“The sun does not shine in the Underworld,” said my son. He smiled up into the sunshine, which reflected off his shiny golden skin and left him glowing. “We want to remain in the sunshine with you.”
“You cannot stay here with me,” I said firmly.
He frowned. “Then we shall leave. Goodbye Father.”
“Wait!” I yelled as they flew away, but they didn’t stop.
“Fuck!”
“That’s not good,” said Ember as she cleaned off her daggers.
“Nanaya?” I said, searching for the succubus among the guild members.
“What do you want me to do?” she said from behind me. “They’ll tear me to pieces.”
“That’s not what I was going to say,” I said frantically. “How the hell do I get control over them?”
“They’re your kids dude,” she said with a shrug.
“Isn’t there a binding spell or something that you can use?”
“Against them?” She scoffed. “Hell no.”
“Great…” I watched helplessly as my golden sons disappeared behind the clouds. “I just released five of the potentially most powerful demons in the Underworld.”
“Oh shit,” said Stormy. “Didn’t you tell me once that they can level like you.”
“Yup,” I said with a mirthless laugh. “And now there is nothing stopping them from fucking and sucking their way right to level 1000.”
“Hey, look on the bright side,” said Cecilia.
“There’s a bright side?” Anna asked.
“We won,” the foxy furry continued. “We saved the kingdom.”
“For now,” said Frisco. “But soon every guild in the game will be able to journey here. We’ve got exactly three days to get that Everstone and make an alliance with the elves. If we don’t, everything that happened here will be for nothing.”
“You’re right.” I pinched the bridge of my nose and paced through the rubble, trying to clear my head.
Trinity must have seen that I was a little frazzled, and she did what any good commander would do; she took charge.
“Miramar!” she yelled.
“I am here, my lady,” said the black wizard as he appeared before her.
“Bring all the civilians back. Get them to work rebuilding.”
“Yes, my lady.”
“Cecilia, Tweak, you two are good at geek shit. See if that emerald the elf queen gave Sam has any juice left. All you fellow tanks, I want you out there helping to rebuild. Healers, you get on resurrecting the militia and the guardians of the tower and get them healed and buffed back up. We leave for the Hollow in exactly six hours!”
“Thanks,” I told her after everyone hurriedly scrambled about to follow her orders.
“No problem, Lover Boy,” she said with a grin. “Of course, I would have rather we leveled. I lost four levels in that fight.”
“Yeah, well, getting them back will be fun,” I said.
We shared a laugh and then jumped when the trapdoor beneath the castle sprang open, sending rubble flying. Miramar emerged and began to guide the distraught villagers out of the portal from Aeorock.
“Oh no!” an old woman yelled.
“Our home has been ravished once again!” said an old man. “We’re cursed I tell you. Cursed!”
Once the hundreds of civilians had emerged from the trapdoor, I stood before them on the pile of rubble that had once been our beautiful tower.
“Citizens of Haven, hear me!” I bellowed as I spread my arms wide. “You may see destruction before you, but we have won the day. The enemy has been defeated!”
“So have we, by the looks of it!” a woman yelled.
Children were crying, and the old people were regarding me with toothless disdain.
“You said that you would protect us!” said a young woman.
“I have done my best, and alas, you are all alive. When you joined my kingdom, I told you that it wasn’t going to be easy. I told you that we would be tested, and now we have. We have been tested, and we have won. Take heart in this victory and set your minds to rebuilding. For this is just the beginning. More will come to challenge us, but we shall be victorious!”
Some people in the crowd cheered, namely the militia and the guardians of the tower. Others grumbled amongst themselves as Mick began ordering them to work.
As the sun began to set, I looked in the direction of the Great Wood, knowing that without the help of the elves, we were doomed.
Chapter 12
The queen had told me that the hollow was hundreds of miles to the north, far beyond the mountains that loomed there. I had never ventured very far in that direction; indeed, I hadn’t seen a quarter of my new kingdom. To get there we would have to fly, so we went to Aeorock to buy some new mounts with a hefty loan from the Purrrrsian Empire’s vault. We hadn’t really spent much on mounts before. Given how fast we all leveled together, we soon outgrew them and then sold them for a fraction of the cost. We had always flown with Nanaya, but for this quest we would need our own mounts. The flight would be longer than Nanaya could sustain her form, and we had no time to let her land and wait for her cooldown to wear off.
The rest of the players in Rebirth Online would be allowed into my kingdom in just two days, and if we had any hope of defending our little city, then we would need the help of the elves.
“Everyone mount up!” Frisco told his guild mates as he joined me beside my griffin.
Our mounts ranged from dragons to griffins, and there were even a few big silverhawks among them.
“Thanks again, Frisco,” I said extending a hand. “I’m sorry that you all lost so many levels in that fight. It wasn’t supposed to go that way.”
“No problem,” he said, squeezing my offered hand and slapping me on the shoulder with his other paw. “I’m sure you’ll make it up to us when you’re a rich and powerful king.”
“You can count on it,” I said, then mounted my griffin.
The villagers cheered as we flew overhead, and I tapped my interface to power up the emerald shield. Cecilia and Tweak had determined that it still had life in it, and it simply needed to recharge. Hopefully it would hold off the enemy until we returned.
As we flew over the northern mountains, I marveled at the vastness of Ozara, and I wondered how in the hell I would ever tame the land and the creatures and make it my own. Winning the tournament had not meant winning a fully functioning kingdom. I guess I had missed that in the fine print. Instead we had inherited a tower and a small army of NPC’s. Both were extremely powerful, but they weren’t enough to handle our numerous adversaries. I had no clue how our enemies had figured out how to get around the ban prohibiting players from venturing into our realm. But I knew that they would soon return.
Then there was the problem of my five demon children being on the loose. I scoured the vast land as I flew, wondering where they might have flown off to. There was sure to be some blow back from my having summoned such powerful demons to the surface world, but that problem would have to wait, right now I had bigger fish to fry.
Four hours into the flight I noticed a thick haze near the horizon. The closer we got, the bigger and thicker it became. A chill ran down my spine as I realized that I was indeed looking at the Hollow.
“That’s it,” I yelled to Frisco over the wind. “We’re going to have to land on the edge and walk in. Follow me!”
I steered my griffin into a barrel roll and glided down to the ground. There had once been a forest on the edge of the lake, but now all that remained were a few scattered sick and dying trees. Animal and fish bones were everywhere, and there was no wind to blow away the foul stench that rose up from the diseased earth.
We landed and dismissed our mounts, then turned to face the thick wall of haze that stood before us.
“Damn!” said Tweak, pinching his nose. “It smells like a mermaid’s snatch up in here.”
“You’re so gross,” said Kit, who was also covering her sensitive nose.
&nbs
p; “Alright team, stay sharp,” I told them all. “The Harbinger is in there somewhere, and if what the queen said is true, then he’s hibernating. That means we’ve got one shot at this, then we lose the element of surprise. I don’t want anyone being a hero. Follow Frisco’s and my orders, and we might just walk away with the Everstone and our lives.”
“This is just like the Red Citadel dungeon,” Frisco told them, referencing a quest that our two guilds had teamed up for a while back. “Everyone knows what to do, let’s move out.”
Ember and the furry assassins slipped into the fog ahead of us, followed by Trinity, Stormy, and Frisco’s tanks. The spellcasters like myself followed close behind, and the healers took up the rear.
I enabled my Fire Sight as we moved deeper into the thickening gloom. I saw no lifeforms, and the cool ground barely registered in my vision as a cold blue depression. At the center of the lake was a hole from which no heat rose; the entrance to the hollow.
“I don’t see any lifeforms,” I told Frisco.
“I smell none either,” he reported as he sniffed at the air.
“Yeah, well I feel like something is watching me,” said Anna.
“I feel it too,” said one of the furrys. “And I’ve felt those eyes before.”
“Stay cool,” said Nanaya. “If there were spirits around, I would know it.”
We continued down the steady decline, crunching bones beneath our feet as we went. The smell of death was all around, though there were no rotting carcasses, only the bleached bones of the long dead. Ember came back from the front to report that she had investigated around the hole leading to the Hollow and hadn’t found anything menacing.
“This is too easy,” said Anna as she walked beside me.
“I agree,” said Zoe.
“Shit, I’ll take it,” said Tweak from up ahead.
“Let’s keep the chatter down,” I told them.
We reached the hole leading down into the deep darkness, and Ember was the first to venture inside. The entrance to the pit was at least one hundred feet wide, but rather than a straight drop into nowhere, the edges were carved out, and a path corkscrewed down into the abyss.
“Here we go, right into the Devil’s butthole,” said Tweak with a nervous laugh.
I expected a rumbling voice or a flock of demonic bats to greet us as we started downward, but there was only the mist, the stink, and the empty silence. I switched back and forth from Fire Sight to regular vision, and still I saw no sign of life. It should have been a comfort, but the longer we went without resistance, the more my apprehension grew.
Anna had been right, this was too easy.
We must have walked down that twisted, corkscrew path for fifteen minutes before we finally reached the bottom, and looking back up from the floor, the dim surface world was but a pinhole of light. When we reached the bottom, the layer of bones that we walked on became thicker, and had it not been for the silencing buffs that the assassins had put on our feet, the sounds of crunching bones would have filled the dark chamber.
“Illuminous!” said a furry wizard, and the end of his staff began to glow.
The light of the staff chased away the darkness, which retreated with a hissing sound.
I glanced at Frisco, and the panther furry cocked a dark brow.
“Well that’s new,” he said with a grin.
“There are two tunnels leading off from this main chamber,” said Ember as she returned with a furry black assassin in tow.
“Penelope?” said Frisco as he turned toward one of his furrys.
She was a short gray-haired cat woman wearing robes that looked to have been fashioned out of old man’s beard tree moss. She leaned on a gnarled staff set with a single ruby and wore necklaces made of bird bones, wooden rings, and small metallic runes. Her big green eyes fluttered as she sniffed at the air, then her ears perked straight up and twitched.
“I sense a great evil,” she said in a voice laced with dramatic flair.
Beside me, Ember rolled her eyes.
“It is…” Penelope continued as she turned from one tunnel to the other. “That way.”
She pointed to the tunnel to our right, and I glanced at Frisco.
“Thanks Pen,” he told the furry seer, then he turned to the group. “Keep your ears up and your noses open.”
Again, Ember rolled her eyes, then she slipped into shadow mode and disappeared ahead of us. The stench of rotten meat became worse the deeper into the tunnel that we went, and soon my eyes were watering.
Then the ground beneath my feet rumbled, and a hot wind followed a loud belching sound.
“You’ve got to see this,” said Ember as she suddenly appeared beside me.
I halted the group, then Frisco and I followed Ember toward an opening.
“Holy shit,” said the panther furry.
Holy shit was right. The chamber that opened from the tunnel was oozing with green slime that led to a shallow pool. The most disturbing part was the walls, which were slowly expanding and contracting.
“I think we found the Harbinger,” said Ember.
Another burp sounded from across the wide cavern, and that rotten stench washed over us.
“Are we where I think we are?” Frisco asked.
“It’s a stomach,” I said in sudden horrified understanding.
The words echoed off the walls, and the pool of green slime before us began to bubble and churn.
“You’ve got to be shitting me,” said Ember.
“I think it’s going to blow,” said Frisco, backing away from the violently churning pool of stomach acid. It was steadily rising, forcing us to back from the shrinking shore.
“Get the hell out of here!” Ember yelled when another burp shook the cavern.
We turned and raced back to the others, and as we did, the ground beneath our feet began to quake violently.
“Shield dome!” Frisco yelled to our waiting guild mates. “Everyone huddle up!”
Everyone pressed in tight as the world around us shook and quivered. The tunnel walls were now pulsing, and dust was falling to the floor, revealing a slick, veiny organic lining.
“You have ventured where you should not be,” came a rumbling voice that echoed through the tunnel. “Now, you will be digested and dined upon for eternity!”
The healers all combined their shielding spells, and soon we were surrounded by a shimmering energy dome.
“Fire at will!” I ordered, thinking that if we had to be in the stomach of a demigod, we might as well do some damage.
More than fifty spells streaked out of our energy dome in all directions, some tearing holes in the nearby stomach lining, others inflicting diseases on our host. The ground shook so bad that we all were thrown to the floor, and a sound akin to a dam breaking issued from the stomach.
“Hold on!” I screamed, and a moment later a tide of green slime slammed into the energy dome. The healers’ combined spells held when we became submerged, then we were all pressed against the sparkling dome as the Harbinger blew chunks, and we shot back up the spiraling tunnel toward the surface.
What had taken us fifteen minutes to climb down took us all of thirty seconds to travel back through. When we broke the surface, we were shot into the air by the geyser of vomit, and everyone screamed when we began to fall back down to Earth. The energy dome finally gave out when we hit the ground, and everyone was unceremoniously deposited on their asses. The stomach acid rained down upon us, and when it hit the skin it burned like a son of a bitch. Everyone began screaming as the acid ate through their armor and skin, but the healers were quick to start relieving the pain.
“Mount up and take to the sky!” Frisco screamed against the growing rumble coming from below the lake.
If the Harbinger had been hibernating, now he was awake, and he was pissed off.
I summoned my griffin and hurriedly leapt up onto the saddle as more of the acid fell from the sky. Somehow, we all managed to escape the ooze and fly clear of the geys
er, and I looked back in time to see the dead lakebed begin to crumble. The big pit that we had climbed down suddenly shot into the air, and I realized that it was actually a long, anteater-like snout. Then the Harbinger broke through the ground with enough force to send debris shooting into the clouds. Everyone struggled to dodge the projectiles, and those who looked upon the true grandeur of the Harbinger let out a gasp.
The creature that emerged from the dead lake was like nothing I had ever seen or even imagined. Its snout was over three hundred feet long and hung from a bulbous head that had dozens of big black eyes like a spider. The body was thin and skeletal, with four arms that had two elbow joints each and hung all the way to the ground. The legs were out of proportion as well, with two gnarled knee joints and bulbous feet with dozens of toes that reminded me of octopus tentacles. As it emerged from the dead lake, I began to second guess the wisdom of this quest.
The Harbinger
Demigod
Level - ?
“Well, we found it,” said Frisco as he glided alongside me. “Now what?”
“Now we hope like hell that we can burn the fucker down.” I conjured a Magic Bolt as I flew around behind the emerging demigod, and I couldn’t believe its sheer size.
I released my spell, and every caster in our ranks followed suit. The spells streaked toward the Harbinger like angry little fireflies attacking a bear, and when they hit their target, the beast let out a trumpeting retort through its tubular snout. A long tongue shot out of the snout, and like a frog picking off flies, the Harbinger snatched one of the furrys and its mount right out of the sky. As the unfortunate furry disappeared into the Harbinger’s mouth, the casters redoubled their efforts. Trinity, Stormy, Ember, and the furry tanks all leapt from their mounts and landed on the Harbinger’s head. He ignored them for the most part, preoccupied as he was with snatching riders out of the sky.
I steered my griffin around the Harbinger in an attempt to stay behind it, but not only was it huge, it was incredibly fast as well. The long snout snapped toward me like a whip, and a tongue as long as a subway train slammed into me. A sticky residue held me and my screaming griffin firm as the tongue yanked us back toward the snout. I unsheathed my enchanted sword as I was pulled to my doom and managed to pry myself loose by stabbing the tongue repeatedly. My griffin was not so lucky, and as I fell, I saw it being pulled into the gaping snout.
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