Chapter 596: Walls and sentries
Mason didn’t really care how many points Jeong spent on his fancy wall. It wasn’t going to stop him. He raced ahead of his forming players, elven bow out and loosing arrows to test a dozen different targets.
Normal arrows bounced off gargoyle heads. A power shot exploded one. The rest started screeching and jumping into the air.
“Flyers first!” he shouted, not slowing as he ran down the line to keep shooting different pieces of the wall and its growing army of defenders. The living gate flashed with shielding, tentacles lashing out angrily and out of range.
The walking corpses jerked as arrows slammed into them, bits and pieces falling off as the Reverberation augment exploded. A few of the dirt and stone beasts broke or came apart, but it seemed like more were forming.
He put a Crippling scattershot into a nice, juicy pack of zombies because he could. They growled or hissed, walking towards him so slow it was like they were made of molasses.
The urge to charge the ‘eldritch horror’ gate was real, but he held off for now. Instead he ran at the sheer rock wall, looking for a patch without any obvious trap. The bit of stone transformed into a giant mouth mid jump, chomping down on a Sleeve as his hands got close.
He yanked some of its teeth when he pulled back, punched out the rest, and used its shattered maw as a foothold. A few other mouths tried to bite him and did about as well. He heard a hiss and looked up in time to see a cauldron of steaming goop dump right at him.
“Oh.”
It was too late to move. He closed his eyes as it washed over him and set Apex Predator going with a bit of pep in its step. The liquid was hot and nasty. And it fucking stung. He shook his head and spit some of it out with a dry wretch. It had the sour sort of taste he’d gotten used to from being bathed in acid on the regular. But this stuff was kind of…sweet. For some reason that really grossed him out.
“People never did that!” he shouted at roboGod as he climbed, grumbling as he went. “Imagine getting a fucking cauldron of boiling whatever on a wall. That’s dumb movie shit.”
A gargoyle tried to rip his face open at the top. He crushed its arm and then head with one hand and tossed the body down. Two skeletons stood by the cauldron staring as he came up. He broke them to pieces using their stirring stick, which made him feel a little better.
He looked down from the wall and saw red robed players coming from the palace. Looked like fucking hundreds of them. Apparently Jeong was going with option ‘sacrifice everyone’ before he gave up or ran. But it didn’t look like many players not in Jeong’s colors were coming. So that was a hell of a good sign. Unless they were just coming slower…
With the time he had, Mason figured it was time to open a gate. Except now that it had transformed into an octopus monster, he saw no sign of a winch or anything else. With a sigh he ran along shooting anything in range, moving for a closer look, but found no obvious way.
Eventually giving up, he leapt the forty or fifty feet back down to the others, and ran for Becky. She was smashing a few stray zombies and skeletons with her mace, looking restless and agitated as the ranged players shot the hell out of everything behind her.
Lodie popped up beside her and gave Mason a grin.
“Want me to blow up the wall, big lord?”
He blinked and shook his head.
“Hold that thought. Think you can make a fifty foot ramp, country girl?”
She looked at him like he was crazy, until she thought about it.
“You know it’s got a big cooldown, right? I won’t have it later, if there’s a fuckin’…” she threw up her hands. “I dunno, giant undead dragon, or some shit.”
Mason almost kissed her on the cheek. Until he remembered the whole ‘recently bathed in acid’ thing.
“Do it. Can’t be too steep to climb, so try and make it…”
“I ain’t some city idiot.” Becky backed up and held up a hand, her eyes glazing as arcane power flared. Mason grinned and spun around with his bow, joining the other ranged as they picked apart the flyers and walking dead.
Becky’s prestige power crackled and filled the air with power, a giant, blue ramp forming from the ground to almost the top of the wall. It shimmered and still looked translucent for a few seconds, then sizzled and formed in all its sci-fi glory.
“Shit.” She went pink as she inspected. “I left a two foot gap to the wall.”
“We can manage that.” Mason looked at a lot of staring players and held back the laugh. “I hope that’s another instructive lesson about walls,” he yelled. “Ready to climb?”
He didn’t wait around to find out, rushing towards the ramp as he lay down another withering series of arrows into anything not alive. He heard the footsteps following him, and charged up the steep, plastic-like surface.
**
Blake swirled into Jeong’s ‘private’ dungeon, ready for anything as the darkness vanished. It looked like a now-typical, dungeon corridor, this one more sci-fi than medieval stone. Normal enough. Except for being completely blocked by a giant, floating, lidless eye.
“Hello,” he said, checking his shields were up.
Identifying, intoned a robotic voice.
The eye was a construct, and a fairly powerful one, at least judging by the obvious arcane power shimmering all around it. Blake’s Mental Partitions all clamored with ideas. One wanted him to unmake it. Another suggested they grab the thing and start smashing it into the roof and walls of the narrow corridor.
Inaction saved the day. His Adaptive Veil partition hummed busily away, and the construct’s pupil shrunk as it beeped.
Welcome back, Patron. Defences disabled.
Blake smiled, and let out a breath. It had been easy. Maybe too easy? No. He’d never really believed in the concept. He stepped forward, about to thank the thing when it flashed again and stared at something behind him. Presumably the assassin, half dead goblin, and fully dead orc.
Identifying, intoned the same robotic voice.
“Oh no, they’re with me,” Blake said quickly. “Nothing to worry about. Guest status. Give them all guest status, please. Patron’s orders.”
The eye turned red. An alarm blared and the corridors filled with a similarly ‘shit is about to go really wrong’ kind of flashing stop sign color. Blake opened his power list without hesitation.
He focused on the construct and activated Primordial Making to rip the thing apart. It wasn’t quite the same as when he used to do it with ‘True Making’, but it still worked. His profile wasn’t as obvious and controlled, his options not so clear. There was also a red flashing icon that read ‘deconstruction resistance’, which was new. But it wasn’t likely to stop him.
The big eye froze and shook, and as Blake focused it started to look different…less like a fully whole thing and more like a collection of parts. Except not parts, exactly. Words. Symbols.
Blocks, he thought. Like blocks of code instead of the code itself. He almost laughed remembering what Psion had told him when it first gifted him his prestige class. And what the class itself said.
‘True Making,’ the divine ‘fish’ had hissed with contempt. ‘What nerve. What arrogance. The only true thing about the makers was their stupidity. We will teach you the essence of creation. We will teach you where true power comes from. If you have the will to learn.’
[Prestige Class Power: Primordial Making. Makers play freely with the blocks of the universe, but they are charlatans and copy-cats, making nothing of their own. Psion will teach you how to make new blocks.]
Blocks. This construct, though powerful, was made up of blocks, exactly like his power described. It must have been what the Makers called ‘Runes’. Runic magic. Blake could use it, though not as well as he once had. Now he could do something else entirely. He could make new ones altogether. And he could rip them apart.
Quick as thought, the mystery construct started to blur and fray at the seams. The pupil swung back and forth in panic, blipping with obvious and apparently futile attempts to do something. To attack. Blake let out another breath he’d apparently been holding, letting his mind stray from pure focus to a relaxed flow of imagination.
“You could be so many other things,” he said, because it was true. “All that magic. All those limitations they put on you.”
Without being sure what he was doing, he’d started to modify and re-build the construct. A dropped symbol here, an added word there. Pliny’s chemical cocktail and mad surgery was forgotten. His objective in the dungeon hardly even registered. There was only the construct and its infinite possibilities.
A switch flicked with a mechanical clunk. The red light flipped back to a pale white. And the big eye stared with a multi-colored pupil. Two bird legs grew out the bottom to hit the steel floor with a webbed slap. It also had a mouth, and saliva-dripping tongue, like a dog.
[Eye-Sentry construct modified to custom ‘Seeing Eye Dog’. Duality of Sentience activated. Experience gained.]
[Title gained: Convert now, repent later. Acquire another creator’s construct without breaking its control rune. +2 presence.]
[Hidden Primordial Making feature discovered: Runic Irrelevance. Magic is the same no matter what words men use to describe it. All rune discovery converted into additional experience or other benefits..]
[Sentry rune discovered. Error. Negative synergy detected. Rune not acquired.]
[You have acquired enough experience to achieve level 18. Please select a power to enhance, and to upgrade to tier 2.]
Blake couldn’t help but watch it all and smile. He pictured Jeong looking down at him, his bones broken as he writhed on the floor. He heard the man’s voice as he’d called him a ‘truly lucky man’ as he locked him in that awful room.
Yes, he thought. I truly am. So nice of you to leave me a powerful construct to make my own. And just the right amount of experience to level.
The eye barked from its new, canine mouth. He could sense its mind now, and see a half dozen useful power. It looked thrilled with the change in ownership. And Blake was thrilled to have it.
“Very good boy,” he said, patting its slimy head. “I know the bad man was terribly mean. Now, can you show Master where all the people are in here? I need to see them. Urgently.”
This time with a distinct quack, the rainbow colored duck-dog-eye turned and walked awkwardly, but with surprising speed, down the corridor. Blake watched it go, wondering where the hell the duck had come from in his unconscious mind.
“Well, stop staring,” he said, not looking at the goblins. “Onwards and upwards. Off we go! We have a lot of people to kill.”
The thought, already accepted, no longer bothered him. And it definitely didn’t bother the goblins. Pliny even grinned, like he’d been asked to start some new and interesting project. They all followed Blake’s new construct in comfortable silence.