by Jeff Sproul
Melissa sat upon the glass throne, which was easily five half-foot steps above the ground floor. The ceiling of each level of the diamond was roughly ten feet and rose five floors into the sky and descended five floors beneath the ground.
A jewel comprised of a swirl of green and yellow rested on the armrest of the throne. Melissa tapped it and brought up an interface for herself. With a few more taps, she brought up a 3D rendering of the local area in quite a large radius, much larger than the radius that Riley had managed to bring up earlier that day at the outpost.
New crystals with mysterious importance sparkled around the room. Melissa navigated the map, zooming in and out while also checking the farther reaches of what the map showed. She saw two green indicators heading toward the base. Her initial scouts, surely.
She glanced over to Gregory, who had walked up to the base of the throne and stopped. "We'll need to extract more resources in order to build the rest of our structures outside," said Gregory. "Estimates show that we can have them in three hours."
"Perfect," said Melissa. "Any hiccups with any of the other systems, or are we running smooth?"
"Everything is going better than expected. We couldn't have hoped for a more resource-rich entrypoint. The water and the sand is helping immensely. There's a great deal of uncommon and rare materials beneath us. It's an ideal location."
Melissa's lips curled as she relaxed back on the throne. "Wonderful. Phase one is almost complete then. Go ahead and start phase two. Use what we're able to spare to get our troops reinforced with artificial ones. I don't want some enterprising guild to spot us and ruin everything we've worked so hard to achieve."
"It's already underway. I know the plan," said Gregory. "We both want this. Albeit…for different reasons."
"Of course," said Melissa. "I know we don't see eye to eye, but you have to admit, we've worked well together. Under my guidance."
"As long as I continue to get what I want, I don't mind," said Gregory.
A pair of armored figures walked through a shimmering glass panel on the first floor outer wall. Barclay and Simone had returned. They approached the throne and took a more relaxed posture. Simone was the one to speak. "We didn't find any signs of hostiles. Nothing to kill."
Melissa nodded. "Then we're in a prime position indeed. But we will need to find some local hunting grounds to extract more resources from this game. Was there anything out there that alluded to which game we ended up in?"
"No, ma'am," said Simone. "Just sand and palm trees. Longer range surveillance will be needed to determine if anyone else is nearby."
"And no signs of Golem?" asked Gregory.
Simone shook her head. "No signs of it, sir."
"Thank you." Gregory nodded before looking to Melissa.
Melissa tapped a function on her interface. A soft chime echoed around the diamond structure. Everyone looked up from what they were doing. Then, Melissa's voice sounded all throughout the building. "Congratulations, Goldbearers. We have attained a strong foothold. We are still trying to determine which game we ended up in, but regardless of which it is, we will hit the ground running and establish ourselves as an impenetrable fortress. Then, we will plunder this game of all it has to offer. You've all done well. Our exit from Mage World Online was less than optimal. But here we are. We've made it, thanks to all of you and your hard work. You will all share in the spoils. But for now, keep to your tasks. We will rotate through logoffs as stipulated in the briefing before we left. The soldiers will rotate out first and then by the time enough get back, we'll have hopefully found a hunting target. Whether it's a player base or monster ground, we'll plunder it. Then, the crafters will rotate out. You all know what to do. So keep at it. Melissa out."
Melissa tapped another icon and her voice was no longer projected to the entire structure. Everyone went back to their assigned projects.
Melissa sighed and looked to Gregory. "Go ahead and sign off. I'll remain here until you return.
"If you don't mind, I'd prefer to take first watch," said Gregory. "I want to know if we discover Golem in the area."
Melissa shrugged. "If that's your preference, I'm going to heat up a pizza and have some wine. Good luck while I'm gone. Don't ruin our success."
Gregory chuckled. "Don't worry. I won't let anything jeopardize this."
"Very good," said Melissa. "Catch you in a few." With that, she tapped a few times at her interface and then closed her eyes. After ten seconds, her consciousness left, leaving just an idle, sleeping body in Sigil Online while she returned to the real world.
Chapter 14: The Crimson King
Once again, Riley raced through the deep red streets of Crimson City. The scorpions made travel significantly easier than running around on his own. He'd had the rover earlier, but he needed a speedier return to Crimson City. Plus, whoever went to the outpost might end up needing it.
Despite Riley's short time around Sage, he'd discovered that the guy was clever, very intelligent, and incredibly paranoid.
When Riley and the others had attacked his lair, they had actually invaded a pocket dimension that Sage was able to create with his powers. Well, to be more precise, Sage's powers let him create organic and hellion-like machines, which could be used for a plethora of purposes. It required a lot of energy and he had to utilize resources around him, but the power behind his abilities couldn't be ignored, even if it did have some drawbacks.
Prior to the arrival of the Bastions update, Sage had created a lair of his own design, using mostly just his powers. It was almost impossible to get into unless there was an opening—the kind of portal-opening that he and some of the other Bunker Brawlers had utilized during Sage's invasion of Gargantuan City. Sage's very method of attack had left him vulnerable. But only marginally.
But with that in mind, Sage altered how people could access the pocket dimension. With Bastions, the Crimson Alliance HQ was now at the center of Crimson City, located underground, as most HQs were. Only from that HQ could anyone reach the lair that Sage spent most of his time in.
Sage had created a quantum link that allowed him to access the HQ and all its facilities from his private pocket-dimension lair. It allowed him to remain safe from harm while still being in control.
For Riley, it was just weird having things happen around the Crimson HQ when nobody else was around.
Riley had spent more time at Aaron's than Sage would've preferred. But he still had a life. He wasn't going to just drop everything he was planning to do all the time at Sage's behest. The Bunker Brawlers were a guild of mostly in-game friends.
But The Crimson Alliance was made up of guilds that were tenuous allies, at best. Sage had practically forced each guild into joining. The decision wasn't that hard when it was 'join and exist together, or die.'
Sage was all Riley could think about as he took the scorpion into one of the underground passages. The route twisted and turned. At one point, he had to wait for a cloaked 'trap door' to appear in the ground, so the scorpion could drop down into it. Then, after taking a few appropriate turns, he reached an organic red doorway that pulsed, as if it was connected to some sort of artery system and heartbeat.
Which it actually was.
The door parted, allowing Riley entrance. He promptly went in, along with the three scorpions in his care. Once inside, he hopped off the metallic one and looked around.
The room he was in was part of a large open cavern. But you couldn't see any of the rock or dirt of the cave due to the fact that everything was lined and encased in the strange semi-translucent red membrane that the strange structure was comprised of.
This was a hellion-centric nest. Or, more accurately, a hellion bastion. There were terminals around the expansive room, but all the terminals looked more like strange organic pods with screens than anything that might resemble an actual computer.
There were larger pods around the room that were used for printing items and creatures. Everything was connected via veins that ran in and
through the floor. At the center of the room was another doorway membrane that would allow someone to walk down into a room where the actual heart of the facility was. A dull pulse reverberated throughout the structure as the heart occasionally beat.
The facility was well hidden. It wasn't precisely at the center of the city. It would take someone a while to find, even if they were actively looking for it. Not to mention, whoever was looking for it would need to spend quite a bit of time searching in close proximity, and in that time, they would be noticed by a myriad of sensors and other defenses that awaited in the tunnels. Not to mention all the above-ground traps and creatures, all waiting and hidden out of sight.
The Crimson Alliance HQ was a bit like an iceberg, as far as its defenses were concerned. At any given time, you could only see a small portion of what it had to offer. This very fact had lured in several attacks from guilds that thought they could take The Crimson King by surprise. Riley thought Sage's moniker was oddly fitting.
"Sage?" Riley called out. He glanced around, wondering where their hellion leader was.
"Oh, you're here?" came a young woman's voice.
Riley glanced over and saw Laura peeking out from behind one of the terminals. The young woman of Asian descent had intense blue eyes and black hair. She wore a long-sleeved purple shirt with a hood along with a pair of denim pants and black boots. She stepped out from behind the console and headed over to him. "I heard you captured an outpost," she said as she crossed her arms. "How'd that go?"
"Pretty well, all things considered," said Riley as he kept glancing around. "Did you speak to Chrono or Sage then?"
"Yeah, I caught Chrono before he made his way over there. He said he needed to make sure it was taken care of, since you got a teleporter running over there."
"Yeah, that I did," said Riley. "I ran into a couple troubles, but overall, everything went mostly smooth. Where's Sage? He said he wanted me to fill him in on some details."
"Relinquisher!" came a booming voice.
Riley's eyes widened upon hearing the hearty, echoing voice of a very familiar comrade.
He barely had enough time to turn around before a large pair of black metal arms wrapped around him and hoisted him into the air. "Ah!" he grunted, more from annoyance than actual surprise. "Hey Thrash, you can…put me down!"
"I heard how well you did out there on your own! I'm proud of you!" said Thrash.
A moment later, Riley was placed back on the strange semi-hard red membrane of a floor. He stumbled away a couple steps then looked up to Thrash. The black-metal humanoid hellion looked like some sort of hybrid between a bodybuilder and a tank.
The man was in his forties, to Riley's knowledge. He'd gone the way of a hellion. But instead of being an insect, or android-demon like Sage, or anything inherently monstrous, Thrash was more of a metal golem-like entity. His body was comprised of a dark metal, but his form was that of a tall and well-built humanoid. He was more like a goliath or a giant, coming in at nine feet tall. He didn't have a mouth. Instead, his voice emanated from where his mouth should have been. Instead of eyes, he had a single dark, glossy black screen a few inches tall and twice as wide.
"It wasn't that big a deal," said Riley as he backed up to a safe distance, closer to Laura, as the two of them faced Thrash. "So what are you both doing here?" Riley asked, glancing between the two of them.
"There was a small incursion of NPC monsters that had come in from the open areas outside the city," said Thrash. "I and a few of my guild mates took care of them. Then I came here to see what was on the agenda today."
"I was going to see if anyone was free at base to do some PVE hunting," said Laura. "If Sage isn't currently tasking everyone."
"Things were a bit hectic earlier," came the cyberized voice of Sage.
The three gathered players all turned to watch as Sage rose from the central membrane in the room, which worked more like an elevator and less like a door that could merely slide open.
Sage, with his two curled black horns and his red skull-like face, walked toward them with his hands behind his back. His body was that of a demon that had been cyberized with electronics.
"There were a few conflicts around the city, all of which have now been resolved. Riley seized the outpost we were scouting. A few members are out looking for new acquisitions and a few are patrolling. But other than that, the day seems to be free for now."
"Great, so you don't mind if we get some hunting in?" Riley asked.
"Not at all. When things are quiet, and when there's nothing to acquire, you can do as you wish. When Chrono returns from the outpost you took, we'll have to re-evaluate our new income potentials. But that's not much of an issue for any of you."
"Thrash, you wanna come hunting with us?" Laura asked, looking up to him.
"Of course!" Thrash bellowed. "Shall I bring a couple of my guild mates with me? They'd love the opportunity."
"Feel free," said Laura. "The more the merrier."
"I've got to hop offline," said Riley. "So I doubt you're all going to still be around when I get back, but if you are, I'll join you."
"We were going to wait a little bit and see who jumps on," said Laura. "But no guarantees that we'll wait forever."
Riley smiled and nodded. "Of course. Wouldn't expect you to."
"I think it might be best if we had that chat now, Riley," said Sage. "It might benefit Laura and Thrash to know the details of that creature you encountered earlier, since they are both guild leaders."
Riley glanced at all three of them. "Well, yeah, of course. So…this is what happened."
Riley then went into detail about what had occurred out at the outpost. How one of his troopers had initially found the orb, how he'd lost four of them, and then how he'd self-destructed the building to kill it. Then, Gella had arrived. He told them what Gella had said about coming from Mage World Online.
"Mage World?" Sage asked, his eyes narrowed as his hand came up to hold his chin.
"Yeah. Are you familiar with it?" Riley asked. "You've got a few years on me, so I imagine you would've had the time to check it out."
"I did have a character in Mage World Online," said Sage. "But I sold all my assets and deleted my character. Now, you were telling Chrono about this creature that was part of the white orb?"
Riley nodded. "Yeah, so…this creature had black tiny scales and almost oily skin. But from what Gella described, I expected it to be more…sludgy? She said that this was just one of many possible variations of something she called Golem, and that it was a pretty terrible monster hive-mind."
"Golem?" Sage asked in a terse voice.
"Yeah. That's what she called it."
Sage rubbed at his chin. "Those idiots. What have they done?"
"What's wrong?" asked Laura. "Are you familiar with whatever this Golem entity is?"
Sage lowered his hand and crossed his arms against his chest. "I am. There's no true reason to hide it anymore, if it's gotten out. I was one of the officers in a prominent guild in Mage World Online. We were one of the top ten, if not top three guilds there. We were powerful, wealthy, and spent a lot of those resources on researching new things. We were some of the forerunners of that game. We pushed a lot of new research. But one of our members pushed that research further than any other. She was very smart. She and her husband both, actually. They worked on a number of projects. One of them was Golem."
"Wait, are you saying your guild members made this thing?" Riley asked. "Gella made it sound as if it was destroying the entire game."
Sage held up a hand, as if to quiet Riley. "I'm getting to that," he said. "The entity known as Golem was an artificial life form that we created. It was of a single mind. It was powerful and could grow exponentially—if it could find the resources. It could utilize any creature it had ever absorbed. But some creatures were more costly for it to make. Even that was only a minor problem for a creature that could expand and consume so rapidly." Sage took a moment to pause, before continuing. "W
e created Golem in an underground research area. The mountain was made of granite. It didn't know how to tunnel through granite efficiently. But it still managed to do so, over time. It expanded. It got out of control. We constantly thought we could control it and use it to our advantage. It was Gregory and Tina's work. They'd spent months and months on it alone. In fact, it was the last thing Tina worked on before she passed away. I shouldn't go into it. It's not my place. But we thought that creating Golem would solidify our hold on Mage World Online. We thought we could conquer an entire game and rule it. But even though Golem had the power to do what we sought to do, we couldn't control it. There was no way to leash it or bend it to our will. We lost many NPC soldiers and some of our players just trying to hold it at bay. But all we could do was narrowly slow its progress while we sought a solution. But there was only one solution. We had to confine it."
"How'd you do that? Riley asked, before Sage could continue.
"I had the knowledge on my character to create an enormous shield around a target area. So I set the shield around the mountain and its entrance. But in doing so, I used the guild's gold supply as a catalyst for the spell, since I had rights to our finances. I emptied our vaults into the creation of what should have been an impregnable shield. But it sounds like Golem still managed to get free. There's only a couple ways that could've happened. Scenario one is that the shield ran out of power. Which is unlikely. It should've lasted for several more years, if my loose calculations were correct. The second scenario is that one of the other guild officers removed the shield I made. I had told them to leave the game and leave it be. But…perhaps they stayed? I don't know. I lost all contact with them when I sold my assets and deleted my character. I was never in touch with them outside of the game."
"Brenda didn't play it?" Riley asked.
Sage shook his head. "No, she wasn't playing games at that time."
"So you think Golem was freed by one of the other officers in your old guild?" Laura asked. "And it got out of control? And now it's here? Wait a second, how did it get here?"