by Vic Connor
“Hello, there,” he said, closing his portal.
The elven sword master stood dead ahead of him with her back turned, oblivious to his existence. She was bent over a sealed doorway, apparently trying to work out how to unlock it and gain entry to the pyramid. But as Aremos spoke, she gasped, leapt up straight, turned around and drew her blade in one swift, smooth motion. Anger flared in her eyes and her blonde hair seemed to crackle with her rage.
“Who are…” she began, before recognizing him. “Aremos the Great… Ah, so, they tempted you down here. As what, their lap dog?” she asked. “Aremos the Fool, more like, if you think the dreadnoughts will so willingly share their power.”
“I know they will not share,” Aremos replied. The elf stalked closer toward him, her eyes darting around and her blade held low and ready. “I’m learning in this place. You have to earn your power—you have to take it.”
With these words, he pointed a finger at the elf and released a volley of lightning bolts he was sure would rip her apart. However, she was too used to this world, too adept at handling it. She leapt in the air, impossibly high even for one so nimble. She pirouetted, flipped over and landed right in front of Aremos, swinging her blade up instantly. It caught him in the side, opening a great wound which sank him to his feet straight away.
The elf laughed. “Aremos the Weak,” she said meanly. “You’ll die so easily.”
She brought up her sword, dripping with his blood, and readied the swing he was sure would decapitate him. Though his HP had taken a hit, his magical reserves were high, and they renewed themselves far more quickly than they ever would in Arkhart. Aremos gripped the Staff of Adamant, raising it to cast a crackling, messy shield just in time. The energy lashed about randomly and refused to stay as the one, clean barrier he was used to. Bolts crackled along his arms, stinging them, robbing him of a little more of his precious HP. Some hit the elf, burning her robes so they fell open at the front, blackened, revealing the angry welts they had just cut across her chest.
She fell backward, taken off guard, and Aremos crawled away from her, reaching for his health potion. He drank a sip and sighed as his skin knitted itself back together, restoring a large part of his HP. Then, to protect himself as he stood and tried to take control of the situation, he released a couple of magical projectiles which the elf dodged and parried, her blade flickering faster than his eyes could follow.
As she prepared to attack again, Aremos drew his power in, reached forward, and cast the Lightning Storm. She might be able to evade a few stray bolts, but the full storm would be impossible, he thought. He was wrong, of course.
As the lightning skittered about, lashing into the pyramid’s surface and sparking off into the distance, the elf leaped up onto the next step above. She ran a few meters and jumped again, riding the gust of stormy wind and turning in mid-air to land behind Aremos. He turned just in time, raising the Staff of Adamant to deflect the worst of her blows as his own wards flashed and crackled, unable once more to stand up to her sword.
I can’t beat her with a frontal assault, he decided. She’s too fast, too experienced. She walks too lightly in this world.
The dreadnought’s words came to him: But she shows no aptitude for learning anything beyond the tip of her sword.
I can’t fight her, Aremos thought, but I can change the rules of the fight.
He reached into the metal of her sword, heating it as he had done all those weeks ago to the orcs outside their encampment. With a surge of power, funneling his magic into his work, he made the sword glow an angry red. It wouldn’t get as hot as he could manage in Arkhart, he realized—it would never make its wielder evaporate on the spot. But it was enough: With a yelp of pain and frustration, the elf dropped her weapon, sending it clattering down the pyramid’s steps and far out of harm’s way.
She stooped, plucking a couple of daggers from her boots, but Aremos was ready for this. Rather than cursing her, he slammed his staff into the pyramid itself, focusing his power on the solid stone beneath their feet. A shockwave spilled outward, knocking both him and the elf off their feet. But Aremos knew what was coming. He cast a portal just beneath himself, jumped into it, and came out a couple of steps higher. The elf was not so lucky, however. She went flying, rolling and crashing down two whole flights before landing, crumpled and hurt, near the pyramid’s base.
Once she’d hit the ground, Aremos jumped down after her, using his magic to slow his descent so he floated. The same as the shades, the same as the dreadnoughts: I’m nothing if not a quick learner, he thought. The laws of physics are there to obey in this world, in Sanguis. He looked at the elf as he landed before her. She was covered in splashes of blood and thoroughly bruised. No doubt a couple of bones were broken. Her HP had suffered, cut in half, and her reactions had been slowed by a likely concussion.
He walked calmly over to her as she tried to stagger to her feet. Now, when he shot a bolt from his outstretched staff, it hit her, tearing through her flesh and stopping her from doing more than flopping uselessly, half dead, against the stone.
“I need your head,” he told her, aware even as he spoke them just how sick his words were. He wavered, hesitating, but then saw that she was once more reaching for her daggers, still determined to defend herself by killing him. The spirit of the child Somera surged in him: “Win, Aremos, win,” it said to him.
It’s the world we are in, he thought, as Somera’s words rang in his mind. Sanguis breeds us to be harsh, I suppose.
He swung the Staff of Adamant high, imbuing it with his power, so that when he brought it crashing down into her chest her whole body broke, smoking, charred, shocked. Every muscle twitched as she died, and a few stray sparks and flashes of magic raged around her. Then, as she lay still, Aremos touched his staff to the nape of her neck and sent out a small pulse of power, just enough to sever her head from her shoulders. It rolled away, blackened but recognizable, as the rest of her body fell in upon itself, turning to ash before his eyes.
He brought the elf’s head back to the dreadnought immediately, oddly proud of his hideous accomplishment.
“As you should be, my boy,” the dreadnought encouraged. “She was weak and foolish. With a little guidance, you might become strong. You might become wise—you might yet make a worthy lieutenant for me.
“You should feel good,” he continued, “asserting your place in the world. But I warn you, few opponents here will be as easy as she was.”
Aremos took out three more people in the first couple of days. There was another player, a sorcerer who had been invited into Sanguis by the dreadnoughts. However, they had regretted their decision—he had not adapted well. He hadn’t been able to transfer his prodigious skills to this new world, to the world of Sanguis, and he needed to be taken care of. “He is a level forty-two, you know,” the dreadnought had told Aremos. “But he still insists on fighting like he is in Arkhart. It will not do.” Aremos almost died in that fight but threw the sorcerer from the top of a high, bleak mountain, casting his body against the rocks and bringing back the remnants of his pulped skull frozen in ice by Aremos’ own casting.
He understood now that dying while in Sanguis was out of the question: he’d never be able to return here.
After the level forty-two sorcerer, there was an old piece of coding from the early days of Sanguis, a banshee who’d refused to be assimilated back into the program, whom Aremos tracked down and destroyed. Her voice could shatter plate armor and turn men’s brains to mush. However, Aremos wrapped her in a vacuum, cutting off the air and, with it, silencing her. He starved her of her greatest weapon, then blew her body limb from limb.
Finally, there was a pack of AI Lycans from Arkhart who had somehow slipped between the two worlds, duplicating their coding in Sanguis so that they existed as separate entities here even as their originals prowled Arkhart. They were tough, and Aremos again came close to defeat, but managed to kill them in the end. He cast a great cloud above their heads, blocking
out the moonlight to greatly diminish their powers, and then he just worked through them one at a time, hunting them down in a few minutes.
Aremos doesn’t just stick to his adventures, however. He finds a few towns, a few settlements recognizably human. They are all miserable, war-torn places in which the inhabitants are as likely to stab you for fun as they are to talk to you. However, Aremos still finds a few people to talk to. He asks around, pumping the other, more experienced players in Sanguis for information. With a little cajoling, he is thus able to find out a little about who the dreadnoughts are.
Over his first few weeks playing in Sanguis, Aremos manages to piece together part of this world’s history. There had been a group of game developers, independent and more skilled at their jobs than any such group in human memory. The team was pure genius, coding things nobody had ever imagined before. They worked together, coding and creating, and over time, they made a progressively generating fantasy game, the prototype for Arkhart. They sent demos to the larger game development studios, hoping to bring their game universe to the wider world. Lynch Media, with whom Aremos knows the child spirit Somera holds her scholarship, the company which owns the world of Arkhart, bought out these indie developers, lied to them about the scope of the game, and greatly limited its capabilities, dumbing it down before selling the game to major platforms.
“And they capitalized on the mass-market version, big time. The original Maker team, they call themselves the dreadnoughts,” a river troll tells him as they walk together through a mountain pass, their weapons bloody from hunting a team of orcs together. “Well, they quit, of course. But not before they hacked a backdoor into the Arkhart servers from where they smuggled their own assets in the unmapped portions of the Universe,” the troll explains. “Thus, they made an entirely new, illegal, unmoderated, hardcore world within a world.”
The troll raises her arms, gesturing wildly. “The world of Sanguis. Truly hardcore, a real test of anyone’s talents. They all agreed, way back in the early days, that if there were real players out there, they ought to play their game instead of the profit-optimized, pay-to-win, niche-marketed propaganda game that Lynch Media had created out of their ideas.”
“And this is their world.” Aremos nods.
“Aye,” the troll confirms. “Sanguis is their antidote to the stale quests in Arkhart. You are new, you won’t have seen the best bits yet, the hardest, most creative bits. And trust me, you’ll have to be ruthless to get there. The stuff the dreadnoughts ask of us… Well, you’ll have seen some of it already. But…” A dreamy look comes over the river troll’s big, ugly face. “It’s worth it to see what they can create.” She looks down at Aremos as if seeing him for the first time. “I know you. Aremos the Great, you slew the wyvern mod?”
“Yes, that’s correct,” Aremos says.
“Easy—any old timers here could do it. They just didn’t take part ‘cos there’s harder stuff, more interesting stuff down here. Still,” the troll adds, appraising Aremos with her eyes. “Not bad for a newbie. I’m Jenna, by the way.”
“Nice to meet you, Jenna… I think…” Aremos replies.
Chapter Nine
Somera is beyond tired. She yawns, her jaw cracking, her eyes itching. She stayed up all night last night, hunting alongside Jenna before single-handedly capturing a lesser demon for the dreadnought. But this morning, she’s determined to focus all her attention on the class at hand.
She sits alone at the back of the classroom, as has become her custom. Her classmates group together toward the front, but Somera is only interested in the information the teachers give, not the social life the campus offers—as active as it admittedly is. And this is her favorite class by a long way, taught by her favorite teacher by a long way.
Nikolai Sokolov is the dean of the college and—for all that he’s busy and well sought after, and for all that he’s in his late middle-age and should, by rights, be slowing down a little—he still insists on teaching a couple of classes per year, on top of all of his other duties. He’s not just a teacher, though: to Somera, he’s an inspiration, a real mentor. He is the only staff member to properly pay her any attention, though she doesn’t take this personally: he’s the only one to pay any of them much attention at all. He has a vibrancy about him, a charisma, which draws people in and makes whatever lesson he is teaching—no matter how dull a subject it might be in anyone else’s hands—the most interesting thing most of the class would do all week long. Everybody takes to him very easily and he takes to everyone easily, too.
But he takes to none more so than Somera, whom, right after her first-ever class with him, he pulled to one side and said, “You clearly have a natural aptitude, the right way of thinking, for this kind of work.”
She blushed and mumbled, “Thank you.” Then she hurried off, delighted—thrilled, even—by his words.
I’ve never felt that way as Somera, she thought, running down the corridor. It’s only ever Aremos who gets to experience that kind of thing, that kind of praise!
Nikolai always gives her good grades on her assignments, too. In the first few weeks, the students have handed back three short papers alongside some examples of problem solving and coding practice, and he has given her top marks for each. “Not just because you’re my favorite,” he told her. “Rather, you’re my favorite because you’re just so damned good.
“Do you play, yourself?” he asked. “A silly question, I know, but I’d love to know who your avatar is. What your play style is.”
“Oh, I try not to let people know… I would rather keep it a secret … it is just that, you know, it is like…” she stuttered, but he held up a hand in an apologetic gesture.
“Forgive me, I shouldn’t have pried,” he said. “Your relationship with your avatar is nobody’s business but your own. Please, forgive an old man for snooping!”
Now, Nikolai stands at the front of the room, talking about world building meta-design, showing the class a presentation on how best to begin working on any given level of a game. Somera’s hands begin to cramp up after a while, she is typing so many notes, so quickly, on her laptop. But it’s gold, it really is, and she has never been so excited to involve herself in the world of game building.
Perhaps one day I might even be able to create something like Sanguis, she thinks, as Nikolai continues to give his lecture. She surprises herself: This is the first time she has ever imagined working for anyone but the Pixel Academy and Lynch Media. It’s the first time she has ever imagined working on anything other than Arkhart.
But every world needs a Maker, she thinks. How cool would it be to become a dreadnought, instead?
She shakes her head, clearing such silly thoughts from her mind. She focuses on returning to herself, to her class, to Nikolai’s talk. Her hands begin to whir over her keyboard once more as she re-engages with the lecture.
Silly, silly thoughts, she thinks. Perhaps, perhaps…
Somera has become too engrossed in the world of Sanguis. She knows it. She’s engaged in both worlds, in Sanguis and Arkhart. However, Arkhart matters to her now only as a way into Sanguis, her lives in both paralleling the other as she fights in each world to save Meredith, body and soul.
But Somera’s engagement with the world of Sanguis has grown too deep. She can’t switch it off—she finds that talking to real people in the real world doesn’t have nearly enough excitement for her. So, each day, she goes to class, completes her assignments in the library, and heads home to play for a couple of hours on regular Arkhart. Then, as the night draws in, she logs into Sanguis for the real fun.
Somera feels torn, however—profoundly torn. One issue in particular divides her: She is split between what she wants to do and what she knows would be normal, reasonable behavior. One part of her wants to play by the rules and complete her degree, make some friends, and play around in the main game. However, the fun-seeking, adrenaline junkie part of her, the rebel who said no to all the marriage proposals, the adventurer who made he
r move to the States to get this degree—her dark side who attacked her warband after they dumped her—wants to completely immerse herself in the nightmare realm of Sanguis.
She can’t admit it to anyone, but Somera is already addicted to this game, to Sanguis and the darker, blood-fueled scope of its play style.
After every session, though, she can’t help but feel sick to her stomach about her dark fetish. Every day, she play-tests on new dark creatures, abominations in AI set loose for people like her to stalk. Every day, she kills other multiplayer avatars on the dreadnoughts’ orders, just so she can please them, just so she can show she’s worthy of their mission, their attention—their respect and adulation, even.
It is as guiltily satisfying as a guilty pleasure gets, she thinks to herself.
She’s beginning to leave herself behind, she feels. She’s uncaring, unconcerned. I leave what is weak, what lives to please the fatuous, and I retain what is great and strong, what will allow me to survive in this world and in Sanguis.
As she’s about to log into Sanguis one evening, her parents call her. She has just finished up for the night in Arkhart.
Aremos has carried on making a name for himself, being watched for his tremendous talents. Tonight, he made progress on a particularly challenging level of the quest that nearly robbed him of a life: He managed to work through a cave of demonic spites in a hidden pirates’ cove, banishing them before being confronted by their master, a diabolical sorcerer with subtle powers he hadn’t seen before. Rather than attacking, the sorcerer had instead cloaked himself, remaining invisible for the most part as he used mind games to manipulate Aremos, leading him on ever more treacherous routes toward his goal. The mission was to reach the cove’s deepest part, wherein lay a treasure map and a special compass with which he’d be able to navigate the next portion of the map. Jagged, high-rising rocks and treacherous gullies of water made the cave especially difficult to explore, and the sorcerer threw him off balance, making Aremos fall time and again. Then, he began to tempt Aremos, overcoming even his prodigious willpower, making him turn around a few times and nearly making Aremos leave the mission entirely before the battle mage was able to gather himself at the last moment and press on. A few times, the sorcerer put fake paths in his way, having him nearly cast himself down on the rocks to die with the odd misstep, and once, he even managed to have Aremos throw his sword and staff into a deep ravine before setting more spites on him, biting and tearing. Luckily, the pain brought on by the spites’ attacks made Aremos snap out of his trance, giving him the wherewithal and ability to summon his weapons back to him. He prevailed, but only just.