Inferno (Play to Live: Book # 4)

by D. Rus

  A sword wafted through the air. The first enemy clutched at his severed face, screaming. The air groaned — then the steel sang as it snapped, hitting a Camo belly. Who would have thought that their dirty robes concealed expensive armor? The leader growled his indignation as he used his meticulously sharpened claws and snow-white fangs. A few heartbeats and five mauled bodies later, the gnoll froze, facing the last human. The man was so scared he didn't even try to die as a warrior, staring at the gnoll with hatred and whispering a hasty prayer to his god into a ritual black box he held to his mouth.

  The coward didn't have an easy death. The Rotten Flesh spell is very painful, especially in a deformed world devoid of regeneration. Miraculously, even the smallest scratch on the prisoner's body hadn't even healed after sunset. The gnolls had suffered, too. The dead ones never respawned. And it took their leader two days and nights to heal his many wounds, restoring the chunks of flesh torn from his body.

  Which was when the first Steel Bee had come. The shaman squinted at it for a long time before shaking his head in concern. The creature was in possession of the Eye of Heat. The shaman cast a succession of Blindness, the Heavy Eyelids and the Tired Hands — with no apparent damage to the flying snoop. But then, something as trivial as a freezing spell had immediately brought it down, putting the roaring monster to rest.

  The next day, two more Steel Bees had arrived. Their death was much more ingenious this time. Even now you could still see bald patches in the forest spotted with molten metal.

  But half a moon later, death had come from the sky. A whole Swarm of Bees had arrived, bearing hundreds of warriors in their wombs, and began to tighten their circle around the Hill. Once again the clan had to flee. They didn't have enough mana to cast a portal. They had to battle their way through.

  That wasn't an honest battle. Dozens of all-seeing eyes watched them from up high, both in the sky and in the eternal void above it. They detected the Gnoll warriors at hundreds of paces, unmistakingly guiding the incompetent humans toward the clan's combat pack. Then came fire, and a loud rattle, and hot steel that left agonizing bodies squirming in the dirty snow.

  And once even the dumbest amongst them had realized that no one was going to escape this mutilated forest alive, the clan's preservation instincts kicked in. The thinned-out ranks of the clan warriors descended upon the enemy and charged a high price for every foot of their advance. Barely a dozen pawfuls had made it to the first enemy lines. But there in close combat the clan defenders sang their triumphant Fang Song.

  They broke the siege, decorating the white trees with the Camos' guts. The remaining warriors divided into two groups, attacking the enemy's flanks and widening the bottleneck for the clan's escape. Death and fire descended from the sky; the earth itself reared up as angry metal tore their perfect bodies apart. Yr had fought with the best of them; he hadn't shrunk behind his comrades' backs. But he was the one privileged to become the last survivor.

  And now he himself had turned into the quarry, luring the furious pursuit away from where the Shield of Cold and the Living Mist concealed a hasty retreat, into the forest's safe depths, of the clan's reproductive nucleus: the guards, the shamans, the King and a couple of dozen elite females.

  * * *

  The raid gradually filtered through the portal, lining up in an alert defense circle. The air reeked of sulfur. Flakes of soot fell densely from the mulberry sky. A dozen volcanoes highlighted the horizon.

  "Matches are not toys," one of the Vets commented thoughtfully.

  Deep inside I agreed with him. Not the most cheerful of places.

  I looked around, searching for my Hell Hound. There she was — as large as life, her nostrils flaring, her eyes glittering wetly. Never seen that before. Was she happy to be back home?

  "Spark?" I called her softly. "Do you recognize it here?"

  She shook her head. "No. Too close to the Highers' domains. Our caves are far from here. Only the strongest are able to live here. But still I think I can smell our big brothers..."

  She was right there. According to the Koreans, they'd managed to mop up, together with the so-called cows, also quite a few Cerberuses... or is it Cerberi? It was true though that their levels were way above 300. My level-190 Hell Pooch had quite a bit of catching up to do. Even though she'd managed to put on quite an impressive bit of weight from all the generous loot our world had to offer, she wasn't quite a match for the local mobs yet. Never mind. Give them another year and three square meals of fresh flesh a day as opposed to one stale bone a week — and I might have my own hunting pack capable of running down Nagafen!

  Although the Koreans had already forwarded us the logs of their infamous journey, my map was blurred gray, clouded with the "mist of war". The only marked area was the tiny spot taken by our raid. Judging by the confusion on the faces of the Korean staff officers, they didn't recognize the terrain, either. Problem. Apparently, the portal had a floating exit point.

  While the raid officers were trying to make some sense out of the only map by overlaying it with transparent tracing-paper charts of previously explored areas, the Koreans' chief ranger pointed a confident finger to the east. "There!"

  I looked at our own scout. Furrowing his brow, he nodded not so confidently.

  I glanced at Spark. "You think you know where this Asmodeus lives?"

  She sneezed in affirmation and pointed her nose at the horizon, outlining an area about 30 degrees wide. "There."

  Oh well. All three seemed to agree on the direction. Excellent.

  "Raid, fall in the ranks in marching order! Code orange! Set the course for eighty degrees west!"

  "How about you just point?" one of the Vets quipped.

  "How about you check your compass? Move it!"

  We didn't get too far. After about a hundred paces, the ranks shuddered all at once from a wave of pain that rolled over them like a tsunami. A disgusting ball of maggots, about ten feet in diameter, rolled out from behind a nearby basalt growth and wriggled quickly toward the raiders writhing with pain. The creature's greedy thoughts assaulted our minds,

  It hurts! Hungry! Me want food! Food kill pain! Hurts! Hurts!

  "WTF?" I felt relatively better than the rest as the Shield of Faith offered decent protection from the mob's growing pressure.

  "This is a Bundle of Nerves," the Gimhae leader croaked, wincing. "That's the name we gave them. It amplifies its own emotions, broadcasting them within a radius of a few hundred feet around itself. The bad thing is, we'll have to kill it now. We met a few of these before. They just won't leave you alone."

  "What's the problem, then?

  "Didn't I just say? It amplifies its own emotions and sensations and broadcasts them back. It will make us feel every blow as we deal it. It's like amputating your own feet with cuticle scissors — without anesthesia!"

  I shuddered. Great analogy. "Well, no point in dragging it out, then! Come on, guys, all together now! Attack!"

  But the game developers were right little sadists. This level-400 creature had an indecent amount of hits plus a definite incoming damage limit. It couldn't have cared less if attacked by a hundred or a thousand men: we just couldn't shave off more than 1% health per second. Once we sussed it out, we stopped uselessly blunting our swords and stood there, groaning and swearing in several languages while the chosen hundred were burning off mana, hacking away at the monster.

  Finally fifteen hundred throats groaned a sigh of relief as if everybody had ceased to have toothache. A relaxed silence was broken by the report from the curious loot master,

  "Four ingredients, one of them unknown. A diamond the size of a pigeon's egg, a rare item. A set of some quest snot. It looks disgusting. Sir, are you taking them? They're no drop, too."

  The unspoken rule entitled a raid leader to any unknown quest items. On one hand, it was his honestly earned bonus; on the other, some quests targeted the entire raid so the leader was the only person capable of completing it. Things like this had happened b
efore, like when Les Miserables had been stuck in a freshly-looted dungeon for an extra forty-eight hours. As it turned out, in order to open a portal they had had to hand over the five hundred badges they'd taken off the mobs back to the Floor Guardian. And they'd had already shared them happily between the raid members, three badges each, yeah right.

  "Coming," I mumbled, not particularly inspired by the mention of the snot.

  Indeed, the sight of what looked like a bunch of semi-transparent entrails squirming sedately was nauseating.

  "Shit. Couldn't they've packed them into a pot or something? How come blood comes already bottled in nice neat vials while this sticky goo has no packaging? Crafters! Anyone happen to have some kind of jar on you?"

  A jar was eventually found and the raid continued on its way. Steel clanged; mounts hollered in many voices; a miscellany of pets marked the ground with a fancy pattern of paw prints. Bottles and flasks of every size changed hands as raid members tasted the respective offerings of the two national cuisines, Korean and Russian, striking quick deals to barter a crate of vodka for a barrel of soju, or a hundred servings of pickled gherkins for an equal amount of kimchi.

  In theory we were in a hurry to save a few lost souls. But in practice, it wasn't really possible to march past a new monster without checking what it had to offer. Both rangers and military guards kept "accidentally" walking into various Inferno mobs' aggro zones, then happily pulled the resulting train toward our column snaking amid the cliffs. We'd make a quick job of the mob and lay it out on the basalt in breathless anticipation of the loot master's report.

  Especially because we'd already had time to study the Koreans' logs and were now casting envious glances at all the unique artifacts in their hands. Warriors ogled the Black Sword, secretly wishing they could strangle its owner in the outhouse, while wizards admired greedily the Crystal of Salamander burning with its bright flame in the hands of the lucky Korean wizzy. And one couldn't even count all the screenshots taken with the Fiery Unicorn. Naturally, we had to stay within the limits — mere politeness demanded we leave quality farming till some other time. So we just marked the coordinates of all the ancient dungeons on the map and kept walking, grinding our teeth and casting frequent glances back.

  In the four hours that followed, we'd encountered at least a dozen Bundles of Nerves. Seeing yet another of them, the entire raid inevitably groaned, cussing in a variety of languages. The Valley of Pain was the name we gave to the plateau so abundant with them. Other mobs were in high supply too, from lone demons in a variety of levels to a pack of feline-like creatures with scorpio tails. The game designers had done their best with them: whoever they stung began convulsing, spewing sticky green froth.

  I understood of course that those were but visual effects accompanying standard Silence and Paralysis, but even after an hour the warriors were still shaking, convulsing occasionally; besides, the sight of green puke all over their gear didn't please the eye, either. But was there anyone to blame at all? What if all this was simply the awakening world gaining detail, letting us know that from now on we weren't going to get away with as little as damage stats? Implying that we were going to get a gutful of the game's doubtful pleasures?

  The loot kept dropping, plentiful and generous, all top items but not the artifacts we craved so much. No wonder. To get them, you had to see mega bosses and shake them out of their gear.

  The Koreans' group kept dwindling. Most of their clan members were real-life players forced to attend to their boring real-life problems. It was funny to watch some scarred warrior who'd just been gulping down vodka by the flask, cracking suggestive jokes and slapping his female clanmates' backsides, suddenly blush and croak, "Sorry guys, really need to log out now or I'll be late for school tomorrow." Such words made our Children of Night guffaw happily while the Gimhae leader squinted his already slanted eyes. They couldn't help it, really. The figures of non-battle casualties in any game had long been established: 3% of real-life players an hour. There was no way around it.

  Soon we heard the happy screams of our pointmen as their widescreen state-of-the-art radars had finally registered the slow advent of the area scanned by the Koreans. We'd made it!

  It took us another hour of unhurried trotting to finally get to the borders of Asmodeus' domain. We cast surprised glances at the yet unrestored watchtower. Why would he leave his outpost unprotected? Where were all the respawned guards? A similar scene awaited us by all the settlements on our way: only a few low-level demon workers tied to their locations. And as for all the warriors slain by the Koreans, they had apparently skedaddled someplace else.

  Trying to save time and sparing the raiders' effort, we gave a wide berth to any potential hot spots, keeping the greedy pullers on a short leash.

  We were now approaching the Small Citadel where I'd intended to make a big Badaboom! aiming to challenge Asmodeus. But I miscalculated. We had nothing to do with the deafening Boom! that echoed through the air. And another one, followed by colorful flashes that lit up the horizon. The earth quaked. Toxic gusts of wind lashed our faces with wintry waves. It looked like somewhere right ahead someone had just engaged in one hell of a scuffle.

  "Move it! Rangers, put your foot down! I want as much information about this ASAP!"

  The light golems made a dart for it, the riders' outlines clinging to their steel backs. The slim-legged wolves — the rangers' highest possible transformation — swooshed past in long leaps. Our entire army gradually accelerated and rolled along, leaving behind the reserves and other slow coaches.

  I could already see the tall spires of the Citadel when the information from the rangers flooded the chat. Apparently, our Asmodeus had clashed with a much bigger guy and was now busy getting his ass kicked big time. A meager few hundred defenders were huddled together by the castle walls while the aggressors' army counted about three thousand, plus another two thousand scorched dead bodies smoldering away on the ground. Yes, you heard it right: Asmodeus' every blow seemed to mow through his offender's legions. And still their general — the scary-looking Verenus — was just as fresh and in one piece, scowling fiercely as he counterattacked again and again.

  We took the surrounding hills in our stride, finding ourselves less than half a league away from the battlefield. Ordinary warriors paid no attention to us as long as we didn't breach their fifty-pace aggro radius. And their two sentient leaders had more important things to do with their time. They were busy trying to kill each other.

  Asmodeus was in a bad way. A pedestrian squashed by a Kamaz truck would appear alive and kicking next to this crippled and mutilated Higher Demon. His black wings were broken, his joints squashed, the remains of his ribs sticking out; the right half of his face had been ripped off together with his horn and stomped into the ashen soil. Verenus was pressing down on him with his body, slowly sinking his purple claw into Asmodeus' only remaining eye socket. The latter croaked, his shaking hands trying to stop the other demon's heavier hand. And still, millimeter by millimeter, he was losing his battle.

  The Gimhae leader's nostrils quivered. "Shall we wait till he finishes him off, then attack?"

  I cringed, remembering Chairman Mao's words: "A smart monkey sits atop the mountain watching the tigers fight." I didn't think it applied to this particular situation. In fact, I didn't like it at all. My mind, sharpened by its virtual reality experience, skimmed through the facts, signaling louder and louder: wrong! We had to act — now!

  I glanced at Dennis. My analyst shook his head. He didn't like the Korean's idea, either.

  So I went for it. Firstly, because I somehow seemed to like Asmodeus' appearance. He still looked like an angel albeit a fallen one. Verenus, on the other hand, was a true spawn of hell the way they portrayed them in 5D adult-only horror movies. I had a funny feeling that if he got the upper hand in this combat, we could forget any negotiation scenarios. All you wanted to do in his presence was piss your pants with fear, not weave any diplomatic lace. Of course I knew tha
t beauty was only skin deep, but still...

  Secondly, the winning tiger would be way too powerful to tackle. A Higher demon with three thousand lower ones and all the hits he needed — they'd simply wipe the floor with us. Besides, it wasn't Verenus we'd come there for and we knew nothing about his abilities. Plus — we had no idea what was going to happen to the captured Korean souls in case of his victory: whether he'd inherit them or disperse them in the Astral or simply let them hover forever in the eternal void awaiting their masters' reincarnation.

  And finally, a typically Russian trait. We always tend to root for the underdog. Just some sick glitch in our minds.

  The Eagle Vision that the wizzies had thoughtfully cast on me endowed me with a clear picture of the fight. I saw Asmodeus shudder, his broken legs shaking uncontrollably. Cloudy liquid ran down his acid-eaten cheek as Verenus' claw pierced his eye.

  We couldn't wait much longer!

  I concentrated and, remembering my mental conversations with Vertebra, reached out to the demon. "Asmodeus! You hear me? Asmodeus, damn you!"

  A weak voice groaned within my head, "Who are… you?"

  "I'm your lucky ticket! If we come to an agreement, of course. Look over at that hill! Oh shit, I'm sorry."

  "I can see. I can use my servants' eyes. What do you want for your help?"

  Trying not to lose my concentration, I blindly shoved Dennis's shoulder and hissed out of the corner of my mouth, "I want the agreement drafts, now!"

  As he sized up the situation, I rushed to offer the demon my ideas. The rush was worth it because Asmodeus' hits were hovering in the red zone, four-digit damage figures floating over his head.