Zorg the Brute and Illuminatus the Shaman stood immobile, their jaws dropped, watching their party leader pulverized by the creature that had burst out of his trunk.
“It’s an ambush!” Zorg the Brute screamed, swinging his wooden club around. Yet Zack was already familiar with Orkish combat weaknesses. The main problem with guys like Zorg was he needed some debuffer or other tank to lock his target in place first, to let the giant club charge its attack, then swing and bash, dealing huge direct damage, some Area-of-Effect, and even stunning you some. This attack would have been devastating if MadDoc was still alive and could help.
AliceX swung around and put an arrow through Zorg the Crusher’s neck before his club had a chance to deal any damage.
ZorgDaCrusher was CRITICALLY hit by AliceX, lost 148 hit points, and was killed!
“Oh hell,” the huge Ork growled. “Oh no, not again.”
The huge greenish Brute collapsed to the ground, hit straight into the jugular, the Elven Ranger being at her best. His huge wooden club clattered down next to him.
We were lucky he was wearing some kind of starter armor still, Zack thought. In the past, the Ork had been protected much better, and a single Elven arrow, mid-level as it was, would not have been enough to bring him down.
“He summoned the Greater Basilisk, how could he do it?” Illuminatus the Shaman was saying, circling around the two of them, his magical staff pointed for an attack, its nature to be yet revealed. He still must be talking to his party on TeamSpeak or something, Zack thought. His companions won’t be happy to see him at the respawn, that’s for sure.
The Basilisk crashed the party next, a huge towering thing on stilts. It flipped around and fired another Leprechaun missile at them, almost point-blank, pulverizing the upper half of ZorgDaCrusher’s corpse resting on the ground. Events were unfolding very fast again, and Zack felt the familiar vertigo of battle kicking in, making him excited and terrified at the same time, jumping on seeing his own shadow and yet thinking with the speed of light.
Illuminatus the Shaman finally raised his staff, and its ear-shaped end lit up and glowed blood-red. Some rune made of crimson liquid condensed above the Shaman’s head, and then exploded, along with the corpses of his two fallen party members. The corpses popped like grapefruit, and their red contents swirled all around forming a whirlwind made of red ketchup-like blood. A second later, a bloated meaty figure, something of a fat upright-walking red toad stitched of dead human bodies stepped out of the bloody whirlwind, which then dissipated.
)))Illuminatus((( reveals Blood Golem!
Blood Golem: Summons a powerful ally homunculus to fight by the Shaman’s side.
Consumes corpses in the area.
“A Blood Golem!” AliceX said. “Wow! Now THIS is a tank. Hey, you’re thinking what I’m thinking?”
The freshly summoned Blood Golem didn’t go for the human players – it chose the highest damage dealer instead, and went for the Greater Basilisk.
It was a true battle of titans: one Goliath against another, both smashing so hard Zack felt shockwaves spreading every time flesh rammed into flesh.
“Yes, I had to recycle your bodies, Doc,” the little goblin Shaman was saying in the meantime, like he was talking on the mobile phone in the middle of the battlefield. “I’m sorry, no, I’m not dying because of you again.”
Zack and AliceX stepped out of their cover and approached him. Illuminatus hardly noticed them.
SMASH! BOOM! In the background, an enraged Blood Golem swirled like a tornado, its two huge hams of arms mashing the stunned Greater Basilisk down to a pulp.
“Look, he did summon this Basilisk mob like he said he would,” the Shaman was saying. “Maybe this guy is really Neo, how do you know? How else did he do it?”
Zack and Alice crowded around the oblivious goblin, carefully staying out of his direct view. He must rely on this big NPC bodyguard of his so much, Zack thought. He thinks the two of us are dead anyway. Good.
The Basilisk defeated, the huge walking carcass of the Blood Golem swung towards Zack and AliceX… then froze in place, started leaking blood, and burst like an overripe tomato and despawned, becoming a pool of gore quickly absorbed by the ground.
“Hey,” the Shaman was saying. “Hey, Doc, please don’t kick me out. Come on. Come o—”
The next moment, AliceX’s flaming arrow was brought up to his neck.
“Enough talking, kid,” the Elven girl said in her commanding little Mary Poppins voice. “We need someone like you. We’re on an important mission. You’re coming with us.”
“Blood Golem,” Illuminatus squeaked. “Blood Golem, summon Blood Golem… why is it not working? It’s not fair! This Basilisk corpse is big enough for the spawn! Blood Golem!”
“Mana Burn,” Zack said, demonstrating a small vial which seemed to contain a little black hole. “I just popped another thing like this one at your feet. That’s why no Blood Golem.”
“Please don’t kill me,” the little Shaman said.
“You will tank for us,” AliceX ordered.
“I will?”
“Your Golem will.”
Illuminatus the Shaman sighed, and then looked up, at the ember runes that writhed about his head and were gone.
)))Illuminatus((( left the party of MadDoc the Commando
)))Illuminatus((( joined the party of Zack the Alchemist
“I swear we only need to reach this resurrection altar of yours, then you will lead the way,” Zack said. “We’ll share all the loot equally.”
“And if you try and pull a trick on us, I’ll kill you,” AliceX promised.
“Look,” Illuminatus the Shaman said. “Stop picking on me. Okay, I’m scared of you, so what. Leave me alone. I’m ten years old.”
Zack and AliceX looked at each other. AliceX rolled her eyes.
The three of them moved on through the mist together.
Chapter 12: The Mob
The Greater Basilisk’s corpse was huge like a bus. Zack felt silly, prodding it with his Copper Dagger for two minutes straight.
“Are you sure it’s possible to loot this?” he asked.
“It is,” the Shaman responded. “So how did you manage to summon this thing?”
“I didn’t,” Zack said. “Or maybe I did. It’s hard to tell these days.”
“But you were chosen, right?”
“I’m afraid I was, except it was random,” Zack said. “I feel this thing watching me all the time, you know. The thing that shapes my adventures. Brings back the people I already met once. Drops demons on my head.”
“Well, that would be the Director AI,” the little Shaman replied. “Happens to all of us.”
“Look, he was struck by lightning,” AliceX said. “Now he’s in some hospital in a coma, and trapped inside this game as well. I mean is it cool or what? Would you say he WAS chosen after all?”
“This, I don’t even question,” the Shaman said. “This is totally wow. My biggest dream. To wake up inside a game. Especially this game. You know. I’d spend my life inside Aetheria if I could.”
“Not me,” Zack said. “I never thought I’d say this, but I miss the real world. I miss it real bad. I’d give anything to be able to log out at any moment, just like you guys, and see what’s happening outside. Just look out of my window, or check out on someone I know.”
“The city is flooded after the storm,” AliceX said. “Mud and broken trees everywhere. Half of the roads are closed. It doesn’t look too pretty, either.”
“This Marduk thing,” Zack said, still prodding the titanic corpse of the Greater Basilisk with his puny Copper Dagger. “I’m sure it’s a real demon. I’m sure it can affect the outside world somehow.”
“How is it possible?” the Elf Ranger asked.
“Everything is possible when you try hard enough,” Zack said. “This game looked so much like life, from the start. It’s ran by enough electronics to fly a spaceship, al
l these next-gen video processors, and physics processors, and neural network AIs and whatnot. How long before it replaces someone’s life, like it happened to mine? How long before a fake demon in the game realizes it may become a real demon, in the real world, if only it would try real hard?”
POP! The huge corpse suddenly gave way and deflated, seeping black ooze into the ground. The Greater Basilisk dissolved quickly, like a ball of ice cream in the summer sun, leaving nothing behind except for a huge ruby crystal shaped like a weird internal organ of sorts.
Item Harvested:
Demonheart (500 gold)
“What is this thing for?” Zack asked, holding a heavy cold crystal up to the light.
“Oh, you enchant items with it,” Illuminatus the Shaman said. “Like, for example, I want my staff to deal some poison damage, so then I grab ten Poison or something, and find this Demonheart, then mix them, and so on.”
“I’d sell it if I were you,” AliceX said.
“Why?” Zack asked.
“You can only enchant Rare and Common things. They’re still weak, enchantment or no enchantment. Then again, this ingredient all by itself costs more than such a weapon after you enchant it. Keep the money instead,” she recommended.
“Just to think it all started because of money,” Zack said. “And that I was sure college was my biggest problem.”
“I used to think my problem was I invest into Ranged too much,” Illuminatus replied. “See, Orks hardly have any Ranged characters, well, you can throw axes or spears I suppose, but everyone knows that’s pretty much just Melee with benefits. I wanted to be a real Ranged Orkish character, one in a million. Didn’t work out.”
“I’m glad you traded it for Summoning,” AliceX said. “Your Blood Golem is cool. Could you summon it again? I wish I had more time to look at it.”
“Nah, it doesn’t work like that,” the Shaman said. “I need corpses first, of enough mass. Two Orkish corpses are enough. Three or four Elven should do. You cannot loot them afterwards. That’s why MadDoc kicked me out, see. I recycled his and Zorg’s corpses along with loot. Now they can’t go back for their bodies on respawn.”
“It’s good,” Zack said. “I definitely had enough of these guys. Shall we go?”
Soon they broke out of the smoky veils of the high-level Swamplands and entered the safer inner lands of the Orkish kingdom. The skies were still yellowish, and a volcanic spore crashed in the vicinity now and then, but otherwise the three of them were pleasantly undisturbed.
The place looked nothing like Mordor. Pandemonia was the local Mordor, Zack thought. Orkish lands looked more like a steppe mixed with a swamp mixed with eternal autumn: rolling brown hills under patches of dry grass all around, wet foggy lowlands here and there, gnarled trees, some of them with orange or yellow or red leaves, some of them leafless. Orkish roads were more like furrows ploughed through fields of dry grass. At a distance, something of a settlement could be seen, a pillar of black smoke rising up to the stormy sky revealing its location as good as a pointing marker.
“Lead on, Illuminatus,” Zack said. “Which way is the altar?”
“There are two ways to get there,” the Shaman said. “And you can call me Mike.”
“Two ways?” AliceX asked. “What do you mean?”
“Well, we could follow the main road; it’s the fastest way, direct,” the goblin said. “But then it’s heavily patrolled, you know. NPC mounted guard.”
“Mounted guard!” Zack laughed. “You can’t possibly mean Orks riding horses! Only the Empire has mounted NPC patrols.”
“Every faction has those,” AliceX said.
“They ride pigs,” Mike the Shaman confirmed.
“Pigs!? I wonder what Elven mounted guards ride then,” Zack said. “Unicorns, no less.”
“I think it’s Pegasii,” AliceX said. “You know, like horses, except with wings. They don’t really fly though, or at least I’ve never seen it happen. They have a nasty knockback attack though. Once I saw a Pegasus send a Cave Troll flying, just by running into it. Every faction has mounted patrols.”
“Okay,” Zack said. “Mounted patrols then. What about staying off the main road?”
“Well, there’s Lizardfolk.”
“What’s Lizardfolk?”
“It’s like a folk made up of lizards,” AliceX replied. “What do you think? There’s a whole faction of them. They have their own parties, and many classes, and small settlements and whatnot. Everyone seems to agree they were supposed to be a playable faction, but then it turned out Humans, Orks, and Elves already make up for a hell of a balance, so the developers kinda left them for the AI to handle and merged their habitat with the Swamplands, where the Orks live. Why Orks, I have no idea.”
“Because you see,” Mike the Shaman said. “Every faction’s mobs are, like, built with this faction in mind first. Like, Orks are heavy-hitting but too slow, so they get Lizardfolk, who are weak but fast, and often use stealth. So no matter how hard you can hit them with that club and instakill them, they still can have a bite of your HPs and everything. What mobs do Elves have?”
“It’s all upside-down,” AliceX said. “Elves are fragile but deal more damage than Humans do. So we have these Cave Trolls, and Minotaurs, and other bulky things. The big and slow stuff that can absorb a lot of damage and then hit back, normally with an Area-of-Effect or something else to compensate for Elven speed.”
“So you see, that’s why Zorg insisted we go raid the Human lands. Wolves, Wasps, Spiders, Skeletons, none of them are good against Orkish blunt attacks, no matter how slow Orks may hit,” Mike went on, using his Shamanic ear-capped staff like a walking stick. “And this is why I first thought it would make sense to be this special kind of Ork, to chip a bit of damage here and there, make a difference attacking real fast with those darts. Didn’t make much of a change though.”
“So Elves are weak but deal extra damage, and Orks deal extra damage even though they’re slow,” Zack said. “So what about Humans then? What makes them special?”
“Nothing!” AliceX said. “This is kinda the point, isn’t it?”
“Humans are vanilla,” Mike agreed. “They are in the middle by definition, like the zero point for all other classes. Nothing really special, no.”
“Humans are a benchmark of mediocrity,” AliceX said. “This is why I’m with Elves, even though they’re underpowered.”
“I am a benchmark of mediocrity,” Zack said. “How nice. So what makes Elves underpowered then? You did say they deal higher damage.”
“But there’s PvP, not only PvE,” the Elven Ranger retorted. “Higher damage, so what? It has to be dealt first. And someone must be alive to deal it. Elves are bad at tanking, and this is no problem in PvE, where you can sorta overwhelm the stupid AI by coming at it, everyone casting spells and blazing flame arrows in all directions.”
“So what’s wrong with player-versus-player?” Zack asked.
“In PvP, this strategy won’t work,” AliceX said. “Human players are ready for everything. Especially heavy damage. They dodge it. They negate it. They send someone full of HPs to soak it all up while they come back at you. There are a million of ways to trick a damage dealer into wasting her damage points completely.”
“How do we fight real players then?”
“It’s all about being creative,” Mike nicknamed Illuminatus said. “And working as one team. Whoever comes up with the best synergy combo, wins the fight.”
“It’s all about surprise,” AliceX said. “I was with an Elf party at first, and we went bounty-hunting this one time. We tracked this Human Mage who was alone, and we thought we could mob him easily and kill him before he had a chance to cast anything deadly at us. We spread real wide, got him surrounded actually, to prevent his Area-of-Effect from doing any good. Our plan was perfect, hit-and-run from all sides, in turns, everyone well-hidden from view, everyone aiming the guy at once. Foolproof.”
“
So what happened?” Zack asked.
“Well, as soon as he was hit once, he must have realized we’re Elves. So he dropped this little thing, like a small black hole, you know. Sucking everything in, except for himself. It’s normally used against swarms of weak enemies. It had an excellent pull. None of us could run. It pulled us all out of hiding, bunched us together around this hole.”
“And then he killed you with Area-of-Effect,” Mike suggested.
“Even worse. He cast some spell that created this ring of flame around him. Except it turned out his little black hole attracted flames as well. So it absorbed this entire flame ring, condensed it into a tight ball of fire, with us pressed to it all around. Its combined damage was immense, not to mention it stacked. We all were fried within seconds, before his black hole even timed out.”
“Neat,” the Shaman said.
“Yeah. We weren’t prepared for this. A surprise your enemy is not prepared for, this is what wins in PvP.”
“Which means,” Zack observed. “Our party is perfect. It’s a unique mix. They may never know what to expect from us.”
“It is a bit of a wild card.” AliceX agreed, frowning. “Could go both ways. Our party wasn’t intended by the developers; that’s for sure.”
The road underfoot still seemed like a deep furrow, some Sourberries and Nightshade to be found here and there, and even some new mushrooms Zack was able to craft into Poison.
“So, is this place the main road, or are we laying low?”
“It’s connected to the main road,” Mike said. “You’ll see.”
Soon their trio seemed to enter some sort of a hollow. The mud banks framing their path dropped to a quarter of Human height, impossible to crouch behind anymore. The gnarled trees were all around, some of them equipped with glowing constellations of mushrooms, some draped in cobwebs top to bottom.
“I hope there are no spiders in here,” Zack said.
“They’re everywhere,” Mike the Shaman replied. “Spiders, rats, these little glowing slimes found underground. They’re not area-specific.”
“Rats.” AliceX chuckled. “Poor Zack. You may never escape Rats.”
The Alchemist of Aetheria: A LitRPG Adventure Page 20