by Hugo Huesca
“A rumor?” Lavy asked, her lips twisted in anger and fear. “That’s not good enough! I’m not paying you to listen to rumors—”
“Lavy,” Kes said. “It’s not their fault. Knowing how she did it won’t help Ed.” On the scrying ball—and on the public screens as well—Ed could be seen facing a tight stalemate as he held an eldritch fireball rune in front of him, trying to keep Vaines’ forces at bay while she and he spoke.
“Then we will,” Klek said, his small hands closed into fists. “Let’s point Jarlen and the others Lord Ed’s way. Maybe they can rescue him.”
“That’s indeed our best shot,” Kes said. She turned to Lavy and her team of spellcasters, “Find the others, help them regroup, then point them in Ed’s direction.”
A rescue operation is only a good option if it has an actual chance of saving the prisoner, said the memory of Sargent Ria’s somewhere in the back of Kes’ mind. The sarge had always been good at pointing out the things Kes didn’t want to admit. Your team will go against an elite Dungeon Lady. And she moves through Portals, so the chances of catching her are slim. Even if your primary objective—protecting our Dungeon Lord—is a bust, there is still a chance of reaching Tillman’s office first.
Kes scowled. I didn’t realize we had ever been in the business of leaving our own behind.
To her surprise, Ria said, No, we aren’t. But you had to be aware it was an option. Before, you thought you had been cornered. Now you realize this is a choice you made. In a fight, intent matters, boot. Don’t forget that.
In the scrying ball, Ed disappeared through a Portal, escorted by Vaines and the rest of her team as they left leaving behind the charred corpse of Lady Redwood.
They didn’t even bother relieving Ed of his weapons. After all, the prisoner pact ensured he wouldn’t be able to attack anyone in Vaines’ team, and he was forced to help them push through the Endeavor to the best of his ability. The Lord of the Haunt had been reduced to a minion, and he assumed those watching from the encampment below were having a field day with this fact. Ed barely noticed.
The sight of Redwood’s charred corpse flashed inside his mind every time he closed his eyes, and he doubted the way she had screamed after the flames had burned through her magical defenses was something he would ever forget.
He wasn’t even sure if his anger against Vaines was justified. He had killed Vandran without accepting his surrender, like Vaines had done. Was there any difference? Redwood had been Ed’s ally for just a few minutes, and even then only because of convenience. She had attacked him the second it was convenient for her, so the lampagos would distract themselves with Ed while she ran away.
“Why did you do it?” Ed had asked Vaines after they stepped through the Portal, his fists shaking with barely restrained anger. “You killed her in cold blood.”
“Because, in her condition, she was more useful to me dead.”
“She was one of you,” Ed had responded as the Dungeon Lady went ahead without looking at him. “A member of your Lordship. Of your family.”
“So? In my place, she would’ve done the same. By killing her, I increased my odds of winning the Endeavor. That is enough to justify the death of an enemy. Aren’t you aware of this already? Dungeon Lords play for keeps, Lord Wright. You would do well to remember that if you wish to be more useful than Redwood.”
She had said nothing more to him after that. A few hours had gone by since Redwood’s execution. He still wasn’t sure if his anger was directed at Vaines or himself.
At some point he would need to come to terms with his situation. He was aware of how perilous his current condition was. A prisoner of Vaines, who lacked a reputation for mercy or kindness, trapped in the depths of the Standard Factory with people that didn’t care one bit if he lived or died. He didn’t even know where in the Factory he was. They had taken many Portals since that first.
There had been traps, more of Saint Claire & Tillman’s automatons, and even a few of the Factory’s enhanced monsters. Ed had to grant it to Vaines, she had been right about the three Dungeon Lords teaming up. The automatons had fallen one after the other with Ed showing little more for it than a few bruises and dents in his armor. He barely recalled the battles. He had swung his sword methodically, almost like an automaton himself, setting up flanks for Vaines so she could barrel through their enemies unopposed, and teaming up with Virion so both their steels turned whatever creature stood in their way into mincemeat.
Hang in there, a dungeon message from Kes had told him in the lull between one such fights. Help is on the way. Just try to get them to stay in one place. Easier said than done, though. Vaines kept them on the move through Ryan’s Portals constantly, following the directions of her silent alarms in what, to everyone else, looked like a random pattern. Ed wasn’t sure if she was hunting someone or avoiding the other Dungeon Lords, but it reduced the chances of rescue even further.
Someone coughed next to Ed as Vaines’ team walked in a single-file line through a corridor. It was Ryan. Despite the armor and the expensive-looking silver circlet, he appeared out of place. Alone and terrified. The bruises under his make-up were more pronounced. The so-called Argent Planeshifter had done very little fighting himself, and most of it had been just to stay alive. Ed didn’t fault him for that. Ed’s first fights in Ivalis had been against spider critters and he’d barely got out alive. Despite himself, he felt a pang of sympathy for the asshole next to him. “We’ve definitely had better days, haven’t we?” he asked, to make conversation, just because between the two of them there had been enough self-loathing to make a banshee uncomfortable.
Ryan jumped a bit as if expecting to be punched. From the look he gave Ed, he hadn’t realized they were next to each other. “It’s you,” he said quietly. “What did you say?”
“Doesn’t matter,” Ed said. “You look like shit, Argent.”
Ryan stiffened at that, slightly more himself than the wreck he’d been moments ago, which had been Ed’s intention in the first place. “Look who is talking… Lord Wraith.” There was derision in his tone, but not as much as Ed would’ve expected from his former Lasershark boss. In a way, Ryan was Vaines’ prisoner as well, and there was not much sense in fighting for status between two men at the bottom of the totem pole.
Ed glanced away. Vaines and Virion walked at the front of the line, and Ryan and Ed by the rear. They were back near Tillman’s mutagen laboratory now, still following Vaines’ seemingly random Portal patterns. Judging from the metallic claws, the containers full of embalming fluid and slowly dissolving carcasses, and the rows of broken crystal vats, the area had been a sort of assembly zone for organic monsters. There were ovens and complex pieces of machinery that resembled a fusion between golems and a production line.
The sort of thing that Ed needed to face off against the might of the Heiligian Army.
Of course, there wasn’t much point in thinking about that if he couldn’t escape from Vaines’ grasp before she reached Tillman’s office.
“Look at this place,” Ryan told him, studying the assembly of monsters. “It’s like all the creatures we killed in Ivalis Online came from here.”
“I hadn’t thought about that,” Ed said, welcoming the distraction. “Yeah, now that you mention it… Do you remember the flying giant octopus that almost wiped us in the Ambush from the Depths questline?” He nodded at a wide glass display with a preserved tentacle about four meters in length. “Blast from the past, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, the octopus that spat fire,” Ryan said. He shook his head. “It made no sense that a water-themed monster could breathe flames. It sort of makes me feel better knowing someone grew it in a lab rather than just in a computer. It was terrible videogame design, but I guess if I could create monsters I’d also add fire-breath to as many as I could.”
“Everything was real,” Ed said. “Someone from our world helped the Inquisition find a way to twist Objectivity’s rules. They tricked people from another world that didn
’t know that what they were doing was real. The final Boss in Ambush from the Depths? He was a real person that we killed.” Ed didn’t even remember what the name of that particular Dungeon Lord had been. They had taken many more lives than that one.
“If that guy was anything like Vaines or her friends, he had it coming,” Ryan said quietly. “So why fret over it?”
“Because we had no say in the matter. We were misled. Used.” Ed shrugged. “His death was someone else’s judgment call.”
“And you would rather be the one who decides who lives or dies?” Ryan asked. “Isn’t that the reason everyone’s killing each other around here?”
Ed thought it over. “I’d rather that other assholes stopped deciding I ought to die to further their plans. Some days, the only way to make them stop is to kill them first.” He doubted that the conflict between the Ivalian factions—or all conflict in general—could be simplified like that. Ed had seldom seen truly evil men rise to power. That didn’t mean they didn’t exist; he had even killed several. But most of his enemies believed that what they were doing was for the best, and that made any murder they committed justified in their eyes. Perhaps there was a grain of truth to what Ryan was saying.
If Lisa could hear me now, Ed thought. She’d never believe I just said that. However, stuck in this vast, abandoned Factory, far away from the petty bullshit of their youth, he found it hard to hold on to his spat with Ryan. After all Ed had gone through, their quarrel seemed small, as if he was looking at it from far away.
Vaines called Argent to the front, and the group stepped through two Portals in quick succession, ending up in a vast field of red grass that grew up to Ed’s head. They found the mauled body of one of Dolmanak’s Dungeon Lords there, in the middle of a burnt-out circle devoid of grass and surrounded by the withered remains of creatures not unlike the Haunt’s own hell chickens. There was the sweet, nauseating scent of rotting meat in the air. Ed suppressed a shiver.
“Lord Godfrey Crane,” Lady Vaines said, kneeling briefly over the corpse of the fallen Dungeon Lord. “What a waste. I thought he’d be more competent.” She stood and exchanged a meaningful glance with Lord Virion.
“The bodies are still smoldering, my Lady. The rest of Crane’s team left in a hurry. Shall we chase after them?”
Vaines looked around at the tall grass and the illusory sky displayed above them. “They’ll be on their guard against something if we come from this direction.” She shook her head. “Planeshifter, return us to the previous area,” she ordered.
Ed didn’t need to look at Ryan to guess at his relieved. The surrounding grass had a tendency to sway softly with a nonexistent breeze.
As they crossed the Portal, they almost walked face first into a cluster of mutant oozes that had wandered into the area. What followed was a painful fight where one of Vaines’ ogres was quickly—and horribly—digested alive inside one of the oozes before the team realized that this variation grew stronger when hit with ice magic instead of dying to it. And fire magic, as the team discovered immediately afterward, made the oozes split in two. Evangeline Tillman had been a sadistic asshole.
They defeated the oozes, but only Vaines emerged without an acid burn or two. In the end, Virion sent his minions to secure the nearby zone and Vaines let the others catch their breaths for a minute and tend to their wounds.
“Come here, I’ll take a look at that,” he told Ryan, who had an angry red rash spreading across his neck. The Dungeon Lord sprayed Ryan with a neutralizing agent from his supplies.
“Shit, that feels refreshing. I thought I was on fire for a moment,” Ryan said as the agent bubbled on his skin. He rested his back against a wall. Around them, the surviving ogres of Vaines’ team did the same, tending to their burns and grunting stoically at the pain.
Ed sat unceremoniously on the cold floor. In the distance, noxious fumes grew up to the ceiling. Ryan’s guardians, the Clerics of Tal Zamor, were working their magic to neutralize the fumes, but Ed didn’t trust unholy magic to keep his lungs free from damage.
The Dungeon Lord brought a pair of wax-sealed provision packets from his backpack and handed one to Ryan.
Ryan took one ravenous bite and almost spat it out. “It’s like chewing on sand,” he said, grimacing.
“Right,” Ed said, eating his without any trouble. “You’ve been eating Lotian food for a few months.” He shrugged. “Provisions aren’t meant to taste good, but they do replenish your strength.” He took a long swig out of a Vitality potion flask, and then handed it to the other man. “Here, wash it down with this.”
“Aren’t potions supposed to be harmful if overused?” Ryan asked dubiously. “Phyelras, my teacher, told me that potion overdose could melt my liver.”
“Yeah, it probably won’t make you live any longer,” Ed granted. Then he nodded to Vaines, who sat alone, eating similar provisions and emptying a potion vial in one go. “However, you won’t have time to fret over your liver and kidneys if you die in the next couple minutes.”
They ate in silence for a while. When Ed finished his portion, he turned to see Ryan staring at his empty hands in silence. There was a tremor there that hadn’t been present before.
“My teachers had me execute prisoners,” Ryan said, face ashen, still staring at his shaking hands. “So I could grow stronger. Vaines said that I was too weak to win a real fight, so she had me execute the shackled men she brought me. I don’t… I don’t even know if they were innocent or not.”
Ed listened in silence, still like a statue, as not to scare off the sudden influx of honesty. Nevertheless, he felt cold horror rise to his throat as Ryan went on with the story of what he’d been doing while Ed and the Haunt were getting ready for the Endeavor.
“Executing unarmed prisoners earns very few experience points,” Ryan went on. “So I had to kill a lot of them. I refused at first, but… Phyelras showed what they did to those who refused to cooperate. The implication being they’d do the same to me, right? So I wielded the axe. Only, I wasn’t very good at it. Some took a very long time to die, and they screamed the whole time. I had to learn to kill a man fast, just so the screams wouldn’t haunt me while I hacked away.” He closed both hands as if wielding an axe right now, then made a chopping motion. “That worked… until I started to hear the screaming at night. Now it’s there wherever I close my eyes.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Ed said. “They were dead the moment she captured them. You were forced, had no other choice.”
“Yeah, that’s what I told myself. But I was the one that wanted to be a powerful hero, wasn’t I? Phyelras and Vaines were only doing what I wanted.” He looked at Ed then, and the Dungeon Lord could see the hollow look in the other man’s eyes, and he realized that no matter what happened, Ryan’s nightmares wouldn’t leave him for the rest of his days.
“You were manipulated,” Ed said. “Smarter people than either of us have fallen for the games the Ivalian gods play.”
“I could have left,” Ryan said. “I’m Argent Planeshifter, right? Who could stop me? At the time I figured, what harm is there in staying with these people that want to train me and surround me with women and riches, at least for a while? And when I realized what they really had in mind, what really was involved in my trip to this fantasy world…” He tapped the circlet on his forehead. “Well, it sure as hell is too late to leave now.”
Ed made a motion to examine Ryan’s circlet, but Vaines’ pact froze his body as surely as if he’d been encased in ice. He gritted his teeth. He was quickly reaching the point of not caring about how many thousands of experience points she had, he’d kick her ass anyway. Or try to, at least.
“Ed, I fucking hate it here,” Ryan said. “This is nothing like I thought it’d be. I should have never left Earth. We are going to die, dude, and it’s going to be fucking painful. And now I deserve it, and nothing is ever going to change that.” Tears streamed down his face. “I’m fucking terrified, man. I only want to go home.”
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nbsp; With a full belly and the warmth of a potion circulating through his veins, Ed didn’t find his situation was as dire as he’d thought a few hours ago. He was alive. He was unhurt. Kes and his friends were looking for him. He hadn’t come this far just to give up the fight. In fact, after hearing Ryan’s tale, he was itching for one.
Even if the prisoner pact kept him from actively trying to escape, he could still try to find a way to oppose it any way he could. Let Vaines get him as close to Tillman’s office as possible. He’d wait for his chance to arrive. If—when—it did, he’d be ready.
“I’m going to get you out,” Ed told him. To avoid triggering the pact, he forced himself to ignore the way a portion of the noxious acid fumes had drifted away from the Clerics and was lingering in a dark corner of the room, as if it wanted to stay out of sight.
“She’s in,” Lavy announced triumphantly. The scrying ball showed Jarlen’s mist hovering a few meters above Ed as he and the rest of Vaines’ procession stepped through a Portal. “So far undetected.”
Kes breathed a sigh of relief. Jarlen keeping track of Ed was a crucial part of their plan. Without her presence for the Diviners to lock on, fighting the protections of Vaines’ spellcasters would be almost impossible.
Outside the tent, the mood among the crowd seemed to be one of excitement, a stark contrast with the tight ball of stress in Kes’ stomach. Three of the eleven Dungeon Lords of the Endeavor had died, and one was captured. Lord Molmeda, who had lost most of his team, was getting pretty desperate on the public screens. Cornered animals could lash out in desperation.
Just drop out, Kes thought, as if she could will him into compliance by want alone. Don’t give these dungheads the bloodbath they crave. She knew enough about the Lordship, however, to fear there were scant chances of that.