The Final Trial, page 26
part #3 of Level Up Series
We went straight to the center without stopping, picking up loot along the way. The mobs here were level 5 to match the hexagon’s owner. Piece of cake.
We found Zack on the base. He must have come back because of the alarm. When he caught sight of us, he panicked, then backed away to the shelter and froze hopelessly. When I got closer and looked beyond the enclosure, I saw that he had with him eight ghastly species of mutated spiders that were four and a half feet tall.
“Hi, Zack,” I raised my hands, palms toward him in a sign of peace. “We need to chat.”
“Hello... colleagues. Chat? Like last time? No thanks.”
“Zack, I already explained why I acted the way I did. I don’t have that dagger on me. But since you’re refusing to talk to me, Jovanna and Ola, I guess the news from Earth didn’t reach you. Is that right?”
“News? From Earth?” Zack was puzzled. “What do you mean? What kind of news?”
“That's one of the things I want to tell you about. Maybe you can invite us into your... house? So that nothing distracts us?”
Zack looked around anxiously, thought about something, then waved his hand.
“Come on in,” he said.
Along the way I noticed an unusual staff that he was holding. It was short, measuring around 15 inches long and looked to be either metal or plastic, but most likely this green-tinged material was entirely unknown to the earth sciences. It seemed too short and thin to be a smashing weapon. Maybe it was something like Jovanna’s lightning rod? I couldn't identify the item by looking at it; I needed to hold it myself.
“Zack?” I called to his back. “That's an interesting, um, baton you have there.”
“It’s more like a magic wand,” Jovanna smiled. “Like Harry Potter’s.”
“This? No, it’s not a baton or a magic wand,” Zack stopped and demonstrated the intriguing item. “It’s a small healing staff. It heals fighting units at a rate of about 10% per second. During the night I was able to vanquish a duxio. It took us a long time to finish it off. This is what it dropped.”
“Wow. Does it heal people?” Ola stared at the staff, his eyes as large as saucers.
“I haven’t tried it out on other people, but it definitely doesn't work on me,” Zack said.
“So let's try it on someone else. Ola, come here and poke me in the arm with your... Oh! Not so hard!” I reeled back, flinching from the blow. “Not with the spear — do you know what kind of treacherous stinger you have there? Use your knife, it’s basic. Just poke me a couple of times... Ouch!”
Damage taken: 47 (stabbed by Ola).
Damage taken: 51 (stabbed by Ola).
“Heal me, quick!” I shouted to Zack. “Faster! Before the wounds heal by themselves!”
Zack pointed the wand. A small green beam flickered from its tip but immediately disappeared.
“You see? But if you point it at your units, the beam doesn’t stop like that.”
“I see...” I scratched my head. “What if someone stands in its path?”
“Won’t work,” Zack answered. “The beam just goes around the obstacle.”
“Hm. Well, in that case it’s probably not the beam that’s the issue?”
“Why not? Curved beams do exist. Phil, I’d be happy to have a scientific discussion, but I don’t want to waste time for nothing. Let's go inside and you’ll tell me why you’re here. It will be evening soon and I wanted to reach level 6 tonight,” Zack went under the dome, leaving the door open.
I went inside and looked around. Two basic modules stocked with fighting units and uniforms. And their owner, who'd jumped up two more levels.
“Not bad, Zack,” I accidentally said what I was thinking.
“What?”
“If it’s not a secret, how are you farming resources?”
“That’s not a secret. The most complicated thing was to collect enough for the fighting unit module. It costs 50 points, so you just kill mobs with your bare hands, ignoring the pain. You know how it is: here it’s not just a snake. Either it's armored or it has spikes or acid slime. I have a feeling that the local lifeforms aren’t carbon-based. But then I don't understand how we can live and breathe here.”
“Oh, that’s easy to explain,” I gave a quick summary of everything I knew to Zack and Ola, whom I’d left in the dark.
But they reacted completely differently.
“That explains my dream!” Ola cried. “Last night I couldn’t sleep. I just lay there with my eyes closed. I dreamed that it was like I was walking around the village and everyone I met called out names to me. I don’t remember all of them, but I definitely remember hearing ‘Phil’ and ‘Ken.’ Who’s Ken?”
“Apparently he’s another test subject from our wave. I didn't have a dream like that, but I believe Phil,” Jovanna said.
“Oh, I almost forgot,” I slapped my forehead. “This morning before the fight with Nagash, Carter approached me. Zack, you don't know him, but he and I have a strange relationship on Pibellau: he killed me and I killed him, but today he decided on his own to join my clan. He said that for some reason it seemed to him that we needed to be on the same team. Do you understand? He also somehow received information from Earth.”
“So where’s this Carter guy now?” Zack wanted to know.
“He died permanently. He was disincarnated.”
“Is that the fate you’re proposing for me? No way. If all this bullshit is some kind of sophisticated skill to sucker me into your clan, it’ll be easier if you just kill me. I’m not joining your clan. Don't even try to talk me into it.”
“Is it our clan you won't join, or any clan at all?”
“I’m not joining any clan. I think I have an idea of what this slavery will be like for me. Constant stress, waiting for the disincarnation timer to be reset? Thanks but no thanks. I have too much self-respect to grovel before anyone, following someone else’s orders.”
“Nonsense!” Jovanna exclaimed.
“Think what you want,” Zack muttered. “If he's so nice to you, Jovanna, maybe you should ask yourself why? Maybe it's because you're a beautiful woman? I’m not joining your clan. Case closed.”
Zack meant it. No amount of semblance between our respective interfaces could make him change his mind. He just didn’t give a damn about the Trial or the upcoming Diagnostics of the human race. For some reason, I was sure about this. But I had to try, if only for Ilindi’s sake.
“Zack, please reconsider. You won’t be able to handle anyone else on your own. You’ll never be able to level up where Juma or Tafari or anyone else is. There are no more available hexagons, which means you’ll need to be happy with just one. If that guy on the rhinoceros shows up here tomorrow, your spiders won't save you. By the way, are they spiders? They look like they're crossed with a scorpion, judging by the tail with the stinger. Anyhow, that's not the point. The important thing is that you won't be able to stand your ground. And you’ll need to!” I stressed my last words. “You’ll need to join a clan. There’s no guarantee that the Nigerian will make that offer. And what then? Permanent disincarnation and you’ll lose everything you achieved with the interface.”
Zack grinned. “I don’t really care. What can they do, take away my wife and kids? They won't take a thing. I’m already a millionaire, the head of a big company, and my wife thinks the world of me. We’re expecting a child. They're going to take that away from me? Like that’s going to happen!”
“But that's what it says in the rules,” Jovanna broke in. “Here, it says, ‘The losers in the Trial will be stripped of their privileges, achievements and development progress in their own world. They will be taken back to the moment when they received the interface. Their memory of the accompanying events will be wiped clean and the interface will be uninstalled’.”
“That's nonsense,” Zack said. “I believe that they’ll take away the interface. But not everything else. How will they take me back to the past? What kind of craziness is that? Can you imagine what a waste of energy that would be, even if they had the technology? That’s destroying the whole temporal branch of reality! And what about rewriting events as if I don’t have the interface, and never had it? Ha! There are 169 test subjects, so what? They’ll destroy 168 time lines?”
“Why not?” Jovanna said. “We’re all on the same branch and we received the interface almost at the same time. They’ll just wipe ours out.”
“First of all, we didn’t all receive the interface at the same time,” Zack said. “I was able to meet and communicate with Mr. Valiadis before the Trial. He told me he’d installed each interface personally and that required him to be close to the subject — the future user. Second, how can they wipe out the branch that the winner continues to live in? So to summarize: I’m sure that the losers won't be taken back to the past. That’s dishonest. I don't believe that. So I'm not joining you. It’s out of the question. In any case, I’ll pass the Trial whether I’m in a clan or on my own. So why should I lose my freedom?”
We were all silent for a moment, thinking about Zack’s words. There was logic in what he’d said about not taking things away. But rational thought, at least mine, wouldn’t let me reconcile myself to a potential hole in the defense of our dominion. I hoped that Tafari wouldn’t show up unexpectedly in the remaining couple of days I'd promised Zack.
And of course it was a pity not to have a healer in the group, even if it was just for animals.
* * *
“Phil, can we maybe take a break?” Ola was clasping his hands and begging for a rest.
Jovanna was collecting the loot as usual and I, cursing like a sailor, was waiting for my side to heal where my ribs were jutting out.
“Sure, go ahead. Jo, please finish up and then we’ll all go to the shelter and take a breather. And there’s something we need to talk about...”
Suffering from excruciating pain, I had the cowardly idea of wasting 860 resource points (counting the 14% bonus for leveling up) to buy level 10, but I decided to stick it out. I figured it wasn't worth starting from a zero-sum game.
The elites, which were attacking our base one after the other, were especially fierce tonight. But we farmed more of them than ever, thanks to our pull tactics: feeling brave, we ventured beyond the borders of the enclosure and whenever we found an elite mob, Jovanna would shoot it, and then the enraged monster would dash at us onto the territory of the base.
One of these pulls was not a rousing success. We’d lured one of those beetles onto the base and had just started the fight when a second one appeared — it had come on its own. That was fine; we had three tank units. Rex held one, Tank another, and Croc and I badgered from behind.
Croc was our third dinosaur, put together from Ola’s Charisma points. Thirteen points belonging to our charismatic Cameroonian blossomed into the largest crocodile in the galaxy. Choosing between the allosaurus and the gigantosaurus — the most dangerous predatory dinosaur on the planet — I ultimately pressed on the sarcosuchus. This 50-foot-long ancestor of modern crocodiles proved itself an outstanding solution to our problem of speed. Tafari’s rhinoceros? Ha! We now had a crocodile mount!
Sarcosuchus Croc
Level 6 melee fighter
Phil’s fighting unit.
Health points: 4700/4700.
Attack: 1200–1500.
Damage absorbed by armor: 60%.
Maximum travel speed: 22 mph
Weight: 10 tons
Talents: Charging, Squeezing, Acceleration.
We’d already tried to take a ride on him, holding on to the tough scales that covered his back, and we were able to do it. Croc’s Acceleration talent could speed him up 1.5 times for five seconds once per minute, which was nothing to sniff at. I have to admit that I had the lowest Agility of the three of us and I once slid off Croc, causing Jovanna to giggle and Ola to howl with laughter. It would be a good idea to come up with some sort of saddle.
On the whole, things were good and the farming was going according to plan, but then Kreken version 2.0 showed up. The resurrected location boss, which was already level 12 and had a shedload of life to go with it, had inspected the surroundings near his lair in the ravine and snuck into our hexagon. It stumbled across us as we were killing a mega kirpi. The elite octopus-hedgehog hybrid the size of a truck managed to fight everyone all at once, using its tentacles to restrain the dinosaurs and us, so we struggled until Rex and Croc tore off all its limbs.
When the mega kirpi was down to about 20% life, the Kreken flew in. Without stopping to think about who the good guys and bad guys were, it spat its plasma at the hedgehog-octopus, evaded a direct attack by Tank sent by Jovanna to intercept it, shot up out of Croc’s collapsing jaws, outstripped Rex, and chose the feeble, level 3 Ola as its next victim.
At this point, the end would have come for Ola and he would have been sent to his resurrection point via the great African void, but I managed to shout a command. Before he completely melted away, Ola hastily bought himself a higher level, which removed the Burn DOT and healed him.
The next few minutes of the fight were a whirlwind of mutual attacks: we evaded the spittle while the Kreken sidestepped the trajectory of the speeding triceratops and the tyrannosaur’s snapping jaws. Jovanna’s arrows dealt minor damage, and that says nothing of Ola who was completely useless in this skirmish and whom I’d told to stay by the shelter and not hover in front of the overgrown horsefly.
Meanwhile, while I dashed toward the boss between two rounds of spittle, something hit me like a ton of bricks. It was the Kreken demonstrating its new ability for close combat as it sent a stinger into my throat which was only protected with the bandana from the uniform.
Along with the sensory loss, I was struck by a scorching, corroding pain that flowed from my throat to my chest up to the top of my head and then surged through my whole body.
My skin turned black and blistered. My breathing became labored; then I couldn’t breathe at all. The Poison DOT ticked so fervently and urgently that I could barely lift my feet to take refuge in the shelter before the boss knocked out my final 30% health.
I took around 10 seconds to regenerate, waited for the poison's effect to wear off, and then returned to the battlefield.
It took the convergence of several factors to get us out of this dead-end situation. Croc waited for the best time to pounce, Rex bobbed his head like a dog being taunted with a bone, waiting for the opportunity to seize the agile beast, while Tank once again gained speed and tore at the Kreken.
At that exact moment, Jovanna shot her bow. Ping!
The Kreken fell prey to the stunning effect of Jovanna’s bow, which both dinosaurs happily took advantage of. Tank head-butted the boss’s fallen body, but Rex didn't let it escape far. He scooped up the overgrown horsefly in his snout and opened and shut his jaws a few times as I shouted, “Shred ‘em!”
My fellow clan members applauded. Croc surveyed the scene impassively as if he couldn’t have cared less about any of this.
As a prize to the victors, the Kreken left behind 1000 resource points (the Intellect bonus took effect) and a small ring.
Ordinary Clan Ring of Leadership
+10% to damage dealt by all clan members.
The effect is activated only when used by the clan leader.
“That’s a real cool ring!” Jovanna exclaimed, rolling it around in her hands.
“You’ve earned it, Jo. If you hadn’t stunned the boss, we would have pounded it till morning. But there was no guarantee that the outcome would have been good.”
Jovanna blushed. Ola brought her back to her senses — or, more accurately, drove her into a stupor by saying,
“If you want to keep the milk fresh, leave it in the cow!”
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“I’d bet my bow that it’s another piece of wisdom from his grandfather!” Jovanna laughed.
“Yo, Jovanna! You’re half right, my grandfather did say it often, but it’s actually a piece of folk wisdom in my country. What I mean is that it's clear who should wear the ring so it has an effect.”
After the Kreken, everything went like clockwork. By morning we’d collected nearly 7000 resource points, counting what we'd extracted from Nagash and from Carter’s contribution. It was impossible to use strength to break out of this place, but everyone was mentally exhausted, except maybe the dinosaurs, because each fight was their reason for being put in this world.
Our fatigue was caused by pain which we hadn’t managed to avoid in a single fight. It affected even Jovanna who was attacked from behind by a squadron of elite sarasurs that had infiltrated the base smack in the middle of a fight with a two-headed snake. Even though we’d managed to do away with them — or rather, we’d made Rex abandon the snake and trample them all — but still Jovanna was in agony from all the acid burns and lacerated wounds.
