"Fillin, I understand that my question is sort of rude, not very diplomatic and, in a sense, even intimate... But I'll ask anyway: do you have a plan?" enquired Morgen sullenly watching at the army we were forced to face.
"Aaah! Don't shit your pants, man! I'm gonna do this."
"Do what?"
"I'm gonna kill em' all!"
"Alone?"
"You bet your ass! Watch this."
I leaped from the top of the wall morphed into an owl and flew up into the sky. Behind me, I heard a faint: "He can't be serious?"
But as soon as I crossed some invisible line, I woke up at the castle respawn point.
"Well, that was quick... What hit me?"
"Lightning..."
"Time for round two!"
...
"What now?"
"A fire spear..."
"Okay, I'll try running."
I jumped from the wall and ran at the endless wave of enemies with the creepiest facial expression I could muster.
...
"Ummm..."
"Looked like som telekenetin mumbo-jumbo."
...
"An arrow of darkness."
...
"A giant icicle."
...
"That bush over there, ate you."
...
"A crossbow bolt to the head."
...
"Acid."
"Yeah, I fuckin' noticed!"
...
"A water whip."
...
"Heck, if I know, but it looked amazing!"
...
After about three hundred deaths, I got sad.
"Morgen! I don't want to play like this anymore! I must be missing something! Like I can't even get in range to use my spells."
"Well, what did you expect?! They are an army of well-trained and well-coordinated groups of NPC's lead be heroes of level hundred and over!"
"Okay, but why the hell have they stopped like a quarter of a mile away from our castle and are completely ignoring us!? I mean, with an army like that, they would have reduced the whole place to nothing in less than a minute! Or even sooner!"
"It's one of the game's rules. After a stronghold has been captured, it cannot be attacked for five days."
"Maaaan, I would..."
"Yeah, yeah, yeah. We know. You'd shit on the laws of physics themselves if you had a chance. But our little, nameless castle is protected by an impenetrable force-field."
"And now what?"
"Now they'll wait for a couple of days, while we soak in the desperation of our situation. The NPC's will be slaughtered. We will be forced into the res-point. Then they'll probably incapsulate us and drag us away to torture us for eternity as an example to all the other would-be smart-asses. Okay, eternity is a bit farfetched, but you can easily spend a couple of years in a room flooded with cyanide, and they won't even break a sweat."
"Fine, let's try plan B. Louie! Legolas!"
"Huh?"
"Yes, Boss?"
" Okay, guys, here's how it's gonna go. You gotta make a run for it and reach those cowardly fuckers that have surrounded us and kill as many of them as you can. Legolas will be the Tank, Lou - damage's on you. The main thing we're hoping for is that the enemy mages will murder themselves in horrific and comical ways by hitting Louie."
"Fine..." Legolas needed no more explanations. I wonder if he's ever heard of Dzen-Buddhism? The guy could quickly become a great guru. All he has to do is hum vaguely, smile a lot, and never open his mouth. Bam! We'll have a wise-ass monk, and we'll say that he's taken a vow of silence...
But I'm distracted from my nontrivial human-resource management by a PM from Louie:
"A 1000 gold for each attempt!"
"10! And say hello to your grandma from Israel for me."
"950, and I don't have a grandma from Israel."
"Nah, man, I'm pretty sure you do... 11."
"Fillin, I am on your payroll, and what you're having me do is probably gonna hurt! 900!"
Two hours later.
"ONE. HUNDRED. AND. FUCKING. TWELVE! And not a gold piece less!" Judging by the expression on his face, Louie was throwing a silent chat tantrum.
"Sold! Here's the contract!"
"If only my granny knew..." Lou broke off: "Hold on, don't tell me your mom isn't Jewish."
"Worse, Louie... I've got gypsy in my blood. Once I even sold an Idea for a million bucks."
"An idea?"
"Yeup, just an idea. Not a business plan, not a patent, not a firm. An idea."
"So? Was it a great one? How much money did it make?"
"That's the fun part. It sucked. It crashed and burned in a matter of seconds. But the point is that I was really convincing. And also, I have a story running in my family."
"What story?"
"My first words when I learned to speak weren't "mama" or "dada". And not even "BRAINS!"
"Gimme" Proposed Morgen.
"Nope, parents said that my first words were: "You will obey". Enough talk. Go forth and wage glorious war. Vence, fetch some beer from the river. And what's for breakfast? Entertaining you fuckers has given me an unhealthy appetite."
Our new team-build was a lot more fun to watch.
Lou and Legolas jumped from the wall, accelerated right before exiting the safe zone, and came under enemy spell-fire. The first one to hit the paladin was something from the school of fire and was made to cover a large area suddenly compressed into a small vortex and disintegrated Legolas. The next one dissipated into a shower of sparks. The third one painted him in a poisonous-green color. The mages began to lose their cool and increased their spell output. And about twenty feet from the squad of knights that were ready to protect the wizards, Lou exploded into green slime.
Our second attack was almost exactly the same. But this time, our kamikazes were assailed with arrows. And they died a lot closer to home.
The third was over in a matter of moments. Lou had some plant grow through him and quickly blossomed with beautiful blue flowers.
On the fifteenth try a spell deflected off our paladin's legendary shield and utterly demolished an entire band of knights. To my disappointment, they were resurrected in a matter of seconds by the priests.
"What the hell!? How are we supposed to beat these immortal bastards?"
After thirty-something deaths, the opposing army decided to engage in a little swordplay, showering out two poor heroes with arrows beforehand. But they were very quick to realize what a big mistake that was. Lou was so pissed off from all the stupid and frustrating deaths that in his burning rage, he looked like a crazed berserker. The blows from his mace and shield sent the poor knights flying in all directions like rag-doll cannonballs. I was really interested in finding out his strength level. The mages panicked and leveled the whole field paladin, soldiers, and all with some sort of mass kill spell. Three mass-kill spells, to be precise. Every single person caught up in the skirmish was killed. But it was soon revealed that our enemies weren't complete soul-less assholes, so they cast an equally massive resurrection rune.
Naturally, Lou got up as fast as the rest of them, and the bloody battle continued. And as a result, the raging paladin was taken down and subdued while roaring insults so loud we heard them. As soon he realized how close he was to being taken hostage, the chaos paladin played the ace in his sleeve. He shouted: "DEVINE PROTECTION!" and his body dispersed into a swarm of giant rats.
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After the first hundred suicide runs, our attacks yielded zero results. The enemy mages quit screwing around, and Legolas and Louie were either squished by telekinesis or swallowed up by the earth instantly. We had to shut down this amusing mini-series.
We tried throwing spells at them, but they all just bounced off the Imperial Army's own force bubble. Having lost all of our hope and enthusiasm, everyone wearily went to bed. We had four days left under the game's protection.
In the middle of the night...
"Holy shit! I've just had a visit from my Muse!" I jumped from my bed in feverish excitement.
"A visit from Schizophrenia more like it. Pipe down its five o'clock in the morning!" Selena angrily turned away from me.
"No! It's a genius idea! With it, we can definitely win and kill everyone! Selena, wake up! I'm gonna need your help!"
"Yeah, kill the whole army, enlarge your dick by five inches without surgical intervention, make a fortune and solve the Shmitd-Veysar equation in Eekola's seventh dimension... Shut the fuck up, Fillin!"
"But..."
A hard kick to the chest sent me flying through the window. My landing wasn't great, and in a few moments, I was looking at my mangled body on the roof of a neighboring building. My bloody left leg began to disappear in bite-sized chunks. Droplets of blood began to rain upon Oakbreaker, who came out to investigate.
"WAKY-WAKY!" I combined my shout with the Sudden Thought incantation. Several spells and heavy objects flew at me from the windows. The dreary army of Chaos crawled begrudgingly into the courtyard.
"Selena, why the hell do you go in for the kill first thing?! How about a warning shot?"
"That was the warning shot! You woke me up, now get to the fucking point! Genius or not, ITS FIVE IN THE FUCKING MORNING!"
"Okay, I know how to destroy the Imperials. Okbreaker, why don't we have firearms here?"
"Cause we don't need them. Call any mage. Why waste time on anachronisms. Lightning strikes faster, Fire burns just fine, telekinesis works wonders."
"I guess nobody cares about thermodynamics in here... Okay, who specializes in telekinesis?"
Turns out, Prof does. I drew my idea on the ground. Prof couldn't stomach it, so he produced his own scroll of paper and asked me to make a reasonable plan. I was assisted in making the first draft by Oakbreaker and Pickle. Who would have thought! The Ogre turned out to have a degree in science of materials. Everybody spent a few minutes in shock from this merciless cognitive dissonance. And the surprises didn't end there: Oakbreaker was an engineer in real life.
Soon our scientific disputes escalated and transformed into a heated rage filled fight. I was sent to the res-point like three times. Once by Pickle and twice by the Prof.
The third time I came back to the sight of a marble statue of myself in underpants. So I came to the conclusion that these were the wrong scientists for the right job. What kind of a world would have a respectable teacher tear off the head of his opponent in a dispute about a construction project? All while screaming: "BRUSH UP YOUR FUCKING CALCULUS!"
Although when I imagined him examining poor students, it brought a smile to my face.
The first official business meeting of Chaos & Co. Inc ended in a joint decision to send the main investor and CEO to wake up the rest of the mages who crawled back to sleep in the heat of the argument.
I cowardly sent Legolas to wake up Selena. At the same time, I carefully scratched at Vencer's door, rigidly standing way behind the door jam. Faust was the least stressful to wake up. He just got up with the routine "What is your bidding, Master?".
When I came back, the second window in Selena's room was smashed, Legolas sat drooping at the res-point, and the fire-sorceress was cursing profusely while writing something on the scrolls of paper. I quietly peeked over Prof's shoulder onto the makeshift table. I was baffled at seeing parchment upon parchment covered in equations and graphs. Jeez-Louise, was this a fantasy game or what? Apparently, Selena had a degree in mathematical sciences.
In ten more minutes, everybody was shamelessly bossing me around to scour the castle in search of the necessary parts and materials. I, in turn, delegated my duties to anyone I could find.
Two hours passed, and we had an entire mountain of scrap metal pilled next to the castle wall.
"And where the hell are we supposed to find Mithril? We need at least twenty pounds!" Selena was digging in the now sorted smaller piles.
"Maybe we could purchase it on an auction? Fillin, we need several ingots of Mithril. Can you cough up the cash?"
"What choice do I have? How much do we need?"
"Three hundred thousand."
I choked on my tea and spat a mouth full of hot leaf water all over my naked thigh since I didn't get around to putting on any clothes.
"Well, we might try Adamantine. We'll need less of it, but it's seven or eight times more expensive. And no guarantee that we'll be able to mold it."
"Steve! There's gonna bloody fucking murder!"
"Wha?" The conjurer stared at me in bewilderment and backed away a little as I advanced.
"How much adamantine did we leave at that fucking cave?!"
"A lot..."
"The fucking MOTHERLOAD, man!! Why the fuck didn't we sell the stuff!? There was a shit-tone of that god-forsaken highly valuable unscientific stuff!! Two-three tons for sure!"
"Probably..."
"FOUR! HUNDRED! MILLION!! FOUR HUNDRED. FUCKING MILLION!! I got away with just a few pounds of the stuff! And gave most of it away for a teleport and my laughable pathetic string!"
"Wow, Fillin, where are you going?"
"To cry tears of greed..."
"Fillin...."
"What?! Fillin, Fillin! A bad-ass orbital flyer costs twenty-five thousand gold, an apartment in the center of Moscow - ten million! The average wage is a measly thousand! And two pounds of virtual non-existent shit - two-hundred and ten thousand gold pieces!! For those of you who can fucking count, that's eighteen flyers, and seventeen years of exemplary work! I fucking threw away four hundred million! You can all go fuck yourself and take these pricelists with you!"
"Fillin..."
"WHAT!? What are you so eager to tell me, Morgen!? Go on, spit it out!"
"Remember how you killed my crew and me with the musical instruments when we first met? If I recall correctly, that was the "Any wish" favor. And it costs just a little over ten million..."
I silently sped up and leaped over the wall. The sight of a naked screaming man demoralized the sentries so much that they didn't even open fire. About twenty feet from a skittish formation of knights, I snapped my neck and activated the invulnerability. And leaped barehanded into their midst. I think I even offed someone, but I can't' be sure since my head was rotated directly backward.
Excursus 2
Inside the besieged castle, a band of players was using the schools of fire and telekinesis to create a weapon never-before-seen on this earth. Standing on the bank of a river of beer, it fumed with incantations and spells that created a barrier that was keeping anything alive or dead sealed within. And only in the direction of the field a path was kept open for the advance of the Imperial Army. The loyalist soldiers were waiting for the end of the inviolability of the fortress to end. These were the rules of the game, and few dared to oppose them.
A man wearing nothing more than his underwear and a sock rushed the army almost every five minutes. Upon crossing the protective barrier, he would commit suicide by snapping his neck, or by jamming a shard of stone into his own temple, become invulnerable and attack the infantry. Those he killed were effortlessly restored, and the soldiers laughed at the futile attempts of an emanation of Chaos to corrupt their spirits.
The Imperial Army set up camp and was in the middle of the strangest siege in its entire history.