by Vic Connor
Chapter Thirteen
Aremos arises, unsteady but whole, as the final stages of his transformation begin. His eyes light up and burn with the cold flame of virtue.
“Well done, my beloved,” the child Somera whispers—and he nods.
He takes her blessing and her sorrow; he takes her repentant remorse and he uses it to forge himself into what he needs to become. He dresses, puts his amulet back around his neck, and walks to the pool of water.
Looking down, he sees himself: Aremos once more, his skin healing, his hair grown back, his eyes and teeth normal again as the potion takes effect. There’s light and there’s bestial fury in him; the power of nature feels revitalized within his heart, reborn from the ashes of his darkest hour.
Feeling physically broken but with his soul settling, Aremos reaches into his robes and pulls out one more bottle, his trump card: The vial of Nightmare Shade—so deadly, yet so needed right now. It will reveal him to himself, he thinks. This is its true danger.
He swirls its contents, regarding them. It’s a vile green liquid, acidic-looking, sinister, and as it swirls, it speaks to him: Hold yourself true when you drink me, show me your greatness and I will amplify it… Show me your weakness and I will tear you apart. He wants to believe he’s safe enough to drink it without dying on the spot. He’s a level thirty-nine now, strong enough to handle it—four levels higher than he needs to be to survive the draught. But survival is not enough.
I do not want to just survive, I need to be great, I need to win the battle, he thinks.
“Then we shall be great,” the child Somera replies in a subdued voice. “We shall be good, and we will let our goodness flow. I am sorry, so sorry, for the darkness I gave you: I remove it, I give you back to the light, my beloved Aremos. I give you over to shine.”
And, with these words ringing in his soul, Aremos unstoppers the Nightmare Shade. He summons his power, allowing white magic to saturate him, to burn out the last of the darkness—the last of the child Somera’s anger—and he downs the whole potion.
He grows, he warps, he changes once more. This is a day for change, he thinks; it’s a day for realizing and becoming, for unearthing my truer nature.
Become what you are, he tells himself, as he feels his own essence growing exceedingly bold.
The Staff of Adamant falls from his hand, but its spirit remains with him and it binds to his form as he grows, its power becoming his own as ever it was meant to be. The ring shatters and the circlets shatter; the Silverthread melts into him, running smoothly to add its defense to his own even as it disappears. His robes fall to shreds and the amulet’s chain snaps… No matter, though: the jewel itself remains firmly in place, embedding itself painfully into his chest as it expands. His back burns and then blisters. The blisters break, and great wings unfurl, blue and green feathers stiff in their newness. His muscles bulge and his face twists until it forms into a pointed beak—looking very much like the Osirion_mod99’s, yet without its demonic snarl. He is an eagle, born to soar, no searcher of carrion in the lands of death.
He howls, his mouth open to the sky, yet his voice comes out as the long, harsh bellow of a great bird. His body sprouts feathers across his skin as his hands become talons and feet become mighty, clawed paws; a tail protrudes and his legs bow, their muscles billowing… Magic spills out everywhere, glowing, thrashing about him as the final transformation takes hold.
Where before had stood a battle mage, broken in spirit and weak in body, something altogether new now houses the soul of Aremos and the spirit of the child Somera. A mighty and proud griffin takes his place, its mind the same, its powers the same… Aremos in total, yet more powerful, in a stronger form.
He is reborn in the form of the purest white magic.
The battle still rages, Aremos thinks, flexing, testing his new found strength. When he examines his stats, he sees that every characteristic has nearly doubled: His damage and resistance are formidable, his speed and agility off the chart, his HP greater than ever.
He stands tall and a new set of robes appears around him. They are of the purest white, covering his torso and reaching down to his knees. They split at his back to allow his great wings and tail their room. The amulet glows hot in his chest. He reaches out a talon and the Staff of Adamant flies into his hand; it grows as he holds it, the better to suit his new proportions.
“Look at you, my beautiful, my glorious Aremos…”
“Look at you, my beautiful, my glorious Somera. Stay strong, child,” he tells her. “The night is yet to be won.”
“And we will win it on your terms… We will show the world the light, we shall banish this darkness.”
He is a creature of the light now, the exact opposite of demonhood, the personification of all that is natural and good.
Aremos snaps his great pinions and shoots into the sky, exulting in his newfound strength and abilities. He had enjoyed riding the Pegasus and its dark counterpart, Nightmare—he has always enjoyed flying missions in Arkhart, and it’s no different in Sanguis. But to be the one actually flying, to be in control, reliant on nothing but his own body, his own power, is glorious.
His name has changed along with his body. Where before the name Aremos had appeared quite rightly in his field of vision, next to his HP and other stats in the top, right hand corner, it now reads: Aremos/Griffin_mod18. That is me, he thinks: the Griffin Mod, above and beyond what I once was.
His eyesight is keener now, given that his head is that of a great eagle, and he sees far across the field of Flos Nocte to where the battle persists. The Osirion_mod99 stands at the center of everything, conducting the end game. The army of a few hundred or more player- and AI-led characters has been whittled down to just a few dozen. They are all that stands in the demons’ way, and the demons still number in the hundreds. While Aremos watches, the Osirion_mod99 blasts two elven knights to one side and begins dueling a couple of sorcerers, eldritch light flickering the small group as the creature batters them down.
Meanwhile, the horde fights on, making ground, pushing toward the town as the few survivors maintain their ranks with difficulty. Though they are the most elite players in the world, first to be invited to Sanguis and then to survive this night of chaos, they are hopelessly outnumbered and fighting an ever replenishing, ever mutating foe. Each player-led character takes at least twenty demons with them, but it’s not enough.
And if the horde defeats them here, it’ll rampage over the rest of Sanguis before the dreadnoughts can fix the software: It will tear the world to pieces and, Aremos thinks, might even find its way out of the Sanguis mod and into Arkhart itself…
The whole server will burn, he thinks.
I cannot let it happen. I will not let it happen.
He cuts a portal in mid-air, sending the other side to stand high in the clouds above the battlefield. He flaps his wings, flying through to hover hundreds of feet above the demon army’s rear, hidden in a dark cloud bank. He looks around, noting that the pillars of fire have grown close; only a couple of miles away, across the distant mountains, they churn over the rockface and split the sky into ever-smaller fragments.
A distraction, he thinks. One thing at a time. I must win the battle here first, before we can worry about anything else.
He must cripple the horde enough to make it more manageable for the few players down below, then he must destroy the Osirion_mod99.
Maintaining his cover and keeping the element of surprise, Aremos the Griffin Mod draws all the white magic around him to his aid, filling himself with its power. He weaves into its varied strands a little of the beast magic which, in his current form, feels all the more natural to him. He cycles it, so that the power comes to him. With surprise and alarm at first, then with exaltation, he feels his own self reaching out from inside his new body to mingle with the magic of Sanguis, emboldening his spells with the spirit of the land itself.
He selects a group of player-led characters below—a cohort of warriors led b
y a battle priest—and encircles them in some of the magical energy from this feedback loop. He casts a blessing and they feel it with great relief, though they don’t know from where it comes. Aremos soothes their injuries with white magic even as he fills them with the power of nature, with the full, pure fury of the beasts.
Each one sees their HP recover by ten percent as they hack and hammer through a throng of tall, mutated, troll-like demons, each with a different number of eyes and limbs. At the same time, the player-led characters’ muscles swell and they stand taller. They find themselves positively glowing with the primal, bestial power of nature. Each one’s damage stat grows by between twenty to thirty percent for a full half-minute as, at the same time, their defense grows by nearly as much. As they become more fearsome, those facing them lose a good deal of morale, faltering. These players bunch together in one tight, aggressive unit before exploding outward, seven of them against a huge throng of demons. Their swords and axes glimmer, their hammers descend, their shields catch even the hardest of blows and turn them effortlessly aside. The demons fall back, their front ranks ripped apart by the savagery of these warriors, their bodies and spirits broken.
Next, Aremos turns his attention to the demons’ eastern flank—the strongest part of their attack—from where they have begun to spill around to encircle the remaining warriors of Sanguis in a broad, sickle-shaped formation. This is where they’d be best thinned, Aremos thinks, and flaps his wings, soaring over to hover above them, still obscured by the darkness of night and the heavy, choking clouds.
He notices some stragglers in the demons’ formations—a couple dozen muscular, hulking brutes who move slowly and lag behind. They hang back in the rear flanks, but as Aremos watches, they begin to lope around to join battle farther around in the formation’s extreme point. Each one does triple the damage of a mortal man, and each one carries heavy iron weapons screaming with evil-looking, burning runes. They are impressive, bleak and mighty, and they make Aremos’ heart quail to look upon them even from his high vantage point, even with his newfound strength.
If they get into battle, they’ll do more damage than the warriors of Sanguis can handle, Aremos believes. I will see to it that they are ended, here and now.
With this thought front and center in his mind, Aremos reaches into his selection of spells to find the Unforging, marveling at what it might be capable of in his new, greatly empowered form. As he had suspected, he manages to ring it around most of the brutes’ weapons, ripping them apart and damaging their wielders even as the unit looks about, stunned, for the source of this mischief. Then, Aremos draws his power deep into the ground beneath their feet, causing vines and roots to shoot up, holding them still. The great plants attack brutally, wounding each of the large beasts and pulling three of them fully apart. Next, Aremos fires several projectiles. They descend on a subtle trajectory, falling without a trace of light or sound, but when they hit the ground amidst the large creatures, they explode with a sudden fury, ripping three more into pieces and doing enough damage to the others to render them useless.
This threat neutered for the moment, Aremos decides it’s time to reveal himself. The Osirion Mod is still the greatest menace, and it must be dealt with before long.
Aremos/Griffin_mod18 descends over the horde’s eastern flank, gathering blazing white flame around himself as many below start to notice him, looking up with their mouths agape. Aremos empowers his staff and a halo of flickering white magic illuminates him. When he drops low enough, just fifty feet above the battle, he unleashes hell, pouring white flame into the demons’ rear ranks. Dozens fall in his first pass, and dozens more as he flies by again. On his third pass, he stops, beating his wings hard to hold himself still, sure that he’s attracted the Osirion Mod’s attention by now. Holding his hands and his staff aloft, Aremos surrounds himself with a nimbus of lightning, crackling and burning. He releases it, churning, through a unit of demonic cavalry mounted on large, elephantine beasts clad in heavy bronze. Half their number falls and the other half flees, trampling backward through the throng of their allies, crushing their own kind as they go. Aremos turns, washing three more units with lightning, eating up a group of small, goblin-like creatures alongside a fearsome, warped beast filled with gaping maws and needle-sharp teeth and horns. The final unit he hits appears made of ghostly specters, each carrying deformed versions of great executioner axes. They glow nicely, however, as Aremos’ lightning seethes through them; they die, if they were not dead already, vanishing under his ministrations.
He begins his next spell, a great vortex of white light which will send a hundred of these fiends back to the hell from which they spawned. However, the moment before he’s ready to unleash it, a great bolt of purest darkness lashes him in the chest, winding him and knocking him out of the air. He plummets, crashing hard to the ground as his wings fail him and his consciousness wavers.
Yes, I have its attention, he thinks to himself, spluttering as his vision blurs and dims.
He is quickly surrounded on all sides by chittering demons, all vying with one another to get within striking distance of Aremos/Griffin_mod18 with swords and spears and claws, but they back away as another presence lands softly beside Aremos.
“I am impressed, Aremos,” the Osirion_mod99 whispers. It was by its magic that Aremos was felled, as he knew it would be; it is the Osirion_mod99 that stands over him now, gathering darkness with which to finish him. “You did great damage to my forces.” It sighs, its eyes glowing green with power as it prepares to strike. “But not enough…”
Lowering its black staff, the beast blasts Aremos, catching him up in a vortex of lashing, green light. It tears at him, ripping his flesh from his bones. But it does even more, Aremos realizes: it doesn’t just reduce his HP, it attempts to hack in and rewrite him, to re-code him… It seeks to steal me over to the demons’ side, he understands.
It would dismiss the child Somera from his soul and take him over, using the rogue program’s AI.
No, no, he thinks. His amulet glows and a great pain enters his bones, trying to unravel his entire being as the whole world goes dark around him.
“You will be great,” the Osirion_mod99 whispers through a psychic link right into Aremos’ mind. “You will be my new lieutenant, replacing the weakling fool you killed this day…”
No, Aremos thinks. “No,” he croaks into the psychic link, to the terrible voice within his own head. He pushes with all his might, his morale and his magic power straining as he pits himself fully against the Osirion Mod.
“No!” he roars, stronger this time, clutching the Staff of Adamant and holding it out as a lightning rod. The green vortex lashes at its head, leaving Aremos tattered and bleeding, but whole. He stands, slowly, as the Osirion_mod99 continues to thrash into him, pouring all of his power into the Staff of Adamant.
Distracting the demon’s power with the staff, Aremos forms a small fireball in his other hand. It’s almost too light, it’s nothing, but the white flame he pours into it overpowers it quickly. After filling it with his own strength, Aremos throws it full in the Osirion_mod99’s face. It explodes in a whirling cascade of light, barely doing any damage, but it’s enough to distract the avian demon. The vortex ends, the green light fades, and Aremos presses his advantage.
With his off hand, Aremos continues to channel minor offensive spells—lightning bolts and energy blasts fly from his palm and his fingers, rankling the Osirion_mod99’s own defenses. With the Staff of Adamant now free, he fills it with white magic. He fills his own muscles with beast magic, drawing power from nature to strengthen him. Then, he rushes forward, propelling himself into a leaping bound with a great clap of his wings.
Descending on the Osirion_mod99, Aremos swings the Staff of Adamant, which glows with intense, magical heat. It’s anathema to the demon’s very being, and Aremos uses it well. He takes it in both hands and crashes it into the Osirion_mod99’s head, sending it flying.
It roars, it falls, and it sta
nds, angry now, frustrated. The two join battle, hurtling their magics against one another, fury incarnate as each tries to incinerate the other. To the outside observer, it must seem like a blazing battle of white, furious energy and all-consuming darkness mixed with evil green light, both battering against one another faster than the eye could see. Light blazes, and both combatants roar. They curse and they defend; they cast spells of healing on themselves whilst leveling their deadliest attacks at each other. Bursts of lightning flash out and black fire burns, enveloping them both, suffocating Aremos/Griffin_mod18. The griffon sorcerer shrugs it off and returns with a volley of cascading light, each bolt tearing a chunk out of the demon’s skin.
A glowing blue sphere materializes around Aremos/Griffin_mod18 as he reaches deep to reinforce his protection. The sphere serves as a dense barrier against which the demon’s curses bounce, harmlessly falling away. Aremos focuses, watching the world through this barrier, and slowly reaches out one talon. As he does, a bright scar blazes across the Osirion_mod99’s chest, causing it to howl in pain as its HP falls. Both have dropped to two-thirds their original health, though it’s worse for Aremos—even in this form, he doesn’t possess the toughness of the demonic sorcerer. Nevertheless, the demon’s power levels struggle to keep up, prodigious as they are, as Aremos’ own continues to fill instantaneously thanks to Nikë’s blessings.
The Osirion_mod99 leaps forward, frenzied now, swinging his staff in a low arc which shatters Aremos’ shielding. The sphere of power breaks into thousands of fragments, like a window shattering, and each tiny piece falls to the ground, dissolving in the mud at his feet. The Osirion_mod99 carries on, and they fight melee style for a minute or more, each parrying and dodging, each raining furious blows upon the other with crashes of magical power leaping out from every strike. Aremos feels the demonic energy burning his skin and feathers, even as he sees his own White Fire searing through his opponent’s body.