by Rue Vespers
One troll went down, its scream cutting off abruptly. Others crashed into the buildings, which collapsed upon them in showers of bricks and wood. They were scrambling, Jenner saw, several of the huge bodies already fading away.
The smarter trolls did the only thing left to them. They ran.
Not back out to the farmlands, their way blocked by rubble and bodies, but deeper into the city. The drumbeat of hundreds of feet created a quake that shook dust from the buildings and made the rubble bounce.
Fight the trolls!
The power of the incantation took hold again, and Jenner’s legs churned for Galadras.
“Let them do it!” Rosy argued. “Stop! Dammit, stop!”
Jenner heard the baritone in a distant part of his mind, and that part put together that the teacup was talking about the fleet of chariots passing overhead. Wizards were firing their wands to the city blocks. Lightning bolts rained down, incinerating trolls in direct hits, and hurling those nearby away in shock waves.
Dislodged soulless flew everywhere. It was a gruesome sight, their bodies landing in trees and crashing through windows, but this neither hurt them nor daunted them. Picking themselves up from wherever they landed, they promptly came back.
The battle scene grew more chaotic by the second as the number of chariots above increased. Witches sent up sheets of purple flames to consume the beasts, naturally nailing many of the soulless in the process, but the dead/undead emerged from the flames blackened yet unscathed. Elves and demons dropped over the sides of flying chariots to join the ground attack. Living dragons screamed, pulsing their wings and diving down to spray fire.
Jenner ran along the broken road, determined to hurl himself into the thick of it. A soft timpani caught his accentuated hearing. Then he was suddenly in the presence of dozens of cats and wolves, all racing past him with eyes fixed upon the conflict. Human players rode on their backs, gripping the saddles to stay steady.
The man on the lead cat wore a helmet with a red plume. His face was chiseled from stone. If he found it odd to encounter a guy running to battle with a teacup on his shoulder, the stray thought left no evidence in that hard visage. He was here for the trolls.
They all were. The players riding the shifters had echoes of that plume in red stripes down their armor. Livery perhaps, of the House they claimed; the cats wore matching silver armor to protect their chests, and the wolves wore a different, darker style of armor from the cats, yet it was the same from one wolf to another.
In the back of the squadron, one sleek cat’s saddle was empty. Seeing a chance to speed his way there, Jenner jumped on and rode with them towards the fray. He couldn’t say if it was his own decision or if it belonged to the incantation. The shifter fortunately bore no quarrel at having a rider.
Congrats! You have received a merit trophy for Werecat Rider!
Fun Fact Time! There are many sub-races of werecat in Talvenor. Some are very recognizable from the outer-world in lions, tigers, panthers, and some are unique to Scrambled Liv-
They entered the city.
The cat leaped upon a pile of rubble and launched itself high, Jenner stabbing a troll in the chest as they soared past. A bolt of lightning struck down into the street ahead just as the cat touched down upon the pavement. It leaped again as rocks exploded upwards in a fount of projectiles. Jenner clutched the saddle, the cat scaling the wall of a partially collapsed inn and righting itself at the rooftop.
From there, the werecat launched onto the back of a troll. They worked together without a word exchanged between them, Jenner and the shifter, his saber spilling blood and the troll tumbling down as the cat bounded upon another.
Chariots swung crazily through the pandemonium. Lightning and fire and arrows flew about in a deadly cacophony. An ice spear punched through a troll’s throat just as Jenner’s cat landed upon it, the creature whirling around in an ungainly pirouette and the cat jumping away with a frantic twist that would have tossed Jenner off its back without the Gregallan glove.
“Sorry, dudes,” the ice demon said casually, and zoomed away on her plates.
Awaken.
Rise.
Obey.
Fight the . . .
The necromancers could not set this spell and walk away. They had to keep up the incantation from wherever they were above. Attention was slipping among the less experienced at magic, and that single, solitary image of a Blue Mountain troll wavered in the minds of the soulless.
Other images stormed in to fill the void. The effect was disastrous.
The army of soulless lost their focus, and it was only Rosy jamming the spoon into Jenner’s ear canal that stopped him from slugging the werecat beneath him. “Hogdoor’s nuts! What is wrong with you?” Rosy shrieked.
Jenner pulled back his gloved fist in shock. For seconds there, the cat bearing him along had been his enemy, the focus of an old grudge from some random necromancer, and the wizard’s hatred of werecats consumed him in whole.
Without a troll image held fast in their brains, the soulless were attacking anyone and everyone in sight. The same ice demon who got in their way was yanked off her plates and swarmed in a siege of gray; winged horses screamed as a chariot flying too low went under. A soulless werecat took a swipe at Jenner’s leg and left slashes along his trousers that didn’t penetrate his skin. He turned in the saddle and fired an arrow into its head just to stall it from attacking anyone else.
Fight the trolls! Fight the tr-
The minds behind the incantation became one, and the battle refocused. The spell lost its hold entirely over Jenner in that moment, the whispers extinguishing like a candleflame in a hard wind.
He was alive. For now. Thank God, thank Hogdoor, thank any and every deity in either world.
“This way!”
The human warrior with the red plume was calling back to his troops. They emerged from the battle to join him on a side street, all of them bloodied and panting. One wolf was minus its rider.
There was a flash of color and motion, and then Ocelo sat up upon the wolf. Her trident was covered in troll blood and gristle, which she shook off. “Still with us, Jenner?” she asked.
“Still with you, sort of,” Jenner said.
Kicking his heels into his mount’s sides, the commander took off with the rest of them in pursuit. The fleeing trolls had left potholes in the roads, making them very easy to follow in their escape through the city.
“Do you know who these people are?” Jenner asked as his werecat ran alongside Ocelo’s wolf in the back.
“Red is for House Armada,” Rosy said. “Only the commander of a House’s warriors wear the plume.”
“Yes, that’s Commander Odelon in the front of the pack,” Ocelo said. “He’s led the guild’s warriors for years. I was gunning for acceptance to House Armada when I was human, dreaming of the day I became a gavvus in their ranks, but I got scrambled first. He had just taken over as commander then. The previous commander was scrambled in an expedition.”
“And the shifters?” Jenner asked the mermaid.
“Armada fosters a good working relationship with several shifter Houses. The cats are House Quenesse, because all sub-races of cats belong to it, whether they get along or not. The wolves belong to House Lupus, since wolves are only second to dwarves when it comes to naming things after the obvious.”
The wolf huffed beneath her, though whether it was in agreement, amusement, or scorn was impossible to tell.
Even in their panic, the trolls had taken the time to bash a wall or window here and there. Then again, the damage could have been incidental, since they were still fighting soulless along the way. Jenner’s cat leaped over a fading troll body that stretched from the tavern on one side of the road to the wand shop on the other. Trapped beneath the corpse was a long-haired soulless of no discernible gender, writhing to free its legs and its head turned in the direction the surviving trolls went.
Since there was nothing here to fight, Jenner called up his
map as they ran on. His blinking dot was on the move in a northeastern cut through Galadras.
Why were the trolls going that way? Once they dodged the worst of the fighting, there wasn’t much to stop them from taking side roads back out of the city. Traveling farther in made little sense when their numbers were shrinking and soulless were everywhere.
There was either a purpose, an end point to this mad race, or else they were so inconceivably stupid and utterly absent of survival instincts that they couldn’t figure out how to leave this maze of building-lined blocks.
Jenner didn’t believe that. He could see the hills from where he was, so creatures towering thirty feet tall could definitely see them. The trolls had a destination, his eyes continuing on in a diagonal sweep to the Palace of Light. “Rosy, do you think they’re heading for the palace?”
“All hail our demonic overlords,” Rosy said.
“Rosy, I’m serious!”
“So am I!” the cup said in umbrage. “That’s exactly where these trolls are probably going. I’d bet my pence on it. If the trolls take the palace, then the demons take Talvenor. It makes sense. And this is good for demons! You’ve got to hand them that. Usually when they make their bids for power, they wipe out so gloriously that the details of their failed attempts become Trivia Night fodder in taverns. Dan told me all about it.”
“Sure it’s not the vampires commanding the trolls?” Jenner called to Ocelo.
“I’m sure,” she said mildly. “The whispers of demons are diminishing. They have taken great losses in this war, from their lowest players to their highest echelons. This is someone else’s game.”
Was it the shifters? Jenner knew better than to float that hypothesis with a shifter beneath him, but he wondered. He should have paid more heed to those articles that bored him so much just days ago, especially the one that practically put him to sleep in the clinic’s waiting room of dragon shifters turning their backs on the High Council. What seemed stupid and petty at the time looked sinister in retrospect.
Commander Odelon swerved onto the sidewalk and drove his cat up a flight of stairs, where it leaped at the landing to the rooftop of a building. They pelted after him along the rooftops, the cats and wolves making mighty bounds between the blocks.
Drumming.
Jenner put a hand to his forehead to shield his eyes from the late afternoon glare of the sun. There were the trolls blocks ahead! They were hurling away the soulless, pounding their fists through upper-story windows, and all of them were moving ever closer to the palace a couple of miles away.
Traveling by rooftop swiftly reduced the distance between their parties, but the commander made no move to close in for an attack. He kept them at a safe distance, running parallel to where the two to three hundred trolls were struggling along.
The shifters soon outpaced them. Reaching the palace first to cut them off was the plan, it was safe to surmise, and they were not alone. Chariots zoomed by overhead, a few rounding to the trolls to fire and the rest going on towards the towers in the distance.
Mr. Eggers.
A random memory uploaded of Jenner’s high school study hall teacher, always yelling at the class to shut the hell up. Thanks, Jenner thought sarcastically to the nets. He thought he might go out of his mind if he asked for his character upload percentage, so he resisted the urge to do so.
His cat curled to the right, distracting him. Jenner peered down the streets to the trolls, who were now just a few hundred feet away.
Though seething with soulless, their tree-trunk legs stamped ever forward to squash abandoned rickshaws and carriages and smash the pavement into rubble. Dimly intelligent they were, but they had put together that it was more effective to chuck the soulless over several city blocks rather than kill them where they stood. Bodies were flying everywhere. Kill them in place and they just got up after a few seconds, whereas lobbing them away bought the trolls some time while the soulless had to run or walk or crawl or fly back to attack.
The great haunches of his cat gathered at the edge of a rooftop, and Jenner clamped his hand over the teacup as they rocketed down to a stretch of grass.
“King’s Park!” Ocelo called.
The park was deserted. Marble statues stood proudly upon pedestals along the flower-lined paths, labeled with the names of former kings and queens of Talvenor. Lucky that Jenner acquired the Zerotte: he could only read what was written on the plaques through the power of the blessing as they dashed past to the palace beyond.
Within a minute, they came to the palace wall. The fact that the drawbridge was up did not stall the shifters, who jumped over the ornamental moat and dug their claws into the wall to climb it. Colorful koi flickered about in the clear water below as Jenner laid low along the cat and held on tightly to the cup.
“Goddammit,” Jenner hissed. “The game just awarded me a merit trophy for visiting the Palace of Light, an inner-world news notification about what hours I can tour the grounds, and then unloaded fun facts about its history and architecture and the High Council.”
“I’m tired of telling you to turn those fucking things off,” the teacup groused. “There are three kinds of players in Scrambled Lives: the ones who love the trophies and fun facts without shame, the ones who hate the trophies and fun facts and disable the notifications to save their sanity, and the ones who hate the trophies and fun facts but leave the notifications on so they can keep hating them. You’re the third kind. You love it as much as you hate it, so close your pie-hole.”
“That’s not true!” Jenner said, but it was and he knew it.
At the top of the wall, the shifters jumped down onto a stone walkway. Palace guards moved aside to give them room. Parked down in the interior gardens and courtyards of the palace were the chariots, wizards and witches and more players rushing up flights of stairs to join them atop the wall.
So many people were speaking at once that the commands tangled together. “-need more warriors on the north side!” “Bows forward!” “Warriors to the west side!” “All dragons to me!” “All cats to-”
Jenner’s breath stuttered as Mereene and a blonde succubus threaded past his cat with Artemis bows. Their battle dresses were grimy with dirt and troll blood, and a feather clip was missing from Mereene’s hair, but they remained just as stunning as if they were garbed in ballgowns with flutes of champagne cradled in their palms.
Or naked and in his bed, sharing him. Play-fighting over him. Begging him for more, and when your lover was a succubus in this game, it was profoundly gratifying to know that you had a lot more to give than you did in the outer-world.
Minutes away from an attack, and Jenner was thinking sexy-time thoughts. He wasn’t even mad at himself for doing it. You couldn’t look at a succubus or two and not think about sex.
Noticing Jenner atop the werecat, Mereene threw him a wink, whispered thanks for the scales, and moved on. You’re welcome, Jenner thought too late, kicking himself for not calling out to her.
Rosy swiveled to watch the pair of succubi go. “What is it about them that reduces your IQ to a troll’s?” the cup scolded.
“If you don’t get it,” Jenner said as he dismounted, “I will never be able to explain it to you.”
“Ugh. I’m going to ride around with the psychic mermaid chick. She’s not a pervert.”
“You shouldn’t,” Ocelo said, sliding down from her wolf and staring longingly at a dark-haired incubus on the stairs. “Seeing as I’ve gotten merit trophies for sex with an incubus, sex with a succubus, and orgy sex with both, Rosy, I’m no better.”
“Sex with a succubus, huh?” Jenner asked. “Were you male in a past life?”
Ocelo smiled and didn’t answer. Jenner had so many questions all of a sudden, but it wasn’t the time to ask with the drumming getting louder.
The trolls were a quarter-mile away at most, and gaining speed as the numbers of soulless diminished around them. The blessing decided what Jenner needed was the bow and quiver, which it supplied. H
e, Rosy, and Ocelo found a place upon the western wall to stand.
“-more to the north in case they cut around!” “Cats and wolves, here!” “Are there dragons? Ice demons? We need you to-”
A hand closed over Jenner’s blessings.
He turned in surprise to the red-plumed commander from House Armada, who lifted the amulets and gave them a cursory glance. Leather thongs and chains were around the man’s own neck, though his amulets were hidden within his armor. None had a demonic feel.
“Name?” Commander Odelon rumbled, his gaze traveling over to the teacup.
“Jenner, sir, and this is Rosy,” Jenner said.
“I’m a glitch,” Rosy explained.
“You fought trolls before, you two?”
“A little,” Jenner replied as Rosy straightened with pride, if a teacup could be said to straighten.
A small part of Jenner braced himself to be made fun of, to be told to get off this wall and clear out for the real army, or even to hand over his blessings to someone else, but this man was no Tetra. Nor was Jenner a player to be discounted with the Zerotte.
Releasing the amulets, the commander said, “Hold your fire until you hear my order. Aim for their eyes with those arrows, warrior. Whatever charms have been placed on these trolls are weakening.”
“Yes, sir.” As Commander Odelon looked past him, Jenner said, “Sir, do you have any idea who’s responsible for this?”
The man’s gaze returned to him. “The investigation is for later, and for others to lead. Right now, we just have to stop them.” He moved past Jenner to speak with Ocelo. Weathered enough in this world to know that it contained mermaids, he inspected her trident and nodded in approval before going on to address a clutch of palace guards.