Apostle of the Sleeping Gods

by Dan Sugralinov

  “This will take us approximately three hours,” Tissa said. “I know a girl from Axiom, she shared boss tactics. If we don’t get wiped, we might be able to do it in two and a half.”

  “We’ll do it in one,” I said. “Just run behind me and pick up loot. I’m gonna one-shot everything.”

  * * *

  The Sarantapod Hive might have been the most boring dungeon in all Disgardium. I wasn’t an expert, I had never explored beyond my sandbox, but I had seen guides so I had some basis for comparison. Anyhow, the poor sarantapods found themselves in a very difficult position when they entered our world. They were bound to the portal they came through, and the biosphere of their world spread from there. But it didn’t go beyond the ins, because they didn’t have enough resources. The sarantapods were planning to break out onto the surface in a desperate attempt to complete a mission they were called to do by their god.

  Seven days later, not long before New Year’s, we took down the third boss, Skolo’rhyssa, for the second time. And that gave me the seventh Fragment of the Seal of Shog’rassar. I put them all together forming a complete seal and placed it in the base of the portal. The portal grew more powerful, absorbing all the energy from the seal, which turned it into dust, and made the portal many times larger. Then the magic sheet of the portal exploded, releasing the final boss into Disgardium. And that was how we completed the Sarantapod mission.

  Shog’rassar, striding through the portal with a regal bearing, was very surprised to see us instead of his servants. He spoke our language but was making a real mess of it. That must have been evidence of his many centuries living among the insectoids. The god of the Sarantapods had entirely lost his human form, but remembered how to threaten at least as well as Patrick:

  “Wretch-ch-ch-ched humanssss! It issss complete...”

  I didn’t let him finish. Time was of the essence, so I killed him with one Combo, not sparing any plague energy for the honored guest.

  That was how we got the First Kill of the final boss. And though the reward wasn’t exactly a disappointment, it wasn’t anything supernatural either. Although the guys didn’t agree with me on that count because, although we didn’t get a skill or gear, we did get nothing more and nothing less than a divine emblem!

  Shog’rassar’s Protection

  Divine Emblem

  +50% resistance to damage from insectoids.

  +100% resistance to poison.

  The emblem initially showed as a red tattoo on our forearms, then went pale and finally disappeared altogether. Divine emblems, as it turned out, could only be seen by the gods. I suspected that I now had three of them, but I also suspected that the marks of the Sleeping Gods and Destroying Plague conferred no bonuses. They were just brands, as if to say: this person is mine. And I had another one labeling me as a threat.

  In just the two runs of the Sarantapod Hive, we got a stupid amount of excellent equipment. Once, we even triggered the chance for improved loot and an epic breastplate for Bomber fell from a normal mob. In the end, we made away with five epics and ten rare items. Everything for level twenty.

  At the first boss, I got epic Armlets of the Impenetrable Nether and, on the next run-through, I got a purple Killer Quiver from the same place. It gave a bonus to agility, endurance, damage and archery attack speed.

  Still, Tissa had the sickest luck of all. She got another item from her set, the Robe of Evil from the Depths. She now had four items in total, giving her a decent boost to magic resistance and a chance to spawn a magic bubble to protect her from attacks.

  And a day earlier Bomber, flaunting the legendary on his finger, finally caught the Golden Fish! It gave the quest to release it, Bomber did just that and, in return, he got a permanent +75 strength.

  Infect just about choked in envy when he heard the news! Pouting, he spent a record amount of time feeling sorry for himself, emanating bad vibes. And if not for Crawler cheering him up optimistically, we might have lost Malik once and for all. Well and on top of that, envy is a corrosive emotion and it needs to be quashed before the team starts to break down. And that was just what Ed did, reminding the thief who got him his scalable dagger, alluding to himself sacrificing his threat status. Then he nodded at me, dressed worst of all. That was enough. Infect admitted he was wrong and apologized.

  We decided against the “All hail the heroes,” even despite the fact that Axiom was already busy with another hunt, combing the whole sandbox in search of Crag and Aphrodite. As it turned out, those two had somehow taken out two groups of Axiom sentries in Little Gully, and without apparent effort. According to eyewitness accounts, neither of them were even using weapons or magic and had practically one-shotted Axiom with a few snaps of the finger. That led everyone to an obvious conclusion that one of them was a threat.

  Meanwhile, Eve’s family had moved to a new higher-category neighborhood, and it was much more out of the way. I called up my childhood friend to find out if she was doing alright and if she needed any help. And though she did answer, she didn’t really tell me anything. All she said was that she was doing very (she emphasized this word) well and, of course, it was very sweet that I was concerned, but there was nothing to worry about. In fact, the conversation felt warm, almost like in the old days. We even agreed to meet up some time.

  As for Crag, it was rumored that he’d hunkered down in his personal room in Dis and wasn’t planning to leave. According to his classmates, he denied all suspicions of his threat status and was acting normal in school. In other words, he wasn’t acting at all. He could never have been called talkative, he was always the reserved and sulky type. I concluded that Tobias was just planning to sit out his remaining time in the sandbox, and trying to keep it a secret.

  No one really had anything conclusive, but still I wrote him:

  Hi, Tobias.

  We might not be friends, but I’ve been in your shoes. Axiom is obsessed with finding you and, if they can’t, they’ll take things IRL, if they haven’t already. So here’s some advice: keep your head down.

  Scyth.

  He answered the next day: “I know. Thanks.”

  I met up with Rita Wood on the weekend. Taking a break from Dis, me and her sat in a café and had a very pleasant chat. Rita even mentioned in passing that she wouldn’t be opposed to joining our clan because we were sending her such awesome and amazing loot.

  “I’d love to have you,” I answered, “but I’m not sure the guys will see it the same way. Maybe we can come back to this after we leave the sandbox.”

  “I won’t insist,” Rita said. “But if you keep this up, the Awoken have great prospects in big Dis. And then... Every clan needs a pet high-level trader, right?”

  I wasn’t sure what motivated her more: business or a desire to see me more often. She had proven herself a very pragmatic dealer, but it also seemed obvious that she liked me. And for the record, she gave me back the epics. The Bow of Burning Arrows from Murkiss, honestly, had to be put back in my chest for the time being. It required level twenty-five.

  After getting the achievement in the Hive, we jumped to the Mire. There our levels hit twenty-two, and we decided to stop. That would put us inside the normal range for the Arena without making people ask questions.

  We then siphoned our unneeded experience to the grown-up and I would say mature needlers. For whatever reason, Tissa’s Thorn and Bomber’s Whatchamacallit seemed like girls to us. Seriously, their bodies were even a more delicate color than the boys’, who chirped more crudely and acted a bit more savage. Iggy, for example, always went out of his way to aggro first, ignoring my commands to heel and defend his master. While we walked atop the muck, a few times he was stupid enough to practically dive under the water to attack the bigheads. He was pretty wild.

  At level twenty-five, the needlers reached adult size and started to look imposing. Approximately the size of a calf, they were both huge and dangerous. These were not the little pocket doges which, in view of their low price, had become the mo
st common pets. All they could do was yap, even though they were also supposedly also battle pets.

  We hadn’t shown our needlers anywhere other than dungeons and the Mire, and we weren’t planning to. The fearsome fivesome would be our weapon of last resort.

  What was more, each of them now had their own abil. For starters, my Iggy could give a Deadly Chirp. It wasn’t exactly deadly yet, just a mass stun of all enemies in a thirty-foot radius for one second. That seemed minor, but a second was sometimes all it took to change the outcome of battle.

  Little Trunk could inject a target with two larvae at once at once. Whatchamacallit had learned to squirt a puddle of sticky slime under an enemy’s feet, which slowed them down and even did damage. But it was still pretty insignificant as well. Thorn could put out quills like a porcupine, which made anyone that attacked her take damage, even at a distance. It was some kind of magic.

  That made us all think the AI was reacting to our pets’ nicknames. And our suspicions were confirmed when Alien learned to spray acid when taking damage. Really Snowstorm..?

  Finishing up the farm, we headed to the city to fill out everyone’s equipment. We had come to the shared decision not to waste money on epics and just traded out our low-level blue gear for more current stuff. In the end, it ran us six hundred gold.

  But after that, our group no longer looked like a collection of bums. In fact, most sandbox players who saw us now treated us with respect. Bomb even mentioned in passing that maybe we should transmogrify our gear to make it all match so we’d look better in the Arena.

  “You think we should pay some transmogrifier a thousand gold or more just to change the color of our gear?” Tissa asked. “Maybe we should get some make-up as well? Or get our hair curled? Are you a warrior or are you a pretty? Even though I’m a girl, that didn’t even occur to me.”

  The “pretties” were a social group who thought looks were the meaning of life, slaves to physical perfection and beauty. And they would use any means available: from plastic surgery to everyday cosmetics. Perhaps that sounded normal, but the pretties would stop at nothing. They even had a saying: “Beauty has no limits.” And when they ran out of surgeries to do or just didn’t have the means, there were always other modifications – skin shading, hair dying, eye and nail coloring, piercings, tattoos, clothing, cosmetics, implanted jewelry and biohacking. Some people looked up to the pretties but our group was more prone to mocking them. None of us saw any point in that stuff. We could understand Denise Le Bon. She earned money with her beauty, but what was the point for someone who worked designing restaurant menus?

  So Hung immediately took it back and, for some reason, started apologizing to Tissa. Lady magic, no bones about it. What else gave them the right to call boys out in plain sight like that?

  “Alright, let’s pack it up,” said Crawler. “We need to get some sleep for tomorrow.”

  Tomorrow was our first qualifying match for the junior Arena games, which had already started for others.

  So the guys said goodbye and left the game. But I stayed. Something Behemoth had told me was stuck in my head, and there was something else I wanted to test out.

  Chapter 28. Qualifying Group

  WE HAD BEEN allocated a room under the stage of the main Commonwealth Arena, which was where we were sitting. It wasn’t the same Arena where I fought Crag. The basic idea was the same, but the scale was much larger.

  In the middle of the small room was a table with refreshments, and around it were chairs. There was also a couch against one wall, and a Ball of Egeria mounted on the ceiling projecting events in the Arena on the opposite wall. For watchability’s sake, there was only one match happening at any given time, each lasting fifteen minutes and running back to back from morning until late evening. It was winter break in school, so they didn’t have to worry about scheduling conflicts. The battle zone was given a new random landscape before each match.

  “Alex, I’ve told you a hundred times and I’ll tell you a hundred and one! No matter how the situation comes together, you cannot use your cheat abils!” Ed harped. “Don’t even use plague energy! Tomorrow, people are gonna go over all the combat logs with a fine-toothed comb: both competing clans and regular viewers. That’s gonna include some analysts and statisticians and, if they see any deviations from the norm, it’s sure to pique their interest. And the preventers will be about a second behind them...”

  “Yeah, I know, I know,” I scowled. In the world killjoy championship, Rodriguez would have definitely taken first place. “Everything will be alright, Ed.”

  Crawler had nagged me every day since our first Battleground, when I lost it and started crushing everyone with plague, saying I couldn’t afford to do that ever again. He was more interested in developing my threat potential than I was.

  “Just remember: if we lose the bet, all we lose is your legendary pet. It’s valuable, I won’t argue. But we have another thing on the line worth a lot more than that, got it?” He was speaking softly and calmly, as if explaining something to his little sister Pollyanna.

  “Alright, Ed. Don’t worry, I’ll act like an archer. I won’t even use my fists.”

  “God forbid!” Bomber exclaimed. “Your Hammers can bring down century-old trees! Don’t play with fire, Scythy!”

  “Fire is Crawler’s thing,” I joked.

  Owing to my sky-high main attributes, impressive Archery and the new moves I’d learned from trainer Conrad and subsequently leveled, I could now fight in the Arena as a true archer. My Unarmed Combat was up to seventy-five and that was the limit for a sandbox. At the very least, I hadn’t seen any mobs higher than twenty-five here.

  “For everyone just joining our broadcast, th-iiii-s iii-s the-e-e Arrrreenna!” roared magivision commentator Dariusz Kowalski, a staple of these events.

  Dariusz wasn’t a player, just a regular person. Snowstorm had poached him from the World Robot Combat League ten years ago and, since then, every contest had been commentated by him and an invited guest.

  “Well, the junior Arena,” noted Ram May, second commentator. “Let me remind our viewers that everyone in these battles plays in an adolescent sandbox!”

  “Oh these youth battles,” Kowalski laughed. “Pointless and merciless!”

  “I’m gonna have to disagree with you there, partner,” said Ram. “Lots of champions of the adult Arena have come up through these same sandboxes...”

  “But none them are in Modus! The current champions!” Dariusz interrupted him. “None of them especially shined in the sandbox. But say Ram, whose faces did you see in the sky when you flew to the studio?”

  “You’ve got a point there. But let me remind you of something. Twelve years ago, a fifteen-year-old boy was crowned champion of this very Arena. His name was Magwai. Remember him?”

  “Who could forget the best player in the world?” Dariusz Kowalski was rattled, but immediately got himself together. “We’re getting sidetracked! Anyhow, moving on to the next match in today’s series…”

  “The teams of the Awoken and Corps of Darkness are asked to please come to the Arena!” rang out in the room. “One-minute warning!”

  We exchanged glances and, without a word, got up from all our chairs at once. It took us twenty seconds to gear up then we spent the next forty huddled up with our heads bowed.

  “The Awoken, representing Tristad, is up against Corps of Darkness from Ebengard,” Dariusz rattled off. “Both teams are from group NA-12, which has five teams. Each of those teams will face off one time. A win earns them one point, and a loss zero. The top two teams from the group will be sent to the main playoff bracket and, from there, they will have to climb to the top to be crowned this year’s junior arena champions!”

  Sh-sh-shu-u-uugh-gh-gh! From standing in silence, we were instantly transported to starting position in the Arena, which was filled with the raucous cheering.

  It took a few seconds to adapt to the bright light. We were transported the same way we were standing: in
a circle. We split up and took a look around. To the right, there was an abandoned three-story house. To the left was an overgrown patch of stinging Dangerous Flycatcher bushes. In the distance, at the far end, there was an impenetrable forest. In the center was a little hill. Here all the environments were made of real elements: mages simply copied fragments of real locations.

  “We’ll tell you about the makeup of the teams as soon as the battle gets underway!” Dariusz promised. “But now... Three! Two! One!”

  “Fight!” the crowd went wild.

  * * *

  There were too many classes in Dis. So the former Dementors didn’t get too specific: rags were mages, priests and anything like them in cloth armor; melee meant close-combat fighters; and ranges correspondingly were ranged fighters. There was also “support,” which referred to any auxiliary profession, which could mean bards, engineers, fairies, flag carriers, and heals. Basically, anyone who strengthened allies more than they did damage.