by Oliver Mayes
It was a tough one. A lot of these players were about to face twenty-four-hour death timers and would likely accomplish next to nothing through their individual sacrifices. Yet to most of them, this was just a game. She’d alienate just as many of them by taking it too seriously.
Then a name had come to mind. Someone she’d often been associated with before she’d learned to do what she did without dying. A long-revered name, likely more legendary to this group than Excalibur, King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table combined.
“This is Lillian. You have ten seconds to turn down your chat volume before I give my prebattle speech.”
Everyone had heard her speak, softly though it may have been. The forest fell silent. With nothing but a flick of her head, the occultists were removed from her list of ‘Enemies of the Realm’. The Carlisle-Elites were now alone in that regard. She closed her menu to find all had turned toward her, waiting to hear what she had to say. Lillian took a deep breath, thrust Excalibur above her head and screamed out her chosen words.
“Alright, let’s do this: LEEEEROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOY—”
The solemn silence was replaced with uproar, much of it laughter. There were winces from those who hadn’t taken her volume advice seriously. There was mild confusion from those who had yet to stumble across this most ancient of memes, but there was also a resounding roar in reply from those who knew it well. Those who didn’t would surely look it up after this. There were enough who did that her call was joined by thousands upon thousands of ecstatic voices.
“—NNNNNJENKIIIIIIINS!”
She turned and ran into the no-man’s land, her Queen’s Guard flanking her on either side and the largest army ever to grace Saga Online stampeding behind her.
30
Faith, Steel and Gunpowder
Damien was still typing out his unmeasured response when the horde of red names in front of him turned green. Seconds later Lillian’s war cry rang through the forest, followed by a wall of noise as almost everyone else took it up with her. Then the snow slid from the trees as thousands of footfalls shook the earth.
He’d spent all day getting ready to help Lillian and she’d left him on the bench. He closed the chat box and yelled into his comms at the fifty occultists he’d handpicked for the fight.
“They’ve started, everybody move up to the battle line as fast as you can! Control your own minions for now.”
Damien had been able to get closer than the rest of them, since he could Shadow Walk in daylight. His ‘Sunset Emperor’ ability didn’t work while he was in his Pride form, but having finished farming he’d reverted to his original state. This was very much intended. He had the 10 soul energy in his Soul Reserve required to transform back, a surprise tool that would help him later. If the battle wasn’t over before he even got there.
The first explosion echoed through the forest, then a whole series of them on top of each other. He ran forward through the trampled mud, looking for Hammertime. No sign. He sent Noigel up a tree at the edge of the clearing and Demon Gated to his position, then scanned the battlefield left and right to find his liaison. He hadn’t managed a full sweep before the scene in front of him captured his attention and would not give it back.
What lay in front of him was barbarous insanity. Combat had started less than half a minute ago and already the ground was littered with bodies. There were so many, both standing and fallen, that you couldn’t see the snow. The wall was a perfect staging ground from which to rain projectiles down upon them, whittling their numbers down wherever they’d been left unprotected.
When Damien and Lillian had made their first assault, the wall was only operating at a fraction of its efficiency: there’d been NPC guards lining the top and NPC archers firing through embrasures across the middle. Three more rows of embrasures were now being utilized, running all the way from one side of the wall to the other.
Now Damien was bearing witness to the firepower of a fully armed and operational death wall. It was no longer manned with NPCs, who were instead serving as cannon fodder in front of the gate. Their positions had been taken by the ostensibly thinking and breathing player characters who’d opted for immediate gratification.
The wall allowed the tiny fraction of players who’d most effectively murdered their kin in the Frozen Forest to take full advantage of their betrayal of the human race. Their protected vantage points meant they were free to strike at those arrayed below them with complete impunity, ensuring through their combined efforts that their immorally obtained advantage was preserved. All they had to worry about was who to target.
Exploding arrows, fireballs, lightning bolts and worse descended into the massed ranks of those their achievements drove them to see as less than them. The level 50 abilities were particularly obvious, unleashed upon droves of dissenters that didn’t even know their names.
Slow-moving orbs of electricity shot out tendrils of jagged blue light in bursts at all in their proximity until the orbs hit the ground and exploded with horrific consequences. Towering walls of ice blocked, froze and impaled those around them, funneling the masses into choke points for effortless extermination. Flamethrowers emanating from the lowest floor of the wall created an impassable blanket of fire that scorched everything in their path, slaughtering both the attackers and the allied NPCs locked in combat with them.
From the top of the wall rained down concentrated streams of arrows and gunfire, which were still less horrible ways to go than what some of the assassins now had access to: clouds of yellow death, spreading from poisonous bombs lobbed over the front line, scalding all they touched inside and out.
Their new allegiance had availed these players the privilege to obtain great power. Power they intended to maintain. Power that was only power, in relative terms, if it was kept beyond the reach of those who came after them.
Yet even in the face of certain destruction, Lillian’s forces advanced. Everyone who’d answered her call knew why they were there: death, glory or both. The bodies on the field remained unlooted. Sanctuary spells overlapped each other on the front line, keeping as much of the onslaught at bay as possible. When one went down, another went up in its place.
The hardiest tanks had survived the initial barrage and were now forming a strong front line, the unrelenting heals landing upon them meaning only a one-shot kill would bring them down. The enemy had plenty of those, but were instead focusing their fire on the squishier players behind them.
“Keep pushing forward! Ladders at the ready! Suppressing fire! Treb support is coming!”
Damien tore his eyes away and found Hammertime. He had to be talking to them over comms, but his bellows seemed intended to make himself heard over the din of battle from half the field away. He was pushing an enormous trebuchet out from the forest with a team of ten Godhammer guild-mates, though he was all but pushing it by himself as the rest of them struggled to keep up with him.
As Damien descended the tree, Hammertime let the machine roll forward and twisted to check on the remaining four trebuchets still approaching their positions. Then he looked over the battlefield and saw what Damien had just seen. He cradled his head in his hands, struggling to comprehend the catastrophe unfolding in front of him.
“They need support, loose! Loose! That means fire, you shit-wits! LOOSE!”
The trebuchet arms whirled round in deceptively lazy arcs, but the boulders in the slings were moving anything but lazily. There was a low whomph as they hit top speed and were released to hurtle over the battlefield. They’d been used a little hastily, but the wall was a large target. The clangs were abrupt, the screech of metal heinous, even over the cacophony of battle emanating from a quarter kilometer ahead of them.
Ten seconds later, five more vacuums created by five more preposterously fast-moving boulders stirred the air. The impacts rang out, creating five gaping wounds in the wall’s outer layer and exposing the players within. Hammertime yelled in triumph and the struggling players across the battlefield echoe
d his call. This seemingly impregnable defense could be hurt. The players behind it were not untouchable. The shift in morale was not just audible, but palpable.
Damien jumped to the floor and ran up, hoping to catch Hammertime before he started yelling again. He’d nearly made it and Godhammer had almost finished resetting when a projectile tinged off Hammertime’s helmet. He took no damage, but precious few of his players were wearing heavy armor and none of them were level 50, unlike Hammertime himself. Damien stopped in his tracks as two other players in Hammertime’s personal group fell to the ground.
This was monstrous. The trebuchet’s ranged superiority was being rendered moot. The Carlisle-Elite didn’t have the ability to destroy siege engines at this range, yet their superior technology allowed them to kill the teams operating them without warning.
Hammertime stared at the freshly made corpses of his teammates in disbelief as another projectile tinged off the back of his head. He had no priests. They’d all embedded themselves in the attacking force, where it had been thought they’d be most useful. The other teams were also under fire, yet they did not stop until their leader ordered them to.
“Anyone not in heavy armor, retreat to the forest! Oh for f— I’m talking to the treb teams, not you in front! Attacking force, keep advancing! Treb operators in light armor, find cover!”
In the time it had taken him to address this problem, more of his team had been wiped out. Such a simple mistake, resulting in so many wasted lives. His lightly armored units fled for the forest, the shots mostly missing now they were aimed at moving targets rather than sitting ducks standing at their posts. The damage was done. Without enough players left to operate them, the trebuchets may as well have been destroyed.
While everyone else had retreated, Damien had sprinted forward and taken cover behind a sturdy wooden strut on Hammertime’s personal machine. Damien’s stats might have significantly improved but his armor was still not designed to keep out bullets. He had no desire to get done in by campers. He twisted his head around the corner and found Hammertime trying to operate the trebuchet entirely by himself, apologizing to whoever was on the other end of his comms.
“Our teams have been compromised, I’m so sorry, please hold on, I’ll make it work. All armored core Godhammer units, come to my location. We have to keep firing at least one!”
Damien could fix this.
“Hammertime, cancel that order. I can—”
“Damien, I’m busy! I’ll deal with you in a minute!”
As usual, a demonstration would be necessary for anyone to have any faith in him. Damien tersely got on his own comms, his finger pressed to his ear.
“Nine-year-olds, don’t come out of the woods yet. Snipers. Send all the incubi out where I can see them. Noigel, where are you? Stop messing around and come here!”
Damien’s entire personal lineup was composed of imps, both to ensure Noigel was on form and to fuel Damien’s many imp-related abilities. Unfortunately, high intelligence was no substitute for enthusiasm. Noigel slowly and deliberately weaved back and forth through the air as bullets whipped all around him, keeping his movements unpredictable to avoid taking any hits. It was effective in many regards: he was trolling not only the players aiming at him, but Damien too. By the time he landed between Damien’s legs, it would’ve been quicker to have dismissed and resummoned him.
“Noigel, how much do you know about the operation of siege engines and can you convey it to a horde of incubi?”
They eyeballed each other as sniper shots thudded into the ground all around them. Damien only looked up when his incubus platoon arrived from the trees as instructed. He had the Soul Summon Limits of fifty occultists to draw from. Under his instruction, they’d shared their gear so that their Soul Summon Limits were maxed. Given that none of them were level 50 and thus his ‘Legion’ trait was an impossibility for any of them, that represented a combined Soul Summon Limit of 1,500. A little more than Damien was used to handling.
This was more than high enough to justify a very satisfying fifty incubi. It was also more than high enough to justify Damien boosting Noigel’s intelligence stat as high as possible, since he’d be micromanaging considerably more minions on Damien’s behalf. The problem was, Damien had never dealt with Noigel when he had such high intelligence. Which, coupled with his imp’s well-documented aggravation at not receiving his rewards, had some drawbacks.
Noigel was not speaking. Damien had thirty-five more imps than the required amount for him to do so. Noigel was being a dick. Damien drew breath for a follow-up question.
“Would you like me to grab you by the throat and hold you out for target practice?”
“It’s a trebuchet. It chucks rocks at idiots, for idiots. It’s not brain science or rocket surgery.”
“I’ll take that as a yes. I want ten incubi on each trebuchet in the next ten seconds, or else I’ll perform brain science or rocket surgery on you.”
Noigel screeched directly into Damien’s face without looking away. It seemed most of it was for effect. The incubi started moving as Noigel uttered the first syllable and split up perfectly into their separate teams long before he’d finished.
As they started winching, greasing and loading the mechanisms with Hammertime gawping at them, the snipers tried their luck on the new targets. Their bullets could pierce the incubi’s armor no more easily than they could Hammertime’s.
This was where the majority of the Council of Nine’s efforts had gone: dressing fifty incubi ‘to the nines’, as it were. The latest in incubus fashion had not come cheap or easy, but it had proven manageable once a dozen occultists had converted their bases into imp/consumer sweat shops. The Tier III Demon Forges had provided a considerable upgrade, one Damien felt was long overdue. They offered minion gear with stats.
While minions gained stats every five levels, they still fell far behind the stat gains of players. Even less balanced, the gear players wore scaled higher and higher as they progressed to each level, making the minions less and less useful as they did so. Damien found it quite reasonable that at the high threshold of level 50 he should finally gain access to comparable amenities for his own minions, keeping them competitive at the cost of the preparation time and material requirements that seemed to go hand in hand with being an occultist.
However, he was willing to concede he’d been surprised he could deck out any occultist minion in Tier III Demon Forge gear. The stats on the gear simply scaled with the level of the minion wearing it. It could’ve been better, if they’d all been able to equip gear with level 50 stats. It would’ve been considerably worse if none of them could wear it at all. Damien wasn’t about to complain about the compromise Mobius had made.
Damien’s only regret was that he couldn’t wear it himself in his Pride form. He’d tried. Repeatedly. He imagined Archimonde had tried too, and given that Archimonde would have access to better gear and was higher level it was probably just as well.
Damien gave up on outstaring Noigel when the trebuchets fired for the third time. He had better things to do. He possessed a passing incubus so he could see what was happening without putting himself in danger. The third round of boulders punched into the wall either near or directly on top of the initial impacts, causing vastly more damage to the already compromised structure. It didn’t look quite so impervious now.
The army had made their way through NPCs and suppressing fire and were now crowded against the wall. Though they were still under attack they’d thoroughly embedded themselves, none more so than Lillian’s personal team: her Queen’s Guard had formed a solid layer of shields blocking out the view from all sides. The fifty of them had to be crammed in there like sardines, but they were certainly all protected. In addition to the wall of armor covering them, the bright golden domes indicated three of the five priests had active Sanctuary spells.
Damien didn’t know how Lillian would swing her hammer in the middle of this group, but she could only be working on bringing the gate do
wn. She’d breached the wall with Rising Tide the first time round, had cleared it all the way through with ten players on her second attempt and was leading this third, considerably larger offensive now. She was the undisputed authority on breaking through Magnitude’s wall. Whatever she was doing in there, it would work. It was only a matter of ti—
Far back from the front line, something was happening: a gap appeared in the crush of players, a gap that widened as everyone in the vicinity drew away from the disturbance. A single orb of blue light was the cause. A lone Login Sphere, in the middle of the no-man’s land. Whoever it was, they were alone. Which was when Damien realized, even with the distance between them, that the sphere was much, much larger than regular size.
There was only one player it could be.
Damien turned to yell a warning at Hammertime before remembering he couldn’t currently speak. He canceled the Possession just as Hammertime started bellowing again, at what sounded like everyone. He’d figured it out as well.
“Lillian, it’s Archimonde, Archimonde’s logging in from the center of the field, all guild leaders stop what you’re doi—”
The sphere cracked open and dissipated to reveal what was inside: pus, oozing from a burst cyst. Archimonde had arrived on the field of battle. For the first time, Damien could see its level: it was at level 58. A myriad of portals appeared all around it, but before any of its minions had stepped through Archimonde was already flicking its wrist at one target after the next. Archimonde had only flicked its wrist a few times, but the Corruption was spreading quickly. Archimonde had taken the ‘Contagion’ trait, allowing Corruption to spread by touch. These conditions, with so many people crammed so close together, were an ideal breeding ground.