by Rue Vespers
Bursting out of the blocks of shops, the trolls stormed into King’s Park.
How many of them were there now? It was hard to count when they were moving in giant knots, and when they all looked so similarly to one another. At least a thousand pierced into the city but this was only a couple hundred who had made it to the palace. About half were armed with clubs, which they swept from side to side like golf clubs to disperse the soulless.
The unarmed found weapons within the park itself. Jerking trees out of the ground by the roots, ripping up the marble statues and benches, they lobbed them towards the wall. Jenner stepped aside neatly to let a statue hurtle past.
His bow swiveled as he tried to mark the trolls through the tree cover. At his side, Ocelo stepped back to allow a palace archer to take her place.
“Ready!”
Arrows nocked all along the western wall.
“Aim!”
The tallest, leafiest tree was plucked out of the soil, two trolls carrying it along on their shoulders. Jenner focused on the one in the lead. Dirt ran down from the roots, which reached up stiffly over the troll’s head. Taking aim at the troll’s left eye, visible through a break in the roots, Jenner waited.
“Fire!”
A hail of arrows flew into the park.
Jenner’s arrow found its target and the troll dropped the tree to roar in pain. Several of the giants fell dead from arrows lodged in their throats. The spells upon them were weakening, because when the trolls fought within the ice ring upon the plains, Jenner saw many well-aimed, strongly launched arrows dig only an inch or two into their flesh, or bounce harmlessly off their hides altogether.
“Ready!”
Trolls were stupid as hell. Dumb as doorknobs. But they were not devoid of a crude level of cunning in battle. The second line of trolls picked up their fallen comrades and stalked on towards the palace. It would be a few minutes before the dead scrambled, and until that happened, these corpses made excellent shields.
Jenner pivoted in frustration, searching for his next target. An exposed head or neck, an elbow or foot, but the living trolls were huddling up tightly behind the dead to continue their advance.
“Aim!”
Awaken-
Oh God, no.
Rise-
It was happening again.
Obey-
He beat against the incantation for control of his mind. This could not happen. This could not happen now! He had to be over the boundary!
“Ch-chara . . . character upload p-percentage!” he stammered.
Permanent Character Addition
You are being uploaded to the game. Check in at any time for an update.
Current Upload: 73.9%
In his last free movement, he threw Rosy to Ocelo.
And then he was gone.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
He was . . .
He was . . .
He . . .
. . .
Fight the trolls!
He blinked.
Huge fingers were closing over the top of the wall. He leaped forward with a feral snarl and brought down his saber. Blood spurted everywhere, the blade slicing one of the fingers through. It dropped down to the walkway and rolled away.
He lifted the blade to do it again.
A spotted, half-blinded face appeared, and the troll slammed its other fist down atop Jenner’s head.
Jenner.
He had found himself again.
The awareness was a sudden light in the darkness, but all the light illuminated was a small bubble around the flickering flame. He was Jenner. Nothing else. The rest of him, if there was any more to him, dwelled in a blackness so profound that the light could not penetrate it.
The blow to his crown neither hurt nor budged him, though the shock of it caused him to drop the saber. As it clattered down, Jenner leaped into the air and kicked out his right foot. He nailed the arrow sticking out of the troll’s blinded eye, driving it into the creature’s pea-sized brain up to the fletching.
Killed in an instant, the troll dropped off the wall and knocked into the troll climbing up after it. The two of them tumbled down to the moat and landed in the water. More trolls mounted the bodies and stretched up the wall.
To his side, another troll had made it to the top. A woman with blue-green hair slammed the prongs of a trident into the troll’s thigh as it tried to swing its leg onto the walkway. As she withdrew the prongs, it swiped at her. She ducked down, the fist going over her head.
She seemed familiar, as did the teacup on her shoulder, though Jenner couldn’t say why.
He attacked, driving his saber into the troll’s gut. It collapsed, half on the walkway and half hanging over the side. A climbing troll tried to use it as a ladder, the body sliding off altogether.
Hands closed down upon the wall behind Jenner. Yet another troll was hoisting itself up.
This one from Blue Mountain was riddled with soulless. They were crawling over its head and feasting on its neck, clinging to its chest and bulging beneath its loincloth. Jenner and the woman threw themselves at it, stabbing and slashing, trying to get to the troll’s flesh under its gray cloak of soulless.
Swooping out of the sky came two gargantuan sapphire dragons to assist. The first wrapped its claws around the troll’s arm and jerked it off the wall. The second bellowed fire and burned it to a crisp before its companion let the blackened remains drop on the trolls down in the park.
But there were more. And more. And more. There were trolls everywhere Jenner looked. Simply everywhere.
They were coming up faster now by stepping on the bodies of their dead. A warrior from House Armada met a gruesome scrambling, a troll pulling him off the walkway and chomping him in half; a clutch of palace guards were seized up and tossed away like rag dolls to be trampled on by the trolls down in the park. A werecat screamed as it was scooped off its feet and then slammed headfirst into the walkway.
A cry made him turn to that somehow familiar woman, who was twisting in a troll’s fist. Her trident was pinned to her side. “Jenner!”
Jenner?
Jenner! He discovered his own name once more, and his saber came down in a strong slash that almost parted fist from wrist altogether. The troll reeled backwards and went over the wall as the woman and teacup sprawled upon the walkway.
Jenner stared at them in confusion.
“Kid!” the cup yelled as the woman scrambled up to her feet. “Gramma! Asshole! Fuckface! Jenner! Are you in there?”
“I-I’m . . .” Jenner stammered.
Awaken.
Rise.
Obey.
A soulless lost its hold upon a troll and rolled up to Jenner’s feet. They stared at one another, painted eyes to painted eyes, Jenner seeing his own blank stare reflected yet he was still here, the smallest trace of him at least . . .
“Watch out!”
Coming to the edge of the moat was a troll.
At first glance, it was no different from the rest. The same size and shape and coloring, it wore an identical though ripped loincloth that revealed the beast to be male. Soulless crawled on him like locusts, gray forms gnawing on his hide.
But upon his forehead was a crown of thorns, which were pricking into his skin. Thin trails of blood dripped down his nose and cheeks like war paint. And in his eyes was presence. Not much, but far more than the mental vacancies of his buddies.
In his fist was a spiraled wand. It looked like a twig pinched in those big fingers, little bigger than the wands the wizards held.
Jenner experienced a moment of clarity. How many times had he peered longingly through the windows of wand stores? Often enough to recognize the regular attributes of wands. They ranged from four inches to fifteen inches long, carved from every kind of wood imaginable.
Most wands were as straight as his arrows. A sizeable minority were knobby as knuckles, and a scant handful were forked at the firing end or spiraled. For the fashionable shopper desiring a fancier wand,
he or she could spend extra on a jeweled handle and hip holster.
The pre-loaded wands intended for non-wizards were simpler, since they did little and wouldn’t last long. Yet what the crowned troll had in his possession was as fine as a wizard’s wand. Smooth and polished and cherry red in color, it was laced in a net of tiny gemstones from the tip down to where the handle vanished into his fist.
With a leering grin, the troll pointed the spiraled wand at the wall.
“He’s got an Eldritch wand!”
Fun Fact Time! The nine Eldritch wands are some of the most feared weapons in the game, and anybody can wield one! A spell hurled at an Eldritch wand is absorbed and makes it stronger, so the only way to win is to not fight with magic. The High Council has located and locked away seven of the Eldritch wands in the Royal Treasury. The last two remain missing.
Not anymore.
“Get away! Get away!”
It was a wizard who was shouting the warnings, and all of his race were reacting in panic. Rather than firing their wands, they were fleeing for the staircases and tripping on their own robes in their eagerness to put distance between themselves and the crowned troll. Panic was breaking out among some of the others upon the wall as well, the succubi and incubi and witches backing up hastily.
Jenner went the other way. It wasn’t him, but the incantation.
He squared off against that troll below, his teeth gnashing, his fingers curling to scratch, the light in his mind blowing out. He was climbing and his knees were bending and he was going to jump . . .
A bright bead of white was swirling around the spirals of the wand. It burst from the tip as a bolt to rush the wall.
BOOM.
He flew backwards in a cascade of rocks and weapons and bodies. Pebbles pinged off his scaled eyes as he was hurled violently off the wall, the wall that was no longer a wall but a huge cavity in space with trolls already climbing through.
Soaring over a courtyard and a rose garden, he slammed into the side of the Feast Hall and fell down into the foliage below. Chunks of rock crashed down to the earth around him and punched through the windows over his head.
Through a thick haze of smoke and dust flashed lightning and purple flames. Here the haze cleared temporarily to show a red plume in the garden before concealing it again; there the beating wings of a golden dragon created a pocket of visibility in the air. It spat fire down to the Blue Mountain trolls running through the gap in the wall. They shrieked and collapsed in a smoldering pile.
A wand spurted a spell and the haze dispersed.
Wounded warriors littered the ground. Some were uncorking ampoules with shaking, blood-streaked hands. Others were beyond aid, staring sightlessly at nothing. Those closest to the site of the blast were literally in pieces.
Fight the trolls!
He pried himself out of the bushes at once, but then he paused. The necromancers were still driving him with their incantation, yet a thread of Jenner was clinging on and battling back. He knew his name again, and he knew someone named Rosy . . .
Fight!
He started for the gap to rejoin the battle, but only made it ten steps when the world erupted again. The corpses of the trolls were heaved up into the air by an invisible force and flung about like they weighed no more than feathers. Jenner threw himself to the ground as one gigantic form soared over his head and slammed through the Feast Hall, demolishing it.
The thorny-crowned troll came through the gap.
“Stop him from coming through!”
Jenner picked himself up with his mind fixed on death. He ran for the troll.
The creature’s beady eyes fixed in amusement upon the warriors running in his direction. The wand went up.
Suddenly, Jenner wasn’t running anymore.
None of them were. Winds buffeted them to a standstill and pushed the lightest players back. Jenner dug in his feet and struggled to continue forward, but it took all of his strength just to stay upright. Meanwhile, the troll strolled confidently into the palace grounds like he was already king.
“Go ‘round!” Leaves slapped against Jenner’s face. He turned his head slightly to let the wind peel them off and saw Commander Odelon motioning to a knot of his warriors. They had taken shelter behind a line of potted fruit trees one garden over. “Go ‘round! Get behind it and attack!”
Jenner could not assist, though he attempted to struggle after the warriors as they crawled behind the pots. The wind was too ferocious: his sidestep succeeded only in losing him ground as he was pushed back closer to the destruction of the Feast Hall.
The troll noticed the Armada warriors creeping along. Halting, he twisted his wrist and the winds changed, sending the warriors down to the earth on their bellies and tipping the heavy pots on top of them. The commander rolled behind a post and clutched it as his warriors kicked and thrashed to push off the pots.
Freed from the wind, Jenner fell flat on his face. No sooner had he gotten up than the wand twisted back, pinning him in place once more. Yelling in frustration, he received a mouthful of dirt for his trouble. The itch to attack the troll consumed him, but he was helpless to do anything!
Everyone was helpless. An elf leaped from the wall with a sword and the wand flicked her way, blowing her out of sight. The pair of sapphire dragons flapped their wings hard and tried to spit fire, but the wind shot that fire back down their throats. Having taken cover in the rubble of the Feast Hall were wizards, who flicked their wands at the chunks of rock and ceiling beams to lob them at the troll. Those rocks and beams levitated before freezing in the air, caught between the competing wands.
No, Jenner thought. It was more than that.
The power that the wizards were using for their spells . . . it was being siphoned away by the troll’s wand. The theft of magic looked like wisps in the air, which were peeled away from the hovering rocks and beams and pulled over to the tip of the spiral. The wisps were the only things capable of moving against the wind, the Eldritch wand drawing them inexorably to itself.
The wisps soared into the tip of the wand. Turning into bright beads of light, they whirled around and around the spiral as they traveled through the wand to the base.
This was bad. This was very bad. The wizards were only fueling the Eldritch wand further.
Jenner was not the only one to recognize the problem. A black-eyed witch hidden behind a fallen staircase with other demons cried out, “Stop! Stop using magic, you idiots! You’re making it stronger!”
The wizards ignored her. She hurled a wall of fire to the Feast Hall, which incinerated the beams and forced the wizards to dive for cover. “Bitch!” one yelled.
The troll lumbered through the courtyard, his wand swinging the winds around to keep them all at bay. Jenner spat dirt out of his mouth as the gales released him, the troll training the tip of the spiral upon the dragons to block their next attempt to fire.
The itch to attack redoubled, but a worse problem immediately presented itself. Furious with the witch for interfering, the wizards shot her down with a bolt of lightning and scrambled her on the spot. Demons popped up all around the tipped staircase, screaming in rage. A fight broke out, spells flying fast and furious between the two camps as Jenner fled from his position in the middle of the battlefield.
Hello? The troll? He thought sarcastically.
At least the others had not forgotten who the real enemy was here. Shifters ran for the gap in the wall to hold it as the surviving Armada warriors slunk after the crowned troll. Jenner crouched down and followed them, praying he didn’t get hit in the back from a carelessly thrown spell. This wasn’t the time to find out if his scales would withstand magic.
Where was the troll going? His stride through the palace grounds was full of purpose, like he had been here a thousand times in the past, or else given very good directions about where to go. That Jenner was capable of wondering about this was a good sign: the light within him was brightening. Though he was still hungry to attack, he was in control.
Mostly.
The Armada commander kept his warriors in the background. The troll took no notice of them stalking along in his wake. His focus were on the frontal attacks from squads of palace guards, none of whom came within fifty feet of the troll before the wand sent them flying. The imbibed spells had indeed made the Eldritch wand even more powerful. The winds ripped the guards off their feet without trouble. Then the creature walked on unimpeded, crushing flowerbeds and benches under his feet.
What did they do? What could they do? Jenner didn’t know. Should Odelon give the command to attack, one errant sound from his advancing warriors and the troll would turn and blast them away, too. For now, they just followed in silence down the paths.
As they came around a corner of another white stone building, the troll’s destination revealed itself.
The Little Tower. The troll was going straight to the Little Tower! The dragon guard from earlier was no longer upon the roof high above, presumably engaged in the fight at the wall. The only guards around was a human contingent in the red-and-white livery of those who worked for the palace. Six of them charged out of the hedge maze. “Take him down!”
The wand flicked. Torn off the ground, they were tossed away.
Commander Odelon held up his hand.
His warriors stopped and knelt down behind a gazebo. Jenner crept up and took a knee beside them. Everyone stared through the slatted sides of the gazebo to the troll, who lumbered on towards the entrance to the maze. “What prisoner is he here for?” “If we go around that side of the maze, we can cut him off.” “If we-” “Which captive does he want?”
“Glave,” said Commander Odelon.
The warriors fell quiet at the name. It meant something to everyone save Jenner.
“Glave,” he said a second time. “They came all the way to Galadras to free Glave the Destroyer. They don’t know, or they don’t believe, that he was scrambled long ago.”
Jenner was irritated to see the blocks, but the notification was relevant.