Archemi Online Chronicles Boxset

by James Osiris Baldwin

  They were digging.

  Every one of the zombies had a trenching tool, which they were using to tirelessly shovel mud and silt into makeshift dams. There were huge mounds of mud and reeds to either side of the work crew. That explained the drop in the waterline. Before I could make out anything else, though, the unit swiveled their heads toward us, letting out a chorus of roars and gurgles.

  “Icecream!” Suri bellowed Cutthroat’s attack command and held on as her hookwing went charging into the fray.

  Rin screamed and briefly covered her face as her turrets began firing on the undead. Karalti and I charged forward with Cutthroat and Suri at our side. The dragon and hookwing were immune to the stench, biting and slashing with abandon. I held my breath as I plunged my spear down, chopping into spongy skulls and mushy shoulder joints. When Karalti had enough room, she opened her jaws and spewed a plume of Ghost Fire across the rank. The zombies didn’t react to being set on fire or scream as their armor melted and their flesh charred. They simply struggled as they burned, falling to their knees and then onto their faces.

  [You have destroyed Dredgers!]

  [You gain 120 EXP!]

  “God, these guys are gross.” I coughed at the stench. “And weak. Surprisingly weak. I was expecting stronger enemies.”

  “Me too. But look: only four of them had any armor on, and their gear’s shit.” Suri pointed at two of the burning corpses, then another pair on the ground. “These people are… were… civilians. Disposable workers.”

  “Looks like it.” I glanced back to see how Rin was doing. She was hanging far back, but gave me a shaky thumbs up. “Let’s keep going. We-“

  My next words were drowned out by a chorus of roars. The water began to vibrate and slosh as the footfall of several very large, very fast somethings gained on us from the east. BOOM, BOOM, BOOM.

  “The fuck is that?” I hopped up to a crouch on Karalti’s back as three towering dinosaurs burst out of the trees to our left. They were larger than Cutthroat but smaller than Karalti, with narrow, keratin armored snouts, powerful grasping forelimbs, and lots of teeth. Allosaurus. “Holy shitballs.”

  “We can take them!” Suri wheeled Cutthroat around in the mud as the Hookwing bashed her claws together and roared in challenge. “There’s only three!”

  “No there isn’t!” Rin clutched onto Hopper as her turrets powered by. “Run!”

  I was almost about to agree with Suri when another three Allosaurus charged out into the open. In the lead was a huge, brutish albino [Alpha Allosaurus]. Its hide was studded with shards of glowing red crystal, and its eyes blazed like wells of magma. It fixed on us, and then opened its jaws and bellowed a cloud of stinking ozone gas. The other five lowered their heads and charged, surrounded by a glowing orange aura - some kind of buff.

  “Okay, it’s Stranged! Tactical retreat!” Suri turned Cutthroat around and dug her heels in.

  “We can still take them! We just need some space!” Karalti plunged through the thick undergrowth, clearing a path for Cutthroat and Suri - and, unfortunately, the Allosaurus.

  “No we fucking can’t! Not on this terrain!” I yelled back. “Up! We need high ground before Cutthroat runs out of stamina!”

  The Alpha bellowed, lowering his head to chomp and snap at Cutthroat’s fleeing tail. The hookwing screeched, running and hopping from one piece of dry land to the next, weaving through trees the Allosaurus pack bulldozed aside. Wood splintered and crashed, sending smaller creatures flying. None of them were stupid enough to aggro on us. The collective weight of the running pack of dragon and dinosaurs rattled the earth like an avalanche.

  “We need to kite them into a trap and either lose them, or rain down fire from above!” Rin shouted to us in PM. “Can you get off the ground?”

  “Agreed! Get in the air as soon as you can!” Suri’s Ride skill wasn’t anywhere near mine, and she was struggling to hold on. She had lost her reins, and had her arms wrapped around Cutthroat’s neck. Only her formidable strength was keeping her on the hookwing’s back.

  The Endlar was mostly unmapped, so all we had to navigate by was the quest marker: a glowing beacon thirty miles south-east of our location. There was no high ground and no open space in sight. Frustrated, I knelt up and turned to look back, bobbing on Karalti’s back as she ducked and weaved, splashed and leapt. The Allosaurus were showing no sign of slowing down or losing interest. Even if I jumped and rained down Master of Blades thru Rain of Glass on them, there was no fucking way I’d land on the ground and live to tell the tale. The terrain made turning around and facing them in any meaningful way almost impossible.

  “There! I see something!” Karalti couldn’t knock over entire trees like the heavier dinosaurs could, but she could plough through brambles and cattails like they weren’t there. “Open area!”

  “Be careful of quicksand! If we sink in a mire now, we’re dead!” I dropped into flight position, catching the saddle grips and shoving my feet in the stirrups in anticipation of an emergency takeoff.

  We broke out of the treeline into an ankle-deep, slushy brown marsh. The reeds around the waterline were trampled and black, slimy enough that I felt Karalti’s foot slip a little as she charged toward the water. There was a strong rotten meat smell in the stagnant air, and bones half-hidden among the dead vegetation. The water here was very shallow, except at the center of the mire, where it plunged down like a funnel into the mud. The place screamed ‘ambush site’.

  “Eww.” Karalti began to lift her back legs. “This place is slimy.”

  Slimy? I looked down to see that the ‘water’ was clinging to my dragon’s foot like taffy, soft and stretchy. Zlazo’s warning came back to me then - the Swamp Hags.

  “There’s a Swamp Hag nearby! Let’s kite them straight into the middle of that mire.” I clenched one of the grips. “Suri! Rin! Go around the waterline! Whatever you do, do not take Cutthroat in there!”

  “Yah!” I heard Suri spur the spitting, raging hookwing to the limit of her endurance behind us. “We’ll get ahead of you and you can drag them in!”

  Karalti bellowed, a guttural sound deeper than the Allosauruses charging through the swamp behind us. She threw herself into the stagnant air, stumbling forward on the downstroke, and just barely skimmed the deepening pool of slime as we lifted. My head lurched, and when I looked down, I saw a behemoth shadow start to rise from under the surface. “Watch out!”

  The dragon snarled with effort, lurching into the sky as the liquid beneath us began to bubble. The Alpha Allosaurus, oblivious to anything but kicking our ass, ran straight into the marsh and jumped. It caught the end of Karalti’s tail, jolting us back and nearly throwing me forward over her shoulder and into the water.

  “Get off me!” Karalti squealed, striving to stay in the air as the dinosaur set his teeth in and tugged. I turned, leveled the Spear, and was about to charge Umbra Blast when the muddy slime sucked down into the hole like the retreating surf that heralded an incoming tsunami, and something monstrous surged up in its place.

  My first thought was that the Swamp Worm was some kind of fish, like the mother of all carp. My second thought was that it was a leech the size of a train carriage. The third was some variation of OH FUCK OH FUCK OH FUCK as a huge blue-gray worm leaped from the water like a playful whale, spewing slime in all directions. It struck Karalti like a net, entangling her legs and dragging her down toward the water.

  Every one of the Allosaurus had charged in after their leader, straight into the trap the giant mud-carp-leech creature had laid. It slithered out, blind and slippery, and sprayed goo from a hole-like mouth onto the dinosaur. The Alpha roared as the liquid slapped against its skin, letting Karalti go and spinning around to flee. It collided with its packmates, which gave the hole-fish time to spray the group of them together like some kind of awful reverse bukkake.

  My dragon’s wingbeats began to falter. “Hector? I’m sleepy.”

  “What? Hey! No, wake the fuck up!” I refocused on Karalti
as her head drooped. “Look at Suri! Get to Suri and Cutthroat!”

  [Karalti is gaining torpor!]

  Holy fuck: it was the slime. The Allosaurs were crumpling to their knees in the mire, drugged to unconsciousness. The giant hole-fish flopped forward on its belly and sucked the paralyzed Alpha’s head into its mouth, working over the forty-foot long dinosaur like a snake over a mouse.

  “Stab her!” Rin shouted from the bank of the marsh. “That’s how you cure Sleep status!”

  “No! I’m not stabbing her!” Frantic, I ransacked my inventory, but I didn’t have any stimulants. “Okay, yes I am!”

  In desperation, I pulled one of my old shitty daggers, jammed it under one of the scales at the base of her neck, and shoved it in about an inch.

  [You stab Karalti for 5HP!]

  “Huu... wha? Ow!” The dragon half-heartedly adjusted her wings: not enough to stop our short descent into the mire.

  “Pull up! Pull up!” I banged her scales with the hilt of the knife.

  My shouts bought Karalti back to her senses. As her long back feet grazed the back of the worm, she yarped and began frantically beating her wings, laboring back into the air with a great whomph whomph whomph that sent water flying everywhere. Cutthroat shrieked from the bank; Karalti replied with an oddly similar cry as she clumsily swooped over to land beside Rin and Suri.

  “Jesus motherfuckin’ Christ.” The Berserker was watching the carnage in the swamp in shock. Two of the Allosaurus were asleep, while the remaining three attacked the monster who was almost done engulfing their paralyzed pack leader. “That was a bit full on, wasn’t it?”

  “A bit!?” Rin rounded on her.

  She shrugged, still staring over my shoulder. “A bit as in a lot. What the fuck is that thing?”

  “That, my friend, is a bonafide Short-Jawed Mudsucker. And we are absolutely not ready to fight it.” I clapped Karalti on the side of the neck, suddenly aware of how much my hand was shaking. “Phew. Least we got a nice adrenaline rush out of it. I almost feel ready to run screaming from the next pack of Allosaurus like a little bitch.”

  “Realistically, in a punch-up with a pack of Allosaurus, anybody’s a little bitch.” Suri sighed. “A Short-Jawed Mudsucker, huh?”

  “That’s right!”

  Rin scowled at me. “That is not what that thing is called.”

  “Sure it is. The Short-Jawed Mudsucker, scientific name Bukkakus maximus.”

  Suddenly, Karalti reared up and bellowed. “Crabs!”

  “What? Oh, you have to be fucking kidding me.” Suri snarled, swinging her sword around as eight horseshoe crab-like things burst out of the undergrowth and charged us, barbed whip tails swinging for our necks. Stingcrabs.

  I charged power, getting ready for an Umbra Burst. “I’m beginning to see why the Demon’s bogged down.”

  “No more motherfucking puns!”

  “Yes ma’am.” Chortling, I spun my Spear around and jumped down into the fray.

  Chapter 19

  It was like this the entire day. Encounter after encounter, mob after mob. Every mudhole seemed to contain something dangerous, venomous, hungry, or any combination of the three. They all had shit EXP and either no loot or low-grade loot. It was so hot that we had to drink twice as much as usual, which meant we were haunted by the eternal specter of Archemi’s fucking Pee Meter.

  My only consolation was herbs, because the Endlar had herbs for days.

  Red Rashovik. King’s Grass. Peppermint, Roseroot, Starberry, Irises, Foxglove, Nightshade and Green Moss. Everything I didn’t already know how to use, I frantically stuffed into my mouth, much to Suri’s confusion and Rin’s amusement. I was able to collect everything from common herbs, like Holy Basil, to exotic things I hadn’t seen before. Acid mushrooms, Hallucinogenic Mushrooms – those were fun for about twenty minutes – Mandrake, and all kinds of monster blood. God. So much monster blood.

  Most the blood was from what was now my least favorite monster species. Stingcrabs were one of the most common mobs in this part of the Endlar, giving next to no EXP while costing us heavily in time and Antidotes. Then there were Gastina plants, which KO’d you and THEN flung spikes of death at your helpless body while other things came to eat your delicious sweetmeats. And pretty much everything here wanted those. The dinosaurs, the bugs, the plants...

  “Bears. In a swamp.” Still covered in blood, I held my spear above the waterline as I waded through chest-deep steaming water. The sun was starting to set.

  “Yup,” Karalti said.

  “Swamp bears.”

  “Yuuup.”

  “Who the fuck puts crack-bears in a swamp?” I angrily pimp-slapped a leech that was oozing toward me through the water, backhanding it to land somewhere with a splash. “This is some Florida-level bullshit.”

  “We’re lucky we haven’t run into a Rex.” Suri said. She and Cutthroat rode to our left. “Allosaurus are bad enough, but there’s nothing we have that could take a T-rex. We get them near oases in Dakhdir... they like to eat carrion. Unless you happen to be trucking a ballista, about the only thing anyone can do when they show up is run.”

  “If they’re desert critters, they won’t be- FUCK!” Something wrapped around my leg, and I stabbed at it and jumped away on reflex. Nothing came of it, and I resumed wading. Tentacle or weed? Who knew?

  “Yeah. This is more like Spinosaurus country, innit? Or what are those water-dinos. Name begins with ‘B’.”

  “Baryonyx.” Rin clung to Hopper as the automaton paddled like a dog behind us.

  “That’s the one. Barry-onyx.”

  “No, it’s BAH-ri-OHn-ix.”

  “That’s what I said, numbnuts. Ba-REE-oh-nix!”

  It was getting colder and creepier as we padded through the thinning trees. They weren’t just thinning - they were dying. The water was drying up, leaving pools of cracked mud. There weren’t any animals or monsters around, and the earthy, organic smell of the swamp had almost vanished. When we were about three hundred feet from the marker, it abruptly disappeared on the mini-map, opening up into a field bounded by a large shaded circle.

  “Looks like we have to search for clues.” I was uneasy as I vaulted down from Karalti’s back, and even more so when I landed on the earth and it crunched under my boots. The area smelled like an ice rink... like dirty ice and old rubber. “Something’s fucky.”

  “Yeah.” Rin followed after me, sliding from Hopper’s back. “Everything’s dead. Maybe we could see something from the air?”

  I looked up at Karalti. She nodded and paced ahead with her wings mantled until she reached a place where she could take off. Suri lit a torch while we waited. The circle of yellow light illuminated ghostly white trees, flying beetles, shallow dead water, and a gravel-strewn ridge up ahead.

  “Weird.” I looked around uneasily. “It’s like the forest is dying.”

  “Yeah.” Suri had her sword out, the point of the huge blade resting on the ground, the torch in her other hand. “Rin, you were saying there were devices that pulled mana from the land, right? Could be what we’re looking at.”

  The Mercurion bobbed her head. “An Ix’tamo could do this. They eventually kill everything off, but they don’t usually do it this fast. Not unless there’s a lot of them.”

  “Hector! I see dead people up on the ridge!” Karalti’s voice broke through just then.

  “Hang on: Karalti found something.” I sniffed, but couldn’t smell anyone or anything decomposing. “Undead or dead-dead? And how many?”

  “About twenty, and they’re dead-dead. They’re lying down in the middle of a pretty pattern.”

  I wrinkled my nose. “… Pretty pattern?”

  “What’d she find? Rotters?” Suri asked.

  I shook my head. “She doesn’t think so. I’d be careful anyway.”

  Slowly and carefully, we headed upward, climbing the narrow gravel path through groves of leafless, shriveled trees. The stench of death hung in the air.

  “Wa
it.” Rin held up small silver hands. “I’m sorry… I can’t do this. I’ll watch the path with Lovelace and Hopper.”

  “Sure thing. But corpse is kind of an acquired resistance. You get used to it, but you have to expose yourself to it.” I tied a cloth around my neck and pulled it up part way over my helmet.

  She looked down. “I… guess you fought in the War? Like, the Total War. Second Total War.”

  “79th Meatshield Division, at your service,” I replied. “I was conscripted in ‘63. Fought in the jungle and the desert for five years. This place brings back great memories, believe me.”

  “That’s… mm.” Rin looked up toward the hill, then set her shoulders and began marching up toward the bodies.

  “You can hang back, Rin.” I looked to Suri, who shrugged. “You don’t like… need to impress us.”

  “No.” The Mercurion shook her head. “You’re right, and you’re my friend. If you have to do this and relive all those horrible things, I’ll go with you.”

  “Alright.” Suri carried the torch ahead, drawing an axe with her other hand. She flipped it around. “But let me go first. You two stay behind me.”

  I hesitated. “If you die-”

  “If you die, Karalti’ll never forgive me. I’m trying to get on her good side right now.”

  “Really?” Reluctantly, I fell in behind her and flanked out, peering out into the gloom. “Why? Think she’s cute now she can turn into a human girl?”

  “Don’t be gross. She’s basically my adopted kid at this point, right?”

  As her words sunk in, I grinned more widely than I had ever beamed in my life. “Yeah. Mine too.”

  It was frigid now, our breath frosting in clouds of vapor, and the terrain was no longer entirely flat. I was okay, but Suri was shivering by the time we crested the ridge. Despite the cold, the smell hit us full force up there, along with the sound: carrion beetles. They rubbed their wings together in a raspy chorus as they crawled over a ring of corpses laid out in a circle on the ground. Karalti was right: these guys were very dead, each one laid out with his arms crossed over his chest. And the pattern was kind of pretty.