Court of Thorns: A LitRPG Story Read online

  “I’m going to see if the Emporium has another Soul Jar for sale. For Alba.”

  Nobody was going to die on his watch if he had anything to do about it. At least until he ran out of Soul Shards. He had only earned two of them so far and getting more was not likely until he left the Common Realm. But he saw the sixty-eight Shards left in his inventory as found money. If he could help his people with them, he would.

  Tava reached for him. “It’s decided, then. Let us enjoy the night, Lord Hawke. My husband.”

  “As you wish, Lady Hawke,” he said. The title sounded funny to him for some reason.

  That’s the name of a movie, isn’t it? Hawke wondered briefly before he stopped thinking altogether.

  Eleven

  I’m still worried, Hawke told Saturnyx.

 

  The wedding night had been the last moment of peace Hawke had enjoyed before making frenzied preparations to keep his lands safe while he was away on the Labyrinth expedition.

  First, he had demanded that Jake delivered a hundred and fifty ward stones. The wizard had grumbled but flown to Akila and come back with them (“It ‘only’ cost six hundred gold denars,” he’d told Hawke. “Put it on my tab,” had been Hawke’s reply.). The wards were placed in a pair of circles around Serenity and Orom. Jake’s contribution plus the fifty ward stones that Hawke had in the Stronghold’s stockpile had extended the anti-Demon, Fae and Undead wards in two overlapping circles sixteen miles in radius. The new warded areas didn’t cover a hundred percent of the valley, but they blocked the main entry points into it and included all major population centers.

  The main problem had been Mana. Each 16-mile-radius circle cost a massive 4,050 Mana per day to maintain. Hawke was forced to shut down all the magical lights in the Domain, forcing people to rely on lamps and torches for the duration of the crisis. He wouldn’t cut down the number of minions protecting the Domain, however, which left him with a deficit of 1,197 Structural Mana per day that would have to be taken from the town’s reserves plus whatever Olaf’s own Mana could contribute (about 250 a day). Thanks to his abilities, Hawke had been able to top off the Domain’s reserves, giving the valley about nineteen days of coverage. Since Hawke had no intention of being away for more than a week, it should be enough.

  He wasn’t sure the wards were enough, however. Powerful Fae like Leara had been able to enter Akila despite the city’s powerful magical defenses. And the Foothills weren’t covered by the Domain’s protections. Hawke shook his head and set aside his worries. He had done what he could. Besides the wards, he had gone through his entire Mana pool several times each day, adding Spell Inscriptions and magical traps all over the place. He’d distributed every last piece of magical gear in the Stronghold Vault among the members of the guild and the select members of the Town Guard and the Sunset Legion. If the Court of Thorns or any other enemies tried anything while he was away, Hawke hoped they would be unpleasantly surprised.

  But you’re right. Might as well get down to business, he told Saturnyx as a horde of stone cyclopes emerged from a wide tunnel and charged his party.

  Stone Cyclops (Earth Elemental)

  Level 15 Elite Minion

  Health 3,750 Mana 1,500 Endurance 3,000

  Each rocky monstrosity stood a good ten feet tall; they were bow-legged bipeds with apelike arms, crudely shaped. Their heads were solid boulders with central crystals as their only features. Sonic waves capable of shredding metal or flesh exploded from their crystal eyes while the monsters charged, fists upraised. The ground shook under two dozen massive feet as the creatures covered the ground separating them from Hawke’s party faster than a galloping horse.

  “Fire!” Hawke shouted as the barrage of elemental blasts hit the Mana Dome protecting the group.

  Tava loosed her first arrow, a glowing missile that multiplied into fifty identical copies before landing amongst the Cyclopes and detonating like artillery shells. Her attack landed first but was far from the only one. Three former Nerf Herder wizards – Aristobulus, Artos and Zippo – opened up with a barrage of Fireballs that created three overlapping explosions that engulfed all the monsters. Glorificus had his bow ready as well, but he held his shot until the first Cyclops emerged from the cloud of fire. His arrow hit the unlucky monster right on its eye, shattering it and finishing it off.

  Unfortunately, that was the only kill from the initial exchange of fire. The remaining eleven monsters kept thundering forward, and their focused shockwaves nearly depleted the Mana Dome’s Health. Amelia Blueflame, another ex-Herder, grunted as she poured more Mana into the energy barrier she had created, restoring some of the damage from the sonic blasts. Hawke and Gosto acted next: a miniature jungle of grappling vines sprang from the ground, courtesy of two Major Deadly Roots spells. The spells weren’t strong enough to keep the monsters immobilized, but it slowed them long enough for a second volley of spells and missiles. Three more Cyclopes fell; the rest tore through the restraints and kept coming.

  Hawke greeted them with a Major Burning Light, imbued with Celestial and Order energy and augmented with extra Mana. The stone monsters literally melted under the spell’s glare, sinking into the earth as their legs collapsed and their torsos liquefied. Grognard (Level 20 Battle Mage-Unyielding Stalwart) added Lava Burst to the carnage, a Fire-Earth spell that finished what Hawke had started. None of the monsters survived. The last one to fall turned into a puddle of molten rock thirty feet away from Hawke, who had been holding the front line with Grognard, Rabbit, Digger and a couple of summoned pets. The party was short in tanks but high in firepower. Hawke figured that mixture would work.

  “Good job, everyone,” he said. “Now…”

  A roar from the entrance the monsters had used interrupted him. And the Cyclopes’ daddy entered the fray.

  The newcomer was four-legged and twice the size of its lesser bros, a moving mountain with a humanoid torso, roughly shaped like a centaur. The yellow jewel on its forehead was as big as a beach ball, and unlike the others it wielded a weapon: a massive hammer with a metal handle.

  Stone Cyclops Champion (Earth Elemental)

  Level 17 Elite Lieutenant

  Health 5,950 Mana 3,400 Endurance 3,400

  “K-Bar, you’re up,” Hawke told the armored giant standing by his side. “Get his attention, and I’ll jump him.”

  “Roger that,” the big guy said before he charged the giant monster.

  “Single target attacks only,” he told the rest of the team. “Keep the pets back to protect the caster and watch out for adds!”

  K-Bar crashed into the monster like a human-shaped missile, delivering a thunderous strike with his Fire-imbued Zweihander blade. The blow nearly severed one of the Champion’s arms, but the creature healed itself with a spell and delivered a counterstrike with its giant hammer that the Warrior-Knight barely avoided. Time to join in the fun.

  Hawke’s Major Twilight Step had a range of forty-five yards, allowing him to teleport right behind the Champion’s humanoid torso and backstab it with both Saturnyx and a Mana Blade for a ridiculous amount of damage. Single-target spells and ranged attacks from the rest of the group dropped the monster’s Health down even more. Someone lobbed a Fireball instead, however, singing Hawke for a couple hundred points of damage. He didn’t need to look or check his combat log to know who it had been. He’d have a word with Zippo after the fight was over, what his brother had liked to call ‘wall to wall counseling.’

  The thoughts flashed through his head while he kept attacking. Grognard tried to distract the monster with point-blank spells, but the giant critter ignored him – and the barrage of spells from the rest of the party – to concentrate its fury on the two armored men next to it. The thing was a spellcaster, too. It fired a shockwave beam at K-Bar while calling up a boulder that came out of nowhere to smash Hawke in the back. The impact knocked him clear off the monster, wiped
out his damage-absorption Bulwark of Light, and managed to inflict 300 damage on him despite all his defenses.

  He returned fire: a Major Hammer of Light with all the trimmings flew towards the monster’s flank and tore into its rocky hide. The Elite beast was highly resistant to all Elements and Forces, but not enough to survive that hit on top of all the damage it had taken already. It exploded into rocky fragments that pelted everyone in the area. An army of normal mortals would have taken multiple casualties from the explosion, but even the squishiest member of the party was too tough to be taken out by mere shrapnel.

  On Earth, we’d be unstoppable, and that’s just counting our physical abilities. Add in our magic and we could beat just about anything short of a huge air strike. Or maybe a nuke.

  He wasn’t on Earth, of course. Probably never would be back there, either. Hawke watched the entrance the monsters had used to see if anything else decided to show up. Nothing did.

  “I guess the exercise is over,” he said.

  Akila’s Arena wasn’t just the biggest source of entertainment for its citizens, it also had magical training facilities that used extremely lifelike illusions to simulate several kinds of environments and enemies. Anything that was in the Arena’s Archives could be brought to life and fought in realistic scenarios that didn’t earn you any Experience or loot but also didn’t injure or kill you, at least not permanently. The illusionary wounds hurt almost as much as the real thing.

  Hawke and the team he’d be leading into the Malleus Mallum had been practicing for two days. Today would be the third and last training session; they simply couldn’t afford to delay any longer. The city’s Legion had managed to hunt down and kill two large monsters terrorizing the countryside, but more were appearing every night. They needed to go in there, figure out what was causing the Labyrinth to malfunction, and shut it down even if it meant clearing all its levels and defeating its final boss.

  “Too easy,” Grognard said as the group moved towards the exit.

  “That was a standard encounter on the upper levels of the M&M,” K-Bar said. “Problem is, we don’t know if that’s what we’ll run into. The thing that killed my team a few days back was nothing like the level boss it had been.”

  Alba Bastardes seemed to materialize out of thin air, startling Grognard and K-Bar but not Hawke, who had seen through her stealth abilities. The Shadow Assassin-Spy looked downright sinister in her jet-black lacquered leather outfit that covered her from head to toe, including her face.

  “Where were you?” Grognard asked her.

  “Killing the other Cyclops Champion,” she said casually.

  “There were two of them?”

  “Yes. The Aqua Fortis I concocted proved to be quite effective. Three doses sufficed to break it down. We danced for a while, but the beast proved to be a clumsy partner,” she finished. Hawke couldn’t see her face but was sure she was grinning from ear to ear.

  “You were supposed to slow down the second monster, not kill it by yourself,” Hawke told her. “Overachiever.”

  He knew that killing the monster hadn’t been as easy as Alba made it sound. His Mana Sight let him see the faint glow that healing potions left behind; Alba had used several of them during her fight. She’d nearly died at least a couple of times. That wouldn’t have mattered in the magical simulation, but he would have to talk to her about taking chances like that.

  “I saw an opportunity and took it,” she added. “The poison worked better than I expected, so I gave the monster enough to destroy it.”

  “Good. If you have any to spare, maybe you can let Tava dip some arrows in the stuff.”

  “Would that I could, but few weapons can survive the touch of Aqua Fortis. I had to craft a special weapon, a glass dagger, that could hold it without dissolving.”

  Alba had adopted Alchemy as her Arcane Vocation and had surpassed everyone else in the Domain, at least when it came to her specialty: poisons. She spent a lot of time in the laboratory at Serenity and kept raiding the Stronghold’s alchemical supplies, paying for whatever Hawke wasn’t willing to give out for free. Between that and her assassin abilities, she had become a holy terror. And she was only level sixteen, although once they entered the Labyrinth that would change very quickly.

  Hawke glanced at the rest of the party. Tava and Gosto were talking quietly; they, Alba and Grognard were the people he could count on without any reservations. Artos and Glorificus were next. The level 17 Rogue-Wizard and level 15 Archer-Scout had avoided imprisonment and likely execution thanks to Hawke and they seemed to be the type of people who repaid loyalty in kind. Neither had been willing participants in the atrocities the worst Nerf Herders had perpetrated, which was another point in their favor. None of the rest had, but he still didn’t fully trust the conditionally-released prisoners who made up the rest of the party.

  K-Bar was a bit like Grognard, except a lot more gung-ho, which made sense for a Marine. He had accepted Hawke’s leadership but wasn’t afraid to speak up if he thought Hawke was making mistakes. Aristobulus was a bit of a whiner and cared little about anything other than the pursuit of magic. Amelia Blueflame was something else. She was agreeable enough but Hawke’s ability to see what people really felt had let him know she was only looking out for herself. There was nothing inherently wrong with that, but he couldn’t count on her to go above and beyond. If the going got tough, she’d get going – as far away from danger as possible. And then there was Zippo.

  Before they reached the Arena’s exit, Hawke stopped in front of the Fire Wizard.

  “You kept using AOE spells after I told you to switch to single target,” he told Zippo.

  The fire mage licked his lips and wouldn’t look him in the eye as he responded. “AOEs do more damage to giant creatures.”

  “And damage anyone on your side who happen to be in the splash area. Don’t do that again.”

  Zippo shrugged.

  “Understood?”

  “Yeah, okay. Got it.”

  “Good.”

  Hawke looked at the rest of the ex-Herders. All of them were staring daggers at Zippo. From what Artos and Glorificus had told Hawke, nobody liked the guy. He only cared about becoming more powerful and, unlike Aristobulus or Amelia, he couldn’t even pretend to give a damn. Zippo hadn’t perpetrated any major atrocities, but had followed Kaiser Wrecker’s orders to the letter without ever complaining. Nobody knew what his name had been back on Earth, either. Of all the remaining Nerf gangsters, he was the most likely to turn into a problem.

  Akila had offered to send a handful of Adventurers along but Hawke had decided to use the current group instead. Having three distinct groups in the same party would cause more trouble than whatever more warm bodies could contribute. If Jake had offered to come along, he would gladly have accepted, but the Archmage said that he was too involved with council affairs to join in.

  “Remember the deal you have with the city,” Hawke told them all. “If you help fix the problem with the Labyrinth, your death sentence will be commuted. You won’t go free, though; you’ll end up doing whatever Akila’s authorities want you to do for several years, maybe decades. If I speak up for you, the hard labor sentence may be commuted as well. You will be released into my custody and be part of my guild for the same period. Be part of the solution, because if you turn into a problem I’ll send you off to respawn and leave you to the tender mercies of the authorities.”

  The four convicts nodded, even Zippo, although the latter did so distractedly, like he had better things to think about. Hawke sighed. This wasn’t going to be fun.

  Twelve

  “Pretty country. Reminds me of Orom,” Hawke said as he and Tava flew over the lands between Akila and the Malleus Mallum.

  That translated from Old Vulgate as ‘Crushing Evil,’ although its alternate meaning was the ‘Evil Grind.’ That was the sort of wordplay only a gamer would appreciate, and it made Hawke wonder if the double meaning was intentional. The Makers had imposed game-like r
ules on reality through the use of magic or super-technology. Hawke suspected the similarities weren’t coincidental. One or more of the Makers had been gaming geeks, he was almost certain of it. He hoped that one day he would figure out why they did it.

  The Labyrinth in question had been around for millennia. Saturnyx had visited it in the hands of Herkulion Invictus, an Exalted Warrior who went from level sixteen to twenty-three during a four-day dungeon-crawl that took him to the end of the Onyx Wing, one of the sections of the M&M, as the Nerf Herders had nicknamed the damn place. Saturnyx’s experience would have been invaluable, if the Labyrinth hadn’t been Chaos-warped. The same went for the Nerf Herders. Their knowledge might be useful, but Hawke wasn’t going to count on it.

  The Proving Ground was twenty miles northeast of the city proper, on a plateau that jutted out between the swamplands to the west and the coastline to the east. The area was high enough above sea level to have a temperate weather, and the locals had taken advantage of it, building dozens of farming villages there. Only the upper one third of the plateau had been left vacant. That was where the Labyrinth stood, and nobody wanted to live too close to it even before its monsters started to slip out.

  The Drakofoxes and their riders passed over one smoking ruin after another. The unleashed monsters from the M&M had laid waste to three villages and two country manors, all consumed by some kind of toxic waste, a phosphorescent greenish-black sludge that continued to release poisonous fumes days after the perpetrators had moved on. According to the reports Hawke had read, cleaning the poisonous chemicals took a lot of magical power. It would be months before the area returned to normal.