by Eric Nylund
“Fine by me.”
I wondered if Grimhalt had a magic item that gave him such supernatural overconfidence? What an idiot. This guy had no idea he was dealing with the person who’d defeated the Grand Imperial Champion of Disorder, Her Greatness, Dominota Koroleva.
I better not get too confident, either. Morgana’s instincts were usually right.
“Let me see.” Grimhalt looked like he was ticking off boxes in his interface. “Four-level handicap. Winner declared when the other guy’s at half health. Non-lethal damage. A hundred quins. Me never hassling you guys if you beat me.” He grinned like this was a joke. “Oh, one more thing. No spells before combat. You okay with that?”
“Hmm.” I pretended to think this over.
No spells prior to combat gave me a huge advantage. As soon as we started, I’d slip into the aether and fire off a Perfect Motion and tap all the ley lines I wanted. Grimhalt would never know what hit him.
“I guess we can do that.”
“Great!” He cracked his knuckles. “Let’s get started. I’ve got to catch up to Harlix and Cassie before it gets too dark.”
He sounded like a kid who had to get home before dinner or he’d catch hell. He also acted like he had this in the bag.
Had I missed something? I didn’t think so…
I double-checked and accepted our terms, set a seven-second countdown, and shut my interface.
ALERT!
You are dueling Grimhalt, Cleric of the Wild Hunt.
Both contestants have accepted the terms of the duel.
Good luck!
We moved six paces apart.
The crowd shuffled in closer.
Grimhalt swung his mace in a wide circle with a hurricane-like whoosh.
Everyone backed off.
I concentrated—my perceptions tunneled, and I emerged in the vast null space-time of the aether. I noted a few sparking ley lines that probably represented electrical forces. Most of the lines within my mental reach, though, were turquoise and fumed with spectral fog. I caught a whiff of peppermint and felt pinpricking gooseflesh crawl over my astral body.
Elemental cold. I could use that.
When I’d first seen Grimhalt he’d climbed out of a red-hot bonfire of a pit. That chain armor of his with its ghostly flames likely imparted fire resistance. That tracked with the extensive scarring on his face. The guy must have been seriously burned before and wouldn’t want to go through that again.
Cold, however, I doubted he’d be prepared for.
I stepped back into normal space-time, trying hard to keep my poker face.
As promised, no spells before combat.
BEGIN THE DUEL? YES / NO
I nodded at YES.
The crowd shouted encouragements and taunts.
START COMBAT IN…
7…
We shuffled a step closer to one another.
Grimhalt donned his horned helmet.
I halted at the edge of his reach with that mace. Perfect.
6…
I’d rush him—get inside his effective swing radius—land a few punches, maybe a kick—then dance out before he could react.
5…
Could I halve his health before he even got in a shot?
4…
On the other hand, rushing him was the obvious move.
How would he try and counter that?
3…
Did it matter? I’d be in the aether and spin up my Perfect Motion buff before this lummox could blink.
2…
Wait a second, was he laughing inside his helmet?
1…
Obviously trying to psyche me out.
GO!
I entered the aether.
Grimhalt froze mid-lunge—mace already raised over his head.
I was impressed. This guy was fast.
I powered up my Perfect Motion buff, grabbed a double fistful of the icy blue ley lines, and wrapped loops about each hand.
The cold burned my fingers, hands, and shocked my heart with needles of pain. I remembered practicing barefoot in the snow outside the Domicile of the Sleeping Dragon and how young Hector Savage of Earth caught a snowball in the face, sidearmed by his maniacal brother.
More induced memories and synesthesia. Neat. But distracting.
I focused.
So far, so good. I still had plenty of spiritual mana but was down by a third of my reflexive mana. I might have overdone it a bit using two Energy Taps.
Still, I shouldn’t worry too much. This was going to be over fast.
I shifted back to normal space-time—coiled to spring.
Grimhalt was right in front of me. He swung—
And I…
There was a blank spot in my memory—
then I watched the sky reddening as the sun lowered toward the horizon—
and, hey, a few puffy clouds were spinning overhead.
I was… floating?
And tumbling through the air.
Then it hit me… he’d hit me!
First.
Before I’d even moved.
Not just hit me, either. He’d been an All-Star slugger, and I’d done my best impression of a slow-pitch softball.
I sailed over the wall.
Pain announced its arrival loud and clear, only slightly muted by my rapidly diminishing shock.
My ribcage had collapsed and bone shards punctured… I wasn’t sure, a bunch of soft bits inside.
I fired off two Spiritual Regenerations.
My insides melded together, just as painful as their separation, but my health bar surged to full, after coming perilously close to the halfway mark.
And I hadn’t even got in a single hit.
How had he done it? I mean the physics of his swing were obvious, but how was he so darned fast?
Wire Work righted me like a cat and I floated toward the ground.
WARNING!
YOU ARE ABOUT TO CROSS THE GAME BOUNDARY
Past the Game’s boundary, many interface functions, game rules, alert systems, and other features cease to work.
Experience points and achievements earned beyond the boundary will be awarded upon reentry.
And then I finally understood how deep the hot water was in this end of the pool.
Earlier, I’d seen the alert about the Game’s boundary being the far wall of the Waypoint Inn’s compound, but never connected the dots to Grimhalt’s request to fight next to it.
The Game still existed beyond the boundary; I was still gypsy elf Hektor, Spirit Warrior and Mage of the Line. Many rules wouldn’t be in effect, though… like the ones covering duels and PvP combat.
I inwardly screamed in rage at my naiveté.
Grimhalt had had this all worked out. He’d somehow known he’d get in that home-run shot and launch me outside the Game… where he’d then be free to kill me.
I tucked, hit the grass, and rolled.
I was thirty feet outside the compound’s wall.
And damn, the guy had already run out the front gate, rocketed around, and sprinted toward me, each of his strides eating up yards of terrain.
I braced, not to attack, but to dodge.
Whatever speed magic he had, I had to assume he’d hit me again before I could return the favor. I couldn’t afford to take another blow like the first.
He was on me—and swung his blur of a mace.
I rolled to one side.
He left a crater where I had been.
I kicked the back of his leg.
He went down on one knee.
I followed up with a punch to the back of his head.
Crackling ice covered his helmet. Nice side effect from the channeled elemental cold.
I hit him twice more so hard he rocked back and forth like a speed bag. The demon bone knuckles under my skin added weight and umph enough to dent the metal of his horned helm.
He swept his mace out blind in a great arc.
I had to back off or be flattened.
He got up and tore off his ice-covered helmet.
My fists continued to fume like they’d been dipped in liquid nitrogen, so the ley lines I’d attached must still be pumping out cold. I’d felt, however, after my first two punches, more mana had drained to pay for the extra damage on that third strike of mine. I better be careful. My reflexive mana was down to 57/120.
I darted inside his reach—chopped his wrist, hoping he’d drop his weapon.
The metal of his gauntlet groaned from the stress of the extreme cold. Grimhalt grunted with pain. Bits of the armor pinged and broke as he forced his hand to clench his mace tighter.
He drew the weapon back. He was too choked up to strike at full power, but he was going to get in a swing.
I stepped into the aether.
I had to figure out what was happening.
I wished I could move in the aether, but hey right now, I was just grateful I could hit the pause button and think for a few relative seconds.
His inbound mace was going to connect, and choked grip or not, it would hurt.
My options were to try to dodge, block, or take my chances and counter-attack.
Could I do enough damage to significantly slow him down with more cold? Unlikely.
That left dodge or block.
Dodge gave me the best chance to survive, but it’d place me outside the range where I was most effective.
Block? Ha. No—I wasn’t quite ready to re-enter orbit, thank you.
Or maybe it didn’t have to turn out that way.
I had more options right in front of me.
I grabbed a sparking line of electricity—wincing as it nipped my skin. My hair stood on end. My teeth buzzed and my tongue curled as if I’d licked a nine-volt battery.
If I blocked Grimhalt’s attack holding this, the resulting discharge might effectively taser him in all that nice conductive metal armor.
With all the jumping into and out of the aether, however, those blasts of cold and prepping this shot of electricity—I’d burned through almost all my reflexive mana: down to 8/120.
I didn’t dare spend any more time here.
I stepped back into the fight.
His mace was a smear of grey—the strike more punch than a swing at this distance.
I barely got my hand into position to block.
Mere millimeters from my outstretched fingers, lightning flashed from me—to his mace—his armor.
Between us, a double thunderclap split the world apart.
I flew backward, tumbled to a stop, and miraculously got to my feet.
My hand had snapped at the wrist. Between the delicate and shattered metacarpal bones it felt as if a thousand volts still ricocheted.
I fired off a Spiritual Regeneration and flicked my hand as I did so to give the bones a chance to heal right. That hurt.
A dozen feet from where I stood, Grimhalt was knocked on his ass.
He lay there, smoldering, tiny sparks arcing over his chain armor.
But… he shook it off and got up.
Back to square one.
“I’ll give it to you,” he panted. “You put up a fight. A decent one. I’ll carve it on your grave marker.”
He hit me.
I didn’t even see him do it.
Later, I’d piece together it had been an overhand stroke. It had to have been a critical hit to my left leg as he shattered both tibia and fibula, pulped the muscle—and I went down.
But not out.
The injured leg was unresponsive, but I managed a kick with the other, nailed him in the stomach.
He staggered back two steps.
My health was down to a quarter. While Grimhalt was off balance I had time to use two Spiritual Regenerations—not enough to fully fix my leg, but enough to keep me from slipping into shock.
Now, my spiritual mana was dangerously low.
And I was out of options.
Like a strong man at a ring-the-bell carnival attraction, he raised his monster mace for a coup de grâce—brought it down at supersonic speed.
I tried to roll away but knew I wasn’t going to be fast enough.
There was a thud.
Dirt and sod pelted me.
He’d missed? How?
I blinked.
Someone stood between me and Grimhalt.
Morgana? …No.
It was a dwarf brandishing a short wooden staff.
Another player, whose placard read:
Melmak Argenté-Wolfram
Wizard / LEVEL 1
Heroes of Thera
Melmak? Heroes of Thera?
Elmac?
As impossible as it seemed (because Grimhalt and his mace had to outweigh Elmac many times over), he’d deflected that strike.
“Now lad,” Elmac told Grimhalt, “that’ll be enough of that.”
CHAPTER 24
Grimhalt stared down at Elmac—then at his own mace.
Confusion melted his murderous grin as he tried to understand why my brains weren’t splattered all over his weapon.
I was wondering the same thing.
He grunted, raised the mace, and brought it down once more.
I was so stunned to be alive I could only watch as Elmac brought his staff in line with the strike and again deflected it.
Thud!
Stones and dirt rained down.
Elmac had made it look easy.
The new Elmac, or excuse me, Melmak Argenté-Wolfram was a dwarf with wavy flame-red hair shot with gold, a bushy beard of the same colors, and a wicked slash of a smile (all teeth intact). I’d guess he was in his late twenties in equivalent human years. He was four feet tall, on the slim side of the standard dwarven stout, and possessed an air of meditative calm that was kind of irritating given my life-and-death circumstances.
And he had only one arm. The right.
Where his left arm should have been, the sleeve of his simple hemp robe was pinned.
Either he’d lost it on his journey here from High Hill or… he’d cut it off?
No way. Even Elmac wasn’t that hardcore, no matter how awesome that magical prosthetic arm of his was.
Hang on… a first-level, one-armed wizard, wielding a simple staff was a match for a ninth-level cleric wielding an enchanted mace of death?
I clearly had taken too many blows to the head.
As Grimhalt and I were trying to figure this out, Elmac poked the cleric in the gut, his knee, and smashed his boot.
Grimhalt jerked in pain.
How were Elmac’s strikes getting through that heavy chain armor?
Whatever he was doing, and however he was doing it, he was just getting started.
He rapped Grimhalt’s gauntlet, spun the staff, and nailed his thumb.
Grimhalt dropped his mace and knelt to retrieve the weapon.
Before he could, Elmac walloped him over the head.
I started to rise.
“Stay down,” Elmac said without looking at me. “You be safer that way.”
I stayed. Who was I to argue with the dwarven equivalent of a Jedi master?
Grimhalt shook his head to clear the bell ringing he’d taken and flexed his gauntlet with a ring-popping crunch. A new mace of a greenish metal appeared in his hand. It was half the size of the previous and glowed with a blue haze of magic. A backup weapon, no doubt, from his inventory.
Elmac, however, was on him—whack—whack—WHACK.
Grimhalt flinched with each blow, and in turn, did his best to flatten his diminutive opponent.
The little guy deflected and effortlessly stepped out of the way of each attack—and while he was doing it his smile grew and he casually landed another half dozen blows.
Grimhalt chanted mystical words as he took three steps back.
Elmac mirrored every one of Grimhalt’s steps with two of his own. He jabbed the cleric in his solar plexus, short-circuiting his spell.
“Furantur etyes vita—oouphff!
I gave up trying to figure out how Elmac was
doing this and just enjoyed the show.
Elmac poked away—finding every exposed square millimeter in Grimhalt’s defense—then unceremoniously tripped the mighty cleric.
The dwarf stood over him and beat him like a rug.
In the nearby grass a shadow slinked closer. A black panther soundlessly emerged and padded toward me.
“I think he’s got this,” I told Morgana.
Elmac kept pounding the now balled-up Grimhalt until the dwarven wizard was slick with sweat. “Had your fill ’o fighting, lad?” Elmac asked him.
There came no answer.
“Guess so then.”
Morgana was human again. She set her hands on my mangled leg and yanked to straighten the bones.
The pain was a scalpel slash along my leg. I clenched so hard, it stifled my scream.
Healing magic poured through her fingertips.
“Much appreciated,” I whispered with a trembling exhale.
Without a word to me, Morgana ran to Elmac.
She hugged him so fiercely, they almost fell over. She then planted kisses on both cheeks, and one on the lips… lingering… long… deep.
Elmac reluctantly, very reluctantly, disengaged. “I’ve never tasted anything sweeter, lass.” He wiped away her tears. “No need for those. ’Twas never in any danger with the Free Trial nor this—” He kicked dirt onto Grimhalt.
“Hey, don’t take this the wrong way,” I said, “but you are El—”
Elmac shook his head and nodded toward the Inn.
The crowd who’d gathered to see Grimhalt and I beat each other senseless had come around the long way through the front gate and headed this way.
Elmac stepped to Grimhalt’s mace. He touched it and it vanished (presumably into his inventory). “That be one heavy weapon,” he said and waddled back to the cleric.
Elmac slapped Grimhalt. Hard. “We’re done, you dolt. Let’s finish this so I can get on with some proper drinking.”
Yes, this was Elmac all right.
Grimhalt un-balled from his protective fetal position. He bled from his nose and ears. He shook his head and blinked. “Who—? What are you?”