The Destroying Plague Read online

  “And the only place for a temple that we might be able to reach is beyond the frontier,” Tissa said quietly, dropping her head. This inaction weighed on her, as she was used to being in the center of the fray. She couldn’t even write to us. “And you guys will probably have all the fun without me…”

  “Damn, we planned to go to the frontier after the sandbox, and now we are!” Ed laughed nervously. “You remember? Back when Axiom wasn’t giving us room to breathe?”

  “There’s something I don’t understand,” Malik spoke up. “The temple spot is far from the frontier! Even with maxed out resistance potions, we won’t get there… Even if we quickly get into the forties and buy mounts, we still won’t make it. Land mounts are too slow, and we’re way off flying mounts. And then we’ll still have to build the temple!”

  “The temple will wait,” I interjected. “If we get to it at all. Right now we need adepts, all the adepts on the island.”

  “Manny has already spoken to his boys. The workers are going to alter their shifts to put more people on the island at a time. They’ll go to the temple to pray. I don’t know how you pray to the Sleeping Gods, but I doubt words are that important.”

  “That’s not enough. Our brave honorary citizen of Tristad, and also first priest Patrick, is in Darant right now. He wrote that he’d gotten acquainted with the city sewers…”

  “Where?” Tobias asked in surprise.

  “In the sewers. Nether knows what he lost there! Anyway, he met some troggs there. They’re supposedly desperate to become adepts, but we can’t take them yet because of our limit. But! They’ll help us extend the delay on Behemoth’s debuff too. Especially if they pray at the temple. That’s why I’m heading to Darant today to find O’Grady.”

  “Your imitation skill isn’t a panacea,” Hung objected. “The preventers will definitely predict that, I bet they’re already patrolling the streets with True Flame.”

  “I’ll be careful. Next. We have renegade kobold s among our adepts,” I continued, glancing at Malik and Melissa. “And we’re very lucky that you guys are still in the sandbox!”

  “Kobold s! Right!” Malik brightened up. He’d been worried too that all the fun stuff would happen without him and counting the days until he could go out into the big world.

  “I’ve sent you the coordinates of the spot where I met them. If you don’t find them there, search nearby. Together you can send the whole tribe to the base.”

  “They’re mobs…” Ed said doubtfully. “Infect and Tissa are nothing to them, they might attack.”

  “I’m nothing?” the girl frowned. “I’m a priestess of the Sleeping Gods! They’ll do what I tell them! Or I’ll banish them and give them to anathema!”

  “Woah, woah,” Hung chuckled. “Don’t go to them with an attitude like that.” If you start giving commands, they’ll definitely aggro! We have few enough adepts as it is, so you’d better take off your crown…”

  Urgent matters now discussed, we moved to our leveling plan. The higher our levels in the desert, the greater our chances of success with Behemoth’s quest.

  Ed brought up a holographic map of the continent’s habitable lands and demonstrated two options for farming routes through the locations: one with Crag in the group and the other without, just in case Crag didn’t want to risk it.

  “I’ll be there,” Tobias said impassively, digging around in his teeth with a finger. “I get the impression we won’t be able to level up on the island — either a dinosaur ate all the mobs or there never were any. And we can’t get through the instance we found in the mine, right? I won’t go out into open spaces, don’t want to risk that, but instances are fine by me.”

  He wasn’t saying anything new. We were already planning to pull him straight out of the depths into the instances. There were problems with choosing dungeons; plenty were under the control of clans, but there were enough public ones too, they were just scattered across the whole of Latteria. That issue was solved by getting to a spot once, then we could go back there every day.

  “With Alex’s new skills, you can easily skip level thirty instances and move up to the forty pluses,” Tissa added. “If Vindication ignores armor and doesn’t miss, mathematically our Herald will be cracking bosses like walnuts. There isn’t a single boss in that level bracket with over a million health. More or less depending on the party size.”

  “We don’t need to take any senseless risks,” Ed objected. “Have you forgotten? Alex can’t die. We need to test everything out in dungeons at our own level, then decide.”

  “Agreed,” I said.

  “Then Hung and I will start traveling to the first planned instances. Portals will beggar us, and we can’t use mounts yet…”

  Ed’s words reminded me that I had a Ghost Wolf Summoning Scroll waiting for me.

  “…which means we’ll be traveling by gnomish airship. Takes longer than portals, but it’s a lot cheaper.”

  “Alright,” I nodded. “Tissa and Malik will search for the kobold s in the meantime and convince them to relocate. I’ll deal with the rewards for Po, then portal over to Darant…”

  “Ugh, I don’t like that!” Ed interrupted him. “Maybe I should be the one to find Patrick?”

  I shook my head. Dis had broken my last character, forcing me to avoid conflicts. I didn’t feel like cowering behind my friends’ backs this time, waiting for them to do something.

  “What about me?” Tobias asked. “Just chill at the base? Boring…”

  I barely kept myself from answering more harshly.

  “Toby, the most influential people from two separate worlds are hunting you! And you’re bored! Do something! Level a profession!”

  “Just don’t take fishing,” Hung advised. “The monsters in the water here’ll pull you in with your rod…”

  While he pontificated on the peculiarities of national fishing in Kharinza, I thought back in reverse chronological order: fishing, the Golden Fish (caught by Hung in the Mountain Dams), our first joint campaign and the reason for the clan’s creation — our dispute with Big Po. Some links in the chain were dim, giving way to a gleaming legendary. I moved from the comm to my character profile, opened the chest tab and brought up the description for everyone to see:

  Arena Master’s Horn

  Legendary

  Unique item.

  Accessory.

  +20% to all group stats.

  Use: Summons ogre gladiators to fight for you until the end of the battle. The ogre’s level is always 3 levels above the summoner’s.

  Cooldown: 24 hours.

  Only for the Bard class!

  Chance of loss after death lowered by 100%.

  “Listen, Malik, you’ll be coming out soon…” I said smoothly. “Could you change your class? What about switching to bard?

  Silence reigned for a few seconds. Hung slammed his fist down on the table and swore. Ed and Tissa got what I was driving at right away and laughed. Only Tobias, having missed our bet with Axiom, glanced back and forth from one face to another and waited for explanations.

  “Well I’ll be…” Ed said thoughtfully, chuckling. “With Crag’s talent, plus twenty percent to stats on top… That is a hell of a boost! And it’s passive. We just need a Bard in the group!”

  Malik leapt up from the table and backed off, shaking his head.

  “No, no, no… No! You can’t be serious, Alex? My daggers are scalable… My epics… My boots! The boots from the treasury? No, no, no… No! Me? A Bard? I’m tone-deaf! Hung, come on! Back me up!”

  “You know, brother Malik…” Bomber said thoughtfully. “You haven’t really been a thief once in your life either…”

  * * *

  Our little Pig and Whistle would grow in time into a full-fledged tavern as good as the Bubbling Flagon. But to explain why we had to build something small if the fort would have to be expanded anyway as our population grew, I’ll have to explain a little about how building works in Disgardium.

  Along wi
th any other profession, construction was heavily simplified. Remember how I ‘cooked’ food, and you’ll understand roughly how much the developers went again realism. All typical buildings had their own so-called schematics, like cooking recipes. After ‘studying’ a schematic, the builder could build it. Just like in cooking, to construct buildings you need ingredients, meaning materials like blocks or wood.

  You could mine stone but couldn’t build anything with it right away; you had to process it first. The quarry worker mined stone; the stonemason gave it shape. It could be ‘processed’ into blocks, slabs, bricks, cobblestones for sidewalks, whatever — the main thing is that you couldn’t do anything without a leveled-up stonemason. Like with metals — unprocessed ore also served as a trading item, but it couldn’t be used anywhere in that form. It could only be used when made into bars, which required knowledge of Mining.

  Stone buildings were built without cement, wooden — without nails, but any building required a certain amount of resources. This many steel bars, this many copper, this much sand and clay, which was also added somewhere.

  After gathering all the required resources in the necessary amount, the builders started the work. Their speed depended on their crafting grade and the number of workers at the construction site. Next, magic got involved.

  As Gyula explained it, if all the conditions were met and the resources were distributed properly, the system invited him to ‘Start construction’ of a specific part of the building, and then the process started when he confirmed it. Blocks connected solid to each other, transforming from several game items into a single whole, for example a ‘Level 1 Tavern Foundation.’ These parts then meld into just ‘Level 1 Tavern,’ taking their place in the world of Dis and taking on new properties such as durability and structure wear.

  This meant that Snowstorm, on the one hand, was making everything easy by departing from realism, and on the other — making a bunch of different professions essential. I knew some of this already, and heard some from Gyula, but it was important to gather all the information and organize it to understand how to further develop the base and what we’d need to do so.

  In daylight, the clan fort looked… different. Just a few buildings constructed along an improvised street that wasn’t even paved. A tropical downpour that had been falling on Kharinza all night had transformed the trampled pathway into a muddy mess. With each step, my leg sank up to the knee into the sticky, slurping soup, reminding me of my trials in the Mire. The air was full of fumes and smells.

  “Sorry, boss, we got a serious lack of woodcutters,” Gyula explained, wiping the sweat from his brow. “Some of the boys have taken on the craft, but they need to level it and level it…”

  The air was so thick with fumes, you could almost cut it. The chief builder gave me a tour around the fort to tell me what had been done and what was left to do. He started with complaints.

  “Nobody has a high enough profession for it, or we’d have put a road down long ago. And the stone situation is terrible! That damn reptile, the Nether take him, he’s gotten cocky! She’s a dumb beast, but even with chicken brains she can figure out where to get food. She’s stopped even moving away from the mine, and why should she? The island is lifeless, it’s not that easy to catch stuff in the sea, and we’re here, right under her nose.”

  Crawler spoke of how he witnessed the Montosaurus hunting. The hunter became the hunted, captured in the tentacles of a gigantic kraken of unknown level. The reptile barely got away, and then didn’t show up at the mine for a long time while she licked her wounds somewhere. But Gyula was right, and his boys’ heroism was under no doubt — non-citizen capsules didn’t dull pain. Every day in this deadly lottery, one of them died in the truest sense of the word. It was a good thing that the reptile’s attack was fatal, and the character’s death instant.

  “I’ll talk to Behemoth,” I promised Gyula.

  “Alright,” the builder nodded. “There’s something else too. Our boys saw some Sharks patrolling around Cali Bottom. They don’t land, so they might just be tracking anyone who flies in.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  Sharks were unavailable to non-citizens. Sure, now they were civilian fliers, but previously only the military used them. They’re easily upgraded to full-scale battle vehicles; have huge durability and they can capture ordinary fliers. That might mean that Cali Bottom was closed to us for now, because the Sharks could belong to the preventers. After the events in the gorge, a fragile peace barely remained intact in their Alliance, alongside an unbridled desire to capture not only the escaped Crag, but also the unidentified A-class Threat. Horvac was cleared of suspicion right away because all of Modus had seen him enter the castle gates just as Crag was kidnapped.

  The street led from the city’s only gates to the temple. Buildings towered along either side, and a low palisade around the height of a man surrounded it all. It wouldn’t protect against Monty, and it seemed of doubtful value before the undead appeared in the mine, but now…

  The first building on the right was the as-yet empty barracks for NPC guards. I still hadn’t hired any yet. Across the street, opposite the barracks, was the humble tavern, built using the same schematic as Tristad’s Bubbling Flagon, but a third of the size.

  Next came the merchant stalls on the left side of the street. They too stood empty. There wasn’t much point in building them, but they were an integral part of a level one fort, just like the houses along the right side. After that came the headquarters and the vault. Crawler and I controlled access to both buildings through the clan control panel.

  After that was just empty space, intended to eventually become a central square in front of the temple. I’d seen something similar in Tristad at the temple of Nergal the Radiant, and that place was always packed.

  Overall, it all looked poor, miserly and homely, but in fact, the fact that it was all ours took my breath away! Especially since the island was big. We had enough space for everything.

  A small graveyard had sprung up behind the temple and I’d set it as my respawn point. Not a particularly useful act given that my next death in Dis could be my last.

  “We need to do something about that beast,” Gyula complained again about the Montosaurus. “We’re sticking to the temple, but if we grow, we’ll need more space. The beast hasn’t been bothering us, something holds it back, but it’s no longer entirely safe behind the palisade.”

  I nodded and he spoke of a planned upgrade to the fort:

  “We’re a long way from a castle for now, but at level three, the fort will transform into a small fortress with a citadel and bastions. If we dig a moat…” Gyula paused to daydream a moment, then shook himself and continued. “To tell you the truth, it’s beyond my current Construction grade. In the future, the clan castle will fill this whole area, and the temple will be at its heart.”

  “What do we need to upgrade? Resources? If we’re missing something, we can buy it in. We have money.”

  “I’m afraid you can’t imagine how much it might come to, Alex,” Gyula shook his head. “Fort level two costs around two or three hundred thousand gold just in resources we don’t have. I’ve studied the schematic. We’ll get a blacksmith, a sawmill, a fishing post, all kinds of gardens. Again, a stone fence. Some of our guys will change their profession to something more useful for everyone — we’ll be able to provide for ourselves… if we can do something with that overgrown reptile!”

  “The Montosaurus and money…” I made a mental note. There was no point in dealing with all this until I’d dealt with the Infection and the second temple. “Anything else?”

  “Yes. Even with all the resources, it’s not that easy to upgrade a fort. There are requirements, and one of them is… We need residents! Look at the control panel, there’s a Population bar. Our population is a joke right now: no garrison, no merchants, empty houses… We don’t count as permanent residents.”

  “Do we need humans specifically?”

&n
bsp; “Doesn’t matter. Any intelligent creatures…”

  “You’ll have your residents, Gyula. And far sooner than you think…”

  * * *

  After the tour around the fort and my conversation with the chief builder, I looked in on Behemoth. The temple was empty.

  The Sleeping God didn’t appear right away. Once he did materialize, he said that holding back the parasite was taking up all his resources, and forming an avatar cut down on the already small amount of spare faith. When I asked him to deal with the greedy dinosaur, Behemoth said that he couldn’t meddle so directly in the affairs of mortals, then said something strange; that the deus ex machina limit was reached, whatever that meant, and I’d have to figure this one out on my own.

  With those parting words, I visited the headquarters, a small building with one room, the fort control crystal flashing weakly at its center.