Trouble With Horns

72: Round Two

The big guys arrived in a cascade of splintering wood and screaming rage. Six meters in height, the huge deer-headed minotaurs wore crude armour made of stone slabs. In their hands were clubs made out of grey marble, their surfaces dented and scratched from countless past battles.

Dawn, who was on the other side of the clearing and right in their path, teleported back towards me. She skipped backwards a further few meters and eyed up the massive newcomers.

“Let’s focus on the one with the smaller horns first, get it out of the way,” she said quickly, eyes alight with calculation. “I don’t like our chances if we have to fight them both for an extended period of time.”

“Sounds good to me,” I agreed, getting ready to hit the small horn boy with everything I had.

Dawn beat me to the punch, metaphorically speaking, by slamming the giant in the face with a beam of superheated magical energy. To our combined disappointment, the huge deerman covered his eyes with a hand and kept right on charging. His skin didn’t even appear to be burning all that much. What the hell?

“Uh, babe,” I said worriedly, glancing at their levels. “These things are like, level 100.”

“Oh, fuck,” she muttered in a tone that was almost conversational.

Grabbing her hand, I made the executive decision to run like hell. “Time to go!”

Together, we rushed for the opposite edge of the clearing as the giant’s crashing drew near behind us. What the hell was going on with the game? Dawn said this was meant to be our level, and if I checked my HUD, it showed as much. Why was the game ambushing us right out of the gate with two big chonky bois and a platoon of little fuckers?

A massive stone crashed to the ground a few feet to our left, gouging a furrow in the soft loam of the forest. It was etched with simple runes, almost like a massive clawed beast had done it, rather than a man and a chisel. Actually, every single rock I could see was like that. Weird.

Wait, they were throwing shit!

Letting go of Dawn’s hand, I spun on my heel. Burning fuel and stamina in equal measure, I pumped as much raw power into my punch as possible. My fist struck the next incoming stone with a bone-jarring amount of force.

Pieces of it exploded out in a cone around me, causing my defensive shield to flare up and keep me safe. The main chunk didn’t break apart, however, and instead flew right back towards the giant who’d just launched it. The hunk of rock, now jagged from its close encounter with my knuckles, bounced off his snout and ricocheted into a horn, smashing it halfway up.

Chaos ensued as the big boy howled in pain and flailed his arms wildly, letting go of his fuck-off huge stone club which landed with a thump in the dust. The second, slightly smaller giant immediately stubbed his toe of that massive pillar of rock, causing him to pitch forward with an almost comical scream of surprise.

“Your luck confuses me,” Dawn grumped, staring at the mess of grey limbs and brown antlers.

“How do you know that wasn’t skill?” I asked, giving her a cheeky grin.

She threw me an amused look. “Because I know you. Let’s get out of here before they stand up again.”

Oh, cheeky woman. Changing the subject before I could kick up a fuss over her lack of faith in my skills. She truly was a smart girl. A clever girl, even.

We did, however, make our way into the trees at a run, dodging and weaving to break the giant’s line of sight before turning and heading off at a diagonal. Hopefully our juking would keep them from tailing us, assuming they weren’t expert trackers or anything.

This new world we’d stepped into though, it was incredible. Like I’d noticed before, every single rock had those strange runes carved into them. Periodically, they would light up with sparks of electricity or little flares of fire. Sometimes they even frosted over, condensation dripping down to the ground.

The whole forest was trapped in an eternal twilight, and its captor was a gargantuan storm that raged high above in the sky. Except, there wasn't really a sky at all, because the very concept of ground and sky didn't exist here. Not really, anyway.

The "planet," and I was stretching the term to breaking point here, was actually a series of large organic tubes and blobs. It was as if someone had taken an artist's interpretation of a neural network and expanded it infinitely in all directions. Onto all of that, the concepts of "sky" and "ground" had been imposed.

From the looks of things, the forest we were in took up at least three or four junctions, plus their connecting strands. The strand we were on was big enough that we hadn't immediately noticed the lunacy of the realm at large until now. Some others, however, were as thin as a city block.

Then there was the storm, which acted as a sort of view distance limiter, ever present and very angry. Lightning periodically lashed out within its depths, giving the whole realm an ominous air.

I could see rain in the distance too, but it didn't fall straight down like normal, since there wasn't a universal down for it to obey. Instead, it swirled and danced through the air, riding conflicting gravitational fields like a flock of birds does the wind. It was strangely beautiful, actually, especially when lightning would flash behind it, spawning a brief and chaotic rainbow of light.

"This place is insane," Dawn murmured as we slowed to a stop.

"And gorgeous," I replied, turning to look at the area we'd chosen to rest.

It was a low, grassy hill that just barely protruded above the twisting trees of the forest. Huge standing stones ringed the base, marking the boundary with the forest.

The hill was a bumpy, weird looking thing, like a pimpled buttock that had been liberally salted with dour grey stone. It was almost as if…

"Wait a second…" Dawn blurted, head on a swivel as she surveyed the area. Yup, we'd both noticed it at the same time.

"I just realised that too," I grinned. "Let's see if we can't find a door, yeah?"

A door, because the hill wasn't really a hill at all, but what appeared to be a pictish inspired ruin. I think? Whoever the ancient irish folk were who made stone hobbit holes or whatever. I saw them in a youtube video once.

The doors turned out to be at the top of the hill, which had a reasonably large circular plaza dug into it, making the whole thing resemble a volcano. Going down into the hill were a series of stairs that ended in doorways, their doors long since destroyed by some unknown force. The whole place appeared to be abandoned. Just the barest hint of memory remained, telling of the past lives that had been lived here.

“What do you think?” Dawn asked as we both stared through one of the doorways and into the darkness.

“We need shelter, for now,” I replied, glancing back the way we’d come. “Then we need to figure out how we’re going to get some loot, then get back through that guarded portal.”

“Yeah…” she nodded, deep in thought. “I just wonder why we were met with such high level creatures. This is a level forty excursion and we’re what, level thirty five? That smells like quest shenanigans to me.”

I frowned, and glanced up at the alien sky, straining my poor brain as I racked it for any idea as to what was going on. Was it a new quest or an old quest that I’d forgotten about? Surely it was a new one, right? This place hadn’t existed in the game when we logged out.

“I can’t think of any pending quests I have that relate to this place,” I said at last. “Can you?”

“Nah, nothing on my end,” she said, pursing her lips. “Well, let’s head in, I guess.”

Summoning a little flame into the palm of her hand, she led us into the depths of the strange ruin we’d found. The walls were rough-hewn stone, dirty and pitted with age, while the floor was so dusty you could only barely make out the old paving stones it had been built out of.

The rectangular room we found ourselves in was reasonably large, with the entrance staircase leading down to the main floor. Large wooden pillars still held aloft the arched ceiling, even after all these years. Debris was everywhere, random hunks of stone and bits of wooden furniture spread randomly around. It was as though the place had been ravaged by a pack of screaming toddlers with power tools.

I could see the place being quite cozy once upon a time. Not now, though, now it was a dusty butt hill ruin. Still, it was shelter, and we hadn’t been jumped by any angry deer-men so far. That was a good thing, right?

“This place doesn’t look very dungeony,” Dawn remarked, glancing around at the large room we were in. “That looks like it used to be a long table. And there’s a dais over there. I think this might have been a great hall of some kind.”

Following her outstretched finger, I picked out the mentioned items. “That would make sense. Do you think there’s going to be anything dangerous in here?”

“Possibly further in,” she said, motioning to the stairs opposite us that led further down. “Want to go and see?”

“Yeah,” I nodded, then paused and shook my head. “Actually, one second, there’s something I want to do.”

“Oh?” she asked, quirking an eyebrow at me.

Stepping up in front of her, I leaned in and pressed a slow kiss to her lips. It was just a small one, but I was feeling starved of her touch, and I wanted to ease my heart a little. All this armour I was wearing had a massive downside. It made it hard to cuddle her. God, I loved her so fucking much. Especially with the surprised smile she was giving me.

“Lead on, gorgeous,” I murmured, trying for a sly, cocky tone. I failed. It just sounded incredibly sappy instead. Ah well, it’s how I felt, so that was fine.