Liar King

by Adam Elliott

  “I can see that. What the hell do you think you’re doing.”

  “Putting an end to this.” She replied, punctuating her word with a martial kiai as her right leg swept through the midsection of a Warden soldier, bisecting the stone soldier just above the waist.

  “Sarah, there are thousands of Warden soldiers out there. Even if you make it-”

  “Busy now. Talk later.”

  Before Cayden could say another word, a pair of soft chimes signaled her decision to end the call.

  “Goddamn it!” Cayden swore. “Silver, maybe she’ll listen to you.”

  “I’ll try.” Came the voice from his headset.

  “What is she trying to do?” Michael asked incredulously, having missed Sarah’s side of the conversation as he watched the video of the charming waitress brutally tearing through Warden troops with seemingly no regard to their attacks.

  “I have a pretty good idea.” Cayden frowned, manipulating a few options on his display before speaking again. “Bammer, do you still have eyes on that officer.”

  “Neg. He shouldn’t be hard to find though. He was heading straight down the Royal Road in your direction.”

  Cayden threw up his hands. “Stupid.”

  “What?” Michael asked, still not getting it.

  “She’s making a run for the enemy officer.”

  “Isn’t that good?” Michael asked, gesturing to the feed on his display. “She’s tearing through them like they aren’t even there.”

  “Officer is a level 35 boss. She is level 40. Even if she does take him down, she isn’t getting out of there alive.” He pounded a fist into his hand and called out into the open air once again. “Silver, please tell me-”

  “She blocked calls after the first ring. Probably too much of a distraction.” Silver said apologetically. “I can try and divert some of the-”

  “No,” Cayden replied flatly. “Get everyone back here and through that portal.”

  Dinah’s eyes lit up in surprise, alongside with the first real, genuine smile he’d ever seen on her face. “I’ll go with you.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Wait, what do you mean go-” Michael asked, his eyes flickering back and forth between the two. “Oh, you have got to be kidding. You just said it is suicide for her and now you’re going out there?!”

  “Safety in numbers,” Cayden replied as he turned and began to walk in the direction of the nearest of the two gates.

  “And you’re going along with this madness?” Michael asked, fresh anger in his tone as he turned his attention to Asch.

  “Heroism is often mistaken for madness.” The older woman said with a chuckle, extending her arm and manipulating virtual space until an enormous two-headed great-ax materialized into her grip. “This is honestly one of the better ideas the boy has ever had.”

  “We’ll get her and ditch in the sewers,” Cayden explained as he reached the gate and the sally port door to the embedded in the wall to the side of it. Some fifty soldiers manned the defense, ready to abandon it the moment they received the all clear to run for the nearby portal, but as of yet the door, reinforced by Roberta’s magic, was holding.

  “And if we get a good shot at the officer?”

  “He is twice our level, what exactly do you plan to do to him?” Cayden scowled. “If it looks like Sarah can take him down, great, then cover her. Hopefully, we’ll get to her before she gets to him.”

  Nearby, Michael sighed in frustration. “You know you two are nuts, right?”

  “I know you weren’t holding your sword a minute ago,” Cayden observed.

  “I hate you so much right now.” Michael spat. “Let’s get this over with.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The outer door of the sally port swung open to silence. It was one of the other things that made the Wardens such uncomfortable foes. A goblin or a Beastman might shout obscenities or war cries in their language. A powerful monster might roar or give some other indication of its displeasure. A Warden soldier did none of that. They simply re-oriented, fixed their weapons and went on the attack with an almost terminator-esque verve to kill their new target.

  Fortunately, as far as the siege of Islo was concerned, if anyone was Arnold Schwarzenegger, it was Dinah.

  The foot-wide blade of her ax swept through the bodies of three Warden soldiers, as she emerged into view, killing two and gravely wounding the third as the weight of the weapon sent the injured soldier flying, in an impressive display that would have given pause to any living opponent. The attack had its flaws, but the comparatively tremendous wind-down time after her use of the cleave skill was no weakness at all when she had Cayden and Michael to back her up.

  They came out the door behind her at a dead run, swords lashing out at the nearest Warden forces to take advantage of what little element of surprise remained. Behind them a few Warden soldiers swarmed the sally port, their attempt stifled as the Elan soldiers inside slammed and barred the door behind the players a moment before Dinah ‘rewarded’ their tactic with two overwhelming swings of her ax.

  Warden soldiers were everywhere around them, their shadowed forms illuminated only by the roaring hellscape that lay just across the river. There were more than expected, but it shouldn’t be a problem. Already he could see formation after formation pulling back from the wall, retreating down this street or that one as their commander ordered them towards perspective escape routes that would ultimately prove fruitless. What units weren’t retreating were attacking, their focus on the battlements or the gates, trying to break the Royal Quarter’s defenses in hopes of finding shelter from the roaring conflagration outside.

  If these units had been organized against them, their little trio wouldn’t stand a chance, but there was no order to this. Their only threat was the knee-jerk offense of individual nearby Wardens. That they could deal with.

  “To the North bridge!” Cayden ordered. The Wardens were particularly thick there, but trying to swim or use the South bridge would take too long. Sarah was fast and driven. If they wanted to catch up to her, the only hope they had was to follow her wake for lack of a better term. After all, if the enemy were chasing her, then they wouldn’t be impeding them.

  Together, the three of them began cutting their way through the Warden troops with a steady rotation of skill usage. Dinah’s would use her area of effect attacks, killing or injuring a cluster of enemy troops, then Cayden and Michael would rush in, snagging the enemy aggro and putting down the wounded Warden troopers before any nearby healers could clear away some of the damage.

  It was slow going at first, leapfrogging from one group of enemies to the next, but the longer they fought, the easier it became. Apart from a few archers taking pot shots, the Warden troops were not smart enough to vary their tactics or to adapt on the fly to the player’s strategy. And like anything else, the more they did it, the better they got at it. By the time they’d reached the bridge, nearly three dozen Warden soldiers lay in pieces in their wake.

  “I’m going ahead,” Cayden shouted to his companions, bracing his legs beneath himself as he shouted. “Personal Skill Use: Leap Attack!”

  The jump carried him from the bank of the river a few feet from the bridge to the middle of it, his sword quite literally disarming one of the Warden troops on the newly constructed earthen bridge as he landed. Two more struggled to bring their long weapons to bear in the packed crowd, but they were unable to get them in line with Cayden’s body before he intoned two words of runic power “Jegara Karatha!”

  A wave of magical force pulsed from two of Cayden’s upraised fingers, followed by an immense explosion that cracked the earth beneath his feet, but thankfully did not shatter it. The Wardens nearest him, on the other hand, had no such luck, their bodies detonating into little more than gravel as they were blown away from him.

  Those a little further away were knocked
off their feet, the majority blown clear off the side of the bridge and into the water below. The water wouldn’t hurt them, he knew, it might even save them from the fire, but it got them out of the way, which was all he could have asked for.

  “You are going to need to explain that later,” Dinah shouted as she ran past him, her ax whirling once over her head before collapsing down onto the torso of a Warden soldier struggling to recover from the blast.

  Cayden laughed. He’d always been garbage at keeping secrets for long.

  Past the bridge, the density of the Warden soldiers began to thin dramatically, which in turn allowed Cayden and his companions to pick up the pace to a full run. Here or there a Warden soldier would issue forth from a building, or a nearby formation, but in ones and twos, the typical Warden soldier was no threat at all to any of them.

  Skill Level Up: Sprint

  Type: Passive

  Skill Level: Novice Level 9

  Effect: Improved running speed by 13%.

  Cost: 9.2 TP per Second + Penalty for Armor weight.

  The notification at the edge of Cayden’s hub drew another laugh. His skills had the worst, or maybe the best possible timing when it came to level ups.

  “I don’t suppose either of you can jump?” Cayden asked after nearly two minutes of running. Ahead of them, one of their barricades accented his query, a ten-foot-tall mound of burning refuse that would have been impossible for a normal human to safely circumvent.

  The question earned nothing more than dirty looks from his compatriots. A man in the heaviest armor a player could buy, and a woman with an ax bigger than he was. It kinda was a dumb question.

  “I think there is a path around if we-”

  “No need.” Dinah interrupted with a smirk. “Just keep out of the way. Skill Use: Earthsplitter.”

  Asch skidded to a stop just before that boundless inferno, her right leg bracing beneath her as she brought the head of her ax behind her body. Its edge glowed with a violet light as its owner drew a deep breath, readied herself, and attacked.

  The light of her weapon cut an arc through the air that it was almost hard to look at, the sudden impact of the blade reverberating through Cayden’s very bones like a nearby artillery strike. Its effect was an order of magnitude more than he’d expected, the edge of the ax a mere foreword to the shockwave that quelled fires and sent material flying in every direction.

  In the aftermath of the strike, a third of the barricade was just gone. A neat hole cut clear through the center of the enormous pile with only a deep gouge in the cobblestone and a slightly smaller crater around it to mark it as an attack.

  “Remind me not to piss you off,” Michael said, his wide-eyed expression belying the casual way he joked about what he’d just seen.

  “Never a good idea to tick off a Brutalist,” Cayden said, his eyes on Dinah. “That is your class, isn’t it.”

  Dinah gave him a sidelong look as they filtered through the now open gap and began to sprint once more. “What gave it away?”

  It was a rhetorical question, Cayden knew. Only one class in all of Babel had attacks of that magnitude.

  The Brutalist class was a case study in extremes. They used the largest two-handed weapons they could find to inflict the maximum amount of possible damage with each and every hit, with almost nothing devoted to speed or endurance, and only a token to defense. High-level Brutalist techniques, like the one she had just demonstrated, could routinely drain a third or more of their user’s TP in a single strike while generating positively absurd amounts of threat as a result. Coupled with the ponderous nature of their attacks, most Brutalist fights were short and, well, brutal. One way or the other.

  It was a class Cayden had never even considered picking at character select, but that had more to do with his particular style of gameplay than any inherent flaw with the class. There was definitely something to be said for being able to end a fight in a single, powerful technique; it just wasn’t for him.

  “We should be getting close, shouldn’t we?” Michael asked.

  “Unless she or the officer turned off somewhere, yeah.” On a regular day, they would have been able to see Sarah by now, in fact, they probably would have been able to see her from the Keep itself with the road as empty as it was. The smoke made that impossible, however. Rolling plumes of thick black smoke emanated from nearly every nearby surface, the light from those same fires the only thing keeping them from being immersed in total, confusing blackness as they ran.

  If this weren’t Babel, they’d also be choking to death by now, Cayden knew. Instead, there was just a debuff, a slow damage over time effect that was little more than a nuisance by now. In roughly five minutes it would upgrade to something more dangerous, and five minutes after that their HP and TP would begin to drop precipitously, whether they were in combat or not.

  He should have been worried, but then again, if they were still in combat ten minutes from now, Cayden was sure they had bigger concerns to deal with.

  “-ill use: Izuna!” The shout from ahead of them was just barely audible over the crackling fires that surrounded them. It was Sarah!

  Before he could celebrate, however, a sudden gust of wind nearly threw the three of them from their feet. A heavy curtain of smoke followed an instant behind the wall of pressure, stinging their eyes as they passed through it, and briefly upping the shallow damage of the smoke inhalation DoT.

  As they emerged from the other side of the smoke, the trio found that what they could not see seconds before, was, for the moment at least, now as clear as day.

  Sarah, perhaps fifty feet ahead of her would be backup.

  She was moving with speed unlike anything Cayden had ever seen in person. Videos of higher level players had never really done them justice, and though Sarah was only mid-level by the modern standards of Babel, she was still a sight to behold as she swerved this way and that. Her curvaceous body, simultaneously dodged the blades of four separate footmen, along with the much more dangerous spear point of the mounted officer.

  “So much for getting to her before she got to him,” Michael remarked with a certain smugness.

  “Clear out the mooks,” Cayden instructed, struggling not to rise to the bait as they advanced. “Command: Party Invite Desdaemona.”

  A split-second later, Cayden got to enjoy his own sense of self-righteous satisfaction as Sarah glanced in their direction, did a double take, and glanced back again. If she’d had the time or the opening, Cayden was reasonably sure some rude gesture would have accompanied that double take, but instead she was forced to accept his invitation as she shouted her displeasure. “- idiot! What are you doing here?”

  “Oh don’t you even start with me!” Cayden snapped back, moving at a dead run towards the melee. “I’m not letting you suicide by Warden, and you know it. We’ve got the small fry; you take down kahuna.”

  Sarah’s expression screamed her displeasure, but there was no time for argument. Instead, she called out another skill use, drew her arms into her sides in a defensive combat stance, then threw them out as one of the Warden troops was fool enough to attack her.

  Her counterattack struck harder than it had any right to, the impact of her punch and the spin-kick that followed sending the lower level Warden troops sprawling, most of them in Cayden’s direction, where he happily scooped up their attention with a use of his taunt.

  What were small fry for Sarah were still meaningful opponents for Cayden’s impromptu party. The earlier battles had depleted a sizable amount of their TP, a loss that had mostly persisted as they spent TP running, and lost yet more to the damaging effect of the smoke. Fighting four elite Warden soldiers without access to a healer, while half exhausted would have been a tall order if Sarah hadn’t already knocked out nearly a third of their HP as more of an afterthought.

  “No, no, no. You’re fighting over here. Personal Skill Use: Taunt.” Cayden commanded as his previous use of the ability expired. Sarah
’s threat was so overwhelming that his taunt was struggling to keep up with it, even after she was no longer fighting them.

  Sarah’s battle with the officer had taken her nearly twenty feet away in a handful of heartbeats. He had reach on her, and a skill with his spear that would rival any of the old wushu films Cayden had watched in his youth. The stone weapon whirled this way at that; a bright red tassel pained so lifelike along its tip that for a moment Cayden mistook it for fabric.

  Foot by foot the mounted officer was driving Sarah back, though he was doing little damage in the process. Each thrust or slash with that razor sharp point was met with a head fake or a juke. Sarah’s body was constantly out of line with the weapon, her palm parrying the haft of the weapon when it came too close, a flip carrying her a half-dozen feet back when the officer committed to a thrust.

  The battle was nothing like the first time he’d seen Sarah fight. Back then, during his last attempt at rescuing her, she had been so far above the people she’d been fighting that she had only taken it as seriously as her anger allowed.

  A split legged skirt flowed beneath her as Sarah danced beneath a sidelong swing of the weapon’s point. She turned from defense to offense in the blink of an eye as she took to the air and threw a quick one-two combo. The sound of Sarah’s fists striking stone was enough to make Cayden wince in sympathy, but it wasn’t enough to stop her as her slippered feet found purchase on the neck of the officer’s mount. The thing bucked, of course, but not before Sarah was able to lay out another brutal combination that sent the officer reeling back in his saddle.

  It lashed out at her as she retreated, the haft of the officer’s spear catching Sarah in midair with such force that it threw her into, or rather, through, the wreckage of a nearby flaming building.

  “Is she okay?” Michael asked as his Penetrating Strike skill lived up to its namesake by tearing a neat hole clean through the torso of one of their three, now two, remaining Warden opponents.