by J. A. Hunter
Warning me to do something. To get away. To regroup. Except I was between a rock and a hard place, with nowhere left to go.
I glanced at my Shadow Stride cooldown timer. Five seconds to go …
Five. It was so hard to breathe; she was literally squeezing the air from my lungs …
Four. My ribs burned as though she had taken a jackhammer to them …
Three. My head throbbed, the blood pooling, my face turning red …
Two. Black was creeping in on the edges as my HP meter moved sharply toward zero …
One …
I triggered my Shadow Stride ability as a last-ditch gamble, hoping the game mechanics would work in my favor. For the second time in so many minutes, time lurched to a standstill, and I found myself falling. The reason why I couldn’t sustain damage while shadow striding was the same reason I couldn’t deal it—because I was essentially an insubstantial shade. A ghost moving through a different realm. And just as my warhammer passed through an enemy when I swung, my body likewise phased right through the Hag’s constricting fingers.
I touched down, light as a feather.
I didn’t have long, but I still took a moment to steal a deep breath, savoring the inrush of air. So good. Then I beat a hasty retreat, beelining for the cavern mouth while I counted my lucky stars. I’d done everything in my power to prepare, but this lady was way too tough. Impossibly so. How could the chief possibly expect me to kill something like this at my level with my skill set? She shrugged off everything I threw at her. I almost made it to the edge of the cavern when time crashed back down on me, accompanied by a bone-shaking howl of rage. The Moss Hag, no doubt noticing my abrupt escape.
I wheeled around, grabbing a Health Regen potion from my belt and killing it in one long slug, then tossing the bottle aside with a flick of my hand.
“No,” she roared, chunks of rock breaking loose from the ceiling, tumbling to the ground. “You can’t escape me, worm.” She grunted and spat a giant ball of sludgy black phlegm into one hand, then promptly fast-balled it straight at me. The glob of putrid spittle stretched and expanded into a net ten by fifteen feet as it spun through the air with uncanny speed and accuracy. I crouched, making my profile as small as possible, and conjured my Dark Shield, hoping it would be enough.
A dome of flickering, purple light took shape an instant before the spit-net landed.
The impact rocked me back as the goop splattered against my shield.
I was expecting the Hag’s spell to dissipate on contact, but instead the disgusting phlegm-net pulsed and wormed its way over my energy dome, eating its way through. After a few tense seconds that left my hands shaking and my body trembling, the shield collapsed under the weight of the Hag’s attack. Thankfully, my defensive spell had robbed the net of most of its potency, so only a few gobs of black remained. But even that burned my skin like molten rock and chewed through a fifth of my freshly restored HP bar.
I couldn’t even imagine what would’ve happened had the full force of the attack hit me.
I really didn’t know how I was going to win this fight. Between my Dark Shield and Spirit Stride abilities, it seemed like I could probably avoid—or at least survive—her major attacks, but that would only work until I ran out of Spirit Regen potions, then I’d be toast. And it didn’t really matter, because I didn’t need to survive, I needed to find a way to kill her.
I glanced over my shoulder, surveying the forest, trying to come up with some sort of workable plan. I didn’t have much time to think, though. The ground began to tremble and quiver. I turned back in time to see the Moss Hag now on her misshapen feet and charging toward me, eating up the distance with a rolling, gorilla-like gait, a snarl plastered across her ugly face. I threw out my left hand, summoning Umbra Bog in an instant, hoping to slow her down. A combat notification flashed in the corner of my eye:
Moss Hag resists Umbra Bog. She is unaffected!
That was bad.
I spun and immediately dashed away from the oncoming nightmare beast—currently moving like a freight train of meat and muscle and moss—breaking past the mouth of the cave and into the warren of trees beyond. Maybe she wouldn’t follow me from the cave; maybe that was the key. I slipped behind a squat swamp oak and peeked around the trunk just as the Moss Hag came barreling out of the cave. Okay, check. I wasn’t going to be able to just run away. It was kill or die.
I ducked out from behind my shoddy defensive position, hurled an Umbra Bolt into her flabby chest, then bolted further into the tree cover. The attack served only to piss her off even more and draw aggro, but that was fine—I was hoping to lure her in. Her size would definitely be a disadvantage in the tight confines of the forest. Maybe. She followed after me like a bloodhound, uprooting trees in her passing, smashing through tangles of undergrowth, stopping for nothing, driven entirely by hate and rage. A thought crept into the back of my mind as I unleashed yet another Umbra Bolt, before taking cover behind a palm tree.
If I was smart and quick, maybe there was a way I could win this after all …
THIRTY-THREE:
Critical Hit
Our deadly game of cat and mouse continued for the next half hour—a constant and nerve-wracking battle to stay one step ahead of the Moss Hag. It was a fine balance, really. Almost a dance. I constantly had to bait her, ensuring she stayed close enough to follow me, while simultaneously avoiding her devastating array of abilities. A steady barrage of Umbra Bolts from the tree line managed to piss her off and draw her attention, while Shadow Stride and Stealth kept me one slim step ahead when she did somehow manage to get into striking rage.
It was close, though, and even enraged, the Moss Hag was a cold, crafty, calculating opponent—using a variety of ranged attacks and Area of Effect, AoE, spells to pin me down or herd me into a corner. More than a couple of times, her maneuvering worked and I only managed to break loose through the use of Night Armor, Dark Shield, and Shadow Stride, and even then, I escaped by the skin of my teeth.
I heard a clap of thunder and glanced back in time to see a fat ball of electric-blue swamp lightning zip toward me like a cruise missile, which, I knew from experience, would shortly be followed by an acid wall spell. I wheeled, throwing out one hand, conjuring Dark Shield just in time to catch the brunt of the attack—the air crackled with power, my hair standing on end as the swamp lightning slapped into my barrier, bleeding through just enough to give me one heck of an unpleasant shock.
As soon as her spell dissipated, I dismissed my dome and immediately triggered Shadow Stride, slipping into the Shadowverse as a wall of green fire—which dealt horrific acid damage—swept toward me like soldiers marching in a line. Time faltered as my body became ethereal, allowing me to step through the attack, untouched. Once out of immediate danger, I slipped behind the nearest tree, pressed my back against the trunk, then pulled up my player map and rechecked my position for the hundredth time. I nodded. We were close now, so close. I reoriented myself, dropped into a low crouch, preparing to run, then disengaged Shadow Stride.
Time resumed, and I watched impassively as the acid wall swept on for another fifty feet before fizzling and dying. As soon as her wall was down, I hurled an Umbra Bolt at her stupid head, then broke into a mad sprint, pushing myself through a wall of foliage as the Moss Hag screamed death threats at me from behind. A huge grin broke across my face as I caught the first glimmer of gauzy, silver spider webbing adorning the trees before me. The Moss Hag’s lair had been several hours to the southeast of Yunnam, which put it less than an hour due south of the Hellweb Hollow, home to Lowyth the Immortal Orbweaver.
The same Lowyth that had almost turned me and Cutter into lunch.
I pushed forward past the webbing, catching a faint scratch-scratching, which immediately put my teeth on edge. Spiderkin, watching the chase from the relative safety of the forest canopy. I leapt over a string of gossamer spider silk barring my path, then darted left, avoiding a heavily webbed thicket of palms, before angling ri
ght, bursting through the tree line and into an all-too-familiar clearing. Everything was exactly as awful as I remembered it: an enormous concave pit in the forest floor, covered with layer after layer of thick webbing, surrounded by a ring of towering trees. Cocoons dangling from branches, swaying and bobbing gently in a warm breeze.
The only thing missing was the army of Spiderkin and their nightmarish queen, but that meant jack-squat, especially since I could hear the ceaseless rustle of their hairy legs. They were watching. Waiting. Curious. I’d escaped once, yet here I was, back for more. I was really rolling the dice here, and if my suicidal gamble didn’t work, I was dead beyond belief. On the other hand, I couldn’t possibly beat the Hag on my own, so I was dead either way.
Mustering all the courage I had, I sprinted around the outside edge of the clearing, wheeling about once I got to the far side, and pressed my back against a wide gnarled tree as I drew my hammer. The restless, unsettling rustle of arachnoid legs increased in urgency and intensity, but that noise was quickly replaced by snarls of inhuman rage and the crash of trees as the Moss Hag exploded into the clearing, beady eyes fixed intently on me.
“So, you’ve finally decided to stop running,” she bellowed, edging forward, raising her bone-wand, preparing to end me for good. “Good,” she snarled, winded from the pursuit. “I was starting to grow tired of this fruitless game.” She wheezed, her giant lungs working like a set of enormous bellows as she flicked her wand this way and that, conjuring a burning orb of green light on the tip of her weapon. “Any last words before I melt the flesh from your muscle and use your bones to pick my teeth?” She inched closer, right up to the edge of the pit.
She didn’t seem to notice or care.
“Actually,” I said, tightening my grip on the hammer in my hands, “I was hoping you might like to meet a few of my friends.”
The Moss Hag paused, eyes narrowing into angry slits as she canted her head to one side, confusion evident on her ugly face. “What are you talk—”
She didn’t get a chance finish the sentence.
The Queen—all hairy, bulbous body, pulsing with fire-engine red light—erupted from the hole in the ground. She sprang forward, quick as a blast of lightning, and lunged at the oversized intruder, their bodies slamming together with a clap that echoed in the air. The Hag howled in surprised fury, lashing out with a bone-shattering haymaker. Her fist landed like a wrecking ball, but the Queen took the blow in stride, barely faltering as she fought to wrap her arachnoid legs around the Hag, drawing her into a terrible bear hug.
Well, a spider hug, I guess.
“Attack,” the Spider Queen droned, her voice the sound of a fork dragging over a plate played through a speaker system. “Tonight we feast!” she screamed before driving her head down, her saber-like fangs sinking into the Hag’s leathery hide. Maybe my puny warhammer couldn’t hurt the Hag, but the Queen didn’t have the same problem. I watched in stunned horror as Spiderkin responded to her call, materializing out of everywhere: pouring from the trees and forest in every direction, rappelling down from above.
A sea of hairy bodies swarming toward the Hag, preparing to defend their queen and lands.
Unless the Hag was a thousand times tougher than I’d given her credit for, she wasn’t walking away from this. No way. But she wasn’t going to go down easy, either.
The Hag struggled, hunching forward and biting the Queen, sinking her blunt, yellowed teeth into one of the monarch’s legs, severing the appendage in a spray of bright red ichor. The Hag wasn’t done though. Nope. Exploiting the momentary opening, she thrashed and smashed her way free from the Queen’s deathly hug, then laid into the overgrown arachnoid with a devastating left uppercut, which somehow lifted the Queen briefly into the air, flipping the bug-mother onto her back.
Exposing her vulnerable underside.
The Spiderkin were converging on the Hag now, covering her arms and legs, scuttling up her grassy back and sinking fangs in like hypodermic needles. But the Hag just glowered and kept right on coming, wading through the press of bodies, eyes fixed on the temporarily downed Queen. As tough as the lesser Spiderkin were, I wasn’t sure they’d have the muscle to take out the Hag without the aid of their queen. The matriarch was my heavy hitter, and without her, there was a good chance we’d be in trouble.
I needed to buy the Queen time to recover. Which meant distraction—sleight of hand.
Quickly, I vaulted onto the hairy back of a huge spider rushing past me, inbound for Moss Hag-ville. The creature didn’t even seem to notice I’d hitched a ride, so focused was it on the giantess. I straddled the creature like a mount and started unleashing Umbra Bolts from its back as it scurried up over the rest of the Spiderkin—one massive, seething dogpile of hairy legs and bloated bodies—and right into the heart of the fight. The Hag responded with a shriek, finally tearing her eyes away from the Queen, locking on me again.
“You!” she shrieked at the top of her lungs. “You tricked me. You treacherous, conniving dirt-speck.” She fought and snarled, desperately working to free her arms so she could smash me into goo or choke the air from my lungs, but the industrious Spiderkin had already begun to web her arms to her side. “Even if I die, I’ll take you with me!” she bellowed.
I just smiled, because despite her threats, I was riding on top of a giant spider with a clean shot at her head. “Like my friend Cutter says, ‘there’s always someone bigger, faster, stronger. So, you need to be smarter.’ This? This is what smarter looks like,” I shouted, swinging my warhammer with all the power I had left, triggering Savage Blow as the weapon collided with her sloping, uneven forehead. The blow, though far from powerful enough to kill her, broke her momentum, and suddenly she was falling backward, pushed by the weight of the spider wall bearing down on her.
It took next to no time before an all-too-familiar scene took shape: a host of spiders swarmed her, pinning her to the ground, sinking deadly fangs down, injecting virulent poison as other spiders encased her in tight strands of silk. The Hag fought and kicked, screamed and cursed, but her HP bar was dropping like a plane that’d lost both engines. The sheer overwhelming physical damage, coupled with the insane amount of spider venom being pumped into her veins, was too much even for a juggernaut like her to handle.
I leapt from the back of my unaware mount hit the ground hard, and smoothly dropped into a roll which brought me clear of the arachnoid feeding frenzy. Temporarily forgotten by the preoccupied Spiderkin, I immediately shifted into Stealth and slipped around until I was a few feet away from the Hag’s misshapen head.
Then, before anyone could stop me, I brought my warhammer up high and triggered another Savage Blow as I attacked. This time, I caved in one of her beady little eyes, dropping her HP to zero. Dead. The spiders didn’t seem to care. They kept up their terrible work, spinning, weaving, cocooning while I quietly looted the body, taking everything I could get my hands on without bothering to look at it—there’d be time for that later, once I wasn’t surrounded by hairy-legged abominations. Quietly as I could, I turned and slipped off toward the tree line, whispering a slight prayer I wouldn’t be spotted.
I was almost home free when the Queen’s buzzing voice sliced through the air.
“It is not often a fly escapes my web,” the Queen hissed at me.
I turned toward her with a grimace. She was finally back on her too-many feet and had an almost thoughtful expression on her inhuman face.
“It is rarer still that an escaped fly returns. Yet you not only returned, but delivered a valued enemy into my hands, providing my brood with a grand feast. Enough to eat our fill for a month. What’s more”—she paused, gaze fixing upon my chest—“you could’ve run, but instead you stayed and fought my enemy during a moment when I was weak. Vulnerable.” She dipped her head an inch in acknowledgement or, maybe, thanks. “So, perhaps for tonight I will extend you a boon and allow you to leave my hollow in peace. A reward rarer even than a fly escaping and returning.”
“That’s very gracious of you,” I said, offering her a tight, nervous smile and an awkward bow.
“You’re more reasonable than the rest of your kind, Shadow Child. What stupid, insignificant name do you call yourself?” she asked, appraising me as her horde of godawful children finished wrapping the Moss Hag’s malformed corpse.
“Jack,” I replied, a slight tremor in my voice. “Grim Jack.”
“Grim Jack,” she crooned, as though tasting the syllables. “I will remember it along with your scent—just in case we should ever cross paths again. Hopefully, that won’t be too soon.”
I offered her another little bow, then triggered Shadow Stride before she could reconsider. I ran away as hard and as fast as I could. It didn’t take me long to find the stream and the totem marking out the Ak-Hani clan territory. Thankfully, this time I avoided the pit as I made my way up the winding dirt path, bound for Yunnam.
THIRTY-FOUR:
Victory Road
I rounded the bend and saw the gates of Yunnam as the sun was starting to break over the horizon, fingers of gold and pink light reaching into the sky. I’d fully expected to find the gate locked and the townsfolk asleep, but I was wrong. The gates stood open and hundreds of people—men, women, children, the elderly—sat on the ground in contemplative silence, each bearing a lit tallow candle against the fading night. It looked like a sea of fire stretching out in front of me; a blanket of stars covering the ground. My eyes skipped over the crowd, quickly spotting Cutter, who sat with Amara and the chieftain near the center of the formation.
The Thief looked worn out, but his eyes were open and he bore a flickering candle in one hand, just like the rest.
What was this?
A collective gasp went up as I stepped through the gate, tired, hungry, disgusting, and ready to sleep for the next year.