Rogue Evolution

by James Hunter

  “Oh my gosh,” Randy said, panicked, “I’m so sorry! I have napkins in my desk, I’ll—”

  “What the balls?” Helen Rose spun around, searching the elevator lobby. “Is this some kind of prank?”

  “No, I-I’m sorry, so sorry. It’s my fault. Clumsy, uh—”

  To his surprise, she laughed, showing perfect made-for-livestreaming teeth.

  “Orly?” Her eyes locked on the PA system. “Drea? You goobers, are you guys punking me right now?”

  Randy stood by, confused as she shook her head, still smiling, and swiped at her soaked clothes.

  “You dorks owe me a dry shirt,” she said.

  With that, she turned around and headed back toward the elevator. She was gone before Randy could explain.

  Dumbfounded, he looked down at what was definitely going to be a coffee stain on his sleeve.

  Except there was no sleeve. No sleeve and no arm. No body at all.

  Randy was invisible. He touched his chest, then picked up his coffee cup. Invisible but not incorporeal.

  Just like a level 40 Arboreal Herald.

  Apprentice Aggravation

  WHEN ROARK LEFT FLAVORTOWN Tavern, he was exhausted. Although Trolls never needed to sleep, he felt wrung out to his core. No rest was forthcoming, however. The day was nearly done, as he’d learned to judge by the subtle shifting of colors in the enormous forest of bioluminescent mushrooms that towered over the marketplace, and it was approaching the time he and Zyra had agreed to meet with Ick for training. Appropriately, training in the School of Night Magick required it to be actual night all over Hearthworld.

  Mac followed along as usual, climbing nearby walls as if he were still the somewhat smaller fat-padded Stone Salamander he’d been when they first met rather than the seven hundred plus pounds of shell, scales, and talons that he was now.

  Much like the mobs of Hearthworld, the Troll Nation Marketplace never slept. Creatures were traveling in from the portal plates in allied dungeons all the time—so many that Roark wondered whether there was a line backed up in their home dungeon. They were easy to spot, loaded down with armor and weapons to sell. The outbound were no harder to find. They walked along as if they’d just rid themselves of a disagreeable load and replaced that with the far more agreeable weight of gold.

  Mac studied them curiously, sometimes stopping to watch and scratch his beard as they ambled by.

  The silly beast had eaten greedily while at Flavortown, but the extra weight in his belly hadn’t slowed him down. In fact, it seemed to have made him even more frisky than usual. He yipped at a few of the shoppers, then ran ahead, hopping from building to building before coming back to scale a wall at Roark’s side and demanding to be petted.

  But even this the Young Turtle Dragon quickly grew tired of. With a low trilling sound that Roark took as a dismissal, Mac camouflaged himself, vanishing from view. At least to the stream of casual passersby. And truthfully, only knowing what to look for helped Roark find the telltale visual distortion scampering up toward the cupola of the Scroll Store. That and a roof tile cracking off and smashing on the packed dirt of the street. It narrowly missed a passing Imp, who recoiled and cast an instinctive Slow spell at the broken shards.

  Her eyes locked on Roark a moment later and tripled in size.

  “Sorry, Dungeon Lord, sorry!” The Imp dropped to her knees and wrung her hands. “I didn’t mean to throw around no magick in the Marketplace! I wasn’t trying to disturb the peace! The blasted slate only surprised me is all!”

  “It’s all right,” he insisted, raising a hand and dismissing her apology with a wave. “Get up. I saw what happened, and I’m not here to condemn you for it. Get up, please.”

  She wasn’t listening, however. She kept going on about the tile and pleading for mercy, face pressed into the ground, arms raised in supplication.

  It made Roark sick to watch. This was precisely the trouble with being a one-man judge, jury, and executioner.

  With a disgruntled sigh, Roark finally gave up on trying to convince her she wouldn’t be punished and turned the corner toward Zyra’s shop. The cries for mercy chased him down the alley, sending shivers of unease racing along his spine. He tried to put her from mind, focusing instead on all the work he had yet to do.

  Zyra’s alchemy shop was perfectly placed, positioned right next to the herbalist, whose chicken-legged hut and garden were located on the very edge of the marketplace. And by design—his, of course—it was also located next door to his smithy.

  A great squawking went up at the end of the street. Roark squinted, turning his gaze on the chicken-legged hut just in time to see it buck off a distortion in the shape of a Young Turtle Dragon. Mac hit the dirt with a thud, sending up a cloud of dust, then regained his feet and cut off through the glowing musical grass, apparently no worse for the fall.

  Roark chuckled to himself and headed toward the alchemy shop. No oily black smoke was billowing up from the chimney in the back. A good sign. The last time the chimney had been smoking like that, one of Zyra’s failed apprentices had met his fate in the oven, ostensibly because she’d sensed him lunging to plant a poisoned dagger in her back.

  When he stepped inside, there were no low-level mob corpses strewn about the shop floor, waiting for their owners to respawn, either. Another good sign. The shop itself was a dark and rather gloomy place, radiating the toxic energy of a Champion Reaver turned Master Alchemist.

  A black wrought iron chandelier dangled from the ceiling, spewing green light over the shop’s interior. Bleached white bones and a motley assortment of skeletons adorned the right wall, along with a collection of shrunken heads and twisted antlers. Along the left wall were shelves piled high with potions and poisons in a variety of odd-shaped glassware; beneath were rows of wooden drawers, which held a wide range of alchemic ingredients and potion reagents.

  Everything from the commonplace Devil’s Tongue, which grew in the shade of the Elderpine trees, to the rare Bunyip Bindweed that could cause death in a matter of moments. Each drawer was carefully labeled in Zyra’s flowing script. At the rear of the shop was a glass-fronted case, stocked with various alchemist equipment: mortars and pestles, flasks and vials, burners and brass retorts.

  Roark rounded the shop counter, heading for the door that led into the laboratory, where Zyra kept her real treasures and did her most delicate work. His ears perked up as glass clinked beyond the door, and something boiled and hissed.

  “Damn it all,” Zyra’s muffled voice muttered.

  Grimacing, he rapped on the door to the laboratory.

  “Zyra, it’s me.” He didn’t plan to wait around for her to let him in, but he’d learned it was best with the paranoid Reaver to announce himself before he strutted in unannounced. She was lightning quick with her blades and prone to stab first and ask questions later.

  Inside, he found Zyra rushing from a mortar to a set of bubbling titration pipes, one arm cradling rare and potent ingredients to her flat stomach while the opposite hand clutched a powder-covered pestle. The rest of the lab was in a similar state, full of in-progress potions, poisons, and brews. He counted four half-ground powders in as many shades and consistencies. A trio of candle flames flickered under round-bottom flasks; the contents of one had already boiled away, leaving behind a salty black residue. There were two cutting boards on a worktable, one covered in thinly sliced magenta flower petals, the other covered with pulsing green things that looked like spiral slugs. All of which were slowly crawling away in different directions.

  So far as Roark could tell, she was doing every menial task an apprentice could have done instead.

  Definitely a bad sign.

  “Put out the candle under that Metamorphic Salt Filtrate, will you?” Zyra asked without preamble. She tossed down her pestle and snatched a bubbling pot off the hearth. Some of its contents splattered and hissed in the fire as she did. Glancing up just long enough to see Roark’s confusion, she added, “It’s the one finished degradin
g,” before hustling back to her mortar.

  Roark snuffed out the indicated candle beneath the flask of black residue.

  “Where are your apprentices?” he asked.

  “Had to fire Og,” Zyra said, furiously grinding away at the yellow powder in her mortar. “Too shifty. He kept watching what I ate and drank, asking me which poisons Septic Brewmasters are immune to.”

  “But you had two others,” Roark said. “Did you cook them before I got here?”

  “I wouldn’t waste the wood on those fools. I sent them on a fetch quest after the Cordial Cherries of the High Plains or some such nonsense.”

  “For a poison?”

  The hooded Reaver snorted. “Not unless it’s an imaginary one. There’s no such thing as Cordial Cherries or whatever it was I told them to go find.”

  “You gave them a fake quest?” Roark dragged his claws through his shaggy black hair. He floundered for words, but could come up with nothing better than an outraged, “Why?”

  Zyra sighed, and Roark thought he could feel her rolling her eyes somewhere in that hood. “If they don’t even realize these ingredients are made up, then they don’t have what it takes to work with poisons of this caliber.”

  “But they’re here to learn,” Roark replied, exasperated. “Apprentices aren’t masters, Zyra. You teach them, then they learn to work with the poisons correctly. They get better over time. That is the process.”

  Zyra shouldered past him and grabbed the flask of Metamorphic Salt Filtrate. “Not before they poison me by accident—which would be even worse than Og doing it intentionally.”

  Roark shook his head. “You’re being impossible.”

  “This class is impossible,” she answered easily, returning to the secondary cutting board. “If an apprentice wants to survive as an Alchemist, then they have to be up to the impossible.”

  She sprinkled the Metamorphic Salt Filtrate on the fleeing slug-like things. Immediately, they sublimated into five puffs of emerald smoke. Zyra threw down her pestle and used a nearby bellows to suck up the smoke and deposit it into a small glass jar.

  “I thought we agreed that you need apprentices,” Roark said, idly drumming his claws on a nearby workstation. “With them to do the simple tasks, you’ll be free to work on the more advanced projects you want to. Perfecting that undetectable contact poison. Breeding Frostrime vipers for their venom. Seeing whether your Septic Brewmaster abilities can be combined with Ick’s Night Magick.”

  Zyra scraped the magenta petals off the primary cutting board and headed for the bubbling pot on the hearth.

  “Right, that. You’ll have to go to training without me tonight, Griefer. I don’t have the—”

  “Time,” Roark finished, slipping between her and her target. “Because you fired or sent away all your apprentices.”

  Her hood fell back a fraction as she looked up at him, revealing a midnight blue nose and chin and full lips that were just a shade darker.

  “If I don’t put these Pickled Haint Orchid Petals in that pot, the antidote won’t turn out,” she said, holding up her fistful of cuttings.

  Roark grabbed her hand and held her in place. “Does that really matter?”

  She ran her free hand over his jaw in a tender caress, drawing him in closer to her lips.

  “That depends,” she purred. “Would you like an antidote for the Flesh-Eating Contact Poison I just applied to your face?”

  In the corner of Roark’s eye, his filigreed Health vial flashed green. He threw up his hands in frustration as a scrap of parchment belatedly filled his vision.

  [Potent Flesh-Eating Contact Poison (Ultra-Rare) absorbed!

  Effect: Loss of 4 HP per second for 60 seconds or until the corresponding antidote is consumed.

  Effect: Disfigurement of affected area and subsequent loss of 13% Charisma until the corresponding antidote is consumed.]

  The skin and muscle over his cheek and jaw sizzled, and melted bits began to drip onto the chest of his leathers. He dismissed the parchment with a thought and turned to find Zyra at the hearth, stirring in the petals into the orange-pink sludge in the pot.

  “I honestly don’t even know if it will turn out at all,” she said, “but this is the closest I’ve been to an antidote for this particular blend.”

  Roark gritted his serrated teeth. There had to be a solution to this, but he was damned to seven hells if he could figure it out just then. Perhaps if he asked Wurgfozz whether any of the second floor’s new arrivals showed promise for Alchemy, he might find an apprentice or two that Zyra couldn’t fool with silly quests or murder for asking the wrong questions.

  In truth, the matter of fulfilling her impossible apprentice demands was starting to seem like a tougher puzzle than getting back to Traisbin.

  That stray thought brought with it the usual brooding frustration surrounding Roark’s experimentation with interdimensional portals. Even though he’d finally unlocked a level 9 magick spell slot in his Initiate’s Spell Book—the prerequisite for writing an interdimensional portal spell in Hearthworld—all his attempts to open a portal to Traisbin had killed him in spectacular and horrific style. Since his last attempt, he’d managed to creep back up to level 39—his third time at this level. Roark had yet to crack level 40 without being blown to bits with invisible shrapnel or shredded by unseen blades and respawning at level 36.

  It was infuriating to no end. When heroes died, they lost experience and had to return to their corpse to gather up their gear or lose it as well, but somehow they were able to hang onto their hard-earned levels. No so for Trolls.

  Many Hearthworld mobs also had evolution caps well past a Troll’s, meaning that if they did perish, they wouldn’t have to drop back nearly so far. Lowen’s Malaika Herald, for example, could never respawn any lower than level 72. The same for every other Tyrant King lackey in the Vault of the Radiant Shield.

  In contrast, Roark’s Jotnar Infernali, the highest Evolutionary Path of all breeds of Troll, reached its level cap at 36.

  Roark clenched his jaw. Based on his calculations, he would have been nearly level 50 himself if not for the constant respawns.

  A pair of delicate, midnight-blue hands covered in glowing blue tattoos of power waved before Roark’s eyes.

  “Are you still with me, Griefer?” Zyra said. Her hood cocked slightly, and she brought her hand inside to cup her chin. “Interesting. I didn’t think the Flesh-Eating Poison had an effect on awareness.”

  “It doesn’t.” Roark shook his head and took out the Clearblood Ring he’d looted from the former Dungeon Lord’s corpse what felt like years ago.

  ╠═╦╬╧╪

  Clearblood Ring

  Durability: 89/96

  Level Requirement: 16

  Resists 100% of poison, disease, and blood-based magical attacks.

  ╠═╦╬╧╪

  It would cleanse his flesh of the poison and protect him against further poison, disease, and blood-based magical attacks.

  “Come on,” he said insistently. “We’re going to be late for our training session with Ick.”

  “What will he do? Click his mandibles at us?” Zyra plucked the ring out of his fingers.

  “I need that in case your antidote fails,” Roark said, holding his hand out expectantly. “I don’t have time to respawn today.”

  “You wouldn’t die even if it did fail,” she said. “Now hold still.”

  Instead of giving his Clearblood Ring back, she caked some of the orange-pink sludge onto his cheek.

  [Flesh-Repairing Contact Antidote (Ultra-Rare) absorbed!

  Effect: Counteracts Flesh-Eating Contact Poison (Ultra-Rare).]

  The filigreed Health vial in the corner of Roark’s vision stopped flashing green and returned to its usual bloodred color, and he could feel the muscles and skin of his melted face repairing itself. Not a pleasant sensation, but certainly impressive.

  “You perfected a Contact Antidote?”

  Zyra dropped the ring into h
is hand. “Feel free to shower me with praise.”

  “Fine.” Roark smirked. “You’re brilliant. Now can we please go?”

  School of Night

  THE SCHOOL OF NIGHT Magick didn’t look as if it belonged in the Troll Nation at all. Its architecture, requested by Ick when Roark added it to the marketplace, was completely different. Rather than the blunt stone construction used in the Cruel Citadel, Ick’s school was built entirely of wood, with peaked roofs that turned up at the eaves and hanging wooden chimes at every corner. The glowing, musical grass surrounding it had been left to grow as it pleased, with only a small path cutting to the wide front porch, and a small stream had been diverted to pass by. Smooth rocks that Ick had made new disciples carry up from the farthest reaches of the Citadel’s wild fifth floor had been placed in the stream to elicit all the gurgling and babbling of a forest brook.

  Without the battle taking place in the street, it looked like the most idyllic place in the Cruel Citadel. Of course, from the outside, one couldn’t see the violent training taking place inside, either. From their few lessons with Ick, Roark could attest that Night Magick was no quiet teatime in the park.

  Roark and Zyra followed the short path to the porch, where they were met by one of Ick’s disciples, a level 5 Changeling.

  “Salutations,” the Changeling croaked, bending his mismatched little body into a clumsy bow.

  From the corner came the soft clearing of a throat and clicking mandibles. The Changeling glanced over and up. Ick was sitting on the ceiling half-hidden in the shadows. Only the hem of his flowing blue-black robe was visible from Roark’s angle, and it hung upward instead of down, seemingly without regard for gravity.

  The Changeling hastily ducked his head again. “That is, uh, salutations, mighty Dungeon Lord and, er, scary Reaver Champion.” Zyra chuckled softly, obviously pleased with her appellation. “The School of Night Magick is pleased to receive your visit.”