by James Hunter
“Perhaps we should pursue a stealth approach,” Amara offered, idly grinding the tip of her obsidian spear into the gritty earth. “That or an air raid. The pillar is out in the open, so we could lay siege to it without much trouble.”
“Idiot move,” Jay said. He squatted on his haunches, arms wrapped around his knees as he surveyed the prospective battlefield. “It’s out in the open because he’s baiting the trap. I played a lot of games back IRL, including chess. In my experience, you only leave an opening like that if you’re sure you can win the fight. I don’t like this”—he shook his head and hocked a fat wad of spit into the dirt—“I don’t like this at all. Feels like I’m about to take the queen but put myself into checkmate in the process.”
“Fair enough,” Abby said from my left. “But we can’t just sit here indefinitely. It’s probably a trap, but the fact remains that we need to take that pillar down and we only have so much time to do it. Should we regroup? Backtrack and try to come in from another direction?”
“No,” I replied. “Look at the place. Sure, we’ll be out in the open for five hundred yards, but that’s true no matter how we approach. And coming in from another angle will take time we don’t have. Plus, there’s no telling what might happen on the way. We’d need to be practically invisible to approach from the other side undetected.” I paused, pulling up my interface. “We have less than twenty-four hours before we fail this mission. This is as good a shot as we’re likely to get.”
“A frontal assault, then,” the mayor finally said, voice resolute, one hand wrapped tightly around the hilt of his sword. “There’s no other way. We need to move hard—draw out Vox’s forces and carve a path to the temple. We’ll keep the ambush occupied while your team takes out the pillar and deals with the Lich Priest.” He nodded, as though it were all settled.
“You sure about this?” I asked, my unease growing. “You could lose a lot of people that way.”
“Quite,” the Satyr replied, voice solemn, “though I am no military tactician, so I’ll leave that portion up to you fine ladies and gentlemen.”
“This is where I come in,” Jay said, turning to face us as he dropped to a knee.
“Is that bloody right?” Cutter said with a scowl, folding his arms in suspicion. “And why the blazing hells should we listen to you, eh?” He gave the man a once-over. “You’re not even smart enough to wear armor into battle, monk.”
Jay stole a lightning quick look at Osmark—some unspoken conversation passing between them—then proceeded, completely unfazed by Cutter’s jabs.
“We should bring up a fifth of the troops to act as the vanguard,” he said. “The tip of the spear, which I will personally lead. We’ll go right up the center in two columns, pushing hard to open a way to the pyramid. As Mr. Osmark noted, I’m not sure where the Lich Priest’s hiding his forces or how, but we can expect them to hit us from both sides. To counteract that, we’ll position canted skirmish lines of melee fighters on either flank.” He drew a pair of angled slashes into the dirt with the tip of his finger.
“You, thief”—he pointed at Cutter—“will be in charge of the left line; your girlfriend will have command of the right. We’ll load spellcasters and archers into the middle, keep them safe.” He glanced up, eyeing Abby. “You’ll be in charge of the support element, Firebrand. Mayor, we’ll leave a handful of your best archers with you, position them on the path so they can rain down arrow fire from the rear. As for Jack and Mr. Osmark, the two of you are our heaviest hitters, so you should push right through the center of the vanguard. Pulverize the pillar and obliterate whatever kind of opposition we find there. Straightforward and effective.” He stood and brushed his hands.
Everyone was silent for a beat, eyeing his carefully etched plans in the sand. “I was a pro gamer back IRL,” he said, breaking the uneasy silence and answering the unasked question on everyone’s mind: where the hell did you learn that? “Lots of MMOs, but a fair number of RTS games as well.”
“And what about me?” Ari pipped in, glowing an energetic green. “I’ve got two hundred Pixies with me, ready to bring the fight. Where do you want us?”
He paused, eyeing the pint-sized fighter with a smirk. “We’ll call you the cavalry. Hang back and if things get real dicey, you can come in and use your fancy light magic as a distraction to cover the retreat.”
We spent the next ten minutes dispensing orders, marshaling troops, and getting everyone in place before we started our treacherous descent down the mountainous trail. The way was slow going, the footpath steep and covered in loose dirt and rocky scree, making every step a gamble. Thankfully, the path zigzagged across the rock face in a series of switchbacks, which made it manageable. Still, I couldn’t help but feel woefully, painfully exposed. Anyone with a pair of working eyes would be able to see us plain as day.
A small part of me wondered why Vox didn’t just open up with a battalion of siege weapons—it’s definitely what I would’ve done—but miraculously we made it to the valley floor in one piece. Oddly, that worried me even more … What in the hell does Vox have planned for us? I found myself wondering.
Once in the valley, the army broke up, the ten-member vanguard stepping out in a staggered, two-column formation with Jay planted in the middle. Those in the vanguard were a surly looking bunch, Gnomes each and every one, with skin like weathered boot leather, long wispy beards, and hard-eyed gazes. The old-timers who weren’t afraid of the business end of a blade. Osmark and I followed at the tail end of the vanguard, ready to push forward as they cleared the way for us.
The rest of the melee fighters, all sporting fitted jerkins or gleaming ring mail, spread out to the left and right forming canted lines so they moved like a flock of geese flying in a “V.” Sandwiched between them were the support casters—mostly priests and clerics, though there were a few proper spellcasters as well—shepherded along under Abby’s watchful eye. Despite the fact that the Pixies were supposed to remain at the mouth of the path, Ari floated through the air not far from Abby.
Surprisingly, I was glad to have the little monster close by my friend. Everyone would overlook her, right until she jabbed her blade into an unguarded eyeball. Abby was in good, albeit small, hands.
We moved through the valley slowly, methodically, everyone watching their field of fire for signs of ambush or opposition while we skittered around the active lava flows. For the first two hundred feet or so, everything was still, silent as a graveyard at midnight, but then came the snap-crunch of bone underfoot. Though the valley floor was cracked hardpan covered in a thick layer of gray ash, everyone quickly realized there were bones hiding beneath the dust. A forearm here, a femur there, a cracked skull with the eye socket caved in.
And not just the bones of humans, but of other things, too. One boulder, propped up near the base of one of the quartz outcroppings, actually turned out to be the skull of a giant mammoth, its tusks broken and jagged.
The unease inside my gut grew, and suddenly I was deeply regretting this choice. But we were already so far in that pressing on was no more dangerous than turning back, so I steeled myself and kept my trap shut.
The crunch of bone underfoot gave way about two-thirds of the distance to the ziggurat—replaced by the sound of screaming. A bloodcurdling shriek from the left flank, followed by a series of shouts on the right. I wheeled around in time to see fireballs streak up and out of a nearby river of magma, burbling along twenty-five feet from our left flank. “Shields,” Abby hollered, thrusting her slick new staff out like a sword, a burning aura exploding in the air like an orange umbrella, catching the incoming fireballs before they could detonate.
The other support casters likewise sprang into action—casting healing spells or buffs, while others conjured floating barriers of shimmering magic.
But the enemy fireballs came faster and faster, quickly filling the air like a murder of crows, too many for our casters to handle. Molten rock fell from the sky on our line. One of the Gnomish sentries who had been guardin
g the Vale when we first arrived went down with an agonizing scream as the fire ate his face and melted his armor. I flinched from the scene, but kept moving forward, knowing full well that my job was to take out Vox-Malum, not babysit our infantry.
More fireballs cascaded in, this time from our right flank, and for the first time, I saw the source of the attacks: strange creatures—all fire and scales and lashing tails—who were pulling themselves from another magma flow. They resembled Komodo dragons, each one scuttling forward on squat, powerful legs made of living flame, their bellies dragging low to the ground, molten tongues flicking out as sinuous tails swayed behind them. Each was only nine or ten feet long from snout to tail, but that was monstrously large compared to the Gnomes and Satyrs they fought.
And besides, there was an army of them easily large enough to rival our own.
A tag appeared, [Flame Salamander Thrall], and then it promptly disappeared as the Salamanders reared up, bodies curved into blazing Ss as they vomited another volley of fireballs from their mouths.
“Archers, engage,” Abby screamed from the center, conjuring a flame tornado with a flick of her staff. Arrows fell while Abby’s blazing whirlwind took shape and slammed into the enemy front line. Most of the arrows hit, doing minimal damage at best, but Abby’s tornado actually seemed to have the opposite effect—healing the wounded Salamanders in passing, which made a certain sense considering they were made entirely of magma. More of the fiery Thralls had emerged from the lava flows on our other flank and were pressing in, closing the trap around us.
Dammit.
I whipped one hand out, calling Devil and my trio of Void chimps from the dark heart of the Shadowverse. They appeared in a swirling cloud of black smoke, Devil on the ground next to me, the three apes already circling lazily overhead. “Take out the Salamanders,” I yelled. “No fire, though. It heals them.” My simian minions squawked their understanding and tore off to the right, swooping toward the Salamanders, slipping into the Shadowverse, then reappearing behind the creatures, lashing out with claws and fangs.
Devil wheeled and tore off to the right, his wings folded up along his ribs as he broke into a flowing gait. He ate up the distance in seconds, then threw himself into the mass of encroaching flame Thralls, using his beefy head as a wrecking ball, battering creatures aside with ease, then laying into them with teeth and fangs and his spike-studded tail. Our battle formation kept right on trucking, halving the distance to the ziggurat once again—only a hundred meters to go—when the other shoe dropped:
A skeletal hand reached up from the gray dirt, wrapping fast around my ankle like a shackle.
TWENTY-SEVEN_
Retreat
The whole valley seemed to quiver and dance, clouds of ashy dust kicking up as the bones we’d been stomping our way through for the last hundred yards pulled themselves from the ground, fitting back together in a crude approximation of life. Cancerous jade light—the same shade as the light emanating from the pillar—filled their hollow eyes and surrounded each in a pale nimbus of otherworldly light. Apparently, Vox wasn’t called the Lich Priest for no reason.
I lashed out on instinct with my warhammer, fracturing the bony limb latched onto my ankle.
It exploded in a puff of yellow bone and green magic, but the rest of the skeleton scrambled to its feet, sans hand. [Skeletal Thrall] appeared briefly above its head. The creature lurched toward me with murder in its empty eye sockets. It was a slow, lumbering creature, its attacks ungainly and ineffectual. I sidestepped a clumsy swipe and brought my hammer screaming around in a wicked arc, smashing its head from its shoulders. The body disintegrated where it stood—nothing but powder and ash—as its HP hit zero.
These things went down easier than beginner-level forest boars, but holy crap the entire lava field was lousy with them. And the worst part was, they’d materialized inside our defensive formation.
The sounds of battle quickly encompassed us in a tsunami: the thundering explosion of fireballs, the scream of dying men and women, the clang of steel on bone. With the Salamanders harrying us from the flanks and the horde of skeletons hitting us from the inside, the whole formation rapidly turned into mass chaos, our lines fracturing like brittle bone as everyone fought to save themselves. Even the elite vanguard ahead of us had more or less disintegrated as they struggled against a new threat, [Skeletal War-Mammoth Thralls], each the size of an African elephant. The great beasts stampeded toward us in a line, skeleton archers riding their backs.
“What the hell do we do?” I shouted at Osmark, who was now outfitted in his steampunk mech.
“Get to the top of the ziggurat!” he shouted, pointing one finger toward the pillar. “Remember the mission, Jack. These things are the symptom, that pillar is the disease.”
“But what about them?” I asked, flailing a hand toward the chaotic battle. Toward the Gnomes and Satyrs dying by the handfuls, ground down by the sheer weight of skeletal bodies or burned to char by the encroaching Salamanders. “We can’t just leave them to die.”
“That’s exactly what we need to do.” He stomped closer, smashing aside a pair of charging skeletons with one enormous hand. “We’re close enough for you to draw us through the Shadowverse, right?”
I dithered, eyed the temple, then nodded.
“Then do it!” he bellowed, the Gatling gun on his shoulder whirling to life and spewing hot lead into one of the War-Mammoths, blasting its legs out from underneath it. The creature pitched forward, carried by its momentum, and slammed face-first into the dusty earth, a debris cloud mushrooming up as the earth quivered beneath me. I glanced back one last time, my heart aching at the chaos and death splayed out all around me. Then I nodded in agreement—Osmark was right, we needed to complete the mission. Nothing else mattered.
I reached out my free hand, grasped the mech’s leg, and triggered Shadow Stride.
Cold energy exploded out of me—refreshing in this hellish landscape—and time groaned to a stop, the oranges, reds, and golds replaced by a sea of blacks, whites, and purples.
“Come on, before it’s too late,” I said, breaking into a trot, beelining toward the obsidian steps of the ziggurat. Osmark followed behind me, the whirl and clomping of his mechanical suit ungodly loud in this silent, frozen world. We moved through the ranks of our vanguard, all locked in the battle of a lifetime, some fending off the mammoths with lengthy pikes while others pulled the skeletal riders from their colossal mounts with lengthy, hooked halberds.
I slipped past Jay, who was frozen mid-kick, his skin chromed out, one foot surrounded in a cloud of light like a comet breaching the atmosphere.
The skeletons ahead were thick as maggots on a carcass, but in the Shadowverse that didn’t prove to be a problem at all—not even for Osmark in his lumbering Goliath battle suit. We simply phased right through them like a pair of unseen ghosts floating through some gloomy otherworld. The countdown timer was ticking away toward zero, but we still had a solid thirty seconds left by the time we reached the base of the ziggurat. As I went to ascend the first step, however, Osmark’s gigantic metal hand flashed out, grabbing ahold of my bicep before my foot touched down.
“There’s something wrong here,” Osmark said, his voice breathy and uncharacteristically uncertain as he toggled between the lenses on his fancy steampunk goggles. “I can see things you can’t,” he mumbled in explanation, trying a variety of combinations. Red lens with green and blue, red and blue with yellow, then he toggled a purple lens in place, frowning. “There are invisible spell runes etched into the stone.”
He glanced at the step, then back to the hardpan we were standing on. “It’s all connected. A chain of sigils meant to trigger a complex sequence of separate spells.” He paused, frowned, and shook his head. “It runs around the entire base of the temple—no way past it—but I can’t tell what any of them are supposed to do. Could be some sort of offensive ward, perhaps? Or a containment spell. No way of knowing, and I doubt anyone has a spell powerful enough to
deactivate it.”
I grinned and shot him a wink. “Maybe that’s so,” I replied, feeling a surge of new confidence, “but I bet we can slip by it in the Shadowverse. Time is frozen here. I’ve walked through pillars of flame and not felt a thing. Besides, even if it does go off, we can’t sustain damage here, at least not by things that are on the Material Plane. If we run across another colossal Void Terror we might be in trouble, but against a spell?” I shook my head. “Naw, we’ll be good.”
I glanced at the timer. Fifteen seconds to go. We could still do this.
With a deep breath, I stilled my jackhammering heart and took the step, my foot touching down on the obsidian stair.
Of course, the moment I made contact the formerly invisible rune appeared beneath my foot—an elaborate circle filled with jagged script and ancient sigils—and began to burn like the rising sun. I faltered and backpedaled a step, suddenly feeling very foolhardy as that light spread outward like a tree’s roots, connecting with more sigils surrounding the ziggurat. They, in turn, began to bleed furious light, burning with ever-greater intensity until I had to squint and turn away or go blind.
“What the hell is happening?!” Osmark yelled, shielding his eyes with one hand. All around us the Shadowverse shook and trembled; the thick pools of shadow danced and writhed around us in discomfort at the encroaching light. I’d seen this twice before—both times while going toe-to-toe with Carrera, who had an unfortunate ability called Revealing Light—and both times it had been bad news bears.
“Run,” I shouted, wheeling around and darting back toward the Artificer, standing behind me.
I hadn’t taken more than two steps when the whole world creaked, the Shadowverse shattering into a thousand pieces like a broken mirror as that terrible light wrapped around Osmark and me, rudely dragging us both back into reality. Time crashed down on us, accompanied by the oppressive heat from the valley and the thunderous roar of the battle. Somehow that sigil had not only worked inside the Shadowverse, it had managed to haul me back into the Material Realm against my will.