The Destroying Plague Read online

  Initiated character race change procedure. New race: undead.

  Initiated character appearance change procedure. New appearance: current, with alterations for features of ‘undead’ race.

  Initiated character faction change procedure. New faction: Destroying Plague.

  At the end of all these procedures, you will become a Legate of the Destroying Plague.

  As founder of the Awoken clan, you will be invited to change the faction of all the clan’s members. If any of the members refuse, they will be forcibly excluded from the clan.

  Logging out of Disgardium.

  This isn’t the end! was my first thought. The next, with a sense of great relief: I can finally get some sleep.

  Maybe I imagined it, but I felt the approval of the Sleeping God.

  Chapter 12. The Awoken Assembled

  I WOKE UP from a nightmare in which I became undead in the real world. It took me a while to come around and feel the edge separating the game from reality. It had been a long day. Hours of wandering through the Treasury of the First Mage, then Darant and my conversation with Patrick, the escape from the capital watchmen, the invasion of the Destroying Plague, the fight shoulder to shoulder with the guardians, the coming of the kobold s and the retreat into the jungle. Then there was the Montosaurus, the mercenaries, the invulnerable Cursed Lich Shazz, the Sleeping God…

  I died! Behemoth lost his avatar! And the temple… Shazz had probably already destroyed the temple. The terrible finale weighed on me like death. Despair rushed in. Even the thought of the money saved for my university studies was no comfort. Through sheer strength of will, I cut through the panic and tried to collect myself, cutting off thoughts of Disgardium.

  I was in real life. I was home, in my own bed. My eyes found the clock — it was approaching midday. I’d overslept for school!

  Jumping up from the bed, I began to get ready in a panic until I realized that it was a weekend. Thank the Sleeping Gods! I can’t imagine how I’d have sat through my lessons thinking about my character’s fate. My thoughts returned to Dis.

  Judging by the latest system messages, although Scyth had died, his game hadn’t ended. But what was his role now? Changing faction, becoming a vassal of the Destroying Plague — what did it all mean? Would his divine abilities remain? Would my class still be the same, or would Herald switch to Legate? Was Legate even a class at all? I remembered the Emissary of the Destroying Plague declaring that very title as a quest reward. It might indicate a position in the hierarchy of Destroying Plague vassals and give new abilities. There was no point in guessing, it was easier to wait until the evening and log in. Then everything would be clear.

  Someone knocked at the door and it swung open.

  “Alex?” My mom’s head peeked round the door. “You up? Great! I wanted to let you know I’m going away for the weekend. Dad isn’t at home either… hasn’t been back since yesterday. Breakfast is on the table; lunch is in the refrigerator. There’s a pizza just in case. Behave yourself, dear. Oh, and another thing… Maybe you’ll want to go for a stroll or to the movies with Melissa…”

  She tapped her finger on her wrist several times, and my comm notified me that I’d received fifteen phoenixes.

  “Thank you, mom.” I doubted I’d want to go anywhere, especially to the movies. “When’re you coming back?”

  Mom shrugged and disappeared without telling me when she was planning on returning. A couple of minutes later, I heard the door closing.

  I needed to sort myself out and think everything over well. My communicator had detected a change in the frequency of my heartbeat, realized that I’d woken up and given me a bunch of notifications of missed calls and messages. Without paying them any mind, I went to the bathroom to take a shower. I felt an urgent need to wash the mud of the jungle away, the touch of dead hands and the bubbling slime of the Devouring Plague.

  An hour later, now that I’d wiped away the imaginary filth, recharged and had breakfast, I was fresh and full of energy. I sat at the table, drank some fresh coffee and listened to my friends. Or rather, their messages. If I said they were full of well-meaning calm and certainty in the future, that would be very far from the truth.

  We need to meet, Manny wrote, and that was far from the only message from him. In the last one he let me know that he’d given all the workers the day off, since ‘dead men have occupied the fort and mine.’

  Alix, call me back as soon as you wake up. I’m worried. Love you — that was Tissa’s message. One of them. The ninth. The tenth succinctly reported: I’m on my way to you.

  The last came from Ed, ten minutes ago: We’re all on our way to you.

  I didn’t have time to finish my coffee. The door buzzed and my clanmates’ faces came up on the screen, serious and frowning. Even the ever-smiling Malik looked crestfallen. My mood was no better, but I was still glad to see them; we were all still together.

  I opened the door. Tissa threw herself around my neck, Ed nodded with a whistle, Hung said “Hi,” with nothing but his lips. Malik clapped me on the shoulder and Tobias appeared behind his back — bearded, bald, in sunglasses and a panama hat. This guy was a true master of secrecy and disguise!

  The guys all hovered outside the door, not knowing what to do. Apart from Tissa, this was the first time any of them had been to see me. Tissa looked guilty. She bit her lip, sighed and spoke first.

  “Sorry for bringing everyone here, Alex. But I think this situation counts as an emergency.”

  “You did the right thing. Sorry for not answering, guys. I hadn’t slept two days before all this. Yesterday I just fell out of my capsule, into bed and was out for the count. I only just woke up… Um… Come in. My folks aren’t here, so we can stay and discuss everything here.”

  I led them into the kitchen-living room. Under ordinary circumstances, I was sure they would have been looking around my house like meerkats, but right then they followed me like a funeral procession and sat down.

  Tissa sat on the sofa. She looked a little lost and was dressed strangely feminine for her: not quite a dress, but not a formless gown either, but jeans that stretched over her long legs and a tight t-shirt that emphasized her curves. Hung Lee barely fit into an armchair and had to move it back so his legs would fit behind the table. Ed Rodriguez spread out in the other armchair, in shorts and vest as usual, outlining his powerful shoulders and biceps. Swarthy Malik sat bestride a barstool. He looked like a young man next to the other guys — narrow-faced, thin, with girlish long eyelashes.

  Tobias milled around in his ridiculous disguise, dressed in cheap trash from Walmart. Eventually he just sat down on the floor and crossed his legs. Yeah, there wasn’t a lot of space in our apartment. The boy’s rumbled black t-shirt read “I need more personal space” with the Reality Distorters logo at the top, another game like Disgardium, only space-themed.

  “Coffee?” I offered. “Anyone want anything to eat? Alright then. I’ll start with the most important part: I didn’t lose my character, or my Threat status.

  Hung elbowed Malik in the side.

  “I told you! Our Alex ain’t so easy to…”

  “Wait, Hung,” I interrupted. “All in good time. I don’t have enough information for a full picture. What happened after I died?”

  “Crawler and I revived behind the temple just as you jumped and fell into the boss’s AoE. Crag went down right after…”

  “Yeah, the boss cut off control and fired off some crazy shit,” Tobias confirmed. “Sent me to the respawn point.”

  “Did you revive?”

  “No, it was my second death that day.”

  “Um… I don’t understand…”

  “In big Dis, you revive instantly after your first death just like in the sandbox,” Ed began to explain. “After the second, you have to wait an hour to revive. After the third you have to wait twelve hours, then the counter resets. For Crag, it wasn’t his first death that day, so he just logged out of the game.”

  “Let me
tell you what we saw before we got out of there,” Hung said. “All the workers used the emergency log-out. Only Patrick and the kobold s were left. They ran as fast as they could into the jungle, right into Monty’s maw, but Ed and I caught up to them, hooked them in our Depths Teleportation and took them to Glendale. That little town where we leveled up before you left the sandbox. The residents there aren’t particularly kind to non-humans like the kobold s, so we took them into some caves outside of town. As for Patrick… Well, you know him.”

  “He found a tavern and set up shop there?”

  “Pretty much,” Ed smiled. “I sent him a hundred gold, should last a while. Did you say something about coffee?” He glanced toward the kitchen with interest, smelling the aroma of freshly ground beans still wafting out. “Wouldn’t mind something to eat too…”

  “Yeah!” Malik and Hung echoed in chorus.

  Crag’s drooling face made it obvious that he wouldn’t refuse some food either but was too shy to admit it. In real life, the boy seemed almost the complete opposite of his virtual persona: tense, timid, tongue-tied. In Dis, he transformed.

  I stood up to heat up a couple of big pizzas and pour some coffee, but Tissa beat me to it.

  “Let me,” she said. “Save your stories for me!”

  “Wow! Little Tissa feels like home at Alex’s place!” Hung laughed. “So, you’re all serious now?”

  “I think we should get ready for some little Scyths,” Malik shook his head in concern.

  The atmosphere was cleared. Throwing jokes back and forth and mocking each other, we ate and I told them everything I saw after my character died, including the fact that the clan members now had a choice: to stay with me and change their faction, or leave the clan.

  “What are you talking about?” Hung frowned. “We started this with you and we’re with you until the end!”

  “I even prefer it this way,” Tobias muttered. “This whole subject of the Sleeping Gods is so murky, and Behemoth…” I’ve never seen more nightmarish creatures.

  “You think the Destroying Plague is any nicer?” Tissa giggled.

  “No, but we haven’t seen him,” Tobias shrugged. “Maybe we won’t even see him. What difference does it make? People play for different races; the main thing is leveling up.”

  “By the way, what’s it like when you’re being controlled by another mind?” I asked, remembering that I was a vassal of the Destroying Plague now. “You just watched without controlling yourself? How did it feel?”

  “It’s a weird feeling… You know, it’s like you really turned into enemies to me! I knew how things were really, of course, but I felt totally different. Although maybe it just seemed that way. In fact, I lost control of my body. All the ability icons went inactive, so I couldn’t have helped even if I’d wanted to.

  His words didn’t uplift me. If ‘vassaldom’ meant something like what Tobias experienced, the game was over for me. But I still held on to hope for something more. Behemoth’s last words still ran through my head too. The deity was an in-game AI, at the end of the day, and he was sentient. He wouldn’t have said such words to give me hope for no reason. He really might have some sort of plan.

  We spent some more time discussing what the faction change would give us, and the guys saw only pluses: unexplored lands, unique quests and abilities, rare achievements… The overall depressed atmosphere was replaced with excitement and passion. Which was possibly excessive, given that all our suppositions were based on the paltry couple of system messages I’d seen before I logged out of the capsule. In any case, the guys had cheered up. Infect had even started walking around the living room and looking at the family holograms with interest.

  I noticed that Tissa, although she was smiling along with everyone, looked far from happy. It was clear why — what girl wanted to play as undead? Rotting, covered in cadaveric spots, surrounded by similarly disgusting characters? Not just on a monitor screen like in epochs past, but almost living it?

  The guys’ enthusiasm rocketed up when we got onto the subject of the Balancer.

  “Imagine the achievements we can get when we start taking out mobs and bosses a hundred levels higher!” Bomber exclaimed. “And that asshole Monty is first on the list!”

  “Hold on,” I said, not sharing Hung’s ardor. It seemed like he didn’t know how the artifact works. “Yesterday, when I balanced the lich, he went to the same level as me. If the undead curse hadn’t have worked and the lich had died, we’d have gotten the same amount of experience from him as a level thirty-nine mob. Well, alright, more since he was a boss. But you saw for yourselves that his level dropped…”

  “You’re both wrong,” Ed said, rubbing his hands. He took out his communicator and brought up the description of the Balancer. “Look: ‘on damage, balances the target with the attacker’! So, the mob becomes your level, Scyth, only when you deal damage. You hit, the system calculates the damage as if it’s a mob of your level, applies it, then returns the mob’s level.”

  “But I saw myself, even before I hit him, the lich…”

  “It works in both directions!” Tissa shouted and smiled victoriously. “Right, Ed? When you were looking, Alex, the lich was attacking someone himself, right?”

  “I’m proud of you, Melissa!” Rodriguez answered, imitating Mr. Kovac. “The lich cast Deadly Grasp on the mercenaries, those dead hands that came through the ground, remember? The ability binds them in place and deals damage.” The lich was constantly dealing damage, then fell in level. For five seconds.”

  “So the mechanic for calculating exp in this case is unclear?” Tobias asked. “If the mob drops in levels and is killed in those five seconds…”

  “We’ll test it out,” I said. “And even if we don’t get experience, what stops us from dropping the mob’s health to the minimum and then finishing it off with Sleeping Vindication?

  “Only the fact that you might not have it anymore,” Ed advanced thoughtfully. “If the Sleeping God is gone and his temple destroyed by the lich, then you might have no divine abilities left.”

  “Plus, the whole system of bonus stat points for the adepts,” Hung added. “Never mind, no point in guessing. We’ll find out soon. Whatever the case may be, I’m with Alex.”

  “So, we’re going to become undead now too?” Malik brightened up. “Then maybe I don’t have to become a bard? Scyth can start using his old invulnerability tricks again and one-shot bosses, and I can still be a good old thief.”

  “Tobias?” I asked. “Are you with us?”

  He nodded, inspecting his fingernails, and muttered something in approval. Tissa was silent so far, avoiding my gaze.

  “Then it’s decided?” Ed asked, looking at everyone. “We’re changing factions and then working out a plan for our next actions after we figure out what the Destroying Plague wants from Scyth?”

  “Wait!” Tissa lowered her eyes as if gathering courage. She made her decision and asked. “What then? Think about what we’re losing here: all the cities will be inaccessible to us, we won’t be able to show up in any populated zone without risking death! We’ll never be able to go into any ordinary city! For our whole lives! Do you get that? No class teachers, merchants. I doubt we’ll even have access to an auction house! The Commonwealth has its own auction, as does the Empire and the neutrals. I guess the Destroying Plague auction house will be separate too? And who will we trade with? Each other? What if the new faction’s zones are high-level? How are we going to level up? Are you sure Scyth will get his undead curse back? What if he doesn’t?”

  “You want to refuse?” I asked gently, taking her by the hand. “That’s fine, and it won’t change anything in our relationship. Especially since you and Malik are still in the sandbox. I can’t imagine that it’s possible to change your race before you go into big Dis.”

  “Actually, it’s my birthday the day after tomorrow,” Malik muttered. “And I didn’t get an answer to my question; can I stay a thief or is it really important to you to h
ave a personal bard with a guitar in your party?”

  “Whether we’re with the Sleeping Gods or the Destroying Plague, it changes nothing,” Ed answered. “We can’t go to Darant and just pick up some random bard, you know? I’m more worried about someone else right now. Tissa.”

  The girl took a sharp breath when she heard her name. Her shoulders drooped.

  “I have to admit,” she said quietly. “The White Amazons made me an offer that is tough to refuse. I don’t want anything left unsaid between us, so I’ll tell you all straight: I decided to agree. It’s going to solve not only my problems, but just everything, even for my dad.”

  It seemed to me that she’d only just made her final decision. Having voiced her doubts, it was as if she’d cut off the other options. Yes, we’d earned a lot of money, a ridiculous amount, and we had great potential. And who knows, maybe that potential wouldn’t go anywhere with the Destroying Plague but would only grow! However, you span it, the abilities of the Sleeping Gods were limited since we couldn’t think of a way to complete Behemoth’s quest and build a second temple. There was a reason the boys were so happy about the news of returning under the banner of the Destroying Plague — they remembered the miracles we performed in the sandbox with its help. Undead? So what? People played for races just as nightmarish, especially if you looked at the Empire. The new possibilities also inspired Ed, Hung and Malik, even Crag.