by John L. Monk
Closer now, I saw a solitary form floating zen-like above the fray. At first, I thought it was Lord Beast, sitting around while others did his work for him. But then he moved at blinding speed into the path of a female attacker who’d fired a pattern of glowing orbs at the dragon. When the orbs splashed harmlessly over the flyer, he waved his hand and a swarm of arrows slammed into the caster, dropping her from the sky.
“Hey!” I shouted. “That’s Jaddow!”
Rita flew toward him and I followed. I was half afraid he might attack me, the way Rita had, but he merely waited.
“You made it,” he said, eyeing me with slightly raised eyebrows.
Part of me expected the mother-of-all apologies for ever mentioning the dryad to me. A less selfish part wanted to sob my appreciation because his plan had gotten me here. And he was here.
“How’s it going down there?” Rita said.
“All griefs,” Jaddow said.
To me, she said, “We can’t touch them unless they hit someone in our raid group.” Then to Jaddow: “Shouldn’t we bring Ethan in?”
I could tell he’d heard her, but all he said was, “They’re fast. Enchanted with speed potions, so Bessie misses more than she hits.”
“Bessie?” I said.
“That’s what I call her.”
“She’s a girl?”
“Didn’t check.”
Now that I was closer, I could make out Bessie in better detail. Not just a dragon—it was a dead dragon. Bones, sinew, tattered bat wings, and weirdly glowing green eyes.
The dragon was scoring the occasional hit, but for each landed, it took five back.
“I think they’re winning,” I said. “How did you hold out this long?”
It’d been months since Jaddow arrived with news of Melody’s game-imposed jeopardy.
“They only arrived a week ago,” Rita said.
Jaddow laughed quietly and without mirth. “There aren’t many high-level players in Ward 2. I’ve spent the last two months tracking down the toughest and convincing them to have no part in this raid. These are the ones who wouldn’t listen.”
Faster than I could blink, Jaddow dove a hundred feet into the path of another attack—this from a lady sword-swinger who’d been pacing the creature from behind through its dives and whirls. The woman’s sword barely nicked Jaddow, but that was enough. His hand twitched and a volley of arrows sprouted from her back, killing her instantly.
He’d gotten two attackers in my presence, but there were still close to thirty left, and they were steadily wearing the dragon down. Bessie flew slower as the spells, slices, kicks, and other attacks took their toll.
“I’ll try distracting them,” Rita said.
Sparrow quick, she dashed into the fray, waving her hands in people’s faces. This caused them to flinch or move to avoid her. One of them mistakenly hit her and she beat him to a pulp. Then a woman I recognized from the command tent—Mary—flew into her, and both Rita and the woman were bathed in dragon fire.
Screaming in pain, Rita kicked the woman away. Not missing a beat, Jaddow flicked his arrow hand and the woman dropped from the sky like a lead pin cushion.
Rita returned to us far slower than she’d descended. Her clothes were smoking. Her skin was red and puckered with burns, and all her hair had been burned away.
“Got one,” she rasped in a voice like sandpaper.
She took a small vial from an inside pocket and gulped it down with shaking hands. A few seconds later, her burns disappeared and her hair grew back.
Jaddow said, “Get ready. Here they come.”
It seemed they were more afraid of Jaddow than Rita. In a game of wolf and shepherd, they flew in formations designed to separate her from him. Each time Jaddow zipped into the path of an attack, he exposed Rita’s flank. To compensate, Rita would fly into his lee, and the aerial dance would begin again.
Lord Beast saw me and grinned evilly. While the others did their best to hit Rita, he stalked her from on high, adjusting his position in wait of the right moment.
The right moment came: a flash of silver and a scream of pain, and his sword cleaved Rita through the middle, dropping her in two pieces that tumbled from the sky.
“Get him, boys!” Lord Beast shouted, pointing at me.
“Turncoat!” one of them yelled.
A sizzling red beam fired my way and was intercepted by Jaddow, who then killed the caster.
I tossed up a Greater Shield. This had almost no effect on the ax someone thunked into my chest. It should have been a deadly blow, but a trigger-heal kicked in. The ax fell out and I lived while my heal-over-time spell brought me back to full.
A quick glance at my active effects showed one more trigger-heal and only a few minutes left on the heal-over-time spell. My options were simple: sit and wait to die or do something stupider.
“Where are you going?” Jaddow yelled.
“To kill that thing! Come on!”
Not waiting to see if he followed, I flew in the direction of the dragon.
With the attackers’ attention now focused on me, the dragon had pulled back to a position directly above the shielded ruins.
“Discern!” I shouted when Bessie was in range.
NAME: “Grezheru”
CLASS: Undead Dragon
LEVEL: 1150
BASE DAMAGE: 20,000
HEALTH POINTS: 15,000,000 (825,271)
Chapter Fifty-One
For such a huge monster, Bessie was pretty quick, and I found it nearly impossible to stay behind it. I took a head-on blast that knocked away my last trigger-heal. I fired back with a series starter called “Sphere of Darkness.”
Three minutes had passed since Rita’s death. I knew this because she flew in-between me and the dragon, wearing a noob tunic.
“What are you doing?” she yelled, staring at me like I was crazy. “Stop attacking her! Do you want the shield to drop?”
To my dismay, Jaddow wasn’t helping either. He continued to wait in the sky for his chance to strike at Lord Beast and his friends.
Now that I was fighting the dragon, my former raid members were leaving me alone.
“Discern!”
The dragon’s health was now less than 600,000 and falling fast.
Jaddow intercepted and killed two more of Lord Beast’s friends, both of whom were women. I noticed this only because he’d blatantly missed several easy opportunities to intercept men.
Male or female, there were just too many attackers for ol’ Bessie. More attacks made it through and at last the dragon fell from the sky with a long, mournful cry of grief.
ENEMY DEFEATED: Grezheru, Undead Dragon, 13,573,000 EXPERIENCE POINTS (SHARED)
YOU HAVE ADVANCED TO LEVEL 437!
+5 Stat Points
+1 Class Point
+1 Skill Point
YOU HAVE ADVANCED TO LEVEL 438!
+5 Stat Points
+1 Class Point
+1 Skill Point
A cheer broke out among Lord Beast and his friends.
Over the ruins below, the formerly red shield turned a translucent blue. None of them were looking at it, though. They were staring at a large golden treasure chest hovering in the air. Floating above it was a ten-minute timer counting down.
While the raiders argued over the treasure, I followed the tumbling dragon, desperate to reach Melody. As I passed through the barrier, a tickle pulsed through my body reminiscent of being discerned. Seconds later, I hit the ground hard and rolled to my feet.
The ruins around me were vaguely Romanesque, or possibly Greek, with fluted columns, fallen architraves, and shattered domes littering the earth or poking up through it. I wasted several minutes running in and out of various buildings before I noticed a hill in the distance encircled by a half-colonnade.
I flew in the air for a better look and my breath caught. There was a stone bier in the middle with a woman on it. Though I couldn’t make out her features, I knew who it was.
“Me
lody,” I said.
Suddenly, I was falling. I hit the ground and tried to rise, but my feet were tangled in a sticky web that glued me in place. The webbing also had an anti-magic effect, because the steady trickle of mana to my robes had shut off like a spigot.
“Not so fast, traitor!” Lord Beast said from behind me.
I lost my balance, fell over, then twisted around to see him and the rest of his people there. Dory, I noticed, stood among them, freshly resurrected.
Way above the bluish dome, Jaddow—who’d never tagged the dragon, and who’d never invited me into his raid group with Rita—floated helplessly, staring down.
“Hi, Beast,” I said.
“Lord Beast,” someone said.
Lord Beast told Larry to shut up, then stalked over to stand over me.
“I hate traitors more than turncoats,” he said. “Thought you could swipe my prize right out from under me, did you? Thought you could pull one over on old Beast, huh?”
In a voice filled with earnestness, I said, “That woman up there isn’t a prize. She’s a real person, and she’s trapped in this world against her will.”
The brute’s mouth fell open—first in surprise, then in joyful astonishment.
“Wow,” he said. “A genuine crazy person. I’d heard people can go crazy in this game but never believed it. Or maybe you’re not crazy at all. Maybe you’re just desperate. Either way, you picked the wrong guy to—”
“Shit,” Dory said.
Lord Beast cast her a look of faint annoyance.
“It’s all true,” I said, imploring him to believe. “She was illegally loaded from an Everlife database, and now she’s an unregistered personality. Which means she’s a real person. If you wake her up and you’re not me, you’ll destroy that personality.”
“Shit, shit, shit,” Dory said.
Glaring at her, he said, “What the hell’s wrong with you?”
“He’s telling the truth,” she said.
Lord Beast regarded us in open shock while the others whispered amongst themselves. One of them snickered nervously.
“Larry,” he said, “how long has Miss Dory been with us?”
“Huh? Oh, uh … Couple of weeks?”
“Now that the dragon’s dead, I expect she’ll be leaving. My guess is she’s not too keen on concubines. Whatcha think?”
“I expect not, sir,” Larry said.
Lord Beast seemed to think it over.
“Alex,” he said, “give her some pain. Four on a ten scale.”
“My pleasure,” a man said.
I squinted him and saw he was a class called a “warlock.”
Magical webbing sprang up around Dory’s feet. Then Alex began working the air like he was kneading it, and Dory screamed.
And screamed.
And screamed.
“Hey asshole,” I said, “why don’t you leave her alone?”
I might not have had any mana, but these ruins were rubbly as hell. I grabbed a chunk of marble and pelted him in the face with every point of my 242 acorn-assisted strength. The blow knocked him over, breaking the spell and possibly the bones in his face.
Dory stopped screaming and fell to the ground.
One of Lord Beast’s men fired a healing beam at the warlock and he promptly scrambled to his feet.
“God dammit,” Alex said, wiping blood from his face. “Take this, you lousy turncoat!”
Again, he worked the air with his hands. A curious way to cast a spell, I thought. The only thing I felt was the barest brushing against my skin, almost ticklish.
“Ouch,” I said and faked a yawn. “That sure hurts. A lot. It hurts a whole lot, Alex. Big time pain you got goin’ on there. Whatever shall I do?”
As Myrialla’s Gift shielded me from pain, I recalled my backup plan—the one I’d considered all but unthinkable in the camp yet prepared for anyway.
“Neat perk,” Lord Beast said. “Love to know which one, but time’s a-wastin’. Come on boys—let’s go wake my new plaything.” With a leer my way, he added: “I’m gonna let them take turns on her. Does that hurt, Ethan? You feeling funny now?”
The term “boys” was correct. Other than Dory, they were all men. Like the dutiful followers they were, they rose into the air when he did and flew up the hill toward the bier.
I reached into my robes and pulled out my noob pouch with the amulet. After a moment’s hesitation, I opened it and spilled the golden acorn onto the ground, where it sank like a stone. Seconds later, a sapling sprang from the earth. It quickly grew into a small tree, then a large tree, widening and spreading out branches at an astonishing speed. A bit too quickly for the supporting earth, as it turned out, judging by the way the ground bucked and heaved as the roots spread out in every direction.
This minor earthquake broke apart the webbing, allowing me to scramble to a safe distance. There, I watched with an odd mix of horror and relief as purple mist billowed from the bole of the tree, spilling into the ruins around me.
Chapter Fifty-Two
I’d had a lot of time to think about my experience in the dryad’s forest, and when precisely I’d succumbed to her enchantments. It had begun with the mist.
Like me, Dory was similarly free from her web restraints. Unlike me, she hung upside down, tangled in the branches that had sprung up around her.
“What the hell’s going on, Ethan? What did you do?”
I couldn’t have answered if I wanted to, because I was holding my breath.
Hell hath no fury like an acorn scorned.
Though I wasn’t the smartest person in the world, even I could take a hint, or in this case, outright instructions: do not drop this acorn. Between acquiring the amulet and arriving in Lord Beast’s camp, I’d further determined the acorn was technically a seed, and that dropping a seed could very well result in a tree.
Just like the real world, holding your breath gets more difficult the longer you do it and eventually becomes impossible. Before I blacked out, I opened my bottomless bag and sealed it to my mouth. Then I breathed through the opening, taking special care not to let any mist seep in around the edges.
Ignoring Dory, I took to the air. Unfortunately, the mist had completely engulfed the blue dome, such that I could no longer see Jaddow or Rita outside it, or very much else inside. The sun was a vague purple brightening overhead, allowing just enough light to see nearby structures.
Rather than risk losing my bearings, I floated back down with the intent of walking. There was only one hill in the area, so anything upward had to be the right direction.
With the tree towering behind me, I picked my way carefully up the slope and concentrated on breathing. Some amount of purple mist must have gotten into the bag because I found myself drifting, as if injected with a tiny spurt of recreational opiates. Not enough to lose control, but I had to fight my inner demons to maintain a good grip on the bottomless bag.
Halfway to the top, I ran into Lord Beast and his friends. Absurdly, they were filing down the hill in a stately progression behind a beautiful, yet alien, creature.
Myrialla’s true form was almost as intoxicating as her mist-augmented appearance, though far less human. Her skin was a soft layer of silvery bark that glistened when she moved. The high cheekbones in her face framed large elfin eyes with dark pupils that threatened to drown me in their measureless depths. Her lips were peach-colored, and her teeth brilliant white when she smiled.
At me.
Behind her, like soldiers on parade, Lord Beast and his friends came to a perfectly-timed halt.
“You have done me a tremendous service, Ethan,” Myrialla said in a rich, musical voice that had me struggling to keep the bag in place. “I had grown weary of that forest, so close to Heroes’ Landing and the steady drip of unwitting noobs ever wandering into my clearing. What nourishment there was could never hope to quench my … appetites … the way others of your kind do. But alas, that was my place, and I made of it what I could.”
The bag
was still in place, and I hadn’t blinked, but somehow Myrialla now stood a foot away.
“Then came the one called Cipher,” she said. “He explained to me my purpose. The creators of this world had planned for me to reside in a higher ward where only the most experienced could find me, or those willing to give up all for an eternity of endless bliss. Then something happened—the plan changed, and I was placed in Ward 1. As a joke, Cipher said.” She shook her head sadly. “From what I know of your kind, such cruelty is not uncommon. Over the years, thousands of new arrivals from your world found their way under my tree. It was never enough to adequately sustain me, and I was forced to feed on the local population of bugbears. And still I nearly starved.”
She stood very close now. Intimately so. I couldn’t run, but I probably could have blasted her if I truly wanted to. I didn’t want to. Not from any power she had over me, but because I wanted to hear more.
“Hardly sporting of me to take all those unfortunates,” she said softly. “But what choice did I have? I must feed. That or shrivel and die—something I would never willingly let happen.”
Myrialla caressed my face, teasing me to the point of madness before pulling away.
“For eons,” she said, “none could escape me. Bound in chains of their own making, they willingly wasted away in my embrace. Then you came along. Cipher warned me of your arrival. He told me the plight of your wife, lying just up this hill. Very pretty, though I fear your reunion will not be a happy one. I could save you that…”
A tendril of purple mist formed between us. It coiled around me like a snake and teased at the edges of my bottomless bag.
“Cipher suggested I let you kill me,” she said. “He knew you would take my acorn here, to this valley, and then plant it. How he knew was a mystery. Such was my desperation that I found myself trusting him. My presence in Ward 1 had become an agony I couldn’t escape.”
Her eyes brightened and she smiled widely.
“The soil here is deep, and these heroes shall provide rich nourishment for eons to come. For this, I thank you, Ethan Crane. Yours is the first willing help I’ve ever had.”