by A. J. Markam
“Are you okay?!”
“I guess,” she said as she spat out blades of grass.
“You flew!”
“I know, I was there,” she said bitterly. “IF you can call that flying. More like falling sideways.”
“But if you practice, you can get better!” I said chipperly.
She glared at me. “I don’t intend to be in this body long enough to learn how to do it.”
“Yeah, but – you can fly!”
“You’re just trying to make me feel better about a terrible situation.”
“Well… maybe a little…”
She grumbled and headed back towards Grung. As she did, the black fins retracted, the jet engines popped back into hiding, and the metal panels lowered to become flush with her skin.
“You should practice!” I called out after her.
“I’m riding.”
“But – ”
“Riding!” she yelled without looking back at me.
21
Alaria didn’t bother trying to fly again, even though I gently suggested it a couple of times. I guess she was still having a hard time accepting the whole situation, and any attempt to learn more about her new body just seemed like an admission of defeat. Like she was accepting that she would remain a robot longer than she wanted. Or maybe she just wanted to ignore the situation, as though that would make it go away.
I was familiar with that last part, and knew it didn’t help to be nagged or prodded, so I left her alone.
Grung must have carried us for an hour. With his giant steps, we made excellent time – but we never once saw a hint of the war golems in the distance, other than the crushed path they had left us.
Our progress came to an end when we reached a giant chasm. It stretched for miles to our right and left, and it had to have been at least a mile across. Thankfully there was a fairly gentle descent into the gorge, though the valley was filled with thick, jungle-like foliage. It looked like somebody had plunked down part of the Amazon in the middle of the Grand Canyon.
The tromped-down grasses on the plains gave way to flattened bushes and shattered trees, making the route even more obvious than it had been before. We could see about 200 feet of pathway that the war golems had carved out. Then the trees became too tall, and the visible part of the trail disappeared under the green canopy.
“Okay, I guess we’re going down there,” I said.
Grung started down the incline, but it was slow going. He wasn’t as comfortable on a steep hill, especially one covered with fallen tree trunks, so we were slowed to a relative crawl.
The jungle itself was pretty, and thank God not as humid as others we had encountered. I could actually enjoy the scenery, like the beautiful flowers in the treetops and the small monkeys that fled as we approached.
Finally, the hill leveled out to even ground. Grung continued walking along the path cut for us by the other war golems – until I saw something unusual off to the left.
It was a temple. Actually, more like a village compound with a temple at the center of it, all of it made out of crumbling stone. Besides the temple, which had to have been 30 feet tall, there were dilapidated houses and Stonehenge-like monoliths jutting out of the ground.
Everything looked like it had been abandoned decades ago, and the jungle had taken it all back. Trees grew on the top of the temple, their roots diving deep into cracks in the stone. Vines twisted over giant faces carved into the walls, partially concealing their gentle, thoughtful faces. The depictions were humanoid, though they didn’t look 100% human – or Elvish or Orcish, for that matter. Maybe they were from a race that had long since died out.
The one truly bizarre thing was that the entire compound was pocketed with holes. And I don’t mean little rabbit burrows – I’m talking sinkholes 15 feet in diameter. Some of the buildings had partly collapsed into them, and a few of the Stonehenge slabs tilted at crazy angles as they threatened to fall into the nearest crater.
“Interesting,” I mused aloud. Had we not been on a tight schedule, I would’ve gladly inspected the ruins to see if there was some kind of quest to be had. But we had to go capture Orlo and get him to transfer Alaria’s soul back into –
BLAM!
An explosion blew up the nearest house, hurling fragments of stone through the air. I was mostly shielded from the blast by Grung’s hull, but I heard the plink plink plink of stones clattering against his armored plating.
“Goddess!” Alaria shouted.
“ACK!” Stig screeched as he flattened himself against Grung’s shoulder.
“What was that?!” I yelled.
“AN EXPLOSION,” Grung said.
“I know that, but where did it – ”
BOOM!
Another explosion hit a nearby fallen tree, and splinters of wood rained down all around us.
What the hell was this?
Had Orlo circled back around and decided to finish us off?
But if that was the case, why were they explosions and not magical attacks?
Maybe he left one of his minions behind to take care of us…
“Is it a war golem?” I yelled.
“I DO NOT KNOW,” Grung answered with preternatural calm.
“Why aren’t you fighting back?” Alaria demanded.
“I CANNOT SEE WHERE THE ATTACK IS COMING FROM, SO TRYING TO TARGET IT WOULD BE POINTLESS.”
“Maybe you should TRY!”
Alaria might have been annoyed, but I knew Grung was right: until he could lock onto a target, he would be wasting ammunition.
Another explosion blew apart a tree standing right next to us. A massive limb ripped off the trunk and slammed down onto Grung, slapping me, Stig, and Alaria with leaf-covered branches.
“Grung, get us out of here!” I yelled.
Grung shrugged off the tree limb and started walking along the war golems’ path –
A new explosion blasted right in front of us. I covered my head as stones and dirt plink plinked all around us.
“Head into the jungle!” I yelled. “Whatever it is, it’s not a very good shot – but if we stay out in the open, sooner or later it’s going to get lucky and score a direct hit!”
Grung shouldered his way into the virgin jungle, pushing aside trees and tromping through the underbrush.
Another explosion blasted somewhere far behind us.
We had done it! Now that our attacker couldn’t see us, we at least had a chance at escaping the –
Suddenly the world went crazy as Grung stumbled. My entire body plummeted ten feet, and I barely hung on to my handhold as he struggled to regain his balance.
“Aaaah!” Alaria yelled.
“UH OH,” Grung muttered.
“What happened?!” I yelled.
Even though Grung had stopped moving, the foliage was slowly rising past us at the rate of an inch per second.
“I APPEAR TO HAVE STEPPED INTO SOME KIND OF LIQUID GROUND.”
I pulled myself over the edge of his shoulder and looked straight down.
This part of the jungle differed from the others. There were trees, but the nearest was fifteen feet away. The only thing on the sandy ground beneath us were rotting leaves, but Grung was sunk into them up to his thighs.
Then, as the giant robot shifted, I saw a ripple spread out along the ground like it was made of liquid.
“Quicksand,” I said in horror.
“WHAT IS QUICKSAND?”
Reasonable question from a guy who had never been outside before.
“It’s bad. Grung, you have to set us down near those trees over there and then climb your way out.”
“ALL RIGHT.” The robot swiveled his waist and extended his arms to the base of the nearest tree.
“Alaria, wait,” I cautioned.
I slid down Grung’s arm and stepped cautiously onto the ground, testing it to see if it would hold. It did, although it was softer and loamier than I would have expected.
“Alaria, Stig, get off over her
e!” I said as I put my full weight on the relatively firm ground.
Alaria joined me, and Stig scampered down Grung’s other arm to the base of the tree.
Grung had already sunk midway up his chest.
“Everybody follow me,” I ordered. We retreated 30 feet, careful to stick to soil with trees growing in it. Then I shouted, “Grung, grab a tree and pull yourself out!”
“ALL RIGHT.”
He grabbed the nearest tree. His immense weight pulled its roots out of the soil and toppled it over, but it fell across the pit of quicksand like a chin-up pole for a giant.
Grung put his entire weight on the tree. It creeeaaked and moaned under him, but he was starting to pull himself out of the muck.
Then I heard a thhhhhp sound and saw a black shape whiz right through the air.
BOOM!
The tree exploded halfway down its trunk and snapped in half, and Grung’s full weight plunged back into the quicksand.
The concussive force of the explosion knocked me, Alaria, and Stig onto our backs. Thank God there was no quicksand behind us, or we would have all been goners.
Still, my eyes were watering, my face stung with bits of shrapnel, and my ears rang like somebody had fired a cap gun right next to my head.
The ringing wasn’t enough to deafen me to Grung’s anguished screams, though.
“FRIENDS, HELP ME!”
I looked up in horror to see the robot flailing about in the quicksand. He was already up to his chin and sinking fast.
“Grung, don’t move!” I screamed. I could barely hear my own voice – it was more of a vibration through my own skull. “If you move, you make it worse!”
He either didn’t hear me or was so panicked that he didn’t pay attention, because he kept thrashing. A second later, his goggle eyes disappeared beneath the surface. One forearm still flailed above the quicksand, and then his hand completely disappeared. There was one last ripple in the sandy surface, and then everything was still.
The jungle returned to an eerie silence.
“What the hell just happened?” Alaria whispered, her eyes wide.
“I don’t know,” I whispered back, distraught.
“What do we do?”
I looked out into the tangle of jungle ahead of us. It was a nearly impenetrable thicket of underbrush – except for the open spaces filled with rotting leaves, which now seemed sinister beyond compare.
“We can’t go this way. We have to go back.”
“But then it will be able to see us!”
“Not if we get behind the temple. Once we get there we’ll figure out what the hell we’re dealing with.”
Suddenly Alaria broke down crying.
“What?” I asked, alarmed. In a way, seeing the vulnerability from her in a moment like this was even more frightening than what had just happened to Grung.
“I should have practiced flying when you told me to,” she sobbed. “If I had, I could have just flown us out of this.”
A resentful, angry voice flared up in my head – Yeah! Why didn’t you LISTEN to me? – but I knew it wouldn’t help to say it out loud. In fact, in the state Alaria was in right now, it would be a brutal act of violence to voice my frustrations.
“It’s okay,” I whispered. “You didn’t know.”
“I could try, if you want,” she said fearfully, though I could tell she knew it was a bad idea.
I shook my head. “If something goes wrong and we crash, we could wind up in quicksand, and that would be even worse. Anyway, even if we flew, whatever it is might be able to take us out midair. It’s better if we stick to the ground.”
She stopped whimpering and nodded.
“Come on, guys,” I whispered, and motioned for them to follow me.
We snuck from tree to tree, making sure we didn’t cross any of the patches of ground that were most likely to be quicksand. Within minutes we had reached the flattened path, and the temple was just another 50 feet beyond it.
“Okay,” I whispered to my demons, “here’s what we’re going to do – ”
BLAM!
A tree exploded not 30 feet behind us.
“RUN!” I screamed.
We dashed across the flattened foliage and ran full-tilt for the temple. Stig got out ahead of us because he could run like a dog on all fours.
There was a thhhhp sound, and a black blur whizzed through the air and pierced Stig’s side.
I heard him scream in pain, then watched as he disappeared in a burst of fire.
Something fell to the ground from the swirl of smoke he left behind.
An arrow – sleek, black, with a razor-edged tip.
A jumble of thoughts and feelings raced through my mind.
I knew intellectually that Stig wasn’t dead – that he hadn’t actually been killed permanently, and I could just summon him again – but I felt overwhelming grief to see him die so suddenly. It was like my brain couldn’t catch up with my feelings.
My second thought was, Holy shit – that arrow just one-shotted him!
Like me, Stig was Level 23 with the hit points to match. A normal blow would just shave off a portion of his Health, not eradicate all of it. For something to kill him with one shot, it had to be incredibly powerful.
My third thought was, An arrow.
That means a Hunter.
Which explained a lot, and filled me with a whole new level of dread.
The Hunter must have had explosive-tipped arrows, which explained why everything was blowing up.
He couldn’t have been all that great, though, since he’d never scored a direct hit.
Well, that is, until Stig.
Maybe he’d just been too far away before, and now he was closer.
Which was not good news.
I looked over at Alaria in a panic. “Fly behind the temple and hide!”
“But what about – ”
“JUST DO IT!”
I think I frightened her into acquiescence. The rockets and black wings popped out of her back and she took off in a wild ascent, shaky and spiraling. Her legs kicked beneath her like a little kid trying to summon the strength to do a pull-up, but she managed to fly and then crash-land somewhere behind the temple, hopefully out of immediate danger.
I was almost to cover and feeling the tiniest bit confident about our chances when the first arrow hit me.
THOCK!
“AAAAH!” I screamed as searing pain flashed through my chest.
I managed to stumble and fall behind the nearest rock outcropping, where I sat on the ground panting and looked at the thing sticking out of me.
It was an arrow of the kind that had killed Stig – and it had clipped off 25% of my hit points.
One fuckin’ arrow, 25% of my Health.
Whoever I was up against, he was one powerful son of a bitch.
I grabbed the shaft and tried to pull it out, but the barbed tip was caught in there deep. Even touching it hurt like a motherfucker.
I couldn’t pull it out – not with my pain settings at their current level.
I hurriedly went into my menu to ‘Sensory Settings.’ If I lowered them to 1%, the arrow would feel no worse than a splinter, and I could yank it out no problem.
I opened up the submenu, selected the slider, and moved it to the left –
But the slider would only go halfway.
Suddenly a window popped up.
WARNING! Poisoned Arrow has disabled all pain-nullifying measures and potions by 50%! Time left: 20 Minutes.
What the FUCK?!
This goddamn arrow had somehow cemented my pain levels at 50% for the next 20 minutes! I’d never seen anything like this before!
After Saykir had tortured me in the Northern Wastes, one of the guys in game development had promised me that torture was only supposed to be a threat, not an actual thing.
Guess they hadn’t worked out all the bugs yet.
I tried and tried to move the slider, but it wouldn’t budge past the halfway mark.
<
br /> God DAMN it!
This is going down in the QC report!
Well – my enemy was still out there gunning for me, and I couldn’t move as quickly with an arrow in my chest.
There wasn’t anything else to do, so I grabbed the arrow, gritted my teeth, and pulled as hard as I could.
And shrieked in agony as I ripped it out.
Had there been any gore in OtherWorld, it would’ve been a bloody mess, but the razor-edged triangle came out clean. It just shaved another 15% off my hit points.
As the pain gradually faded, I threw the arrow away and cursed my shortsightedness. I was down to 60% hit points, but because I didn’t have a visible target yet, I couldn’t Soul Suck him yet. Which meant I was going to have to rely on my regular healing rate of 0.3 hit points per second, unless my enemy oh-so-helpfully decided to come out of hiding and present himself as a sitting duck. Which wasn’t going to happen.
I cursed myself for selling off all those healing potions I had found in the Tomb of Tharos, thinking I would never need them because of my self-healing spells.
What an idiot.
I resolved never to put myself in this situation again. That is, if I made it out.
It was a Hunter chasing me, I knew that much – but who? And why?
Hunters were one of the classes in OtherWorld. Just like I was a Warlock, and just like there were Mages, Paladins, Warriors, and Priests, Hunters were a class that came with their own special abilities. They were the only people who were able to use ranged weapons like bows and arrows, crossbows, and guns with anything more than passing efficiency.
Yes, OtherWorld had guns, just like they had cannons – except that the technology level hovered around what was available during the American Revolutionary War. So lots of flintlocks and single-shot pistols like the one the bartender had pointed at my face, but no AK-47s or Uzis.
Unlike some other videogames, any player in OtherWorld could pick up a crossbow or gun and use it – but the results were generally pathetic. If you were anything other than a Hunter, you could practice five hours a day for the rest of your life and still never get above 30% accuracy. The Hunter class started off at 60%, and both accuracy and range increased as players leveled up.