by Vic Connor
No matter though, he tells himself. He closes his eyes, going deep within himself even as that thunderous charge comes toward him. “Somera, Somera, where are you?” he calls out.
“I am here, Aremos,” the spirit replies. “And I am still angry, and I am still powerful.”
“Then the day is ours to win,” he tells her, opening his eyes once more. Two more centaurs are charging in, the chieftain and another much like him, as the other two circle around, cutting off his escape should he choose to flee. But I will not leave this hilltop until victory is mine, he thinks.
He throws a bolt of pure magic at the centaur chieftain. It’s not even a spell, it by no means comes out intricately—it’s just a projectile summoned from, and empowered by, the beast magic which flows so abundantly hereabouts. It rages, crackling green and red and brown, all the colors of summer’s great rage. It flies from Aremos’ outstretched palm with all of Somera’s anger bound within it and hits the chieftain directly.
The creature throws up his clawed hand as a shield and catches some of it. The rest of the magical energy smashes him fully in the chest, blasting his skin to ribbons, cracking bone and throwing him backward, halting his charge. He recovers quickly, strong as he is—but he’s limping now, unable to run into combat. So he staggers forward, ready to duel this foolish man rather than spear him through the heart as he may have wanted.
The other centaurs come in close, a dozen or so yards away, and Aremos casts his ace: Time Warp, unused yet in Sanguis. He’s not sure how well it will fare, but the gamble could be worth it.
It casts differently compared to Arkhart. In Arkhart, the spell comes out sudden and even: Everything within the wizard’s vicinity slows to a crawl, all moving at the same painful pace as the wizard and his comrades set to work. Here, however, the world reacts strangely to his casting: Sanguis allows no such order, no such easy win.
One of the centaurs is frozen entirely, stopped as if turned to stone. The chieftain himself jerks and struggles, as though his limbs are bound, the world shaking to a standstill around him. But he is strong, and he is as angry as any beast in a fight. He pulls himself forward, step by step, as though held back by many hands but not by time itself. The third centaur is more interesting still. He has almost reached Aremos when the time warp hits him. He pauses in mid-air, his spear leveled and his shield raised, but he continues to fly onward. Inanimate in his motions yet with the full force of his charge behind him, like a statue thrown by the hand of a giant, he careens forward on a collision course with Aremos.
Aremos dives to the side once more, but he hadn’t expected the movement and he jumps out of the way a little too late. The centaur buffets against him, catching him in the ribs with a hoof before crashing down to the ground, sprawled and unmoving, held in place by the frozen time. Aremos lands painfully, aware that he has some broken bones, possibly fractured his collar bone … he lies still, panting, in pain…
He reaches into his robes and takes a health potion, sipping a little from its flask. His bones knit back together, the pain disappears, and his HP replenishes. Aremos hadn’t anticipated using any of his health potion so soon in his quest, but these centaurs had turned out to be more powerful than he had assumed.
The chieftain is now upon him, still dragging himself, still jerky as he bleeds from the great gashes strewn across his torso. Aremos jumps to his feet and runs, outpacing the frozen centaur as the final seconds of the time warp slip away. The two outermost centaurs move at a tenth of their usual speed, though faster than they would have, had they been cursed in Arkhart proper. Aremos dispatches them quickly, throwing lightning bolts to tear through each of them. He does the same to the final centaur, the one bound in place and lying sprawled on the floor, spraying him with flickering light and killing him on the spot.
As the time warp breaks, the chieftain canters over to him, yelling madly, his claw and his spear ready for the attack. He sweeps his clawed hand around, nearly beheading Aremos, too fast and too skillful for Aremos to parry. Were Aremos a master swordsman or a stronger warrior, were he a quicker creature like an elf, then he might be able to hold his own. But this chieftain is too good for him, too powerful and strong: Aremos ducks once, parries once, and then the claw catches him with a backhand across the chest, sending him flying back six feet, his HP counting down to nearly a half.
In quick succession, Aremos casts a number of minor projectiles and curses, throwing everything at this beast, but they don’t do much. They catch the chieftain fully at times, tearing chunks of muscle and skin, but he ignores it, bearing the pain and advancing. He stabs Aremos through the shoulder with his spear from five feet away, twists it and throws him to one side. Aremos collapses on his back, in pain, the Staff of Adamant rolling away from him as the chieftain rides past, swinging that claw down at him, catching him in the temple as he tries to dash out of the way.
I am with you, Aremos… My rage is yours…
The spirit of Somera wells within Aremos’ heart. If this quest was in Arkhart, he’d have won this level ages ago, but Sanguis was designed to be harder, to test the most promising, to push them harder than ever.
And we’ll rise to it, we’ll meet this challenge…
The centaur chieftain gallops back, his spear raised high for the final blow. Aremos throws all of his fear and anger into the earth itself, flattening his palms against the loamy grass, and at once bushes and rows of thorns spring up, wrapping themselves around him, shielding him so that the spear is battered harmlessly away.
He points one hand toward the chieftain, roaring, and the thorns ripple away until they encircle the chieftain, binding his arms and legs so that he’s held still, bleeding from a hundred little pricks as well as from the greater wounds caused by Aremos’ previous spells. Aremos stands, holding out his hand, and the Staff of Adamant jumps back into his palm. He focuses his will into his staff, channeling his power, and releases one last projectile directly between the chieftain’s eyes.
The centaur’s head is blown clean off, smashed into pulp. The thorny vines die and wither, receding back into the ground as the beast’s body flops down to the grass, dead.
Aremos reaches once more for his potion, restoring his health but using up nearly the whole bottle. He only has a few left now. If I’m to win back the soul of Meredith, I’ll need to use myself more cleverly than this, he thinks. The hubris of Arkhart can’t prevail: I need to up my game.
Aremos walks onward, up the hill and into the mountain range, the mouth of which the centaurs had been guarding. He proceeds through the next two levels that night, learning with each stage how better to channel his anger, smiting his foes with a power he has not felt before. He ends the night fighting a trio of half-giants, all well-armed and all warped the same as the other beasts in this place. By the time he’s done with them, two are burning, wrecked, and the third is fleeing him, pursued all the way to the horizon by Aremos’ curses. The entire surrounding forest feels alive to Aremos with the reach of his magic.
He channels the last of his night’s power into the roaring flames as they consume the two half-giants, making them blaze and turning them to ashes outright. They fall to the ground with large, dull thuds, and Aremos bathes for a while in the warmth as their carcasses burn.
It’s after these fights that he finally gains a new level, likely because he has learned the ways of a new magic type. He takes a brief glance at his fact sheet, satisfied.
Level: 32
Unallocated XP: 104
HP: 560 / 560
Magical Power: 770 / 770
Agility: 54
Melee Weapon Skill: 38
Ballistic Accuracy: 33
Damage: 51
Resistance: 39
Morale: 65
Core Skills: Battle mage
By the time he finishes the day, the chat rooms of Sanguis are lit up with talk of this mad battle mage. Clips of him defeating the mountain ranges’ wild inhabitants are bandied about for all to watch in disbelief.
/> Very soon, everyone learns of his ferocity and skill.
Chapter Eleven
A few weeks pass, and Somera continues her isolation. As San Francisco grows merry with festivities—so much so that even where she lives, in the Pakistani community, there is a feeling of elevation, of joy to disrupt the midwinter blues—she pulls herself away from life. She has nearly a full month off from college but, generous as her stipend is, she can’t afford a flight home, so she stays on her own in her rented apartment.
Her assignments are easy enough to complete. Sometimes, Somera sits downstairs, talking with her landlords and their children and grandchildren, eating pakoras, drinking chai, and typing away on her laptop, bombing through her essays. But for the most part, she keeps herself secluded, locked away in her room as she delves ever deeper into the world of Sanguis, working through nearly to the ends of her quests in both worlds.
It has been long, slow, and frustrating work to complete the missions. Arkhart has seemed both tedious and strenuous, whereas the constant uncertainty within Sanguis has played her nerves almost to the breaking point at times. Her spells often don’t work as she expects them to, and her opponents often show no weaknesses in the face of even her most frantic assaults. Yet she battles on, laying them low by doing as the dreadnought bade her: Combining her intelligence and her passion to overcome the deficits of her casting…
…Combining his intelligence and his passion to overcome the deficits of his casting, Aremos soars through the heavens, falling, falling, as everything around him burns. It burns at his hand. Seconds before, he’d been riding a great, white-winged Pegasus high above the clouds, doing battle with a mighty drake—a dragon whose nest lies in a nearby volcanic island in Arkhart’s oceanic territories.
The Pegasus was a funny quirk. Last night, Aremos had spent several hours in both Arkhart and then, later, in Sanguis, creeping through mountainous terrain. His mission in Arkhart was to subdue and ally himself with the white-winged horse, whose lair was at the pinnacle of another island, near to where he had been fighting. Using a combination of wit and wonder, Aremos was put to the test: He had to charm the Pegasus into servitude, then use psychic casting to control it. Neither were strong points of his—these subtler forms of magic have always eluded him, reliant as he is on the channeling of white magic to blow his opponents to pieces. The closest he has come to these more subtle forms is a simple befuddlement, which is useful in combat for distracting his enemies, as he did so effectively to the demonic pirate captain not so long ago. But to buy, equip, and perfect a series of charms and psychic spells, all within one mission, was a stretch.
Aremos prevailed, of course, gaining himself a great deal of XP in the process, though it took him a while. He’d managed to stun the Pegasus as it landed in its nest, where Aremos had been waiting for it. Then he’d hexed it, immobilizing its wings so that it couldn’t take off until he was ready for it to. He’d set to work, aligning his mind with the animal’s, subduing it mentally and placing it under his control. Slowly, a symbiosis was formed. Aremos learned that he didn’t need to control it by force but, rather, by opening himself up, they could intermingle their thoughts and, eventually, they could soar as one, above the heavens.
Then, when Aremos logged in to complete his next mission in the mountain ranges of Sanguis, he was tasked with a similar job. A Nightmare was haunting the peaks of three of the tallest mountains, and he was to break its will and bond it to him in servitude. This was relatively easy in the beginning, as all he needed to do was fill the sky with lightning, wounding the beast grievously to ground it. He found that, by opening himself to the magical winds of Sanguis, he could adapt them to his will, channeling his own power back into them in a repeating loop. This was part of what the dreadnought had meant when he’d told Aremos to master the ways of operating in Sanguis, Aremos knew. The laws of nature themselves seemed to behave differently than anywhere else in the gaming community. In this manner, Aremos was able to amplify his Lightning Storm to twenty times its usual reach, crackling his own power through the heavens for a half mile all around. It worked. The beast fell, stunned and exhausted, and crashed onto a nearby peak.
Aremos opened a portal, dismissing his Lightning Storm, and walked through to Nightmare’s location as the last of the static electricity died down, buzzing through every pixel in the frame. Then, arriving in Nightmare’s new, temporary sanctuary, Aremos could fight it. He saw it up close for the first time.
It was a Pegasus. Or, at least, it may have been at one time. Its willpower and HP were both double those of the white-winged Pegasus of Arkhart, its skin was gray and scaly, and its forelegs ended in vicious-looking claws. Its wings were leather pinions, rather than the graceful feathers of its counterpart in Arkhart, and its eyes blazed red with an inner flame. However, strong as it may have been, it was in bad shape when Aremos found it. Its skin was smoking and it was stunned; its HP was down by thirty percent from both the lightning strikes and the trauma of landing so dramatically. It could still fight—indeed, it would prove a challenge—but Aremos had the upper hand from the beginning.
Rather than opening himself up to it, however, Aremos had to break it. He recognized it for the demon it was and wreathed its body in White Fire as, coming to its senses with this newfound threat, it tried to charge him. The White Fire caused it excruciating pain and dropped its HP down to forty percent. Wounding this animal was no issue, but Aremos had no idea how to turn it into his ally.
The animal … the beast…
After he had dimmed the demonic fire in its soul with his own white magic, he switched back to the beast magic he had been perfecting over the previous missions. Aremos raised his hand and an ethereal horn wove itself into being, knit from threads of his own magic. He brought the horn to his lips and blew, channeling the animalism of his own heart into his breath. As he did so, he watched the beast’s willpower drop—lower and lower, until it finally stood still, allowing him to approach without it attacking him.
Then, Aremos held out both his hand and his staff, chanting, and gold chains leapt from him, wrapping themselves around Nightmare’s neck and pinching its throat. He laced White Fire in with the chains, ready to blaze hot should the beast disobey him.
And now, we are ready, he thought. He leapt onto the beast’s back for their first flight.
He’ll use it later tonight, when he’s done in Arkhart, to complete his next mission. For now, however, he’s falling from the skies, through the thick clouds and down toward the volcanic island below. His Pegasus has died, its wings burned off and its skin tattered. It falls not too far from him, a dead weight, all of its grace and beauty spent. The dragon proved nearly too much.
They clashed above its lair, and Aremos and the Pegasus blazed with their sorcerous enchantments. The drake was wiry, thin and fast—it evaded most of Aremos’ attacks and answered them with its own flaming breath. Though nowhere near as tough as Wyvern_hardmod9—lacking the Makers’ own magic and the near immortality granted by their design—it was still a mighty foe.
He lashed it with projectiles, cursed it, hexed it… He paused for a little while and threw a golden net around its wings to sink it, but it fought off every attack. Finally, things came to a head when it charged in, its reawakened breath so strong that it killed the Pegasus, throwing Aremos off in the process. It caught the dead steed in its claws, tearing it apart and throwing it down after Aremos. But as Aremos was unseated, so too did he work his greatest magic—he had been waiting on the dragon coming close enough for him to do so.
He drew his sword, imbuing it with power, and threw it into the dragon’s stomach as it descended. The weapon caught, slicing through the scales and the leathery flesh, sticking in. It only took three percent of the dragon’s HP, leaving it with a full seventy even as the Pegasus died and Aremos fell to his own death. But it was enough.
Falling now, Aremos grips his staff tight and bellows an incantation. The dragon comes after him, readying to snap him up in i
ts jaws in mid-air. Foolish wizard, most would think: It would take a warband of four or five to down this beast—the hubris of taking it on alone is astounding.
But as it nears, Aremos releases his spell. The Lightning Storm sprays outward, every stray flicker catching the dragon. Some of its power goes into its head and its limbs, robbing the dragon of a further five percent of its HP. However, most of it travels straight into Aremos’ sword hilt, poking out of the dragon’s stomach like a lightning rod.
The dragon burns, screeching, as its HP drops down all the way to thirty-one percent. Its willpower is gone and, with it, a large part of its morale. Its scales burn and drop off in many places, leaving it with its defense in tatters.
Aremos casts again and again, lashing the dragon with a few more focused projectiles, aiming for those bare parts where it is most vulnerable until, with a great heave, he throws his last spell and smites the monster. It dies and drops, crashing into the side of the volcano, its body breaking.
Meanwhile, as Aremos falls, he gathers the last of his magical power to his aid and, as he focuses, the clouds above him begin to move, to coalesce. The air around him grows agitated, beginning to whirl and, impossibly, to thicken. He stands tall, staff in hand, as his descent slows. A whirling vortex is at his feet, the same tornado he had used against the demonic necromancer so many weeks ago.
After riding the tornado to the lip of the volcano, he dissipates the wind and falls the last couple of feet, landing comfortably on the solid rock. Below, in a vast crater, smoke and ash swirl, the smell of sulfur pervading the air. And below, even further down, the dragon’s body has met its end.
A good day’s work, Aremos thinks. The demon is deep within the belly of the volcano. The dragon was the demon’s greatest guardian, and now, it is slain; Aremos, its hunter, is another step closer to his quarry. I’ll fight the demon within days, he thinks, Meredith’s body will be safe.