by Trey Myr
Ed and Lucy dismounted from their own horse, and the three watched as a group of undead appeared from around a small hill.
It took Ed only a second to notice that this group of undead was very different from the groups they’ve fought before.
A large skeletal minotaur lead the way. It must have been at least two and a half meters tall, not counting the horns, and at least a meter and a half across its skeletal shoulders. It was wearing the rotting remains of a leather loincloth, and carried a large black axe in its hands.
The figure following the minotaur was harder to identify. The tall humanoid was wearing a suit of black plate armor, and the only thing visible underneath it were two glowing red eyes. A large heater shield was strapped to its right arm, and a large mace was held in its left. Though dwarfed by its skeletal companion, Ed knew that the armored figure had to be at least a hundred and ninety centimeters tall.
The third member of what was evidently an undead adventuring party floated silently behind the armored tank. Glowing green and semitransparent, it was obviously female, and might once have been called pretty, if not beautiful. She was dressed in tattered green robes that were as transparent as she was, and might have been an actual part of her, as far as Ed could tell.
Behind the ghost walked a rotting corpse wearing finely made black robes and holding a long staff with a black crystal on top. This was no zombie or ghoul, however. Keen and cruel intelligence sparkled in the lich’s otherwise dead eyes, and it moved with a grace the promised a physically capable enemy, as well as a powerful caster.
Bringing up the rear was the archer that shot Ingrid’s horse. It was clad in a hooded cloak and carrying a long bow, and although Ed could see very little details about it, he felt there was something familiar in the way it moved.
The undead group stopped about fifty meters away, and the cloaked figure moved forward to stand between the minotaur and the armored death knight. It turned its hooded head to regard the three delvers, and spoke in an incredibly familiar voice.
“I was hoping to meet the three of you here.”
Ed was still trying to place the familiar voice when Lucy’s face scrunched up in anger, and she called up a Chromatic Storm on the cloaked archer. Just before the destructive energies of the storm manifested around it, the figure vanished from sight, leaving the cloak behind to be incinerated, and reappeared ten meters to the left, completely unharmed.
“Is that any way to greet an old friend, Lucy?” the mocking voice came from the grinning skull of a ram, and Ed suddenly realized why the voice sounded so familiar.
Kevin was wearing a suit of black leather armor and carrying a much fancier bow than the last time Ed saw him. A sickly green cloud covered his skeleton, taking the vague shape of flesh and filling out the armor. His eyes glowed with the same sickly green, and puffs of the gas wafted out of his mouth when he spoke.
“I don’t think I’d consider you a friend, Kevin,” Lucy said out of clenched teeth, and then she grinned suddenly. “That sheep has sailed.”
The unexpected pun broke Ed’s tension, and he found himself struggling not to giggle. Ingrid showed far less restrain, and her loud laughter made it impossible to hear Kevin’s retort.
“I suppose someone had to fill the ‘annoying douche’ slot after James died,” A very annoyed Kevin said once Ingrid calmed down a bit. “Makes me glad my new party members can’t talk.”
“Whatever helps you wether, Kevin.” Lucy’s smile was getting wider and wider as she saw Kevin’s anger. “Oh, did that hit too close to home? Do tell me if this is getting over the tup.”
“Enough!” Kevin yelled, the green cloud replacing his flesh rolling faster and faster. “I wanted to give you a chance to come with me quietly. My master would have given you the same gifts he gave me in exchange for whatever secrets you might have. But it’ll be good enough if I just bring him your bodies!”
The minotaur and its armored companions broke into a run, charging at the party, and Ed quickly recalled his phantasms. Lucy had already started to cast Firebolts at Kevin, and Ed ordered his kitsune to cover the enemy magic users with a Chromatic Storm. Ingrid met the minotaur head on, blocking a mighty swing from its axe on her shield, and piercing it with her spear before it could recover.
The phantasmal dvergr squared off against the undead knight, and seemed to be holding its own, using its smaller size to avoid the knight’s mace and blocking the blows it couldn’t dodge with its hammer. Seeing that the dvergr was managing on its own, Ed sent the cat-kin to harass Kevin and prevent him from shooting at himself and Lucy.
The battle seemed to be going in their favor when the ghostly woman glided out of the storm, seemingly none the worse for wear. She raised her hand and pointed at the kitsune, and a ball of green liquid shot out at the phantasm, covering it with acid. Ed’s barrier spell protected the kistune for a few seconds, but as soon as it failed, the vulpine’s low hit points were overwhelmed, and it vanished, along with its Chromatic Storm, revealing the scorched lich, who began to cast its own spell.
Ed started to resummon the kitsune while Lucy focused her attacks on the ghost, leaving the clockwork Archer to attack Kevin. As soon as the phantasm reappeared, Ed had it recast Chromatic Storm, covering the lich, but not before a decaying curse hit Ingrid, causing her weapons and armor to instantly turn to rust. Ingrid cursed and leapt back to reform her equipment, but not fast enough to completely escape the minotaur’s swing, and a long slash across her stomach made her wince in pain before the naiad could heal her.
Rearmored and rearmed, Ingrid went back into battle, and the minotaur was quickly covered in stab wounds, none of which seemed to have any effect on the huge beastman.
Lucy had better success against the incorporeal ghost, and her Firebolts, enhanced by Ed’s Chromatic Field and her own Sunfire ability, left large gaping holes through the undead’s transparent body. The ghost called up another ball of acid, and fired it at Lucy, but her fire shield, switched to protect against earth damage by her elementalist class, was enough to prevent the acid from breaking her barrier, and a few more Firebolts caused the ghost to shriek silently and disperse.
Ingrid, seeing that her spear was having little effect on the minotaur, decided to change tactics. Ditching her shield, she transformed her weapon into a wicked looking halberd, and used her enemy’s confusion to land a mighty overhand slash at its left arm, slicing it off at the elbow. Unable to properly use its huge axe with just one arm, the minotaur was easy prey for the hobgoblin, and a second two handed blow cleaved off its head.
Lucy turned back to attack Kevin, who was too busy avoiding the cat-kin’s daggers to use his bow, but a few seconds later green fog began to swirl over the ghost’s last position, growing swiftly to a ball with a two meter diameter, and then drawing inwards revealing the ghost’s incorporeal body unharmed. The ghost wasted no time, and a ball of acid hit the unprepared phantasmal cat-kin, obliterating it.
The same green fog began to seep out of the minotaur’s corpse, and it didn’t take a lot of time for Ed to realize that it, too, would be coming back to unlife in the next few seconds.
Kevin, finally freed from the phantasm’s harrying, smiled in glee. “I probably should have mentioned this before,” he said before launching an arrow made of light at Ed, managed to shrug off the attack thanks to his barrier and resistance to light element. “My master has granted us true immortality. Even if you kill us all, we’ll just be back mere seconds later. So how long do you think you can keep fighting?”
Ed started to resummon the phantasmal cat-kin, while trying to think of any way to win against enemies that wouldn’t stay dead.
“Ed, get on one of the cloud horses and get out of here,” Lucy whispered urgently. “Get into the fort and out to the Arctology.”
“I can’t abandon you and Ingrid here. And we still don’t know where Katya is.”
“If you get out of this alive, you can revive Ing and me from the outside. There’s nothing the
House of Hermes can do to us, since we’ll just get unsummoned. But if they get their hands on you, they’re getting all three of us.”
“You don’t know that for sure. And besides, I don’t have any way to identify myself to whoever is in the fort. They’ll just shoot me down, since they’re under attack right now.”
The battle had turned into a stalemate. The undead minotaur couldn’t harm Ingrid, but no matter what she did, the horned monster would just come back to unlife. The dvergr and its undead knight opponent managed only glancing blows on each other, while the newly resummoned cat-kin played a cat and mouse game with Kevin. Lucy has given up on trying to kill the ghost, and did just enough damage with her Sunfire bolts to prevent it from using its acid ball attacks, and the lich was still trying to make its way out of the kitsune’s Chromatic Storm.
Finding himself with very little to contribute to the battle, Ed furiously went over his status and Shards, trying to think of anything that might help him get himself and his lovers out of their predicament, when something in Ingrid’s status caught his eye, and he raised the information about her shieldmaiden Classshard.
Shieldmaiden
Tier 1
Level 5
Locked
Female warriors highly trained in the usage of shields and defensive tactics, dedicated to the protection of their teammates
Gives expert knowledge and muscle memory needed to properly use shields
+2 Constitution
+2 Strength
-40% to physical and magical damage taken when protecting others.
+1 Shard slot, useable for defensive abilities.
Rank up options
Shieldmaiden (tier2)
Bulwark (tier 2)
Valkyrie (tier 2)
Guardian (tier 2) requirements unmet
Acting half out of wishful thinking and half out of a burgeoning belief in the guiding attention of whatever controlled the Labyrinth, Ed used his privilege as Ingrid’s summoner to rank her up into a Valkyrie.
As soon as he accepted the rank up, Ingrid stiffened up, causing her to mistime a block and take a heavy axe blow to her shoulder. Grunting with pain, she nonetheless managed a return blow that hit the minotaur’s chest, barely slowing as it slashed through the undead monster’s chest.
As the minotaur started falling, Ingrid dismissed her shield and lunged forward, her hand passing through the corpse’s body as if it was incorporeal. The minotaur continued falling, unhindered by Ingrid’s hand, and when it hit the floor, Ingrid was left holding a glowing, transparent form, indistinguishable from her now unmoving enemy.
“You have fought well, warrior,” Ingrid said in an oddly echoing voice. “Though compelled to battle against your own will, you have died in battle with a weapon in your hand. Come. A seat awaits you in the halls of the slain.”
Turning in a direction that shouldn’t have existed, Ingrid took a single step and vanished, leaving behind the dead minotaur, his body bereft of the green fog.
Valkyrie
Tier 2
Level 1
0/30000
Valkyries are the messengers of Odin, sent to guide the souls of the honorably dead to the Halls of the Slain and lead them in the battles of Ragnarok.
Psychopomp: lead the souls of the dead to their proper afterlife, where they will be beyond the reach of both the terrestrial and the divine. All attacks count as light element and deal double damage when fighting the undead.
Kevin froze in shock at the defeat of his seemingly immortal companion, earning him a gash from the cat-kin’s daggers. The combination of rage and fear rendering him unable to speak coherently, he completely ignored the damage dealt by the phantasm, and instead stood and shot rapidly at Ed.
Ed, who used Kevin’s moment of shock to rank up one of his own Shards, raised his arm, and a shield identical to Ingrid’s materialized on it, blocking Kevin’s arrows effortlessly. Bracing his rifle on the edge of the shield, Ed shot at Kevin, his bullet turning into a solid beam of light that sliced through the archer’s body, leaving a hole that looked far too wide to have been made by a .308 round.
A flash of light heralded Ingrid’s return, as the newly minted Valkyrie, riding a winged, copper colored horse appeared in the air, perfectly aimed to swoop down on the undead knight, her lance blazing with an actinic, white light as it completely ignored the armored plate covering her target’s chest. Instead of slowing down, Ingrid went on flying, diving into the undisturbed ground, and Ed had just enough time to see her hand plunge into the falling knight’s chest and pulling out what must have been its soul before she faded away again, presumably on her way to Valhalla.
Ed chambered another round, firing another beam of light through the battered looking ghost, and then had to struggle to restrain his urge to grab its soul and send the dishonorable dead down into the depths of Nifleheim.
Kevin, having lost the use of his right arm to Ed’s shot, could see that the tides have turned against him, and struggled to get a small glass orb out of his pocket with his remaining hand. By the time he managed to throw the orb down to shatter on the ground, Ingrid had made two more trips, leaving him the sole remaining unliving member of his party, and was maybe an centimeter away from skewering him on her lance when the teleport took hold and yanked him out of the Labyrinth.
Epilogue
The remainder of the ride went smoothly with only the occasional group of undead slowing them down, and by the time the delvers reached the fort the besieging undead had already been defeated.
“So I get that you used your privilege as our summoner to rank Ing up,” Lucy said while riding next to Ed. “But where exactly did you get the ability to create shields out of nothing, and what was that you shot at Kevin?”
“I ranked up my Spinner class into something called ‘Phantasmal Nexus’, which lets me copy Shards used by my phantasms. I copied Ingrid’s Valkyrie, and since it’s based on her shieldbearer, it gave me the shield.”
“Ooh. That’s a nice class. You can just copy every one of our Shards?”
“One per level, and switching Shards has a cooldown. I’m a Valkyrie for the next twelve hours.”
“And here I thought Ingrid was the overpowered one.”
“I’ll have you know I most certainly am,” Ingrid answered from Ed’s other side, riding on her own, now winged, mount.
Approaching the fort, Ingrid raised her shield, flashing the House Bjørnson crest at the defenders, and the three flew over the walls, landing safely inside.
“This attack makes absolutely no sense,” a short, stocky dwarf was saying into a communicator when Ed dismounted and dismissed his cloud horse. “We never get monster waves so close together, and there weren’t enough people in the fort to incite the Labyrinth to it.”
“That’s because it wasn’t a random monster wave, Uncle.” Ingrid hugged the dwarf, and introduced him to Ed as her uncle Mathias, the Legion Summoner. “We ran into our old teammate, Kevin outside. I don’t know how they got here, but this was a Hermes attack.”
“That’s a very serious accusation, Ingrid,” Cathrine’s voice came from the communicator. “I’m willing to accept that this wasn’t a random attack, since you ran into a hostile delver, but we only have Kevin’s word that he’s working with Hermes.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Mathias cut her off. “If it’s a delver attack, we need to figure out how they got here. I’m willing to bet it had something to do with the previous undead attack. They must have had some high tier necromancer seed the Labyrinth with created undead, hoping they’ll stumble on something interesting and lead them to it, and their minions got caught up in the wave. But that still means they have a beacon somewhere, and we’ll need to find it.”
“That’s your job as our new arms master,” Cathrine answered. “And it doesn’t explain what my daughter and her armsmen are doing there, since they definitely didn’t come through the portal, and last I checked didn’t have access to this floor at all.”
/> “Questshard shenanigans, Mother. It dropped us into a task after we finished floor nine, and the task must have counted as floor ten, since we found ourselves here after we finished it.”
“You’ve got a Questshard and you didn’t say anything? You know how rare those are and how little information there is about them!”
“You may as well get back home, Ingrid,” Mathias turned off the communicator as Cathrine’s voice rose higher and higher. “She’ll want the full story, and I have a beacon to go and find.”
Cathrine shanghaied Ingrid as soon as the party went through the portal, leaving Ed and Lucy alone. Ed’s phone, which was left in Ingrid’s suite when the party entered the Labyrinth what felt like an eternity ago, was full of a host of text and voice messages from an irate and increasingly worried Katya, and after a long shower and a quick dinner, Ed left a sleeping Lucy behind and went to the Drunken Pug.
Katya sat quietly in a corner table when Ed walked into the common room, and said nothing while he told her everything that happened since they left the demon’s compound.
“…and that’s it. We used the portal to get back to the Arctology, and I saw your messages and came over. You were in the bazaar all the time?"
“Yes. I walked through door after killing demon, and found myself on stairway. When you did not join me, I tried going back but door was gone, and when I tried going to next floor I was alone in floor eleven, so I got back out as soon as possible.”
“I wonder why the Labyrinth did that,” Ed mused. “We think it was the Questshard that brought us to the fort in time to meet Kevin, but why didn’t it bring you too?”
“Is obvious, is it not? You have Questshard, so Labyrinth brought you to where it wanted you, and it brought your summons with you. And I am not one of them.”
“That makes sense, but it’s just speculation Katya. It might also be that you weren’t with us when Kevin betrayed us, so you weren’t part of whatever this was.”