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.
