by Robin Rhodes
Chapter Five
As much as he hated to admit it, the ocean was much more fun than the desert.
If it wasn't for Aaron, he would have been enjoying himself down here. Standing at the helm of the ship and watching the waves part for him. It was empowering. It was fun.
Amber had suggested asking the computer for advice about learning how to sail and they'd all gained adequate knowledge to pilot the ship. He'd have never thought of doing that.
As the leader he got to stand and steer the ship though, and having the powerful vessel beneath his hands put a satisfied smile on his face.
They'd just raided one island, killed a bunch of orcs, and gotten some loot. Only one person had been bitten by a lizard, and they'd been hit with paralysis, which was the least offensive of all the side effects as far as he could remember.
Now they were heading to the next island in his vision. He didn't just want to kill Aaron and his dungeon, he wanted to bleed it dry, first. If by some chance they didn't manage to kill him, despite all the manpower they'd brought, he intended to at least have gotten as much loot as possible.
The next island they came to was much bigger than the last, and was covered in dense jungle.
The heat was already bad, with clear skies leaving the sun to beat down on them, but he suspected going into the jungle would make it humid.
"There has to be loot in here, doesn't there?" one man asked.
"It would be cruel if there was nothing in there," Aiden replied, but he was talking about Aaron here so he wouldn't be surprised. "I'm sure we'll at least find some orcs for the XP."
They sailed the ship straight onto the beach but still secured it with anchors in the sand to make sure it wouldn't be dragged away by the tide. After hopping off the boat and assembling at the edge of the jungle, Aiden said, "We should probably split into two groups for this one. It's looks like it's going to be a long trek."
Aaron had made his dungeon a lot bigger. He could see how people might spend days in here if they were determined to search every island for every piece of treasure like he did. They had already spent hours just picking a ship and dealing with the first island of many he could see on the horizon.
They split into four groups of three in the end, with a DPS, a tank and a healer on each team. He, Amber and another officer he wasn't close to formed one team, and they headed along the beach to enter the jungle on the right side.
Everyone had a cell phone and police radio. There was no reason they shouldn't be able to keep in contact while they walked.
He promised before they set off that they'd take a rest after this island. The good thing about the ship was that they weren't reliant on finding a sanctuary to have some beds to rest in. They'd picked a large ship, with enough rooms below deck for all of them to find somewhere to nap as long as they shared rooms.
Aiden was still hyped up, still ready to keep going and going until Aaron's head was on a spike, but he didn't want to wear the others who didn't have such a personal connection to the place out.
Amber walked at the end of the group, then Aiden, then the healer behind him.
Amber cut through vines without hesitation, looking back every now and then to make sure people we keeping pace with her. "This is awful," she said, pausing when they came to a clearing and wiping the back of her hand against her brow. "Why did he think putting a fucking rainforest on an island was a good idea?"
"I think us hating it and having a bad time was the whole point."
"He's really that much of a bastard?"
"Absolutely."
"Did you know him before you came down here?"
"No."
"I suppose he does have your girlfriend down here, I'm being insensitive." She looked away and wiped her brow again. "I thought we'd have at least come across something to fight by now."
"Maybe the others are having more luck," the healer suggested, pulling out his radio and making contact with the other teams. None of them had anything to report. It was all clear for all of them.
"I guess we just keep walking, then," Amber said, heaving her sword off the ground. She was wearing her shield strapped over her back for now.
They chatted as they walked. Amber was from Oregon, but had moved to New Jersey when her boyfriend had started college there. They'd broken up now, but she hadn't wanted to lose her job.
Aiden kept to himself, and didn't reveal much of anything about Elizabeth or his relationship with her. It made him roll with anger whenever he thought about it, and he didn't think he could articulate any of it without scaring Amber off, and he was enjoying her company.
At the next clearing, their legs were really starting to ache. "We can't just keep going forever," Amber complained, leaning against a tree and wiping her brow. "This is ridiculous."
Aiden followed suit, setting his heavy staff down and looking up at the sky. It was just as blue as it was a couple of hours ago when they'd started their trek, and the sun hadn't moved at all. It was completely artificial, and the day wasn't going to get any cooler.
"I'll check in with the others again," the healer said, and brought out his radio.
Again, there was nothing. No one had found a thing.
"Fucking bastard," Aiden hissed. "He's sat up there laughing at us right now. I can feel it." The knowledge Aaron was watching it all made his skin crawl, and his blood pound.
He was embarrassed. He felt like he was being made a fool of.
Amber swore and stood up, rubbing the back of her neck. "Something bit me."
She came over to Aiden and turned around so he could see it. It was just a small mark, nothing that looked life threatening, but he'd seen what happened to Brad when a lizard had bitten him.
He'd been dead within hours.
"I'm sure it's nothing," he said now. Panicking her wasn't going to help anything. "It looks tiny."
"Okay." She completely trusted him with that answer, and he pushed down some guilt. If she fell dead in a second that would be that, she wouldn't know the difference.
Just as he was about to push away from the tree, he felt something on his own hand.
"Bastard," he cursed, looking at the bite there.
Dread filled him, and it took everything not to give away what he'd just lied about.
Aaron would know what had just happened to him. Would he be grinning with pleasure, sitting with Elizabeth by his side and forcing her to watch him keel over and die?
"I'm done with this shit jungle," Aiden said. "We're going back to the ship."
Amber looked around. "And which way is that?"
Aiden ran both hands through his hair. "Back the way we came. Don't you know which way that is?" But as he looked around the clearing, he couldn't even pinpoint the direction they'd entered from. It all looked exactly the same.
He looked at the static sun in the sky. "We've been walking towards the sun," he said. "It hasn't moved the whole time we've been here. Now we'll walk away from it."
This whole thing was just an endurance test, like the desert, and Aiden resented it. What did Aaron even get out of something this boring? Just watching people get more and more frustrated?
He was like that, though. He liked people suffering.
Aiden started walking, the hand that didn't hold his staff curled into a fist.
Amber hurried to walk at the side of him. "Don't break formation."
"There's nothing in here to require a formation."
"We don't know that. We just know we haven't come across it yet."
Another half an hour and they finally did come across it. They burst into a clearing—not one they'd walked through before, despite the surety Aiden had that they were retracing their steps exactly—at the same time a pack of orcs did.
The fighting started right away, with Amber diving forward and stunning a heavily armed melee orc with her shield.
Aiden stayed at the back and set his focus on the two bowmen that fired arrow after arrow into
the trio.
There were five orcs, and they were outnumbered, but they'd been training for this. The orcs were just stupid monsters. They couldn't have the advantage.
If the first room was anything to go by they'd easily be taken out.
Amber hopped around the battlefield, gaining all the threat from the melee orcs and then slamming into the first bowman to gain his focus, too.
The final ranged orc had his focus on the healer and he loosed three rapid shots in a row. The first stunned the healer, and he was frozen mid-cast. Aiden used a cleanse on the healer before Amber's health could drop too low from all the aggro she had, and then turned his focus to the bowman attacking the healer.
He put a powerful DoT on the orc and then started casting his most powerful projectile. He needed that guy gone, because Amber was already struggling to keep aggro from the pack of orcs with her still-limited spells and the healer was taking damage at an alarming rate.
Aiden finally charged his projectile and sent it flying in a blue orb across the clearing to hit the bowman straight in the face. He collapsed with a weak groan, and Aiden's shoulders slumped in relief.
Until the first melee orc that Amber had taunted zigzagged across the battlefield in a charge and slammed his fist straight into the healer's chest that knocked him over backward and stunned him. Aiden's cleanse was gone, and he was forced to just watch as the orc executed their healer with one clean blow to the neck that decapitated him.
"Shit," Aiden hissed, being forced to up his game now that the orc was coming after him. He slowed the orc with a frozen projectile that chilled the orc for ten seconds, and walked backward until he could start casting his big projectile while sure that the orc wouldn't catch him and knock him out of the cast before it was finished.
The big projectile procced another spell to give him instant cast and that knocked the orc down to below 10 percent HP. Aiden kept walking backward and finally remembered that he had the instant cast DoT in his arsenal. He cast that now, and sped himself up to avoid the orc as the DoT took his last sliver of health over three seconds.
The orc collapsed, dead, but Aiden couldn't give into the same relief he had when the bowman had died.
Amber was struggling. The second ranged orc was dead on the ground, but the others were pummeling her over and over again with attacks that she struggled to block. Her two stuns were on cooldown, and her shield was running low.
Aiden started out with both his DoTs, and realized they should have been on everyone in the orc pack the second the fight had started. Then he focused his attention on the one with lowest health, casting his big projectile and hoping he got another proc. He didn't, and was forced to cast again.
It was taking too long, Amber was taking too much of a battering without the healer to help her. She used her own weak heal that barely brought her back above 40 percent HP. Aiden's cleanse came off cooldown and when one of the orcs stunned her he canceled his cast to cleanse her immediately.
She didn't even look in his direction to thank him, completely absorbed in keeping herself alive.
She was good at this. She really knew what she was doing. Aiden doubted she'd made a single mistake in the fight so far, it was him and the healer that had let the side down with their bad rotations and inability to survive past only one orc targeting them.
If Amber died it would be his fault.
He searched his codex while he started casting his big projectile from nothing again, looking for what he must have forgotten that would turn the fight in their favor, but he knew his moves.
His problem was that he didn't know how to use them effectively.
He got lucky and the projectile killed the orc he was targeting and procced another instant cast. He used it on the surviving orc, and now it was two versus one.
Amber was on a quarter health, but all her cooldowns were coming back up. Her shield replenished, and she stunned the orc. Aiden had room to cast his big projectile, but by the time he was finished, the orc was dead. Amber had critted with her basic attack and it had taken him low enough that she could use her execute.
Breathing heavily, she stood lopsided on her damaged legs. "What happened?" she demanded, full of anger. Then she looked to the side and saw the healer, without his head, on the ground. "Oh, shit. What the fuck happened?"
"He forgot to heal himself," Aiden replied, looking at the sky and trying to forgive himself. "I only realized after he'd died. I should have told him during the fight and I could have saved his life."
"None of you are ready to be down here," Amber hissed. "You haven't had enough practice facing real opponents."
Aiden leaned forward. "And where am I supposed to find real opponents except to come down here?"
Amber threw her hands up. "I don't know, but this is unacceptable. We never should have lost that fight."
Aiden ran a hand over his face, because she was right. "We shouldn't have split up." Them getting used to how they should use their spells in the heat of the moment was one thing, but if they hadn't split up they never would have lost even though they were rookies. "The whole point of bringing twelve of us down here was that we could overwhelm anything we came up against."
Amber leaned heavily against a tree as her health slowly regenerated.
"Here," Aiden said, fishing in his satchel and handing her a vial. "It's a health potion." One of the wives of someone in his precinct had picked alchemy as her profession and had taken to it immediately. She was supplying them with health potions as fast as she could get the ingredients, which wasn't fast enough.
"Thanks," Amber said, swallowing the potion. It didn't heal her completely, but all the visible wounds disappeared and she returned to well above 80 percent HP. "What should we do with him?" she asked, looking at the healer.
"I can't carry him," Aiden said. "I'm not strong enough." The healer was a huge guy, and Aiden hated to admit he wasn't strong enough.
Amber pressed a hand to her mouth. "I can't either. He... he has no head. We couldn't take that back to his family."
Aiden pulled the police badge from the healer's robes and put it in his satchel. "That'll have to do," he said. He bowed his head and shut his eyes. "I'm sorry."
And then they kept walking, because there was nothing else they could do. Aiden got in touch with other groups and told them to be careful of roaming orc packs, but left out what had happened to their healer. He made sure everyone was heading back to the ship and told them to get a move on with it.
As he walked, he started feeling hot under the collar, and it had nothing to do with the sun that continued to beat down on them and the humid air.
Amber was plodding along in front of him, and he couldn't take his eyes off her ass, even though there wasn't much to see behind the metal plating she wore.
"Shit," he muttered, because he knew what this was. He'd seen it in Elizabeth's eyes when Aaron had fucked her senseless.
He'd been drugged.
The lizard bite had drugged him.
When Amber looked over her shoulder at him with dark eyes, he knew he wasn't the only one.
Chapter Six
Aaron was very pleased with how the fight had turned out. Aiden was right, he had been an idiot for splitting them up. The max number of people allowed to take a dungeon at once was ridiculous. Twelve people was far too many.
The fact Aiden had managed to get twelve people together and failed to use it made him an idiot.
He should have been able to steamroll his way through the dungeon and forced Aaron to bring every single orc he had in the dungeon into one big group to try and take them out.
Instead, he'd lead his party to a slaughter.
His healer wasn't the only one to have been surprised by the two roaming orc parties he had lurking in the jungle, and another group of three had been completely decimated by one of the packs of five. They'd only taken out one of those orcs, and they'd gone on to find another group and kill their DPS.
&
nbsp; Their levels were up to scratch, but they didn't understand that having adequate levels to take on the monsters in his dungeon didn't mean they would just waltz through it. Being equal level was one thing, but they were completely undergeared. Only a couple had gear different from the ones they had been given when the Braxian Expansion hit. Their stats were lower than their levels suggested.
The other thing was that they had no idea what they were doing with their spells. Learning the most optimal rotation had been easy for them in theory, Aaron guessed, but the minute they were faced with silences and stuns and more than themselves to look out for, things got hectic and everyone fell apart. Aiden's healer had forgotten to heal himself, for fuck’s sake. One quick heal and he would have survived.
They were complete noobs, and thought that just upping their level was all they needed to be successful.
The one or two people who seemed to know what they were doing hadn't realized how bad it was until it was too late.
Aiden's tank was one of those people. Amber was good, really good, but she was being let down by her party. She couldn't carry them alone, especially not with subpar healers.
Aaron didn't really care about that right now, though. It was an advantage he'd exploit later.
What was interesting to him at the moment was watching them fight the aphrodisiac that pumped through their veins. There were lizards littered throughout the jungle, and they'd happened to stumble across his favorite.
They'd already been attracted to each other before the lizard bite, and it would make it even harder for them to resist each other now.
Aaron lay on his bed with his eyes shut and a smile on his face. This was going to be good.
Aiden was going to feel awful when he came back to his senses.
He was following Amber through the jungle, pulling at his robes and fanning his face. His cock was hard beneath his robes, Aaron knew it. His grip was so tight on his staff his knuckles were white, and his other hand was clenched into a fist whenever it wasn't wiping sweat from his brow or adjusting himself.