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
