“The serpent does not appreciate it when I interrupt his rest. And that’s putting it lightly. He could tear me apart and lower my reputation. But what you suggest Scyth…” He twirled a finger in the air, thinking. “It’s a guaranteed jackpot if we can do it in time. I’ll do everything I can to summon Apophis sooner rather than later, but I doubt he’ll agree to speak to you.”
“He should, Yemi. I have an offer for him.”
“As you say… kiddo.”
There was a word I didn’t like at all. The mage stared at me as if trying to see something. The air seemed to thicken. The piercing eyes of my possibly former allies made me uncomfortable. It wasn’t that I was afraid of a fight. I just didn’t want to make yet another enemy.
“Do we have a problem?”
“Maybe,” Yemi said. He was quiet a while, then asked: “Tell me, Legate… are you honest with me?”
“Have I given you reason to doubt it?”
“Let me put it another way… Do you tell the whole truth? You promised to turn us undead, but that service is no longer worth anything. Snowstorm is about to unlock the race for everyone, and Yoruba certainly won’t be the first. Mogwai is streaming and we know that the Elites have already got the cream of the new faction. And that Scyth’s position as a legate of the Destroying Plague is under threat. You aren’t planning to abandon us, are you? We stuck our necks out to help you! All those we attacked put us on their KoS lists. The less said about our reputation in the Empire, the better. Nothing but losses!”
“Have you forgotten to count how much Yoruba earned?”
“Less than we hoped!” Yemi spat. “Answer me, if you have something to say! What’s your plan, kid?”
I didn’t answer right away. I weighed up every word, deciding what exactly to say, how exactly to keep my allies given that I was basically talking to thugs. Our security officers had given me a very enlightening report on the activities of the Yoruba clan in real life. All of them, including Yemi, were from the lowest rung of society. Not inwinova, but very close to it, especially before they started their careers in Dis. In the African district, people got citizenship status through underhanded means; it was fully possible that they’d gotten their citizenship through blackmail or bribery. Yoruba had brought its way of doing business from real life into Dis, and I couldn’t forget that people like that had to be taken seriously. And I couldn’t allow the Yoruba leader to keep using that tone. If he felt weakness, that would be it. He’d press hard.
Casting a glance around the castle yard, I saw that we were surrounded by two hundred warriors. They kept a respectful distance, but looked ready to leap on me at a moment’s notice and tear me apart, or at least try. Each was at full attention, listening carefully to how I would answer their leader’s claims. They were silent. The piercing cries of cranes flying over the castle sounded loud in the quiet. Their honking sounded like distant trumpets. By the time the sound faded, I knew what to do.
I gathered plague energy into my hand—just enough to take away health, but not to kill. I grabbed Yemi’s shoulder in a death grip. The fearsome blades of Reaper’s Scythes snapped open, then closed like a mantrap. The ore gritted his teeth in pain. His harsh black hair stood up on the back of his neck, but he held back his cry.
My voice, distorted by Cloak Essence, sounded thick and cruel.
“Listen carefully, mage. My plan is too vast to explain here and now.” Plague filth seeped into the ore. His face twisted and he tried to pull away, but couldn’t. “But I give you my word—I will not hide it. I will share it with you within the next few days. Maybe right after our raid on Terrastera. In the meantime… Study this. I think you’ll get the idea right away.”
I copied the description of Unity to Yemi and released him. He lurched back, grabbing his blackened arm, which was falling in scraps from his rotten shoulder. The ore’s health was down to five percent and tears ran down his beast-like face.
“Read!”
The mage nodded and his eyes turned glassy while he read the lines of the description. The text read: All followers get +1 to a random statfor each new follower of the Sleeping Gods. If you read it without thinking, the bonus didn’t seem too impressive, but if you thought about it…
“Most of his power is from the Sleeping Gods after all…” the mage muttered, mouth open, eyes staring. When he realized what he’d read, his face smoothed and flame lit up in his eyes. Yemi livened up, waved a calming hand to his clanmates. The people breathed a sigh of relief after the stress of waiting for things to unfold. They clanked as they put their weapons away.
“Does the bonus count only adept followers?” the spellcaster answered. “How many do you have? Is there a limit?”
“Ordinary followers only get the bonus from those that came after them. But I’ll give you two priest slots. They’ll get the same bonus from Unity as the Initial. That’s me. Which means that you and someone else… Francesca, I guess? Or Babangida? To avoid a split, let’s say three priests from Yoruba. You’ll get almost two thousand points randomly distributed across your stats. The current adept limit is a little below thirty thousand.
The ju-ju class shaman’s eyes widened, glowing even brighter with each word I said. I could almost see the numbers amassing behind his eyes.
“Scyth! Assign the priests right now! I have a great relationship with the ores of the Broken Axe clan. They adore me! They have a big tribe. Thousands of warriors! I can comince them to join the Sleeping Gods!”
I don’t know where it come from, or why I acted the way I did. The ritual for appointing priests required nothing special. The Touch of the Sleeping Gods skill spoke for itself. But all the same, with a stony face under my Cloak Essence, I shouted a triumphant order: “Bow before the might of the Sleeping Gods, mage Yemi! On your knees!”
He smirked, baring crooked yellow fangs. He turned, looked out across his soldiers and announced loudly:
“Yoruba! You have heard the words of the Initial of the Sleeping Gods. Obey!”
With a screech of metal, the entire clan knelt along with their leader. Yemi rose as a Priest of the Sleeping Gods. A minute later, Francesca and Babangida joined him.
We set up a quick council meeting at a table in the Pig and Whistle. It reminded me of the good old days in Tristad, only Irita was with us now instead of Tissa.
In short, our plan was this: complete the instances on Holdest that the boys had already discovered, and the arachnid dungeons in the reptiloid island; clear the undead instance in the Kharinza mines; kill the Montosaurus and discover Terrastera. Then hand in Tiamat’s quest and get our human forms back—the undead workers had been warned and were waiting for the appointed hour. At the same time, I kept it in my head that if I had time before Nergal’s army arrived, then I had to try to find Supreme Grand Master Oyama and learn a couple of new moves, or, more importantly, increase my Unarmed Combat rank. Both would be best.
In the very long term, I wouldn’t mind dealing with Knock-Knock, a certain monster that had been terrorizing the sewer trolls. Clan chief Movarak had mentioned him. I was curious to see Knock-Knock with my own eyes and see whether we could get a Fii’st Kill on him.
On the whole, however overconfident this sounds, nothing seemed to present much difficulty—if, of course, I could convince Apophis.
While discussing the plans, I almost missed news of Bomber’s achievement. His reputation with Orthokon the kraken had reached full trust He announced it in passing, right after Crawler and Infect told the story of how they got set up at the new place—a lot less comfortable than our home in Alaska. Time pressed, but it was worth spending five minutes to find out the details.
“What changed?” Infect asked, greed in his eyes after listening to Hung. “Did he give you something else? Something divine?”
“A primeval mythical item!” the warrior declared proudly.
“What?” the bard gasped, his jaw dropping.
“That happens?” Irita asked in disbelief.
&
nbsp; “No, it doesn’t,” Bomb answered, smiling. “But it would be bad manners to not tease Malik at least once a day. Get used to it, Rita.”
Angry, Infect rose and brandished his precious epic guitar, but looked at Irita’s giggling face and decided against hitting Bomber.
“Anything to laugh at the poor little bard,” he grumbled, going back to his seat at the table. “Tin already green with envy. Believe me, Rita, you can expect the same!”
“I’m not envious, but I’m really interested!” the girl said.
“Alright, enough jokes,” I said. “Bomb, what changed with the kraken?”
“Basically, he obeys me now. The trouble is, it costs reputation points—I lose a whole bunch of points for each request. I lost five hundred just from setting the kraken on a shark! I had to feed him again, but he did get the shark.”
“It’s only a thousand and five hundred points from fi’iendship to trust,” Crawler said. “So just two or three requests and you have to do it all over again?”
“Seems so, but “I’m going to test it,” Bomber declared. “I want to reach respect. But that’s not all! Ortho hasn’t learned to talk, but when he WTapped his tentacle around me, I got a quest! I need to somehow get to the underwater kingdom of the naga near Meaz and convince them to return to the protection of Orthokon. I feel a long quest chain coining on.”
“Uh-huh,” Infect agreed, scowling from under his brows. “Considering nobody has reached Meaz yet, there are monsters in the ocean with levels too high to see, and Underwater Breathing Potion doesn’t last long and has a cooldown, you can probably forget about your quest.”
“W-e-e— 11 …” Bomber said, glancing at the bard conspiratoriallv.
“What?!”
“Actually, the kraken gave me the ability to be underwater without needing to breathe!”
“So what?” Infect snorted sceptically. “Exhaustion will still get you! Or the monsters!”
“He can swim on the kraken, right?” Irita suggested. “And it’ll protect him.”
“Something like that,” Bomber confirmed. “I’ll get down to it once all this crap with Nergal’s event is over. I can feel it in my gut; getting to the Undenvater Kingdom will be the easiest part. I’ll have to level up my rep with the naga before they’ll even talk to me. In the meantime, I’ll keep gaining rep with Orthokon too.”
“Wooow, it’s so exciting with you guys!” Irita said. “My first day in big Dis and I’m already in a clan with a class-A Threat and another Threat with a pet beast god, and we’re talking about farming Holdest, Meaz and Terrastera as if it’s a piece of cake! Are you guys really that awesome?”
“As a certain envious showoff bard once said, get used to it,” Crawler smiled. He turned to me. “By the w^ay, about Rita. We can’t miss a chance to give our clan members a boost with some unique achievements. And we’re only a little away from clan level five. The achievement points stack for each member. Level five unlocks Gold Flow.”
“Oh, wow, that sounds great!” Irita jumped, clasped her hands. “Money from the air! Take me with you! I’m all in favor! Means I can put my feet up a little longer…”
Crawler continued:
“When any clan member picks up money from a corpse, an extra one percent of it is created and goes to the clan treasury. Magic, it really is like cash from thin air!”
“Everything is from thin air here. It’s virtual reality,” Bomber said. “Alright, alright, I get the point.”
“We need to level the clan up in any case,” Crawler added. “Instantaneous mail, mass raid respawns, improved defenses and damage inside the fort… There are plenty of bonuses, and they’re all useful…!”
“What about the frost debuff?”
“A few seconds is enough for Rita to poke her nose through the instance portal. We’ll jump straight to the entrance.”
“Alright. Then let’s take Gyula and Patrick with us too.” I waved a hand and shouted to O’Grady. “By the way, I think we can bring him back into the clan. What do you think, can he handle looking after the fort’s supplies?”
Bomber took a generous swig of coffee and coughed.
“Are you serious?” Crawler asked. “He even started bugging the cultists of Morena: Give a copper to an honored citizen ofTristad… They think he’s crazy!”
“But they throw the coin!” Bomber laughed.
“Only one way to find out,” I pondered aloud. “He’s changed. Behemoth fixed his head…”
Irita’s example showed me that, unlike the clans of the Commonwealth, the Empire and the neutrals, who were severely limited in their choice of faction when it came to taking on new players, the undead had no racial prejudices. It was the only side that would accept sentients from all races into the clan. Considering the Destroying Plague had no developed infrastructure, that move by the developers made sense.
“So, are we moving out?” Crawler asked.
“I need a little time, with peace and quiet,” I answered and quoted a system message: “Two hundred and seventy-five thousand free stat points available!” The timer until Mogwai respawned was ticking, but it would be dumb not to spend ten minutes nearly doubling my strength.
The boys whistled and nodded—of course, of course. Irita wanted to say something, but she just sat there open-mouthed, trying to grasp the number.
To avoid distracting me with their conversations, my friends sat down at another table, and Crawler even covered me with a Dome of Silence. Immersed in his thoughts, Gyula sat down next to them—Gyula wasn’t interested in our games, it seemed. Patrick O’Grady made a sixth in the group, once again accepted into the Awoken clan and already feeling a taste for adventure on Holdest.
Left alone, I racked my brains to figure out what to focus on with my stat points. At the same time I thought ahead, realized I’d be playing without the abilities of the Destroying Plague. It was obvious that I had to level up perception to make Sleeping Vindication more effective. Every extra point in the stat increased the ultimate ability’s range by a yard.
There was the hitch. When I lost Immortality, I’d need a lot of endurance. I needed to put particular emphasis on the physical attacks of Unarmed Combat, which meant I needed plenty of strength, and increased agility wouldn’t hurt either.
In the end, I distributed them all roughly equally between strength, endurance and perception until I got even numbers of them all. A small remainder went into agility.
Unfortunately, the racial penalty to charisma worked even on the points from the adepts of the Sleeping Gods, but, surprisingly, in the end it resulted in a perfectly round number.
Not counting equipment bonuses, but with the boost from Unity of one thousand, nine hundred and eleven adepts to the Sleepers, these were my stats: Primary characteristics
Strength: 1300.
Perception: 1300.
Endurance: 1300.
Charisma: 1000.
Intellect: 555.
Agility: 720.
Luck: 3198.
Secondary characteristics
Health points: 3,962,326.
Mana points: 845,154.
Vindication points: 2,197,000.
Plague Energy points: 2,200,000.
When I got my human form back, the penalty to charisma would be gone. Then I’d use Grain of Transformation to redistribute my stats toward strength and endurance.
“Are you done?” Crawler asked, seeing that I d stopped staring into space.
“Yeah. Let’s go,” I answered, standing up from the table.
We left the tavern and formed into a circle: me, Crawler, Bomber, Infect, Irita, Gvula and Patrick. Fortunately, instances outside the sandbox accepted groups of up to ten, scaling up the mobs within depending on how many were in the group.
Without Tissa, we didn’t have any strong buffs, and we used other means at our disposal to protect the new players from the climate debuffs. Crawler gave Patrick and Irita potions that slightly lowered damage and increased resistance to frost,
along with an Elixir of Regeneration, which restored one percent health per second. That should be enough to stay alive on Holdest for at least long enough to enter the instance, where the temperature wasn’t as extreme.
“My God…” Irita whispered, chinking down the potions and licking her lips. “Now this is what I call hitting the ground running! Yesterday I was in Tristad, today I’m on the way to Holdest!”
The buyer of the Portal Key to the continent was still unknown.
“It’ll be fine,” I reassured her.
“We’re good at that,” Infect grinned happily. “When I…”
The bard didn’t have time to finish speaking; Crawler had started casting his teleport a couple of seconds earlier. The usual process stretched out a little—I’d noticed that the actual distance to the destination affects the time Depths Teleportation takes to reach it.
Cartography skill increased: +1. Current level: 10.
Now you can create even more detailed maps of unexplored lands. You move faster in previously mapped areas. From now on, you can see hidden entrances to dungeons, treasure troves and caches.
Quality of maps you create: good.
I waved away the notifications, looked around. The wind howled and huge snowflakes whipped my face. We stood up to our knees in a snowdrift at the top of a high hill, and it felt like the blizzard could cast us off it at any moment. I couldn’t even see the outlines of my friends in the white mist, but I could make out the gleaming veil of the instance’s entrance, set in a broad crater. The portal curtain glimmered, seeming to stretch out space, flowing with color like an oilslick. The crater sloped sharply down.
“When I first went along with Scyth…” Infect said, stubbornly continuing the story he’d begun before the jump, raising his voice to shout over the wind. Crawler interrupted him:
“Patrick, Irita, hold on to me. Hurry!”
The mage disappeared through the portal with them. The others ran in after, and I followed.
Holy War Page 30