The Modus clan leader seemed to surprise not only me, but his clanmates too. Hinterleaf’s reputation as a treacherous, cruel and authoritarian leader didn’t match with what I was seeing. Unless these games of democracy were a part of another plan.
As soon as I thought of that, Yary interrupted the clan leader. The knight stood up next to the leader and took off his strangely shaped helmet with a blade at its peak. A shadow crossed Hinterleaf’s face. Maybe the old man really was giving way. That must be the source of the conflict with his own officers, masked as it was under ‘differences of opinion.’
“I doubt we’ll get out of here at all with the top clans on our tail. My people, that which our dearly respected clan leader has said — it is utopia. We won’t be forgiven for such a trick. Nor for solely terminating the Threat. There’s a reason we’re called Modus. We value covenants that take the interests of all sides into account. That’s how we reached the top, by solving problems not with weapons, but with words. Who is in favor of letting in the Alliance’s envoys, to solve this misunderstanding and deescalate the conflict?”
“They can’t pierce the Righteous Shield! It regenerates faster than they can damage it! They could bring the entire army of the Commonwealth here and still break their teeth!” Hinterleaf bellowed. “We will reinforce ourselves with mercenaries…”
“Blackberry, what’s the situation with the mercenaries?” Yary interrupted, addressing the officers.
The tall figure of an elvish woman in leather armor, with a short crossbow at her back, stepped forward from the group. Her long legs ended in black boots with wings.
“All mercenaries above level three hundred were engaged this morning,” the girl answered loudly, raising a few feet off the ground so that everyone could see her. “The client has not been disclosed, but it’s likely to be the Travelers.”
“You see?” Hinterleaf shouted triumphantly, although the new information contradicted his words. It seemed like he was more interested in winning the argument with his officers for the majority vote than in solving the conflict with the alliance. “The dark ones decided to betray is long ago! And now one of us is ready to compromise? To subjugate ourselves and serve up the Threat on a silver platter?”
“That’s an exaggeration,” Yary stated. “Hint, you’re our leader. We’ll accept whatever decision you make. You know that. But I beg you, be reasonable! We can’t hole up in this castle and hide from the world! We’re getting reports that our mines and plantations are under attack too. Our new castle at the frontier is under siege, and it doesn’t have a Righteous Shield artifact! We’re already losing before the battle has begun! No clan has ever won in a battle against everyone else. And that’s what you’re leading us into!”
Hinterleaf chewed his lip as if choosing his words, took a deep breath and spoke gloomily.
“You don’t even know what you’re refusing. To the nether with it! Enough words! We need to make a decision. Who is in favor of keeping the Threat for ourselves? Regardless of what we do with it.”
He cast a dark gaze across the clan. Not a single hand was raised. The Modus leader nodded disgustedly.
“Nether take you, weaklings. Call in the emissaries, one from each Alliance clan.”
Yary gave the required orders. Two stars ran to the basement where Crag was being kept. The emissaries demanded that they be shown the Threat, to ensure it was still intact.
I braced myself and messaged Tobias to tell him not to listen to anyone, that we’d be leaving soon. You never know, he might decide it was all over and just turn his coat.
In the meantime, the Modus soldiers formed into a defensive battle formation in case of unforeseen surprised from the besiegers. Regardless of the discipline that reigned in their ranks, I managed to slip through the darkness closer to the spot where Crag should be brought through.
First the defensive dome disappeared. Then the gates swung open, opening the way to the emissaries. Each of them was mounted on a winged mount and could have flown across the moat and walls, but they came in across the bridge in a column: Glyph on his Winged Tiger, Horvac on his Ghost Dragon, the Colonel on his Burning Phoenix and all the rest. The eyes wanted to shy away from the gleam of all that legendary equipment. There was at least a billion gold walking across that bridge.
In the meantime, Crag’s marker appeared on the minimap. The countdown was down to seconds.
They were supposed to be bringing him by not far from me, but I still kept pushing forwards to get as close as possible. Thirty feet, twenty-five, twenty… Damn! They turned fluidly and now were moving away from us. My heart, already beating fast, began to thump fiercely in my chest. I rushed to get closer, pushing through the crowd. I saw a gap and went for it, paying no attention to the shouts of displeasure and jabbing elbows.
Someone got particularly annoyed and tripped me up. I fell, my chin struck the pavement and my vision swam. Crawling, I swore under my breath. There was a palisade of legs around me. I jumped straight onto all fours, headbutting knees and calves, losing all sense of direction and realizing that I’d lost…
The depths icon lit up, turned active, but I didn’t have time to activate the ability — the range broke again. And then Crag, as if sensing something, stopped. Lowering my head, I took on the form of Horvac, who was riding into the castle. The crowd yielded to the emissaries.
Jumping up, I took a step, another… and activated Depths Teleportation. Three heartbeats later, we appeared at Kharinza right at the entrance to the Temple of the Sleeping Gods.
The figure of Behemoth materialized inside. I nodded to the divinity and looked at Crag. He fell to the ground and sat down, dropping his hands onto his knees. A grubby smile lit up his face. I crouched down next to him.
We did it! We’re at the temple! I wrote to the others. Crawler and Bomber soon teleported in a few feet away. Trixie, Manny and Gyula ran at full pelt toward us, waving their hands in greeting. The little man struggled along, trying to keep up, and shouted something.
“Damn, where are we?” Crag asked.
“Welcome to the future clan fort of the Awoken!” Crawler declared triumphantly.
“We’re home, Toby,” I whispered, falling onto my back. Myriad stars flickered, celebrating the end of an important mission. “We’re home.”
Interlude 1: Wesley
AFTER GRANDPA DIED, leadership of the large Cho family went to Uncle Joe, the older brother of Wesley’s father. That had happened three years ago, back when Big Po was still called just Wes, and he hadn’t yet come up with his nickname, Polynucleotide. The uncle then called the father to talk, after which everything changed for Wesley.
His father suddenly stopped eating at dinner, put aside his chopsticks, loomed gloomily at his wife and switched his gaze to his son.
“Your uncle Jonathan isn’t going to help us anymore,” he said. “If you still want to get into business, you’ll need to win a scholarship. The family won’t pay for your studies.”
His father didn’t explain Uncle Joe’s decision, but Wesley knew that business wasn’t going well in the family. Since that conversation, everything just got worse. He gained weight due to a corrupted nutrient exchange, and physical training carried as much weight in school as academic knowledge.
Wesley reflected. Back then he was only thirteen, with a little under a year left until he could play Disgardium. While his friends enjoyed childish VR worlds, Wesley tried to imagine his life and who he wanted to become. And the more he thought, the more he realized that he needed to make a career in Dis. He couldn’t win a chance at a free higher education, that was clear.
Then he did what he loved the most — he planned. Many strove to progress, make money and forge a career in Disgardium, and to this day it was still a gold rush — there were still many unexplored lands in the game, and that meant chances to get rich quick. But few achieved success. Wesley decided to figure out why.
First, he studied how the best players in Dis had begun. All of them had
a hardcore, even fanatic manner of playing. They’d spent all their time in the game from the first day they hit the sandbox.
But many did that, and not all of them achieved significant success. Something more was needed. That ‘something,’ as a rule, was a kind of in-game advantage: a rare ability, a unique artifact, generally anything that led to abnormally fast progress.
Wesley, thorough as he was and used to weighing up the risks and striving toward his goal step by step, derived a plan. The first part of his plan concerned the sandbox; he wanted to create a top clan and achieve domination, which meant storing up resources to make progress in big Dis. There were multiple options for the second part — Wesley decided to return to them when he was ready to leave the sandbox.
He brought his cousin Scott in on his plan, who’d started in Dis four months earlier. Scott was kind of a silly kid, so Wesley treated him as if he was younger. The cousin accepted Wesley’s superiority and took inspiration from his ideas.
Wesley prepared a detailed leveling program for his cousin, which, if followed, would give both cousins a full set of equipment when Wesley arrived in the game, along with weapons and the ability to immediately take combat quests without bothering with social ones.
Scott didn’t have much imagination. A couple of days before his fourteenth birthday, he decided to ask his cousin about his in-game name.
“I’m going to be Polynucleotide,” Wesley answered.
“Poly... what? That’s so dumb!” Scott shook his head. “What about Predator? Or Angel of Death? What kind of nick is that, Wes?”
“I chose it for its uniqueness. There isn’t a single Polynucleotide among billions of players. I don’t want to just another Wesley, or Angel of Death or Predator, because it’s easy to get lost in that crowd. A name should be memorable.”
“What does it even mean?”
“It’s a biopolymer. Forget it, just remember that it’s from chemistry.”
As it happened, Scott was so impressed by his cousin’s originality that he called himself Polynuclear.
Each time his cousin played, Wesley studied the videos from his game and corrected his plans. And although Scott didn’t do everything the way he was told due to his forgetfulness and inattention, in the end it all worked out. Wesley started in Dis with green equipment and weaponry.
Another Po soon joined them — Pocketrocket, Scott’s best friend. He had some doubts at first that Wesley was worthy of leadership but calmed down when he lost to him in a duel in spite of a two-level advantage.
In math classes, Wesley met Irina Katznelson, a tall girl with a long nose and huge blue eyes. A head taller than him, she stooped to make it easier for them to talk.
In one of their instance runs, that time the Crypt of the Temple of Nergal the Radiant, they were looking for a fifth group member and found Sanji, also known as Atiyakari. They didn’t know each other in real life, but the future bandit proved himself a skilled damager and joined their company.
And then there were five. More than enough to unite into a clan. Wesley loved math and the hard sciences, so he called the clan Axiom. Irina supported him and the others didn’t object.
Soon the clan gained strength in Tristad, taking the most hardcore players it could find under its wing. Under Wesley’s control, they managed to get into the top one hundred leaderboard in their first year based on their Junior Arena score, and higher level team members invited him to join their groups, acknowledging not only his leadership and talent as a tactician, but his skill as a PvP fighter as well.
The Dementors were too independent and selective to join Axiom, although Wesley kept trying to lure at least Hung from there. As for the Night Stalkers, the second strongest clan in the sandbox, he’d managed to negotiate a merger. JJ didn’t argue with Wesley’s leadership. His budding romance with Marishka stopped him from being online around the clock. He was at the mercy of his hormones.
The first part of the plan was done. There was still half a year left until the next part, until Wesley left the sandbox, and he didn’t doubt that unforeseen problems would crop up there too.
That stage meant farming achievements. A new instance had opened in the Olton Quarriеs — Evil from the Depths — and Axiom was focusing chiefly on that. Uniting with the Night Stalkers allowed them to claim the instance, the full completion of which became a mere matter of time — they were missing a little damage, and that problem was solved when the main static members leveled up. Another dungeon nobody had yet completed, Nest of the Swamp Needlers, was delayed due to permanent debuffs. Every percentage of health was important for Murkiss.
For the first time in all his experience in Dis, Wesley allowed himself to relax a little. They organized a party in real life, and there he saw Irina with a new perspective. Overcoming his shyness, he asked the girl out on a date.
Now, months later, the boy realized his mistake. Not because of the girl, no, he liked her as much as ever. It was because he’d lost his concentration as a result of their developing relationship. Focus on your goal! his father had always told him, and Wesley had always followed that rule. His father had always been considered a loser in the large Cho family, but he didn’t want his son to repeat his own mistakes. His low citizen status and neglect from his brother Joe were the results of his father allowing secondary things to distract him. He’d spread himself too thin. He hadn’t focused. Wesley promised both his father and himself that he wouldn’t repeat those mistakes.
Punishment came at once. He was flying to his first date with Irina when he got a call to tell him that a stranger had made his way into Evil from the Depths. Alex Sheppard, also known as Scyth. A name that Wesley ended up hearing more than once.
Things only got worse. Axiom lost its First Kill, first in that instance, then in another. It failed dismally in the qualifiers at the Junior Arena, losing the bet to Scyth for the legendary Arena Master’s Horn, for which Wesley had had big plans. There wouldn’t have been any bet at all if Big Po hadn’t decided to go through some Triad acquaintances to hire those inwinovas to teach the Dementors a lesson…
The only silver lining of the following months was the First Kill on Bloodsucker, a strange rare spider that suddenly appeared instead of Crusher the wolf. They’d each received a Spider Egg then, which provided a battle mount. Some small consolation also came from the election victory for the Tristad city council. He became the first player to achieve anything like that, and he got an achievement and access to forbidden areas in the city.
Then there were plenty of strange occurrences. As Wesley analyzed them, he became more and more sure that Scyth was to blame for all of them. They studied his routes for several days. Atiyakari and Greykillah, the clan’s top stealthers, sometimes tracked Sheppard’s movements, but there was no way they could go up against his ability to jump all over the sandbox. Then Wesley made the decision to take Scyth as soon as he appeared in Tristad and check his Threat status. And that day, a Threat came from an unexpected place.
Tobias Asser, the failed ganker Crag, demolished the guards Axiom had placed at a new instance without much effort. Aphrodite was with him, but he doubted she was the problem. According to Atiyakari, the girl just showed her presence, although her damage was impressive.
While the whole clan rooted around to find the guy, one of their own leaked info on Crag to the preventers and got paid a pretty packet for it. Enraged, Wesley nearly disbanded the clan in an attempt to find out the traitor’s name. On the other hand, they still had a chance to eliminate Crag themselves.
But then the next day, something even stranger happened. Detrovay and Annamassy abandoned their post at the Sarantapod Hive. They’d just up and damn well left, since apparently Wesley himself had dismissed them! But he’d been at school! Unfortunately, the pair hadn’t thought to record what they’d seen, so he didn’t believe them. He decided instead that they were just feeding him excuses after they missed someone sneaking into the dungeon.
That was probably the last st
raw. He went nuts, shouted at Detrovay and Annamassy in front of all the officers, and kicked them out of the clan. Before that, JJ had already left Axiom with his guys, and the new wave of conflict divided the clan. Wesley flipped out, losing control of the clan and the trust of his members. Even Scott and Irina didn’t support their friend. “Big Po has lost face,” his father would have said, and those thoughts burned his soul.
All the following days, Wesley stubbornly wandered the outskirts of Tristad, trying to find the Threat on his own. With a Torch of True Flame clutched in his hands, he scoured all of Gloomwood, the murlock lands, the shoreline of the Bottomless Ocean and the edge of the Mire, all the while seeking Scyth or Crag. He had no doubt that one of the two were Threats. Maybe even both. In any case, Wesley was ready: he had Full Petrification and Invulnerability Bubble scrolls to help him subdue anyone he needed to. As to how he got them in the sandbox, that was another story related to his relationship with the Tristad Archivist and his friend from Darant, a high-level mage. A little flattery, a unique chain of investigation quests and the maximum reputation that came from it, allowing him to get these powerful spells.
The Destroying Plague Page 5