Steel Wolves of Craedia (Realm of Arkon, Book 3)

by Akella,G.

  Vaessa took the glass from me, her hand shaking slightly, and gulped down the contents. Then she fished in a drawer, produced a bone pipe and a tinderbox, and lit up. She took a deep drag, then released the smoke with a contented sigh.

  Your reputation has increased. Necromancer and magus of the dark arts Vaessa dar Luan is friendly to you.

  "Just because you're not asking for anything in return doesn't mean I won't repay your generosity," she said, exhaling another cloudlet of smoke toward the open window. "Put your hand on the table, please."

  I did as she asked. And when she laid her palm over mine, chills ran down my spine.

  You've completed the quest: Dire Tidings.

  You've learned a unique skill: Riding Creatures Summoned from the Gray Frontier.

  "This ability has been passed down in our family for generations, dar. Yes, I know of your black razorback," she chuckled, "but additional knowledge is never redundant. You never know what fate might throw your way."

  "Thank you," I said earnestly.

  Never look a gift horse in the mouth, if said horse even has teeth. I'd never seen such mounts personally, though I could recall necromancers and death knights having a long quest chain to acquire a bone steed, their class mount. Was that an example of a mount from the Gray Frontier? That I didn't remember. Not that it mattered—I didn't intend on trading my magnificent boar for a bag of bones anyhow. I'd sooner be riding Lucy, if circumstances allowed. Admittedly, bone steeds made for an impressive sight, so much so that some players would opt for the death knight or necromancer class purely for their macabre appearance.

  "That's not all, dar," she handed me a decrepit leather scroll. "Take this. My father had recovered it from a desecrated Syrat shrine. It was hidden in a cache with the Claw," she nodded at the black kris that was now hanging off her waist.

  "What is it?" I unrolled the leather carefully. The scroll was so ancient that I feared it would crumble to dust right then and there. It depicted a map of some kind, in the lower right corner of which was a drawing of a strange object with a broken line running through it. Underneath the image were tiny scribbles in hieroglyphics.

  "What's the world coming to?" Vaessa sighed. "A demon marked by the lightning god fails to recognize his patron's attribute. Your belt and these gloves," the daressa gestured at the drawing on the scroll with the mouthpiece of her pipe, "were crafted by the same master. And this piece of the map shows where to find them."

  "Where would that be?"

  "If my knowledge of Ancient Pangean can be trusted, that would be the Spectral City. According to legend, it is located in the south of the barbarian lands. I do not know where exactly to look for it, but that's only half the trouble. The object is guarded by Velargass, a terrible bone dragon whose power rivals Nerghall's, the ghastly beast whose essence is imprisoned in the soulstone. I do not know what roads lead to this place, nor what other monsters you might encounter on your way, but you can always try. Where an ordinary demon will invariably fail, an elder might just succeed. Besides, the gods themselves favor you. And not only the gods..." she added almost to herself, the words barely registering a sound.

  You've accessed the quest: Ingvar's Gauntlets of Valor.

  Quest type: epic.

  Take the warrior god's gauntlets from the Great Bone Dragon Velargass.

  Reward: experience, gauntlets from the Ingvar's Valor set.

  Again with the Spectral City! Not only had the legate mentioned it, apparently Nerghall had crawled out of there as well. Naturally, I accepted the quest—only an imbecile would refuse. Or maybe it was the other way around? Some might say only a certified cretin would rush off after an item guarded by a bone dragon...

  Then again, nowhere in the quest did it say Velargass had to be killed. Maybe I could make a deal with the dragon? Or wait till she's asleep, then sneak in and lift the gloves Baggins' style? Some fairytales would have you answer three riddles, and for that I had wiki up my sleeve. Whatever the case, somehow I wasn't terribly worried. The game was much like life in this way: when your actions conformed to the game's internal logic, the virtual world responded well and opened up new opportunities. Were I to keep the kris, I wouldn't have gotten the shield upgrade nor the chance for another set item. The quest wouldn't have even been offered if I hadn't befriended the necromancer's daughter. And the game's logic worked both ways: were I to behave like a ruthless killer, I could just as easily garner the attention of one of the dark gods after pillaging a village or something. The Twice Cursed weren't the only dark gods in the Realm of Arkon. Although, when each deity is driving their own cause, it's hard to tell which are good and which are evil. Take Ingvar, for instance. Who but the warrior god was responsible for all the atrocities committed by legionnaires in sacked cities or castles? Would all the raping, reaving and mass executions be sufficient to consider Ingvar a dark god?

  Or take the feeling that was driving me to the upper realm above all else—hatred. I didn't give a rat's ass whether Syrat, the patron god of hatred, was cursed twice or a dozen times. When I catch Cheney and break his neck, I might even thank the wretched deity. Back to the matter at hand. The Spectral City sounded great and all, but I wasn't about to drop everything and go off searching for it. I had enough on my plate already, though I might revisit the idea after finding my sister. The bad news was that I couldn't take my people out of the princedom due to Ahriman's curse.

  "By the way, Krian, what do you intend to do with the soulstone?" the demoness' voice brought me back.

  "Summon the scum and kill it. What else is there to do?"

  "You cannot kill the Lord of Darkness for good. The best you can do is dematerialize him for about a thousand years," Vaessa gazed out the window contemplatively, where the setting sun had nearly set behind one of the far guard towers. "And how do you plan on doing that, exactly? Even a thousand fighters might not be enough to take down the beast, and, as far as I know, you have not even a hundred."

  "I'll think of something," I said. "Why do you ask?"

  "I'd always suspected that my father's disappearance had something to do with the disappearance of the Lord of Darkness that the disavowed had summoned. And I've spent my whole life piecing together information about the monster. I had a lucky break a few years ago when a distant relative who knew about my interest in Nerghall brought me a journal recovered from some tomb." The tiflingess got up and left the room, soon to return with a thin leather-bound notebook. "The author is a researcher on the antiquity who had seen the Lord of Darkness in battle and lived to tell about it."

  "A relative?" I asked mechanically.

  "Aye, the Leopards and other clans visit us regularly—what of it? All it takes is to cross the border and open a portal to Xantarra's gates. As for the weakness, they didn't come here with bad intentions, so it didn't matter."

  "I remember Satrap Gorm telling me about that."

  "Anyway," Vaessa handed me the journal, taking a seat in the armchair across from me. "Nerghall the Soul Devourer is one of four attendants of the Twice Cursed god. His body is that of a dragon, with a hypertrophied six-armed giant torso growing out from the neck area. When engaged in battle, each of his six arms turns into a bone tentacle that's as strong as any steel and can stretch for many yards. In addition to siphoning the life force of his opponents, the Lord of Darkness throws out his tentacles across the ground periodically, using them to devour souls. And once a tentacle has got hold of you, there's no escape," she shuddered, leaning slightly forward.

  The tattered cover of the journal bore unfamiliar lettering. But even if I did speak the language, the inscription was largely effaced, as fragmented bits of hieroglyphics twisted and curled outward. Inside I found the typical boss description, the kind devs put up on the site a month after a patch. Case in point, the language was florid and bombastic: the Lord of Darkness, Faithful Servant of the God of Torturous Death, Bane of All the Living... These were but a few of the epithets the writers had lobbed at the monster from th
e Gray Frontier. I didn't know if Vaessa could see numbers in the text, but to me everything made perfect sense. One a half billion HP on a level 550 raid boss spoke for themselves. Furthermore, in addition to ordinary physical attacks that dealt roughly 10,000 damage, the boss boasted two special abilities.

  Siphon Life. Nerghall siphons life from all living creatures within a 150 yard radius of himself, one percent from each target's maximum hit points every two seconds, restoring ten times the amount of life he devours. This one was easy. If I had, say, 10,000 HP, I would lose 100 every two seconds, while the boss would heal himself for 1,000. And considering that Nerghall's level was three times my own, those figures should actually be multiplied by three as well.

  Devour Souls. Nerghall throws out three of his six tentacles, which hit the ground up to one hundred yards away, immobilizing all enemies within a five yard radius of them for ten seconds. When the ten-second stun wears off, the immobilized targets are drained of 120,000 HP, with each death healing Nerghall for 50 million HP. In our case, the damage would be three times greater—360,000 HP instead of 120,000. The ability wasn't terribly original. To be sure, it would be better to avoid the tentacles altogether, but if anyone did get caught by one, assuming that the standard means of breaking free of immobilization wouldn't work, the rest should run over to their restrained comrades and share the damage with them. If one hundred ran over, each would only lose 3,600 HP; if fifty, then 7,200 HP. The math was clear.

  The boss used Siphon Life in the first phase, Devour Souls in the second, and both in the third.

  Standard attacks shouldn't be overlooked either. With a threefold difference in levels, 10,000 became 30,000; accounting for an average 75% damage absorption, our tanks would suffer a loss of about 7,500 HP for every unblocked hit. And given that Nerghall operated six tentacles, it would be impossible to block all attacks.

  But that wasn't all. There was also Dark Rain, an area of effect attack, and Piercing Gaze, a control spell. In case of the former, thunderclouds appeared on the battlefield, their contours indicated on the ground, and anyone caught underneath had to run out posthaste. In case of the latter, the boss tried to mesmerize whoever was on his aggro list, presumably the main tank. If successful, he would go for the second, and then the third, up to twenty targets in all. This was a nasty ability because mesmerized targets had their aggro reset and were taken out of the battle for one minute, though also immune to the boss' other attacks. That seemed to be all, though it was now clear why I'd need no less than three hundred to smoke this sucker. Just running to the tentacles would be a pain to coordinate since, realistically, I didn't see us avoiding them completely. Maybe if we were all pro gamers, having honed our skills over years of sleepless nights, but that just wasn't us. Not yet, at least. The only upside to what I'd read was that Nerghall didn't berserk on account of being a world boss.

  World bosses were those you could encounter, whether randomly or on purpose, under the open sky. That and you could field as big an army against them as you wanted, even ten thousand. Except in cases like Nerghall, too large a crowd would be detrimental to the common cause, as people would only get in each other's way. Besides, I shuddered to imagine the ungodly amounts of HP the boss would siphon out of ten thousand people, and then there were the soul-devouring tentacles that healed him for fifty million HP, a ludicrous number any way you sliced it. What kind of asshole was responsible for these mechanics and behavioral algorithms? Was it all done with the players in mind, to keep them feeling challenged? Perhaps... After all, who could have predicted such a turn of events?

  What else was there about world bosses? Firstly, you could bump into such a boss totally at random, and get massacred before you knew what hit you. Secondly, it was extremely difficult to find guides against them. When they were found and killed, it was typically done by plain old zerging—that was when you threw everything but the kitchen sink at the boss without bothering to study or avoid their abilities in hopes of winning the fight with sheer numbers. And that approach worked most of the time. Thirdly, when a world boss did win, oftentimes the culprits were well-intentioned idiots acting out of ignorance.

  I remembered when Paragon took on the Great Sea Dragon, how the gaming world was abuzz for a solid month, the press running one headline after another. As one of the world's oldest clans, dating back to the dawn of the first non-virtual MMORPGs, Paragon was without question one of the top ten most powerful clans in the Realm of Arkon. The clan's scouts had worked out the time and place when the Great Sea Dragon Onexia would appear on the shore, and had managed to recover a strategy guide in the ruins of some coastal city ravaged by the dragon. The guide had an indispensable tip—don't touch the dragon eggs lying along the shore! It took the clan's five hundred fighters three full months to traverse the orcish lands—a testament to their skill and perseverance given that Paragon was mostly comprised of humans and light elves. At last, after slaughtering dozens of orc squads and evading a veritable horde of enemies amassed by one of the tribal chieftains, the raid crossed the coastal mountain range and reached the small inconspicuous bay on the shore of which Onexia had laid her eggs.

  And then, in the finest tradition of Murphy's Law, a couple of low-level orcs disembarked on that very shore, that very night. Earlier that day they had taken a boat out into the open sea to work on their fishing skill, but had been chased back ashore by some sea monster. Being too low to build a portal out of there, they had decided to call it a day amid a cluster of what looked like large round stones, and logged out of the game.

  When morning came, the adventurers were in for quite a surprise. The whole coast was ablaze and quaking from mighty magic blows. Roaring amid the mountains was an enormous dragon, with hundred of fireballs, lightning bolts and boulders being hurled right at her. Melee fighters in plate and mail surrounded the majestic creature in a ring, plunging all manner of sharp and shiny weapons into her scaly coat, resplendent in the rising sun. The orcs started a live feed of the battle, broadcasting it online, and then it dawned on one of them that the round stones around them weren't stones at all but dragon eggs, laid by the same dragon whose roar was presently soaring over the beach and the sea. And, naturally, the brainiac decided to peek inside.

  In a later interview the orc, who ended up being an ordinary student from Canada, admitted that he had hoped to obtain unique pets for himself and his friend. Unfortunately, that wasn't what ended up happening. When the two doofuses finally managed to break the shell on one of the eggs, it set off a truly legendary chain reaction. Too bad the orcs couldn't witness it firsthand, since the baby dragon that had crawled out of the egg instantly dispatched them to the nearest graveyard. A moment later another egg cracked open, and then another one. In less than a minute a veritable century of dragons were rushing headlong into battle to aid their mommy. The raid wiped within minutes—each newly hatched dragon was roughly equal in level to the players, while adding an extra percent to Onexia's health and five percent to her damage output. The chain reaction also could have been avoided if the eggs had been dragged apart from each other by ten yards or so, but the clan simply hadn't enough time, having arrived at the site of Onexia's clutch the day before the dragons were due to hatch. There might have been some other reasons as well, but I couldn't remember for sure. When it was all over, the victor and her brood took off, leaving behind five hundred corpses belonging to one of the game's preeminent clans, a couple of overly curious orcs, and a few carcasses of perished baby dragons. Naturally, Onexia never returned to the bay. Firstly, her babies had already hatched, so there was nothing for her there. Secondly, she was a free creature without a permanent home, which only added to her already enormous value as prey. Only unique bosses trumped world bosses, like Shaartakh or the bastard that in a month's time was due to escape the soulstone that had been his prison courtesy of the death goddess Celphata. Oh, and lest anyone feel sorry for those orcs, I should add that they ended up arriving first to the scene of their crime. Naturally,
they weren't allowed to loot any of the players' gear, but the money and items the raid had been carrying was enough to turn them into millionaires in real life. Of course, they had to delete their characters thereafter—when there's a bounty of twenty gold pieces on your head, anyone with time on their hands is going to be after you. And dying in the game was far from a pleasant experience, even at only ten percent pain sensitivity. And especially if it happened several times a day.

  Finally, besides well-intentioned idiots there were those who sought to reap the rewards of someone else's labor. Imagine your clan had just taken down a major boss in a barnburner of a fight. Your fighters had gone all out, burning all of their cooldown-based abilities and potions. Some of your clanmates are chilling at their bind point or jogging briskly toward the site of your glorious victory... When suddenly you're attacked by a rival clan, a PK group or an enemy faction squad that just happened to be passing by. Naturally, nine times out of ten they mop up all the survivors, grab the loot from the boss, and go their merry way. And sometimes they rub it in by uploading the video of your careless blunder for all the world to see. Sadly, such incidents were all too frequent, and that was why, as a rule, all the powerful clans organized their raids by splitting up into two groups—one to take down the boss, the other to guard against intruders.

  "What are you thinking, Krian?" the daressa's voice disturbed the prolonged silence.

  "A nasty bugger," I closed the journal and produced my own pipe.

  "And?"

  "And what?"

  "Still think you can tear up the Lord of Darkness with what you've got?"

  "Do I have a choice?" I tried to add as much confidence to my voice as I could.

  "No, but..." Vaessa motioned at the books lying open on her table. "I can dig around. Maybe I'll find something useful."