by Oliver Mayes
While Archimonde’s wrist continued to flick, some of the more optimistic players ran in to engage the creature in melee. Archimonde’s other hand pointed at the floor beneath its feet and a Circle of Hell appeared there. All players within its confines were snared and set ablaze, which is when the armored hell hounds began to savage all around them.
It appeared Archimonde had also dressed his minions for the occasion. Damien focused, trying to give them new orders, but it didn’t work. Every time he, Archimonde or Bartholomew had employed this undocumented skill, the minions had either been freely given or were in close range. He’d have to get closer. Damien was more than willing, since he couldn’t beat the shit out of Archimonde without doing so.
There was no time to Shadow Walk there. Nor could he transform and Charge, because Archimonde was surrounded by allied players who’d break the Charge on impact. Damien rounded the trebuchet he’d been using as cover and immediately broke into a run. Other players had taken a similar view and were starting to react. Ranged abilities thudded into Archimonde’s vast consumer body, doing little and sometimes even healing it if they were carelessly cast at the gaping maw. The tongue flicked out and caught a priest spamming Dispels.
As she died in Archimonde’s jaws, the mouth opened even wider and two more tongues lashed out of it, wrapping around anyone in the vicinity and drawing them in before they knew what was happening. For the regular consumers, successfully eating one enemy doubled the speed, range and draw strength of Tongue Lash – ‘Feeding Frenzy’. Compound interest. Archimonde’s Sin of Greed-based version was at least three times more effective, based on the proliferation of tongues.
Damien was not deterred. In the ten seconds since Archimonde had arrived, nearly a quarter of Lillian’s army had been infected and Corruption was still spreading. Archimonde pointed at an imp flying toward the front of the army, his tongues apparently seeking targets of their own accord while he focused on other matters. The Imp-losion overhead scattered players all around it. The Corruption was spread even to those who’d been careful, starting new blooming points.
From overhead, on the wall, it would’ve been similar to seeing a bacterial culture blossom on a petri dish. Which was likely close to how Magnitude’s forces viewed the players opposing them in the first place. It wasn’t killing everyone, but it was killing a lot of them and weakening all of them to further attacks from other sources. A single spell, cast a handful of times, could do this much damage in the right conditions.
Meanwhile, Archimonde was feeding itself so quickly, standing so firmly in the center of the Circle of Hell and eating so rampantly, that nothing could kill it fast enough. All the while, the influence of the Embodiment of Greed was reducing pressure on the attack on the wall. Damien was halfway there when Archimonde spotted him. Damien had him right where he wanted him: as far as Archimonde was aware, he’d be just another easy meal. Damien was nearly close enough to hit Archimonde with a kunai. His transformation would be almost instantaneous. Archimonde would have no time to react.
Damien was putting his hand over his heart when Archimonde stabbed a finger into the air. Damien couldn’t hear what he was saying over the hubbub, nor did he need to. He stopped and looked up, where the black ball of nothing appeared in its infancy and started to grow. When he looked back down, Archimonde was already facing the wall. Where Archimonde’s imps had been flying. A second later, Archimonde was gone, standing on the damn wall. Replaced with a paltry imp.
Why had Archimonde fled? This was supposed to be it! Yet the moment it had seen Damien, Archimonde had immediately abandoned what it was doing, despite having no obvious cause for concern. The damage was done. The entire battlefield was stampeding away from the wall as the Dark Omen in the sky grew. It wouldn’t be long before it tore into the ground, sucking in a huge number of players with it. They had to get clear, but the person with the furthest to run was Lillian, who’d been attacking the front gate.
Damien started running forward, against everyone else. He wouldn’t leave her there. It was only a few seconds before she passed him, effortlessly outrunning everyone nearby. She did not look happy, but she was very much alive. Her Queen’s Guard were nearly keeping pace with her, covering her escape to their own cost. Most of the wall was firing at her location, attempting to bring her down while her back was turned. Ironically, much of their ordnance was sucked into the Dark Omen forming overhead, but the same could be said of the trebuchet shots being fired to cover the army’s escape.
Damien ran back the way he’d come, fighting the instinct that he was running the wrong way. Lillian retreating made it easier yet harder at the same time, given the look on her face. He got a good view of it once she stopped and turned, prompting him to turn with her, right as the Dark Omen plummeted into the earth. Players who hadn’t got clear were sucked backward into it, along with many of the corpses that had been littering the ground. What little was left of the evening light grew even dimmer.
The entire offensive had been interrupted at the critical moment. While they’d done a little damage to the wall and Lillian may have done some damage to the gate, their casualties were obscene. They’d have to start again. A new defensive line had formed outside the gate, only visible now the Dark Omen had passed.
This time it was Carlisle-Elite players rather than NPCs, the big guns. There weren’t as many of them, but they were all over level 50. That wasn’t the most offensive thing about them. Not even close. They were squatting down, looting the bodies during the lull in combat. They’d suffered next to no casualties and were already profiting from their tactic.
The equipment of those who opposed them would be distributed to fill the gaps in their gear or melted down to reinforce their wall. The potions would become fuel to kill the next wave. The gold might well fund the next place Magnitude enacted this strategy. Compound interest, fed by the exploitation of the living with a view to turning them into the dead.
Lillian’s army was in complete disarray. Many of the players were still on low health with no potions and not enough mana between the healers to get everyone combat-ready. Sniper shots were ringing into the assembled masses even as they paused for breath. It was obviously time to pull the occultists off the bench. Damien walked up to Lillian as she shouted orders.
“All healers with no mana or mana potions, report to the supply chain! Any party with less than twenty-five players dissolve yourselves and join other groups! I need anyone with a shield to join my Queen’s Guard and make a defensive line, we’re still taking fire from marksmen!”
There wasn’t time to be polite. The longer they waited, the longer Magnitude would have to take advantage of their absence. Damien’s forces were still fresh and the way to the gate was clear. He could go all out. He pulled Lillian’s arm away from her ear and stared into her eyes.
“We need to attack now, the occultists are ready to go. Or do you want us—”
—to keep cheerleading from the back, is how he’d have ended the sentence, if Lillian hadn’t interrupted him by pulling her arm away and pointing a finger in his face. And then she just wandered away from him, shaking her head in disbelief. She regarded him as a burden.
Fine. Damien was past asking for permission and did not require forgiveness. He put his hand over his heart and muttered his Sin under his breath.
“Pride.”
He exploded into his true form, the players on all sides of him falling beneath his lofty perspective, then cracked his neck each way. This body had already become more comfortable to him than his normal one, having spent hours abusing its benefits during that day’s grind. It was not quite so comfortable for the rest of the human race arrayed around him. They were cutting him a wide berth, much as they had Archimonde. Damien couldn’t care less what they thought. This was how he operated, now. No more slinking in the shadows. Instead he’d throw some shade.
He’d turned away from player-killing. He’d advocated cooperation. He’d been patient. Even a personal relati
onship with the Ruler of the Empire hadn’t been enough to grant him due consideration. He paced up and down to avoid the sniper shots now trained solely on him as he publicly adopted the only operable position he’d been left with. He was ostensibly talking to his occultists, but everyone heard what he had to say.
“Occultists, forward. Battle formation as discussed. I’ll go first to prevent more looting; no one loots Empire corpses except us. We need to defend our protection racket, since they can’t defend themselves.”
The snipers had hit him a couple of times while he spoke, tracking his movement. Damien was a large, large target. Irritating. Actions speak louder than words. Damien paced a little longer until a final shot dropped his hit points just below 50%. When his body bulked up as his Narcissistic Rage kicked in, he faced the wall and Charged.
When he’d been in Possession of a regular incubus, Damien had been able to get halfway across the no-man’s land in the ten seconds following his Charge but had then been forced to plod the rest of the way over with regular movement. However, his new body retained his agility stat and ‘Single-Mindedness’ doubled the speed of his Charge after twenty feet, a distance he could achieve in a single stride.
Damien was the only player present who was not surprised when he cleared the length of the battlefield in just a shade over four seconds.
He’d chosen his target arbitrarily, since it didn’t make much difference what he decided to hit. They all looked pretty much the same. He honed in on the largest blob in the middle of a long line of indistinct figures. It was BiggusDickus. Who was looking rather flaccid at Damien’s approach. He fluffed himself up a bit right before Damien reached him, grounding his shield in the dirt and bracing himself behind it.
This would’ve been very effective against a conventional Charge. However, when the devil grants you a body that weighs approximately a ton and has a top Charge speed in the region of 50 meters per second, most of these details work out in your favor in the majority of circumstances.
Damien’s Charge was ended the moment his shoulder connected with the shield. All the kinetic energy had already been transferred. BiggusDickus’s health was already low as he flew backward into the gate. His flight was short, his end was not sweet. The gate did not fare well, but it fared better than BiggusDickus did. Fare-poorly, BiggusDickus.
The players around Damien were not attacking, for some reason. In fact, they were running toward the gate, which remained firmly closed. Those who arrived there first were screaming and pounding on it, even. Damien needed to get his health back up before the ten seconds of life-steal were depleted. He threw a chain kunai at one of the runners, then pulled them into his melee range. His second kunai ran them through on arrival.
The chunky design of the kunai traded off quick attack speed for better armor penetration and more damage. This was not a problem when most things Damien attacked died in either one or two hits. It was even less of a problem when Damien had the size and strength to wield them as if they were regular daggers. His health was now above half and his strength had dropped back to pre-Enraged levels, but he still did more than enough damage to put most of the enemies away in one, two or three hits, depending on whether he managed a critical strike with either or both of his first two attacks.
It was a shame that the ‘Stagnation’ effect while he was using Pride prevented him from getting experience. He’d never killed so many players with so little effort. It did not take long. It didn’t take much longer for enemies in the wall to start firing back.
The most noteworthy disadvantages of the Pride form were twinned. His lack of armor and preposterously large character model were an extremely poor combination. Damien’s health was as high as the sturdiest tank, yet he had no armor to make the most of it. While his life-steal was superb for sustainability it only lasted for ten seconds after he went below half health. He’d still die if he was hit by enough attacks simultaneously, or if he didn’t get his health back above 50% before his Narcissistic Rage effect ended.
All he could do was keep moving as unpredictably as possible. A second standing in one place would invite death. He’d acquired a variety of new dodging mechanisms on the Path of Deceit, and the rest of them he’d been practicing for his entire play-through. So long as he wasn’t jumping straight toward or away from the players aiming at him, any movement was good movement.
He had a lot of different factors to look out for, including keeping an eye on the wall to evade the larger, nastier spells being thrown his way. So it took him a few seconds to find a spot where he was comfortable enough to answer Lillian’s voice call.
“I’m busy, Lillian.”
He hung up. That felt good, until he remembered he was about six feet away from her in real life. No time to think about it now, he was running out of prospects to attack on the ground level but there were still plenty of projectiles coming his way. Some of the players aiming at him were doing so through the holes that had been left by the trebuchets. Mistake. He feinted toward a player on the ground, then jumped up and hurled both kunai at a mage who’d been channeling a spell in plain sight. One hit sufficed.
It was a shame he couldn’t pull himself toward players lighter than him without canceling his Pride form, but there was no way he’d deactivate it to try. Even his human form would weigh more than any clothies or leather-wearers, since his Sin of Pride had come with a free growth spurt. He’d die pretty quickly if he didn’t succeed the first time. Besides, he already had a plan for that bit. If Noigel and the occultists ever showed up.
Damien had been concentrating so hard he had no idea how long he’d been there. Long enough to kill the entire platoon who’d been on looting duty, but that didn’t tell him very much. Long enough that his stamina was starting to run low. He couldn’t look away from the wall, otherwise he wouldn’t see the projectiles coming. He couldn’t ask the occultists what was happening without entering his menu, since he’d set the chat so he was the only one who could communicate through it. It had all seemed like a good idea at the time.
Damien found a concrete answer to how long he’d been there when his Charge came off cooldown. It had been thirty seconds. It felt longer. He could always use it to retreat. And face thousands of people who’d rather watch him die alone than help him achieve their goal?
He wouldn’t give them the satisfaction.
Damien set his sights on the gate and was positioning himself to Charge it head-on when a loud noise, far away but quickly drawing closer, caught his attention. It was a human cry. Deep, sonorous, angry, scared and...coming from somewhere high above? The players in the wall had been looking down on Damien, but the noise and the spectacle drew their gaze away from him and onto this UFO. The scream grew louder and they began firing at it. It was only as it passed directly overhead that Damien dared glance up. What he saw so confused him that he drew to a stop.
Hammertime.
Godhammer’s guild leader was curled up in a bright-red glowing ball, the light of his Berserker Rage trailing a blood rainbow across the sky in his wake. It was handily displaying his trajectory, which was a small price to pay for the full minute of regeneration and damage reduction he’d be receiving from it. He’d need it. He was heading straight toward a pristine section of the armor-plated wall.
That wasn’t the strangest part. Hammertime was spinning. It looked a lot like one of Toutatis’s spins, only vertical instead of horizontal. A Whirlwind attack. That was a pretty cool ability and this was a pretty insane way to put it through its paces. It was only when Hammertime hit the wall at full tilt, tearing a wider hole in it than any rock could, that Damien realized how Hammertime had achieved such airtime in the first place. The madman had fired himself out of a trebuchet.
It did not take long before the screams of squishies and the dents appearing all along his level of ingress indicated Hammertime was very much alive. He was exactly the kind of player this construction was supposed to keep ranged units safe from. Now it was trapping them in clos
e proximity with him.
The floor Hammertime had “infiltrated” went completely dark. There were no more attacks coming from anywhere on that level. Yet despite Hammertime no longer being a target, not all the remaining players were firing at Damien. Many of the shots were going high over his head. Damien moved out of their line of fire and glanced behind him.
Fifty incubi were pacing slowly down the no-man’s land in a long line, a walking wall of consumer iron armor. The occultists hid behind them, one each, as the armor-coated wall of flesh turned away arrows and bullets. Twenty-five consumers were spaced out at intervals between them, stepping forward whenever a magic ability was cast in that direction in order to eat it raw.
Over six hundred imps were split between the air and the ground, filling the battlefield with their screeches. They frustrated any attempt to make a meaningful dent on their army or their own numbers, leaping or swooping in front of single-target high-damage spells, only to part when large AoE abilities were sent their way.
Twenty-seven succubi flew with the airborne groups, each with an orbiting imp-meat shield. They were the only other minion type Damien had seen fit to construct armor for, and were clad in consumer steel. The consumers were already protected by the armor-clad incubi and would also recover health and mana every time they successfully ate a spell.
Noigel had outdone himself, wherever he was. Damien’s top imp took it to the next stage when the line reached the halfway point. The closer they got to the wall, the easier it would be for enemy players to aim over the armored front line. The second half of the battlefield had to be traversed as quickly as possible. But not by everyone. Just the imps would suffice. The succubi all cast simultaneously and almost every single imp was Bloodlusted. They swarmed forward.
The imps bobbed and weaved, their numbers dropping rapidly now their mandate was to close in. However, they were not dying fast enough to prevent them from accomplishing their purpose. Intelligence-based occultists and the succubi provided covering fire, flinging Chaotic Bolts or casting Corruption through breaches in the wall’s defense. The imps flew into every nook and cranny then made themselves visible, poking their heads out of the arrow slits and screeching to draw attention. The occultists were scanning the wall, looking out for the blue headers of their own imps in the sea of green as they continued to move forward behind their troops.