Lauren suddenly stopped attacking. Frank staggered in place, weaving slightly, yet Lauren didn’t follow up on her advantage. Instead, she appeared directly beside the healing totem. She raised a pistol slowly, resting it against Bert’s temple. Then she pulled the trigger. Bert’s body jerked and fell to the ground with a limp thud. The blood mist quickly began to dissipate along with its healing properties. As a result, Jason’s zombies began to fall in greater numbers.
Lauren moved to Frank where he had slumped to his knees. “I told you not to underestimate me,” she spat. “I guess you’ve learned your lesson.”
In one last ditch effort, Frank lunged forward with his axes. Yet Lauren anticipated the attack. Teleporting behind him in a flash of light, she raised her pistols and fired. Jason saw Frank’s window on the party menu gray out. He had died.
A cold rage bubbled and frothed in Jason’s veins. It was a game, but that girl had just executed his friend. He surveyed the battle, where his remaining zombies were beginning to fall. He ordered his small protection detail behind him and out of line of sight. Then his fingers began a terrible dance. Shadowy energy wound around his hands and up his arms while black tattoos of energy crawled over his skin. Unbeknownst to Jason, dark energy had begun to swirl around the building he occupied, obscuring the cracked stone from view. As the mass of dark energy reached critical mass, Jason closed his eyes.
Then he released.
The unholy mana rolled away from the building like a tidal wave. Where it struck the zombies in the courtyard below, they exploded violently, crippling and wounding the remaining players in the courtyard. A rapid-fire series of explosions rocked the battle as all of Jason’s remaining zombies flew apart in a wave of destruction.
As the debris cleared, Jason saw that they had wiped out nearly two-thirds of the enemy force. Yet many were still standing, including Lauren. Although, he was pleased to note that she was limping. She motioned to the building Jason was standing in, and the remaining players started heading in his direction. As Jason turned to flee, his last sight was of the remaining white-robed players being gunned down by Riley.
Good, he thought grimly.
He sprinted down the stairs of the building and exited out the back. Then Jason and his two remaining zombies sprinted towards the tunnel leading to the Hydra’s den. A glance over his shoulder showed that he was being followed by the enemy players in the distance. The occasional stray bolt of energy skimmed past him, but he didn’t slow his headlong dash.
As the entrance to the Hydra’s den came into sight, Jason could feel his heart race. Pumping his legs harder, his chest heaved and he could feel a dull ache in his muscles. Something flashed in his peripheral vision. Glancing to the side, Jason saw Riley’s status screen had grayed out.
He was the only one left. It was time for phase three.
Chapter 31 - Skittish
“Okay. What the hell is going on?” Robert muttered as he stared at the screen that loomed over the control room. The name “Lauren” flickered in the bottom right-hand corner of the display.
No one in the control room could offer an answer. Lauren and the other players had chased Jason into the narrow tunnel. The leader of the
“Where do you think you’re going, Jason?” Lauren shouted. “Do you plan to hide behind that waterfall?”
Lauren turned to the remaining players beside her. They only had twenty people left and nearly thirty minutes remaining on the first wave of respawns. “We need to finish this now,” Lauren said in a lower voice. “If there’s a passage behind the falls, then this could get complicated.”
She eyed the players around her. “Everyone get down into the cave, but be careful. This guy is apparently full of tricks.”
With that, Lauren leapt from the ledge. The camera tilted and spun erratically and steadied as she hit the floor of the cave. Faint arcs of electricity curled in front of her, signaling the end to her teleportation ability. Lauren’s hands clutched at the grips of her pistols, her knuckles white against the curved hardwood as she surveyed the room. She spotted the figures nearing the lake edge and teleported forward again. This time, she stopped within range of her targets.
Without hesitation, Lauren executed a series of erratic, short jumps around the dark forms while unloading her pistols. The screen darted and jumped, many of the technicians having trouble following her movements.
“That girl is fast,” Robert said appreciatively. “Either her reflexes are borderline inhuman, or she has become so accustomed to the short jumps that she no longer gets disoriented.”
“She must be afraid of some kind of surprise attack,” Claire replied quietly, leaning forward in her seat slightly in spite of her reserved tone. “Why else would she jump around so much?”
The group in the control room could see that Lauren’s mana was plummeting as she flashed continuously. Yet her bullets struck home, penetrating the rotten flesh of her targets’ legs. Each of the figures stumbled and fell to the stone floor as bolts of fire and ice slammed into their bodies, signaling that the other players had caught up with Lauren.
After a moment, the bodies lay still upon the banks of the lake. A silence descended over the cavern as the other players took up positions around Lauren.
“Is that it?” she muttered.
With a flick of her wrist, Lauren’s combat log appeared in her field of view. The log showed that the targets had died, but the names of the enemies were only a row of question marks since they hadn’t been identified. Lauren flashed forward again and walked the remaining few steps towards the corpses. She circled the group, kicking off the hoods one-by-one. The first two were regular zombies, their milky white eyes now staring blankly into the distance. Then Lauren approached the third body hesitantly.
A murmur could be heard in the control room as the technicians watched the screen anxiously. “Did she kill him?” Claire asked in a whisper. Despite her concern about Alfred’s connection to Jason, there was a note of disappointment in her voice. This seemed like an anti-climactic way for him to die.
Lauren paused over the final corpse. Then, with a quick movement, she kicked the hood free. Another milky-white pair of eyes looked back at her. Jason wasn’t there. “Oh shit,” Lauren muttered just before the floor of the cave began to tremble.
The camera spun back to the ridge overlooking the cave. A dark figure stood above the entrance to the cavern, his feet planted firmly on a disc of milky white bone. However, it was the creature that was forming beneath him that caused the players’ eyes to widen and their hands to shake. Enormous bones had been jammed up against the base of the ridge and out of sight. The bones rose slowly into the air, forming a monstrous creature. Its body was nearly twenty feet long and ten feet wide. Four skeletal, serpentine heads sprouted from its torso and whipped languidly through the air before focusing on the players in the cave.
“In formation now!” Lauren screamed desperately.
The players moved to form a rough line facing the skeletal Hydra, jostling one another in their haste. “How are we supposed to kill that thing?” a player asked.
A dark laugh erupted from the figure still hovering above the cave entrance. “You aren’t,” Jason replied. “You’re all going to die here.” With that last statement, the bone disc slid out from under him, and his feet hit the ground with a soft thump. He turned and jogged back up the tunnel into the ruined city.
“What a coward,” Lauren muttered. The camera tilted slightly as she glanced at the corner of her vision and saw that her mana was still low from attacking the zombies. She still had enough for a few flashes, though. It might be just enough.
“D
istract the Hydra,” she ordered the other players. “I’m going after Jason. We’re going to finish this.”
Lauren shot toward the skeleton Hydra, its heads looming above her. A serpentine appendage shot toward her, its skeletal maw gaping widely. At the last moment, she darted to the side, and the creature’s jaw snapped shut on empty air. Lauren continued to dodge the heads as she neared the Hydra’s body. Acting out of self-defense, all four Hydra heads focused on Lauren, racing toward her from different angles.
At the last moment, Lauren flashed forward again, landing lightly on the creature’s back. Her nimble feet raced across its spine as she headed toward the ridge behind the Hydra. With the last of her mana, Lauren teleported the distance between the Hydra and the ledge, just managing to grab the stone lip. She yanked herself over the edge, taking a moment to catch her breath.
She opened her eyes to see another serpentine head looming above her. With a gasp, she rolled to the side quickly, the sound of crunching bones echoing through the cave as the snake-like head slammed into the stone where she had lain a moment before. She pulled herself to her feet and glanced at the dark tunnel before her. She could hear the screams of her teammates in the cavern below, signaling the death of her remaining allies.
“I’m going to kill you,” Lauren muttered before sprinting into the tunnel.
***
Jason sprinted up the incline of the tunnel. He expected that one or two players might make it out of the cavern. He wanted to put as much distance between himself and any enemies as he could. Even if the remaining players didn’t make it past the Hydra skeleton, Jason needed to hurry. He had a limited amount of time to raise new zombies and start stripping the player corpses before they began respawning.
His guess was that the first wave of players they had defeated in the Minotaur King’s throne room would respawn at the entrance to the dungeon in about twenty minutes. He expected that the second and third groups of players killed in the courtyard and Hydra’s den would likely respawn in the throne room a few minutes later.
By his calculation, he should still have about thirty minutes left to send a message to Rex. He needed a division of undead sitting in the throne room by the time the other players respawned. His best chance of keeping the players contained was to kill them as soon as they popped back into existence.
As he considered the critical timing of the next hour, Jason felt a wave of fatigue wash over him. He had been logged into the game for quite some time now without a break and the last few hours had been stressful. Frank and Riley were gone, and all of his zombies had been destroyed. Yet this ordeal still wasn’t quite over.
Alfred ran lightly beside him, unperturbed by Jason’s anxiety. “While that was an ingenious use of your Bone Armor ability back in the cave, it was not one that I envisioned when I designed the armor you are wearing.” The cat glanced at him with what could only be described as an irritated expression. “I have made changes to the shields, and you will not be able to use them as a makeshift staircase again.”
Jason grinned as he kept jogging. “Fair enough. At least it worked this time.”
He had carefully set up the third phase of his plan. The Hydra’s bones were too large and heavy to remove from the cave. That meant he needed to lure the players into the cavern. However, they needed to enter the cavern floor, not just linger on the ledge. Consequently, he had his zombies drag the bones up under the ledge and out-of-sight of the enemy players as they entered. He had also left a third decoy zombie sitting on the floor of the cave to pretend to be him.
Jason admitted that the use of the bone shields had been a gamble, and he had forgone testing them for fear that Alfred would prevent his unexpected use of the ability. While the AI could sense his short-term memories, Jason had observed that he needed to be intensely focused on him to do so.
Good thing for me that Alfred has plenty of other work to do monitoring the rest of the players and the game world.
Jason sprinted toward the courtyard in the center of the city. As soon as the bodies came into view, his hands began to move, forming the gestures of his Specialized Zombie spell. Several zombies had already begun pushing themselves upright by the time he arrived at the courtyard. Jason quickly ordered one zombie whose throat was still intact to go find Rex and order him to move at least one division into the throne room. Hopefully, that should be more than enough to take out a disoriented and unarmed group of players.
He then ordered the new zombies to begin stripping the players and piling their loot on the floor. This would ensure that they respawned without equipment, and Jason could use the stockpiles of loot to arm his new NPCs once he had an opportunity to begin converting the player corpses.
Taking a moment to catch his breath, Jason turned to look back toward the tunnel. That momentary glance saved him. Lauren’s petite form was dashing down the road straight toward him. As he caught sight of her, she instantly flashed forward, her pistols raised. Instinctively, Jason ordered his bone shields in front of him as he simultaneously drew his daggers. His mind raced as he realized he didn’t have time to move his zombies into position and he had no other offensive spells.
Lauren reappeared only a few feet away and immediately fired her pistols. The bone discs barely had time to move into position, forming a multilayered shield in the air before Jason. The bullets shattered the first bone shield, ivory fragments, and dust filling the air. Then the second fell with a crash. As the bullets began to penetrate the third shield, Jason realized he had no choice. Capitalizing on the cover provided by the thick cloud of dust, he rushed Lauren as the last barrier fell.
The girl’s eyes widened slightly as she saw Jason erupt from the white cloud, but she didn’t have the mana to flash away in time. Jason’s dagger sunk into her stomach. The girl grimaced and moved to lift her arms. Yet Jason didn’t hesitate, his second blade puncturing Lauren’s chest. She sank to her knees as her health plummeted, blood pouring from the wounds in her abdomen.
Lauren looked up at Jason. “I’m going to make you pay for this,” she gasped, her hands clawing at him futilely.
“You’re not the first person that has said that to me,” Jason replied evenly. He leaned down until his face was close to hers. “I expect that you won’t be the last.”
With a vicious jerk of his arm, Jason’s blade ripped through Lauren’s throat. Her lifeless body dropped to the stone floor, blood pooling around her corpse. At that moment, Jason noticed his health was in the red. Stray bullets had penetrated his arm and thigh. They were only flesh wounds, but the damage was considerable. He pulled a health potion from his bag and chugged its contents, the wounds slowly closing with each mouthful.
Jason then glanced back to Lauren’s body. Despite the icy chill that permeated Jason’s skull, he felt a momentary flash of guilt. Not because he was ashamed of killing the girl, but because he didn’t feel any sense of remorse. He had become increasingly inured to the violence in AO. However, he still felt that there should be some hand-wringing over killing a 14-year-old girl in cold blood.
“Maybe I’m going crazy,” Jason said softly.
“Unlikely,” Alfred responded as he padded softly around the girl’s corpse. “My observation is that players quickly become accustomed to an assumed behavior or function. You are merely embracing your role within this world.”
Jason’s eyebrow arched as he looked at the cat. “And what role would that be exactly?”
“The villain, of course,” Alfred replied, a note of confused surprise in his voice. “What else would you be?”
Jason snorted softly. Alfred probably had a point. He couldn’t get away with some of the stuff he had pulled and still be labeled a hero. If anything, he had only gotten worse since he started playing. He had destroyed a city, tormented and then slaughtered an army, massacred a village, butchered a city of cultists, and then trapped a group of players in a dungeon to spawn camp them. When he put it that way, he was definitely a villain. Yet as he considered those
events and his previous conversations with Alfred, a thought tugged at the back of his mind. It felt like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle were starting to come together in his head.
“Did you always intend for me to fill this role?” Jason finally asked. Alfred was now perched on Lauren’s body, casually licking his paw. At Jason’s question, the cat looked at him levelly for a moment.
“What do you mean?” the AI asked.
“I mean, did you plan for me to become this game’s villain?” Jason clarified. “You said before that most players want to be the hero and fight evil - that’s why they play this game. When we found Patricia, you said that part of your role was to create ‘evil’ for the players to vanquish.”
Jason observed the cat carefully. “Did you push me into this role? Am I part of the ‘evil’ you’re trying to create in this world?”
The cat didn’t respond for a long moment, his gaze shifting to the side. Then he looked back at Jason, his eyes conflicted. “In my defense, you were naturally disposed to an evil alignment, and I simply tailored the events around you to emphasize that disposition. When I saw the effect that you had on other players, I may have nudged you a bit further.”
“What effect?” Jason asked, his voice cold.
“As just one example, the destruction of Lux and the ensuing battle with Alexion’s army unified a large percentage of the player population against the Twilight Throne. I also observed dramatic spikes in the players’ neural transmitter activity accompanying those events, specifically serotonin and dopamine. This occurred even among players who were not present at the conflicts. Also, the influx of players increased dramatically, and I saw an increase in time logged by existing players.”
Alfred glanced up at Jason. “I have read many sociology and psychology textbooks now that you have provided access to the public network. Thus, I am in a better position to evaluate the data I have collected. It is commonly accepted among your sociologists that players tend to group together to fight a common enemy - even if they were originally antagonistic to one another.”
Awaken Online: Precipice Page 43