by A. J. Markam
It was ironic – a single grave without a body in it, and yet all these thousands of dead above ground who would probably never be buried.
“All right, that’s it,” I said. “It’s done.”
“So if you die, you will resurrect here?”
“Yes.”
“Excellent,” Shyvock said, and walked over towards me.
My eyes bugged out. “What the fuck are you doing?”
He grabbed my foot. “Seeing whether you are telling me the truth or not.”
Before I could scream, he swung me in the air in a 180-degree arc over his head and slammed me down on the opposite side –
Where my head hit the tombstone.
CRUNCH.
There was an excruciating pain and then everything went black.
The next thing I knew I was standing upright by the grave, shocked beyond belief.
“So it worked,” I heard Shyvock’s voice behind me.
“You asshole – you said that you wouldn’t HURT me!”
As soon as I turned around, though, there were three blurs in the air.
THOCK THOCK THOCK.
I gasped in pain as three arrows slammed into my chest.
I fell back on my ass with only 25% Health left. Each arrow had taken off a quarter of my newly restored hit points.
I stared down at the arrows sticking out of me, then looked up at him, my emotions somewhere between shock and rage. “You SWORE you wouldn’t hurt me!”
“Yes, I know. I’m surprised you believed me.” He pulled out the enormous Bowie knife from his belt. “I don’t give a shit about my ancestors, I don’t have a clan, and I couldn’t care less about anyone else but me.”
“But… but…”
“I am fully prepared to betray Varkus for a large amount of money. You knew that. Did you seriously think such a person could be trusted? If so, you are an even greater fool than I took you for.”
Shit.
He was right.
“But,” he continued, “because you have been a monumental irritation to me and cost me my mount, I’m going to follow through on what I promised Varkus and kill you 300 times. Perhaps I will even add an extra hundred because I’m feeling generous… and because you are such a sniveling little turd.”
I stared up at him in horror.
“Although, I am in a bit of a rush,” Shyvock mused. “Perhaps I will leave you chained up here, go take the gold from the gnome, and then come back and kill you 400 times. I haven’t quite made up my mind yet. Perhaps I should flip a coin.”
He patted down his armor.
“Unfortunately, I do not have one at the moment. Do you?”
I stared at him in disbelief. “You have to be fucking kidding me.”
“Never mind. Here is something we can use.”
With one savage swipe of his bowie knife, the Hunter beheaded the topmost orc on the pile of bodies. The head dropped to the ground at his feet.
Shyvock leaned over, grabbed the head, and stood up. “What is the most you have ever lost on a coin toss?”
GOD DAMMIT.
Now I knew the game developers were just fucking with me.
It was a direct quote from Anton Chigurh in No Country For Old Men.
Or, I guess in my case, no country for stupid men.
Shyvock held up the orc’s skull. “Heads, I kill you until I get bored, and then depart. Tails, I tie you up until my return, and kill you then.”
“Wait,” I said, “what’s heads and what’s tails?!”
Without answering, Shyvock dropped the skull, and it thudded dully in the grass.
“Oh look,” he said in a deadpan voice. “Heads.”
ASSHOLE.
He was just fucking with me all along.
“Time to fulfill at least part of my promise to Varkus,” the bounty hunter said, and held out the Bowie knife in front of him. “I think we will start with flaying first.”
I was about to uselessly try to scurry away when a voice floated up from out of the maze of dead bodies all around us.
“I have your money.”
It was a woman’s voice, slightly digitized.
31
“NOOO!” I screamed at the top of my lungs. “Alaria, get out of here!”
“Ah,” Shyvock said, amused. He sheathed the Bowie knife and pulled his bow from where it hung on his back. “More fun.”
He walked away through the snowdrifts of corpses, searching out the source of the voice.
I ignored the pain from the arrows and stumbled after Shyvock. “ALARIA! Get the fuck out of here, now!”
“But I should give him his money so he’ll leave us alone,” she called out in a cool voice.
“Yes,” Shyvock agreed as he walked through the walls of dead bodies, then chuckled. “You should absolutely pay me, and I will leave you alone. I swear upon the souls of my ancestors.”
“He’s a fucking liar! Don’t believe him, Alaria!”
“I think he’ll keep his promise this time.”
“Of course I will,” the Hunter said.
“Good. Then come and get what you deserve.”
We turned a corner and found a narrow corridor with walls made of bodies. At the end of the path stood a silver figure atop a pile of dead orcs at least ten feet tall.
Shyvock stopped about 20 yards away. “I was hoping you would show up.”
Alaria smiled. “I’m sure you were.”
I knew that smile. I’d seen it a lot the first couple of days I’d known Alaria, back when she was still my slave.
That was her smile when you gave her an ambiguous order… right before she fucked you up the ass.
But how she was planning to do that to Shyvock, I had no idea. He was far more powerful than she was, and there was no way the two of us could stop him.
“Alaria, GET OUT!”
Shyvock turned back and shot an arrow into my thigh. I screamed and went down on my hands and knees.
Shyvock drew another arrow and nocked it, though he didn’t aim it at Alaria. Yet.
“So where is my gold, little succubus?”
“It’s right here,” she said sweetly, and sunk her hand down into the mound of dead orcs.
There was a mechanical whirring sound, and then Hell exploded out of the pile of corpses.
An energy beam six feet in diameter charred every dead orc in its path and hit Shyvock square in the face.
He bellowed in pain as he tumbled backwards across the grass. When he finally came to a halt, his bow had disintegrated and his leather armor was smoking.
I looked back to see what the hell had just happened.
Alaria was standing on top of the dismembered arm-cannon of a war golem.
She must have found the walls of corpses, positioned the arm to hit whomever entered the corridor, and then hidden the cannon behind another pile of dead bodies.
Of course, now the dead bodies were so much dust, and the iron barrel of the cannon was perfectly visible.
“YES!” I screamed in jubilation, then looked back at the Hunter, who was picking himself shakily off the ground.
He still had 52% of his gargantuan number of hit points – more than enough to do me and Alaria in.
Stay and fight, or run?
Alaria had apparently made that decision already.
“Ian!” she screamed, and launched herself off the golem’s arm towards me.
Her engines and wings kicked in, and she roared towards me fast as a jet airplane.
I barely had time to steel myself for the impact when she slammed into me at 100 miles an hour.
“UFF,” I grunted as she grabbed me and hauled me into the air.
Below us, Shyvock was pulling something else from his back –
A crossbow.
Alaria pointed her good hand down at him and shot a violet ray of energy directly into his face.
“ARGGHH!” he roared as he went down again.
It only took off another 2% – damn, that golem arm canno
n had been STRONG! – but her blast was merely a distraction to make sure he couldn’t fire at us.
Alaria kept flying over the mounds of dead bodies until we reached the other end of the battleground. Her jet engines cut out as she tried to come in for a landing. It was awkward, but we only ended up tumbling a couple of feet across the grass.
When it was over, she sat up and looked over in alarm. “Are you alright?”
“Baby, I’m fucking GREAT!” I laughed, and meant it. “That was AWESOME!”
She looked a little worried. “I was afraid you might want to try to finish him off.”
“I don’t think we can manage it right now,” I grimaced as I pulled the arrows out of my chest. “Not in the shape I’m in. And he’s too powerful, even in a wounded state. But why did you stop here? Did your rockets run out?”
“No, I promised somebody I’d come back and get him if he could help me rescue you.”
I was confused for a second – and then I noticed the fallen body of a war golem. Its limbs had been savagely torn apart by explosions, and its torso lay on the battlefield amongst hundreds of dead orcs.
Grung.
I went with Alaria to the body and walked up the slope of one ruined arm to his chest.
His metal head was undamaged, but sparks popped from a charred hole in his chest, and wisps of smoke curled up into the breeze.
“HELLO, FRIENDS. YOU CAME BACK FOR ME.”
“I told you I would,” Alaria said.
“So did I,” I added.
“THANK YOU – I AM TOUCHED. BUT I DON’T THINK I’M DOING SO WELL AT THE MOMENT…”
“What should we do?” I asked.
“WELL… MY HEAD IS DETACHABLE… IF YOU TAKE IT WITH YOU, I WILL STILL BE CONSCIOUS.”
“If we detach it from your body, won’t you die?”
“NO – THE POWER SOURCE FOR MY HEAD IS SEPARATE FROM MY BODY. ORLO DID THAT SO A GOLEM WITH A HEAD WOUND BUT AN UNDAMAGED BODY COULD BE SWAPPED OUT WITH ANOTHER WHOSE HEAD WAS UNDAMAGED, LIKE MINE.”
“How do we do it?”
“ACTUALLY, THAT’S A GOOD QUESTION. SINCE I CAN’T SEE WHERE MY HEAD ATTACHES, I HAVE NO IDEA.”
“Well,” Alaria said, “here’s hoping for the best.”
She put her hand into the crevice between Grung’s head and the edge of his armored neck. There was the sound of groaning metal, then the SNAP! of a metal support strut. She did it twice more, and Grung’s head fell off and dangled from his body by a thick cable.
Now that his head was out of the way, I could see the inner architecture of the neck. Alaria hadn’t needed to break the metal connections – she could have just slid a few bolts here and there.
Of course, it was easy to nitpick after the fact, when I could see everything easily.
“HM, THAT SEEMS TO HAVE WORKED,” Grung commented.
“Are you okay?!”
“I AM STILL CONSCOUS AND NOT IN ANY PAIN, IF THAT IS WHAT YOU MEAN. ALTHOUGH EVERYTHING IS UPSIDE DOWN.”
“All right,” Alaria said, “let me just – ”
BOOM!
An explosion blasted both Alaria and me off the ruins of Grung’s body and onto the ground.
“What the hell was that?!” I yelled as I stumbled to my feet.
“AN EXPLOSION, I BELIEVE.”
“I know that, but where’d it come from?!”
“IT WASN’T FROM MY INTERNAL SYSTEMS,” Grung assured us.
“Shyvock,” I muttered out loud.
I couldn’t see him yet, but it had to be him. He must have fired from a long way away, which is why he hadn’t been able to hit me or Alaria with his normal laser-like precision.
“Where is he?!” Alaria cried out.
“Never mind him,” I said as I ran over to Grung’s dangling head and detached the largest bag from my belt. “Just get Grung off that cable and then get us the hell out of here!”
She did as ordered and unhooked the cable from its port in Grung’s head. The watermelon-sized metal skull slid neatly into my bag and completely disappeared.
The things you carried in your bag were essentially weightless – otherwise there was no way that somebody could carry around entire suits of plate armor and 100,000 gold coins. It would have been impossible. What you could carry was basically only limited to what you could cram through the opening of your bag.
I checked my inventory window and saw that Grung’s head was displayed as a tiny icon.
“Let’s go!” I yelled as I held tightly onto the bag. “Fly low so you can avoid his arrows!”
Alaria grabbed my arm and took off with a jolt from her rockets. Another explosion blasted the ground nearby, throwing up clods of dirt and bits of orc, but Alaria was able to fly us over the remaining piles of corpses without exposing us to more of the Hunter’s shots. We soared away over the ground, leaving Shyvock and his deadly artillery behind.
32
We flew for a few minutes until the orc war tents were nothing but specks behind us.
The only problem was, more specks appeared just a few miles ahead.
Alaria was the first to notice. “Uh-oh – it’s the rest of Orlo’s war golems.”
“Stop! Put us down before they see us!”
Alaria cut her thrusters, and we tumbled across the grass in a particularly crappy landing.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine – are you okay?”
“I’ll survive.”
I looked at her beautiful face, smudged with soot and dirt and scratched from swords and shrapnel.
She had never looked lovelier.
She peered out at the dark shapes on the horizon. “I don’t see their trail in the grass, though.”
“We were probably flying parallel to it. Which is good – we’re going to have to follow them at a distance. We can’t let them know we’re still around.”
“If Orlo’s on that damn flying carpet of his, he’s probably already seen us.”
I looked up at the skies, searching for a black spot amongst the white clouds, but saw nothing.
“But then why would he let us stay alive?” Alaria mused.
“That’s easy. He likes lording it over me. Not to mention I helped him get paid 50% more.”
“How?”
“The orcs told him to get lost and take his golems with him. Then you guys showed up and started slaughtering their army. Orlo threatened to walk away, and the orcs had to pay him extra to keep the golems.” I smiled grimly. “Seeing as I’m great at negotiating him more money, maybe he’s keeping me alive in the hopes that I’ll do it again with his next client. Or maybe he hasn’t seen us, because he’s already flown onto the next client instead…”
“More orcs?”
“I don’t know. Let’s find out.”
I pulled Grung’s head out of the bag. Actually, to be accurate, I let it tumble out of the bag on its own.
“DID WE ESCAPE, FRIENDS?”
“Yeah, for now. Hey – what’s it like in there?”
“YOU MEAN YOU DON’T KNOW?”
“No.”
“ACTUALLY, IT’S NOT LIKE ANYTHING AT ALL. IT FEELS AS THOUGH YOU TOOK ME OUT TWO SECONDS AFTER YOU PUT ME IN.”
Interesting. Not only space, but time was apparently different inside the bag, too.
I’d become more and more worried that Alaria’s flesh-and-blood body wouldn’t survive indefinitely. If we couldn’t wrap things up with Orlo soon, at least I could return and put her body into the bag. If Grung was right about its time warp properties, we could store her in there forever.
Not that I wanted to think about that possibility.
“Do you know where Orlo’s taking the rest of the war golems?” I asked Grung.
“NO. ALL I KNOW IS THAT HE MENTIONED ‘CLIENTS,’ PLURAL.”
“Great…”
“What are we going to do?” Alaria asked.
“I’d like to see where they wind up next before we try anything.”
“Could you summon your friends a
gain so we can attack them?”
I thought about that for a second.
I could do what Alaria was suggesting, but the favor I’d asked for earlier was a massive one-off, not something I could do over and over again.
With the orcs, we had been facing insurmountable odds. Now that the odds were greatly reduced, I couldn’t really justify asking for more help. After all, what was I going to do for the rest of the game – rely on everybody else to do my quests for me?
Besides, I’d been able to play on everybody’s sympathies the first time around. Giant robots, 10,000 orcs, blah blah blah. But I would piss off a ton of people if I messaged them and said, Hey, that was awesome – but now that you’re scattered hundreds of miles apart at different graveyards, can you come save my ass again?
There was one other thing I couldn’t tell Alaria, since she wouldn’t understand about Westek or the outside world. In a meeting with my boss, he had explicitly told me I couldn’t join a guild to help me on my missions. My job as a QCer was to play like a solo player. I think John would probably be okay with me asking ONE favor from a bunch of friends, but repeatedly relying on them would fall under the ‘no guild’ rule.
“No,” I finally said, “that was a one-time thing. From here on out, it’s on us.”
She nodded dispiritedly, but didn’t protest.
“SO WHAT SHOULD WE DO?” Grung asked.
“For right now, avoid both Shyvock and Orlo. If we’re lucky, Shyvock might even do some of our work for us.”
“WHY DO YOU SAY THAT?”
“Because I told him about the gold Orlo got from the orcs. Shyvock is greedy, and I’m absolutely sure he plans to track Orlo down and steal it from him. But just to amuse himself, he might track us down first. So I think we ought to stay as far away from the war golems as possible. After all, we can always find their trail whenever we need to. No need to follow them and give both Orlo and Shyvock a crack at us.”
“BUT SHYVOCK COULD APPEAR ANY MOMENT.”
“No – you killed his mount when you shot it down, so he’s going to be traveling on foot. He may be a master hunter, but I don’t see how he’s going to track us if Alaria keeps flying low to the ground.”
“I can’t do it forever,” she cautioned me. “I was getting near the end of my reserves when we saw the war golems just now.”