by Deck Davis
Gilla couldn’t help wringing her fingers as they rode further and further into the distance, marking every ten feet with the poles. She wanted to be with them, but she’d never gained the mount skill. Her place was here, for now, where she could see everything. When their trap was in place, she could start to kill.
Not long now. She hoped Lamp was right about this.
Cayla was gone by the time Zayne reached the fences. The roar here was enough to hurt his ears, heightened as they were by his rat senses. He eyed Penny Alvertos’s archers standing by the fences, some dipping their arrows in fire barrels and then nocking them, others pulling red-glowing arrows from quivers on their backs. When an archer at the end of the row, a fat-bellied half-troll, yelled “Now!” a swarm of burning arrows rose high into the sky, leaving red and yellow contrails behind them, before arcing out of view.
Zayne felt twin feelings of excitement and worry grow in his belly. To quell this he looked for his own guild, but the only gathering he saw by the gates were a bunch of Mountmend NPCs who’d armed themselves and looked to be heading to the plains, singing a song about Godden being a dwarf.
Cayla must have directed the others to go fight in the plains. She didn’t need Zayne’s permission for this; he delegated most of their combat to her. Cayla being Cayla, she’d stormed out into the thick of the fighting.
He opened his inventory and brought out items that he’d bought a long time ago and had never used.
The first was a suit of armor only a ratfur could wear, exquisitely shaped for his body. The metal was deceptively dull, more like lead than silver, but most swords would bend against it before the armor broke. It looked heavy, with its interwoven silver sheets and its enormous rat heads capping each shoulder, but really it was like wearing a set of silk pajamas. Pajamas that could withstand the blow of a barbarians axe.
Next, he slipped his front and back paws into custom-forged gauntlets fitted for the ratfur race, the back two artificed to grant speed, the front to deal poison damage along with heightened strength.
Armored up and weaponized, the last thing he did was to gulp down four potions in quick succession, the hit of flavors so unsuited together that they formed a horrible mix in the back of his throat. Something lemony with what tasted like the smell of tobacco. A bitter, basil-like taste, and something floral.
Notifications spewed into the air in front of him, informing him of the stat boosts his one-use, auction -bought, expensive-as-hell concoctions had given him. He did the mental math; to bring his stats up to the equivalent of a higher-level player, he’d just gulped over eight thousand dollars’ worth of in-game potions. These devs had a good thing going on.
The armor and the potions filled him with confidence and he tore off, his metal gauntlet claws chinking on the pavement. Leaving the gate, a message appeared.
You have now left Mountmend [PVP enabled]
He stopped now. He looked around, and he felt cold. It was chaos. Complete chaos without restraint, the screams of the weavers and tapping of thousands of feet mixing with cries of pain, with grunts of effort as players swung swords, with the swoosh of arrows in the air, so many it was like a horde of insects taking flight. The sound churned into one so it could only be called the sound of battle, neither human nor inhuman, just the clamor of death.
A great clacking sound pulled his attention to the gates behind him. He couldn’t believe it.
The NPC dwarves had filed out of the gates now and headed into the fray on the plains, but the remaining few leaped out of the way of Penny Alvertos, who was sitting in a wooden cart.
Its four great wheels turned on their own as if it had an engine, but the only thing fueling the vehicle was artificery. Each time a wheel completed a turn, sparks of ignited manus drifted from the wood, casting their sulfuric smell in the air.
Penny was sitting in a tight compartment at the front with four crossbows nailed in place on the wood, each fixed to a base so that Penny could pivot them around. He had four quivers by his feet, the artificed blue tips of the arrow poking up.
The cart looked like it could have been used to wheel wood piles or turnips around one day, before Penny had gotten his and his crafter’s hands on it. Now it was reshaped, varnished, and its name was printed on the side; Red Matilda.
Squinting through the sights of one crossbow, Penny fired, and an arrow and its trailing manus plume of smoke fired out, cutting through the air before landing home somewhere in the mess of weavers.
While another arrow clicked into place of its own accord, Penny moved on to the second crossbow, squinted, fired, and then gripped the handle of the third, completing this rotation again and again until the air around him stank of manus, and he had to pause to load five fresh arrows into each crossbow
It was a sight, that was for sure, but the best part was the man standing behind Penny. There was a raised platform on the back end of the cart. A humongous crossbow, this bigger than a person and with an arrow the size of a sapling loaded onto it. It looked like it would tip the cart over, but somehow it won its battle with gravity. More artificery. It had to be.
Maybe he’d gotten Penny wrong. Penny had set his archers up by the fences and supplied them with artificed arrows. He’d brought out this cart with its monstrosity of a crossbow, and a man standing behind it and swiveling it around to get a better aim. Penny had contributed more to the final wave than his reputation would suggest.
This filled Zayne with more shame, and it fell on top of the image in his mind of Cayla walking away from him, barely hiding her disappointment that Zayne had planned to let others die first.
His Magnificents were gathered around him now. Where they had come from he had no idea, but he noted that Cayla and three of his better fighters were missing. Instead, there were two dozen men, women, gnomes, halflings, half-trolls, troll-wights. The armor Zayne had newly-bought for them sometimes caught the glint of fire arrows flying way overhead. Fighters rested on the hilts of their swords, mages let manus grow in their palms before snuffing it out. All eyes were on him.
“Where do we attack first?” said a gnome named Rodney, who was always pestering Zayne to buy him new halberds.
The question of where to strike first was the problem, but Zayne couldn’t speak it aloud. It wouldn’t do to show that without Cayla, he didn’t have much of a clue about fighting, Every show of weakness was a tide eroding the cliffs of leadership. “Which way did Cayla go?”
“You know her,” said Rodney.
A dark feeling stirred in his stomach. “Straight into the middle?”
“And haven’t seen her since.”
“Her and the guildies she took with her,” said Zayne, under his breath.
They waited now. They expected orders from him, quick and true. But without Cayla, every thought he had felt weak. Which way to attack? If they followed Cayla, they’d die as soon as they breached the horde’s lines.
Unlike Penny and his archers, the Magnificents didn’t have enough long-range spellcasters or archers to justify hanging back. Their way of fighting had always been quick, brutal, and unmerciful, just like Cayla.
A sound answered his question.
A giant clap, just softer than the start of a thunderstorm and much more mechanical-sounding. Zayne followed the direction of it just in time to see a spear-like bolt fire from the giant crossbow on Penny’s battle cart.
While his archers’ arrows zipped through the air, this giant log of a bolt roared through it, losing speed as it reached the weavers and then finally letting gravity drag it to the ground. When it hit the weavers, it cut a hole in their lines so big that a dozen men could have breached it. It disorientated the arachnids, but those who were merely confused were the lucky ones.
The bolt had impaled seven on impact and wounded plenty more, these ones skittering on broken legs or falling to the ground with blood leaking from their wounds.
Zayne felt the warmth of an idea flooding his mind.
But the bolt wasn’t done
yet. It was wedged into the grass now. Pale blood-red light began to seep from it. It emitted a noise. What was it? It was familiar to Zayne but strange at the same time.
It played out a few more bars, and then he knew.
It was the sound the weavers made when they spoke to each other. The noise drew weavers toward the bolt, and the red light grew stronger and stronger, spreading like the mist that had brought the arachnids here.
Zayne watched, rapt with excitement, his idea full-bloomed now but he couldn’t execute it until he saw what happened next.
The bolt exploded. After gathering dozens and dozens of weavers around it, it burst in a boom and fizz of blood light, sending dirt and weaver legs flying way overhead and then splattering into the ground as a blood and dirt shower.
When the mist faded, there were no weavers left in that section of the plains, and the surrounding weavers gave it a wide berth. One giant bolt, a hundred weavers dead.
His idea tingled inside him now. He smiled. He pictured telling Cayla about it after the battle, knowing she’d approve. “This way,” he said to his Magnificents.
“You heard the rat,” said Rodney, now holding his Halberd of Misery’s End, which had cost Zayne 500 bucks and so far hadn’t shown much of a return on investment.
As his Magnificents followed Zayne across the plains, Penny’s giant bolts shot out, hitting all parts of the horde. Another six of them, each thudding into the dirt, letting out its weaver-like cries, then exploding when creatures gathered around it.
Meanwhile, the Striders had completed their task, and Zayne understood what Gilla’s plan was now. They had jammed poles into the ground all around the weavers' outskirts, front, back, left, right. Lights glowed on each pole, and strings of luminescence spread, connecting them all like telegraph poles.
Containment by artificery, that’s what it was. Putting an electrified fence around a herd of cattle, except the fence was a construct of manus, and the cows had knives for legs.
The weavers were trapped. They still numbered almost a thousand, but they couldn’t get past the Striders’ artificed poles.
Every sane player had left close combat now, knowing that they were safe enough if they stood on the correct side of the Striders’ poles. Some melee fighters pulled out bows and shot poorly-aimed arrows at the arachnids, while others used what little magery they had, firing puffs of fire and clouds of venomous manus at the weavers.
Throughout this, Penny bombarded them with his bolts. The weavers began to learn now, and some of them avoided the bolts, ignoring the sounds they made. Even so, dozens died with each one. On the eleventh bolt, something strange happened.
This one stuck into the grass just like the rest, and it wailed out its weaver cry. But no weavers would go near it, and the red light was absent.
Zayne and his Magnificents reached Penny’s cart. Penny wore a maniacal grin now. While nearly everyone in the Reach had changed into their best armor, Penny still wore his stinking rags. Take him away from his guild, from his artificed cart, from his god-sized crossbow, and he blended into the beggar population.
“Did you see that?” Penny said. “Pulped weaver everywhere. Enough for everyone. Pulped weaver pie.”
“They figured out your trick,” said Zayne, pointing. “See? They’re avoiding your bolts like a one-legged matador fleeing a bull on heat.”
Penny leaned forward and rested his hand on Zayne’s shoulder. His breath stank of whiskey. “Zayne, my man, they couldn’t have played further into my game.” He patted the remaining six wooden bolts next to the giant crossbow. “These aren’t artificed. Why bother paying for artificery on all of them? I figured the weavers were clever enough to learn. They know to avoid the bolts now. Sometimes the threat of death is a better control than the act. ”
Understanding hit Zayne in a flash. “Right…so we can decide where they move. If we want to herd them somewhere, you just need to fire a bolt, and they’ll move away from it.”
“Exactly. And with the Striders and their fences, we have the game in our favor.”
It was true. They had it. He opened his map, where the player count in the Reach was listed. It didn’t make for pleasant viewing.
“Thirty-eight of us left,” he said.
“Thirty-eight is plenty when they’re trapped,” said Penny. “The tide’s turned and we’re sailing it into the sunset.”
With their trap sprung, and the weavers held in check, Gilla was ready to order her Striders to start picking off the arachnids, when the weavers stopped attacking. Confused, she tried to make sense of it as hundreds of weavers shuffled left and right, forming a pathway between them.
A man walked through the pathway. He wasn’t overly tall, but the sword in his grip added height to him. Wisps of blue seeped off the blade. His face was pale, his eyes purest black. The weavers let him go by, and as he got nearer to the artificed poles, Gilla recognized him.
It was the Fell Lord, but another version of him. A paler one, his eyes dead and fixed firmly on the pole ahead of him.
Gilla sprinted west until she found Lamp directing his battle mages to bombard that flank of weavers with fire and arcane energy spells. The sleeves of his robes were charred from his manus use, and parts of his overlaid armor were scorched black.
“Gilla! It worked,” he said, eyes beaming. Then his expression changed. “So why don’t you look happy?”
“The poles. Were they artificed to just repel weavers, or do they work on everything?”
“Just weavers. We couldn’t afford artificery for everything. Why?”
Her stomach sank. She pointed.
The Fell Lord raised Frost Carver, and landed a blow on the pole, splitting the wood in half. The chain of artificed light broke, fading to nothing, dying from pole to pole.
“I thought he was on our side?” said Lamp.
“And I thought he’d died.”
A rumbling sound grew from beyond them, way behind the last line of the weavers. It was something rhythmic, not one sound but several of them mixing to sound unified.
What had been utter madness minutes before, a place that had been an orchestra of slaughter was now as quiet as a spring early morning. Spells died on hands, manus was saved, bows were lowered, sword-tips rested on the ground.
“Any ideas?” said Gilla.
Lamp shook his head.
Soon, Gilla realized it wasn’t a rumbling. It was a thudding. A uniform, one-two thudding but repeating hundreds of times. A small difference, and with implications she couldn’t mentally reach yet.
“Oh god,” said Lamp.
He pointed. First, she thought he was pointing at the Fell Lord, the traitorous ravager of the defense that she and Lamp had so carefully planned.
But that wasn’t what made Lamp’s hand shake so much as he pointed. Gilla saw what he was looking at, and despair spores multiplied inside her, attacking her stomach lining, making her guts turn to water.
The thudding came from the sound of boots, one after another, stomping on the grass.
The boots belonged to players. Some Gilla recognized, others she had never met. But from the ones she recognized, she knew what had happened now. She knew it from how black their eyes were, and how they marched past the weavers and toward Mountmend.
Every player who had died in the Reach had come back. The first of them reached the Fell Lord and gathered around him, and Gilla knew these weren’t real players now; they were imitations, ones controlled by the master of the hive.
“This is Boxe,” she said. “He brought them all back. Anyone who ever died has come back to kill us.”
With that, weaver and returned-players alike tore toward the Mountmend defenses.
CHAPTER 73
And with the last click of the last key, a mist took form just inches from their faces, a tornado’s little cousin that swirled round and round. Shocks of lightning sparked inside it, and the smell of manus puffed out with each crack. It gave off a roar, and it was such an ear-splitting n
oise for so small a fog. Tripp wanted to back away, and he worried when he saw Jon doing the same, reaching out and grabbing him before his foot left the square he was on.
“The traps,” Tripp reminded him.
A thick rope of anxiety tightened around him as he watched the fog, wondering what it would reveal when it dispersed. The rope coiled around his insides was sodden with his own tension, tightening as the fog grew and plumed upward until it almost touched the ceiling.
Tripp felt his neck click when he looked up. Whatever was hidden in the fog, it was big.
Jon nocked a green-tipped arrow which gave off a manus smell of its own. Tripp reminded himself to loosen up his muscles, to relax his grip on his flail, knowing tightness would only make his strikes clumsier. He eyed the shields wedged into the grooves, memorizing their essences, ready to pick up the right one to defend against whatever this creature revealed itself to be.
“The fog’s going,” said Jon.
“You ready?”
“No.”
“Me neither.”
A thrum of excitement and fear coursed through him, the feelings churning and keeping in time with his thudding pulse. He could taste the manus in the back of his throat.
But the mist was thinning. He held his flagellation flail. Tensing, he struck his own chest hard, letting the weapon leech his own hitpoints and channel it into damage that would be stored kinetically in his weapon. As soon as his hitpoints drained, his artificed armor restored them, and the flail shook in his palm with all the new power inside it.
Inch by inch the fog left. Tripp held his breath. Jon pulled his bowstring tighter. The manus leaked off, the smell clearing as the fog dispersed.
Then it was there. Their last enemy.
“What?” said Jon. “Really?”
It wasn’t even as tall as Tripp’s ankle.
Hovering an inch above the ground, it was a runt of a thing that would barely measure up to a hamster, and it was a strange creature at that. A melding of the four monsters they’d guessed that they would face, so that it had the face of a hornfel, the small, bony wings of a frorarg, with slime-drenched tentacles floating behind it. A cloud, dark and cold enough that Tripp felt his hands chafe, gathered around it.