by Charles Dean
“No, it’s just, Qasin, this is about more than a village. This is about an entire world. You’re a King. You should know by now that wars require you to make the hard call and give up a few soldiers to save a thousand.”
“I was a poor King as you were quick to point out. There are simply lessons I am too foolish to ever learn.”
“Qasin, this is my boat if you haven’t forgotten, and I am not risking everything. I didn’t come this far to give up here. I am not changing the course.”
Qasin had heard enough. His hand was itching and his patience was gone. There was a problem on the shore, and everything down to his bones told him he couldn’t let those people die. He walked to the edge of the boat where the railing was. “I signed up to help you, not to be your pawn. You turn the boat towards those people, or I will swim to shore on my own.”
He watched Eve stare at him sternly, then turned to the rail. We don’t have time for this, he thought, about to jump off the boat, when she stopped him with a shout. “Fine! I’ll turn the boat, but we better still catch Darwin. Don’t make me regret this more than I already do,” Eve bellowed out angrily.
“Saving lives is not something you can regret easily,” Qasin said, parting from the ship’s side and walking up to the wheel where Eve was steering.
“You may be right, but I’m worried that the number of lives we save today will be incomparable to the number of lives that may die tomorrow as a result of this. Either way, we were set to arrive at Darwin’s port before he did with just wind alone earlier. If we’re going to make this detour and still be on schedule, we’re going to need to speed things up,” she said, turning around to face the back of the boat. Eve calmly raised one hand to the side of her head as a gust of wind began to creep out of nowhere, pulling ever so slightly at the ends of her black dress as it pressed against her. The gusts behind the sails became stronger and stronger with each passing moment until the boat had gone from a comfortable cruising speed to one where it tore through the water like a hot knife through butter.
Qasin, momentarily mystified by the sudden effects of a magic he had not seen, caught on to what she was doing and quickly grabbed the wheel to steer the ship towards the town. What would have been a ten or fifteen minute venture was shortened to mere moments. Unfortunately, as Qasin quickly saw, there was nothing that would stop the ship from simply colliding into the docks and tearing them in half.
“BRACE!” he yelled at Eve, whose focus was on the spell and not the impending crisis.
Eve didn’t move though: whatever the spell was, it took all of her attention. Qasin didn’t bother warning her a second time. As the ship got closer and closer to ramming the dock, he simply tossed her over his shoulder and, using a fireman’s carry, rushed to the edge of the boat where he proceeded to jump into the water.
As Qasin broke through the water’s surface in an awkward, feet-first landing, he felt Eve’s body slip off his back, buoyed by the water pressure. He turned around, opening his eyes to see where she was despite knowing how much the water would sting them and then swam up to grab her again. Luckily for him though, by the time he reached her, she was already aware of what was going on and had started treading water towards the shoreline, which was now covered with debris from the splintered boat and dock.
“Are you okay?” he asked her as he slung her over the wooden dock remains.
“Yeah, just go save your village, and tell them they owe me a boat,” Eve said as she coughed up a little water.
“Right,” he agreed, not waiting to see if she had anything else to say as he dove underwater and began his swim to shore. He made sure to stay as deep in the water as possible to avoid the floating obstacle course above him until he finally reached where the sand and air converged.
He broke into a sprint the second his feet hit dry land and ran as hard as he could towards the fight. He couldn’t see what was going on, but he could make out enough details to know who were the good guys and who were the ones that needed killing. The peasants were dressed like they were trying out to be potatoes in a court play, and the guards were in three tight tower shield formations moving independently to block the invaders. They wore a uniform he didn’t recognize, but he knew the garb of a guard like the back of his hand. After years of having to deal with men of that ilk escorting him even to the lavatory, their style of uniform was more familiar than any. The pirates, on the other hand, with much smaller, plank-like bucklers, were charging forward in clustered groups and ramming into the defenders’ formations as they tried to propel their blades over the shield wall. They were unsuccessful, however, as their attempts were constantly being parried by free blades.
Eve was right: they won’t last forever, Qasin thought as he charged headlong into the conflict. The defenders of the town had already lost five men, and, with a few more men down, they would lose their buffer zone and get surrounded. The pirates simply had more men and were attacking in waves designed to wear the guards out, get their shots in and drain their numbers a little each time as they rotated into fresh, fully-manned groups. Just as much as the Captain clearly knew what he was doing, so did the pirates, and they would have undoubtedly won the skirmish with few to no losses.
Qasin came up behind the group furthest back that was readying for another slam and slashed his blade as hard and quickly as he could into their backs. Four down, he smiled as his blade moved from one enemy to the next. The crash, his running up behind them--they hadn’t noticed any of it over the constant clanging of metal upon metal, and their focus was still entirely on the battle before them. Qasin had open hunting season on his foes, and he planned to kill his prey before they noticed he was taking aim.
As he finished cutting through the back wave, with only a few noticing him in time to even try to stop his blade, the next group up spotted him. They pivoted from facing their initial line of foes to facing him, and charged with their defenses up as if he represented an entire wall of wood and metal. There aren’t openings. The formation is beautiful, Qasin admired as they grew closer to his position. It’s too bad that their awareness of their surroundings is far too lacking, he laughed to himself, noticing that the closer the pirates came to him, the closer the freed up group of guards came to slamming into the pirates from behind.
He almost wanted to just back up and watch the massacre, and it probably would have been more than just a thought, if it weren’t for his urges: the same urges that made his hand itch for his sword during idle conversation and made him smile as his favorite piece of steel rended flesh like a butcher cutting meat on a busy day. Those same urges were what now compelled him to unnecessarily rush into the mass of potential victims just to kill as many as he could before the rear attack from the guards could assist him.
However, just as he was about to hit the line and slay more of the pirates, his blade eagerly hungering for the action, the pirates started dropping their armaments and clenching their chests. Almost all at once they fell to their knees, panting and screaming. Wounds started opening up all across the bodies of the assailing sea bandits and blood started to funnel out of the fresh gashes and pool above Eve’s victims in a single, giant, floating red blob that starting whirling and flattening out like a disc as it approached the shore line. There, it settled upon Qasin’s charge, Eve, where the spinning disc became a sphere and enveloped her completely before growing smaller until only Eve was visible again.
Qasin, along with every guard and villager that was in the fight, stared at Eve.
“There. Are you happy now?” she said, dusting off her once-again pristine black dress. The only bit of red still visible from the vampiric death spell she had cast was the crimson shine in her eyes as she flashed Qasin her usual sly smile. “Shall we continue our hunt, dear?”
Chapter 3: Not a Cougar
Darwin:
After Alex excused himself from the training session with Darwin, Darwin left to the main cabin to meet up with Stephanie, who helped him practice his sword technique fu
rther. He would have probably spent the entire time working on his technique, anything to distract himself from the Hunger, if it weren’t for the fact that, after a few hours, they were interrupted by a loud shouting coming from outside the door.
“Darwin, I know you’re, um . . . busy, but you may want to come outside and check this out,” Daniel said from behind the door before he even started knocking.
“Alright, be out in a minute,” he replied then turned back to Stephanie. “Sorry, I’m going to go check it out. He doesn’t seem like the type to make a big deal out of nothing.”
“Whatever. Like, see you when you get back,” Stephanie said with an exaggerated frown.
“Don’t be like that. You’re welcome to join. Is there some way for you to not turn everyone else into stone?” Darwin wondered out loud, realizing that dating a Gorgon was going to be a lot more difficult than he originally anticipated. But how did she talk to Alex? he started to think before she interrupted him.
“I’m sure we’ll think of something,” she said as she motioned to shoo him off and go see what Daniel was on about.
Darwin gave her one last long look then bolted out the door so as to not miss whatever it was that Daniel was so excited about. Before he could ask though, he saw it. It was the castle city they had set course for; and, as his eyes took hold of the city, what little breath he still had in him left instantly. His eyes popped wide and his mouth hung open like he was trying to catch every snowflake in a blizzard. “That’s magnificent,” he mouthed quietly as he gazed at the spectacle on the horizon. Darwin wasn’t one to often prefer Asian designs for castles and towns--he had spent years of playing fantasy games centered in the European dark ages and all--but this one was spectacular, beautiful.
There were walls on all sides except an opening along one which was only big enough for ten or twelve ships to pass through at any given time. The first fifteen to twenty feet of wall rising above the ground was comprised of nothing but large dark gray stones of all shapes and sizes stacked on each other, lacking even the smallest hint of mortar. Then, on top of the stacked stones were white walls with black, red and gold inlay etching on and around every foundation, corner and window. The walls were capped with little, sloping, terracotta tile roofs. While it was hard to see anything beyond the tiles, the main castle was still visible. It was almost identical to the walls in principle and design except that it was at least five to six stories taller and had red as its primary color instead of white.
“Right? I told you that you were going to want to see this. Thought you might want a view of it before we got too close,” Daniel said.
“Before we got too close? You’re not worried the town is going to turn out like a Monet girl, are you?” Darwin asked, his eyes still glued to the castle city’s walls.
“A Monet girl? Like the painting?” Daniel asked, not sure of the lingo at first. Darwin had only used the term because he had heard it a lot at the office, but felt embarrassed a bit when Daniel didn’t know it at all. “You mean the ones that are pretty from a distance but look uglier the closer you get to them? No. Nothing like that. It’s just looking at the size of it makes me think you won’t be able to get a good view of its scope up close. Won’t be as awesome.”
“Well, you’re not wrong about that. It’s massive,” Darwin agreed. He couldn’t remember if he had ever described a city like that before.
As the boat kept growing closer to the port, the actual inside of the city became visible. Whereas the city walls and castle part of it were ornate and beautiful--even the window frames were designed to look like dragons--the actual city that came into view was much less so. The port was crammed with houses three or four stories high, just shorter than the height of the wall, stacked on each other like Lego bricks from end to end. They had a design that felt something like fishing town shacks, but they had a striking uniformity too. All in all, the port had the appearance of another wall blocking his view of the town behind it.
“It’s haphazard because they are player made,” Daniel noted. “The main city is traditional with its layout. The docks are player owned and all of those houses were bought en masse by people rushing to get space in the city.”
“People buy houses in the city?” Darwin asked, slightly confused as to why someone would want to own one of the Lego dock shacks.
“Yeah. They not only buy them, but those which are for sale are also incredibly expensive to most of us players since we are all just now reaching the mainland.”
“Why?” Darwin found himself honestly puzzled by it. He remembered that in most MMOs he had purchased houses, but it was more because they looked awesome and made him feel special, not to actually hold tangible property. “The inventory is infinite, and you’d sleep outside of the game, no? What’s the point of a house in a city, especially an ugly house like all those?”
“That’s gonna vary based on who you are asking,” Daniel started to explain, “but likely it’s because the squares are too crowded for people to gather effectively, so Guild Leaders will buy up land to have a meeting point. You can’t own shops to sell to other players unless you have a tangible location, and Guilds that own property in a city don’t have to pay the city’s merchant tax when selling to citizens. For you though, I suppose you’ll get a place just so your citizens have somewhere to sleep, unless you expect them to sleep on the boat?”
“This boat has to be a heck of a lot better than those shacks, but I get your point. I’ll have to ask Alex about logistics and scouting the area out.” Darwin looked at the woods to the side of the town thoughtfully. “It’s not ideal, but maybe we can take over a dungeon again?”
“Why are you looking for Alex to do your scouting?” At soft voice came from behind him. With how well the owner had snuck up on the pair of them, Darwin might have thought it was Alex himself had it not been clearly a woman’s voice.
“Oh, just that . . . that is his job. He’s kind of logistics and scouting?” Darwin was confused by the question. Why send a Scout to scout?
“Hate to say it, Boss, but he’s not really that anymore, is he?” Daniel pointed out as Valerie, the woman behind the voice, stepped closer to the rail to properly join the conversation. “You’re talking to me instead of him about this information likely because he’s really busy making sure everyone is tended to and everything is taken care of for the unloading process, right?”
“No argument. He is busy doing that stuff, but I’m sure he also knows who to send to scout for the things we’ll need,” Darwin thought aloud, enjoying Daniel’s abilities as a sounding board.
“Or, if you don’t mind, Great Lord Darwin, I could scout for you?” Valerie offered before Daniel could give his response. “A White-Wing could scout faster than anyone on foot, thanks to the wings and all, and we could report back to someone on the boat as soon as we find a good location to set up camp.”
Darwin didn’t even get time to think of a better alternative to the idea when his heart suddenly started beating twice as hard, and everything in his vision was tainted red for a second. Hunger, he thought, remembering the surprise it had given him the first time he felt it. That’s another tick on the life bar down. The most unsettling part of Hunger wasn’t the loud heartbeat, the momentary adrenaline, or the loss of a percent of health bar. It was the urge that came with it. His eyes, even if for just a minute, switched from regarding people like Daniel and Valerie as friends to regarding them in the same way a cat’s eyes must see a mouse: as food.
“Boss?” Daniel asked. The change must have been visible. “You okay?”
Darwin was about to make up an excuse when he saw Valerie’s face staring at Daniel angrily. Oh! That’s right! She still thinks I’m an NPC that has to be regarded with proper titles, he laughed to himself. “Yeah, I’m fine.” He decided it was best not to lie, but he wasn't exactly going to tell the whole truth either. “And that sounds great, actually. Just get the details of what we’ll need from Alex before you head out.”
“Great! We’ll complete the job in no time at all, Great Lord Darwin,” Valerie said before darting off.
“Not going to go with her?”
“I will, but knowing her, the first thing she’s going to do is go looking for Mclean, and she’s in the opposite direction of the one Val just took off in,” Daniel said with a wry smile. “I’m just going to wait here until she figures it out.”
“You could have told her?”
“What would be the fun in that? This is a game, after all.”
“That’s true. It is just a game,” Darwin laughed, imagining poor Valerie scurrying around looking for someone on the wrong side of the boat while in a rush.
“You’re not going to tell her that you’re not an NPC either, are you? Let her keep calling you ‘Great Lord Darwin?’” Daniel asked, laughing with Darwin.
“No, no, actually I didn’t plan on it.”
“Well, in that case, I’d say birds of a feather and all . . .” Daniel paused to gesture to his wings, “but I feel like I’ve already used that cliche once. Anyways, it was nice talking with you, Boss, but I have a strange feeling the girl you left in the cabin will be rather grumpy if you leave her there by herself for too long.”
“Birds of a feather, indeed. See you, Daniel,” he chuckled as Daniel skipped off in Mclean’s direction.
I should probably get ready, he thought as he went back into the cabin with Stephanie. No matter how much he wanted to stick to just staying in the cabin all day with her and joking around, he wanted to go out and explore the city even more.
“Why the face?” Stephanie asked as he walked in the door. “Was it bad news?”
“No, just the opposite. It was just a view of the city. It looks amazing.”