felt like a livewire. It only lasted for a moment. Then I was out.

  And my body suddenly felt incredibly cold, like someone had poured a cryogenic liquefied gas into my bloodstream.

  The world around me looked nothing like the grassy plains and verdant forest I’d been standing in previously. This new place was dead. I couldn’t see a single sign of plant or animal life anywhere. It looked like I was in the middle of a canyon, with massive cliffs looming over me on either side. I took a step forward. Crunch! Something snapped underneath my feet, and I looked down to notice I’d stepped on a skull.

  A human skull.

  I tried not to shudder as I walked over to Brad, carefully picking my way through several bones. He was standing a little ways in front of me. His cloak flapped in the breeze as he looked into the distance.

  “The demons who’ve taken control over this place are quite something,” Brad said as if to himself. “I’ve been studying these Rift Worlds for a while. This was one of the worlds I was studying when the demons attacked and forced us out. Its color is Black, in case you're curious. Black is the magic that involves spells regarding death, absorbing negativity, and darkness. This is considered a dark world. One of the people I was with had been able to Soul Bind with this world and could use those powers as he pleased. He’s dead now, though. The demons killed him when they attacked.”

  As he spoke, the others arrived, first Elric, then Ju Chen, and finally Vyra. All of them shivered like I had when I first arrived here. However, I only paid them a cursory glance. Most of my attention was focused on Brad.

  “Soul Binding is that thing you talked about before,” I said.

  Brad nodded. “You can basically bind yourself to different worlds. If you bind yourself to a world, you’ll gain that world’s color, and your ability to use magic represented by that color will increase. The darker your color is, the stronger your magic becomes. You can also summon beings from a world you are Soul Bound to.” He paused. “But you can’t do that right now, since that’s not the real you. It’s just an avatar.”

  “Interesting,” I said, mostly because I didn’t have anything else to say. “Wait. What do you mean the real me?”

  But Brad didn’t answer me.

  “It looks like everyone is here,” Brad murmured as he turned to look back at all of us. “All right. Since we’re all here, let’s keep going. This portal dropped us off close to a secret entrance I plan on using to have us enter the fortress. I actually used that portal to escape last time. Had I not… well, let’s just say I probably wouldn’t be here right now.”

  With Brad in the lead, we continued marching on. The barren ground, high cliffs, and lack of life was was so vastly different from what I had experienced before that it was hard to wrap my head around everything. That was why I shunted all these thoughts aside and tried to focus on the mission.

  We eventually reached what appeared to be a giant wall built into the cliff. Brad walked up to it, tapped on the wall several times, and then reached a point where the wall sounded hollow. He grinned and pushed on the wall. It moved inward, a loud grinding sound echoing from it, as it revealed a dark passageway.

  “Ju, that rifle of yours has a flashlight, right?” asked Brad.

  “It does.” Ju Chen walked to the front, turned on her flashlight, and performed a very professional sweep of the inside. What little I could see beyond her revealed a stone floor and walls. It looked like a dark hallway to some fantasy-esque dungeon.

  “You lead us from here,” Brad said to her. “I’d do it myself, but I don’t have a light.”

  Ju Chen didn’t complain. Nodding once, she walked into the passage and the rest of us followed. I glanced around at the walls and ceiling, but aside from looking like an ancient building made of large stone, it didn’t seem all that special. Even so, walking through such a dark passage caused the hairs on my arm to prickle.

  The passageway soon ended in a door. Brad took the lead after that, opening the door and walking through. We followed him and discovered a staircase on the other side. It wasn’t very big. I’d say two of us would be able to walk up it standing shoulder to shoulder—except for maybe Vyra, whose broad shoulders were about two people altogether.

  Our footsteps echoed ominously through the staircase as we ascended higher and higher, until we eventually reached the end, where a wall stood before us. It was a dead end. However, even as I thought that, Brad once more pushed the wall aside and walked through.

  What lay on the other side was a long hallway. The stone floor, walls, and ceiling made this place look like an ancient fortress I once saw when I was traveling through Europe. Candles lit the way, situated on the wall at even intervals. There were no windows, no decorations, just a long hallway.

  “It looks like this is our lucky day,” Brad said with a grin. “There are no patrols in this area yet, though we need to be quick.”

  “Hey, if our job is to take this base from the enemy, why are we sneaking around?” asked Vyra, scowling.

/>   “Because in order to make this base ours, what we need to do isn’t just clear out the enemy. We need to find the Dungeon Master as well. We find the Dungeon Master, take them out, and then clear out the rest. It will be easier with the DM gone. He’ll be the most powerful fucker in this whole place, so if we can defeat him, the rest of the baddies will be mostly grunts. The only person we’ll need to fight before the DM is a succubus who’s kind of like the mini-boss of this particular area. She’s a right bitch and quite vicious. I want to avoid making too much noise and alerting her to our presence. It will make things harder if she knows we are here.”

  “Well, I suppose that’s fair enough,” Vyra admitted.

  “Right. So, let’s go.”

  And so off we went, traveling down the long corridor, which branched off into multiple other corridors. We didn’t run into any of those demons Brad had mentioned.

  At least, not at first.

  It happened while we were turning a corner. A pair of small creatures, clearly not human, also turned the corner at merely the same time. They only came up to about my waist, had crimson skin covered in cracks, and glowing eyes the color of blood. Horns curved around their heads. Their hands only had three fingers with wicked claws, wings jutted from their backs, and they had a spaded tail swinging behind them.

  “Oh, shit. Imps. Bryan! You and me! Let’s take ‘em!” Brad shouted as he rushed forward and swung his scythe. His weapon cleaved clean through the imp nearest him. The creature was sliced in half before it exploded into dust—perhaps ash.

  I’d never used a sword before, but I pulled it from my sheathe, ran forward, and thrust it out like I would an army knife. The blade pierced an imp’s head. I felt my blade slide through with a bit of resistance, saw blood gush from the head wound, and then the imp burst into ash like the first one.

  I thought that was the end of it, but then loud squawking came from behind us. It was another one of those imps. No, there wasn’t just one. Several sets of glowing red eyes appeared in the distance. Dozens even. They stood shoulder to shoulder, wings retracted, eyes glaring at us with a malevolence that caused me to feel like knives were penetrating my flesh. One of them squawked, then the rest squawked, and then they all began rushing toward us.

  “Shit! This isn’t good,” Brad snapped. “Everybody, prepare for enemy contact! If any of you have any buffing spells, now’s the time to use them.”

  All of us readied ourselves for battle. I gripped my sword, Elric his mace and shield, Ju Chen her gun, and Vyra’s claws suddenly seemed to elongated and sharpen. Elric then lifted his mace, which began glowing with a bright white light. I wasn’t sure what happened, exactly, but as he did this, my body suddenly felt… lighter. It was as if I weighed a little less than before… no, more like I felt stronger than before.

  This must be a buff.

  Seconds before the horde of imps made contact, Ju Chen dropped to her knees, took aim, and opened fire. Her gun spat bullets at a rapid rate, mowing down the first line of imps. They collapsed to the ground and didn’t get up. Then they burst into dust just like the other imps had. The rest of the imps continued rushing toward our group like hungry wolves attacking a pack of helpless sheep. Ju Chen kept firing, but it was clear she’d never be able to kill them all.

  And then the imps reached us.

  I swung my sword like I’d seen people do in movies. It felt awkward and clumsy. Marines weren’t trained to use a sword, though we were trained to use just about every other weapon under the sun, including utensils. Even though I wasn’t what I would have called graceful, swinging a sharp object wasn’t very hard. My sword cleaved through imps with ease as I swung it around.

  As I began fighting, I remembered those skills I had: Whirlwind Slash, Death by Piercing, Fire Slash, and Fireball. As I shuffled backward to avoid a claw, which came inches to hitting me in the face, I thought about the Fireball skill and how nice it would be if I could just burn all these creatures to cinders.

  Almost like the magic responded to my will, I felt a pull on my lower stomach. It felt like something was being drained from me. Then a spark exploded above my head, transforming into a small conflagration that shot forward, striking a group of imps further back and incinerating them. The explosions wasn’t very big. It didn’t even damage the ground. However, six imps were blasted apart, bursting into ash as they died.

  Wow. That was pretty cool.

  I wasn’t the only one using magic. Elric slammed his mace into the ground, creating a quake effect that knocked the imps near him away. It didn’t spread far. However, even my body rumbled as the attack struck me. I couldn’t feel myself take any damage or suffer an injury, so I assumed it hadn’t reached me, but it looked like friendly fire was possible here.

  “There are too many of them!” Ju Chen shouted.

  “Let’s retreat!” Brad called out.

  The five of us began a fighting retreat with me and Vyra in the rear. The woman who had turned herself into a Dragonfolk was even more vicious than her species was known for in most media. She killed creatures with claw and tail. Some of the imps unfortunate enough to come near her were slammed into the wall with her tail, their bones shattering. Ash burst all around her as she demolished the imps that attacked her.

  I used my sword to carve up several imps that got too close. I wanted to try that attack of mine, Whirlwind Slash, which was said to be good against multiple enemies at once, but I didn’t have the time to use it. Despite this, imps burst into ash as I killed them, and I felt something odd rush into me each time. I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t have time to figure it out either.

  We reached the end of this corridor, which led to a set of double doors. Brad was the first inside. The rest of us followed him. We slammed the door shut.

  “Get something to bar the entrance!” Vyra shouted.

  I looked around the cylindrical room we found ourselves in, but I couldn’t see anything we could use to block the entrance. There was a large statue in the center of the room. It was of a man having his heart pulled out of his chest by a naked woman with devil wings and a spaded tail. There were also a number of tall columns that reached up to the ceiling several dozen feet above us. Candles sat in small candle holders to illuminate the room. That was about it.

  “There’s nothing here,” Elric came to the same conclusion.

  “Fuck!” shouted Vyra.

  All of us leapt away from the door as something slammed into it. The door exploded, and the imps poured in, leaving us with no choice but the keep fighting.

  Chapter 3

  I was caught in the middle of a blood bath. Imps stormed into this cylindrical room, shrieking with laughter as they attacked us, and we cut them down with superior strengths and skills. Blood ran along my blade, arced through the air, and drenched the ground, creating slippery puddles that we had to be mindful of if we didn’t want to fall. Falling now could prove fatal. The imps would overwhelm us with sheer numbers.

  Taking a stance with my feet spread, sword extended, I channeled mana through my blade and called upon the skill I wanted to use. A slight tug at my gut was the prelude to my attack. I spun around, a full 360 degrees, and a powerful arc of red energy shot out in a full circle like a single ripple spreading across a lake.

  The first group of imps surrounding me were mowed down. Blood sprayed from their bodies as they fell. The imps fell to the ground as they were cut in half, then their bodies burst into ash and a strange form of energy filled me. My energy attack continued on, cutting through two more groups of imps, though my attack lost power the further it went from me. While the second group died same as the first, the last group only received light cuts.

  Several yards from me, Vyra was tearing into the imps surrounding her with claws, feet, and tail. It was impressive. Using nothing more than brute strength, she launched imps through the air. They soared across the sky and smacked into their fellow imps, taking them all down in a jumble of limbs. Most of her attacks sounded like exp
losions. Each strike echoed through the room, each hit seemed to break the imp she struck.

  Elric and Brad were fighting side by side. Scythe and mace swept imps away in twos and threes. As a Paladin, Elric had a lot of physical strength on top of his holy abilities. His mace glowed as he swung, crushing skulls, knocking imps away, and breaking their bodies. Meanwhile, Brad swung his scythe in wide arcs, slicing off limbs, cutting imps in half, and slowly whittling down their numbers.

  Behind them was Ju Chen, the Space Marine who was using the pair as cover, while she took potshots at any target of opportunity. Her aim was impeccable. Every shot was a headshot. I was fighting one of the imps, and one had come up behind me, when Ju Chen put a bullet through the creature’s head. It flew back and hit the ground, rolling to a stop and tripping several of its comrades before exploding into ash.

  I had no idea how long we’d been fighting. The stench of blood made my nose curl. We kept fighting and killing, but no matter how many imps we slaughtered, more kept coming.

  This was too real, I concluded. I’d been sure this was all some kind of realistic virtual reality simulation, but there was no way an experience like this could be simulated to such an astounding degree of accuracy. This was real. The weight of the sword, the feeling of resistance when I cleaved through an imp. Whatever this world was, whatever these creatures were, they were no illusion, no mere simulation.

  I was forced to accept what Brad had been telling us.

  As the situation continued, as our battle progressed, a loud rumbling echoed from some distance away, growing louder with each passing second. Once the room began to shake, the imps all screeched in fear and ran off. It was so sudden and startling that none of us could figure out what was happening.

  “What the hell?” Elric asked, scratching his head.