by Hugo Huesca
Ed knew he needed to slow Lord Vandran down before the man had time to set up a defensive position. If Vandran managed to create a dungeon-within-a-dungeon where he could stage attacks and fend off counter-attacks, it would be terribly difficult and costly to get him out of Undercity. So until Ed and his minions had time to get there, the undead would have to do the job. Wracking his memory for any nearby creature that could be of use, he recalled an acid ooze near the sewers that served as a way for the dungeon to get rid of the trash.
That’ll have to do, he thought, and sent a drone to lure it as well.
Then, he flicked his dungeon vision to the city and flashed through key areas. It seemed only the park had been attacked—people were rushing out in a hurry, and he saw Thieves and spider riders fighting against a small bunch of miragefiends with character builds geared toward sneak and assassination. They had been buffed with camouflage spells, which was the reason he hadn’t seen them at first—camouflage was weaker than invisibility, but much harder to detect by magical means. His veil-piercing Evil Eye, though, had advantage against illusions, so he had been able to see them once he was shot and activated it.
The Thieves and his minions were doing just fine against the fiends. Alder, not far from the fog, was working in tandem with Karmich and Pris to keep a pair of fiends from running into the smoke. Two illusions that looked just like a fully armored Ed mocked the assassins and made grand proclamations and boasts while darts pierced through him, and did nothing. A group of three spider riders, on the other side of the fog, had tried to come to Ed’s aid but had run into more miragefiends. The spiders were slowly webbing the creatures’ arms and legs, and the batblins’ spears kept them at range, but between the two creatures there were eight arms, and they were slowly gaining on the riders—who were unwilling to retreat, Ed realized, because it would mean turning their backs on him.
“Eldritch edge!”
Just as the fog cleared, the Dungeon Lord jumped right at the back of the two fiends. Without so much as a warning, he brought the blade down like a mace right at the nearest miragefiend’s head. The short sword lacked enough weight to crush the skull, but it still bit into bone with a clean chop and embedded an inch of blade into the back of the bulb-like head. Green fire spread onto the wound and set skin aflame as a jet of black smoke burst out as if from a boiling kettle.
The miragefiend convulsed and stumbled forward, and Ed let go of his weapon to turn toward the other creature, which turned half-way toward him, strings of webbing slowing the fiend’s movement. Ed stepped into the miragefiend’s turn to end up right behind him. He blocked a pair of right-side elbows with one arm and he closed his skeletal hand around the miragefiend’s meaty stalk. At once, the assassin tensed as if jolted by an electric shock, and Ed pulled the stalk down hard, putting his back and all his weight into it. The miragefiend’s head bent in a sharp angle and he lost balance as Ed stepped back, bringing the creature down to the floor, where he then stole rank after rank of Endurance.
Before the assassin could react, Ed let go of the stalk and stomped on his head, keeping his arms up to avoid the creature’s frantic blind slashes. Ed then jumped back to avoid the blades and kicked at the stalk and the head with his steel-tipped shoe. He only managed to land one hit before his spider riders charged down the creature as it tried to roll away from the Dungeon Lord and speared it down through the torso, pinning it to the grass like a butterfly nailed into a collector’s parchment.
A wet gurgle came from the miragefiend and black blood poured out of the mangled stalk. Ed turned right as the horned spiders began to eat the dying creature, and retrieved his sword from the skull of the first miragefiend, whose head had been turned into a charred, melted mess.
The Dungeon Lord put it out of its misery, then used dungeon vision to give himself a view of the field from above. The Thieves and the minions had routed or killed the assassins; Alder and Karmich had brought down one; and Pris and a group of Thieves jumped from rooftop to rooftop in pursuit of a wounded survivor. A few other spider riders pursued another through the sewers—that fiend was missing an arm and was looking behind him in panic as the shadows of the spider riders came at him fast, skittering across the roofs.
“Lord Wraith, are you hurt?” asked one of the batblins whose spiders were feasting on the corpses. He and the riders hurried to make sure Ed was alright.
“Yes, I’m just scratched,” Ed said, discreetly pressing his arm against his leg to stem the bleeding. The gash on his forearm was deep, but he didn’t have time to worry about treating it. “Thank you for your help, riders, but please focus on the citizens now. Make sure no one is hurt and survey the area for any hiding infiltrators. They are likely to be under camouflage so use your echolocation talent.”
“You can count on us, Lord Wraith,” the batblin said. He and his mates then turned to the spiders. “Feast later, girls, we have more work to do!”
Ed headed for Alder and Karmich. He tried to sprint, but could only manage a jog. Looking back, the entire fight couldn’t have lasted more than two or three minutes at most, yet he was winded. A fight with blades involved was nothing like the movies back on Earth had promised. They were short and brutal affairs, and the winner was left out of breath and bleeding no matter how skilled he was or how high his stats were. Adrenaline left a metallic taste in his mouth, and the feeling of his blood pouring out his body was nothing he could ever just shrug off, despite having been wounded before and in worse ways.
No matter what the rumors in Undercity said, he was still only human.
“Ed!” Alder hurried to meet the Dungeon Lord. “Are you okay?”
“Alfred is down, envenomed. Don’t know with what,” Ed said, putting a bloodied hand on the Bard’s shoulders. “A Dungeon Lord is invading the catacombs; I need to go rout him out. You’re in charge here. Get the wounded to safety, secure the area, chase those fuckers away. Oh, and guard my body, try to make sure I don’t bleed out.” He showed the Bard the wounds. “I’m going in.”
“Ed—” Alder said, eyes widening.
“Murmur’s reach!”
Ed’s soul exited his body, and the vibrant colors of reality were displaced by the misty world of spirits. The Dungeon Lord’s face was covered in blood, dirt, and sweat. The last sight Ed had of his body was of Alder catching it as it fell, and Ed hoped he’d still have a body to return to when it was all over.
Ed traversed ancient masonry and forgotten lead piping, through solid ground and open unlit halls full of darkness and decay. He shot in a straight line toward his target, drawn like a piece of metal to a magnet by the force of the spell.
The acid ooze was nearly in position, slowly chasing after a nervous drone with the steadfastness of a river eroding a mountain—slow and unstoppable. It was a dirty, green, rectangular creature, a head taller than a normal man and wide enough to swallow him whole. Ed’s soul entered it, and there was a peculiar sensation—as if he were a liquid being poured into an almost empty container.
His vision of the world of spirits was replaced by the scant sensations of the ooze. Being an ooze was a zen-like experience. With a Mind of 1 and a Spirit of 3, the ooze had a sort of rudimentary heat sense, hunger, and that was pretty much it. Ed had seen smarter plants.
It was as if he were floating in an empty black pool, but whatever feeling the acid ooze lacked he could provide himself—and right now he was pissed off beyond belief. The complex emotion poured into the ooze’s brain—or whatever it had that most resembled a brain—and utterly saturated it, leaving space for nothing else. Ed took control and headed for the nearest vent—the one the drone had been luring the creature onto.
Open it, the Dungeon Lord ordered his drone, and the imp hurried to obey.
Moving without arms and legs was just as peculiar as having a body consisting entirely of what amounted to extra-strong stomach acid. He crept forward, and then poured himself down the sewer pipe, thankful that the ooze lacked any olfactory organs. The rectan
gular body altered itself to fit the shape of the pipe without any trouble at all and slowly slid down as Ed crept and wiggled as fast as he could.
The pipe bent once before going straight down and Ed gained speed, turning his slide into a straight fall. He plopped with a wet sound unceremoniously into an undead-infested corridor. The zombies and skeletons, which were little more than necromantic automatons, ignored the ooze. It was too simple a being to count as a living creature that could trigger their aggression.
Get out of my way! Ed thought as he urged the ooze forward, trying to increase its speed by sheer anger alone. It wiggled forth, leaving a snail-like trail on the stone floor, and the undead parted around it to avoid their obstacle. A skeleton’s pathfinding failed and didn’t move away in time, so Ed ran it over like the world’s slowest steamroller. The bones weren’t affected by the acid, and the skeleton got up once Ed had gone past, looking cleaner than it had been in a hundred years.
Ed reached the door that kept the undead away. A couple skeletons had been hacking away at it with rusty axes but hadn’t had much success, and it was barred from the other side. A normal acid ooze would’ve ignored the dead wood, thinking of it as a dead-end, and gone another way. Instead, Ed pushed his rectangular body against the wood.
A tiny amount of ooze went into the small slits and cracks in the door. He pushed harder, and more of his acidic body got into the iron hinges. Slowly, the rusty iron began to weaken and dissolve inside Ed—a property of the acid oozes that made them hated by adventurers all across Ivalis and by the players of Ivalis Online.
Another push, another shove. The door cracked, bent under Ed’s weight, and then exploded into splinters and a shower of acid droplets as he burst into Vandran’s staging grounds.
OH, YEAH!
Satisfaction mixed with killing instinct as dungeon vision, which didn’t work in a contested zone, shut down right after showing the surprised expressions of the minions and their Dungeon Lord. Then Ed’s acid ooze ran over a miragefiend lying stunned on the floor, and the undead fanned out behind him.
The ooze’s heat sense showed a chaotic world of reds, blues, and black. With the anti-scrying protection of the room blocking his dungeon vision, it was all Ed had. He toyed with the idea of angling dungeon vision an inch outside the entrance, but his arcane knowledge skill was high enough to realize that would probably just piss Objectivity off.
The red shape inside him—the miragefiend he had just eaten—wrestled frantically, trying to drag himself out. The ooze morphed its body a fraction, an instinctual movement not unlike the way jellyfish swam. The miragefiend was sucked farther inside, and its skin began to blister and dissolve. There was no physical pleasure to eating. An ooze ate to grow bigger until eventually it accumulated enough mass to split into two oozes, which would then repeat the process—forever, or until food ran out, in which case it would go into hibernation.
Projectiles smashed into Ed as he slowly advanced toward the summoning circle and the red shape he judged to be Lord Vandran. The arrowheads and the feathered backs dissolved inside the acid, and the wooden shafts remained untouched along with door splinters. They would stay there until the natural movement of the ooze pushed them out, months or years later.
Vandran and his minions had been focusing on clearing out the zombies Ed had snuck into the room from hidden passages, and thus the attack through the main entrance had taken them by surprise. Vandran’s shape stepped back and started casting non-stop, which Ed saw as a technicolor display of heat and cold mixed together and surging in all directions. Vandran’s spellcasters lined along him and followed his lead.
Illusions, Ed realized. Vandran specialized in illusions, and judging by the way he saturated the room in color, he was quite powerful with them.
Sadly for him, neither the ooze nor the undead had any eyes to see the illusions, nor much of a brain to comprehend them.
Ed simply pushed forward, ignoring everything and everyone but the enemy Dungeon Lord, in what had to be the world’s slowest bullrush ever recorded. His undead stumbled toward the confused miragefiends and overwhelmed them. The unaligned zombies attacked every living creature in sight, so they pretty much worked with Ed. Every once in a while, Vandran nailed a skeleton with a minor order variant, because the blue and black shape would turn on the others briefly, get ignored, and then return to normal a second after the spell ran out.
The distance between Dungeon Lords was now about a quarter of the room. Only a few more steps and Ed would run into the runes of the summoning circle and shut down Vandran’s only means of escape. A volley of ice spear spells struck Ed’s ooze, and this finally did real damage for the first time, taking out chunks of frozen acid with each strike.
Not enough, Ed thought grimly. Almost there…
Vandran seemed to come to the same realization, however, because he stopped casting and stepped backward, waving in Ed’s direction.
What the hell is he doing? Ed thought. Wait, is he trying to monologue at me? Vandran was wasting his words—Ed couldn’t hear a damn word he was saying. He could make a few guesses at the content of the speech, though: “This is not the last you’ve seen of me, Lord Wraith!” or something similar.
When Lord Vandran finished his threats, he disappeared in a flash of heat, only a second before Ed reached the summoning circle and shut it down.
The remaining minions stopped fighting for an instant, as they came to the realization that their Dungeon Lord had just left them to die. Most tried to escape into the catacombs. The few that made it out soon realized that the depths of Undercity held far worse dangers than skeletons and zombies.
You have gained 45 experience points for defending against a raid.
Your skills have increased: Leadership +1. Your aura’s energy expenditure has been reduced.
There are new talent advancement options for you.
7
Chapter Seven
Primordial Memories
Andreena removed the ill-smelling poultice from Ed’s forearm and studied the half-healed gash. “Not gonna lie, Ed, it’ll leave a mark,” she said. “But you should regain full range of motion before the Endeavor, as long as you take care of yourself.” The Herbalist’s voice held a note of accusation, as if Ed had gotten himself cut on purpose.
“At least my other hand can handle a little stabbing here and there,” Ed said, grinning weakly. Fighting off Vandran’s invasion had proved to him the usefulness the undead could have. No wonder there were so many Necromancers and cultists running around.
“Your other hand—” Andreena scowled at Ed, worry in her eyes “—is proof that you should be more careful with your body. The Haunt lacks the Light’s healing magic. There is only so much damage herbs and Dark remedies can cure before you are maimed permanently.”
Ed shrugged. “Tell that to the people who keep stabbing me.” Unlike his videogame characters, he couldn’t go around wearing full plate all the time, so there was little more he could do than what he already was.
Andreena replaced the poultice, then gave him a disgusting potion to keep away infection.
“Luck doesn’t last forever, is all I’m saying,” the Herbalist finished. “And the older we get, the faster it seems to run out.” She stood up, grimacing as she did, her weary knees suffering under the weight of her aging body.
“Thanks for your help,” Ed said as she left the room.
“Any time, Ed. It’s not like if you die everyone else suffers horrible deaths. Please, go ahead, keep running face first into sharp objects.”
The Dungeon Lord chuckled, then almost gagged when he took a swig out of the potion. Did she have to make it as foul-tasting as possible? he wondered. Did the minionship pact even protect against that?
He lay down in his bed slowly, trying to get around the pain flowering in his torso. The spidersilk vest had kept the blades of the miragefiends from running him through, but the weapons had still left nasty black bruises that were only now, a couple of days
after the attack, turning purple.
“I don’t have time for bed rest,” he said aloud to the empty room. Although he could micromanage the Haunt using dungeon vision and his drones, there was more that required his presence. The first day, he had used a spider warrior’s body while his real one recovered, but Andreena had vetoed that, furious, claiming he needed sleep. Overworking a comatose, wounded body, she argued, would eventually leave nothing for his soul to return to.
Ed disagreed with her on that. He was toying with the idea of using Murmur’s reach at night to keep going while his body slept—the increase in efficiency was too much to just ignore. But since the Herbalist was the Haunt’s leading medic, the Dungeon Lord had decided to follow her advice.
Alder and Jarlen had increased security in Undercity after the attack, with the Bard running several Ed illusions everywhere he went, both to goad any potential leftover minions of Vandran and to give the impression that Ed was invulnerable and feared no ambush.
That was a lie. Vandran had needed help from inside Undercity to set up the summoning circle in the first place, which worried Ed. Alfred had recovered from the venom—a sleep draught variant—and the Thieves Guild was scouring the city for Vandran’s sympathizers, so far with little success.
Sleep seemed far off with so much left to do. He needed to prepare for the Endeavor. He needed to find more weapons and armor. He needed to find out what he was up against so he could tailor the talents he had been saving his experience points for. He needed to shift around the defenses of the Scrambling Towers to keep the Inquisition from growing complacent. And Spriveska was almost upon them, so there was a festival to prepare. His Quest-log was growing faster than he could clear it. How could he waste time in bed when people’s lives were on the line? Right now, Klek and Alder risked their lives by walking through Undercity’s streets.