by Hugo Huesca
“My plan was to kill you quickly and then leave,” said Alvedhra through gritted teeth. “But then I had an even better idea!” She feinted a dash at Yumiya and threw a sideways slash at Kes’ neck. The Marshal tilted her neck to let the hit slide off her helmet and then bounce safely off her gambeson.
Kes tightened her fist around her blade and punched Alvedhra in the nose using the pommel of her sword. The Inquisitor recoiled, blood spewing everywhere. Behind Kes and Kaga, the other Monster Hunters shot darts at Alvedhra, but they were deflected by her armor.
It didn’t matter. The Inquisitor’s back was against the window, with only empty air behind her. She was done.
“Yes? From my vantage point, your idea doesn’t seem that bright,” Kes told her. Now I’m taunting a defeated opponent, she thought. Is this how a Dungeon Lord feels all the time? She had to admit… it was more than a bit cathartic. She’d needed this fight.
“It’s very simple,” Alvedhra said. She jumped back and hopped on the edge of the window, using her hands to steady herself. Kaga and Yumiya advanced, unsure if they should push her off or drag her inside. “My plan was to force that bloodsucker you brought with you to regenerate into mist, then track that mist as it flies straight into your Dungeon Lord’s main dungeon.” The Ranger gave Kes a nasty grin through her bloodied face. “See you soon, Kes.”
And she jumped out, just before the kaftar could catch her.
Kes and the Monster Hunters looked out the window in time to see the griffin fly away in Hoia’s direction, a battered Inquisitor on its back. A few kaftar shot crow familiar runes their way, but in an instant the griffin was well out of range.
“So,” Kaga said, turning to Kes. He looked dejected. “They got away. What now?”
Kes let out a long exhalation. She couldn’t admit it aloud, but she was glad she hadn’t had to kill or capture Alvedhra. “We better cross our fingers and hope Lavy’s invention works. Otherwise there’s going to be a long line of Inquisitors and Heroes knocking at the Haunt’s doors real soon.”
The runes engraved in Ed’s sword flashed blue under the eldritch edge as the steel struck against Rylan Silverblade’s scimitar. The Rogue faltered under the weight of the attack, but he slashed at Ed with his second blade, fearless and precise.
Ed slapped the slash away with his gauntlet as he stepped back, forcing the scimitar to strike his plate-covered shoulder. His armor’s enchantments, enhanced by his pledge of muted armor, flared to life and the blade bounced off without doing any damage. The Dungeon Lord used that opening to hack at the Rogue, landing a hit that struck Silverblade’s enchanted helmet. Arcane sparks erupted from the spot where the metals met, and both combatants pulled away to regain their stances. Ed’s lungs burned with exertion, and the rain threatened to slip into his eyes at any second. He blinked furiously and bent his head at a downward angle.
Rylan’s scimitars glowed purple as the Rogue crossed them in front of him—the telltale sign of a shadow strike. Ed gritted his teeth and prepared to defend, well aware that a shadow strike would make the Rogue disappear from sight and attack from whichever direction Ed wasn’t facing, landing an instant critical hit. That had been the same attack that almost killed him minutes ago. A chill ran down the Dungeon Lord’s spine—he wasn’t eager to go through that all over again.
Before the Rogue could dart forward, though, Mark’s Fighter bull-rushed him with a tackle that sent the Rogue sprawling several feet away.
The Fighter ended his rush only a step away from Rylan, but for some reason, the dwarf didn’t push the advantage and just stood there while Rylan jumped to his feet with a flourish. The Rogue didn’t attack the Fighter either, choosing instead to activate a shadow field and disappear under a screen of gunpowder-black smoke.
Why aren’t they targeting each other? Ed wondered. Next to him, Lisa’s Cleric used stormwind to blow the shadow field away, but the Rogue had entered stealth while under the shelter of darkness and was nowhere to be seen.
Ed activated his Evil Eye, trusting its veil-piercing enhancement to reveal Rylan. The Rogue had gone invisible and was sneaking his way toward Ed. The Dungeon Lord rushed at the automaton and threw a downward slash with all his weight behind it. As he expected, the Rogue back-flipped away—a wasteful move that would surely give Kes a heart attack out of sheer anger if Ed ever tried it—and Ed went after him, trying to land a hit to end his invisibility.
During his time playing Ivalis Online, Ed had learned that Rogues excelled at dealing with elite enemies by delivering devastating amounts of damage in one single combo. No matter how skilled the opponent, he was sure to take some damage if the Rogue knew its job—the trick was in landing the first hit. Ryan had gotten his favorite strategy by reading the forums: he began with shadow strike to attack his enemy from a vulnerable spot, then transitioned into an eviscerate—which was easier to block, but ignored armor—and then finished his foe off with the rest of his powers.
Back there, when the Rogue jumped Ed atop Gloriosa, the Hero had only used a couple of skills because he’d been busy fighting the Haga’Anashi and the horned spiders, so most of his rotation was in cooldown. But Ryan was doing his best to set up another combo even as he fought the three of them—only using skills with short cooldowns while the others recovered.
To beat that strategy, Ed had to do two things. The first was to force the Rogue to use skills before it was the right time, and the second was to just fucking kill him as fast as possible.
The Dungeon Lord and the Rogue exchanged a flurry of strikes and counter-strikes, parries and dodges, arcane flashes sparking all around them as their armors ate the brunt of the damage. Blood poured from Ed’s arms from long scratches wherever his enchantments had failed to protect him, but he barely noticed. It was as if his entire being only existed to deliver the next blow, to parry the next attack, to disrupt the next skill.
Rylan Silverblade stabbed forward with his scimitars. Ed managed to parry one, but the other struck his shoulder, next to his neck, and bit into his flesh in a spot unprotected by his armor. Burning pain spread across his body as rivulets of blood tinted red the bas-reliefs of his breastplate, and his mind snapped into a sharp focus. He punched Rylan’s blank face with his black hand and wrenched a rank of Endurance out of the Hero in an almost-visible rip and tear of dark aura. It left a familiar taste in Ed’s mouth, as if somehow he recognized it from somewhere.
There’s something living inside that thing, Ed noticed as he pushed forward and slashed at the automaton’s face, leaving a line of fractures across the Hero’s skin.
Lisa used holy carapace to create a protective, sand-like layer of second armor around Ed, who could feel his pledge interacting with it and improving it even further—making him into a damn living tank. It would come in handy against Rylan’s normal attacks, but he needed to be careful against his skills, which specialized in avoiding armor.
The Rogue darted to the side and tried to eviscerate Ed’s guts, but Mark came out of nowhere and activated his taunt, forcing everyone in a small area around him to face him instead. That included both Ed and Rylan. At first, Ed tried to resist the compulsion, but he realized it was faster if he simply worked together with his friend. He faced the dwarf and rushed him while Ryan tried to dart away from the dwarf—which he couldn’t attack. Ed jumped at the Fighter, planted both feet on the dwarf’s chest, and pushed hard to propel himself like a Dungeon Lord bullet against the Rogue as he thrust his sword forward with all his strength. He aimed at Rylan’s chest, hoping to pierce it enough for his sword’s anti-magic enchantment to trigger.
At the last second, Rylan shadow stepped, only to reappear right next to Ed. Both scimitars struck at the Dungeon Lord mid-air, fracturing his golden carapace and sending him crashing against the ground. Ed rolled away and jumped to his feet, shaking his head and trying to clear his mind.
He and the Rogue circled each other, with Lisa’s Cleric and Mark’s Fighter to each side.
They can’
t directly attack each other, Ed realized, then. Ivalis Online didn’t allow a Hero to target one another, they had been using skills that didn’t need a target. Bull-rush was a movement skill, and stormwind was an area-of-effect spell.
Lisa and Mark weren’t in a fight for their lives like he was they were playing a game under a specific set of conditions never intended by the developers—they needed to keep a Boss alive long enough for him to deliver a killing blow against a Hero, while at the same time not being allowed to attack said Hero themselves. The Militant Church would’ve forced them to log-out long ago, but thankfully, the laptop they would’ve used was now in the Haunt’s possession, and the man trained for the job by the Summoned Hero was now dead.
Even then, if the fight dragged out, the risk that someone back in Heiliges or Galtia would figure out how to eject his friends from the game increased. Ed was aware the laptop wasn’t the only computing equipment the Militant Church had, and the Summoned Hero had probably trained more than one person in its use.
We need to end this, Ed thought. But if he destroyed Rylan too soon, the Hero would just teleport away. If Ed waited for his friends to activate the Jamming Tower, Rylan would self-destruct. The only way to capture the Hero was for Ed to run him through with his anti-magic sword after as the Jamming Tower powered on. He could feel that his minions had finished capturing the Charcoal Tower in the distance. Alder, Lavy, and Kes had to be there, readying the Jamming dish. Would Ed and them be able to coordinate at exactly the right time?
Just like Mark and Lisa, he too was playing a game with a very specific handicap. Sure, he could destroy Rylan and try to capture some other Hero another time. But he needed to defeat the Rogue, the very core of his being demanded it. This fight was more than a battle to the death.
Ed had something to prove—to himself and to the rest of the world.
The card in his pocket showed a future that would never come to pass. The alternatives of the Shadow Tarot—the Wraith and the Tyrant—would not do. The only way forward was to challenge the odds and create a new path, like unlocking a secret ending in a videogame’s storyline. The Dungeon Lord alone wasn’t strong enough to achieve that ending—he’d gone down to Silverblade’s attack just like so many others before him.
But Ed was alive, and not because of a hidden Dungeon Lord’s power he’d unlocked all of a sudden, or a burst of determination, or the Dark’s intervention. He was alive only because back on Earth, before the Mantle, and the dungeons, and the otherworldly powers, he’d spent many nights having a good time playing videogames with his friends. Friends who liked him enough that, when forced to choose between siding with him or their asshole boss, they’d gone with Ed—even with their jobs on the line.
It was humbling, and it went against everything Ed thought he’d learned so far. For a long time now, Ed had thought that as he increased in experience points and furthered his path as a Dungeon Lord, he was becoming stronger than the helpless young man he’d been back on Earth.
Tonight was the first time he realized some part of him may have actually gotten weaker. Hadn’t killing been coming easier to him, lately? Would Lisa and Mark have liked the man he was now, if they had they met him today for the first time?
Ed had needed to don the name of Lord Wraith just to survive in a cruel, unknown world. But surviving wasn’t enough. All the other Dungeon Lords had survived, for a while, and then they’d lost, and Lord Wraith wasn’t any different. Ed was playing to win. And now he wondered if the ace in his sleeve had been there, all along, waiting for him to claim it… Like a sort of heritage.
Perhaps, by aligning his two different personas—Dungeon Lord and nerdy IT guy—he’d find the strength to forge the path to his secret ending.
Both hands, black bone and human skin, closed tightly around the handle of his sword. He had a plan, but even though he had had a bit of practice before, it would be extremely risky. He could feel his body shivering at the memory of the scimitar piercing his chest, the animal part of his brain screaming against the possibility of experimenting that kind of pain again, begging for him to turn tail and run. Ed forced that sensation down, and steeled his will like a warrior honing his blade before battle, until there existed nothing else but that moment, the surrounding Heroes, with Rylan Silverblade squaring up against him. The trembling stopped. Since he’d taken running out as an option, his entire being prepared to fight.
“Hey, Ryan! Are you listening over there? Your combo is off cooldown already, so quit wasting my time,” he taunted the Rogue, unaware if Ryan was reading his words through his computer monitor back on Earth. There was a small chance he was—Ryan loved to interrupt the final Bosses’ speeches, but something told Ed that Ryan would listen to him, if only because of their mutual hatred. “You know, the problem with you is that you’ve always been a lazy player,” Ed said as he lowered his guard on purpose, goading the Hero further. “That combo of yours? You stole it from other players as soon as you stumbled across the forums and have been using it ever since. The problem is… you’re a one-trick pony. Back when we played together, if you used your combo and failed, Mark, Lisa, and I were stuck getting your ass out of trouble. No one’s coming to save you this time. Have you thought about what’s going to happen if you cycle through all your cooldowns and I’m still standing?” The Dungeon Lord grinned. “Well, that’s when I get to teach you how to play this damn game at last!”
The Rogue’s scimitars flashed purple, and he rushed at Ed, fast and silent. The Cleric and the Fighter charged after him, trying to interrupt Rylan’s path, but Ed went after him, holding his sword in front of him as if offering the tip of the blade for Rylan to impale himself into.
Instead, the Rogue activated shadow strike and disappeared in a flash of purple light—in less than a second, he’d reappear exactly in the Dungeon Lord’s blind spot.
So Ed activated his dungeon vision, using the Charcoal Tower that oversaw the plaza, and which was part of Undercity’s new dungeon, as the focal point. In an instant, his field of view shot upward over the battlefield at dizzying speeds—but Ed was used to the sensation and expected it. He kept his footing as the blood and the bodies came into focus. His few remaining creatures and minions fought against last dredges of Heroic opposition in the plaza. He saw the griffin flying away, and the dozens—if not hundreds—of fresh Heroes eager for action coming from Mullecias Heights.
And then he focused the vision, so it showed the surrounding area, just in time for Rylan Silverblade to appear exactly behind Ed’s back, scimitars already tearing through the air in a double horizontal slash meant to cut Ed’s neck in a single strike.
Except that the Dungeon Lord saw it all, and using his improved reflexes he arced his back and thrust his sword behind his head as if preparing for a heavy downward slash. Instead, he saw from his vantage point, high above, how the tip of his flaming blade struck against Rylan Silverblade’s face right between the eyes. He felt a resistance like clay breaking and heard it shatter like glass as his sword pushed through.
The scimitar attack went wide and hacked at Ed’s carapace, vaporizing it without damaging the Dungeon Lord. Still under the effects of improved reflexes, Ed turned to face the recoiling Rogue, drew his sword out, and punched hard at the crater that marred its charred and broken head—stealing another rank of Endurance as he struck.
The Hero recoiled, its movements less human and more mechanical by the second. He was about to counterattack when Mark bull-rushed him again and the both of them struck a dilapidated wall, collapsing it and showering the automatons in a rain of debris.
Ed adjusted his dungeon vision. Rylan stood, his body covered in superficial fractures. The Fighter, who had suffered an enormous amount of damage from that point-blank enhanced fireball, stayed down, trying to heal.
“That was lesson number one at how not to suck at the game,” Ed told the Rogue. Now he was sure Ryan was listening. “After lesson two, you aren’t getting back up.”
Lavy had th
ought that her life in the Haunt had prepared her to be ready for anything, but the battle unfolding in front of her was on an entirely different level. The air was so thick with static that she could barely breathe, and the black clouds above had broken into a checkered pattern that revealed parts of the night sky. She was aware, theoretically, of what that specific phenomenon meant—only she had never, ever expected to see it happen with her own eyes.
But what Witch wakes up one morning knowing she’s about to live through history in the making?
“Are we under some kind of Legendary-ranked illusion?” Alder wondered aloud next to her. The Bard and even Costel and her guards were next to Lavy, watching how a Dungeon Lord and two Heroes—who were under no mind-control or anything of the sort—teamed up against a third.
“If we are, don’t dispel it,” Lavy whispered.
For all her life, the world had operated under certain rules: if you killed a dangerous creature you got experience points. You could bend Objectivity’s rules at your own risk, but never break them outright. A Hero is the natural enemy of a Dungeon Lord. Should they meet, one of them would be destroyed.
What Ed had done tonight had never happened—she didn’t need to check with Alder to know that. Not only had the Cleric practically brought Ed back from the gates of death, he had gotten up as if he had expected it. As if the Cleric and the Fighter had set this up with him beforehand. She didn’t know if that was true—hadn’t Ed mentioned that those three were his old team? It was hard to tell. All Heroes looked alike—but she sure as hell knew what it would seem like to the people watching along with her.
The Cleric had stacked so many high-leveled spells on the Dungeon Lord that, for their duration, he was inhuman. The fight against the Rogue became a blur of movement and deadly clashes that would’ve killed a non-enhanced man several times over. Lavy could barely follow the seemingly uninterrupted flow of attacks and parries and counterattacks, but she could almost feel each strike rattling her body.