Chapter

Eight

In front, Lurilan used the walking stick he’d made, poking the ground in front of them as they walked, even though it was obvious that the ground on their path was solid. Or was it obvious? They were worried the Phasmid had messed with the terrain.

He strained his eyes, looking everywhere, trying to see some sign of an illusion.

Hogg put a hand on his shoulder. “It may be the case that you’ve gotten pretty good at spotting illusions, after watching those undead for so long. Maybe you’d be able to spot the monster before any of us. Give us an early warning, yeah?”

“That’s right,” said Brin, standing up a bit straighter.

“Do us a favor and… don’t,” said Hogg.

“Wh—”

Hogg cut him off with a subtle shake of his head.

What was the point of having a special superpower if he wasn’t supposed to use it? But even if he was allowed to, there wasn’t anything he could point out. The empty bog was empty. It was quiet, too. Too quiet? That was the cliche in movies and fantasy novels: it always got really quiet right before the ambush. Did that happen in real life? Nature was supposed to be quiet. That’s why people liked it.

The Heroes didn’t run, but they walked quickly, so he had to trot to keep pace. Soon he was breathing heavily, taking in huge lungfuls of stale air. Sweat came off him in streams; it was hot now that they were out of the shade of the trees.

Brin scanned the area, desperately searching for some sign of whatever had the Heroes on alert. He noticed the others weren’t doing the same. Lumina, Hogg, and Galan all walked with their eyes forward, bored expressions on their faces. The only sign something was wrong came from Lurilan, who stabbed his staff into the ground again and again.

Brin focused on it, and that’s where he saw his first sign of illusion. Lurilan’s staff sunk a foot into what looked to be dry ground, and came away muddy. Focusing on the ground there, he saw that it was an illusion. Following the trail, he could see that much of the landscape around them was fake. Twisting lines and trails of fake terrain snaked around them, hemming them in. Lurilan wasn’t guiding them away from it; quite the contrary, he led them to the thickest spots.

Maybe the Heroes weren’t looking around because somehow they knew that they couldn’t trust what they saw. Or maybe it was because they didn’t want to give the Phasmid any sign that they knew it was close.

After all, how do you hunt an invisible monster? Easier if you can convince it to hunt you.

Near the center of the clearing, they stopped.

Lumina said, “Now?” Her hand went to a side pocket on her cloak, then she mimicked opening a bottle.

“Let’s wait a bit,” said Lurilan.

“That’s fine then,” said Hogg, so loudly that Brin jumped. “We’ll take a break. Little Brin here looks like he could use it. You were asking about the bog, right? We can talk more about that.”

Hogg was stage-talking, his voice much louder than it should’ve been. It probably carried all the way across the bog and into the forest. He also had a look of open, genuine friendliness that Brin frankly found unnerving.

But he wasn’t an idiot, so he played along. “That’s right. You were saying there are bogs like this all over? I’d always wondered why we lived in Travin’s Bog when we were clearly in the middle of the forest. And I’d always assumed that Travin was the town’s founder or something, but you made it sound like the name existed before the town.”

“That’s right,” said Hogg. “They were named after the original explorers. Just divvied them up and named them after themselves, one by one. Only they weren’t so much explorers, I guess, as refugees, I think. Oh, maybe Lumina should explain it.”

“Oh, yes, of course,” said Lumina, as if startled from a trance. “You see, when Ithmall fell, and that’s a gross oversimplification of course, the fall of an empire isn’t one event, but rather a loosely connected string of events, where one can definitely say it happened, but to point to any one event and say exactly when it happened is difficult. Fruitless, in the eyes of most real historians. The specific event I refer to is the sacking of the northern defender cities by the Huhul barbarians, no offense, Galan.”

“None taken. We were quite barbaric in those days,” said Galan, who had taken to pacing around idly while the rest chatted.

“After the cities were sacked, many refugees fled south and west, to what was then called the Blighted Lands. They found that the poison had long since dispersed. The poison, of course, being—well, perhaps I should tell the story of Nhamanshal, which we now call the Burrow Kingdom…”

Knowing history and being a good storyteller were vastly different skill sets, and Lumina clearly only had one of them. Her voice quickly became background noise as Brin tried to figure out where the Phasmid was, without looking like he was looking.

“...destroyed utterly, and only the catacombs remained, which is why we inaccurately call them Burrow Cities, because the burrows are all that they left behind. The poison— oh, Galan. See there, a Phasmid. Kill it, if you please.”

“With pleasure,” said Galan.

Brin was embarrassed he hadn’t seen it first, but it was there.

A strange, brown something climbed out of the mud. It was long and thin, and at first he thought it was a worm, but it was too straight, not bending its spine at all. Then thin, spindly legs detached, six of them, all ending in sharp-looking two-pointed claws. He couldn’t see any eyes or a mouth, just a head that ended in a sharp point. It looked like a fat, eight-foot-long spear with six legs that were also spears.

It was also completely fake, but he figured the Heroes knew that already, so he kept his mouth shut.

Galan marched up to it, haughtily. There was an almost drunken sort of cockiness to his posture that was far different from his normal refined confidence. At the last second, he dashed towards the monster and swung his mace in a downward arc.

He wasn’t exactly slow, but nothing like the blistering speed the [Knight] had displayed earlier. And he was clumsy. He seemed to get in his own way, awkward in his armor.

The Phasmid dodged easily, and Galan cursed.

He swung again and again, and the Phasmid dodged every strike. Galan grew increasingly agitated. Or pretended to. It was definitely a ruse, and Brin had to stop himself from smiling at the antics.

Finally, he seemed to clip the illusory monster with the edge of the mace and sent it flying. It landed with a splash. An audible splash, though Brin knew that was fake.

Come to think of it, the flames on the undead army had sounded like fire as well. Illusion magic could do sound, too. Something to keep in mind.

Galan raised a fist in triumph, then turned around. “I got it!”

The Heroes gave him a half-hearted cheer, but even before they finished, Brin spotted motion from the ground. A Phasmid crawled up out of the water of a nearby pool. Another rose from the mud, a line of sod still clinging to its back. Three more rose from a nearby stream. More and more appeared from all around them, until dozens of the monsters surrounded them in a ring.

Of course, they were all fake.

“Now?” asked Lumina.

“Not yet,” said Lurilan.

Galan lashed out with his mace, but the tide of Phasmids avoided it, spilling around it like a rising tide.

They darted in and out, sharp motions, never staying still, but never approaching quite close enough to give the Heroes a good shot.

Lurilan loosed an arrow, then another, but the Phasmids he was aiming at dodged them with supernatural reflexes.

“I thought those were expensive,” said Hogg. To all appearances, he was standing next to Lumina, guarding her, but that was just a fake copy.

Fake copies against fake copies; it was a confusing mess. Frustratingly, with this much illusion in the air, Brin didn’t have any idea where the real ones were.

“I said they weren’t free,” said Lurilan.

“So how are we doing? Is it time yet?” asked Hogg.

“Maybe?” said Lurilan.

“Then let’s increase our chances,” said Hogg. With a shortsword in each hand, the fake Hogg charged into the mass of Phasmids. They retreated from him, many peeling off to encircle him just like they had the rest of the group.

He yelled in frustration, swinging at them, but none of his swings connected. Apparently, the Phasmid couldn’t tell he was a copy.

“Now!” shouted Lurilan, and everything happened at once.

Lumina grabbed a glowing blue glass bottle and shattered it against the ground. An explosion of mystical light burst from the flask, covering the area in a filmy glow.

Galan ran to Brin, shielding him.

All the Phasmids disappeared as soon as the blue light touched them. Hogg disappeared as well, only for the real Hogg to reappear right behind Lumina. He caught a Phasmid, the real one, in crossed shortswords, then sliced, cutting the Phasmid’s head clean off.

The two pieces of the beast fell to the ground, twitching.

“That wasn’t an illusion. We got it,” said Hogg.

“You’d think it would be smarter,” said Lurilan.

“Did it really think to take me out first? Did it truly believe it could? Ha!” said Lumina.

“I thought for sure it would go after Brin,” said Galan.

The ball of eerie blue light continued to expand. After twenty feet or so, the light slowed, and it crept across the ground, rearranging the landscape back to reality from the Phasmid’s illusion.

“What… what just happened?” asked Brin.

Hogg answered. “Alright, now that we know it’s not listening in, we can explain. It’s rare for a beast to develop the intelligence necessary to understand human speech, but it’s not impossible, which is why we were being careful. So, Phasmid, illusion type. It hunts by… well, you saw it. There’re Classes that give people illusion powers, too. [Illusionist] is the main one. Time was, the [Illusionist] Class was respected almost as much as [Mage], and feared almost as much as [Witch]. Then about six hundred years ago, an [Alchemist] created a hard counter: the Eveladis. A magical potion that can reveal the truth and dispel all illusions. Nowadays Illusionists have to be sneakier; no one can suspect they’re looking at an illusion if you want it to work. Beasts didn’t get the memo, I guess. Heh.”

Hogg looked suddenly thoughtful as he eyed the expanding blue glow. It showed no sign of slowing down or weakening. “Remember this day, Brin. This is how [Illusionists] die.”

Brin looked at the twitching Phasmid and gulped. Hopefully he’d get a Class without such an obvious weakness. It was crazy that the thing was still moving. Was it still alive? That could be why its illusions were still holding until the expanding light of the Eveladis whisked them away.

“We should finish it off,” said Brin.

“I still say something’s wrong,” said Lurilan. “A Phasmid that high level should’ve been smarter than that. Why did it lure us out into an open plain?”

“Phasmids are at home in bogs,” said Hogg.

“Low-level ones are. This one should’ve stayed in the forest, where it could hide behind obstacles. The open plain put it at a keen disadvantage. If it isn’t smart by itself, the master controlling it should⁠—”

“Did you see a notification? I don’t think it’s dead!” interrupted Brin.

The Heroes all froze for an eternal moment, before Hogg said, “Burn me, he’s right.”

Hogg slammed Lurilan to the ground. At the same time, Galan lifted his shield, intercepting a storm of black arrows. Matching arrows stopped in the air, not being able to penetrate an invisible shield around Brin and Lumina.

Lumina muttered a word, and blades of air sliced the remains of the Phasmid into a hundred pieces.

The light of the Eveladis had already stripped away all illusion, so Brin should have noticed before: no blood. The Phasmid was undead.

Stumbling to his feet, Hogg was white-faced. “I just got the notification. It’s dead… only it says the level was thirty-eight.”

Galan planted himself between the party and the direction the arrows had come from, shield forward. Lumina started chanting in her ear-hurty magical language.

Lurilan picked himself up and casually nocked an arrow. “If that’s the level of the pet, then what can we expect from the master?”

With the Phasmid dead, the last of its illusions faded away, like sand sliding off a piece of paper.

At the tree line, the light of day revealed a black army of the dead.

Brin knew right away that this army was on a different level than the one that had destroyed Travin’s Bog. Compared to this, that had been a small raiding party. The dregs.

This army was arrayed in diverse but orderly units. Pikes forward, shields next, archers in back, then cavalry or irregulars. Mixed units but every monster in its place. They all wore gleaming black armor, not the thin black clothes of the undead soldiers from before. Their weapons looked new, and many of them glowed with inner light, some red, others blue. It wasn’t an illusion. All of this was real.

Several units had beasts; smaller, human-sized undead held the leashes of snarling wolves the size of horses, or huge red-and-brown crocodiles with teeth that didn’t all fit in their mouths. Above the rest rose the intimidating forms of fully plated giants, some of them sixteen feet tall. These ones carried outrageous clubs, so big they could be columns from the Parthenon.

They walked with organized precision. Every moment, new soldiers smoothly exited the forest and joined their ranks.

He couldn’t hear them, though. He couldn’t hear anything above the sound of Lumina’s chanting. She finished her spell, and a bar of shining flame blasted towards the army.

Halfway to the army, it detonated, blocked by spell or skill from the army. He felt the heat of the explosion and shielded his eyes with his hands. It felt hot against his skin.

Staff-wielding undead returned with magic of their own, green balls of flame. Lumina intercepted them with thin blades of blue light, and retaliated with more fire and ice of her own, which the undead blocked in turn. The entire field between Lumina and the army became a fireworks show of detonating spells.

Brin looked at his hands, seeing them starting to grow red with sunburn. Not from the sun, but from the radiation of magical warfare.

Galan stepped forward. Brin couldn’t see his face, but the [Untiring Knight] looked confident and proud. He walked forward, undaunted, then his walk turned to a run and he charged into the mess of spellfire. He didn’t flinch as the spells detonated around him like artillery shells. A bolt of green fire hit his shield head-on, and he ran through it, not slowing at all.

There was a part of Brin that wished he could run with Galan. Not out of some desire for suicide. Rather he wished he was stronger, that he could be the type of man who could run with Galan, to face those kinds of odds with the same courage Galan was showing. His locked System was like shackles around his ankles and a collar around his neck.

“[True Communication],” said Galan, in a quiet, calm voice that Brin could still hear clear as day, despite the distance and the noise of the magical warfare. Then Galan’s voice grew painfully loud. “<Hear me.>”

He spoke in the strange, magical language that Lumina used, only this time Brin could understand every word. “<Hear me and awaken, my brothers! Remember who you are and awaken! Let the unclean and unworthy see and understand. Wake from the Long Sleep! Remember why they call us Untiring! Arise!>

A breeze blew in, then turned to a wind, blowing at Galan’s back. It cooled the sweat all down Brin’s back, and on his face. He touched the wetness below his nose. Not sweat. His nose was bleeding. And his ears.

The breeze brought ghostly figures to Galan’s side, until he ran in a line with fifty phantoms. Knights, in full armor, just like him. They grew more real by the second, filling in, becoming substantial.

He couldn’t tell what they really looked like, since they were all in full plate armor, except one. The one who ran next to Galan didn’t have a helmet.

Instead, he wore a golden crown on a pearly-white skull.

Galan crashed into the enemy with an army of the righteous dead by his side.

Lumina kept up her chanting, fire in her eyes. “<Wind Blade, a Flurry, the Storm> <Fire, like Lightning, Engage> <Unceasing Fountains, Erupt> <Thraknu, Inhalla> <Azzera…”

Her words faded into gibberish, becoming a foreign language again, but the avalanche of magical death kept coming.

The two lesser Heroes, Lurilan and Hogg, made eye contact. It was hard not to feel for them. In a way, they were like Brin. Outmatched. Sure, they never would have gotten this far if not for Lurilan’s tracking ability, but his bloodless face told the truth: a battle like this was completely beyond him.

To his credit, his hands didn’t shake when he put an arrow to his bow and loosed it.

“Well, what are you waiting for? Take the boy and run,” said Lurilan, loosing another arrow.

Hogg looked perfectly miserable, but nodded nonetheless. “Hasten me.”

Lumina cast a spell on him, not taking her eyes off the army, and then Hogg picked Brin up. He had one hand holding Brin around the waist in front of him, then another along his spine with his hand on the back of Brin’s head.

Brin had seen this in that X-Men movie. He was supporting his neck so that it wouldn’t break from whiplash. “Wait⁠—”

A sudden lurch of movement and Brin went from standing still to flying through the forest like a jet. It was too much for his stomach; he puked. Hogg simply tilted him to the side until he got it all out, then moved him back in place and ran even faster.

The trees flew by, flitting shapes that he could barely make out. He was dizzy, his head hurting from the aftershock of Galan and Lumina’s abilities. The wind bit at him, and Hogg kept rocking him back and forth. It wasn’t smooth like when Galan had carried him. Every time Hogg dodged a tree it felt like getting hit by a club.

After five or so minutes of complete misery, the Hasten spell wore off, and Hogg went from moving mind-bendingly fast to only superhuman quickness. He ran quietly. Unlike Galan’s loud footsteps, Hogg made barely a whisper as he ran through the forest.

Brin didn’t have a good guess for how many miles they had crossed with the Hasten spell, but it must have been a lot, because the forest had changed. Instead of low, wide-trunked, moss-covered trees, these looked like pines except for the bright red berries on the highest branches. They rose high into the sky, and the ground below was eerily empty of underbrush, just a thick carpet of fallen needles.

Now that they weren’t going lightning fast, Hogg adjusted his hold on Brin to grabbing him around the thighs, like one would hold a toddler. It wasn’t exactly the most dignified way of travel, but at least Hogg hadn’t tossed him over his shoulder.

They ran like that for maybe an hour, which gave Brin’s head time to clear and his stomach time to settle. His skin still felt raw and started to itch from the radiation burns he’d gotten from Lumina’s spells. It felt exactly like sunburn. Mageburn? And his bleeding ears were worrying, but they had stopped right away and it didn’t seem to have affected his hearing. He couldn’t hear Hogg’s footsteps, but he could hear the sound of the wind in the trees.

His stomach started to settle as well, and when it did, it loudly reminded him how hungry he was. He’d eaten that morning, but felt like he hadn’t eaten in days.

After an hour, Hogg abruptly stopped running and let Brin down. He made a big show of stretching out his arms and shaking his legs. “We should be far enough away by now. Let’s take a break.”

“R-really? Are you sure we should?”

“We’re safe enough for now. I’ll take off running again if anything gets close, but I’ve got my eyes peeled this time. They won’t sneak up on us again. Besides, you look like being near those Skills and spells rattled you something fierce. You’ll feel better after walking it off, trust me. It ain’t my first time carrying a young’un off a battlefield.”

“Oh. Ok.”

Brin took a few careful steps, just to be sure his legs would really carry him. They felt sturdier than he expected them to, like his body had wanted to move. He walked for a bit, and really did feel better.

“Are they going to be ok? The others, I mean,” said Brin.

“You don’t have to worry about those three. They can take care of themselves. Now here, have something to eat. It’ll all clear up all nice-like,” said Hogg.

The Heroes had let Brin bring a little bag with his few meager possessions and some food, but Hogg brought out a sausage from his own bag and handed it to Brin. Brin tore into it, not about to question the gift. He wasn’t sure why cranky old Hogg was being so nice all of a sudden, but there wasn’t much Brin could do but wait for the other shoe to drop.

The meat was divine, and it helped him shake off the last of the shell shock. He was so entranced that he almost missed it, but out of the corner of his eye, Hogg split.

The real Hogg turned invisible and retreated back the way they had come. An illusory Hogg stayed, walking along next to him.

It was the first time he’d been able to get a good long look at an illusion without worrying about imminent death. He couldn’t help but be impressed. In short, Hogg’s body double was good. Perfect.

No matter how much he stared, Brin couldn’t find even the tiniest flaw. While he’d seen mistakes in the undead’s illusory flame right away, Hogg didn’t give anything away. His feet sank into the ground just the right amount. He left faint footprints in the pine needles, smushing them organically, matching the natural unevenness of the ground. They walked towards a patch of sunbeam, where sunlight illuminated the dust in the air, but even that was perfect. The dust swirled around Hogg’s fake like he was really disturbing the currents of air.

“What are you staring at?” asked Hogg.

“I um… Do you have some more?” asked Brin.

“Let’s wait to see if you keep that down first. Then I’ll give you some more,” said Hogg.

“What about water?” asked Brin.

“You have water, don’t’cha?”

“You’re right. Sorry.”

Brin really was thirsty, so he brought out his water bottle and started chugging, certain he could down the entire thing.

“Slow down there,” said Hogg. “Small sips. Wait to see if your body can handle it.”

“Right. Thanks,” said Brin.

Brin did as he asked and took small sips. He had the bottle to his mouth, when Hogg said, “So what’s Ee Yart huh like?”

Brin didn’t catch exactly what Hogg was asking, so he didn’t give the old guy the reaction he was probably hoping for. Brin calmly drank his water and asked, “What?”

Hogg peered at Brin, squinting, as if trying to read something in very fine print. “Eart-huh. Earth. What’s it like on Earth?”