“What the FUCK is THAT?” Suri shouted, throwing herself down. She began connecting straps to one side of her harness, and I took her other side.
“I have no fucking idea, and I really don’t-”
The final words of my sentence were drowned out as a Godzilla-sized sandworm burst out of the charred sands in front of us.
Chapter 15
The Queen of the Sands was recognizable only because of her size. The Level One Hundred and Fucking Twenty [Voidwyrm Empress] was now as black as coal, jerking and writhing oddly as she exploded out of the sand.
A tic started beside my eye. This was Not Okay. The new and improved Stranged Sandworm Queen was now big enough to pop Karalti in her mouth like a potato chip. “Karalti? Please go sky now.”
Karalti didn’t need to be asked twice. She launched into the air, striving for speed rather than height. As she kicked off, the voidwyrm pivoted in our direction. Barbed tentacles lashed back and forth between the lobes, flickering and tasting the air, and then the creature’s mouth split open and she screamed. The banshee wail was some kind of attack: we were far enough away that we avoided the primary AoE, but the shockwave struck like the aftermath of an explosion. It was strong enough to send pieces of Withering Rose tumbling.
Karalti desperately winged away from the titanic monster, and I turned to watch in disbelief as the Voidwyrm Empress belly-flopped onto the ring of glass shards and crushed them to powder, taking no damage at all as she slithered toward us.
[Stranging has caused Teleport to fail. Leave the area to cast spells.]
“What the fuck are you waitin’ for!” Suri bellowed. “That bloody great cunt’s about to fuckin’ blow us out of the air!”
“I’M TRYING!” Karalti shrilled.
“Flatten out! Minimize wind resistance!” I roared at Suri, before shifting my focus back to Karalti. “Karalti! Cut around Withering Rose and use Wings of Deception!”
The dragon’s mind focused like a laser. Her Mana dropped by 50 points, and then her Mana and HP pools split by 50% each as she warped forward in a roiling cloud of dark energy. We burst out on the other side of it, veering to the right as her shadow clone flew to the left, identical in every way. Karalti’s scales heated sharply under my hands as she burned mana like a fuse to keep the clone active.
The Voidwyrm Empress reared up, sucking a pillar of light deep into her body as she tracked the fake dragon through the air. Karalti dived, but the worm swung forward and flung the lobes of its mouth apart to release the mother of all breath weapons. A ray of freezing black Void energy sang out—and obliterated everything in its path. The glass, the debris in the air, and the shadow copy were toast. Karalti seized underneath us, lurching as her clone was instantly cut in half and dematerialized, the fluttering scraps sucked into a huge scar of howling darkness that hung in the air.
[Voidwyrm Empress deals 20187 damage!]
Karalti’s back and chest flexed with enough force to almost throw me off as she strove for the open air with all her strength. Behind us, the Voidwyrm Empress wailed, jerking and popping, then twisting in our direction.
“Go! Go!” I yelled.
Karalti roared with effort as she burst out of the churning windstorm and over the threshold of the Stranging. There was turbulence at the edge of the storm that gathered under the dragon’s wings and thrust her up and forward into the thinner open air. She flapped for a moment, swinging her hindquarters in to avoid being sent tumbling.
“Back to Kalla Sahasi! Now!” I gripped the saddle tightly.
The bond surged as Karalti burned all but two of her remaining mana points, teleporting us away from the colossal shadow rushing toward us from the storm.
***
The dragon reappeared back in the cold air in the valley of Karhad, about half a mile from the castle. Given what we’d just run from, I couldn’t fault her for not sticking the coordinates quite right.
“Urrrgh...” Karalti’s wingbeats were off-tempo, dragging on the wind as she shakily veered toward the castle. “Hector... I don’t feel so good.”
“You got this.” I clapped her on the base of the neck—partly to reassure her, partly to try and keep her awake as we lurched starboard. “We’re gonna be fine as long as you stay awake.”
“Yeah... awake.” She shuddered beneath us, then briefly redoubled her efforts as my Will joined hers. “Gonna land. Hang on.”
I got into the dive position, rested my head down between Karalti’s shoulders, and bent my mind to the task of keeping her going. I felt her draw a deep breath, steadying her flight path as she teetered down toward the castle in a fast glide. She dipped to the right as we passed over the remains of the southern wall, but yawed back to center just before she backwinged and stumbled to a stop. She panted hard, wings drooping as Suri disconnected her harness and gratefully slid to the ground. I stayed on Karalti’s back, reaching out to embrace her neck.
“Ugh. That sucked.” She swayed on her feet, heaving for breath.
“You did great,” I said. “A couple weeks ago, we’d have crashed that landing. You pulled it off like a fucking pro.”
Karalti craned her head to sniff, then lick my face. “You helped.”
“Of course I did. I’m your personal cheerleader. And I want you to fix that image in your mind, clearly. Miniskirt. Pom-poms. Pigtails. All of it.”
The dragon groaned, and nudged me back with the tip of her snout. “Go to hell.”
“Is she okay!?” Suri called up to us from the ground.
“I’m fine. Don’t worry.” Karalti carefully shuffled down on her hind legs, squatting until her chest touched the ground. “I’ll just... rest here for a while.”
I slid down her flanks to the ground, and removed her saddle. The heavy leather and metal rig vanished from her body into my Inventory, immediately encumbering me. I groaned as gravity settled over me like a lead blanket.
“Fuuuckin’ hell. What on Earth was that thing?” Suri let out a tense breath, walking over to lay a gentle hand on Karalti’s wing edge. The dragon had already dropped into an exhausted doze.
“The voidwyrm? She’s just about the last thing we need, is what.” I pulled my helmet off and swiped my arm across my face. “That overgrown piece-of-shit caterpillar is Level 120. One two zero. What a load of ass.”
“Could’ve been a lot worse. We didn’t end up as worm food.” Suri shook her head in disbelief. “What the hell are we gonna do? The Warsinger’s a wreck and that voidwyrm thing... Christ. I dunno.”
“We’ll figure something out. We always do.” I reached out and squeezed her shoulder.
“I sure as hell hope so.” Suri frowned and rubbed the back of her neck, then stopped to look past me, over my shoulder. I focused on my peripheral vision: it was Istvan and Rin, sprinting across the yard toward us from the direction of the stables.
“Your Grace! My Lady!” Istvan called. “What happened? Is Karalti alright?”
“A whole lot of bullshit is what happened.” Fuming, I opened Karalti’s inventory and placed the saddle in there, but didn’t equip it. “We need to talk with you two and Vash over some dinner. There’s a situation with the Warsinger.”
Chapter 16
“I can’t believe it.” Rin balled her fists on top of the table in front of her. “The Warsinger... he destroyed her?”
The five of us were seated in the dining hall: me, Vash and Suri on one side of the table, Rin and Istvan on the other. We had plates of torkany in front of us, the characteristic Vlachian stew of tender Europasaurus meat, vegetables, dried peppers, sour cream, and potato dumplings. It was delicious, but only Vash had cleared his plate: everyone else had forgotten their food, listening anxiously as I recounted the battle with Ororgael, what he’d done to Withering Rose, and the heap of shit we now found ourselves in.
“I think ‘wrecked’ is probably more accurate,” I said. “‘Destroyed’ implies it no longer exists. It’s still there. It’s just FUBAR.”
“How could
one man destroy such a thing?” Istvan asked, almost as horrified as Rin. “Wasn’t it made to withstand battle with the Drachan?”
“In theory,” Suri drawled. “What I want to know is, how the fuck did he blow the damn thing up? Because if we retrieve it and rebuild it, I want to know what enhancements we need to make to avoid me getting one-shotted by this cheating bastard.”
“Well, firstly, the Warsinger was... is... old and weakened from millennia of immobile storage.” Rin ticked off on her fingers. “Secondly, it didn’t have any mana to power its defenses. None of its magical protections could be active if it doesn’t have an energy source. And after it fell over? Anyone can wreck a defenseless machine.”
“Huh.” Suri’s brows furrowed. “Good points.”
“But still, it must have taken an incredible force. And thus we return to Istvan’s question.” Vash had his feet up on the table and his heavy fall of braids draped around his chest like a scarf, smoking furiously. “How does one man wield such terrible power? How does anyone, even an Architect, cause such devastation? Stranging the land for miles in every direction? Corrupting and empowering a sandworm, turning a legendary war machine into junk?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “And that’s a problem. Before Ororgael, when Baldr was just Baldr, I know he had a unique Advanced Path. ‘Spirit Knight’. But I don’t know anything about it.”
Suri sucked on a tooth, looking up toward the ceiling. “Yeah. No info on it in the wiki.”
“We’d have to find a Path tutor to tell us, or another Spirit Knight. There might actually be a Spirit Knight trainer in Taltos,” Rin said, her blue-on-blue eyes flicking between the four of us. “As for how he got so strong... Well, I knew Michael—Ororgael—when he was alive. Not well, but I knew him. I’m sure that in addition to setting up ways to possess and take over players, he squirreled away some experience caches for himself when he still had access to the Admin tools. Items, level up bonuses, things like that.”
“Would the system permit him to?” I asked.
“Sure. Archemi’s still in beta, so there’s all kinds of bugs and exceptions and unfinished places. Rin replied. “I mean, imagine like, a room that can only be opened after certain preconditions are met, like a dungeon area only Michael could access. It’s filled with small, harmless mobs, but if you kill them, you get ten thousand EXP per head. That’s the kind of stuff Devs do to test environment-avatar interactions, to make sure OUROS is spawning mobs correctly. NPC enemies are supposed to be challenging, but proportionate, right? So a test environment might allow a Dev to rapidly level to see if the dungeon began spawning the correct level enemies. Michael’s team, the Neuromorphic R&D Division, had access to those kinds of sandbox tools. Spawners, 1-hit weapons, special potions, special magic...”
“Like Void-element stuff?” I linked my fingers together, leaning forward on my elbows.
“Maybe? But that stuff wasn’t ever supposed to be for players,” Rin said. “At least, that’s what I heard around the office.”
“You were an artist among the Architects, were you not?” Vash pointed the stem of his pipe at her.
Rin bobbed her head. “Yes: I worked in environmental modeling. Mostly architecture... I helped design Taltos and a few other cities. But, like, all this stuff with the Drachan and the Void monsters and everything is just unreal to me. They were just meant to be like any other NPC enemy. I don’t understand why Michael’s so obsessed with them.”
“He really likes to rant about the Drachan and viruses,” I said, stirring my spoon through my stew and taking a mouthful. “And squalor. He likes that word.”
“Ugh. It’s so weird.” Rin rubbed her face with both hands. “I mean, I know the artists who designed the Drachan. We had little plastic figurines and stuff in our pod. One of them was named Terminus the Deadline Drachan, for crying out loud. We were contracted with a big toy company. They were going to make pencil cases, and t-shirts...”
“Hang on a second. I got a quest to deal with this before we went hunting Withering Rose. Matir said something about the Drachan in it.” I pulled up the menu in my HUD. “Here we go, ‘The Second Drachan War’.”
Rin, Suri, and Istvan leaned in.
“Okay, this is what Matir said. ‘When the Architects created this world, the Drachan were always instead... intended to be a fear... fearsome opponent’.” I read haltingly, struggling with the written words. “But something is not right with the order of things. A voice whispers to me that they are no longer of this paracosm. I do not know what this means. Been... Being Starborn, you are not a child of this world. Perhaps this expression has greater sig... significance to you.“
“Beyond operational parameters?” Rin repeated. She scrubbed at the side of her head with the heel of her hand, screwing her eyes closed in thought. “Urgh. I don’t know enough about the SysAdmin side of things to make sense of that.”
“There’s someone who might,” Suri said heavily.
I looked at her. “Jacob?”
She nodded.
“I assure you that two weeks alone in a cell has softened his outlook somewhat,” Vash remarked. “And he is coming to trust me. I will speak with him about it, if you like.”
“No. It’s not your job,” Suri said. “Of all of us, he’s most likely to talk to me.”
“Suri, no. You don’t have to do that,” Rin urged. “Let V-Vash do it. Or even me. He might listen to me. I was one of his co-workers.”
“It’s my gig, and that’s the end of it.” Suri lifted her chin. “For one thing, I’m the best procedural interrogator you’ve got. For another, I don’t have any good reason to be afraid of him anymore. He’s rotting in our dungeon now, and if he doesn’t change his fuckin’ tune, he’ll stay there.”
“She’s right. It’s her choice to make,” I said. “Suri is good at grilling people. She’ll get the information we need. “
Rin pressed her lips together, eyes shining with emotion, and gave her a nod. “Okay. Just know I’ll be here for you if you need to decompress afterward, alright?”
“As will I,” Vash said. “You can sit on Uncle Vash’s knee and cuss out the little dickstain for an hour or two. Istvan can vouch that I am an exceptional agony aunt.”
“I said you are agony,” Istvan muttered. “Just agony.”
“You’re so full of shit.” Suri grinned. “But thanks, all of you.”
“I’m glad.” Istvan sighed, and shook his head. “I hate to always be the pessimistic one, but I struggle to imagine how this information will help us in the coming weeks and months. Even with information on how Ororgael managed to wreck the Warsinger, what can we do against such a man? What is the point of having a Warsinger, if Ororgael can pierce it in a single strike? What you described is something I believed only the gods could do.”
Vash grunted. “There is that.”
Suri shrugged, and looked down. So did Rin.
“We do everything against it,” I said firmly. “Because sure, he’s powerful. He’s probably cheated himself and his dragon to max level and thrown in some other exploits for good measure. But the fact of it is, there will always be some asshole who wants to take away your freedom and subjugate you to his selfish, ass-backwards agenda. In this time, in this world, Ororgael is that asshole. But you know what? The only reason he and his lieutenants felt the need to cheat was because they weren’t strong enough to exercise real power, real strength. We ARE strong enough. We can fix the Warsingers. We can free Ilia’s dragons. We CAN pull this world together, starting with Myszno, then Vlachia, then all of Artana. And if we can’t stop him here, we’ll go to Daun, and we’ll work with the Lys and the Tuun and defeat him there. Believe me when I say we WILL win. I will NOT let this motherfucker do to Archemi what the Total Wars did to my planet!”
I’d gotten to my feet as I spoke, standing with my hands flat on the table. The others looked at me strangely.
“Sorry,” I said, sheepishly. “Didn’t mean to get shouty.”
“No, your Grace. Don’t apologize.” Istvan drew a deep breath. “While you were speaking, I felt my heart swell. That is a good feeling, Hector. The feeling of determination replacing fear.”
“Same,” Rin said, softly. “I believe you. I believe we can find out why Michael is doing what he is, and that we can beat him.”
Suri nodded. “If anyone can, it’s us. We have two parts of the Triad together already. Hector and Karalti are the Paragons of this age. Me and Withering Rose are the Warsinger. All we need is the second Artist.”
All eyes turned to Rin, who blushed bright blue. She held up her hands. “Wait! Whoever the Artists are, I’m not one of them! I’m nowhere near good enough. They’re probably on, umm, Zaunt or something...”
“Ahem.” Vash wiggled his aurum metal fingers. “Lady Palmer and her five daughters would beg to differ. If you can design a metal arm with enough control that a man doesn’t rip his own cock off, I’d call that talent.”
Rin put her hands over her face. Istvan sunk down into his chair. Suri laughed, covering her mouth when it turned into a snort.
“I mean... he’s got a point?” I shrugged.
Vash nodded. “A massive one. Eh, Istvan?”
Istvan, face-down on the table, thumped his face down against his forearms.
Rin groaned. “Men.”
Suri sighed, shook her head, and pushed her chair back. “Right. Well, I’ll leave the measuring contest to you blokes. I’ve gotta go and grill a rat.”
“Jacob? You want to go now?” I frowned, getting to my feet.
“Yeah.” Suri grimaced, stretching her neck and shoulders. “Might as well get it over with.”
“In all seriousness, my lady, I would advise against it.” Vash kicked his feet down, sitting up straight. “What I suggest we do is deprive him of his dinner tonight. He will be on edge due to the break in routine. Then, first thing in the morning, wake him up and take his breakfast to him, then talk. A man like Jacob is barely two steps above an animal. Associate your presence with food, as you would when taming a feral dog. It will make your words more effective.”
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