Tinker, Tailor, Giant, Dwarf ( LitRPG Series): Difficulty:Legendary Book 2

by Gregg Horlock

  “Who are the newbies?” said Feidan, glancing at the warriors. They had taken up their swords and were mercilessly pounding the mannequins.

  “A few days after you left, people started arriving,” said Brian. “Seems Percy has been busy in Blundow. We’ve got twenty new faces around here.”

  I couldn’t believe it. I had hoped our guild would start to grow, but I hadn’t expected it to happen so soon. We’d have to look at extending the guild house before long.

  “Listen,” said Brian. “It’s good to see you, but I’m afraid we have bad tidings. Come inside, there’s someone I want you to meet.”

  We walked into the farmhouse and went into the common room. The meeting table was in the centre of the room, and various vials filled with dull-coloured liquids filled them.

  “Been practicing your alchemy?” said Feidan, picking up a vial and shaking it.

  “A lot of practicing, but not much success.”

  “What’s that meant to be, puddle water?” said Smoglar, glancing at a bottle.

  Brian fixed his friend a stern stare. “Dwarf poison,” he said. “So you better watch out when I master it.”

  A man sat at the end of the table. I didn’t recognise him, but I saw from his name tag that he was a player character.

  Connor Rutland – Warrior Level 41

  He had long blonde hair that was matted and ran down to his shoulders. His eyes had a heavy look as if he had seen a lot of trouble over the years. He wore armour that gave the appearance of leather, but it had been dyed red. A sword was strapped in a sheath at his side. On his neck, he had a blue tattoo that seemed to run down below his armour. I couldn’t see it all, but I didn’t like the part of it that was on view. It was the head of a Serpent, with a forked tongue sticking out. I reached for my dagger.

  “Don’t worry,” said Brian, holding his hand up. “You’ve noticed his tattoo, but it’s not what it seems. He…It’s probably better I let him explain.”

  The man stood up. Although he was no giant, he was still taller than the rest of us. His body was bulky, but his movements seemed so easy that I guessed he carried a high agility level as well as strength.

  Connor nodded at us. “I wasn’t exactly expecting a ‘welcome to the guild’ cake, but there’s no need for your dagger.” He looked at Brian. “Is this the tinker you told me about?”

  Brian nodded. “That’s Janus.”

  Conner stared at me. “There’s something strange about you, Janus. What is it?”

  He looked at me closely, as if he was inspecting every part of me. I knew straight away what he was doing.

  “You can stop using Appraiser on me right now,” I said. “You’re in our guild house. I want to know where you’ve come from, and why you’re here.”

  “A little distrust is healthy,” said Ozreal, next to me.

  Smoglar pulled a chair out from the table and took a seat. Ozreal and Dereck stayed standing, while Feidan left the room and went upstairs to his alchemy lab.

  “Just hear him out,” said Brian.

  I stood at the end of the table and held Connor’s stare. “I’ve had my fill of Serpents,” I said. “And your neck tattoo doesn’t inspire trust. Why are you here?”

  “There’s no hiding it,” began Connor. “I was in the Serpent guild. I was part of it for years, in fact; ever since I hit level 29 and decided I didn’t want to travel alone anymore. But what I once was part of, I’m not anymore. The tattoo might stay there, and I can’t do anything about that, but you’ll see that I don’t have a Serpent symbol next to my name.”

  “The absence of a symbol doesn’t mean anything,” I said.

  Brian sat down. “Connor arrived a few days ago. He’s really pitched in. He’s helping train the newbies in swordplay.”

  “And they’re going to need it,” said Connor.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  Connor looked at Brian, who nodded. “Tell them,” said the giant. Suddenly, he looked worried.

  “I’ve come here with a gift for you,” said the warrior. “And it would be in your interests to accept it. Trust me, you’ll be thankful I came here.”

  “What is it?” said Ozreal.

  “The gift of a warning,” answered Connor. “You might have one ex-Serpent at your table, but I’m afraid I have bad news for you. Soon enough, you’re going to have a hundred Serpents on your doorstep.”

  All of a sudden, I felt weary. The last few weeks seemed to have gone by in a blur, and I knew I hadn’t rested enough. I pulled a chair out from the table and sat down.

  “What are you saying, Connor?”

  The warrior pulled his sword from his sheath and laid it on the table in front of him. “The Serpents know where you are, Janus. They know about your guild, and they know that you visited the Greyes. Worse, they know about the dagger.”

  I knew that when I had used the Old Serpent’s Sting in Margar dungeon, a map marker had been placed on me which would allow the Serpents to find me. Back then I didn’t have a choice but to use it, since we would have died otherwise.

  What really worried me was that the Serpents knew we had visited the Greyes. I didn’t see how they could possibly know that, unless someone had told them. That meant one of two things; either somebody in our party had informed them, or Helblake Crowley had. Either way, someone purporting to be an ally was working against us.

  “How did they know we’d gone to the Assipian peaks?” I said. “And how do you know that they know?”

  Connor pointed at his blade. “See this?” he said, gesturing at a bloodstain near the tip. “I was travelling toward Iskarg when three Serpents warriors and a mage found me. I was a deserter, you see, and when I lost my Serpent symbol, a bounty was placed on me.”

  “We know all about bounties,” said Smoglar.

  Connor nodded. “The gang who tried to claim my bounty were overly optimistic of their chances, and didn’t seem to notice that I was 20 levels above them. I made short work of the warriors, but I held the tip of my blade against the mage’s throat and made him talk.”

  “Men can get awfully talkative with a blade against their skin,” said Ozreal. “What did they tell you?”

  “Two things,” answered Connor. “Both of which will interest you and worry you in equal measure. One: The Serpents have been fed information on every move you have made over the last week.”

  I looked around me to see if anyone flinched when they heard this. I hated thinking suspiciously of my friends, but I just didn’t see how else the Serpents had gotten their information.

  Connor continued. “Two: The Serpents have assembled a part of their army and given them a task. Namely, to come here and kill you all, destroy your charterstone, and take the dagger.”

  “How long do we have?” I said.

  Connor looked at me with a grim expression. “Two days, at most.”

  ***

  We didn’t waste a second. As the evening wore on we started to build our defences. Guile, the banker, paid for a host of construction workers from Iskarg to erect perimeter fences. The price was that we would have to promote him to an officer of the guild, but we had no choice.

  As the construction workers laboured around us, I stood around the meeting table with my friends.

  “This won’t work,” said Smoglar. “We’d be better off leaving.”

  The evening sky was darkening, and with every passing minute, I knew that our choices were shrinking. Time was our most precious resource now, worth much more than even a bank full of CR. It was slipping away.

  For hours we had debated back and forth. Smoglar thought our best option was to escape, and Feidan agreed with him. I turned to Ozreal for council from time to time, but the mage said little, preferring to take in the conversation flowing around him.

  “We have two options,” I said. “One; we leave. We abandon the guild, abandon the newbies who have joined us, and we escape with the dagger. That means we leave everything we’ve worked for behind, and we leave
our new guild members, the ones who came to us for support. Then we hope that the Serpents don’t just murder them all.”

  “Better they die, than us,” said the dwarf.

  “This isn’t like you, Smoglar,” I said.

  He held up his stump. “I’m not exactly a warrior anymore, am I? And if I’ve learned anything, it’s this; you can’t win every battle.”

  I nodded toward the stairs. They led to the upper rooms, where the newbies were in the bedrooms that we had hastily converted into a barracks. “They’re not just nametags,” I said. “They’re people. Some of them will be like us; they will have spent their last CR on getting into the game, and they won’t get another chance. Do you think the Serpents will spare them?”

  “Not a chance,” said Brian, who paced around the room.

  “They’ll carve every single one where they stand,” said Connor. “Trust me, I know. And the ones they don’t get to, they’ll chase around the world map until they find them.”

  “This is bigger than just a few new players,” said Ozreal, speaking for the first time. “The item you guard will mean the death of many more if Herelius gets it.”

  I nodded. “I know that. But what’s the choice?”

  “Like I said,” answered Smoglar. “We leave. Tonight.”

  Silence hung in the room. Every man seemed to weigh up his own options. All our paths had led us here, but that didn’t mean we were bound together. I knew that each person in the room had their own quests, their own goals. They had their own fears, too.

  I addressed everyone and raised my voice.

  “If we leave now, we abandon everything we’ve worked for. We let the Serpents know that they can take what they want. Re:Fuze will go back to being a 4-guild world. The newbies who came here because they didn’t have anywhere else to go, will know that there’s no hope for them.

  “The dagger might be precious, but it isn’t the only thing that threatens the world. If we let the Serpents take what they want unchecked, then nothing will ever change.”

  “So what, then?” said Smoglar. “What are you saying?”

  I took a breath. “That we stay. We do everything we possibly can to prepare and shore up our defences. We get the newbies ready. Connor can drill them in swordplay. When the Serpents come, we put up a fight.”

  “It’s one we can’t win,” said Brian. “Objectively speaking.”

  “But I can’t leave knowing we didn’t try,” I answered. “We’ve got a diverse group. We might not have the numbers, but we have skills. Don’t you want to be able to look in the mirror and know that you stood for something? That you didn’t just give up?”

  “Sometimes that’s all a man can hope for,” said Connor, standing up. “I knew that when I deserted the Serpents, losing one man wouldn’t make a difference to them. But I did it all the same.”

  Ozreal nodded. “Janus is right. Visit the Grand Library, and you’ll see that Re:Fuze lore is full of individuals who made an impact. Lastor Bombraid, Jeremal the Halon. Even Necrolor, for all his evil. One man, if he is strong enough, can affect the course of history.”

  I spoke to my friends. I felt as if I should have had an orchestra playing battle music behind me. “So we get ready. We prepare as well as we can, and when those snake gits get here, we make them bleed.”

  Smoglar stood up. He pounded the table with his fist. “You’re right, tinker. Dammit, you’re right.”

  Brian crossed his arms. “And if it all goes wrong, Janus? What then? We need a plan for the dagger.”

  I nodded. “If everything turns sour, a couple of us will leave with the Old Serpent’s Sting. But only if it comes down to it. This is our last stand, friends, and it’s the most important one we’ll ever take.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  We spent the next 36 hours in a frenzy of activity. Connor told us everything he could of the Serpents army tactics and how many fighters we should expect them to bring. With us, our new members, and Connor, we had 26 people in our guild. In his most conservative estimate, Connor expected the serpents to bring over 200 fighters.

  We knew that the Serpents guild used mounts, so we had to expect some kind of cavalry charge. To that effect, I took 5 of the newbies into the woods where we felled trees.

  Skill Gained – Lumberjack

  We dug holes in the ground and planted the logs on a slant so that any mounts rushing at them would impale themselves on the sharpened ends. We packed these so closely together that it formed a barrier around the guild. This meant that the Serpents could only ride their mounts a short distance before having to get off and then march toward us.

  Connor had well-developed two and one-handed swordplay skills, and he wasn’t too bad with an axe, either. We had him instruct some of the melee-fighting newbies and give them some tips. Through this he gained a ‘mentor’ skill which, although he didn’t say it, I could tell he was proud to earn.

  “We need potions lined up in strategic locations,” Brian had told me.

  To that effect, Feidan brewed a batch of his own brand of health potions, as well as mana and stamina. We placed these in stockpiles in defensive positions in the field surrounding the guild, and we also left some in the house. I hoped it wouldn’t get to that. If we were fighting inside the guild house, it would mean we’d taken our last stand.

  Brian and I made screw bombs. We rigged these to thin, almost invisible pieces of string and then set them in the fields around the guild. I had named these ‘screw trip bombs’, and Brian asked me to stop adding prefixes to my bombs names all the time. After telling the rest of the guild where the trip wires were, we had ourselves some booby-traps.

  I stood in the common room and waited for the rest of the guild to gather. A few newbies walked in, and I caught them glancing at me.

  “Scared?” I said.

  One of them nodded, the other shrugged his shoulders. Their gear was so basic that they looked fresh out of the box. This must have been how I appeared when I left Blundow.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “We’ve got a good chance.”

  I said the words, but I didn’t know if I really believed them. The odds were stacked against us, and I knew that the Serpents army wouldn’t be mainly comprised of newbies, like ours.

  While I waited, I decided to spend my 4 remaining stats points from my last levels up. With the prospect of a battle, I needed a few extra hit points and some added damage resistance, so I loaded a point into endurance.

  Endurance increased to 6

  Hit points increased to 169

  Stamina increased to 134

  With 3 points left, I needed to be sensible. My highest ability right now was Appraiser of Everything. This could give us an edge in battle if I could tell my guild mates our opponents' weaknesses. The problem was, Appraiser was mainly useful for NPCs. It was rare that a player character would have a glaring weakness unless they were wearing some kind of armour that gave them one. And who would do that?

  With that being the case, I realised that my Knife Play skill was going to be useful in the hours ahead. Knife play increased my chance of a critical hit but it had also earned me another attack; Poison Blade. This attack would drain HP off the person I stabbed, but I could only use it once per battle, and I needed to save it. I used 1 remaining point on agility and the rest on intelligence.

  As I leaned over the table and stared at a map of the area surrounding our guild, I heard booming footsteps walk toward me. Brian ducked his head under the doorframe and walked into the room.

  “They’re here,” he said.

  When I followed him outside, I saw that a sea of faces filled the horizon. The fields beyond us glinted when sunlight shone on the armour of the Serpent army. They hadn’t sent a rag-tag group of fighters today. It seemed that the Serpents had dispatched a freshly-equipped fighting unit. Their armour bore no marks, and blades that weren’t yet covered in the scratches of combat. Not all of them were mounted, but some of the Serpents bobbed up and down as their Warg
s and Rockdogs carried them over the plains.

  Hundreds of square Serpent logos filled the air above them. The army advancing on us was dressed in black like a funeral possession. At the front of their formation were the infantrymen. These were likely the lowest level of their force and would have only leather armour, but they had dyed it so that it was black.

  I was joined outside the house by the rest of the guild. Smoglar had wiped the stains from his armour, and his axe gleamed. Everyone seemed ready for battle, and even Ozreal had donned a helmet and gloves.

  The closer the Serpents got, the louder their marching became. Soon, it sounded like some enormous machine was advancing toward us. Some of the newbies looked nervously at the ground, while others could take their eyes off their opponents.