Troll Nation

by James A. Hunter

  Drake selected the thumbnail, and it jumped up to cover half his screen.

  “What’s up, you crazy Bro_Fo?” he asked with false good cheer.

  But Darren wasn’t tricked out in his coolest gear and ready for his closeup. He was scowling into the camera in some half-lit stone room, arms crossed over a Threadbare Shirt.

  “Dude, I got jumped by that a-hole from your guild, PwnrBwner, and some jerk Troll named Roark the Griefer who says he fought you in the arena yesterday. These assholes are working together apparently. I would’ve killed ’em both, but they snuck up behind me, took out my party, and locked me into this weird respawn-binding necklace.” Darren thumbed a metal band sitting just under his angled Adam’s apple. “So, I guess this is a hostage situation.”

  Down in the viewer corner of the HUD, the numbers were spinning like crazy. Word must be spreading that Bad_Karma’s little bro had gotten himself kidnapped.

  Drake squinted into his own camera. “What do they want?”

  “This Troll is the one who died like a little bitch when you laid the smackdown on him, remember?”

  “Yeah.”

  From somewhere off camera, Drake heard a grating laugh. “You did die like a little bitch. I saw the replay footage over on the Highlights board.”

  “Get stuffed, mate,” an accented voice replied.

  Onscreen, Darren said, “He wants a rematch with you. One on one. And he wants you to stream it for everyone to see. They said if you don’t come face him, they’ll start griefing my main, and I can’t get away because of this stupid freaking bind necklace—it’s some kinda bullshit mod thing, I guess.” That whine that drove Drake crazy was starting to creep into his brother’s voice. “So you coming or what?”

  As soon as Darren asked, Drake’s viewer numbers slowed to a crawl. They stopped right at 999,999.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Drake said under his breath. It was like they were waiting for him to answer. In his private mode, he flashed over to the H-boards real quick. The whole place was lit up with posts like “KARMA VS GRIEFER ROUND 2 ZOMGGGG!!!!” and “Get around @Bad_Karma’s livestream rtfn! He’s going after the modder!”

  This could put him through the roof on followers. And truth be told, he was more than a little cheesed off that somebody would have the balls to go after his little brother—the little brother of the best player on the whole freaking server. It was like... disrespectful or some crap.

  “Karma?” Darren whined.

  “Yeah,” Drake said, glaring. “Yeah, bro, I’m coming. You tell that Troll to listen up. Can you hear me, Griefer?” He pointed his finger at where he thought the middle of the camera was for maximum dramatic effect. “You best beware, buddy-boy, because in Hearthworld, Karma ain’t a bitch. In Hearthworld, you’re Karma’s bitch.”

  Home Field Advantage

  ROARK FINISHED INSCRIBING the last Curse Chain rune onto the walls of the citadel’s second floor, accepted it, then stood back to admire his handiwork. Rings of the sharp, stilted lettering circled the room, nearly invisible to the naked eye, ready to be activated. The lines of runic script were everywhere throughout the level: engraved into pillars, scrawled across the walls, even encircling the entire perimeter of the second level.

  And those weren’t the only changes. The whole floor had undergone a total transformation in the past eight hours. Gone were the open lava pits and the hanging cages, along with the torture tables and Blackthorn coffins. What remained was a sleek labyrinth of stone hallways, punctuated by hidden hallways, secret traps, and even more teleportation plates. All of which Bad_Karma would have the pleasure of experiencing in short order.

  Even with the bevy of deadly changes, Roark wasn’t sure it would be enough.

  He turned and leaned nonchalantly against a stone column as wide as a tree trunk, his gaze locked on the portal plate near the far wall.

  Not an easy feat with the wired energy running up and down his limbs. If Bro_Fo’s furious ranting about how they were all “dead meat” could be believed, then any minute now his elder brother Bad_Karma would step across the new transport plate Roark had installed on the citadel’s threshold only to be redirected here, to the second floor, which was currently devoid of all life save for himself. He crossed his arms, then propped one foot against the pillar like Zyra often did. After a moment, he decided such a pose wasn’t for men and returned his foot to the floor. He took a deep breath and blew it out.

  Everything was in place. There was nothing to do but wait. And think about all the ways his plan could go wrong.

  Roark had embedded layers upon layers upon layers of curses into the foundation of the second floor, but because Curse Chains didn’t play nicely together, he hadn’t been able to jam them all together in one neat little runic script. And because Curse Chains further had a certain radius of effect, he’d had to place each new layer with pinpoint precision so the effects of one Curse Chain wouldn’t trigger the others—causing an explosion that would surely kill Roark, though maybe not Bad_Karma.

  As a result, Roark would be forced to lead Bad_Karma on a merry chase throughout the floor, activating each Curse Chain in passing, until the hero was finally weak enough for his final surprise to work.

  If Bad_Karma managed to kill him any time before the Curse Chains he’d laid out were active, it would negate all the work he’d done, and he seriously doubted he would be able to lure the hero into another trap if this one failed. Bad_Karma was powerful, and his power made him careless, but it wouldn’t make him stupid enough to fall for the same trick twice.

  Roark shifted feet and took another deep breath, trying to calm his nerves. He didn’t have to kill the hero by force of arms, he reminded himself. This time would be different; he just had to survive long enough to let his dungeon do the brunt of the heavy lifting. If he could manage that much before Bad_Karma killed him, then he would succeed.

  The flare of blue light from the portal plate sent Roark’s heart thundering in his chest. He pasted a self-satisfied smirk on his lips and faced the incoming hero.

  The level 50 Ascended Blood Sentinel appeared on the portal plate, Lifeblood Billhooked Polearm in hand, his face a mask of confusion.

  “What. The. Balls?” Bad_Karma looked around the radically different floor plan. “Bro_Fo? Where you at?”

  “By now, I’d say he’s somewhere between an aerial battle over a volcano and a bustling city marketplace with a warning that he’s about to respawn.” Roark pushed off the column, slapping his hand against a bloody red rune—the prime activator—setting off the script around the perimeter of the floor. A lethal containment ward that would prevent teleporting outside of the dungeon. One down.

  “You again?” The Blood Sentinel’s confusion twisted into a snarl.

  “I did specify that it would be a one-on-one duel,” Roark said, pulling out a cursed head.

  Bad_Karma glanced down at it. The head had come from one of the female heroes from Bro_Fo’s party that Zyra had beheaded, as by now all the Trolls who didn’t support him had either left the citadel or been killed. The long red hair dangled down past Roark’s hand.

  “All right, psycho,” the Ascended Blood Sentinel said. “I guess now’s as good a time to kill you as any.” He looked down and to the right as if he was checking something. “Hope you like humiliation, ’cause you’re about to get your ass beat to the tune of one point five million viewers.”

  “Is it true that you won’t respawn?” Roark asked casually, arching an eyebrow. “I’ve heard rumors that one kill will end you forever.”

  Bad_Karma threw his arms open. “Try it. I’ll give you a free shot.”

  With a shrug, Roark pulled the earring from the redhead’s ear and lobbed it at Bad_Karma.

  The hero caught it one-handed. It detonated in his gauntleted fist in a blast of fire and bony shrapnel. Shards of the skull embedded in the wall around him. Only a quick Infernal shield saved Roark from being peppered.

  The red in Bad_Karma
’s Health bar barely twitched.

  “Dude,” the Blood Sentinel said, stalking forward. “I’m freaking invincible. Literally nothing you can do will kill me.”

  Roark grinned. “You’re basically invincible now—let’s revisit that in ten minutes or so.” He slapped his hand on an invisible pressure plate set into the wall behind him, triggering the first in a long series of traps. “I only survived this long by cheating, mate, and I don’t intend to stop now.”

  The grating sound of stone on stone filled the air as a series of panels lining the walls flipped open, unleashing a hail of crossbow bolts. The firing mechanisms weren’t enchanted, nor were the bolts themselves, ensuring they had the best possible chance of landing a clean hit. A barrage of bolts peppered Bad_Karma from either side, many ricocheting harmlessly off his dark crimson armor. Not all of them fell uselessly away, however. With the sheer volume of arrows in the air, some were bound to land critical hits, and so they did—punching through the armor in places and jamming into unprotected joints.

  Bad_Karma barely slowed down. He swept his free hand down his chest like a man sweeping away crumbs after a meal and broke the shafts off.

  “Bro, I don’t know who you think you are, but a couple of bolts aren’t gonna put me down,” he sneered. “Especially cheap-ass bolts without any effects.”

  Roark slowly backpedaled, watching as Karma’s life bar flickered above his head. The hero hadn’t lost a sliver of Health. If anything, the minimal damage Roark’s first severed head had dealt disappeared, bringing the hero back to full life. Perfect.

  “Oh, there was an effect, mate.” He held up one of the arrows, the tip gleaming with a light veneer of red. “A Health potion, made with a few curious ingredients.” He pulled another head from his Inventory, this one an elf with long white hair and glazed-over eyes. He pulled the cursed earring and hurled the head underhanded, sure that Karma would catch it just as he had before.

  A man’s cockiness could be exploited to great effect, as Roark had learned many times firsthand.

  “You already tried this move, loser,” Karma said, catching the head and rolling his blood-rimmed eyes. “How ’bout you Git Gud and stop pulling the same lame tricks?”

  Before Roark could respond, the head exploded. This time instead of releasing an eruption of fire and shrapnel, toxic green gas billowed out in a cloud. Above Karma’s head, his filigreed Health vial flickered and turned green, perhaps for the first time in the hero’s life.

  Roark grinned with satisfaction. The Health potion on the bolts had been laced with Clotwart, courtesy of Zyra. Not enough to allow something like contact poison to kill the Ascended Blood Sentinel in an instant, but enough to reduce his immunity from 100%. The potion-induced weakness wouldn’t last for long, perhaps ten minutes at most, but if Roark couldn’t finish this within ten minutes, odds were high that he’d already be dead.

  Bad_Karma staggered for a moment, reeling uncertainly.

  “What the fuck?” he asked, sounding genuinely confused. “How did you even...” He trailed off, clearly examining the strange status effect. There were potions that could remove an effect like that, but thanks to Randy, Roark knew the man didn’t have any such potion in his Inventory. Why would he? Who would carry a potion for a disease they thought they were immune to?

  “If you can defeat me, I’ll tell you,” Roark taunted. “Unless you’re afraid to see what I can really do.” He cast a level 1 Hazy Smoke Spell to obscure his movements, then wheeled around and darted down a narrow hall, only a few feet long.

  “I’m gonna make you eat your own asshole,” Bad_Karma called, heavy footfalls following as he charged into the smoke. The fool never saw the metal plate across the threshold of the short hallway. There was a flash of opalescent light as the hero disappeared, carried to a small room deeper in the dungeon.

  Roark stamped his foot on a smaller one-off teleportation disk on the floor; the smell of ozone filled his nose as the world shimmered and distorted. He reappeared a second later in the same room as his victim, though he’d arrived in a very different location inside the cramped space. Roark stood on a narrow stone walkway running along the right-hand wall, which connected back to the main corridor that snaked its way through the heart of the second level. Bad_Karma, however, had been unceremoniously dumped into a pool of burbling green acid, whiffs of white steam curling up from the roiling concoction.

  According to Randy, Blood Sentinels had a particular weakness to acid-based attacks, which was precisely why Bad_Karma was waist deep in a pool of the deadliest corrosive Roark could find.

  “You little ass-nugget, come and fight me fair and square!” the hero hollered, trudging toward the edge of the pit, pulling himself along with massive arms while acid sizzled, popped, and chewed at his armor and exposed flesh.

  Roark laughed.

  “Not a chance, mate.” With a muttered word and a flick of his wrist, he activated a rune-engraved metal plate next to the door. The plates were built from solid silver and had a Flawless Pearl the size of a chicken’s egg—a beautiful blue stone, shining with oil-slick translucent colors—embedded in the center. Power rushed out from his palm, filling the plate with a buzzing blue-white light. Identical plates, one affixed to each wall, and another, larger plate on the ceiling burst to life with magical power. These particular plates had no active effect, rather they had a very specific purpose: dramatically amplifying the effects of any given spell cast in the AoE while the plates were active.

  Crafting them had been beyond tricky and prohibitively expensive, but the effect would be worth it.

  While Bad_Karma swore and struggled his way toward the edge of the sucking acid pit, Roark summoned his Initiate’s Spell Book above his left hand and cast a fairly standard Slow spell.

  [Selected target is Slowed! Movement speed reduced by 45% for 30 seconds.]

  The magick exploded from Roark’s outthrust right palm, a globe of white light that slammed into Karma like a feather pillow. But the second the spell hit, the plates arrayed around the small room erupted in blinding light. Roark squinted and shielded his eyes with his free hand. The light died a second later, the plates becoming inert and lifeless—they were good for only a single use, but the effort had still been worth it. He received a notification:

  [Spell Amplifier! Selected target is Slowed! Movement speed reduced by 85% for 12 minutes.]

  Among the other things Randy had told him, Roark had learned that Bad_Karma had a ridiculously high movement rate bonus. Though this Slow spell wouldn’t drop him to the level of a normal player, it would go a long way toward hobbling one of the hero’s biggest advantages.

  And now was the time to exploit just such an advantage.

  Roark slapped yet another plate on the wall, this one positioned beside the first, which was now dull and lifeless. The new plate burst to life, and its brothers burned with blue life all around the room. Yes, not one set of spell-boosting plates, but two. Overkill was a term Roark had recently learned from PwnrBwner, and he felt it suited the situation well.

  He pulled an unenchanted Peerless Slender Rapier of plain steel from his hip and padded forward along the walkway, gaining the measure—guadagnare la misura, entrare in misura—then lunging in fast and deadly, stoccata, driving the tip of his blade between the creases of Bad_Karma’s left pauldron from above. The hero moved to slap the thrust away, but a moment too slow. The blade slipped through the heavy plates and bit into yielding flesh below.

  The instant his sword penetrated, Roark triggered his second spell, this one granted by his Hexorcist Class: Hex-Touch. Though Bad_Karma was at a far higher level, his skill points were heavily distributed in favor of Strength and Constitution, so his Intelligence was lower than Roark’s.

  The hero’s arm batted Roark’s aside, tearing the rapier from his shoulder. At the contact, the spell took hold like an iron fist.

  Roark had slotted the Hex-Touch in a fourth-level spell slot, extending the duration of the spell to eight hour
s. He focused on the attribute he wished to curse—Constitution—as stomach-churning power, like raw sewage, rushed out through his knuckles, down his sword, and into the Ascended Blood Sentinel’s body. A notice followed as soon as the spell landed.

  [Spell Amplifier! Selected target is Cursed! Constitution Stat reduced by 60 Points for 12 hours.]

  Roark almost cackled as he pulled his sword free and backpedaled out of the room.

  Furious, Bad_Karma howled and cursed, finally pulling himself free from the burbling acid pit that had claimed a fair bit of his overall Health. Between Roark’s attacks, the poison working through Karma’s system, and the acid pit, Roark had managed to whittle down a fifth of the hero’s substantial Health bar. Roark lingered at the door, dropping to a knee with an engraver’s awl in hand. On a square of stone just inside the room was a mostly finished Curse-Chain—one that had proven to be particularly deadly, though effective. With a few quick marks, a notice appeared.

  [Would you like to Transmute Inscription to invent Curse Chain: Sucking Miasma of Death? Yes/No?

  Note: There is no cost to attempt to invent Curse Chains, however not all combinations of runes and curses play nicely together. Success depends upon compatibility of runes and curses used and will not be revealed before the attempt to invent a Curse Chain is accepted. Failure comes with steep consequences.

  Please inscribe responsibly.]

  Roark accepted, knowing exactly what would follow.

  [Your invention of Sucking Miasma of Death has failed! Goodbye!]

  The notice disappeared, immediately replaced by a cloud of toxic yellow fog. The fog churned and bubbled, moving at many times the speed normal fog would waft, but unlike the first time—when this very same spell had killed him in such a grisly fashion—Roark was ready. He slipped a transport gauntlet on over his right hand, instantly whisked away from the death-trap room and into the next chamber in his elaborate cogwork death machine.

  This room looked much the same as a the first, a rectangular space with one hallway leading away at the far end. Directly in the center of the room, however, was a large statue that resembled none other than Kaz the Gourmet. The statue was solid stone, a gray so dark it was nearly black. Roark broke into a steady trot, positioning himself behind the stone Kaz’s giant back, holding his breath as he waited for what would come next. Secretly, he was praying the Sucking Miasma of Death curse would kill Bad_Karma just as it had killed Roark what felt like a lifetime ago.