by Rachel Aaron
For a heartbeat, everyone just stood there, staring in wonder, then the entire raid broke into cheers, hugging each other and jumping up and down. Tina would have jumped, too, if her armor hadn’t felt so heavy, but it wasn’t time to celebrate yet. Grel was already stirring beneath the stone, reminding her that the actual fight part of the fight was just beginning.
“All right, everybody!” she said, holding up her sword. “Time for phase two! Let’s kill this bastard!”
The raid cheered even louder, swarming over the mountain of rubble to start hacking, shooting, and beating on the giant trapped below. Even the spell casters who were out of mana whacked at him with their staffs, pounding on whatever part of Grel’Darm they could find under the stone. The giant shook and roared, but it didn’t do a damn thing. Grel’Darm the Colossal had finally met a force even more colossal than him. Trapped and crushed flat, he could do nothing but struggle futilely as three dozen Roughnecks chipped him to death.
Tina left the work to the others and climbed up on top of the pile to look around. While they’d been fighting in here, the rest of the undead army had spread out to attack the rest of the fortress. Dismantled zombies and skeletons were piled high at the base of the walls, and Garrond himself was running back and forth along the battlements, slaying huge groups of undead single-handedly with his blazing golden sword.
But while he made quite the impressive one-man army, the rest of the Order was in way over its head. The soldiers on the battlements were barely keeping the undead off the walls, and the archers’ fingers were bleeding through their gloves because of how many times they’d pulled back their bowstrings.
It was a staggering sight but also wasn’t Tina’s problem. She was worried about what would come to attack them next. But her raid must have killed more undead than she’d realized, because though the walls were still swarmed, the field in front of the fortress was almost empty.
Satisfied that no more threats would be coming from that direction in the immediate future, her next thought was to look for SB. She didn’t have much hope—trying to spot an Assassin who walked through shadows was a pretty foolish thing to do—but she looked just the same. But though she spotted the catapults, she didn’t see any sign of her friend, and she couldn’t go looking for him until Grel was dead. Telling herself he’d be back soon enough, she whirled around and stomped back down the mountain of rock to stab her sword angrily into the top of Grel’s skull, the only bit of the boss she could see.
The exhausted raid pounded on their trapped prey for a comically long time. The sun was never visible in the Deadlands, so Tina couldn’t say how long exactly, but seeing how much abuse Grel’Darm could soak up made her feel very validated for insisting they stick to the plan. There was no way they could have done this much damage while actively defending against the rest of the undead at the same time.
Finally, their endless hacking was interrupted by a sudden white glow. Heat began to creep up through Tina’s boots next, then actual tongues of ghostfire appeared, the white flames blazing up through the stones brighter and hotter by the second.
“Get ready!” Tina cried, looking around to make sure no one had any unhealed damage except her and Frank. “Here comes the suck!”
The raid replied with a chorus of yelled-out personal defensive abilities. Wards, personal shields, and magical barriers lit up the dreary afternoon as everyone braced for Chain Fire. Seconds later, two pillars of white-blue fire blasted out of Grel’s cavernous eye sockets and through the rock like geysers to jump into the raid. The flames hit NekoBaby and Zen first, making them both scream in pain as they lit up like torches. A heartbeat later, the ghostfire jumped to four more people, then eight, on and on until the whole raid was burning.
It leaped to Tina last. The white flames covered her stone skin beneath her armor in an instant, bringing both horrible pain and sudden hatred of all life. For a few seconds, she was consumed by the overwhelming urge to murder everything. The world was a sin that needed to perish, and she would be the one who swung the righteous sword. She was already turning to strike the player next to her when the flame fluttered out, and Tina sagged to her knees, closing her eyes as the urge to murder the living faded, leaving little else behind.
Hand shaking, she reached up to rub the burns that covered her stony face. That had been close. Too close, and not just because of the new murder impulse. That was a side of Chain Fire she’d never seen in the game, but as scary as it had been to suddenly hate everything, her death was what Tina feared the most. She couldn’t see her hit points anymore, but the strange, crumbly stiffness in her body told her she’d pushed it down to the wire. A few more seconds of burning, and the fire would have killed her.
It hadn’t, though. She was still alive, and now that they’d made it through the first big hurdle, things would get a lot easier.
“Okay,” she said, turning to her gasping, burned raid. “Now you can heal.”
Cheers went up as the Clerics and Naturalists began casting spells as fast as they could go, lighting up the raid in a fireworks show of green and gold. Tina sighed with relief as the blessed healing magics swept through her. She’d never been healed for this much before, and the experience was utterly euphoric. She felt like she was swimming through golden clouds as her wounds closed and her shield arm grew light again. The cascades of silver blood vanished from her armor, and her vision cleared completely, revealing a world that was alive and full of color. Then suddenly, it was over, the healers cutting off early to save mana for the final Chain Fire.
“All right,” Tina said, trying not to shudder at the loss of so much bliss. “That was the halfway mark. Let’s burn down the rest of him!”
The renewed raid cheered and returned to bashing and stabbing the pinned Grel’Darm with utmost vigor. Tina got back to work as well, picking a large finger this time to gleefully hack her way through. It was immensely gratifying to finally cut off a piece of the giant she’d had to take such a beating from, and she savored every resounding thwack.
“Forty-five seconds, Roxxy!” Anders called out a few minutes later. Tina looked up in confusion, then she remembered that the ichthyian and all the other Intelligence-geared players now had razor-sharp time-tracking and calculation abilities. Anders must have done the math to figure out how long it had taken them to get Grel to fifty percent and used that number to estimate how long it would take to get him to the final twenty-five percent.
“Last chain fire incoming!” she yelled to the raid. “Use ’em if you’ve got ’em!”
The words were barely out of her mouth when the rubble pile began to heat up again. Grel’Darm bellowed again, shaking the entire rubble pile as his broken eye sockets lit up with the great ghostfire of the Once King. The flames rose through the broken stones and jumped to the closest players, engulfing Frank and one of the Sorcerers in blue-white fire. Everyone around them started calling out whatever was left of their defensive abilities, bracing for the ghostfire as it split again, spreading like a virus through the raid.
Just like the first one, the second Chain Fire ripped through everyone in quick succession. Some people cried, and others howled damnation for the living. Tina was forced to duck as a burning Killbox turned on her, his eyes blazing with the white fire as he swung. Thankfully, he lacked his usual precision, and the ax flew over her head, but it was still terrifying.
He was about to swing again when the golden light from a Cleric’s spell washed over him. The Berserker’s burning eyes cleared, and he dropped his ax in horror. “Sorry, Roxxy,” he said, staggering away from her. “I don’t know—”
She cut him off with a grin. “It’s all good,” she said, scooping his ax off the ground and handing it back to him. “No slacking. We’ve still got twenty-five percent left to go, so get back to chopping.”
He gave her a shaky grin in response and saluted then turned around to bury his ax deep in the exposed bone of Grel’Darm’s wrist.
After that, there were no mor
e hurdles. Tina and the raid hacked, kicked, pounded, and stabbed the massive skeleton boss into bony bits. It was tedious, backbreaking work that took much longer than anyone could have expected, but at last, the ghostfire vanished from Grel’s pulverized skull, and the shaking stones fell still.
The moment it was over, everyone collapsed into the mound of rubble. Tina thrust her sword into the air, and the raid joined her in a joyous—if ragged—cry of victory. As predicted, Grel had been the army’s burning heart. Once he was gone, the undead assault on the rest of the fortress quickly fell into disarray, allowing the Order to finally gain the upper hand. The undead, as was their nature, still fought to the last twitching limb. Without their general, though, the mindless skeletons were little better than dangerous cannon fodder, and the one-skull Order soldiers made short work of them. When it was over, Commander Garrond himself walked out into the battlefield, marking dead soldiers for burial and dealing personally with any remaining troublesome undead monsters.
Tina was right behind him.
She was exhausted, and she still hadn’t been healed to full, but SilentBlayde and the other Assassins still hadn’t returned. Now that Grel was dead, finding them was Tina’s top priority. The rest of the raid was still healing up, though, so she’d left them with orders to get back in fighting form, given Neko a loaf of bread, and told her to get onto her back. Once the Naturalist was safely eating on her shoulder, Tina marched them both out through the blasted front gates to start the search.
The hill leading up to the front of the fortress was a scarred battleground. Tina hadn’t even heard them going off in the chaos, but the Order’s own catapults and ballistae must have been going nonstop. The ground out here was a pockmarked mess of blasted craters and huge bolts stuck deep in the gray dirt.
The rest of the debris belonged to the undead army. Broken ladders and siege towers lay in heaps all over the field. Pushing the crushed gray wood out of her way, Tina made a beeline for the closest of the undead’s catapults. It must have been put together quickly for this assault, because it was lacking the usual decorative skulls and bones, but it was pointed at their position between the gates and surrounded by dead zombies. That gave Tina hope, and she started running toward it, forcing NekoBaby to cling to her shoulders.
As she got closer, she saw that all the zombies had been dismembered, their bodies cut apart by a sharp blade. They were piled everywhere, but the biggest heap was at the back of the catapult by the firing lever. Nothing was moving, though, and Tina’s heart began to pound as she grabbed the bodies and started flinging them aside, digging her way down to the firing position underneath. Then halfway to the bottom of the stack, she saw something gleam silver.
It was the tip of a sword poking out the back of a zombie. Scrambling, Tina grabbed the body and tossed it over her shoulder. Then she tossed the one below it, finally clearing the way to see what she feared.
At the very bottom of the pile, a shredded and bloody SilentBlayde was lying with one hand on his sword and the other curled around the catapult’s firing lever. She’d already grabbed Neko to demand another Raise Ally spell when his blue eyes cracked open.
“Hey, Roxxy,” he wheezed. “Did we get Grel?”
It took everything Tina had not to grab him in a crushing hug. That might have killed him, though, so Tina settled for digging the rest of him out instead. “Yeah, man, we did it, thanks to you. I’m so glad you’re alive! Now tell me how you ended up covered in…”
Her voice trailed off when she got to his legs. She’d wondered why SilentBlayde hadn’t Shadow Walked his way back after completing his mission. Now she knew. He’d been stapled to the catapult by no fewer than four barbed spears.
“Holy shit, dude.”
“It stings a bit,” he said weakly. “But I couldn’t leave the job undone, could I?”
Considering he’d saved them all with that catapult shot, Tina couldn’t argue, but that didn’t stop her hands from shaking as she began pulling the spears out. SilentBlayde gasped as the barbed points ripped free, then NekoBaby bathed him in soothing green light, and his eyes grew delirious as the bliss of the healing magic washed through him. Tina took advantage of his altered state to rip out the last and deepest of the remaining spears and caught SB as he collapsed into her arms. More healing poured over him, and the elf shuddered in relief before putting his weight on his legs.
“Wow,” SilentBlayde said, giving himself a shake. “That’s the good stuff. Thanks for the save, guys!”
“That’s our line,” Tina said, grinning so hard her face hurt. “You Assassins were the heroes today. We’d all be dead if you hadn’t landed those shots.” She glanced at the fortress on top of the hill, several hundred feet away. “How’d you even hit the wall from this distance?”
SB began to preen. “Turns out Agility makes me deadly accurate as well as superhuman fast.”
Tina’s eyes grew wide. “You mean like it does for the Rangers? Coooooooool!” She was about to ask what else he could do when she realized something else was missing. “Wait, where are the others? Surely you didn’t fire both of those shots yourself?”
SilentBlayde’s expression darkened. “Zero’s probably still at the western catapult, but you won’t find KuroKawaii.” He clenched his fists, looking angrier than Tina had ever seen him. “She bailed on us!”
“She ran?” NekoBaby said, horrified. “In the middle of a fight?”
SB nodded. “We tried to give her the benefit of the doubt, but once it became clear she wasn’t coming back, Zero and I had no choice but to split up to save time. I came out of the shadows by myself here and made it work but wound up in that predicament. I don’t know what happened to Zero.”
“I can’t believe she left Zero,” NekoBaby said, baring her fangs. “That dirty little traitor!”
“Don’t worry. She’ll get hers,” Tina promised, cracking her knuckles. “But we’ve got more important things to deal with right now.” She turned, waving for them to follow. “Come on. Let’s go find ZeroDarkness and get back to the fort to collect our ticket out of here.”
SB and Neko nodded together and ran after her as Tina strode across the battlefield toward the western catapult. They’d barely made it halfway when ZeroDarkness climbed out of the corpse of the undead boar he’d been hiding inside, waving his bloody arms wildly at Neko for a heal.
****
“You call that a victory?” Commander Garrond snarled. “You did more damage to my fortress than the enemy did!”
Tina laughed haughtily at that. It was an hour after their victory, and she’d come to Garrond’s office to negotiate the opening of their portal to Bastion. She’d expected the commander would be a little pissed about the destruction of his gate, but after what she’d just been through with Grel, the four-skull’s anger didn’t even faze her.
“We just killed the twelfth most dangerous creature in the entire world,” she reminded him. “Grel’Darm the Colossal is—or was—the Once King’s greatest siege weapon, and you’re bitching about some broken masonry?” She snorted. “It’s only because of us that you have a fort left to fix.”
Garrond huffed through his mustache. “You’ve left us defenseless! With the outer gatehouse demolished, we have nothing to prevent—”
“And nothing to attack,” Tina snapped. “The enemy is dead. Re-dead, really, but the point is we won. The Once King’s army is demolished and Grel’s a pile of bone meal on your front door. You can’t say we didn’t do our job, so when are you going to open our portal?”
Garrond gave her a hard stare. Tina met and held it, unblinking. It was a fun trick she’d come up with once she’d discovered that stonekin didn’t need to blink half as often as the fleshy races did, and it worked like a charm. After almost a minute, he was forced to drop his eyes and shuffled his papers as he glared at his desk. “I can’t give the order until tomorrow.”
Tina’s glare grew sharper. “I hope you’re not trying to play me, asshole, because—”
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“You misunderstand,” the commander interrupted. “I would love to kick you out today, but opening the portal to Bastion takes a great deal of magic, and my entire base is out of mana. You’ll just have to wait.”
Given that none of Tina’s people had been able to open a portal since this thing began, she was very interested in knowing how the Order still could. “Could we help?” she offered, hoping he’d take the bait. “I have a lot of skilled Sorcerers.”
“You have five sorcerers,” Garrond said. “All of whom are exhausted, by the way. It takes a lot more than that to open a Bastion portal from this distance, so as great as you players are, I’m afraid you’ll just have to wait.”
Tina sighed, disappointed. Clearly, opening portals across the world took a lot more magic now than it had in the game. If it was just a matter of getting enough Sorcerers together, though, that didn’t mean they were out of reach, especially once they got to Bastion and she could rally more players. Still, it looked like they were stuck here for at least another day, and if they had to put up with a bunch of glowering Order stiff necks, Tina intended to make the most of it.
“Fine,” she said, stabbing an armored finger down on his desk hard enough to dent the wood. “But we’re dining on your dime as long as we’re here.”
“Very well,” Garrond said, then he stood up and offered his hand. After a moment’s hesitation, Tina took it, watching the commander suspiciously.
“What’s this about?”
“Appreciation,” Garrond replied, folding his hands behind his back. “For all that I still hate you players, you fought like legends today. I don’t like your methods, but I cannot question your courage. Your guild may sleep in one of the empty barracks tonight instead of the courtyard, and if any of your people ever want to join the Order of the Golden Sun, I would welcome them. We need fighters of your caliber out here on the front lines.”