Roaring, the two-thousand-strong army of troggs also ran straight at the enemy, brandishing fearsome hammers and clubs. Morena s cultists finished their summoning ritual; a shimmering silhouette of a gigantic ghost appeared above them, bleeding out streams of mist. The mirage enveloped the attackers, and when it retreated, nothing remained of them but their bones—it seemed even NergaVs Inspiration couldn’t protect against the deadly mist.
The ores of the Broken Axe clan were cut down in an unfair fight. Nergal and Marduk had gifted their followers with a short period of invulnerability, which decided the outcome in advance. Even the bonuses from Unity couldn’t save the defenders of Tiamat’s temple against such an overwhelming force. They w^ere simply crushed by the masses. The apparent futility of our cause so early on in the fight made me grind my teeth.
The boys, Irita, Gvula, Patrick and the guards ran to the temple. Yoruba retreated too, but I could already see that not all of them would make it. The legionnaires of the Commonwealth and players who could smell blood descended on Yemi’s clan and slowed them down with battle and slowing spells.
Gyula hesitated outside, looking at me, and Bomber pulled him into the temple.
I focused my gaze on one of the attackers, concentrated on the timer and counted down the seconds until Nergal’s buff ended. 3… 2… 1…
Sleeping Vindication!
The invisible wave dealt no damage to my allies, but cut through the legionnaires like a merciless invisible scythe. Experience and Serendipity flooded in and something clanked into my backpack; Magnetism at work.
Serendipity collected: 1,000,000 /1,000,000.
Quest of Fortune, Goddess of Luck, completed: Serendipity for Fortune.
You have collected enough Spheres of Serendipity from the corpses of fallen sentients. Give them to Fortune to clairji your rewards (Elixir of Luck; +1,000,000,000 experience; +5000 reputation) and the next quest in the Wheel of Fortune divine quest chain.
I waved away the notification, ran out of the temple, set off another explosion— Aid of the Sleepers refilled my vindication right away—and then ascended as high as I could, feeling the heat of the approaching meteorites on my skin.
They flew past me. Nine apocalyptic strikes crashed down on and around the temple. The roof fell in, the shockwave tore up columns, the altar cracked, but technically, the temple was still whole; the building still showed twenty-four percent durability.
The troggs, the ores of the Broken Axe and Morena’s cultists fell to Armageddon. In an instant, the Sleeping Gods lost eight thousand followers, although it didn’t affect the Unity bonus. I would mourn the dead later, I told myself, but tears began to well up in my eyes all the same.
Roaring laughter boomed out across the desert, shaking the earth. It was Nergal and Marduk, their chuckles drowning out the triumphant screams of the allies’ army. Tiamat’s avatar dimmed.
Everyone within the temple was forced to the floor and covered with wreckage, but they all survived thanks to Sacrifice. My health, on the other hand, was down in the red zone—someone in my raid group hadn’t made it into the temple.
“Protect the temple!” I shouted into my comm amulet. “I’ll take care of the preventers!”
My health recovered fully after I fired off another Sleeping Vindication. After that, I kept using it constantly, reaping the fruits of Aid of the Sleepers.
In the distance, I could see sunning mercenaries from the Goblin League still fighting, but their groups were sparse islands in the path of a torrential river of sentients striving to reach the temple. They paid no attention to the couple of dozen suniving defenders, just shooting them with spells, arrows and crossbow bolts in passing. A couple of Sleeping Vindications later and that river dried out, leaving only thousands of corpses. Unfortunately, my allies died too.
Only my raid group and my sequestered pets remained. The vice tightened around the temple. In the distance, beneath mobile defensive domes, I saw enemy engineers sweating to erect gnomish cannons and to switch their tanks into siege mode. Catapults whined, throwing balls of fire at the temple walls…
“Two move Armageddons, Scyth!” Bomber shouted.
A crazy thought came to me. Roaring, I headed straight toward the meteorites. It was a desperate move, but the temple wouldn’t withstand two more meteorites.
The space around me began to distort—the players on flying mounts weren’t shy about using their Ultimas. I sent the damage back with Sleeping Vindication, knocking down the boldest. That repeated again and again, until I was finally alone in the sky. Unfortunately, the level gap was too wide for me to get experience.
A quick glance below: almost nothing remained of the legions of NPCs and most of the players, although the clans of the Alliance of Preventers were still whole, along with the priests and the Aspects of Light and Colossi of Darkness. They were still advancing on the temple.
Three hundred and sixty million health, rank four Resilience, Sleeping Invulnerability— I just had to survive a direct hit from Armageddonl I intercepted the first meteorite a mile in the air, meeting the red-hot fifty-yard-wide ball with a Hammerfist. For a few moments, I was in the epicenter of the explosion, curled into a ball and surrounded by a storm of hellfire. My health dropped right to the bottom. I could smell my own burning flesh, hear it crackle. My hair blackened and my skin bubbled and burst, but another came to replace it, Diamond Skin.
There was no time for a break. Gulping from my Bottomless Healing Potion, I restored thirty percent health and flew beneath the second meteorite. It was fired a little later than the first, so I managed to intercept it.
I had just enough time to glance down at the temple as I flew—my team was locked in combat with an Alliance assault group in the ruins. The enemy standard-bearers and sappers took their chance and did their job, setting up flags to demoralize and debuff us, and mining the foundation. Rogues in stealth guarded them, although I could see them clearly thanks to my high level. I fired off Sleeping Vindication, but was too high up to kill anyone…
Clenching reflexively in anticipation of the coming collision, I placed myself in the meteorite’s path and fired off a Hammerfist an instant before the strike, smashing the stone into pieces. The subsequent explosion threw me right onto a Colossus of Darkness.
I was as if in limbo—gloom and emptiness all around. I was shaken, then thrown from the Colossus. Diamond Skin ran out an instant before I was thrown through the sky with a debuff growing at a breakneck speed. I had no time to leave the raid group, to save my friends. All I could do was watch as my chest exploded from within and a clot of black mist burst from the hole.
You are dead.
Remaining time to respaivn 9… 8… 7…
While my corpse fell, I saw a flickering black and wiiite image: the sky, blinding in the north and dark in the south; the towering avatars of Nergal and Marduk; the huge figures of the Aspects and the Colossi; the battle unfolding at the temple walls and the portraits of my raid group members, all covered with skulls, including Patrick and the guardians.
Subconsciously, I was ready to lose my NPC friends, but to go through it for real… I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.
My grim, hopeless grief turned to fury and a desire to take vengeance. A few yards before I hit the ground, a notification flashed up:
Second Life! You managed to dodge death!
I came alive, activated Flight to slow my fall. I looked around and began to quickly descend, reviving my friends and player allies where they’d died. I waited a few seconds to make sure that we were attacked first and Sleeping Justice activated, quadrupling my stats.
A high priest stood on a flying disk of light in the distance, his cassock gleaming. I headed there, preparing to summon all my pets at once. By then, Crash had respawned, and I sent the Diamond Worm to wreak havoc among the ranks of the Travelers and other dark ones from the Alliance.
As I flew above the raid of the light ones—Modus, the Children of Kratos and the rest—I summoned Monty, Iggy, Storm
, Crusher and Sharkon.
The reptile grew to its former magnificence in combat and trampled through the panicking preventers, swallowing some of them whole. A heavy hit from Yary caught his attention and he opened his mouth wide, turned his head and breathed out a stream of white-hot flame. My huge wolf careered along beneath Monty, while the dragoness supported the terror with constant strikes of lightning. One after another, the many layers of magic shields and forcefields fell, and Modus’ second leading man left the ranks of Nergal’s army.
Sharkon, the underground terror, crashed through the earth’s surface and appeared next to a raid group consisting of women in gleaming armor that barely covered their bodies—by some irony of fate, they were the White Amazons, with the Ochre Witch at their head. I felt some satisfaction when I saw Elizabeth’s character disappear into Sharkon’s maw, and I followed it up with a flash of Sleeping Vindication.
When the High Priest of Nergal saw me, he pointed at me. Seven invulnerable Aspects of Light shot a thousand deadly narrow beams, burning through my armor and skin. I screamed in pain, sped up, but they continued to drill into my body as if locked onto me. My health quickly fell. Blasts of Vindication were all that saved me from death, allowing me to heal from Aid of the Sleepers when I killed players.
I kept seeing notifications of Resilience gaining levels, but my consciousness marked them in passing. I was focused on the high priest, his hate-filled gaze still fixed on me. I barreled into him, grabbed him by his snow-white cassock burning with light, and took off into the air. His clothes tore and I had to grab the praying servant of Nergal by a leg.
As I flew, I tore the fabric of creation with ceaseless explosions of Sleeping Vindication mixed with constant Hammerfists. Reapers Scythes flashed in the air, but my efforts were in vain. My enemy didn’t have a single scratch on him.
The priest, just like the Aspects of Light, was a hundred levels above me. He had the strongest divine magic and layers upon layers of shields. Nergal’s direct gaze bestowed particular power upon him, but he was still human. A mortal creature with a health bar of one hundred and ten million, which hadn’t so much as trembled while the divine shield was active.
Half a mile up in the sky, the beams from the Aspects of Light stopped burning holes in me, but I was still taking damage from Shining, an aura of deadly light like the one that surrounded the Great Portable Altar, but with a smaller percentage increase. Apparently, the high priest was relying entirely on his shields, and hadn’t bothered learning any combat moves. When his defenses fell to my Reflection, Shining ended as well. One Combo charged with vindication was enough to deprive Nergal of his most zealous follower.
A gigantic column of light covered the desert where Nergal towered. It took a while for the enraged deity to fall silent. Blood flowed from my ears, but his scream ended eventually. The radiant god disappeared, and with him went the Aspects of Light too, dissolving into thin air.
I wiped the blood off my face, out of my eyes, found the other two priests of Nergal. I locked on target, sent Monty after them.
“Sic ’em, Monty!”
The priests burned me with their eyes and hurriedly tried to cast some sort of high magic. Monty approached them from behind, caught them unawares. The dinosaur bit the first follower of the radiant god in half, swallowed him down. The second priest screamed at the sight of his colleague’s death, raised his staff in a defensive gesture… But there was nobody to defend the priest, and the ancient reptile dropped a gigantic foot down on him. There was a crunch. Blood sprayed out, shining at first, then dull. Black droplets rained down on the sand.
Adrenaline coursed through my veins. Forcing Nergal off the battlefield had given me a second wind. I licked at the blood flowing down my face. I should tiy that trick again! I thought, and zoomed off for the High Priest of Marduk. My sharpened vision allowed me to see what was happening below.
Having exhausted their Armageddons, the remnants of the Alliance fought against my pets. The temple durability had dropped to a pathetic eight percent and continued to go down under the barrage of miniature black holes firing from the Colossi of Darkness. Crash died again—for the second time in a day. Crusher, it seemed, hadn’t survived even five seconds of the battle. Storm was down too. Monty and Sharkon, on the other hand, seemed to be doing fine, tearing through ranks of panicking preventers. Both pets had lost over half their health, but the Alliance had apparently used all the tricks up its sleeve.
Gyula stood anxiously frozen by the altar—he was repairing the temple, slowing the building’s destruction. Tiamat’s avatar shimmered next to him, taking on her usual form. Iggy was chasing preventer sappers around the perimeter. They were kiting the needier, distracting him.
Vindication! Vindication! Vindication!
All the sappers and other saboteurs were blown away like dust in the wind. Until now, my friends had been standing with our allies from Yoruba, surrounded by a hundred soldiers from Excommunicado and Azure Dragons, but after the explosions, they looked around in surprise—all their enemies were gone. My inventory was filled to the brim. Loot lay on the ground untouched, but nobody reached out a hand—the battle still raged, and my friends ran toward the suspiciously survivable leaders of the preventers.
“They must have some kind of defensive artifact, Scyth,” I heard Crawler say through the comm amulet.
“I’ll deal with the preventers once I’ve taken out those Marduk priests. Protect the temple!”
I grabbed the Thunderbearer trident and fired a charge at the high priest of the god of darkness. His health bar didn’t move, as expected, but the charge knocked down the ink} layers of his divine shield.
When I crashed into him, his toothy orcish mouth spat curses, but soon the priest stopped trying to offend me and started praying for help. Gloom, a version of Shining, turned out to be stronger than the proactive defenses of Nergal’s high priest. The DoT grew and I was forced to drop my enemy. Reflection and the fall from half a mile up broke his shields, but the priest himself survived.
He crashed down a few hundred yards from the temple. Diving down toward him, I saw that the Colossi of Darkness and two other priests were headed for us.
An ore is an ore. Unlike Nergal’s priests, the servant of Marduk accepted the fight honorably; he pulled a spiked flail out of nowhere and span it skillfully. The weapon fumed, created clouds of mist, tore the air and sang a song of war.
“Rot of the Sleepers, you have not power to resist darkness!” the high priest growled in broken Common. “Marduk, I call you! Punish the corrupter who dar…”
I caught the enemy’s weapon with Reaper’s Scythes and hit him with a Hammerfist to the chest. The mighty ore withstood it, but completely lost his desire to talk. The blades of the fist weapon curved with predatory thirst, feeling yet another life unlived. A jerk of the hand, and the now hook-like blades of the Scythes broke through the priest’s ribcage and tore out his still beating heart.
“Vile fool…” the priest forced out along with bubbling blood.
The sky darkened for an instant and all fell into darkness. When the mist dispersed, the Colossi and Marduk were gone. Both the remaining priests ran toward me, baring weapons, but I didn’t quench their thirst for battle—I was in a hurry. I just threw Sharkon’s Mane at them, charged with vindication. They fell and didn’t get back up again.
Once done with the servants of the two strongest gods of Disgardium, I headed for the temple. A suspicious silence reigned there—no one was fighting.
The Alliance leaders: Hinterleaf the gnome, Colonel the goliath, Horvac the ore, Glyph, Joshua and Vivian the elves, Nergatosh the vampire, Motark the ogre, Fang the gnoll and Adda the dryad—they were all crowded together and just standing, surrounded by my hundred soldiers—minus the dead guardians and Patrick. All the preventers’ routes of escape were blocked. The Montosaurus towered above them, my sole surviving pet. Ogre gladiators stood by Infect, aimlessly shifting their feet. He’d finally used the Arena Masters Hor
n to summon them.
As I approached, I realized why nobody was fighting. Hinterleaf held a gleaming crystal in a raised hand, creating an impenetrable forcefield around the preventers. I could see them talking, but I heard nothing.
When I stood with my friends, I felt Irita’s touch. She clung to my arm. I squeezed her hand firmly, kissed her on the cheek.
“I wonder how long it’ll hold…” Francesca mused, watching as Babangida tirelessly beat his hammer against the barrier.
‘1 wonder who’ll break first—the barrier or Ba?” Yemi chuckled. “They’re done, and they know it.”
“Why don’t they just teleport away?” Irita asked.
“Two options,” Crawler answered. “Either the barrier is impenetrable in both directions, which means they can’t leave it. Or…”
“Or?”
“Or they’re getting ready to do something…”
I heard measured hammer strikes behind me. I turned, saw Gyula casting ‘repair’ on the temple. The structure’s durability had either reached or fallen to three percent—well, while the temple was active, all was not lost.
“Scvth, look!” Irita pulled at my sleeve.
The leaders of the alliance stood in a circle, leaning on each other’s shoulders. Hinterleaf remained in the center, crystal in hand. Suddenly he raised his second arm. A glass flask gleamed within it… He clenched his fist and a viscous liquid like melted gold flowed down his palm. The others pressed close to Hinterleaf, causing the substance to flow onto them too. A moment later, it had enveloped each of them. Then the group sculpture began to melt.
We stood and watched the process open-mouthed—none of us had ever seen anything like it. The barrier fell, and the liquid along with the melted preventers formed a ball around eight yards in diameter, which quickly transformed into the humanoid figure of a giant.
Conjoining of Souls, level 4597 Meld
Separation in: 10… 9…
A second into the existence of the Conjoining of Souls, events began to unfold at lightning speed. The giant, with a combined level of all the melded preventers, smashed through Monty’s chest with its gigantic fist and snapped his spine, then swept away my friends and allies with a single wave of its arm, sent me flying with a kick across the blackened crater and then rushed toward the temple. It took no damage from Reflection for the simple reason that it was immortal. It didn’t even have a health bar.
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