Spear of Destiny by James Baldwin (room on the broom read aloud txt) 📗

immediately encumbering me. I groaned as gravity settled over me like a lead blanket.

“Fuuuckin’ hell. What on Earth was that thing?” Suri let out a tense breath, walking over to lay a gentle hand on Karalti’s wing edge. The dragon had already dropped into an exhausted doze.

“The voidwyrm? She’s just about the last thing we need, is what.” I pulled my helmet off and swiped my arm across my face. “That overgrown piece-of-shit caterpillar is Level 120. One two zero. What a load of ass.”

“Could’ve been a lot worse. We didn’t end up as worm food.” Suri shook her head in disbelief. “What the hell are we gonna do? The Warsinger’s a wreck and that voidwyrm thing... Christ. I dunno.”

“We’ll figure something out. We always do.” I reached out and squeezed her shoulder.

“I sure as hell hope so.” Suri frowned and rubbed the back of her neck, then stopped to look past me, over my shoulder. I focused on my peripheral vision: it was Istvan and Rin, sprinting across the yard toward us from the direction of the stables.

“Your Grace! My Lady!” Istvan called. “What happened? Is Karalti alright?”

“A whole lot of bullshit is what happened.” Fuming, I opened Karalti’s inventory and placed the saddle in there, but didn’t equip it. “We need to talk with you two and Vash over some dinner. There’s a situation with the Warsinger.”

Chapter 16

“I can’t believe it.” Rin balled her fists on top of the table in front of her. “The Warsinger... he destroyed her?”

The five of us were seated in the dining hall: me, Vash and Suri on one side of the table, Rin and Istvan on the other. We had plates of torkany in front of us, the characteristic Vlachian stew of tender Europasaurus meat, vegetables, dried peppers, sour cream, and potato dumplings. It was delicious, but only Vash had cleared his plate: everyone else had forgotten their food, listening anxiously as I recounted the battle with Ororgael, what he’d done to Withering Rose, and the heap of shit we now found ourselves in.

“I think ‘wrecked’ is probably more accurate,” I said. “‘Destroyed’ implies it no longer exists. It’s still there. It’s just FUBAR.”

“How could one man destroy such a thing?” Istvan asked, almost as horrified as Rin. “Wasn’t it made to withstand battle with the Drachan?”

“In theory,” Suri drawled. “What I want to know is, how the fuck did he blow the damn thing up? Because if we retrieve it and rebuild it, I want to know what enhancements we need to make to avoid me getting one-shotted by this cheating bastard.”

“Well, firstly, the Warsinger was... is... old and weakened from millennia of immobile storage.” Rin ticked off on her fingers. “Secondly, it didn’t have any mana to power its defenses. None of its magical protections could be active if it doesn’t have an energy source. And after it fell over? Anyone can wreck a defenseless machine.”

“Huh.” Suri’s brows furrowed. “Good points.”

“But still, it must have taken an incredible force. And thus we return to Istvan’s question.” Vash had his feet up on the table and his heavy fall of braids draped around his chest like a scarf, smoking furiously. “How does one man wield such terrible power? How does anyone, even an Architect, cause such devastation? Stranging the land for miles in every direction? Corrupting and empowering a sandworm, turning a legendary war machine into junk?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “And that’s a problem. Before Ororgael, when Baldr was just Baldr, I know he had a unique Advanced Path. ‘Spirit Knight’. But I don’t know anything about it.”

Suri sucked on a tooth, looking up toward the ceiling. “Yeah. No info on it in the wiki.”

“We’d have to find a Path tutor to tell us, or another Spirit Knight. There might actually be a Spirit Knight trainer in Taltos,” Rin said, her blue-on-blue eyes flicking between the four of us. “As for how he got so strong... Well, I knew Michael—Ororgael—when he was alive. Not well, but I knew him. I’m sure that in addition to setting up ways to possess and take over players, he squirreled away some experience caches for himself when he still had access to the Admin tools. Items, level up bonuses, things like that.”

“Would the system permit him to?” I asked.

“Sure. Archemi’s still in beta, so there’s all kinds of bugs and exceptions and unfinished places. Rin replied. “I mean, imagine like, a room that can only be opened after certain preconditions are met, like a dungeon area only Michael could access. It’s filled with small, harmless mobs, but if you kill them, you get ten thousand EXP per head. That’s the kind of stuff Devs do to test environment-avatar interactions, to make sure OUROS is spawning mobs correctly. NPC enemies are supposed to be challenging, but proportionate, right? So a test environment might allow a Dev to rapidly level to see if the dungeon began spawning the correct level enemies. Michael’s team, the Neuromorphic R&D Division, had access to those kinds of sandbox tools. Spawners, 1-hit weapons, special potions, special magic...”

“Like Void-element stuff?” I linked my fingers together, leaning forward on my elbows.

“Maybe? But that stuff wasn’t ever supposed to be for players,” Rin said. “At least, that’s what I heard around the office.”

“You were an artist among the Architects, were you not?” Vash pointed the stem of his pipe at her.

Rin bobbed her head. “Yes: I worked in environmental modeling. Mostly architecture... I helped design Taltos and a few other cities. But, like, all this stuff with the Drachan and the Void monsters and everything is just unreal to me. They were just meant to be like any other NPC enemy. I don’t understand why Michael’s so obsessed with them.”

“He really likes to rant about the Drachan and viruses,” I said, stirring my spoon through my stew and