by A. J. Markam
“But we already went in the dungeon downstairs,” I said, confused.
“That was more of a basement. In the game, a dungeon is a place where you fight a lot of monsters and get a lot of loot. It could be underground, it could be an open field – it doesn’t matter.”
“Oh. Why five?”
“One tank, one healer, three damage dealers. Remember? Double-D? Eh? Eh?” the orc said with a grin and a wink as he elbowed me in the ribs.
“Why can’t you get in with four people?”
The orc sighed and turned to the others. “It’s like talking to a three-year-old. Why, why, why?” Then he turned back to me. “Cuz that’s the way it’s always been. Take it up with the game designers, not me.”
“Last fellow we played with,” the troll explained, “was utter shite.”
“Not that you’re much better,” Russell said cheerfully, “but we happen to like you.”
“…thanks,” I said, not sure how to take that.
“Go into Stealth,” Jen said, “hang back, and don’t come out of it unless you absolutely have to. The fight in the basement was hard enough, so we’re going to need Richard focused exclusively on healing us.”
“Oh, yeah, you’re definitely not putting him at the kids’ table,” Slothfart said sarcastically.
Jen turned on the orc. “Hey, ASSHOLE – I’m trying to do the right thing by taking him along, but I can’t compromise the safety of the group. If he doesn’t stay in Stealth, either he gets killed in the first 30 seconds, or we wipe. Which do you want?”
“No, no, it’s cool – I’m fine, I don’t mind hanging back,” I said hurriedly.
Jen was grumpy, but she grew softer as she looked at me. “It’s just until you level up. Then we can all go through dungeons and everything will be more even.”
“It’s cool. Don’t worry about it.”
She looked regretful, like she was going to say something – then she stopped herself.
“Okay… let’s do this,” she said.
We walked through the shimmering barrier together, and were greeted with a little slice of hell.
It was a large, two-story study, with dozens of wooden shelves filled with thousands of books –and about 50 ghosts between us and the upper level of the library.
The male vampire sneered at us from railing on the mezzanine. He was tall, pale, with shoulder-length blond hair. He was dressed in a fancy suit straight out of the 1800s, with frilly white lace at the collar.
“So glad you could make it. I would say that I will enjoy draining your blood, but you’re such disease-ridden filth that I think we’ll just throw you in the lavatories instead.”
“If you wanna drain somethin’, suck on this!” Russell yelled as he grabbed his armor-plated crotch.
“ATTACK!”
The ghosts immediately descended on us – well, on my teammates, anyway.
My friends exploded into action. Russell cannonballed right into a swarm of ghosts, Jennifer blasted them with bluish rays of ice, Slothfart slashed his scimitar through the nearest specters, and Richard shot out bolts of purple energy whenever anybody got hit. I watched in amazement as a virtual tornado of violence ripped through the library, with my friends at the center of it.
I hung back behind Jennifer, and sidestepped anybody who got too close to me.
The group killed the first ten easily, but then the ghosts begin to overwhelm them with numbers. Russell was taking heavy damage with every new encounter, though he appeared to be loving it. His hammer and shield were slamming every single ghost around him, although he had to take a few seconds between attacks.
Jennifer would freeze a specter in place, then leave it trapped while she tried to kill others. Then when she’d killed the immediate threat – or the frozen ghosts were able to break out of their temporary prisons – she would put them down for good.
The whole time, golden numbers appeared in the air: 50XP, 40XP, 65XP – a virtual snowstorm of them.
We ran through the library, destroying ghosts as we went, and made it up the stairs to the same level as the vampire.
When there were only five ghosts between us and him, he sneered and bellowed, “Come, said the spider to the fly – come deeper into my web!”
Then he escaped through a side door.
“Pussy!” Russell yelled as he threw the hammer after the vampire, only to have it slam into the wooden door before it returned to his hand.
“Okay, so this doesn’t appear to be a mini-boss situation,” Jen said as she destroyed the last ghost.
“What you mean, a mini-boss?” I asked, and immediately came out of Stealth. “Dammit – ”
“You’re alright – we’re not under attack anymore, so just go back into Stealth. Normally there’s one big boss at the end – the main guy we have to kill. He’s pretty difficult. Along the way, there’s usually a bunch of smaller bosses we have to go through to get to the main boss. I figured that the son, the daughter, and the wife would be mini-bosses, and then the big guy would be the end – but I don’t know if that’s true or not.”
“They’re vampires,” the orc mused. “You think we have to kill them with a wooden stake or something?”
“Technically, we can also kill them with a silver knife, by decapitating them, or dunking them in holy water,” Richard said.
“Well, if you see an industrial-size vat of holy water, let me know.”
“You wanted special weapons that only worked on specific enemies, remember?” Jen said. “Be careful what you wish for.”
“I was talking about ghosts,” Slothfart protested. “A Number 2 pencil isn’t a special weapon.”
“…Number 2 pencil?” I asked, and came out of Stealth again.
“Stabby McStab-stab?” Slothfart said, making a stabbing motion with his hand in the air. “Wooden pointy thing right in the heart?”
“Oh.”
“Go back into Stealth and stop asking questions,” Jen ordered. “Everybody ready? Let’s go!”
Russell slammed through the door, knocking it off its hinges and crashing it to the floor.
And we found ourselves in even worse straits than before.
We were in some sort of a bird keep – a big, empty stone chamber with exposed rafters that stretched up to a thatched roof. Up in the rafters sat a dozen winged gargoyles with glowing red eyes.
As soon as they saw us, they dive-bombed down from the rafters.
“Hold up!” Jen yelled as she swirled her arms through the air.
Giant spikes of ice rained down. Some impaled the gargoyles midair – others just damaged their wings, sending them flailing to the floor.
Unfortunately, having their wings clipped didn’t mean they couldn’t scamper towards us.
“Russell, Seth – take the ones on the ground! I’ve got the ones in the air!”
I watched as she blasted shot after icy shot towards the rafters, taking down the gargoyles hovering above us.
Twenty feet away from us, Russell was smashing gargoyles over the head with his hammer, and Seth was slicing and dicing with his scimitar.
Suddenly a gargoyle flew directly over my head, straight for Jen.
I didn’t want to come out of Stealth – after all, she’d told me not to, and the thing could probably kill me with one blow – but it was heading right for her. And I don’t think she saw it.
Out of nowhere came a swirl of purple light, and a giant black cat leapt up into the air. It snarled and took the gargoyle down to the ground in one fluid leap. Once on the ground, the cat buried its fangs in the creature’s neck. There was an awful crunch! and pop of cartilage and bone. The leathery wings flapped and spasmed, and then the thing lay still.
“Hey, Richard brought out his pussy!” Russell yelled with delight.
“Hey, ya big pussy!” Slothfart roared with laughter.
There was a shimmer of purple light, and suddenly the puma transformed back into a troll.
He adjusted his tiny spectacles on the
bridge of his nose and muttered, “Why do I even bother?” Then he resumed casting swirls of purple energy at the others.
Another golden blizzard of XP numbers danced through the air. I was a little surprised that I hadn’t leveled up yet, considering all the killing that was going on – but then I looked down and saw the counter until my next level-up.
I had to reach 56,000 experience points, and I was only about 60% of the way there.
Whoa…
The gargoyles were halfway defeated, but it was obvious that they were taking a toll on the group. They were much harder opponents than the ghosts in the library.
Jennifer must have noted that, too, and decided to gamble.
“Run for it!” she yelled.
We took off across the stone floor, weaving in and out of the wooden pillars, until we got through the doorway to the next room.
Slothfart slammed the door behind us and barred it with a massive wooden log. There was a terrible thumping on the other side, but the barrier held.
We looked around.
We were in a small room with a low ceiling. The only thing of note in the cramped space was a spiral stone staircase that went down into the darkness, with a few torches along the wall to light the way.
“Crap – really?” the orc whined.
“Let’s go,” Jen said, and started down the spiral stairway.
As we circled down through the darkness, we encountered four werewolves – massive, furry creatures that stood upright on two legs. They probably would have been difficult to kill if we had to take them on all at the same time, but one appeared about every 30 feet. That allowed all the group members (except me, of course) to focus on one werewolf at a time, and thus make short work of each.
After the last werewolf, the spiral stairway emptied out into a large underground room. Four-foot-high rectangular blocks made of marble were evenly spaced along the damp floor, and statues peered out from dark archways set into the walls. Men with swords and women in robes stared down at us with unseeing stone eyes.
It took a second for me to realize where we were: inside a tomb. The marble blocks were basically fancy graves.
“Crap – we’re fighting a bunch of vampires, and we just walked into a crypt?” the orc griped. “Great.”
“You should have never come,” a familiar voice boomed through the darkness.
“That’s what she said,” Slothfart whispered, and he and Russell burst into suppressed laughter.
“But now that you’re here,” the voice continued, “you will stay here forever.”
The tops of the marble crypts began to slide off with a rumbling, grating sound.
“Heads up!” Jen yelled. “Russell, take the left – I’ll back you up! Seth, you’re on the right!”
Bony arms thrust up out of the crypts, and the inhabitants leapt up on top of the marble slabs. I suppose technically these guys were dead like me, but we looked nothing alike. For one, they had glowing red eyes, and any trace of flesh had disappeared from their bodies long ago. They were basically skeletons wearing armor.
They jumped down from the crypts and ran at us, hissing like snakes.
Jen froze the first two. Russell slammed into the ones on his side, and Slothfart took down one on the right.
It was slow going – my friends had to fight for every inch – but one by one, they killed the undead knights.
We reached a big metal door at the end of the tomb, and Slothfart yelled triumphantly, “Is that all you got?”
Suddenly there was the sound of cinderblock grating on cement.
“What did I tell you about saying things that sound like famous last words?” Richard asked.
We all turned around to look back into the crypt.
All of the statues in the alcoves were coming to life.
“Oh crap,” Slothfart moaned.
“Aw yeah!” Russell yelled, and raced out into the middle of the room, throwing his shield and ricocheting it off three of the statues at once.
Jennifer put up wall after wall of ice as barriers, and blasted the statues one by one – but they kept coming. They would get an arm knocked off, but they wouldn’t stop attacking. They were relentless, dealing out a hundred damage points with every blow. Russell got knocked across the entire tomb several times like a silver pinball.
Suddenly, Slothfart began to scream. Not a regular scream, either; one long, unbroken roar of rage. His eyes bugged out of his head, his veins stood out like wires against his muscles, and he began to slam into the statues with abandon. He took massive amounts of damage, but Richard backed him up with as much healing as possible. Jen would freeze statues until Slothfart could get to them, and then he would bash through them in just a matter of blows.
When it was all over and the statues were reduced to rubble on the ground, Slothfart turned around. He was a frightful site – eyes bloodshot, nostrils flared open and snorting like a bull, every muscle in his neck and body standing out like they’d been carved from wood.
“Nice berserker attack,” the goblin complemented him matter-of-factly.
The veins begin to fade, Slothfart’s eyes slowly sunk back into his head, and he exhaled. “Thanks, dude,” he said in a normal voice.
“What just happened?” I asked, even though I knew I would come out of Stealth.
“Berserker rage,” Richard explained. “He basically becomes the physical embodiment of violent madness.”
“It’s one of my skills,” Slothfart said. “Picked it up at Level 11.”
“I wouldn’t have thought you could get that angry,” I said, shocked.
“Well, not in real life. The weed really chills me out. Speaking of which – ”
“NO, not until we clear the dungeon,” Jen said. “We have four bloodsuckers to kill, don’t forget.”
“Lead the way, luv!” Russell said happily.
We pulled on two ornamental rings attached to the massive iron door, and it creaked open on rusty hinges. Stone steps led up from the crypt into an open-aired courtyard in the middle of the manor, with a dozen or more apple trees dotting the lawn.
“Let’s go!” Jen said, and we ran across the courtyard.
Suddenly, the roots of the trees erupted from the ground, pulling free with a pop pop pop from the dirt and slamming down like long, ropey feet.
Branches cracked downward and became arms, and smaller limbs twirled around each other until they formed pointed wooden fingers. The knots in the tree trunks twisted and cracked, and now eyes and gaping mouths were staring out at us.
It was like The Wizard of Oz on acid.
“There are times when I wish I was a Fire Mage,” Jen muttered, then shouted, “Get the ones closest to us, I’ll freeze the ones farthest!”
Slothfart and Russell focused on one tree at a time, hacking out chunks of wood with the scimitar and slamming it to splinters with the hammer.
Jen was as good as her word – she froze as many trees at the far end of the courtyard as she could, and put up a wall of ice as a barrier to give Russell and Slothfart more time.
Suddenly, things started whizzing through the air. One struck me square in the forehead, and I came out of stealth. “Ow!” I exclaimed, and looked down at what had hit me.
An apple.
The assholes were throwing apples.
Pieces of fruit began flying through the air like a horizontal hailstorm. They were more of an annoyance, but each impact sapped a few hit points. When four or five hit you every second, it started to add up.
“Dammit,” Jen exclaimed, and threw up a glowing light shield around her. “Run guys, run! If we get to the house, they can’t follow us inside!”
We darted across the courtyard with Russell leading the way. I couldn’t go back into Stealth, but I did my best to avoid any trees – although the apples kept slamming into me, inflicting constant damage.
We made it to the main house and slammed the door shut. The trees broke through the glass panes on the doors, but they were too big
to fit through the doorway.
We were safe.
Or so we thought.
Sinister laughter echoed all around us.
I immediately went back into Stealth and kept to the shadows.
We turned around. We were in a massive dining room – more like a ballroom in size – with a rectangular wooden table that could have seated 50 people.
At the end of the room, a massive double-sided staircase led up to a second level. At the top stood a man in a black suit and iron-grey hair. Next to him was a woman, probably in her 40’s, in a midnight-blue ball gown.
On the same level as us, the young blond vampire was walking towards us with his sister. She was beautiful and pale, with twisting black curls cascading across her bare shoulders and down the back of her emerald dress.
“So good of you to join us for dinner,” the grey-haired man said in a rumbling bass voice. “Too bad you’re on the menu.”
“I thought we weren’t worthy of havin’ our blood sucked!” Russell taunted the vampire.
“Such impudence,” the older vampiress sneered. “Brantum, Sira… kill them, darlings.”
“With pleasure, Mother,” the daughter laughed, exposing two pointed incisors.
“You might have defeated our minions,” the blond male said, “but now you die.”
He and his sister leapt forward with blinding speed.
Russell rushed to meet them, but Brantum batted him aside like a tennis ball. Russell slammed into a bunch of chairs, reducing them to sticks of kindling.
Slothfart swung his scimitar at the girl Sira, but she ducked out of the way.
“Is this what passes for adventurers these days?” Brantum sneered. “They really should send us a better class of Warriors.”
“Not just Warriors, asshole – Mages, Paladins, and Druids,” Jen yelled as she sent down a strike of foot-long ice stalactites. They did a little damage – I could see the brother and sister’s damage bars dip down about 10% – but they basically laughed it off.
Jen put up an ice wall, but Brantum smashed through it without any problem.