A Slave in the Locked Lands

by Arthur Stone

  This is where Ros became truly stumped. How was one to interpret this? It wasn’t just that there shouldn’t be any mobs of this level in these parts—especially in such enormous numbers—how was it that no one had ever encountered their kind before?

  What the bloody hell was going on here?!

  He couldn’t even ask Digits, who was typically offline at this hour. But he could give it a try, anyway.

  The chat window wouldn’t open. It felt as though Ros was still inside that peculiar page. He decided against browsing the forum—it would be a silly thing to do in an area infested by aggressive high-level mobs.

  A search of the monsters’ carcasses didn’t yield many trophies—all Ros got was an enhanced crystalite club. An unremarkable item in terms of stats, but the material it was made of cost serious money. It could also be useful for jewelry—there wasn’t much crystalite sold on the open market, so that buying some meant paying through the nose.

  The Soul Crystals, on the other hand, were a pleasant surprise—his Soul Traps had proved their worth. If these mobs were on par with the one he’d fought, they’d make trophies of the highest value. Ros had never seen anything like them before. Apart from Bug and Trathkazir, that is. But the former was a whole different kettle of fish—an extraordinary phenomenon altogether.

  The bonuses for slaying the mob were nice, too. It might make sense to hunt more of them—his new pets would make that totally feasible. All he needed to do was get his gear up to snuff.

  “Damn, I really am a noob!” Ros slapped himself on the forehead.

  How hadn’t he realized it before?! Sure, he looked different now, but he was still wearing his old equipment! Might as well write his old name on his forehead.

  Ros had a full set of gear prepared a while ago for precisely this purpose, stashed away in a bag hidden in one of those tricky slots of his legendary belt that he’d scored from his first raid of Trathkazir’s lair. He’d decided against splurging on top-of-the line items, opting for something less conspicuous and well-worn instead. He hadn’t intended to wear them for very long.

  Still, he’d kept his approach to equipment creative—rather than just buy up a bunch of random stuff, he tried to pick out matching pieces that would convey at least somec sense of style. Having never exhibited a propensity for high fashion, he’d hoped that it would further aid in his disguise—his pursuers were more likely to be looking out for slobs.

  And besides, how many players cared about style at lower levels?

  Five minutes later, the character standing on the road looked like a dyed-in-the-wool necromancer of the most menacing sort. clad all in black, with a dark blood-red amulet glinting on his chest and a skull embroidered on his cape in silver thread, he carried a staff with blades jutting out from either side, capable of giving his opponents a taste of cold steel besides magic.

  Anyone who spotted someone like him in the vicinity of a mortuary would likely become a stutterer till the end of their days.

  Ros drew deeper into the woods, climbing yet another tall tree and finding a spot near the very top before deciding it was safe enough to browse the forum.

  He wasn’t surprised at the numerous clickbait threads saying more or less the same thing. The hapless Rallia province had become the epicenter of strange events yet again. Only this time Ros had nothing to do with it. While he stayed in hiding, editing his character and taking care of other affairs, the players kept exchanging information actively that could be pieced together into a rough picture.

  It was no secret that Rallia was a border province. That implied a border. And any Second World border implied certain complications. They were normally patrolled by squads of NPCs protecting the inhabited lands from whatever lived on the other side—as a rule, aggressive, unpleasant, and high in number. High-level players would go to such places to grind or get killed, as well as curious individuals and cartographers whose bravery verged on the suicidal. That was also where all kinds of fiends came from to raid human settlements. On the whole, these places could rightly be considered hot spots.

  But not in this case. In fact, Rallia’s border was one of the most boring places in the world. It was considered a border for a single reason—no one could get past the vertical wall of rock that towered for miles. According to legend, what lay beyond was known as the Locked Lands. They were locked for a reason—the ancient mages, who were the usual suspects in all such cases, had been up to some unnatural stuff over there a long time ago. Namely, they were crossbreeding Chaos spawn with generic Second World stock. Rumor had it, they even contributed some of their own genetic material, indulging in these perversions long enough to spawn numerous offspring from their “guinea pigs.” But in the end, it was those very offspring that had brought about their downfall. The pandemonium that ensued was registered by other mages—ones less degenerate in their habits—who swiftly built an unscalable wall around this “corner of paradise.”

  One of the segments of the wall came tumbling down last night. Some noob clan was blamed—they had decided to make a granite quarry there. The consensus was that their actions had been ill-advised—the cheap rock was nowhere near rare enough to take risks of this sort.

  But who’d expect noobs to understand?

  At any rate, the wall came down with such a crash that not a single windowpane was left intact within a ten-mile radius, and many a dish was shattered on the floor. Hordes of the distant offspring of crossbreeding enthusiasts began crawling out of the rift, their numbers in the thousands. The first thing the hideous things did to avenge the suffering of their ancestors was massacre everyone at the ill-fated quarry. And they would have kept at it still, for the workers’ bind point was right in the quarry, as per tradition. The security guards and the workers initially expressed great concern over this fact, and boo-hooed on several threads filled with lame and unconvincing excuses and claims they had played no part in the destruction of the barrier.

  “Oh? You don’t say? Nope, we know nothing about anything. We don’t know who it was.”

  There were no mages left in the world strong enough to repair the barrier, and the fiends did not stop at the quarry. Their advance parties were already approaching Arbenne, without a single village left intact on their way. A few high-level player groups tried to face the beasts for fun and profit, but that ended quite badly.

  Quite badly for the players, that is.

  Those reckless enough to get involved shared their experiences on the forum right upon respawn. They claimed there were at least a few dozen species of mobs participating in the invasion, and none of them had ever been encountered before. The few players lucky enough to kill so much as one specimen received achievements for discovering creatures that had not been in the bestiary. There were few other bonuses: the loot wasn’t that great, and it was hard to pick it up in battle. The creatures had a lot of HP, and they hit hard. The mobs were all in the 200-300 level range, and some of them even higher than that, for not even the highest-level characters could discern anything about them. The monsters were moving in a single wave that wasn’t comprised of the strongest. But if you managed to cut a path through their ranks, you would run into other squads, much more dangerous.

  It was one of those squads that eventually sent the daredevils to their next incarnation.

  Incidentally, their reincarnation worked differently, too—the players could only get back to their bind points if the invaders hadn’t reached them yet. If the points were under the mobs’ control, the characters would find themselves revived at one of the Temples of Light in the Western Empire’s capital.

  Moreover, no teleport anywhere in the vicinity worked anymore. Or, rather, there were a few that still functioned, but only the stationary ones located in the larger cities. And they only worked one way—away from the invaded area. Anyone who wanted to look at the mobs had to either walk or ride their mount there.

  Teleportation scrolls didn’t work at all—in either direction.

  The chat opt
ion didn’t work, either, even for players with expensive accounts and personal messengers.

  Basically, none of it made any sense. The owners of mines and sawmills were very anxious to know how long all this hullabaloo would last, and how it would end. Some opined that the mobs would leave just as quickly as they had arrived. Others thought Rallia had been transitioned from a sleepy hinterland to a major location for high-level characters. There were lots of mobs, after all, and they were everywhere. All the players had to do was wait for some stability to set in.

  But it made no sense to try resisting the horde until then. Unless someone simply wanted the thrill, or to be transported to the capital free of charge.

  Relatively free, of course—one would lose some experience, or even some equipment if one got particularly unlucky.

  Ros stopped reading the chaotic forum posts and got to thinking. His editor trick had evidently made him the sole survivor of the invasion. No groups of mobs could be seen anywhere, having apparently passed these parts. Apart from a few stragglers, like the one he’d fought.

  He pondered his further course of actions. Would suicide help? He’d been meaning to visit the capital for a long time, after all. That was also the location of the imperial teleport. It was expensive, but he could use it to get to the Western European sector to do what he’d been planning all along—clear the one-off dungeon.

  The last thing he’d been planning was to end up smack in the middle of an invasion. And yet, here he was—more than a little confused after everything that had happened, but still reluctant to leave the province. Ros was beginning to get used to trusting hunches in this world—especially with the unlocked and nicely leveled Seer stat. According to the forum, there were very few in Second World who’d resemble him in that respect. The stat was supposed to help the players foresee virtually anything, and turn it to their own advantage.

  It was rather odd, then, that Ros could not foresee his abductions or any of these events. But could he foresee anything that he couldn’t possibly benefit from in the first place?

  Right now, Ros badly wanted to explore the Locked Lands. No one had ever been there, after all. Aircraft was a concept alien to Second World, and no living thing could scale a wall as tall. It had been tried, but the lack of oxygen at the higher altitudes would eventually drive the brave souls back down, and no one had ever managed to solve that problem.

  The horde that had spilled out of the rift had massacred everyone in the local mines, sawmills, and villages. The NPCs died, never to be reborn, and the players were dispatched far away—to the imperial capital. That came as some surprise, considering that the province had been relatively calm of late, and missing any high-level player squads—apart from the one that had hunted Ros. Therefore, the survivors were probably low in number.

  It was possible there were no other players but him around for many miles. But that would probably change before too long. High-level players would likely band together to try to stop the invasion—either for experience or for the thrill. And upon prevailing, they would move right on to the ravaged land.

  So, it would seem that Ros had a headstart on them, and he wasn’t about to waste it.

  * * *

  “He didn’t end up in the capital like the rest of our guys. All the temples there are under control, but no one’s seen hide or hair of him.”

  “Could he have changed his appearance again?”

  “We’ll have to watch everyone coming from Rallia.”

  “We don’t have enough resources.”

  “Then we have to stretch what we’ve got as far as we can.”

  “We’d need a miracle.”

  “A miracle would be nice. He might reveal himself in some way.”

  “What if he’s still in Rallia?”

  “That seems to be the likeliest scenario to me.”

  “Same here.”

  “Shall we send a squad?”

  “A small one. Very circumspect.”

  “And how would you go about it? These mobs made mincemeat of almost a hundred well-equipped top players. There are thousands of them, and seemingly a lot more where they came from.”

  “If we send a large party, someone will inevitably brag about it somewhere, and we’ll have other clans tracking our every move. Would you prefer that?”

  “If we send a small party, it will be a waste of XP and items for the guys.”

  “So, what do you suggest?”

  “Let’s see what happens next. If he’s in Rallia, he won’t be able to get past the mobs. Teleports down there don’t function, either. The instant he gets snuffed, he’ll be transported right to the capital. And we’ve got everything under control there.”

  “Oh really? You’re suggesting we take the city by storm just for him? The capital?”

  “I’m suggesting nothing of the sort. All we need to do is locate him, and we’ll see how it all plays out. We did manage to get hold of him once.”

  “For a couple of hours.”

  “We’ll get luckier the next time.”

  “We haven’t even managed to have a proper talk with him…”

  A telephone conversation between officers of the J_P guild.

  Chapter 8

  When the developers were creating Second World, they populated it with hundreds of millions of NPCs that looked just like players. The AIs controlling them were so advanced that it would be hard to tell an NPC from a player fully in character even after a long conversation. That was the main reason why software-controlled characters had special symbols next to their names—so as not to be confused with human players.

  There was never any crowd of unorganized NPCs—the developers initially aimed at creating several empires, a few countries, large and small, and several small territories with anarchic or similar rule. All of these states were engaged in active interactions: they traded, formed alliances, plotted, and waged wars against each other. Players could take part in that tangle of relations by doing quests, entering civil or military service, or affecting the state economy in some way.

  There was an inflexible rule for character creation—one had to choose one of the thousands of starting cities as their birthplace. Those had everything a noob needed in the vicinity, or even in the city itself: low-level mobs, common plants required for Herbalism and Alchemy, cheap resources like copper, and everything else a fledging worker might need.

  Players could choose any city from the list, but the editor recommended a shortlist of home cities located within their time zones. After all, it made sense to play on the same schedule with others, and not have some players depart for a good night’s sleep while other misfits who’d chosen the “wrong location” wander around in morbid solitude. Second World was a team game, after all.

  In Ros’ case, he hadn’t been given much time to consider his choices—the system had chosen a starting city for him based on standard considerations. His chances of running into another player in the forest at night were negligibly low. Apart from the fact that the invading mobs had killed most of them, they were usually asleep around this time.

  Only Ros could get no sleep. A rrokh’s vision could easily overcome the challenges of darkness, which was a considerable advantage. There’d be no such advantages during the day, when the chances of encountering a keen-eyed high-level mob were a lot higher.

  It would make more sense for him to sleep for two or three hours in the daytime, and to use as much of the night as he could.

  He could see the glow from a faraway fire ahead and slightly to the left. Ros actually felt encouraged—he’d been walking for some four hours without anything happening anywhere. It would be wrong to walk by without expressing any interest, so he decided to come closer and take a look.

  It was a village. Or, rather, it had been a village before the night fell a few hours ago. He didn’t know whether it had been torched by the denizens of the Locked Lands or whether it was an open fire or a falling ember that started it after the locals had made their escap
e. Whatever the cause, all thirty houses were ablaze now, as well as the adjacent haylofts, woodpiles, and sheds.

  Ros watched the mobs from a safe place at the edge of the woods as they moved past the fire. Their procession moved across fields and vegetable plots—the creatures didn’t seem to be in any hurry or frightful of the fire. They ambled along in a relaxed yet purposeful manner. They all looked similar—erect, with reptilian bodies whose massive tails left trails on the ground, and crocodile heads covered with funny-looking wide helmets that looked a bit like cloth caps. Each mob wielded an oval shield and a mace with long spikes, a halberd, or a spear. From time to time, he could spot the officers, distinguished by their long capes and swords at their belts. There was also the odd occasional mage identifiable by their weapons—short and long staves, or peculiar objects resembling tambourines.