The Elder Demon's Dilemma (Realm of Arkon, Book 9) Read online

  "Good thinking," Max smiled, pressing his woman to his chest. "Even if naming your children after gods may be considered bad form here."

  "You're the Guardian - such conventionalities shouldn't bother you none."

  The young woman looked up at him, then nodded in the direction of the approaching army.

  "When is it going to start? I'm on pins and needles already, and all this waiting..."

  Max shrugged. "I'd say fifteen minutes or so. The last time, the Ancients attacked from about a half-mile distance. But don't worry so much - everything will be all right."

  "I very much hope so," Alyona shifted her shoulders, as if from a chill.

  The legions of the defending army had formed in three sections. The left flank was taken up by the elves, the middle by the dwarves, and the right by King Rayan's legions alongside the Erantian heavy cavalry. The entire second row consisted primarily of elven archers and Nightcrawler shamans. They would retreat if the transformed were to break through the fifteen ranks of heavy infantry in the front. The mages were presently in front of the army, waiting for the order to cover the ground in traps and quickly retreat to safety alongside the healers and ranged damage-dealers, well behind the melee fighters up front.

  From his vantage point on the hill, Max could only observe the right flank of the defending army. Of course, he could make use of his Guardian abilities to scrutinize the formation to the smallest detail, but what would good that do? He wasn't in charge, and he could hardly be of assistance at any rate. The army's command had already done all that they could, and there wasn't anything left for him to do. Not yet, anyway...

  The gods had split into two groups. Kirana, Alak, Loaetia, Mara and Amerys took up positions across from Max's hill. Ingvar, Myrt, Setara and Dylanneus stood a few hundred yards to their right. And in the middle, at an equal distance between both groups, froze the frail frame of Neima, who was tasked with the role of backup healer in the upcoming battle. Ingvar and Alak were standing a bit in front, ready to tank in this battle just as they had done in the last. There was no need for a third tank this time, which meant that Amerys would likely fight in lycarn form. However, none of the gods had shifted into combat form just yet.

  Where the hell is Vaepar... Max sighed, then stared at the varicolored icons in the corner of the virtual screen. Had he gone south of the mainland? Fallen behind on the march? Or was he attempting to sneak around the allied army and flank them? Morrigan's Phantoms had reported that he wasn't anywhere within a hundred mile radius. The titan had simply... vanished. Now what could that mean? Some kind of nasty trick on the part of the Ancients or a benevolent gift of the System?

  The next twenty minutes were total bedlam, but once the formation was completed, a tense silence blanketed the plain. Tens of thousands of eyes looked eastward, toward the enormous shapes in a cloud of dust drawing ever closer.

  A scene like this could only happen in a video game. The elves and their allies had taken up positions in the path of the transformed army, which was passing through the exact same spot as two and half thousand years ago. "The Battle for Mount Hyjal," this was what Alex had dubbed the upcoming battle, for some reason. And not just him - some of the other guys from the Blades had said the same yesterday morning. The reference was lost on Max, but he'd had neither the time nor to desire to indulge his curiosities.

  He closed his eyes and took a deep breath to steady himself. One might wonder, why bother being nervous if you've already resolved to pass into the Void? But he wasn't interested in a pointless death that would squander all of his potential. No, he would need to attack at precisely the right moment. Now if only he knew how to recognize when that moment arrived...

  The Ancients' figures loomed larger with each passing minute, and Max could finally appreciate first-hand just how enormous they were. As for their appearance... The game's designers never wanted for imagination, but sometimes one couldn't help but wonder just which Lovecraftian horror they drew their inspiration from. The monsters were a quadrupedal, grotesque mix of reptile and bovine, with a broad bone collar, huge horns curved outward, and a massive triangular mug. Though billed as powerful mages, for someone who grew up in the magical world of J. K. Rowling, it was damn hard to picture a giant cow casting spells.

  Lost in thought, Max missed the moment when the two titans lowered their heads in one synchronous motion, letting loose a couple of fireballs at the expectant gods. Roughly ten feet in diameter, the fireballs cut through the air, splashing bits of flame and leaving a trail of thick black smoke. The whistling sound they made was reminiscent of air bomb.

  "Damn..." Alyona exhaled in awe beside him.

  The figures of the allied gods instantly blew up in size. Neima, Setara and Loaetia threw up their hands at the same time. One of the fireballs smashed into a translucent shield that materialized in front of Kirana's group, turning to scorching lava that dripped down to the ground. The other flew by way higher, crashing spectacularly into the peak of an adjacent hill. The earth shook as the hill transformed into what looked like an erupting volcano. A burning smell filled the air. Alex and Donut had claimed that no creature engaged in a battle involving players could attack with magic from a distance further than fifty yards. It would seem that the Ancients weren't up to speed with the user manual.

  The allied army buzzed with excitement as the legates barked their first orders and the war drum began its beat from the left flank. The front rows of the attacking army were full of large animals that resembled African rhinos. Were this happening in the real world, that would mean certain doom for the defenders. Thankfully, this wasn't the real world, at least not in the truest sense. Here, the transformed were still mobs and NPCs, their effectiveness in combat determined not by brawn but rather by mathematical formulas.

  The Ancients launched another attack a few minutes later, having drawn within six hundred yards of the defenders. Their aim was even more off this time as both fireballs cut a wide arc and disappeared in the forest. Now, sure, it wasn't easy to fire while moving, but Max suspected that the titans' misses were strategic. The heath they were standing on was once a lush forest that had been devastated by fire two and a half thousand years ago to the tune of several hundred square miles. To this day nothing grew on this soil save for rosebay, bearberry and dandelions.

  What would be the point of this? The only explanation Max could conceive was that the titans were looking to cut off any retreat paths for the enemy.

  The smell of burning intensified, making each breath a struggle. The hill that had been ignited by one of the Ancients' fireballs was still burning. Having changed color from red to black, the flames were devouring the ground as if it were a bundle of twigs.

  "Look!" Alyona elbowed him as she pointed at the first rows of the transformed troops. "That's not dust! It's some kind of magic. Those freaks are up to something!"

  Max followed her finger, then grunted. Alyona was right - no dust cloud could be so impenetrable. Little more than four hundred yards remained to the vanguard of the transformed army, yet you couldn't make out anything beyond the first few rows.

  "What if it's Vaepar hiding in there?"

  The height of the cloud was close to fifty feet, so, theoretically...

  "I highly doubt it," Max shook his head after a moment's hesitation. "Gods can't be fooled by such cheap tricks."

  "What is it, then?" the young woman wouldn't let up.

  Max gave a carefree shrug. "They're almost here, so we'll find out soon. It doesn't matter, anyway. The titans will go down, and then the gods on our side will annihilate their entire army in the span of a few minutes."

  "Do you honestly think that we're strong enough to stop them?" Alyona asked him in a private channel as another meteor whistled through the year.

  "I don't doubt it," Max replied, not taking his eyes off the advancing titans. "Otherwise, what's the point of it all? Why bother gathering here? Why bother putting up a fight?"

  "I wish I had your confiden
ce," the young woman sighed and lowered her gaze.

  Looking at all this fireball hurling from the side, a casual observer might deem the attackers to be total morons after all but the first two had landed in the woods behind the defenders. Were the Ancients really trying to cut off their paths of retreat? Or did they have another purpose in mind?

  "Shields up! Lances in front! Don't give them an inch!"

  There came a string of explosions as the magic traps went off like popcorn, marked by visual effects of every color of the rainbow. A terrible roar went up over the heath as the massive frames of wounded beasts stumbled and fell over one another. A volley of elven arrows followed without delay, peppering the front rows of attackers. The battle had officially entered its first stage.

  The tongues of flames emanating off the auras of Valeph and Halephos shot up in the air as the titans let out a low growl and sped up, bearing down on Ingvar and Alak who had come out about a hundred yards ahead. Blinding discharges of lightning sundered the sky. As the Ancients moved, the ground around them split into deep fissures, out of which viscous lava flowed like blood from a wound.

  The entire visible section of the heath became transformed into a localized section of hell. Glitch fell down on his forepaws, stuck out his muzzle in the direction of the battle, and growled ferociously. In the blink of an eye, a black smoke blanketed the ground, then rushed toward the clashing armies. The cries of legionnaires blended with the clanging and gnashing of metal, the groans of the wounded, and the roaring of the Ancient Gods. The visual effects of spells going off all around made for for a spectacle so breathtakingly, terribly beautiful that a solid ten minutes must have passed before Max came out of his awe-induced stupor.

  The first rows of the transformed had fallen, unable to break through the shield wall on the right flank of the allied army. Presently, huge piles of corpses pincushioned with arrows covered the ground before the defending elves, while the "rhinos" in the vanguard had been replaced with bipedal Darkaanese warriors in full plate. The elves hadn't given an inch, losing less than five percent manpower in the first minutes of the battle. Alas, the Darkaanese emerging from the magic cloud matched them both in level and skill. The transformed had their own healers behind them, and before long the battle became hopelessly deadlocked. With no line of sight to the front rows of the enemy, the mages and archers in the back rows kept hurling projectiles and spells into the magic cloud hovering above the two armies, hoping and praying that their attacks were having any kind of impact.

  As for the gods and their battle, though Max's view was largely obstructed, the little that hardly inspired optimism. Valeph and Halephos were pressing the tanks, swinging their monstrous horns with amazing alacrity, and making Ingvar and Alak look like amateur matadors sent into the arena by some cruel and malicious joke. Every few minutes the titans breathed out jets of black flame that burned through a quarter of the tanking gods' HP. The reserves of prana for Neima, Loaetia and Setara, all of whom were healing the tanks, had decreased by seven percent each. And given that Valeph and Halephos had lost only two percent HP in the same time frame, an objective observer couldn't help but be pessimistic.

  "Look! Over there!" Alyona gripped his wrist.

  Max shook his head - the battle of the gods was downright hypnotic. But when he looked in the direction Alyona was pointing, he froze with terror.

  The magic cloud still hovered over the field of battle. Only now, hundreds of huge black birds were flying out of it. With a wingspan of about ten feet, their bare necks extended into wrinkled human heads. Each creature held a small item in its claws, the shape of which resembled a football. To the elves credit, most of the birds were almost instantly stricken by arrows, but their bodies still fell on top of the defenders' heads, popping as they crashed. Within seconds, the scene of battle became a veritable nightmare. The entire first row and some of the second became engulfed in black flame, and the cries of elves being devoured alive by flame drowned out even the din of metal. Max couldn't see what was happening on the left flank and in the center, but he could assume the situation there wasn't any better. Paying no mind to the ground burning underfoot, the Darkaanese warriors wasted no time launching an offensive. In a matter of minutes, the first rows of the elven army were broken and trampled into the ground.

  "Bastards..." Max whispered in helpless rage, clenching his teeth and his fists so hard that they hurt.

  Just then, Halephos pushed off the ground, twisting his torso unnaturally as he transformed into a two-legged stone giant. A monstrous foot smashed into Alak, catching the god by surprise, before the titan landed back on the ground. The impact of the landing seemed to resonate as far as the mountains on the horizon. The heath shuddered as the ground cracked open with deep rifts. Max and Alyona came tumbling to the ground, unable to keep their balance. The Stun debuff appeared on the icons of the five gods in the first party. With a triumphant roar, Halephos scooped up the body of Loaetia who had somehow ended up right near him, and squeezed her in his monstrous arms. The goddess' HP bar twitched, then began to rapidly dwindle.

  At that moment, Max leaped back to his feet, threw out his palm towards the titan, and mentally pressed the dark crimson icon on his action bar.

  Fury of the Great Forest!

  If not now, when?!

  * * *

  "Krian! Dark One! Wake up!"

  The darkness dispersed in patches, giving way to Sata's face, twisted with terror. Her features were blurry, but her eyes were open wide.

  "Wake up, damn you!!!"

  My body convulsed painfully as I took a few ragged breaths, then broke into a cough from the smoke clogging up my lungs.

  "Water! Quickly!" Raena's alarmed voice sounded somewhere to my left.

  "No need!"

  I sat up, massaged my face, and finally opened my eyes.

  Holy smokes... Half of the shrine was wrecked, with a huge crater in place of the entrance, out of which spewed tongues of black flame. The courtyard was shrouded in smoke from the burning structures, and buried under blocks of granite, brick and blackened corpses. The three-story building that had stood across from the shrine had been reduced to smoldering rubble. The keep was ablaze, the flames transmuting the roof and walls into strips and isles of molten rock and metal. The gate tower was in ruins, and through the breach in the south wall I glimpsed Vaepar's giant frame. Surrounded by mounted Darkaanese, the titan was slowly moving toward the castle over burning ground. Next to him, the transformed looked like toy soldiers. Another hundred yards, and...

  "Drink!"

  I accepted the cold mug from Raena's hands automatically, and took a few big swigs as I frantically tried to surmise what the hell had gone wrong?! Raena and Masyanya were the only ones with me - one was on the floor, the other on her knees. Both had soot on their faces, and a tenacious hatred mixed with hope in their eyes.

  "Where is everyone?" I inquired dryly, handing the mug back to Raena. It was a stupid question I already knew the answer to.

  "There..." Masyanya sobbed, gesturing at the pile of smoking rubble next to the breach in the wall. "They're all there..."

  "The baron was visited by the priest at night," Raena quickly continued for the huntress. "He said that you were lying here unconscious, barely breathing. We know that you have these episodes sometimes, so we forbade anyone to bother you."

  A nasty howling sound cut through the air as a giant fireball crashed into the keep, leaving an uneven gap in the wall. The ground shook underneath as flames splashed all around and debris rained down on the pavement.

  "That beast appeared on the horizon about an hour ago," Raena continued, yelling over the racket with hatred in her voice as while gesturing at the advancing god. "Our people were on the wall, and I was below, as usual. He attacked from a quarter-mile away. Nobody saw it coming... Vaessa's shield didn't hold. Masyanya was the only lucky one. I managed to heal her up, and we ran here to you right away."

  "What of Ulrich?"

  "The
baron and his wife were in the gate tower. They're gone now," the sorceress lowered her head with a sigh. "Farat and the survivors are waiting behind the keep. They have a couple of mages, a ballista and half a century of troops, but-"

  "I get it."

  I rose to my feet, eyes fixed on Vaepar looming through the breach in the wall, and shifted my shoulders to loosen my aching back. On the outside, the Ancient God resembled a triceratops, only with a smaller collar, and two horns instead of three. That and he was twenty times the size of any model I had come across at a museum exhibit. An unfathomable level and damage output anchored by nearly one trillion HP. Whoever designed this thing must have been an a full-on sociopath. Oh, and this freak bastard had just killed my friends! For no reason other than they had happened to be in his way. Time to put an end to this bloody prophecy...

  "Get out of here, now! That's an order!" I roared at them while shifting into combat form. I felt like I was skirting the edge of madness.

  Masyanya gave a few frantic nods, wiped the tears off her face with her sleeves, then jumped to her feet and peered into my eyes.

  "Kill him, Roman! I don't know how, but I know that you can!" she exclaimed in a voice ringing with hatred.

  Without waiting for an answer, the huntress pulled on Raena's sleeve, and the two of them headed off toward the blazing keep.

  I nodded, quickly equipped my helm, and walked around the crater by the shrine, stopping at the edge of a broken wall. There was no point going out to meet Vaepar - he was already a couple of hundred yards away, leaving me maybe a minute before I fell under the influence of his aura. The transformed were staying close to their god, and I doubted that they would enter onto the castle's territory - those Doberman mounts didn't seem very capable of scaling blockages.

  Hart! There are so many of them! But that's all right. Fury of Primordial Chaos would decimate anyone who got anywhere near me. My element didn't care what stood before it - a bipedal lizard on a dog or some freakshow cast out of Lemuria. The Ancients' aura was your standard AoE, and I'd be able to take it with zero risk for fifty seconds. His shield would be a different matter. I didn't know how the System classified his defenses, but I'd still have twenty seconds to work with. I wasn't going to try tanking the bastard - the plan was simply to enter his aura, Step onto the back of his neck, pop Setara's Shield and inflict maximum damage in the ensuing twenty seconds. Then let Phallet take over and finish the job.