“Wait, so the Shrill, Baal the head bad guy, and Paskunji the giant bird are all siblings?” I asked.
“Yes,” said Fiona. “Zagan and Baal were cast out of the heavens a millennia ago. But all three were once angels. All three, even Paskunji, have been twisted by time.”
“So where are the other two angels? Are they also guardians?”
“They are the chained gods,” Fiona said. “The two other angels were the emissaries of the heavens. While Paskunji had to prepare in case of an attack, they had to prepare in case of peace. But Paskunji disagreed with the idea of an armistice with the fallen ones. So she captured her two brethren, placed them in a state as close to death as angels may come, and she chained them. As the centuries passed and the twenty-two races formed, the radiants emerged as the leader class of this world. They are the caretakers of the two chained gods. They bleed the gods in the temple. They create these so-called blood nuggets to distribute amongst the other classes. They drain the angels of celestial power just as we drain soul power from the fallen.”
I remembered something that the groundling cleric had said to me.
“The groundlings told me there’s a prophecy about worm surgeons. That’s why the celestials hate us so much.”
The mayor paused, and then something very odd happened.
A cutscene triggered. And this time, it played.
Chapter 53
I peered at Avvinik from a distance. Unlike all the previous guardians I had spied, this one blended well with the tall trees of the forest. Its black coat shined, a picture of perfect health.
The panther demon was much smaller than Bast. She was maybe a shade bigger than Epsilon. But easily smaller than Orthrus. And a lot smaller than the Shrill.
Moritasgus had managed to knock down every tree in his path, creating a wide rift of destruction from the fields to his hiding spot a quarter-mile behind me. I had him burrow himself, but he wasn’t truly hidden, not with that path of devastation behind him. Banksy was also buried. He kept himself out of both guardian’s range, especially Moritasgus.
The panther could easily be mistaken for a large hill in the middle of the forest. He somehow managed to prowl through the area without knocking hardly any trees down. I suspected it was because of his long, lean legs. The kaiju’s lower bulk likely rose above the top of even the most enormous of trees, and he was careful where he stepped. My badger kaiju, on the other hand, had much shorter legs and had a haphazard, stumbly way of walking. So he bulldozed his way through the trees and everything else in his path.
I wasn’t sure the best way to get Clara’s attention. My first idea was to get inside of Avvinik, hunt down Clara’s base, and knock on the door. Unless she’d altered the permissions, I wouldn’t be allowed inside. But would she hear me there at the door? The bases filtered out most exterior noises. I wasn’t so sure she would.
After thinking about it some, I went for the second option. I was to have Moritasgus smack the panther around a bit. She’d notice that for sure. But as I loaded up the guardian menu, I spied something that gave me pause.
Winky. She fluttered near the panther’s flank. She appeared to be hunting fireflies as they blinked off and on in the forest.
I emerged from my hiding place and waved, calling to the bat. The moment she heard me, she popped away in a panic. But a moment later she popped back into existence a few feet in front of me. She started squeaking at me.
“Hi Winky,” I said. “I don’t know what you’re saying, but can you tell Clara I’m here?”
Winky squeaked again.
I felt the barrel of the gun against the back of my head. I engaged my shield, dropped, and twisted, aiming up. A moment later I grinned and dropped the gun.
Clara. She had changed. Oh boy, had she changed.
I pulled the floating fairy into a tight embrace. She let out a slight, “Oof” as she retracted her wings, allowing me to hold onto her. For several seconds she didn’t embrace me back, but then she grasped me tightly, hugging me so hard I took a small amount of damage.
“You’ve been working on your strength,” I said, easing her to the ground.
“It’s the new armor,” she said. “It gives me a plus 15 to my strength. It’s the most powerful fae armor in the game.” The black power armor was made of the same composite as sundered skin. The slick, light armor was a full-body suit designed for her kind, complete with a helmet that covered her head. Her face and her hands were the only parts of her body left exposed. That armor had to be worth at least a million teeth, maybe more.
She’d also upgraded her gun. It was identical to my own Epiviper, though hers was the standard edition that shot red pulses instead of blue.
“Did you manage to get to Medina?” I asked.
She didn’t answer for several moments. She looked at me almost hesitantly, as if she wasn’t expecting this enthusiastic of a reaction from me. Eventually she nodded. “I did. Cone of Silence plus Invisibility plus flying very high, very fast, and I managed to barely get in. They still sensed me. The blood wyverns, they have some sort of radar, I think. Once I got into town, I upgraded my Teleport to level 4, so now I can freely jump to Medina, to my base, to Bast, and to the cockpit of the Opera. That one is a long story.”
Her demeanor changed once again as she put her hands on her hips. “So, where the hell have you been?”
***
She teleported us both to her base inside of Avvinik. She had decorated the base with the default skin. This room looked even more like Anatoly’s base than the worm surgeon equivalent. In fact, I suspected she was using the human default skin and not the fae one.
The apartment was littered with garbage and equipment. Candy wrappers and popsicle sticks lay strewn about. She’d purchased multiple upgrades for the space, including a television that took up the entire brick wall and a level-5 fae food box that I knew cost over five million teeth.
She’d left the television on to a Korean channel. Even though I didn’t speak a word of the language, I’d watched so much of the show when we were in Bast that I actually recognized some of the characters. This wasn’t her favorite soap opera, but it was one she mildly followed.
For the next several hours we recounted our stories. I told her what had happened. Her reaction was similar to Banksy’s when she learned about the jail.
“Damnit,” she said. “I should have known! I hadn’t even thought of that. I looked everywhere for you. You weren’t in the Medina jail, and when I approached Little Cibola, they wouldn’t let me in. So I figured you weren’t there, either. I even went into the Shrill, thinking you were stuck in your own base.”
Clara told me of discovering a hidden tree camp occupied with fae. From there, she’d received a quest that involved getting to the bottom of the large lake just west of Medina. In doing so, she ended up raising the ire of the fish-like dagon race. It ended with her getting control of the Opera. There was some long, convoluted story about how Avvinik and the Opera were made at the same time and shared some sort of guardian DNA. The head of the dagon clan in the end decided Clara was worthy, blah blah blah. It was all typical game stuff. With the salamander guardian, she attacked a pavilion owned by a mid-level demon lord who transformed herself into a giant pig thing. They fought, the Opera won. And somehow after that Clara also got the controller for Avvinik.
I decided my quest was cooler.
After that, Clara spent the rest of her time building herself up. She was now level 52. She would set both guardians to attack large enemy encampments and pavilions while she approached by air. The three of them would tear through encampments, wreaking absolute destruction.
The only thing she couldn’t yet handle were the pavilions closer to the rift and the army camped outside of Medina. She’d attempted her three-pronged assault on the pavilion of Andras, the demon we were supposed to kill for Stolas, and both her guardians were dead in moments, and she’d been blasted out of the sky. She claimed she was “gearing up” to attempt the a
ssault again, but based on the condition of her apartment, I suspected she was more likely just catching up on her soap operas, waiting for that timer to run itself out.
At Clara’s current level, she had risen to well above the point needed for one to win the game in single-player mode. But I could see it in her eyes. As happy as she appeared, there was something there under the surface. A deep well of defeat. She had given up, and she was ready to die.
“We can still do this,” I said. “It’s not too late.”
She looked at me, long and hard. “For a while there, I thought we could actually pull it off. I have control of two guardians, and so do you. Plus I thought we might be able to level Banksy up enough. That gives us five. But it’s not going to work. I’m sorry, Duke. It’s not. I learned a little bit about the endgame from the fae guildmaster. She told me only directly controlled guardians can get through the gate. That means the Shrill and Avvinik only. No Moritasgus, no Opera. No Banksy, either, if he hits level 50 before we want to go in there. Two guardians against all of hell. And once they die, they regenerate back on this side of the rift. So you have to start over again. When Anatoly did it with three players, it took them two days. And he’d used a cheat. He never said what the cheat was, but knowing what I know now, I have a pretty good idea. He’d told me that Bast had died at least 20 times in there. Do you know what that means? He made it so the guardians could respawn where they fell. That made them basically immortal. They chipped away at Baal, over and over. It took them two days to do it. Two days, Duke. It took three guardians with three experienced players with OP, immortal guardians two whole fucking days to take down this same boss you want us to attempt to kill.”
This is too much. This is too much.
“We can try. We have to try.”
“If we try, he’ll know. He’ll do something to mess it up.”
“You mean Jenk,” I said.
“Yes. He’s here. And you knew he was here, and you didn’t tell me.”
And that led me to the next topic.
“Okay,” I said, taking a deep breath. “Let me explain what happened.”
She stiffened, but I didn’t pause. I proceeded to tell her the full story of the amplification and of how I’d been “rescued” by the lycan. I told her of what he’d said. Tell her ‘You-know-who misses her mommy. But not to worry. She’s in great hands.’
Clara was silent for a long time. She’d long since dismissed the television screen. The fireplace crackled.
“He’s talking about my daughter,” she finally said. “I was pregnant when I came here.” She paused, looking at me, afraid. It was the first real emotion I’d seen from her since we’d reunited. “It’s how I met Anatoly, actually. He promised me he could take care of the pregnancy. He’d said he was an activist. They called it the New American Underground Railroad. He was going to get me into Canada.”
Washington state had been the last holdout when the abortion laws in the United States had reversed. For several years, the state had defied the federal ban. And as a result, the Seattle area had, for a while, boasted the highest concentration of women’s health clinics in the country. The feds finally cracked down a few years back. I shivered, remembering the news from that day. There’d been a protest, and a gun battle. Arrests were made during a procedure, resulting in the death of the mother. Both sides of the debate called that day Bloody Wednesday. But after that, most of the practitioners of formerly legal and safe abortions fled over the border into Canada.
That made Vancouver, British Columbia the new safe abortion capital of North America. But getting there for the procedure was next to impossible. It was illegal to leave the country while pregnant. A new criminal enterprise emerged. They called them coyotes. Some were legit. Most were not, and they preyed on desperate and scared pregnant women attempting to get over the border.
Clara continued. “So I told you before, I was a test subject for these guys. I could take it. Paulo liked fucking boys while slicing their throats. Then he cooked them up. Princess—she played a midwife, by the way—she liked making girls dress up in doll clothes, and she’d sew buttons on their eyes and zippers on their backs. Then she’d drain their blood and stuff them with goose down. She was a weird one. Frank also liked sewing. He chopped people up and sewed them back together, turning several people into one. All boys except the heart. Then he’d sleep—not fuck, but actually sleep—with the body for a few days. SmashSouth liked bringing people to the edge of death and then jerking himself off. Or fucking them. He was different than the others. Not as smart, not as consistent.”
She grasped my knee. “There were others, too. All of them sick. But none of them. Not a one was anything like the Canadian. Jenk.” She spoke slowly, matter-of-factly, each word a nail she was hammering down. “His thing is torture. Not just physical torture. Cruelty. He learns what you fear the most, and then he makes it happen. It’s not sexual. Maybe it’s a power thing. Maybe he is so utterly devoid of emotion that this is the only way he can make himself feel. I don’t know. He looks at something, and he instantly knows how to break it in the worst possible way. He is the devil. The literal devil.”
I swallowed. “What did he do to you?”
“I had another child, from before. A son. He died in a car accident.”
I felt a pang at that. It was as if she’d stabbed me in the chest.
“That loss, it hung so thoroughly on me that I didn’t think I could feel anything again… And when I found out I was pregnant again, I… I…” She stopped, then. She put her face into her hands, and she sobbed.
I rubbed her back, feeling helpless. Christ, she’s wearing armor. She can’t even feel your hand. She had lost a child. She was just like me. “You don’t have to continue.”
“No, I need to,” she said. She sniffled. “So I was pregnant when I came in here, but I’d been here so long I didn’t know what was happening with my real body or the baby. When I was given to Jenk, the first thing he did was show me what I’d missed. He played a video of me giving birth while I was passed out in the rig. There was a doctor, and he cut the baby out of me. It was a girl. A beautiful, baby girl. Anatoly was there along with two other men. One of them had their face blurred in the video, and it was Jenk. Anatoly called him that in the video. He’s tall and thin. I remember his wrists were so slim, almost like he was anorexic. Then it showed the doctor giving the baby to him. To Jenk. He switched off the video then.”
“Holy shit,” I said. “So he has your baby. He’s kidnapped your child.”
Clara nodded. “He showed me more videos. Of me breastfeeding my baby while I slept. Of him changing her diapers. He would whisper to her, ‘Your mother tried to kill you, little one. But don’t you worry. I have you now.’ He would show me videos of her playing with two women with their faces obscured. I don’t know who they are.”
“That’s awful,” I said. “But as awful as it is, at least she’s being taken care of.”
“No,” Clara insisted. “No. He is the devil. He knows what’s in my head. They were going to take Solomon from me. I had nightmares about him being raised by others. Screaming nightmares. I’d dream about the new home, about them telling him, ‘Your mother didn’t want you.’ Don’t you see? Jenk knows this. He knows. They couldn’t take Solomon. But they took my daughter, and they’re telling her I didn’t want her. Just like my dad said to me about my mom.”
Clara began to sob once again. Her entire body trembled.
There was a lot to unpack there. Solomon was her dead son. He’d died in a car accident. But it sounded like she was about to lose custody of him. Clara was mentally ill, terribly so. Her son had died, and when Clara got pregnant again, she found Anatoly who had promised to get her an abortion.
Some of the dots started connecting. “How long has Jenk been in the game?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I don’t know. He was here when I first arrived. He was one of the originals.”
I was starting to suspect he was m
ore than one of the first ones. He was one of the game’s creators. Not a client, but one of Anatoly’s partners. If he’d been there, physically there when Clara’s child had been born that meant he knew where they kept us.
That was a problem. A big one.
Clara was right. He would mess it up one way or another. He could stop us on either side of the veil. He could prevent us from winning the game. Or worse, he could possibly do something to our physical bodies. He’d know when we were going for the final boss. Apparently, the whole realm went nuts the moment a player stepped foot into hell. And if Jenk even suspected we might be about to wake up in our rigs… I didn’t want to think about it. This guy had possibly engineered the fake suicides of a dozen people in jail cells in different countries. And if he could manage that, two people in his basement wouldn’t be a problem.
I fingered the amulet around my neck, thinking. I thought of the cutscene I’d watched after I asked Fiona about the prophecy. It had offered a glimmer of hope. Something had to be done with Jenk. The first tendrils of an idea started to form in my mind.
“So what happened?” I asked. “Banksy said you got into a fight with Jenk and Orthrus, but you beat him.”
She shook her head. “I didn’t beat him. I did the same thing as you. I used Avvinik’s fatal attack. It’s called Hail and Kill. It forces the target to cast their most expensive spell, whatever it is. The attack kills Avvinik, but it forced Orthrus to cast Crab Cakes, which is his fatal attack. It’s the same one you described before. He split in half and then all his guts leaked out of him. After that, Jenk hasn’t been back.”
“You’re avoiding my question,” I said. “All that is what happened when the two kaiju fought. What happened when you were face to face? Before the guardian fight?”
She looked down. “He went inside of Avvinik, started cutting him up from the inside. I went out to meet him, and we fought.” She glared at me suddenly. “I thought it was a demon boss. If I’d known it was him, I would never have gone out there. Still, he wasn’t expecting me to be so powerful. He’s probably the same level as me, maybe one higher or lower. Once you’re around level 50, it doesn’t matter so much. He tried to cast Deceleration on me, and that was his mistake.” She held up a ring I hadn’t noticed before. It held a sliver of blue jade on a silver ring, “I knew that was his go-to, so I bought this in Medina. It protects against bindings, and it reflects the spell at the caster. So he ended up frozen, not me. I tossed him into Avvinik’s stomach. It was better than he deserved. Still, it’s a very painful death. The meat on your body melts right off. He didn’t log out though. Most of these guys usually eject the moment the consumable fights back. Jenk and I talked for a bit as he was dying. I watched him sink below the surface, his body consumed. A couple minutes later, Orthrus attacked.”
Kaiju- Battlefield Surgeon Page 41