2:50 P.M.
“Why is it that all of the revolvers we looted had to be right-handed?” Ashcroft complained.
Ashcroft and Emile had advanced far beyond the North Gate. They could no longer see the Gate behind them, but they could barely make out the very top of the huge concrete wall that surrounded Osiris. Ashcroft held his revolver in his left hand and a handful of bullets in his right. The revolver’s cylinder ejected out of the left side of the gun, so Ashcroft had to contort his hands awkwardly to reload the revolver.
Emile reloaded the shotgun he had looted from a goblin five minutes before. “Most people are right-handed. In fact, you’re right-handed, Ashcroft.”
“Impressive that I can shoot so well with my left hand then, isn't it?” Ashcroft said with a smile.
The two Knights stood atop a thin coating of dust. This dust and various pieces of scattered equipment was all that remained of three dozen Deluvians. Ashcroft and Emile had much experience working as a unit, and they made short work of any monstrous incursion.
A goblin’s head and torso appeared in a second-floor windowsill of a nearby building. Ashcroft casually thrust his revolver in the goblin’s direction and pulled the trigger. He did not have time to look down the gun sights; he fired based on instinct alone. The goblin’s head jerked back as the bullet passed through its brain.
“Do you think Tantalus will get pissed that we killed the NPCs at the North Gate?” Emile asked.
“No way,” Ashcroft said with a laugh. “Tantalus is a smart guy. He won’t care that we decided to test out the combat system before we ran into any real trouble.”
“But…” Emile said.
“Tantalus isn’t your boss, Emile,” Ashcroft cut him off. “Hell, neither am I, not officially. We’ve only been in the game for about five hours. Not enough time has passed for a hierarchy to calcify.”
Three more goblins appeared from behind a house, but they were killed effortlessly by the combined gunfire of the two Knights.
“I do not intend to take orders from Tantalus,” Ashcroft continued. “An equal relationship would be acceptable, but I don’t know exactly how the cards will fall.”
Suddenly, a door no more than five feet to Aschroft’s left crashed open, revealing an orc dressed in full plate armor. The orc was wielding a spear in one hand, and it used its own momentum to bring the point careening toward Ashcroft’s ribs.
At the last possible instant, Ashcroft jumped out of the way of the spear. Acting entirely on instinct, Ashcroft drew his saber and brought it crashing against the orc’s chest. There was a loud clang of metal on metal, and the sword bounced harmlessly off of the orc’s armor.
A half second after the armored orc’s unexpected assault, five more orcs burst out of the entrance of a nearby house. These five orcs were equipped with the standard fur clothing and two-handed swords. Emile’s attempt to assist Ashcroft was interrupted as Emile had to focus his whole attention on not being killed by the orc squad.
Ashcroft, now inside the reach of the orc captain’s spear, lost no time in altering his attack. The Captain of the Knights of Ashes steadied his saber against the wrist of his hand holding the revolver. The orc captain tried to step away from Ashcroft, but Ashcroft perfectly matched the orc’s footwork as he brought the tip of his saber up to an eye hole in the orc’s helmet. A look of fear and confusion colored the orc captain’s expression as it tried to escape. This was the first time Ashcroft had seen a Deluvian express an emotion other than pure hatred. Ashcroft’s moment of hesitation gave the orc captain time to draw a dagger from its hip and bring its steel tip toward Ashcroft’s stomach. Ashcroft dodged out of the way of the dagger, but the process forced him several steps back.
With an annoyed huff, Ashcroft saw that he was back in range of the orc captain’s spear. He silently lamented his mistake. Ashcroft realized a second after dodging the dagger that he would have been able to kill the orc captain in that exchange if he had let himself be stabbed and used the opening to stab the orc in the eye.
“Emile, how’re you doing?” Ashcroft asked without looking back at Emile. Ashcroft spent a few seconds pacing around the orc captain, looking for openings.
“I can handle it, but it might take a second,” Emile said over the sound of steel cutting through flesh.
“You have skill, Revenant,” the orc captain said without warning. The orc’s voice was surprisingly human-like, and there was a pleasing quality to it. In a different situation, Ashcroft might even have called the voice soothing. “I would like to hear your name before I kill you.”
“Oh, you clearly don’t know who you’re dealing with,” Ashcroft said with a smirk. “You can call me Sir Ashcroft of the Ashen Knights.”
“I didn’t know there were knights among the Revenants,” said the orc captain. “Well…”
The orc captain was cut off by Emile. He shouted, “Oy! Ashcroft! Quit screwing around! Kill that orc so you can help me!”
“Right,” Ashcroft said under his breath before unloading six shots into the orc captain’s breastplate over the course of two seconds. The shots were grouped together perfectly. Any non-supernatural entity would have been killed by such an assault.
“Has no one told you that only anointed weapons may pierce the hide of my kind?” the orc captain asked mockingly.
Ashcroft cast his revolver aside and began sprinting full speed at the orc captain. He took a grazing blow from the tip of the orc’s spear as he closed to close-combat range. The orc was still holding a dagger in its off-hand, and it tried to bring the dagger to bare. However, Ashcroft did not remain at close range with the orc for long enough for it to use the dagger. Ashcroft’s body came into contact with the orc captain, and then he brushed past and out of range of both the spear and the dagger.
The orc captain was confused by Ashcroft’s behavior. Why had the Revenant risked the danger of charging past the spear if he was not going to do anything? As the orc captain thought this, it looked at Ashcroft and saw that he was not holding anything in his hands. Where had the Revenant’s sword gone? Slowly, the orc captain looked down. Ashcroft’s saber had speared through the orc captain’s chest.
“To answer your question,” said Ashcroft, “I know that bullets can’t pierce an orc’s skin. I also know that bullets have no trouble piercing through plate mail.”
With a horrified look on its face, the orc captain fell dead to the ground.
“Emile!” Ashcroft shouted, turning toward Emile for the first time since the fight began. Emile was bleeding from a large chest wound, but he had managed to kill the five orcs.
“Well, that sucked,” Emile complained loudly before sitting on the ground with a huff. “I think we should head back to the Gate.”
“Yeah,” said Ashcroft. After a long pause, Ashcroft continued, “Something tells me this is going to be harder than I originally thought.”
At the West Gate, the conflagration had progressed nicely. The first thing Tantalus did upon arriving at the Gate was order the nearby NPCs to burn down the surrounding buildings. The fire at the West Gate started four minutes before the fire at the East Gate, and this allowed the West Gate defender slightly more breathing room.
Elias crouched low behind a concrete barrier. He grasped his rifle with shaking hands. Elias’s vision was severely impaired by the shrapnel that had peppered his right eye. He had healed the damage, but his eye, apparently unsalvageable, had fallen out of his head much like Cadmium’s foot.
Bebop laid dead a few feet from Elias. Bebop’s face was a rictus mask of terror; his throat had been torn open by a high-caliber bullet. He must have gone into shock before he could heal himself. The satchel at Elias’s side was starting to get light, and Elias was starting to dread the moment that he ran out of bullets and had to start looting Bebop’s corpse for ammo.
In the brief moments Elias had spared to look at Tantalus during the fight, he saw an unparalleled level of carnage. Tantalus had fought like a demon, and there was no doubt in Elias’s mind that the brutality of the killings served the secondary purpose of terrifying the Deluvians.
At that moment, however, it was calm. The fighting had stopped, and the defenders were tense with anticipation.
Two figures appeared running from the smoke of the conflagration. Elias gritted his teeth to the point that he could feel them scraping as he aimed his rifle at the figures. He was just about to pull the trigger when he started to make out qualities of the figures. The figures were Pixie and one of the NPCs that Tantalus had sent to start the fire.
“Friendly approaching!” shouted Pixie. “Don’t shoot!”
Elias stood up from cover with a heavy sigh of relief as Pixie and the NPC took cover in one of the alcoves off to one side of the opening to the Gate. The player and NPC leaned against the wall while trying to catch their breath. Tantalus, absolutely covered head to toe in Deluvian blood, approached the two. Elias followed close after.
Pixie looked up as Tantalus approached and recoiled slightly. “Are you okay?”
“Oh yeah, this,” said Tantalus. “This is orc blood, mostly. How’d the mission go?”
“Could have gone better,” said Pixie. “We lost most of the NPCs to goblins, but I was able to save the last one.” Pixie patted the NPC on his back.
“What’s an NPC?” the NPC asked.
“Don’t worry about it,” Pixie said quickly.
“Sir,” the NPC began speaking to Tantalus. “I know I’m speaking out of line here, but I have to know. Why did we have to burn those houses down? I really hate to ask, but Eadric and Demetrius deserve to have died for a reason.”
“Your comrades died for a good cause, son,” said Tantalus. “The fire will slow the assault and allow us to use these,” Tantalus gestured at his bloody rifle, “much more effectively.”
The NPC grimaced at the sight of the gun, but he was mostly able to hide it. “Thank you for explaining, sir.”
“By the way,” said Tantalus, “I never caught your name.”
“Sigismund, sir,” said the NPC. “If I may, I should give my report to Colonel Dolok.” Sigismund gave a salute to Tantalus, which Tantalus wordlessly returned.
“What a strange culture,” Tantalus mused quietly as Sigismund left.
Pixie approached Elias and asked, “What happened while I was away?”
“Five of us have died so far, including Bebop” said Elias. “Among the survivors, just about all of us have taken damage. I’d say we’ve killed about fifty of ‘em. Oh yeah, and we’ve lost about twenty NPCs. The bastards don’t understand how cover works, so they’ll charge toward a gun line of goblins if we don’t physically restrain them. Did you see any Deluvians when you were coming back?”
“No,” said Pixie after a moment of processing the numbers. “We’ve lost five people?”
“Yeah,” Elias sighed. “Let’s get into cover so we don’t get added to that statistic.”
Pixie and Elias took cover behind a concrete barrier, pointing their rifles at the entrance to the West Gate. They remained there, taking breaks back and forth, for the next twenty minutes.
After a long period of inactivity, Tantalus shouted to the defenders of the West Gate, “They’re not coming! Stand down for now!”
A cheer went up among the defenders, and Elias slumped down in relief.
“Will every day be like this?” asked Pixie.
“God, I hope not,” said Elias.
The battle had ended at the East Gate, and FullDan was left surrounded by the corpses of NPCs and players. Mander was standing in the center of a semi-circle of dust.
FullDan saw Enzo sitting on the ground with his back against a concrete barrier. He was facing toward the Deluvians, and he held an empty 1911 in his hand. Enzo’s form was lit up by the burning houses just outside the East Gate. Panicked, FullDan ran to Enzo’s side. When he got closer, FullDan could see that Enzo was bleeding heavily from three gunshot wounds. Enzo had been shot in the stomach, lung, and thigh.
Enzo spoke quietly, “Hey… FullDan… you got any ammo? I seem to be out.” He chuckled weakly at his own joke.
“You’re hit bad,” FullDan said, taking in the severity of Enzo’s wounds. With no hesitation, FullDan tore off his own jacket and started tearing it into strips. “Medic!” FullDan shouted loud enough for anyone at the East Gate to hear.
“I messed up,” said Enzo. “I should have retreated back to the City after I fell from the battlement. Stupid mistake. I’ve lost too much blood, my [Rapid Healing] isn’t working. I’ve only got six Blood Points left, and it’s going down. I don’t know what happens when it hits zero, but it can’t be good. Five now.”
“It’s okay, man,” FullDan said, clearly lying. “I’m going to stop the bleeding, we’ll get you hooked up to a blood bag, and then you’ll be able to heal yourself. How’s that sound? Hey, stay awake. CAN I GET A MEDIC!?” FullDan shouted significantly louder this time.
“Four,” Enzo said. Tears began to fall from Enzo’s eyes. “No, I can feel it. I don’t think I’m going to walk away from this, FullDan. God…” Enzo’s voice broke, “I really wanted to see the world with you guys, but I don’t think I’ll be able to. Sorry.”
“Listen to me, Enzo,” said FullDan. “You’re going to be fine. Just hold this bandage in place, okay?”
With a sudden burst of strength, Enzo grabbed FullDan by his white undershirt and pulled him close. FullDan could see the tears in Enzo’s eyes. “I only have a few seconds…” A powerful resolve formed in Enzo’s eyes in that instant. “Could you do me one last favor?”
“What is it?”
“Beat this game... and kill GM."
Enzo’s grip on FullDan’s shirt loosened, and his body fell once more against the concrete divider.
Enzo’s eyes closed, and he did not stir.
