The fog hadn’t come back. Maybe the enemy needed it for something else, or had decided it wasn’t necessary. Aristobulus used one of his Scrying abilities to provide everyone with the equivalent of a personal telescope. Through his scrying window, Hawke saw four ground forces converging on the fort from every direction except the wall facing the now-visible pit to their north. It was one of the biggest Hawke had seen in the zone, covering a bigger area than the fort. That would protect one of their flanks, somewhat. There was still plenty of open ground between the walls and the pit, more than enough to let enemies reach them. Three of the forces were Labyrinth monsters: Chaos Titans and Maulers, about twenty and a hundred per group; that seemed to be the maximum size for the ‘mobs’ here. The fourth had just as many Labyrinth critters and but also almost a hundred Lords of Bones and close to a thousand Troggs.
A flock of flying creatures flew over the main group. Sixty or seventy Upirs were led by thirteen figures, each flying a skeletal Drake. The draconic mounts were a good twenty-five feet long, with about the same wingspan, although the wings had to be mostly decorative; naked bones couldn’t provide much lift or gliding ability. The riders were hooded humanoids. Revenants. Hawke focused on them, and discovered they all had been upgraded into Labyrinth Bosses. Not the final boss, most likely, but incredibly powerful nonetheless, with over twenty thousand Health apiece. The bad guys had a Labyrinth Core to play with, and were finally making full use of it.
Huntmaster Laryn was in the lead, and the bastard had gotten a lot of upgrades:
Huntmaster Laryn (Fae, Undead)
Level 40(30) Unseelie Revenant/Level 30 Elite Boss, Tier 2 Greater Being
Health 32K Mana 36K Endurance n/a
“Hey, cool!” Bak Sun-Ah shouted. “It’s the mother-freaking Nazgul!”
“Yeah, they’re a special bunch,” Hawke said through clenched teeth. “I’m going to enjoy killing them for the last time.”
It was almost funny. Hawke hadn’t had much of a hate-on for the Revenant. The monster just didn’t have enough personality to hate. But seeing the monster now pissed Hawke off. That thing had been involved in two conflicts that had killed thousands of people. It needed to be put down, and fate or the Makers had put him in right place and time to do just so. He felt the urge to climb on Blaze’s saddle and meet Laryn in the air. Or assuming his mantle and flying out himself. Angel of Order versus Lord of the Nazgul.
He shook his head. That might make for a hell of a death metal video, but fights didn’t work like that. Laryn’s fellow Revenants and their draconic pets would gang up on him and tear him apart. He needed to fight smart, and that meant holding the fort and using it as a rock to smash the incoming enemy wave. His assigned post had been the gate side, facing the main force, so he and Laryn would be meeting soon.
“On my mark,” Kastor said, his Leadership allowing everyone to hear his words as if he was standing next to them.
The central force and the fliers above them were two hundred yards away and closing fast. That was too far for any of Hawke’s spells and even his Mind-Fire ability, but battle-magic could affect targets even further away. Kastor ‘painted’ targets for everyone with a ranged spell or attack that could reach the approaching army. Hawke wished he had more bullets for the Dragunov, but he wouldn’t have to wait long to use his abilities.
“Now,” the Half-Giant ordered.
Hell burst over the monster army.
Battle magic was intense. A Battle Fireball filled a hundred-foot radius with burning flames and had almost ten times the range of the ordinary spell, at a base cost of 8,000 Mana. Unfortunately, only the two Silver Fist mages knew it. Aristobulus claimed Zippo had mastered a few Battle Mage spells, but that was no longer a concern. Those spells and Panadel and Leara’s weird flying spheres (Hawke hadn’t been able to identify the spell, or even learn whether it was a spell or some kind of Fae superpower) wiped out all the Maulers on two of the flanking forces and heavily damaged the Titans among them. The Silver fists casters repeated the spell one more time, hitting the third Labyrinth force, along with Panadel, for the same result while Leara hit the largest ground battalion.
By then, other raid members could engage the enemy. Hawke was assigned a target: the flying company of Upirs and draconic-riding Revenants. He used Mind-Fire, spending enough flame to spew a continuous stream of psychic energy; he started on the left end of the flying formation and played the stream along the width of the formation, hitting dozens of targets. The Upirs melted away under the giant blowtorch he had created; their smoldering corpses dropped onto the ground forces below.
The Revenants had some sort of defensive aura, however: bubbles of Chaos and Undeath energy sprang to life the moment the jet of Mind-Fire came too close, absorbing it. Hawke cursed before pumping more Mana into the attack and firing on a single target, one of the Revenants by Laryn’s side. After three seconds of continuous fire, the bubble popped. The Revenant had fifteen thousand Health, but Hawke burned through all of it before he had to pause and inject a Mana potion. One ‘Nazgul’ down.
Unfortunately, several Undead bosses cut loose with their own Battle Magic.
Hawke found out what a Chaos-infused Battle Death Cyclone looked like. Or rather, six of them hitting the area at the same time. Everybody was in the area of effect of at least three of the swirling vortices of purple energy. The Death effect hit the fort’s walls and made them experience centuries of decay instantly, depleting their Durability by well over half. The effect on living beings was much worse. Three Troll Warriors rotted away, their flesh sloughing off their blackening bodies as their 5,000 Health dissolved into nothing. Everyone else got hit for well over seven to eight thousand base damage by each spell, but luckily their armor, defenses and resistance values reduced the damage to survivable levels.
In Hawke’s case, he ‘merely’ lost his Bulwark of Light and took nine hundred damage, all of which came off his Mana, but that was because his Death and Chaos resistance values were high enough to protect him with the full ninety-five percent resistance cap. He had to burn another Mana potion to avoid going out of Mana, but that was all. The raid’s healers had to go on overdrive to keep people alive. Other than the trio of unfortunate former Labyrinth monsters and most of the non-tanking pets, they lost nobody, though.
Panadel and Leara weathered the barrage well enough to launch a third set of flying spheres that destroyed the remaining creatures from the three Labyrinth forces. Spells and missiles from the other defenders thinned the enemy’s numbers even more. Tava brought down another Revenant and injured the rest with three well-aimed Inscribed arrows that unleashed Mass Blast Undead spells on impact. Aristobulus brought down a third of the Undead bosses. The surviving enemy forces reached the fort and the remaining ten Revenants instructed their Drakes to use their breath attacks. Clouds of sickly green-and-purple gases descended on the fort, inflicting half a dozen sickness and poison debuffs even as the corrosive fumes melted flesh and metal with equal ease.
Despite the healers’ – including Hawke’s – best efforts, one of the Cyclopes went down, flesh, metal and bone melting into a bubbling puddle that ate through the battlements of the fort’s wall. Several Lords of Bones reached over the walls, smashing through them and crushing several summoned defenders. Hawke fired off his usual anti-Undead rotation, adding Soul Whip to the mix. Another Revenant went down, along with most of the Troggs, but the defenders were still outnumbered.
Laryn’s Drake came crashing down on him. Hawke’s smile was invisible under his helmet as he saw the monster swooping down.
He used Twilight Step to avoid the attack, teleporting above and behind the Drake, which crashed through the section of wall he had just vacated and landed in a heap on the courtyard. Forty feet up in the air, Hawke assumed the Archon mantle. Kastor hadn’t ordered him to do it, but this was the time and the place. The wings rose behind his back and he dived down onto Laryn, who teleported away from its mount as Saturnyx sliced through the drac
onic skeleton’s vertebrae, severing the monster’s head and killing it instantly.
Laryn appeared in a cloud of darkness a short distance away. The Prime Revenant had picked up Hawke’s favorite spell; imitation was the sincerest form of flattery. It wielded a sword of its own, a long thin blade with a greenish tint and a jagged point and edge. It fired off a Major Death Curse that shaved off almost a thousand of Hawke’s Mana as the two combatants charged each other, ignoring the chaotic battle around them. A Trogg tried to interpose itself; Hawke sliced it in two without missing a step as he closed in on his quarry.
The Revenant lunged with inhuman speed. The green sword ignored Hawke’s auras and struck his still-unprotected shoulder, ignoring his Mana Shield and other defenses. The pain was almost paralyzing, but in his current incarnation Hawke was beyond human frailties. He ignored the immediate loss of a third of his enhanced Health as he pressed forward, pushing Laryin’s sword more deeply into his arm, and managed to land a swing on the bastard that severed its right arm at the elbow. The green blade was expelled from his body as he cast a healing spell on himself. He pushed on.
Laryn Twilight Stepped away. Hawke reacted with a spinning slash that would have hit the Revenant if it had arrived close enough to backstab him, but the Revenant had appeared a good distance away, right next to a massive break in the wall and the Lord of Bones that had created it. Hawke fired off a jet of Mind-Fire, but the Lord of Bones sacrificed itself, shielding Laryin with its massive bulk. As the giant creature fell apart, Hawke lost track of his enemy. He also realized that he was in the middle of a wild melee. The invaders had breached the fort in multiple places and the raid members were fighting for their lives. Hawke kept casting Healing Wave as he moved, blasting enemy concentrations and giving the raid the time to rally. Several tanks had made a ring around the ranged combatants, and Gosto had summoned a Forest Guardian to help out, a giant living tree that could have been a member of the Evergreen Council.
Hawke noticed those things as glimpses of a chaotic whole. Lords of Bones were the most numerous foes remaining, and there were still enough of them that most tanks were having to fight two of them at once. The surviving Silver Fist Ogre was being dismembered and put together in a gruesome competition between two Lords of Bones and the Priests of Vitara and Lumina. It would have been cartoonish if it weren’t for the utterly real gore and bones being torn apart and stitched into place from one second to the next. Hawke destroyed one of the Undead monsters, giving the Ogre the chance to fight back.
Another Drake rider came swooping down; the flying mount and Hawke exchanged breath attacks at point-blank range. His white flames overwhelmed the putrid fumes of the draconic Undead and flowed into its open mouth. He downed his last Mana potion and poured it on until the Drake’s skull exploded. The Revenant, its armor smoking and melting in places, managed to leap from the dying mount and avoid the fire stream. It landed in front of Hawke and slashed at him with a red-tinged sword. Hawke tried to block with his shield but his left arm had gone numb. Whatever Laryn had inflicted on him was still slowing him down, even in full Archon form. And he got hit in the same spot on his shoulder. Everybody loved to go for the chink in your armor.
The hit shaved off two hundred Mana and would have stolen ten levels from him if he hadn’t been protected. The Undead was fast. It evaded Hawke’s counterattack and drained more Experience from his Aegis Against Death, bringing it down to 580 ‘levels.’ Hawke decided to stop playing around and used Mass Blast Undead. The area effect attack dropped the monster below a thousand Health. Hawke used Burning Light to finish it off, along with two Troggs caught in the cone of energy. Belatedly, he used Restore Order to remove the crippling effect. Using the new abilities took a greater mental effort than his old tried and true ways. His shoulder returned to normal. A notification flashed past his eyes:
Digger has died.
Hawke turned toward the still body of the Greater Tarakken. Digger was surrounded by Trogg and Lord of Bones’ bodies, but his killer was still standing. Laryin, its arm and sword back in place, and its Health back to full, stepped away from Digger and moved toward him.
The Archon form did not feel anger or loss like a normal person. They were there, but they burned with a cold flame as he flew towards his target, striking it with Mass Blast Undead, which the Revenant couldn’t dodge, and followed that with another Mind-Fire blast. It counterattacked, and once again Hawke found himself facing a better swordsman. Laryn had been practicing, or maybe had sucked skill levels from a victim, or something. The Revenant was almost as good as Horosha. It parried Hawke’s attacks, hit him a few times, poisoning him again, and tried to use some high-end Undeath spell on him, which Hawke disrupted by throwing 2,000 Mana at it. In a one-to-one fight, he would have been in trouble.
But Hawke wasn’t alone.
Alba teleported behind Laryn and stabbed it in the back. A moment later, Blaze bowled the Undead over and gave it a faceful of Mind-Fire. The Revenant teleported behind Alba but she used her Shadow Step in time to avoid getting skewered. Hawke reached out with a Mana blade and stabbed the monster; their eyes met as Hawke used the conduit to send a 20,000-damage Energy Blast into its body.
Laryn’s expressionless face twisted into an insane grin before the Revenant exploded, sending mummified remains and bits of armor flying everywhere.
Instead of satisfaction, all Hawke felt was a sense of dread. Laryn – no something inside Laryn – had been happy to be destroyed. He was sure of it.
Hawke looked around. While he fought his personal war, the raid party had wiped out the rest of the enemy. There had been plenty of casualties, including all the Labyrinth creatures that Hawke had claimed. Besides the Cyclops Hawke had seen melt, they had lost both Silver Elves in Panadel’s gang, as well as Aristobulus and Grognard. Hawke clenched his teeth. He knew the Eternals would be respawning at the entrance to the Labyrinth, but they wouldn’t be able to rejoin the raid until the final battle was over, one way or another.
As it turned out, the final battle had already been fought.
The ground shook, a full-fledged earthquake that had everyone swaying on their feet. There were flashes of light everywhere, as if they’d gotten trapped inside a lightning storm. That was followed by a rising elevator feeling, except turned up to eleven, as if the entire zone was being shot up towards the sky. Everyone was driven to their knees by the sudden acceleration. The air itself shook as deafening thunder echoed all around them. Hawke sensed huge amounts of energy swirling madly throughout the area, and realized that tens if not hundreds of thousands of Structural Mana points were being unleashed.
His Archon’s mantle slipped away, even though he hadn’t dismissed it. He became human again, or as human as he was ever going to be.
I don’t know, Hawke replied. But it’s bad, whatever it is.
The darkness that had filled the Deepest Pits was suddenly replaced by almost blinding daylight. Hawke saw the sun and sky overhead. They had moved outdoors somehow, and the pits that had dotted the ground were gone, replaced with ordinary soil. The remnants of the force had also disappeared. But the pillar of mottled black-and-white light still rose over the horizon. Right where the magical nexus had been.
QUEST FAILED: End the Malleum Mallum
With a final sacrifice, the Court of Thorns has accomplished its objective. The Malleus Mallum is no more, its Core transformed into a World Core. In its place, Vazalak’s Undying Land has been born. You have failed to prevent their objective.
You have gained -50 Reputation with the Triune Goddesses, -5 Global Renown.
“What the hell?” K-Bar was shouting. “What did just happen?”
Hawke looked at what had been their objective, still maybe a mile away. The pillar of Chaos light flashed for a few seconds before disappearing. Buildings rose in its place. That was where all the Structural Mana he
had sensed was going: to reshape the land into its desired shape. As the survivors of the raid group watched, a massive castle with asymmetrical towers that looked like broken teeth rose hundreds of feet into the air. A huge face was carved on one of its walls, its features half-rotten like a zombie version of Castle Freaking Grayskull. Another face appeared next to it, this one female, her expression twisted in an insane rictus. Hawke recognized them. Vazalak and Madwoman. Two of his least-favorite Makers.
The worst part, though, was that they were no longer in the Labyrinth. He saw familiar mountains rising over the horizon to the south and spotted the Legion’s fort they had left only a few days ago. They were on the plateau where the M&M had been, except all the structures of the Labyrinth were gone. They were being replaced by something else.
Or was that the worst part? Hawke noticed that his level was still brevetted up to thirty, despite the fact that they were in the Common Realm.
“What happened?” K-Bar asked again.
“We screwed up,” Hawke said.
Forty
“We’ll be taking our leave now,” Kastor said.
“Wait! Maybe we can take that castle. Reverse the process,” Hawke told the War Chief.
“We signed a contract to fight in a Labyrinth. Show me a Labyrinth and we will go there. This is now a matter for armies, not a band of Adventurers. We fought as well as we could and lost a good Warrior. No hard feelings, Hawke Lightseeker, but this is beyond our power. We will use our Wayfinder Stones to return to Crystal City.”
Hawke wanted to argue the point, but the truth was, he didn’t know what he could say to convince the mercenary to stay and undertake a likely suicidal attack. Whatever was going on was too much for the Silver Fists. Maybe not too much for Leara and Panadel, but the two Fae had been engaged in a deep telepathic conference ever since the quest had failed.
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