I hated the feeling I got when I passed through a personal portal. This was my third time now and, though it got slightly easier each time, it still made me feel sick and disorientated.
This portal was the worst yet.
I fell through it at a decent speed thanks to our free fall, but when I exited it I shot out of the other side horizontally, hitting the pavement like a skimming stone as I bounced and rolled across the ground.
My head was spinning, my body ached, the skin from my knees was practically rubbed down to the bone even with my armour covering it.
It felt like I’d been hit by a truck, or flicked by Asmodeus the demon lord like Clive the elder litch once was.
But, I was alive, and all things considered, I guess it was worth it.
BANG!
A loud sound like a demolition came from nearby and I looked towards it just in time to see Sally and her oversized blade bulldoze their way through the nearby skyscraper.
CRASH!
The building looked unsteady as she disappeared through a catonid sized hole and a cacophony of other destructive sounds followed.
“She’s going to be in so much trouble when Freja gets here,” Panda said with a groan as he rolled onto his backside and sat rubbing his head.
“Yeah…” I began.
My arrow! I thought suddenly as my senses began to return.
Just before we’d fallen into the portal I’d fired off a soul shot to try and slow down my fall. That meant that the first bang I’d heard was probably from me.
I’d fired a destructive bolt of acid infused power straight into a skyscraper, and then Sally and her sword had followed suit.
I knew that acid melted most things, but could it melt magically enhanced steel beams?
CREAK…
That would be a yes.
“Look out!” I screamed, scooping up Panda and making a mad dash back towards the portal.
My legs were shaky and my HP was running dangerously low so I mentally clicked on a healing potion in my inventory as I ran.
Suddenly I was swept off my feet and practically close lined, as Bell came barrelling out of the portal headfirst.
We fell to the ground, rolling in a tangled ball of limbs, hair and fur and came to a stop a few feet further back than I’d been when I started.
Achievement Unlocked:
Bush Did It
Steel beams… jet fuel… need I say more? Toppling a skyscraper is no easy feat.
Reward: Conspiracy Loot Box
I pushed the notification to one side, I could deal with it later.
“Thanks for trying to catch me,” Bell said in a dazed voice, “I guess it actually didn’t hurt too badly when I fell from heaven.”
CREAK…
I heard the stomach flopping noise again and craned my neck towards the nearby skyscraper as its lower floors began to emit steam and its upper floors began to wobble.
“We need to leave,” I panted, but it was too late.
The building imploded.
Floors crashed downwards as the ground floor’s structural support could no longer hold the weight above it. Dust bellowed out, forming a kind of mushroom cloud as tiny bits of rubble buffeted my face and eyes.
I held up my arm to my face, attempting to shield myself from the worst of it, but it barely made a difference as sharp pieces of broken glass and building materials sliced my skin.
“Kaleb!” Panda shouted from underneath me, “what did you do?”
“I think it was my arrow,” I replied.
“This is so cool!” Bell hollered excitedly.
We waited, huddled in a pile on the ground as dust and shrapnel pelted us, obscuring my vision. The noise was deafening, though I could hear screams and shouts emanating from the general direction of the skyscraper.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
I wondered where Sally was and hoped dearly that she wasn’t inside the imploding building.
Oddly, as we huddled up, pressing ourselves into the ground for dear life, I felt some kind of relief.
I was alive.
A moment ago I was falling to my death after a suicide bomber had blown himself up. Now, though I may have been in grave danger which I may have been the cause of, but I was alive.
The dust began to settle after a few moments and I disentangled myself from Bell and Panda and sat up. My skin was sliced all over and I was bleeding and sore, but I was alive and it seemed the worst had passed.
“I can’t believe we survived all that,” Bell giggled as she sat up, leaning back on her hands and gazing open mouthed into the sky.
She blinked twice and I followed her gaze to see a dazzling rainbow of colour glimmering above us.
“We might not survive that,” Panda said as he too looked skywards.
The glimmering lightshow above us seemed to be getting closer and that was when I realised that it was a huge shard of glass which was refracting light from the sun.
It’s a mega-guillotine… I thought, sighing as the huge piece of falling sharpness neared us, I’m not even surprised anymore.
“Fireball!” Bell yelled enthusiastically, raising a single palm to the sky and firing off a radiant, orange flame.
It impacted the glass which exploded into tiny shards of pretty death which rained down around us like painful snow.
I flinched as a few of the pieces imbedded themselves into the parts of my skin that weren’t protected by my armour, but for the most part I came out ok.
“I wander what’s going to try and kill us next,” Bell began, “maybe a nuclear bomb, or an exploding gnome… oh wait.”
“Or maybe it’ll be an extremely pissed off Adventure Society director,” Freja’s stern voice rang out from behind us as she emerged from her portal looking as if she’d just stepped onto a catwalk.
Her scarlet hair was fashionably tussled and she seemed entirely unharmed.
Level cappers must have skin like steel, I though as my jaw drooped open slightly.
“Good job staying alive human,” Asmodeus said as he hovered behind her, “I won’t allow you to die until I can devour your soul. Which means you are under my protection until such a time as my full powers can be returned to me.”
“Gee, thanks,” I muttered, climbing to my feet and brushing building dust and glass shards from my armoured pants.
“Where’s Sally,” Freja growled as she strutted towards us, “she’d better still be alive.”
“She flew through that building before it imploded,” Panda answered, gingerly picking bits of glass out of his fur.
“That building,” Freja said through gritted teeth, “was the Adventure Society building. My home… urg, if that gnome wasn’t already in pieces he’d be about to be.”
The director stormed off in the direction of the building, cracking the pavement as she stomped.
“She doesn’t seem best pleased,” Asmodeus observed as he landed on my shoulder.
“I thought I recognised this street,” Bell muttered to herself as she gazed in the direction of the ruined skyscraper. “I hope she’s still going to give us our mobile base. We did technically complete the quest.”
A few days earlier Freja had given us a quest with a reward that the others were quite excited about. We needed to travel a long way to get to Castalor at the request of Director Lucas Regina of Havar, and in their minds, a mobile base equalled a luxury transport that would take us there.
I was a little more sceptical.
Emergency Quest:
Put Down That Pickaxe
Civil unrest had erupted across Cali Port between the capitalist and the communist factions. Find a way to stop the madness before someone gets hurt.
Objectives:
Stop the protests: 1/1
Reward: A mobile Base for your team.
Speak to Adventure Society personnel to hand in this quest and receive your reward.
“Well,” I said slowly, “it looks like the quest has been completed, but we might want to wait for Freja to calm down before we cash it in.”
“Good idea, kid,” Panda replied as we stared after her silhouetted figure.
My dragon’s eye flared as power radiated out of her like a fifty-foot warning sign. She was definitely pissed.
“Can you hear that?” Bell asked.
“Hear what?” I asked.
We all stood silently for a few moments and then my ears began to pick up on something. It sounded squeaky, like tiny screams in the distance.
That was when it suddenly occurred to me just how empty the street was. Usually the area outside the Adventure Society building was a bustling hive of activity. It was right in the centre of the business district and there was a slew of shoppers and commuters going about their business at almost any time of the day.
Yet right now, it was deserted.
There weren’t even any curious locals turning up to see the ruins of the skyscraper.
Suddenly I heard something much closer, the sound of a manhole grating against the concrete. I turned my head towards the sound and saw a group people climbing out of the sewers.
First I saw a catonid, and then a few gnomes, then a garuda flew out behind them, cackling as she soared high above the city.
“Today is finally the day comrades!” One of the gnomes shouted in a squeaky voice. “The revolution is nigh, seize the means of production, execute the bourgeoisie, Cali Port will be ours!”
The group cheered and began running off in all directions as even more of them emerged from the sewer. I knew that a lot of the communist group had been living in the Under-Slums, which was their name for a shanty town they had built in the sewers, but this seemed like it was planned.
“Comrade!” The loud gnome said as he spotted us and hobbled towards me. “You survived!”
“How would you know that we had to survive something?” I asked, “was the bombing planned? You nearly killed us!”
“That was… unfortunate,” the gnome began, playing nervously with his hands, “however, a backup plan was needed just in case and-”
Before I knew what had come over me I kicked the little guy hard in the stomach and he flew backwards into the side of a nearby building with a little squeak reminiscent of a dog’s chew toy.
“Fuck you!” I shouted after him. “We helped you and you rewarded us by blowing me up! Fuck you and fuck communism and this whole shitty town!”
“Kaleb,” Panda said, grabbing my trouser leg as I advanced on the dazed gnome.
“You know what,” I continued, too angry to stop myself. “I hope your revolution fails and you’re all hanged. You’re just a bunch of crazy terrorists hiding behind some fluffy worded, ideological bullshit.”
“Kaleb,” Panda tried again, a little more urgently this time.
“I bet you don’t even care what happens to these people do you? I think this whole thing was a desperate power grab, because that’s what your kind always want isn’t it? You speak in fallacy and use people’s better nature to appeal to their sense of justice and get them onside, when in reality all you really want is to create some warped cult of personality that puts you on top where you can blow us up or send us to your gulags. Well I’m sick of it-”
“KALEB!” Panda shouted, jumping up and backhanding me in the face.
“WHAT?” I shouted back, finally turning away from the dazed gnome.
“I think you might have upset them…” He said, and as I looked around I realised that we were surrounded by a large, angry-looking group of Under-Slums dwellers with weapons.