Guilds at War: The LitRPG Saga Continues
Page 19
Hawke shook his head again. When we’re not dealing with emergencies, maybe you should give me a list of all the Makers. I thought Laughing Man was in charge of Chaos and Vazalak Zombi was the Undeath guy.
The infodump was enough to give him a headache, and the thought made him feel like breaking out into laughter, despite the fact that the guttural chanting coming from the center of the plaza was getting louder and there was nothing funny about the situation. Even without activating his enhanced senses, he could feel a massive gathering of power ahead. Laughing would be something only a madman – or a Madwoman – might do.
He took a moment to activate Tranquil Mind, which cost him a hefty ten percent of his total Mana capacity (which was already down another ten percent by having Mana Shield up). The payoff was more than worth it; the urge to start cackling like a nutjob stopped and he felt calmer and more centered. He was positive that the effect wasn’t a targeted attack but simply part of the ambiance of the underground city. Shrugging, he kept moving until he finally got a good look at the plaza.
There was enough light in the open area to allow him to see without his dark vision. He found himself looking onto a circular plaza, at least three or four hundred feet wide, that descended onto a smaller central circle some twenty feet below the street level; a spiraling ramp led from the edge to the center of the plaza. It was like a stadium built by someone who wasn’t quite right in the head. More importantly, the entire spiraling ramp was filled with hundreds of Undead. And they came in two distinct varieties.
Most of the monsters were like the ones who had chased the Nerf Herders into the sewers. The reanimated corpses of innocent Akila citizens, mostly dressed in the remains of woolen tunics and trousers or long skirts that the lower classes wore, although here and there he spotted men in chain mail armor and the red tabards of the City Watch, as well as the occasional adventurer type. Humans for the most part, with a sizable minority from other species, including some Elves, whose Fae blood should have rendered them immune to the Undead curse. They were the Revenant’s work.
The second group comprised a good third of the gathered crowd. Where the regular zombies just stood there, still as statues, the other bunch were dancing as they chanted in low, guttural voices. They were from a species he hadn’t encountered yet: broad-shouldered, with longer arms and shorter legs than humans. Their heads were narrow and flat at the top, a bit like the Frankenstein monster from classic movies; they had no facial or head hair at all, and their long bat-like ears flapped in time with their capering dance moves. Troggs, a bastardized Latin word for troglodyte, although the term usually meant primitive cave-dweller and these Troggs lived in cities and, unlike the zombies that filled two-thirds of the spiraling plaza, were dressed in fine silken robes or suits of full armor made of gleaming bronze scales and mithril helmets with monstrous face masks. They ranged in level from fifteen to eighteen, and their stat boxes identified them as Risen Troggs, with over a hundred Health and Mana per level. Tough critters.
They were Undead but they weren’t the emotionless, relentless creatures Hawke had encountered in the past, maybe because they were creations of the Madwoman rather than Vazalak. The Risen Troggs were chanting and dancing with big grins on their faces, showing off vampire-like fangs. He noticed that the ones wearing silk robes were doing the singing while the warrior types danced. Both the tune and the moves didn’t follow anything like a steady rhythm, however. It kept shifting in discordant ways, like an arrhythmic heartbeat. The music of Chaos. The part of him that was linked to that Force began to pulse in tune with the bizarre melody, causing his Order-attuned Mana to burn hotter, as if it was getting angry. Hawke had to take a moment to fix his Mana channels before the conflict tore him up from the inside. This was some nasty crap and it wasn’t even aimed at him. He was glad his friends hadn’t come along; Heketa, Tava and maybe Grognard might have been able to deal with the insane vibes flying around here, but not the rest.
At the center of the spiral was a pit, and Hawke felt the presence of a Mana Node at the bottom. Screams were coming out of it, almost drowned out by the chanting of the Troggs. Standing over the pit were two figures. Huntmaster Laryn was one of them, although the tall Fae had replaced the dark green cowl he had worn while leading his corrupted Woodling army with a suit of black leather armor covered with blood-red magical symbols. Not he, Hawke corrected himself. It. The Huntmaster wasn’t a person anymore, just a thing under the control of the Undeath Demiurge. Hawke saw the monster’s face for the first time: it had that funhouse-mirror long and narrow shape you saw among the more pure-blooded Elves, with the pointy ears and silver hair common among the Fae. Its skin was chalky white, with missing chunks of flesh that revealed the bone beneath. Larry the Revenant was rotting away, and it didn’t care.
Huntmaster Laryn (Fae, Undead)
Level 23(20) Unseelie Revenant
Health 2,325 Mana 8,638 Endurance n/a
The bastard had risen up quite a bit in power since the last time Hawke had seen it, although luckily the level cap in the Common Realm prevented the monster from getting the full benefits of its current rank. The numbers only told part of the story; there were multiple energy auras around Laryn, glowing in purple, dark green, and swirling multicolored hues, the colors of Death, Undeath and Chaos, respectively. Hawke was reluctant to use Advanced Mana Sight in a place infected with insanity-inducing energies, but he didn’t need it to see that Laryn had a ton of heavy-duty defenses. Taking down the Revenant was going to take more than him. Maybe more than his entire guild. Larry looked like raid boss material.
And the laughing Trogg woman standing across the pit from Laryn was in the same class.
The Troggs’ physical characteristics were not meant to please human sensibilities, so he couldn’t call her beautiful, but ‘alluring’ and ‘fascinating’ definitely fit. She radiated what they used to call animal magnetism, with eyes bright with insane amusement and a twisted expression that made Heketa seem normal. Her flat head was topped with a spiked bright red Mohawk rising above a gold tiara studded with black jewels. Her scarlet and silver robes had a metallic sheen that rippled in the faint glow of the circle of torches set outside the spiral. There were faces woven in the strange fabric, and they were magically animated, opening and closing their mouths as if saying something; Hawke suspected that if he were closer he would be able to hear the faces in her robes whisper to him.
Arch-Priestess Urgah Thul (Trogg Undead)
Level 25 (20) Chaos Bringer, Death Dancer, Necromancer
Health 3,918 Mana 3,112/6,783 Endurance n/a
Like Revenant Larry, Urgah was surrounded by protective magic, including something that linked her to her fellow Troggs. That was all Hawke could see without delving deeper than would be good for him. What was important was the fact that two high-caliber agents of Undeath were performing some sort of ritual in the pit, and that from the cries in English coming from the hole in the ground, the Nerf Herders they had captured were part of it.
Problem was, he couldn’t look into the pit without getting a lot closer to the spiral courtyard. His Forces-infused Twilight Shroud was good, but probably not good enough to push through a crowd of Undead. He considered using his Farsight amulet to watch from above.
Do you think they could sense it? Hawke asked Saturnyx. It’s a passive ability.
Hawke still hoped there was a way to rescue those poor bastards. Maybe they were keeping some of them alive for a later ritual, and he might be able to sneak in after the ceremony was over. Gritting his teeth, he activated the amulet and found himself looking down into the center of the spiraling structure. He regretted it almost immediately.
Three Nerf Herders were at the bottom of the pit, floating in some sort of thick liquid, like molasses or quicksand. They were melting in it. As he watched, one of them – the Orc, Gorat – raised one arm out of the muck, only to scream as the limb simply fell under its own weight as if made of mud. Another Eternal stopped screaming a moment later and sank into the thick sludge without a trace. Strands of blue light emerged from the Mana Node in the pit and flowed into both Laryn and Urgah, who inhaled the death energies, drinking the released soul.
The monstrous pair weren’t simply absorbing the Eternals’ power: they were sending it right back into the ritual they were conducting, augmented by the Mana Node in the center of the spiral. Whatever spell they were devising, it was incredibly strong, the sort of thing he had only experienced when watching the Makers of the Realms reshaping his Stronghold’s structures. It wasn’t quite the power of Creation itself, but something approximating it. The Demiurges couldn’t create or destroy matter, but they could reshape it at will. This ritual was something along those lines. He had to learn what it was.
Knowing he wasn’t going to like what he was about to see, Hawke activated Advanced Mana Sight.
Twenty-Four
Pure information flowed into his mind, overwhelming it for several seconds. If he hadn’t had Tranquil Mind activated, he might have ended up as a drooling vegetable, but luckily the ability and his high Willpower kept him sane, or at least no less sane than he normally was.
The torrent of knowledge shaped itself into forms his mind could digest: complex Mana patterns turned into images and sounds, like a movie played for the benefit of someone too illiterate to read a book. The amount of data in the energy construct would have filled a library; Hawke was able to scan through the highlights, which gave him an idea of what was going – and what was at stake.
The Ebon Dynasty the Troggs had built in their underground lairs – and Lairs, Dungeons and Labyrinths, for the Trogg civilization used those Proving Grounds as homes and fortresses, insane as that sounded – had been devoted to the Madwoman, the Demiurge they knew as the Chaos Dancer, the Empress of Bone and Blood. To gain her favor, the Arch-Priests of Madness had enslaved entire species into a bizarre form of Undeath in which the victims’ minds remained trapped in their corpses, but only after they had been driven insane through a process involving mental and physical torture. Their Chaos Cult had spread throughout the Realms and encroached into the Courts of Faerie and even the High Realms of Asgard and Olympus.
There had been a backlash, of course. The Dynasty’s fall from the peak of power lasted less than a century as all its rivals joined forces to destroy it. Hawke caught glimpses of a magical version of a nuclear apocalypse. Entire cities were consumed by black flames, or collapsed into clouds of loose powder. Giants wielding glowing blades clashed while antlike armies swarmed between their feet. Continents were reshaped or sank beneath the sea.
The Troggs lost. Overthrown and hunted everywhere, the last remnants had retreated to the First Realm, where their most powerful enemies did not dare follow, since their power would be severely curtailed. Near the end, the surviving Arch-Priests had gathered their knowledge and built new weapons of mass destruction. The Common Realm’s limitations had actually worked for them, acting as a dampener that allowed them to use enormous amount of energy without unleashing its full potential, sort of like testing atomic bombs while their explosive power was tamped down to the equivalent of firecrackers. Before they could complete their grim work, however, their own deity betrayed them. The Madwoman apparently decided her followers had gone too far, and with a wave of her hand killed them all. All, as in the entire subspecies of Trogg who formed the Dynasty, wiping them out through every Realm.
All of that flashed through Hawke’s eyes. It was like the inline documentation you found in programming software, adding comments and descriptions. The important stuff, of course, was the program itself, or in this case, the spell the Revenant and the last Arch-Priestess of the Dynasty were casting. Laryn had awakened Urgah from stasis, which had spared her from the fate of her fellow clerics, and the two of them were trying to set off a magical nuke that would turn all living things in Akila and a good fifty mile circle around the city into insane Chaos zombies.
The blast would not quite reach Hawke’s Domain, but all the villages, towns and cities in the area of effect had a combined population of hundreds of thousands. All of them would turn into Undead and swarm in every direction, infecting others. Even worse, the Undead would be crazy but not mindless. They would be able to use weapons and even tactics. Once they wiped out all life in an area, they would march off to another, or even sail ships to reach distant shores. It would be the worst kind of zombie apocalypse, one with hordes of thinking, cunning creatures with only one goal: to create more of their kind until all living things were gone.
And that was but the beginning of the bad news. From the details in the spell’s code, some of the Undead it created would be superior specimens with powerful magical abilities. Others would combine thousands of bodies into giant war beasts. Undead kaiju, Godzilla-sized but with none of the warmth or charm of the big lizard. Very few things in the Common Realm would be able to stand up to them. That ritual was going to be a mother effer.
Crap. The word didn’t do justice to the situation, but he could have gone on a swearing rampage for an hour and not done any better. The only good news was that it took a lot of time to activate the spell, and that they weren’t even halfway there. The four Eternals they were feeding on were reducing the casting time, but it would still take another two or three days to complete the ritual, and Hawke didn’t plan to give them that long. Time to call the cops.
Urgah raised her head and looked directly at the spot where he had placed the Farsight spell. She looked right through it into Hawke’s eyes. A moment later, she gave out an inhuman shriek, loud enough to echo through the Undead city. Hawke turned off the spell, but the damage was already done. Even from his hiding place, he could hear movement coming from the plaza. Hundreds of monsters had reacted to the outcry and gone into motion, hunting for him.
Double crap.
Hawke ran.
Twenty-Five
Objective Completed: Evil Lurks Beneath the Earth
You have discovered that a powerful necromantic ritual is being conducted at a hidden Trogg city beneath Akila. Report this to the authorities before the ritual is complete to claim your reward.
Awesome, Hawke thought as rushed toward the exit.
There was a flash of purple-green light from the spiral behind him, bright enough to cast a shadow in front of him. Heavy-duty spell, he figured.
A moment later, translucent arms rose from every paving block on the ground, including the portion where he was running, each pair connected to one of the skulls suspended in the blocks. It was like an Undead version of the spell the Terror Tree had cast against Hawke a few days ago. Invisibility didn’t count for crap when dozens of groping hands appeared and began to feel around. One closed around his ankle with bone-crushing force and only his superhuman Dexterity prevented him from faceplanting. He unleashed Mass Blast Undead, Consecrated Ground and Burning Light in quick succession, shredding all the ghostly limbs near him – and also doing the magical equivalent of firing off a signal flare. This was going to get nasty.
Really nasty, he realized when an earth-rending sound made him turn toward the entrance he had used to get there. The black-metal door was closed.
He was trapped in the Trogg Undercity.
Hawke kept moving, casting his buff rotation as he went. The time for stealth was over. He soon discovered that the grappling limbs were relatively wimpy, withering away when they came into contact with his Order- and Celestial-augmented Aura of Light, which burned them for 120 damage per second. He cut a swath through the spirit shapes as he ran, at the price of leaving a trail a blind man could follow.
Behind him, he heard the rumble of a hundreds of footsteps trampling the ground as the Undead gave chase. He had a good head start on them, but soon found himself having to backtrack when the twisting streets led him to dead ends. A group of regular zombies and a couple of leaders spotted him and used their banshee shriek as an attack and a signal to the rest of the monsters. Hawke retaliated with a volley of Light and Life spells that drained him of a good chunk of Mana but cremated all eight monsters. By the time he was finished, however, a handful of Troggs reached the scene.
The robed Undead unleashed a trio of Chaos-enhanced Death Cyclones that shredded his Bulwark of Light. His other defenses, including his new Mystic powers, took care of most of it, and Mana Shield absorbed the rest, but between that and his spells, his energy pool was running low. Hawke used Blinding Light to slow down the monsters and kept running, using the Dispenser to inject a Major Mana potion directly into his bloodstream. He didn’t need Saturnyx to tell him he’d screwed up. Taking the time to destroy the first gang of Undead had almost gotten him killed. There was no way he could win a stand-up fight even with the hundreds of minions in the city, let alone the two bosses. He had to stay on the move until he found a way out.
I should have paid someone to teach me Earth magic.
Between his Unlimited Potential and his Mana Channeling senses, he could pick up any Element or Force he was exposed to. Problem was, only a handful of people in the Sunset Valley knew Earth spells, and most of those were members of the Stern Clan, who liked to charge an arm and a leg to teach spells. Hawke had figured he would eventually get around to it, as soon as he found some time off from his duties running the Domain, having a relationship with three women, and dealing with one emergency after another. Maybe he should have found the time.