Clans War

by Mahanenko, Vasily

  Clouter peeked from behind the tree. The guards were staring dumbly into the ground and it was looking like the opportunity to return back to the land of the living was zooming away with the speed of an express train.

  “Are you saying that if I don’t agree then none of us can be living again? No one will return to life?” the boy asked in a voice so plaintive that I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of pity for him. Was being a Priest really so alluring to him that he was prepared to give up his mother for it?

  “Six Spirits, six Zombies,” Knucklear replied implacably. “And you need to make your decision now — the longer this takes, the weaker your Spirits will be.”

  “Mahan, what am I going to do?” Clouter glanced over at me. “I don’t want to be a Warrior.”

  Quest updated: ‘Who will guard the guards themselves?’ Time remaining: 60 minutes.

  “What’s with you?” the boy asked after I had done cursing. Whatever choice I made right now, I’d end up paying for it with Attractiveness and Reputation. If I ordered them to turn into people, I’d lose Clouter who’d begin to blame himself and blame me for not remaining a Priest — causing Elsa to be upset as well. If I tell him to remain in his current state, the other five Zombies would suffer and blame me, which would make a good portion of the Anhurs NPCs really upset with me and my clan as well. There was danger all around and yet I had to resolve this in short order.

  “All right, boys, what do you choose?” I addressed the guards as a way of starting. Having received a monotone mutter in response (the guards preferred their old lives in Anhurs but would accept any decision made by the master Earl), I frowned: The current situation looked like it might affect my social status as well. Clouter meekly asked me to keep him a Priest, if that was possible, but refused to speak out against the will of his colleagues as he considered doing so wrong.

  “What do you say?” Knucklear asked me only a minute later, clearly prodding me to make a decision. “Are we going to turn them or not? Six Spirits — six Zombies. There’s no other way.”

  Ignoring the monk’s question, I was about to call Stacey for help when a mad idea buzzed into my head, dodging any of my attempts to swat it out of there. Once the idea had grown tired of buzzing, it settled on my brain like on a sugar cube and began to gnaw at it with smacking noises, demanding immediate action. A wondrous picture took shape in my imagination — the hamster and the toad were standing shocked, their eyes popping out of their sockets, while the fly, blinged out like some famous rapper, was sitting on a sofa in oversized sunglasses scarfing down pieces of my brain like popcorn and calling for the show to go on. The idea had buzzed in to see the show and now demanded I go on.

  The amulet of communication appeared in my hand like by magic.

  “Speaking!” Came the response, evoking a sigh of relief from me. There had been no guarantees that my student was in game.

  “Fleita, this is Mahan. I have a…”

  “MAHAN!” The squeal in the amulet drowned out everything around me. “WHERE ARE YOU?”

  “Don’t yell like that,” I barked unhappily. “At the moment, I’m with the Zombie Monk teacher in Kartoss and I…”

  “Don’t move, I’ll be there in a jiffy! Five minutes! Don’t go anywhere! I’ll be quick!” roared the little monster, hanging up. I stared dumbly at the dead amulet. What was that?

  “So what do you say?” Knucklear asked again, forcing me to return to reality and ticking off another minute of my time limit.

  “If it has to be, I’ll become a human again, Mahan,” Clouter too was prodding me to make a decision, just like the guards who’d stay Zombies until the end of time for their beloved colleague.

  Like hell!

  “Mahan!” A mere three minutes passed before an insane whirlwind enveloped me, almost knocking me off my feet. Once the dust had settled, the whirlwind embodied itself as Fleita, hanging on my chest and bawling her eyes out. “You came back! I was watching that terrible trial and thinking that you’d never come back! How could they do that to you? Mahan! They all said that you were done, that you’d never show up again, but I went on believing! I really did believe! But I couldn’t find a way to get in touch with you! And Kornik refuses to teach me. He says that the Zombies now have new teachers coming from other continents, let them deal with the Shamans! Mahan, where’d you vanish to? And also someone…”

  A river of words poured out of Fleita. The girl didn’t even think of letting me go, her arms still clasped around my neck, all the while chattering at a thousand words a minute. Along with the theoretical pails of tears. On the one hand, players can’t actually cry in Barliona, unless it’s in a scenario, on the other hand, a dry crying is even more terrifying than an actual one.

  “…and the Emperor doesn’t say anything, since the update has now taken effect and it’s not clear anymore whether I can join your clan or not. Sally from the other continent told me that…”

  “Hold up!” I shouted, placing Fleita down on the ground. Among the general noise emanating from Fleita, I couldn’t find the information I needed. “What did you say about the clan?”

  “They don’t want to transfer me to Malabar!” Fleita tried to throw herself on my neck again, but I stopped her.

  “What exactly did they say?”

  “Nothing! Nothing at all! I already wrote the devs two letters. They don’t say anything. Or rather they replied that the issue is being processed, and that they’d figure out the exact dates and stuff as the situation develops,” Fleita said these last words in a semiofficial and contemptuous tone as if mocking the Corporation officials. “No one wants me to join your clan!”

  “I do,” I reassured the girl, “but for that to happen you’ll have to adjust your character a little bit. Are you ready?”

  “Adjust my character?” Fleita stitched her brows together in puzzlement. “How?” And why? And where? Will you let me join your clan afterwards? What’ll be my rank? And how…”

  “Stop!” I interrupted the girl yet again and in several words related to her the difficult quandary of Clouter and the guards, slowly and steadily working my way to the main reason for why I had called my student to begin with.

  “I don’t understand,” she muttered with surprise. “You need six Zombies. They’re already here. You need six Spirits. They’re wandering around somewhere. At the same time there’s a difference of opinion about whether it’s worth turning back or not. What do you need me for?”

  I stayed silent, looking at Fleita the way Kornik used to look at me. Wryly.

  “OH COME ON!” Fleita somehow managed to yell with her whisper so loud that I expect they could hear her even in Malabar. “You want me to be the substitute Zombie?!”

  “Knucklear, I have six Zombies who need to be turned into people,” I told the monk, having assured Fleita that everything would be okay and I would take her into my clan. After which I turned to Clouter and added: “My dear Clouter, what are you still doing here? Shouldn’t you be on your way to meet the Priest trainer?”

  “Mahan, I…” Clouter began, but I cut him short.

  “Write a letter to your mother, please. Explain everything to her, but in your words, don’t overthink it. Here,” I offered the boy a pen and granted him permission to use stationary at my expense. “Good luck to you, Priest!”

  You have made your choice.

  Quest completed: ‘Who will guard the guards themselves?’

  Reward: Friendly status with Tartarus.

  “I accept your sacrifice, my daughter,” boomed an ample and powerful voice, forcing goose bumps (which didn’t actually exist in Barliona) to appear all over my body. I turned around and beheld one of the most powerful creatures of the game world — Tartarus. The god of Kartoss. A humanoid creature, with two legs and two arms and a head that resembled a terrible combination of a dark sphere which had something roiling within it that I couldn’t quite focus my eyes on. Tartarus was terrible indeed.

  “I accept your decision and tak
e you under my banner,” Eluna appeared beside Tartarus. The sudden concentration of divine creatures in one tiny area began to warp reality. The only thing missing was…

  The space around me went dark, becoming two bipolar worlds as the Astral consumed me.

  “WE ARE PLEASED WITH YOUR STUDENT!” growled the Spirit of the Lower World. “WE ACCEPT HER DECISION!”

  “SHE SHALL BE THE CONDUIT AND PERFORM OUR WILL!” added the Spirit of the Higher World. “YOU DESERVE A REWARD, SHAMAN!”

  “FROM NOW ON WE SHALL USE HER TO DO OUR BIDDING!” added the White Spirit. “YOU MAY TELL KORNIK THAT HIS DEBT HAS BEEN REPAID!”

  Control over your character has been temporarily blocked. At the moment, your character is possessed by the Supreme Spirits of the Higher and Lower Worlds.

  To say that I was surprised would have been an understatement. I didn’t even bother swiping this message aside, reading it again and again and trying to figure out its secret significance. And on the face of it, the significance was terrifying — this very instant, some highly advanced Imitator was controlling my Shaman. What the hell was this?!

  My inquiry to tech support wrote itself on the fly. Trying to use the proper legal jargon, I inquired in pure curse words, what the hell they were thinking when they took away control of my Shaman from me? How was I supposed to know if at the moment all my funds weren’t being transferred to strangers or my personal information wasn’t being downloaded?

  +1000 Reputation with the Spirits of the Higher and Lower Worlds. Current status: Exalted.

  “Mahan, this is impossible!” Fleita whispered in rapture once I’d been returned to the game world. I looked around and apprised the situation. I’d never seen such astonishment on my student’s face before. Once upon a time, I happened across a video in which a child who had lost his sight in infancy regained it following a surgical procedure. I’d never seen such a sincere and incommunicable elation and, simultaneously, shock, and I imagined I’d never see it again. Things like this are unique and you can count yourself lucky to witness them even once in your life. But I was wrong — I was lucky enough to see it a second time, and in person. Giving Anastaria her due for forcing me to always keep my in-game camera running, I checked Fleita’s properties and swallowed hard. Nothing in this game had prepared me for this.

  Draco the Decembrist. Great Shaman. Dragon of Light.

  “You changed your name,” I said astounded, refusing to believe my eyes. “And your race…”

  Fleita — or rather — Draco — didn’t say anything. Damn it! How am I supposed to tell her apart from my Totem now? Suddenly there were too many Dracos in Barliona.

  “All right kids, that’s quite enough of staring at each other and not knowing what and how and when and where,” Knucklear scattered the lingering silence. “Girl, don’t you have to start performing the Supreme Spirits’ tasks as urgently as possible?”

  “I…Yes, I’ll be just a second,” muttered Fleita-Draco, still in shock and staring at a text only she could see.

  “Hang on!” I managed to cry before my student dove into the portal that had just opened up. She hadn’t cast a scroll which meant only one thing — the girl had received some curious scenario. If that was the case, I’d need to make the most of this opportunity. The brand new Draco glanced at me with her enormous gilded eyes, glinting like polished gold in the sunlight. Muttering something about changes for the better, I opened the clan management interface and invited her into the Legends of Barliona. I wasn’t about to let a Dragon (whose powers and abilities still remained a mystery to me) go off freely in the unknown.

  “Thank you!” A smile bloomed on my student’s face. “Mahan, I will complete all my quests and then tell you about what happened here. Thank you! And…Thank you!”

  Fleita-Draco looked away, blushed and then glanced up at me again, appeared beside me and I didn’t even have time to blink when her lips alighted on mine. The kiss was initially so clumsy and strained yet so insistent and unexpected that I, unwillingly, replied at last, lowering my face to meet the girl’s desire.

  “I understand everything, but I couldn’t help myself,” the girl said after the sweet moment, which seemed to last thousands of years, ended. Sparkling from happiness like a Christmas tree, the girl entered the portal, leaving me in a state of happy shock. Even though what had happened had been unexpected, I can’t say that I didn’t like it. Damn it — I did like it. Fleita was an attractive girl and it’d be dumb to pretend that I never wanted to get to know her better. So I did. And I can’t say that I didn’t like what I discovered either. Something tells me that I should edit the video of what had happened in Kartoss before showing it to Anastaria…

  “All right, you five don’t have patrons of that level.” Knucklear’s voice reached me through my fog, reminding me that I was not alone. I had to concentrate and dispel the lovely stupor, to see that he was speaking to the five guards who were still Zombies. A note was lying right at my feet, which I guessed had been written by Clouter. The boy himself was nowhere in sight. “Gather your belongings and follow this student. Turning back into a living creature is a difficult and tedious venture. You’ll have to work hard.”

  Somehow entirely unnoticeably, I remained completely alone in the middle of a forgotten cemetery in Kartoss. The guards were ushered out by the monks, thereby preparing a new batch of exciting quests for the players — from ‘Bring 100,500 crab whiskers from crabs killed in the second harvest moon’ to ‘Sing a song of those who fell in battle against the Mages of Malabar.’ In other words, gather some stuff so that the Zombies could return to their living selves. The only upsetting thing was that I wouldn’t get a crack at it. Only Kartossians were allowed to participate.

  I mourned this fact a few moments until I recalled that I already had an interesting quest to do for the next few hours. The hermit! Stacey was occupied, Fleita was taking a stroll somewhere, and Mr. Kristowski was still cooped up in the Imperial palace discussing the future tournament, so I had the unique opportunity to find out who the hell this hermit was. Why were there so many loose ends tied up in meeting him? And, furthermore, he was an Artificer who knew about the Titan Armor…

  Shivers ran down my spine — I had promised Kreel that he would kill the Dragon. Damn it! Not only had I managed to spoil that quest, but I had broken my word. Squelching my urge to get my amulet and arrange a meeting with Kreel, and making a mental note to be more conscientious about my own promises, I opened the map and entered the hermit’s coordinates into my ‘Blink’ input box. An elephant is best eaten bit by bit.

  A new territory has been discovered: ‘Silvan Plateau.’

  Quest available: ‘Artificer. Stage 1. Prepare for the meeting.’

  Do you wish to start the quest?

  I found myself at the foot of one of the many mountains in the Elma Range — a sierra that ran like a terrible, winding scar from the north to the very south of our continent. The hermit’s location may have been in the South, but the area around me didn’t resemble a tropical resort in the least. I could make out the forest among the heaps of ice and snow, but the area immediately around me may as well have been Antarctica. The fragments of wood and frozen leaves that poked up through the ice here and there indicated that there had recently been a leafy forest here — like the one I could see in the distance. But something had happened and nature here had changed. Or to the opposite — everything had happened the way it was meant to. Shrugging my shoulders, leaving the mystery of this glacier’s sudden appearance in the middle of the tropical South unsolved, I pushed the ‘Yes’ button. The time had come to meet the hermit…

  Ten minutes elapsed before I realized that the meeting would have to wait. My character received the unpleasant ‘Frozen’ buff, as well as ‘Chill’ and ‘Frostbite,’ my movement speed dropped by 90% and I was informed that I could no longer summon a flying pet, yet still the hermit didn’t appear. As bitter as it was to admit it, I was forced to open the description and read what I
had to do to prepare for the meeting. Another ten minutes in this freezing cold would kill me. Opening my quest log I stared grimly at the description and realized that I had some entertaining minutes, hours and possibly days waiting ahead of me. The description promised me nothing else:

  Prove that you are worthy of meeting the master…

  * * *

  “And there aren’t any caves or portals or signs or anything?” Anastaria asked, offering me a mug of steaming coffee. Even though the game was above all just a game, and my sensory perception was turned down to zero, I had grown so cold morally that I really felt a chill when I crawled out of my capsule. It was warm, comfortable and light in our apartment but I was shaking as if I really was in an icy forest. In a few hours of scouring up and down the glacier I hadn’t managed to accomplish anything but freezing myself and my character to death — at which point we’d been sent to respawn. Cute — I wasn’t killed by some terrible mob or a Dungeon boss, but by a huge pile of snow and ice that had appeared who knows where from.

  “Nope,” I replied, wrapping myself in the quilt and exhaling the stunning aroma of freshly-brewed Jambi coffee. I glanced over at the roasted chicken that Stacey had ordered in the nearby take-out place. My spouse had emerged from the game an hour before me, and had arranged our food, drink and comfort. “There’s nothing there at all.”

  “As you can imagine, it’s pointless to ask on the forums. I don’t have this info either. Head over to the library, maybe you’ll find something about the Artificers there,” Stacey had initially been interested in the hermit until she realized that this NPC was made for craftsmen and would be useless to her. The girl sighed heavily, looked at the wall that had some drawing on it and blurted out: “Dan, I talked to my dad. The Celestial Empire will be in Kalragon tomorrow night.”

  “What?” I almost scalded myself with the coffee. “You said that we have a week?”