Dragon Web Online: Dominion: A LitRPG Adventure Series (Electric Shadows Book 2)

by S. R. Witt

We were too late.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

  Indira lowered her face. “It’s over. There’s nothing left for us to do here.”

  Bastion put his shoulders to the big doors, but they didn’t budge. He thumped his mailed fist against one of the iron snake heads adorning the barrier. “Even if we weren’t too late, we couldn’t get through these doors. I’d need to be ten times stronger to break them down.”

  I paced the floor, head in my hands. After all this, after Havelock’s sacrifice and everything else we’d been through, Corvus had still beaten us.

  Beaten me.

  Power thrummed around me. The air rang with it, like the trembling echoes of a plucked guitar string. If the ritual were complete, that magical go-go juice wouldn’t be hanging around. It would all be tied up in the pattern the ritual was powering. “We’re not too late.”

  Indira and Cringer both looked at me with skeptical eyes. The elf crossed her arms over her chest. “I just told you the pattern was complete.”

  “I know what you said, but completing a spell’s pattern just gives that spell a shape, right? That’s what you told me before. They still have to fill the pattern with mana to complete the ritual.”

  Indira’s eyes went wide. “That’s true. But that could happen at any time. They have a whole church filled with people working together to generate mana for this spell.”

  She had a point there. The cultists were still pounding their heads against the sanctuary’s floor, working themselves into an ecstatic frenzy to unleash the magical power contained within them. Their tortured hymns filled the air around the ritual chamber with the raw fuel Corvus needed to fill the pattern and complete the binding.

  “There’s still time to stop this, then. We need to get inside the ritual chamber.”

  While the rest of the party stared at the doors, my eyes were drawn up to the ceiling far overhead. This part of the temple hadn’t been as severely damaged as the passage we’d traveled through, but it wasn’t unscathed. Where the ceiling met the wall of the ritual chamber, a chunk of rock had broken loose. There was a narrow opening.

  Narrow, but just the right size for a scrawny thief.

  “I can get in there, but I don’t think the rest of you will make it.” I paced before the big doors. “Indira, can you burn a whole in these doors?”

  The elf reached out and pressed her fingertips against the iron surface. “I could, but it’ll take a very long time to make a hole big enough for one of us to get through.”

  The echoes of chanting made it clear we didn’t have a lot of time. But they also hinted at another way to do this. “What if you had more power?”

  Indira shrugged. “Sure. If I had enough power, I could blow a hole right through the iron in no time at all.”

  “Great—”

  “But that much power is way beyond my abilities. Like I’ve told you before, magi are limited as to how much mana they can channel at once. If I tried to handle that much power in one shot, it’d burn me alive.”

  All eyes were on the elf and me. We were at the literal threshold of completing this quest, we just needed to figure out some way to get inside. “What if you didn’t have any limits on how much mana you could channel?”

  Frustrated with my pie-in-the-sky dreaming, Indira threw up her hands. “Sure! If I had no limits, I’d be a god, and I could blow the damn doors down with a thought. But I don’t have the kind of raw power you’re talking about, and even if I did—”

  Her complaints died as I pulled my hand out of my backpack. The Focusing Lens of Primal Flame shone with an inner light that throbbed in time with the chanting. “Well, look at I found,” I said. “Would this fix your channeling dilemma?”

  Indira reached out for the Lens. “How did you get that?”

  I smirked and held it away from her. “That’s a story for another time. Will this solve your problem?”

  She nodded so hard and fast I thought her neck would snap. “Yes, with that I can channel as much power as I need. It’s unfettered. But how—”

  I wagged a finger in her direction. “Nuh-uh. Not gonna talk about it right now. I’m going to give this to you, and then you’re going to melt this door into a pile of slag. Also, it would be great if you killed everyone inside, other than Mercy and me.”

  Indira held her hands out in front of her, eyes wide with wonder. I dropped the Lens into her grasp and shot her a wink. “Don’t say I never gave you anything.”

  Bastion rested his elbow on my shoulder. “Neat trick, but you still have to get her the power.”

  “Already gotta plan for that,” I said. “But I need you to keep an eye on Cringer and Indira while she opens that door. If anything goes wrong, you have to give her time to do her thing.”

  “All right, bro. And then what?”

  “Then I expect you to charge in there and save my ass because the rest of my plan is a lot crazier than what you’re going to be doing.”

  I motioned for Mercy to follow me over to the ritual chamber’s outer wall. “We’ve got a lot of work to do.”

  Mercy looked at me with a skeptical eye. “Now it’s we, huh, kemosabe?”

  The nostalgic line made me laugh despite our dire circumstances. “You better believe it, Tonto. We’ve got us a crow to kill.”

  Though Mercy wasn’t a thief, she was a natural explorer, and those dragonborn claws of hers would help her keep pace with me. “Up we go,” I whispered, and started climbing.

  We scrambled up the ritual chamber’s cracked wall like a pair of monkeys hunting bananas. It wasn’t the easiest climb I’d ever made, but I was getting good at this. Hell, I was so good I didn’t even gain a skill point the whole way up.

  The hole in the wall was a little bigger than it looked from below, which was a nice break. I sucked in a deep breath and wriggled into the gap, careful not to snag my cloak or weapons on the rough edges.

  The ritual chamber was at least fifty feet across and just as tall. Thirteen holes burrowed through the room’s ceiling, and carved channels spiraled counterclockwise from each hole to the ceiling’s center. Flickering green power flowed through those channels and gathered in a swirling orb.

  As I watched, a sizzling drop of power as big as my fist fell from the orb and splashed onto a massive crystal hung ten feet below the ceiling. The crystal was secured in place by chains as thick as my thigh, and those chains were mounted to thick plates bolted to the chamber’s walls.

  The power that dripped onto the crystal flowed through an intricate pattern engraved into its surface. Most of the pattern glowed with unwholesome green radiance, but a good chunk of it wasn’t yet filled.

  Mercy nudged me forward, and I crawled all the way through the opening and out onto one of the chains mounted to the wall next to the hole in the wall. She joined me a moment later, eyes wide as the green light splashed over her face. “That’s it?” She asked, voice low.

  “That’s part of it,” I whispered back. “Look down.”

  The ritual chamber’s walls were lined with chanting cultists. Their gargantuan leader kneeled before an obsidian chair, which sat directly below the glowing crystal. It was a smaller copy of the Burning Throne back in Frosthold.

  Corvus sat in this version of the throne with a black box cradled against her chest. Jarissa and Yark, who watched the iron doors leading into the chamber, flanked her.

  Great.

  Mercy’s eyes flicked from the channels in the ceiling to the crystal, and then to the throne. She put the pieces together in no time at all. “So the juju power flows into here from the sanctuary, fills up the pattern on the crystal, and then the ritual goes off, and Corvus gets to be the Queen of Frosthold?”

  “That about sums it up.”

  “And your plan is going to stop all that?”

  The truth was, I didn’t know if my plan would work. When I shifted my vision over to my Thief’s Eyes, I saw pretty much what I’d expected, though, which was a comforting sign.

  The crystal wa
s a little more than three-quarters filled. Each of the glowing green channels was a thread feeding magic to that pattern. The connections between the pattern and the threads throbbed with violent emerald light. They churned as more and more energy flowed through them.

  Another, thicker thread, descended from the bottom of the crystal like the tail of a tornado. The loose end of that thread whipped and writhed through the air, reaching desperately for the replica of the Burning Throne. Once the pattern was complete, that full thread would connect to the little throne, and all the mana would drain out of the pattern to finish the ritual.

  But if I grabbed that thread and used my mad Threadweaving skills to reroute its power, that couldn’t happen. The binding ritual would stall out.

  Easy, right?

  Except for the part where the thread was carrying so much power just looking at it made my eyeballs sweat. If I made a mistake all that mojo wouldn’t be rerouted, it’d surge through me like a bolt of angry lightning.

  I had a distinct feeling I was about to die.

  But, you know, never let them see you sweat. “Yeah, that’ll work.”

  Mercy grunted but didn’t jinx me by telling me I was full of shit. “What do you need me to do?”

  “Provide moral support,” I joked, but it fell flat. “Also, if anyone down there starts lobbing sharp objects in my direction, turn them into fucking pincushions.”

  “You got it, boss.” Mercy said, and left it at that.

  I appreciated her lack of sarcasm as I crawled out onto the support chain and began my challenging and terrifying task.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

  Climbing up the chains to the lens was tricky, but far from impossible for a pro such as myself. I reached my target without breaking a sweat or attracting attention from any of my enemies below, which I took as a fabulous sign. It took me a few minutes to get settled into position at the end of the chain and turn my attention to the crystal.

  Then it was time for the scary stuff.

  The fact I’d done this once before didn’t make me any more comfortable with the plan. My other threadweaving attempts had been the equivalent of unplugging my mom’s hotplate. Tampering with the throbbing primal thread before me was like grabbing the power mains on a nuclear reactor with my bare hands. A few hundred people were beating themselves to death to fuel this beast, and once I pulled the plug all that juice had to go somewhere.

  If I did this right, the circuit would be complete once again. The mojo would flow from the sanctuary, through the channels, and then out through the rewoven thread to where it could be put to awesome use.

  If I screwed it up, I’d be flash fried in seconds.

  Even better, I had no formal magical training. This was all running off theory Indira had taught me and the little bit of sorcerous thievery I’d picked up along the way.

  I didn’t have the foggiest idea what I was doing. Good times. Good times.

  I closed my eyes to shut out the world. I needed all of my wits about me if I was going to do this, and that meant no distractions from the outside world. It was just the pattern, all that juicy mana, and me. My normal senses faded away, leaving me with just my Thief’s Eyes to take in the scene.

  When I opened my peepers, the ritual chamber was lit up like a Halloween bonfire. The light from the channels above me was so bright it hurt even when I didn’t look directly at it. The pattern itself was more subdued, as the power it absorbed was used for a specific purpose. The thread descending from the bottom of the crystal looked like a snake made out of lava.

  Grabbing that monster of a thread didn’t seem like such a bright idea, now that I had an up close and personal look at the damned thing.

  The ritual continued below me, guided by the demented high priestess. The bloated monstrosity’s words assaulted my ears with a glutinous conglomeration of sloppy vowels and guttural consonants oozing an intense yearning. The high priestess wasn’t demanding anything. She begged the powers that be to accept her, to give Corvus what she needed.

  “Not today,” I whispered to myself and went to work.

  It was tricky, much more delicate than the work I’d ever done. This wasn’t about pulling a pattern apart, it was about draining its power without burning myself to a crisp. My mind reeled as I tried to wrap my head around how this had to work. I practiced every step in my thoughts so I wouldn’t have to think about it once the process began.

  The layers of reality were weirding me out. I was in a game, which was one level removed from the body lying in my bed. I was reaching from the virtual physical world of Invernoth into the virtual, virtual world of magic that existed beneath its surface. There was no physicality to what I was doing. Everything was all in my head, no matter how deep I dove.

  Enough, I admonished myself, and let my mental fingers do the walking.

  I brushed my mental fingers over the thread leaving the pattern, fully expecting to get zapped for my trouble. When nothing happened, I got a little bolder and imagined an invisible hand, an extension of myself, gripping it.

  The sensation wasn’t much different from grabbing a hot water pipe. There was power there, rushing through the thread with unimaginable force, but it was on the other side of a barrier that protected me from harm. With great caution, I imagined pulling the thread toward me.

  It popped free of the box in Corvus’ hand. Without an outlet to drain the energy from the primal thread, it grew thicker and more vibrant by the second.

  Corvus didn’t react to my tampering. She remained motionless on the throne. Her glossy black feathers never stirred, and her beak lolled open to reveal her ebony tongue.

  So far, so good.

  The next part was going to be trickier.

  The Lens I’d given to Indira was far away from me, physically, but magic doesn’t work like that. If I could imagine it, and I’d looked at the thing often enough to remember it with photographic detail, I could reach it.

  I twisted my head to look back at the iron doors, and I saw the Lens and the rest of my party. Indira glowed like a candle, as did Cringer, their magical strength faint but visible. Bastion appeared dull and gray, though the sword strapped to his back had a core of purest white running through it that was hard to look at for longer than a moment or two.

  I turned my attention to Indira and the Lens. Unlike the crystal, the Lens had no loose threads. But everything on Invernoth—people, monsters, inanimate objects, everything—had a pattern that defined its physical, mental, and spiritual properties.

  Careful to keep its loose end away from my own pattern, I guided the throbbing thread’s twitching tip toward the Lens. Like electricity, mana is always looking for the shortest, easiest path to take. As soon as it drew near the pattern that defined the Lens, it snapped into place like a magnet finding its mate.

  A tiny fraction of the power stored in the pattern shot out of the thread and into the Lens. It throbbed and pulsed like a living thing as it moved through the thread and into the Lens. As fast as the cultists tried to fill the pattern with their prayers and head-banging intensity, the Lens drained it away so Indira could use it.

  My spell thievery had worked!

  And a split second later, I knew I’d fucked up.

  Indira screamed like a scalded cat. As the magic flowed through the Lens and into her, she lit up like a Roman candle. To my Thief’s Eyes, the magic pouring through her burned as bright and relentless as a magnesium flare.

  I’m killing her, I thought.

  I’d miscalculated. The power was too much, even for the Lens, and it was immolating Indira right before my eyes. I had to do something, stop the flow of power before it was too late.

  Then she pointed the Lens at the door and let ‘er rip.

  Holy. Shit.

  A battering ram of magical fire slammed into the iron doors and knocked them off their hinges. The cultists standing inside the doors were hurled across the ritual chamber like dolls flung into the air by a hurricane, their bodies bursting like gory
piñatas where they slammed into the ritual chamber’s far wall.

  Through the opened doorway, I watched Indira hose down the inside of the ritual chamber with a coruscating stream of elemental flame. Cultists screamed as the unimaginable heat transformed their flesh into piles of greasy embers. For a moment, it looked like Indira was going to end this fight before any of the rest of us could even contribute.

  And then the Lens ruptured.

  The power from the primal thread overwhelmed even the unfettered artifact’s pattern. Indira yelped with surprise as the explosive destruction threw her hands wide apart.

  The thread writhed in the air, searching for another pattern to latch onto. It found Indira’s and filled her with so much juice she levitated off the floor with fire billowing from her screaming mouth and bulging eyes.

  The thread, which I was still holding in my mind, carried Indira’s voice to me. “End this! Pull it away before I’m destroyed!”

  Her cries echoed in my head, and I jerked the thread away from her with all my might. It ripped loose from her with a roar of static and turned on me. It reared up above me like a scorpion’s tail, swaying as if ready to strike. It needed an outlet, and if I didn’t find one for it soon, it was going to come back to the path of least resistance: Me.

  Bastion, meanwhile, took advantage of the confusion in the ritual chamber to up his body count. His flaming longsword carved a bloody swath through the cultists. For a good thirty seconds, everyone in the room was too confused to react, and Bastion made the most of his time. A head flew off its cauterized neck, entrails spilled, and a trio of arms popped away from their bodies as the fiery sword did its work.

  Bastion rushed the priestess, raised his sword high overhead, and brought it down in a vicious swipe that should have opened her from her right shoulder to her left hip.

  But that’s not what happened.

  Yark recovered his wits and surged across the chamber, a challenging roar rumbling from his chest and growing louder with every step.

  The ogre slapped Bastion’s blade away with the palm of one gauntleted fist.