Soon, a giant crowd of scorpids, vultures, hooked horrors, basilisks, tumbleweeds, snakes and stone worms rolled, tunneled and flew to the plowed and sundered dune, where the ragged Sharkon was finishing off the last of the mobs remaining alive. The boss had around ten million health left, and my army of the dead had enough strength to bring him down to the condition I needed. It suddenly occurred to me that with a horde like that, I could capture the Modus castle. I smiled — didn’t sound likely. At least not for now.
I picked out some of the lowest level and least useful, in my view, zombies from the snakes and stone worms, and sent them at the boss. I waded in too, leveling up my archery. This time I managed to lose a few arrows, which let my skill level up to eighty.
Soon the attacking zombies fell senseless, but the mission was complete — Sharkon’s health had dropped to a million. Fury, your time to shine!
Plague Fury activated: released 1,892,000 energy!
Scattered bones, torn-off limbs, spikes and innards, the bodies of lying snakes and worms; all of it burst into flame and instantly burned away, and the sand thirty feet around me began to melt, creating a circle of glass with the boss and I at its center.
The air around us was annihilated under the incredible rush of energy, and fresh air rushed in to fill the vacuum. If there was any moisture around us, it all evaporated. The boss’s shell blackened and fell off in ash as if eaten away by acid, baring his flesh. A heartbeat later, there was nothing left of the boss but his bones. The skeleton didn’t collapse. Subject to the magic of the dead, the infected creature transformed into my undead minion, keeping all its abilities.
All hell broke loose! Virtual fireworks, sounds of triumphant fanfare constantly replacing each other depending on the subject of the notification. Windows filled my vision:
Sharkon, Underground Terror, has died.
Experience: + 661,936,813.
You leveled up!...
You leveled up!...
You leveled up!...
…
You leveled up! Current level: 105.
325 free attribute points available!
Level 100 reached!
Rank one is now available to your skills, abilities and crafts!
Unlocked achievement First Kill: Sharkon, Underground Terror!
You are the first in the world to kill the local boss Sharkon, Underground Terror!
An ancient mage suffering from an excessive sense of humor performed an experiment to cross a shark, turtle and armadillo. The animal turned out to be what he needed — deadly, armored and very stupid. His creator has long since died, and the deserted city he lived in — covered in sand. Sharkon became the terror of the Lakharian Desert and lived many thousands of years here until he met you.
Reward: Sharkon’s Mane shield.
Sharkon’s Mane
Legendary
Scalable
Unique item.
Shield.
Armor: 90.
+120 strength.
+180 endurance.
+25% block chance.
On activation: throws the shield at enemies, dealing 1000% of base damage. The shield bounces off all other opponents within a hundred feet of the current target, then returns to the owner’s hand.30
Gem sockets: 3.
Durability: indestructible.
Sale price: 7200 gold coins.
Chance of loss after death lowered by 100%.
All hail the hero!
Would you like to make your name public? Doing so will give +100 reputation with all the main global factions and +500 fame.
Attention! Achievement I’m on Fire! — 3 upgraded to maximum I’m on Fire! I am the Fire!
Defeat 100 enemies who are more than five times higher level than you.
This is so impossible that it speaks for itself. You’re on fire, no doubt about that.
Rewards: +100% health points; Diamond Reputation Token (+2000 with any faction instantly).
Unlocked heroic achievement: That Doesn’t Happen!
Defeat an enemy who is more than ten times higher level than you.
Hmm… You better contact tech support and make a bug report. Did the mob get stuck in the terrain? Ha-ha, just kidding. Everything is possible in Disgardium! What an incredible achievement!
Reward: Legendary Storm Dragon Summoning Whistle
Legendary Storm Dragon Summoning Whistle
Legendary
Unique item.
One-time use.
On activation, permanently gives the owner the chance to summon a flying mount — a Legendary Storm Dragon.
Requires level: 100.
Requires riding level 10.
I fell to the sand and smiled, looking at the stars. I urgently needed some company, so I summoned my needler.
“Sixty-four levels gained,” I said to Iggy, who was purring measuredly nearby. “I’d jump for joy, but I don’t think I have the energy…”
The pet whistled and I watched the stream of congratulatory messages come in. I waved away all the invitations to make my name public and unwillingly picked myself up to collect the loot.
I didn’t find anything special; meat, all kinds of claws, fangs and a handful of gold coins. A field day for craftspeople.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t loot the boss or the raised infected. My sense of greed complained, not to mention my prudence, which grabbed me by the throat and forced me to renounce infecting bosses. I’d made huge gains for the future; first the loot, then leveling up my Plague Reanimation.
My killed, or at least broken-down mechostrich had recovered by then, which allowed me to summon it and mount up to move toward the place of power. My army of the dead followed me.
I wasn’t planning to retreat from any more battles. The terrifying creatures that became my servants would eat whoever they liked. Especially the former boss Sharkon, and the hermit that I’d called Toothy. Incidentally, Sharkon had started steadily growing his shell back.
I could have walked, but I couldn’t wait to level up my riding skill to ten and fly my own dragon!
There were a few more skirmishes on the way, which took my level up to one hundred and eight — no more fountains of experience like what I got from Sharkon. I aggroed the mobs first to restore my plague reservoir, then set my dead minions on them.
We were in time. We reached the place of power by midnight, where the tips of stone columns eaten by wind and sand pierced through the ground. The system defined it as a separate zone, and I got an achievement for being the first to discover it.
Unlocked achievement Explorer 1.
Discover a zone that no other player has ever been to.
Reward: +10 perception.
Scyth, you have the right to name this new zone!
You can keep the old name (Departed Temple Ruins) or come up with your own.
Unlocked level 1 Cartography skill!
Cartography is used for forming maps of areas. The skill allows you to create your own maps of previously unexplored zones, create routes for ships on the ocean, and use other people’s maps to find treasure and artifacts.
In your travels around Disgardium, you can find encrypted treasure maps that point to locations where troves are buried. Using the Cartography skill, you can determine the place to go searching.
Keep upgrading the skill by exploring new lands.
Strange that I didn’t get an achievement for discovering Kharinza. I thought for a moment and decided it was possible that an inhabitant of the sandbox couldn’t be allowed to discover new lands outside it. I mean, it could have been that there was just no code for it.
Without thinking hard, I called the area Temple of Tiamat. If we built a new temple, the old name with the word ‘ruins’ wouldn’t apply.
The timer should activate in a few minutes. I ordered my mobs to patrol the area while I wasn’t there, made sure that I had enough plague energy to maintain them, then did the last thing I planned to do.
I released the Diam
ond Worm.
A three-foot long sausage touched my face with its snout, sprang away from my chest and buried itself into the sand. I’d have to feed it a lot of experience in the coming days, and Iggy too; he’d fallen behind a lot in levels.
There was plenty for all the Awoken to do here.
Chapter 20. Awoken Undead
A BOMB DROPPING couldn’t have had more effect than the news of the first kill of the local boss Sharkon in the Lakharian Desert. The teachers didn’t let us use communicators in lessons, but in our breaks, we greedily checked all the posts and discussions, all the exaggerated versions of what happened.
New threads on Sharkon were created every second on the official game forums. Nobody doubted that the boss must have fallen to an A-class Threat, it seemed. The logic was that none of the top players would have hidden their name if it was them. There’d be no point; global feats and achievements like that got you a lot of popularity, which meant a lot of money. Some had doubts, of course, accusing the preventers of hiding a new potion from the wider public, one that let them withstand the desert debuffs. Some even shared ‘insider intel’; there really was such a potion, but its recipe was deliberately kept off the market.
There’s an A-class Threat in action! They exist! Ian Mitchell wrote, a journalist from Disgardium Daily. Yesterday we received irrefutable proof. Remember how we laughed a week ago at the hapless so-called Alliance of Preventers, who let a D-class Threat slip through their fingers? The mutual distrust and sluggishness of their top players nearly led to the collapse of Modus. Last year’s champions of the Arena have apparently turned into fat cats resting on their laurels. How else do we explain their embarrassing mistakes in their military operations and internal politics…
Ian wrote derisively, dripping scorn for the preventers. This meant he only spared a couple of lines for Sharkon himself, devoting more attention to taunting and mocking the Alliance. Apparently due to a lack of information about the boss; nobody had ever seen it except me, after all.
The article ended thusly: A-class Threat! Whoever you are, know this: I and millions of my readers are behind you! Kick those arrogant bastards’ asses!
The text had over a hundred million likes and four million comments and change. The top comment read: Anyone know what the Threat’s superpower is? Although who cares, anyone who can take out bosses past the Frontier is #1! Finally Dis has someone who can shake things up! P.S. You missed it all, Mogwai!
The fastest growing topic was called “Hey, A-class, I want to volunteer!” and had amassed over ten million applications, people leaving their in-game information and expressing their willingness to join my plague-ridden crusade against the civilized world. For some reason they were all sure that’s what I’d be doing, and they wanted to take part. In other threads, like “A-class Threat — who is it?” they argued about what faction I might be in, my gender, my age…
There were all kinds of speculation, but most popular of all was the idea that the Threat was a poor inwinova that had randomly found a certain artifact in a mine, allowing him to not only get his status, but also to get rich. I could only guess at who had come up with that and why. Either the preventers knew something and were sending their competitors on a false trail, or it was the mining companies pushing a ‘success story’ to motivate their workers.
One of the comments my eye randomly hit upon was from Zoran. Murphy, buddy, if you’re reading this… it’s like I’ve seen Jesus! Or Satan, depends how you look at it. Yeah, I gave Ehehe his stuff back. I just wanna say thanks and good luck!
The preventers themselves maintained an amiable silence, refusing to give any comments to journalists. Some eyewitnesses saw them mobilizing at global boss spawn points, and that made us think; the top players had stopped sitting on their laurels, as Ian wrote, and were leveling up, and all the while still building plans to capture and eliminate the Threat.
For me, Distival should become a decisive factor. I didn’t allow myself the delusion that I’d be without suspicion — I’d left too many traces — but I wanted to make sure. If I managed it, I’d speak to Yary and look him in the eyes. I doubted clarity would change anything, but… it would shift the priorities in my plans slightly. But there were still three more days left until Distival, and we had a lot to do by then.
That evening, first I dragged the others to the desert, then they delivered Manny and Gyula’s workers to the site of the future temple. After careful consideration, I decided that the former treasury guardians would stay behind. I couldn’t leave the fort entirely defenseless.
Looking around in awe, my clanmates felt themselves to make sure the heat of the desert wasn’t hurting them. Infect picked up some handfuls of golden sand and watched in excitement as it ran through his fingers. The others cautiously watched my undead army as it milled senselessly around the ruins.
I didn’t feel alone anymore. I was surrounded by friends and like-minded people. My feelings welled forth and I couldn’t hold them back anymore. I shouted at the top of my lungs.
“Welcome to the Lakharian Desert, my Awoken!”
* * *
A day later, I sat on crest of the tallest and observed events on both sides of it.
On the right, far below, two brigades were at work. I could see Manny managing the miners, gesticulating with his usual enthusiasm. They were digging the ruins of the temple of the Departed out of the sand. Gyula and his builders had begun to erect the foundation of the future temple of the Sleeping Gods in a cleared area. Now that they were undead, they all had a permanent subject for mutual jokes and mockery.
We didn’t have to go far for resources — the workers mined stone and sand in situ. The other guys brought more from the fort. Just now, Crag, Crawler and Infect had gone to Kharinza for some missing materials.
Our builders were hard at work on the left, in the valley, but on the other side of the dune, a battle raged. My specially selected personal guard — five of my most powerful minions who had preserved their abilities from life, including Sharkon and Toothy — were tearing apart two basilisks. I divided my other brainless zombies equally around the construction site, creating something like a security perimeter. Throwing them all at once at a couple of respawned mobs would be foolish; they’d only have gotten in each other’s way.
I quickly replaced any that fell in final death with new ones, raising dead mobs and killing three birds with one stone; keeping my overall number of minions at fifty, leveling up Plague Reanimation and increasing the quality of my soldiers. The last one seemed to me to be something like evolution: weak zombies steadily got replaced with strong ones that preserved their abilities. Those received names and stood out not only for their greater effectiveness in battle, but also their fairly civilized behavior.
Cr-r-rash! — the gleaming flexible body of Crash flew out of the ground, throwing up a fountain of sand. The Diamond Worm, my new pet, had grown to sixteen feet long and had fattened up a lot, but was still a child.
“Hellish pet!” Bomber commented, climbing up to me for a rest. “Shame it’s bound to this zone. I’d have taken it farming with me…”
“This zone could expand to cover half the desert, Bomb,” I told him. “The habitable zone border expands half a mile every ten levels.”
At that moment, Crash bit into the tail of a basilisk and hung on like a bulldog. Now that he had a grip, he turned and stabbed his drill-like tail into the creature’s skin. The tail’s special structure turned the pet into a mini drilling machine. The diamond drill span up to full speed in a second and began digging into the mob’s body. Scraps of reptile skin flew in all directions, but the level difference was so great that it caused little damage.
To become an adult specimen, the legendary worm needed a lot more experience than epic needlers. That would happen only when it reached level one hundred. But immediately after that, it would be able to independently hunt and level up on its own, and against high-level enemies too.
“Look, your minions
are doing a great job,” Bomber said as he watched the fight below.
My ‘guards’ really were working well together. Toothy the hermit was stuck a basilisk’s face and had begun a battle dance while Sharkon tanked aggro from both enemies. Apart from Crash, they were helped by the skeletal vulture Birdie, the morten zombie Kermit and the nightmarish and deadly tumbleweed known as It. The first two tore and rended a basilisk’s sides with their claws, while the tumbleweed pulled a reptile’s claws into itself and began to digest it rapidly.
The Destroying Plague Page 32