by Rue Vespers
A soulless human walking upon a rooftop went over the edge obliviously. Jenner gasped as the guy dropped like a stone down three stories and hit the ground near the merman, who didn’t turn around to see the cause of the thump. The soulless human should have died, he should have scrambled, but after a few moments of stillness, his arms and legs twitched nauseatingly and his head raised. He got up to his feet unhurt, his broken body having stitched itself back together.
There were so many more than two or three soulless. Jenner was gaping down to several thousand of them. If it was like this all over Galadras, it was an army greater than the Blue Mountain troll army at its height. Tens of thousands, fifty thousand; in a city as large as Galadras, it could be a hundred thousand failed uploads, and Hogdoor only knew how many more were strewn throughout Talvenor.
Their heads turned, and their flat eyes stared up to Jenner.
Not to Jenner, not really, but north.
Awaken.
Rise.
Obey.
The others had joined him, all but the sleeping dragonling, and they choked at the horrifying sight below.
Dan the Troll wore an expression of ineffable sadness; Amarelle in her human form had her hand over her mouth in disgust. Ocelo’s eyes snapped with outrage and offense, and Rosy was spluttering.
“But they said!” the teacup cried. “They taught in the lab that this was against the law! They warned every fucking class not to get lured into necromancy, because it would result in scrambling. I sat through those lectures for months, so how can they do this?”
“There are no rules in war,” Jenner said hollowly. It was a line he once heard in a bad action movie, dramatically spoken and poorly acted. But now he saw the truth of it. Rules were for civilized times.
“Desperate straits make for desperate choices,” Dan the Troll said. “This is the High Council’s desperate choice.”
Jenner turned to him. “Why the High Council?” he asked. Of course, though. It had been in the news. In Unprecedented Move, High Council Summons Necromancers To Secret Meeting.
“Who else could have commanded this?” Dan the Troll said. “No one but the High Council. A necromancer stays in the shadows. They do not parade what they are in the streets. To be suspected of necromancy is a terrible blow to a wizard’s reputation. I have seen wizards scrambled in a tavern over a simple rumor that they dabbled in the darkest of arts. Necromancers are reviled by one and all, because what they do . . .”
The troll shook his head. “It is as foul as a grave-robber in the outer-world. The soulless are to be left alone. They could be any of us.”
“But the lure is strong anyway,” Amarelle said as the drumming grew louder at their backs. “Too strong. I saw it in my wizard life how some could not resist the call to command the dead.”
Awaken.
Rise.
Obey.
“I can hear them,” Jenner said in a winded voice. “I hear the incantation.”
His body was still alive out there. He could hear the spell being cast, but he was not controlled by it.
Yet.
He seized Ocelo’s hands in panic. “Please,” he begged her. “I don’t know you that well, and definitely not well enough to ask for a big favor. Or any favor. But please . . . if you can, please take me to the Snapteeth. If I don’t make it, put me in the Gate Gardens so nobody can use me like this.”
He cast about for something to give her in gratitude. “You can have everything in my purse. You can sell my dagger and my blessings. The Zerotte must be worth tons of gold. It is, isn’t it, Dan?”
Solemnly, Dan the Troll said, “It is worth a fortune.”
Jenner nodded, hating how his voice was trembling. “You could buy your own pool in Galadras with it, or anywhere in the game you want to live. You could . . .”
Ocelo slipped her hand from his, and pressed it to his cheek. “I will take you to my island, Jenner, I promise, and I will unlock the gates for you. My people will care for you for eternity.”
“And will you take care of Rosy?”
“I will take care of your cup, and your cup will take care of me. We’ll go on every quest in Talvenor that you should have gone on.” Her eyes gleamed with unfallen tears.
He kissed her. Just once, and lightly, his heart hurting for what could have been.
Then it was settled. He would go to the Snapteeth, which was hopefully far beyond the necromancers’ reach or interest; Rosy would go to Ocelo; and Ocelo would have a purse so full that she could do anything she pleased in the game.
He embraced Dan the Troll, and offered his hand to Amarelle. She pulled him into a hug and patted his head in a grandmotherly way. “I can fly you and Ocelo south with Dan holding you steady in the saddle, so you needn’t walk the distance,” she said.
“Thank you,” he whispered.
Then he plucked up Rosy from the rock. “I’m glad I came to the lab that day.”
“Fuck you!” Rosy barked. “You aren’t dying until I say you’re dying, and I don’t say you’re dying so none of this weepy bullshit and feelings! You’re fine.”
“Rosy, I’m not fine. I can hear them.”
The cup blew a raspberry at him. “It’s your imagination. What’s your upload percentage? Is it at 69% yet? I’ve been waiting so long for you to tell me it’s 69% so I can tell you to stop flirting with me and that nobody wants to hear about your favorite sexual position. I know I’m dead sexy for a cup, but you’re not my type for a human and . . .”
Jenner checked. “You missed your chance. I’m at 71.4%.”
He had come so close. So damn close.
Awaken.
Rise.
Obey.
Fight.
His fingers clenched around the cup, which he quickly put on his shoulder. He slammed his fists to his sides and fought to keep them there, pinching his trousers between his thumbs and forefingers until they went numb. He would not obey the necromancers; he would not fight for them; and yet the incantation was a siren call attempting to wash him away.
Below, those painted-on eyes surveyed the world around them.
The soulless still did not see one another. Or they did, perhaps, but these were not the targets they were looking for. Their kinship stopped them from attacking one another. Yet for those among them who were not soulless . . .
Precious few players remained upon the streets. The last NPC dragons had lifted away long ago with their baskets of youthful charges; the blue waters of the Ends were speckled with tiny boats. Jenner assumed it was the same on the southern side of the city, the demons fleeing the Whittler on horseback.
But a few had ignored the emergency evacuation notifications and stayed behind in the city. Some of them spilled out of an alley in high spirits, five club-wielding men who proceeded to smash the windows of the shops and inns, brothels and taverns along the road. Even at the distance, Jenner had a good view of them with his new blessing.
Their purpose was not so much the joy of looting as it was the joy of destruction, although sporadically they did reach in through shattered windows to liberate a fistful of jewelry, new blades, or mugs of ale. Chugging their drinks, they threw the mugs at the soulless and went on their happy way.
The startling presence of the living dead in the streets left them untroubled. Perhaps they were drunk, or just unspeakably stupid and ignorant like the idiot twins in the wagon to Sundown Castle. These five men had to be new or relatively new players, or else they would recognize that something was different. Something was wrong, extremely wrong, and that something should have sent them fleeing.
Fight.
The men lifted their clubs, laughing as they approached the big windows of a grocery store. They were fully unaware that the dozens of soulless on that particular street were pivoting to stare at them.
On the count of three, they bashed at the windows together. Glass sprayed everywhere. The clubs rose and fell, rose and fell, rose . . .
Fight.
They
whirled around as their arms were grabbed, and their laughter stopped.
The battle was short and brutal. Sporadically a fist or head raised above the gray swarm of soulless, who felt no pain or fear, who were void of compassion, void of a basic understanding what it was they did. They were empty vessels programmed to fight.
And Jenner, who was not a vessel, longed to fight with them.
The need was a ferocious itch beneath his skin, and he gripped his trousers harder to stop himself from turning on Ocelo or Dan the Troll. To rip them up and sate that itch, to slug Amarelle and stomp on Rosy and assault the little dragonling . . . Chew out her throat, tear off her wings, half of his mind feasting on the mental images of destruction and the other half so sickened that he thought he might throw up.
No. God almighty, no.
He wouldn’t do any of that! He didn’t care how unbearable the itch grew. He would throw himself off the hillside first, or stick the dagger down his throat and choke on it until he met the great scrambler in the sky. He wasn’t a feral animal for the necromancers to command. He wasn’t going to be anyone’s nightmarish last sight as they died.
The swarm dispersed, leaving five broken bodies upon the road.
The gray heads turned. They were looking for someone else to attack, but the only ones present were each other.
Fight.
Images flashed within Jenner’s mind of the Blue Mountain trolls, and of wizards in hooded robes conjuring from chariots with their wands pointed to Galadras. Other images flashed past in a whirlwind: wizards and demons and shifters and dwarves, but the trolls returned and wiped out the rest.
The necromancers had to center this image within the vacant minds of the soulless, to tell them what they needed to fight, but some of these dark wizards were newer to the art, and their own personal enemies were pushing forth in their thoughts to disrupt the spell. Trolls . . . dragons . . . wizards . . . trolls . . . humans . . . demons . . . trolls . . . trolls . . .
Fight the trolls!
The trolls took center stage once more. Jenner’s knuckles went white as he battled the sensations overcoming him. Erasing him. The craving to tear and claw and kill these beasts eliminated all the rest of who he was. He battled for control, to hold onto his name at the very least, and chanting it in his head Jenner Jenner Jenner suddenly brought everything back.
He had not died. But it felt in those seconds of erasure like he came perilously close to the brink.
The drumming of the trolls’ racing footsteps was so loud now that it woke up the dragonling, who flew from her hot stone bed to what she thought was safety in their company. Her tiny scaled fingers closed over Jenner’s trousers and he almost wept, wept for what he could have done to her had the necromancers not shifted his focus.
The first trolls appeared.
They coursed out of the breaks in the hills like a flood, pounding their chests and roaring in victory as the city came into view. The wooden fences of the farmland were splintered to pieces as they slammed through, their huge feet pounding the crops flat to the earth. The flocks of sheep ran away in fright as their pastures were invaded. The trolls did not pursue them, running instead to the farmhouses and barns to stamp through the walls and rip off the rooftops. They grabbed out fistfuls of objects, bathtubs and beds, chairs and wardrobes, tractors and cows and even a person, and flung them away.
Leaving a swath of agricultural destruction behind them, they moved on to the city. The paved roads crumbled beneath their weight as they breached the first line of buildings. Balling up their fists, they punched holes in the walls and windows, crushed chimneys down like a whack-a-mole game, jerked hitching posts out of the ground and lobbed them into the air as if they were confetti.
Awaken.
Rise.
Obey.
Fight the trolls!
The soulless surged.
Jenner surged with them.
Chapter Thirty-Six
The incantation took hold of the legions of soulless.
Hands curling into claws and jaws gnashing, they rushed through the streets towards the Blue Mountain trolls. An identical expression of hatred distorted their faces, yet that hatred was not truly theirs but grafted on by the spell. It overlaid the vacancy rather than displaced it, so they were just as hollow as before. All they had within them was the itch to tear the trolls apart.
Maybe the casual observer wouldn’t see that. Jenner, however, felt it.
They were not armed. They had no strategy. They remained curiously unaware of one another, jostling shoulders and tripping on heels, yet a common purpose bound them. The damage of their incomplete uploads affected their gaits: some of the soulless ran and walked with lurching strides, others shuffled without lifting their feet, and a small number could only crawl. The dragons flew, low and at lopsided angles; the cats scaled the buildings clumsily and dropped down on the other side in a sprawl.
The noise that the trolls were making at the northernmost outskirts of the city was as effective as the lures on the plains. It drew the army of the dead/undead like moths to a flame through the roads of Galadras. Oblivious to the danger sweeping ever closer, the trolls continued to destroy the buildings until the first of the soulless reeled around the street corners.
The trolls gave off on pounding the buildings flat to leer at the approaching soulless. They were too stupid to recognize the danger, seeing only little players to be quashed. They were also too stupid to notice that their menacing roars did not daunt the soulless in the slightest.
They charged one another, trolls and soulless, and clashed.
As for Jenner, he was still himself as he ran down the hillside. Himself, yet not in whole. His legs were completely under the power of the incantation. But there was far more in his head than what was in the heads of the soulless, each empty mind below riveted to a single image of the enemy to be defeated.
“Stop! STOP, you idiot!” Rosy was thumping Jenner all about the head with the spoon. “What are you doing, Gramma? We just got away from them! Go back to the hilltop!”
He couldn’t stop. He didn’t want to stop.
Yes, part of the drive to fight was from the spell, but the rest was from himself. Or maybe it was from the Zerotte blessing. There wasn’t time to figure it out, and he certainly wasn’t going to take the blessing off.
At the bottom of the hill, he sprinted through the flattened grass. More trolls were streaming from the hills. Since there was little left of the farmhouses and barns to tear apart, they bypassed the heaps of rubble to head straight for the city.
The blessing knew what Jenner needed. His left hand closed over a bow as a quiver dropped from his belt. Whipping out an arrow, he drew it as he ran.
He could not have done this without the blessing. He hadn’t ever shot an arrow in any world. With the blessing, the knowledge of what to do was just there in his mind, as if he learned from the elven masters themselves. The knowledge, and long combat experience as well; shooting a bow while in motion was not for the beginner.
Head, shaft, fletching, nock. He took aim at a troll who had already sustained considerable damage, its back bristling with arrows like a porcupine. It was smaller than the others, half the size at best, so Jenner assumed it was younger. As the beast blasted through a chicken pen, sending its feathery inhabitants squawking away, Jenner shot. The arrow flew away almost too fast to see, and buried itself in the back of the troll’s neck.
He had felt the sheer strength of the Artemis bow, the power that sent the arrow soaring. Yet the thick hide of the troll afforded it a lot of protection, even one this young, and the arrow did not go as deeply as it should have.
But it got the troll’s attention. The beast wheeled around, crushing the wooden hutch beneath its foot, to confront its assailant. And it took Jenner’s second arrow in its eye, the only eye it had since the second was gouged out. With a screech of pain and fury, the blinded troll fumbled at the smashed hutch, broke off a leg, and waved it warningly in Jenner�
�s general direction.
The third arrow went right into the troll’s mouth as it bellowed. And that still wasn’t enough to kill it, the ugly creature staggering forward and swinging the wooden leg so viciously that it whistled through the air.
The bow and quiver were swapped out for the Gregallan glove and saber as Jenner neared. Ducking under the leg of the hutch, he slugged the troll squarely in its loinclothed crotch. The force of the blow sent the troll pinwheeling backwards. Tripping over what was left of the stone wall around a pigpen, the beast crashed down into the mud.
“Nut punch!” Rosy cheered with a wince, which was funny since the teacup had nothing to feel protective about in that arena. “Okay, you’ve had your fun. Let’s go back to the hill.”
Going back to the hill was the farthest thing from Jenner’s mind. He wanted blood.
Jumping over the remnants of the wall, he slugged the troll in the head as it struggled to get up. Brown water splashed everywhere as its skull bashed into the ground. Then Jenner slashed its throat with the saber.
Congrats! You have earned a merit trophy for Troll Killer!
He looked down the shattered road to the city, ravenous for more.
Fighting was thick amongst the blocks. The trolls had gone gray themselves, reeling from the swarms of soulless crawling all over their bodies. As fast as they grabbed them off and hurled them away, more clawed on and scaled them like beetles. Staggering in the streets, some dropped and rolled to rid themselves of the infestation by squashing the soulless to death.
But there was no death for a soulless.
Their HP was permanently stuck at full, or else returned there so rapidly upon damage as to render that damage meaningless. Within seconds of a troll delivering a crushing blow that would have scrambled anyone else in the game, the soulless were clambering upright to continue the attack. It maddened the trolls, whose roars of rage trembled the city itself.
The soulless humans did the least damage, armed only with nails and teeth, yet their numbers were so monumental that they weighed down the trolls’ arms and legs, making them vulnerable to assault from the others. Ice demons among the soulless had those wicked ice spears to throw, and skimmers to move them; vampire soulless had their fangs and moved with single-minded purpose for the neck. The undead dragons flew low yet spat fire; the cats and wolves and bears ripped their claws through troll flesh and bit anywhere they could.