by Rachel Aaron
“Ha!” Arbati shouted at their backs. “Victory!”
James wasn’t so sure about that. This dungeon didn’t have a back way out, and in his experience, undead didn’t run. The lich must be pulling his forces back to a more favorable choke point deeper in. They didn’t have much time left, though. James waved everyone forward to give chase.
The battle was sporadic as they moved through the dungeon. They were able to pick off the slow, plate-covered warriors, but the faster undead quickly left them behind. Soon, they were alone in the grim tunnels, walking nervously past skull-decorated doorways and rooms with iron grates and terrifying stains on the floor. In the prison area, James saw the bodies of several players swinging from cages, their surgical scars and fresh amputations testaments to how they’d died. He sensed no life or ghostfire in them, though, so the army moved past without comment, marching in nervous silence until they reached the Jacob’s-ladder-framed door that marked the beginning of the Laboratory of the Four Elements.
“What is this place?” Arbati asked, wrinkling his nose. “It smells even worse than the rest of this pit.”
“It smells wrong,” Thunder Paw agreed, looking down the four matching hallways, each lit with a different-color light.
“This is where the lich experimented with death-infused elements,” James explained, pointing down the red-tinged hallway toward a room filled with brightly burning braziers that, in the game, at least, had been fueled by corpses. Going by the smell, James was pretty sure that was still the case.
“Ghostfire is powerful stuff, but it’s difficult to work with if you want to make something more complicated than a zombie. Deathly fire is much easier to harvest. All you have to do is burn the dead. When the fire and death magics mix, necromancers can catch the tangled weaves and make whatever they want.”
“I thought ghostfire was necromancy,” Arbati growled, giving him a dirty look. “And how do you know so much about death magic, anyway?”
“It’s all in the FFO Wiki,” James explained. “There’s also a whole paragraph about it in the mission text for this dungeon. This is stuff most players will know if they’ve bothered to read the quests, but what’s really interesting, Arbati, is that you’re right. Ghostfire and deathly fire are both necromancy. The difference is potency. According to the lore, the Once King stole fire from the Sun itself and took it deep underground. He and his followers made many sacrifices, merging the deaths of celestial elves with the holy Sun’s fire to create the ghostfire. It’s a direct perversion of the divine, which is why it’s so damn powerful.”
“If he had fire from the Sun already, why bother corrupting it?” Arbati said stubbornly. “You already have the power of a god. How can you hope to improve on that?”
“Not improve,” James said. “Steal. You see, death doesn’t spread. A corpse doesn’t make you dead because you stand next to it. Life, on the other hand, is always expanding and growing.” James swirled a bit of life magic around his hand to show how the green glow blossomed. “Even if you try to stop it, life will spread to every corner of the world, given enough time. Fire is the same, which is why ghostfire is so terrifying. It’s death that can spread.”
James waved at the four multicolored hallways. “The lich running this lab was trying to expand on that idea by corrupting other elements. Deathly water, deathly air, and so on. He’s had some successes, and we’re about to fight them, so watch out.”
When the others nodded, James led them down the red-glowing corridor toward the first boss’s room. James spotted more burning pits and harvesting cages filled with players and gnolls, but no undead. Not even a single ambush.
At last, they reached a giant circular room lit by dozens of braziers filled with burning corpses. Overhead, huge glass spheres hung on thin chains from the ceiling, and inside each one was a black flame the size of a bonfire.
“There’s the deathly fire,” James said, pointing at spheres. “But where’s Rot Flame?”
“He’s the first boss, right?” Arbati said, looking around. “And this is his room?” When James nodded, the warrior scowled. “If he did not rush out to meet us, where did he go?”
James had no idea. He’d assumed the giant fire gnoll would come out to fight them as soon as possible, but he hadn’t caught so much as a whiff of his sulfurous, burning-fur stench, and that worried him.
“We need to pick up the pace,” he said, jogging through the empty room. “The lich is preparing something, and I don’t want to give him time to finish.”
Keeping the army moving, they passed into the deathly-earth wing next. Here, the stone floors of the cave had been replaced with loose dirt, and every room was filled with fresh shallow graves, some still wet with blood. Again, though, the boss’s room was empty. Or at least empty of the boss.
“Everyone stay single file, and don’t touch anything,” James ordered, keeping his hands pressed tight to his sides. The floor here was filled with tunnels packed with dormant zombies. In the normal dungeon, zombies would constantly pop out of the ground until the boss was dead. Now that things were real, though, James had no idea how deep the tunnels actually went or how many zombies were stored inside them, and he didn’t want to find out.
“Walk very carefully,” he said, making sure to step only on the dirt that looked firmly packed. “And stay to the middle.”
The gnolls obeyed, creeping through the giant room on tiptoe. They were even quieter than James could have hoped, but that didn’t stop him from sweating bullets as they crept past the lumps of the sleeping zombies James could now see buried just beneath the loose soil.
“Why aren’t we fighting those?” Arbati whispered.
“Because we don’t have to,” James whispered back.
“Not that,” Arbati said, frowning at the inactive zombies. “I meant why isn’t the lich using them to attack us? We’d be outnumbered, and he would win.”
That was a good question. “Maybe he fears his bosses more than us?” James said with a shrug. “The lich controls his own necromantic creations, but the Once King controls all the undead. Maybe the lich doesn’t have clearance for these? I don’t know. Just be glad we don’t have to fight them.”
The wing of deathly water was likewise devoid of undead, unless one counted undead fish. The lab of deathly air was even quieter, though James was very surprised the canisters of poisonous gas hadn’t been ruptured. A room full of killer gas would have stopped them cold.
“This is so weird,” he said, scowling as they marched through yet another empty boss room. “It’s like the lich wants us to corner him.”
“It definitely reeks of trap,” Arbati agreed. “I don’t like it.”
“Neither do I,” James said, but there was nothing to be done. Even with nothing in their way, it had taken a long time to walk through the dungeon. Time they didn’t have. If they wanted to break that orb and save Lilac before dawn, they had no choice but to keep moving forward, so James waved his army on, filing out of the deathly-air wing and down the long stairway that led to the lich’s private lab.
When they emerged into the last, long hallway that led to the orb room, James and company screeched to a halt. As the approach to the final boss, this hallway was bigger and grander than the others. It was almost as big as the natural cave they’d crossed using the bridge on the way in, and just like that bridge, the far end of this corridor was packed with another wall of armored undead hunkered down behind heavy shields.
“Damn,” James muttered, looking over the skeletons’ heads at the stairway behind them. That was the final ascent to the lich’s chamber. He could almost see the doors from here, but he didn’t dare engage the skeletons this close to the lich himself. If the ancient necromancer joined the fight, he might start animating dead gnolls, quickly turning their numbers advantage against them.
“We don’t have the time for this,” Arbati said, gripping his sword. “We must charge and take down the enemy!”
“Just give me a second,”
James said, leaning over in an attempt to see into the lich’s room, but his view was blocked by the short stair that acted as a mini-gatekeep, complete with portcullis. Thankfully, the latter was still drawn up as it always was, but after the lab doors, James wasn’t taking any art asset for granted. He was wondering how the portcullis was controlled when the gnolls in the back started yipping in panic.
James whirled around and froze, heart in his throat. Standing at the top of the stairs behind them was the hulking, smoking figure of Rot Flame. The aura of black fire coming off his feet was hot enough to scorch the stone as he moved down the steps to make way for another monster behind him, the huge purple-and-green serpent boss who lurked in the corrupted water wing, Death Fang. Behind the snake were the corpse-amalgam boss of earth and the crackling white of the lightning-based air boss. And if that wasn’t enough, behind them stood the countless skeleton knights and archers that made up the rest of the dungeon’s patrols, standing in formation behind the bosses like clay soldiers waiting to fall down the steps on top of them.
“How did they get behind us?” Arbati cried, his voice tinged with panic.
“The teleport stone,” James said, shaking. “They must have used the damn teleport stone! Every linear dungeon has a stone at the end that teleports players back to the beginning. The lich must have ordered them to use it! He let us come down here on purpose so that his troops could teleport back to the beginning and cut us off! He knows we can’t rush him with all these gnolls. Now we’re pincered!”
“So what do we do?” Arbati asked frantically.
James had no idea. The gnoll army was yipping in fear around them, pressing down the hallway that led to the lich’s chamber. Pushing that way was death, James was certain, but they couldn’t possibly fight all of the dungeon’s monsters plus the first four bosses at once. Especially not here, where the hallway kept the gnolls packed together, allowing the bosses’ AOE damage auras to hit all of them at once. If they were going to survive, they had to get to a better position, and on that count at least, James had an idea.
“Thunder Paw,” he said, grabbing the gnoll. “Are you still following me?”
“Yes, James,” Thunder Paw said gravely. “Me have not regretted following you yet. What are your orders?”
James pointed up the stairs behind them at the flat stone ceiling above the advancing bosses. “When I give the word, have your Naturalists cast lightning at the roof. Bring the whole thing down if you have to.”
The old gnoll’s one eye widened as he realized James’s plan, and he nodded rapidly. “We will bring it down,” he promised. “But what of the lich?”
“Arbati and I will handle him,” James said. “You just focus on giving that undead army a bad day. Once the ceiling comes down, you’ll still be trapped in this tunnel with the remaining undead, but you outnumber them by a lot. Use that advantage to stay alive, and I promise we’ll come back to rescue you all once we’ve dealt with the lich.”
Thunder Paw gave him a broken-fanged grin. “Do not worry about us, Chieftain. We will win.”
James smiled back. “Then let’s go.”
The old gnoll barked commands, and all the Naturalists started winding up their lightning spells.
As the magic built, Arbati grabbed James by the arm. “How are we going to get to the lich alone?” he asked, jerking his head down the hallway at the wall of armored undead that barred the stair leading to the final boss room. “We are good, but that is too many even for us. If we fight them, we might get to the lich too broken to do any good.”
“Don’t worry about the skeleton doormen,” James said, gripping his staff as the gnolls’ lightning magic neared its peak. “I’ve got a plan. When the lightning goes off, we use the confusion to charge the undead line. Then when I say jump, I need you to jump like you want to hit the ceiling.”
Arbati gave him a funny look, but James was already pulling a storm of air magic into his hands. When the spell was ready, he yelled at Thunder Paw.
“Now!”
The explosion of lightning bolts was earsplitting. Gnolls and undead alike were thrown to the ground as the raw fury of nature blasted the ceiling above the approaching bosses’ heads. Instantly superheated by the electricity, the stone exploded, flinging shards of red-hot rock in all directions, then there was a deep rumble as the tunnel began to cave in.
Rot Flame was the first to go down, his smoldering body crushed beneath the avalanche of jagged stone. Bigger rocks followed after as the upper levels of the dungeon collapsed into the lower. It wasn’t enough to crush all the undead, but the rockfall quickly created a wall separating the other bosses and their minions from the gnoll army in the hallway.
It was a damn beautiful thing, but James barely had time to watch any of it. He was already sprinting down the long hall with Arbati, using the explosion of dust kicked up by the cave-in for cover as they closed the distance to the undead shield wall. When they got close, the skeletons brandished their swords and readied their spiked shields to impale the two jubatus.
But then just before they got into stabbing range, James yelled, “Jump!”
They both launched upward as hard as they could. Before this moment, James hadn’t tested the limits of his jubatus ability to jump. Going by some of the leaps he’d pulled off against Gore Fang, he was guessing it was pretty impressive, but the height he managed now surpassed even his wildest expectations. He and Arbati flew straight up, going so high, their heads brushed the hallway’s vaulted ceiling. But even as they soared through the air, James knew that it wasn’t going to be enough.
For all that they’d jumped an impressive ten feet straight into the air, they weren’t going to clear the thirty or more feet they needed to leap over the mass of undead soldiers. So as the arc of their jump peaked, James released the storm of wind magic he’d built in his hands, unloading his Gust spell.
Gust was the Naturalist’s big PVP ability. It did no damage, but the blast of air it created knocked opponents around like ping-pong balls, and sometimes off cliffs if you were good. But while James did blow over several undead, the skeletons weren’t his target. He’d blasted the floor beneath them, using the spell’s power to launch himself and Arbati forward at hurricane-force speed over the heads and blades of the armored undead and onto the stone steps behind them.
As the stairs rushed forward to greet them at might-actually-break-neck speed, James began to worry he’d taken the whole “jubatus always land on their feet” thing a little too far this time. His fears were short-lived, however, as he and Arbati both twisted on instinct, landing hard on all fours at the bottom of the staircase that led to the lich’s chamber. James was still boggling that he’d actually pulled it off when the wall of undead they’d just rocketed over turned on them.
“Arbati!” he cried, scrambling up the steps. “The chain! Cut the chain on the portcullis!”
Arbati jumped up at once and swung his massive two-hander like a bat to slice straight through the inch-thick chains that held up the protective portcullis James had noticed earlier. Severed from its counterweight, the heavy iron grate fell with a deafening crash, slamming down hard across the base of the stairwell.
The charging undead crashed into it a split second later. The armored skeletons hit the grate like hungry lions then grabbed the iron portcullis and started to lift it back up again through sheer brute strength. They managed to raise it almost a foot before Arbati grabbed the chain he’d just sliced through and wedged it into the portcullis’s control mechanism, jamming the gears and locking the gate in place.
“Nice work,” James said.
“How much time do we have left before sunrise?” Arbati asked, sheathing his sword as the undead started to hack at the iron portcullis.
James checked his new highly accurate, Intelligence-fueled internal clock. “Five minutes.”
The warrior nodded and charged up the stairs toward the final room. James followed right on his heels, clutching his staff as they entere
d the lich’s chamber.
Chapter 13
Tina
If Tina had thought the raid couldn’t be more miserable than they’d been during the forced march through the Deadlands, she was wrong. Sitting there, defeated, surrounded by hostile soldiers, waiting for the end to come—that was the most miserable.
She sat at the far edge of the group. The betrayed looks had finally stopped, but no one was talking to her, so she didn’t know what anyone felt for real. Since she wasn’t ready to ask yet, she and SilentBlayde passed the time by staring up at the still-dark morning sky, wondering what to do next.
“We could challenge Commander Garrond to a duel,” SB suggested.
Tina shook her head. “Why would he take it? He’s already got us in the corner. Even if he did accept, he’s a four-skull, built for a ten-man party. Going one-on-one with him is suicide.”
“How about blackmail? I could steal something juicy from his desk.”
“Who would we report it to? Garrond’s the big cheese out here.” She rolled her eyes. “Besides, he’s such a paragon, I doubt there’s anything to use.”
SB didn’t give up. “A hostage, then. I bet I could bag his second-in-command.”
“I bet you could,” Tina said with a smile. “But it wouldn’t do much good.” She nodded at the Order priests casting protections on the massive formations of troops rallying in the yard. “So far, it looks like the NPC healers can do everything ours can, which probably includes the Raise Ally spell. Hard to be threatening if they can just kill us and raise the hostage when they’re done.” She slumped over with a sigh. “Face it, dude. We’re out of options.”
“We aren’t dead yet,” he said stubbornly.
“We might as well be,” she said. “Even if I had a plan, no one’s going to follow it. It’s over.”