When Liam was a child, he had learned to read – in Polish – from a set of ‘Eagle’ books that began at level one with simple words and pictures, but which concluded at level fifteen with full stories. One of the final stories was of Jack the Giant Killer. Everyone in Ireland knew that Jack climbed a beanstalk and felled the plant just in time to save himself from the giant coming down it. But in Poland, Jack had additional adventures, including one where he tricked a storm giant into holding a roc’s egg, just before the monstrous raptor swept down to carry the giant away.
The illustrations to that story were based on a real storm giant’s castle on the Fifth Plane of Virtue and Liam was filled with suppressed excitement that they would soon be up in the clouds and exploring the castle to grind up their next two or three levels and to win their second stars. Once again they were travelling to a relatively unexplored zone. The storm giant’s castle had just a few scholarly papers written about it, mostly focused on a raid event, The Storm Lord’s Bride. Lord Azanth had assured Liam that there would be many safe places from which to pull suitable mobs for their level. Crucially, there were several repeatable quests associated with the castle in the clouds and Liam was currently walking through the streets of Pommerstein, a medieval-looking town, collecting them by holding the relevant conversations with the town’s officials.
Quest Received
Your group has been asked to rescue humans from the Dukedom of Westein who have been captured and made to serve the storm giants of Grimghast Castle (repeatable).
Quest Received
Your group has been asked to kill five storm giants (repeatable)
Quest Received
Your group has been asked to kill ten griffons (repeatable)
Quest Received
Your group has been asked to kill five wyverns (repeatable)
With the quests initiated, they left the town and walked along a cart track, Liam sticking to the soft grass between parallel lines of dry earth. He’d become used to walking with his staff, holding it in his right hand and planting it firmly on the ground ahead of him. Having a magic staff made him feel like a proper mage, like he had graduated. And he was looking forward to finding out how effective it was to have an increased range on all his skills, especially Thunderclap, the skill he had chosen on reaching Level 15.
Above him the sky was blue, apart from an enormous, grey cloud that supported the castle of the storm giants. According to Wikipedia, there were three reasons why, despite the opportunity to get easy quest completions and rank up, hardly anyone came here: first, you needed to pay the local apothecary the equivalent of about €200 each to buy Fly potions in order to get up to the castle; second, some of the giants had the Lightning Strike skill, which could do a lot of damage from a distance; third, the initial break in to get to a good pulling spot was hard. For the first point, money wasn’t so much of an issue right now. And as for the tricky giants with Lightning Strike, there was the demon assassin who was walking beside Liam. She would not be grouped with them (because the level difference was so great, no one else would gain EXP or quest completions while grouped with her) but she could easily take down any mob that posed a threat to them. Lord Azanth’s Chief of Spies could also create the space for them to set up safely.
There was something charismatic about the demoness and Liam found it hard to speak in her presence. Whenever he did say something to her, he always felt like an idiot. Efficient, lethal, and beautiful – especially her purple eyes – the assassin radiated competence and self-belief. As he looked across at her (for the hundredth time) she caught his eye and with a lurch of his heart, Liam quickly looked down at the ground.
‘You are utterly certain Earl Clarence and Lady Liseth released Chronos from his chains?’
Liam nodded and explained again the sequence of events in the tunnels of the Hostelry of Eternal Light and Darkness. Even though his memories were jumbled by the way that time had been shuffled, he had no doubt that just before Chronos had escaped his chains, Earl Clarence and Lady Listeth had sprinted past Liam from the direction of the titan’s cave.
‘Earl Clarence is vain enough and overestimates himself sufficiently that I can believe he would secretly let loose the titans in order to be the saviour of the fifteen planes. I had not thought Lady Liseth such a fool. She will bring about her own destruction along with the rest of us. Those who break the circle do not get to draw it again.’
‘We have an idiom a bit like that: if you play with fire, you will get burned. Do you have that one?’
‘Demons don’t burn.’
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Liam felt a blush warm his cheeks. ‘I…’
‘Everyone in the fifteen planes must learn of this. Even the most ardent supporter of Lady Liseth will not stand by her should it become known that she assisted in the unbinding of Chronos.’
‘Right. We have a popular podcast. My brother does I mean. We are going to expose Earl Clarence on that.’
‘How many subscribers does your podcast have?’
‘About forty thousand.’
‘Not bad. But you will need some decisive evidence. Something irrefutable and stronger than your testimony. Even if people accept that you are honest, there are illusions and skills that might have misled you. Whoever released Chronos may have used a disguise skill to implicate Earl Clarence.’
‘But if that was the case, they would have wanted to be seen. Whereas there has been no mention of this at all. I believe it really was him. But you are right that we can’t hope to bring him down with the podcast alone, Earl Clarence has six hundred million followers on Instagram. If it’s Aengus’s fans against the paladin’s, we’ll lose.’ Liam could hear the bitterness in his own voice. There had been a time when Liam looked up to the paladin, adored him even. That man had seemed to be the epitome of bravery and nobility, rather than vanity. The loss of his belief in the heroism and goodness of Earl Clarence was painful.
‘I must think about this. We must entrap him in a circumstance where his true nature is revealed for all to see.’
The place has been reached at which our flight should begin.
‘Lord Azanth says we should fly from here,’ announced Liam.
‘This is going to be fun,’ said Aengus, swilling a light blue liquid around its crystal bottle. He pulled out the stopper, drank the potion in one go and gave a shrug. ‘Nothing… oh… wait.’ Flapping his arms, Aengus began to rise from the ground. ‘Oh yeah! This is great.’
Smiling at the sight of his brother in the air, Kate opened her bottle and drank the potion. Soon she was rising too, moving faster than Aengus as she kicked her feet as though swimming. When he drank his own potion, Liam soon felt the magic course through him. His body became weightless and, more than that, by concentrating on the direction he wished to go in, he began to move through the air. It really was a delicious and fun feeling.
With Aengus raising a fist and making the superman pose and with Kate learning to do cartwheels through the air, Liam found himself laughing, at least until he looked down past the sombre face of the demon assassin to the already distant fields of the farmers of Pommerstein.
Fear not, the potion will last long enough that we will not fail to reach the castle in the clouds; you will not fall.
Lord Azanth was right, of course. Once they had flown around the side of the cloud to land on the surface, Liam found that the ground was very firm underfoot. Whatever magic had created the castle in the sky, it had made the grey surface he was standing on as solid as stone. Ahead of them, only two hundred metres away, was the wall of a great castle. With a dozen tall towers and flags flying from each of them, it was an impressive sight. Even with the assistance of the Chief of Spies, Liam felt daunted and a little anxious.
This was the exact scene in Liam’s childhood book: the huge castle through which Jack had made his way to the treasures of the King of the Storm Giants. Never, as a child, had it ever occurred to Liam that he might see the real castle on which the picture was based. Here he was though, and he took a moment to remind himself that this was the life he wanted. There was nothing he would rather do than be an Adventurer, roaming the planes and levelling up and seeing the places that he had once daydreamed about.
There was a blogpost that Liam had read which described how the writer’s group had broken into the gatehouse and gone through to some good camping spots in the vast courtyard beyond. It sounded complex and dangeous though and instead Liam watched as the demon assassin flew up onto the walls and killed several guards. Once she’d cleared a space, the assassin leaned back over the wall, waving for them to come up. With the potion of Fly still in effect, it was easy enough to join the Chief of Spies on the wall-walk.
‘I shall take to the shadows and eliminate any casters you encounter. I suggest you work your way around clockwise.’ With that the assassin was gone and even though Liam knew she must be nearby he simply could not pick her out from shadows and stone.
‘Ready?’ asked Aengus.
‘All set,’ replied Kate. Liam gave a nod. A moment later, Lord Azanth’s hit point buff, Fortify, landed. With that, Aengus ran forward until he got the attention of an axe-wielding giant whose black beard covered his chest. Two griffons also came, so Aengus had to use Still Heart to shake them off and then get up in time to isolate the axeman for Freeze and Magic Missile.
They were back grinding again and Liam was content.
When he had reached Level 15, Liam had departed from the typical choice of mage skill, which was Fireball. For mages in traditional groups and especially for those going on raids, Fireball was the classic and obvious skill to get. A long-range spell, it launched a ball of flames as though from a catapult and when the ball hit anything It exploded and did damage according to the level of the skill. Crucially, it did damage to every creature within ten metres of the impact and that could be a lot.
Fireball did not, however, suit his group. It broke the effects of Freeze and Intoxicating Scent, which were crucial to their crowd control. Since the four of them lacked a tank, it was of the utmost importance that they controlled the landscape of the battle and avoided being overrun by mobs. This was why Liam had chosen Thunderclap as his Level 15 skill.
Thunderclap
A burst of thunder echoes above your enemies.
Level 1 – Range 10 metres, area of effect 2 metres radius. Allied stun debuffs last 40% longer; enemy cooldowns are interrupted for 1 second. Available
Level 2 – Range 12 metres, area of effect 3 metres radius. Allied stun debuffs last 50% longer; enemy cooldowns are interrupted for 1 second. Available
Level 3 – Range 12 metres, area of effect 3 metres radius. Allied stun debuffs last 60% longer; enemy cooldowns are interrupted for 2 seconds. Available
Level 4 – Range 15 metres, area of effect 4 metres radius. Allied stun debuffs last 60% longer; enemy cooldowns are interrupted for 2 seconds. Locked (requires two stars)
Level 5 – Range 15 metres, area of effect 4 metres radius. Allied stun debuffs last 70% longer; enemy cooldowns are interrupted for 3 seconds. Locked (requires level 20)
Level 6 – Range 18 metres, area of effect 5 metres radius. Allied stun debuffs last 70% longer; enemy cooldowns are interrupted for 3 seconds. Locked (requires light blue rank)
Level 7 – Range 18 metres, area of effect 5 metres radius. Allied stun debuffs last 80% longer; enemy cooldowns are interrupted for 4 seconds. Locked (requires level 50)
Level 8 – Range 25 metres, area of effect 6 metres radius. Allied stun debuffs last 100% longer; enemy cooldowns are interrupted for 5 seconds. Locked (requires level 100)
At his current level of skill, Liam could trigger Thunderclap in order to add 60% to the duration of his and Kate’s Freeze and the same for Lord Azanth’s Intoxicating Scent. For now, that meant their enemies would be stunned for about 7.5 seconds instead of 5, and over 11 seconds for those who were frozen. Better yet, when Liam completed enough quests for his next star and the others did too, that would mean 9 and 14 seconds respectively for the duration of the skills. That was serious battlefield control.
The main limitation of Thunderclap, and the reason it got a lot of criticism online, was that the range was fairly low. Being surrounded by mobs just ten to twelve metres away was risky. When their stun or root broke, they would be on you pretty quickly. With Liam’s newly purchased staff though, the mobs could be held up from over twenty metres away; There would be time enough to recast a Freeze or for Lord Azanth to use Intoxicating Scent and catch the incoming mobs before they arrived in melee range.
The first giant died easily enough when bombarded with Shock Wave and Magic Missile and the uptick along Liam’s EXP bar was noticeable. Good, this was a promising start.
Revenge knows no pause in progress and development and she attaches her curse on all inaction.
Tell it to Aengus. I’m ready for the next.