A Song of Shadow Read online

  It was time to exit Barliona.

  Chapter Two

  Our further gaming plans became subject to wide-ranging discussion. In addition to Sasha, Sloe’s guildmates also wanted to cross the Arras and at this point Sloe announced that he would act as the scout. The plan was elegant in its simplicity. Sasha hit on the idea of selling his contacts in the Dark Legion the opportunity to enter a closed location. By way of payment he was going to ask the Legion to teleport his avatar to the Arras as well as protect him from the hostile mobs in the area.

  “Under no conditions can we let third parties in on this! Let alone the Dark Legion,” Sloe objected on the conference call. He looked like he was about thirty, tall, gaunt, with a pocked, narrow face. “My clan will handle teleportation and security. We’ll sweeten the deal with some gear for you, useful scrolls and whatnot—whatever your noob soul desires. But no Dark Legion or anyone else!”

  “What do you care whether you lot get in there alone or with someone else?” Chip asked, surprised by his reaction. “The more, the merrier—and the higher the chance of victory.”

  “Why there’s a whole forest of local scenarios here!” Sloe brushed him off. “And they’re there for those like me who started playing as pirqs or biota. The new location has to have a new dungeon. Whoever completes it first, will earn incredibly useful bonuses for his guild. There’s nothing dumber than sharing an advantage like that with your competitors. Got it?”

  “Not really,” my warriors shook their heads in sync, and Sasha elaborated:

  “The hell do you need to get into the game so much? It’s like you people are losing your minds in there...” At this point Sasha trailed off and began to snuffle the air with his long nose. In the next instant he yelled, “The burgers are burning!”

  And Snegov jumped from his seat and dashed into the kitchen.

  Sloe’s sigh of despair sounded in the comm, while Reed, who had stayed silent this entire time, remarked bashfully: “For some people this isn’t a game but a means of survival. For people like that, having an advantage is important.”

  Reed’s appearance matched his voice. He was an ordinary-looking guy my age with a potato-shaped nose and a shock of reddish hair. His mussed hairdo reminded me of the Scarecrow from that ancient kids’ movie. All he lacked was a straw hat.

  “We won’t ever understand that,” Pasha confessed, opening a box with the model of some ancient vessel named SS Great Eastern. I don’t know why this five-funneled steamship was famous, but both soldiers had danced a shamanic dance over the kit’s box when it was delivered and were now planning on spending all evening assembling it. They had a generally unhealthy, in my view, obsession with various models of historical and speculative-historical machinery. Pasha’s room, for instance, was decked out with shelves full of all kinds of junk: From an ancient T-34 tank to a small Death Star. On the other hand, this hobby helped Pasha train his fine motor skills which were lacking following his accident.

  “I don’t want you to understand, I want you to keep in mind,” Sloe explained patiently. “Don’t you care who it is that helps your friend reach the Hidden Forest?”

  “Not one bit,” Pasha replied laconically, using a precision knife to separate the parts from the rest of the plastic cast. “The goal is the most important thing...Everything else doesn’t matter. Hah!” He triumphantly raised half of the hull and held it out to us like he had just dug up a nugget of gold.

  “Excellent,” Sloe smiled with satisfaction. “I will coordinate the party and conduct the negotiations. Now, explain to me please exactly what you’re planning on doing. As I understood, we won’t be leveling up with Lori anymore, but we now have the opportunity to provide the Seventh with information about the renegades. I imagine we can use this to squeeze out something interesting.”

  “You can decide this among yourselves. I’m curious to see what’s going on among the local villains. You can figure out how to use this information on your own. I’ll tell you everything I see without any problems.”

  “What are your plans, Chip? Are you going to switch too or will you go on fighting on the side of good?” Sloe asked Pasha.

  “We’ll have to wait and see,” the pilot replied vaguely, concentrating on some unruly piece of the model.

  “Uh-huh,” Sasha backed him up, returning from the kitchen. “You can rest easy my fine friends—I have saved our dinner!” He sat down beside his friend, and arming himself with some pliers began to separate the tiny pieces of plastic.

  “Good, evil...” the ranger smirked, “It’s all nonsense. As they used to say: What’s good for one is death to another. Like for instance, who decided that Bastilda or whatever her name is, is evil?”

  “Astilba,” Sloe corrected him fastidiously. “Well it’s just an example. Anyway, why do you want to go to that location? The pirqs and biota won’t exactly welcome you—crossing the Arras will immediately give you a negative rep with them. The renegades won’t be happy to see you either. They’re like Nazis or whatever—they’re opposed to alliances with other races. And what are you going to do there at your Level 30?”

  “See the sights, hear the sounds, smell the smells,” Sasha shrugged. “Maybe dig some holes...”

  “Tourism, in other words,” Sloe concluded.

  “I’m a tourist in general,” giggled the ranger. “Where haven’t I been! I’ve even gamboled on the surface of the moon! And all on the taxpayers’ dime.”

  Sloe waved his hand grimly and turned to the most taciturn member of our party.

  “Reed, do you have any plans?”

  “Not in particular,” Reed shrugged his shoulders. “I’m reading the forums bit by bit, considering how I’ll make money and leveling up. Only...” He blushed deeply, coughed bashfully and with a little difficulty added: “I uh...I’m in a party. With Kate...I mean Brouhaha. We’re leveling up together.”

  At the mention of Brouhaha, Pasha twitched a cheek, which led me to conclude that he hadn’t forgotten her insult. Like a little child, I swear...Sasha merely smiled to himself, and Sloe calculated something to himself and then looked over at Reed doubtfully.

  “Once you leave the starting location, I’ll ask my people whether they need a bard for their party. All right, let’s get in touch later. I’m going to arrange the raiding party for crossing the Arras.”

  “I’m going to return to the game too,” Reed announced, concluding our slightly muddled deliberations.

  The burgers in the kitchen sure smelled good.

  “Time to eat,” Snegov ordered, intercepting my look and sliding aside his tools. “Pasha, set the altar of sacrifice.”

  To my amazement, the burgers tasted much better than the ones the autocook would make. The guys discoursed about man’s superiority over technology, while I couldn’t help contemplate a small paradox of life. All of my guy friends proudly claimed that cooking wasn’t a man’s job, but a woman’s—that they were humans, not kitchen appliances. And as a result it worked out that in the minds of most of my generation, cooking became an unworthy activity, a lowly one and entirely non-masculine. And here were two grown men, who had seen things that I hadn’t even seen in the movies, cooking their hearts out without for a second imagining that this was somehow to the detriment of their masculinity. To the contrary: What kind of a man would you be if, far from civilization, you died shamefully as a result of your own inability to provide food and shelter for yourself? You can’t argue with that. Eh, something strange and perverse is happening in our society if helplessness has become a synonym of civilization and progress.

  “But really,” once I’d satiated my hunger, I returned to the topic of Barliona, “what are you really going to do in the Hidden Forest?”

  Still munching on his burger with gusto, Sasha flashed me a sardonic look.

  “You’ll laugh,” he said. “I just want to get out.”

  “No, I get that part. But—how? Everyone you meet is going to try to kill you. The biota for crossing the border, th
e renegades for being an alien. Dying again and again seems to me a bit suspect as a form of entertainment.”

  “They’ll have to find me first,” the ranger waved his hand. “I’ve got a good handle on camouflage and I’ve had a decent cloak made. Once we meet up with Pasha, we’ll figure out what to do next.”

  “Are you asking me out?” The pilot formed a little gable with his recently-regrown eyebrows. Considering how the rest of him looked, the ensuing face was simultaneously comical and terrifying. “Oh you monster!”

  “What of it?” the ranger spread his arms akimbo. “A romantic stroll through the woods. A bonfire of ents, a bouquet of biota skulls...”

  “You don’t say,” Chip agreed. “You, Snegov, should be writing novels instead of wasting your time in the army. Novels about love among psychos.”

  “You forgot a muff of pirq hide,” I couldn’t keep myself from contributing my own banter to this idyllic scenario.

  “And you should be his coauthor,” Pasha chimed in. “A perfect partnership.”

  In response, Sasha stuck out his tongue and shuffled closer to me, saying:

  “Keep your jealous envy to yourself, you pirq muff. You better hope we won’t come skin your hide for its fleas! Right, Lori?”

  “Aren’t you forgetting something?” Pasha squinted slyly.

  “Like what?”

  “Well...” The pilot propped himself up against his chair’s armrest with an expression of triumph on his face. “Your numb skull has forgotten how Lori likes to treat her allies!”

  Sasha made a grimace of terror, stole a piece of the burger from my plate and jumped away, almost losing his balance and rolling out of the kitchen on his stool in the process.

  “I rescind my offer!” he yelled, stuffing the stolen piece into his gob.

  “Eh, where has my knight in shining armor gone?” I sighed with all the pathos I could summon. “All you men are alike! You only think about one thing—how to get some more grub!”

  “Thass uss alright...” The ranger agreed through his stuffed mouth and spread his arms helplessly.

  After dinner, Sasha went home. As we understood from his vague explanations—he had to get ready for a ‘romantic stroll through the Hidden Forest.’ Pasha and I chatted some more and then went to our rooms. He went to bed, and I entered Barliona. I wanted to go over the quest I’d received and see what it entailed.

  I traveled the not-so-short distance to the location indicated on my map without any problems. The blighted beasts didn’t bother me and the mysterious sentries of the Hidden Forest didn’t enter blighted ground. The tall thickets of thorns and brambles, like the one that fenced the Sixth’s meadow, kept them from shadowing me. If this were all happening out in reality, the thick thorns would have long since tattered my leafy cloak to pieces, as well as my dark blue dress and thin fringe.

  In general, these thickets were all over the place and they didn’t grow randomly as much as according to some sort of system. I tried my best to fill them in on my map, but I didn’t bother checking everything out either, so my ‘doodles’ looked a bit like the intestines of some mysterious animal. I don’t even want to imagine what I would be in this simile.

  The difficulties began once I’d reached the border of the blighted ground. My path wound its way through, but there was an overgrown ent with a very unpleasant appearance standing in the fog. A Level 300 Forest Sentry. So there’s the catch in this seemingly simple, at first glance, quest. Go ahead and try to get past a guard like this.

  “Okaaaay...” I remarked to myself, staring into the monster’s smoldering, red eyes.

  I wonder whether he’s a sentient relative of the biota or something like a nature elemental.

  “Greetings, my dear fellow!” I called as politely as I could from a respectful distance.

  No reply. No reaction whatsoever. He kept staring at me from the edge of the blighted ground as before.

  “I mean you no ill!” I reassured the creature without much enthusiasm. “I would simply like to pass on my way!”

  Zero emotion. The dull log! Standing there, guarding the border. Hmm...why that’s an idea...

  Knowing ahead of time that this idea was actually a dubious one, I got out my lute and played the Hendrix lick...

  Machine gun

  Tearing my body all apart

  Machine gun

  Tearing my body all apart...

  Three magic missiles went flying at the wooden giant and one after the other slammed into the monster. Fail. The Forest Sentry shifted his weight with a displeased look, but there was no other discernible reaction. That’s what you call, ‘not even tickled.’

  Right. Even if the sentry can step onto the blighted ground, it would take me two months to kill him, no less. If I can even hit them, given our level difference. This means I have to find another way. The tactic of moving in camouflage had worked earlier, maybe it’ll work now too?

  I activated my natural camouflage and began creeping along the border. The sentry followed me with a stern look. Oh come on...Okay. What are my other options? I looked over the wooden colossus critically: He had short legs. This Pinocchio might not be much of a sprinter. In theory I could simply run away from the sentry, reach the location indicated on my map, toss out some seeds and then book it to the next patch. I wonder where I’ll respawn if things go awry? The Tree with its Branch of Oblivion was closed to me and according to the lore that was where we biota received our new bodies. Although, surely there was a mechanic for biota players to respawn in the wider world? In that case there should be a respawn point here too. The only question was how far it would be from my current position. I didn’t want to check, but my options were fairly scant.

  Okay, what else do I have in my arsenal? Buffs won’t help, debuffs...Weakening spells wouldn’t do me any good and I didn’t have any slowing debuffs. Song of Confusion? A debuff to perception might allow me to creep by camouflaged, but I’m afraid that playing the lute will give away my location, and that spell was channeled—the target had to hear the music. It wouldn’t work.

  Vengeful Flame. Here I had to pause for thought. In theory, this spell would allow me to kill the sentry even at my level. That is if he will maintain his distance and doesn’t have any ranged spells to take me out with first. He might throw some pine cone grenade or something, who knows. But even if things went perfectly according to plan, the spell would destroy us both. If I stop at 1% HP for the two of us and heal myself...Practice had just shown that it would take me hours to finish off the ent, and that wasn’t taking into account any regeneration that he was capable of, or self-healing etc. Meanwhile, Vengeful Flame’s cooldown was 24 hours. Nothing doing.

  Therefore, the only useful spell was Shadow Haze. What’s the deal with its range and effect duration?

  Shadow Haze: Target area is covered with a haze of impenetrable Shadow in which only creatures who have adopted Shadow can see. Even a divine gaze would have trouble piercing the haze of Shadow.

  Negative effect: -40% to efficacy of divine magic.

  Negative effect: Blocks all communication.

  Effect duration: Until spell ends. This spell is channeled. Confusion or some other form of control over the character interrupts the spell. Casting time: Instant. Cost of performance: (Spell radius) MP per second. Maximum radius: (Intellect ÷ 4) meters.

  Cooldown: 1 hour.

  Hmm. Purely theoretically, I can cast the haze, dart in the direction I need and gain a decent head start before the sentry realizes what’s going on, leaves the area of effect and finds me again. The question is whether he uses sight to orient himself or some other sense. I wish I knew whether I had the mana pool and stamina to make this work. All right. My mana regeneration was 2 MP per second, which wasn’t great. Either way, I’d never know if I didn’t give it a shot.

  For the lulz, I waved farewell at the sentry and returned to the thicket of black brambles where he couldn’t see me. It’s dumb to hope, but it’s dumber not to try—w
hat if losing sight of me, the sentry will simply go about his business? I’ll study the pattern that Lotos gave me in the meantime, compare it to the lay of the land and visualize where I have to sow the seeds. It’s better than trying to figure all that out while on the run.

  The Forest Sentry didn’t go anywhere. Either the jerk sensed that I’d be back or that was his typical post. For the sake of curiosity, I returned to the brambles where the sentry couldn’t see me and left the blighted ground at a tangent to the path I needed to take, skirting the watchful ent. It’s much easier to loop around the dangerous area than perform dubious experiments.

  The first few minutes it seemed to me that I had tricked the system and that my ruse had worked. My minute of patting myself on the back was interrupted by the sentry’s thunderous footsteps. He was ponderously moving to intercept me, returning my intellectual benchmark to its previous position—average. Of course. The Forest Sentry had sensed a threat to his dominion, otherwise, what kind of sentry would he be? I didn’t much feel like checking what means of intercepting me he had at his disposal, and so as quickly as I could, I dashed for the area I was supposed to sow with the seeds. According to my guesstimates it was near a plant that resembled a giant gladiolus. The sentry added speed but was still moving much slower than me. The forest echoed with my triumphant laughter. That’s how we do it! First you have to catch me, you slow stump you!

  And then the stump caught me. A tangle of roots burst from the earth, two of them coiling around my legs, binding them with the force of steel shackles. I went down and kissed the ground at full sprint, earning a ‘full kisser’ (as Sasha liked to say) worth of leaves and humus, which, unexpectedly, tasted pretty good! Still, I began spitting and sputtering reflexively and cast Shadow Haze. The world went gray but didn’t lose its definition, while the sentry slowed his pace and began looking around in confusion. So his sight is important to him after all. It’s too bad only that it isn’t vital. This driftwood was no dummy, and he continued to lumber in my direction where, in his educated guess, I should be fettered by the roots. And, damn it all, there was some logic to this.