by D. Rus
Life flowed out of me in a very fine, but very fast, stream. I barely managed to look around, trying to maintain control of the fight. The guys were practically invisible, only noticeable by the way the huge piles of demons moved unnaturally. The small creatures had overwhelmed and inundated us. We were enveloped by them as if by chains that exploded like rotten thread under the strain of the level 300 muscles of our epic heroes.
Healing wasn't working for us. Casting under a barrage of blows was practically impossible and we were in no condition to form a normal rear. Zena fought like everyone else, hiding behind a small shield made from the enormous scales of an ancient dragon and quite deftly wielding her glittering club. However, it was hardest of all for her. A cleric is no warrior and she has no passive hand-to-hand skills. Hits to her were rough and often. The kill counter showed just over fifty dead to her credit, but this old lady-turned-mercenary had already lost half of her hits. Her regeneration was choking and vials were melting away, but her overall health debit was still negative.
I gave Hummungus the command to protect her, though there was little sense in it. All it did, it planted the large bulk of my bear next to her tiny shape. My pet wasn't able to get the attackers off of her. This was one case where Fortune was on the side of the large battalions.
Our healer couldn't gain any distance. There was no rear and all around her was a sea of low-level evil. After a second, I received a sad reminder of this. First came a cheerful Ding! followed by a message,
Your familiar has received a new level!
And a moment later,
Your familiar has fallen in battle!
The bastards had gotten to him, after all.
I winced. Shame about the XP. I checked the life bar of the next contender about to die: Belka. The hound's hits were in the orange. She looked like an armored Doberman fighting a pack of rabid cats. I yelled out in the psychic range,
"Get out of there! Kite! Pull them behind you and we'll deal with them later! We'll take them off you!"
The hound understood. Hobbling on three legs, dripping blood onto the snow and losing plates of armor, the hound took off towards the horizon, taking along one of the hundreds of Maniacs.
Snowie mowed down the demons like dry grass. They blindly rushed forward like partridges towards a combine harvester, trying to divert the iron monster from their nest. The effect was hardly more noticeable. Our troll was already at eighty percent; from time to time, he needed to let off his military pressure, taking short pauses to use his vials.
I looked at the state of my pets. The spiders had dropped by ten percent. Their time for natural regeneration at rest was about two minutes. However, damage was gradually increasing: their chitinous armor plates were damaged and in some places torn off and corroded with acid. Repeated strikes at these points were happening more and more often and protection modifiers weren't cushioning them anymore.
My zombie platoon kept fulfilling its orders: to rush towards the shooters, knocking their way through two legions of Cerberuses. The infernal dogs hung on by their paws like grapes, shattering their teeth on the insectoid armor, dying in their hundreds. In this battle, their racial skills were useless and compensation was critical. Biting the three targets in front of them wouldn't work: counterattacking every hit was physically impossible. All of the spiders' attacks were fatal.
After three minutes of battle, one of the Cerberuses’ units fell. The spiders tore through four dozen dogs, wiping out the first legion of magical archers.
The enemy leader roared another command, switching the shooters to more dangerous targets and deploying the next thousand Maniacs. That was a good decision. Strikes to the spiders' backs were definitely more of a priority than jostling in the sea of little demons, waiting their turn to be smacked by Fuckyall or Snowie. The area of our contact with the enemy was finite and the maximum density of attack was two dozen Maniacs at any given moment.
Finally, the Player couldn’t take it any longer. His huge black stallion reared up as he threw himself into the most dangerous part of the battle. One of the spiders had worn down the thin chain of Cerberuses and rushed into the ranks of the marksmen, vulnerable to close combat.
The Player was a hundred and fifty levels below my pet, but it didn't bother him. There was no balance between the two worlds. Levels, equipment, skills, and artifacts were all controversial and unequal. The Might and Magic’s most basic artifact—the Five-Leaf Clover with a Fortune modification for five hundred gold—became a unique crafting cheat in AlterWorld.
The enemy sparkled with battle combos, fighting confidently and effortlessly, quickly lopping off the unfortunate spider’s legs turning him into an angry immobile hunk of flesh. The leader's retinue—a dozen level 150 Lords of the Abyss—finished what he had begun, slicing the pet with their black, Darkness-oozing swords.
Zena kept fading. Her hits had dropped to a third when Fuckyall decided to pull out one of his trump cards. Activating a thirty-second invulnerability—a paladin's ability with a six-hour cooldown—he cast a Mass Healing, hoping to heal everyone within the spell range.
The effect was striking. The magic of True Light scorched the earth around the paladin within a sixty-foot diameter, destroying demons and mixing the ashes of their bodies with the white of the Alaskan snow.
Ha! We’d forgotten about their ultimate vulnerability to the Light! Praise be the game balance and Korean random!
Fuckyall liked the result. Hundreds of beasts were sent to the underworld and friendly targets regained seven hundred hits.
The Legion of Maniacs couldn't stand a vacuum. Once again the sea of demons closed around Fuckyall, only to crumble to ash once more. Under the cover of invulnerability, Fuckyall was able to repeat this trick four more times, practically halving the remaining legion who were blindly fulfilling the last order of their Master and were left without the supervision of the Player.
One problem was that a hybrid tank was no caster, so he wasn’t expected to have lots of mana, and mass spells were as thirsty as a steam liner.
"Mana at twenty... Drinking vials...” Fuckyall reported, not very intelligibly, in voice chat.
I tried something I should have tried long ago. I forwarded all ten percent of the reserve of the First Temple's Altar to Fuckyall.
The chat lit up again.
"Thanks. I can see the icon of divine attention. The effect is pretty minimal—plus thirty two units per second. How much of the mana flow did you divert?"
I grimaced. "All of it. It's total shit: the First Temple is barely able to reach Earth. Either it's too far or the barriers are too strong."
"I see," Fuckyall wheezed. "Never mind!"
Once again the paladin was covered up to his eyebrows with enraged creatures trying to bury him, crack his armor, bite through the cracks in his armor, lift his visor, and cause any damage possible to the figure clad in artifact steel. And they seemed to be succeeding.
Mosquitoes are quite capable of killing a man overnight in the taiga. A school of piranhas will tear a swimmer apart in minutes. A thousand crocodiles can make a quick job of a regiment of Japanese soldiers, as had indeed happened in 1945.
However, we were hardly fighting mosquitoes, rather the creations of Chaos and Inferno, endowed with magic and remarkable strength. Having said that, we were no bunch of winos that had carelessly fallen asleep in the woods—nor the unfortunate medieval Tatar who’d been strapped to a hundred-year-old Siberian cedar on Ermak’s orders and left there for the night.
There were a lot of Maniacs. A whole lot. They also had one very unpleasant ability: every strike robbed the target of one point of Attack and Defense and passed it on to the other soldiers of the demonic legion. The enemy slowly but surely robbed us of our armor and strength.
If in the beginning of the battle my valiant hooks had been stripping the enemy of seven hundred hits, then already after ten minutes my blows had been weakened by a third. Only when one of the legions collapsed, I received a hundr
ed and fifty points of potential damage back. They were a very tiresome enemy.
As it turned out, it was even harder on my pets. A hand-to-hand with a Lilim was an exotic way to commit suicide. The demonesses’ racial ability, Charm, didn't work on the spiders, of course. Their second ability, however... Incoming damage to the Lilim was cut by twenty percent. Of the remaining, another twenty percent damage reverted to the attacker, which was a fatal surprise for us.
I was literally distracted for five minutes—tearing one of those voracious little things off me, giving it a few hits, and trying to cast a massive Life Absorption. During this time, three regiments practically annihilated each other. You might as well wipe the spiders, Lilim, and Matriarchs from the game board and cross them off the list.
The enemy still had over two thousand Maniacs, a bloodied legion of Cerberuses, and the Player himself, along with a dozen Lords of the Abyss. And we... we had suffered our first losses. Helplessly cursing, I watched as the lives of my colleagues dwindled. The slaughter of the innocents produced a lot of blood.
Zena's snotty lizard was the first to fall. The unfortunate amphibian hung on for some time only by his Devour Flesh skill, kicking and clinging to life for all of four minutes.
Zena was next. The cleric was not a full-on fighter and Dan, coming out of stealth, wasn't able to turn the situation around and take the monsters off of Zena. The girl had spent all of her abilities and last resort skills.
"Don't forget to resurrect me...” she whispered and expired.
It filled us with hope and fear. Everyone had their own scrolls of resurrection, but whether or not they were going to work... that remained to be seen.
I heard Fuckyall grit his teeth as he didn’t dare to spend his life-saving skill, Holy Hands, on the least useful—in this confrontation—member of the group. It was a difficult but right decision.
Dan, having fallen into a disadvantageous exchange of close combat, escaped death by a hair’s breadth and, ducking abruptly to the side, was able to once again disappear into stealth. But not for long. Anguished with the loss of his trusted cleric, he decided to carry out a suicide attack that, if successful, just might have tipped the scales in our favor.
I understood him. An officer could not sit back in stealth, passively watching his comrades die. But there was no point crying over spilt milk. If he were to be swarmed by fifty demons, his death would be meaningless. How would that benefit the group?
A flanking march of the battle field didn't take long. Still hidden, the rogue easily slid past the low-level creatures in a wide arc, making his way towards the enemy leader. Violating the rules of voice chat, he was whispering softly to himself like a sniper who, gently squeezing the trigger, silently urges his target to "stay there, don't move... that’s a good boy..."
Out of the corner of my eye, I followed his movement on the map. I didn’t say anything. Stealthers were individualists, sliding through their own dimension alone, choosing their targets themselves, and making their own decisions about the attack. It's no use telling a father how to raise kids.
After a minute, his friendly-green marker reached the red star marking the enemy leader. The two markers overlapped. In a heartbeat, the battle chat exploded with lines of the rogue's attack.
I took an exhausted swing to punch yet another Maniac, shook off five more demons that were hanging onto my arm, managed to step on the slowest one's back and whispered under my breath,
"Good luck, Dan."
Chapter Nine
We inched toward to each other, approaching the apex of the triangle. It was too late, too clumsy, and not very effective, but we still managed to fall into a basic combat formation.
The radar interface was a blazing red blot. It sported just a few green dots of the allied markers, but the enemies were simply innumerable. The battle script was lagging, failing to process the torrent of new combat log entries. The number of the enemy's losses was an approximation, but they were appalling: after twenty minutes, our group had smoked over five thousand beasts. XP was at zero, our finances and factional relations with Inferno plummeting, our gear in shreds and in bad need of urgent field repairs.
The snow was gone. Under our feet was a solid carpet of dead bodies of the Maniacs and Cerberuses. Whenever I accidentally brushed my hand against another carcass, the loot window popped up in my mental view. Normally it would be two or three gold, a few pieces of still red-hot chains, a wide variety of grayish demonic innards, an occasional small item from the lower sector of the loot table—or a priceless crystal of a Demonic Soul.
There was no time to examine the loot, and there was nowhere to store it. My inventory was stuffed and Hummungus, my staff loading truck, was about to kick the bucket. At the last possible moment, I shoved him back into the summoning artifact. I needed my mount! Alaska was huge. Fuckyall had already long been fighting on foot. I didn't know whether he too had unsummoned his hobby-horse or whether he’d lost it in battle.
I cussed, collapsing yet another unwanted loot window as hits from the brazen Maniacs showered my armor. A moment's pause, a quick glance at my clanmates slashing away not far from me, then I was back in the battle.
We could already turn our backs to each other. Pressure from the enemy was much weaker at the rear and the demons couldn't manage to seep through our flanks in large quantities. Our skills began to pool together, merging, filling us with the feeling of camaraderie that reached out and wrapped us in the caring radiance of the Paladin's aura.
Snowie roared wildly and slammed his club against the ground, breaking the enemy's legs for dozens of feet around him. My quickly-yellowing health bar unexpectedly began to soar. Fuckyall had held his concentration and under a hail of blows carried out another Mass Healing.
I seized every available moment to cast several more Life Absorptions, robbing the demonic crowds of two hundred hits each. The monsters were losing life, rapidly withering away and losing blood. And I, basking in the glow of the cheap horror movie's special effects, enjoyed the honestly earned spoils. If an outsider was to look at us, he wouldn’t know who to root for: me or the sorry-assed Infernal creations.
My Death Knight skills seemed to be designed to work against dense arrays of low-level creatures. My name wasn’t butcher, but the Reaper. After a three-and-a-half-second cast, I was healthy again, like a Paladin who had used Holy Hands on himself.
I fought, growled, and gritted my bloody teeth, barely managing to hold myself and on the brink of combat madness. What was that? The leftovers of Frenzy still circulating in my system? Or was it the powerless anger from losing yet another member of the group?
Yes, we’d lost Dan.
My eyes were clouded with rage and pain. I roared like a wounded bear, driving a kick into the shoulders of the middle skull of an attacking Cerberus.
So much for my being their leader! Some commander I was! I’d lost two of my group members, useless idiot! Couldn’t they have thought of something more clever than a straightforward head-on collision? Hadn’t I seen the legion's banners?! "A hundred thousand Chinese warriors, come and have a good scrap!" Motherfucking wonder-warriors.
There were also these Lords of the Abyss. Had they not intervened in the fight, Dan would have managed. A hit from a high-level rogue in the back of an untrained individual was almost always fatal. His combos maimed, paralyzed, knocked out joints, and tore nerve centers. After a dozen seconds, the counterintelligence officer had dropped the Player's life into the yellow zone. Another two or three combos, and he would have gone under. But a dozen demon guards had used micro-portals to jump him, surrounding him and pushing him away from their Master, taking hits upon themselves and slicing Dan’s leather armor with their black blades.
Their levels were almost equal—Dan was nearly two hundred and the demons were a hundred and forty. But there were thirteen of them and only one of him.
I once again gritted my teeth. With a blow to the back of the head, I knocked away a Maniac that was clinging to
my scruff. I noticed a quick-moving shadow in the sky and intuitively covered my eyes with my armored forearm. A gush of acid rain lashed both friend and foe, corroding flesh and generating green clouds of toxic smoke. The Gates' pentagrams duly supplied the Player with reinforcements. Not a lot, but regularly—a hundred at a time at intervals of one and a half minutes.
The Player had mainly ordered shooters and had practically restored the legion of Lilim that had been destroyed by the spiders. Those summoned weren't souped up—they were all level thirty, the lowest possible—but there was a shitload of them. The damage was no longer spread over three dozen targets, but focused on three horrifying figures that were swarmed by a living shield of demons.
A heavy salvo knocked down a quarter of the hits and friendly fire mowed down the attacking small fry within a radius of a dozen paces. Taking advantage of the pause, I cast an Absorption, simultaneously pulling out the cork of a mana vial and choking on the wretched cinnamon.
I looked around. The enemy ranks had thinned considerably. Only two standards towered above the battlefield—that of the halved legion of Maniacs and that of the even scanter legion of Cerberuses. Formation density had fallen, our spells went through more frequently, and victory no longer seemed so ethereal.
One problem: the summoned Lilim began luring us with their demonic charms from a hundred and fifty feet away, pressurizing us with Charm and regularly loosing off thousands of magical sparks. The demonesses could become a real problem. The potential of falling under heavy fire or killing yourself from their auto-reply to incoming damage was very real.
If the Player's guards didn't disappear with his death, then we wouldn't make it without the help of our pets. However, reading off the forty-second spell under a barrage of punches simply wasn't realistic. The Concentration ability was able to absorb one or two kicks, but certainly not fifty!