by Vic Connor
So it’s in a state of extreme anxiety that Aremos watches the God Mod. Half of him wishes the group wouldn’t disband. The spirit of the child Somera writhes inside him, torn between warring desires. Calm, child, he thinks. We’ll need to focus in the coming days. A battle mage is not troubled by such things; his equilibrium is key to his power and we can’t afford to jeopardize that.
But the wish is there, he can feel it—half of him wishes they’d lose, so nothing would change. He wouldn’t lose his warband, they wouldn’t be forced onto their different paths. He wants out. He wants to run from this and to return to the good old days, when the stakes were low and the glories simple.
He has never shared this with his battle sisters and brother. But if he wins, he knows his path. The child spirit Somera will go to the academy in the land of San Francisco, which some call the greatest melting pot in the world beyond worlds, where minds of all kinds come together to work in unity. They share a knowledge of San Francisco, he and the child Somera, thanks to the magics of television and popular culture. They already have a love for it. Indeed, Aremos has even made it there himself, in his spiritual wanderings. The child Somera showed him the way: a VR program of the city allowed him to walk its streets, stripped of his power yet full in body and mind, soaking in its every sight, sound and smell, breathing its air, seeing its people.
It’s a dream come true—it will be a dream come true, he thinks as he watches the God Mod.
Finally, the God Mod smiles. “It is a victory for Aremos the Great and his warband,” it says, and the Great Hall erupts.
Immediately, the XP which Aremos had felt hovering on the sidelines washes over him.
His heart begins to thump, and his head grows fuzzy. He feels his power rising within him, all around him, as everybody watches, cheering. He jumps five levels immediately, heading straight for level thirty-one. The members of his warband stagger beside him, each overcome by it all. They leap three levels up and Aremos can see their bodies swelling, as his own must be, as all of that glorious XP is granted to them, all at once, by the God Mod’s words.
Aremos feels unstoppable, he feels transcendent. However, as the initial giddiness wears off and the foggy-headed glee of all of that extra XP begins to clear, he notices the crowd around him. They encroach upon him and his warband, pressing in on them from all sides, jabbering away. He realizes they’ve shoved him closer to the dais during his moments of disorientation, and they’re now threatening to fully sweep him off his feet. Sah struggles next to him, while Eirrac and Asba have somehow been separated from them and are pushing and shoving to get back.
Aremos glances at his core stats, celebrating the jump in the level and, especially, in his newly available experience points:
Level: 31
Unallocated XP: 1032
HP: 550 / 550
Magical Power: 755 / 755
Agility: 52
Melee Weapon Skill: 38
Ballistic Accuracy: 31
Damage: 46
Resistance: 37
Morale: 60
Core Skills: Battle mage
Now that he has exceeded level thirty, his leveling up will become arduous, controlled by complex rules and algorithms of Creation. It may take many difficult quests to get to level thirty-two, and it may take him years to reach level forty that unlocks access to elite-level privileges.
Too soon, he has to close the screen and return to the din of voices surrounding him.
“What’s your real name? Where are you from? How old are you? Who are you, Aremos…? What are you going to do with all the prize money? How are you feeling now, and did you expect…?” The questions close in on them, a brash and overbearing cacophony. Cameramen and interviewers, Twitch and YouTube streamers begin swooping in, taking pictures, recording and writing down the odd, burbled quotes the warband manage to offer.
Most of the warband seem too stunned, too overcome to answer the questions properly. Aremos can only stand and stare, while Eirrac and Asba, finally pushing through to be near them once more, appear too taken by the effort of staying by Aremos’ side to think of any intelligent replies. Sah, however, is clearly beginning to enjoy himself—it shows in his beaming smile.
“Who is Aremos, what’s your name, pal?” a crowd member asks.
“He’s Jesus bloody Christ.” Sah laughs. “He’s the Messiah come to show us how it is done. He’s Mick Jagger and Keith Richards rolled into one. He’s the boss, the best of the best!” He begins to swear at them, lacing his jibes with profanities when the questioners in the crowd start pressing him to be serious. “I’m rolling with Big Daddy Aremos,” he tells them, flipping them the finger. “I don’t answer to any of you mother—”
The end of his sentence is drowned out by the crowds’ jeers, but its meaning is clear to all.
“Come,” Aremos whispers to his warband while the cameras flash and the questions keep pouring in. “With me, outside.” He turns his back on the demanding crowd and barges through them toward a side door out into the grounds. His warband follows, hurrying along in his wake.
When they reach the door, they find it locked—they’re trapped inside the walls with everybody in Arkhart watching them, wanting a piece of them. The reporters begin to close in on them again, and Eirrac asks, “What is it, Aremos?”
“I want to celebrate properly,” Aremos replies. He looks at Sah. “Reckon you could open this door?”
Sah shrugs. “Naturally.” His eyes glow momentarily and he begins to swell, growing larger and larger as the noisy crowd backs away. Soon enough, a great, black shaggy bear stands in his place, rearing onto his hind legs. He swings one mighty, clawed fist at the door once, twice, soon shattering it.
“Come on,” Aremos calls, leading his group out of the Great Hall. As soon as they step into the garden, he finds his powers available once again. He’s reached level thirty-one now, and can cast within the palace grounds. Snapping his fingers, he deploys a shield around them, covering each member of his warband. Immediately, the clamor of the reporters and the curious spectators fades away. Nothing can reach them now, and nothing can hear them.
“Now,” he mutters, thinking through the world of Arkhart. “I know.” He grips his staff and casts a portal to the wastelands where he knows bands of orcs and evil men wander the deserts, attacking innocent travelers and generally causing mischief. He closes his eyes, searching for a battle, and finds an orc encampment slightly to the west of where he has located his portal. He adjusts it, sending it roving over the map to a better position, just outside the encampment’s high, ramshackle walls.
“That’ll do nicely, brother,” Sah says, mangling the words slightly in his sharp toothed, bear’s mouth.
“Awesome,” Asba agrees, readying her bow. “Let’s go.”
They all step through, leaving the palace and the crowds far behind. Aremos’ shield disappears, his portal vanishes, and the spectators are left wondering where in all of Arkhart the four companions have gone.
They find themselves in a vast, dusty bowl of desert wilderness. Before them stand the dilapidated, poorly-made wooden palisades of an orc encampment. Orcs are a nomadic species, never settling in one spot for too long since they can create nothing on their own. They have no smiths or tailors, no builders or craftsmen. All an orc tribe can do is fight and plunder, bleeding an area dry until there’s nothing left to steal. Then, when they’ve taken everything they need, they move on to wherever the next fight is to be, wherever the next riches are awaiting them. Every realm in Arkhart has their orc populations. Every town lives in perpetual fear of an invasion, and every mayor, burgher, and monarch in the land keeps a ready stash of gold to hire mercenaries for when the time comes to defend themselves against the greenskins.
The time is here, Aremos thinks. He uses his Second Sight as the warband stands before the settlement, learning what he can of this tribe’s recent history. He reads that they’ve been through five towns in the last month, pillaging and murdering, a
nd they’re on their way to a sixth. He reads that they are well-armed with human and dwarven steel from their efforts.
No matter, he thinks. “We won’t let them do any more harm,” he tells his companions.
“But first,” Eirrac chimes in. “Shall we take a moment? Let’s play around with some upgrades before we go in.”
“Good idea,” Sah says, and Asba nods. “Let’s reconvene in five minutes.”
With that, they all shut down, going deep within themselves to find their new XP and use it. Aremos does the same, closing his eyes on the world around him to search through the options now available to him.
Several items present themselves—some larger, requiring a greater portion of his new XP, and some small, requiring just a little. He picks a few smaller items to play around with, saving the majority of his new XP to spend once he decides what he’ll need later on. He picks one mid-range item as well, however: Time Warp, a new ability that will allow him to freeze time for himself and all of his warband. They’ll have a full ten seconds, when he casts it, in which their enemies will barely move—ten seconds to wreak havoc and gain the advantage.
To use this on a whole tribe of orcs is too much to resist. Indeed, it’ll be what wins the battle for them, Aremos has no doubt.
He also invests some experience points to bring up his Agility and Resistance levels, increasing his survival chances in the coming fight.
He returns after five minutes spent buying and equipping his upgrades as the rest of the warband do the same, each opening their eyes and springing back to life.
Asba looks stronger and faster than ever: Her muscles have become taut and wiry, bulging in a way they hadn’t before, and her Melee and Damage stats have taken a significant boost. She looks hungry for action, entirely pumped. Eirrac also has a little more muscle straining against her thick robes and leather armor. The biggest change is to her Ballistic stats and her gun, however. Above the rotating barrels, another muzzle has appeared, looking very much like the nozzle on some kind of canteen. “Wyrdflame,” she says, smiling. “I can channel wyrdflame through my gun now.”
“You can’t buy weapons with XP,” Sah protests. “You have to have gold for that, you have to go to a smithy.”
“Apparently, rune-smiths at my level can do what they want.” Eirrac shrugs. “I have all sorts of juicy options. Wait until you see my axe.”
Sah doesn’t seem to have changed at all. He looks the same: lanky and nondescript, reverted back to his human form.
“What did you buy?” Asba asks him.
Sah smiles mischievously, then arches his back, spreads his arms wide, and roars out a couple of words in the black speech of demon kin. Immediately, his skin cracks. A bright orange glow appears from between the cracks, followed by flames which spread fast to consume his whole body. A long, slim tail grows out behind him and two great, curling horns sprout from his head. He reaches out and plucks a two-handed great axe from thin air, made from the blackest of iron and burning as wildly as his own body.
“I can become a fire demon now,” he announces as the others all cheer. “What about you, Aremos?” he asks, his voice crackling with power. “What did you pick?”
Aremos smiles. “You just wait. For the moment, let’s let them know we’re here.”
“Aremos, no—” Asba begins, but it’s too late.
Aremos points his staff at a section of the orcish wall and a bolt of azure light shoots out, rending a great, smoking hole in the palisade.
A horde of fifty or so orcs gather almost instantly, appearing from all over the camp, and, after a brief exchange of growls and shouts, begin to charge down toward them.
“You idiot, we’ll never beat them like this!” Eirrac moans, lifting her gun to her shoulder.
Each orc looks taller than the tallest human Aremos can imagine, and weighs a good hundred pounds more, all muscle and fury. They seem well-armed with the spoils of their recent conquests—steel and brass glint in the sunlight as they stream down to chop the intruders to bits.
“You just watch,” Aremos whispers, smiling. He throws up one hand and a circle of blue flames encloses them, forcing the orcs to fan out and form a ring of their own.
“Well, now you’ve got us surrounded, Aremos, you fool,” Sah complains. “Quick, open a portal, we can’t win this.”
Still grinning, Aremos makes a small gesture with his hand and the flames explode outward, slamming into the orcs’ first rank and pushing a few monsters back. A furious howl rises above the attacking horde. The orcs open their misshapen mouths, yelling insults, and brandish their weapons. They charge again, leaping over their few fallen comrades and pushing one another forward as the flames die down.
Sah bellows and heaves a couple of large fireballs into their midst, killing two or three smaller orcs. Green flame licks out from Eirrac’s gun, completely evaporating a couple more who have almost reached her, while Asba fires a few arrows in quick succession.
“We’re going to die here, damn it!” Sah yells, an audible undertone of panic in his voice.
Aremos shakes his head slowly. “No.” He gathers his strength and thrusts his staff into the ground, allowing his new spell to overcome the space around them.
The enemy advance stops almost completely as each orc becomes frozen in time. Their movements seem to last forever, their steps cover no ground. Aremos has chosen a bolstered version of Time Warp, giving his group a full fifteen seconds before any of the orcs can move more than a foot toward them.
“Fifteen seconds!” he cries out, breathless with the effort of casting such a mighty spell. He has expended a full hundred Magical Power points, and he feels somewhat depleted. “Have at them.”
Hooting, laughing, barely believing their eyes, the others set to work. Exalting, Sah runs through the orcs’ ranks, his great axe mowing through them, cutting through the first couple of the monsters with hefty swings. Each limb he chops off hangs in mid-air, each head he caves in remains still, unmoving. He punctuates his swings with fireballs and flaming breath so that within ten seconds, a whole quarter of the charge is alight, crackling away unbeknownst to their enemies. Eirrac rushes toward the orcs’ frontline on the other side of Sah, filling it with bullets as she cranks her autocannon’s handle. Then, she slings it over her back and draws her axe. Runes flicker and flash and the lightest swing causes shockwaves through the bodies of her enemies, destroying their health and resistance where they stand, leaving several crippled and hanging in mid-air as they die in extra slow motion. Over and over, she swings and kills, but her rune-crafted axe doesn’t dent, doesn’t blunt, doesn’t lose even a little of its potency. By the end of the Time Warp, five have died by her hand and several more are on their last legs.
Aremos and Asba stand together in the middle of the circle. Asba works methodically, firing her exploding arrows into the crowd. None of them detonate yet, however. “I presume they’ll go off all at once at the end.” She smiles at Aremos.
“My thoughts exactly,” he replies. He wants to try out a couple of his new minor upgrades, now that he has so deftly demonstrated the Time Warp. He’d bought an upgrade to his lightning bolt spell, called Lightning Storm. First, he downs the contents of one of his flasks, wincing from the powerful tickling sensation as his magical energy replenishes itself. Then, reeling from the sudden hit of energy, he holds out one hand, palm forward, and speaks the incantation for Lightning Storm. A cascade of electricity flows from his extended palm, dancing through the nearest few ranks of orcs, making them smoke and let go of their weapons, dead on the spot.
Finally, as the last few seconds tick away, Aremos draws his sword. He gathers his magic to him until the blade glows white, then points it at the largest orc he can find and releases the energy. The orc and three others around him begin to glow white when the bolt hits them, and even more around them are struck by its glow. Aremos focuses his magics on the metal in their armor and weapons, heating them to an impossible temperature until they begin to lit
erally melt.
“Everybody, to me!” he shouts as the timer counts down from three. His companions sprint back to his side, arriving just in time for him to pull up a magical barrier between them and the horde. When the countdown hits zero and time resumes its usual pace, all hell breaks loose.
The orcs with their burning armor and weapons turn to charred bones and molten flesh. Those around them take damage from the heat and back away, even as the afterglow of lightning leaves four more dead or dying. The roar from Asba’s enchanted arrows finally blowing up hits the orcs from one side as the sudden explosion of heat from Sah’s flames billows out on the other. A whole rank of orcs drops off their feet, catching bellyfuls of Eirrac’s bullets as even more burn bright green with her wyrdflame. Limbs drop from their suspension as their owners charge on for a few more seconds, oblivious at first that arms, legs and even heads have been removed.
Chaos reigns all around them, a medley of fire, magic and a mess of dying, mutilated orcs. More than thirty enemies drop in five or six seconds—most of the tribe felled in an instant, instead of the easy fight they’d likely anticipated. The remaining orcs, those at the rear of the pack and the few lucky enough to escape the worst, stop moving, looking dumbfounded. They start whimpering, and a few wail with apparent grief. Then, they turn and begin to run.
They don’t make it very far. Asba’s arrows and Eirrac’s bullets catch a couple of them, two or three shots apiece tearing into each orc. Others are engulfed in flames as Sah whirls about, making the most of his new form.
When it’s all over, the warband stands still, panting. “Well,” Eirrac says after a little while, looking both flustered and triumphant as he smiles over at Aremos. “I like your new moves, buddy.”