Psycho led Esther and Draya through the farms and woodland homesteads toward the massive cliff face that rose east of Stormview. They found its shadow several hundred feet from the base as the sun was still climbing in the eastern sky. Not only did the stone block the sun, but a growing storm hanging over the mountains made it difficult for the light to find them.
The elf stopped just inside the treeline, 100 feet from the wall. Anything closer than that wouldn’t get enough sun during the day to survive. It wasn’t dense foliage, but the scattered pines offered enough cover that the ranger knew no one in the fortress above would be able to see them. Esther and Psycho naturally blended into the shadows, but Draya didn’t.
They didn’t speak as they prepared their tools for the climb. Esther would go first, and Psycho tied a strong cord around her waist. She wore her armor and skirt. She had worn her cloak for the walk through town and then through the outskirts, but she removed it now, needing complete freedom for her arms and legs.
Draya wore her new mage dress. As daring as the slit up the side was, climbing the cliff before them would be impossible without it. And Esther had helped her out by designing the rest of her wardrobe to give her the modesty her temperament required. She wore half-length black leggings and a tight-fitting blue shirt under the dress. Both items complimented the colors of the magical gown and looked like they belonged. Plus, if she ever had to remove the curse by removing the dress, she might be left in tight-fitting clothes, but they wouldn’t be her underwear.
Psycho tied the other end of the cord to Draya’s waist, leaving a length of 20 feet between them. To an outsider, it might look like the safety line was to prevent the mage from falling, but in reality, once Draya enacted her Dragon Strength, she had a much better climbing ability than Esther. And since the rogue was casting the handholds and testing each one first, she was more likely to mess up and fall. Draya would see that and have a chance to brace herself and resist the pull of the descending woman. If Draya slipped and fell, Esther would be caught off-guard and might only be holding on with one hand.
There were two inherent problems with this climb. The first was the length of it. They needed to ascend 750 feet. Placing a handhold every 18 inches meant 500 of them. Each one took five mana to cast. That was 2,500 mana. Esther and Draya didn’t have that much combined between them. However, Esther did have a Mana Generation skill of 21, so every round, she could replenish enough mana to cast the spell four times. Since the game only allowed you to cast up to three burst spells a round, Esther would be able to create a handhold at least once every two seconds and never run out of mana. They doubted she could keep up that pace, but however fast she went, she could generate enough mana to compensate.
Accelerating the rounds like that posed the second problem for Draya. Outside of combat, her Dragon Strength would last an hour. But with Esther accelerating the rounds to about ten seconds each, her spell would only last 100 seconds. To extend it, she would need to spend 100 mana per round, which was only possible if she used her dress. Draya activated the curse and appreciated the warmth on this chilly morning. Now she was permanently in combat mode, and it didn’t matter how fast Esther went. She would need to spend 700 mana every seven rounds to keep her Dragon Strength going.
While the women prepped themselves, Psycho had his eyes on the two keep towers almost 800 feet above them, trying to memorize the shamans’ routine. In order to see them fully, the elf had to back up into the trees more and get the proper angle. The guards spent most of their time standing still against the rearmost of the five stone pillars that supported the roof of their lookout stations. Once every five minutes, they walked around, looking down the cliff to their left and right before returning to their stationary positions.
The archer needed to number the five shamans in his head to keep them straight. The two flanking the fortress entrance were numbers One and Two. The two that straddled the women’s climbing position were Three and Four. Number Five was out of sight to the elf and overlooked the ample space of trees and open grassland next to the keep.
Shamans Three and Four were not synched in their guard rhythms, and after Four took his circuit around his station, Psycho had to wait a full minute before Three did the same and stood back at attention. The archer rushed back to the women’s location and hurried them in a sprint across the field. Esther made it to the stone wall first and didn’t waste time. She bent down to put two nubs lower, one at knee level and one at hip height. Then she placed a third at her left shoulder and finally reached up with her right to place the fourth. She stepped on the lower holds before reaching up with her left and adding one even higher. Within a few seconds, she had her rhythm and was climbing steadily, her elbows and knees seemingly connected as her right arm and leg lifted together, and then a few seconds later, her left side did the same thing.
Draya was forced to mimic the climb or be dragged up behind her friend. Psycho gave the shorter woman a boost to get started. Since she needed to pause every seven rounds to refresh her Dragon Strength, she had to out-pace Esther during the other six to build slack in the rope, allowing her to stop. It was a tricky rhythm to find at first, and Draya needed to look up at the rogue constantly to gauge her speed.
“I hate to sound like Gromphy,” the mage said. “But couldn’t you have worn pants?”
“And miss a chance to make Psycho blush,” Esther quipped.
“Looking good, Legs,” the elf called in a harsh whisper, giving the rogue the attention she wanted. “Great form.”
Draya needed to release a hand from her climb to suppress a laugh.
“You don’t look so bad yourself, Red. Now keep quiet and get moving.” Psycho raced back to the tree line, his internal clock telling him the guards would be on the move again soon.
Esther regained her focus and concentrated on the spells she was casting. It took a second or two for the stone grips to form inside the shells fully, and if she put her weight on them too soon, they would fall away. They were in a hurry, but she could only push the spell so fast. She felt she had finally found a decent rhythm when she heard Psycho issue a birdcall. This signal let them know when the guards started their rounds again. They didn’t know how good the shamans’ eyesight was, and since Esther was clad in black with a black hat, she was pretty sure she couldn’t be seen, but Draya had a colorful dress that pulsed faintly every six seconds. They probably couldn’t be seen now, over 500 feet away, but they planned to get much closer.
Esther could easily hide in the shadows, but Draya didn’t have that skill. She could cast invisibility, but that would drain her mana, and the “damage” the dress gave her every round would yank her back out of the shadows anyway. Instead, Esther tugged on her hat. The unique item created a pillar of darkness for the character directly under it. With Esther almost 100 feet in the air, the column stretched all the way to the ground, enveloping Draya in the process. It was a burst spell, meaning it only lasted one round, but now that Esther was resting and not casting, it would last for six minutes. Draya was in constant combat mode, but because her pulsing magic was all internal, it didn’t affect Esther or the hat.
They waited for a little over a minute until Psycho whistled again, letting them know that both guards had checked their cliff wall, and they could continue. Psycho couldn’t see them inside the hat’s darkness, but once they started moving again, they were like tiny dark spiders climbing the cliff before him. During this interval, they made much better progress, falling into an efficient rhythm, and Psycho knew they would reach the top soon. The two shamans needed to be dead before that.
However, Psycho discovered a problem with their plan that neither he nor Jace had anticipated. After a shaman had walked along the perimeter of his five-sided tower, checking the cliff walls below him, he gave one final look to his left and right to check on the other two guards beside him. Each tower was over 300 feet apart, and since the guards weren’t synched together, they never looked each other in the eyes, but it was enough to ensure everyone was still at their post. This meant that if Psycho killed Three and Four, when Two and Five turned to check on the shaman beside them, the dead guards would be discovered, and an alarm would go off.
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Psycho had to alert the women to stop once more before he came up with a solution. He had been hoping he could use regular arrows for these kill shots as the bow did most of the work, and he coveted the dragon-killing projectiles Jace had given him, but now he realized he needed the Heavy traits of the level 15 arrows for maximum penetration. If he hit a shaman through the head or neck while standing at attention against the rear pillar, the heavily enchanted arrows should be strong enough to sink into the stone and nail the human in place. Any glance from the shaman on his right or left would show the guard still standing at attention, and hopefully, the distance was too far to see the shaft sticking out of his face.
The archer focused on Three, as he had most recently become stationary. The angle had to be perfect. When it struck the shaman's head, the arrow needed to be traveling almost perfectly horizontally. Psycho had to back up another few dozen feet and then move significantly to his right to ensure he had a straight-on shot. He fell into the shadows and aimed.
As he zeroed in on the head of the guard, he tried to justify what he was about to do. This was an NPC in service of PCs responsible for kidnapping and torturing players. They deserved what they got. Of course, Psycho had been working under Dresher for a while, and the arms dealer was guilty of things just as bad. Psycho had been tricked and was a slave to his script. But were these shamans any different? Of course, they weren’t independent NPCs like Esther, Draya, and himself. They were spawned clones like Drescher’s half-orc guards had been. They had no family and no backstory. Once he killed them, the game would generate new ones in the mountains.
In the end, Psycho decided it was all relative. If someone had killed him while he had been supporting one of Drescher’s evil plans, he wouldn’t have blamed them. Psycho took the shot. As the shaft left his bow, the result was predetermined. Since he wasn’t in combat mode until the arrow damaged its target, he could Concentrate and take a 20. All the other numbers in play were constants, and the shot had no choice but to fly through the air in the blink of an eye and skewer the distant human through the forehead. His body jerked on impact, and Psycho’s vision flashed red, but the shaman didn’t fall. His body hung limply from the shaft through his skull.
The elf breathed a sigh of relief and turned his vision to Four. He couldn’t see Two but figured Jace was probably standing by the bridge about now, and shamans One and Two would stay focused on him for the next few minutes. Shaman Four started his patrol, and Psycho let out a birdcall. The women were over halfway up the cliff by now, and they stopped and disappeared into shadow.
Four checked all the angles for any irregularities and returned to his post. He looked right first, spotting Five outside of Psycho’s vision, then turned to look at Three. The active shaman didn’t even flinch at the sight of his companion standing stock still against the distant pillar. Soon he was standing motionless as well.
Psycho ran to his left now to get a better angle on his second target, and after three more minutes, Four would never move again.
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Esther heard the double bird call informing them that the guards were dead. They wouldn’t have to stop anymore. Esther had no problem killing the guards, but Draya gave off a bit of a whimper when she realized what had happened. She was willing to use her powers against evil characters enslaving and torturing others but killing the guards just doing their jobs didn’t seem right. Esther had told her not to worry about it, so she tried.
Now they could move quicker and didn’t have to worry about pausing every four minutes. They raced up the last third, and Esther pulled up short just outside the lighted area. Guards or no guards, if they moved through the last fifty feet, the motion wards would see them, and alarms would go off.
Esther stowed one of the shells in her inventory and reached up to her hat again, but instead of tugging on the brim, she removed it and flipped it over on her raised knee. It wasn’t easy to do with only one hand, but she had a firm grip with her other one, and her advanced Athletic skill helped. She removed a black cloth disc with an enchanted wire encircling the perimeter to maintain its shape. She held the object in her teeth while replacing her hat. Then she removed the disc with her free hand and shook it in a specific pattern. The thin material expanded to a dark circle four feet across. Esther pressed the flexible object against the wall before her, angling it up as much as possible. In addition to being illuminated, the last 50 feet of the climb angled toward them, meaning not only would they have to defy gravity to climb it, but the keep’s walls were now almost directly above them.
When Esther felt the disc was positioned correctly, she tested it with her mana. Jace had told her it would create a tunnel through the stone, but if it didn’t end in open air, the spell wouldn’t work. Esther was trying to angle it so it would drill into the rock above them, pass through the keep floor, and into a perimeter hallway. The effect didn’t take at first, and she needed to adjust it a few more times, but the magical object finally accepted her mana, and she could release the spell.
Jace had enchanted the object with a level 16 Stone Tunnel spell, so with a two-foot radius, the tunnel could be 70 feet long. Esther only needed 60 feet to penetrate the floor of the fortress. The spell wouldn’t work if the stone had any finished metals in it, and the keep walls were undoubtedly reinforced with steel, but who thought to do the same to the floor?
The tunnel ascended at a sharp angle, but Esther still had the seashells, and after retrieving one from her inventory, she climbed up into the tunnel, and Draya followed.
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After the second kill shot, Psycho stored Dragonwing in his trench coat and raced across the open field to the stone ladder the women had left behind. He didn’t have Dragon Strength or Esther’s supernatural Athletic ability, and he weighed as much as the two women combined, but he also didn’t have to stop or cast spells constantly. His pace up the side of the cliff was faster than the women ahead of him. He did hide in the shadows just to be safe, and since he wasn’t taking damage or casting spells, nothing brought him out of it.
After fifteen minutes of strenuous climbing, he found the tunnel the girls had left open for him. He used the handholds to climb through quickly and soon found himself in a dimly lit corridor. The women weren’t there but weren’t instructed to wait for him. They needed to get to the prisoner’s cell, kill them, and return here. He was supposed to make sure the exit was safe. After waiting a minute, an idea struck him, and he changed the plan. He memorized the position and angle of the hole, then reached against the rim of the opening and snagged the magical object as Gromphy had shown him right before they had left Jace’s home.
The tunnel disappeared, and he was holding a floppy black circle. A quick shake reduced it in size to fit inside Esther’s hat again, but he stored it in one of his cloak’s numerous pockets instead. Psycho drew his elemental long bow and ensured mundane arrows were available in his magical quiver. Then he set out at a quick pace down the hallway. After 150 feet, he found a sizeable pentagonal section of the wall jutting out and stairs leading up. He was directly below Three’s position. A three-way intersection sat at this junction, with the extra hallway moving into the center of the fortress. Psycho listened intently for a few seconds but didn’t hear anything and ascended the stairs.
A few moments later, he felt the cool morning air on his face, and his head cleared the floor level of the observation area. He slowed and turned to look toward where he knew Shaman Two would be. As his vision cleared the crenulated rim, he saw the shaman standing at attention with his back to a pillar. He didn’t know how long he had been standing there or when he would start his regular round. Jace was apparently no longer at the entrance to distract him. The elf would just have to be fast.
Psycho stayed low and crept to the dead shaman at the back of the lookout station. He shuddered as he saw the blood running down the man’s face. The attentive look in his eyes showed he had been caught by surprise when the arrow had speared his forehead.
Psycho just couldn’t bring himself to waste one of these fantastic arrows. He stopped before the dead man, glanced at Two to ensure he was still occupied, and stood up. The elf supported the shorter human around the neck with his left hand and pulled the arrow free with his right. Or, at least, he tried. It was buried deep in the stone pillar. He had to push hard with his left, strangling the already dead guard as he pulled with all his strength with his right. The shaft came free suddenly and sprayed him with gore. Psycho stored it in his inventory and replaced it with a mundane arrow, threading the hole in the man’s head and pressing it into the pillar.
When he released the man, he stayed upright, but barely. The replacement arrow wasn’t buried tightly in the stone the way the level 15 shaft had been, but Psycho had managed to force its head into the triangle-shaped undercut in the pillar the first arrow had made, and it held for now. The shaman wasn’t standing at the same rigid attention anymore but was still upright. Psycho’s eyes went to his right to see Two start his round. Sunlight streamed through a crack in the clouds into the open-air tower, so the elf couldn’t hide in the shadows and dropped back down the stairwell, keeping his head just high enough to see between two crenulations. The distant guard did his routine check on Three and didn’t react negatively. Psycho breathed out a sigh of relief and hurried down the stairs. When he returned to their potential exit site, he saw that Draya and Esther weren’t back yet. He thought he had time to get the second arrow and ran off in that direction.