She noticed him at last, her swirling blue eyes refocusing on his. A little smile warped her cheeks. “Heya, Row! Where are your minions? Did a big monster turn em into a shaved ice dessert?”
Closing the distance with a Rime Blink, Rowan took her with a squeezing hug. “Hey.”
She giggled that sweet, sweet light-hearted mirth, and he inhaled her watery-pineapple scent, savored her warmth and soft body, and gave her tush a pat and gentle squeeze. Mind and body, it was no one else but her. Quirky, cheerful, and sexy beyond imagine. Unique. There was only one Gabrielle, and she was all his.
Rowan stepped back after too long, a light blush heating his cheeks barely concealed by the hood. This one girl somehow made him far happier than all the rest. Not even pretty, hot-headed sluts asking to be dominated and raped could compare. “Yeah, there was a Red Dragon World Boss. It was going to pass judgment on me for what we did to Redwing.”
Gabrielle’s giant eyes bounced left then back to him. She gave a thumbs-up. “Ya kept him alive! Seth too! Good job!” She blinked cutely. “But what do ya mean by pass judgment?”
“Oh, Seth had this melodramatic prophecy about it coming over the mountains. A great beast, ten horns and a wreath of flames with the power judgment, which I’m not sure what it means. The great beast looked about right.”
“Huh.” Her eyes slowly enlarged. “Did ya kill it?”
A bit of hesitance leaking through, his head jerked a shake. “It was too powerful, and Seth’s ultimate is still on cooldown. I probably wouldn’t be able to get close enough to use mine either.”
“Awww… could’ve dropped a lot of good loot, especially if it’s tier seven or more.”
“Non-dungeon bosses drop loot? Why didn’t Zaine or those three in the naval battle drop any?”
She giggled a few chirps. “Silly Row. Loot only drops if they’re defeated. Zaine technically isn’t, and those three have Blessings.”
“Ah. Makes sense.”
Her eyes wandered rightward, then abruptly clipped back to him. “What tier was it?”
Rowan’s mind blanked. He didn’t know. A wave of itchy embarrassment coursed from head to toe.
“It was tier seven,” Ayla said from behind, startling Rowan with a blunt, solid whack to his head. “That was pretty fucking close back there.” Her greatsword was out and very bloody. Fresh crimson dripped onto the grass.
Rowan spun around and beheld a scene of carnage. The twins stood next to three highly-geared corpses, tending to injuries, while several assassin bodies were littered around Seth, his blade also bloodied. By the pond, the Dark Humans and Ambiguous had their weapons drawn but smartly stood in a defensive formation close to where Ayla had strutted from, more corpses over there. And Redwing lazed next to the spinning Divine Intervention window.
Rowan’s head swiveled back and forth, confusion miring him. How did I miss this?
“Hehehehehehe.” Gabrielle patted his shoulder. “Row is sure unobservant in the trance of my beauty.”
Ayla huffed a wispy breath. “He looked like a swooning schoolboy drooling over his first big crush. Is this really our dark lord? You can’t be serious.”
“Yup. One big dummy at times.”
“Get on with the Divine Intervention.” Rowan mentally slapped away their lame comments. He walked away to raise all these corpses.
But they kept wasting more time with their girly chat regarding this and that. Nonsense.
But suddenly, Gabrielle pinned Ayla with a kind of crazy yet deadly-serious expression. Her eyes narrowed. “Oh, by the way, ya hussy. Row’s mine. We have a deal and everything. So put on some clothes before I curse ya!”
“Oh, you had a deal?”
“Yup!”
Sounds about right. Rowan indulged in his only happiness while raising the corpses with flicks of his wand.
Ayla laughed. “Like an in-game marriage?”
Rowan choked on his saliva, almost losing balance. Now that was going too far.
Chapter 42
Before Creation
The ghostly Intervention window began solidifying into opaque black and white mana, taking forever to activate. The wheel within a wheel rotated and spun faster.
Along with everyone else, Rowan downed a small vial of High-Quality Draught of Greater Poison Immunity in a single disgusting, bitter gulp. Gabrielle and Ayla’s bickering descended into what he assumed to be private message territory. He discarded their nonsense and continued re-summoning his icy Undead with little concentration. Second nature, his wand hand motioned on its own, an incantation muttered now and then to bolster the flow of magic. Typeless mana was dense in the air, but it wasn’t enough to sustain a constant output.
Mana drained and regenerating at a pathetic rate, he checked the forums. One thread near the top of the general section screamed bloody murder.
HUMAN CAPITAL IN DANGER posted by Sienna Flow 1 minute and 21 seconds ago
Come to the human capital in Greenwood ASAP! LeMort is going to sacrifice everyone to a Divine Intervention! That was all a diversion at Stonehurst!
Rowan flipped the goddamn browser off the game interface. “They know. They recognized the Divine Intervention. Edward, how much longer?”
“Three minutes.”
“Calm down,” Ambiguous said. “Do you know how long it would take to evacuate over a hundred thousand people from a medieval slum at night when everyone’s sleeping?”
“They cleaned out the Water Mages’ town in record time.”
“Less than a thousand. Group Portal, a rare skill scroll not all light classes can learn, has a limit of five hundred at tier ten.”
Somewhat assuring.
She went back to patching up the Dark Humans’ wounds with her seemingly bottomless stock of health potions. They were cheap as iron bolts, the markets flooded with them thanks to players training the potion-making profession.
Skylar grabbed two and splashed his deep, charred wounds, no fucks or pain given. But Katarina hissed, squinting, as the strawberry-scented liquid dripped onto her ruined arm, ruined beyond recognition. She had taken quite the number of hits, her dirty blonde hair singed. The light players had focused her… because she was a Witch Doctor. The only support apart from Gabrielle. Of course those fuckers would target her—an innocent child of darkness. She hadn’t even gotten the chance to do anything wicked yet. And why was she so distressed? Because she hadn’t learned a healing skill yet? Her eyes, all their eyes, kept hovering toward a—
By the pond in the tall grass laid a seared child’s corpse missing a leg and an arm, a gaping hole in his stomach. Gregory and Amelia knelt by it and applied potion to no effect, concerned but composed as expected of them.
[Corpse] Melvin Yester (Void Mage): Level 132
Integrity: 62%
Decay: 0%
Buffs: None
Debuffs: Burned (increases decay rate)
One dead on Rowan’s watch already… because he had been too busy having a tender moment with Gabrielle. The first Dark Human fallen to enemy hands. A failure—though small. It could’ve been worse; the corpse’s integrity was dangerously treading on the threshold of no return. Irritation blooming within, Rowan rolled saliva and strode over with a lengthy stride. “Why didn’t any of you tell me?”
Katarina flinched. “Sorry, Lord Black, we saw you were discussing something and didn’t want to interrupt. Are you able to bring Melvin back?”
“He’s pretty mangled,” Viola mumbled. “Just saying.”
“He’ll be back soon. Keep his body safe.” Rowan’s wand hand cut a horizontal flick, the spell invoked. Melvin’s corpse healed and strengthened in a turbulent influx of dark mana. His eyes bleached to cloudy milk. Rowan gave control of the puppet to Viola and clicked fingers at the two girls who were still having a stare-down. “Ayla! Stop bitching around and stay close to them. Gabby, go help heal.” Those low-tier potions were horrible, unable to rid their burn and bleed debuffs. Why did Ambiguous even carry them?
Finally, some sense. Some class.
Ayla smirked at a bleeding, burned Skylar. “I hope you have a good memory.”
“I do, but I won’t need it.” He returned the smirk—and was even somewhat relieved that the object of his desires wasn’t displaying herself for every last guy to ogle.
“And what do you mean by that?” Ayla sighed. “I keep telling you it wouldn’t end well between us. I keep telling you that you aren’t actually real or alive or conscious like I am. Just a smart mimicry created by very smart people in the divine realm.”
How brutal. And just when I thought they had a thing going on.
Skylar lifted his chin. “Are you trying to convince me or yourself?”
Ayla crossed her arms under her breastplate. “You only exist in a device far beyond your understanding. A quantum supercomputer. They could pull the plug on you any moment and you’d stop existing. This world, that device, was actually put into stasis recently, offline maintenance as they call it, and you didn’t even notice. To you it didn’t even happen. Did you know there was only one moon before? Your memory was altered.”
Sad. Just sad. Rowan almost had some sympathy for the AI. But it was nothing more than soulless AI. Lifeless.
The other Dark Humans took the truth rather well, a few turning to look at the moons above Greenwood Spine. Skylar held a neutral gaze. “I don’t care.”
“You should. You are not destined for the divine realm when you pass. You cannot exist there in the way you do now. You can’t come with me when I log out. I can’t be your sex slave or anything else for that matter, kid.” Ayla finished him off with a menacing squirrel-face.
Skylar shrugged, his eyes unwavering. “Still don’t care, and I figured that out when I died the first time.”
Gabrielle slapped the suitably-attired Death Knight on the back, fingers clanging loudly. “Come on. Dun’ be such a meanie. Skylar’s a good boy! And your glamour is much better. Good choice!”
Why was she still idling? Rowan stopped himself from snarling. “Go heal their burns!”
“On it, Lord Grumpy!” She stiffly saluted him and skipped over to the children.
Ayla gave a final warning glance to Skylar, who refused to relent in the chase.
Edward said, “Twenty seconds.”
“Thank you.” Rowan gave him curt nod, then said to Ambiguous: “See anything?”
Gabrielle answered while patching up Katarina’s burns, “From what I can see, not much. Most are asleep.” She pointed at a nearby palisade. “A bunch in the wealthier section are moving, trying to not cause a panic with all the super-poor. Ya know how regular humans are. There will be a stampede and chimp-outs while others huddle in their houses.”
The monkeys. The animals. The masses. Rowan couldn’t agree more with that assessment, especially after what he just witnessed back at the Dark Temple. That enraged mob coming through the forest was one for the history books of gaming.
He asked Ambiguous once more, “What about your long-distance ward? Are there any spawnpoints nearby?”
Her head shook. “The Chaos Mystic variant works a bit differently. It reveals a fixed area to me for two hours, on cooldown while it’s revealed.”
Interesting. “Are there any other variants I need to know—”
Edward cleared his throat. “It’s time.”
On cue, as though someone overheard, shimmers in the night, assassins dashed through the trees. A Tainted Ice Blast de-stealthed the lot. They rolled and sidestepped the explosion. Four Rogues. Levels 152 to 193.
Ambiguous was already on it. Faceted onyx coated her skin, scimitar igniting. A purple flash, she appeared among them and unleashed an Arcane Force Wave. They toppled onto the grass like bowling pins. Her scimitar decapitated the level 193.
SoSo and Edward pelted them with arrows, and Rowan’s Undead finished the lot in a mess of multicolored dark skills. The level 152’s screams reverberated throughout the park. Poor lad, dragged into a high-level conflict.
A quieter scream from behind snatched Rowan’s ear. Two Radiant Duelists and three Rogue bodies laid around Ayla and Gabrielle, another impaled on Redwing’s bone talons. And Seth was heavily wounded despite his millions of health points—low armor and resistances. He had been the target. Damn. Nearly lost a key piece. The surly guy cursed in the dark language, his wings shifting.
Gabrielle puffed to him, tended to his cauterized shoulder, humming upbeat music.
Rowan hit the raid party with a get-reading ping. “Do it. Now.”
With a slow nod, SoSo pulled back her bow and released a pellet of dark-light mana at the gyrating wheel within a wheel. It struck with a resounding shudder in the night air. Cold and hot wind stormed the park. The darkness and light of the undulating blob divided with a metallic zing, a column of light piercing the heavens.
Ione’s ghostly features were for Gabrielle alone, though she gave Rowan a curious glance. Her silky voice spoke with a feathery echo, "Gabby, my dear. You have have a list of requests?"
Gabrielle handed Seth the two draught flasks and skipped to the goddess. "Yup!" She grabbed a papyrus roll from her dragonscale pouch, handed it over. Their fingers touched, mana sparking.
Ione read with a downward flick of her eyes. "I see, but you understand that I may only bend the rules of magic for you, correct? Your requests for gear and resources and power for your character can’t be granted."
"Yup! But ya can’t blame a girl for trying." Gabrielle giggled sheepishly.
"The same applies for second-tier class ascensions."
"Huh? Ya got me one, and ya said the other time—"
"Divine Intervention had numerous overhauls during the stasis." The maintenance.
"Awww." Gabrielle’s face and shoulders fell—not a look Rowan liked whether she was playing it up or not.
Ione palmed her hip. "However, I can—"
"Stop them!" An assortment of high-level players—high-level NPC guards and players—came charging through the trees from multiple directions. Hundreds of them. Tens of Light Screens erected, but few were high tier. Arrows and elemental blasts flew through.
Ambiguous reacted with a Temporal Rift, an indigo bubble enveloping the area. The missiles slowed three-fold, enough for Ice Harpies and Ayla to intercept. She followed up with a High Gravity Zone, impeding their advance. "Area attacks!" she shouted and issued the respective ping.
The party obeyed the order without question: Rowan charged a blizzard with Anton’s wand, Redwing hurled a close-range Mortar Shell, the twins each chanted a Colossal Arrow, Gabrielle charged her Big Bad Death Attack, and Seth lobbed spherical bombs of dark-light mana. The combined ultimates and area-of-effect attacks vaporized their wide-arc formation and then some. The fallout plumed high above. Every tree in that section of the park disintegrated, nothing but an icy crater remaining.
Immediately, Gabrielle was the first to recover before Rowan’s blizzard ceased. "Okie dokie! On with the Divine Intervention. What were ya about to say?"
Ione chuckled. "I can grant everyone here, apart from you, ascension quests as though they received them from a Dark Oculus, but you no longer have sufficient sacrifices for your other requests."
"Huh? Seriously? There’s like almost two-hundred-thousand monkeys here!"
"They are each of little value to both you or your enemies."
Gabrielle’s cheeks inflated in thought. "What else will a Final Intervention buy me?"
Final Intervention: sacrificing the skill itself, globally, for a significant grant. Gabrielle had explained earlier.
SoSo stepped forward. "Are you serious? Final?"
"Yup. Don’t forget who helped get you your cla
ss, gear, and skills."
Soso’s lips pinched, but she backed down. "Alright. Whatever. This better be good."
Ione said in a clipped tone, "It shall cover your requests and allow for a special surprise—in your futures. That’s all I shall say."
Gabrielle perked up. "A wonderful, joyous surprise?"
A queasy feeling churned in Rowan’s stomach. He wasn’t a fan of surprises.
Ione nodded. "Is that a deal?"
Gabrielle tapped her chinned thrice. She whispered to Edward, Rowan overhearing, "Psst. Take a recording for Not Insane with your crystal camera thingy. Send me a copy." So kind of her to think of Bird-man. Rowan discarded his jealously. She retrieved Zaine’s only soul anchor, tossed it to Ione, and gave a thumbs-up. "Yup! Go ahead! Passed ya control of the warheads."
Devil's Waltz Page 42