Death March (Euphoria Online Book 1) Read online

  “Here they come!” I turned and ran on. “You have any mana left?”

  “All out!”

  “Damn!” I opened my character sheet even as I ran, the pale screen allowing me to make out the street through it, and checked the pop-up window:

  You have gained 35 experience (10 for evading the draugr ambush, 25 for defeating the peasant skeleton). You have 55 unused XP. Your total XP is 80.

  I swiped it away, nearly tripping as I did so, and swiped away two more screens before getting to the window advertising the new talents available to me. I could barely make out their titles, but I knew exactly what I was looking for. I selected Adrenaline Surge without any hesitation and a new entry appeared at the bottom of the list.

  Ledge Runner

  XP Cost: 30

  I had enough XP left over, and instinct made me select it without even reading the description. The text glowed gold, but I dismissed all the screens to see that Lotharia had pulled ahead by a good ten yards. Looking over my shoulder, I saw the draugrs right on my heels.

  Cursing, I activated Adrenaline Surge. Fire flooded my veins, my lungs expanded with fresh air, new energy filled my muscles, and a dizzying sense of exhilaration flooded through me, as if I’d just pounded six black coffees back to back.

  I tucked my chin and sprinted all out, leaving the draugrs behind and swooping in behind Lotharia. She turned to look at me even as I scooped her up in my arms, carrying her with ease.

  “What are you—”

  Her scream cut off as I ran right at a tumbled wall and leapt. Every second was precious. Every moment of fiery energy was crucial. Even with her in my arms I was able to reach the top of a ragged chunk of wall, and before I overbalanced I hit my newest skill and activated Ledge Runner.

  I found my balance immediately, as if the earth had become magnetic and the soles of my feet were made of iron. Adrenaline still pumping through my system, I grunted and ran up the precarious wall, fleet as a fox and high up onto its jagged top.

  Lotharia held tightly onto me, staring wide-eyed over my shoulder, but I didn’t hesitate. How many seconds did I have left? Five? Ten? I sprinted with everything I had along the six-inch-wide wall, striding over gaps and cracks, right up to where it ended at an alley. A charred beam extended between the two houses across from me, and with a strangled shout of fear I leapt.

  There was no way I could land on that narrow beam. A lifetime spent in my real body made me feel nothing but sick with horror for even attempting it. But somehow my feet found the four-inch-wide beam, and somehow the balls of my feet stuck, arresting my momentum so that I fell into a cat-like crouch some fifteen feet above the ruined interior.

  I could feel Adrenaline Surge fading. Grunting with effort, hoping Ledge Runner wasn’t on an even shorter time limit, I raced along the blackened beam to its terminus, ducked my head and collapsed forward through the window and into a dark room.

  Lotharia rolled free of my arms as soul-crushing exhaustion and nausea overcame me. The draugr barks were faint, still coming from the street over, and growing fainter.

  “How— Never mind,” said Lotharia. She ran to the window, pressed her back to the wall alongside it and then carefully peered out. “I’d forgotten how quick you earn XP. Good thinking.”

  I tried to rise and instead threw my arm over my eyes. “Not like you were about to do anything.”

  “We’ve got to work on that charisma,” she said distractedly. “It sounds like they’re looping around the block. They may have lost our scent for now, but they won’t give up.” She came back from the window and crouched by my side. “You all right?”

  “Gah. No. I feel like I was out drinking for three days straight.” My head pounded, my muscles ached, even my lungs were cramped and tight. “Shouldn’t… shouldn’t last long.” I knew I should be looking around, investigating our new digs, but it was all I could do to stop the room from spinning by lying still, eyes closed.

  Lotharia move around, and then, like a sweet benediction, the nausea and exhaustion fell away. It felt like a fever breaking, and with a deep breath I sat up.

  We were in a small attic, the ceiling sloping down on both sides, our window the sole source of light. A faded rug lay over the warped boards, and small cupboards lined the low walls beneath the angled ceilings. A narrow door stood shut across from the window, and what looked like children’s toys – wooden blocks, faded dolls, toy soldiers – lay strewn across the rug under a thick layer of dust.

  “Kids?” I picked up one of the dolls. “Can players—”

  “No, but the NPC families usually had them.”

  I moved to the window and listened. The draugr barks had grown faint, but peering outside I saw that our activity had stirred up the dead. I caught glimpses of skeletons filling the street we’d left, some of them armored and moving with greater purpose. A lone draugr was sniffing at the rubble directly beneath us, its stinger tail dragging over the rocks like that of a rat.

  I crept back to Lotharia. “Looks like the whole area’s riled up.”

  She pinched the bridge of her nose and nodded. “We’d best stay quiet and stay put. Things will quieten down in a few hours.”

  “What are the chances they find us in here? Will they search every house?”

  “Possible. The draugrs have terrible eyesight, and usually track by scent. Going high was perfect. But the wraith that was coursing them? If it saw us go up, we’re done for. But if it was still around the corner, we could have thrown him off, too.”

  “A wraith? I’m guessing they’re hard to kill?”

  “Way beyond our paygrade.” Lotharia moved over to the cupboards and began opening each one. “They’re level twenty-five, minimum, and immune to normal damage. Even if I used Imbue to enchant our weapons, we’d not be able to scratch it. My Hail Strike would probably just tickle it.”

  “What was it doing coming after us?”

  Lotharia pulled out a broad, narrow box and blew dust from its surface, revealing primary colors and figures dancing along a crimson road. “Probably wanted to drain our mana and raise us as minor wraiths. Which would have well and truly sucked.”

  “That can happen? We can get raised as undead?”

  She set the box on the floor and pulled the lid off, revealing a board and several small pouches. “Yeah. Only really powerful undead can do it, and it can be reversed by other players with the right magic. Course, if that happens to us, nobody would know to help us out. We’d spend the next six months with our ability to control our avatars seriously modified to the point where most people just give up their session and log out.”

  I stared right through her into the middle distance, horror filling me. “What would happen to someone on Death March if they got raised as undead?”

  “I… I don’t know.” Lotharia blinked. “At a guess? They’d be killed by Euphoria when their six months were up if nobody rescued them. Turned into permanent undead NPCs.”

  “Great. I’m going to make it a point to avoid wraiths.”

  “Then you need to get out of Feldgrau,” said Lotharia matter-of-factly. “This place is crawling with the undead.”

  “And go where?” I asked, trying not to feel exasperated with her. “The castle?”

  She paused in the process of laying out the board. “I don’t know. I’ve not been up there.”

  I took one last glance out the window at the undead milling below, then uneasily sat across from her. “Not once?”

  “No,” she said. “I just assumed it would be more dangerous than Feldgrau itself. Though, to be honest, I’ve not had much of what you might call ‘a plan’ since I logged in three weeks ago.”

  “Then maybe we should go take a look.” When she didn’t answer, I continued. “Look, there’s a logic to these kinds of situations. In games like these, nothing is truly random. Something happened here. Somebody is
in control of these undead. I’m willing to bet there’s some kind of final boss here in town. That wraith coming after us today means we can’t count on being ignored any longer, and if the final boss is interested in us, then we’ve got to get out of Dodge.”

  “Feldgrau,” said Lotharia, not meeting my eyes.

  “Whatever. Let’s wait till things quieten down outside and then head up to the castle to explore. Maybe we can hide out there for a spell. Maybe we can find clues as to what happened to Cruel Winter, or some useful items.”

  Lotharia rattled a pair of dice inside a leather cup.

  “Unless you want to try your luck again the next time that wraith shows up?” I continued. “Last I checked, the undead have a remarkable ability to focus exclusively on any one given task. If the big boss ordered it to find us, it won’t stop looking.”

  “Fine,” she said.

  I studied her as she busied herself placing tokens on the board. “What is it?”

  “What’s what?” She still wasn’t meeting my eyes.

  “Why are you so resistant to going to the castle?”

  “I said fine, didn’t I?”

  “Yeah, technically. But you’re acting like a four-year-old who doesn’t want to have a bath.”

  She snapped her head up and glared at me.

  “Sorry,” I said. “That could have come out better.”

  Lotharia sighed, shoulders slumping. “You’re right. I don’t want to go up there. Some of my best memories are from times spent in that castle. Best memories of my life, even. To go there and see it all ruined, destroyed… It’s irrational, I know. But I was just trying to preserve those memories, and not overwrite them with horror.”

  A burst of compassion for her passed through me, and wanted to put my hand over hers. But knowing me, I’d accidentally clock her in the face while trying. I’d never appreciated how important social stats could be if they were actually taken seriously.

  “I hear you,” I said, focusing on my words, trying to not let them wriggle out of my control. “And I’m sorry. But I still think it’s our best bet.”

  “Yeah,” she said, staring glumly at the board. Then she took a sharp breath and sat up straight, visibly perking herself up. “And who knows? It might not be as bad as all that.”

  “Right!” I tried to smile, but doubted the expression was convincing. “Who knows what we’ll find?”

  “A party, just waiting for us!”

  “A feast!” I said.

  “A weapon rack loaded with legendary artifacts!”

  “A swimming pool filled with liquid XP!”

  We grinned foolishly at each other, then both slumped.

  “Guess we’ll find out,” said Lotharia. “Ready for a round of Candyland?”

  “Sure. I love playing minigames while the undead hunt for my immortal soul. Roll ‘em.”

  7

  By midday, the undead furor outside had died down. From our window I could still make out the occasional skeleton or worse monstrosity amble past the alleyway between the closest homes, but the sense of being searched for was gone. Lotharia meditated till all her mana returned (my entire point did so of its own accord), and then we headed out.

  The front half of the house we’d been hiding in had collapsed into the street, making our descent from the little attic room rather more adventurous and exposed then I’d have liked, but we scrambled down the remains of the stairs and into the shadows of the ground floor without being noticed.

  From there, Lotharia showed me her patented technique of getting around Feldgrau without being discovered. It basically involved short sprints from one hiding spot to the next whenever the coast was clear, which meant it took us nearly two hours to finally leave the village behind us. On the plus side, nothing spotted us in the process.

  Those two hours gave me ample opportunity to observe the current denizens of the town, and I tallied up six different kinds of wandering mobs. You had your basic draugr pack, which tended toward five or six individuals. Then you had your lone peasant skeletons who staggered around like drunks looking for their car. There were these horrific zombie creatures that scared the pants off me: they had the zombie look, but were all hunched over and moved with unnervingly sudden jerks of speed. They’d sniff at things, too, which made me think we were done for, but luckily their sense of smell had to be rotten because they didn’t pick up our trail.

  Draugrs, wandering skeletons, and creepy hunched zombies and plague zombies surrounded by clouds of buzzing flies. Those were the most common. Then there were the six-armed skeleton champions. I saw only two of those, but that was more than enough. Eight feet tall and wielding rusted scimitars, bands of platinum around their brows, they made me want to nope the hell out.

  Even worse was what could have been a banshee or wraith variant that floated down the street right at the end when I thought we were in the clear. She had that classic, never out of style look where your legs fade away into mist below the hips, a ruined wedding dress and hungry way of leaning forward as she went, hands clutching and clawing at the air.

  Yeah. Pretty awful.

  The final mob I saw looping erratically around was as disturbing as it was weird. It looked like a rhino—which was already pretty weird—with a massive bone ribcage emerging from its neck instead of a head. Or a bone flower that was curled up tight? I couldn’t really tell. It just drifted forward, bone head-thing pulsing.

  When we finally cleared Feldgrau and could relax, I turned to Lotharia. “What the hell was that rhino?”

  She looked as spooked as I was. “Rhino? I guess it looked like one. I don’t know. I’ve only seen it once at night with its head unfurled. It has like six red tongues a yard long that float up and dance in the air. I didn’t stay to learn more.”

  I ran my hands through my hair. Despite our slow pace I was drenched in sweat and my heart pounded as if I’d run a marathon. “And you’ve been living in there for three weeks? How’ve you not gone mad?”

  Lotharia gave me a shaky grin. “I thought I had at some points. Still, I’m really warming up to your idea of leaving town. Genius. Surely the castle can’t be as bad.”

  We both looked up the overgrown road that curled amongst the foothills and led to the castle barbican. It was one of those realistic looking castles, the kind that was built to resist sieges and not host fairy princesses. The exterior curtain wall – what was left of it – rose some forty feet and looked as dense and impenetrable as a cliff face. Of course, the gaping holes put the lie to that. The barbican was a brutal outpost that defended the approach to the drawbridge and gatehouse, and it too looked battered and savaged. I could see a blocky keep rising behind the walls, flat-roofed and with arrow slit windows, while three round towers rose up from inside the curtain wall.

  “That looks like the kind of place a warlord would love to hang out in,” I said. “Complete with fifty or sixty murderous soldiers and a dozen killer knights. Not a place for parties and fun.”

  Lotharia gave a one-shouldered shrug as we made our way up the road, gravel crunching underfoot. “We had a couple of wizards who specialized in illusion magic. Jeramy was an archmagus, even, so powerful we even forgave his obsession with awful puns. They’d decorate it every night in a different way. Make the stones look like gleaming white marble, or glass cubes filled with water, all kinds of wonders. And inside there’s a large courtyard – the bailey – where we had a stage on which we performed plays, held dances, and we strung lights everywhere, invited all kinds of mythical creatures to come party and play with us…” She smiled sadly. “It all feels like an impossible childhood dream now. We once even hosted the Silver Flame herself. She came down with a dozen of her Argent Exarchs. I can barely believe I was part of all that.”

  I sensed something up high and off to my left. On instinct, I took hold of Lotharia’s arm and pulled her off the path and behind an
outcropping of boulders. She followed, not resisting, and when we crouched behind the rocks she joined me in staring up at the sky.

  Dragon.

  It had emerged from the clouds and was gliding in a lazy circle far, far above us. It tightened its approach into a downward spiral, looking majestic and at ease in the sky, growing ever larger, and then flew down onto one of the castle towers with a massive, jerky flapping of its wings to arrest its momentum and disappear from view.

  My stomach cramped and I clenched my fists. “Well. So much for that idea.” I wanted to give up right there and then.

  Lotharia was pale beside me. “If I met your Astute Observer talent at a bar, I’d let it buy me a drink and take me home.” She gave me a shaky smile. “You can believe it’s next on my shopping list.”

  “But what are we going to do? How the hell do we tackle a dragon?” I knew the answer. We didn’t. We couldn’t.

  “That wasn’t a dragon,” said Lotharia. “That was a wyvern. Far smaller, and did you see it only had two legs?”

  “All right, fine. Wyvern. Still way out of our league.”

  “True,” said Lotharia. “But wyverns are dumb as bricks. They’re like really ferocious cows. We should still be able to poke around if we’re careful.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Did you just compare that thing we saw to a cow?”

  She gave a nervous laugh. “Yeah. Maybe not the best comparison. But do you really want to go back down into Feldgrau?”

  I studied the small village that lay below us, a morass of ruin, debris, and wandering dead. “Not really.”

  “Come on. Let’s keep going. We’ll play it safe. You’re the one who woke up all my old memories. Now I want to take a peek.”

  “And if it spots us?”

  “I’ll Summon Fog. That should give us enough time to hide.”