The Land: Predators

by Aleron Kong

  “In accordance with the Qualifier of the Duel, I give you this information. The guardian of a Dark magic portal was slain recently. The destination key on our side of the portal was lost long ago, so my master could not be sure that I would be able to return after I was sent to discover why. In case I was killed or could not report my findings, he has laid a trap for any who come through the portal that will slay all who dare to enter our realm.”

  The undead’s information confirmed that when Richter had killed the decaemur knight he had tipped off its master, the eldritch magic user. That had already been pretty evident though with the rise of undead attacks in the lands surrounding the village. The more important point was about the key.

  Richter had known the activation key had to be present on the other end of the portal. Both the sending and receiving portals had to have the activation keys present, otherwise the portal’s magic wouldn’t work at all. For a portal to be more than just a pretty light show, the gate needed a second runestone, the destination key. The key took you to a specific place. Without it, you simply passed through the energy field and nothing happened. The Tefonim knowledge Richter had been given about portals hinted at something called an “untethered portal” that worked without a destination key, but his knowledge didn’t tell him exactly what that was.

  The Death Knight had been true to the terms of the Duel. The information he had provided was valuable. Not knowing if the destination key was present on the other side of the portal was what had kept Richter from entering it in the past. When you added in the fact that the lich was waiting for them and had laid a trap, it meant Richter and Hisako couldn’t risk taking their armies through the gateway. It would be a slaughter.

  How would they get to the lich then? Richter couldn’t just let the undead attacks continue and get worse. There had to be another way! Richter thought about the Death Knight’s story and realized there was an obvious question that could be the answer to his problems.

  “Then how do you plan to get back?” Richter asked.

  The ghast slipped a helmet over his head, completing his set of heavy armor. “No, worm. The Qualifiers have been met.” With that pronouncement, an aura of purple and black light exploded out from his body, bathing the entire room.

  Richter staggered backward as red warning prompts filled his vision like alarms that came too late.

  You are afflicted with Fear!

  You are afflicted with Death Aura! Death Magic +35% more effective while within the aura. You are +7% more likely to suffer critical hits. Enemies within the Death Aura area are afflicted with Despair.

  You are afflicted with Despair! Attack speed and Damage decreased by 28%.

  The Death Knight glared at Richter’s quivering body through the slats in his helmet. His voice was horrifyingly quiet, “Your soul is mine.”

  CHAPTER 70 – Day 144 – Kuborn 34, 0 AoC

  Richter had never been so afraid in his life. It was all he could do not to piss himself, and that was a near thing. He was no stranger to fear. He had been plunged into one terrifying experience after another since coming to The Land. Some were worse than others… tentacle monster… the Assassin…

  His mouth went dry and his eyes widened in absolute horror. His body had started shaking, and he could do nothing to stop it. Remembering those traumatic events had just made the shivering worse. The face of the Death Knight shifted to the face of every nightmare he had ever had, the undead’s aura plunging sharp claws into his soul. The chaos seed quailed under the onslaught, but then something happened, something that had saved men since time immemorial.

  A woman told him he was being a moron.

  Despite the debuffs, Alma’s voice came through loud and clear, *Snap out of it! Your Mental resistance is 100% now. The psychic effects of the undead’s aura cannot touch you. You are only suffering from the emotional component. Focus on my voice and retreat within your mental fortress!*

  Though terror clenched his heart, the deep bond between he and Alma still let her words reach him. Her love and dedication were all the proof he needed to believe her words and firm his will. The Death Knight started stalking forward, arrogant words falling from his lips as he taunted Richter.

  The undead thought Richter was completely paralyzed and helpless, as so many of his enemies had been in the past. An angry voice deep inside of the chaos seed started spitting in defiance. That voice vowed that the undead creature would regret his hubris.

  *Fight, master! You can use my strength, but you must focus! Fight!*

  Richter followed her advice and ignored the Death Knight’s taunts. Instead, he pulled his awareness inward. Doing so made him completely helpless, but that was already the case. Once he knew what to do, it was the work of a moment to conjure the mental representation of his village. Just as before, it had a small fort in the middle that was his primary mental bulwark. There were differences though. The village walls were twice as high as they normally were, and the small fort that represented his primary defenses had turned into a two-story castle.

  Richter pictured himself at the top of a battlement looking out over the village and out past the settlement walls. He felt something coming and, within moments, a creeping red fog appeared. It was actually thicker than mere fog, he realized. It oozed more than flowed. The scarlet mist appeared in one spot in the distance, then two, then a dozen. Before long, the viscous red fog was flowing in from the forest in all directions.

  “It is the ghast’s Fear skill trying to overcome your mental defenses,” came a familiar reptilian voice from above. Richter knew it well, but it was still strange hearing Alma with his ears rather than inside his head.

  The chaos seed looked up. Resting on the roof was Alma. But she was big! The small familiar now had a body the height of a Great Dane and twice the length. She unfurled her wings when she saw him looking at her. Each of the inky black appendages stretched five feet. Her voice held a tone of smug satisfaction, “Am I not beautiful, master?”

  Despite the impending attack, her cockiness still amused him. Richter reasoned that with the time dilation effect within the walls of his mind, they had a second to talk. “You are gorgeous, you silly thing,” he responded with a smile. “And you’re speaking so well.”

  “As this is all inside your mind, master, technically I’m not,” she responded sardonically. *I can still speak to you psychically,* “but I found that I enjoyed speaking with you before we underwent the Messeji.” The familiar switched between the two modes of conversation seamlessly, and in each, her voice was the same.

  A woman liked the sound of her own voice. Shocking, he thought to himself… or at least he thought it had been to himself. The fact that she hissed at him seemed to indicate otherwise. Apparently the Messeji also lowered the barrier between their personal and transmitted thoughts. Coughing loudly to cover, he told her, “You have a beautiful voice, my love, but there is something I still don’t understand. Why has my mental fort become a castle, and why are the walls bigger?”

  She narrowed her draconian eyes at him, a clear promise of future retribution for his errant thoughts, but stayed on task. “As you already know, everything here is just a construct of your mental landscape. While our Psi Bond has allowed you to develop your mental defenses much faster than you would otherwise, most of your defenses are still due to the Mental bonuses our Psi Bond provides you. The Messeji has increased those bonuses, so your psychic fortifications have become more formidable as well.”

  “This is about indirect damage, isn’t it?” Richter asked.

  “Yes,” Alma responded. “Your Mental resistance was 55% the last time you focused on your mental defenses. With the Messeji, that leaped to 100%, hence your walls doubling in height and your fort becoming a small castle.”

  When she had first explained how magical resistances worked, she had subdivided the mechanism into direct and indirect damage. Having a 100% resistance to Fire magic would make you nearly invulnerable to spells of that school, though the
re were exceptions. A fireball would do almost nothing, for instance. That was an example of direct damage.

  Indirect damage would be like running through a forest fire. Having a fire resistance would increase your base resistance to burning, which would make it more likely for you to survive, but sure as hell wouldn’t make you fireproof. In the case of indirect damage, the resistance bonus was applied to your innate defense value. His Mental and Spiritual resistance were both +1, for instance. That was the average for most humans in The Land. His training with Alma had increased his Mental Defense to +1.9. That was represented by the outer wall of his village. When he was inside of his mindscape, with his mental fortifications in place, that jumped to +4.9. The extra three points of Mental defense were represented by his fort, which had become a castle thanks to the Messeji.

  The dragonling had berated him often for not having his mental walls up all the time, even when sleeping, but Richter hadn’t been able to manage it before. It had taken extreme focus that he just couldn’t maintain for long without a break. Now that their Psi Bond was increased though, he thought he might be able to hold them in place. Reaching level seven of the bond had made mental exercises easier; he could already feel a greater stability in his mindscape.

  He could test it later. What mattered now was that Alma had been right. The Death Knight’s Fear skill was an example of indirect damage, so he couldn’t just shrug off the Mental component even though he now had a 100% Resistance. Getting behind his mental wards increased his Mental defenses to a level that surpassed the attack potential of the Fear skill. A quick check of his combat log proved that.

  Mental component of Fear (20%) has Attack of 5.4 and is resisted 100% due to your Mental Defense of 8.1 (base 4.9 + 65% Mental Resistance). Emotional component of Fear (80%) has Attack of 8.6 and is resisted 11% due to your Spiritual Defense 1.05 (base 1.0 + 5% Mental Resistance).

  There was a similar entry for how he was resisting the Despair. Not only was he able to completely ignore the Mental component of the Fear skill, but being in his mindscape let him ignore the Spiritual side as well, like a man could ignore the pain of torture with meditation. He had a feeling that the encroaching red fog meant he couldn’t ignore the Spiritual attacks forever. Even now that his ability to think clearly had been restored, he still had limited capabilities with regard to interacting with the real world. He switched his view to what he was actually seeing in the undead throne room. The Death Knight was moving towards him very slowly from his viewpoint, thanks to the time dilation effect of the mindscape, but that didn’t alter the fact that the undead was getting closer.

  All of that explained the change in Richter’s construct, but it still didn’t explain the red fog that was oozing ever closer to the walls of the village, and it didn’t explain the black shapes he was seeing inside of it. “So that is the ghast’s Fear skill?” he asked. “It looks more like a menstrual fog. And what are those black shapes?”

  Alma gave a long-suffering sigh, but otherwise ignored Richter’s ‘fog’ comment. “The black shapes are how your mind is interpreting the attack from the Death Knight’s aura. You are safe so long as neither the fog nor the black creatures touch you, but they will both keep coming.”

  The mist had reached the outer trench and floated right over. The trench was just an affectation, an image to make the mental village more closely resemble the real thing, not an actual mental defense. Thankfully, once it reached the village walls, which were actual representations of his innate Mental defenses, it stopped, as did the black figures inside of it.

  After what felt like only a few moments, Richter could see that the red smoke was pooling at the base of the stone defenses and slowly rising higher. “When the Fear mist reaches this castle, it will climb the walls as well. If it reaches the psychic representation of your body, the Fear debuff will cripple you again. Perhaps now you see how important growing your base mental defense is and that you should take our training more seriously,” she added archly at the end.

  “Yes… I do,” Richter answered sourly. Even in a life-and-death moment, the main woman in his life found a way to say both ‘I told you so’ and ‘This entire situation could have been avoided if you had listened to me.’

  She sniffed at him, “That is how long you have to kill the Death Knight.” She paused a moment before flippantly adding, “Unless our Messeji bond runs out first. Then you-”

  “Lose my increased defenses,” Richter interjected. “I know.”

  “Actually, I was going to say ‘Then you’re fucked,’ but it amounts to the same thing, master, and you shouldn’t interrupt.”

  “Thanks,” Richter said with supreme annoyance, “Is there anything else that you can do to help?”

  “Just this,” she responded with a twinkle in her eye. She launched herself off the roof towards the encroaching mists. Her voice echoed in his mind, *What you can do, I can do!* Then she opened her mouth and breathed nearly invisible glass flames over the scarlet mists. They fog dissipated wherever her attack touched, slowing its overall encroachment towards Richter’s perch atop the castle. He also caught sight of the black things for the first time. They were stick-like figures with claws and teeth. They looked like the scariest things from the Nightmare Before Christmas. Hearing their high-pitched screams as they died was music to his ears. Richter looked at her in amazement; she really was a true dragon!

  Thanking his lucky stars for his wonderful soul familiar, Richter turned his attention back to the real world. Though he’d been talking to Alma for a full minute inside of his mind, the time dilation effect meant that bare seconds had passed in his battle with the Death Knight. The creature had just stepped down to the third level of the dais. Now back in control of his faculties, Richter decided on a plan. He just needed a bit of time. Luckily, he had that covered. With a mental command, he ordered the eight remaining bodaks to attack, but left his other summoned creatures in reserve.

  “Ha!” the ghast scoffed, seeing the low-level skeletons moving towards him. “Your pathetic minions only delay your death.” To prove his point, the Knight swung his sword through the body of a rime bodak. The reanimated skeleton was destroyed by that one blow, and bones went flying. Richter hated seeing how easily his creature was dispatched, but was not dismayed by the loss. All he needed was time. He couldn’t waste any more energy worrying about the reanimated monsters. He had his own part to play if he was going to survive to see the dawn.

  Putting what he hoped was an expression of dismay on his draconian face, he crumpled to his knees as if all hope was lost. The ghast’s answering laugh showed that Richter’s deception was having the desired effect, at least for the moment. Richter hunched over once his knees hit the ground, but he wasn’t out of the fight, far from it. Laugh it up asshole, he thought bitterly, then he began to cast.

  His body hid the flashes of black and gold light that began to grow around his hands as he prepared to cast a spell of Deep Magic. The arcane words fell from his lips as he pretended to cower on the ground. More of his summoned creatures fell, almost one a second, but they served their purpose. A part of Richter marveled at how easily he was able to resist the seductive pull of the Spirit magic inside of his mental construct. A deeper, more sadistic part of him looked forward to what was about to happen. Though his face remained pointed down, through his psychic bond to his summoned creatures he saw that the Death Knight had destroyed three skeletons and had reached the bottom tier of the dais.

  The light spread from his hands to his arms, then began to radiate off him like heat shimmer in the desert. Afraid the ghast would see, Richter ordered his creatures to redouble their efforts to distract the undead creature. The energy on his arms met with a second focus of energy centered on his chest. The two waves of force created a turbulence that manifested as a sphere of black and gold energy between his hands. In the space of a few seconds, it grew from the size of a pea to the size of a softball, then even larger. Crackling bolts of gold and black energy danced a
cross the surface.

  He was dual casting the spell and his mana was falling at a precipitous rate. The original cost of one hundred and sixty-eight had swelled to a head-splitting six hundred and twenty-five MP. This was why Richter had refrained from using the new blood perk of his Symbiosis Boon, Siphon. While having 10% of the strength of some of the rime bodak he had slain would have come in handy, the fifty MP reduction to his mana pool would preclude him from using his strongest spells.

  The magic he was using now was one of his longest casts, taking a full ten seconds to complete. Another two skeletons fell, but it was worth it as Richter approached the ninth second. He sent a mental command to his few remaining creatures, not wanting to risk them being hit by his magic. He didn’t actually care about their well-being, but his life, and possibly the lives of all his people, might rely on his spell hitting the target. The remaining bodaks immediately dropped low, abandoning all defense to grab hold of the Death Knight’s legs. The Death Knight looked at them in surprise, then suspicion. Too late jabroni, Richter thought with all the vehemence he could muster. With a last word of Power that had the volume of a shout, he straightened up and thrust his hands forward, casting Weak Aura Lance.

  The ball of black and gold energy shot forward with the speed of a bullet, lengthening into a javelin of void black and shining gold. The Death Knight’s eyes widened at seeing a magic he was unfamiliar with, and he tried to dive out of the way. However massive his strength was, having four bodaks, even of a lower level, holding onto his legs stalled him for a split second. That was all it took.

  The spell impacted against the ghast’s stomach, just above the groin. It disappeared, and for a second, nothing happened. Glee began to find its way back onto the undead warrior’s face, but then cracks ran through his body, quick as lightning. Wafer-thin pieces of him peeled off and floated into the air before disappearing. Once the process was done a moment later, no outward change could be seen in the Death Knight, but Richter’s combat log told another story.