“We’re not fast enough,” AliceX said. “We won’t shake this one off, not even get out of its attack range, ever.”
Zack looked back and instantly knew she was right. Even worse – the Dragon seemed to have a good grasp on what a moving target is – the creature’s next run was aimed to intercept them.
“STOP!” he commanded. AliceX and Illuminatus the Shaman stopped just in time. The three of them stood in one place for a while, watching the flaming column sear the land right in front of them.
“I’ll try and hit it,” AliceX said, nocking her Flaming Arrow.
“Isn’t it immune to fire?” Zack asked.
“One way to check!”
WHOOSH! The Flaming Arrow flew off, and it also looked tiny compared to the giant flying monster. Still, AliceX was lucky, and the magical arrow struck the Infernal Dragon right in the open mouth.
Infernal Dragon Lvl 48 was CRITICALLY hit by AliceX and lost 35 hit points
The creature screamed. Its roar was made to be terrifying, and Zack felt it with his innards – a deafening shriek which then echoed through the Swamplands and made the scorched and dried bushes vibrate and shake all around them.
Infernal Dragon Lvl 48 reveals Call to Arms!
Call to Arms: Start a demonic invasion at the location of Self
“Now this doesn’t sound good,” Zack muttered, and the next moment, volcanic spores began to rain down all around their position, like a precise artillery strike: one rocket hit the ground, then two more, then five more in salvos and pairs.
One of the flaming spores crashed right nearby, spawning a little snarling creature with an open flaming maw. The creature instantly charged Zack, but before it could reach him – whack! – a festive-looking Elven arrow brought it down in one hit. The demonic thing tumbled down, bleeding sparks and ash as it fell.
You encountered an Angry Imp!
Angry Imp Lvl 28
Angry Imp Lvl 28 was CRITICALLY hit by AliceX, lost 48 hit points, and was killed!
“It’s just Imps,” AliceX said. She looked at the spores crashing far away. “Or maybe a Hellhound or two. Nothing we cannot kill. By now.”
Zack dashed and stabbed another Angry Imp coming in from the opposite direction. The little monster was hot – extremely hot! – and the enchanted Copper Dagger burned his hand so much Zack nearly dropped it. Mike’s locusts arrived then, swarming the creature and finishing it off.
“There’s too many of them,” Mike said. “Still too many. And there’ll be more. We won’t survive in here!”
The Dragon was upon them again, the flaming column killing a couple of advancing demons, and nearly taking out Zack, who was saved only by a dash at another Imp, sheer luck this time.
“You must go!” Mike said. “I’ll keep them busy! Go to the altar!”
The three Imp corpses popped then, and the Blood Golem rose. Zack could see the effect it made on the circling Infernal Dragon: the giant beast instantly altered its course, ready to take the Golem out with its next run.
“Are you sure?” Zack asked.
Something crashed into his side the next instant, and Zack spun around. But it was merely AliceX, pushing him out of harm’s way.
“He’s right,” she said. “Go! I’ll keep you covered!”
“What about Mike?” Zack asked. “He’s doomed!”
“Then we’ll meet him back at the altar!” the golden-braided Elf said. “Move! There’s more of them with every second. Run!”
And so they ran again, leaving Illuminatus the Shaman and his Blood Golem behind. The infernal spores rained all around them, spawning new waves of advancing Imps, but the creatures were too puny and too slow to be more than a minor distraction. For just one time, they encountered a slithering scaly demonic thing resembling a Komodo dragon. It jumped Zack, then recoiled when AliceX’s arrow caught it.
“It’s a Hellhound,” the Elf Ranger said. “Watch out for its tongue.”
You encountered a Hellhound!
Hellhound Lvl 31
Hellhound Lvl 31 reveals Lash Out
Lash Out: Immobilize target. Fire damage
She said it right on time because, right then and there, the thing’s tongue shot out and unfurled like a fiery lash, trying to wrap itself around Zack. He was prepared though, and dashed forward instead of trying to avoid the lashing tongue. He finished the creature with a precise strike of the enchanted dagger, stabbing it straight into its open flaming mouth.
Hellhound Lvl 31 was hit by AliceX and lost 22 hit points
Hellhound Lvl 31 was CRITICALLY hit by Zack, lost 29 hit points, and was killed!
Far behind them, the Infernal Dragon roared, scorching the land and bringing in more and more demonic minions from the sky. And still, Zack and AliceX never looked back; they pressed on and on, scaling the hill with the altar on top of it, following the winding trail ploughed through the hillside back and forth, marked by wooden Orkish totems, leading ever up.
“There it is!” Zack said. “We’re at the top!”
The final flight of rocky stairs was still in front of him, snaking all the way up. There, between the last pair of wooden totems, Zack could see the sky, and sometimes a spark or two sent up by the playing white fountain. The Orkish resurrection altar was operational. He only had to reach it, and then…
“Alice!” Zack turned around. AliceX was busy holding back a few Angry Imps who had chased them all the way up here. As he watched, she disposed of the last remaining creature and turned to face him, looking up. Behind her, he could still see the Infernal Dragon rampaging and circling like a bomber, and waves of demonic creatures advancing across the plains. Seems like our Mike is still in business, Zack thought. The hellish flaming spores were falling everywhere, and the thunder roaring above made it hard for them to hear even each other’s words.
“Go!” AliceX shouted from below. “Enter the cursed thing, turn off your Permadeath. Go before something happens, and then you can’t, and we have to start over, and…”
“Wait!” Zack raised his hand and stopped her. “Wait! Look… I’ll never have enough courage to ask your number, but just in case, my phone number is: five-seven-five-five, nine-o-two, seven-o…”
BOOM! An infernal spore crashed from above right on top of the little Elf Ranger, burying her underneath. Instakilling her. The flaming boulder that pierced the rock popped open like a flower bud, and one more Hellhound jumped out of it. The creature lashed at him. Left with no other options, Zack turned around. He raced up the remaining stairs, and kept running until he reached the Orkish altar.
He stopped in front of the altar’s dancing white flame, only for a second. Zack brought forward his hand and carefully tested the flame. It was pleasantly cool, like a water fountain.
Without wasting another second, Zack stepped right into the dancing white geyser.
And then, the next moment, the world around him was gone.
Chapter 14: Awake
Zack found himself floating amidst an endless vacuum of swirling darkness, the same darkness he had witnessed after Marduk had brought the shrine down on his head. The dark emptiness was oppressive in its monolithic nature: no matter where he looked, it was identical; no up or down, no cardinal directions. Just black nothingness all around.
Zack seemed to still have a body; he could even touch himself, but not see himself. And because of this, even touching seemed somehow insubstantial, more of a leftover phantom feeling than the real thing. Zack could still breathe but he wasn’t sure it was needed anymore. He was, literally, in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by nothing.
Still, he was no longer scared, Zack realized. He remembered how they trained astronauts – he must have seen it on Discovery Channel or somewhere – how they locked trainees in all kinds of dark and soundproof places to teach them the proper calm needed to fight the oppressive darkness of outer space. This was what made Zack overcome his initial fear of nothingness. Aetheria wasn
’t real. No matter how high the stakes were, it was still a game, a test of sorts, something for him to solve and unravel.
He scanned the surroundings again, for as long as it took him to spot a single tiny star in the distance, a beacon of beaming white light Zack was now facing.
Was the movement still controlled by thought? He tried to think of going towards the glowing dot, and kept thinking about it hard, for a minute or two, to no avail – the white star seemed to remain in place no matter how hard he concentrated on moving towards it.
What if it’s near? Zack thought next. There were no directions and hardly a scale reference around. What if he would imagine the white beaming dot grow and expand before him instead?
The result of it was similar to a Big Bang: the pinhole of light expanded like an explosion, a wave of color hitting Zack like a shockwave, straight in the face with an audible pop. A new reality engulfed him: it was still Aetheria, Zack realized, but seen from high above, the whole landmass within his view. Zack could see the green rolling hills and pastures of the Empire of Man. Next to them, the immense Elven forests, their trees so tiny the Elven kingdom looked like several patches of dark-green lawn. Farther still, he saw the Swamplands and Pandemonia, its mushroom cloud of volcanic ash no bigger than a snow globe.
His vision worked in a strange way, Zack realized. He could see the entire world of Aetheria at once; and at the same time, he could focus his eyes on its every corner. He could see the altar he had just entered, a tiny white flame on top of a brown hill. He could see every street of the Human capital from above, and every single one of the malicious broken crags of the demon lands, and every separate tree in the Elven forests he had never visited.
Everything was immobile now. The time in Aetheria was frozen, most likely at the very moment when Zack entered the white flame. In the Swamplands, he was able to find out the tiny figure of Mike the Shaman, still locked in the fight with the Infernal Dragon, his Blood Golem’s arms raised above a bunch of some unfortunate Imps. He found AliceX by her Elven respawn altar, hidden deep between the roots of some giant enchanted tree.
Then the landmass receded again, and Zack looked at the entire continent as a whole, and could observe more things this time. What seemed like the Sun to the players, he realized, was in fact a sphere of golden light high above the land, not isolated but attached to every NPC, and every player character, and every single active piece of the scenery with a billion of barely visible golden strings, gossamer threads connecting every gameplay-affecting thing in Aetheria into a huge system regulated from the insides of the golden sphere.
“Director AI,” Zack muttered. He must have been seeing the game in some kind of developer mode now, all connections and triggers visible on demand, the global AI presence visualized.
Where’s Marduk though? he thought next, and instantly saw more than he would have liked to. Below Aetheria, deep below the spaghetti of underground cave and dungeon systems, Zack saw another sphere, or even a blotch: a pulsating blob of reddish glow which seemed to make the darkness around it coalesce and grow darker.
“There are TWO Director AIs!?” He gasped.
It had to be so, for many reddish-black threads connected the second glowing presence to various places and characters of Aetheria. Zack thought of another person trapped in the game, the developer guy supposedly, and almost instantly saw an immobilized figure wearing an expensive golden armor, chained and crucified against a mossy stone wall of some underground chamber, surrounded by runes, the biggest of which looked like a tree made of crescent moons. The evil gossamer thread snaked from the malignant glowing sphere straight towards the chained figure and disappeared up its belly button.
A terrifying thought caught up with Zack next. He looked down, and instantly saw he was also connected to the malignant sphere: his thread grew almost invisible as it approached his invisible body, and seemed to reach as far as his head – or, at least, he couldn’t see the end of it no matter how he rolled his eyes.
“No…” Zack muttered. “No, no, no, no…”
He tried to grab this weird umbilical cord with his invisible hands. At first it seemed impossible, like trying to grab a trickle of smoke, but then Zack felt some traction, and finally, the writhing gossamer thing seemed to remain in his grasp. Zack pulled on it and nearly cried out.
It hurt. It felt about as much as trying to pull the guts out of oneself. On the other hand, he couldn’t help but understand how absurd this all was. Nothing here was real. This was merely an illusion. And the pain he felt wasn’t altogether unpleasant – as he pulled the invisible cord further and further out, Zack started to feel like someone removing the stinger of a poisonous creature out of his body. Slowly but steadily the gossamer thread gave way, and the world around him grew darker, less defined. And then his invisible hands were stopped.
“Come on,” Zack said. He tried to pull harder, but this was it. The cord didn’t budge, and it was still latched onto him.
One thing left to do, Zack thought.
He clamped his invisible teeth, squeezed his invisible eyes shut, and yanked the malignant cord with all his might.
ZZAP! He couldn’t tell if it was a jolt of pain, or a sound, or a flash of light, or everything at once. Next thing he knew, Zack realized he was staring at a ceiling lamp.
Everything around him was white: the sheets on his bed, the ceiling and the wall in front of him. Zack propped himself up with an elbow and saw the grey carpet on the floor. Hot sunlight painted it in wide yellow strips. Zack looked up, saw a drip and a portable life monitoring unit, and realized he was in a hospital.
I’m alive, he thought. He tried to speak up, but only managed to mutter something unintelligible.
“Zack!?” He heard a familiar voice.
“M-mom?” Zack looked to the other side, and there she was, her breath held in a gasp, her tear-streaked eyes wide with surprise and shining with happiness.
“He’s alive!” Zack’s mom jumped up and called, “Nurse! He’s awake!”
And then she hugged him, crying again, this time with joy.
Soon, Zack was surrounded by nurses in green scrubs, flashing a light in his irises, asking him questions, prickling his limbs with a needle. After the nurses left him alone, Zack turned to his mother again.
“Mom, I was… The guys… They helped me get to the altar… The game…”
“Oh my poor kid,” his mom said. “There is no game! You had a dream. You were in a coma. You were here all the time.”
“A dream?” Zack raised his hands and looked at his fingers in confusion. “No, I…”
“You were struck by lightning!”
“Yes!”
“And your computer, it burned completely. And the game…” His mother made an uncertain gesture with her hand, tears gleaming in her eyes. “I’m sorry…”
“You mean I wasn’t...” Zack looked at her, then at his hands again. “I wasn’t in Aetheria? And the rig’s gone?”
And my college money, gone too, he thought.
“There’s something else,” his mom said. “Someone wanted to see you.”
“Who?” Zack asked.
The next moment, the doors of his room were swung open, and a boy entered, some unfamiliar kid, twice younger than Zack. He was wearing glasses and looked a lot like someone not very used to talking to strangers. With Zack staring at him, the kid approached his bed, took off his backpack, pulled out a thick wad of cash, and put it on the hospital sheets next to Zack.
“The dragon dropped an Epic Aetherium Shard,” the kid said. “I got lucky. This is your cut. I mean, since you’re alive.”
“Mike?” Zack said in amazement. The kid merely nodded.
“I got lucky,” he repeated.
“You… you killed the dragon?” Zack asked. “How?”
“With a Dragonbane Scroll,” Mike said. “Had it since this big dragon event we had. It happened before you. I mean, the scroll was a bit high-
level for me, but I leveled up killing small demons. Then used it.”
“How the hell you even survived?” Zack asked, still unable to put all things together.
“Oh, I died many times,” Mike said. “But we were next to the altar, right? So I just, you know. Kept respawning, and looting my own corpse, and…” He shrugged. “Well, I managed in the end. But that’s not all.”
Mike looked back. Behind him, the doors of Zack’s room opened once more, letting in a freckled teenage girl about Zack’s own age.
“Alice?” Zack asked.
She wasn’t cartoonish anymore, but still as pretty and blonde as her Elven character. Alice walked up to his bed and nodded at the wad of cash.
“You owe me some of it as well,” she said. “Thanks to you, I lost all of my unspent XP. And my items. Some of which were premium by the way. But I’ll let it slide.”
“How did you…” Zack kept staring at her, eyes wide open. “How did you even find me?”
Alice grimaced a little, dismissing his question.
“Well, your name was on the news,” she said. “Also GPS tracking. You gave me your phone number, remember?”
“But I didn’t finish,” Zack replied. “You were killed… I’m sure I didn’t have time to say the last digit. Or two.”
“Yeah,” Alice said. “Took me some trial-and-error.”
They looked at each other for a while, trying to grasp the scale of everything that had happened to them. How long I was inside, I wonder, Zack thought. A day? Two days?
“Oh well,” Mike finally broke the silence. “What now?”
“Well, it seems he finally got his money,” Alice said. “Now, he can go to college.”
“No.” Zack shook his head. “No, no, no. College can wait.”
“What do you mean?” Mike asked.
Zack sat up on his bed.
“We have unfinished business, guys,” he said. “We need to go back. I’m buying a new rig.”
He picked up the money and they started elaborating their new plans.
The Alchemist of Aetheria: A LitRPG Adventure Page 23