Beyond the Boss Read online

  Theodore slipped back through the rocks that bordered the trail going up into the mountains. He looked tired as he walked back to where the party stood at the base of the trail, most standing next to their mounts. He strolled up to Horc and Bigdaddybear. “Okay, here’s what we found.”

  Horc glanced around. “Where’s Tufkakes and Jamica?”

  “They stayed up there, ready to attack from behind if the Yetis start down toward us. It’s an edge we might need.”

  Horc didn’t like splitting the party, but it made sense for the two Rogues to prepare an ambush just in case it was needed. “Sounds good.”

  “That’s what I said when TK suggested it.” Theodore took a long breath and wiped his face. “Since we’ve got about thirty of them up there, that’ll help give us a bit of an edge.”

  Bigdaddybear whistled. “Thirty? That’s a fair number of Yetis.”

  “Right.” Theodore nodded. “And there might be more in the caves up there. The thirty was just what we saw. The good thing is they’re about level thirty-five. I don’t know why. Previously they were about level ten to twelve, but at least they aren’t maxed out.”

  Rambull sighed. “You’re right there. Thirty maxed out mobs isn’t something we want to take on. Thirty level thirty-fives we might be able to handle.”

  “We’re going to have to stay sharp and be ready for anything,” Horc said. The odds were in their favor, but all it would take would be a slip up and the close odds could turn against them. As a party, they had taken down opponents ten levels above them with a bit of a struggle. A mistake on their part could give the Yetis a break.

  “A standard battle formation should be enough,” Titanya said. “Tanks in front, healers and damage folks behind. That’ll also make a good attack plan to make the most of the Rogues in behind the bad guys.”

  “I agree.” Horc still missed having a melee. He wondered if the Yetis would leave anything lying around in their encampment that he might be able to pick up and use. Since their kills weren’t lootable, he hoped something would be.

  “Okay, that’s a good idea and all, here’s the thing.” Theodore put his hands behind his back and a concerned look crossed his furry face. “There’s a couple of Yeti shamans up there with them. They’ll probably be doing what they can to keep the others alive. We’ll probably want to try to take them out first. They’re also level forty.”

  “Level forties we can deal with,” Titanya said. “To be on the safe side, Horc and the casters should target them first. If they try to get past us to them, we can go after them.”

  Horc nodded. “Okay. Let’s do this so we can get through the pass and keep moving. The sooner we reach the shore, the sooner we can see what kind of boat Rick’s got ready for us and we can get across the ocean.” He started to mount his red lizard, then stopped. “Mounts, or no mounts?”

  Theodore looked thoughtful for a moment. “Let’s use mounts. The trail is fairly smooth up that way. We can maybe ride a few down if we need to.”

  Titanya laughed. “I like the way you think.”

  They mounted and head up the trail.

  Since they were riding, Horc felt strange being toward the back of the group. Sure when they had been in the dungeon he’d let Steelmaiden and Slasher lead their charges, but since they’d been on the lizards, he was normally in front leading. The trail started out fairly flat, but quickly sloped upward toward the mountain pass, visible as a low spot between two snow-covered peaks.

  About halfway up, they encountered their first couple of Yetis. They jumped out from some large rocks, hitting Titanya and Stanoran hard enough to knock them from their mounts. By the time Horc had his bow unslung and an arrow nocked, they were both dead from caster spells and Titanya’s massive sword.

  Titanya caught her lizard and remounted. “For the first attack, that wasn’t too bad.” Her health bar had barely dropped in the brief encounter.

  Stanoran frowned at a huge dent in his armor from where he’d fallen to the ground. “Speak for yourself. We can’t get armor repairs until we get done with this quest. Chainmail doesn’t dent the way plate does.”

  “So—” Titanya snorted “—get some chainmail.”

  Stanoran rolled his eyes as he mounted. “And where am I supposed to do that? We aren’t getting drops, we can’t talk to NPCs without them trying to take our heads off. It’s not like Bigdaddybear’s husband is going to be able to just leave us armor and weapons lying around.” He settled in the saddle and pointed at Horc. “Even our leader doesn’t have a weapon because we can’t get him one to replace the one the sandstorm ate. We need to get this quest done so we can get this game back to normal.”

  Nobody said anything more as they resumed riding up the pass. Stanoran had hit the nail on the head and there wasn’t anything any of them could add. His words reinforced how hard the game was getting, and how much danger they were all in if things didn’t change for the better.

  “We’re almost there,” Theodore said in a low voice as they made it up a particularly steep section of trail, There had been three more Yeti ambushes along their way, none of them very bad, although Stanoran did suffer a couple more dents in his armor.

  Horc had been riding with his reins in one hand and his bow at the ready in the other. He nodded and Titanya, Rambull, and Stanoran rode out in front of everyone by a short distance.

  Something moved in the boulders along the trail.

  “Up there!” Horc pointed with his bow. The movement was in between the tanks and the rest of the party.

  “Got it.” Bigdaddybear said and a ball of brown Druid magic rolled off his fingertips. Seconds later a huge white shape jumped out from behind the rocks coming toward the casters.

  Mage and Witch spells caught it just as Horc’s first round of impact arrows hit it. The Yeti rolled backward in midair and vanished, blown to bits by their attack.

  Then it was like an avalanche as more of the monsters hurled themselves down the pass at the party.

  “Shit!” Baladara began casting Fireballs as fast as she could.

  Horc wasn’t sure how many of them there were, but he was fairly sure Theodore had been wrong about their numbers.

  Firing arrow after arrow, using Multishot as soon as the cooldown finished, Horc did his best to add as much pain as he could to the Yetis that attacked the party. Most of the monsters went down with just a few hits, but some of them were obviously being targeted by healers as their health bars started to drop, then rose again to full health quickly.

  “Find the healers,” Horc yelled as he finished off one that had been hit by a Fireball Baladara cast.

  The Yetis swarmed over the party. Horc kept shooting arrows, wishing he either had a melee weapon or something that would help.

  In the distance a deep howl rolled across the mountains, carrying over the sound of battle. Although the Yetis were strangely silent, like all the other NPCs and mobs they’d battled on their way across the continent.

  Horc fired another round of arrows and was prepping his next. He selected impact arrows and readied a Multiple Shot spell as a huge dark ball of fur entered the fray. It looked vaguely like Wolf, and when Horc loosed his barrage of arrows, he glanced at his screen. The companion icon that had been missing from his view since he’d returned to the game was there.

  The text over the fast moving fury of fang and fur said Wolf, but the thing was easily three times the size of his companion. It savaged one of the Yetis, then threw it up in the air as it vanished in a swirl of pixels. Horc’s heart soared as Wolf ran through the Yetis destroying them as he came. Trying to anticipate his companion’s path, Horc focused his fire. He’d put a couple of arrows in a Yeti, and Wolf would finish them off.

  “Damn, that wolf is good,” Theodore said standing near Horc.

  Horc grinned. “Yes he is.”

  We got one of the shamans. Tufkakes

  Thanks. Horc quickly replied as he sent a volley of razor arrows into the closest Yeti.

  Mo
re Fireballs seared the air between them and the Yetis, then Titanya and Stanoran were there, laying waste to them from behind.

  “Help!” Scarletcrest yelped.

  Twisting in his saddle, Horc looked back as five Yetis pulled the Gnome Witch from his mount. “No.” Horc hit one of them with a Fire impact arrow.

  Wolf rushed past Horc without pause. He leapt over Scarletcrest’s mount and hit one of the Yetis hard enough to knock it to the ground. Horc sliced the thing deep with a razor arrow and it vanished.

  Scarletcrest’s health bar was in the orange.

  Horc changed targets. As he loosed another arrow, a new Yeti jumped out from the rocks. Its trajectory was perfect to intersect Horc’s arrow. The great white beast hit the ground hard, and rolled toward the rocks on the other side of the trail.

  “Damn.” Horc tried again to target one of the Yetis on Scarletcrest, whose health was down into the red. “Bigdaddybear, can you get to him?” Horc shouted at the top of his lungs.

  “Busy right now.” Bigdaddybear replied.

  Horc fired an arrow off and glanced at the party icons. Scarletcrest’s health was nearly depleted. Bigdaddybear’s was half down, and his mana was farther down than that. Baladara’s mana was in the red. Titanya’s health was getting low.

  Deciding to ignore the party icons in his field of view, Horc focused on the Yetis pounding on Scarletcrest. He got off two more shots, the first taking down the one he’d shot a couple of times already, the second starting on a new target that Wolf pulled off Scarletcrest and savaged. The final Yeti drove its claws into Scarletcrest and the Gnome blinked out of existence.

  “No!” Horc screamed and fired arrow after arrow as fast as he could at as many Yeti’s as he could. He was moving faster than he ever had before in the game. It was like he’d activated some special Ranger power to let him fire that fast. Yetis fell as he struck them multiple times before they could move out of the way. A haze of red enveloped him. There was nothing around him but the Yetis who needed to die. Horc killed them all until there were no more to shoot.

  “Horc, Dude, it’s okay.” Bigdaddybear’s hand rested on Horc’s shoulder. “You’ve taken them all out.”

  “Or scared them off,” Titanya said.

  Horc shook his head. “I don’t think these things controlled by the AI can be scared off. They’re in the fight until the end.”

  “I agree.” Tufkakes said appearing on top of one of the boulders. Jamica appeared out of the shadows just below him. “But we, or better yet, Horc, got them all. No more Yetis in the area.”

  Horc looked at Bigdaddybear. “Check with Rick and see if they managed to get Scarletcrest. Did he get out, or we have to add him to our list of people to rescue?”

  Pursing his lips and wrinkling his nose, Bigdaddybear nodded.

  “Man, they were more spread out than I thought,” Theodore said.

  Wolf came over and nudged Horc’s hand for a scratch. “And more of them than you said,” Horc replied. He’d lost a party member and he wasn’t sure who to be mad at. He hadn’t thought to have anyone watching their back. Maybe if he had then they’d have spotted the Yetis coming in from behind. But if the Yetis had been anticipating their arrival, it might not have done any good. There were only so many of them, and when an entire tribe of humanoids attacked them, all they could do was their best and hope nobody got killed.

  “Sorry about that,” Theodore sounded sincere in his sadness. “I hope he got out.”

  “He did,” Bigdaddybear said. “Rick says Scarletcrest is safe out of the game, and free of his pod. He listened to our instructions and logged out as soon as he started to respawn.”

  That took a lot of the weight of Horc’s shoulders. “Thanks. That’s good to hear.”

  “Night’s getting close,” Baladara said, her health and mana bars already showing full. “Should we find a spot to camp, or do you want to keep going and use magical light to guide us?”

  “We don’t know how long before these things respawn,” Horc said after taking a moment to consider their limited options. “Let’s keep going. I hate to say it, but unless we can find a safe spot in the trees, or caves, we might be on the move until we actually defeat the Dragon.”

  “Then I’m going to worry about all of us getting fatigued,” Baladara said. “We’re going to need somewhere to rest, but I also agree that here where we just killed a tribe of Yetis isn’t the best option for us.”

  Horc glanced at Theodore and Tufkakes. “Can you two find us somewhere safe to sleep? We’ll post a watch, one caster and one tank per watch.”

  Titanya looked at Stanoran. “I can take first watch on the tank side.”

  Stanoran nodded as they all started walking on through the pass. “Sounds good.”

  It was great how well the guild worked together. It made him feel even worse about the loss of Scarletcrest. The fact that he was alive IRL didn’t really help the dark mood that settled over Horc. He wished Scarletcrest was still there with them. He’d been willing to take on the risky journey even when he didn’t have to. Being torn apart by Yetis couldn’t have been a pleasant way to die, especially with the pods transferring the pain from the digital world to the player’s real body.

  Horc also wished he knew what had happened when he’d… gone berserk? That was the only term he could think of for what happened. He recalled some of Steelmaiden’s berserker rages back in the Gnoll King’s dungeon. The problem with that was he hadn’t activated any spell, and he wasn’t a Barbarian. He didn’t want any more mysteries in Halfworld. He wanted to follow the arrow to the AI’s Dragon avatar, kill it, and get everyone the AI had kidnapped and set them free so Rick and the other developers could go over the AIs code with a fine-toothed comb to figure out what went wrong and stop it from happening again.

  11

  Things stayed cold beyond the pass and through the thick forest on the other side. Horc was thankful it wasn’t a jungle. They weren’t having to hack and slash their way through the underbrush, but at times the trees were so thick they had to ride single file, and duck under branches to make it through. None of them seemed to be in a talkative mood as they went. They’d lost Scarletcrest. Even though he’d been able to log out before the AI got hold of him after his death, it didn’t help Horc’s mood a whole lot. He was the leader of the guild and was supposed to help provide them guidance and safety. Scarletcrest had been the smallest of them, and in some ways, a Witch was a weaker class than the others, being reliant on more spell components with longer casting times than the Mages like Baladara. The exchange for Witches came in the sheer power of the spells they could cast. But that power hadn’t been sufficient to save Scarletcrest when his guild… Horc… had failed to keep him safe enough to bring his power to bear against their opponents. He should’ve been safe at the back of the party, but he wasn’t.

  The trees ended and a long pebbled beach greeted them. The ocean was different than it had been at the edge of the desert. It was clearer and looked a lot colder just in the color of the waves and the way they sparkled in the sunshine.

  “So now what?” Theodore asked as they started riding along the rocky beach.

  “Now we see if we can find a boat,” Bigdaddybear said. “There should be some kind of boat, raft, barge, something. Rick said he was working on transport to get us across the water to the AI’s lair.”

  Horc glanced at the arrow on the map, it was still pointing due north. He hoped they weren’t going to have to search forever for their aquatic transportation. He felt more exposed on the beach than he had in the forest, even though he knew in the forest there were a lot more places for things to hide and jump out at them. Since they’d fought the Yetis things had been quiet. Not even a rabid squirrel had come out after them.

  Wolf rubbed against Horc’s leg as they walked along. The red lizard had gotten over its initial jumping every time Wolf did that. It was like the digital companion could sense his discomfort at losing Scarletcrest and was determined to stay c
lose and provide comfort. His constant presence made Horc wonder again what it would be like to have a dog IRL. Would it be as loyal and loving as Wolf was? Would it sense his moods and be there for him, even when no one else was?

  “Hey is that it?” Jamica pointed down the beach.

  Putting a hand over his eyes to shield from the glare coming off the water, Horc followed her gesture. There was something half in and half out of the water a short distance away. It looked a lot like a huge log sticking out of the ocean. He activated one of his Ranger abilities of Sure Sight to give him a longer look at the thing. Upon closer inspection, it looked to be a Viking longboat with a snarling wolf masthead that bore a striking resemblance to Wolf. There was a woman standing next to it. Horc couldn’t make out the text over her head, but it was green, not yellow or red. She looked like some kind of Valkyrie.

  “Might be. Looks like we have a friendly along with it,” he said as they all kicked their mounts to a faster pace toward the boat.

  “Friendly?” Baladara asked. “How is that possible? I thought they locked down the game for people logging back in.”

  “Maybe they let Scarletcrest generate a new toon and get back in when they sent us a boat,” Tufkakes suggested.

  The thought of Scarletcrest coming back in a new toon, helped lift Horc’s spirits. He would apologize for not being there for the Gnome, and hope nothing happened to his new toon.

  “You know, a Viking longboat wasn’t exactly what I was thinking when Rick said he’d send a boat,” Bigdaddybear said. “I really wish we’d been able to make use of that pirate boat we captured on the way to the arena, but after we escaped the island and were back on the mainland, we tried to get it to work, but couldn’t even get it to materialize. I’m betting that was because of the AI.”