The seven coffins each slid open at the same time. Mist puffed out as cracked and mummified hands reached out to pull dead things free from their final resting places.
A notification appeared as these revenants pulled themselves free of their coffins and took up arms to fight us.
The Rotten Council.
Defeat the seven ancient revenants of the Rotten Council to conquer the Mistbegotten Crypt.
Each of the revenants that rose from their coffins wore clothes of a quality and style that set them above the bloatmages, marrowrangers, and rotknights that we had fought throughout the crypt elsewhere. Had the types of enemies we fought so far in the ruins and the crypt subtly prepared us for the attack patterns of this Rotten Council?
Two of the council were called Bloated Archmages and they held staves made from gnarled branches in their hands. They immediately began chanting something in their wet-throated gurgles. Two other council members drew bone arrows from quivers on their backs and nocked them. These were called Bonerangers. Two more wielded tarnished swords and shields and wore heavy plate armour, and these were called Scourgeknights.
Those six were similar to the ones that we’d already fought, but the seventh member of the council was something that we had not seen before. The seventh was the largest of the council members and stood easily half a metre taller than the others. It was significantly bulkier and wore heavy armour, adorned with spikes on the shoulders, elbows, and knees. A wicked helmet sat atop its skinless skull, with two horns that rose into the air in savage points. It held a massive greatsword in both hands, and its eyes glowed an icy shade of blue.
This seventh and final member was called Varokan the Destroyer, and he let loose a cry that echoed all throughout the chamber. This was the clarion call that spurred the Rotten Council to launch themselves towards us.
“We have the high ground!” I shouted as I refreshed my Balaran Armour. The cracked pieces had almost regenerated, but I focused my anima to those places where they needed to re-form. “We defend this position, and they’ll have to rush the stairs to get us!”
The only way into the chamber from here was down the stairs, but there were two pillars that stood at either side of the stairway. I quickly ducked behind one of these and motioned for Kaiser and Spook to do the same.
“We wait for them to come up the stairs. Spook, you hit them with a Get Away From Me and blast them back down the stairs. The mages and rangers won’t be able to hit us if we’re out of line of sight.”
Spook nodded, and Kaiser stayed by her side. I was glad he’d decided to take care of the young one.
Kaiser: I’ll mop up any of the others that make it through with a Sic ‘em.
The sound of creaking bones crept ever closer. Their ancient joints clicked as they moved in ways they hadn’t in millennia. I idly wondered as the seconds ticked by if this Rotten Council had been here in the Plateau of the Architects for centuries. Were they real, or a part of this contest dreamt up by the Empire? Regardless of their origins, they had almost reached us.
Suddenly a bone arrow slammed into my shoulder. It cracked through my pauldron and drove into my flesh.
“Ah, fuck!” I shouted and poked my head around the side of the pillar.
I pulled my head back a second later and another bone arrow flew past where my head was a moment earlier. In those few seconds I managed to see the two bonerangers take up firing positions where they could get an angle to hit us behind the pillars. The two scourgeknights and archmages climbed the stairs with their eyes blazing the same intense blue of Varokan the Destroyer.
“Keep your heads down!” I shouted. “The moment you cast Get Away From Me, you’re going to need to Mist Blink back to safety, Spook! Otherwise you’re going to get filled with arrows.”
The young warrior looked whiter than normal. A few seconds later as the rattling of bones became impossible to ignore, Spook stepped out and cast Get Away From Me, which blew the knights and mages back down the stairs. In her panic, Spook cast Mist Blink, but she must have been looking down at the circle surrounded by sarcophagi. Her eyes went wide as she exploded into mist, and that mist cloud rushed down the stairs.
“Oh shit. New plan, save the kid!” I shouted.
Kaiser and I rushed out from behind our pillars and down the stairs. Arrows whizzed by, but we were fast enough to avoid most of them. One came really close to slamming into Kaiser, but passed through the shaggy black and gold fur of his underbelly instead.
We reached the bottom just as Spook reformed from mist. She stood right before Varokan the Destroyer, whose skinless face formed a death grin as he lifted his greatsword ready to strike. The poor kid must have been looking at the boss when she activated the ability. I couldn’t even use my stomp ability to interrupt or stagger the destroyer because Spook was in the way.
Luckily Kaiser was on the case, and he ran down the stairs at a clip to get to Spook before the greatsword came down and ended her first day’s run too early. Kaiser leapt up and chomped down on the hem of Spook’s trousers, then pulled her out of the way. The greatsword slammed down into the stone floor a second later.
Meanwhile, I fired off a stomp to the right-hand side, positioning myself so I would hit one arechmage and one boneranger, before summoning my claws and slashing towards one of the approaching scourgeknights.
Varokan the Destroyer grunted in frustration as his kill was taken from him. Kaiser rushed to the left of the arena and activated his Sic ‘Em ability at the archmage. Kaiser leapt at the archmage and tore into its rotten throat, cutting off the spell it was trying to cast. In some games you needed to use a specific ability to interrupt spellcasting or channelled attacks, but maybe that wasn’t the case here.
Choking a motherfucker still choked a motherfucker.
I wanted to rush over to my buddy’s side, but it was impossible while trying to fend off this knight with its sword and shield. It managed to land a couple of hits on me, but my Balaran Armour held out.
The anima fuelled armour cracked in a few places as the sword slammed into it, but it held. The knight’s armour was rotting and tarnished, but it still stopped me from slipping my claws into it to draw the anima out. There had to be a way for me to remove its armour and suck the energy out of it.
The breastplate was only held by one leather strap. The strap on the other side had been eaten through by time and decay, so I focused my energy into my claws. I lashed out and tried to cut the other side of the breastplate off. On my first attempt the scourgeknight managed to deflect my blow with its shield, but I circled around to the side so that the archmage was also in a straight line behind the knight, and then unleashed another Leshy Stomp.
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A wave of force rocketed away from my feet, slamming into the knight in front of me, and then slammed into the archmage behind it that was already muttering an incantation to cast another spell.
The knight was staggered, and the bloatmage was interrupted. I used the opportunity to slip my claw underneath that second leather strap and tear it away. The breastplate clattered to the ground, revealing a desiccated rib cage filled with putrescent organs. The blackened lungs still inflated and deflated as though it was trying to breathe, but there was no heart to be seen. I slammed my claws into the thing’s chest, and I drew all of the anima I could out of it.
The total in my anima tank rose, and it felt good to have anima to draw on again. If worse comes to worst I’d be able to use an anima grenade to turn the tide in this battle. If it didn’t come to that, then I’d be able to convert all of that anima into experience points at the end of the fight, or I could hoard that anima for another grenade in the overworld. That would be an easy way to destroy another high value target if we needed to.
As I continued sucking energy out of the knight, Kaiser yelped in pain. I swung my head around to see an arrow sticking out of his flank, shot by the boneranger nearest to me. I quickly finished off the knight by grabbing its spinal cord with one hand, then stuck my fingers into the eye sockets like it was some kind of fucked up bowling ball. I tore its head off, then threw the head right at the archmage as I ran by towards the boneranger.
I tried to punch the boneranger straight in the head, but it used some kind of ability to leap backwards out of my reach. I swore under my breath, then chased after it. Kaiser yelped again as another arrow slammed into him from the other boneranger. They were targeting Kaiser for some reason. Maybe because he had the best manoeuvrability and greatest potential for burst damage? I grunted in frustration, took a quick glance at my mana total, and realised it would still be some time before I could fire off another Leshy Stomp.
I had anima in my tank, but none of the abilities that I had were useful in this situation. There was no forest so I couldn’t increase my movement speed, there were no trees or high landmarks, so I couldn’t use Death From Above, and an anima grenade would just take too damn long to charge up for it to be useful. I needed to rely on an old faithful. I drew my bone hatchet and wielded it in one hand, and used the claws on my other hand as I rushed across the battlefield to Kaiser’s side.
“Spook, where the hell are you?” I called out as I crossed the room.
The kid was nowhere to be seen. Had she used Mist Blink again and messed up? Had she already been killed? No. There would have been a broadcast that went out through the general channel if she had died, just like the one when Astrid McKillop died. No, that meant that Spook was still somewhere within this battlefield, but she’d chosen to stop fighting.
Maybe she was scared.
Kaiser limped away from the knight and the destroyer. He had three arrows sticking out of his side, and I placed my body between him and the two bonerangers which were gearing up for more shots. I put my hand on Kaiser’s back and used Minor Heal. Energy passed from my hand into Kaiser, but I was going to need to do something very unpleasant.
“This is going to hurt buddy. Grit your teeth and we’ll get this over with quick, okay?”
Kaiser growled, but he didn’t object. Normally if you got hit with an arrow, traditional wisdom was to leave it in place until you could get it professionally removed. In the real world nobody had access to instant healing abilities which would cause fresh wounds to heal over in a short amount of time.
I pulled two of the arrows out and Kaiser sent a string of obscenities in the chat. I was a little impressed. I didn’t know Kaiser’s vocabulary was that extensive when it came to cursing, but Kaiser’s comment drew the concern of both Naginata and Big Mac. There was no time to answer them. It was currently two against six. I’d only managed to kill one of them so far and four of the remaining six could attack us from range.
I knew that Spook was just a kid, but it didn’t stop me from being pissed off. Spook had talked like she was this expert on how these kinds of games worked. She’d been okay fighting against the Mistbegotten Leshy, but this council was something different. Was it because the destroyer had almost managed to kill her? Or was Spook ashamed that she put herself into that position with the misuse of one of her abilities?
As Kaiser and I rallied to try and fight off the other knight and the destroyer, I quickly fired off a reassuring message into the chat.
Hatchet: It’s not your fault, Spook. We know that you didn’t have a handle on your abilities, and we don’t blame you. But right now, you have a choice. You can either let your shame rule you, which could get Kaiser and I killed, or you can rise up to the task and help us kick these sorry sons of bitches back into their coffins. But you’ve got to make the choice, and you have to make it now.
A few seconds later a scream wrung out from behind Varokan’s coffin. Spook had tears running down her cheeks, and her eyes were ringed with red. She talked a big game, but Spook was just a kid. If my daughter Lorelei was in the same position, she’d probably react the exact same way.
The sadness and frustration disappeared from her face as it was replaced with burning rage. Suddenly something strange happened to Spook. The air around her seemed to shimmer, almost like the air above the road shimmers on a horrifically hot summer day in Australia.
Was it heat, or some other kind of energy? We’d all been chosen for a reason, and the only thing that was common between us was that we had all been changed in some way by anima.
Spook held out her hand towards Varokan the Destroyer and she screamed. As she did, strange pools of energy began to bubble up around the feet of the Rotten Council members near us. Suddenly ghost-like hands emerged from the cracks and grabbed onto the legs of the council members around the room.
This looked very much like Spook’s ability Stop Right There, but it felt like it was a powered-up version of the attack. I’d read many books over the years about teenage girls going through puberty and developing special powers. Carrie and Firestarter by Stephen King were two of the more famous ones. Was that what was happening to Spook here right now?
The phantasmal hands stopped the destroyer, a scourgeknight, an archmage, and a boneranger in their tracks. We needed to take them down quickly and quietly while we had the chance. This time the boneranger couldn’t leap out of my way, so I buried my axe in its face. It still lashed out at me by grabbing two of its ribs and trying to slam them into my chest, but I dodged out of the way. The edge of one scratched the surface of an armour plate but did no damage. The boneranger fell soon after that.
Kaiser took care of the archmage behind me with another Sic ‘Em. Across the room, Spook used Get Away From Me over and over, far beyond what I thought she was capable of. Whatever she’d done had either supercharged her mana regeneration rate or reduced the cost of her abilities to the point where she could spam them.
The remaining four rotten council members around Spook were slammed backwards with each wave of force, while the ghastly apparitions held their legs in place. With each backwards slam, more and more of the rotten council smashed away.
The last scourgeknight dropped its sword and shield, then pieces of its armour smashed as it was slammed into the ground. The bones of the last boneranger and archmage cracked and crumbled too, so Kaiser and I rushed in to finish them off. I drew some anima out of the archmage, which seemed to have more within it than the scourgeknight I’d drained before. The energy rushed into me, filling my tank as the seconds rushed by. The archmage crumbled under my grip, but I’d learned something useful. Enemies that use magic had more anima for me to draw on.
I used Refresh on myself before we turned on Varokan the Destroyer.
With the other six council members dead, Varokan was much easier to deal with. That greatsword of his was a menace, but the big revenant moved slowly and telegraphed its movements. If Varokan raised its greatsword over its shoulder, he was about to slam it down in a powerful force attack, which pushed us backward. If he swung the sword back, he was about to launch into a whirlwind attack. If he opened his skeletal jaws, he was about to unleash a shout that reduced our movement speed.
We timed our attacks in between recovery phases and whittled the boss down, chipping away at its health until it went down on one knee. Varokan the Destroyer opened its mouth for one last shout, but I swung my bone hatchet into his mouth with all my force.
His head and helm went bouncing away as the boss monster died.
Congratulations! You’ve defeated The Rotten Council of the Mistbegotten Crypt!
You have received 500 experience points.
You have received a Boss Prize Box!
Enjoy the spoils of your victory, champions.
Another contest-wide notification went out.
[EDGE Force] members Hatchet, Kaiser, and Spook, have cleared the Mistbegotten Crypt dungeon in the Festergut Swamp. Team [EDGE Force] have earned 500 points, and remain the number 1 squad on the leaderboard!