by John L. Monk
Having witnessed the fruit of all my work come to pass, I released a shuddering breath of built-up tension. This was the moment I’d been dreading. Jim hadn’t lasted half a second. Strung together over thousands of future kills, his experience would seem like maybe a day or two of sudden, painless deaths. Not fun, but not torture.
One of Lich 1’s minions raised the next lich, then quickly recited my instructions to it.
I flew down to ask why its minions were doing all the work.
“No particular reason, Lord Howard,” Lich 1 said.
Across from me, four liches watched with the menacing patience of carrion birds waiting for something to die.
“Add this to my previous instructions,” I said. “Keep the ratio of players to liches at one per two hundred. But limit the number of summoners to one per ten thousand liches, per stone. Tell every new lich this, and ensure all new liches get the same instructions. Got it?”
“Of course, Lord Howard. But I am curious: Why does this matter?”
See that? Liches were insolent.
Patiently I said, “When this is over, I’ll have millions of liches. Much easier to give a few thousand commands than millions.”
“You are a credit to your math instructors, Lord Howard,” it said.
I stared at it a moment, then shook my head. “Just do it. Leave the jokes to me.”
“My will is yours.”
With five liches under my command, my Necrotic Aura had soared by 3000 vit, or 30,000 health.
Ten hours later, my tiny squad had grown to two hundred. My vitality had soared to 60,000, my health to 600,000, and my rate of decay to 12,000 an hour. By most measures, I was just about unkillable. I was also very close to the 10 million XP needed for my next level.
When my army reached two hundred liches, I ordered Lich 1 to transfer ownership of one hundred liches to me. Then I set out to add additional seed players for harvesting.
My liches descended on encampment after encampment, blasting every player we found without regard for level. There were few players in all of Mythian who could withstand 100,000 points of damage delivered in an instant. These new kills—around four hundred in this smallish zone—were added to the group at the stone.
Nine days later, with millions of health points at my disposal, I’d gained over 1100 levels from the avalanche of death I’d unleashed. From 100 to 500, the XP cost was 10 million a level, then 20 million from 500 to 1000. From here on out, it’d stabilize at 40 million a level.
This one zone was giving me 6.7 billion XP a day. It seemed there was a small mix of higher-levels in with the low-level players. Friends helping them, I supposed. That or Ward 1 had more high-levels than I’d thought, and they spent all their time doing easy things like weddell-hunting rather than risk the pain and toil of higher wards.
At this point, I didn’t even bother adding to vitality anymore. No, I added to intelligence, upping my mind control resistance far beyond values seen by even intelligence-based casters like wizards and sorcerers. What a shame if I did all this work, only to be charmed into servitude by some high-level seductress.
After checking on Lich 1—called to me by yelling its name repeatedly over the nonstop re-issuing of instructions to new liches—I took a thousand liches with me and began my sweep across the continent. Though I was now insanely powerful, I still wouldn’t dare test my mettle against the combined might of the high-levels from Heroes’ Landing.
I limited my attacks to sparsely inhabited areas like the Azure Woods, the Centaur Downs, and the Whispering Hills. Places you couldn’t get to by road, or areas where flight was dangerous, like the harpy-infested Screeching Hollows. These places usually had a few hundred to a few thousand players.
Unlike my careful growth near the weddell village, I grew out each binding stone quickly. Newcomers to these zones would naturally seek to bind before doing anything dangerous. Speed in taking the continent was thus essential. If they were killed before binding, they’d reappear at their last binding stone—which, if I were unlucky, would be back in Heroes’ Landing or some adventurer town like Brighton. And what a story they’d have: “Thousands of liches killed me for no reason!”
At first, people would laugh it off. Or maybe they’d believe it but consider it a fluke and nothing more. In time, more stories would circulate, and eventually some high-level would fly out to look for themselves. After that, they’d spread the word far and wide for people to flee back to the city.
Against that day, I moved fast.
Three days later and I passed level 3000. Two weeks after that, 2,000,000. Still no sign Everlife had noticed, but the time dilation between here and the real world was a consideration. Eventually, they would. They’d have to.
With a leveling rate of two per second, I began hitting bigger zones like the Swaze Pit, the Festering Swamp, and the Shimmering Mountains—home of cyclopses and bugbear slaves forced to mine gold by hero mining cartels. When I ran out of zones, I swept through towns like Brighton and Deep Watch like a … well, a dark tide, as Lich 1 had described it.
One rumor I’d heard for years had been happily confirmed. Players who reached level 6000 received every spell for their class, including the Gate spell. Gate could be cast by anyone, regardless of whether they were casters or not. For a single mythereum gem, players could teleport to any named location in Mythian three times a day. With this spell, I could easily teleport around when it came time to disband my forces, and I’d made it a part of my overall plan early on. But first I needed a source of gems.
In a halfhearted nod to balance, the Amulet of Ethan didn’t allow me to loot my victims, so getting the gems that way was out. I also couldn’t buy them. Most monsters in Ward 1 were too wimpy to drop the sort of treasure needed for purchasing.
Then I remembered: I still had that primal fleckulent Felix had forced me to keep.
“But will it work with spells?”
In theory, it would substitute for any ingredient, but I’d mainly thought of it in terms of enchanting and alchemy.
“Worth a try,” I said and took out the shimmering fleckulent.
Holding it up, I said, “Gate—Hall of the Storm King!”
To my happy surprise, it worked. The fleckulent vanished, and a freestanding black rectangle appeared in front of me—an inter-dimensional portal to the Storm King’s lair, I assumed.
“Okay, guys!” I shouted at my direct minions. “Follow as fast as you can!”
The door would last five minutes, or until dispelled. Long enough for about 1300 of my much bigger honor guard to cram through single file.
On the other side, they joined me in battle against powerful beings easily twenty feet tall. I didn’t even need the liches. Attuned Harrow hit for my level in health points per second, turning the weakest single-target damage spell in the game into the strongest. But there were a lot of giants, so it was quicker to let the liches finish them off.
I’d been here before, but long ago. The Storm King’s lair was a fairytale castle constructed of shining white stones rooted in a massive thunderhead in the sky. It drifted east and west along Ward 2’s southern border—similar, in a way, to Tormegazon’s northerly journey from Ward 2 to Ward 4.
Cloud giants were powerful foes. My liches swarmed without being ordered to, sowing confusion as they focus-fired them down in groups. In the end, I only lost a handful.
We found Thulsidar, the Storm King, in his cavernous throne room. For five noisy minutes, he raged about my “insolence” from behind an invulnerability shield. When it dropped, he fell in precisely one second from Harrow.
Despite everything I’d seen so far, I was impressed. This zone, which used to take hours of difficult fighting with a well-formed group, had lasted less than ten minutes.
“Good work, guys,” I said unnecessarily.
The Storm King’s vault had sent me into a swoon my first time here. Now, other than the three glittering mythereum gems resting on a plush red satin pillow, I barely n
oticed the loot. These gems were moderately rare in the upper wards, but only the Storm King’s vault loaded with them every respawn.
“Lich 2?” I said.
A second later, Lich 2 flew to my side. “Yes, Lord Howard?”
“I’m leaving you and these others here. Under no circumstances are you to kill any heroes who come adventuring. If a group shows up, head to the forest below, then come back the next day. I’ll send reinforcements every week or so.”
“But my lord,” it said. “Why not kill these interlopers? We are stronger!”
“Ward 2 deaths are different than in Ward 1,” I said. “I’m not trying to actually kill anyone. My guess is they won’t attack you, but if they do, shoot to miss. You’re an undead wizard—be scary. If they don’t go away, retreat farther and await orders.”
Lich 2 chuckled hollowly. “My brethren and I can be exceedingly scary, Lord Howard. Your kind will not trouble us. But … with respect … is there a reason for our presence here and not with the rest of the dark tide?”
I nodded. “The Storm King and the rest of the giants will respawn every day at 6 a.m. Kill them, secure the gems, and I’ll collect them when I send reinforcements.”
Lich 2 inclined its cowled head. “My will is yours, Lord Howard.”
A month in and I’d reached the mind-boggling level of 14,000,000. I’d miscalculated how long it would take to occupy all of Ward 1. The dark tide was an unstoppable wave, spreading from my early lich hubs to every corner of the continent.
The miscalculation in my victims’ levels turned out to be the rule for all of Ward 1. Most of my victims were in the 60-300 range, and not the 40-200 range I’d expected.
At an average of 42 thousand XP per kill, multiplied by about one million players, I was earning 42 billion XP every three minutes. Multiplied by four hundred and eighty respawns a day, that came to 19.2 trillion XP a day. Divided by 40 million—the level requirement for players 1000 and up—that came to 480,000 levels a day.
But for that brief stint putting points into intelligence, I’d dumped all my stat points into vitality, once per day. Eventually, my player-to-lich ratios would hit one-to-two hundred. When that happened, I’d spread the word among my directs to raise corpses every other respawn. This would give me two Death Blossoms per cycle, and let me build a theoretically bigger army.
Unfortunately, I had a problem: I was losing hope.
“I want this over with,” I muttered, staring down from a cliff overlooking a wide valley teaming with the forms of close to three hundred thousand liches. They were stacking on top of each other, like wriggling worms on a corpse. Rather than producing a steady stream of kills and summonings, the liches had harmonized their efforts. Every three minutes, the area around the binding stone exploded to five times its size, and a roar like that of a crowd at a sporting event carried to me—the liches, repeating the instructions I’d given out weeks ago.
Lich 3 said, “What would you like over with, Lord Howard?”
“All of this,” I said disgustedly.
Lich 3 was my third directly controlled minion. I’d taken to keeping it with me to control my personal guard, not that I needed a guard anymore.
Lich 1 had died long ago—likely killed by a lucky AOE from a high-level between one anti-magic spell and the next. I guessed. I hadn’t checked the logs.
“Why would you ever want this to end?” Lich 3 said in a tone of confusion. “The world is at your mercy. What else is there?”
I shook my head. “It’s not your fault. You’re designed to be evil. You’re not even all that evil, really. More of a caricature—killing for fun, evil laughs, that sort of thing. This world … created with such potential and then neglected… That’s the real evil.”
Lich 3 nodded carefully. “I have heard your words about the Domination, when you are talking to yourself. Though it makes me question your sanity, in this I find myself agreeing with you. Destroying an enemy through overwhelming power—taking everything from them in a contest of wills—is far preferable to winning by default. Otherwise, what is the point?”
“Exactly,” I said.
“Your plan to fix this problem is … pleasing to me, Lord Howard.”
I smiled. “Thanks, Lich 3. Coming from you, that means a lot.”
At some point, I moved my headquarters to Silverlock Castle—one of the few adventuring locations in Ward 1 with no nearby binding stones, and thus one of the few places left outside Heroes’ Landing not inundated with the undead. The castle’s lucid occupants—highborn elves living in peace with the land—treated me as if I were a guest.
Lich 3 suggested numerous times that we should slay them all and loot the place. Instead of that, I waited in my room and read some of the books I’d borrowed from Felix. Every week, I’d use the Gate spell to retrieve mythereum gems from Ward 2, as well as to check on the situation there. Apparently, my minions weren’t having any issues with the local players. By now, word had surely spread about the fate of Ward 1, and they wanted nothing to do with liches.
Two more weeks passed and my XP per hour had finally stabilized. Very few new players were falling to the dark tide. As my forces reached the prescribed one-to-two hundred ratio of players to liches, my ROD and vit-per-kill were converging. In theory, they’d eventually reach perfect parity while I continued to level like a runaway train.
One day, after dining with the lord and lady of the castle, I took out a coin and did my karma test. Ten tosses in and I stopped it, having tossed ten heads in a row.
“What the hell?” I said.
There was nothing wrong with the coin. Same dragon’s head on the front, same Everlife logo on the back.
I kept flipping. Sure enough, ten in a row turned into twenty in a row, then thirty, then forty, then fifty in a row, all the way up to one hundred in a row. Which meant my karma was sitting at one hundred percent.
Thinking about it, I thought I knew why. One of the ways players could raise their karma was through playing the game and leveling up. Excess karma, I theorized, had a bleed rate. The less you played the game, the more it would drop, eventually bottoming out around fifty percent. Likewise, damaged karma had a natural regeneration. Sitting in town at twenty percent would eventually grow it to fifty percent.
In my case, not only did the game see me as not sitting around, it figured I was playing at a rate of twenty-one thousand levels an hour. All of this was totally within the good graces of the karma system, per the Good Grief perk’s description: Griefing beyond three kills will NEVER incur a karma penalty. All other offenses still apply.
“Thank you very much, Ethan,” I said. “Otherwise, I’d be drowning in a thunderstorm of flying whales right now.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. Despite all the exploits I’d done over the years, I was now the luckiest boy in the world.
Chapter Forty-Three
Five days after that coin toss, I noticed a change in my leveling spree—it was diminishing. At the same time, my cumulative ROD was going down, and the number of minions under my direct control was slowly increasing.
I asked Lich 3 about it.
“I have no idea,” it said. “Would you like me to kill something?”
“Never mind,” I said.
With over eighty mythereum gems in my bottomless bag, it was nothing at all to teleport out to where my highest number of minions were—just outside an N-dimensional building called the Tower of Broken Mirrors with a binding stone just beyond the entrance.
I’d spent years exploring the tower and still hadn’t seen all its wonders. Almost a ward of its own, the tower had miles of corridors, secret passageways, special rooms, riddle masters and puzzles to solve, and of course, wandering monsters. As such, the zone was hugely popular with players, with low-, medium-, and even the odd high-level attraction hidden within its tangles.
My Gate spell had opened five thousand feet above the tower, per my intention. The tower, however, was lost in a massive corona of liches. The roa
r of their constantly repeated instructions was deafening.
“What the hell?” I said.
The liches were fighting each other! Beams of red, green, and blue flashed back and forth across the churning mass like a nightclub scene. The attacking liches fired into the shields or bodies of their fellows, but those liches never fired back.
I checked my map and did a rough count. There were close to sixty thousand minions down there, and over a million liches. A day ago, there had only been around one hundred thousand minions here. Something had been killing my top-level liches, causing their minions to devolve to me, and now I knew why.
“Dammit.”
I flew down to within a few hundred of the fray. Necromancers had a built-in instinct for recognizing their minions, and I used that to find a largish mass of friendlies.
“Hey, you!” I shouted. “Get up here!”
The hey you had been generalized to one of my larger groups. About sixty liches flew up, each repeating their standard My will is yours, Lord Howard.
“You,” I said. “Come here.”
The you in question flew to hover five feet away.
“Everyone else, go back down and … uh … try not to die.”
Fifty-nine liches said, “My will is yours, Lord Howard,” then flew back down.
Turning to the remaining lich, I said, “What the hell is going on here? Oh, and your name is Ralph.”
Way too difficult to refer to it as Lich 11,628.
“Thank you for the new name, Lord Howard,” it said. “As to your question, we are following your orders to the letter, as instructed.”