Entry Sixteen

  The Battle of Random Meadow

  I had two clues as to the question of possible homicidal intent on the part of the remaining monsters. First, all the pseudo-goblins began shouting and gesticulating (yes, gesticulating) angrily. They must have truly loved and admired Bob because they were all capital P, Pissed. Some of their gestures were downright lewd, while others were merely indicative of the means by which they intended to impale, claw, eviscerate, gnaw, and or otherwise introduce me to my Ilerian makers. Second, they all leveled their weapons and charged directly at me.

  Remember that smugly smug smile I had just a short while ago? Gone. My hands flew through a rapid series of somatic spellcasting motions as I once again grasped the invisible stringy somethings in front of me. Yet again, even though this was definitely not ATO, the spell worked. Whereas Frost Barrier created a large, floating disk of white ice, my higher-level Frost Swarm spell instantiated a quartet of slightly smaller, blue ice boulders in the air in front of me.

  I literally felt them zoom over to me from some unknown, magical place as I completed the spell’s somatics. The vague, tactile feedback was pretty neat. I promptly sent them hurtling outward without even looking and started the next spell, moving by long-practiced muscle memory. All those hours of ATO spellcasting practice were about to pay huge dividends. I hoped.

  I opted for a druidic defensive conjuration next. This time, the sensation in my mind reminded me of the few times I’d helped Marge pull weeds from her small backyard garden with one exception—these weeds fought back. Invisible tendrils of weave-weeds tangled around my hands and pulled them down toward the ground as I cast the spell, threatening to disrupt it. I focused, fighting the strands, lifting them upward as I completed the somatics. As I lifted my hands skyward in one final thrust, vines burst violently up out of the ground between me and the hordling horde.

  They grew much faster than bamboo, lacing themselves together with preternatural speed to form a thorn-covered, nasty-looking defensive wall around me. The pseudo-goblins didn’t care. They barreled right into the Needle Spine hedge—exactly like I wanted them to. The great thing about ATO’s Needle Spines was that they were feisty. They were also very proactive, not simply reactive. My attackers shouted and barked in dismay as the thorny vines went on the offensive. They lashed out at the monsters with whip-like tendrils even as they grabbed hold of their throats, legs, arms, and, well, other appendages. Some of the more ill-armored pseudo-goblins were about to deeply regret coming to work in casual attire that morning.

  The hedge would buy me some time, but I still had my back to the top edge of a literal cliff wall. I doubted I had time to kill all my attackers before they broke through the vines and got to me. I also doubted that my newbie leather armor would be of any use when Bob’s Band of Belligerent Buddies got close enough to poke very sharp objects at me. Also, casting those three spells back-to-back left me feeling oddly tired. It wasn’t a physical fatigue but something less tangible, as if my soul was growing cold and weary.

  “Weaver, how are you doing these things?” Catzilla asked.

  “You told me to do what comes naturally,” I replied, feeling slightly more confident now that my death was merely probable rather than 100% guaranteed. “I naturally kill bad guys.”

  I took a steadying breath and finished a Meteor Storm spell next. With a whoosh of my hand, I pulled a couple dozen bowling ball-sized rocky projectiles into existence and sent them raining down from the sky. The jagged meteorites hammered the ground to my left with a deafening roar and shook the cliffside so hard that I dropped to all fours to avoid being bounced into the ravine. The storm lasted a good four or five seconds and kicked up a huge cloud of dust, obscuring the area.

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  When it cleared, a swath of pseudo-goblins was hideously broken, semi-squished, and dismembered. The meadow beneath them had been churned into a brown pulp covered in spreading pools of brackish, grey blood. The smell of raw, rancid meat hit me immediately, and that was it. I doubled over, dry heaving, gladly averting my eyes from my grotesquely mutilated enemies.

  “By all the planes of heaven,” the cat whispered, “you’re a spellweaver!”

  I had cast Meteor Storm dozens of times in ATO and wiped out hundreds of creatures with it. Yes, there had been fake, digital blood flying everywhere and corpses littering the ground afterward, but this? This was unfiltered, up close, slaughterhouse carnage. This was still-twitching limbs, pale loops of lacerated entrails draped over half-flattened, meaty masses and eyeballs that had been ejected from sockets to lie against lifeless cheeks. Suddenly, I didn’t feel the exhilaration of battle; I felt sick.

  Plus, the soul-fatigue I’d started to feel before summoning the meteorites had now tripled, leaving me feeling like an elephant was stepping on my… on my me. Most games had a mana point system or something like it; performing physical actions cost stamina and, similarly, casting spells cost mana points. Ileria took it to a whole new level. I felt like I had a Level 10 Wet Blanket of Weariness draped over my spirit.

  “Watch out!” Catzilla’s whisper-shout came as something hard slammed into my side, bowling me over. I caught flashes of angry pseudo-goblin as my attacker and I rolled over the ground. The thing gut-punched me and snarled something at me that was lost to the ringing in my head from the meteorite impacts. I ended the roll on my back with my legs hanging halfway over the edge of the ravine. He ended the roll with his knees planted on my stomach and a short, stone knife in his upraised hand.

  The knife plunged, and my hands shot up and caught his wrist. The monster added his other hand, pushing down harder. He was smaller than me but wicked strong. The tip of his knife scratched a jagged line across my leather chest armor as I stared at it, willing it to ascend. I pushed, gritting my teeth, growling with the effort, and the knife moved sideways, slicing open the leather above my sternum. This wasn’t going to work; I didn’t have the leverage. Plus, more of Bob’s buddies were coming soon.

  There were very few ATO spells that required only one-handed somatics. I freed up one hand, made something that looked like an “okay” gesture, swapped it for an extended third and fourth finger, and made a fist as I once again felt that strange stringy sensation. I clenched my eyes shut as hard as I could, shoved my hand into my attacker’s face, and extended all my fingers.

  The Sunflare spell was so bright that it gave me a big, red, hand-shaped afterimage even though I had my eyes clenched shut. Bob’s buddy wasn’t so lucky. He screamed, dropped his knife, and grabbed at his eyes. I sat up, shoved him hard, and watched him fly backward over the cliff and into the ravine.

  “More! Move, weaver! Flee!”

  I scrambled to my feet and surveyed the scene. My Sunflare had blinded all the other pseudo-goblins as well. Half were still hung up on my hedge wall, but three others had fallen to their knees inside its perimeter, mere feet away from me. I blinked, cleared my head as best I could, and cast another multi-target attack spell.

  This time, I had to put in a herculean effort to cast the spell as the unseen, stringy weave thing resisted my desperate somatics. Still, four long, needle-sharp shards of ice popped into existence in front of me, and I sent them flying, point-blank, at the three closest monsters. They never saw what hit them.

  “Flee,” Catzilla commanded. “Do not slay the rest of them.”

  Oh, hell no. That one dude scared the ever-loving infernal darkness out of me, very nearly killed me, and, worse, scratched the crap out of my armor. There were only five or six hordlings left, half of whom were trying to push through my hedge while the other half were trying to extricate themselves from it, probably to retreat. I started another offensive spell, gritting my teeth against the weariness threatening to fog over my brain as I mentally targeted the remaining creatures.

  “No,” the cat shouted into my mind. “Don’t!”

  It was too late. I couldn’t have stopped the spell even if I had wanted to. And trust me, I didn’t want to. These grotesques needed to die. No one would miss them. A moment later, another swarm of huge icicles materialized and lanced outward, finishing them off. I quickly scanned the nearby tree line. Nothing. No more hordlings.

  I dropped to my knees, hugging myself, my whole body shaking as fatigue and adrenaline coursed through my body. Yes, the game even simulated that.

  “You fool,” Catzilla whisper-growled softly. “Do not move. I will arrive soon.”

  With that, she charged into the forest on her side of the river, heading west, most likely heading for the bridge she had mentioned.