by James Hunter
“Then I’ll just sneak into the Empirical Library,” I said flatly.
She threw back her head and cackled. “Sometimes you can be so naive, Jack,” she said once her laughter died off. “There is one way in. Only one way in. And that way is guarded by an army. You want to face Thanatos, you’ll have to fight them first. Besides, you need to dispatch his forces and claim the Necropolis because it will weaken him. Morsheim is a source of power for Thanatos, just as the Realm of Order is a source of power for me. If you fight Thanatos without first undercutting his realm, he will decimate you—Reality Editor or no. Taking the Necropolis and Skálaholt with it will weaken him enough that you may have a chance. Your only chance, Jack.”
“Fine,” I grumbled, seeing the logic in her words. “But I still think you’re wrong about the War Council.”
“Have a little faith, darling. There is more going on than you know. As I said, you aren’t the only piece on the board.” She faltered as though she wanted to say more; she looked more human, more vulnerable, than I had ever seen her. “Suffice it to say, things that were set in motion long before your arrival are finally coming to fruition. You must assemble the War Council tomorrow, and you must convince them to attack. There is no other way, and the longer you wait, the more certain our doom becomes.”
<<<>>>
Quest Alert: The Road to War
Sophia, Immortal Goddess of Balance and Order, has informed you that you cannot delay your war effort any longer. Tomorrow morning you must assemble the War Council and convince them to attack Morsheim. Use every strategy at your disposal to win them over. Barring that, launch the assault with whatever forces you can muster. In the meantime, keep on the lookout for any new information that might help win over the Council to your cause.
Quest Class: Rare, Alliance-Based
Quest Difficulty: Infernal
Success: Sway the War Council to your cause and launch the assault against Morsheim before it’s too late! If that isn’t possible, launch the attack yourself within three days. Time is of the essence.
Failure: Fail to launch an invasion against Morsheim within three days. WARNING: The consequences for failure are dire!
Reward: 20,000 XP; +100 to Renown; Guidance of Sophia: Although Sophia will not be able to accompany you physically into Morsheim, she will aid you and all those who rally to your cause by dispatching strategic quests, which may just tip the balance in your war effort.
Accept: Yes/No?
Please, Jack. This the only way.
<<<>>>
I read over the quest and accepted, because what else was I going to do? This was an ultimatum if I’d ever read one, and much as I hated it, I’d come too far to give up now.
“I don’t know how this will play out,” Sophia said as I hit Accept, “but, for what it’s worth, I’m pulling for you. For all of you.”
Then she was gone, vanished into the night, the balcony back to normal, bugs crooning away once more. I wanted to grind my teeth in frustration and holler for Sophia to get back here and explain herself without being so incredibly mysterious—what did the Overminds have against a straight answer, anyway?—but I knew that wouldn’t do any good. The best thing I could do for myself was get some shut-eye, because tomorrow was shaping up to be absolutely miserable, and I would need every edge I could get.
Rotten Roots
SOMETHING dinged in my ear, drawing me out of a fitful sleep filled with dreams I couldn’t quite remember—like a word right on the edge of the tongue that just wouldn’t come. At first, I thought it was the sound of my alarm going off, but when I grumbled verbally to “shut up,” the sound refused to stop. When the buzzing persisted, I finally sat up, blinking lazily against the dim light, then rubbed my palms into my eyes as I tried to figure out where in the hell the noise was coming from. My brain was still hazy with sleep, and more than a little disoriented, but eventually I opened my interface and noticed I had a message, marked as Urgent and set with a notification alarm.
Because a feature like that could be used to drive someone completely insane by a malicious internet troll, only those who had been given personal approval could send an alarmed notification. Which meant only a handful of people could’ve sent the PM. I noticed the timestamp blinking in the corner of my vision and groaned. 5:15 AM. This had better be important, I grumbled inside my head as I opened the message:
<<<>>>
Personal Message
Jack,
Hey man, so sorry to bother you! I know last night was crazy, and I really didn’t want to reach out, but... Well, we’ve had an incident. Probably just best if you come by and see for yourself. It will make explaining things sooooooo much easier. Attached is a one-off scroll to a location in the Tanglewood—please come as soon as you can and bring Abby with you. Thanks so much, and sorry again!
See you soon,
Jo-Dan
<<<>>>
Map Update
Congratulations! Your in-world map has been updated with a new location: The Overhang.
<<<>>>
Jo-Dan—more formally known as Joseph the Gravemonger—was a good-hearted seventeen-year-old kid from a bad part of Atlanta who’d had the misfortune of winding up in a malfunctioning NextGenVR capsule. Through a series of ill-fated events and divine intervention at the hands of the Overmind Cernunnos, Jo wound up as the only known player in Viridian Gate Online who was also a Dungeon Boss. He was tied, irrevocably and forever, to the Catacombs of the Forsaken, deep in the heart of the Avilynn Wood. Despite being overly apologetic, if Jo-Dan was reaching out like this, then things were probably running wildly off the rails.
As much as I wanted to burrow back beneath the blankets and furs, I knew this couldn’t wait. So, I gained my feet with a groan and slipped around the makeshift bed on the balcony. Navigating by the moonlight, I pulled open the sliding doors and padded into my suite, reveling in the delicious warmth radiating from the oversized fireplace set into the wall. It was a sauna inside, not that I minded a whole lot. Quietly, I ghosted up to the spacious king-sized bed and gently shook Abby awake, even knowing she was going to be pissed.
She cracked one eye and glared at me before scrunching the blankets up all the way past her chin and curling into a tight ball.
“Sorry about last night,” I said softly, running a hand along her blanket-covered arm. “I was just tired. Stressed.”
“Uh,” she grunted noncommittally. “You can apologize by letting me go back to sleep,” she mumbled after a beat, only half awake.
“Wish I could, but we have a quest. Need to pop over and see Jo-Dan. It’s urgent, apparently.”
“No, Jack. I refuse,” she said, sounding a little more alert. “The sun isn’t even up. Between the hours of four and seven AM, someone else has to save the world.” She rolled over, offering me her blanket-covered back. “It’s in my contract. Just check the fine print.”
“Okay,” I replied with a feigned sigh and a shrug. “I’ll check on Jo by myself. But, also, you should probably know that Sophia paid me a little visit last night. She kindly informed me that we have to assemble the War Council and convince them to march against Morsheim in the next three days or the world will end. So, maybe while I’m off gallivanting in the woods and killing mobs, you could call the delegates for me. Get a jump start, since I bet it’ll take at least a few hours to get everyone to stop complaining long enough to browbeat them into assembling.”
A grin played across my lips as I watched her struggle—one part of her positively wrathful at the idea of getting up at 5:15 to put out some Alliance fire, while the other part of her warred over the notion that I might get to do something fun while she got stuck babysitting a bunch of red-tape bureaucrats from all over Eldgard.
“Gah! You’re the worst, Jack.” She finally caved, throwing aside the blankets, then cast Residual Heat and popped her Searing Halo spell, conjuring a cloak of ghostly reddish flames around herself. “Fine. Fine.” She pushed herself upright, curling her ar
ms in as she scowled at me like I’d just kicked a puppy. “But this better be important, and I want to hear every word Sophia had to say. Every. Single. Word. Also, coffee. I need all the coffee. That is my line in the sand, comprende?”
“Hey, we’re in this together,” I said, extending her a hand, helping her up. “Coffee’s on me.”
I filled her in on my conversation with the Overmind while we showered and dressed.
By the time we’d finished with that, procured the most valuable asset in Eldgard—delicious, life-giving Western Brew—and popped the one-off scroll Jo-Dan had sent along, it was just past six. The portal dropped us in a thickly vegetated forest, though one still gripped by the fading tendrils of winter. A steel-gray dawn cast muted purple light over a host of leafless trees, all clawing at the pale sky with bleak branches. A spattering of hardy evergreens dotted the landscape, offering a bit of color in an otherwise barren landscape. My mug sent up thin wisps of white steam as Abby and I crunched our way across the snow-covered ground, following the new location marker tagged on my in-game map.
“Something’s not right here, Jack,” Abby said after a few minutes of hushed trudging. “Look at the trees—they’re blighted. This reminds me of Ravenkirk all over again.”
I frowned and headed over to a barren ash, its bark dark gray and oddly brittle. I bent over and squinted, noting small yellow spots peeking through places where the bark had fallen away, revealing the soft wood beneath. The spots looked swollen, almost infected; radiating up from each one was a host of jagged black veins that looked like lightning. Abby wasn’t wrong. We’d definitely seen this kind of thing before, usually in places where the Vogthar had taken over a dungeon. But as I righted myself and glanced around, I realized that every tree I could see looked to be infected with the blight.
After inspecting a few more trunks and a handful of the evergreens—all likewise diseased—we resumed our trek, moving with more speed and urgency than we had before. As we got closer and closer to the map marker, the sounds of battle drifted along on an errant breeze, replacing birdsong with the clang of weapons and the muffled shouts of combatants.
“Yeah, that’s probably not good,” Abby said, glancing my way. “Guess we should pick it up a little?”
She slugged down the rest of her joe in one long glug—because priorities—stowed her mug, and pulled free her staff, activating a bevy of spells while she surged ahead, ready to mercilessly punish whatever was responsible for getting us out of bed at such an ungodly hour. I pulled my warhammer free and triggered Night Armor, wrapping myself in frigid ribbons of shadow power like a second skin. We sprinted past fallen trees and jutting rocks, the ceaseless sounds of violence growing louder and louder with every second.
In less than a handful of minutes, we broke through the tree line and into a small clearing thirty feet across, evergreens and barren winter oaks forming a semicircle on one side, a fifty-foot drop-off on the other. Poking up from the edge of the cliff were the remnants of a forgotten temple, ruined by age and neglect. All that remained were some sandy yellow blocks, heavily weathered and dusted with snow, and a set of corkscrew stairs that drilled down into the ground.
The entrance to a dungeon. No surprise there, considering who had sent us the invite.
Vogthar were scattered across the clearing—these ones pasty blue, their armor augmented with frost and spikes of crystalline ice, their weapons coated with a sheen of hoarfrost.
Encircling the inhuman invaders was Jo-Dan’s own private army.
Hulking skeletons, Risen Dead, built from yellowing bone, gleaming red muscle, and ropy gristle, made up the majority of the undead strike force, but they were augmented by a detachment of heavy-hitting zombie warriors decked out in black iron armor complete with enormous tower shields and a veritable arsenal of weaponry. A trio of unnatural Corpse Hounds, easily as big as male lions, but stitched together from the decaying pelts of many long dead animals, worked in unison with a full platoon of brown-haired spiderkin. The two groups—clearly representatives of both Jo-Dan and the Spider Queen—fought in perfect harmony.
The spiderkin used strands of silver silk to corral the Vogthar, cordoning them off and leaving them exposed to the armor-wearing Revenant Knights, who waded through the Vogthar ranks, cutting down Vogs like lumberjacks chopping firewood. Meanwhile, the more basic Risen Dead formed a ring of rotting meat around the combatants, selflessly protecting their spiderkin brethren while the nimble and deadly Corpse Hounds attacked any stragglers who somehow managed to break through the defenses. The whole time, a single undead spellcaster, clad in frayed brown robes and surrounded by a nimbus of unearthly green light, spammed constant buffs and regen spells on Jo-Dan’s troops.
I had to admit, it was a wonder of death and destruction. A clockwork machine of butchery—every part flawlessly serving its function.
“Hey, Jack!” A rather chipper voice called from a copse of trees just off to the right, tucked a little bit away from the action.
Confused as hell, I pulled my gaze away from the fighting and noticed that Jo-Dan and Lowyth were both watching the fight unfold from a safe distance.
“Mornin’, you two,” Jo-Dan called, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and perpetually optimistic despite the fact that he was a living monster.
Jo had grown since the last time I’d seen him, standing well over seven feet tall now. He wore dark purple robes covered by heavy plate mail built from bone and inscribed with emerald runes. A dark cowl covered his head, and where his face should’ve been was just a gaping black hole like a bottomless chasm. Bony wings protruded from his back as if he were an Accipiter that had died and molted.
Honestly, Jo would’ve been completely unnerving if not for the fact that he was so nice.
“I brought extra Western Brew in case you guys are still zonked out from the party,” Jo said, miraculously producing a steaming silver pot like a stage magician pulling flowers from a hat. Jo and Lowyth slowly headed toward us, entirely unconcerned about the battle royale happening not ten feet away.
“Yeah, I’m good,” I said with a shake of my head. “Don’t normally turn down coffee, but considering the circumstances, I think I’ll pass.”
“Same,” Abby said, stealing sidelong glances at the rotting corpses slugging it out.
“Hey, fair enough,” Jo replied with a shrug. “I just know it’s early. Felt really bad about reaching out to you guys, but Lowyth”—he jerked his head toward the Spider Queen, still, thankfully, in her human form—“insisted I call a meeting.” He disappeared the pot back into his inventory or whatever the dungeon lord equivalent was.
“It is true,” Lowyth buzzed. “Although your settlement was attacked, it was not the only skirmish to occur. Sixteen dungeons were assaulted last night. All overwhelmed by Vogthar raiders, the Dungeon Cores within corrupted. That is part of the reason my spiderkin were slow in responding to the incursion at Yunnam—we were spread thin, dealing with other raids.”
Wow. That was news to me, though it did explain how the Vogthar had managed to get past the spiderkin and take out the Shadow Cannoneers manning the walls. Thanatos had created a massive distraction, effectively drawing the spiderkin away from Yunnam before launching his scouts. Damn, he’d set us up and played us like a fiddle.
“Yep,” Jo Dan said, bobbing his head. “Then, to top it off, early this morning we got reports that poor Hokima had bit the dust. That’s when we knew we had to talk.”
“Hokima?” Abby asked, cocking an eyebrow.
“It’ll all make sense in a minute,” Jo replied. “Nil should be done clearing the dungeon any minute.”
“Should we help?” I asked, nodding toward the battle. “With the fight, I mean.”
“Probably best if you don’t,” Jo replied, extending a bony wing to bar my path. There was no malice in his voice, no rebuke to it, but there was a hard edge that said he was in charge here. Not me. He was a champion in his own right, and although I still often thought of him as a ki
d, he’d clearly grown a lot since stumbling into V.G.O. He’d come into his own.
“The dungeon lord is right, troublesome fly,” the Spider Queen hissed, crossing her arms as the spider legs on her back curled in agitation. “This is a thing we Dungeon Born must learn early on, but a thing which you have yet to master. You have underlings for a reason. No Dungeon Boss could survive long if they took on every challenger at the outset. We grind them down slowly and only enter the fray against the true threat. As it should be with you. But instead, you fight at the head of every battle. You make yourself a target.” She turned and waved a claw-tipped hand toward the clash. “These Vogthar have Malware blades. Any one of them could kill you.”
I pursed my lips and lifted my warhammer. “Somehow, I sorta doubt that.”
“But why take the risk, Crimson King?” Lowyth asked, tilting her head to the side and regarding me with her army of eyes.
“Not a king,” I mumbled under my breath.
“Lord. King. Commander. There is no difference,” she said, waving away my argument as though it were in fact a troublesome fly buzzing around her head. “They all mean leader, and that you are. From one leader to another, I can respect your need to fight. To satiate bloodlust. But there is no point in risking yourself unduly. This is a light skirmish of the kind our forces are used to dealing with. They are more than well-enough equipped for this task.”
“But we could help instead of just standing around.”
“Ah. But you are helping,” she said, full ruby-red lips curling into a telling smile. “By not dying. And by observing. Seeing the way they fight. The way they think. To lead, troublesome fly, you must know all. To lead, you must find that which only you can do, and do that. Everything else you must delegate to your scuttling whelps and minions. This is a lesson the Gravemonger has learned quickly.” One of her spider legs extended, caressing the side of Jo-Dan’s cowl-covered head with something that might almost have been affection.
“Okay,” I finally relented, sliding my hammer back into the frog at my belt. “It’s your call.”