There was a girlish scream from behind us. Drawing a deep breath, I pushed myself up, searching for my spear. You could drop weapons in Archemi, and I saw the Alpha Rod highlighted by my HUD about twenty feet away, close to where Rin and Suri fought a crowd of shambling undead – thirty or more of them. Cutthroat was hanging back because of the mana in the air, barking fearful cries of warning. The shuffling corpses – some still bleeding, some missing limbs - pulsed with magical light. Shards of mana crystal had erupted from their skin and hands, like claws made of glass and frozen blood.
Karalti tottered up to her feet, panting. She and I were both in the deep red: 280/949 HP for her, 81/738 for me.
“Use Bio on those zombies,” I panted, and broke off at a jog to retrieve my weapon.
Karalti concentrated, and the seams of opalescent material between her scales went from multicolored to a brilliant blue. “250 HP… no MP. They’re weak against Fire and immune to Darkness.”
“Got any fire in you?”
“I think so.”
I scooped my spear off the ground and spun it around before angling it down along my arm. The freshly healed bones ached, but they were functional. “Blast ‘em.”
The dragon shook her head and roared in challenge as she broke into a limping run, her damaged wings held in against her sides. She thrust her jaws forward, and her throat swelled just before blinding white liquid fire burst from her mouth. Karalti’s Ghost Fire ability had a narrower stream than the typical yellow flamethrower-blast of other dragons I’d seen, but she could wield it like a whip, lashing the stream up, down, or to the sides.
The gout of flame lanced past Rin and struck the zombie that had broken past the defensive wall of her turrets. It made a weird whistling sound as the flames caught it, and its skin caught like it had been dipped in gasoline. Rin stumbled back away from it – she was clutching a matched pair of daggers in her hands, holding them up to shield her face.
[Karalti used a fire attack! It’s super effective!]
[You deal 523 damage to Mana Zombie!]
[Mana Zombies use Entrap! Suri is Entangled!]
Suri had hacked her way through a hoard of zombies and was stuck inside of a twenty-strong mob. They had gathered around her in a knot of moaning, clawing bodies, forcing her to strike them away with her feet and the hilt of her sword. Unlike me, Suri didn’t seem to have any real Push attacks. Her HP ring was draining, one Bleeding attack at a time.
“Protect Rin! I’m going to break open the pack for Suri!” I grit my teeth and charged.
I burned ten precious hit points to Dash in, because it gave me the boost of speed I needed to chain Blood Sprint and Blood Storm – a sacrifice that paid off as I slammed into the mobs and blasted them back. Five targets on a good hit meant 50 HP in the tank. They were immune to Darkness, so I swung the polearm around, triggering Whirlwind Butcher during the Sprint cooldown. That maneuver threw enemies like skittles and blasted the mob to pieces, killing the zombies Suri had already injured.
With room to move, Suri was once more in her element. With a roar, she slashed once, twice, and then channeled a burst of boiling red energy into a downward blow that cut a zombie in half and cracked the pavement under the blade of her sword. She pulled it free and whirled on me, teeth bared.
“What the fuck are you doing here?! You have barely any HP and no fucking pots!” She snarled, belting another zombie that lurched toward her.
“Same thing you were doing when you waded into a boss fight with one arm and no bra,” I snapped back. A trio of zombies ran at me, slashing with their crystalline claws. I dodged on reflex, Jumping back into the air, then reversing course to rain down Obscuring Veil on them. The Dark energy fell like freezing needles – they were immune to the Blindness debuff and the bonus damage, but they still took the normal damage from the physical strike as I came down.
“Mass them up!” Suri called to me. “I can hit 8 at a time with Bull Rush!”
“Why didn’t you use that before!?” I bounced back and dodged the clumsy zombie swipes. Suri tanked the blows, but they had a hard time hitting me. Compared to them and Suri, I was prancing around like Tinkerbell.
“I did! They have a special entrapment ability when there’s more than six!”
I led the zombies into a waltz, dashing to the side – ten more HP gone – then Sprinting into them again as soon as the timer vanished. I only hit three with the combo, restoring a tiny sliver of HP, but had to Dash again to avoid getting stuck in the crowd. Once they were rounded up and shambling in a group, Suri dropped the sword, pulled her axes, and ran at them from behind. Crimson light coiled and snapped into an energy shield that she used like a battering ram to plow through the rank. This ability had Knockdown, and it floored eight zombies to the pavement and split the mob. Whirlwind Butcher took out my side; her ax tornado took out the others.
[You have defeated 28 Mana Zombies!]
[You gain 337 EXP!]
Soldiers were pouring out of the streets that fed into the main plaza, with several hookwings. Backup – thank fuck. I sagged down to one knee, exhausted. Suri ran back toward Rin, and I turned to see Karalti spending the last of her fire on the few remaining zombies attacking her and Rin. Mutated victims of the bombing were scattered around them in a ring, their chests and heads plugged with arrows. And Rin was backing away, terrified.
“Run!” She screamed, just before she broke into a sprint away from the center of the plaza.
“What?” Confused, I looked back at the approaching soldiers and waved, then forward again, freezing as five guards broke rank and bodily tackled Rin to the ground. “Hey! Wait–”
Suri and Karalti were as startled as I was as at least fifty guards swarmed us. I was knocked down from behind, struggling as soldiers piled onto me. My head was forced down; my spear was torn from my hands, and they were pushed back behind me. “Wait! We’re working for the Volod!”
“We know who you are,” one of the guards retorted.
“You want a piece of me, you cunts!? Here it is!” Suri roared.
[Suri uses Berserk! Suri loses control!]
“Hector!” Karalti cried. The hookwings were encircling her, and she was out of Ghost Fire and low on HP.
“Get out of here! Karalti! Get away!” I shouted, struggling against the crush overhead. It was getting hard to breathe, and I writhed and bucked to no avail as a pair of manacles were clamped around my wrists.
Flexing her injured wings in a panic, Karalti tried to take to the air, but was taken down by nets and bolos flung out by the cavalry. The weights dragged her back down, honking with pain and terror. Someone ran up with chains that crawled with magical sigils and snapped them around her ankles. She blasted someone with the last of her Ghost Fire.
“Karalti!” I screamed in real fear now, thrashing on the ground.
Suri was next: she fought like a demon, felling soldiers left and right, but there were just too many of them. I lost sight of her as the platoon crowded forward.
“You’re under arrest for aiding and abetting a terrorist and conspiring against the Crown of Vlachia!” A woman’s hard voice pierced the fugue of cursing and screaming. “Stop resisting, or you will be made to comply.”
“Fuck you! You want it? You fucking take it!” I bellowed back. “Suri! Rin! Karal-”
The boot to the back of my head drove my nose into the pavement, and I didn’t even get to say her name one last time.
Chapter 39
Thunk. Thud. Thunk. Thud.
The world rumbled and swayed and grunted as I faded into consciousness. My head was pounding, my pulse hammering in my temples and fingers. My throat was dry and tight.
“Uhhgggh... fuck.” I shifted around on what felt like blankets, itchy and coarse against my bare skin. I tried to push myself up on my hands, but as I did, the damp wooden floor beneath me lurched. I dropped back down with a groan.
Thunk. Thud. Thunk.
The rumbling I heard was the sound of wagon wheels
bucking over rough stone. We were moving steeply uphill. I cracked my eyes open and stared up at the iron-reinforced ceiling. I was naked, alone, and being taken somewhere in a prison wagon - great. There was nothing good about this. I needed to move. I needed to find Karalti.
I gritted my teeth, and rolled onto the side that hurt less. “Karalti? Where are you, Tidbit?”
[You are Incarcerated by the City Guard! Private messages are currently disabled!]
Trying to speak to her caused an odd sensation: a sense that my words hit an invisible barrier between her and I, as if I - or Karalti - was trapped inside a glass bubble.
“Ugh.” I spat, trying to clear my mouth of the dirt and grit I’d picked up from rolling around on the ground. “This fucking game.”
Slowly, I sat up and took stock of my predicament. The compartment I was in was maybe half again as long as I was tall, and it reeked of old sweat, piss, and terror. There was a rusty grate in the floor in the far left corner, and a small barred window about five feet off the ground on the wall to my right. I had 20 HP left - no more broken bones, thankfully - but I was laboring under no fewer than 6 debuffs: Hunger, Thirst, Chained, Incarcerated, Exhausted, and the fucking Pee Meter. I was also half-naked. They’d left my pants on and stripped everything else. Armor, weapons, items, all gone. And so were Karalti, Suri, and Rin.
I got to my feet with some effort, weighed down by heavy chains. Keeping balance with the wall, I shuffled over and tested the crusty grate, looking for a weakness. The bars were unfortunately sturdy. Resigned, I whipped out Hector Jnr and got busy fixing Archemi’s most awkward debuff, and was about halfway done when someone knocked on the wall where I was resting my other hand.
You know what happens when someone lets go of a firehose while the water’s on full blast? Yeah. “Fucking shit-tits!”
“You’re a real poet, aren’t ya?” Suri’s voice croaked from the other side of the wall. “You should’ve become a bard.”
“Jesus Christ! I just pissed all over my... my everything.” Scowling, I shook my hand.
“Stop telling me about your golden showers and go look out the window, eagle eyes. Tell me if I’m seeing what I think I’m seeing up on the wall of Vulkan Keep.”
I kind of awkwardly wiped everything, then straightened up and went back to the window, bending down to look out. We were on the hairpin road leading up to the castle, just about to turn the bend that led into the gatehouse. When I looked up at the portcullis, my blood turned to ice.
Kirov hung limp along a long metal stake mounted on the wall like a flagpole. The sharp end jutted out from his mouth. But even worse were the bodies mounted alongside him: Stefin the Jeweller, his eyes still bugged from terror and agony, two women, and three children. All staked, and left out for the crows.
I squeezed the bars until my knuckles groaned, clenching and unclenching my jaw. “I see Andrik’s fucking death sentence, is what I see.”
“That’s what I figured.” Suri sounded as exhausted as I felt. “Volods, Sultirs, Emperors… royals are all the fuckin’ same. He’s probably going to stake us, too. If I end up back in Al-Asad-”
“Don’t say that.” I drew a furious shuddering breath, and pushed back from the window to pace back and forth inside the narrow space. “I won’t let them send you back.”
“You can’t. I’ve already tried breaking the window and the piss grate on my side. No luck, and I’m up to 42 Strength after my last level. So what I was gonna say was... if I end up in Al-Asad, don’t give up on me. I’ll find a way out again, somehow. I dunno. Maybe it’ll be easier to break out now that these Architects are mostly out of the way.”
“I won’t give up on you, and I won’t give up on Karalti.” I rolled my shoulders, balled and unballed my fists, and wracked my brains for a solution as we turned and climbed the final hill toward the keep. “If I have to bust through the walls like the fucking Kool Aid Man, I will. These motherfuckers don’t know who they’re dealing with.”
“The Kool Aid what?”
“The Kool Aid Man. You know. He’s this giant jug full of juice that breaks through walls and screams ‘OHHH YEAAAH!’.”
“Right. Think you could start by breaking through the walls of this prison wagon, then?”
I took a moment to compose my best nerd voice. “Weell, ackthully, there’s more to life than just muthcles? And I hypothesize we’re going to have to use our brains for thith dilemma?”
“Christ.” I was pretty sure I could hear Suri’s eyes rolling around and around in her head, like the wagon wheels. “How are you managing to take the piss when we’re about to die?”
“I was taking the piss when I was so rudely interrupted, young lady.”
She groaned. “If you keep talking about your fetish, I’m gonna start telling you all about my trip to the grate.”
I pressed up against the wall. “I’m just trying to warm up before King Ramrod gets busy with those stakes.”
Suri barked a short, bitter laugh.
“Biznasck! Shut up in there!” A guard pulled up beside my window on his hookwing, banging his spear against the bars before riding off ahead.
“You shut up.” I gave him the finger, but he didn’t see it. “Asshole.”
In all honesty, I had no idea what to do - other than joke around to stop myself from going insane with anxiety and rage. Death by stake was not exactly my idea of a fun time, but I couldn’t believe an NPC was capable of inflicting that kind of torture on players. There had to be some real-world law against that, something that would prevent it from happening. We were just going to have to wing it once we were inside the castle, and hope that one of us could think of something.
The wagon stopped thunking as we rumbled over the drawbridge, and then smoothed out even more once we were headed through the grand gates leading into Vulkan Keep proper. Guards were pacing by the wagon on both sides now, so I hung by the wall and ground my teeth, waiting for the right opportunity. I’d escaped imprisonment twice in Archemi already. I was sure I could do it again.
We didn’t go inside a building: we went underground, moving past the hookwing stables to somewhere deeper under the Keep. When the wagons stopped, I heard Suri shuffle around in her nest of chains, moving away from the back wall toward her cell entry point.
“Stop it! Let me go!” A high, girlish voice cried out from up the line. Rin.
“You there - help the mages with that dragon. It won’t carry itself!” A thickly accented voice demanded of the other guards. “You - put the disruptor to that silverskin’s head. If she does not comply, you stun her like a cow.”
Fuck. I had no idea what a ‘disruptor’ was, but it sounded like magictech.
Suri was next out. She launched herself at the guards with a shout, cursing in three different languages as she fought. A mostly-naked Berserker was still a Berserker, and I tensed with excitement as one guard gargled and fell while others shouted in alarm. But once again, there were too many of them, and not enough of us. Suri was bought to ground, and I clenched my jaws together at the sound of her being beaten into silence.
Twenty nearly-silent minutes passed before a heavy fist thumped against my door. “You! Stand facing the back wall with your hands up. If you do not comply, then the lives of your women and your dragon are forfeit.”
I frowned. There was a good chance they were forfeit anyway, but I remembered the words that Karalti’s mother had said to me not long ago. “Herald… you are a creature of shadow. Be subtle and be clever.”
I drew a deep breath, turned around, and put my hands up.
A key turned inside a heavy lock, and then the door opened out, admitting two guards. They took me by the elbows, and I let them walk me out - not resisting, but not doing anything to help them, either. We were in a loading-dock like area that had a low stone platform and multiple doors leading further underground. There was no sign of Rin or Suri - save for Suri’s blood on the ground. The Captain gave a terse nod when he saw me, then spun on his he
el and clanked his way toward one of the doors, unlocking it ahead of us.
The guards frogmarched me through a series of dimly lit tunnels - winding tunnels with deep S-curves and defensible murder holes. Several steel doors and a flight of stairs later, I found myself entering through a secret door into the Great Hall, where Volod Andrik Corvinus the Third sat in his throne, contemplating a huge magical circle that had been drawn straight onto the flagstones. Karalti was in the middle of it, wrapped up like a tamale in layers of blankets and chains. When she saw me, she whimpered - but it was clear she couldn’t move.
I kept the insults and angry words locked down deep inside as I was taken around Karalti to join Rin and Suri, who had been made to kneel in front of the staged area that contained the Corvinus Throne. There were other people here besides the Volod, flanking Andrik to either side: to his left was Garen, the Commander of the Kingsguard, who was dressed in full black dragon plate armor. He had his hands wrapped around the hilt of his greatsword, the point resting on the floor, and was now flagged as a combatant. He had a violet HP ring with a skull beside it, as did the other five Kingsguard who ranged around the throne.
To Andrik’s right was the Voivode, Janos Lanz, and a well-muscled, olive-skinned man with piercing green eyes I didn’t recognize. He was old enough to have gray streaks in his curling hair, and was wearing robes and an apron similar to the ornate clothing of Forgemaster Toth. I could guess this was his replacement.
“You know, I really would like to be wrong about foreigners for once in my life.” Andrik said. He sat with one ankle crossed over his other knee. He was dressed in his scorched armor, his ruby crown, and had a jeweled longsword resting over his lap. “I hired you in good faith. I offered you hospitality in my castle-”
“Yeah. You did. And you just broke hospitality,” I snapped back.
The guard on my right slapped me over the back of the head. “Silence.”
Trial by Fire: A LitRPG Dragonrider Adventure (Archemi Online Chronicles Book 2) Page 34