The Dragon's Wrath: Shadows in the Flame (40 page)

“Uh… I guess I do?” she mumbled quietly as she lightly kicked the snow and looked down at her feet. “Sorry, got caught up in the moment.”

“Hey so what’s the real story?” asked Ethan in an attempt to restart the conversation as the mood became awkward. “Climbed a mountain and found it at the top? That sounds totally bogus. No secrets needed here.”

“It’s the truth,” I said while testing my leg to see if I could put pressure on it. Silence filling the air once more, my leg was definitely broken but I could still walk on it with a limp. Running was out of the question but as my mana had recovered and the battle was still being waged, it was about time I reentered the fight.

“What’s a Relic?” asked Barik.

“It’s a legendary item in the game,” replied Emily as she sat down and leaned against a tree with arms wrapped around her legs. “There aren’t that many of them and if he can teleport plus everything else you mentioned, he’s got one of the best in the game.”

“Whoa, nice going Sigurd,” said Ethan with a thumb’s up.

“Man, I’ve been looking all over for one and he’s already got a top ten power,” she mumbled with a depressed atmosphere clouding over her. “And here he’s already got one… so early too….”

Letting out a sigh as she moped in the corner, I began walking towards the field of battle as the other three stared curiously at my back. Not bothering to answer them, I flash stepped through the forest and out to the edge. Looking around, no one was nearby and the fighting was only about four-hundred yards from our current location. Resuming my walk, I could hear footsteps behind me as Barik and Ethan came running up.

“Ey wait up,” said Ethan as Barik ran up next to him.

“Yeh, what’s the hurry?” asked Barik.

“We were losing the battle until we scared that entire flank of theirs,” I explained as I struggled with every other step from my broken leg. “Now look, that little change caused them to panic and hundreds of people shifted and collapsed, out of six-thousand or so players, that’s still around five percent.”

“Yeh, so some of them died,” said Barik quickly. “Still losin’ the battle.”

“Yeah, well if I can bombard them safely from a distance, they’ll start to falter again,” I said plainly. The truth was that I could only kill or wound up to around thirty with a single strike as they remained extremely clustered, shoulder to shoulder. That alone wouldn’t change a battle if I could only do it twice every five minutes… but if a hundred people were blinded and lost their hearing simultaneously and in reaction they tried to retreat, it might open holes large enough for our forces to swing in and counter.

It wasn’t much of a plan but Emily was right, I had the strongest magic on the field by far… other area of effect spells would maybe kill a handful of players and wound a handful more. I could affect dozens outright, and potentially many more.

“Need a shoulder?” asked Ethan as they walked on either side of me.

“Nah, we’re almost there… need to be about thirty to fifty yards out for this,” I explained as I surveyed the field. “Only another hundred to go.”

After three hours had passed us by and night had fallen, I found myself back at the staging grounds being attended to by a high-level priest. My status as an Exceptional Threat had been retained as I used my artillery magic to lay waste to the clustered enemies every time it was up. One cast, then a brief period for the cooldown to pass, then another cast and a trip to the backline to recover my mana.

Emily felt guilty and later came over to help but remained depressed for the rest of the battle as she couldn’t believe I had already beat her to finding a Relic. If she knew I had the location of a second Relic, she probably would smash my face in. She also threw in the towel saying my Relic gave me too many advantages and it wasn’t fair to compete for kills any longer, as if we were actually competing before.

She moved up to a solid fifty-seven kills though as she fell to number four on the list. Two other casters passed her up as they latched on to my spells and dropped their artillery-styled spells on top of mine. Recognizing the dark cloud, by the end of the battle my lightning strikes were nearly useless save to split the enemy force apart and send them running in fear. Five seconds of cloud cover was plenty of time for them to run so long as one person saw it.

The other lightning strikes weren’t nearly as powerful as mine but they learned the differences as my cloud was larger, darker, and had brighter lightning streaks dancing about. Watching the battle unfold as I recuperated mana, my strikes were almost three times as powerful… all thanks to a little Relic. Unfortunately, my trick didn’t work anymore and my influence wasn’t enough. I wasn’t strong enough to sway the battle, even if I was still the number one threat by far with two-hundred and eleven kills to name.

No one was really close. The problem was that we still lost the battle. We suffered far more casualties again and the widening gap between our player numbers was beginning to present an insurmountable task.

The five of us… could only do so much.

I, could only do so much.

Staring at the purple armband poking out of my pocket, I pushed it back in as I kept it a secret. Interestingly enough, I had found the armband lying out in the field. It appeared to have been slashed and left behind with either the player dying a distance away where it was no longer leashed to him or he discarded it of his own free will. I didn’t have a use for it but I wanted to hold onto it for now. An armband was the only thing that signified your allegiance out on the battlefield… and if a player died with theirs on them or nearby, it stayed bound to the player the same way their gear and select items would.

If a use ever came for it, it would be nice to have.

Looking out at the staging camp that surrounded me, the size of it all was hard to take in. Nearly as far as the eye could see were hundreds if not thousands of makeshift tents and campfires as inhabitants sat back and relaxed without a care to the situation on hand. Nearly a thousand NPCs and slightly more players remained here but it certainly felt empty compared to hours before when there were three times as many bodies.

Finding people in the crowd was actually possible now.

Yet that was a sad reality.

Having finished my treatment, I was making my way through the camp when someone spoke out to me, grabbing my attention.

“How are you feeling?” asked a familiar voice as I turned to face her.

“Ah, I’m fine,” I replied with a faint smile. “Staying on for a bit?”

“Mm. Not sleepy,” she answered with a nod while sitting down

Joining her in the open space, there wasn’t a whole lot to do in between battles but the break was necessary. Players kept going for hours without paying attention to the time, fighting an endless battle that truly appeared to have no end in sight. It was taxing on the mind and if it went for far too long, I worried about the physical and mental trauma in real life.

“If you don’t mind me asking,” I questioned while looking her in the eyes. “Do you dislike PvP in general, is that why you only watch?”

“Mm… it seems interesting,” she replied with a slight pause, taking her time to think it over as she put a finger to her lips.

“Then why not join in? You’ve had the opportunity.”

“I’m a priest, I heal.”

“You hardly heal though,” I countered with as soft of a delivery as possible, not wanting to offend her.

“Oh, that’s because there’s too many health bars on the screen so I turned them all off except for ours,” she explained rather quickly while giggling. “I suppose that is funny, isn’t it. I’ve only been watching the whole time.”

“You have offensive spells too, don’t you?” I asked, wanting to follow up.

“They are rather tame,” she said. “Quite tame, really.”

Thinking over her situation, I found it interesting that she had been so fearless in combat but restrained herself from participating because she felt her spells weren’t of much use. Perhaps compared to my lightning and Ethan’s fire magic, her holy spells didn’t measure up but they could still do quite a bit of damage and could help sway a single duel one way or the other.

Katherine was evidence of that.

“Want me to teach you lightning magic?” I asked somewhat off-handedly, not really expecting her to say yes but willing to do so if she did.

“Thanks for the offer but I must decline,” she said sternly, catching me off guard. “You see, I’m far more interested in Dark Magic, if I was to learn another type. I… find it, intriguing at times. Perhaps because it’s familiar to me. To be able to wield the darkness and the powers of the void, the thought is rather exhilarating.”

“Empowering?” I asked as I leaned back.

“Yes.”

A thought occurred to me but it wasn’t something I was willing to do yet. She was a nice girl and so far seemed friendly but in a week, there was no telling if I would ever run into her or Emily again. For now we were friends through motive… and I wasn’t sure we were much more than that. It wasn’t long ago that she disliked me.

Maybe another time.

For now, I wanted to rest. After looking at the Leaderboards, the original army of four-thousand something on our side had been reduced to one-thousand, one-hundred and eight players while the enemy force was happily standing at one-thousand plus however many were left that couldn’t be seen.

Their numbers had fallen significantly but they now outnumbered us nearly three-to-one by the visual gauge and the reality was that this next battle could very well be the last. Everyone realized that players would be respawning soon and unless they wanted a stalemate, both sides wanted to end it with one last fight.

If I was stronger, if I was better maybe this could have turned out differently. I couldn’t afford to die so I couldn’t take uncalculated risks, everything was planned and actual combat time was kept short. Every second in the middle of it all was another tick up the percentage for likelihood of spontaneous death.

I was at a loss on how to turn it around.

Turning to the forums, the only relevant talk was about our involvement within the fight. Alliance One and Alliance Three, as I later found out Emily had convinced them to use her naming scheme, were happily within the top twenty. Alliance Four was somewhere in the top two-hundred as we also later learned that the grayed out names of the fallen were removed from the Leaderboards after they died and the next battle started.

Their totals were kept in a Running Total off to the side but their current totals were reset. Since that was how the system worked, instead of being in a competing pool of over four-thousand, we were now in a pool slightly larger than a thousand. There were quite a few people with a lot of kills now and that meant one thing to me. The next battle would be more difficult, as the fodder had been removed.

Yet of all the Alliance members being talked about, it was Alliance Two and Alliance Zero that got all of the attention. Everyone commented on how Alliance Two must have been the girl that simply walked around and sat down randomly in the middle of the battle while never casting or doing anything of importance.

Her strange behavior had caught a lot of people’s attentions as they focused on her for a split-second before resuming their fight. She was the talk of the forums as a hilarious entity that didn’t give a shit. She was given the nickname Honey Badger on the forums for her actions, and I found it pretty accurate in a way.

Then came the talk about me.

It was always a weird experience, reading or watching others talk about you. Especially when you didn’t know who they were or had no relation to them outside of passing them by for a moment in the game. The worst part though was someone singled me out with footage and showed my face to the world. The moment that was captured was of me shooting lightning.

Thankfully, I thought ahead and shaved my beard and trimmed my hair to nearly resemble a buzz cut. No one recognized me as the red-eyed wolf pelt monster as the game footage only showed me casting a [Lightning Strike] and nothing else. Someone had made the joke that I was the Alliance All-star and it stuck. So now we were being referenced as the Alliance All-stars collectively and then individually I had the moniker of
The All-star
while Valerie was now known as the
Honey Badger
.

Probably not the best of nicknames but I didn’t mind them,
Alliance All-star
did have a ring to it after all. Reminded me of a different game though, a game where the Alliance was a faction and the name held more weight.

Hm, I wonder if that’s where she got the idea from
, I thought to myself.

The other name that had been gaining traction was the Sword Instructor, a female warrior that used a claymore and fought on the purple side. She moved around with a small army of NPCs and had been fighting since the first battle, easily defeating any player adventurer that challenged her.

A lot of questions came up on her, as no one knew anything about where or why she was there. The fact that she was leading the enemy side was what made her special though as she sat on eighty-seven kills. Paling in comparison to my God-tier numbers, she was still ahead of the rest of the players by a small margin. She was formidable.