The light flickered and went out. Three intersecting circles of energy lit up at the center of the room.
“Excellent,” Jurgen said. “Everything’s working. I’ll connect myself from here via the onboard network.”
“And what do you want us to do? Should we stand in a circle and hold hands?” Foggs joked clumsily.
“No need for stupid rituals. Either the device accepts your settings and kicks in, or it doesn’t, becau-“
A surge of interference swallowed the rest of his phrase, distorting his voice. A pale glow filled the room.
Reality blurred and flickered, then expired.
Chapter Four
An unidentified location in space
Water warbled nearby. My visor was broken. The odor of decaying leaves mingled with the aroma of flowering grasses.
My vision came back slowly. At first, reality was akin to a blurred pencil sketch.
Gradually the world began gaining detail, glitching occasionally as it grew in color. I could already see a large mossy boulder half-buried in the ground; a green meadow edged with fluffy seed balls; and further on, the swaying branches of brambles heavy with tiny red fruit.
The icons of my interface were gray: inactive.
A rabbit sneaked past. A large lizard froze in a small rocky crevice.
A breeze ruffled the trees, bringing the faint disturbing odor of decomposition.
A scattering of red indicator lights on the inside of my visor blinked, then went out. I couldn’t move. My armored suit hindered my movements, digging into my body as if deformed.
Communications were down. My mind expander didn’t respond.
Right! No good lying around! I leaned against one arm and tried to heave myself up. My suit’s servodrives screeched.
My heart was pounding. I was short of breath. Where on earth had this fabled Founders’ network sent me?
I struggled to catch my breath, then took a look around. A greenwood forest towered nearby, looking rather worse for wear. Its branches were broken as if ravaged by a tornado. A siege tower lay overturned on the ground at the forest’s edge. Its sharpened pales, dark with time, pointed every which way.
This was the Crystal Sphere!
I could barely recognize my stomping ground. This newb location had suffered some drastic metamorphosis. Once bustling with life, it was now uneasily quiet. The village where a few years ago I’d completed my first quest had been reduced to a few houses, and even those stood roofless.
I could see a range of low hills to my left, their slopes peppered with craters and scorch marks. This looked very much like the aftermath of a mass use of top-level spells which was unacceptable in a newb zone.
There were some marshes not far from here, inhabited by an old friend of mine. I might need to ask him whatever had happened here.
My companions were nowhere to be seen which worried me quite a bit. I wasn’t used to having so little information about my surroundings.
Never mind. The main thing was, we’d made it! Even though this good old fantasy world wasn’t our ultimate port of call, still I found it encouraging. Our identities had just traveled through an ocean of light years and ended up in a predetermined location of Earth’s cyberspace!
As I took my bearings, my armor had completed its transformation. Instead of the cargonite suit I’d been used to, I was now wearing a pair of statless canvas pants and a matching shirt.
So the Crystal Sphere’s engine had apparently accepted me, stripping me of any technological advantage. The only thing still reminding me of Phantom Server was the Founders’ navigator device which had suffered no transformation.
“Zander!” a desperate scream made me swing round. This was Arbido’s voice!
A narrow river flowed behind some shrubs to my right. I could distinctly hear the warbling and splashing of water.
“Help!” the scream was coming from the river bank, accompanied by the clashing of steel.
A wide trail led off in that direction. It was still quite fresh, the leaves on the hacked-off branches of the surrounding bushes still rigid.
“Help, someone! They’re killing me!”
I ran as fast as I could.
The trail ducked into a small ravine, then brought me out to the bank.
Wow! What was that? A battle must have unfolded here, and very recently too!
Decaying bodies in muddy bloodied armor lay everywhere, pillaged by groups of looters.
I saw Arbido. He stood with his back to a blackened piece of driftwood, clumsily brandishing a naginata with a broken shaft. Three ragged skinny bandits (definitely NPCs, judging by their vile expressions) stood there in sullen determination, waiting for him to run out of steam. They didn’t want to take any risks but they apparently weren’t going to let him go alive, either.
Their gear was all mismatched, their dented armor bloodied and pierced in places.
I picked up a sword as I ran: its blade jagged, its tip broken off.
I knew the Crystal Sphere like the palm of my hand. I used to play as Paladin, and I still had all my skills at knee-jerk level. No idea how the game engine had gone about adjusting my current levels, but it should at least be good enough to smoke a few robbers!
Arbido noticed me and stopped yelling. He perked up a little. His helmet was gone, his Dargian suit (the only one that could fit his goblin build) still surging with charges of energy. That’s why the NPCs hadn’t dared to attack him yet. They must have thought he was bewitched!
I had about a dozen paces between him and myself left when the looters turned around and took off.
Further upstream the bank was ripped apart, forming wide ravines. One of them parted, revealing Charon, also without a helmet: all covered in mud, angry and disoriented. He held an uprooted young tree in one hand and clenched a rabbit by its ears in the other.
“Phew,” Arbido crouched, gasping. “I nearly had a heart attack. I thought that was the end of me.”
Noticing us, Charon growled a greeting. In a flash, the bank emptied. The looters disappeared very promptly.
“Did you see Jurgen and Foggs?” I asked.
“Nowr!” Charon cast a curious look around. “Is this your world?”
“Not quite. This is a made-up reality. Will you let go of the rabbit, please?”
Charon released his fingers. The harmless NPC scampered away.
“What do you mean by a made-up reality?” Charon asked. “I can see no traces of civilized life here! Why are the local technologies so primitive?”
“I’ll explain to you later. Now I’d like you to remove your suit. Arbido, that applies to you too.”
“Why?” the old man wasn’t in a hurry to comply. “What have you done with your own suit?”
“The Crystal Sphere’s engine has utilized it. But before that happened, the wretched suit very nearly broke every bone in my body. So you’d better get out of yours pretty quick. We’ll get some new gear here.”
“What, take it off corpses?” Arbido cringed.
“Just do it!”
While they were busy removing their suits, I tried to explain to Charon the meaning of a “game world”.
“I still don’t get it,” he finally admitted. “Who killed them?” he pointed his improvised club to the river bank strewn with bodies.
“No idea,” I admitted. “The rules forbid any serious fighting here at all.”
The two neat piles of cargonite armor began to quiver, losing shape. Soon both suits had totally dematerialized.
Arbido shivered. All he had left on was a pair of knee-long pants.
Charon’s light onboard suit wasn’t affected.
“Am I supposed to freeze to death?” Arbido began to moan.
“Just wait a little. I’ll get some gear from somewhere. Weren’t you going to contact someone?” I reminded him.
“To do that, I need to get to the nearest tavern! It’s not very far from here, don’t worry. We’ll get there in no time at all.”
&n
bsp; “I don’t think so. You can forget your tavern. The village has been reduced to ruins.”
He looked flabbergasted. “What do you mean?”
“Can’t you see what’s going on?” I stared at the dead bodies. The memory of my arrival in Phantom Server sprang to mind. This was exactly what I’d encountered in the alternative start location on Oasis when I’d first arrived there. Some of the avatars there wouldn’t disappear after the character’s virtual death. Which meant that the player had died in both worlds, crumbling under the realism of the experience provided by his or her neuroimplant.
Thousands of players had died here as they tried to hold the river bank. Who could have attacked them? The broken weapons, the pools of blood, pierced armor and shattered shields — all this pointed at a fierce struggle, but at least half of the gruesome picture seemed to be missing. Whoever had created this battle painting was a very, very strange artist.
I could see hoofmarks in the sand. A lost horseshoe. A broken piece of a spear with a very unusual tip. A scaly glove lay by the water edge. I picked it up. It must have been hacked off with the bearer’s hand still in it. Still, it was empty inside.
Did that mean that the attackers, whoever they were, had successfully respawned?
“Zander!” Arbido scurried toward me. “There’s something I need to tell you! I have a cache here somewhere!”
“All right,” I agreed. “Let’s see if we can find it. What have you got in it?”
“Just some gear I stashed away for my mercs. You know very well that these start-up locations are a dream to work in. Newbs can be too impatient, too hungry for adventure. So my guys did their bit by offering them a free ride through the local dungeons. It’s not much in terms of gear, really, because my guys didn’t want to stand out too much in the crowd. Still, it’s better than robbing corpses.”
“I wouldn’t say so. They have all sorts of gear all the way up to level 50. It looks as if the entire area came here in order to deter the invaders or die.”
“Whatever. It’s up to you.”
“It’s okay. We’ll open this stash of yours, that’s for sure. What did those looters want with you? I saw them talking between themselves. They didn’t seem in a hurry to get a taste of your naginata.”
Arbido shrugged. “They were weird. They could kill me in their own sweet time. At first I couldn’t even move. One of them stumbled over me and saw that I was alive. You can’t imagine how pleased he was! That grin of his! He said to the others, “We need to bind this one! We can carry him to the old well and throw him down. Once the Reapers have him, we can count on a reward!”
“What did you say? The Reapers? Never heard about them.”
“Neither had I,” Arbido headed toward a small ravine, then pointed at two flat rocks on the ground. “That’s my stash, down there.”
* * *
Arbido’s stash proved untouched. I moved the rocks aside and scooped the sand out until I discovered three large chests.
Arbido opened them and quickly equipped himself in some leather armor and a short sword. I was more interested in the scrolls he kept in a separate box.
Arbido proved a foresightful type. Actually, why would his business acumen surprise me?
We couldn’t find anything that would fit Charon though. Never mind. We would think of something, that’s for sure.
The scrolls proved extremely handy. They were nothing special, just a bunch of regular spells, but you didn’t have to be a wizard to use a scroll. All you had to do was break the seal. I took all of them. I also found a slotted belt and moved the Wall of Fire and the Hand of Earth to quick access slots.
My interface was still dead, the icons of my mnemonic abilities inactive. But once I’d handled the scrolls’ yellowed parchment, two of the Founders’ icons suddenly appeared in my mental view. Both were related to high-temperature exposure.
“Step aside, guys!” I focused on the bottom of one of the ravines and activated a Wall of Fire.
It worked nicely! The shrubs exploded in flames, the heat searing my face. The local critters scattered in all directions.
“Why did you have to waste it?” Arbido demanded.
“Because we’d better check it now than be stuck with a dead scroll in the heat of battle. You should have stashed away more of them, man. We could use them, that’s for sure.”
“That’s a bit of wishful thinking now, isn’t it?” he grumbled.
While Arbido and I sorted through his stash, Charon waited on the bank, looking pensive. He paid no heed to the stench of the dead bodies; instead, he watched the waves rolling onto the sand shallows and frothing around the rocks.
“A long time ago there were rivers in my world too,” he half-growled with a sad gasp.
“Why, what happened? Why did they disappear?”
“We entered the era of the Black Sun,” the Haash announced sadly.
“Did that have something to do with the Founders?” I suggested.
He nodded gloomily.
“Can you tell us?”
“Not now,” he growled. “It’s a long story. Zander, when are we going to get to your planet?”
“I’m afraid it’s not going to be easy now,” I glanced at Arbido but he preserved a broody silence. “First we need to find Foggs and Jurgen. Then we’ll go for a walk. I have an old friend living nearby. He might be able to tell us more about all this.”
Charon shook his head. “You just said this is a made-up world. Does it really matter what happened here?”
His words made me think. The idea of a game was alien to him. The Haash viewed their lives as the only possible reality.
“Listen, Charon, why didn’t you ask me to send you to your own star system?” I asked. “Don’t you want to go back home and see how things are going there?”
“Nowr.”
“But why?”
“I haven’t done my duty yet. I can’t go back. Let’s change the subject.”
“All right. I’m not forcing you. But one day you’ll have to tell us.”
Charon lowered his head. “Where are we going now?” he gasped hotly.
“There’s a ford across the river nearby and a village next to it,” Arbido said. “We need to check it. You never know, there might be survivors there. Besides, Foggs and Jurgen know this area so they’re sure to head for the ford. You just can’t miss it.”
* * *
The battle had been impressive. When we turned a bend in the river, we saw row after row of sharpened stakes set into the shallows, their tips facing the water. I just didn’t understand anything anymore. It looked like the mysterious riders had attacked the village at full tilt, otherwise how does one explain the dead horses still impaled on the stakes? Did that mean the riders could gallop on water?
The little village by the ford had been burned down. The ford, too, was gone, replaced by a fast torrent, deep and dark. Someone must have used some very powerful spells here in order to deepen the river bed. The local defenders had spared neither lives nor effort in stopping the yet-unknown danger that had descended on them from the opposite bank.
Arbido looked completely lost. The sight of the burned-down village seemed to have disheartened him.
“Zander!” Charon growled. “Look!”
Two people walked along the bank. They were still too far for us to make out their faces.
“That’s Jurgen and Foggs,” Charon said confidently.
Soon I recognized them too. They looked tired. Their clothes and gear were mismatched.
“This machine has quite some range,” Jurgen wiped the sweat from his forehead. The day was hot and virtually windless. “We’d walked a couple of miles at least,” he perched himself on a hillock. “It’s the same everywhere. Vultures and dead bodies. It looks as if a whole army came through here from the other bank. They forded the river in full stride. Lots of dead horses are lying around. Over there,” he pointed, “they met with some resistance put up by archers and wizards. But the wizards w
ere no good. All they did was burn all the undergrowth.”
“Have you seen any of the attackers’ bodies?” I asked.
Jurgen shook his head. “No. Those who defended the river bank were regular players, no doubt about that. A rather motley bunch, very badly organized. But who on earth could have attacked them, I’ve no idea.”
“NPCs, who do you think,” Foggs said confidently. “I just don’t understand why they kept coming from the opposite bank. There’s nothing there, only the forest and some cliffs. That’s where the location ends.”
“And that’s where the Corporation testing grounds start,” Arbido added. “The trail I told you about, it starts among the cliffs.”
That was a surprise. Could this mean that the source of the invasion lay within the testing grounds?
The river was wide. I couldn’t see much on its far bank. It was shrouded in a gray mist that crept toward the water’s edge.
“We shouldn’t go there blindly,” I said. “First we should try to find out what happened.”
“There’s nobody around!” Arbido said. “Who do you want to ask? Even the looters legged it the moment they saw our Charon.”
“I have an idea. Come with me.”
* * *
I noticed my old friend from afar. Forrest the Forest Sprite was busy skirting a deep crater that had formed on the site of an evaporated marsh. He looked bewildered and distraught.
“Those bastards!” he groaned as he walked. “Why would you destroy something this good?”
By good he meant the tangle of old gnarly driftwood covered with moss which used to be his home. Forrest — which was the name we’d given to this grumbling but rather harmless NPC — used to hide here from some of the more forward players that craved a quick bit of leveling. The game developers had messed up his settings somehow, allowing newb players to smoke him three times, every time receiving a nice (for a start-up location) bit of XP for his trouble.
“A talking plant?” Charon looked puzzled.
Black Sun (Phantom Server: Book #3) Page 8