While we moved towards the swampy area Kaiser and Spook were at, I found a way to minimise the map screen and change the opacity. Modern games almost always had some kind of mini-map that appeared in the top right corner of your view, so that’s where I instinctively moved this window. The interface thrust upon us by the Alarendei Empire was surprisingly user-friendly and responsive to thought commands. I was begrudgingly impressed.
Both Marilyn and Lockjaw wanted to stop Grendel from killing Kaiser or Spook, so we played a little game of evasion by proxy. Whenever Grendel changed position, they fed me the information, and I passed that on to Kaiser and Spook. In turn, they used it to stay one step ahead of Grendel and escape his clutches.
We couldn’t share messages through chat with other squads, but there was nothing stopping us from talking. We could coordinate across squads as long as we had one member of each squad physically located together. I felt like that would be important in the days to come. Five squads united would be much more powerful than five squads divided.
According to Kaiser, Grendel was so overtaken with single-focused fury that he was pulling the attention of all the stinky knights that patrolled around the swamp ruins. Kaiser was adamant the enemies were bad stinky, not good stinky. That was an important distinction, apparently.
Soon enough, the ruins came into view, and I was not looking forward to fighting in this place. The whole swamp was covered in thick clusters of mangroves, which messed with the lines of sight. Combined with the sucking mud that threatened to immobilise you, this was the perfect place to get stuck and die a horrible, messy death you couldn’t escape from.
It wasn’t all bad, though. Pathways of solid ground wove through the mangroves towards a multi-level crumbling ruin. As the map’s fog of war dissipated I could see the top-down view a lot better. The ruin was mostly rectangular in shape, with only one point it could be entered from ground level. Kaiser and Spook’s markers were inside that ruin, while Grendel remained outside, engaged in a battle we could hear but not see. Savage snarls and wet gurgles fought for dominance.
“We need to use this terrain to our advantage,” I said. “Has Grendel said anything about what he’s fighting?”
“Grendel is not good with his words,” Lockjaw said.
I caught sight of something wandering along one of the raised paths through solid ground. It wore a suit of armour, but the thing inside it was a corpse in the bloating stage of decomposition. The skin was mostly green, but black in places where the necrotic decay had progressed. It held a rusty sword in one hand and a rotten shield in the other. It made a squelching noise as it walked.
A sudden notification on the global channel almost scared the crap out of me.
Jeremy Gilmour [Heartlight Vanguard] has slain the Proud Archfiend in the Soulburn Mountains Zone!
250 points have been added to their squad’s total. [Heartlight Vanguard] are the current #1 squad on the leaderboard!
Heartlight Vanguard was a strange squad name that I assumed had some kind of meaning that wasn’t readily apparent to me. They had that bald woman named Arclight in their team, which was similar but not the same. Was there a connection there?
Heartlight Vanguard had a score of 390, while EDGE Force had a total score of 305. Somehow we’d racked up an extra 55 points outside of killing the Rancid Shardhide, but I hadn’t received any notifications about how that was calculated. Next up was Edgebreaker with 130 points, then Monster Squad with 95, and Reality Benders bringing up the rear with 75 points.
If Edgebreaker or Monster Squad managed to kill one of these high-value targets, they would easily take our spot on the leaderboard.
That was when the Rotknight Crier saw us. I don’t know how, because the corpse had writhing maggot colonies for eyes, but it saw us nonetheless. It was level 5, but only had a danger rating of Low. Maybe the danger rating had something to do with both my level and the number of other contest combatants close by? There was so much I didn’t know.
The Rotknight raised its head and bellowed as though it was calling for help. I wanted to smack myself around the head for not realising what the name meant. It was a Rotknight Crier, like a Town Crier. It was made to get the attention of others.
Suddenly the surface of the swamp began to roil and bubble as an entire horde of other rotting corpses rose from the stagnant water. This new force was made up of Rotknights, Bloatmages, and Marrowrangers. They outnumbered us at least three to one, and the smell was horrendous.
The Rotknights all crawled out of the muck and onto raised ground, but the Bloatmages rose to the surface of the water and stood on it as they wetly chanted incantations. The Marrowrangers climbed the sides of the mangrove trees and prepared to fire on us with bows and arrows.
“This isn’t good,” I said.
Lockjaw just shook his head. “No, this is great!”
He rushed headlong into the battle and got within melee range of the Rotknights. Lockjaw let loose a thick stream of toxic gas, which added a poisoned debuff to all the knights standing on solid ground. I activated my Balaran Knight armour, flexed my claws, and then joined Lockjaw in battle. Somehow Marilyn could transform her feet into a kind of slime that let her skate over the top of the water like an ice skater, and she set about stopping those Bloatmages from casting.
An arrow slammed into my back from one of the Marrowrangers as I went to take a swipe at a Rotknight. The pain was explosive, somehow finding a gap in my armour, but that wasn’t the most terrifying thing. A poisoned debuff appeared, which drained my health at 2% per second over 30 seconds. By the end of the debuff, I’d be down a whopping 60 percent of my entire health pool, and that was way too close to dying.
Sure, I’d resurrect the next day, but I didn’t want to be the second to die. Astrid McKillop had gone down first due to an unlucky encounter with the Gargonath, which meant she’d start the second day of the contest at a severe disadvantage.
I had a little anima in my tank, and I wasn’t far away from Level 2. I used my blessing to convert that anima into pure experience points, which propelled me all the way up to the cusp of Level 2, but not actually into the level. If I was on the brink of levelling, killing one of these monsters would send me over the edge, and hopefully heal me back to full.
I’d based that assumption on nothing aside from remembering my son playing an online MMORPG where if you levelled up during combat, your mana and health were automatically refilled. I wanted to test to see if this was the case in this competition.
If not, I’d have to switch up my strategy to avoid an untimely death.
I slashed my claws into a nearby Rotknight and tore it to shreds. The danger rating was right: by themselves, these enemies weren’t much of a challenge. It was when they all attacked together that they became deadly.
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I killed the Rotknight by harvesting anima from it, which replenished much of what I’d just used, and sent me up to Level 2.
Congratulations, Hatchet! You’ve reached Level 2!
You now have 3 attribute points to allocate.
You’ve received 1 Skill Token.
You’ve received 1 Gear Token.
There was no time to get my head around how character progression worked at that moment. I was too busy focusing on how the hell I was going to keep myself from dying. Levelling up had not refilled my health, which meant it was up to me to do it myself. Back in Romania, I’d used the anima stored within myself to heal others. Was there a way I could use that same mechanic to heal myself?
I tried to push anima from my tank into my own body to push the toxin out, and I was thoroughly relieved when it worked. It only countered about half the damage caused by the poison, but it was better than nothing. I earned myself a new skill by doing this called Refresh, which I could only use on myself. Curiously, this actually used my mana and not the anima I had stored in my tank. After this battle was done, I’d try healing Lockjaw or Marilyn to see if I could also learn an external healing skill too.
Lockjaw tore through the masses of knights and used his colossal strength to hurl their armoured corpses at the Marrowrangers in the trees. He didn’t hit them every time, but he interrupted their constant rain of arrows as they had to hide from the flying bodies. Marilyn used a particularly nasty strategy for dealing with the Bloatmages. One by one, she schlurped her slimy body into whatever open cavity she could find, then expanded herself while inside the bodies of the mages.
The result was messy, explosive, and looked like something out of a B grade horror movie. Those films always held a special place in my heart, especially when they used practical effects, but something in the back of my mind immediately wondered where Marilyn had learnt she could do such a thing.
I still hadn’t really come to grips with the reality that this dinosaur dude and the slime lady actually existed out there on Earth somewhere before today. Twenty-five warriors had been chosen for this contest, but how many of us existed out there already? Surely there had to be more people who went bump in the night.
An arrow slammed into my shoulder and stuck tight in my glowing green armour. I reached up and grabbed it, then pulled it out. It hadn’t even reached my skin, which was a great comfort. There was a great splintering crack where the arrow hit though, and it took some time for the armour to mend itself. It drained a little of the anima from my tank to repair the crack.
I took more than a few arrows as Lockjaw and I worked through the Rotknights. We racked up experience points but didn’t have enough time to loot the corpses while we were under attack. I didn’t like Lockjaw throwing the bodies of the Rotknights at the Marrowrangers, because it meant we’d never be able to loot them properly without getting stuck in the mire.
By the time we’d vanquished our foes, we were all looking worse for wear. Marilyn looted what she could from the bodies stuck in the swamp, while I focused on trying to heal Lockjaw. For some reason, this dinosaur hybrid guy seemed to trust me already. He didn’t baulk at me stabbing my claws into his wounds to try to heal them.
“So what’s the story with this whole situation?” Lockjaw motioned to my claws as I pushed anima into the site of a particularly nasty cut on his arm.
“This is a blessing from an interdimensional dragon,” I said without feeling the need to further elaborate. I had a feeling his own story was just as strange.
Lockjaw grinned, exposing his savage teeth the size of kitchen knives even further.
“I daresay we’d all have some stories to tell if we roasted marshmallows over a campfire,” he said. “Me and Marilyn? We go way back. We were both Mnemtech experiments, but we figured out a way to break out. I doubt they ever turned anyone else into slime after Marilyn. She took down their whole operation by sneaking in and out of vents and frying their computers. Bullet just goes right through her now, you know.”
“You know Grendel is a product of Mnemtech too, right?” I asked.
Lockjaw’s tiny little eyes went wide. “Really? As I said, Grendel pretty much just growls and broods. He hasn’t told us anything. That’s not such a surprise now that I think about it.”
“My first mission involved an old Mnemtech base. Both Kaiser and Grendel came from it. But they did something else to Grendel, injected him with something called a relic catalyst, and it warped him into the scary-looking beast he is now. But once upon a time, he was a carbon copy of Kaiser.”
“The relic catalyst was what they used on Marilyn and me too. They said it’s something old, ancient even, and it lets them do whatever they want to the genetic code of their victims.” Lockjaw gave a dry laugh. “They called us subjects, but we were victims.”
At that moment another notification appeared. I’d unlocked an ability called Minor Heal, which let me restore health and cure small wounds in others. This ability, just like Refresh, used mana instead of anima. I pulled my claws out of Lockjaw’s arm, then repeated the process on a huge gash across his chest. This time he winced as I slipped my glowing claws into his skin.
“I didn’t always look like this,” Lockjaw continued. “Some would say it’s an improvement. But there are some upsides. I’m a hell of a lot harder to kill now, and I never need to wear a costume when I go to Comic-Con.”
My mind circled back around to something I’d said a minute ago, and then I found myself thinking out loud.
“If Grendel is a carbon copy of Kaiser, then he’s still in there somewhere. He’s all twisted up from what Mnemtech did to him, but it’s not Kaiser he needs to be pissed at. It’s not actually Kaiser he wants to kill. It’s Mnemtech itself. They’re responsible.”
“You and I both know that there’s a whole team of Mnemtech goons here on the plateau with us,” Lockjaw said.
Marilyn rejoined us just in time to expound on this line of thought. “Two of Robert Forge Senior’s heavy hitters were chosen for this contest too. Jeremy Gilmour and Isaac McMillen are here with Robert Forge Junior, no doubt as his bodyguards. Isaac came really close to killing me before I helped Lockjaw escape the Mnemtech facility we escaped from.”
“Gilmour is Forge’s right-hand man,” Lockjaw continued. “He’s been hunting me for years down in the Louisiana swamps. Where else can a face like this blend in, huh?”
“So if Grendel wants revenge, we need to point him at Mnemtech. Not Kaiser.” My tone was firm. If Grendel managed to kill Kaiser he would be resurrected, but I didn’t want him to go through that. It wasn’t just that Kaiser would end up behind on the levelling front - I didn’t want Kaiser to have to go through that terror.
Lockjaw nodded. “Right.”
Then, a message came through from Kaiser on the chat.
Kaiser: We found a dungeon at the bottom of the ruins. You have to pass through this weird mist barrier before you go inside, and it warned us that only squad members can access the same instance of the dungeon. I don’t even know what that means, but I think we’re safe from Grendel for now. He hasn’t followed us in. He almost got us. My leg hurts.
Hatchet: Okay, buddy. I’m coming in there after you. I just got a healing skill, so I’ll fix you up. You should be safe for now, especially if the instance is locked to your squad mates.
Kaiser: This place looks dangerous. Come quickly.
I relayed this information to Lockjaw and Marilyn and they also didn’t know what an instance was, so I explained.
“This whole place is pretty much a gigantic video game, and instances are kind of like mini universes separate from the overworld. Separate from everything. I can walk through the mist and into the dungeon to find Kaiser and Spook, but if you all rush into the same dungeon, through the same door, you’ll only be able to see people from your own squad in your own version of the dungeon. We can both be clearing the same dungeon at the same time, but different instances of it. It’s how multiplayer online games can have lots of people doing the same dungeon without having groups competing for kills or overwhelming undertuned enemies with Zerg Rush tactics.”
Lockjaw blinked at me. “Are you even speaking English right now?”
Marilyn smiled and patted Lockjaw on the back. “Don’t worry, I understood it. You just bite anything that moves, big guy. Trust me.”
“You know I do, sugar.”
“Think about chess,” Marilyn continued. “The rules are two opposing sides with limited resources. Imagine the chaos if someone suddenly added a third force to the game. It wouldn’t be fair anymore. The game can only be played within those established rules. Instanced dungeons follow that same logic. The Alarendei Empire only wants squads to be able to face the dangers within those dungeons alone. They don’t want other squads helping out. It’s about control.”
“Those fuckers,” Lockjaw growled.
“It’s fine,” I said. “We need to understand the rules of this game to be able to break them. Plus, once Kaiser, Spook and I clear the dungeon, we can share our intel with you so you guy can go in armed with knowledge of how to beat it.”
Lockjaw grinned. “Then we should probably get you into the ruins.”
“We’ll get Grendel away from here if we can,” Marilyn added.
“If we get separated, remember the bridge over the river. That’s where the EDGE Force Squad will be going after this,” I said.
After looting as many enemies as we could, we continued on through the swamp.