NOVEL NEXT Chapter 57: Spiraling
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Mau_dev: People get the wrong idea when you say 'AI moderation'. You think 'inhuman focus, perfect coverage' and you should be thinking 'doesn't know murder is wrong out of the box'. Honestly, if I'm the one writing up a moral code for something, you should all be very skeptical.
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November 15th, 2090, about 8:30 pm MST, Ghostlands, Ruined Keep (1,840 viewing)
Ever since he had first been introduced to Ghostlands, Harry had found himself drawn irresistibly to the knight-and-armor archetype. He loved the longswords, the brutal sweep, the clangor of the armor, the weighty thud of his feet. He loved the viscerally satisfying slam, the metal-crashing sound as opponents rebounded off his shield. He loved heraldry—having to learn this or that lord, or earl, or count, or baron, and know his flag. He loved the idea that soon he'd be able to make his own colors, design his own crest.
In Ghostlands, nobility was a class rather than simply something to aspire to. You took Scion as your base class, and your power—much like Batman's—was money, or more accurately, influence. You would start off with a different playset from anyone else. Other classes got better hit points or moved faster or hit harder, but you had a place to go home to. That was most of it. As your authority grew—that being the core of the Scion class—you would become able to summon and maintain retainers. Those would fight for you. You could contract player retainers, and that was how a knight class such as Harry's might eventually come to own land: through a noble class bestowing it in exchange for fealty.
He had considered taking a noble class. He'd considered it very seriously. The two powers of the noble class—those being verbal coercion and land (i.e., summoning minions, the retinue)—all told, it was an interesting class if you were engaged in high-stakes games of political marriage and infidelity. Not quite his thing, but he certainly understood why people wanted to play it.
Starting out, Harry had believed—kind of thought—it would be a game like the classic MMOs of yesteryear. The ancient classic World of Warcraft, for example, with animations and activatable powers which you might strategically spam one after another or in concert for different tactical purposes to support your search for ever-better gear, to enable you to complete ever more difficult quests, and make more money and gain experience and level up.
And to some extent, Ghostlands enabled that kind of gameplay—at least it was an option. You could take a shield charge as an activatable skill and use the canned animation and do predictable damage along a predictable vector—but Harry quickly realized that if you charged in a straight line, other players would sidestep you and give you a false edge cut to the back of the helmet, or trip you, or take the opportunity to pickpocket you. That had been embarrassing.
Ghostlands gave you martial skills, but they were only useful against the NPCs. So he had begun to seek out ways to improve his player-versus-player combat skills. It quickly developed that in order to sign off as a virtual swordsman, you had to be a good virtual swordsman—which meant, at the very least, watching good real swordsmen on YouTube. There was more to swinging a sword than he had ever known: draw cuts, false-edge cuts, thrusts, lunges, footwork, feints, ripostes. He had never understood just how deep the skills could become in such a small, specialized area.
It was one of his favorite things about hobbies—the discovery that behind an innocent-looking single word like fencing, there could be endless hours of reading and deep dives and searching and techniques and masters and people who took it seriously and wanted to discuss old manuscripts over a cup of coffee.
That had been how he met Gordon. Over a cup of coffee, looking for someone in the area—preferably at the same college—who knew anything about fencing. Gordon had been an enigma. He drove a fancy car that wouldn't always start—a hand-me-down, he joked—and mostly kept to himself in classes, but streamed an Outlaw character in Ghostlands every afternoon or evening.
When Harry found out that he streamed an Outlaw, he had nearly looked elsewhere for fencing assistance. But as it turned out, Gordon was something of a Renaissance man—and quite good with a sword.
Their nightly duels to increase Harry's proficiency had settled into a pattern. That pattern became routine. That routine gave birth to familiarity—and then friendship. And then Gordon invited him to join the stream, and Harry had met Claire, Gordon's stepsister.
Everything clicked into place. He knew where he wanted his life to go: wherever she went.
Today, though, Harry realized that he had never seen Gordon go all out. Karen was a dervish with her two blades when she was feeling tempestuous. Gordon was a monster.
They had made it into the circle of the second curtain walls before tripping the alarm. It wasn't Harry's fault. Gordon had found one of the sapper tunnels the ghouls had dug when making their entry and had judged it to be the easiest way to make it past the second circle wall—which, being 25 feet tall, was a bit too tall to climb. He'd hit his head on a protruding rock and bled a little bit, and the ghouls had woken up.
Ghouls in Ghostlands were serious. The first one that smelled them turned and screeched a horrible wail—an elevation that didn't belong on something with humanoid vocal cords. Skittering, echoing, uncanny. The rest of them had straightened from their torpor and began shambling into the courtyard into which the sapper tunnel had led, forming up in ranks in a much more military way than one would have thought for the undead.
But these were not just any undead. Gordon had spoken lovingly of the design features that had gone into making the ghouls more than just another zombie. They were smart. They understood military tactics. They could use equipment. They could specialize in skills: surround, enfilade fire, all that good stuff.
They formed up—ghastly gray flesh and weathered bone, glittering eyes with no visible pupil reflecting the light like cat's eyes—and attacked without any visible signal, just as arrows began to streak down from the towers overlooking the courtyard: a castle's defenses acting like a castle's defenses should.
Harry, in full enchanted plate and wielding his artifact sword, felt like a comical contrast to Gordon's peasant garb—just tunic and breeches—but fell back-to-back with him when Gordon took a serious-looking stance with his starter-set iron sword held in high guard before him. The dead closed the distance, stolen weapons shining dully with rust, outstretched, clawed hands opening wide to grasp or scratch.
In real life, cutting an arrow out of the air is only barely doable. It can be done—there are people who film themselves doing trick shots and tricky acrobatic stunts similar to cutting arrows out of the air—but it's difficult. It requires a slow arrow, a fast blade, and for you to have been watching when the arrow was shot and already know how quickly to swing. Harry had never really been able to do it.
But that was in real life.
In Ghostlands, where even those who played with a prop played with what was essentially a Wii remote and not a real sword, the weight and leverage problems of a real blade were gone. It was about movement, about lining up the shot.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
All of that to say: when Gordon swept an arrow aside as his first movement, Harry was impressed—but not in disbelief. This was one of the staples of the upper-tier players, in whose rarefied waters he had been swimming alongside Gordon for the last year or so.
When Gordon reversed the swing—stepping forward and wrapping the sword around his body for a broad, sweeping slash which met the first halberdier across the right arm from the outside, removing said appendage—Harry was much more impressed. Missed him by inches. That's the sort of thing you only get from doing the work and spending time dueling.
Much of the dueling Gordon had done… had been against Harry himself. But they'd never covered polearms.
The halberdier was only the first, and only because of the length of his weapon. Disarmed—literally—he may have been, and Gordon was offside and beyond the range of any retaliatory attack, but ghouls did not bleed. And a halberd is a two-handed weapon: the creature smoothly extended its left arm in a thrust—not at Gordon, but at Harry—and fell into a deep lunge, lending the thrust the entire force of its body weight.
It was odd to watch a one-armed fantasy zombie produce a deadly accurate and quick spear-thrust form—but not so odd that Harry failed to deflect it. A thrust with just one arm to the ground has very little resistance to being redirected—in fact, a simple bash with the crossguard of his sword was sufficient to send the weapon skittering from the creature's grasp entirely. Though it continued to move with some of the velocity from the strike, it fell behind Harry to the cobbles of the courtyard with a metallic ringing noise.
Arrows fell with a pap-pap sound, missing them by inches—and then a clang, as one well-aimed arrow was nevertheless deflected by Harry's kettle helmet.
Gordon wasn't superhuman, and it took a second for Harry to realize the trick the unarmored man was using to stay unperforated by arrows: he stood in Harry's shadow, as seen—or rather, relative to—the archer towers. They couldn't shoot him through Harry.
"Cheap trick," he grumbled.
Gordon cut off two swordsmen at the ankle and, rising, lopped the head from a spearman at Harry's flank.
"It's not cheating," he said cheekily, referencing one of their favorite works. "It's technique."
It was Harry's turn.
He had never invested the same way that Gordon had in personal skill—partially because he expected to operate as part of a group, and partially because it was more important for him to be able to handle the NPCs than other players. Most players didn't look for a PvP duel versus a tank, because it did not tend to be as rewarding or as simple as going after nobles, or straightforward martial builds, or casters.
But there was no getting around it: the ghouls were everywhere. Ghouls—and whatever the monster of the week was. If it wasn't ghouls, it would be goblins. If it wasn't goblins, it would be raiders or bandits. Like any good RPG, there was no shortage of bad guys to fight.
And so, Harry had invested in some good martial skills.
Whirlwind Sweep was a canned animation that let him throw two quick, alternating off-side pirouettes and two sweeping slashes of his greatsword, carving a figure-eight-shaped swath with a horizontally aligned blade. At full power with a class boost—and no risk of the blade being redirected—in short, he was a lawnmower.
He activated his power now, stepping forward into the fray. The massed ranks of the undead had formed in good order—a full ten across by two to three deep. Polearms peeked between the gaps in the ranks in front, crossbows in evidence on the third rank. At this distance, crossbows would ignore his armor—but from the third rank, getting a clean shot? Well, he would just have to be careful.
The first rank fell before him like wheat before a scythe, crumpling as too much of their unnatural bodies was compromised for them to remain upright and functional.
Gordon was right behind him, skip-stepping twice to the left to dodge a fusillade of arrows skipping off the cobbles, then moving quickly forward and bashing into the back of Harry's cuirass—one hand tugging heavily on his pauldron, right where it met its twin along his spine on his upper back—and then his friend was flipping over him in a one-handed assisted front handspring, sword horizontal and out to the side as he cleared the ranks of the enemy and landed, crouched, back to back with their third row.
His first hit was one-handed—a difficult strike with the long-handled zweihänder—a false-edged cut, rotating the blade from an extended bar to an acute angle, right above his own head. The longsword's point, most of five feet up, coincided neatly with the crossbow cord of the weapon, even now twisting to train on his new location.
Standing, he twisted to the right, his right hand taking the pommel as he trailed the blade down in a ragged draw cut—not the best form—pinging off buckles and armored panels, then lunging into a shallow thrust which nevertheless pierced deeply, his blade having found purchase at sternum height. As Gordon attained his full height, the falling ghoul tugged his blade into a low guard position as it slid free.
"I need them grouped," Harry told him, jerking his chin toward the archer ghouls, who were even now peppering them with quick—if inaccurate—shots.
Gordon gave the battlements an instant's glance, then nodded.
"No machicolations—so we'll hug the base of the left tower. They'll have to group on the other one."
He suited word to deed, sweeping the feet from beneath another crossbowman and slashing at it in passing as he darted toward the archery tower.
On a battlement wall, there were embrasures—the cutouts an archer could lean through to take a shot. And on overhanging battlements, there would typically be holes—machicolations—through which defenders could drop rocks, oil, or fire directly downward.
In this castle, the architect had apparently decided that overhangs were unnecessary, which meant the firing arc of either tower couldn't reach its own base.
"Bull Rush," said Harry, invoking another skill. He sheathed his sword, watching the chevron-patterned steel of Vantage slide silkily into its sheath. It wouldn't be needed for this.
He planted his feet as the skill took hold—his firmly braced legs suddenly churning like a linebacker's. He dropped his shoulder and burst into motion, his bulk slamming through the first rank of ghouls, then the second—passing like a bowling ball through pins.
He elbowed heads, shoved with the heels of his palms, arms pumping with his stride as he powered forward, bulky armor roaring across the courtyard.
An arrow sank into his shoulder—his pauldron less effective against fire from above—but the wound was shallow. He grunted, ripped the bolt out with a wince, and flung it down without breaking stride.
The dead were right behind him. Their reaction times were inconsistent—dodging with uncanny speed when pressed, but slow to reorient while attacking. That made them dangerous in clusters… and easier to outpace once they committed.
Gordon was there—dancing side to side, blood streaming freely from his side in two places. He'd been hit, then. An empty health potion lay shattered near his feet, the thin glass glinting in the sunlight.
He rushed forward just as Harry reached him, a counter-charge to make room for Harry's next move, cleaving into the oncoming dead with brutal two-handed blows.
Harry looked upward. Seven archers.
"Vantage," he said, drawing his blade once more. The named weapon sang in his hand as he invoked its power.
"I love this sword," he told Gordon as an aside. It had been cheap—tossed in with the shield as a package deal. Underappreciated.
His friend grunted in acknowledgement, shielding himself from a mace blow with the flat of his hastily interposed blade.
Harry focused on the archers, took position, and swung once, smoothly, at neck level.
His strike met only air—but also resistance.
Seven little pockets of resistance.
A hundred feet above, seven archers fell, one after another.
"I'm jealous," complained Gordon. He kicked a ghoul in the kneecap and rolled to his feet in the instant of opportunity.
"Ha. Hah," said Harry.
Gordon's typical six-shooter was arguably better at what it did than Harry's artifact.
"I'm serious," Gordon added. "It looks cooler when you do it."