“How much longer, Rusty?” Utrice called. “We need to rest. We can’t keep going like this.”
Cries and shouts came from all around them. Innumerable parties were working alongside the NPCs along the front of the wall. The order from the king and queen had been clear: all long-range attackers to the wall to hold back the army for as long as possible.
“How much you got left in you, Justin? Sal? Clayton?”
They all gave a half-hearted thumbs-ups between firing, ducking out of the way as black-feathered arrows soared past their heads.
“Keep pushing,” Rusty called back.
He had been in many tough situations since diving into Obsidian several weeks ago, but this one certainly took the cake as their toughest challenge. Yet, even though the dark army was unrelenting, the attitude was one of excited optimism. The blessed and the NPCs alike were up for the challenge, and ready to defend the keep. No one could remember the last time there had been this much excitement in Hammersworth.
Rusty looked down at his sword, hanging useless by his side. He was a warrior. A close-combat fighter. What little use he was right now came in orchestration and encouragement. A short while ago, the queen’s latest Chief Guardian had swung by their part of the wall and injected them with the For the Queen! boon and bolstered their stats, but she had yet to come back their way.
Hands gripped Rusty’s shoulders and yanked him backward.
“Watch out!”
Two metal hooks sprang over the wall and gripped the rock. Rusty peered over the edge and saw a line of orcs climbing the ladders, leering grins on their faces.
Rusty turned to thank the person behind him and saw a giant rock of a woman who looked as if she were carved from stone.
“Thanks.”
“Gelda. And don’t thank me yet. Help me get rid of them.”
Gelda grabbed one prong of the ladder and Rusty took the other. With great difficulty, they raised the hooks and gave the ladder a shove, but not before several orcs leaped over the wall.
The orcs stood no chance, stumbling into the waiting warriors. Blades tore them to pieces.
Until another ladder was raised.
And another.
And another.
Rusty turned back to his crew. “Just a little longer, folks,” he cried, a grin playing on his lips as fire burned in his eyes. “It’s my turn to get involved and cut some down.”
The Ethereals were a party of half a dozen mages. In real life, they were a pop band from the Czech Republic, looking to strike it big by growing their social media presence and hoping to land a spot on YouTube as one of the biggest artists of the year.
The group played music together, ate together, and traveled the world together. Their latest fancy was playing Obsidian together, each member of their party learning the wonders and mysteries of magic and the etheric.
Little did they know, however, that they would be among the first wave of mages brought together to protect the rift from the oncoming storm.
A cry came to them, only just audible over the shouts and snarls of the orcs and other creatures struggling to break through their shield. “Hold steady!”
The shield was impressive, they had to admit that. With several lines of dwarves with their shields raised around the outside the mages, the spell created a large orb that circled a large area around the rift.
Even the dwarves were covered. Wave upon wave of enemy ran up against the shield and were thrown back. The same sharing of the etheric that had enabled the rift to open in the first place was now being used in defense of the thing.
“Hold! Focus on the etheric, not on the enemy!” Tabitha shouted.
Although she had been late to the party with the mages, Tabitha, the head of the Mages’ School, led the first group. Realizing the dangers before them, she had finally brought the mages from the school out of their ancient torpor and into the action.
“God, does she ever shut up?” Laurie complained, eyes screwed tight with concentration.
May chuckled. “Her voice is a little shrill, isn’t it?”
“You said it.”
The others giggled.
Having learned to manipulate the etheric, their mana had stopped draining as quickly as it used to.
“You know we have band practice in half an hour?” Laurie said.
“Isn’t this more fun, though?”
For the first time since Laurie had taken up keyboards, something trumped her excitement about playing in front of a crowd and rocking the keys.
“I suppose.” She grinned.
“Let’s see this out,” Ilene suggested, her hands glowing amber with power. “It won’t be long until the switch-out, then we can log off for a bit, practice, and come back.”
“Fine,” Laurie said with faux annoyance.
The Ethereals giggled again and returned their concentration to the job at hand, just in time to see the monstrous figures of immense creatures lumbering through the army like whales carving a path through plankton.
She saw them some distance ahead.
Glowing blue shadows of people. Shimmering cyan visions of those who had passed. The see-through images of the deceased.
Ghosts.
“Impossible,” she mouthed, stalking after the ghosts, her party following her as silently as the night.
She had not believed they would find anything. When the queen’s guards had issued the command that a group of watchmen should remain vigilant in the streets each night, she had not believed that they would find anything of note.
“Ghosts? I’m sorry, I know this is a game and everything, but seriously? Ghosts?”
The guards had nodded, telling her what Veronica had found the previous evening. She still hadn’t believed it.
Now what choice did she have?
Dana took a shortcut through an alley and found that she had closed the distance between her and the deceased. She knew the town like the back of her hand; had to, really, given that the Thieves’ Guild members were notoriously on the run.
Hammersworth was a labyrinth, and only a few knew every nook and cranny. Only those proficient in sneaking could remain invisible while treading silently through the streets. Only those who wore the garb of the Thieves’ Guild could blend with the shadows and sneak up on ghosts.
They closed the distance easily enough but that didn’t help them. The ghosts found their way to the cemetery and floated through the iron gates. Dana watched as those whom they had led from their beds stumbled into the iron bars and formed a pileup.
“See? Nothing to worry about,” she said to Camphrey, her apprentice, who was standing right behind her. “The gates are locked. They’ll never get through.”
And then her mouth fell open.
Although she was right, and the living couldn’t get through, that didn’t stop them from attempting to. They squashed themselves against the gate, reaching through it with desperate fingers, their flesh straining between the iron bars.
“They’re going to kill themselves trying to get through,” Dana said suddenly. “Quick, we need to wake them.”
They poured out of the darkness like shadows, taking the arms of the ghosts’ followers and tugging them backward. Only one of their crew had the sense to splash a bottle of water in the faces of the sleeping, which snapped them immediately from their reverie.
“Are you guys okay?” Dana asked.
She got no cohesive answer. Confusion was written on the faces of the newly awakened. She tried to explain what had happened, but the ghosts had all faded. After a round of unanswerable questions, those who had sleepwalked found their way back home, leaving the group from the guild alone in the street.
“How are we supposed to stop this from happening again? No matter what we do, they’re going to keep trying to make the sleeping kill themselves.”
Dana mulled this over, her thoughts only broken when she heard screams nearby and saw a ghostly blue glow coming from the window of a house down the street.
They towered before him—huge wooden things, several feet thick. Wooden buttresses had been wedged at angles against the gate, with clusters of guards using their weight against the door to keep it from breaking down and swinging inward with the mass of the enemy’s forces pushing against it.
And then there was Walter, a Level 5 warrior who still had no idea how he had ended up in this situation.
He had been “born” in Hammersworth only a week ago. In that time, he had navigated the city streets and gotten his bearings, familiarizing himself with the various guilds and creeds so he could work his way up the ranks of his preferred class.
He had always loved being a warrior. Since the first time he dived into MMORPGs the warrior class was what he had picked.
Unfortunately for him, that first time was this game, and now he was starting to wonder what he’d gotten himself into.
“Don’t be scared, dude. You’ll be fine.”
The man beside Walter threw him a reassuring smile.
“Will it hurt?” Walter asked. He had yet to be involved in any serious scrapes. Most of his leveling up had consisted of taking small jobs from the Heroes-for-Hire notice board and training against the straw dummies at the Warriors’ Guild.
“Nah. You’ll feel it, sure, but it won’t hurt like it used to. Back in the early days, they had yet to calibrate the pain receptors. Now it’ll be like getting a soft punch or getting bruised.”
Walter nodded, unsure how the man beside him could tell how new to the gaming world he was.
Cries sounded. Up on the walls people shouted commands. The rabble of creatures beyond the gate was endless, and he saw them moving through the small gap between the doors.
The silhouettes of the bird-like creatures who had arrived in Hammersworth the previous day darkened the sky. He wondered if the enemy would bring their own airborne fighters. Maybe they had at least one advantage in having a team of creatures who could navigate above the battlefield.
“The good guys will win, won’t they?” Walter asked the man.
He considered this. “I hope so. They usually do.”
The eyes of the vanguard turned to the parapets above the gate, where a red-faced man leaned over the railing and called down to them, “Ready your position!”
The vanguard moved into a defensive stance, weapons at the ready. A feeling of calm came over the group as two figures cut through the formation and made their way to the gate.
There was an audible gasp as the king and queen stood in front of their army. They looked glorious in their gleaming armor. Queen Therese held a hammer, while King Abaxis held his axe.
And now there were more of them. The Chief Guardian of the Queen and her party. Three warriors, a goblin, a cleric, and something that looked like a child’s cuddly toy with claws that could slash through steel.
“For the Queen!” the Chief Guardian called.
A wave of power shot around her, finding its way into the vanguard and anyone within hearing range of the wall. Walter felt his confidence swell, saw his stats boost and several timers appeared in his vision, counting down the buffs that had been applied to strength, stamina, and mana.
He smiled, sword in hand. He had never felt more ready for anything in his life.
That is, until the colossal shadow appeared on the other side of the gate. The ground shook. Above the wall, he could just make out the truncated head of some monstrous thing as its body slammed into the gate.
Chapter Fifty-Three
The gate fractured. Shards broke free and rained down upon them. The creature was huge, and it wasn’t the only one out there.
Veronica had seen them from afar. While helping those on the parapets, she had watched their massive shapes coming through the sea of enemies.
She had no name for them. Couldn’t even fathom what they might be called, but there was a certain familiarity to the creatures that made them easier for her mind to digest.
They were part-rhino, part-elephant. Their hide was thick and brown, with a shaggy mane of dark fur around their necks. Though their ears were small, their trunks were wide and long, and at the end was the sharp tusk that had been used to stab into the ground and act like a fifth leg.
A being of muscle. A battering ram. A creature bred to break open the city and throw wide the floodgates for the masses of orcs behind.
They had concentrated their fire on it as soon as they could. All available archers showered arrows upon its hide. All available mages scorched and poisoned and tried to entangle or trip the monster, but it had powered through.
Veronica had no idea how much strength the damn thing had, but it was certainly enough to reach the gate and break it down.
Another crash. More fractures now.
“Brace yourself! Position!” Veronica called, heart racing.
They prepared for the final blow, silence falling behind the wall.
It came in an explosion of wood and debris. The creature, who had been terrifying from up high, was even more daunting from the ground below. It towered over them, its trunk already swinging at those on the floor waiting for it.
Therese and Abe moved in time to avoid its muscular trunk and sprinted toward its ankles, where thick tufts of fur allowed them to jump on and hack at the leg.
Several warriors followed suit, including Huk, Leonie, and Talbot. Blueballs also joined in, springing into the air and slashing his claws through the creature’s hide.
A pained moan, and the creature began to wobble. Its ankle buckled beneath its weight. It struggled to stand, then grew weaker as the blood spilled into the street.
Soon enough, it was down, eyes closed and finished.
But that didn’t leave any room for celebration. The gate was now open, and the enemy orcs screeched excitedly as they began to climb the creature’s corpse and tumble into the city.
All available fighters jumped in to help. The whole front wall of the city was alive with action. The orcs who had climbed the ladders had now begun to pile on top of the walls, engaging in combat with warriors and support fighters who had been waiting for their chance to shine.
The mages outside the gates held their defenses tight, their shields protecting the rift from possible enemy intrusion. What had once been fields and farmland was now nothing more than orcs, wargs, and other creatures Veronica and her company could not name.
Veronica, clad in her newfound armor, experimented with the blades she had been given by the king. Silver daggers the length of her forearm, emblazoned with a scripture she couldn’t read. They were light and responded easily to her touch. As she used them to block and carve enemy attacks, she was surprised to see her skills and proficiency grow.
Therese and Abe were a force to behold. Working back to back, their respective axe and hammer whistled as they spun and clobbered the enemies around them. There was a visible aura surrounding them, and it was the first time that anyone had seen anything like fear in the orcs’ eyes.
Therese wondered what was happening but couldn’t come up with a conclusive answer. Her focus was almost entirely on survival and defending the city in the attack, along with the people of the city. Her city.
Blueballs was a blur of blue fur tearing around the battlefield. At twice the height of the average orc, he bore down on enemy after enemy, grabbing them by the head and sending them flying or slashing them with his powerful claws. His roars and growls were enough to strike fear into the heart of any enemy.
“Huk!”
Talbot looked around wildly for the small goblin. It had certainly been a concern on his intelligent mind that someone so small would quickly be swept up in the heat of battle, but he hadn’t been able to do anything to protect him.
A moment ago, they had been fighting side-by-side, Talbot doing his best to keep him near. Now he was gone. Lost in the crowd.
“Talbot!”
He couldn’t work out where the cry was
coming from, but at least the little guy was still alive.
An attack from an orc drew Talbot’s focus back to the battle.
The sky was dark. The cowladites circled overhead, throwing projectiles into the crowd. Several of them circled the giant elephantine creatures, occasionally landing on their backs and attacking to bring them down faster.
Veronica took down two orcs with her blades, reveling in the experience she was gaining. She had never thought of herself as a close-combat fighter, preferring to heal or fight with magic, but she had to admit that this was exhilarating.
While her staff had been useful for healing, this was certainly a more direct way to go. She spun and whirled and sank her blades into enemy after enemy, keeping an eye on her experience bar as it slowly moved toward the next level.
“What are you smiling about?” Therese called. She finished clobbering an orc’s skull with her hammer.
“No reason,” Veronica said. Then, “This is actually pretty fun!”
“Fun!” Talbot called. “You’re calling a battle for the end of the world ‘fun?’ What’s wrong with you?”
Blueballs streaked past them, smashing through several orcs like a bowling ball as he sprinted on all fours.
“We’re not going to be able to keep this up forever,” Leonie shouted. “There’s too many of them. We have to bring people back. Take shelter.”
Therese’s face grew resolute. She turned and saw the stairs to the parapet a few feet away. With determination, she swung her hammer, carving a path through to the top, where she looked out over the landscape.
Leonie was right. There were far too many of them. She couldn’t see where the army ended and the darkness began. Dotted throughout the army were more elephantine creatures, with one of them headed directly for the rift.
“How’s it looking?” Abe said, appearing at her side.
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