by Pavel Kornev
Shaking my head in disbelief, I retraced my steps back up to Isabella. I stood next to her and began brushing the bone dust and cold prickly snowflakes off my cloak.
“Life’s not boring with you, kitten,” the priestess gave me a disapproving look.
I smiled to myself. “The best is yet to come.”
That’s when I noticed a dark figure trudging across the field. My hand closed over the hilt of my flamberge. As I did so, my Perception soared, bringing the world into focus and turning the faceless silhouette into the familiar figure of Goar.
The green-skinned paladin wheezed and gasped, apparently not in the best of moods. “You couldn’t have found a place even further, could you?”
“Please don’t moan,” Isabella said as she produced a teleport scroll. “Time to kick some butt.”
Goar cringed as if he’d just swallowed a toad. Still, he only gnashed his teeth, choosing not to protest. “I need more details.”
“Yes, please,” I seconded him. “How about details? Where are you thinking about sending us, anyway?”
“First you’ve got to do the Bone Dragon Hill,” Isabella said. “It’s already been purged by Silver Helmets a week ago, so the strongest of the mobs haven’t respawned yet. I don’t think you’ll have any trouble. No player would bother to go there in the foreseeable future.”
“Difficulty level?” Goar asked.
“Between the two of you, you can manage,” the priestess reassured him. “Just please make sure you don’t steal the show, Goar my dear. We need to level up our kitten here.”
Goar cringed again. “Sure.”
“What about XP?” I asked, anxious. “You sure we can raise enough, considering all the big mobs are out?”
She chuckled. “It took the Silver Helmets forty-eight hours to purge it — and their group counted at least twenty fighters. Don’t you worry. Plenty of leveling still left to do there.”
“Provided you’re prepared to spend a week there,” Goar grumbled. Nothing seemed to please him today.
“Your sword, my dear green friend,” Isabella reminded him. “Your sword.”
The Paladin of Equilibrium fell silent and stroked the hilt of his sword. “Let’s go!” he finally said, turning away from the priestess.
She broke the seal on the scroll.
An oval teleport entrance formed before us.
Excellent. Time to kick some ass!
Time left: 29 days 5:33:20…
THE BONE DRAGON HILL turned out to be a high, steep mountain topped with the ruins of a castle, the spires of its towers concealed by clouds. Even though it was daylight here, the sun struggled to penetrate the thick low thunderclouds.
Goar looked around him unhappily, drew in the air through his nose, then slammed his helmet on.
“Let’s go!” he told me. “I have no intention of getting soaked by the rain!”
I laughed. “You’re not made of salt!” Still, I hurried in his wake along a winding trail.
Soon we came to the gaping entrance of a cave. It must have once been protected by a massive gate which was now ripped from its steel hinges and lay upended on the ground.
I peered into the dark. “This isn’t the main entrance, I take it?”
“It’s not,” Goar replied in a stifled voice as he headed inside without yet baring his awesome sword. “Don’t lag behind.”
“One moment,” I hurried to conjure up a magic energy skull. There’s no such thing as too much mana in battle.
He only chuckled as he studied the little skull icon which was now rotating above my head spreading a ghostly glow around. Then he stepped into the darkness. “Let’s go!”
As soon as we started along the dark passage, I heard a crackling sound. Then we were showered by cascades of bone fragments which had littered the stone tiles. Now they were stirring and reaching for each other to form skeletons.
“Quit stallin’!” Goar snapped. “Fight!”
What about him? I had no time to ponder over it: I went into the fight head on, crushing the dead guards’ bones with a mere touch of my flamberge. Piece of cake. By the same token, the XP I received was nothing to write home about.
Never mind. Let’s keep going.
For a while, we kept advancing along a narrow tunnel until we reached a spacious hall. Immediately we were assaulted by a host of skeletons armed with rusty swords and halberds. They came for us from every which way, trying to get to Goar. My neutrality must have forced them to ignore me — until I bared my flamberge.
Surrounded by skeletons on all sides, I used the opportunity to use the Circle Strike. Bones flew everywhere. Although I’d managed to kill at least half of them with one blow, that wasn’t the most amazing thing. I watched in disbelief as a few of the pikemen turned their weapons against their own.
Retinue!
Laughing, I threw myself into the thick of the fight. It looked like I might not need Goar’s help to purge this dungeon, after all.
Although by now the hall was packed with at least thirty guards, the entire melee had taken less than two minutes. Goar took virtually no part in the massacre, using his steel gauntlets to send some of the most insistent skeletons flying. Me, I was on a roll, crushing and throwing powerful punches.
I was good. Wish I could say the same about the XP.
Having finished, I opened the stats window and cussed. “This is a pittance! If it continues to go like this...”
The orc shrugged. “It won’t,” he pointed at a couple of surviving pikemen. “What’s wrong with those two?”
“They’re with me now.”
Goar chuckled. “As you say.” He trawled through the bones with his boot, revealing a battleax, but thought against picking it up. Only a complete noob could fall for such a crude item.
My own eye chanced upon a jointed bone. Nothing special but it just might come in handy to make a rune or something.
Once I’d collected a few of those, we continued through the monotonous enfilade of halls and caves. We had to battle our way through a few times, bringing my retinue up to a couple of dozen skeletons. I was especially happy to have laid my hands on four crossbowmen who shot even the fastest of enemy soldiers before they could approach. Being a lord of the dead wasn’t such a bad thing, after all.
After a while, our path began to fork until the dungeon became a maze of side tunnels, complex and illogical. Not good.
“You don’t happen to have a map, do you?” I asked.
“Nope,” Goar replied, apparently bored to near death by the monotony of the fighting. My request seemed to have surprised him.
“So where do we go now?”
“Don’t worry. You just can’t miss the stairs up,” he said as he strode toward the next hall.
I trudged along. My skeletal army followed in our wake, accompanied by the cracking of their own joints.
“Goar!” I finally said. “I don’t think any mobs have respawned yet. It’s way too easy here. I’m not complaining but so far, it’s just not worth it. If it goes like this, it’ll take me a couple of years to level up!”
“This is the lowest floor,” he said. “It’s just to get you in the mood. It’s gonna get much harder soon.”
All I could do was take him on his word.
Time left: 29 days 4:02:37…
BY THE TIME we’d approached the first staircase, my dead army counted forty men. Of which only a meager five — all of them crossbowmen — had made it to the third floor. You wouldn’t expect things to turn so rough, would you?
The second level of the underground maze which permeated the entire hill was slightly richer with detail even though you’d be hard pressed to notice it. An occasional rusty torch holder on the wall; a broken chain; sometimes a door or a barred entrance to a dungeon, all of them forced open.
And lots of skeletons, for sure. They were a given.
I fought my way through with gusto. My retinue didn’t lag too far behind. Why not, if I received all the XP accrued?
Still, gradually some of the tunnel guards turned up wearing full armor. From that moment on, my little undead army began to dwindle. Few of those armored guards fell under my Lich’s control while the ranks of my old servants kept thinning out.
And once we came across some undead sorcerers, you just could forget it.
The second staircase was defended by a knight, cumbersome but incredibly strong. He was the first opponent whom I failed to one-shot: it took two attempts to chop his head off.
That was when I realized that I only had a few crossbowmen left.
“It's only gonna get better now,” Goar grinned, climbing to the third floor.
Oh well... he was right, to a point. I wouldn’t exactly call it “better” but it surely wasn’t as boring. Dead knights and skeletal pyromancers; packs of bone hounds and blood-chilling cadavers made up from parts of different bodies sometimes completely incompatible. Those latter proved to be the nastiest opponents. Not necessarily the most difficult ones but surely the most loathsome, if you know what I mean. Whenever you killed them, they exploded, splattering the place with fountains of venomous slime. And the stench!
Normally, my five crossbowmen shot them from a good distance without letting them approach. But then my meager support group fell prey of a fireball launched from one of the tunnels, leaving us without any backup.
Still, we made good progress, despite the complex maze which, if the truth were known, hindered our advance much more than the actual mobs did. Underground barracks gave way to alchemy labs and gloomy shrines, all of them interconnected by passages which led every which way, forcing us to blindly follow them in every direction in search for the next staircase which just wasn’t there.
Luckily, I finally chanced on a scrap of parchment in one of the chests: a map, which allowed me to work out our way to the next level without having to purge the entire floor. By then, both Goar and myself were sick and tired of the stinky cadavers which brought in absolutely no loot.
The fourth level was lit up by torches lining its polished walls. Here, the dungeon had finally ceased to resemble an abandoned mine shaft — not that it made it any less complicated. It had a great many side passages which could take you anywhere, from a storeroom to a next corridor, or it could turn out to be a dead end.
The guards here were different too. The skeletons were gone completely, replaced by much more powerful mages and swift chimeras. Those creatures, put together from a variety of bones, would attack you from a dark corner, using all their arsenal of impressive fangs, sharp claws, and venomous stingers to deal quite a lot of damage. It had taken us a lot of blood, sweat and tears before we could work out a suitable strategy against them. In the end, Goar would use his slowing skill on them while I took them apart with my flamberge.
Only once did we get lucky when I picked up a dog-eared book from one of the undead sorcerers, containing maps of the next three levels. Still, we decided against taking shortcuts between staircases, seeing as every chimera killed brought us quite a bit of XP. And once we started coming across bone golems, I seriously cheered up.
This looked much more like normal leveling, especially after they started dropping some nice rune tablets framed in gold, silver and even mithril. We also came across some decent weapons which I shared with Goar, unwilling to overload my own inventory.
Time left: 28 days 22:57:11…
WE FINISHED the fourth floor and part of the fifth without much effort. Although the monsters were now smarter and cannier, Goar pulled them to himself, allowing me to use my flamberge without much risk of getting killed.
Then at some point he stopped dead in his tracks and removed his helmet. “Enough for today.”
“Meaning?”
“My time is almost up.”
“What about me?”
“What about you? When are you logging out?”
Despite my disappointment, I managed to shut my big mouth just in time. “Soon enough.”
“So you see.”
“Wait. Can you log back in right here?”
“Sure.”
“Excellent. D’you mind sending a word to Isabella? Tell her to contact me.”
He stared at me, uncomprehending. “Can’t you do that yourself?”
“I’d rather finish a couple more rooms,” I lied. “Will you message her?”
“Yep,” he said, dematerializing.
I cussed, flung my flamberge over my shoulder and strode on along the corridor.
I was so sick and tired of it all, you can’t even imagine.
WITHOUT GOAR’S BACKUP, my advance had slowed down a lot. Before, all I’d had to do was hack my way through the ranks of bone monsters — but now I wasted a lot of time waiting for the Silver Deadman’s Amulet to restore my health.
I was already busy purging the sixth floor when I got killed for the first time. I didn’t stand a chance. A horde of dead knights ran out at me from every direction. Before I knew it, they’d surrounded me, locked me in combat and hacked me to mincemeat, leaving me no chance of stealthing up or just legging it.
Once resurrected, I extracted myself from under a heap of bones, cussed and continued on my journey. Now I was taking my time: although I could easily steal past the mobs’ cordons, that wasn’t what I’d come here for. I needed XP.
So I had to outsmart them. I had no other choice: the death magic which was my forte dealt virtually no damage to the dungeon guards, forcing me to engage in hand-to-hand. That wouldn’t be so bad, but all those dead knights, chimeras and golems now walked around in groups — and the further I advanced, the more numerous those groups were.
That’s not to even mention the mages! Those blasted skeletal pyromancers had become a real pain in the ass! Their magic fire jets were so strong they actually swept me off my feet, so I had to be doubly careful and avoid all head-ons: if they didn’t burn me alive, they’d simply trample me to death.
At first, I’d tried to use the Veil of Death which very soon had syphoned off all of my internal energy, so I had to change tactics pronto. In the end, I did find a way to get around their defenses, but that slowed down my progress even more.
The bone hounds became my priority because unlike all the other guards, they could sniff out a stealthed-up stranger and attack him the moment he got near. I would sidestep into a neighboring corridor and kill them there: luckily for me, despite their impressive speed, bone hounds were remarkably stupid animals.
Pyromancers were the next on my priority list. Normally, I’d use my magic lasso to extract one of them from behind the guards’ backs, behead him and run back, pulling the fastest fighters in the enemy group which were usually golems.
The rest was paperwork. In the end, I advanced slowly but surely. Same for my XP numbers: they kept growing albeit equally unhurriedly. All I’d managed to achieve by the end of the first twenty-four hours was raising one level for both Rogue and Undead respectively.
And I was already sick of constant swordwork! Where was Isabella, dammit?
25,000 XP in twenty-four hours: ridiculous! That way I’d never raise one million by the end of the month, let alone five. I wasn’t a tank, after all. I was only a...
Shit! With a resolute shake of my head, I stood tall and walked on.
I was gonna make it. It took me to make it.
So I kept going, after a fashion. I used my new levels to improve my Strength, Agility and two-handed weapons. For a while, that tipped the scales in my favor, but very soon the game balance caught up with me, sending stronger mobs my way as I advanced.
I GOT KILLED for the second time the moment I climbed to the seventh floor. Just as I stepped off the stairs, a trap went off. With a nauseating crunching sound, my left leg sank mid-calf through the floor.
I tried to pull it out. Didn’t work. It was stuck there well and good.
Terrible figures with two heads and four arms stepped out of the wall niches, their bone armor studded with foot-long spikes, their fingers ending in terrible thorn
like claws made purposefully to rip living flesh apart.
Immobilize the enemy and and bludgeon them to death, wasn’t that a classic?
And you know what?
That’s exactly how they did it.
Time left: 27 days 20:54:45…
DARKNESS. BONES. A skull in my hand.
I made my way out of a heap of ribs dumped in a corner, shook my head and gasped a silent curse.