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  I couldn’t stop the battle. And in any case, I’d lose. If the preventers won, their path to Tiamat’s temple would be clear. If Shazz won, then the Destroying Plague would never stop; the lich would turn the top players into legates, and those like Big Po would retain control of their characters, becoming the pioneers of the officially launched new faction. Immediately after that, the undead race would probably become playable for everyone else. That’s how it went when the dark ones were unlocked. It was a good thing Kiran Jackson considered our agreement complete—all I had to do now was delete my character… But we’d see about that. I planned to defend the temple and fort to the bitter end, no matter what happened.

  Cloak Essence hid my Blackberry disguise, which I’d decided to keep for now. Pecheneg wrote to me not long before. When I warned them that Blackberry had been discovered, the elf girl logged out of Dis and managed to escape the Modus clan building in the chaos I’d caused. As for Hinterleaf s astral mark on the girl, they’d deal with that when Pecheneg and Victoria (her real name) came back to Dis.

  The Alliance leaders saw Deznafar’s towering frame from a couple of miles away. Of course, they already knew of both Shazz’s undead and the Battle Avatar of the Departed from their scouts. The fixing mounts of that class were protected from the heat, the only ones apart from those obtained in the Lakharian Desert itself, like my Storm.

  When I met him, the lich reported indifferently that “all whose shadows fell upon us have been eliminated,” but the scouts would have made their reports all the same. However, this was the first time the preventers saw the mega-undead with their own eyes. They stopped.

  The raids took up defensive formations. The preventers chose a spot on the crest of a dune to mount a defense, in a semicircle before the smaller undead army. The flanks stayed in the same row with the rest for now, but I knew they’d move out and surround the undead when Shazz came close.

  Mere minutes remained to the collision.

  I saw a gleam of glass in the constant flashes of buffing spells. Looking closer, I made out the familiar face of one of the Children of Kratos. Taranis, that scout from Vermillion whom I’d told a week ago that I was a Legate of the Destroying Plague. His news release had stunned the world. My super-high Perception allowed me to make out every face. Taranis was looking through something like binoculars. He opened his mouth and jabbered into his comm amulet, keeping his eyes on me.

  Another few dozen heads jerked upward. I tried to keep myself beneath the sun to remain unnoticed, but now that they knew where to look and what to look for, it wasn’t hard to make out big Storm in the sky with a rider on her back. Glancing at the Alliance leaders, I saw Yary already giving commands. Mogwai frowned nearby. Crag was hanging around in the form of an elf. After our meeting in the headquarters of the preventers, my friend had found a way to get out of his capsule and told me in CrapChat that Nergal had punished him for helping the enemy: his divine ability had been halved in strength.

  Several top players summoned mounts at once, but only one ascended. So that’s how it was. They’d decided to figure out whether I could break through Nergal’s protection.

  Without moving, I waited for the guinea pig on a white hippogrvph to reach me. I wanted to know if the magic of the dead could damage him or not too, so as soon as he got within range, I loosed an arrow with half a million plague energy behind it.

  You dealt damage to the player Zomba, level 379 Drunken Monk: gi.

  Health points: 1,856,239/1,856,330.

  The fat stocky monk grinned when he saw the damage numbers. I swore—the plague energy hadn’t gotten through, and rank zero Archery dealt pathetic damage. If it weren’t for my accuracy, which was now over two thousand percent, I’m sure I would have missed at my level three hundred and nine. But this was no time for pessimism.

  Zomba stood up on his hippogryph’s back, balanced, prepared to attack. A whirlwind of air surrounded his body, and when the distance between us closed to thirty yards, he jumped and stretched out his arm like damn Superman, flying straight at me. My shield Sharkon’s Mane flew from my hand to meet him and got caught in the monk’s whirlwind defense. They both flew toward me. It all happened in a split second, but I had enough time to greet the monk with Hammerfist. I broke through his defense—the whirlwind seemed to harden, then shatter,—but then everything went wrong.

  The top player’s swift charge knocked me from Storm’s saddle like a leaf in the wind. My eyes managed to catch the Reflection damage numbers—almost three hundred thousand, and from one hit! Then everything started to flicker. The earth and sky span, swapping places, and the monk and I fell toward the earth, locked together.

  Riderless Storm roared, discharged bolts of lightning. The monk’s fists were a blur in the air, wrapped in some kind of legendary cloth, smashing through my ribcage with such ferocity that I didn’t even have to hit him again. Reflection did my work for me. I managed to grab my falling shield, but now I faced death: I couldn’t survive a fall from a great height, even with three million health. Such were the game mechanics. And Immortality wouldn’t work with another Legate nearby!

  In a panic, I tried to activate Depths Teleportation, but the cast was interrupted—the preventers had started shooting at my falling body. I heard shouts, commands, spells, the whistling of arrows, crossbow bolts and darts all around. A motley mass of battle pets clustered where I would land.

  Smack! I fell in a bad position, head down. My bones crunched, my neck twisted unnaturally. As I hurried to hit the respawn button, I realized I’d survived. I’d gotten so used to Immortality that I’d forgotten all about Diamond Skin of Justice. Nine seconds of full invulnerability!

  I heard a few explosions; dwarven tanks firing their cannons at me. The cannonballs bounced off into the sand with a dull metal thud and span there, red-hot and deadly. Diamond Skin of Justice absorbed the shock. I survived and ran away, recalling Storm and activating teleportation.

  Three seconds later I stood in complete silence outside the Stronghold of the Destroying Plague. Sticky anthracite soil covered in sand and crisscrossed with green veins led to the fort. Only the glimmering veil of the portal was gone—it seemed my sectarian friends from the cult of Morena had smashed all the ziggurats on the other side.

  Digging through my inventory, I took out the Bottomless Healing Potion with a half-hour cooldown and drank it. Honestly, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d used it—there had been no need. Now it came in handy.

  I turned my head around, made sure my neck was right again, summoned my dragoness and rose into the air. The carelessness of a few minutes ago put things into perspective for me. I couldn’t get into another scrape like that, or eliminating me would be a piece of cake. Shazz was close, and that meant death would be final for the character Scyth. And under such furious fire from so many top players, I’d die in within ten seconds of Diamond Skin ending.

  The sky darkened a few miles away from the battlefield and three bright dots appeared in it, leaving a fiery trail behind them. I recognized the overwhelming sound of meteors rushing to earth —Annageddonl And not just one, but three at once! It seemed the top players had decided not to spare their scrolls worth a million and a half gold—although it wasn’t even about the cost so much as the extreme rarity of the ingredients. There were very few Armageddon scrolls in all Dis.

  I’d arrived just in time. The three massive meteorites ripped into the undead army with a second between them. The first one pulverized the left flank, the second—the right. The third, central meteorite crashed through Deznafar’s ribcage. The explosive shockwave swept aside the dead minions that weren’t hit directly. Shazz himself, through some miracle escaping the danger, was pushed five hundred yards away. Nothing was visible in the smoke and rising dust where the meteorites fell.

  Almost all the undead creatures were down. Some surviving banshees scurried around at one edge, howling; the frame of a Sickening Rotter crawied through the sand with its bottom half torn clean off;
a Bone Hound was pinned beneath a shard of meteorite, whining pathetically. My brain mechanically marked every scene, each showing the undead army dying helplessly.

  I couldn’t believe my eyes—was it really all of them?—and I even felt respect for the preventers. Or at least for the Armageddon scrolls.

  In real life, I wouldn’t have made out any details so far away; this time I kept my distance and didn’t descend too far. But in the game, thanks to my heightened Perception and the game conditions, I saw gleeful excitement reigning in the preventer ranks; they were jumping around, hugging each other, shouting.

  What if I descended rapidly down to the cart with the altar? It had been left at the foot of the dune with a guard of a single raid group and the giant haulers. I could try to destroy it while the soldiers were distracted with loot.

  Deep in thought, I didn’t notice at first what was happening where the meteorites had fallen. And something interesting was happening there.

  The raised dust settled, and three huge black craters with slopes of glass appeared. Something moved in the central crater.

  Deznafar! The monster had survived, although Armageddon had cut him in half, and scattered his bones across the land. I didn’t see how much health the Battle Avatar of the Departed had left, so I’d assumed he wouldn’t get up. But with Plague Boost, Deznafar had absorbed experience from his disincarnated allies and now stood as a level nine hundred and thirty super-mob! Bones began to twitch here and there around the crater. Shazz had returned to the battlefield and streams of plague energy stretched out from his fingertips, raising the fallen.

  The preventers celebrated too soon. Instead of a thousand minions, Shazz had around a hundred left, but all had leveled up and gotten stronger. It seemed the Alliance was fresh out of Armageddons…

  I was wrong. Below, I could make out the Modus raid group by its flag colors and clan crests. A figure of a familiar gray-haired gnome emerged it, hand raised. That’s when I decided to take a risk.

  Taking advantage while the raid’s attention was locked on Shazz, I focused on Hinterleaf and made Storm drop through the air like a stone. As soon as the Subjugate Mind skill turned active, I cast it.

  The world doubled up. Through the eyes of the Modus leader, I saw an Armageddon scroll clenched in his hand and a red circle overlaid on the terrain ahead, showing where the spell would hit and where the explosion would cover. The cast bar was half full.

  Turning sharply, I redirected the meteorite to another area and waited for the spell to finish casting. The scroll crumbled to dust, the sky darkened. Not even the rising rumble of the falling meteorite drowned out the exultant cry from Hinterleaf s lips: “For Cthulhu!”

  I examined the stunned faces of the Modus soldiers, shouted an order:

  “Everyone attack the lich!” I ran first to show them that the clan leader wasn’t joking.

  Hinterleaf surely had something to protect him from mind control. The raid surely had someone who could remove the spell’s effect, and maybe they were trying, but as I’d already learned, the abilities of the Destroying Plague broke through resists. I recalled how Koshch the Cursed Lich had twice gained controlled of the succubus Nega in spite of her inbuilt resistance to mind-control magic.

  As Hinterleaf got within attack range of Deznafar, I had him fire some spell at the monster and then gave up control. The cast required an enormous amount of plague energy to sustain, and there was no chance to top up my reservoir—I wasn’t about to put myself under fire.

  My vision went back to normal. I quite literally came back to myself, and pointed Storm sharply upwards to get out of the Armageddon ‘s blast radius.

  The preventers split into chaotic disorderly ranks. Some rushed ahead after Hinterleaf, some away. Others shouted loudly, pointing at the sky—the meteorite wasn’t falling where it should. It was flying straight toward the Great Portable Altarl Deznafar had recovered from the strike that hit him and now he made his presence known on the battlefield. The monster’s roar was drawn-out and screeching, drumming like a baton raked across metal bars. It pierced the eardrums, filling the air to the brim. The top players directly in front of Deznafar, Hinterleaf at their head, froze in place…

  I thought it must have been something like the Montosaurus’s paralyzing roar, but a moment later I realized I was wrong. The space in front of the mega-undead dematerialized into vibrating pixels and the air blurred as if spreading across mirror shards. The bodies of the players within the radius of Deznafar s ability shook, vibrated, then burst all at once, exploding in showers of blood.

  Then came the blast on the other side of the dune!

  The fiery meteorite crushed the cart along with its altar and unlucky giant haulers. The defensive raid legion survived thanks to its last-chance artifacts, but couldn’t withstand the hellish heat that followed. Few climbed out of the crater.

  Deznafar, suddenly incredibly mobile, tore into the ranks of the preventers; paying no heed to the mosquito bites from the top players, he trampled the ground with all eight limbs at once and released his terrible roar, blowing up humans, ores, elves and minotaurs, gnomes and dwarfs, lophers, fairies and hobbits, vampires and werewolves, ogres and titans, centaurs, trolls…

  The raiders’ formations devolved into separate groups, which immediately fell into skirmishes with the advancing undead. A few rotters and queases killed by Armageddon had been combined into one enormous rotter that towered over the preventers like Gulliver over the Lilliputians. The beast leaked acid slime and feasted, grabbing players with its ten limbs and swallowing them alive.

  The raiders had gone from slapping each other on the back a few minutes before, united and confident, to fleeing to the four winds. The whole Alliance looked in shock. The wipe was unavoidable, and the preventers now felt a new danger. Before they had time to appreciate their immunity to Plague Fury, something even scarier had hit them. Deznafar tore space itself in a thirty-yard cone in front of himself. I couldn’t see any way to defend against it. I felt sure that even the Montosaurus itself would be reduced to blood and guts if it stood before the attack of the Battle Avatar of the Departed. If the Departed had such pets, then how strong were they themselves?

  The chief puppeteer made himself known too. My fellow Legate, the lich Shazz, joined in with the fun. He flew above the crest of the dune and span in a deadly dance. Bubbling Devouring Plague like the one I saw during the battle at Behemoth’s temple covered almost the entire dune, finishing off the despairing survivors that continued to fire off spells at Deznafar. I dropped lower to see his health stats— Armageddon and all the following attacks from the preventers had taken just a third of his health.

  Shazz busied himself with precision strikes to finish off survivors, throwing handfuls of Grave Worms at their backs as they ran. The sickening dead magic hit the Azure Dragons rogue hobbit as he went into Stealth. The unlucky rogue was knocked out of invis, and the segmented bloody worms started diving into his skin. The massive combined damage killed the preventer in seconds. A Sphere of Serendipity appeared above the corpse, shuddered and disappeared, absorbed by my Magnetism.

  The lich flew ten yards into the air, raised an arm and began to spin in place. His clothes, shaped like an inside-out tulip, began to spark. Petallike scraps peeled away from him, filled with mist and flew out across the battlefield. Grave Storml My breath caught as I remembered the spell’s effects.

  They flew through the air in a deadly rain of black flakes, and when it hit the preventers’ armor, it melted away like wax. Shazz had gotten a little stronger since the battle on Kharinza: there were three times as many flakes in that Grave Storm, and they flew so far that all I could see was black land wherever my eyes fell.

  I decided to use the distraction to make sure the altar was destroyed. Grave Storm had no effect on me, but it mined visibility.1 had to fly around to find the crater of the last Armageddon. From all around I heard screams of pain from players, the wailing of banshees, the crack and shatter of bones, Dezn
afar’s roar and the lich’s triumphant whisper. I tried to find players raised as undead, but saw none. Maybe raising players was only my job, and Shazz had his own assignments.

  The altar had survived. Descending almost all the way to the surface, I looked at the range of glimmering dome shields covering not only it, but also the reviving players. They weren’t hurrying back into the battle. Mages casted shield after shield. From above, it looked like bubble wrap. So satisfying to pop. The undead hadn’t gotten here yet, and it seemed the preventers were taking advantage of the breather to discuss strategy. There was nothing for me to catch here.

  I pulled up on the rains to ascend, and then…

  The world roared and I went deaf. In the ringing silence, I watched as if in slow motion while the neighboring dune exploded, throwing megatons of sand into the atmosphere, smashing the bubbles above the preventers. Deznafar’s colossal frame toppled from the dune’s peak and swept away the remnants of the undead.

  “WHO DARES DISTURB MY MEDITATION?”

  The thunderous voice boomed across the desert, bounced off the sky and returned in a thrice-amplified echo. Where the dune had stood a moment ago, a tiny dot hovered immobile for a few seconds, then sped toward us.

  It was a man. Naked save for a worn loincloth, all skin and bones, with a beard down to his feet. Hair just as long covered his face.

  Oyama, Human, level??? Supreme Grand Master of Unarmed Combat

  The very same Oyama who once taught my teacher Sagda! He was supposed to be traveling the astral plane. He looked far from meditative now.

  From a range of a couple of hundred yards, still floating above the earth, Oyama performed a few strikes. His attacks left an impression in the air. The next second, the dune with the reviving preventers at its foot exploded. I couldn’t escape the shockwave—Storm span and roared in terror, fell to the earth. Her wings broke as she landed, pinning me as she died. Diamond Skin activated to save me. I jumped to my feet, rushed to Oyama—this must have been Fortune’s influence. I really needed to talk to the master.