Chapter 699: The power of friendship

Mason smiled as his divine title started glowing. Demi was close, which meant most of the eastern players must have been at the wall, or were pushing out. Then he put it from his mind, and smashed another demon back to hell.

He charged through the demon army, a small army of wolves and his other bestial followers like a wedge of cavalry in his wake. Streak and Breaker were right behind him, huge and glowing with his innate powers, crushing his enemies with pure strength and mass without slowing down.

Yalor’s champion loomed. He was different than in the druid dream. And by ‘different’, he meant worse.

It didn’t have legs—it was a giant’s rotting corpse hovering on a cloud of black mist. It’s dead face held no expression, head lolling like it could barely hold itself up. Humanoid limbs reached out from the darkness it floated on. Flashes of screaming faces appeared than vanished like they’d been pulled away.

The white flesh of its body was a patchwork of creatures, a Frankenstein’s monster fused together with monstrous magic. A patch of fur here. A little bestial limb there. Faces stitched flat into the thing’s chest, mouths open in silent screams.

Yalor’s monster didn’t walk—it writhed. The creature jerked and slithered as it moved, like ten thousand beings all struggling to escape themselves, but bound unwilling to the same terrible purpose.

Mason didn’t need psychic magic to be horrified. And that wasn’t to mention the smell. It smelled exactly like it looked. Like a mound of corpses in various states of decay.

He slaughtered his way towards it, hoping to see a weakness, thinking about roboGod. Is that how their synthetic god saw itself? Or was it how it thought humanity saw it? Was it the evil monster out of some horrible fairy tale?

Even now it felt like some being trying to…communicate. Trying to make humanity understand something it couldn’t or wouldn’t say. Maybe it was. But on the back of so much death, it just didn’t matter. The only thing to do was stop it.

“Hey kid, about to do something crazy? I mean, it’d be in character.”

Mason looked down to see Carl jogging beside him, his knife-arm soaked in demon gore.

“How did you…nevermind. I might need dagger work. I don’t think that thing needs its head, so there’s no point in cutting it off. We should try digging down into the body.”

Carl gave him one of those slack-jawed sort of, horrified stares. He took his few seconds to be afraid and disgusted, but you had to give the man credit. He came back to reality with a resigned nod. Most men faced death a lot worse.

“So that ugly fucking head is for show? I hate the apocalypse. Also how am I gonna get up there? We don’t all fly. I can’t just…warp up and hope for the best.”

Carl recognized his peril the moment he finished talking. He reached out a hand and shook his head as Mason scooped him up and spread his wings, mentally commanding his beasts forward without him.

“Blake?”

“Still with you, brother,” Blake’s voice shouted from somewhere above. “You’ve been doing really fine work. Wish I had popcorn. Most of the constructs are…you know, coming. Back there somewhere.”

Mason jumped with Carl in his arms, flying up above the chaos to take a quick look at his people and the field of battle from above the canopy. Blake hovered up beside him.

“That’s a lot of centaur.” Blake pointed south. “Centaurs? Centauri? I mean it sorta should be Centauri, from Centaurus, if we’re talking Latin. English is really selective in how it…”

“Holy shit,” Carl thankfully interrupted, looking out towards the centaur from his princess carry in Mason’s arms. “That is a lot of them. Think they’ll actually make a difference?”

Mason had no idea, but he was pretty impressed. It was hard to see through all the trees, but he saw thousands of the usually forest-hesitant creatures shooting and spear-charging the demon army all over the place. He did his best to tell the forest using One with Nature to treat them as allies and not enemies.

Mason. A message from Haley popped up in his profile, showing Demi in brackets, presumably sent on her behalf. I have a lot of players down here eager to help. Tell us what to do.

He took a breath, remembering he wasn’t alone, and never had been. He looked back at the lower city of Nassau—an island in a demonic sea, still holding back the tide. Everywhere around the walls were mounds of corpses. Broken bodies and piles of ash. But the walls held. Guarded by mankind’s last line of defense.

He saw orcs, goblins, and elves, too. In fact a whole side of the city was a sea of green warriors. They couldn’t come out and fight a god’s avatar, or bring down a handful of lords. But maybe they could hold those walls on their own, and let human send out its champions. He messaged back.

Final order. Every powerful player: attack. Fight out to Yalor’s champion. Do anything possible to kill it, or slow it down. If it reaches the tree, we lose.

People were going to die in the attempt. That was just a fact. And he didn’t know they’d lose if the thing reached the tree, not for sure. But he felt it in his druid bones. If the great tree in the heart of Nassau died, the Nexus fell. And if the Nexus fell, so did the world, or at least half of it.

Maybe mankind could run. They could go back to the west and abandon the eastern continent. But there was no version of this fight where Mason allowed that. Better to die fighting than live forever knowing you’d chosen to fail, that you’d given up the very reason you existed in the first place. That would be worse than death.

“I’ll drop you on its back,” he said to Carl. “There might be crazy shit that happens first and I have to toss you away. Be ready to warp-land. And the aura might suck the life out of you. Warp away if it’s bad. You can die a hero, but make it a useful hero.”

Carl glared, then stopped his hand mid-way to rub his scalp.

“I’d say it’s been fun, but, you know. It hasn’t.” He gave a half smile and punched Mason in the arm. “Still, nice knowing you, kid. If we don’t make it and all.”

Mason looked at his brother, who made a ‘this is an emotional moment’ sort of face and pat his chest. Mason rolled his eyes and looked back at Carl.

“We’re killing the world-destroying demon now. Unless you want to write me a poem, or something.”

“Ooh, like a death haiku? Man, I should have thought of something. I’d be like a Samurai. Or I could…shiii-”

Mason weight-shifted and plunged for speed, swooping up to get over the giant demon’s aura. He kept scanning for some kind of weakness but all he saw was magic and useless flesh. This thing’s corporeal form seemed almost…secondary. Incidental. Did he need magic to kill it?

If so, he’d use Solar Wrath, and find out just how much mana he could drain.

“Get ready.”

Mason shifted to ‘blunt’ his talons, then transferred Carl to his feet. He summoned his bow and flew closer, taking out a few nearby flyers before laying a barrage of arrows at ‘Doom’.

Surprisingly, there was no kind of shield at all. His sonic-infused, planar arrows ripped into the thing and stuck. His immediately followed Exploiting Strike, Power Shot, and Crippling Strike blasted away flesh and threw off black goo.

“Well that’s promising!” Carl shouted. “Maybe just shoot it to death and we all go home!”

It was sarcasm, but there was hope in the man’s voice. Mason didn’t feel it himself. In fact, it felt like a trap. He waited, loosing more arrows, reaching out all around himself with his senses, real and magical.

There was something wrong. He could feel it. He just didn’t know what.

He dropped Carl a moment before the air shimmered. The air elemental lord he’d left alive appeared and flickered with some channeled electrical power.

Lightning struck him and arced to the nearby trees (and probably Carl). A handful of powers flared from various sources, too much light and chaos to know exactly from who or what. Mason spun and loosed return shots as he flew.

Magical projectiles and arrows crossed like tracer shots in a firefight. Mason clenched his jaw as his body fought the electricity shooting through him, making his limbs stiff as the energy increased.

[Apex Predator activated. Affinity: elemental.]

The tension eased, and the mouse became the cat.

Mason chased his enemy spraying planar arrows, watching most crackle with hits on whatever shield was protecting the thing’s near-invisible form.

“Another lord! Above!”

Blake whipped by on his disc, several flying construct-blades now trailing behind him. Mason glanced up from his shooting to see what could only be described as a shadow-bird, diving straight at him.

He twisted and flapped for more speed, expecting the thing to miss and dive past him. Instead it just…stopped. Stopped on a dime mid-air, wings spreading before a kind of projection of itself launched in the correct new direction.

Mason turned over and sprayed arrows through it, mental finger on the Solar button. He had a feeling this thing wouldn’t love unique, divine light magic. He just needed to make sure it hit.

“Number three! Look out from…”

The air crackled with the sound of…gunfire? Mason flinched as his wings rippled with physical hits, twisting again and picking up speed as he dodged away. He caught the glimpse of something large camouflaged in the trees, two points that looked like barrels aimed up at him.

Apparently the world-hating, horror flick monstrosity ‘Doom’ had the primary power of…friendship. Not what Mason would have predicted. But then he wasn’t fighting alone, either.

“Flyers are mine,” he shouted, “deal with that shooter!”

He didn’t have time to check on Carl. The man was hard to kill and would take care of himself. First he had to bring down those lords, quickly, then get back to Yalor’s champion. Because the arrows hadn’t so much as inspired the thing to glance up. It was still hovering away towards its target, slow but sure, inevitable as death. And the clock was ticking.