Glory to the Brave (Ascend Online Book 4)

by Luke Chmilenko

  A desperate feminine voice calling out from inside the nest of roots.

  “Please…help…me…”

  Chapter 16

  “There’s someone alive inside it,” I said, staring dumbfounded at the cocoon, watching it rock again from side to side as the voice repeated itself.

  “Help…help…please…” it called, the urgency increasing with every word that it spoke. “I can’t…breathe…p-please.”

  Blinking at the cocoon as I processed what the voice was saying, I pushed past my shock and found myself shouting as loud as I could. “There’s someone alive inside it! Help me get this open! Quickly! Tell the others too!”

  In an instant, the silence that had taken over the forest shattered, dozens of voices breaking out into panic and shouts, several of them rushing forward beside me. Reaching out, countless hands then grabbed onto the cocoon, all of them beginning to tear and pull at the roots comprising it, the brittle tubers coming apart effortlessly in our hands. Blackened blood accompanied by a fresh wave of rot spilled forth from the cocoon as we continued to peel back the layers comprising it, the smell doing little to slow us down.

  “I think I see something!” I called out, tearing away a large cluster of blackened roots after what seemed like ages but in reality had just been seconds. As I did, I began to see the shape of whatever was calling out from inside it, catching a brief glimpse of what looked like pale skin. “Hold it steady!”

  Waiting for a second for those around me to grab hold of the cocoon, I wrapped my hands around a final and thick mesh of tubers and violently tore them apart, using every ounce of my strength to reveal its inner heart. With a grunt and spray of black ichor, I felt the roots give way, leaving me staring directly into the horrific prison.

  “Oh my god,” I whispered as I took in the sight, my heart quivering in my chest. “It’s a person!”

  Nestled deep within the ichor-filled cocoon interior lay the withered and shriveled body of a woman, which despite the shock was at least in line with what I was expecting, given the desperate cries that we’d all heard earlier. What I hadn’t been expecting to find, however, was the massive wound in her naked chest that carved straight through her exposed ribs revealing blackened and rotting flesh beneath. If that wasn’t already enough, I found my eyes drawn to a massive pulsating root connected to the cocoon itself that protruded from the poor woman’s chest, having burrowed itself into the spot where I expected her heart to be.

  What the hell happened to her? I asked myself in silent horror as I looked down at what I clearly recognized as an Eberian woman trapped within the cocoon’s heart. How did she end up inside this thing? Shit, forget that, how did she end up here of all places?

  “Thank…thank…” the woman called out with a gasp, pulling me out of my thoughts and causing my eyes to shift upwards until they met a pair of glassy amber eyes staring back at me. “…yooou…”

  No sooner were the words out, did the woman suddenly launch into a coughing fit, the root protruding out of her chest visibly contorting as she did so. A spray of blackened blood misted the air as her distress intensified, culminating in a vicious retching sound as a thick stream of liquid suddenly poured from her mouth.

  “Oh, shit!” I exclaimed, flinching at the unexpected volume of blood, several other voices around me also shouting out in surprise.

  “Alistair, I need you here!” Theia’s voice suddenly barked out from beside me, not wasting another second before she thrust her hands into the cocoon, placing them on the choking woman. “Same goes for anyone who can cast a heal! Get in here!”

  Not needing to be told twice, bodies then began to shuffle around me as non-healing adventurers were pushed to the side, with several others taking their place around the cocoon, each of them following the lizardwoman’s lead. Shortly afterward, a bright golden glow erupted around the captive woman, and her coughing fit gradually came to a stop, only to have her begin to scream and writhe in agony, the parasitic root in her chest twisting violently. Eyes opening wide with pain, I saw the woman desperately reach out towards me with a bony hand as the healers worked, her mouth moving soundlessly as she tried to speak. Without thinking, I grasped the proffered hand and leaned in closer, immediately feeling her grip tighten around mine. Glancing down, I saw nothing but pain in her expression, her faint voice finally reaching my ears.

  “Stop…stooopp…” she pleaded, her eyes fixated intently on me as she spoke. “Hurts…so much…root is digging deeper…”

  “It hurts?” I repeated, feeling my own eyes widen at the woman’s news and the surprising strength that she was clutching my hand with. Turning my head towards the healers, I didn’t waste another second before shouting out, “Theia, stop! Everyone, stop healing! She says the root is hurting her!”

  “That’s what we’re trying to fix!” Theia exclaimed angrily as she turned her head to look both towards me and the woman. “She won’t last much longer without our help!”

  “And look at her now!” I countered as the woman let out another loud scream as the strange root contorted once more, causing her entire body to spasm. “She’s not going to last much longer with it either!”

  “Ah, damn it!” Theia shouted in response, sparing the woman’s face a quick glance before shouting something else towards the healers that I couldn’t hear, the golden light fading away as the healers pulled their hands away from the woman. Breathing an audible sound of relief, the agony that had gripped the mystery woman visibly diminished as the healing magic came to an end, the writhing root buried into her chest no longer thrashing.

  “Is that better?” I asked, turning to back towards the woman, feeling Theia press herself against my side in an attempt to hear her response.

  “Yes…” she replied in a firmer tone than before, the healing magic having at least done some good for her despite the agony it had caused. “You…you…are not them…are you?”

  “Them?” I repeated with a frown, seeing the woman rapidly blink before looking up at me once more, the glassy sheen on her eyes fading away, and her hand suddenly tightening around mine. “What do you mean? Those who used to be in this camp?”

  “No…you aren’t them!” she continued excitedly, ignoring my question as if I hadn’t even spoken, her gaze sliding off of me and towards Theia. “You must be the others! The others from Aldford!”

  “Wait, you know about Aldford?!” I exclaimed, a sharp spike of dread lancing through me as a distant revelation began to coalesce in the back of my mind. “How? And how did you get way out here? Did you come from Coldscar?”

  “Yes, yes! I came—we came from Coldscar with many others!” the woman cried out excitedly, suddenly breaking out into tears as she began to hyperventilate and stutter. “W-we w-were to go Aldford…t-to s-start a new life! B-but we were attacked…and taken!”

  “Taken?” I repeated, my heart skipping a beat as my earlier suspicions confirmed themselves, leaving me staring at the woman numbly.

  She’s one of the settlers the Dread Crew kidnapped, I thought, the realization causing me to freeze with renewed shock. One of the settlers Carver’s people gave to the orcs.

  “Yes! Taken far away!” the woman exclaimed, speech starting to grow faster the more than she spoke. “P-please! Y-you…m-must help! They are…killing all of us and many of the others they have enslaved! They beat us and w-work us to death…t-then when we are broken and useless, they t-turn us into these m-monsters…”

  “They?” I repeated, struggling to keep up with the woman and how fast she was speaking. “Who are they?”

  “They are orcs!” the woman practically shouted in response to my question, baring her teeth viciously towards me in anger before going completely slack. “T-they…they are…”

  “She’s bleeding again!” Theia suddenly shouted, the lizardwoman leaning forward into the cocoon and placing her hands on the woman’s chest where the wound was. “Shit! Whatever this root is, it’s starting to die! She’s going to bleed out no mat
ter what we do!”

  “Breathe!” I found myself almost shouting as the woman began to struggle to take in a breath deep enough to satisfy her. “Just breathe! You need to tell me what you saw! Where are the orcs? Where did they take the other settlers with you? Was it far from here?”

  “They…took all of us…” she gasped in response, her eyes not moving from mine despite the twin streams of blood starting to pour from both her nose and mouth. “Took us…north. Away from…this place…through the forest and to an orc city. Khudazal. It…is an…evil place.”

  “There’s an orc city?” I repeated in an eager tone, risking a glance over towards Theia as she fervently continued to work on the woman’s chest, the grim expression written across on her face telling me everything that I needed to know. “Do you know where it was to the north? Or how far you traveled? We can try to find the others if you tell us.”

  “I-I don’t know…maybe two—” she started to answer but was forced to stop in order to cough up another stream of blood, her voice weakening greatly afterward. “Maybe…two days through the forest…I can’t…remember. But…but that is not…important. You need…you need to know…”

  “What do I need to know?” I asked, leaning in even closer to the woman in an attempt to hear her better, the color in her body starting to fade away rapidly.

  “That…they ready for war again,” the woman said in a faint whisper, her hand beginning to tremble as she spoke. “They ready…to march on…Aldford and Eberia. Please…you must…stop them before—”

  With a gut-wrenching heaving sound cutting her words short, the nameless woman vomited blood for a second time, the stream strong enough to splash across our two hands and send up a spray that misted across my face. Flinching backward with a surprised shout, I saw her body then begin to seize and shake violently as even more blood began to pour from both her mouth and the now withered root protruding from her chest.

  “No, no, no!” Theia shouted desperately as she tried to stem the flow of blood with her hands, but to no avail, the woman’s thrashing body coming to a sudden and final stop. “Damn it!”

  “We never had a chance, Theia,” I whispered heavily, still holding the unknown woman’s hand as I looked down into her lifeless eyes, her desperate gaze never having shifted away from mine as she died. “There was nothing we could have done.”

  “No,” the lizardwoman agreed, her voice sounding hollow as she spoke. “That we didn’t.”

  Letting out a sigh, I shook my head as I moved to place the woman’s hand down gently on her chest and then moved to close her eyes, my heart feeling exceptionally heavy in my chest. A part of me knew that the woman had only been an NPC, destined to play whatever role that the game had cast for her. But for now that realization did little to soothe my mind after witnessing such a personal level of suffering firsthand.

  “What about the others?” I asked as I pushed myself back up onto my feet, rubbing my blood-soaked hand clean on my armor. “There must have been other cocoons in the other creatures. Did any of them survive too?”

  “No…I don’t think so,” I heard Theia whisper from beside me as I turned to look around the clearing, seeing the groups of people gathered around the two other cocoons, all of their expressions downcast.

  “Damn,” I replied with a sigh, my eyes continuing to scan over the crowd and eventually landing on Freya, who was sitting on the ground a short distance away from her group’s torn open cocoon with a hand over her face. Taking in the sight in a heartbeat, I felt myself begin to move towards her without a second’s hesitation. “Oh, oh no.”

  Crossing the distance between us quickly, my gaze shifted off the blonde-haired woman and onto the spear, seeing that it was protruding from the chest of a person belonging to a bearlike race that I couldn’t identify.

  “I killed him,” Freya stated as I arrived beside her, looking up at me with teary eyes. “I didn’t know…I was just trying to stop the thing…I-I…”

  “This isn’t your fault, Sonia,” I said gently as I could, using her real name as I knelt down by her side and placed an arm around her. “There was no way you could have known.”

  “I know,” she replied softly, shaking her head. “At least…I think I do, but right now it just…sucks.”

  “It does,” I agreed. “But we weren’t going to get a happy ending here no matter what we did. I have no idea what happened to these people, but they were beyond our help. We just gave them peace.”

  “Yeah…” Freya said softly. “What the hell did we walk into here, Lyr? We were supposed to find the Dread Crew here. Not whatever these…evil, corrupted things were.”

  “I don’t know, Freya,” I replied, giving her a reassuring squeeze as I spoke. “But we’ll find out. I promise you that.”

  Reacting as if in response to my words, I suddenly heard a familiar chime echo in my ears followed by a wave of text flashing across my vision.

  War Quest Update! The Town of Aldford vs. The Dread Crew!

  After defeating a trio of strange rotting creatures in the remains of a Dread Crew camp, you have discovered that each of them contained a captive imprisoned deep within a cocoon-like shell. Calling out for help, you discover that one of them, a woman, is still alive, just barely clinging to life. Speaking urgently, she reveals that she belongs to the group of missing settlers that were abducted by the Dread Crew and taken to a distant orc city somewhere far to the north named Khudazal.

  From there, she painted a horrific outline of her treatment at the hands of the orcs before desperately requesting for you to save the other settlers before they are transformed into more of the monstrosities that you’d just fought. Unfortunately, before the woman could fully finish her warnings, her wounds caught up with her, and she soon after succumbed to her injuries, leaving a final bone-chilling statement behind.

  The orcs are preparing to join the war.

  New War Objectives:

  Find Khudazal: 0/1

  Find Aldford’s Lost Settlers: 0/1

  Stop the Orc Invaders: 0/1

  And there you have it, I thought as I finished reading over the quest update, which all but confirmed what the woman had just told us. Enter the orcs, stage left.

  Letting out a sigh at the thought, I dismissed the text from my vision and glanced over towards Freya once more, seeing her eyes moving as she too read over the update.

  “Are you going to be okay?” I asked after giving her a few more seconds to catch up and read. “This news about the orcs changes a lot, and the sooner we can get the word out and figure out what happened here, the better.”

  “I agree,” Freya answered, matching my sigh with one of her own while also shaking her head to clear her thoughts. “And I’ll manage. Being busy is probably the best thing for me right now.”

  “Okay,” I said, moving to offer the woman my unstained hand and help her up. “Let me know if that changes."

  Taking my hand, we rose to our feet and rejoined the others, where we all collectively set about coming to terms with both the battle that we’d just fought and the stunning revelation that had followed afterward. Starting first with the most obvious post-battle activity, we did a headcount of our surviving ranks, finding out that we’d lost just shy of half our number with the scouts suffering the greatest toll. Yet their sacrifice had served its purpose in allowing the rest of the raid to remain relatively unscathed, none of us wanting to think of what might have happened if the corrupted guardians had risen directly in our midst.

  Once our headcount was completed, we promptly set about the next two most urgent tasks, simultaneously, the first being to secure our immediate surroundings and the second being to report in our offline chat with what we’d discovered. In the case of the first task, and our highly tuned paranoia being what it was, none of us were willing to discount the chance of a secondary ambush lying in wait somewhere beyond the Dread Crew camp. As such, we all promptly took precautions to explore the abandoned base to ensure that there was nothi
ng else lying in wait. There was little doubt among us that the trio of guardians had been left behind as a trap, though what remained to still be discovered was if it was a trap intended to soften us before a second attack arrived, or if it was a trap designed to slow us down and force us to spend time that we didn’t have looking for answers that weren’t there.

  As the bulk of us worried about those possibilities, two of our number logged out back into reality to address our second task, ensuring that everyone knew what had happened to us. Given the short and brief warning that we’d had about the orcs supposed preparations to march on Aldford, our primary goal was to alert Cassius and his guild as soon as possible. As part of our earlier plan, they were heading directly northwards in the direction that the orcs were supposedly located, and the last thing that we needed was to have all of them rush headlong into another ambush unaware. Then, once all of that was done, we turned our attention towards the camp itself, inspecting both it and the remains of those that had been trapped within the strange orcish constructs as we soon learned they were.

  And what we found chilled us to our very bones.

  “It fed off them,” Halcyon announced, his eyes glancing between Caius, Zethus, Theia, and myself as he spoke, the five of us having busied ourselves in determining just what exactly the guardians were. “Or more specifically, the spirit that piloted this…thing, fed off their life energy, using them as if they were some sort of living battery.”

  “That’s…horrific,” I whispered, shaking my head before looking down towards the glowing red ball of energy I held in my hand. Recovered from the remains of the guardians, it was one of nine [Essences of Anger] that dropped on their death, the strange orblike items appearing identical to the others we’d found in the Nafarrian ruins and Twilight Grove. “And what was supposed to happen when they were all used up?”

  “From the looks of it, they simply died and the construct then…falls apart,” Theia said in a sad voice. “I looked over each of those in the cocoons and two of the captives died by wounds…uh, suffered during the battle. It caused the spirit animating the construct to starve and fade away.”