by Oliver Mayes
Damien liked CactusLover less and less. He’d dealt with his assigned face-hugger imp quickly and then executed Damien’s best minion. Damien would almost have rather taken the hit himself. With Noigel dead, he’d have to direct his troops himself, which meant sticking his head in CactusLover’s screen-watching sights.
Now they were in combat, all the torches requiring a free hand had been extinguished one by one in favor of full combat capability. The priest was dead, his Holy Orb sputtering away. The mage was dead, his Mana Wisp had fizzled out of existence. Damien was most of the way to achieving his ulterior motive of plunging the group into darkness. The last obstacle in his way was his least favorite fan, CactusLover, who was spraying the trees at the clearing’s edge with one enflamed arrow after another. He was creating a ring of light around the clearing to block Damien’s potential points of ingress.
Damien scowled. He should’ve killed this guy first. He was still processing his disgust when CactusLover, a new fire arrow notched and drawn, abruptly turned from the tree he’d been facing and loosed straight at Damien’s all but imperceptible head. Damien had to pull back as the arrow whistled past his nose into the dense forest beyond. It was pretty clear by this point who Damien’s next target priority was.
It’s quite an advantage, seeing what your opponent sees. But at least he wouldn’t be able to tell what Damien was thinking. If he was so intent on watching through Damien’s eyes, that could be used to Damien’s advantage. How many minions did he have left? He checked his Soul Summon Limit and found it at 17 out of 30. Sounded right, he’d lost a hell hound and ten imps, Noigel included. That left him with a succubus, a wraith, one last hell hound and four more imps. He’d have to make do.
From the safety of cover, Damien assigned his minions their orders. The hell hound and wraith would be coming with him. He’d have to keep them behind him, otherwise CactusLover would rob them of the element of surprise, but all three of them moved fast enough to make up for it. The four imps and the succubus would remain hidden until he’d provided an adequate distraction. He took a deep breath, focusing on what he wanted to happen, and started running clockwise around the outside of the densely forested circle, away from the fire arrows embedded in the trees around his location. He stayed just within the darkness the foliage provided, making sure to keep his eyes on CactusLover as much as possible.
CactusLover took the bait. He immediately abandoned his campaign for a better lit forest and started yelling orders at his superiors, his excitement getting the better of him.
“He’s trying to flank us! Follow my arrows and chase him down, I’ll cover you!”
Most of his allies ignored him, either because the one issuing the orders was a scrub or because they didn’t feel like chasing an occultist around in the woods. Damien glanced around the clearing, looking for HighZen and wondering why he wasn’t giving the orders. The raid leader was nowhere to be seen. That was a problem.
Damien had more pressing concerns. The party assassin had decided to follow CactusLover’s instruction. The lack of light was a benefit for him too, and he was better suited for one-on-one combat than Damien. He threw his arms out behind himself and, following the trajectory of CactusLover’s arrows, charged into the trees at Damien’s back.
Damien couldn’t help but groan as his new target vanished, even when he knew he needed to focus. He was aware that, in theory, holding your arms behind you made assassins run faster. Even so, he’d never submit to looking quite that much of a try-hard to do so. This guy probably had the Ninja trait and everything. For shame.
If the assassin got him it was likely game over. Since his own character was an ‘assassin-lite’, with most of his focus on the wisdom stat in order to have a full roster of demons, he was ideal prey. Assassins not only beat him soundly on physical stats, they also came pretty close to the heightened senses and movement speed occultists boasted in the dark.
Fortunately, courtesy of multiple experiences with assassins, Damien had developed a single-word command to address this problem.
“Fetch.”
There were a few seconds where the only sounds were the snapping of twigs under his feet and the rush of arrows around him as CactusLover continued trying to guesstimate his location. Then there were a series of short, sharp pants as the hell hound closed in, the Detect skill very much in play. The silence was interrupted by half a swear word, which in turn was interrupted by a snarl, after which followed a great deal of decidedly unstealthy yelling. Without skipping a beat, the wraith delivered a stab in passing before continuing to follow in Damien’s slipstream.
Damien risked a glance at CactusLover, the night vision bestowed by his ‘Shadow Walker’ trait becoming advantageous in the absence of light sources. The hell hound’s ignition and the assassin’s screaming were distracting CactusLover enough for his own screen to provide more interest than his target’s. The rest of the party’s attention had been drawn to the burning mass at the edge of the woods. The warrior and paladin tanks were at the front, with the rest bringing up the rear.
This wasn’t exactly what Damien had planned, but it would suffice. He paused with his back to a tree and leaned out to check where the flaming arrows were. It was much easier to locate them now he’d made his way to the opposite side of the clearing. Once they were gone, this battlefield would be much more hospitable. For him, anyway. His four imps promptly flew from the trees to remove the arrows.
Damien quickly drew back behind his cover and called the wraith to his side. He turned it away from himself and thought ‘Possession’. His vision jumped two feet forward and his real body slumped to the ground behind him. With any luck, even if CactusLover was watching his screen it would only register as a blip. Damien’s real body hadn’t finished rag-dolling behind his borrowed one before he propelled his new vehicle even further around the clearing, guiding it at extreme speed while avoiding incoming obstacles by smoothly leaning left and right.
It took three seconds of weaving through trees at breakneck pace before Damien found himself at the edge of the stairway up the mountain, where his failed attempt at diplomacy had begun. He was now precisely on the opposite side of the clearing from the hell hound he’d enflamed, exactly where he needed to be. He veered into the clearing and tore toward the center, where CactusLover had positioned himself to grant maximum reaction time.
Damien had reduced this meager advantage to nothing. His ‘Nine-Tenths of the Lore’ trait granted anything he possessed doubled stats, and the wraith’s primary stat was agility. The imps had extinguished four of the six burning arrows simultaneously, as well as providing an unforeseen benefit: CactusLover had turned his attention to fire at them instead of looking after himself.
With his minion’s agility doubled, the superior ‘Shadow Beast’ passive ability fully activated in the dark, the beefiest units drawn to the opposite side of the field and his target’s attention diverted, Damien was in good shape to achieve his objectives.
Damien was halfway across the clearing before CactusLover’s screen-watching alerted him to the danger. He turned just in time to receive an arm-blade through the neck. As Damien drove him into the floor, the object of his ire gurgled half for the benefit of his party and half in delight.
“I’m being killed by Daemien!”
Damien drew back his second arm and prepared to plunge its attached blade through the ranger’s chest. The whole battle would be much easier once this guy was dead. So he was doubly perturbed when a slender curved blade protruded between his eyes, directly out of the wraith’s forehead, before he could deliver the finishing blow.
Damien’s vision abruptly blurred and he was back in his own body in a fraction of a second. He peered around the tree trunk from the floor. HighZen was standing over the smoldering remains of his wraith’s corpse, offering his free hand to CactusLover to drag him back to his feet. CactusLover had survived with just a fraction of his health left thanks to HighZen’s expedient intervention. But where had his
savior come from? He’d probably Charged in from cover, with his agility-based character making it even faster. What a palaver.
“Hey—,” the party leader yelled, “—we need a heal over here!”
Oh, I don’t think so. This was more than worth risking his succubus for. As the party wheeled around, their brief encounter with the diverting hell hound finished, Damien’s spell-casting minion started charging a Chaotic Bolt. Damien focused on the subtle purple light on the opposite side of the field of battle and possessed its wielder as quickly as possible. Possession had no cooldown, he wanted to end CactusLover by his ‘own’ hand, and possessing his succubus would double its intelligence to make that a reality.
He entered his new vessel just as the Chaotic Bolt pulsed, indicating it was fully charged. With very little time to tarry, Damien flung it at the middle of the field. CactusLover didn’t quite have time to complete the defiant, exultant utterance he was yelling into the woods around him before it connected.
“I survived Daemien himself! Take tha—”
Then the bolt pounded into him and he exploded. Coated in his anti-occultist tactician’s remains and shrouded in almost complete darkness, HighZen announced the only tactically sound decision he’d made all evening.
“Retreat!”
They’d thought themselves capable of dealing with Damien as a ten-man party, but now they’d lost their four most crucial roles and were fighting blind. Damien thought about letting them leave before deciding it wasn’t appropriate. Four out of ten was not enough to compensate for his wasted planning.
He wasn’t gonna catch ’em all. They were scattering, taking the nearest exit rather than leaving as a group. HighZen himself had sounded the retreat and wasn’t sticking around to make sure everyone got out okay. Akunaratana and LightLawd were running to catch up with their guild leader, but HighZen was much faster than either of them and leaving them behind. These three would do.
Damien had two imps and a succubus left. The succubus was still under his Possession. He extended her wings and dropped into a dive, using the speed of the drop to boost his chase. Using the succubus’s wings was much like guiding the wraith, only with an extra dimension added to where he willed it to go. It was extremely useful, being able to impart your consciousness to an expendable body. It allowed Damien to play very aggressively, not to mention granting a wide range of abilities to use in imaginative ways.
As Damien flew over the fleeing players in the dark, he pointed his vessel’s clawed forefinger at the ground directly in front of HighZen and thought ‘Circle of Hell’. A wide ring of black fire immediately engulfed the escape route and Damien’s target blundered straight into it. HighZen had stopped nearly in the center when Damien landed in front of him, the succubus’s whip already coiling forward to encircle HighZen’s neck.
HighZen hadn’t even decided if he was coming or going. He was not on his guard. The steel barbs pierced him around and around, then encompassed his hands when they instinctively shot upward to try and remove the obstruction. Damien took the whip in both hands and yanked it over his head, dragging HighZen onto his knees.
Damien had approximately half a second to enjoy the spectacle before his vessel burst into golden flames. His succubus had been Smitten. While his foray with her had been an immensely successful maneuver, the paladin healer and warrior tank were not far behind.
The succubus would last a few more seconds. Damien needed to get into position. He canceled the Possession and jumped to his feet, running past the tree he’d been hiding behind just in time to watch the tank run up and finish his lone demon off.
She’d already fulfilled her purpose: Damien’s final two imps had caught up. The first of them was hovering above and in between HighZen and Akunaratana, right at the furthest range of the ability. Where the pull would be strongest.
The Streaming Champion pointed.
“Imp-losion.”
The unstable portal cracked open over their heads and sucked everything toward it with incredible speed, pulling the two of them into the air. The rift closed a fraction of a second later, taking the imp with it, and they collided where it had first materialized.
That was only the start of their problems. The second imp had swooped in underneath them in the wake of the Imp-loding first and was ready to perform Damien’s demonstration of the most stupid ability he’d seen in the game (so far). The cherry on the cake of why not partying with him had been an incredibly bad idea. Damien equipped his daggers, pointed at the second imp and, squinting his eyes, braced himself. He’d been waiting for a fitting occasion to use his newly acquired trump card, the trait he’d chosen for hitting level 40. This was as good as it would get. He pointed again.
“Ex-Imp-losion.”
His new ability was the polar opposite of its paired sibling. Where the former pulled things in, this one very much repulsed them. While they both required an imp as cost, this one did not forcibly dismiss the imp and leave half a soul behind in return. It blew the imp apart from the inside out, removing it from the field in a much more direct manner. However, that was more than equitable given the ability’s effect: every time Damien Imp-loded an imp, a charge was added to the Ex-Imp-losion icon in his HUD. For each charge, the energy and imps drawn into the rifts from Imp-losion’s casting were added to Ex-Imp-losion’s next cast.
Damien had charged it fully before he came. Five charges. Which meant not only was he about to receive five imps from this rift, but that they were going to be fired out of it with five times the force of an Imp-losion. Considering Imp-losion packed enough of a punch to pull tanks into the air like beach volleyballs hit by baseball bats, that constituted considerable power.
Damien was very glad to be behind his tree.
If the Imp-losion had precipitated a piercing crack, Ex-Imp-losion’s cast was announced via a deafening roar. Two rag-dolling bodies above it hurtled high into the tree line in different directions, helpfully screaming and thus allowing Damien an acoustic approximation of their trajectories. He surmised they were going very far, very fast. LightLawd was close enough to get hit by the blast as well. He shot past Damien with a low hum of displaced air and disappeared into the woods far behind.
The trees snapped and bent over backward, creaking and shaking as the blast tore through them. Even from Damien’s relatively distant cover, his head was thrown back and his hood blown off by sheer force. Imp-losion had a maximum area of effect. Ex-Imp-losion had no such discernable boundary.
One of the complications was that Damien could not control how the imps left the rift. One of them was shot directly downward at twenty-eight meters per second over less than ten meters, which translated the imp into a smudge. Another was marginally luckier, avoiding the floor but being thrown into a nearby tree before it could self-correct. What remained of it was not in flying condition.
The remaining three were fortunate enough to get thrown out in directions that did not immediately ensure crippling injury or death, and they dutifully did exactly what Damien had ordered them to do through Noigel. They used their Ex-Imp-losion-enhanced momentum to fly toward the nearest un-imp-eded enemy and latch onto them.
One was fired straight up and latched onto Akunaratana before he’d finished the ascending segment of his flight. His extended stay in the Circle of Hell had not been kind. He was still burning. Damien immediately Demon Gated onto him in midair, latched his legs around the tank’s waist from behind and started frenziedly stabbing him in the back of the head.
This tactic would only work if he managed to kill his target, otherwise the cooldown on his Demon Gate wouldn’t reset and he’d be committing exotic, elaborate suicide. His best chance to avoid that was by inflicting as much damage as possible before the armor reduction of Circle of Hell wore off.
Akunaratana, bless him, had absolutely no idea what was happening. Damien critically stabbed him through his armored skull three times before the armor-reducing flames wore off, at which point Damien meticulously levered the
dagger that was still embedded in his helmet and rained blows on the side of his neck with his Striking Dagger instead. They’d just reached the top of their trajectory when his target expired.
Damien kicked off his body and turned his head toward the remaining screams. The raid leader was not heavily armored, so the blast had carried him a little faster and a little higher. There was no imp currently on him, but there was one flying straight in his direction. The raid leader already had low health. He’d probably die from fall damage if left to his own devices, but Damien wanted as active a role in his demise as possible.
Damien Demon Gated to the second imp and they swapped momentum. Less than half a second later Damien’s dagger was embedded in the raid leader’s chest. HighZen stopped screaming, his face a confused tangle of terror, as Damien brought his own face in close.
“Who’s naive?”
It only took one more stab through his forehead, then gravity started bringing them both down. Time to get off. Damien looked to the edge of the forest where he’d come from and ordered the first imp he’d swapped positions with out into the center of the clearing where he could see it. There was too much at stake to play chicken with Arcadia’s surface. He Demon Gated to the floor as soon as he saw the imp, in order to swap places and momentum again, leaving the plummeting imp to control its own descent.
He’d pulled it off. He had to secure the area. Some of the enemies had been running and might, if they lacked common sense, come back. A hell hound was the priority, so he’d be alerted if that happened. Especially since a fair portion of his viewers could be running to his location at this very moment.
So long as that was taken care of, there was something else he wanted to see. In all the excitement, Damien had neglected to keep track of his most important stat. He glanced up at the viewer count on his HUD and suddenly felt extremely self-conscious. Over the last five minutes, nearly 50,000 people had tuned in to watch his first ever livestream. He’d better say something.