by G. Akella
"Idiots ought to stick to marrying idiots," she replied calmly, triggering some chuckles out of the foxes standing nearby. If nothing else, the young woman's sense of hearing certainly wasn't lacking, apparently having eavesdropped on and registered our entire conversation from fifty feet away.
"Well, all I need is to nap a few centuries to cure me of my idiocy, then I'll be saying all sorts of smart things!" the mage countered.
"No, you won't," Raena said just as calmly. "Because if your prince doesn't cut your tongue off in your sleep, I'll do it for him."
"Women are so complicated!" Reece gave a dramatic sigh, then waved dismissively and started toward Kan and Vaessa standing by the stone sculpture.
I watched him go in slight bewilderment. What kind of cheap soap opera was this? First James, then Kan, and now Reece? No longer did I have any doubts that the mage had fallen head over heels—I knew him and his mannerisms too well by now. Throughout his life, his combination of looks, charisma and suggestive humor had been quite sufficient to seduce most women, but here all that shattered beyond repair against the impenetrable ice walls put up by the blue-eyed sorceress. As for Raena, her behavior was nothing like it was in the first days of joining up with us. The young woman had long recognized that the mage fancied her, and was now in full-on torture mode with her caustic remarks to his signs of affection. Now, yes, Reece was a bona fide clown, but he was my clown! And it gave me no pleasure to see him in this predicament. What could I do? Kick the girl out of the party? Nonsense, that would only hurt him more, and she was our only healer besides. Alas, there was no easy solution in sight. When there's nothing you can do about any given situation, let it work itself out without your meddling—that was my philosophy. I sighed, then proceeded to contemplate the corpses of seven mountains trolls stuck in picturesque poses by the far wall of rock. Finally, I looked up at the ugly bastard perched on the stone throne, his bald skull shaped like a fir-cone, arms stuck out in front, unnaturally thin for his build, mouth gaping in a muted cry... The humanoid on the throne looked like a sheared chimp. A sheared chimp terrified of something. The map had led us here, but to what purpose?
We had set out to the Spring of Arrakas—a small spring girdled by mountains and guarded by a half-century of "blue cats"—immediately after our audience with Holgrim. Unfortunately, reaching out hadn't been revelatory in any tangible way. Water is water is water, if somewhat salty and smelling a bit like rotten eggs. Personally, I much preferred regular old sparkling water from my past life.
The entire drinking process took us no more than fifteen minutes. Thankfully, we didn't need to lap up the water like animals lest we soil the purity of the ritual—standing next to the holy spring was a gazebo interlaced with vines, inside which stood a small table set with ten vessels of varying sizes. Upon completing this simple procedure, we returned to Mycana, and from there it was all hands on deck. On Holgrim's insistence, it was decided to summon the knights and mages right into the barbarian capital's outskirts, while Kan and Reece headed to Craedia through a portal built by the chieftain. The former to organize the passage properly, and the latter to build the return portal, as it was relayed to us that only a member of the ruling bloodline could build a direct portal to the capital, which Reece had conveniently become very recently. In this sense, Arkon was a very fair and efficient world—any change in status instantly transferred all due entitlements into your possession. The bureaucrats of Earth would choke on their rage were anything like that to start happening back home.
The knights and mages turned up closer to midnight, bringing our total to exactly ninety nine, counting demons and humans both. The rest had decided to follow Gerat's lead, and it made no sense to try and collect them throughout the princedom. Now wasn't that interesting? While you're off pursuing some insurmountable goals, barely managing to catch your breath, normal sentients around you get together, get hitched, and start families. And the presence or absence of horns doesn't faze their prospective partners one bit—on the contrary, they find the exoticism alluring.
The knights and mages were quartered in barracks specially allocated for them, and the following morning Holgrim, having acquired a third son overnight, surprised us with a gift of his own. Two hundred fifty war lizards and a promise to send two hundred eggs to the princedom once the border opened—a royal gift it was indeed. I had no need of a lizard mount myself, obviously, but watching seasoned soldiers squeal with delight as they rode those reptiles up and down the road was a sight to behold. And seeing as every lizard was outfitted in shiny new armor, I suspected that Mycana's armorers must have donated a full annual quota's worth to our cause. As for the object of the chieftain's joy, he turned up at breakfast clearly nursing a wicked hangover, which didn't stop him from downing a liter of wine right there on the spot. In response to my proposal to leave him here with his new family he declared without hesitation that he'd rather risk his ears and tongue than to stay behind in Mycana. I didn't press the issue, and on the morning of the following day our incomplete century, accompanied by a half-century of grim-looking women, took a portal to the border of Effervescent Peaks.
For any normal person, mountains are either a word on a page, a brownish blot on the globe, or vistas of mesmerizing beauty on paintings or the visor. The reality, however, is somewhat different. The vistas are just as mesmerizing, but their dimensions can be even more overwhelming. The Effervescent Peaks, spanning zones ranging from levels 200-350, stretched for over one hundred twenty miles to the south, disappearing in the Great Ocean that, according to Vaessa, surrounded all of the Realm of Arkon's planes. Sentients also called it the Dark Ocean, and it was said—by sailors in particular—that swimming in its waters was a particularly bad idea even for the realm's gods. For the avoidance of complications that would be incompatible with their eternal lives.
I doubt that any person alive is truly capable of giving justice to the natural of beauty of mountains with descriptions—there just aren't any appropriate epithets in any of the world's languages. Emerging from the portal, I forced the boar to run a few more dozen feet, then dismounted and froze, flabbergasted by the visual beauty that opened up before me. The sprawling mountain valley was carpeted by lush verdant grass, and decorated lavishly with isles of pink flowers. About a quarter mile to the left, a river of wondrously emerald color fell into a perfectly oval lake. Roughly a third of the valley was occupied by a pine wood, running down the mountainside to my right, precipitous and crisscrossed with deep fissures. I saw boulders overgrown with brown moss, cliffs grasping at the floating clouds, herds of yaks grazing and wild horses galloping... Looking at all this, suddenly all I wanted was to forget the whole bloody prophecy, build a camp on the lakeside, break out a spinning rod with a six-pack of Guinness, and build a campfire... Only my trusty Pflueger was nowhere in sight, likewise the slightly bitter dark beer... Chasing away the inopportune blues, I hopped back into the saddle, slapped my four-legged pal on the withers, and gave a wave forward, steering my party toward the pass lurking some twenty odd miles in the distance.
The idyll came to a swift end before long, as green hills gave way to wastes laden with naked rocks, and the air began to reek of dead flesh, overpowering the fragrance of mountain flowers. Curiously, I could see no visible sources for the stench, and nobody else seemed to pay any mind to it. I wasn't especially worried—what could possibly pose a risk to a squad of level 300 NPCs in a level 220 zone? That's right, nothing. As for the odor, I'd smelled enough dead flesh back in my princedom that any paleontologist back on Earth would choke with envy.
My confidence was proven right with the very first attack, as a group of two dozen mountain trolls swinging wooden clubs was decimated by our scouts before even reaching the main host. The frequency of attacks picked up as we drew closer to the pass. Strangely, the trolls appeared to aggro on our party whenever we entered their field of visibility, which defied the very fundamentals of this world—regular mobs shouldn't behave like this! Except nobody
seemed to have told them this.
As we drew within ten miles of the pass, the groups of trolls were replaced by earth elementals, though that hardly impacted our pace. It hadn't taken the foxes and mages long to master their new means of transport, so now their ten in the vanguard wasn't just taking out all the mobs along the way, but managing to loot their hearts and essences to boot. The women assigned to us weren't taking part in the fighting, but riding calmly in the back with impassive faces. The journey so far was free of any surprises, and when evening fell our squad pitched camp about a mile from the pass, at the foot of an old mountain, hunchbacked like a sleeping camel.
I'd previously envisioned a mountain pass to be almost like an elevated mound over which an off-road vehicle could easily drive. The reality turned out somewhat different—we were looking at a nearly vertical stretch upslope at least a full mile in length, and a similar distance downslope. Good thing we had tools at our disposal that mountain-climbers back home couldn't even dream of, like Jump and the lack of fatigue by default, in addition to traditional ones like horsehair ropes. But if I'd suspected before that mountain-climbers were out of their freaking mind for picking this hobby, now my suspicions were firmly cemented.
The night passed uneventfully, not counting a level 210 wyvern attempting an aerial attack on the camp and getting hopelessly ensnared in a defensive spell. It must have been either the hungriest or the dumbest wyvern around. And now, thanks to natural selection, Raena was rocking a decent ring with mana regeneration and +100 to healing spells.
It took us about eight hours to conquer the pass, and all the while I was cursing profusely whatever outstanding individual was responsible for portals being prohibited in the Effervescent Peaks. According to Krina, that happened the year that strange blight crawled out of the Pass of Forty Springs.
Nothing, I sighed, casting another glance at the humanoid sitting up on the throne. This frightened monkey holds the key to entering the Spectral City. Once there, I'll be sure to get answers to all my questions.
Eight hours was nothing compared to what it would have taken us to cross the ridge if not for Krina's panthers. Besides clearly feeling comfortable in the mountains, the women were incredibly adept at reading the rock to find the optimal path of ascent. Of course, it stung a little to catch their slightly derisive glances, as I felt like a clumsy bear by comparison, but I wasn't going to sweat it. No matter how good you may be at any given thing, there was always someone out there who was better—and I was rather lousy at this particular thing to begin with. In theory, I could put in the time and effort to learn rock-climbing or the myriad other skills I was deficient in, but which of those things would make a tangible difference in my life? No, you had to be selective with your time and resources—in this world as well as in the past one.
With the ridge behind us, we kept moving toward the gorge without stopping. The valley into which we'd descended had uneven terrain, so we decided not to summon the mounts we'd released before starting the ascent—it was simply more comfortable to travel on foot.
On the approach to the gorge, we saw scenes of primitive humans depicted on the smooth surface of the sheer mountainside, ostensibly the handiwork of some smartass designer. The pictures featured ugly humans and even uglier animals. Now, it wasn't that the Realm of Arkon couldn't have had cavemen in its history, or that some of those cavemen couldn't have been artistically inclined. But when you saw inscriptions in the rock above one such scene claiming that one Christopher Holmes was a dumbass and a bastard, it was hard not to suspect that the local Neanderthals or Cro-Magnons had little to do with this. To say nothing of the scene itself, in which three humans were hurling spears at the fourth's posterior, while three deer stood nearby, reared, holding their bellies with their front hooves, laughing maniacally. Interestingly, neither my fighters nor Krina's panthers appeared to pay any mind to the petroglyphs. Was this kind of art commonplace in their minds, or was it that they simply couldn't register it? I recalled Christopher—a decent dude all around who managed one of the subdivisions in a neighboring department—and wondered what he might have done that one of his subordinates would risk a hefty fine, maybe even their job, with this tomfoolery? Oh well, this was in the distant past. Casting a final glance at this memento from a long-gone world, I signaled to my party, and entered the Pass of Forty Springs.
The gorge itself resembled a rocky corridor roughly three hundred yards wide. Virtually vertical walls rose about a quarter mile over the mouth of a river that began here. Here and there the water trickled through fissured rock, like tiny waterfalls, and pooled into springs, elucidating the location's name, though I didn't bother counting them all. There wasn't any vegetation here aside from brownish moss draping the rock and patches of short grass that reminded me of nettle. The stench in the air suggested that somewhere not too far ahead we should find several hundred of dead elephants. And not just dead, but largely decomposed. Seeing no mobs in our line of sight, we kept moving along the right wall for a little over two miles, then took a right at the river. Another couple of hundred yards led us to a spacious cul-de-sac in which fifty or so level 250 mini bosses were waiting. As before, the mobs attacked simultaneously, thereby violating the game's laws, but that didn't help them one bit...
"All done, prince," Saverus' voice brought me out of my ruminations.
Nodding to the mage, I peered at the group of clustered fighters, found Kan, and pointed him toward the enormous rock lying some fifty yards from the humanoid's throne.
"Go there and stay there until I've opened the path," I said, then turned to Krina, who was standing nearby.
"We're on location," I bowed my head ceremonially, my hand on Ruination's hilt. "Thank you and your fighters for leading us here."
"We merely traveled alongside you," the young woman bowed her head in turn, then looked me in the eyes and smiled. "Good luck, Dark One! We're planning a visit to your princedom a year from now, and I hope to see you there alive and well."
With a nod goodbye, she spun on her heels, walked up to her brother, and ruffled his hair playfully. "Take care of yourself, little brother," Krina gave a sad smile, patted him on the shoulder, then spun around again and started toward the river. The panthers followed her in silence.
"Everybody, to that rock!" Kan commanded, pointed to the boulder.
He had assumed command of the combined forces only temporarily, for the duration of this campaign, which would be his last. Though the warrior was now a full-fledged member of my clan, he remained the most experienced commander among the humans, so who else but he should lead them out of this plane? With my help, of course. My job, as usual, was the cushiest by far. I was beginning to think the post of art director or coordinator was designed specifically for me back on Earth.
As the panthers were walking off, I double-checked the quest log to make sure part two of the Celestial Seal key was still there, then produced the scroll from inventory and made for the monkey perched up on the throne. Part one of the quest had been completed the moment I'd departed Ahriman's private library, with the system immediately activating part two. There was no way of knowing whether building a portal to Karn would work without all these quests, simply by holding both fragments of the key in your hands, but I wasn't going to test that theory.
Putting the unfolded scroll to the markings glowing a dark red color on the rock wall just left of the throne, I jerked my hand away and took several steps back. For a minute or so, nothing was happening. Finally, the statue shook and grew covered with webs of cracks. There was a barely audible clap, and the next moment the entire composition crumbled to the ground, replaced by a hillock of brown sand and the pitch-black rectangular window of a portal.
Attention all clans and players in Demon Grounds! The continental event known as Cathella the Spectral City has started!
Objective: capture and destroy Cathella the Spectral City.
Reward: 1 epic scalable item of one's choosing to every participant.
Duration: NA.
Conditions:
The Spectral City can only be destroyed once.
Failed attempts to complete the continental event will alter the reward for its completion.
First failure: 1 level-appropriate epic item of one's choosing.
Third failure: set of 8 level-appropriate rate items of one's choosing.
Fifth failure: set of 4 level-appropriate rate items of one's choosing.
Ninth failure or thereafter: 1 level-appropriate rate item of one's choosing.
On behalf of the Realm of Arkon's administration, best of luck to all the players and clans!
I watched the lines of system messages tumble over one another, then shook my head. Another continental event, eh... But why wasn't there any mention of the second fragment of the key, nor of the two bone dragons? Were those supposed to be a surprise? Oh well, no point asking questions nobody was going to answer. Personally, i couldn't fathom what any dragon might want to do in some dead city, but most players probably never had those questions. Dragons in the city? So what? And who cares what the devs had been smoking at their brainstorming session when the idea came up? You're not here to ask questions, but to raid and farm phat lewts! The continental event could only be completed once. Thankfully, nobody was breathing down my neck, so I could fail as many times as I liked. Only I wasn't planning on failing even once. In theory, a century of level 300 NPCs should sweep a level 220 instance without any hiccups—at least I badly wanted to believe it.
"We enter!" I turned around and waved to Kan, then started toward the portal. But before I could walk through it, there was a fluttering of wings above, and out of nowhere a black crow alighted on my shoulder. The very same crow that had already taken a ride on my shoulder on the road to Mycana. Settling comfortably, the bird gave me a light peck on the cheek, croaked, and pointed her beak at the portal.