All the same, Shazz was hit. His life paused at a single unit of health—it seemed the preventers were using all the artifacts at their disposal.
Still miraculously alive, Sharkon was frozen nearby in a defensive stance. Heaps of player corpses lay around him. I couldn’t see the guards anywhere.
The lich held onto Immortality, and he looked furious. He did something and a few dozen undead units suddenly fell dead. The bones collapsed and flowed into the lich in streams of plague energy. I noticed that the undead were somehow slowed, and even the fast Bone Hounds were running as if in jelly.
At the same time, Shazz rose still higher and created his own version of a spear, although it wasn’t so large. The crystalline stake sparkled as green charges ran across it. Spreading his arms, the lich sent his cast weapon up to the skies, felled several huge Nightmare Rotters and Terrible Queases to draw in even more plague energy, then clapped his hands. The lich’s spear lanced down, multiplying in flight, and one spear became hundreds. Far away as I was, I could still hear the air crack. All the spears hit their target. Hundreds of players died at once. Not even hastily erected shields saved them.
One of the survivors who wasn’t in the area of effect of Shazz’s ultimate magic created a blinding silver disk above his head. A column of light struck the sky, bounced back and returned in a hundred beams, lancing into the bodies of dead players. Not believing my eyes, I lowered Storm and saw all the players reviving with full health.
The preventer army recovered its initial numbers. In mere seconds, the revived players finished off the remaining undead roaming among their ranks, and began to form up in battle formations.
Then I was seen. The figures below squirmed, started running to and fro. Their mouths opened and they shouted something, but I couldn’t hear the words.
A few preventers took off and I instinctively sped up Storm, rushing to the back of the undead army.
I turned in flight and saw as one of the figures scurrying below aimed a hand at the lich and released something odd, so small that I couldn’t make it out from above. All I saw was a black dot, a mote of dust that seemed to float toward Shazz in a strange spiral trajectory. I focused and recognized the spell’s source—Horvac.
I flew in a circle above Shazz. Spells, bolts and arrows flew at him—I could see his body shake with each hit, but he wasn’t dying, though I was nearby, in the same area. Maybe because his Immortality activated before I showed up.
Wrong. It was something else keeping the lich alive, and the resource wasn’t endless. Or maybe I got too close. The black spark sent by Horvac reached its target and buried into Shazz’s chest.
A black spot appeared there and started growing. When the lich was fully covered in black, he died. His body collapsed in a heap of ash, blowing into the air on the wind.
Hundreds of triumphant roars carried across the desert.
I was the only legate left not only in this area, but in the whole world.
In the next instant, messages flooded my vision; Sharkon, Flaygray, Nega, Anf and Ripta were all back under my control. Dozens of nameless mobs joined them—all almost at level six hundred. Waving away the notifications, I ran to the nearest dune and saw the figures of the guardians fighting behind it, highlighted with frames. I sent Sharkon there, first ordering him to go underground.
“The boss is back!” Nega shouted, whipping a bleeding minotaur.
“The Sleeping Gods heard our prayers,” Flaygray groaned. He was fighting off three leading players from Mizaki.
Ripta and Anf successfully reflected attacks from a titan and elf that were joined by the players chasing me. They didn’t seem to know my abilities, because they fought furiously and passionately. I discharged Sleeping Vindication. A second later, only Sharkon, the guards in my group and I remained alive within a radius nearly half a mile across. Now was just the time to decide what to do next. Reason told me to take to my heels.
“What’s that?” Nega pointed at the blackening sky beyond the dune.
We ran up to the top and saw the whole desert covered in a silver veil from horizon to horizon, laying so thick that the sun was hidden in the sky. It covered us too, sticking to our skin and equipment and seeping through it.
Plague Dust
Kills all life, infecting it with the Destroying Plague.
I heard screams and wails all around. Players twisted, rotting alive and collapsing into piles of stinking flesh.
Shazz was dead, but he had fulfilled the Nucleus’s will.
Chapter 12: All hail the hero!
THE LAKHARIAN DESERT is often imagined to be an endless sea of sand dotted here and there with windblown cliffs and even rarer oases, but in reality, it is far more diverse than that. There truly is a lot of sand there, and now the view over the state of Lakharia, long since wiped from the earth, is nothing but monotonous waves of dunes as if frozen in time. But there are also stone planes in the desert, and lifeless hills, mountain ranges and dried-out streams, along with ancient ruins strewn across the land—in one of those, Infect managed to find the entrance to an instance.
Today, it was the battle that played the role of archeologist. The shockwaves of Armageddon and Sleeping Vindication freed polished stone structures from the sands.
At first I thought it was nothing out of the ordinary, just Dis revealing a new instance to the world, but we found nothing of the kind. We meaning not only my guards and I, but Crawler, Infect and Hung, who
