Chapter 1
So much work to do. So much to accomplish. So much… to conquer.
Vic barely registered as a flicker in my transformed mind. I’d set my thoughts to more profound ventures than simple revenge. Lady Kalma has given me visions of the world to come—of death and destruction on a scale that no mortal was truly capable of comprehending—and those visions now drive my footsteps and guides my squid-like arms. But still, Vic will die. I will give him the glorious gift of true death just the same. And the sand in his small hourglass has already run dangerously low.
I stood amidst a legion of undead minions. We were several miles outside Echelon, on the other side of the city from my necropolis, and things were steadily going according to plan.
We knew the last remnants of survivors would either flee or try to mount a resistance. Most of them fled Echelon’s walls before we arrived, but they are of no concern to me now. For the moment, my focus is honed in on Elyk. The crazed murderer wore my armor and wielded Infernum. He was a whirlwind of fire, steel, and death, slowly creeping toward outer limits of my vision. The battle had only barely begun, but already the field of corpses left in Elyk’s wake was wide and deep.
I watched the harvester with a smile of admiration like a father pleased by the performance of his beloved son. And I was. Everything Elyk had become was because of me. Not only did I give him an incredible set of equipment, but I had given him a home and a life. If I hadn’t taken him under my dark wings, he would be either dead already or fleeing Echelon right now.
I thought of Helvegen. I… I didn’t love her. No, I do not believe what we had was ever love. Perhaps we had approximated the notion of love, but we never attained it. Now we have something else. A rivalry? Perhaps. I’m not sure, and I didn’t think to ask her where we stood as her blood dripped from my tentacle arm to the floor next to my bed.
But she’s here. I felt it in my bones.
“Elyk is about to break through,” Xia said quietly, interrupting my silent thoughts for the first time in some hours.
I nodded. “Almost to the core,” I replied.
The harvester, leading over a hundred verdantly augmented undead, was pushing toward the resurrection beacon outside Echelon. It controlled the souls of all those who died on the entire continent, bringing them back in fresh bodies and seeing them go on their way. The whole concept was disgusting—an afront to Lady Kalma and her sisters of death. I was eager to bring it all to an end.
I hadn’t given the defenders much time to prepare before marching my soulless army to their doorstep. We’d moved in less than a day, but still they were at least partially entrenched. In the end, the defenders of Echelon, their barricades and bulwarks, would all be inconsequential. Echelon was the easy city to conquer. My citadel was right next door, and we gave them little time to prepare. But the other cities… they would be difficult to capture. They would have time. And they would know exactly what was coming.
Just then Elyk broke through the line of defenders, and what had begun as a pitched battle with clearly drawn line devolved into a chaotic rout. Those brave souls defending the beacon knew their time was up. My zombies flooded through their ranks, and within moments I could no longer tell where my troops ended and the defenders began.
“We need to move closer,” I told my lieutenants. “I want a better view.”
My cadre of elite players and NPCs began the slow march toward the front lines. I didn’t want to enter the fray myself, but I wanted to see what the resurrection hub looked like. I needed to know it exactly, and know what kind of area or building it was kept in, so I could easily find all the others spread throughout Wonder.
We neared the cacophony of the front lines, stepping over ruined bodies and shattered undead, and something struck me as impossible.
Somehow, my soldiers were losing.
They had broken through the defenders’ lines, but they weren’t gaining any more ground. In fact, they were losing it. I stood maybe thirty or forty paces from the action, and I struggled to find Elyk among the chaos. He was badly wounded—it looked like a spear was lodged in his shoulder through his breastplate. His helmet was missing as well.
“Sir… what do we do?” Xia asked. She sounded scared. And the warlock never sounded scared.
I had to think for a moment. If I called for a retreat, we could regroup, reassess the defenders, and then make a new assault with better planning and more information. But that would give my enemies just as much time to do the same, and if our surprise attack failed then so would a planned attack.
“Tell the zombies to pull back. Bring Elyk here as well. We’ll retreat, but only for a moment. Then I’ll lead the charge,” I commanded.
Xia obeyed my orders at once. She called the zombies, bringing back what few of them were left intact, and soon enough I saw Elyk staggering toward me. The harvester was bloody and haggard, using Infernum as a cane to support his body weight.
As soon as he was close enough to be heard, he started yelling at me. “What the hell are you doing?”
I was instantly taken aback. The man looked like he was on the verge of death, and he questioned my order for retreat? “We’re losing too many!” I yelled back. The answer was obvious. How could he not see it? “We have to regroup. We’ll make another push!”
Elyk shook his head. “We almost have them! Send the zombies back in! You’re letting them escape and respawn!”
I shook my head. Something didn’t make sense.
Elyk took another few steps closer to me, and his appearance instantly changed. He stood upright, his helmet returned to his head, and he now held Infernum in a steady grip. And he wasn’t impaled by a spear. He was fine. More than fine. Covered in gore, yes, but none of it was his.
“What the hell?” I struggled to wrap my mind around what was happening.
Elyk continued to berate me. “Send them back! Every second of delay is going to cost us more zombies. They’re respawning back there, and most of them are fleeing now. We won’t be able to catch them all.”
He was right. “Back through the lines!” I yelled as loudly as I could. “Kill them all!”
“What’s happening?” Xia asked at my side. She had readied a ball of magic between her hands, but she let it dissipate as our zombies began turning back toward the breach in the bulwarks.
Elyk readjusted his grip on Infernum’s hilt and charged. When he cleared the first two destroyed barricades, his appearance instantly reverted back to what I had seen before. He was battered and bloodied, barely clinging to life. I charged along behind him. When I was close to him once more—shoving zombies aside to make my way through the rotten, disgusting swarm—I could see him as he truly was.
Finally, it dawned on me.
Helvegen was somewhere on the other side. The painter was using her immense skill to change what I saw.
“Fuck. That’s not good,” I said to no one in particular.
“What is it, master?” Xia asked.
“Hel is painting the battlefield. She’s making it look like we’re losing. But we aren’t. We’re fucking slaughtering them all!”
I caught sight of a defender struggling to breathe through a broken jaw. He was leaking blood from a dozen or more gashes and gouges, but he was still alive. I went to him, towering above him on the ground, and wrapped my tentacle fingers around his bloody neck. I hoisted him up to my eye level so I could capture his entire attention.
“Where is Helvegen? Tell me where she is, and I’ll let you live,” I said evenly.
The man only looked terrified. His mouth moved slowly, though no words came out. He was too wounded and shellshocked to be of any use.
I crushed his esophagus in my hand and tossed him over the earthworks toward the rest of my army. After the battle, he would be converted into a mindless undead to swell my ranks.
I kept pushing forward with my soldiers. Elyk was deep in the thick of the battle ahead of me, cleaving left and right with impunity. Half of his strikes were so powerful they blasted apart two or three others in a single stroke. And he wasn’t always hitting our enemies. Zombies who got too close to him were torn to ribbons just the same as the defenders. So be it.
We reached the end of the hastily built bulwarks, and what resistance we had been facing trickled down to nearly nothing. Everyone who was still alive was running. At the end of the barricades and earthworks stood a stone and mortar building about two stories tall. It had no door, but rather each of the four walls were completely open between the pillars supporting the roof. In the center, a red orb slowly oscillated about four or five above the ground. It dripped a pinkish liquid that looked like watered down blood or thin paint.
Our zombies spread out around the stone pergola in a defensive formation, Elyk standing next to the orb with a sheen of blood reflecting from his armor.
“We have it,” the harvester said.
I watched the rotating orb with fascination. It shimmered and shined, dancing in the strong light of the day, and it captivated my attention.
“How do we destroy it?” Xia asked.
“One good hit should do it,” Elyk responded. He readied Infernum above his head like a lumberjack about to split a piece of wood. I had no doubt the legendary sword could rend the orb in half, but another plan began forming in my head.
A buzzing sound rang out from the orb, short and punctuated, and I held up a hand to stop Elyk’s movement. Everyone waited in a silence. A few seconds later, a shimmer obscured a man-sized patch of air right next to the orb. Then the man himself appeared. He was tall, perhaps in his late twenties, and the name floating above his head was George.
Something about witnessing a resurrection within the game gave me pause. In a way, it was beautiful. But at the same time, I hated everything it meant and everything it could do. Resurrection was not the will of Lady Kalma.
George blinked and held a hand to his eyes against the light. He was only level eleven. His class showed him as a crossbowman, but based on his clothing I guessed his stats and abilities were designed more for economics or crafting than combat. The man didn’t speak. He only stood with his hand to the sun and watched, his entire body trembling with fear.
Another vibration jolted out of the orb. Seconds later, the man I had killed and thrown beyond the bulwarks reconstituted in front of my eyes.
I looked to a handful of the nearest zombies. “Push the orb,” I commanded them.
They obeyed my order at once, lining up shoulder to should and reaching their foul hands to the orb. They touched it, then began to push, and the orb moved, though not much.
“More,” I said, pointing to another pair of zombies that looked a bit stronger than the first set. They had thick vines wrapping around their arms and legs, and they hadn’t been nearly as damaged during the battle as some of the others. They joined the first four, and the six of them pushed the orb with all their strength.
Finally, the orb snapped out of place. It jolted to the side like someone had cut a taught string balancing it in place. At once, the color of the orb faded to a dull grey. It lost its luster. Though it still hovered above the ground, it looked like a plain ball of metal or maybe painted wood. Everything about it that had made the orb so captivating was gone.
George shifted nervously from one foot to the other.
The other man, his name was printed in an alphabet I couldn’t recognize or pronounce, looked like he was about to bolt. His eyes were glued to a space between a pair of zombies, and he had all the weight on the balls of his feet. He was so close to running that he was nearly falling over. Honestly, he looked ridiculous. Escape was impossible.
“We need to run a test,” I said to the nervous man. “You understand, right?”
I rammed my pointed tentacles through his chest before he could respond. He gagged, sputtering blood and random gasps of air from his ruptured lungs. I spread out my fingers inside his chest, and he stopped squirming. George looked like he was going to piss himself. I shook the corpse from my arm and waited.
“Well?” Elyk said after a moment.
The orb was silent.
“I think we got it,” I said. I turned to the zombie moving crew and commanded them to push the orb all the way back to Undercroft Citadel. They started maneuvering the orb back through the bulwarks toward the breach and out of sight.
That left only George. He still hadn’t said a word.
I fixed the man with my eyes. “Well? What’s it going to be?” I asked him. Truth be told, he probably wasn’t useful enough to bother saving. He would serve my cause better as a mindless slave. Someone I would never have to worry about again.
George took a moment to gather his wits. “I’m… I’m George,” he said quietly.
“I know that much,” I said with a laugh. “But what’s going to happen to you, George? Are you useful to me? Are you going to beg for your life and come back to my citadel to serve me? Or am I going to kill you here and then drag your corpse back to my necromancer to serve me that way?”
George nodded, though I wasn’t exactly sure why. “I’ll go with you, I suppose.”
“But what makes you useful? Why do I need to save your life?” I demanded.
He thought for a moment. “I’m not very strong. I can make crossbows, but I’m not a great fighter.”
“Well at least you’re honest,” I replied. “Anything else?”
“Back… back home I was a professor. I never played the game much. Always working.”
He was becoming less and less useful every time he spoke. Unless he taught courses in bomb making or military strategy, I was going to kill him. “What did you teach, George?” I asked.
Finally, he managed to look me in the eye. “Classical philosophy. Mostly to freshman and sophomores. I only got my doctorate two years ago.”
“Like Plato and shit?” I never cared much for ancient books and their confusing prose. In the game, I cared for it even less.
George looked back to his feet. “Not Plato,” he said. “Xenophon and Diogenes. And some Eastern writers, but not many.”
“Fucking useless,” I muttered. I made my arms into something of a sledgehammer in front of me and swung hard for the man’s chest. His bones caved inward beneath the strength of my limbs, and he collapsed to the ground with his back against one of the four stone pillars supporting the roof of the pergola. I stepped in front of him and slammed his chest again. Crushed between my combined fists and the stone pillar, he died without a sound. I waited again for the telltale humming and vibrating of the resurrection module, but none came.
We won. True death was back, at least in part of Wonder. The part that mattered most.
“Alright, back to Undercroft. Everyone will be fleeing to the other cities and their resurrection hubs. I highly doubt we’ll see anyone else trying to resist on the entire continent.” I looked at Elyk, his smile as broad as my own. “We have a lot of work to do.”