“I see,” I said in a soft voice as I shifted my attention to look at the withered ursine man in the cocoon, a thought occurring to me. “What happened to the other guardian? The one I killed. The woman was still alive for a time afterward.”
“It was the destruction of the spirit’s anchor that caused the construct to unbind itself,” Zethus explained, holding up a cracked elk skull in his hands as he spoke. “Each of the spirits was bound to the skulls that we saw on the guardians, which are essentially responsible for maintaining the spell that’s animating them. When the skull of that one construct was destroyed, it broke the spell’s binding and released the spirit, causing everything to then unravel.”
“So our options when it comes to killing these things is to either kill the person trapped inside or to try and shatter the skull anchoring the spirit,” I said as my eyes shifted over to stare at the damaged piece of bone, seeing that despite it being rather badly scarred and burned, it was still surprisingly intact. There was little doubt that the magic that had been bound to it had also managed to drastically increase its durability. “It seems that no matter what we do, the poor soul trapped inside dies.”
“So it does,” Theia agreed. “Which is why we must ensure that we put a stop to the orcs from making more of these abominations and rescue all those that they have captured.”
“Yeah…” I replied with another sigh, my voice trailing off as I considered the discovery of the black-scaled arakissi that had been the final victim of our battle with the corrupted guardians.
It seemed that the orcs had managed to enslave our settlers in addition to the other pair who belonged to two foreign races in the greater region around us. One of them, the arakissi, we fortunately already knew of, thanks to Theia and the other Thunder Lizards who had decided to leave the Fens of Swyn in early days of Ascend Online’s release. But in the case of the other, the one belonging to the ursine man, it was new to us, none of us ever having seen or heard of his race of people before.
I’ll have to double-check the primer to be sure, but I definitely can’t remember seeing a bear race being available anywhere close to Eberia, or even in the areas beyond it for that matter, I thought as I considered where the man or his people might have come from. Regardless, it likely means that there’s another group of people somewhere out here that are also fighting the orcs. Assuming, of course, the orcs haven’t already killed or captured all of them.
“We’ll stop them,” I promised, pending my train of thought for later as I turned my attention back to the others. “But right now, I think that the best thing we can do for them is get these people back to Aldford and out of this forest. Not only do we owe each of them a proper burial, but the more that we can find out about what the orcs did to them, the better chance that we’ll have in helping any others down the line.”
“If we can help them,” Halcyon added in a somber tone that provoked a series of grim nods around our circle. “That corruption that you told us about sounds terrifying in its own right. I don’t even know what we’re supposed to do against that.”
“Me either,” I agreed, my eye shifting over towards a notification that had appeared shortly after the battle, outlining the effects of the corruption counter that I’d seen appear in my combat log. It seemed that by attempting to drain the mana of the corrupted guardians, I’d managed to briefly poison myself with some sort of affliction, which if it hadn’t been for my ætherwarping could have seriously affected me.
What did you stumble onto here, Carver? I asked myself, not for the first time, as I brought up the notification and skimmed over it once again, trying to tease out any sort of clue from the never before seen update.
Special Status Effect Discovered!
During your adventures, you have found your body and spirit afflicted by [Corruption], a vile and twisted magic that seeks to rob you of your strength and ability. The more that you are exposed to this malevolent energy, the greater the toll it will take upon you, to the point where it may even cause permanent physical or mental changes.
The effects of this can be categorized into four separate stages of severity represented by a Corruption Counter which scales from 0% to 100%.
Mild Corruption – 1% to 35% – During this stage of affliction, the corruption has only begun to take root in your body and spirit, afflicting you with occasional nausea and unsettled emotions but otherwise remaining too weak to cause you harm. Effect: None.
Moderate Corruption – 36% to 75% – During this stage of affliction, the corruption has now managed to gain a solid foothold in you, weakening you both physically and mentally. This stage is accompanied by a persistent sense of nausea and unease, along with a growing sense of weakness. Effect: All Player Stats are reduced by 15%.
Major Corruption – 76% to 99% – During this stage of affliction, the corruption has progressed to the point where it is in danger of fully consuming you, making it difficult for you to move or think. In addition to the intensification of the previous stages’ symptoms, haunting visions and whispers begin to plague your mind, greatly hindering your ability. Effect: Player Stats are reduced by 30%, and all skills are reduced by 3 levels.
Fully Corrupted – 100% – At this final stage of affliction, you are considered fully corrupted and immediately fall unconscious. While unconscious, the corruption causes both your body and spirit to then undergo random changes. Effect: On reaching 100% corruption, you are rendered unconscious for a period of 8 hours after which you permanently gain a randomly generated [Corrupted] trait.
Recovering from Corruption – If afflicted by corruption, your Corruption Counter will decrease by 10% every 24 hours until it returns to 0%. Beyond natural regeneration, you may reduce your total corruption through the use of specific healing spells designed to cure the affliction or by special Traits that affect it. However, should you reach the Fully Corrupted stage of affliction, your natural regeneration will become muted, and you will only be able to be restored through the use of magic or a relevant Trait.
“But at any rate, that’s a problem for later,” I said as I finished skimming over the notification and dismissed it from my vision once more, seeing everyone in our circle give me a solemn nod. But before we could resume our conversation and begin the process of figuring out how exactly we were going to carry the cocoons back to Aldford, Constantine suddenly called my name, causing us all to turn in his direction.
“Hey, Lyr!” he announced loudly, the rogue walking towards us with a flat, rectangular board of wood in his hand. “Found something that you might be interested in seeing.”
“Oh?” I asked, my eyes dropping down towards the object the man was carrying. “What is it?”
“A message from the looks of it—one that I’m pretty sure is addressed directly to us,” Constantine said, his face grim as he stopped in front of us and held up the board, revealing that three words had been scrawled across it with something that looked like blood.
NEVER TRUST TRAITORS.
“Then they really did expect for us to come looking for this place,” I said as I read the sign, feeling a spark of anger start to burn in my stomach. “They expected someone to talk.”
“It looks like it, Lyr,” Constantine replied, his expression tightening even further. “But that’s only half the message.”
With his words hanging in the air, he turned the sign over to its other side, revealing three more words.
SEE YOU SOON.
Chapter 17
Friday, April 12th, 2047 – 6:51 a.m.
CTI Player Housing Complex
“We’ll just need to—” I started to say, only to find myself cut off by a ringing chime that signaled someone new joining our video channel, the screen splitting to reveal a new face. “Speak of the devil; there’s Lance now.”
“We found them,” Cassius’s familiar voice announced without any preamble as the connection stabilized and he appeared on the screen, his tired eyes scanning over each of our faces. “We found th
e orcs and the Dread Crew.”
“And?” Misha asked from right beside me in a hopeful tone as we looked back at the bald-headed man that vaguely resembled his avatar’s appearance, save for the addition of roughly a decade of extra wear.
“We’re in trouble,” he stated, shaking his head slowly and letting out a sigh. “There’s no doubt that they’re still working together, and there’s…a lot of orcs along with them. A lot, a lot. And as luck has it, they’re all gearing up to head down our way.”
“Shit,” I whispered, feeling my heart drop in my chest at the man’s news. We’d entertained a fleeting hope that the orcs had maybe decided to double-cross Carver and the others—a situation that would have greatly simplified our concerns. Unfortunately, it seemed we weren’t going to be that lucky. “Do you have a rough guess at numbers?”
“We don’t know for sure yet, but a few hundred at the very least, on top of several dozen more goblins and ogres. Plus then, of course, the Dread Crew on top of that,” Lance replied tiredly, a hand appearing on screen to mask a yawn. “They’re all mustering outside the forest in a large encampment right around where we expected to find the hunting camp Phillion told us about. Unfortunately, anything more than that is a mystery right now, because we didn’t have time to stay and look. They had teams of scouts patrolling the area, and we had to move out of range or get caught. Whoever’s running the show there is definitely not stupid, and they’re making sure to keep an eye on the area.”
“Fantastic,” I said, my gaze moving to see the looks of resignation on both Gavin’s and Misha’s faces.
It had been a long night since the events at the Dread Crew camp and our discovery of the horrors that it had contained, all of us having been scrambling practically nonstop since. After finishing our search through the remains of the base, and finding precious little information to work with, we left the place, taking the remains of the captives with us. From there, once we’d reached the plains, we partially split our forces, with a portion of the guild heading farther north to Shadow’s Fall and the rest returning to Aldford.
Joining the latter of the two groups, I didn’t arrive at the town until the early hours of the morning, barely managing to stave off exhaustion long enough to explain what had happened to Aldwin, Veronia, and Stanton. Once that was done, it was all I could do afterward to find a place to log off and stagger into my bed back in reality, hoping that by the time I woke up there would be better news to greet me.
Unfortunately, so far it seemed that the day had other plans in store for us.
“So what does that mean for us?” I went on to ask, giving voice to the thought that had haunted me for most of the night. “Are we screwed?”
“I…don’t know,” Lance answered with a sigh, shaking his head tiredly from side to side. “I hope to get a bit more information as the day goes on today and we get some light so that we can better see their camp. All that I can confirm for sure, though, is that our days of fighting pitched battles on the plains are done. There are simply way too many orcs…and too many of those constructs that you warned me about to make that an option. We would get overwhelmed instantly.”
“So you saw more of those…things then?” Gavin asked from his screen, the dark-haired man speaking up for the first time since Lance had joined the call.
“We did,” he confirmed. “Though we saw more than the one kind that you warned us about. There was another kind that almost all of the scout groups had with them called a ‘corrupted dervish’. They look like smaller and sleeker versions of the guardians and are damned fast. On one occasion, I saw one of them go after a roaming creature that crossed their path, and the thing crossed thirty feet in the blink of an eye and tore it to shreds before I knew what was happening. Hell, it moved even faster than any of the orcs or adventurers accompanying it could even nock an arrow, let alone move to help it.”
“Great. That sounds like it’ll be especially fun to deal with,” Misha replied with a sigh, the conversation lapsing for several seconds before Lance continued to speak.
“I wish I could give you guys a better idea of what we’re dealing with, numbers and all,” he said, “but we’re going to need to take it slow if we want to stay hidden from the orcs. With any luck, by the time the afternoon comes, I’ll be able to give you a better answer, but until then, I can only give you my first impressions.”
“We’ll gladly take anything you can tell us,” Misha said in a soft voice that I knew concealed her nervousness. “Even a rough outline of what to expect is more than we know right now. Plus, hopefully, it’ll keep us from twisting in the wind in the meantime.”
“That’s fair enough,” the Hallowguarde guildmaster replied, offering us a brief nod before going on to give us a more detailed explanation of what he and his guild had discovered the previous night.
Starting first with his departure from Shadow’s Fall, Lance described the journey to find the second Dread Crew camp as uneventful at first, his guild easily making their way northward thanks to Spirit of the Wild speeding their progress. However, as they ranged farther away from the ruined settlement, the flat terrain that was the plains began to shift, gradually transitioning into rolling hills that forced them to slow their progress. Filled with a host of higher-leveled creatures similar to the Hartwyld, the Iron Foothills was a virtually untouched region filled with a host of vicious and deadly creatures, all of whom happened to have a taste for adventurers.
Forced to blaze a path through the monsters, the guild’s progress slowed drastically as they steadily ground their way forward, eventually getting the warning of our experiences at the other Dread Crew camp partway through their journey. Once they did, however, their speed slowed even further as they began to move with extreme caution, taking pains to ensure that they weren’t walking into an ambush of their own. With the slower pace, it wasn’t until nearly midnight when they’d stumbled onto the orcs and the Dread Crew, the sight of dozens of open fires, tents, and moving shapes appearing in the distance.
“…I can’t give you a good accounting of their levels yet, but we saw all kinds in our brief window of scouting,” Lance said as he continued on with his report. “The lowest were right down at level ten, which belonged to a group of goblins that were working straight into the night, and the highest was a level twenty-seven corrupted guardian right at the camp’s entrance. The other orcs and ogres were all a mix in between those two ranges as far as I could tell, with the bulk of them being in the low to mid-twenties.”
“That’s…actually better than I let myself hope,” I replied as I listened to the man’s explanation. “If we’re going to be outnumbered, at least we can be outnumbered with a slight level advantage. That at least gives us a fighting chance.”
“It does,” the man agreed. “Though that all depends on how we want to engage them and what our plan is going forward. If you’d like, we can try to start skirmishing with them and taking out a few of their patrols. But I’m not going to lie to you, I don’t think we’d last long doing that. Not with just us up here. Levels will only go so far with us being outnumbered ten to one, if not more.”
“That’s true too,” I said with a sigh, leaning back in my chair and turning to look towards Misha. “What do you think about this, Mish? You’re the one already heading north to join up with Lance and the others.”
“I think we’re in desperate need of information before we do anything,” the woman said, shaking her head at the question. “But unless something really drastically changes, I’m inclined to think that an attrition game is really our best hope. Given the space that we have to work with and how far we are from any defensive fixture, I just don’t see any other options available to us. Maybe if we still had Shadow’s Fall to fall back on we could make a stand there, but since we don’t…”
“Our next best hope is Valor’s Point,” I said, silently wondering if this was the reason why the Dread Crew had razed both the Hallowguarde settlement and their forest camp, making sure
that we couldn’t use either as a base to resist the coming orc invasion. “Assuming we can fortify it enough to stand up to them.”
“Pretty much,” Misha said, offering both me and the two men on the screen a resigned shrug. “There might be a lot for us to deal with, but in the end, they’re still NPCs. If they die, that’s it for them. They don’t get a second chance like we do. If we can bleed them enough, both on their march, and when they reach us, we might be able to break them.”
“Assuming, of course, that they aren’t willing to absorb those kinds of losses in order to achieve their goals,” Gavin pointed out from his half of the screen. “We have no idea what the orcs want in the first place, nor why they’ve allied with Carver and his group. For all we know, this could be a precursor to another world event that kicks off a second invasion of Eberia.”
“Which would suck for us quite a bit, seeing as we’re directly in their path if that’s their plan,” I stated as a grim expression appeared across each of our faces.
“If that’s the case, should we be looking to get help a bit more urgently?” Lance asked. “What’s the status on those guilds you’re inviting? Can you reach out to them sooner at all? This orc problem that we’re facing could be moot if we had a few hundred more adventurers on hand to call.”
“That’s actually my plan as soon as we’re done here,” I answered, having already anticipated the question. “Right now, we have a meeting scheduled for Tuesday, which is…ages away with how fast things have been moving. I need to see what I can do to move that up a bit, or if not reach out to them in-game directly—though I’m worried doing that might be coming on a bit too strong and desperate.”
“Better come off that way than miss the opportunity entirely,” Misha said with a shrug. “Because if we can’t get some help coming our way from them, our next best option is to put out a general call for any and all adventurers in Eberia and Coldscar, which is likely going to cause as many problems as it solves.”
Glory to the Brave (Ascend Online Book 4) Page 23