The Clan

by D. Rus

  "Which is how much?"

  "Ten grand at least. Five hundred each. Easy money!"

  I only shrugged. We dollar millionaires—or I could say debtors—don't care much about half a grand. Never mind.

  "Go ahead," I waved in agreement. "Just make sure you keep the details secret. They don't need to know them."

  Two hours later, I was standing in the thick of a crowd who wished to gawk at the still-alive dragon, generously cursing everyone and their grandmother under my breath. The wretched Patriarch of the Church of Light had promised to close the event by casting a free mass buff for everyone. Ad gloriam, so to say. Circuses and freebies—that was the explosive mixture that had driven over ten thousand sentients to the square.

  My three-hundred strong group that had looked so huge in the hangar had dissolved within the sea of people leaving no trace. Zero hour was almost upon us. Warriors thickened around me, squeezing out all the irrelevant individuals, surrounding my fragile frame with their monolith ranks. Obeying unseen orders, they increased the gaps between themselves, forcing everyone else back and clearing a space in the middle. The crowd grunted and gave way, surrendering the area without a fight.

  I caught the junior coordinator's quizzical glance and shook my head. I hadn't yet lost hope of reaching the Bone Dragon's mind. The beast was in a bad way. Her massive skeleton, once shiny, was now yellow and cracked; her once-gleaming eyes two dying embers. Amid the crowd's racket, I barely heard what sounded like a dry branch snapping as one of the Dragon's ribs broke. Awkwardly she slumped to one side. The creature was dying.

  Was she so dead she couldn't hear me or what? Come on, you bag of bones, speak to me! This is Laith, I've done what you asked me to, you've got two lovely chicks, damn them!

  My stare was boring a hole in her as I kept up my rambling, flexing my non-existing telepathy muscle. Finally, her enormous bulk bulged; she raised her head, her unseeing eyes scanning the crowd. The mob roared—apparently, the dragon hadn't entertained them with any signs of life for a while.

  Laith?

  Yes! Yes, damn you! You've got chicks, you empty skull, a boy and a girl. Phantom ones, just like you hoped they'd be!

  With a stir, the dragon forced a feeble wing open and struggled to her feet leaning against it. Crack! Her fragile bones snapped in a whiff of dust as her once-powerful body collapsed back onto the cobblestones. The crowd was celebrating. The priest needed no other encouragement to keep going on about the power of Light and the approaching demise of the Dark.

  The dragon raised her unwieldy head. The primal Darkness that once filled her now swirled in barely noticeable grayish spots. But happiness—true happiness—was now gushing out across all band widths. The crowd quietened down, open-mouthed, gawking at the joyous creature of the Dark. Tears welled in the corners of her eyes; then they left her empty sockets clattering across the stones, easily passing through the dome and disappearing under the crowd's feet. A struggle began in the first rows immediately growing into a fight.

  The stands protested. Someone especially sensitive jumped up, shouting, "Mercy! Have mercy!"

  With that initial impulse, dozens of spectators began chanting,

  "Mer-cy! Free-dom!"

  Their voices were barely heard in the thousand-strong crowd but still the chief prayer-monger sensed the change of sentiment. He hastily motioned to a thin line of about fifty servants encircling the dome.

  "Commence!"

  With a jolt, I hurried, Hold on, we're going to get you out now. I've got mercs here with me. Just don't you dare die on us, your chicks are going mad with worry, they're flooding the location with their emotions! They need their mother! Just wait till I lift the dome, then fly to your castle!

  The dragon audibly sighed. She paused, thinking, and then whispered a decision that didn't seem to have come to her lightly, Very well, I'll try... At least I can go with dignity, snapping my jaws at them one last time...

  She lowered her head. Groaning with pain and effort, she pulled out one of her own ribs. The crowd gasped. The dragon stuck her head into the resulting cavity and almost immediately jerked it back out. In her teeth she had a huge black diamond.

  "Heart of a Dragon," Widowmaker commented in the staff chat. "At least a thousand years old, judging by the size of it. What a loot! That is in fact the main ingredient for a dome shield artifact. A Nova class, even. Half a million gold."

  Crack! The Dragon munched through the stone. A wave of energy surged through her from top to toe, restoring the clouds of Darkness and knitting the broken bones. Many, but not all, by far not all. But at least now the creature looked like a rather battered dragon and not a dead bag of bones like she had a minute before.

  "Was half a million," Widowmaker corrected himself. "So she decided to risk her afterlife..."

  "Pardon?" I asked mechanically, too busy assessing the rapidly changing situation.

  "It's common knowledge. If a dragon leaves its heart behind, it'll never respawn. Quite rare loot, that. Was. The stone's a goner. At least the holy Joes won't lay their greedy hands on it. But I shouldn't die any time soon if I were this dragon. She won't respawn anymore."

  The Patriarch jumped up from his folding throne. "Get on with it!" he squeaked.

  Get on with it! I echoed in the battle chat.

  "Once you remove the dome, keep away!" the dragon whispered. "I can't see. I'm blind..."

  "Charge!" Widowmaker yelled at the top of his lungs.

  "Barrraah!" hundreds of throats joined in.

  Things got rolling!

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Zelenogorsk Highway, not far from St. Petersburg. Current time.

  Snowflakes floated in the blue sky landing on Taali's face where they immediately turned into tiny droplets. Sorry to see their beauty disappear, she pulled down the edge of the balaclava, covering her face. After a moment's hesitation, she lowered her large goggles that, apart from their yellow marksman's lenses, didn't differ much from the regular sports ones. Now everybody was happy: the snowflakes as well as the girl who'd become absolutely unrecognizable.

  Taali lay on a foam mat spread over the well-trampled snow: the position carefully prepped for her beforehand by her anonymous helper. The spot he'd chosen for her was perfect. A straight half-mile stretch of road lay in front of her—sufficient to shoot as many rounds as she wanted to and at any distance. Then the road made a sharp turn of at least sixty degrees, skirting the forested area where she lay in waiting.

  A tiny pink radio—virtually a toy—dinged with a code signal. The target car had cleared the control point. That was the last she'd hear from her unknown assistant whom she'd never be able to identify even if she wanted to.

  She rolled onto her stomach and pulled off her warm mittens. Underneath them she wore fingerless suede gloves, soft and thin. She lifted the suddenly heavy Vintorez, pressed the heel of the butt against her shoulder and rested the forestock atop a low ice parapet. The touch of the deadly steel and her favorite smell of gun oil and burnt gunpowder felt calming and soothing. She took several deep breaths to level her respiration. Pressing her cheek to the butt, she looked down the sights.

  The car showed up a few seconds earlier than expected. This quiet Saturday morning its police driver hurried to reach her luxury country house. Time to bring her to book. Nine hundred feet. Too early. It took the heavy subsonic bullet a whole second to cover the distance. Its ballistics demanded a considerable adjustment for height and wind.

  Six hundred feet. Get set. Taali took another deep breath and began squeezing the trigger softly and gently, millimeter by millimeter. Three hundred feet. The car was within sighting distance. Her optimal range. The one she'd performed best during training.

  She aligned the crosshairs on the top button of the corrupt policewoman's uniform and softly squeezed the trigger. Clap. The recoil poked her in the shoulder. For a brief moment, the image in the sights jumped. A small white spot appeared on the car's windscreen, turning into a red blot and
generously splashing over the car's insides. Lowering the sights just a tad, Taali fired three more bullets in rapid succession, almost without aiming, into the target's presumed outline. She breathed out.

  The heavy car veered to the left, clinging to the central barrier and emitting long trails of sparks as it careered along it, grazing its side. Scaring the few road users with its unpredictability, it pulled over to the other side, crossed both lanes and dove into a ditch.

  "One, two, three..." Taali counted the car's somersaults.

  Finally, the BMW lost momentum. It stood on its nose, swayed in search of a new equilibrium, then tumbled backwards. Oh well, not a good scenario. According to their plan, the ideal situation would have been for the car to expose its gas tank. In this projection, all Taali could see was the car's reclining front and its creased roof.

  Oh well, plan B, then. The last six armor-piercing rounds in the clip could go through an 8-mm steel sheet at three hundred feet. Bang, bang, bang. The heavy tungsten carbide bullets ripped through the engine's vulnerable aluminum casting, showering the area with red-hot shrapnel and fountains of sparks. A clap, followed by an almost-white flash and black smoke bellowing from the car as the fire slowly took hold. Passing vehicles were already pulling up by the roadside, commuters getting out, pointing their communication bracelets at the gory scene in search of five minutes of cheap YouTube fame.

  Time to leg it. Dragging all her equipment along, Taali crawled backward a dozen feet. Rising to her knees, she stroked the gun farewell and took a good swing hurling it as deep into the forest as she could. They were going to find it, of course, but not straight away. As her anonymous well-wisher wrote in his message, it was humanly impossible to track the Vintorez to the hitman. The gun was already obsolete, replaced by the state-of-the-art VSS Boor, its production licensed out to at least twenty different countries. Considering all the army depots looted during the Second Georgian war, the Vintorez had long become the most popular and numerous (after the AK, of course) medium-range score-settling weapon—amid pros and amateurs alike. And Taali had every right to consider herself an amateur.

  She folded the mat and attached it to her weekend backpack. Then she pulled her skis out of a pile of snow and clicked a switch in her glasses, lowering the mirror filters. Now she had to get to the train station and mix in with the hundreds of Saturday skiers to get home safely. Considering her current mundane appearance, CCTVs wouldn't be much help to the investigators. She'd lie low in the hotel room rented in her dead sister's name. Then in the evening she had to arrive at a second position, directly opposite the casino patronized on Saturdays by those boastful Caucasus-tribal types with their black cars and their young victims.

  She had only run for a few hundred feet when a deafening explosion made her look back. A black cloud rose over the little forest. The gas tank had finally exploded. Excellent. Those German rides had big tanks, a good twenty gallons easy. Now they had to wait for the fire brigade and the results of an autopsy which was the only way for them to determine that the policewoman had indeed been shot. Taali hoped it would give her a good twenty-four hour leeway.

  Time to go! One more stop, one more shootout, after which she was going to one of those little towns outside of Moscow to meet Max's mother and enter the FIVR capsule's warm womb. Bye, cruel reality; hello, AlterWorld.

  * * *

  "Attack!" the battle cry gusted across the square drowning out the thousand-strong throng.

  About fifty rogues—a popular character choice with mercs—flickered, stealthing. Immediately they unstealthed, only now they stood behind their chosen enemies' backs commencing their tooth-shattering combos. The fun began!

  The clap of hundreds of elixir vials popping open all at once signaled the start of the melee. In between hits, hand-to-hand fighters gulped their life potions while mages downed their mana drinks. Wizards didn't bother selecting targets as they bombarded the crowd with mass damage spells, showering the square with meteors and torrential hail. Liquid fire and venom streamed in every direction; arrows, throwing knives and crossbow bolts pelleted the panicking crowd. Sheer Armageddon.

  Already after the first few seconds of the battle, hundreds of tombstones began to clatter down onto the cobblestones. The crowd recoiled, hurrying to free up the area around us. Low-level players died instantly. The event had attracted lots of newbs: for anyone between levels 10 and 40 a skirmish like that was a one-way ticket to their resurrection point. Indeed, ninety percent of the attendees presented no serious threat to the mercs—with exception to their numbers as grinding through nine thousand people is no easy task. But the remaining thousand were more than enough against our three hundred. Plus the hundred guards on duty who were already elbowing their way through the human sea. In addition, we expected the King's guards to arrive any moment. Time was running out.

  "The dome!" I yelled. The team of wizards on duty opened the Minor Power Dome.

  I pulled the scroll out of my pocket. Selecting the dragon's transparent confinement as target, I broke the seal. In a clap of fire, a ravenous twister rushed upward to the sky, the familiar bolts of black lightning swirling like mad dervishes. We were on the right track.

  Until now the Patriarch had stood frozen, his incomprehensive stare searching the crowd. Now he'd discerned the source of all evil. He pointed his gnarly finger at us. "Kill them!" he squalled.

  About fifty of his staff flapped their cloaks wing-like, raising their hands and pointing them at the mercs. The skin on the palms of their hands began to burst exposing, in the midst of the bloodied wounds, large colored eyes. Blinking the blood away, they glared at us. The next moment, red, blue and green blades of plasma began slashing at our dome, Star Wars-style, sparking and leaving lingering scars behind.

  "What's with the Jedi shit?" I croaked into the staff chat. The High Spell cooldown was already weighing me to the ground.

  "It's the bastards of Light with their God's Glare. Deals the same damage as a bolt of lightning from a level-180 wizard. I can tell you it hurts," Widowmaker commented as he watched the battle unfold.

  I cast a quizzical look at the wizard team's leader. He shook his head, groaning without unclenching his teeth, "We won't hold it. Another twenty seconds max. Distract the servants!"

  I nodded to Widowmaker who was listening in, "Proceed!"

  He rushed through the staff chat in a whirlwind of orders,

  "Group leaders Sissy, Absinthe and Duke! Change of priorities. Priority target: the servants of Light. Allocation of targets: scheme 3."

  About a dozen of our rogues darted toward the cloak-wearers, stealthing as they ran. The epicenter of the magic cataclysm shifted, covering the area all around the Dragon's dome including the servants of Light and the first rows of the more unlucky spectators. A dozen archers continued to draw their bowstrings, sending heavy arrows deep into the flurry of flames.

  As if it could stop the Patriarch. Raising his flimsy fists to the skies, he shook them, begging ecstatically, "Oh our Lord of Light, hear my plea! Give us strength!"

  His God did hear him. The skies shattered, sending scared clouds flying in all directions. The God's irate face showed amid the blinding light.

  Divine Blessing alert!

  The Sun God has turned his benevolent gaze to the terrestrial quarrels, granting new strength to his followers.

  Effect: +20% to ALL characteristics for all worshippers of Light.

  Thousands of shafts of light reached down from the sky, highlighting the selected figures and granting them the aforementioned blessing. The funny thing was, at least one-third of my mercs turned out to be worshippers of Light, so we got a share of his attentions, too. Nil nil.

  The irate little man kept raging. His sharp eyes singled me out in the crowd. "You!" he shook with anger. "You filthy spawn of the Dark! Here's a stamp to mark your blackened brow!"

  The Curse of the Sun God's Patriarch!

  Daylight causes mana regeneration to drop 90%!

  Duratio
n: as long as the High God or the Patriarch are still alive.

  You scumbag! Now that hurt. Really. Or rather, it would have—had I not switched the Altar mana flow onto myself just in time. That gave me any amount of virtually non-stop mana bath.

  The patriarch just couldn't leave it alone, could he? His glare burning a hole in me, he began whispering something dangerously long and definitely just as unhealthy. Time to wrap up the show. I turned to Widowmaker and nodded at the priest.

  "Try to neutralize him. Ideally, kill him."

  More order-rattling. The epicenter of the magic tempest shifted once more, covering the Patriarch and his bodyguards. He managed to take cover under his own magic shield. Then his eyes widened in surprise: apparently, the pressure on the shield was much higher than expected. Shouting encouragements to his men, he activated a portal and disappeared in a flash.

  We'd managed to neutralize one of the threats, at least temporarily. Still, the change in the focus of the attack had cost us dearly, giving time for the stunned crowd—who hadn't expected to be attacked from inside—to shrink back, recover their breath and grasp the significance of what was going on. Now that they'd determined our meager numbers, the enemy became furious. It couldn't have been much fun to realize that you'd just been hysterically scratching the cobblestones with your nails trying to crawl away from opposition thirty times your inferior.

  The situation had turned on its head. The human flood surged in the opposite direction trying to get to our vulnerable bodies and trample them into the dirt. In doing so, the enemy had produced a couple of clear thinkers who introduced some semblance of discipline and control. The small fry stepped back, showering us with arrows, magic and crossbow bolts. It might be weak, but imagine a thousand-strong crowd of immortal first-graders, their self-preservation instincts disconnected, armed with sharpened steel bars. Would you rather bank on them? I would. This was the case of quantity turning into quality.