51: Branches That Dance Without Wind

As we approached the city, the unsettling sound that we had been hearing for the past hour grew louder and more frequent. It rattled our bones and made our hair stand on end. We strained our eyes to try and see through the thick mist that surrounded us, but it was impossible to make out anything more than a few feet away.

“Fuck me,” Elena muttered. “What the hell is that?”

“Dude, oath,” Noah grumbled, frustration clear in his voice. “Can’t see shit with this fucking mist. We really need to be able to—”

As if on cue, a deafening explosion of magical energy washed over us, causing us to stumble and lose our balance. When we regained our footing, we saw that the mist had been purged from the area up to a mile from the city walls, revealing a chaotic battle raging before us.

The walls of the city had been breached at several points, and twisted waxen mushroom horrors swarmed through the holes towards the heart of the city. Above them, the figures of unseelie fae flitted through the air, their dragonfly wings sharp and serrated.

NPC guards fought bravely against the onslaught, alongside a growing number of players who were throwing themselves into the battle like predators catching a whiff of blood. The defenders cut down wave after wave of monsters with their weapons and spells. Mages exploded huge holes in the thronging enemy, while arrows imbued with all manner of magic tore straight lines through multiple enemies. The front of the battle heaved too and fro like a storm-whipped tide, melee classes hacking and chopping with every conceivable weapon. It was absolute chaos on a scale that was only ever seen inside modern games.

It wasn’t just mushroom goblins too. Almost every mob in the region was represented. Trolls, wolves, bears, spiders, and at least one dragon were fighting on the side of the evil faeries, each of them twisted into a vile simulacrum of what they were supposed to be.

The same high-pitched charging sound that we’d been hearing for an hour began again, and when I focused on the origin of the sound, I could only stare in fascination and awe. A beetle the size of a large suburban home was busy generating energy in a huge quad-mandibled mouth. On its back, a small wooden fortress stood, where unseelie operated a huge ballistae that suppressed any of the city’s siege weapons that tried to line a shot up on the creature.

Strangely enough, the siege beetle wasn’t a mushroom creature. It was just a regular old multi-tonne behemoth that defied real world physics as easily as it punched holes in ancient masonry.

The charging cycle ended with the crack-boom we’d all been expecting, and a short-lived beam of energy lanced out from between the mandibles of the beetle. The beam ripped through the city with overwhelming force, leaving destruction in its wake. The shockwave rolled out over the city, shattering windows, knocking over buildings, and sending debris flying through the air. The ground quaked as though in fear, and all across the battlefield, combatants stumbled. The hole in the wall was now large enough for a small army to pass through, and the buildings behind it were reduced to rubble.

My party didn’t falter for long. We kept rushing forward, faster now than before.

From behind the city, far enough back that the haze of the atmosphere washed out some of the colour, a shape began to rise. Vaguely cigar shaped, the shadow turned towards the battle and began to pile on speed.

“That’s a bloody airship!” Ethan exclaimed.

My wings slowed as I gazed up at the ship. Airships were extremely rare, expensive, and had only been introduced in a recent update to the game. It was impressive to see one, but that wasn’t what had caused my pace to lessen. Nah, it was the giant symbol emblazoned on the side. A silver mountain on a black background, with a bright blue moon hung in the sky behind it. Silver Ridge.

Paisley was the one to ask the obvious question. “How did Marlon get his hands on one of those?”

Massive crossbow emplacements hung from the wooden hull of the ship, and they fired almost as one. The bolts flashed down from the sky like a god passing spiteful judgement, lit from within by searing orange gold light.

The beetle was pinned to the ground like some sort of oversized specimen, and it writhed when the magic imbued in the projectiles began to cook it from within. When the beast opened its mandibles wide and dark light began to build, I thought the strategically placed steel armour that protected key sections of the airship hull was about to be peeled away. It didn’t fire a beam. It screamed.

Terrible power erupted in all directions, arcing over the battlefield as deep black and white chain lightning. It threaded through defending players and simulacrum with equal prejudice, detonating their bodies as it went. The players disintegrated into dust and charred gear, while the meat-less simulacrum simply showered fleshy fungal body parts all over the place.

Another volley of bolts rained down from the sky, and like a switch had been flicked, the beetle and its powers died when a bolt impaled its head.

The elysian fae who’d crewed the living vehicle weren’t idle during this time. At first, their healers attempted to pull the bolts free and heal up the damage, but the death of their charge made their struggle pointless. So, instead, they leapt up into the air and formed a circle around the massive insect.

“Keiko?” Trepidation laced Noah’s tone. “Can you see that magic too?”

I could. The elysian fae were twisting their hands in a complex series of movements, summoning brown and black energies that snaked down towards the beetle like the roots of a tree seeking moisture. Threads of their magic began to join as they converged, until a web was created with the dead monster at its centre.

The beetle twitched.

“Oh, hell,” I swore.

Up from its head, fungus swelled and burst like overripe fruit. The invading tendrils laced themselves through and over carapace. They consumed the monster in a feast of twitching mushroom that had my stomach doing unpleasant flips. It was over quickly, and reborn, the titanic beetle pulled itself up off the ground, ballista bolts and all.

When it was upright, the bolts were wrapped up in fungal flesh and pulled free. The tentacles lifted them up over the top of the beast until they were above the head. With a crunching sound that even we could hear way out here, they plunged fletching-first into the head. Horns. The unseelie were using the bolts as horns. That was… oddly creative for Rellithesh NPCs.

“Keiko!” Paisley blurted, looking up at me with the sudden spark of epiphany alight in her dark eyes. “The tree! Fly fast and convince it to bring its dryads. We hit them from the side with an army and this might turn.”

“Oh shit, you’re right!” I gasped.

She nodded enthusiastically. “Go!”

With a twirling salute, I turned back in the direction we’d come and opened up with all my abilities. Of the two fairies in our party, I was by far the fastest. Noah hadn’t really needed or wanted to spec into speed, and all his abilities were tank related.

Me on the other hand? I left a trail of pink ribbons, flower petals, and dark silver energy in my wake as I chained all my abilities together to increase my speed dramatically. My wings blurred, creating a sound that was almost like a propeller drone, but one of the quiet ones with the wacky rotor blades.

The journey took me less than a quarter of the time it took the party to walk to the city, and when I arrived, I found the tree already awake. Not just awake, but busy smashing fungal simulacrum underfoot, or with its many long branches while it rapidly spawned undead dryad horrors.

Even as I closed the final distance, I saw it wrap willowy vines around a bear and yank it in towards the maw under its massive trunk.

“Ah. Flitling. I had wondered what had become of you and your noble party,” the tree rumbled ominously. It probably wasn’t trying to sound scary, but its voice was like a mountain come to life for the sole purpose of relaying some sort of dire prophecy.

“Yeah, the city nearby—and I suspect the whole region—is under attack,” I explained, coming down to hover somewhere near the ‘front’ of the tree. “The elysians are making a play for the world, it seems, and using these fungal simulacrums as their foot soldiers.”

The very air trembled with the sudden rage of the ancient undead tree. “Fungus? Those wretched flitling rot-peddlers go too far!”

Taken aback, I cautiously asked, “I uh… I don’t like fungus either, but what makes you hate them so much?”

“I am a dead tree!” the willow proclaimed. “Fungal spores seek to invade my boughs and weaken me with their insidious tendrils! You say the mortal city is under attack? Is this where the rest of your kindred minders have gathered to fight the invaders? I demand you make its location known to me so I might help to purge the forests and prairies of their filth!”

Bloody hell. I wasn’t going to need to convince the tree to help, I was going to need to stop it from rampaging all the way into the fae wilds.

“Absolutely, great lord willow!” I said, unable to keep myself from falling into character as some sort of fairy minder for it. What could I say? The way it spoke was infectious. “I’ll guide you from within your branches. Uh… but if you could grow roots or branches over our building to make sure it doesn’t fall off, that would be great. You were a lot less… animated, when we built it.”

“An excellent point, flitling. I cannot have the domicile of my allies crumbling! Like a woven home of a hunting raptor sheltered within my branches, I will keep your nest safe while we lay waste to these upstart interlopers!”

I hopped up onto a prominent branch of the willow and grasped the gently swaying appentage for support while I pointed with the other hand. “That way. It took my companions and I an hour or two to walk the distance, but—”

Any further words I might’ve said died in my throat when the whole goddamn tree began to gallop.