Healers Suck!

by Charles Andrews

  I looked at the thing, dumbfounded, but then decided that it was probably high time for me to get the hell out of here.

  That's when I heard another squeal and the sound of something crashing through the underbrush nearby. Something that seemed to be crashing right towards me.

  I rolled my eyes and sighed. "Son of a bitch!"

  7

  Rescued

  "This is not what I had in mind when I said I wanted to take care of these boars!”

  There were four of them on my ass now. Only one of them at a time was actually attacking said ass, but it didn't make it any less pleasant that they were now running a big ol’ train on me.

  I turned and stunned one, and that went into a five second cooldown. I mesmerized another one that looked like it was getting ready to come after me. Which left one that was within melee range, and another that had just had its mez wear off and now it was running towards me, but it was still at a distance and these things didn’t seem to have any ranged attacks.

  "I don't know," Treanna said. "This is all pretty fucking funny if you ask me."

  "Yeah, I'm sure watching me take it up the ass is hilarious!"

  "It might be more fun to watch you give it, but yeah. This is a pretty amusing too."

  She grinned, and I found myself distracted for a moment thinking about what it might be like to indulge in the kind of pleasures she'd just sort of bank shot offered. That distraction only lasted for a moment before it was interrupted by the less than pleasurable feeling of another boar ramming into me.

  I mean I’m sure somewhere out there on the Internet there’s some dark Rule 34 cursed corner of some creepy forum where there were people who were into this sort of thing, but I wasn’t one of those people and I wasn’t amused by this bullshit.

  "Son of a bitch!" I shouted.

  Another squeal sounded off in the distance. I was really going to have to learn not to scream at the top of my lungs. Doing so only drew more of these boar motherfuckers after me. They all wanted a piece of me!

  "You might want to learn to keep that down," Treanna said. “You’re only inviting more trouble.”

  "Yeah, thanks for the advice," I said. "That might've been more useful a few seconds ago before I pulled aggro on that motherfucker out there!”

  I hit another heal over time. I didn't bother to go with a full heal. I'd discovered the heal over time coupled with mesmerizing and stunning boars on rotation meant I was able to strike a delicate balance between my health going down too fast and the heals keeping up with that damage.

  Of course that was all predicated on the notion that there were only four of these boar motherfuckers coming at me at any given moment. It was a delicate balance that would be shattered by, say, another boar attacking and adding to the train that was already going down.

  It definitely wasn’t the fun kind of train, I can tell you that much!

  "We’d better get to that fucking town soon," I growled.

  "It does seem like it would be a good idea, doesn't it?" Treanna said.

  "I'm going to…"

  My thoughts were interrupted as the fifth boar, the one I’d just drawn with my shouting, came shooting out of the forest and right for me.

  "Motherfucker!" I yelled.

  I didn’t even care about maybe drawing another boar. At this point I was only delaying the inevitable. The delicate balance that had my health ticking up slightly faster than it was being ripped down by these motherfuckers was over. I was a dead man.

  Virtually speaking.

  "So much for not going quietly into that good night," Treanna said.

  "You're still not helping much," I said.

  The latest boar looked a little bigger than the others. As I looked at its name I realized its name, Wild Boar, was orange, where all the others had been a nice yellow color to let me know they were about the same level.

  At least it wasn't an angry deep violet. That’d be a sign that I was going up against a monster that was far beyond my level, but this new orange boar might as well be purple for all the good it was going to do me to try and take it on.

  "Great," I said. "A higher level monster."

  "I thought players were supposed to be happy about taking on higher-level monsters!" Treanna said, smiling as though she was enjoying the fuck out of my consternation.

  I opened my mouth to give her a piece of my mind, but that was interrupted by a fireball that came ripping out of the forest. For a brief moment I worried that I'd inadvertently stumbled into some sort of player versus player combat, or maybe I'd drawn a monster that could use fireballs.

  I didn't think it’d be a boar tossing around those fireballs, at least. I was pretty sure there was no such thing as a boar mage. Unless the devs had taken a design cue from a certain infamous video game legend and covered it with just enough plausible deniability that they wouldn't get their asses sued off by Nintendo, but still.

  Even if there was something like that lurking somewhere in the game I was pretty sure it wouldn’t be found in a forest designed for newbies.

  Which meant I’d run into another player, and not a moment too soon. The fireball flew past me and slammed into the slightly higher level boar that’d been on the verge of really fucking my shit up. It flew back with a squeal, and smoke rose from its furry boar ass.

  "Yeah!" I shouted, landing a stun on the thing as it scrambled up on its hooves. "Eat stun motherfucker!"

  That freed me up to mesmerize another one, and it fell flat on its side, totally asleep, as another fireball shot through the air and slammed into the boar that’d been stunned.

  Now this was more like it.

  A window popped up in the middle of my vision.

  Keli has invited you to join her party. Accept? Yes/No.

  I wasn't going to stop and think about it. I thought yes, and the word highlighted on the translucent party invite. A moment later I found myself staring at the portrait of a pretty dark-haired elf girl who smiled back at me. A moment later a girl in matching mage robes came barreling out of the forest, a spectral sword held high above her as she screamed at the top of her lungs.

  I stopped and stared, dumbfounded. This girl was beautiful. She wore mage robes, but they were suggestive in all the right ways. Her slim stomach was exposed, revealing an expanse of tanned skin and a cute little belly button. Her top had a plunging neckline that showed off her cleavage and it had me focusing on that more than on the fact that I was being rescued. Her face was beautiful with delicate elvish features and striking green eyes that were lowered in fury now.

  She also had pointy ears that stuck up through purplish hair that’d been pulled back in a pony tail behind her.

  Her robes down below seemed a little more conservative by the standards of what I'd seen so far in the game, Treanna’s outfit being the only frame of reference I had for female clothing, but that only meant her robes went down to slightly above her knees rather than down to slightly above the curve of her ass.

  An ass, I might add, that looked plenty spectacular with the way those slightly more conservative robes clung to her body. Though it wasn’t even right to call them robes. More like a tight fitting dress that somehow molded to her body and didn’t seem to impair her as she dove through the underbrush to attack one of those boars that’d been hellbent on destroying me.

  Either way I was staring, and I was liking what I saw. I wondered if she was possibly someone I knew from the Academy, but that wasn't likely.

  Sure the game was populated exclusively by the rich and well to do for the moment, but there were still a lot of rich people at various levels of the elevator and administering various parts of the flatland who could afford early access to the game. Which meant I probably wasn’t looking at one of the relative handful of people from the Academy.

  Still, the way she looked in that robe that wasn't exactly a robe so much as it was a piece of lingerie that probably had magical bonuses to it was every bit as distracting as any of the women I saw runn
ing around the Academy wearing the latest in super expensive designer fashion.

  Maybe more so than the women I saw running around the Academy. Within the confines of the game she had no idea I was a poor charity case who’d been allowed into their world for a moment. Which meant I might actually have a chance. As long as things stayed in the game world, that is.

  "Holy shit," I said, and I wasn’t sure if I was talking about the way she was throwing around fireballs or the way she looked in that magical garment that was borderline lingerie.

  "Holy shit is right," Treanna said.

  I looked at her and she cocked an eyebrow. Shrugged.

  "What?" she asked. "I'm just saying I wouldn't kick her out of bed for eating crackers, is all I'm getting at."

  That filled my brain with some interesting possibilities as my mind went to a place where Treanna and this Keli girl were interacting with each other in the sort of carnal way she was suggesting, but it only lasted for a moment before I got my mind out of the gutter and back to the moment.

  This girl was impressive, but I knew we weren't going to last long if I didn't do my thing. Already she was surrounded by boars, it was nice to see someone else getting their ass gouged for a change, but I needed to do something to help.

  Even as impressive as she was, I could see how rapidly her health was depleting under five boars hitting her at once. Which meant it was time for me to do my thing.

  I cast mez on one that broke its previous mez and was barreling towards her, and then stunned another one that’d gotten close enough to do some damage. Then finally I hit her with a heal over time, instant cast bitches, and hit her with a heal once I was sure none of those boars were coming after me.

  That heal finished surprisingly fast considering I didn't have any boars attached to my ass trying their best to kill said ass.

  "Thanks!" Keli grunted, swinging that spectral sword.

  The sword was impressive. It looked like it was made out of pure magic. It also looked like hand to hand combat was a lot more involved in this game than in other games I’d played. Every time she slammed that magic sword down it was accompanied by a spray of blood that got all over everything.

  Apparently the game designers had decided they were going to make combat as realistic as possible, which meant every time she landed a hit it was causing a veritable geyser of blood to shoot up. Like I didn’t think it was possible for a pig to have that much blood in it, though I guess this was a game so there was exactly as much blood in those pigs as the art department said was in those pigs.

  Were talking realistic blood that would've gotten a game company in trouble with a congressional oversight committee back in the ‘90s, but of course of those bad old days were well behind us. Not to mention it’s not like there was any congressional oversight these days with the elevators calling the shots.

  I kept right up with the stunning and the mezzes, and by using my crowd control abilities on rotation and healing this Keli girl every time she needed a top off I was actually able to stop any of the things from attacking her. Unless we’re talking the one she was currently working on dispatching, that is.

  Finally when the last boar within melee range dropped dead she dropped her sword. It vanished in a puff of mist as she turned, flames gathering in front of her hand, and sent a fireball off towards the last boar. Which broke the mez, you try to sleep through getting your ass fireballed, and the boar came barreling towards her like a furry freight train.

  But with a combination of my stuns and her slamming the thing with fireballs on repeat it was dead in a charred pile before it could reach either of us.

  Finally when it was all done I allowed myself to look at her again. Because let's face it, looking at her was an enjoyable experience. She turned to me and smiled.

  "Thanks for the assist," she said.

  "No way," I said. “Thank you for saving my ass!"

  “Smooth move," Treanna said. “You were the hero there for like half a second and then you had to go thanking the girl for saving you and remind her that she was the badass conquering hero. That's really going to make a great first impression on the sexy mage!”

  "Shut up, I muttered, wondering if I'd ruined whatever this might be before it had even started. Damn it.

  8

  Meet Cute

  This girl, Keli, lowered her eyebrows as she looked at me.

  "Excuse me?"

  "Sorry," I said. "I was talking to my AI."

  Keli's eyes lit up. "You have an AI with you! That's awesome. I’ve heard of people who have them but I’ve never actually seen one. Can I see her?"

  I turned to Treanna, hopeful, but she simply stuck her tongue out at me. Of course she wouldn’t do anything helpful to ingratiate me to the hot elf chick.

  "Um, I don't think she's in the mood to reveal herself yet."

  "Oh," Keli said. "Well that's okay. I'm Keli!"

  "I know," I said.

  "You do?" she said.

  "Well yes," I said. "I can see your name in the party window?"

  That party window hovered just slightly of to the right edge of my vision. It showed her portrait smiling at me with an animation, along with her health and mana bars. There were also a couple of debuffs, mostly bleed effects considering those pigs didn’t exactly have debilitating magic they could use on players, that had landed on her while she was fighting the boar, but as I watched they ticked away to nothing.

  "Right," she said, blushing. "Well nice to meet you…"

  She paused for a moment, her eyes darting up to the right. No doubt she was reading my name in her own heads up display that showed all of my information.

  "Alin."

  "The pleasure is all mine," I said. "Believe me."

  My eyes ran up and down her impressive outfit, and the impressive curves on display under those tight clothes, and I had to turn to the side because there was a very embarrassing situation developing that was causing some of my clothes to get a little too tight. Particularly my pants.

  "Is something wrong?" she asked, concern clear in her voice.

  "No," I said. "Nothing at all."

  Meanwhile I was pretty sure I was going to be the first person in the game to die from embarrassment. Damn it. Why did I have to be such an idiot?

  Why did my body have to betray me like this, for that matter?

  That second part was easy to figure out, at least. My body was betraying me precisely because, as I've gone over so many times that I feel like a broken record this point, it’d been a while and there were certain parts of my body that were operating on a hair trigger.

  "Smooth," Treanna said.

  I glared at her, but didn't say anything. I didn't want this Keli girl to think that I was griping at her again. Which I totally wasn’t. I was irritated with my AI assistant who could sense my predicament since she could read my mind and she was using that ability to make fun of me rather than help me.

  Weird, but whenever sci-fi authors talked about the rise of the machines it was always death and destruction they worried about. They never envisioned a bleak version of the future where that AI took over humanity through sheer embarrassment and pointing out inopportune boners that apparently were totally still going to be a thing in this virtual reality cyberpunk future I was living.

  "So what brings you out here?" Keli asked, distracting me from the existential underpinnings of bringing unwanted boners into the next step in human evolution.

  "Actually I just logged into the game for the first time,” I said. "Just got access to Crystalia, and I sort of got taken by surprise by all those boars."

  "Oh," she said, looking me up and down brazenly.

  It was a look that had a certain parts of my anatomy sitting up and taking notice. Though as I’ve covered that bit of anatomy was already taking notice, but now that notice was getting decidedly uncomfortable, and I just had to pray that my stylish robes were enough to not make that immediately obvious.

  "And what brings you out here?" I
asked.

  She shrugged. "Same as you. Only I’m out here trying to kill shit. I'm surprised you weren’t kicking the shit out of those boars. They’re all your level after all. Except for the last one."

  She paused and looked at the boar corpses all around us and then back to me. "You do know you're supposed to kill them, not run from them, right?"

  "Yeah, about that," I said. “It turns out I don't have any offensive abilities at all. Just the ability to stop things and the ability to heal other people."

  Her expression turned to amusement. But I thought I could almost feel something coming off of her. Like she was slightly impressed by the fact that I couldn’t actually kill anything in this game. As weird as it was that she would be impressed by something like that.

  "You're serious?" she said. "You chose a class that has no way of attacking? All you can do is support stuff?”

  I picked up the small hammer I had at my side. A hammer that looked like it was barely enough to mount a picture on a wall. Not that I’d ever dare do something like that at the Academy. Not considering some of the steep fees that were charged on move out if the housing people discovered I’d been punching holes in the wall. Those were fees I couldn't afford.

  So pretty much like everything else at the Academy that wasn’t covered by my student fees.

  Not that it stopped any of the rich assholes from doing the same thing in their dorms. They could afford the fees. Which were basically just another way for the school to bleed the rich people who attended dry.

  "Afraid not," I said. "I didn't stop to think about what that actually meant while I was creating my character."

  “You can tell her the truth,” Treanna said, doing a little twirl in the air that showed off everything the good game designers gave her. “You were so distracted by my beauty that you were willing to do anything I asked of you.”

  I shot her a glare, but again I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to let her know she was getting to me, after all.