War Aeternus 3: The Culling

by Charles Dean

  Lee felt bad for her. He could see the agony she was in, but he couldn’t stop the fight to show pity. Instead, he just reached around her body, grabbed onto one of the arrows that had lodged itself inside her, and pushed it deeper, twisting and turning it inside her as if he were trying to stir up a mixed drink

  “Die!” Lee hissed into her ear as he continued to turn her insides about with Ling’s arrow. “It’ll be easier on you.”

  Her eyes turned lifeless as her body acquiesced to Lee’s command, and a howl erupted from off to Lee’s right. Then, Lee quickly shoved the body away from him and rolled to the side as the enraged Firbolg smashed down with his shield and all the strength he had.

  You have killed Sinead. Your party has been awarded a crumpled letter and 1100 Experience. Your share of this is a crumpled letter and 367 Experience.

  Lee spring-boarded off the ground, instinctually trying to re-equip the shield that he had lost somewhere in the previous skirmish, but he realized that it was still on the ground somewhere. Armed with only a sword, he rushed at the Firbolg. The man countered by thrusting forward with his own shield, clearly intent on bashing Lee for a second time, but Lee already knew how this conflict would play out. He veered hard to the right and dodged the massive wooden barrier as it swung around at him. The shield barely missed him, and he felt the massive form of the Firbolg warrior as he flew by. Lee rolled through his dive and came up into a crouch just in time to see the Firbolg slide to a halt.

  Lee smiled, facing the Firbolg once more with his sword raised. “Come, then, let’s finish this off, the two of us,” Lee taunted as he watched the raging man approach him.

  “SINEEEAAADDD!!!! “I will avenge you!” he shouted in the most Miller-esque fashion a Firbolg other than the actual Miller could achieve.

  The massive warrior leapt forward shield-first yet again, but just as the two were about to collide, Lee stepped to the side once more. A corner of the giant shield nicked him in the chest as he moved away, but it was only a glancing blow due to the angle of his dive. The shield’s impact was drastically dulled, doing nothing more than eliciting a shot of pain, and the Firbolg’s fate was much worse. The giant brute’s foot stomped down onto Lee’s dropped shield. The Spiddlendra spikes had been broken off, but the nubs they had left behind were buried in the wood, razor sharp, and they pierced through the man’s flesh like nails into a foam block.

  “Ahhh!!!” the monster screamed out in pain, howling so loudly that he was probably heard a mile away. The giant gritted his teeth and sneered at Lee after a moment, squeezing his eyes shut against the pain.

  And Lee instantly took advantage of the man’s momentary lapse in judgment. He lunged forward and to the side, neatly slicing around behind the man’s defensive barrier and into his leg. His blade bit deeply, unhindered by armor, and cleanly sliced through the man’s calf. The Firbolg’s eyes sprang open at the sudden shock as Lee’s blade cut through his leg, but he refused to cry out again. He teetered for just a moment as he fought to maintain his balance before slamming the massive shield into the ground and leaning his weight against it. Seeing his second opportunity, Lee pivoted around and stabbed the man in the back, repeating the fast jab several times until his blade pierced through and found something vital.

  You have killed Lugh. Your party has been awarded a battered tower shield and 1321 Experience. Your share of this is a battered tower shield and 440 Experience.

  Lee spun around to face the two golden wolves the moment he saw the death notification, and he found that they were still circling around the messenger, nipping at the man as they tried to make it through his meager defenses. Connacht’s man wasn’t exactly fending them off, and there were already a few bite marks on his arms and shins, but he had managed to stay alive with Ling’s help. Every time one wolf rushed in, she targeted the other and prevented it from attacking at the same time. Thus, he only ever had to face one of the giant dogs at a time and never both.

  Both wolves turned to face Lee as he approached, and one let out a loud, angry-sounding howl of rage when it saw the two dead bodies behind Lee. The wolf launched forward with what Lee suspected was full force, and it was upon him in the span of a second. Lee was getting ready to sidestep the beast and bring his sword around just as he had done before, but he was caught off guard once again when it shapeshifted into a thin and gaunt-looking woman wielding a pair of daggers. The Phouka was simply too fast, and the transformation didn’t give him enough time to prepare for the change in tactics. The frail woman crashed into him with all the momentum of a leaping wolf, driving both the daggers past Lee’s defenses and into his chest. He felt the air explode out of his lungs as the daggers were driven home, and his vision flashed black as the blows stripped away 200 health. A bleed effect window popped up to let Lee know that he was now losing 27 hit points per second from the attack.

  The crazed woman stared into Lee’s eyes and snarled, “For Sinead,” before pushing both her daggers further into Lee’s chest.

  Lee stared down at his sword, where it had somehow buried itself in the crazed woman’s stomach, and then gasped in a combination of shock and pain as he used his free arm to throw the dying woman off him. He had only just managed to circulate enough spirit to heal his wounds from the last two people he fought against, and now he was almost dead again. In addition, he also had gained a bleeding effect which was speedily stripping away even more. Not wasting any time, he jumped atop her fallen body and stabbed right into her heart again and again until he saw the window he was waiting for pop up in front of him: her death notice.

  You have killed Clodagh. Your party has been awarded 2 obsidian daggers and 1101 Experience. Your share of this is an obsidian dagger and 367 Experience.

  Divinity Power: Life in Death activated.

  He looked over to see Connacht’s man on the ground and covered in bite marks with a half-naked, blonde-haired, pointy-eared, full-figured woman lying dead next to him. Lee walked over to the servant and then extended his hand. As soon as he took it, Lee pumped his healing mana into the wounded man and made sure the situation was, at the very least, no longer critical.

  “Thank you,” the messenger said. “Thank you so much.

  “Don’t mention it,” Lee replied. “Do you know who they were? Why they were attacking you?” Even if he had saved the man, he still didn’t trust him, and he was going to hold off on opening up the letter in front of him. He didn’t know what was in it, and he wanted to make sure that he had a full grasp of whatever information it had before allowing someone else to have a look at it. As Alexander had taught him more than once, controlling information was incredibly important, and he didn’t know how much he could trust this guy since his allegiance was to Connacht.

  “I don’t know,” the man said. “They just . . . They just appeared out of nowhere. One of them stopped me, said I had the right smell, and then they all shifted and started attacking me.”

  “I see.” Lee frowned as he looked between the dead bodies. “That’s twice in one day.”

  “Yeah.” The manservant nodded. He had been there for the earlier Phouka attack as well. “It doesn’t bode well, but it is just all the more reason we must make it to Kirshtein as soon as possible. If the Phouka are real, and if they are out and about and on a rampage, then we need to warn others.”

  “You’re not wrong,” Lee agreed. “We do need to tell people what’s going on.” I may have saved you, but do I want you alive and well enough to tell Connacht and the others that this Queen Meadhbh, as she calls herself, is interested in me and wants to be my partner? Inevitably, his ethics won out, and he didn’t draw his sword again. Instead, he walked back to where his old shield was still lying on the ground with a newly-attached foot stuck to it. He plucked off the appendage and threw the thing in his inventory, not bothering to further clean any of the blood off of it.

  “Ling and I are going to go on ahead of you,” Lee said as he climbed back up on top of the Krunklerump, and he and Ling qu
ickly rode off.

  “I don’t trust that one,” Ling commented as soon as they were out of earshot.

  “He tried to protect us by encouraging us not to help him,” Lee countered.

  “He was too insistent that we go with him,” Ling pointed out. She had been practically mute since Amber’s death, and the only talking she had done had mostly been to tell that very man to bugger off when the overly-persistent lackey had tried to drag Lee back to Kirshtein instead of giving him time to mourn.

  “It’s not him I don’t trust . . .” Lee sighed as he thought back to the earlier fight and how desperate the man had been to complete his mission, so much so that he was even willing to die rather than risk Lee being lost in the skirmish. That was not a man who lacked loyalty.

  “But didn’t Connacht help save you and organize the attack against Devin?” Ling knew which direction Lee was thinking.

  “Because I am still a useful tool to the man,” Lee answered as he pulled out the crumpled-up letter from Sinead’s corpse and began straightening it. “He’s too skinny, what with that lean and hungry look, to be keeping me around just for the bacon.”

  “You don’t trust thin men?” Ling asked. Being curious was in her nature--she always asked questions no matter what was said--and even if she had politely let Lee mourn, that inquisitive nature wouldn’t always stay hidden.

  “Let me have men about me that are fat, sleek-headed men and such as sleep a-nights,” Lee quoted from one of his favorite plays. He knew that she wouldn’t recognize the quotation, but he still hoped she’d understand the thought.

  To her credit, she just gave him a ‘hmmm’ and let the subject drop.

  The idea of plagiarizing and stealing from the rich cultural history of Earth had actually danced through Lee’s head a lot. Most of the jokes, memes, phrases and other particulars from his world that had attained great fame were dependent on cultural references that the people in this world wouldn’t understand--or on things that might not make sense when translated by the system to their language--but that didn’t mean that there weren’t plenty of things like bacon and fried chicken that would be good in any world regardless. In truth, he had spent quite a bit of time thinking about what he could steal to increase the successfulness of his church. If he could mimic the appeal of some of the rock icons of Earth, for example, then attracting a hoard of zealous followers would most likely be a piece of cake, and he could even do it pretty peacefully.

  “You should go for it,” Augustus’s chimed in, interrupting Lee’s thoughts. “There is definitely a crafting section for guitars and the like in that book of mine.”

  Augustus didn’t seem to have the ability to just pop into Lee’s head when he was on Earth, so he had momentarily forgotten that the deity was likely watching or listening to every single thought of his and just waiting for an opportunity to interrupt while he was here. “I mean, personally, I really like that little repetitive tune from the block arranging game you played as a kid.”

  The block arranging game? What are you talking about? Lee thought for a moment before realizing he was an idiot as he heard Augustus start to hum the familiar tune. Nope, nope, none of that Russian earworm. If that song gets stuck in my head, it’ll be years before it leaves.

  “Well,” Augustus chuckled, “do you even play an instrument? Maybe we should start there?”

  You know I don’t. But it can’t be that hard to learn one, can it? Lee thought, looking at his Intelligence score. When he first left his home world and came to the competition world, the stat had been dismally low. Now, thanks to learning skills and his fragments of the world stone, he was at 177 Intelligence. That meant that he could learn things significantly faster, as each 1 point of Intelligence was a 1% increase in his ability to learn skills. After talking to others, like Ling, who only had 22 Intelligence and Miller, who had less than 10, he realized that his brain power was one of the abilities he picked up from Augustus. It was likely a divinely-inherited advantage of being a Herald.

  “I mean, you can, but which one are you going to pick? Even if you’re learning them two or three or five times faster than someone else, it’ll still take you forever to master an instrument to the extent you could impress anyone,” Augustus pointed out.

  That’s true, Lee acknowledged, thinking to himself about how to get around this problem. In general, churches relied heavily on music to influence and capture the masses. In fact, every advertising campaign generally used sound as a key instrument of their push, yet he had nothing yet in this regard. For a world capable of only medieval technology that was rife with constant life-threatening war, it made sense that there wasn’t a lot of proper music and instrument-based songs. After all, it wasn’t like that many would even be able to read sheet music. There wasn’t even any standard method for discussing notes or timing or anything else. In fact, from what Lee was able to tell during his conversations at the Hunter’s Guild in Kirshtein, most bards kept their musical ability a trade secret and charged noblemen heavily to teach them their craft.

  Wait! Lee suddenly realized something. That book of yours, it can teach me how to craft anything imaginable, right?

  “Yeah, but be careful. This world’s tech limit is pretty strict. You can’t make yourself a robot girlfriend to use since Masha’s not here,” Augustus joked.

  But, if I thought about it, it would have the diagrams for anything based on the parameters I used?

  “Yeah, I suppose. You gonna craft a bunch of war machines since you can’t play guitar? I know the phrase ‘love, not war,’ but when people can’t fit in with the guitar-playing hippies, they usually don’t immediately turn to war,” Augustus chuckled.

  No, not at all. Hold on. Lee paused his little conversation with Augustus, pulled out the book and thought about the self-playing instruments that had been popular in the 1920s on Earth. Even back then, there had been plenty of crank-style music box systems and orchestrions around.

  After searching around, he found something that would work perfectly. The musical contraption was a large wooden box nearly a foot and a half deep and roughly the size of a man in height and width with a multitude of vertically-aligned pipes visible on its front face. The pipes all had holes near the point at which they disappeared into the wooden cabinet, about halfway down the height of the machine. Inside the contraption was an intricate series of gears, shafts and wooden arms extending off of flywheels--mechanisms that worked the built-in percussion system and pumped the bellows, syphoning in the air that gave life to the instrument’s music. There were also copper prongs aligned in a row parallel and below the pipes. The prongs resembled those of a thumb organ but were much larger, each nearly the size of a man’s finger. The prongs were situated such that, when plucked, they activated corresponding levers that in turn opened and closed the valves of the copper pipes, releasing air through the bowels of the organ and creating a chorus of haunting, ethereal notes.

  The genius at the center of the instrument was an intake for sheets covered in a vast multitude of little bumps just big enough to trip the metal prongs when they were brought past them by the rolling of a smooth log inside the machine. The secret of the log’s movement and the pumping of the bellows was a tightly wound spring that, as it gave up its pent-up tension, brought the large music box to life. It would fill Lee’s church with music and was complex enough to leave any visitors in unabashed wonder at its apparent magic.

  The only thing that disappointed him was the number and level of skills that were needed to create the various components via the assembly spell. Making it by hand was possible, but it would take a long time to craft everything so precisely. As such, he had wanted to cheat and use the assembly spell instead. The higher one’s Intelligence, the lower the requirements on the skills, yet even with his freakishly-high stat, most of these required a bare minimum of Initiate Level 6 for Carpentry, Engineering and Miscellaneous Crafting, something he took to mean the fashioning of tools like strings or pencils that might not
fall under any specific crafting tree.

  Welp, looks like I’ll have to put together a project and get this done the old-fashioned way. Although . . . I suppose I could also try picking up those skills. Spirit Smithing has helped me with locked doors and other issues, so there is no telling when I might need some good carpentry and general crafting skills.

  “That’s the spirit!” Augustus chimed in. “When you can’t learn a skill like playing an instrument yourself because you’re too lazy to put in the effort, just spend a ton of time and energy building a machine to do it for you. It'll save you a lot of time in the long run, and you’ll be able to spend that drinking or being with women or drinking with women.”

  Of course you had to bring women into it. Lee sighed. I thought you were supposed to be the God of Alcohol and Crafts. Why does it feel like they missed the title of debauchery and whoremongering in there?

  “Because they ran out of space on my business card to add the other things. If they had room, they might have even added the God of Handsome Faces and Terribly-Dull and Boring Heralds,” Augustus responded.

  Have you actually had more than one? Lee wondered.

  “No, the games are so infrequent that it’s honestly like winning the lottery when you get called into one,” Augustus answered, and Lee felt like he could hear a shred of disappointment, as if Augustus wanted these god-killing games to be a normal thing.

  Well, speaking of Heralds . . . Lee looked down at the letter that he had straightened out earlier.

  “What does it say?” Ling asked as Lee opened up the letter. She was riding on the back of the saddle and was now straining to try and get a good look over Lee’s shoulder to read the contents.

  “Don’t hurt yourself. You can read it after I’m finished,” Lee said. He didn’t trust that the woods were without ears, even if he was traveling at a very healthy speed on top of a Krunklerump.