“Fire!” Anwi shouted as she used Warrior’s Charge. Her body blasted forward and visions of Jack flashed through my mind as she drove her shoulder into the beast’s chest. The stun went off, freezing the frenzied animal in its place like some hideous sculpture of a werewolf. “Now, Curafin!”
But Curafin didn’t have his sword out. He’d just healed me and quickly tried to switch to his sword, but just as he got it in his hand and rushed in to attack, the stun wore off.
The beast howled and backhanded him in the face, dealing absolutely massive damage that brought him well below half health. He followed up for a second swing, but Anwi dashed in and blocked the blow with her blade.
I rolled forward and came up under the Blood Beast’s chest and activated Eviscerate. This time, the damage was better, scoring a critical hit on the beast’s vulnerable belly.
The sick creature slipped and skittered away from us and let out an ear piercing roar. I thought it was going to do another one of its jaw attacks, and dodged back in anticipation, but this time, something even more unexpected happened.
With a heinous vomiting sound, the Blood Beast spit a putrid stream of gut colored sputum at the entire party. The spray was so wide it was impossible to get out of the way. It rained down on all of us like acid, applying a debuff that steadily began eating away at our health.
My Bloodied Wound debuff had barely just expired, and I was already low as it was. Quickly, I used my Health Kit to get myself above half, but the way things were going, we were all going to be in big trouble.
Anwi charged in again and dealt a devastating blow with her giant sword. The beast howled and clawed at her, but I watched as she leapt into the air, planted a steel covered foot on the creature’s head and leapt over him in a graceful arc that seemed impossible with all the plate mail she was wearing.
The Blood Beast spun around as she soared, but Anwi brought her sword down and used some kind of special ability that caused flames to sprout from the metal, and slashed down on the beast’s skull. The damage was good, bringing the horrible dog well below half. I felt a healing spell hit me and took the opening to draw my bow.
I fired a Scatter Shot at the beast’s feet. It went off, scattering the countless deadly fragments across the stone, sending them bouncing back into its belly, chipping away steadily with damage as I began pelting it with arrows as fast as I could fire.
Curafin re-cast Menace, and leapt into action with his sword, opening with Warrior’s Charge. He used the speed to plunge his flaming sword into the beast’s haunches, causing it to cry out in pain and spin around to face him. He was met with a Cleave and Broad Strike as I fired more arrows and Sabotenda drove his halberd into the beast’s face.
His health was dropping and I watched as Anwi slashed horizontally, cutting across the monster’s tail. I fired another Scatter Shot as it came off cooldown, dropping the Blood Beast below 25%, but something flashed in the corner of my vision and I realized my health was approaching critical as the monster’s debuff continued to chew away at my HP.
“Curafin!” I shouted, realizing how low he was too. “Heals, heals!”
Curafin leapt back and checked his health and gasped. Quickly, he swapped to his Cleric’s Staff and used self heal, restoring himself to just above half. Then, he turned to Sabotenda, who was lower than everyone else, and cast. He hit Anwi with the next one, but I knew there was no time to wait for him to get to me. I used another charge from my Health Kit and got above half, but the debuff was still there.
I fired again, but swapped to my daggers as the beast spun around to face Anwi. I activated Rush, then slammed into him with everything I had using Ambush. The daggers chirped as a critical hit cleaved off more of his health and plunged him into critical.
“Now!” I cried out, unleashing with everything I had.
My health was plunging, and in the corner of my eye, I could see Curafin aiming his staff at me. I only had seconds before the beast’s debuff melted me and I was on my way back to Cara.
The Blood Beast spun around in a panic, slicing through the air with its massive claws. The blow hit me just as Curafin’s heal spell landed. The two completely cancelled each other out and I watched as my health ticked back down to critical.
Anwi cried out and I watched as she raised her sword high in the air and activated the Execute ability. Her blade flashed and she brought it down against the beast’s back in a devastating blow that finished it off.
The Blood Beast’s cry rang out through the city as it collapsed to the ground and burst into smoke.
A satisfying sound chimed from all of us as the beast’s debuff left us, and I fell to my knees and glanced at my health bar: 5 HP remaining.
“Hurry up and heal me, Curafin,” I groaned. “Before I have a heart attack.”
53
The Old Graveyard
“I got you, boss,” he chuckled, hitting me with the most satisfying heal spell of my Carrethen career. It didn’t quite fill my bar, but it was enough to calm my nerves, at least for a moment. Everyone used Health Kits and Curafin topped us all off and we took a moment to get our wits about us after the frantic battle with the Blood Beast.
“Well, we avoided being bitten,” Sabotenda said with pride. “But you could have warned us about that puke attack, Anwi.”
“It is something I have not seen before,” she replied. “Jahannan is unpredictable.”
“Right,” he smirked, “Full of surprises.”
“Hey, what’s this?” Curafin asked, picking up something from the Blood Beast’s loot pile. He held up his hand, and in between his thumb and index finger was a small round crystal the color of blood.
“I dunno,” I said, walking up to him. “What is it?”
He inspected it and read the item description aloud. “Hardened Bloodstone. A small red stone found in Jahannan, the City of Ash. It is said by many that blood is Jahannan’s most valued commodity.”
Everyone shrugged in unison—everyone but Anwi, who stood stoically with her hands on the hilt of her sword.
“Beats me,” I said, looting a small number of Pareals from the ground. “Maybe a quest item?”
“Or a mat,” Sabotenda suggested. “Maybe Gehman can use it for something.”
“Should I keep it?” Curafin asked.
“Might as well,” I replied. “No reason not to. Not like it weighs anything, right?”
“Good point,” he said, putting the stone into his inventory.
“Where now?” I asked Anwi.
“We follow the canal to the docks,” she replied. “Then to the Old Graveyard.”
“Great,” Sabotenda groaned. “Skeletons.”
“No,” Anwi corrected him as we walked, keeping the canal on our left. “Something far worse than skeletons. Bloodletters.”
“What are those?” I asked.
“You will see,” was her only reply.
We continued on in silence, but it wasn’t long before I noticed something moving in the water out of the corner of my eye. I glanced over to the canal and saw a small empty rowboat drifting slowly with the current. It looked like it was on the verge of crumbling into pieces.
Jahannan felt as though we’d stumbled into something real—a city never designed by developers, but built organically by the creatures and people in the game, and that everything we were seeing was part of the city’s history.
We came upon the overpass of a low bridge that led across the water to our left, with a small group of Diseased Villagers beneath it, huddled around a torch that burned on a small pile of hay. Having just dispatched the Blood Beast, the group was nothing to us, and we cut them down quickly and moved on.
The canal came to an intersection as four more fingers of water all met together at a group of docks where countless empty rowboats, like the one that had passed us, were all slammed into one another, overflowing out of the water and onto the land. A small boathouse sat crouched in the shadows of a taller stone building that loomed over it like
a giant, its door smashed off its hinges from the outside.
“Inside is the Boat Master,” Anwi said, circling toward the docks and giving the shack a wide berth. “He is difficult and not worth fighting. We will avoid him for now.”
“Sounds good to me,” Sabotenda replied as we quickly moved past the docks as the boats continued to pile up on the shore behind us. Ahead of us, the canals merged into one single stream, smaller than before, which led into a dark tunnel that appeared to slope down.
“Are we going down there?” I asked Anwi, pointing. She shook her head and changed course to the high wall on our right.
“No. We go up.”
Then I saw where she was headed. A rusty ladder hung from above and Anwi began to climb. I let Sabotenda and Curafin go ahead of me, taking up the rear as we made our way back up to street level.
The ash was even thicker as we reached a wide street of Central Jahannan that stretched out on either side of us. To the left was a massive cathedral with countless double doors and flickering white torches on its walls, and to our right was a town square with a monument at its center. I didn’t have much time to look, but it appeared to be some kind of insect, fat and bulbous with a thick shell on its back. Around it were countless Diseased Villagers on their hands and knees, bowing and praying to it as though it were a god.
“What the Hell is—?”
“This way,” Anwi interrupted, turning left and taking the bridge across the canal towards the cathedral. As we crossed I glanced over the edge to my right, where the water spilled over an enormous cliff and vanished into a thick mist below.
“What’s down there?” I asked Anwi.
“The Lower City,” she replied. “Hectar is not down there.”
Something down there grunted, low and guttural, like a giant boar, and I shook my head and turned away. Jahannan was twisted enough as it was, and thinking about what horrors might lay beneath the city wasn’t anything I wanted to do.
Anwi was headed towards the cathedral, its enormous flight of stone steps leading up to a series of double wooden doors that were all shut except one. Two large carts lay unused on either side of the steps, barrels toppling out of one and a pile of old rotten hay in the other.
“Are we going in there?” Sabotenda asked, pointing to the enormous church. It really was massive, at least four times the size of the Church of the Dark Moon, with rows and rows of fogged windows and ornate bronze metal work just beneath the roof that had long since turned green.
“Do not worry,” Anwi replied. “We will not be staying long.”
The city of Jahannan loomed over us wherever we went, its tall towers stretching high into the sky, its maze of high bridges linking buildings together in ways that seemed never intended. The city seemed to breathe, like an organism just waiting to swallow us up. It was almost easy to forget that the outside world existed as the sprawl seemed to stretch on forever with no end in sight.
We took the steps to the double doors and Anwi pressed quickly inside. We entered through a cramped foyer with a low ceiling that opened into the most enormous hall I’d ever seen. It must have reached up the entire height of the cathedral. Every pillar was adorned with gold that reflected the shimmering rows of candles that lined the aisles through the pews.
More Diseased Villagers sat in prayer, their hands clutched together in front of their faces, muttering to themselves, oblivious to us as we made our way up the central aisle towards the altar.
“Not another Cleric I hope,” I whispered to Anwi.
“No,” she replied simply.
She’d been here before, and as much as I was sketched out by the place, I couldn’t help but think about her coming through the city alone on her quest to find Hectar—no guide, nothing but her sword to keep her company or show her the way.
Our footsteps echoed through the great chamber as we approached the altar. I glanced around for any other signs of danger but saw none. The Villagers and Pilgrims were all there was, and they were too busy praying to pay us any attention.
Anwi reached the altar first and circled around to its back side. It was decorated in gold, almost like a casket, rising up with a gentle slope as though it had grown out of the very stone of the church itself. She pressed something, and a deep snapping sound came from beneath us. Sabotenda leapt back.
“What the Hell was that!?” he asked, halberd at the ready.
“Do not fear,” Anwi said as the altar shuddered, then slid slowly to the side to reveal a set of crumbling stone steps leading down into the darkness. “For this is our path.”
I glanced behind us at the pews to make sure the Pilgrims and Villagers had not stirred from their prayer, but they seemed content on ignoring us, and that was fine with me. Anwi took the first steps down into the gaping chasm revealed beneath the altar, and the rest of us followed slowly after her.
It was nearly impossible to see as we made our way, the only light coming from the end of the passage, which seemed to be quite far away. A few steps down, I heard the sound of stone grating on stone and looked back as the altar began to slide back into place.
“Oh, great…” I groaned as it sealed shut behind us. “Guess we’re not going back now.”
“There is no reason to,” Anwi replied.
“This gal’s a bit…cold, don’t you think?” Sabotenda whispered beside me.
“Give her a break,” I whispered back. “She’s helping us.”
“I know she is,” he replied. “That doesn’t make her any less cold.”
The light at the end of the tunnel slowly began to expand as we continued down the steps, and it wasn’t long until the end was in sight. A stone archway, and beyond it, large stone cobblestones covered in fallen leaves and ash.
We stepped through the door and found ourselves on a raised terrace beneath a tall tree overlooking a graveyard. The ground was swollen and humped like massive pustules ready to burst, and the earth was brimming with headstones, packed together so tightly that they were touching in most places. How many dead could possibly be buried in one place?
Anwi crossed her arms and gazed out over the deathly place. “Welcome to the Old Graveyard.”
54
Trewdor
Gravestones stretched out beneath us, covered in a thick red mist that clung to the ground like a single living organism, feasting on the flesh of the rotted corpses buried just beneath the dirt.
Several trees were fighting for life, their roots being forced from the ground by stone and bone, their leaves falling as the ash continued to fall from above like a thick winter snow.
The buildings of Jahannan rose up on all sides like retaining walls, closing us into the graveyard, the only visible means of escape being the tunnel we’d just taken that had sealed up behind us.
“This place gives me the creeps,” Curafin remarked as we stepped up to a low wrought iron fence at the edge of the terrace and gazed out over the stones that marked the dead. “I mean—I know it’s all just for show, but I still can’t help but think—what would it be like to be buried in a place like this?”
“You wouldn’t know the difference,” Anwi replied. “For you would be dead.”
I let out a soft laugh at Anwi’s consistent bluntness, but Curafin simply shook his head. “Still…”
Something moved beneath us in the mist, and I looked down to see a black figure, cloaked, hovering just above the gravestones. It was some kind of wraith, humanoid, but with no visible legs and bone thin pale arms. Something metallic and deadly gleamed in its hands, reflecting the silvery glow of Jahannan.
“Bloodletter?” I asked Anwi, who simply nodded.
“Anything we need to know about them?” Curafin began to say when a Fire Ball sizzled through the air and splashed into the wraith, scorching off almost half of its health. The Bloodletter spun and shrieked, letting out a high pitched sound like metal being torn in half, then dashed across the graveyard at an almost impossible speed.
Another Fire Ball streake
d through the air from somewhere and slammed into the ghostly figure, setting its cloak aflame. The Bloodletter raised its weapon to strike, and I finally saw what it was: a straight razor, its blade brilliant and keen, clutched in a pale, sinewy hand.
It sliced down to attack, but was met with a massive blast of fire that engulfed and incinerated it, destroying what remained of its health.
“Can you see—?” Sabotenda asked, his halberd at the ready.
“No!” I hissed, nocking an arrow in my bow.
“This way,” Anwi said, crouching low and taking a set of stairs that led down from the terrace to the yard. We all followed as quietly as possible, doing our best to stay crouched and hidden in the fog.
Another Bloodletter cried out from somewhere in the distance, hidden in the bloody mist that lay around the graves. Flames burst past the trees and we corrected course in that direction.
“Shoot first, ask questions later,” I hissed to my group. I’d had enough of Jahannan’s surprises, and could feel the old D rising up inside of me. Enough was enough. We had things to do, and it seemed like every time we made progress in the city, something new showed its face around the corner and slowed us down. I was honestly ready to just speedrun the city and sprint our way until the end and ignore whatever massive train of monsters we ended up lugging behind us.
We reached the first tree and took cover, peering out into the mist, trying to locate the source of the Fire Balls. But for a moment, the Old Graveyard was quiet. Then, something swished behind us and I whirled around to find myself face to face with a Bloodletter.
Beneath its tattered cloak was the beautiful face of a young girl, not yet a teenager, with gorgeous flowing blonde hair and striking green eyes that seemed to see right through me. For a mere second, I was taken completely taken aback, but a mere second was all she needed.
“Bleed,” she whispered casually as she sliced out at my throat with the straight razor. Half of my health disappeared instantly and a debuff slapped onto me that began ticking away at what was left of my bar.
Lord of the Flame: A LitRPG novel (Call of Carrethen Book 2) Page 24