We hurried the unconscious cultist into a crate tucked into the very corner of the storage room, then sauntered as casually as we could out of the room, wearing our new pale orange robes. I led the team towards the church’s main atrium, where more of the cultists were gathering, when the woman on the front desk cleared her throat.
‘And where do you think you’re going?’ the receptionist asked, hands on hips.
My heart dropped. Had she noticed her colleague enter the room and never leave? ‘We… err…’
‘You haven’t had your induction presentation yet!’
‘Oh!’ I replied. ‘That’s OK. We were just gonna go talk to our fellow cul—’
Corminar coughed pointedly.
‘—worshippers,’ I corrected myself.
The receptionist smiled. ‘There will be plenty of time for that after the presentation. There’s free t-shirts at the end!’
‘Ooh!’ said the barbarian.
‘Lore.’
'Is this a vision?’ Corminar asked. ‘Do you see our attendance here to be important?’
‘No, it’s just… free stuff.’
Corminar, Raelas, and I stared Lore down.
‘OK, no free stuff then.’
I turned back to the receptionist. ‘I think we’re good. We know the gist of it; Players are great, am I right? We’ll just be…’ I gestured to the ten or so cultists in the main hall.
The receptionist hissed through her teeth. ‘Oh, I’m afraid access to the main hall requires the induction. Church rules. I’m sorry.’
‘And there’s no bending them just for us?’ I asked, trying on my winning smile. ‘We’re kinda in a hurry.’
‘I would if I could, but the rules came straight from the top.’
‘From…?’
‘Yusef himself.’
I cast my eyes back to the main hall. In normal circumstances, we could fight our ways in, but we were here to change minds, and that would hardly have been starting off on the right foot. I sighed. ‘Well, if a Player said so…’
The woman’s eyes lit up, and we followed her into another small room adjoined to the hallway. In this room was a number of very uncomfortable-looking fold out chairs facing a blackboard. I grimaced; if there was one thing I hated more than a group of Players doing untold damage to this world to further their own goals, it was the sound of chalk on slate.
‘Welcome! Welcome!’ the woman said, clapping her hands together. ‘Please, take a seat. My name is Wuila, and I am the deputy administrator of the western Coldharbour church of Ascendancy.’
‘Quite the job title,’ Corminar muttered under his breath.
Wuila’s eyes flicked over to him to suggest she’d heard, but she didn’t comment. ‘It is lovely to have so many new faces joining us today. Perhaps we could all go around the room, and both introduce ourselves and say one interesting fact about ourselves?’
Nobody said anything, all of us staring back at her.
‘OK, I’ll start! As I said, my name is Wuila, and I won bronze in the Coldharbour junior gymnastic championships when I was fifteen. And now…’
Still, nobody said anything.
‘I’ll pick someone, shall I?’ Wuila looked around the room, casting her eyes over all of us, before landing on Corminar.
The elf shook his head.
Wuila looked instead to me. ‘Could you…’
I sighed. ‘My name is Styk and I have died twice.’
The cultist narrowed her eyes. ‘Um…’
I nudged my elven friend.
‘My name is Corminar and I watched my homeland fall to foreign invaders while it was under my command. Raelas?’
The tiefling smiled a saccharine smile. ‘My name is Raelas and I think this guy is super hot.’
I kept my eyes fixed on the cultist, not meeting the other tiefling’s gaze.
‘OK, but that’s not really about you, is it?’ Wuila pointed out.
Raelas nodded. ‘Fair point. Here’s one: as a child, I was once so close to starving that after I fell unconscious, I woke up in a morgue.’ She turned to Lore. ‘Big fella?’
‘My name is Lore and I like sheep!’ Lore’s smile was less saccharine, more sincere. ‘Also I have an active effect that forces me to see possible futures whether I like it or not, including occasionally the deaths of my closest friends!’
‘Huh,’ Raelas said, this being the first she’d heard about all that.
Wuila stood at the end of the room in stunned silence, and we looked back at her. After a moment, she clapped her hands together. ‘OK! Maybe I will skip the introductions section in future.’ She turned and began scrawling on the blackboard with the chalk, and all four of us cringed at the noise.
Lore raised his hand. ‘When do we get the free stuff? You said it includes t-shirts?’
‘At the end,’ Wuila muttered, finishing up her scrawling on the board. The message she’d written read CHURCH OF ASCENDANCY, with a tick next to it, followed by CULT with a big cross next to it. ‘The first thing you must know about the church is that it is not a cult. Malicious agents around the western continents have sowed the seeds of this idea, and alas, it has taken hold. So, again: not a cult, just a group of lovely people worshipping Players so that we might ascend to heaven. But as you’re here, you know all of this.’
‘Sure,’ Lore said encouragingly.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
‘Our church began as a small number of loyal followers of Yusef, the Player gifted with knowledge of the future.’
‘Like me!’ the barbarian added.
‘I’d keep that to yourself,’ Wuila suggested. ‘Trust me.’ She turned back to the room at large. ‘Yusef will in time lead us all to the land of the Architects. However, until this day comes, we must obey his every instruction, and live as he wishes us to live. In normal induction meetings, I would now reiterate Yusef’s orders: to obey all Players, to eliminate those who would opposite them, and so on. However, I received glad tidings this very morning—Yusef is coming to Coldharbour!’
The cultist went silent for a moment, as though expecting applause. Raelas and I figured this out first and began cheering and clapping as much as we could manage without looking like we were taking the piss. Lore and Corminar joined in.
‘Yeah!’ Wuila said, also now clapping and cheering, not realising that we were only doing so to fit in. ‘That’s it, yeah! Very exciting times! Yusef will be here in the next few days, according to my reports, and so you’ll soon be able to hear from the man himself—probably on the steps of the central plaza, as that’s where he usually speaks. You might even find people are hanging about there already, as space will be at a premium!’
When Wuila trailed off, I raised a hand. ‘Are we done?’
Raelas nodded. ‘Yeah, we’d love to go meet our fellow cul—’
Again, Corminar coughed pointedly.
‘We’d love to go meet our new friends.’
‘We’re done! I’ll go get the t-shirts.’
As Wuila disappeared from the room, Raelas and I rose from our seats, then hesitated when it looked like Lore and Corminar weren’t following.
‘Aren’t you coming?’ I asked.
Lore stared back at me, confused. ‘Didn’t you hear? She’s getting the t-shirts.’
I tried Corminar instead. ‘I expected this of him, but you?’
The elf shrugged. ‘Perhaps they will be fashionable.’
I shook my head, exasperated, then led Raelas out of the room and into the main hall. More cultists still had gathered there, apparently having been drawn in by the news of Yusef’s arrival in the near future. I glanced over them, figuring out who would be the best person to start with, then realised that I was probably going to have to sow the seeds of doubt in all of them anyway. While Raelas went right, I went left, towards a group of young tieflings in the same pale orange robes as me.
‘How’s it going, fellow worshippers?’ I asked, butting in on their conversation. They all blinked back at me. ‘My name’s Styk. Just joined. Players are pretty great, right?’
‘...Yeah, they’re pretty great,’ one of them replied.
‘Well, most of them, at least,’ I carried on. ‘Don’t suppose you heard about what happened in the Dawnwood?’
The tieflings looked to one another, and their eyes changed from distrustful to interested. ‘No?’
‘You didn’t? Huh. I suppose we’re a long way from there.’
‘What happened? Was a Player hurt?’
Well, yes, but that’s not the point I want to linger on, particularly because I was the one who hurt her. ‘A Player went rogue! Led an attack on the elven homelands. Slaughtered thousands. Tens of thousands, maybe. I didn’t know a Player could do that.’
‘A Player—’ one of the tieflings started, but I didn’t let this narrative get thrown off course.
‘I imagine Yusef will sort it out though, won’t he? He wouldn’t let that happen.’
One of the tieflings, with a furrowed brow—in fact, they all had a furrowed brow, not being able to comprehend this—leaned in. ‘Yusef would not stain his hands with the blood of—’
‘Spawn?’ a voice called across the room.
I ignored it at first. ‘So you’re saying he would let that go unchecked? That’s not very benevolent of him.’
‘Spawn!’ a voice shouted louder, marked with the tangs of orcish accent.
Only on this time did I look over, and I saw an orc in orange robes having just entered the room. I didn’t recognise her at first, but she certainly recognised me—because I was the “spawn” she was talking about.
And then my heart dropped. I remembered. A long way back, just after we’d taken down the pyroknight, I’d travelled north with Arzak to get more information on the Sisyphus Artifact. Up there, I’d sought out an artifact expert named Lillya, who’d told me that only those with Player blood in them could use the device.
And it was this orc that stood before me.
‘Spawn of Architects!’ she shouted, arms raised at her sides as though meaning to embrace me.
‘No! No no no…’ I started.
‘It is him! He with Player blood inside!’ Lillya was pointing at me by this point, and the whole room was looking.
‘You guys already have a Player to worship!’ I protested.
‘Yes. But there is thing better than Player.’
I knew I was going to regret this, but I asked anyway. ‘What?’
‘Two Players!’
Mouths began to open, adoring eyes falling upon me. This wasn’t good. I needed to be invisible if I was going to have any chance of killing Yusef. Being known to all his cultists was hardly invisible.
‘I… err…’
And then I turned and ran.
"Styk"
Level 19 Bladespinner
Base Stats:
Vitality — 50
Intelligence — 208
Dexterity — 125
Strength — 78
Wisdom — 74
Charisma — 49
Skills:
Worldbending — Level 56
Knifework — Level 41
Stealth — Level 25
Identification — Level 18
Needlework — Level 18
Abilities:
Stab III — Put your weight behind your wielded blade and force the tip through tougher hides and armour. Damage scales on [STR], increased by an additional 50%.
Execution III — Attack a target while undetected for +300% damage.
Closed Reach — Bend reality to narrow the gap between blade and target by up to 8 inches. Uses mana.
Mana-Fuelled — Passive. Optionally, use mana in place of stamina to activate Knifework abilities.
Knifestorm — Lash out at all surrounding enemies in a tornado of blades, using either one or two daggers. All enemies with arm’s reach receive physical damage worth weapon’s base damage and additional damage scaling on [STR].
Enhanced Portals — Create a portal to another location within current range of sight or within a thirty yard radius. Support up to two pairs of portals at once. Uses mana to open portals only.
Portal Slice — Passive. Portals can now be spawned within non-sentient objects. Doing so slices through all objects that are not reinforced by magic.
Tamed Portals — Passive. Increased efficiency of portal magicks means that your portal glow is reduced by 50%, making them less likely to be detected by enemies.
Ash Husk — Convert your flesh to ash, strengthening it against flame for ten minutes. Gain 50% resistance to fire attacks.
Shrill Perimeter — Create a perimeter wall of 20 foot radius, invisible to all but those adept in magicks. If an enemy crosses this perimeter, this spell releases the shriek of a banshee.
Warped Shield — Passive. If an enemy strikes you with a low-level melee weapon, Warp Shield automatically activates to open a portal that deflects this attack. You must not have any portals currently active. Uses mana on activation.
Pocket Worlds — Open and access pocket dimensions. Storage capacity of summoned pocket worlds scales with [INT] of creator.
Silence III — Create a bubble of 20 yard radius in which sound is eradicated. Uses mana to cast, zero mana to maintain. You may only have one bubble active at any one time.
Saved Portals II — Select a location to “save” for future portals. Until your save point is moved, you may always open a portal here, even if it is beyond your current Local Portal range. Mana is used only upon opening the portal.
Stealth Attack III — Passive. 200% boost to damage when unnoticed by enemy.
In Plain Sight — When activated, you have a heightened abilitiy to hide in plain sight, and are able to spot opportunities to break from combat at a higher rate. Scales on [WIS].
Gentle Step — Passive. Your footsteps are dampened on even the hardest of surfaces. Reduce noise of movement by 80%.
Stitch — Create a basic stitch in common fabrics. Ability scales on [CHA].
Improved Cloth Armour — Craft a cloth armour of significantly higher quality, dependent on materials, time and skill level.
Active Effects:
Legacy of Sisyphus:
XP gain increased by +1,400%