by Brian Simons
Daniel had to wonder if she meant it. Sybil had a small frame, but an indomitable spirit. She could do some serious damage, regardless of how large Jack might be in real life.
“It won’t come to that,” Sal said. “You have a live-in tank now! If he wants to kidnap Farah, he’ll have to go through me.”
“We have to get her back first,” Sybil said.
“We will,” Daniel said. “At the end of the day, this is still a game, right? It can’t keep her here forever.”
“I don’t know what this game is capable of anymore,” Coral said. “The CEO, Domin Ansel, is running a secret server with an ulterior motive. He’s behind some of the worst things the game has thrown at us, and from what Hector says, Domin is over Travail. He won’t care if it all comes crashing down.”
“I’ve had enough crashing down for one day, thank you,” Sal said.
“Crashing! Splashing!” a high stringent voice yelled. Everyone stopped and scouted the spaces between tree trunks for any sign of its source.
“Something fishy with fishies!” the voice got louder and a giant-sized man came jogging toward them, hunched over to keep his head from hitting tree branches. His shoulder-length hair was made of tangled green vines.
It was a leshy, a species resident to the forest that they had encountered briefly on their last adventure. Daniel and the others stood poised for battle, knowing better than to trust this creature or its intentions. There was only one leshy so far, against the five of them — six including Blat. Daniel stared as the leshy approached, activating Surveil.
>> You have Surveilled a Level 26 Leshy: 1480 HP.
“I have a dirty job for you!” the leshy said as he took the last few steps toward Daniel. He stood upright now, a full story higher than the rest of them.
“We already have a job,” Daniel said. “We’re hunting down Sivona and looking for Ze.”
“Poor Zevona, at war with herself. Poor leshies, at war with the fishies. Kill them for XPs!”
New Quest: Purge the Forest (II)
The leshies used to fish for food and sport, but now the fish have turned on them. Help the lanky green creatures rid the evil fish from their former pond by killing ruined pike fish until the leshies are satisfied.
Reward: 30,000 XP.
“Go away,” Sybil said. “We’re not interested.”
“Wait,” Daniel said. “The reward is massive. I may actually unlock Nuclear Option in time to hit Sivona with it. Plus, it’s part of a quest chain. If we want Purge the Forest III, we’ll have to do this one.”
Sybil closed her eyes and clenched her jaw. “Fine, but only because I want to see the look on Sivona’s face when you blow her to smithereens.”
“Excuse me,” Coral said. “Did you say Zevona?”
“Little Ze, trapped in a cage,” the leshy said. “Cages don’t work on fishies though.” He took off through the trees. Daniel ran after him, his cloak blowing behind him. He stopped short when the trees ended and an area the size of a baseball diamond opened up before him. The trees around the edge of this area were blackened with rot, and the ground ahead looked like a bog full of the black mushy remains of trees that had long ago succumbed to decay.
The leshy leapt through this muck until he reached the middle of the clearing. The waxing moon and smattering of stars were the only light.
The sludge underfoot reached the leshy’s ankles, so Daniel stepped forward and found that he could walk through it. “Are you the same leshy we met last time we were here?” Daniel asked.
“Who knows?” he replied. “Leshies all the same to you, people all the same to me.” He reached for a crude wooden box six feet high. It was made of tree branches tied together with some thick vine. It might even have been leshy hair for all Daniel could tell.
Then something resembling a pike fish with glowing white eyes and an oversized jaw leapt from the mud and flew in an arc toward the leshy. The gangly man swept his cage through the air to catch the fish and missed. He tilted his head back and gave an ear-piercing shriek that lasted two full seconds.
The fish snapped its jaw, shredding through the mud with its long, sharp teeth. It burrowed until it disappeared. Drawn by the leshy’s call, a handful of other massive vine-haired men and women emerged from the trees, holding cages of their own.
“I’ve seen fish like those before,” Coral said, “when I was fishing in the Ogrelands. The ones I saw were already dead though.”
“These aren’t, yet,” Daniel said. “They want us to kill the fish, which shouldn’t be too hard.” He trudged further into the mud, sinking a few inches further with each step. With his sword ready, he waited for another evil pike to fly by.
The leshies thumped their cages against the ground, seemingly at random.
Blat stayed near the perimeter of the bog, more interested in digging into the muddy ground with his bare hands than fighting flying deathfish.
A fat, round fish popped out of the ground and rose high into the sky. In an instant, it had an arrow through it, an unbent fish hook poking through its other side. “Ha, I get fishing XP for this!” Coral said.
Another fish emerged from the ground, and Sal slammed his iron war hammer into the mud, forcing the fish back down and destroying it in one swing. “This is like whack-a-mole,” he said.
“Or Duck Hunt,” Coral said, tracking another fish with her bow and releasing a hook shot arrow that pierced the creature mid-flight.
Sybil sliced her scythe through the air, cleaving a fish in half, while Daniel attacked the fish that rose near him. “This is actually kinda fun,” he said. “And the XP is good too.”
>> Blighted Pike takes 905 Damage.
>> Blighted Pike dies. You receive 2295 XP.
“The blighted ones always have the most XP,” Sal said.
“Then that means—” Daniel started. He didn’t have a chance to finish. Ruined souls wafted upward from the mud and started to swirl above them. The next fish that emerged from the mud was greeted by a ghostly shade that turned its body translucent. It dug back into the mud and disappeared.
“Great,” Sybil said. “I can’t hit them after they get all ghosty.”
The blighted creature jumped out of the mud, still translucent, and collided with another fish midair before landing on the mud’s surface. The two pikes fused together, creating a monster with twice as many teeth. The word Splash appeared above its head, but it just flopped awkwardly on the surface of the mud after it landed. Daniel thrust his sword down, ending its life.
>> Conjoined Spikefish takes 870 Damage.
>> Conjoined Spikefish dies. You receive 3405 XP.
>> Congratulations! You have improved your Swordfighting combat skill to 13. +16% damage when using a sword.
“At least these mobs are fairly weak,” Daniel said. “They just flop around.”
“Maybe they’ll grow up to be something big and strong one day,” Sal said.
“Until then,” Daniel said, “we could power level here.”
“We came here to get you a skill that would stop Sivona and save Farah,” Sybil said. “We don’t stay a second longer than we have to.”
Daniel nodded, sure Sybil saw his assent in the low light. He was grateful for his own Nightvision, and wondered how well Coral and Sal would see anything once they left this clearing and trekked further into the dark forest.
A ruined soul dived at Daniel, and he threw himself to the side. His feet were held in place by the mud that rose mid-calf, but the rest of him flopped onto the mud’s surface and avoided playing host to another shadowy mob. The shade wafted back toward him as Daniel stood up. It lingered before him as if contemplating the extent of his blight. Maybe this shade took pity on him. Or maybe it recognized him as one of its own.
“I should have expected more ruined souls,” Daniel said.
“Sivona strikes again,” Sybil said.
“Zevona does this?” the leader of the leshies asked. “We’ll need more than leshies to protec
t ourselves…”
When the next fish flew from the mud, Daniel reached out and grabbed it with both hands. Its slimy, spongy body bucked left and right, snapping its jaw at him. “Sal,” Daniel called out, “you’re up!”
Sal turned back and Daniel pitched the fish into the air, not realizing it was on a collision course through a ruined soul. The fish’s body absorbed the ghost and became translucent as it sailed through the air. Sal pulled his hammer over his shoulder and waited for the fish to come closer before batting at it.
The head of his hammer smacked into the fish dead on. Daniel twisted to follow the fish’s trajectory so he could make some kind of a home run comment, but he couldn’t find it. When he looked back, he saw Sal struggling to keep his hammer away from his face.
The weapon’s head was no longer a dense chunk of simple iron. It was a spiked fish made of pure metal, snapping its sharp teeth at Sal. The next fish that erupted from the sludgy ground was greeted with a quick whack from the hammer, and Daniel watched as the weapon sank its teeth into the fish, piercing its body and sending its juices running down the hammer’s handle.
“This. Is. The. Coolest!” Sal yelled. “That ruined fish turned this weapon into a Maw Maul! This thing bites baddies just like I do. A weapon after my own heart.”
“Argh!” Sybil yelled. “I am covered in raw fish slime.”
“The good news is, I think I just killed the last of them,” Daniel said. He glanced around the mud field for more mobs but couldn’t find any. If this area had been a fishing pond before, it was nothing more than a lifeless mud pit now.
Daniel trudged toward the leshy that had given him the quest, his feet making wet smacking sounds as he lifted them from the mud. A few other leshies stood nearby holding wooden cages with no fish in them.
“No more fishing for fish,” the leshy said. “Now only fishing for fishers!”
Quest Complete: Purge the Forest (II)
The leshies’ former pond is now a mud field devoid of life. They seem content with that.
Reward: 30,000 XP.
>> Congratulations! You have reached Level 37. To apply your 10 skill points now, open your Skills and Attributes screen.
Just one level to go before Daniel could summon a nuclear-grade magic spell that would turn the tide of any war.
Daniel turned toward his friends and started to trudge through the mud when an arrow hummed past his ear. His head whipped around to follow the arrow’s trajectory. It had landed in the wooden bars of the lead leshy’s cage, which the leshy held high over Daniel’s head.
“Helpers in cages, just like Zevona!” The leshy slammed the cage down, but all he caught was mud. Daniel had dodged to the side.
“Run!” Daniel yelled. He and the others clomped through the thick ground as the leshies did the same, a cat and mouse game in slow motion. Arrows fired one by one, twanging as they landed in wooden cages.
Just as Daniel reached the edge of the glade, a leshy grabbed him by the arm and pulled him back. Daniel reached up a hand and blocked a wooden cage from landing around him. A handful of leshies approached behind the first one.
“We just helped you!” Daniel yelled.
“We need fishers if fishies come back!” the leshy replied.
“They won’t come back,” Daniel groaned as he pushed against the cage bearing down on him. “We’re going to stop Sivona and fix the forest.”
The leshy looked down at Daniel and lessened its effort to trap him just enough for Daniel to push against the creature and step out of the bog. Back on dry land, he prepared to run when a glint of something white caught his eye.
A full head of hair as white as snow. A man crouched in the trees. That’s where the arrows had come from. Quinnick.
Daniel turned back and saw the leshies banging on an invisible barrier, trapped in their mud pit by a magic wall much like the one that ringed the forest itself. He didn’t have time to consider where it came from. The sound of his friends speaking was a dull murmur to him. His only focus was Quinnick.
Daniel roared and slammed his palms against the tree Quinnick perched in. “Come down here and fight!” he yelled. This was the man that had attacked him in Havenstock and sent elf mages to hurl fireballs at him. This was the man that had followed him around Travail for days on end to find any weaknesses he could exploit. This was the man that had led an elven battalion up the mountain to slay the dwarven army. He was going to pay.
Quinnick jumped down from the tree and ran, turning back only every few seconds to shoot an arrow at Daniel. The arrows landed by his feet, but never touched his skin. Daniel would have welcomed the pain. It would spur him to run harder and to throttle Quinnick’s neck tighter when he finally got his hands on him.
Every now and then Daniel’s knee locked into place with that same metallic grinding sound. It slowed him down, but he kicked his leg out and shook himself loose to keep running again.
As he ran, he closed the gap between himself and Quinnick. He grabbed the elf by the collar and yanked hard, pulling the Tactician to the ground. Daniel pounced on top of him and stared into Quinnick’s deep brown eyes for a moment before pulling his arm into the air and balling his fist. No time to grab my sword, he thought.
He attempted to punch his fist into Quinnick’s mouth, but something stopped him. He turned his head back. An elf woman had her hand around his wrist and her eyes locked onto his. “Quinnick just saved your life,” she said. “He shot a warning arrow to get your attention in time to escape the leshies, and I sealed them temporarily inside the bog. Come.” She dropped Daniel’s wrist and took a few steps toward an old tree. With a wave of her hand, a small door appeared in the broad trunk.
All he wanted to do was tear Quinnick apart with his bare hands, but he needed to control himself. Something wasn’t adding up here. Daniel stared at the woman as she opened that magical door and stepped through.
>> Lora. Level 61 Light Mage.
Coral shrugged at Daniel, then followed Lora into the tree and disappeared into its dark interior with the others.
Daniel got up from the ground without offering Quinnick a hand and stepped inside the hollow darkness behind that magic door.
39
The second Coral stepped inside the tree, she was assailed with brightness. She had gotten used to squinting and straining to see in the darkness as midnight approached. Inside, the tree opened to a cavernous room lit by glowing orbs within glass lanterns. The ceiling, floor, and walls were solid wood, with bookcases lining the room. A long table in the room’s center had elves seated around it, with dozens of other elves standing behind them.
“Please,” Lora said, “have a seat.” The elf woman sat at the head of the table, her auburn hair pinned in a large bun on the back of her head. Her face was full of wrinkles and scars.
Coral took an empty chair, as did Sybil, Sal, and Onik. Blat climbed up the back of Coral’s chair and hung on, watching the crowd over Coral’s shoulder.
“I’ll stand,” Daniel said. As he bent down to clear the doorframe, Quinnick followed behind.
Lora nodded. “As you know, Quinnick has been trailing you for some time. He told me early on that you all would be up to the task, but I didn’t believe it. Not until I saw you enter the forest. Two humans, an ogre, a goblin, and a minotaur. The strangest company for an elf I’ve ever seen.” Her eyes fell on Sybil for a moment.
“So Quinnick was attacking us on your orders,” Sal asked, “and not Sivona’s?”
“Each wave of elves that attacked you on the mountain,” Lora said. “Were they powerful fighters, or just below your level? Did they leave equipment at your feet when their bodies perished? Did you drink in the experience of battle and grow stronger from it? When you first fought Quinnick in Havenstock during the crisis of Sagma’s tower, did he reveal weaknesses that you have since overcome?
“If Sivona had dispatched Quinnick with an army meant to kill you, you’d be dead. I sent him, in the hope that you would be strong eno
ugh when you got here. A lot of good elves died under dwarven blade to give you this opportunity.”
“A lot of dwarves died too,” Daniel said.
“Let it not be in vain,” Lora replied. “Fulfill the task at hand so the world will be safe for your people again, and mine.”
“And that task is?” Coral asked.
“Sivona was once a wise and gentle ruler,” Lora said. “As a Life Mage, she worked together with Ze to keep this forest thriving and safe. Sivona spent half her time in the temple discussing how best to foster the forest with the goddess and her priests. That Sivona, however, is long gone. Whatever she has become, she is a danger to everyone.”
“From what we’ve heard,” Coral said, “someone used Thanaker’s Mark to turn her into a zombie.”
“Not just any zombie,” Sybil said. “Have you heard of synapstick?”
“It’s a spice, torn from the bark of a rare tree,” Lora said. “It’s meant to enhance intelligence. Especially helpful for spell casters.”
“And what happens when you mix it with Thanaker’s Mark?” Daniel asked.
Lora’s face grew pale. “An undead with such high intelligence would be uncontrollable. No necromancer in their right mind would attempt it.”
“She’s more than just a zombie though,” Coral said. “I shot her with an arrow embalmed with juvensprig. If she was just a walking corpse, she would have respawned where she stood. We’ve used juvensprig in the past to revive the dead.”
“You’re right,” Lora said. “She is more than a zombie. She is an undead Life Mage. Sivona walks a narrow path that blurs life and death. Her existence has become an impossible amalgam of opposing forces. From that well of power and despair come the ruined souls. As we speak, she is using them to pervert the natural order in the most unholy way: to force Ze to merge with her.