by M Helbig
I turned to see who it was while still keeping my eye on the thing. Nyytro moved for the first time since its appearance, but only enough to sputter out, “They’re not supposed to attack the living! Please don’t kill me. Please don’t kill me. Please don’t kill me.”
Alizia tossed another potion at it. The vial sailed right through it, but the specter did pause for a few seconds. I took the extra seconds to grab Nyytro and pull him back with me.
“Not supposed to attack the living?” I asked. “Do you know what these things are?”
“Please don’t kill me. Please don’t kill me. Please don’t kill me.”
I slapped him hard and his eyes began to move. “We call them ‘Reapers’ but we’re not sure what they really are.”
I tried casting Regrowth again but got another error message. “Great. You’ve heard of them—now how do we stop them?”
“No idea. They’re evidently some sort of glitch in the game, but none of our best developers could find how to get rid of them or even where they came from in the code. Up until recently, they were nothing more than a nuisance, but then about a year ago, while your dad and I were working on our project, we stumbled on one of them doing that gaze thing to a defeated player. The player died in the real world immediately after. A few months later, we saw it happen again and then again a week later.”
“If it can do that,” Alizia said, “we should get out of here.”
The Reaper lunged forward, its arm passing through my head. A coldness washed over me and my brain turned to mush. Red characters collided from all over, but I couldn’t make any sense of them; they looked more like symbols than numbers. When the arm pulled back, my HP bar was flashing red. I tried casting a Regrowth, but my fingers lethargically stumbled like I was drunk. The spell predictably failed. I stumbled back, and fortunately it didn’t follow, giving me time to gather what wits I had left.
Alizia summoned another potion and pulled back her arm to throw it. “Alizia, stop!” I said. “Both of you, grab Decrona’s corpse and get out of here. If what Nyytro says is right, that thing can kill her in the real world. I’ll keep it distracted while you two get her out.”
Alizia tossed the potion softly through the Reaper toward my chest and I caught it. The Reaper didn’t react this time. “How about no?” Alizia snorted. “Now drink that while Dr. Alizia figures out a way to cure what ails you. Hey, Reaper, come pick on someone your own robe size! Still shouting at ya!”
I almost spit out the potion as she made some of the dumbest faces I’d ever seen. Even the fear addled Nyytro let out a laugh. The Reaper, however, was not laughing. (Out loud, anyway. There was the possibility it didn’t have vocal cords and was laughing on the inside.) It turned and advanced on Alizia.
Alizia raised her hands in triumph. “It worked. Eh, now what do I do with it?”
I spun to Nyytro. “How do we stop this thing?”
“I don’t know how to stop it.” Nyytro almost hyperventilated. He stopped when I slapped him again, but I had a feeling it wouldn’t last. “No one’s ever been alive nearby in any of the videos, and if they were, they must’ve run immediately, something we should be doing right now. I can’t even guarantee it does that face-meld thing only on dead players. I started this war, so there’d be a lot of deaths. And with all those deaths, I figured there was bound to be a recording of one of these things afterward; a recording that I could view safely from miles away. In no way did I want to be in one.”
“You were looking for these things? Why?”
“It was all your dad’s idea. He wanted to stop them.”
I had a billion more questions to ask him but Alizia’s scream drew me back. The Reaper had embraced her in a bear hug, and a jumble of red symbols flew up. I couldn’t make any sense of them. While they weren’t numbers, the effect was the same; Alizia’s HP bar plummeted.
My fingers were no longer acting up, so I tossed a Regrowth on her. The red symbols turned to green, but instead of coming off her they floated out of the Reaper’s head. The Reaper’s grasp broke and it raised its arms in panic; its hood shook like it was screaming, yet no noise came out. Instead, memories of all my worst accidents and injuries flooded into my mind.
This time the Reaper didn’t advance slowly when it turned back around. It floated toward me like I was a magnet.
“I’ve got it!” I said. “We can only affect it when it’s hurting one of us. It must not be in our plane of existence enough for us to injure it directly, so we have to piggyback off our bodies—the part of us it’s harming—and indirectly hurt it through magic, or spell-like effects. That must be why the potion I tossed at it when it was draining Decrona affected it—some of it must have barely splashed on her—but not later, until I healed Alizia. Does anyone have one of the bigger healing potions?”
Alizia’s eyes lit up. “So, what your saying is you’re stealing my ‘Human Potion’ idea from earlier?”
“Oh, God. This plan came from Alizia . . .” Olaf’s eyes glazed over like he was looking in his inventory. “No, mine are all lessers.”
Alizia’s giggling stopped, and she stomped her foot on the ground. “Mine are too.”
Nyytro summoned a vial and tried to hand it to me. “Here.”
I was about to grab it when I took in the color. “That’s not a—"
“You’re definitely not your father.” Nyytro spun to face the charging Reaper. He glanced over his shoulder and gave me an insufferable wink as the bright orange liquid from the potion dribbled down his throat. The Reaper closed its arms around him, and the strange red symbols floated up again.
The Reaper spasmed uncontrollably and the red symbols turned to green. I doubled over as my worst memories flooded my mind again, somehow more vibrant and terrible than I remembered them. I reflexively put my hands over my ears, even though there was no sound besides the screaming and sobbing of my companions.
I barely managed to muster enough strength to raise my head. The Reaper jittered and squirmed harder as the images in my mind intensified. It continued to thrash and convulse until it careened through me and landed on the ground, finally releasing the motionless Nyytro to land in the opposite direction.
“That wasn’t a healing potion,” I said. “What was that?”
“I think I saw one of those once,” Alizia said. “But I was pretty drunk by that point. I do remember seeing the guy who drank it pass out, but then he suddenly got all better.”
We nervously stared at it for several minutes, but it didn’t move again. Olaf finally took a step toward it, but stopped behind Alizia, ready to use her as a shield in case the Reaper moved. “My Inspect skill is still not working on it,” Olaf said.
“Do you—Do you think it tastes like chicken?” Alizia summoned a knife and fork. “And completely unrelated question, did anyone bring any barbeque sauce?” She knelt to remove the hood but jumped back when it faded through the ground.
My mouth hung wide open. Not from the Reaper’s death but from who had saved us. Nyytro. The man who had killed me in the real world had risked his life to destroy that thing—a monster that killed people permanently. He was my murderer and my hero. What was I supposed to do with that? If he wasn't dead for good, should I continue to hunt him down for what he’d done to me or should I spread the word of this great deed?
Alizia began to dig through the ground to try to get to the Reaper.
“Alizia, stop!” I said. Shockingly, she obeyed. “We need to get going. It’s not safe here.”
Olaf pointed toward the town. “Agreed. We need to help save it for our faction.”
I bit my lip. “No, Nyytro was right. We’re only level sevens. The only thing we can do in there is provide target practice and waste a lot of our money by leaving unrecoverable corpses.”
Olaf looked at the tunnel like a sad puppy. “But we’re the only ones who can get to the palace quick and sneak up on them.”
Systemwide Message: Highwall has fallen to the Shadow Consortium! All
Sun players bound in Highwall will be sent to the nearest Sun alliance starting city, Kagsgrude, upon death, until they bind at a new bind point.
Systemwide Message: A new king has been declared in Highwall. All hail the Monarch of Gloom!
I nodded at Olaf’s shocked face like I’d known the thirty minutes had almost been up. “We need to get out of here before the Shadow forces start sending patrols.”
“Speaking of an unrecoverable corpse . . .” Alizia motioned toward Decrona’s. “Should we drag that with us? Seems a waste to go through all the trouble of saving it from the Reaper only to leave it here so other Reapers can do unspeakable things to it.”
If I thought Olaf was shocked before, his face now looked like it might implode. I imagined mine probably looked the same.
Seeing our predicament, Alizia opened her mouth again. “If anyone’s going to do unspeakable things to it, it’s me.”
Olaf raced over and hoisted Decrona over his shoulder. “I’m keeping this thing as far away from you as I can.”
Alizia pouted. “By the way, where are we going? Fen, Kagsgrude, or somewhere else?”
My eyes were stuck on Nyytro’s dead body. After his heroic sacrifice, the least I could do was haul his corpse off like Olaf was doing for Decrona. “Fen’s the closest, and while my map does give directions to Kagsgrude, I have no idea what kind of mobs reside between here and there. We ride—sorry, walk briskly to Fen.”
Getting Nyytro’s flailing limbs to balance over my back was a lot harder than Olaf had made it look, but then again, he had more points in Strength. When I finally got Nyytro balanced, I was struck by his unusually light weight. I had a feeling that corpses were made that way to compensate for the fact that they couldn’t be put in bags.
As we moved, Olaf kept biting his lip and looking back at the city. Every time our eyes met, he gave me a sad puppy look like he was expecting me to suddenly change my mind and come up with something to save Highwall. After the fifth time, I did, however, come up with a truly brilliant plan: to stop looking at him so I wouldn’t need to feel guilty.
I’d have thought the sudden change from glowing, polished marble walls to jet black obsidian, or the towering demons patrolling on top of them, would’ve clued him in to the fact that the city was lost. A padlocked door had even appeared over the opening to the secret entrance. I was quite confident our futures would reside elsewhere, and the only way to find out where was by continuing to put one foot in front of the other.
So That’s Why There’s No Deodorant in This Game
With the west holding high-level mobs, we had to loop around Highwall to get to the road to Fen in the north. We were spotted several times by Shadow players from the walls, but there were no close gates for them to get to us. The magic that prevented players from flying into the city also prevented them from flying out. Since we made sure to stay well out of arrow or magic range, the only battle they could offer us was through shouts and insults—a battle Alizia won every time.
With the walls relatively close, we encountered only a small sprinkling of mobs, none aggressive unless provoked. Alizia naturally took that as a challenge as soon as the Shadow players got bored and went back to celebrating in their new city. Olaf and I tried to shoo the bunnies, squirrels, and chipmunks away, but they only seemed to get the message when Alizia’s scepter connected with their tiny bodies. Part of me died inside whenever she caught one of the adorable woodland creatures, and worst of all, they no longer gave us any experience—so after her tenth kill, I made her carry Nyytro.
An hour later, I decided we were getting a little too close to the northern gate, so we moved into the forest. Almost immediately, yellow eyes appeared in the distance. My map told me we were in roughly the same area where I’d completed the werewolf quest so long ago, it seemed. I assumed the eyes belonged to my old pals, the pocket wolves, and when several of them got close enough, Inspect confirmed it. At level two, they’d been quite the challenge, but at level seven even a pack of them would be easy to solo, laughably easy for a group of three. The wolves seemed to know that as well and maintained a safe distance for the next hour, retreating whenever Alizia tried to close in.
All at once, the yellow eyes seemed to vanish. Olaf breathed a sigh of relief. Alizia cursed. I ordered a halt.
“An excellent idea, Horus,” Alizia said. “I could use a break. This walking is really tiring me out.”
Olaf set down Decrona. “Tiring? This isn’t the real world. Even burning through our Action Points with Sprint doesn’t require a rest; they will recover while walking.”
I summoned my bow. “When deadly beasts—to newbs, anyway—suddenly run away, there’s usually a reason for it.”
Alizia shrugged. “Probably means we’ve moved out of their spawn area. Like Olaf said, this isn’t the real world.”
“You are probably right, but better to be safe.” Olaf summoned his dagger.
A much larger pair of yellow eyes appeared in front of Alizia about three hundred yards away. Even though it was too far for Inspect, I knew what it was. Amphicyon, the huge, murderous beast that had so mercilessly torn me apart when I was only level one. While we needed to get moving to outrun any Shadow players who might be out exploring the area or looking for payback against Alizia, I had a feeling this thing wouldn’t let us leave. Besides, I wanted my revenge. The look on Olaf’s face said he wanted the same. Alizia only wanted to mess with it. Her fart noises drew it out of the bushes and steadily closer.
I figured my memory of it was the exaggerated view of a newb encountering his first deadly mob, but the snarling bear/dog was actually bigger and more ferocious than I remembered. The tree-sized beast seemed to be made of only four things: fangs, claws, fur, and muscle. It looked like it could tear all three of us to pieces in one bite, but I also knew this was a role-playing game and looks never trumped stats and levels. With it now in range, I decided to answer that question with Inspect.
Amphicyon
Level: 25
Resits:
Type: Raid Boss
Light: ???
Race: Bear Dog
Dark: ???
Faction: none
Earth: ???
HP: 40,000/40,000
Water: ???
MP: 0
Fire: ???
AP: 0
Wind: ???
AC: ???
Special Attributes: ???
Weaknesses: ???
Even though her fart noises had already done the job of getting its attention, Alizia decided to formalize the action by hitting the beast with Shout. She wisely hopped behind Nyytro’s corpse, so she wouldn’t accidentally trip over it, and summoned her arms. With the beast bearing down on her, she braced herself and raised her shield. Even at her seven feet of height, it was almost comical to think she’d any chance of staying on her feet when the multi-ton animal pounced, but this wasn’t Earth and the same physics didn’t apply.
Surviving more than a few hits, given the beast’s level difference and Raid Boss status, was another matter. At least with the distance we’d traveled, I felt pretty certain our corpses would be safely away from any possible Reapers that might have been near our previous encounter. And with our bind points now moved, dying would save us the trip to Kagsgrude too.
I began my heal as Amphicyon bounded its last few steps; however, the spell fizzled out almost immediately. I cursed myself for being so easily distracted, but in retrospect, shouldn’t have been so hard on myself. How could I have readied myself for the beast inexplicably stopping right in front of Alizia?
Alizia banged her scepter against her shield. “Your father stole picnic baskets and your mother was a low-end condominium.”
The massive beast ignored her Shout and lowered its snout to sniff the ground. A few quick sniffs of Nyytro’s corpse was all it needed. Raising its head, it let out a quick yelp and bounded away in the opposite direction.
Alizia stared at the empty space it had vacated in disbelief and
shrugged. She lifted her left arm and walked over to Olaf. “I swear I bathed this morning. Here, smell this and let me know what you think.”
Olaf scurried away. “You smell great. Trust me. I can tell from here.”
As Alizia chased after him, I let out a sigh. “Alizia, it was something on Nyytro it smelled, not you. Probably the lingering scent of the Reaper.”
“You’re probably right, but as a scientist I have to cover all possibilities.” Alizia caught Olaf and grabbed him.
Trapped against a tree, Olaf let out a strangled cry. “It wasn’t you. It wasn’t you! You smell great.”
“Let go of him,” I said. “And since when are you a scientist?”
Alizia hopped back. “Oh yeah, I hate scientists. And to think I almost ate that thing. If a Raid Boss was afraid of just the smell of it, there’s no telling what could’ve happened to me. Why, I could’ve died. I could’ve gotten an incurable disease like cancer or doofus. I could’ve even turned into a zombie, a princess, or worse yet, a zombie princess!”
“That’s great, but we should probably get out of here.”
Alizia saluted me. “Aye, aye, O Captain, My Captain. You are all business and no fun, yet I still respect you for your sound decision making, tactical brilliance, and unparalleled expertise in all things plaid. Which direction should we travel toward, O Leader of Men and Beautiful Green Women?”
I pointed to the northwest.
Alizia scratched her head. “Not to question your peerless decision making, but isn’t that where Amphicyon went?”
“Exactly. He should clear everything out.” I hoisted Nyytro’s corpse and handed it to her.
Alizia saluted and lifted Nyytro over her shoulder. Olaf did the same with Decrona.
As I predicted, we encountered no animals or monsters for the next hour as we continued along the path of crushed bushes and tree limbs. Ironically, the only real danger we faced after Amphicyon, was when we neared Fen and were almost killed by a pack of Sun players. Fortunately for us, Olaf had the wherewithal to turn on Sneak and appear behind the Elemental Mage just in time to push him and make him miss. Alizia was convinced that his fireball had ruined the top of her hair, though no one else could see anything wrong. After several profuse apologies, the group of mid-level players let us go on our way and even offered a few healing potions to her as apology. Her spirits were only brightened, however, when we reached the gate outside Fen.