Hell to Pay (Ascend Online Book 2)

by Luke Chmilenko

  Then the next thing I knew, I was falling.

  Chapter 26

  Slamming into the ground with a bone-jarring crack, I felt my sword fly from my grasp as I tumbled and bounced end over end, sliding along the hard-packed ground and throwing up ash everywhere. Flipping onto my back, I gradually slowed to a stop, pain radiating from every single muscle in my body. Coughing wildly through the billowing ash, I opened my eyes and found myself staring straight up into a sky filled with smoke and fire.

  That’s not right, I thought to myself in a daze as my head pounded violently, making any sort of meaningful thinking impossible. Closing my eyes, I covered my face with a hand, holding it in place until the pain receded, and I took stock of my injuries, making sure that I hadn’t broken anything in the fall.

  “What the hell just happened?” Sawyer’s voice rang out from nearby, followed by a coughing fit. “Am I dead?”

  “Ugh,” I heard Quinn groan in pain. “I don’t think so, but if this is how it feels to be alive…Lord, take me now…”

  “Is everyone okay?” Molly asked with a hacking cough. “Did anyone see Lazarus?”

  “I’m here,” I called out while opening my eyes slowly. Pushing myself up off the ground, I forced myself into a sitting position, realizing that we weren’t in the Phineas mansion anymore.

  Or Eberia, for that matter.

  Glancing around me, I was greeted with the sight of a desolate, rocky wasteland that stretched as far as my eye could see, being broken up by jagged breaks in the terrain. Huge mountains of darkened stone rose up in the distance, with massive columns of smoke billowing upwards from their peaks. As if witnessing the inhospitable landscape weren’t enough, I felt a wave of heat sweep over me, sending the dark ash covering the ground billowing up and into my face.

  “Where are we?” I asked while shielding my face, joining the others in their violent coughing as the pervasive ash caused my eyes and throat to burn. Waiting until the ash settled, I removed my hand from my face and turned to look for the party, involuntarily flinching at what I saw.

  A substantial chunk of the Phineas mansion lay on its side, propped up against a small ridge of stone jutting out of the ground. Looking at it carefully, I recognized it as belonging to the façade that had lined the inner courtyard, appearing as if it had been torn free by a giant hand. Debris littered the ground everywhere as I continued to turn around, spotting the countless fragments of wood, stone, and the partially shredded remains of what I could only assume was once a loveseat.

  In the midst of the destruction, I saw the battered and prone shapes of the party, slowly pulling themselves out of the wreckage.

  “I…have no idea,” Quinn replied as he shifted a pile of debris off of himself and stood unsteadily on his feet, clutching his head. “I remember the artifact exploding…and falling.”

  “I tried to stop it,” I said while standing up and looking around for my sword, thankfully seeing it a short distance away from me, sticking out of the ground. “It didn’t quite work out the way that I planned…”

  “Well…” Molly’s voice was tight as she finished extricating herself from a pile of shattered wood and stone. “Hopefully this isn’t as bad as whatever Dorian had in mind.”

  “That’s…fine for everyone else,” Sawyer grunted in pain as he pushed a large block of stone off of himself, sending the grey slab crashing to the ground with a loud thud. “But what are we going to do? This sure doesn’t look like anywhere near Eberia.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” Quinn agreed as he surveyed the area, his eyes landing on the remnants of the house. “Maybe the artifact malfunctioned and teleported us somewhere? Looks like it took most of the building with us.”

  “I wonder where Dorian and Edith ended—” I started to say, before my Perception skill suddenly flashed in my vision and pointed towards a large pile of rubble, a faint voice reaching my ears. “Hey, you hear that?”

  “Hear what?” Sawyer grumbled as he tried to brush a combination of plaster and ash from his now grey-red armor. “Something conveniently coming to kill us and put us out of our misery? Because I’m done with this vacation and I’m ready to go home.”

  “No, I hear a voice!” I pulled my sword out of the ground as I rushed forward. “Help me look!”

  That was all it took for everyone to shake the cobwebs from their heads and move to help me as I pointed to the pile of wreckage I’d seen earlier, the faint voice echoing through the air.

  “Help,” a muffled voice called out from inside the pile. “Someone, help me…”

  “Ransom?” Molly was the first to answer as she started to dig through the debris. “Is that you?”

  “Molly?!” the voice replied with surprise. “Please…I’m bleeding out…”

  Spurred on by a sense of urgency, the four of us clawed through the pile until we saw a familiar blue robe sticking out of the rubble, causing us to slow down slightly as we cleared it away from the trapped half-orc.

  “Shit!” Quinn cursed as we lifted a large plank of wood free, revealing the warlock. “He’s missing an arm!”

  Pulling the Ransom free, I noticed that the half-orc’s skin had already gone pale and grey from blood loss, with a massive bloodstain covering his chest from where he cradled a stump of his arm. Wasting no time, Molly reached out and pressed her glowing hand onto the bleeding stump, channeling her healing magic into Ransom.

  Looking over the fallen warlock for other injuries, I noticed that his missing arm was only the latest in what seemed like countless injuries and bruises covering his flesh, some clearly having been caused by whatever the artifact did to send us here, but others having lingered for a few days on end. Wherever Ransom had been for the last few days since the heist, it clearly hadn’t been a pleasant experience for him.

  They kept him hungry so he wouldn’t regenerate, I realized, looking at the fresh burns that covered Ransom’s head, having seared off the majority of his black hair. It definitely doesn’t look like he was willingly working with Edith and Dorian.

  “Molly, Lazarus, thank God it’s you two,” Ransom sighed with relief as Molly finished her healing efforts, color returning to the half-orc’s face, his wounds and bruises fading as if they had never existed.

  “What happened, Ransom?” I asked the warlock, not knowing what else to say. All this time, we had assumed that he had been complicit in both Dorian’s and Edith’s plans. The only indication that he wasn’t a willing participant had been his ragged appearance and how badly he had fought Edith when she dragged him to the ritual circle. “What did Dorian and Edith do?!”

  “What?” Ransom looked at me with confusion, his eyes shifting to look past me and towards the burning sky above us. Staring upwards, Ransom’s expression froze, before slowly becoming one of terror. “Oh God, we got pulled through. You didn’t destroy it.”

  “Pulled through?” Molly echoed, fear coloring her voice. “Pulled through to where?”

  “Avernus,” Ransom answered as he forced himself up into a sitting position, cradling the stump of his arm against his bloodstained robes. Contrary to the weakened half-orc that we had pulled free of the rubble, Ransom had made a rapid recovery with the aid of Molly’s healing. “One of the planes of Hell.”

  “We’re in Hell?!” I shouted, feeling a sense of dread come over me as everyone in the party cried out in surprise, each of us trying to process what the half-orc had said.

  “I tried to take the artifact from her after you fell, Lazarus,” Ransom said, completely ignoring all of our shock, using his one hand to push himself off the ground, and he began looking around as if trying to find something in the distance. “But the second that you touched it…it activated, and both Edith and I were…twisted. Anyway, none of that matters right now, we have to find—”

  “What are you talking about, Ransom?” I interrupted the warlock rudely, the man’s head snapping back to look at me.

  “I’m talking about the Arcaneum,” Ransom stated with a frown,
completely taken aback by my response. “When we tried to keep Edith from the artifact.”

  I blinked blankly at the half-orc as he stared at me with a puzzled expression. “I don’t remember anything that happened in the Arcaneum, Ransom.”

  “What?” Ransom glanced over at Molly in disbelief before turning his eyes back on me and, with a voice tinged with anger, replying, “Come on, Lazarus! Be serious here! This isn’t the time to be screwing around!”

  “I am being serious here, Ransom,” I spat back at the warlock, matching his anger. “Something in the Arcaneum caused the game to completely block out my memory. Something that you or Edith did to me.”

  “You’re bullshitting me!” Ransom snapped. “The game can’t do that!”

  “Do you really think I would do that?” I waved my hand at the surrounding landscape. “Just stand here in the middle of Hell and tell lies?”

  Ransom opened his mouth, ready to retort, but paused as my words finally sunk in. “But that’s…that’s…completely unethical, though! How was that ever approved?!”

  “I honestly don’t know, Ransom, and given our situation I’m past the point of caring,” I told the man, feeling all the frustration that had built up over the day begin to reach a boiling point. “All I know is that yesterday, I woke up in an Undertaker torture chamber with them trying to cut a pound of flesh from me, with Fairfax’s body an arm’s length away.”

  “Oh.” Ransom looked at me with sudden understanding. “Lazarus, Molly, I’m sorry! I swear I didn’t have anything to do with that!”

  “That’s easy to say without proof,” Molly replied, her voice taking on a hard tone. “Do you have any idea what Dorian and Edith have done to Eberia in the last day?”

  “No, I don’t,” Ransom admitted, while holding up his one remaining hand. “But whatever they’ve done so far, it pales in comparison to what they’re planning to do next. We need to find them as fast as possible and hope that it’s not too late.”

  “Too late for what?” Quinn asked derisively. “Last time I checked, we’re trapped in the middle of Hell. This is literally what my grandmother has been warning me about my entire life. How can anything be worse than this?”

  “Not worse for us, but for Eberia,” Ransom explained as he took a deep sigh, glancing between each of us before continuing. “Dorian and Edith are both working with The Holy Ascendancy of Eligos.”

  “They’re what?!” Molly hissed as she took half a step towards Ransom. “How?! Why?!”

  “I don’t know,” Ransom answered, flinching back a step from Molly’s sudden movement. “Despite all that Dorian has done, he’s still a pawn to someone else. You all saw that strange ghost-man, right?”

  “Yeah,” I replied slowly, still trying to wrap my mind around everything that Ransom had just said. “Who was he?”

  “I don’t know,” Ransom said with a shake of his head. “But from what I could tell, he’s the one responsible for setting all of this in motion. While I was being kept prisoner, I overheard him talking with Dorian and Edith constantly. Their goal was to use the artifact to open a portal into Avernus and to allow the Ascendancy into Eberia.”

  “Allow them into Eberia?” Sawyer repeated with a confused expression on his face before something clicked behind his eyes. “Shit! You mean they’re going to invade the city?!”

  “That was their plan.” Ransom nodded emphatically at the warrior. “I don’t know how, but apparently, the Ascendancy sent an army into Avernus, using it as a shortcut so they wouldn’t have to fight their way past Coldscar and The Bulwark; if they make it to the portal, they’ll be inside the city and past all of our defenses.”

  “But I thought we were in the middle of—” Sawyer cut in, before his face went pale. “Oh fuck, that’s why the military left!”

  “The talks have broken down,” Molly whispered in sudden realization, her eyes going wide. “They’re just stalling.”

  “The military did what?!” Ransom looked at Sawyer and then Molly in shock.

  “They were sent to Coldscar,” I replied, taking my best guess at their most probable destination. “They just left this morning without any warning at all.”

  “Oh damn.” Ransom ran his hand across his now partially bald head, only a few singed hairs remaining. “This is bad.”

  “No shit,” Sawyer snorted. “What are we going to do?”

  “We have to try and find the portal,” Ransom said as he started to walk forward unsteadily, moving away from the pile of debris that we had pulled him from. Despite being healed, it was clear that Ransom was exhausted, the last few days having taken a brutal toll on him. What he needed, what all of us needed, was a long night of sleep and rest.

  But I had a feeling that just wasn’t going to happen anytime soon.

  “The only thing we have going for us right now is that Lazarus managed to damage the artifact pretty badly and push it out of alignment,” Ransom stated as he led us away from all of the wreckage that had come through with us. “Hopefully we can take advantage of that.”

  “How is that a good thing?” I asked the warlock, waving at the debris as we walked past it. “If I had just let the portal open, we would have had a chance to get to the artifact without being pulled into Hell. As it is, I’m pretty sure that most of the mansion was destroyed because of what I did.”

  “No, we wouldn’t have,” Ransom replied, shaking his head at me. “We would have been overrun by the Ascendancy the moment it opened.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, looking at the warlock and raising an eyebrow.

  “Do you know why Dorian went through all the trouble to open the portal in the middle of the House Phineas courtyard?” Ransom countered, waving my question off.

  “I thought he was just killing off the nobles, like he did to the Crawridge and Wynbrandt heirs earlier in the day,” I replied with a shrug.

  “He what?” Ransom eyes bulged from his head before he caught himself, shaking his head violently from side to side. “You know what, never mind, tell me later if we survive all of this.

  “The reason why Dorian fought his way into the House Phineas Estate was because he wanted to open the portal at a very specific place in Avernus, but in order to do that, he had to be at specific place in the Real World where both Avernus and it matched up,” Ransom explained, pausing for a moment, thinking over his choice of words. “Uh, the Real Game-World, not the Real Earth-World. You know what I mean, right?”

  “I’m following.” I nodded at the warlock, understanding the confusion. It was already hard enough to keep Reality and the game separate; adding more planes of existence within the game world wasn’t going to make things any easier.

  “So, if you hadn’t managed to damage the artifact and caused it to short-circuit, it would have opened right where the Ascendant army was waiting for it,” Ransom told me, miming a slicing motion with his hand. “And they would have started coming through almost immediately.”

  “Oh,” I replied with a hard swallow, realizing just how lucky we had been. Had I been a few seconds slower, Eberia would have been invaded and occupied before it even realized it was at war.

  “But since you did damage and knock the artifact out of place, the portal opened off target, and it might buy us enough time to find out where the portal ended up before the Ascendancy army can get moving and go through it.”

  “Just how off target are we talking about?” Quinn asked from behind us with a worried voice. “Because walking blindly through Hell searching for a portal that may or may not be there isn’t high on my to-do list.”

  “I have no idea, a few kilometers, maybe?” Ransom replied with a shrug. “I’m not exactly an expert at this, I’m just repeating what I heard Dorian and Edith say.”

  “Do you have any idea why Dorian chose to open the portal in the Phineas mansion?” Molly asked as we slowly picked our way through the wreckage that littered the ground around us. “Even if he had to be in a specific spot that aligned with the…Rea
l World, he risked everything just to fight into the estate. It would have made better sense to do it somewhere safer and in secret.”

  “That was the original plan,” Ransom said with a shake of his head. “From what I understand, Dorian was planning to open the portal where he was keeping me, in a huge warehouse of some sort.

  “It wasn’t supposed to be today, though,” Ransom continued. “Dorian was planning to wait a few more days for better weather before opening it and once the Ascendancy reached where they were supposed to be, relative to where the two planes overlapped.”

  “But instead, we forced Dorian’s hand and he had to open the portal somewhere else, somewhere closer to where the Ascendancy was now,” I said with anger. “We forced him into a corner where he had to attack House Phineas in order to speed up his plans. We just as well killed—”

  “Lazarus! We had no way of knowing what his plans were!” Molly cut in sharply before I could start spiraling. “We were in ‘react’ mode the entire time. There is literally nothing we could have done differently.”

  “I know that, but I can’t help but feel responsible,” I growled in frustration while rubbing my head. “If I hadn’t lost my memory…none of this would have happened.”

  “And if that happened, then I would have been left alone wondering why the three of you abandoned me,” Molly countered. “Because then you would have likely been taken prisoner along with Ransom and I wouldn’t have seen you for days.”

  “I would have escaped—” I started to retort before Sawyer’s hand slapped me on the shoulder hard, catching my attention.

  “Hey, everyone, remember that army that Ransom just mentioned?” Sawyer said, his voice taking on a nervous tone as he pointed ahead of us. “Well, it’s right over there, and it looks like it’s coming this way.”

  Chapter 27

  Sawyer’s words caused all of us to flinch in panic as we instinctively followed his hand past the remnants of the Phineas mansion and towards the horizon where a shambling blob slowly moved in the distance. Rushing forward, the five of us ran past the wreckage of the building and the ridge that it was leaning against, our feet crunching on broken glass and shattered stone.