The force of everyone in the risers jumping to their feet at the same time shakes the steel frame so much I need to grab the ledge to keep myself from falling down the stairs. I lean over the edge of the risers, half falling over the railing I cling to, and look out at the stampede coming toward us. Bears, ten feet tall at the shoulder and roaring with hate in their eyes, bully their way through the tents, ripping apart red and yellow fabrics, cleaving clawed paws through eight-inch-thick wooden beams like they were paper. There are hundreds of them, monsters all.
Screams and yelling comes from the crowd below. Some panic, running away from the charging mass of monsters descending on the mostly unarmed group of rank one magicians. Kendon hits the rail next to me, leaning over to see the impending slaughter as I do. The man’s sword is in his hand, but stuck up here with the rest of us, he can do little to help those below. Some instinct tells me to start over channeling a Dragonfire Bolt; I oblige.
There are some within the crowd trying to organize a response. Their voices carry only a short distance as they push and shove others into some kind of order, but it is like trying to build a sandcastle with mud. The bear-shaped monsters come on.
A man runs out from among the crowd that is still trying to get the people with magical weapons to the front of the group. He carries a weapon I’ve never seen before, a dagger attached to a rope, and spins the blade around him in lightning-fast circles as he runs forward. He stops, a strange motion of the rope causing the dagger to streak forward. The dagger sinks into the chest of the nearest monster before it explodes in a cloud that buzzes with the constant air of electricity. When the vapor of the cloud clears, the monster stands there still with the dagger buried to the hilt in his chest.
Yellow glowing eyes stare back at the man as drool drips dumbly from the monster’s snout. It takes a step, not toward the man who still holds the rope, but instead sets its dish-sized paw down on the rope still connected to the weapon impaling it. The man tries to pull the weapon out, but the bear catches him too off guard. He struggles for a moment, but the monster’s strength and weight is far too much for him to contend with.
“Damn beast,” he swears as he pulls at the rope.
Another man rushes out of the wall of the crowd, disrupting the mages that are busy activating their abilities to deal with the monsters; he doesn’t make it far. A spike of bone, as large around as my fist, soars out of the churn of charging monsters and impales the man still struggling with his rope weapon through the chest. The rope slackens in his hands. He stares down at the bone running him through. I hear the meaty thunk as three more of the bone spears come sailing out of the mass of monsters, striking the man dead before he hits the ground. The last thing I hear before the mass of monsters hit us is the cry of the running man, racing to make it to his friend’s corpse even as the monsters reach it and start tearing it open. The last thing I see before the monsters collide with the magicians still attempting to form an orderly line to meet the charge is the huge bear-like monster in the charging crowd that had fired the spikes of bone.
Alpha Dire Bear
Pandemonium.
Each of the monsters weigh over a ton. When the bears hit the wall of magicians, they smash through them like charging cavalry. The sound of splintering bone, the gurgling of the dying, screaming men and women, roaring monsters: all of it mixes and drowns out even the stomping of the bears racing toward us.
Dust hits us in the wake of the monster’s charge, a thick cloud of choking dirt that tears at my eyes and blocks out everything. Something heavy collides with the steel risers I stand on, making the entire frame of the structure groan. Three more rapid collisions follow, shaking the risers so hard I flip over the edge. A hand grabs my arm as I start to fall toward the ground. I look up to see Macille holding me tight. I hear the carnage below me, but through the dust I cannot see it.
“Climb up,” he tells me.
I grab his arm and start hoisting myself up, thanking my improved strength. More of the monsters collide into the rafters beneath me, and with a final aching groan a steel beam in the structure collapses. I see fear in Macille’s eyes the moment before the entire structure starts to collapse in a cascade of twisting metal. Macille grabs onto my arm with his other hand as well, and then we are in freefall.
My back slaps hard into the ground, pushing the air from my lungs. Macille lands next to me with a snap. I can’t look at him, lurching out of the dust above me comes the descending shadow of the rafters. It screams as it falls toward me, and I realize that the screams I hear are those still on the rafters. I shut my eyes, waiting for the inevitable crash, and when it comes, people and steel screaming together, the crush of it knocks the consciousness out of me.
I open my eyes; I don’t know how much later. Something wet falls against my face. I see; a cage of steel surrounds me, illuminated by rays of sunlight peeking through the gaps. Macille is over me, holding himself up on his hands and knees, stopping the weight from the piled steel stabbing into his back from falling on me. A tear of blood drips off his chin. A line of red leads up to a gash along his forehead. A spike of iron among the steel rests just in front of his face, blood from the gash on Macille’s face still glistening on it.
I feel something trigger in me, deep in me. That emotion of rage, the indignity of being attacked, starts pouring into my veins, making me grit my teeth. The universe has sinned against me, I know it down in my blood. It attacked me and Macille, it hurt him, and Macille is my friend. MY FRIEND! MINE!
“What can I do?” I ask Macille. I lean myself back onto my elbows. I look at Macille in the cramped space. Looking, I can see that the rods of steel stabbing at his back were stopped by the shield still there.
“This is kind of heavy,” he grunts at me. He spits out bloody drool.
I always thought myself flexible, but in the cramped space I am humbled. It takes me three minutes of grunting and shifting to find a position to put my shoulder into the metal that won't make Macille fall over. I groan as I heave against the weight. I feel my thighs bulge, all the strength that I have accrued over the last few weeks driving my desperation to escape the cage of steel. Beyond the barrier of metal, I can still hear the roars and screams of people outside. With a final grunt of effort, I am able to help Macille heft the metal off us, and sunlight momentarily blinds me as a hole opens.
“Go!” Macille grunts while he holds it open.
I squirm out from beneath the steel. It takes me a second, but I find a rod that I use to hold everything in place before helping to pull Macille from the steel. We stand in the spot where the risers collapsed, looking around at the destruction.
The grass of the prairie still waves gently in the noon sunlight, but patches of it have been torn to ribbons, clods of dirt thrown up, and the spray of monster blood and others decorates the waving stalks. People still stand, small groups of three or four attempt to face off with one of the monsters at a time, most of their effort put toward avoiding being surrounded than actually killing any monsters. Corpses of each side litter the ground, and worse than that, those that will soon die and which cry out for help.
I feel something fall out of my hand as all feeling drains away from me. I look down, seeing a pipe on the ground near my foot, bent oddly, the bend glowing a vibrant orange and white. I look at my hand, remembering that I have still been over channeling my Dragonfire Bolt this whole time. White fire licks up from my fingertips, ghostly in its flickering. The rage comes back to me, the moment of unfeeling banished.
“Macille.” I call his name. When he looks back to me, I don’t see the vacancy that I had seen before in the fight with the Desert Spearman. Macille is sharp, good. “We need to go.” I look toward one of the monsters being engaged by a group of three dwarven women with heavy hammers.
Dire Bear
I release my Dragonfire Bolt at the monster, and my mana is cut in half. The fire leaps forward faster than I’ve ever seen it do before, a rod of white-hot fire appearing in the air for a split second before disappearing. I stare at the hole of charred flesh burned through the bear and a second one eleven feet behind the first.
Instead of Galea appearing with message windows informing me I have killed a monster, both of the bears stop in their current fights and turn my way, the second one stumbling for only a moment before it catches itself. I see the first bear puffing up its lungs to roar at me, when a hammer sparkling with moonlight crashes down on the monster's head, splitting it down the middle like a melon. Six arrows peg into the second monster, the wounds they leave oozing a vile yellow fluid. It slumps over dead before taking three more steps.
You have defeated Dire Bear
You have defeated Dire Bear
The woman with the hammer yells something to me in a language I don’t understand. Seeing my confusion, she points far behind me toward the South. I turn, seeing the wall of crimson rise up toward the sky, more impossibly massive than I could have imagined when it was still several miles away. It is less than a mile away now, rising toward the sun. It will blot out the light overhead soon. I can already see its red shadow advancing on us.
The dwarven women are gone when I turn back. I find Macille digging through the steel piles when I look for him.
“We need to go,” I tell him again.
“Kendon,” Macille says, looking back at me, “he could be under here. Kendon!”
“He was on top of the risers,” I say. I look back to the wall of advancing red and see it as it moves. The red does not advance toward us at an even pace, every few seconds the entire thing lurches forward, the barest second between one position and the next. “We were only caught under it because we fell off!”
“That doesn’t mean he can’t be here.” Macille struggles to try and lift a load of iron. He finds someone beneath, but it’s not his brother, and the person isn’t breathing any more. Macille jolts up, dropping the steel again, before falling back onto the ground. I watch him for a second as he breathes on the ground, eyes wide as he stares up at the sky.
“That red wall is coming,” I tell him, pointing South.
The wall jumps forward; the shadow of red falls over Macille’s face as he turns his eyes toward the wall. “I’m unarmed,” he says.
“I know somewhere there are weapons,” I tell him, grabbing his hand and pulling him to his feet. “These monsters don’t look very fast. I bet everyone that could ran into the forest to get away from them and regroup.” I start channeling another Dragonfire Bolt.
The monsters still fighting throughout the prairie are bigger than any I have seen before, and they are clearly strong enough to destroy steel structures. Their charge hadn’t been all that fast, more unexpected and unstoppable than anything else. That said, among the monsters which mostly seem to be the huge Dire Bears, there are others that stand out.
I stare at an especially big bear that stands mostly docile in the prairie, chewing up the corpse of somebody. A Dire Bear begins to approach the bigger bear. The big one turns glowing red eyes on the Dire Bear. A second later, the Dire Bear bursts into flames, falling over dead in just a second or two.
Dire Bear of Burning Gluttony
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
“Where are we going?” Macille asks me.
“Into the forest. There is a spot a few miles in that has a lot of weapons and armor. I can’t believe I’m just figuring out what it’s for now,” I tell him.
Macille removes the shield from his back and straps it onto his left arm. He looks around at the battlefield one last time, but neither he nor I find Kendon, Jor’Mari, or Coriander among the living or the dead. Macille nods at me. “Let’s go then. Don’t stop to fight. We keep running.”
“Of course,” I breathe. I turn and try to spot a path through the battlefield of monsters, magicians, and the dead. “Follow,” I tell him, taking off at a sheer sprint, expecting him to keep up easily enough.
A clear path is a daydream. We run as fast as we can, attracting the attention of bears not engaged in combat with magicians. One lurches our way. I duck the swing of its paw, rolling, and continue to sprint as soon as I make it to my feet. Macille bashes its skull with the edge of his shield as he runs by. I see the bear shake off the braining after only a second and continue running behind us. I choke the relief that starts to rise in me after seeing the Dire Bear unable to keep up with our sprint; a slip in concentration now might be the last mistake I ever make.
Air pumps in and out of my lungs as I push my legs for all they’re worth. I barely catch the hint of something sailing at me from the right. I dodge to the side, rolling again, and see spears of bone sail over my head, thudding into the ground a great distance away. Macille grabs the back of my shirt as he runs past me, hoisting me to my feet with little effort, and pushing me to continue. The sprint to the tree line takes less than thirty seconds. We’re in.
I don’t break stride as we make it into the forest, the grass beneath our feet disappearing as we run, replaced with detritus. I can’t feel the cold anymore, warmed by my pumping blood and the dragonfire I continue to hold in my hand. The shadow of the forest descends upon us as we race away from the light.
The battlefield spills into the forest in chaotic spurts of fighting but doesn’t extend much further than a hundred feet or so before the corpses of people and bears thin out to something sporadically seen. I put my back to one of the towering trees of the forest, gulping air and scanning the area around us for a moment to see if we can take a short break. It is only after I stop for a moment in relative safety that the aching in my back starts to lay into me. That fall from the risers earlier had been nearly thirty feet. I have no idea how I am still in shape enough to sprint as far as I had. Perhaps I have been underestimating this magician’s body of mine.
I look at my vital energies: Healing Points 193/230, Mana 306/600, Stamina 143/256. I watch as my healing points continue to flutter at the number it is while mana and stamina continue to recover points. It occurs to me that I must be actively using the healing points, no wonder I recovered from the fall so quickly.
“Are you okay?” Macille asks me.
“I just need a second.” I look at the gash on his head, the blood coagulated, but it still looks grisly. “You should heal yourself while we have the time.”
“Not a bad idea.” Macille raises his hand, light beginning to pool in his palm. He bites his lip, letting his hand drop back to his side and letting the light fade.
“What’s wrong?”
He looks back toward the parade ground we had just fled from. “People need help back there.”
“What can we do for them?” I ask. “You can’t fight those monsters without a weapon. I might be able to take down one or two with the mana I have left, but there are hundreds still back there.” I point to a group of elves sprinting into the trees a dozen or so yards away from us. “They are doing the same thing we are.”
“It’s cowardly,” Macille says. He groans, looking up at the dark canopy overhead. “Adventurers are supposed to fight monster and save people. People are being killed by monsters right now and we are running away.”
“This entire thing was designed to make us run away,” I say. “Did you forget the wall? In ten minutes or so it will start smashing through the parade ground or worse.”
“You think that they want us to run away from monsters? That doesn’t sound like part of a contest to find the strong,” he says.
“I don’t know what they want,” I admit. “All I know is that I don’t want to find out what happens when we stay behind and let a giant wall of glowing red magic touch us. I doubt it will be anything good.”
He spits into the ground. “I hate it.”
I stand, putting a finger in his chest. “Hate it all you like. You agreed to this contest the same as I. I didn’t think it would be this sadistic either, but it is, now we have to live with it.” The words come out harsher than I intend them, but I can’t keep the anger out of my voice. Another group of five sprints past us on our left and I hear the galloping stomps of a monster chasing them.
Hissing a breath through my teeth, I try to calm my voice. “Look. Everyone around us that can is running as fast as they can toward the battlefield I found yesterday. Looks like word about it has gotten around.”
“Battlefield?”
“Yes, Macille. Yesterday, after the first speech, I explored the forest and found a battlefield littered with the corpses of soldiers, their armor and weapons still there. Obviously, it is the place where all of the magicians that left their weapons and armor behind before are supposed to equip themselves. That is where we are going. That is where the others will be going.”
Macille looks back the way we came. “People here still need help. They need my help.”
“The people at the battlefield will need your help more,” I tell him. “Your brother will need your help there.” That gets his attention.
“What?”
“There are rank two monsters walking around there. Ones with weapons, and ones that I suspect are far more dangerous than the bears behind us. That asshole dressed like a god wants to crush us between those scary ass monsters and the bears. If we don’t break through the ones on the battlefield, the bears will catch up and kill us. That is what this is.”
He looks at me for a long second. I watch a drop of blood collect on his chin, falling to stain an already bloody spot on his tunic. “Are you sure that’s what this is?”
“Yes,” I lie. I know anything else will see him going back and dying in the fight with the bears.
“Why didn’t he wait for me?” he asks.
“I don’t know,” I tell him, gripping his arm. “We will find him.”
“This is wrong,” he says, starting to trudge northward, away from the carnage behind us.
“It is,” I agree.
We are both running after a handful of seconds.
I keep my eyes on the canopy as we run through the forest, but I don’t catch any sign of monsters lurking in the trees. Yesterday, when I made this same trip, nothing attacked me as long as I kept on moving. I hope nothing stops us this time either.
The break in the trees that demarks the snowy battlefield eventually comes into sight. The backs of several people face me, standing on the edge of the tree line, a dozen or more just in front of me. Macille and I slow to a trot, stepping up next to everyone else and looking out at the battlefield that softly rises away from us.
There are new bodies out in the snow, fresh blood sprayed onto the white. I see an armored monster holding two blood-slick daggers in its limp arms as it stumbles around in the snow. Three dead magicians lay near its feet.
“That one is really fast,” I hear a voice say behind me. I turn, seeing Dovik Willian standing at the edge of the forest, a few other magicians around him as he nods out toward the armored soldier with the daggers. “Hello, Mrs. Devardem. I knew that we would meet again.”
“Who are you?” Macille asks, taking a step forward in front of me.
“Someone I met yesterday here,” I tell Macille, putting a hand on his arm.
“You trust him?” he asks me. “He is a competitor. Everyone here is.”
Dovik raises his empty hands. “I didn’t hear anything about us needing to knock each other out of the competition to pass,” he says. “In fact, there seemed to be a real lack of laying out any rules for this contest. I don’t doubt other will turn on each other, but I have no such intentions.” Dovik waves a hand toward the people milling about behind him, five in total. “I am more interested in putting a group together to deal with all this crazy bullshit. I’m not delusional enough to think that I could survive all this alone.”
Out of everything he says, it’s only the last bit that I think might be a lie.
“Will you be okay alone here for a moment?” Macille asks me. “I want to go see if I can find the others.”
“Go,” I tell him, holding up my flaming hand. The orange is deeper than I have ever gotten it before, brighter too, but nothing near that white fire I threw at the Dire Bears earlier.
“Thanks,” he says, jogging away to look for his brother.
“Others?” Dovik asks me.
“I thought you were informed about your niece’s pupils,” I say back to him.
“Ah.” Dovik nods. “There is another one that I was hoping to meet. I hope your friend is successful in finding them. The more the merrier.”
“You saw the monster fight,” I say, nodding to the armored monster with the daggers up the slope.
Armor of Forgotten Dead
“I did,” Dovik says, allowing me to change the subject. He frowns and follows my gaze up the slope. “They thought three would be enough to get through it. They were wrong. Rank two monster with high speeds are especially nasty. I’ve never had to consider one that had weapons before. That’s rare.”
“Not here it would seem,” I say, pointing out at least two of the other armored monsters.
“Not here,” he agrees.
“Do you have a plan to deal with it?” I ask.
“No.” He tries to smile at me, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. “We were going to continue down along the tree line until we found another monster that we think we will be able to beat. Something that looks slow, preferably.” He glares at the monster up the slope. “Though, something tells me that it won’t be that easy.”
I glare as well, and I am shocked when Galea swims into my vision. The dragon grins silently at me, pointing in the direction I am looking. The light of three magical auras rise into the still, frigid air. The magic items that the dead magicians were carrying.
“Can we retrieve their bodies?” I ask Dovik.
“Why?”
“That one,” I say, pointing to one of the fallen magicians. “He has a magical sword. If we need to fight with these monsters, that will be useful.”
Dovik gives me a strange look. “That’s a little cold, don’t you think.”
“It’s practical,” I say.
“It doesn’t matter,” Dovik waves off the thought. “Just stepping out onto the snow was enough to get the attention of that monster when those three made a break for it. I don’t have an ability that would allow us to retrieve their bodies, and I don’t know anyone else who does.”
“What then,” I say.
“I suggest that we wait for your friend and then look for easier prey. We are well ahead of the wall I think, and I doubt those bears will catch up to us for a while. A few minutes ago, we saw a group of twelve or so manage to charge through, killing one of the Armors quickly before making it to the other side of the rise. If we have enough people, it is possible.”
“Maybe,” I say.
“What do you have to lose in trusting me a little bit?” Dovik asks.
“Other than my life?”
“Other than that.”
“Not much really,” I say. I continue to stare out at the monster until I hear Macille pacing back toward us. I turn to look at him.
“Couldn’t find anyone,” he tells me.
“Maybe they already made it across,” I say.
“Kendon wouldn’t do that,” he says. “There is no way he would just leave us back there like that. Something is going on.”
“I don’t know Macille,” I say. “It’s strange, but maybe he thought we died when the risers collapsed.”
“He would have still dug us out,” Macille says.
“You can keep looking for him,” Dovik cuts in. “You look like a strong man. I would appreciate your help. We were just about to continue down the tree line, looking for an easier place to cross. This battlefield seems to go on forever in both directions. Come with us and I’ll even let you pick which way we check first.”
Macille takes a long moment to stare at Dovik before grunting and nodding. “West,” he says.
“West it is then,” Dovik agrees readily. The man turns to the others behind him that had been speaking. “Looks like we have two more with us, and that we’re going West from here.” The man gets a few nods and the others shifting behind Dovik begin to ready themselves to move. He turns back to me and Macille. “Welcome to the team.”