by Deck Davis
In that section, corpses were laying all around Godden and his surviving force, and there looked to be even more orb weavers in the distance. Tripp could feel the tiredness in Godden’s bones. He could smell the blood dripping down his face. He felt the desperation of the man who had fought a battle, lost thousands of his kin, only for more of his enemy to scuttle onto the plains.
Yet, the look on Godden’s face wasn’t fear, but strength. In the face of a force that never stopped coming, he didn’t let fear in. That was what Tripp needed now.
He won this, or he died. Either way, there was no other way of getting out of here. He might as well face it while staying brave and giving it everything.
“One,” he said.
A spark of an idea hit him, leaving as soon as it came. He grabbed for it, but it had scuttled away.
“Tripp?” said Jon.
“Two.”
The spark lit again.
He paused. He tried to reach for it.
“Tripp?”
This time he was too quick for it, and he seized the idea and brought it into the light.
“Wait. I have an idea.”
He picked up two fire-artificed shields from the ground. Flame swept over the metal, and he instinctually held them by the edges so as not to burn his fingers, before logic appeared and he held them properly, knowing that his own artificery wouldn’t hurt him.
“Running out of time, Tripp,” said Jon. “Gotta be a minute or two before the wave now.”
“This will help. Trust me.”
He kneeled in front of the eisschwarm statue, with the marble-cast cloud above him, dark and mean and seeming like it was just itching to be given life so it could destroy him with freezing rain.
Tripp traced his finger over the outer edges of the eisschwarms checkerboard square, smiling.
“There are grooves around each floor square,” he said. “Only an inch or two, but still…”
“What does that mean?”
“Watch.”
He lined the edge a fire shield up with the grooves in the floor. Biting his lip in concentration, he jammed it in place and pushed and wobbled until he felt it get stuck. When he took his hands off it, the shield was stuck in the grooves, forming a kind of mini-wall next to the statue.
He did the same with the second fire shield so that there was a smack, L-shaped fire shield wall around the eisschwarm statue.
“When it comes to it, the fire shield should keep it trapped until it figures out that I couldn’t cover the square completely,” he said. “Do the same with the others. Ice beats fire, so use the ice shields on the frorarg square.”
They got to work quickly, sorting through shields and jamming them into the grooves around the appropriate squares. Tripp and Jon carried theirs, while Clive made shields levitate and float through the air.
When they were done, each statue’s square had a two-wall shield with the relevant elemental effect. The frorarg was hemmed in by an ice shield wall, the hornfel by a lightning-artificed wall.
“They’ll figure out that there are no shields behind them,” said Tripp, “but it should give us a few seconds to get some hits in while they’re too scared to move. That might be the difference.”
“I believe the Blood Wave is about to start,” said Clive.
“Let’s get to it. Turn your keys and say your words.”
CHAPTER 72
Gilla made a lap of the south facing Mountmend fences, noting the mixture of cowardice and bravery, strategy and utter disorganization on offer. It could all have been different. It should have been, damn it. If she’d convinced the guilds to work with her, they could have been ready.
They would have to muddle through as best as a bunch of discordant guilds and random unguilded players could. Gilla and the Striders would fight until their last breaths puffed out into the air of the plains, anyway. But…if they made it close to the end, and the other guilds were still around, then God help them. She’d always thought of regrets as the hangover of an ill-advised choice, and she was about to give the players of Godden’s Reach a hell of a hangover.
Her own Striders looked the most organized of the lot. Her swordsmen, spellwrights, assassins, thieves, clerics, and mages waited inside the Mountmend fences. While Penny Alvertos’s archers had occupied the gaps in the west fences, the Strider arcanists and fire-wrights took up the east, ready to pelt the orb weavers with bolts of scorching manus when they got close. At that point, her swordsmen would stream out of the gates and hack the weavers into mincemeat, no doubt joined by the scattering of guildless players who had survived so far.
An arm rested on her shoulder. Gilla flinched, then noted it was Lamp dressed in his battle armor, and she let his arm stay there.
“When this is over, I want to recruit whoever survives,” she said. “It doesn’t matter about their level or skillset. You don’t survive a wave without balls, guts, and a spine made of iron.”
“A long way to go before that. We need a way to thin out the weavers,” said Lamp.
“We aren’t alone. The Fleet and the Magnificent Elven might not be working with us, but they’re still fighting for survival. And there’s a Fell Lord outside the gates. See him? See his sword? Makes Abyssal Shard look like a gnat’s toothpick.”
“We still don’t have enough. Even if some higher-level players here can kill two or three weavers at a time, we’ll be swarmed.”
Standing outside the fences now, with the sky turning dark above her, with a night-time wind blowing cold against her face and bringing the sour grass smell of the plains and a rich, oaky smell of smoke, Gilla tried to get a real look at her enemy.
At first, all she saw was the endless plains, with the spread of mist all across it. A blanket of grey, suffocating and crawling. That was the worst part; that the mist kept secrets from her. It hid the weavers' numbers and made it impossible to see how many they had to kill to survive tonight. Not content at blindness, it spread fear into people’s hearts.
But people were learning.
On the night of the first wave, hundreds had charged out into the plain to meet the weavers, while the more patient fighters stayed in the town and watched the impulsive swordsmen die.
The second night, fewer numbers had rushed out.
Tonight, nobody rushed, because the fog brought the fear of the unknown. If you rushed into it, it was like swimming into the tar-black waters of an ocean at night-time. You didn’t know what was lurking in the spots you couldn’t see, but they knew you were there.
“You’re right,” she said. “But Ralph might be wrong about what he saw.”
Lamp didn’t answer. When her scout had returned from the edges of the Reach, words had spurted from him like water from a punctured hose, spraying everywhere with no direction. It had taken him a few minutes to calm down before they pulled the truth from him.
That truth had opened a pit of hopelessness right by her feet. By everyone’s feet, actually, every soul in the Reach. But only she and Lamp could see it.
“Whenever you’re quiet, I know you disagree with me,” she said.
“Doesn’t seem to make much difference now,” said Lamp. “They’re almost here either way.”
“Did you send another scout?”
“Tamia went out on her pinchdragon. I told her to ride all around the mist. See how wide it is, how far it stretches over the Reach. Get close and see inside it if she could, but don’t risk herself. The more I know, the more I can extrapolate, plan, dissect.”
“And?”
“A few minutes after I lost sight of her, the total number of people in the Reach dropped by one.”
Zayne Haley took a running start and then leaped, catching the ledge and using his claws to get a better grip, before pulling himself up. As he clambered up the sloped Adventurers’ guild roof, he felt the wind brush over his fur and twirl his whiskers around.
The roof was made of sheets of slate interwoven in layers with odd slates missing, some in need of repair
, and all slick with rain. If a human player could even get up here, they’d have lost their balance. There were benefits to playing as a ratfur.
The roof sloped up toward a brick turret, the highest point in the whole of Mountmend, save for Old Kimby, and that was where Zayne headed. As he hopped from one slate to the next, he felt a smile growing on his face.
Given that his real lungs were so shot that he could barely walk his stairs without gasping for air, he took every opportunity to run and climb in Soulboxe. He’d found that next to the elf class, the ratfurs were the most agile race, and had the added advantage of being able to scale impossibly smooth surfaces, coupled with heightened night vision.
He didn’t care that ratfurs had inherent combat penalties and magic limitations. He understood that was why you didn’t see many around, but it didn’t bother him. If he could sprint around and jump and climb, he was happy.
Well, that had been enough at first. But Zayne’s father always said “Zay, your appetite changes direction like piss in the wind.” He supposed that was right. Running and jumping wasn’t enough now; he wanted accomplishment.
It just happened that outside of Soulboxe, there wasn’t much left for him to accomplish. His talented family had gorged themselves on success, and he didn’t like the taste of the leftovers. He had money outside of the game, so there was no need for him to become wealthy. His older brother had so many athletics medals his bedroom shone brighter than a pharaoh’s tomb, and his younger sister was always wedging her acceptance to Oxford university into every conversation. As well as that, his father couldn’t have made it clearer that he saw Zayne as too reckless to be his heir apparent for Oystuk Oil and Gas, so becoming the next business wonderkid was out of the question.
But Zayne could do something in Soulboxe. If people wouldn’t talk about his real-life deeds, at least if he accomplished something in the game, it would be written about. Soulboxe was the most popular game around, and the Wave was the first event on its kind to happen here. If Zayne was one of the survivors, he’d watch himself talked about by video streamers, see his deeds written about by bloggers. Once something was published on the internet, it was there forever, for better or worse. It was the twenty-first century way of becoming a legend.
He let thoughts of legend fade and fixed on the turret ahead of him. A woman was standing in it. Her hair was fire red and her eyes usually burned just as hot, but today they were unblinking and whiter than the purest pearl. Her leather armor, a mythical-rated set that Zayne had bought for her, blended perfectly into the night. It was grey now, but as the night came upon them fully the armor would darken to match it, and then in the morning – whether they saw it here as survivors or elsewhere after tasting death – it would fill with blue to mirror the early-hours sky.
It had cost him five thousand real dollars to buy the armor for Cayla. He’d never told her that because he knew she had never even seen that kind of money, and it would embarrass her beyond belief to know she was wearing in-game armor worth more than her car. You didn’t embarrass the people you loved, even if you never told them you loved them and probably never would.
He scampered up to the turret and rested his arm on the brickwork ledge and waited. Staring into the white of her eyes, it was easy to think she was far away, her thoughts caught up in the swirl of a cosmos he couldn’t perceive. Which she was, in a sense. Even so, he knew that a part of her would be aware of his presence, and he had to let her come out of it in her own time. Let her drift back in reality rather than drag her into it.
Shocks of red seeped into her eyes. Her fingers twitched, her nose pinched. More red flood the white until soon, her eyes were completely crimson. She blinked and looked at him.
Far away, merely a speck, an eagle took a sudden dip in the air, before righting itself again. Zayne watched it regain control of its body and take swooping arcs away from the Reach, getting smaller, darker, until it was gone.
“I much prefer your real eyes,” said Zayne. “They look like yolkless eggs when you use elementaire.”
“Charmer,” she said, and punched him on the arm. He let go of his grip on the turret ledge and feigned losing balance, swinging his rat arms madly as if he was about to tumble off the roof. Her eyes flinched with concern as she grabbed for him, and he let himself enjoy the warm feeling this gave him, knowing that she cared.
Then he held the ledge and lifted his legs, showing his feet. “Claws on my feet, too,” he said.
“I should have remembered.”
He nodded at the sky. “Was the eagle yours?”
“Falcon,” she corrected. “And I wouldn’t say mine. They never belong to me. Think of me as a passenger.”
“What did you see?”
Cayla swept her hair back and then brushed her hand through just a few inches of it before her hand was lost completely in the jungle on her head. When she spoke, she did so with an American accent undercut by traces of harsh Polish notes.
“I lost two falcons before I could get a good look,” she said. She dug a hand into her mess of hair again. “Must be a thousand weavers out there, Zayne.”
“What else? The mist is hiding something other than weavers.”
“Gówno,” she said, her accent slipping into Polish. Zayne tried to remember the swearwords she’d taught him, but couldn’t think of what Gówno meant. “You know how much manus it takes to elementaire just one bird? I can’t get close to the mist because they kill my ride, and I’m empty now.”
She lifted her boot and then stomped it down. Zayne heard the crunch of glass and saw the smashed pieces of potions vials by her feet.
“If we don’t know what we’re fighting, we don’t know what to use against it.”
“I flew over the mist, and I sent two birds into it. I can’t make miracles.”
“What did you see?”
“Death. Death that struck before I could even get a look at its face. Soon as I penetrated the mist, they were killed.”
“I wonder if we should pull the guild back into the square. Let the others take the fall first.”
She stamped her boot again, this time in frustration, crunching more glass into molecules. “Don’t be such a skurwielu, Zayne. I didn’t join the Magnificents to put my thumb in my tylek and let others fight in my place.”
“You joined because I promised to buy you fancy items and access to master-level trainers.”
“And I agree six months, no? Five months have gone. I won’t spend the last as a coward.”
The talk of time and months was a double punch to Zayne’s gut. He’d wracked his brains trying to think of how to persuade her to stay in the Magnificents for longer, but there was nothing. He’d offered to send her real money, but she’d called him a cienias, whatever that was, and told him “there are better charity cases if you wanted to piss your money into a storm.”
Forget it, he told himself. He needed to focus on tonight.
She jabbed him in the ribs. “Zayne, look!”
He climbed up onto the turret ledge and sat on it and looked out onto the Reach. First, he saw the Mountmend fences, three feet taller than they had been earlier that morning, and with Penny’s archers peering out from custom-cut slats.
Then there was a unit of Striders outside of Mountmend, waiting in the plains. Eight of them wearing the heaviest armor imaginable, wielding warhammers that looked like they could topple houses, axes large enough to carve through a giant’s calf. They were sitting atop various wargs and mounts, some on lion-lizard crossbreeds, others on what looked like half-sized elephants but much leaner.
Across from the Striders and their mounts were the only other players who’d forsaken the illusionary protection of Mountmend. It was as random a hodge-podge of races and classes as he'd ever seen.
He saw a battlemage with his wrinkled face peeking out from his hood, and arcane bursts of purple and blue and red light seeping from his sleeves and gathering over his hands. An alchemist wearing artificery goggles, her hair almost
covering her elvish ears, a series of straps all over her chest keeping potion vials in place. The most impressive was a Fell Lord, a good few feet taller than the rest of them with a sword and shield glowing electric blue, his armor dazzling with artificery. He was standing alone and gazing straight forward at the mist.
That made him feel a little better. Having a high-level Fell Lord fighting in the Reach was them taking an AK47 to a spoon fight, and Zayne would bet his father’s last million bucks that his weapon and armor were as mythical as the gods in the Greek pantheon.
But Cayla wasn’t pointing at the battlemage, the alchemist, or the Fell Lord. It was the mist that she had drawn Zayne’s attention to. Not only had it traveled to a stone’s throw of Mountmend, but it was beginning to thin now, letting them get a glimpse of the secrets it had hidden.
Legs pierced through the front shroud of smoke. Pincers first, then the full length of the leg, sinews and all. They raised and fell, and the mist drew back further to reveal rows upon rows of orb weavers. Hundreds, maybe a thousand, legs tapped over the ground, thousands of black eyes reflecting the moonlight. Anyone who said the orb weavers had dead eyes hadn’t looked at them properly. There was life in them. Life and intent, even if that intent was born in hatred.
Gilla was the first player to act, as she always would be. Standing on an overturned wheelbarrow, she shouted to her guild. Mounted Striders split into two groups of four, one heading west around the mist, one going east.
This movement spurred the other players. Across the plains, a battlemage smashed his staff into the ground so hard it stuck fast, and he spread his hands above it and shouted something, letting white light gather around it.
People scurried back and forth inside Mountmend. The air filled with their orders and curses, with the rattle of armor and clomping of boots, with dozens of weapons pulled from sheaths.
Yet none of this could rival the sound of the orb weavers as they tore out of the fog and toward Mountmend. So many weavers with so many legs. It made Zayne’s stomach churn just listening to it, never mind that he had climbed high enough to get a full view of the army of monsters they had to fight.