The whole massive group of guards that had escorted Seth and Aurora piled back through the doorway and surrounded them. Seth was jostled out the door and then out of the building, heading for the tall city wall.
Chapter 17
Seth had never considered himself to be particularly afraid of heights, but standing atop the city wall, knowing he’d been brought up there for the express purpose of being booted off unless he came up with some information he couldn’t possibly know did a little bit to change that.
The raw terror of being in Ybarra’s presence had faded almost as soon as they’d left the room he was in, but it had been quickly replaced by a new kind of dread, springing from the knowledge that Aurora and the old adventurer wouldn’t be coming back from a dive off the wall like Seth himself would.
At one point along the walk to the city wall, the pack of guards had been forced to stretch, then to fit down a slim alley. Seth had ended up near the bald man. The man looked at him and said, “Ivon.”
Seth was momentarily perplexed before realizing that the man was telling Seth his name. Seth replied, “I’m Seth.” One of his guards smacked him across the back of the head with his sheathed sword and told him to be quiet. The hit had only done a few damage points, but it exposed the man’s level to Seth in his combat log as twenty-one. Not much higher than Seth himself.
On a whim, Seth willed that Ivon be added to their party. Seth saw the man jump slightly in surprise at the window that must have appeared in front of his face, and then Ivon joined their party. Seth immediately pulled up his statistics, wanting to see who he may be fighting and dying with soon.
Ivon Main Class: Level 36 Scout Second Class: Level 9 Rogue 2,948/2,948 Health Points Factions: Adventurers’ Guild
Seth was blown away at the man’s level. Perhaps they did have a fighting chance if they could get weapons, and Seth could summon Pahan.
Up on the wall, wind buffeting them from both sides, Seth began to feel panicked. A few other soldiers had started loitering around, waiting to see what happened, and Seth silently cursed their presence, as each additional soldier lowered their chances of escaping. Not all of the soldiers had actually ascended the final stone staircase onto the wall as it wasn’t terribly wide, and there wouldn’t be room for all of them to stand without spreading very far out.
Instead, around a dozen of their escort stood below on another level of stone that ran along the inside of the massive stone walls. The staircase to get up to the wall was relatively slim, so not many guards could get up it at once. Perhaps they had a chance.
Seth expected Freya to give them some kind of last chance to fess up before she had Ivon thrown from the wall, but they pushed him right to the edge so Seth spoke up, saying, “Wait! Take me first. Please.” Ivon’s eyes shot towards him then, and Seth saw a strange mixture of surprise and guilt. The guards pushing him stopped and looked to Freya for approval.
She seemed to ponder it for a moment before saying, “Sure. If the man wants to die first like a coward, we can grant him that. I wouldn’t want to see my friends go over the wall either. Better to go first.” A sick smile crossed her face, but Seth’s glance over her shoulder must have tipped her off, since she whirled around in an instant, globe of angry purple lighting sitting in her palm, ready to throw.
Pahan stood tall and proud several yards down the wall, wind blowing his white fur, lips peeled back to reveal razor sharp fangs. A ludicrously deep growl emanated from his barrel chest, rumbling the stone wall beneath their feet, and he took a single menacing step forward.
Everyone utterly froze. Pahan’s sudden appearance had spurred every human’s mind to hard-reboot, saying something like, Surely, there isn’t an eight-foot-tall lion standing on top of this city wall. I probably just need to wait a second and it will turn out I’m just seeing someone’s bed sheets drying on a line.
When the giant lion turned out to actually be a giant lion, less than two seconds later, the wall erupted into utter chaos.
Freya let her lightning bolt loose at the big cat, but he didn’t even flinch as it flew right through his face and out of his back, continuing on into the sky.
Pahan took another menacing step forward, completely unharmed by the spell. All of the guards grew even more scared of the giant beast than they had previously been.
Aurora head-butted the guard nearest her, and dual streams of blood erupted from his nose as he stumped backwards, dropping his sword. Aurora picked it up with her bound hands, teeth barred like an animal, drops of the man’s blood speckled across her face.
One of the guards escorting Ivon tried to tackle him to the ground as he sprinted towards Aurora and Seth, but he missed and went sailing clean off the edge of the wall, a high-pitched scream issuing from his lips.
Seth activated Quick Change and felt the weight of his new claymore settle on his back. He reached over his shoulder with his bound hands and drew the sword, but switching outfits had left him armorless. For the moment, most of the guards actually on the wall seemed focused on Pahan, so Seth set the blade tip down on the stone and sawed at the ropes binding his wrists.
When his hands were free, Seth threw his sword to the ground, activated Quick Change again so that Enrique’s armor sat over his body, and picked the sword back up again. He was ready to fight. Seth let loose a wordless bellow as he swung at the nearest guard, but the man simply dodged to the side, freakishly fast, and planted a front-kick square in Seth’s chest. Seth flew back several feet, right over the edge of the wall.
Seth had a moment of stunned Zen as he started his long descent off the wall. His part was over too quickly, and he hadn’t done as much as he had hoped to for Aurora. He could only hope that they would find a way out of the situation themselves.
The man who’d Sparta kicked Seth off the wall was still visible as he fell, peering over the edge at him, and everything seemed to move in slow motion as the two made eye contact. Seth crossed the distance threshold then, and in the back of his mind a little ding was almost audible as his Charge skill became open for use.
A thunderbolt of disbelief shot through Seth, and he wondered if it was too good to be true. He made the decision, having literally nothing to lose by trying, and activated Charge.
Seth’s body, seemingly of its own accord, shot a foot forward and made contact with the wall that was now streaking past him. Somehow, unbelievably, his foot actually sunk into the stone, his leg muscles bunching, and his descent totally stopped. He was precariously balanced there for a mere second, completely defying physics.
He’d only fell a few feet at that point, and he looked up to see utter terror in the guard’s eyes as he tried to backpedal away from the edge of the wall. Like a coiled spring, Seth’s leg shot straight and downward, like he was stepping up a stair, and he flew back up the side of the wall, sword raised to the heavens like a pissed off pointy rocket ship.
Seth was on the guard in an instant, his sword sinking into the man’s abdomen, stopping his upward momentum. Seth’s feet alighted on the wall again. The guard locked up, and Seth took advantage of the stun effect by brutally ripping his sword out of his torso, spinning around behind the man, and shoving him off the wall. Seth felt a pang of regret that he hadn’t been able to take the time to line up an awesome Sparta kick, but figured pushing his enemies off tall things still had to look pretty cool.
Seth scanned the fight and tried to gain his bearings, only to find that almost all of the guards, including the ones who’d been just loitering to watch their execution, were on the ground in various states of dead or dying. They were all riddled with arrows. One man several feet from Seth had Fearless, the sword he’d gotten from Enrique, gripped in his hand. Seth pried the man’s bloody fingers from the shining sword and took it, sheathing the big claymore on his back.
Seth looked back to where he had last seen Ivon and his formless questions were answered. He’d somehow gotten ahold of a bow, probably from one of the guards. Ivon drew the string back and Seth sa
w light blue energy coalesce around the arrow for a moment before the man released his draw. The arrow streaked toward one of the last standing figures. Freya stood near Pahan, still releasing bolts of lightning towards the great lion.
He’d continued to close on her, but had taken his time to keep her occupied. She’d backed up almost to the edge of the top wall. Seth saw Ivon’s glowing arrow slam into the meat of her upper arm, and as if the arrow had weighed as much as a truck, she went flying off the wall and down twenty feet to the lower level of the stone wall below. She didn’t immediately move.
Seth found Aurora halfway down a flight of stairs leading to the top of the wall from the next level down, ending one of the Howlingshield soldiers who had tried to run from the fight.
Seth racked his brain trying to think up a good way to escape, but Ivon took care of it for him, digging a huge length of rope from a crate that sat on the edge of the wall and beginning to tie one end of it around a battlement.
He had a slightly looney look in his eye as he hollered, “Get over here, kids! We’re going down the fast way!”
Chapter 18
Ivon, it turned out, really deserved the title of adventurer. He had finished tying the rope around the battlement, and then tossed the rest over the edge of the wall. He didn’t even wait for Seth or Aurora to devise a plan at that point, just whooped something about beating the youngsters to the bottom before hopping over the edge and starting to slide down the rope, halting himself every few yards to regulate his speed.
Seth motioned Aurora to go next once Ivon had made some good progress, and she looked like she wanted to argue about it, but Seth just said, “Hello, I’m immortal!” She went ahead of him then, though she didn’t look too happy about it.
Seth looked to Pahan while he waited a few seconds for Aurora to make some progress down the rope. He said, “You did great, partner. That was honestly some of the scariest walking I’ve ever seen.” Seth could feel the stupid grin plastered across his face, but didn’t try to hide it. Before Pahan could answer, Seth continued, “Honestly though, Pahan, thank you. You are the only reason we even have a chance at escaping this. I’m going to re-summon you once we get a little distance between us and the city. Is that alright?”
The big lion rumbled and nodded his head once, and Seth thought he could almost detect a sly grin on his feline features. He started down the rope and activated the skill to dismiss Pahan back to the void, not wanting a giant lion acting as a beacon to our position as we tried to escape the city, and knowing he could only carry two of us.
By the time Seth reached the bottom of the rope his hands felt like they were on fire. He flexed them and hissed at how raw his palms felt, but shook his head and tried to focus on getting away alive. He glanced toward Aurora and Ivon, who had been crouched low against the wall, and caught sight of the broken bodies of the two guards who’d fallen off the wall.
Seth cringed when he imagined how close that had come to being his body, and then felt some guilt about the fact that these men wouldn’t come back to life like he would have.
Seth shook those feelings away, though, as those exact men had been ready to end the lives of both him and some of his only friends in Morgenheim, and if he had to choose them or their enemies to fall, he’d choose an enemy every time.
Aurora said, “Follow me, watch your step,” and began moving toward the deep ditch that surrounded the city. They were able to pick their way down the steep dirt walls and around the spiky wooden poles that stuck out at odd angles along the bottom of the ditch. As the group climbed out the other side of the ditch, Seth heard a faint yelling and looked back up the wall.
Freya stood at the top of the wall, pointing at them, and yelling something, though the wind took her voice away. Seth laughed and flipped her the bird, though he realized it probably meant nothing to these people.
Aurora shouted and warned him, but it was too late. A massive bolt of lightning descended from the clear blue sky in a fraction of a second, striking the female mage on the wall. Instead of ending there though, the energy routed through her body and shot out of her fingertip, directly at Seth.
Seth dove to his left, but the bolt hit him barely a foot into the jump. Indescribable pain racked his body, all of his muscles locking up at once as the heavenly power raged through his body and out the soles of his feet. Blessedly, it was over quickly.
Level 39 mage (Freya) critically hits you for 648 damage with Redirect Lightning.
You have died.
9,548 experience deducted, your level has been reduced from 18 to 17. 1 experience remaining until level 18.
***
Seth spent as much of the time in the void sleeping as he could, but there was only so much a man could sleep on a rock-hard featureless surface. He’d ended up poking through his menus as he waited to respawn and found some interesting things. Firstly, he couldn’t summon Pahan while in the void, though he wasn’t even sure if the place he went was the same as the place Pahan went when he wasn’t in the real world.
Secondly, he found that Djinia’s Blessing, the spell that was giving him ten times normal experience, wasn’t counting down while he waited, even though he knew that time was passing out in the world, too. In his active effects’ menu, it was just frozen at 97 hours remaining the entire time he spent in the void. That was great, since it meant that his time in the void wasn’t completely wasting his use of the apparently super powerful spell.
He looked hard in every menu he could think of to will into existence but couldn’t find any info on how he could attain a second class. He eventually relented and planned on asking Aurora when the next chance arose.
Seth also got a look at his most up to date stats.
Seth Main Class: Level 17 Warrior (9,999/10,000) Second Class: None 612/612 Health Points 0/100 Fury Points Factions: None Stamina: 34
Dexterity: 38 (34 + 4) Strength: 66 (51 + 15) Intelligence: 17
Wisdom: 17
In digging through menus, Seth also discovered he’d gained another warrior skill. He read the description.
Axe Mastery - Passive - Cost: none - Cooldown: none You’ve gained the ability to use war axes, one and two handed, with as much proficiency as you have in swords. Go, cleave the enemies that dare stand before you!
The skill was certainly cool, but Seth had Fearless, and wasn’t sure when he’d get a chance to try an axe as finely made as that. He also wasn’t sure axes would mesh well with his Quick Change Pierce skill so vowed to try it all out when he got a chance.
Seth also eventually ran out of Morgenheim thoughts to occupy himself and his mind started to focus on his life on Earth. Were his coworkers missing him? He thought of the team of people he’d been leading on the failed checkout redesign project. Somehow, he doubted they missed him too much.
He also thought about his parents. He still was holding onto hope that at least one of them might have been transported to Morgenheim, too. While that would have made it possible for him to actually see someone from his former life again, it made him sad to think that his parents’ marriage would be split up by the transition. He was torn between selfishly wanting someone he knew, and wanting the best for those that he loved.
Not that it really mattered. He had absolutely no clue how he’d ever find someone from Earth in Morgenheim. He’d been to one town and one large city so far, and heard nothing about adventurers. Either they were all laying low, or there just weren’t very many around. His mind spiraled like that for hours, souring his mood.
Finally, blessedly, the eighteen-hour time ticked down to zero. Seth appeared in an unfamiliar group of mossy old stones, feet sinking into the muddy ground. He wore Enrique’s armor, and Fearless was belted at his hip. He mentally activated Quick Change and confirmed his longsword was still strapped to his back in his other outfit slot before swapping back to his main outfit.
The sun was low over the horizon, and doing the math from it being in the afternoon when he’d died the day before, he d
educed it must be mid-morning. Seth could feel Aurora and Ivon in his party presence in a specific direction, though he had no idea what direction that was. He was happy to see that both of their HP bars were completely full. He just hoped they hadn’t been recaptured.
Seth activated the skill to summon Pahan, and the big lion materialized a dozen feet away, curled into a tight ball, eyes closed. When the lion didn’t immediately move, Seth cleared his throat and said, “Um…Pahan?”
One massive eye opened and looked at Seth before closing itself. Pahan continued to snooze in silence. Seth said, “I thought you didn’t have to sleep.” He probably said it louder than he needed to.
Pahan’s ears twitched, and he said,
The beast leapt into action heading straight towards where Seth could feel Aurora and Ivon were, so, apparently, he could sense them, too. The two traveled mostly in silence, both lost in their own thoughts.
The scene around them wasn’t quite the same as it had been around Vardon, so Seth wondered just how far Aurora and Ivon had made it on foot in the eighteen hours he’d been gone. There weren’t many trees, and about half of the trees that Seth did spot were dead and leafless. Most of the ground was covered in low shrubs, and Pahan’s feet squelched in the wet ground every time they touched, though the lion’s speed didn’t seem too affected.
As they got closer, Seth started to worry about how Ivon would take seeing him again. He’d just met the man, though he was unsure if Ivon and Aurora knew each other from the guild. Hopefully Aurora had prepared the man for seeing a ghost.
Quick Change Volume 1: Slyborn Page 12