Viridian Gate Online: Books 1 - 3 (Cataclysm, Crimson Alliance, The Jade Lord)

by James Hunter

  I shot a look at Cutter and mouthed what’s going on?

  He just frowned and offered me a no-clue shrug. My inbox pinged a second later, which seemed suspiciously timed. I reached out and grabbed Cutter by the shoulder before he could ghost away. “Hold on a sec,” I whispered urgently while pulling up my interface. Quickly, I scrolled over to my inbox—the new PM was from none other than Sophia. Sophia the Overmind.

  <<<>>>

  Personal Message:

  Sorry I’ve been a bit aloof, running the world is surprisingly more complicated than you might imagine, but I haven’t forgotten about you. Not completely. First, let me say I wholeheartedly approve of the job you and Abby are doing—bang-up work, really. Making a deal with the Spider Queen was a bold move, and your plan to take on Carrera is brilliant. Frankly, that’s exactly the kind of unconventional thinking I was hoping for from a couple of wild-card humans. There’s one hitch in the plan, unfortunately: Abby still hasn’t found someone capable of modifying the Arcane Shadow Cannons. Believe it or not, but it’s a bit trickier than you’re thinking. Siege engines are specifically designed to be big or immovable, so you can’t teleport them. But never fear, there’s a loophole.

  Just down the corridor is a very unique traveler, a former Russian weapons engineer, who is on the verge of acquiring a truly rare class kit: Alchemic Weaponeer. There are less than a handful of them in V.G.O., and this one is Factionless. Admittedly, he’s a bit useless now—a clueless newb who’s never played an RPG in his life—and not a fighter by any stretch of the imagination, but once he acquires his proper class, just get some weapon or machine blueprints into his hands and stand back. As the Overmind of Quest Creation, I gave him a class-specific assignment that would guarantee you’d cross paths. I can’t promise he’ll join you, but if you help him out, I’d say there’s a good chance of it. Now, off you go—and don’t “screw the pooch” as you Americans sometimes say.

  You’re Welcome

  —Sophia

  <<<>>>

  I grinned in spite of myself.

  I was still wary of Sophia’s help and interference, but she certainly had a knack for pitching in at exactly the right moments. Maybe having her on our side wasn’t such a bad thing after all. I inched up next to Cutter, gave him an abbreviated rundown of what I’d just found out, and then together, we crept up to a “T” intersection. The path on the right quickly dead-ended at a wall of rubble and debris—caved in at some point in the distant past. The path on the left, however, continued on for another fifty feet or so before stopping at a hulking, circular stone door, carved with glowing green runes, which reminded me of a bank vault.

  A man stood in front of the door, beating on it with curled fists, muttering angry curses in both English and Russian. He was a Dawn Elf with golden skin and a sheet of platinum hair hanging down to his shoulders. His gear was rough and threadbare—beginner equipment if I’d ever seen it—and he looked both exhausted and hungry. I wasn’t sure what he’d experienced so far, but I was guessing it hadn’t been good. The man gave one more hearty pound on the door’s front, then threw his hands up in frustration and began to pace back and forth across the breadth of the hallway.

  “Bozhe, ya nenavizhu eto mesto!” He screamed into the air, shaking a fist at the heavens.

  Finally, he took a deep, shuddering breath, slumped against one of the tunnel walls, and slid down onto his ass. He laced his hands through his hair and bowed his head—the look of a man utterly broken and completely defeated. “Why did I choose this?” he asked no one, his voice hollow and flat. “Perhaps I could have survived on the outside—but no, I had to take all my savings and buy a capsule. A derr`mo, American capsule. Now here I am, stuck in this awful place—where a guy can’t even get a bowl of borscht—by myself, forever.” He squeezed his eyes shut and pulled his knees into his chest, slinging his arms around his shins. “I wish I were dead.”

  Poor guy, I thought. If he’d never played an MMORPG before, this would definitely be the worst kind of culture shock—not to mention he was surely dealing with the emotional fallout of the entire world ending less than a day ago.

  I stood, letting Stealth fall away, then took a few, exaggerated steps so the sound of my footfalls carried down the hallway. I didn’t want to scare the guy.

  His head shot up in an instant, and his eyes, a soft purple, shot wide as he spotted me and Cutter. He scrambled to his feet in a hurry, dropping low, fishing a rusty dagger from his side as a snarl split his face. “Leave me alone,” he said, his accent made thicker by fear. “You mu’daks have already had your fun, now leave me be.”

  I raised my hands slowly, keeping my weapon at my side. “Hey, I don’t know who you think we are, but we’re not them, and we’re not here to hurt you.”

  The man squinted suspiciously, scrutinizing us thoroughly before finally giving a brief nod and standing. He didn’t sheath his dagger, though. “Apologies,” he said curtly. “It has been a bad couple of days for me. These Imperial-aligned thugs, they keep finding me and killing me. I had one friend, an NPC I started with—they killed him, too. Now, I’m by myself with next to no money, next to no gear, and stuck at this stupid door.” He spun and slammed his hand against the slab in anger. “I have one final quest in order to unlock my specialist kit and no way to complete it.”

  Yep, this poor guy sure had a rough go of things—it sounded like some higher-level players had grave camped him. “Why do these people keep killing you?” I asked.

  He screwed his face up in distaste. “The Imperial-aligned players are going through the town, purging any travelers who refuse to join one of the Imperial factions. The NPCs, they seem to get a pass, but everyone else has a target on their back. Most people have either signed up or moved on to different towns, but me?” He hooked a thumb at himself. “I can’t go. I need to get my class specialization first, and the only way to do that is to defeat a bunch of cultists hiding out in the Plague Tunnels. First chance I get, I’m leaving. Now, if you are one such Imperial, then kill me and be done with it.”

  “Bollocks, I like this guy,” Cutter said to me with a lopsided grin. The thief rounded on the man, a shifty smile parting his lips. “Got some stones on you, haven’t you? Well, you just happen to be in luck, friend. You’re not gonna even believe it, but this bloke right here”—he jerked his head toward me—“is none other than Grim Jack Shadowstrider. Leader of the Crimson Alliance, which happens to be the only Rebel-aligned traveler faction in all of Eldgard. At least for the time being.”

  For a moment, the man didn’t respond; we all just stood there while the silence stretched into a painfully uncomfortable thing. “This is true?” he finally asked, suspicion thick in his words. “You are a Rebel faction leader?”

  I nodded, doing my best to look intimidating and powerful. The way a faction leader should look, instead of like a thirty-two-year-old EMT with no leadership experience.

  “Now, as you might imagine,” Cutter continued, slicker than any used car salesman I’d ever seen, “we’re sorta the underdogs in this situation, and we’re looking for people just like you to join our cause—”

  “Like me,” the Russian interrupted, slipping his knife into its sheath, then folding his arms. “I’m a level four Alchemist with no money, weapons, skills, or combat ability.”

  Cutter waved his protest away and offered him a reassuring smile. “Trust me, friend, we’re looking for people exactly like you. Now, as it turns out, we also have business in the Plague Tunnels. So how’s about we join up, eh? You sign on with the Crimson Alliance, we’ll help you complete your quest as a show of good faith, then we’ll bring you back to our base camp in the Storme Marshes. You’ll find it a much more agreeable place, I’ll wager. We can set you up with a place to stay, get you a decent meal to eat, even see you get out of that tattered garbage you’re currently sporting.”

  “But this stupid door,” the man protested weakly, waving at the unmoving slab.

  Cutter shrugged, t
hen casually sauntered past him. He ran his hands over the surface of the rock, pushing here, prodding there, tracing a finger over a few of the glowing runes. After a few seconds, there was an audible click followed by a clang and a crunch as the door swung outward, a fine shower of dust raining down in its wake. “A deadlock door,” he said nonchalantly, glancing over his shoulder, smugness radiating off him in waves. “She’s got a specialty lock built right into the stone—you either need a town guard with a key or a world-class thief for a thing like this.”

  The man broke into an uneven smile, eyeing the passageway beyond.

  “I’m Vlad Nardoir, from Saint Petersburg. It is truly a pleasure to meet you both. Now, how do I sign up?”

  TWENTY-SIX: Plague Tunnels

  Our new companion, Vlad, was forty-three, very Russian, and a former weapons designer for some company called Almaz-Antey. He also wasn’t much of a talker—even getting that much personal information out of him was like pulling teeth from an angry crocodile. Aside from a semester I spent overseas in Prague, I’d never really traveled abroad, nor did I have any Russian friends, so I wasn’t sure if his tight-lipped nature was a cultural trait or strictly a Vlad trait. It was okay, though, since we didn’t have much time for chitchat, not with all the atrociously difficult mobs the Plague Tunnels offered.

  No easily dispatched sewer rats, here.

  Oh no.

  Mostly, there were zombies—heaps and heaps and heaps of zombies, all in different stages of decay. Some were little more than shambling piles of sinew and bone, clad in the tatters of old armor, wielding rusty weapons. Others looked a bit fresher: their skin molted and sloughing off in places, revealing slick patches of rotting muscles beneath. Worse, the zombies seemed to retain whatever skill set they’d had in life, so we had to deal with Stealth attacks from fleet-footed thief-zombies, brutal heavy assaults from tank-like fighters, and even the occasional fireball or lightning bolt from a mage-zombie.

  On top of that, every single hit had a chance to deal either poison or plague damage, sometimes both, which ate through both my Health and Stamina with a hungry ferocity. As a Murk Elf, my resistance to both disease and poison was naturally higher—currently at 37.8 percent—but Vlad had no such protection. If a zombie so much as looked at the lowbie, he seemed to catch the plague. Literally. The only true saving grace was the fact that the mobs seemed mindless despite retaining their class abilities in death—if they’d worked together as an actual team, they would’ve smoked us in a blink.

  I carefully edged around a pile of bones, giving it a wide berth in case it was warded or booby-trapped. Aside from terrible mobs, the Plague Tunnels were also filled to the gills with assorted traps—spiked pits, poison darts, magical flamethrowers. Cutter was ahead somewhere, scouting the way, disarming the various dangers, but I still wasn’t interested in being peppered by an impromptu bone-bomb. Cutter had already missed one trap—something he would never, ever live down in my book—which had earned me a face full of skeletal shrapnel and a temporary, but painful, Plague debuff.

  Pretty much, these Tunnels were the worst.

  They were all ancient gray stone walls, dusty floors, rusted-out torture equipment, and bones: heaps and heaps of bones. Yellowed femurs, cracked rib cages, fractured skulls—some human, others not. Hulking stone columns ran up the center of each hallway. Dilapidated metal cages and old worn leather restraints dotted the ground, no doubt restraints against plague victims in the grip of debilitating pain. Rusty chains hung sporadically from the ceiling, studded with cruel meat hooks stained with old, rusty-red flakes of blood. Basically, this place would provide me with nightmare fuel for the next hundred years.

  At least the mobs gave out better than mediocre loot and some decent EXP.

  I’d already crept up past 10,000 points, which put me nearly a quarter of the way to the next level. Vlad was tight-lipped, so he hadn’t mentioned any level gains, but since he’d started at level four, there was a good chance he’d already banked three or four new levels since entering this section of the dungeon.

  “Got another group!” Cutter screamed as he scrambled around a corner and tore ass toward me, legs pumping as fast they would go. “Big one,” he yelled, stealing a panicked glance over his shoulder. “They’ve got a couple of Rat Kings, too!”

  I groaned and prepared myself.

  Cutter skittered to a stop next to me, huffing and puffing from his sprint, as a horde of shambling undead rounded the bend, their moans and groans echoing off the walls as they shuffled toward us on jittery feet. A big group was right. There were at least twenty undead—a couple tanks, a bunch of generic miners with pick axes, some rotting archers, and even a pair of wizards in the back—not to mention a few Rat Kings. The Rat Kings were even worse than the zombies: hulking things which walked on two legs and more closely resembled rabid werewolves than rodents.

  Despite every survival instinct screaming at me to run away, I sprinted toward the group, drawing aggro so they’d focus on me instead of Cutter or Vlad.

  An inhuman howl went up and suddenly a hail of arrows and a soccer-ball-sized comet of flame were streaking toward me. I thrust my left hand out, conjuring Dark Shield as I ran. A dome of flickering, purple light burst to life in front of me, absorbing or deflecting the incoming projectiles, though eating through my Spirit like a school of hungry piranha. I dismissed the shield a heartbeat later and lashed out with Umbra Bog before they could unleash another volley of arrows. Inky black exploded from the floors and walls beneath the oncoming horde, tendrils of shadow wrapping tight around arms and legs.

  With a malicious grin, I dropped my weight and activated my new Plague Burst spell, excited to see it in action for the first time. Knowledge bloomed in the back of my head—a burst of utter inspiration—and suddenly my empty left hand was whipping through the air in a complex series of motions, foreign to me and yet somehow completely natural. Flick, twirl, snap, fingers splayed out, then hand curling into a fist as cold power trickled into my palm. It was mesmerizing to watch, but also a bit disconcerting: all my other spells were instant effect, but the 8 second cast time on this one seemed to take forever and a day.

  Beads of nervous sweat broke out along my brow and trickled down my face. Although the mobs were pinned down under the effects of Umbra Bog, the archers could still launch ranged attacks, and I was just standing out here in the open, flapping my hand around without a shred of cover.

  I let out a soft sigh of relief as raw power ripped its way free from my body, taking a huge bite out of my dwindling Spirit reserve—the spell was complete. Sadly, I finished just as the snap of bowstrings filled the air with a round of thwangs. I didn’t have time to get a shield in place, and as a result, a trio of arrows peppered my body: one smashed into my gut, another into my shoulder, while the last punched into my thigh. Pain lanced through me like a lightning bolt; I had Shadow Armor firmly in place, which took the edge off the hurt, but I still dropped to a knee, grimacing as I groped at the wood shafts jutting from my body.

  As a kid, I once stepped on a rusty nail in my dad’s toolshed—this was like that times a million.

  I really needed to bring a proper tank with me in the future: some giant uber goon with a shield as big as a door to duck behind.

  Cutter and Vlad were both by my side in a blink, wriggling the shafts free, then tossing them to the side. I was grateful for their help, and even more grateful for the Health Regen potion Vlad slipped me from a pouch at his side. The arrows had only shaved off a fifth of my life, but the gesture was still welcome, and I downed it greedily.

  I threw the empty bottle aside and glanced up at the trapped mobs … I nearly sputtered and choked in surprise.

  A rancid yellow cloud—thick, billowing, and positively toxic—bled from the air itself and swirled around the small army of monsters, digging at their eyes, clawing at their skin, boring into their yawning mouths. Many of them simply keeled over on the spot, grasping throats as they choked and desperately fought
for air. I glanced down at my left hand, then back up at the horde. Damn was that impressive. The cloud dissipated and vanished a few seconds later, though my Spirit meter continued to plummet as the Plague debuff chewed through enemy hit points.

  Total, Plague Burst had cost me fifteen seconds, but since I’d upgraded Umbra Bog, we still had a full twenty-five seconds before the spell lapsed.

  I crawled back to my feet, hefted my warhammer, and charged at the mob—Cutter and Vlad trailed a step or two behind. More arrows and fireballs flew toward us, but this time I had Dark Shield ready to go, batting aside the attacks with ease. In seconds, we crashed into the horde and began to work our way through them. Cutter moved like smoke and shadow, slitting throats, thrusting his blades into desiccated eyeballs—earning huge Crits—and throwing out a fan of smoky conjured blades which sliced through armor and rotting flesh.

  Those shadow blades were definitely a new ability, which could only mean that Cutter was growing as well—his skill set expanding along with mine.

  Vlad kept close to the edge of the action, all the better to retreat in case things got too hot, and dealt what miniscule damage he could with his rusty starter dagger.

  I put them both from mind as I danced among the undead, swinging, thrusting, smashing, twirling. I was still struggling under the Death’s Curse debuff, which meant my attacks weren’t quite as powerful as they should’ve been, but I still felt good. With those extra points I’d invested into Constitution, I moved faster and breathed easier, and with those 15 extra points invested in Dexterity, my hammer felt as light as a feather in my hands. Zombie heads and skeletal torsos exploded as I whirled by, leaving a cloud of bone dust and bloody mist in my wake.