Dungeon Lord: Abominable Creatures (The Wraith's Haunt Book 3)
Page 47
“It doesn’t matter!” Karmich said. Pris’ crow-like attraction for shiny things had gotten them into trouble many times, but this was another thing entirely. “More will come—it’s like a game to them! The more we kill them, the more the others want to take a bite out of us!”
He grabbed his friend by the neck of her cloak and pulled her back, dragging her toward the wall. “We can replace this stuff later, our lives are more important!”
“Where are you going?” she asked, trying to shake him off as they approached the open window. “We’re three stories up above the river, you asshole!”
As a response, Karmich grabbed the butt of his dagger and smashed a case with a steel gadget inside—a bulky cylinder, similar to a crossbow, with a hook at the end. It was the legendary grappling hook of Grand Master Armari, the famous gnome inventor. “I’ve got an idea,” Karmich explained, grabbing Armari’s hook.
Pris’ eyes widened. “Karmich, that’s a priceless Guild treasure,” she said. “Don’t you dare use it. There must be another way!”
At that moment, two Heroic Rogues jumped onto the balcony right outside the Museum, their cloaks floating after them like trails of shadow, their inhuman faces hidden in darkness, their scimitars glowing black and purple with enchantments and deadly buffs. They glided toward the Thieves without making a sound.
“Alita’s fucking tits,” Pris exclaimed. “What the fuck are you waiting for, use it, use it, use it—”
Karmich grabbed his friend by the waist and jumped out the window right before the Rogues reached them.
The world seemed to turn and freeze in place for an everlasting fraction of a second, the stars below and the black canal above, and then reality itself spun around Karmich. He’d have liked to say that he and Pris acted with bravery and dignity, but the fact was, both screamed like a pair of banshees.
He somehow took aim at the burning Guildhouse and pressed the hook’s trigger. The weapon hissed and a small explosive charge triggered, propelling the hook into a nook of the stone. The steel cable attached to it tensed, and for a terrible moment, Karmich feared he’d dislocate his shoulder as he and Pris hung from the hook, holding tight to each other like a pair of lovers.
Half-way below them, dozens of shadowy figures jumped out of the building like fleas running off a dog’s fur, escaping onto the city rooftops or scrambling into dark alleys, with Heroic teams hot in pursuit.
Pris and Karmich made eye contact as their screams slowly faded. No one was paying any attention to them. “Fuck,” said Pris. “I think we made it.”
Then there was a loud screech as a griffin bolted out of nowhere through the fire and the smoke above them and the Inquisitor riding it aimed a rune Karmich’s way.
The Thief felt a jolt of burning agony searing his arm, and his fingers lost their grip on the hook as the griffin rose upward for another pass.
The Thieves Guild burned, and all around it, the purge of Undercity was well underway. No one noticed the two silent figures hitting the cold waters of the canals.
After surviving many dangers thanks to improved reflexes, the talent had become part of Ed’s instinctive response against incoming danger. When the fake Summoned Hero shot at him, Ed instantly activated the reflexes. Time slowed down to a trickle as he dove out of the way, which gave him enough time to realize that the bullet had already struck him in the chest long before his brain had even realized what was going on.
He saw in perfect, hyper-aware detail the aftershock of his armor’s enchanted runes as they overloaded, and felt the strain of his body as his defensive talents fizzled out. An instant later, he gasped as air rushed out of his lungs and his ribs tried to hug his lungs. It felt as if a sumo wrestler had drop-kicked him in the chest. Still in slow motion, he slumped against the wall as his dive lost momentum and his legs gave way underneath him. He fell in a heap, gasping for air, as time resumed its normal flow.
“Interesting,” said the man, smoking gun still in his hand. “Dungeon Lords are truly a pain to put down. What a waste of ammunition.” He wasn’t the Summoned Hero, after all—just another member of the Militant Church. He looked nothing like lanky young man in the Shadow Tarot card, and he spoke like a born Heiligian.
Ed placed his hand against the center of his chest where the bullet had struck. He lifted it, expecting to see it covered in blood. It was clean. He gazed down, and saw a round dent in his armor about the size of a Vyfara cent, with the charred remains of the bullet embedded in the center. The Dungeon Lord blinked, still too stunned to think. A small part of him wondered how a three-millimeter-wide piece of steel had stopped a modern bullet.
“Enchanted armor and defensive talents,” said the fake, frowning in the focused way of someone reading a character sheet. “What an annoying combination. But I doubt your head is as protected as your heart.” He took aim.
Clarity rushed at Ed like a storm. Many things happened, one after the other, as training took over Ed’s stunned mind before he had time to think about his actions.
This time, he activated improved reflexes before the fake had time to shoot. Ed pushed himself to the side, hard, away from the man’s aim just as his finger pressed the trigger in slow motion. The gun fired. The bullet struck the wall a couple inches away from Ed’s head—he felt a sting in his temple right next to his helmet visor.
The fake cursed and took aim again, but Ed’s hand was already clutching at his utility belt, the one he’d taken from the Thieves Guild a long time ago. He didn’t go for his sword—it wouldn’t do him much good in a cramped room against someone with a firearm. Instead, he went for a throwing knife kept in a sheath right next to the smoke bomb pouch.
“Eldritch edge!” The small blade caught in green fire right as it left Ed’s arm in one smooth, practiced motion. The flaming projectile crossed the air like a ship sailing through smooth waters and embedded itself into the man’s belly up to the hilt. The man slumped and his third shot went wide, breaking a window. Smoke and blood poured out of the terrible wound, soaking his linen white shirt in a crimson flower, small at first, but quickly blossoming.
Ed ended the reflexes. Both men stared at each other with wide eyes as if they couldn’t believe what just had happened. The fake Summoned Hero opened his mouth as if trying to take a deep breath. With his free hand, he grasped the hilt of the knife.
“Don’t,” Ed gasped. “You’ll only make it worse—”
The man, clearly in shock, tried to pull the knife out with one hard jerk. He almost succeeded. His face lost all color, his eyes rolled back, and he collapsed to the floor, dropping the gun and pulling the laptop down with him as he went. The machine bounced on the floor and slid away.
The trickle of blood feeding the crimson flower turned into an open faucet. You struck an artery, Ed thought absentmindedly. He could see the man’s exposed guts, shredded and burned to a crisp. The smell filled the room. He’d done that to a person without even thinking about it.
Bile rose into his throat, and he fought down the need to heave. It was as if he was living a terrible nightmare from where he couldn’t wake up.
No, no, no, no.
The man bleeding out onto the floor was the only person who could’ve helped him make sense of the Heroes. Even if he wasn’t the person shown in the Shadow Tarot, he knew how to control the Heroes—Ed had seen him using the laptop. At the very least, Ed could have gotten him to make the Heroes to leave Undercity.
His win condition. He had killed his win condition.
He stumbled toward him and knelt beside him. He tried to staunch the blood-flow with his shaking hands, but it was like trying to plug a flood with a finger. “Where’s the person who gave you that computer?” Ed asked.
To his surprise, the man opened his eyes slowly and met Ed’s gaze. He could tell the wounded individual was in a dangerous state of shock. The kind that precluded only a few seconds left to live. “I’ve no idea… what you’re talking about.”
“He must’ve taught
you how to use it. Come on! Please! We could stop all of this—” he gestured with impotence at the battle raging outside the room “—right now!”
The old man frowned as if he could tell that something wasn’t right. “We did it ourselves. Someone built the Heroes… Perhaps an Inquisitor…? Taught us how to use them at some point… Gave us the technology. He… Wanted…” He shrugged weakly.
“That makes no sense! That’s a laptop from Earth, there was a Summoned Hero!” Ed could see the old man was about to die. The Evil Eye blazed with terrible anger born out of desperation. “Tell me the truth!” he bellowed, using a minor order spell. In his desperation, he ignored the fact that minor order definitely wasn’t meant to be used this way, since demanding someone to speak truthfully wasn’t minor in any measure.
And at once a sense of doom overcame him, passing him by as if the feathery wings of the angel of death had brushed against his heart. For one brief instant, he was colder than he’d ever been in his entire life. Like something huge and vast had reached out to crush him into nothingness and then had, at the last second, decided it wasn’t worth the effort. Yet.
The dying man chuckled bleakly. “You know… if I hadn’t been telling the truth… You would’ve broken… Objectivity’s rules… Erased from history.” He took one deep, ugly, throaty breath, and then something like clarity glinted in his eyes. “I should have lied. I could have done the world a favor.”
The fake Summoned Hero died in Ed’s arms, but his words awoke in Ed a terrible realization that overcame the Dungeon Lord and made all his plans and hopes for the future—a future that had been impossible since the beginning—collapse around him and vanish.
It was the first warning Kharon had given him about Ivalis. No one can break Objectivity’s rules, not the gods, and certainly not bright-eyed men from Earth that thought they could change a world they barely understood. Today, he’d almost suffered the consequences of abusing Objectivity for one small mistake.
For long had the Summoned Hero been in Ivalis? According to Jarlen’s story, the Heroes’ creation had taken many years. In that time, a curious man from Earth may commit several minor mistakes. And luck didn’t last forever.
The man in the Shadow Tarot must’ve been just like Ed. Proud, and playing with forces he didn’t fully understand. Eventually those forces retaliated. The Summoned Hero wasn’t in hiding. He had tried to fight the heavens and for that he’d paid the ultimate price.
There would be no peace. The card in Ed’s pocket was the product of an unintended interaction between Objectivity and a legendary Artifact. It would never come to pass.
Dungeon Lord Edward Wright struck the floor with bloody fists and screamed at the sky until his voice gave out.
28
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The Man from Earth
A group of Inquisitors and Militant soldiers had managed to fight their way into the main garden in the middle of the mansion where a powerful spellcaster stood above a summoning circle. The spellcaster, a short, fat man with a feminine face, grunted with effort as he maintained a sort of bubble around the circle—a Heroic-ranked version of circle of respite—which kept Ed’s forces away from the survivors inside.
The bubble was littered with the corpses of Haga’Anashi and spider warriors alike, including a few princesses. Gloriosa and the rest of her cluster surrounded the area, spread out to limit the effect of a fireball in case the spellcaster dropped the bubble and attacked. The Haga’Anashi did the same, their blowpipes and knives at the ready.
Ed regarded them all with cold eyes as he slowly walked down the stairs. The men and women inside the bubble saw him approach with a mixture of reactions—anger, fear, raw hatred.
One of the Inquisitors, a broad-shouldered man wielding a war-hammer and wearing a breastplate over an expensive tunic stained with blood, snarled at Ed and tried to shoulder his way past the spellcaster. “That’s Wraith! Drop your spell, Hatter, so I can end him!”
Hatter shook his head while a pearl of sweat traveled down his double chin. “No. That’s my last Heroic spell,” he whispered.
“Then let us retreat already, before they figure out a way to get us!” exclaimed a woman dressed in the same tunic and silver mantle as the other two.
Again, Hatter shook his head. “No, Bartheny. Not without him.”
Ed ignored it all. He strolled forward until he was only a few feet away from the bubble.
“Lord Wraith,” said one of Gloriosa’s surviving princesses. “It’s dangerous—”
“If Hatter drops the shield, kill them all,” Ed said simply, without taking his gaze away from the circle. The Inquisitors seemed undeterred. But the circle stayed up.
“Yes, my Lord.”
“You piece of—” began war-hammer man.
Ed raised the blood-stained laptop he was clutching with his right hand, up above his head for everyone to see. War-hammer man shut up, paling visibly when he recognized the machine. “You may not remember this. Not so many years ago, Alita—or whoever of her underlings you’re in speaking terms with—brought you a man from Earth to help you fight the Dungeon Lords from Lotia. Back then, you were losing the war.” Behind Ed, the fires of Undercity raged on. Black storm clouds hid the twin moons, and thunder roared in the distance. The air was so heavy with static that he could smell the incoming storm. It was going to be a big one—one to remember. “This person figured out a way to shatter the Dungeon Lords’ advantage while killing as few people as possible—only you forgot to tell him the other side also has innocent people, didn’t you? He automated the process of war. He created the Heroes using your kingdom’s resources, then field tested and upgraded them until they were ready. When most of your Inquisitors failed to learn how to manipulate a keyboard, he decided to use people from our home-world instead.” This was conjecture, but based on his experience, even people born in a world with computers oftentimes never bothered to learn the very basics. In a world without electricity, it was probably several orders of magnitude worse. “It probably helped that Objectivity is more lenient with people from a different world, to a point.”
In fact, it was the key to the way the Heroes worked. Because, even if controlled at a distance, if someone from Ivalis was the one controlling the Hero as it earned, say, a hundred experience points—those would go to him. Swords didn’t level up, and Heroes were little more than animated tools. But Ed knew that Objectivity rewarded risk. An Inquisitor sitting inside a castle a thousand miles away from any danger would earn pretty much none of those hundred points. Instead, by using people from Earth—which Objectivity couldn’t reach—the Summoned Hero had found a way to let his creations, the Heroic constructs themselves, to absorb the points and use them to amplify their own ley lines instead.
In other words, the Summoned Hero had found a way to make the Heroes count as living creatures when it came to earning experience points.
But that very same stint that had gotten the Summoned Hero erased from history. After all, Objectivity often was flexible. But it had its limits, and the Summoned Hero had created thousands of Heroes, and changed the balance of history to one side.
And he’d paid the price.
Had he even known? Had the Inquisition even bothered to warn him about the risks?
“Creating the Heroic system destroyed your Summoned Hero. Not that you care,” Ed said. “His creations stayed behind, and so did the training that he managed to impart on a few of you. Wetlands, you probably like it better like this—I know there are ways to figure out when Objectivity has annihilated someone close to you, otherwise Ivalians wouldn’t ever know it’s a danger.” He could see something akin to shame, for an instant, showing its ugly head in the spellcaster Hatter. It was all the confirmation Ed needed. “You suspect what happened, but choose not to think further about it. Because the Heroes are now yours to command instead of belonging to someone who doesn’t understand your ways. Someone who may not have been as bloodthirsty as you are.”
“Fuck you—you did this,” Ed said, pointing his finger at her like he was aiming a sword at her heart. “I had nothing to do with your war against the Dark. Had you asked me for my help back when I arrived, I may have been on your side!”
“We would never ally with a spawn from Murmur,” said the war-hammer man through a scowl.
“And I would never help a mass-murdering bastard who razes entire cities to the ground because a few men dare challenge his rule.” Ed pointed back and above him, at the columns of smoke rising from the city and feeding the storm clouds. “YOU! DID! THIS!” His arm was shaking with rage. He forced his Evil Eye off and took a deep breath. “Whatever happens now is on you. Get the fuck out of my city, you piece of shit. If any of you ever come back, I will kill you. That’s all the warning you get.” Ed turned to Gloriosa. “Get every prisoner you have and hand them to these people. Do not attack if they drop the shield to get them inside, but open fire if they take a single step out, or attempt to cast a spell. According to their own rules, we could’ve infested their friends with mindbrood larvae, so they must kill them to be safe. Let’s see if they have the stones to do to themselves what they so freely do to others.”
Bartheny scoffed. “Tall talk for someone with a few hours to live. Enjoy Undercity while you can, Dungeon Lord. There’s a hundred Heroes out there, purging your evil from the land. The lives of all the good men you’ve killed today will be avenged by the end of the night.”
“Only if I lose,” Ed said. “If I win—and I intend to win—then your main advantage against me is gone. You know how to operate the Heroes, and you may even know how to create them, but you don’t know how they work, or how to upgrade them. Whatever computing equipment you have in Heiliges is all you have left. Well… I doubt you know how to troubleshoot a computer. And you better pray to Alita I don’t figure out this machine’s password, or you may wake up one day being Ivalis Online’s new villains.” He handed the laptop to one of his Haga’Anashi. “Get this to the Haunt.”