First, I cast Auditory Illusion, fixing it to a point in the air above me and having it play a set of sounds: silence followed by crickets followed by a soft whisper of the phrase: “Hello, world." Then, certain that it worked the way I wanted it to, we set off up the mountain, going much more slowly now that we knew Haroshi’s group was potentially in earshot.

We gained a lot of elevation—I wanted to be absolutely sure the spell was out of their range. Then, choosing a point further on to land at, I cast my spell and we launched ourselves toward his camp. We heard no cries of alarm as we approached the collection of tents, and so I assumed that we hadn’t been seen as I loosed the spell into a space just beside me, many storeys above their camp below.

I’d thought hard on what I wanted my 64 seconds of looping audio to be, and the system had generously done whatever work remained in composing the sounds I’d chosen. First, eleven seconds of silence—enough time for Cuby and I to glide far from their camp. Then, a series of ear-splitting, cacophonous shrieks, a combination of the bald-eagle sound effect that I’d heard in who-knows-how-many tv shows and movies, the cry of the wyvern I’d fought earlier that night, and a kind of ululating distortion that I’d invented myself. The shrieks grew in volume and number, layering so that it seemed like there were many monsters overhead—then, after 15 or so seconds, suddenly fell silent.

It was horridly loud, louder than a movie theater—more like a concert. Not loud enough to damage our characters, as the spell promised, but loud enough that I couldn’t have heard someone speaking to me even as I glided further and further away.

The silence continued for only a few seconds—the introductory sounds of monsters were only there to convince them they were under attack. They weren’t the ideal noise to keep them from sleeping, just to wake them up.

Then the real sonic torture began.

I had thought hard on what the main body of my repeating audio would be. At first, I’d thought it should be like a hotel fire alarm—a pitched chirp that simply can’t be ignored. But then I realized that mother nature had done a better job than we ever could at composing music to make us squirm.

I played them the sound of a crying infant.

And not an infant crying out because it’s diaper needs changing. I played the throat-scraping, panicked, squealing screams of a baby that someone is hurting.

And I knew it would work, knew that I’d made the right decision as soon as the cries began—because I hated it. Hated, hated, hated to listen to that sound, every fiber in my being demanding that I do something to stop it. Even as we turned toward the slope above Haroshi’s camp my whole body was tense with a deep and ancient anxiety.

We alighted on an awkward, sloped collection of cracked stone and huddled down to watch his camp come to life, lights appearing as people rose and moved about, unsure of what was happening but preparing for an attack.

“Alatar,” Cuby said, emphasizing her words with thought speech as well so that I could understand her easily over the din. “What… what is that?”

“It doesn’t matter. It’ll work.”

“It’s horrible,” she said. I looked over at her and saw that her expression was slack, sickened, her mouth partly open in a confused part-frown. “It’s… I’m a phrenodine. I should just be able to… to vanish it. The feeling, I mean. Why can’t I vanish the feeling?”

But I didn’t answer her, instead watching the figures below and trying to take deep breaths to calm myself as I listened to a baby scream in pain and fear. Haroshi’s people had human instincts, now—enough that a being like Cuby, so clearly inhuman in some ways, still couldn’t help but be disturbed. This would torture them as much as it was torturing me.

As I watched them, the sounds of their shouting not reaching us, I surprised myself by feeling the same sort of cold satisfaction that I’d felt earlier, under the focus potion. It was a feeling I recoiled from almost instantly—this needed doing, but it shouldn’t be enjoyed. I wasn’t a monster.

I saw Haroshi. From this distance I could tag him and read his name, easily. I watched him shout orders to other players that he had to grab by the shoulder to speak with. I watched him cover his ears for a moment, drop his hands at the fruitlessness of it, then seem to let out an agitated scream before searching the nearby mountainsides, but looking nowhere near us.

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Then everything fell silent, and a few shouts from carried-on conversations reached us at our perch before the speakers lowered their voices. The illusion had looped back to its beginning.

I heard the shriek of a wyvern—but from behind us. Then I heard another—from the opposite side of the valley. Then another, from a direction I couldn’t place.

Oh.

“Those aren’t my illusion,” I said to Cuby, moments before the distorted sounds of my spell began again.

“Wyverns,” she said. “Coming here, from the sounds of it.”

I looked down at Haroshi’s camp, well-lit and bustling with activity. “They’ll spot them a lot more easily than they’ll spot us.”

“All right,” said Cuby. “So either we just gave Haroshi’s people some free experience… or we gave ourselves an opportunity.”

I looked into my inventory, found the Warped Spell card—the one that would effectively add 20 meters to the range of my spells. “I think we can make it the latter.”

When the illusory screeching subsided, I listened and heard more cries of wyverns—it sounded like more than the three we’d heard earlier. I knew that Cuby had the Heightened Hearing skill, so I turned to her. “Do they sound like they’re getting closer?” I asked, worried that they might just be crying out in the way that wolves howled.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I—” and then she winced. The baby had begun screaming again. “I hope so,” she added, again reinforcing her speech with thought speech.

“We can wait a few cycles and see,” I said. “Head onward if they’re just making noise, but hopefully get an opportunity to take some of them down.”

We waited, watching them muster for an attack that might not come, a few of them casting buffs—one of them who definitely caught my interest.

“Give me the spyglass,” I said. “Quick.”

She complied, and I looked through it the camp—at an elf with bursts of light coming from their hands intermittently, bursts of light that were familiar to me.

“Mage,” I said, tagging them:

Esrit – Level 8

I tried to examine every one of the moving figures. There were more than we’d thought—sixteen, I counted. But the important thing, the thing that had piqued my sudden interest, was that Esrit seemed to be the only mage: he was casting Mana Shields on everyone present—Supercharged ones, judging by the cast time.

I passed the spyglass back to Cuby. “I know you said that mages are mediocre, but I think they only have one left.”

I brought up my abilities, double-checking a few just to be sure. “Elemental Aegis and Elemental Weaponry both take a Magic Affinity. He and the spellswords will be the only ones who can cast it.”

“Oh,” said Cuby, seeming to realize where I was going with this. “And spellswords don’t have a mage’s mana, or Supercharged Spell.”

“Or Mana Shield,” I said. “Which protects them from being killed in one hit.”

The world fell suddenly silent again as the illusion looped, the quiet dark around us a strange sensation compared to the grating noise from before. We heard another wyvern cry.

“Closer,” said Cuby. “They’re coming.”

“Good,” I said. “Because if we take out that mage it’ll take out their resistances and their extra Hit Points—two things I’d like to see disappear. And I think I can get him if they’re distracted—the only problem is—”

But I was cut off: not only had the sounds resumed, but both of us felt something pass over us, the night too dark for us to see its shadow. We each looked up in unison, and I can only imagine that Cuby tagged the massive monster at at the same moment I did.

Spire Wyvern Patriarch – Level 11

We looked at each other and grinned. I suppose it made sense that wyverns were territorial—it probably took a lot of mountainside grazers to keep one of these beasts alive, hence a need for unshared territory.

I watched the patriarch dive toward Haroshi’s group, eager to see how it fared—whether it would be nothing but dogmeat, or if it could form an effective distraction. It swooped in, taking a volley of attacks from the group below—but no crowd control effects that I could see.

Then, in a move that seemed to change its appearance from a fortunate happenstance into an act of divine providence, it reached the group and reached out with its talons to grab none other than Esrit the mage with its talons and carrying him off into the night, its wingbeats so enormous that buffeting winds pushed several of Haroshi’s people to the ground.

A warrior let out a shout, but that did nothing to slow the ascending wyvern. It might have been hit with an Unnatural Confusion or Unnatural Terror spell—it sort of wobbled in the air for a moment. But then it was free, flying away into the night with their only mage.

“Would you look at that,” said Cuby. She worked her mouth a moment, seeming at a loss before finally turning to me. “Kill the priests, then?”

The illusory sound of crying wyverns ceased for a moment. Distantly, past the shouts of Haroshi’s people, I heard the terminal scream of a mage who had not taken Charm of Gliding.

I nodded and turned back to the camp. “Kill the priests.”