The Survivors Part 1

The Massacre

Brian McGoldrick

The Survivors Part 1

The Massacre

Brian McGoldrick

Amazon Edition

Copyright © 2017 by Brian McGoldrick

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living, dead, or undead, is purely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author or publisher.

Edition: April 2017

Contents

Title Page

Book Summary

The First Day

The Second Day

The Third Day

The Fourth Day

The Last Day

Book Summary: The Survivors Part 1

The Massacre

Thorrin Hammerfist is one of The Damned, players of the VRMMORPG (Virtual Reality Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) Taereun: Battleground of the Damned. Along with tens of thousands of other players, in a world other than Earth, his mind and soul have been imprisoned in the body of his character. Tasked by The Nameless God with freeing his own body from the dungeons beneath the city of Have, they have searched and fought for nearly twelve years. Along with everyone else, Thorrin has lost more people he has considered friends than he wants to count. Like many of the other Damned, Thorrin is close to burning out.

After their long struggle, The Damned have reached what they believe to be the zone where they will find Haven, but Haven is nowhere in sight. Never a unified force, The Damned are on the edge of fragmenting, and groups have already set out on their own in search of Haven.

As the remaining Damned rest and prepare for their final march toward Haven, unknown to them, an orc horde of over half a million warriors is fast approaching. In the coming battle, with their very existence on the line, how many more friends will they lose? What prices will be paid for a chance at survival? Who will survive the massacre?

The First Day

The Great Fuck Over Day 4,181

Here Lies

Talon

A Man Who Was Slain By

Those He Fought For

Those He Defended

Stabbed Him In The Back

Damn you, Talon. Why did you have to let those ungrateful bastards kill you? More than eleven years we fought for the chance to send everyone home. You only fought for that faithless bitch that hated your guts because you felt you owed her father. Why did you have to turn your back to them? A sense of tiredness fills me as the words Talon will never hear go through my mind.

It has only been three days since those bastard Bohemian Cats murdered Talon, but his tombstone is still a veritable monument. Dacbold outdid himself. I owe him for carving this in such a short time.

I don't need to look around to know how few people are here. The players mostly hated and feared Talon. Only a few from my guild and Connor's guild are here. No one else cares enough to pay their respects to the man that fought for them for eleven years. Most of them do not know how much of our intelligence came from Talon's scouting. He was almost always alone in enemy territory. Even if he did not do it to spare them, he still saved the lives of hundreds if not thousands of them. Humans are such ungrateful bastards.

For the first time since The Great Fuck Over began, I'm tired. Even with all the hardships and the deaths, I thrived on the adventure. But now, I lost the one man I wanted to save more than any other. He deserved a chance to live without being hated by the very people who should have been grateful to him, and all he got was being murdered by the friends of the worthless cunt he was trying to protect.

According to all our intelligence reports, this should be what most of the players think is the zone where Haven lies. If only they knew the truth, most of them would go bat-shit crazy. Still, we have almost succeeded. Now, we just need to reach Haven and see if that bastard of a self-proclaimed God's body is really there or not. As tired as I feel, I cannot relax yet. There is still the last push, and it will be a longer push than most of them imagine.

Once everyone is freed, if I'm still alive in this amazing body, I'll be free to explore. Damn it all, Talon. You were supposed to survive so that I could drag you along on a great adventure.

“Thorrin, what now?” Nessa's voice is hoarse. The fool girl has been crying off and on since she saw Talon's body.

“Go back to your boyfriend, before he gets all bent out of shape. You've been giving Talon the cold shoulder for eleven years. You even shacked up with that punk, because you were mad at Talon. It's too late to get all weepy now.” My voice sounds as tired as I feel.

Nessa really doesn't deserve that, but she made her choices and should live with them. Talon was probably happy about her choice, if you can call being relieved that she would be less likely to be a target for Menton being happy. He probably never understood how the girl really felt. When it comes to a girl not hating him, he was the densest son of a bitch I've ever seen. Even if a human and Half-Dvergar probably would never have worked out, Nessa might have been able to get Talon to open up and live. Damn it all; it's too late now.

I turn around and meet everyone's stares, at least, the people here. Even though several thousand people came to pay their respects to Talon, only fourteen are from the ranks of the players: seven people from Thorrin's Hammers, my guild; five from Connor's King of Taereun. I'm the thirteenth, and there is one surprise mourner,  Kamehameha, who I had always though hated and feared Talon. All the rest of the mourners are from our mercenaries. The players seemed flabbergasted when they saw how many of the mercenaries came to pay their respects to Talon.

Most people would think Connor's face is calm, but after knowing him for over fifty years on Earth, long before we started playing Taereun, it is obvious that he is angry. Connor was a Marine like I was, but he was from the generation that had to fight in W's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. More than anyone I have ever known, he values loyal comrades in arms. Entirely too many of the mercenaries have similar expressions. They are all men that survived ugly battles, because of Talon's actions.

There are around thirty thousand of the players that survived to reach this point. Another fifteen thousand or so are still based out of Emer. They never took part in The Nameless' quest, and I cannot blame them for being scared. Maybe forty-five thousand out of what most people estimated was somewhere between seventy-five and ninety thousand that were taken by The Nameless are still alive. I had a good look at that Chamber of Transition and thought there might have been over ninety thousand of us, but none of us know for certain. In the chaos at the beginning, we never made any accurate head counts before a lot of them disappeared on their own or in small groups, but after eleven years, around half of us are dead. Among our dead, probably a third were killed in our own internecine conflicts, just like Talon.

I take a deep breath and release it slowly. The dead are dead, and I have to fight for the living.

“Thank you for coming, everyone. There are some things I need to take care of tonight, but tomorrow morning, I'm holding a meeting. Everyone here is welcome and spread the word to anyone you know that you think will be interested as well. There is some information that all of you need to be made aware of before we make plans.”

Connor glances around. “More than a third of our forces have already taken off on their own. Everyone is in a huge rush to find Haven and finish this.”

“Hmph. They won't be finding it anytime soon. I need to confirm things with the other Dvergar, but we should still be quite a distance from Haven.”

Connor's eyes narrow, as he stares at me. “I know you like playing some things close to the vest but don't play games with us.”

I make a calming gesture toward Connor. “Don't get excited. Until I confirm things with the other Dvergar, I don't want to start wild rumors. I've been a bit distracted for the past few days, because of what's happened. We'll be letting everyone know what we know in the morning.”

Connor has a slight frown as he turns away. “I'll spread the word about the meeting.”

“Thank you.”

As Connor and the rest of Talon's mourners leave, I stare at the massive structure to the south, the Labyrinth of Yggr. About four miles offshore, it is embedded in the ocean floor.  In places, piles of rubble including boulders the size of skyscrapers rise up along its sides. More or less decahedral in shape, the outer shell has thousands of spires that dwarf any building ever built by man, sticking out more than a mile from the Labyrinth's main surface. I do not know how big it is, but it is no smaller than fifty miles in diameter and probably closer to a hundred. Apparently, it was constructed from stone, but I have no idea what that stone is. It barely reflects any light, making it appear blackish-grey in color.

A few miles to the east of our location, a causeway runs from the shore to the Labyrinth. Being built from blocks of granite about 10 yards square, the causeway is more than two hundred feet wide, and it leads to the massive gates we used to exit the Labyrinth.

We spent more than eleven years inside that thing. It seems impossible to believe, more like completely insane, but that structure contains thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of dimensions. Each one is unique, and many seem to be miniature universes.

The Nameless God tore our minds and souls from our Earth bodies and dropped us into the bodies we thought of as our characters. He gave us a mission to find and free his body from Haven if we wanted to get back to our real bodies. For eleven and a half years, we searched, negotiated, and fought our way through the Lands of Despair. Even if only a few us know it, we should finally be on the surface of Taereun proper.

Most of the players are acting like we are home free. The camp looks more like a victory party than bivouac in hostile territory. Tomorrow, I have to get through to them just how dangerous this last stretch of our quest will be. If they do not get their heads out of their asses, they'll survive long enough to go home again.

* * * * *

Seven Possessed Fallen Dvergar in a shitty cave, and not one of us is a lord let alone a king. We are all Makers, but none of us really understands what a Maker actually is. We have three Smiths, two Jewelers, and two Artificers. Even though we can craft Items of Power, we do it more by rote than anything, using the skills and memories of our bodies. Where we've made improvements, it's by trial and error and guesswork. We can see patterns and identify some of their characteristics, but we don't know what they really mean. Still compared to when Taereun was a game, we are orders of magnitude better. It almost me makes laugh, but the situation isn't something that is all that funny. Everything is different from when Taereun was a game, but nothing has changed.

“You're certain that constellation is the Southern Cross?”

Dacbold gives me a flat stare. He's a master at using no expression to display discontent or contempt. For a man who seldom has much to say, outside of bickering with Farnulf that is, he can say more with a look than anyone I've ever met, but when he speak, it's always worth listening. “I may not have a degree in astronomy, but I spent most of my life staring at stars through telescopes for fun. A lot of the stars don't match up with Earth constellations, but that one is definitely the Southern Cross. The red star is Gacrux, and you can see the Coalsack Nebula below it.”

Even if anyone overhears our conversation, we're not worried about it. Besides the seven of us, there isn't a single person, Damned or mercenary, that understands Battle Cant. I have no idea why the Dvergar language was named Battle Cant. From what the seven of us can piece together from the memories of the bodies we're inhabiting, the Dvergar were created by the Dragons as a race of warrior-slaves. Maybe the Dragons gave their language the name Battle Cant.

“So, we were right, and this really is a duplicate world to Earth.” Ahlred is staring at the ground beneath his feet.

Dacbold laughs. “A duplicate? Yeah, it's sort of a duplicate. If you can call a world ten to twelve times the diameter of Earth a duplicate, then sure, it's a duplicate.”

None of us are particularly happy. We're royally fucked, and we know it.

"That would mean that if Haven is roughly five or six hundred Earth miles up the West coast of South America from us, it's really about six or seven thousand miles away on this world."

Dacbold rubs his eyes like he's a tired old man. “That could take us years. We have no clue what obstacles lie between us and Haven.”

Cwichelm snorts. “Orc hordes. DokkAlfar outposts. Probably a few dozen human city-states. Do I need to continue?”

BOOM! BOOM! Crack-BOOM!

Wihtred's head snaps around to look at the cave entrance. “What's that?”

None of us respond. In our hearts, we can all guess, but no one wants to be the one to say it out loud.

*Is anyone in the north or northeast end of the camp?* My question is voiced in the guild channel.

A chorus of negative answers fills the guild channel.

*Everyone gather at Talon's grave. I'll let you know what to do once we have a better idea of what is happening.*

After The Great Fuck Over started, we learned a lot more about how Patterning works compared to our time in the game. Whether it's guild bracelets, party charms, or whisper charms, we, the Dvergar and a few others, learned how to improve them, but we kept the distribution limited to guilds and people who we trusted. From the beginning, the divides among the players were too deep for us to give our new work to groups like Thug Horde and their allies.

Danleib pulls out a small clockwork bird. It looks like a sparrow, but every time I see it, I am reminded of the owl in Clash of the Titans. Being almost a century old movie, most people have never heard of it, but my human body was over a century old. The Earth I remember from my younger days was already long gone by the time of The Great Fuck Over.

As the clockwork bird flies off toward the northeast, Danleib sets a device on the ground. Made out of a bronze colored metal, much like the bird, the device has an octagonal base that is four or five inches high and about an inch less in cross section. On top of the base sits a crystal as clear as the finest glass, with hundreds of facets. With a quiet humming noise, an image appears above the device. About three feet in diameter, the image is nearly as clear as my own vision of the scene would be.

The stone ridges to the north and the valley between the ridges in the northeast made the backdrop for the image. In the lower third of the image, our camp rolled past as the clockwork bird flew toward the northeast. Smoke and flame rise into the sky from the north and northeast sides of the camp, which is devolving into chaos. The players are running around like chickens with their heads cut off. It looks more like a scene from our first couple of months of The Great Fuck Over, than something that should be happening now.

The sounds of screams and yells drift from the bronze device. Mixed in with them, voices, calling out orders, are audible.

“RUN!”

“Don't Run!”

“STAND AND FIGHT!”

“Form a line, you cowardly fucks!”

Marauding among the fires, thousands of humanoid figures become visible. They look like they're half ape and half pig, with a quarter human thrown in as if it was done just to make you feel disgusted. Their foreheads slope down to heavy brow bones, with bushy brows over squinty little pig-like eyes. Heavy fanged jaws protrude like muzzle with big wet nostrils snuffling nostrils above their mouths. Their skin colors range from light grey to dark grey and light brown to dark brown. They're orcs, but they're bigger and more vicious looking than most of the orcs in the Battleground of the Damned or the Lands of Despair. With the shortest one over six and a half feet tall, they have massive builds that rival our own bulk as Dvergar. These aren't the descendants of cast off runts like we encountered in the Battleground of the Damned and the Lands of Despair. These are real horde orcs.

“Those aren't outcast mercenaries. Those orcs are part of a real horde.” Farnulf's voice holds a tone of resignation.

BOOM!

“What the fuck is that? It sounded like it came from the Labyrinth.” Wihtred is staring at the causeway some four or five miles to the east.

Cwichelm takes out a contraption that looks like a pair of binoculars with extra tubes attached to them. Putting them to his eyes, he stares at the causeway and the Labyrinth for a few moments.

“Damn! It looks like the gates are closed!”

“Can you see any sign of the guard detachment we left inside the Transition Chamber?”

Cwichelm looks at me, shaking his head. “There's no one on the causeway.”

“I get the feeling that this was planned.” Dacbold making an offhand comment is unusual. He must be getting pissed.

“Planned by who?” Farnulf looks like he's ready to start an argument. Anytime Dacbold takes a stance, Farnulf tends to take an opposite stance. Before The Great Fuck Over, they were friends on Earth for over forty years, and the two of them sometimes bicker and fight like a pair of old women.

“Have you seen Thug Horde in the past couple days?”

None of us respond to Dacbold, but we look around at one another. My concern and anger are mirrored on the faces of the other Dvergar.

Even though he tried to be subtle, to be able to deny culpability, Menton has tried to endanger and destroy any person or guild that did not follow his lead. For eleven years, we put up with it to avoid losing the guilds and players that were not part of Thug Horde but thought that Thug Horde's size and organization made them indispensable. There were two to three dozen guilds that could rival or exceed Thug Horde's numbers, so I will never understand why The Nameless only entrapped Thug Horde from among the major guilds.

"Menton needs a good killing. The more pieces he's in when it's done, the better." Ahlred has always been the most violent of us, even if he's not the strongest.

"Talon tried killing him, and he came back to life. Three times he came back." The other Dvergar stare at me with looks that say they don't quite believe me.

“You heard Talon tried to kill Menton after the First Battle of Emer, but none of you saw what Talon did to him.” I cannot keep from shuddering at the memory of Menton's ruined corpse. “Talon worked on him for three days and nights before finishing him off, but less than a month later, Menton was back, looking exactly the same as he did before Talon tortured him. After that, Talon caught, tortured, and killed him two more times that I know of. He came back each time, and he's still out there.”

A thunderous frown settles on Ahlred's face. “You don't know how he does it?”

“Not a clue.”

Danleib is scratching his chin. “Are you sure Talon actually killed Menton and not some double or duplicate?”

I stare at Danleib. “Do you think the Nameless would have brought any doubles or duplicates Menton had when he took us?”

Danleib shrugs. “I'm just saying . . .”

“Our problem is the orcs. I don't see Menton or Thug Horde around, so to hell with them for now.” Dacbold's tone is cold, and his eyes are glued to the scene being projected by Danleib's device.

*Thorrin, where the hell are you at? I got the message from Tomas, but he said you weren't with them yet.* Connor's voice still sounds a bit irritated. He's not one to let something go quickly or easily, and he was definitely not happy about the being put off this afternoon.

*With the other Dvergar. Danleib has his bird out. Where are you?*

*Near the northeast corner of the camp. The pass here is filled with orcs. There must be over a hundred thousand of them, and they are a shitload bigger than the ones we fought a few days ago.*

*These are part of a real horde. They're not the merc trash that were fighting for the DokkAlfar. And someone closed the gates to the Transition Chamber.*

*Well, this is a total clusterfuck, and it's going FUBAR fast. You better get another line of battle setup somewhere defensible, or we're gonna get wiped out.* Even though it's been decades since he finished his full twenty in the Corp., Connor still has a habit of using Marine jargon.

*We'll do what we can. Try to buy us some time.*

*I've only got five grunts with me. You expect me to do something with the regular shit-bricks we've been running with?*

*Do what you can. I'll call you as soon as we get something going.*

As I'm looking at the image of the mess being transmitted by Danleib's bird, a shiver runs down my spine. We're in it deep this time, and I don't know how we're going to get out.

Before the attack, the camp was already a mess. None of the guilds were keeping more than a token watch. After getting past the last Transition Chamber, everyone started acting like we had already won. I was just as bad as anyone else. I was so caught up in my grief and anger that I never paid any more attention than the rest of them. I have no idea why Connor didn't have his guild running patrols or anything, but like he would say, it was a clusterfuck all around.

“Danleib, we need to find someplace defensible. Connor says the northeast pass is filled with orcs. Can you put out a couple more of those birds?”

Danleib shrugs. “I can put them out, but if I need to maneuver them delicately, it's hard to control more than two. These things don't have real combat programs; there's barely enough room in their tiny bodies to inscribe the sigils for normal flight and recon.”

“Just send a couple toward the west. If we try going east, the orcs will be able to cut us off too easily. You can recover the one at the battle. Connor will let us know when something happens.”

As the bird returns, the images projected by Danleib's device shifts back to our own camp. The chaos is getting worse. Our people are panicking and heading for the causeway. The mercenaries are forming up into tight companies and retreating toward the causeway. With the exception of a few of the smaller guilds and factions of the medium sized guilds, everyone is trying to make a run for the Labyrinth, and the groups are fighting one another to get there first.

“I don't get it. Yeah, we're being attacked, but that's no reason to panic. What the fuck started this?” Wihtred is staring at the image being projected by the device with narrowed eyes. His mouth can get foul enough to give Talon a run for his money. At least, he could when Talon was still alive.

I don't know much about Wihtred's background on Earth. Like all the other Dvergar, he's a senior citizen, but he's still young enough to be my son or maybe my grandson. When I first met him, he already has a number of tattoos and piercings. Since then, he has completely covered his body with tattoo and added enough piercings to fill a bank vault. Though in his case, every one of those piercings is a specialized Item of Power. He has more attack, defense, and support spells bound up in his jewelry than any ten other Damned put together.

“Someones fueling it. The question is who is it and why is the fucker doing it? If we can find him, we should cut his balls off, before we kill him.” Ahlred's smile would make most Company spooks piss their pants, if he was looking their way. He's ex-military. I don't know which branch, but he's mentioned doing time in Leavenworth, even though he was an NCO. I'd trust my back to him anytime, anywhere, just like I would with the other five.

None of us respond to Ahlred, but that does not mean that a couple of the others wouldn't help him do it. All of the other Dvergar were men with interesting pasts, and they were all senior citizens before they started playing Taereun. Though, I was still old enough to be their father.

As Danleib returns his clockwork sparrow to storage, the triple image being projected from his device becomes a double image. One of the sparrows is flying toward the west while remaining inland. The other is flying along the coastline.

Our location on Taereun is analogous the southern tip of South America on Earth. This is a land of harsh cliffs and steep-walled fjords. The trees are small but hearty, despite being twisted by the year round, harsh winds.

“There! The shoreward bird!” Cwichelm points at one of the images being displayed.

As the Danleib begins to circle the sparrow, we evaluate the terrain. A narrow strip of land runs along the shore between a high cliff and the water. After running about three hundred yards, the strip opens up into a bowl valley, and a rocky spur of land extends out into the frigid, southern waters. The sloping rock walls of the bowl valley can't qualify as a cliff, but it will be a better place to defend than just about anything else we can reach quickly.

“We can hold that strip with a line less than two hundred men wide. That point of land can be held by a line of around a thousand, so it can be a secondary fallback position.” While talking, Ahlred points to each terrain feature.

“Everyone, get your guilds moving and have them suck up as many others as they can. That's at least seven or eight miles away over rough ground.”

The images displayed by the crystal show rough cliffs and valleys as the birds sweep inland heading back toward our position. There are dozens of orc war parties scattered throughout the regions. Their numbers are ranging from dozens to thousands. Our position cannot get much worse than this.

*Tomas, get everyone in gear and head to the west. Follow the shoreline. About eight miles or so from here, you'll find a narrow strip of land running between a high cliff and the water. Set up a defensive line there. Gather anyone else that isn't too stupid to follow along.*

*What about you?* Nessa sounds worried.

*I'm with the other Dvergar. We're going to slow down the orcs and remind them why they should be afraid of Dvergar.*

*You're not real Dvergar. I'm coming to you. Where are you now?* Even after eleven years, Nessa still hasn't gotten over her belief that she knows better than everyone else.

*Nessa! You stay with the guild. You'll only be in the way.*

*Don't you get sexist with me, old man! You'll need a healer!*

*You're only human. Shut up and do what you're told!*

*I will . . .* As I block her from talking in the guild channel, Nessa's voice cuts off abruptly.

*Tomas, don't let that girl run off on her own! This is going to be uglier than anything we've seen so far, and with luck, there will a lot of wounded headed your way, instead of a lot of dead on the battlefield.*

*You got it, Thorrin. Don't get dead on us.*

Wihtred has a mocking grin plastered on his face. “That little girl was giving you what for again, eh?”

“Sod off.”

Wihtred's cackling takes some of the tension out of the air, and the rest of us smile faintly. With none of us needing to say a word, we all take out our shields and axes. We were all ex-military on Earth, and we've only improved upon our understanding and appreciation of effective small unit tactics since The Great Fuck Over began. Even if we always keep it on the QT, This is not the first time that we seven Dvergar have worked together to complete a necessary mission.

“We can't hide it anymore. This is an orc horde. If we try to keep our level of strength and Power a secret, we're going to get hurt or killed.” Farnulf is staring directly at me.

All of us are more than just a little secretive about our strength. We were like that as gamers, when we just thought Taereun was a game, now that it's real, we've become even more secretive. I'm probably the worst of us about it, with the possible exception of Farnulf.

Human's, especially those raised under the oppressive culture of Earth, where everyone has to be exactly equal except for the chosen minorities, are jealous and fearful of anyone stronger, smarter, or better than themselves. The governments have gone out of their way to force everyone to be equal, to make everyone think they are on equal footing, and to crush those that excel but are not the chosen subgroups that supposedly deserve special privileges because of past prejudices against their subgroup. It's a completely fucked up twisting of the American ideal of everyone being equal under the law, but the way they implemented it, it works. It makes sure that America is a pen of docile, easily led sheep. The paranoia and fear of anyone who is not a chosen minority and exhibits strength or original thought is probably an intended effect and not an unintentional side effect.

We Dvergar have gone out of our way to keep our strength a secret to avoid creating jealousy or fear among the other Damned, but if we're going to win and save them, we're probably going to be forced to show more of our cards.

“I know. I don't like it, but we can't avoid it, I suppose.”

Turning toward the orcs, I set out at a steady jog. The other Dvergar on either side of me in a loose chevron formation.

*Connor, we're heading toward the orcs. Try and get people organized and retreating toward the west. About eight miles along the coast there is a bowl valley that's as good we're going to get for defenses.*

Connor doesn't reply immediately. I can tell that my charm is connected to him, so he has to be conscious. It's more than thirty seconds, and I'm getting past worried, when he finally responds.

*Thorrin, it's bad here. At least five thousand people are dead or captured already. These orcs aren't just big; they're fucking monsters.* Even though it's a mental chat room, Connor sounds like he's panting.

*They're real orcs. The ones we've been fighting in the Labyrinth are the outcasts from the hordes. They're the descendants of the ones that couldn't make it in the hordes: the weak, the sick, and the runts.*

“I've got them, Thorrin.”

I glance at Danleib. He has an ocular device, made from bronze-colored metal, over his left eye. It serves the same purpose as his projection devices, but it only displays the image for him.

“You lead.”

Danleib shifts to the point of our flying wedge and I take up the position on his right. The rest of the players we are passing through are mostly milling about like a flock or chickens. I hear comments about the closed gates and questions about the noise, but most of them are confused and getting scared. The fear in the air is so thick and palpable that the sharpest sword in the world would barely cut it.

These are the people who survived till now, but they are ready to break and give up. The intangible but nearly overwhelming pressure of the orc's horde is more than they can take.

In places, groups numbering up to a few hundred are quickly and quietly gearing for battle, while keeping a watchful eye on their surroundings. I recognize most of them as the people who spent their time in the front lines of our battles, and those who didn't hesitate to explore monster and undead infested ruins for clues on our journey. When they look in our direction, I point to the west, and they generally nod or wave, and begin moving that way.

The screams and clangor of metal on metal get louder as we get close, and so does the smoke in the air. Orcs have an obsession with fire, and they are burning our camps as they advance.

A group of our people comes running out of the smoke with forty or fifty orcs hot on their heels. Without hesitation, Danleib makes straight for the orcs. As we close ranks behind him, Cwichelm releases a trio of crystal formations, and they begin to circle his head with a humming noise.

One of the orcs points at us snarling something I am too far away to understand. It's ugly face has an expression that is probably startlement on it, but with their ugly mugs, it's hard to tell.

With howls of rage and screams in a language I can only pick a few words of, the orc charge at us, ignoring the human they were pursuing. There must be dozens, if not hundreds, of variants of the orc's language. Except for a handful of words, one can be completely unintelligible from the rest.

“Steel is stubbornness.” I speak the words under my breath. The core and key to my Smith skill, my secret of steel.

Mumbled words from the other six around me indicate they are mouthing their own secrets. These Dvergar bodies we inhabit are all the bodies of what are called Makers. They were all magical craftsmen who used their skills to forge items that used Power. From the memories of the previous owners, we have all learned to use the skills and abilities of Makers.

Auras of Power spring up around our axes. We each have our favorite weapon buffs, and their effects vary. Even though this isn't a game, we still think in game terms. Buffs, debuffs, temps, and enhancements are what we call the abilities we have acquired from our bodies.

“Link Shields!” My voice is a snarl of hatred. The intensity of the hate and aggression in my voice shocks me. This isn't something that comes from my mind. It comes from my body. We've faced orcs since the start of the Great Fuck Over. I've faced orcs since the start of the Great Fuck Over, but I've never felt so much raw emotion rising from my Dvergar body. Has something changed?

Closing in so our shoulders are pressed one against another, we lock our shields together, using special lips on their rims made for that purpose. Axes held over our heads, a more than two ton roaring juggernaut of flesh and metal, the seven of us slam into the oncoming orcs. Bursts of Power blast outward from both sides. Force, fire, and lightning overlap in a thunderous cascade. The impact jars me to the souls of my feet. Sliced, crushed, detonated, burned and electrocuted, the lead orcs are hurled backward.

Zap! Zap!

As Cwichelm releases two of his crystal constructs, a golden glow fills the air above our heads and beams of coherent light slice into more of the orcs. Orcs howl in agony, and a stench like burned pork fills the air. Swords, axes, spears, and cleavers rattle off our shields, and our axes cleave into orc shields and armor.

“Circle clockwise! Wihtred call the tune!”

“Born to be Wild!”

Wihtred was in the Army. Three tours in Afghanistan, while Obaka was in office. Dubuyah may have started that mess, but Obaka really fucked the troops over. Wihtred was part of a squad that beat the fuck out of one of those Afghani ass-fuckers that was raping a little boy. It cost him his stripes, his career, and got him a dishonorable. Until they put the dole in place, he spent the rest of days working crap jobs and singing in a rock & roll cover band. He claims to have had a great singing voice, but as a Dvergar, he has a shitty voice.

As we shift to a circular formation, Wihtred grins like a lunatic and starts singing.

“Get your motor runnin'.”

Danleib crouches and uncoils, launching a shield bash with a shimmering explosion of inertial force. Battering the orc in front of me with an explosion of fire, I step in and cut down the off-balance orc in front of Danleib with a single blow. As I become the furthest forward member of the formation, Farnulf repeats the maneuver behind me, followed by the rest.

“Head out on the highway.”

With the conclusion of each line of the song, we shift our positions in the circle. Not knowing when they will be suddenly struck from the side the orcs have no chance to react. We begin moving through the orcs like a buzz saw, each of us taking the point position in turn and relinquishing it to the Dvergar behind him. The strength we kept hidden for years is well more than ten times that of a human being. As strong as the orcs are, they are like adolescents in the face of our Dvergar strength, and their Power pales in comparison to that hidden within our massive bulk. Body parts fly through the air and bounce off the ground and other orcs. Blood fountains through the air painting everything crimson.

“Lookin' for adventure.”

The battle lasts less than a minute, leaving only us seven Dvergar standing. The dismembered corpses of forty-seven orcs litter the ground around us. As I stare at the dismembered orc corpses, I can't keep the cold feeling out of the pit of my stomach. orcs are not the real monsters. We are.

*Thorrin, stop it! Power is nothing in and of itself. It's how we use it that makes it something to be lauded or feared. Can't you stop being afraid of yourself?*

Danleib's words are inaudible to the rest, since he is using a whisper charm, but I can't keep from looking around guiltily. As much as I hate it, I hide my Power more out of the fear of what I may become than any other reason.

*If we forget who we are and where we came from, what will we become?*

*Does it really matter all that much? As long as you never lose your moral compass, you'll always be a man to be respected, not a demon to be feared. You know damn well this isn't a game any longer. This is life and death for us and thousands of others. Now, more than ever.*

I shiver slight, as I look for the other Damned the orcs were chasing, but they are gone. I don't where they've run off to, and there is nothing we can do for them now. We don't have the time to look for them.

“Let's get going. There's still more orcs we can kill.” Ahlred's smirk would make a sociopath piss his pants.

Wihtred looks at Ahlred like he's insane. “There are more orcs than we can kill.”

“Gives me a goal. A man needs something to strive for.”

“How did you manage to stay out of prison?”

Not all of the rest know that Ahlred served time in Leavenworth.

Ahlred smirks. “I always made sure that I knew where the social cameras were. If they don't have a visual record, they don't persecute you.”

“Prosecute not persecute.”

“I said persecute, and I meant fucking persecute. My granddad told me there was a time two men could have a fight and long as they didn't destroy another man's property, nothing much would happen. Fuck the guvment!”

The two of them could go on for hours. We're all like that, start arguing and we never stop. It's like entertainment for us.

“Danleib, take point! Let's get a move on.” For better or worse, I'm the closest thing to a leader the seven of us have. It's probably just because I'm fool enough to try and be the most diplomatic one.

We start jogging after Danleib in a loose wedge formation. Ahlred and Wihtred keep bickering, but I tune them out. Even though we all work well together, we constantly bicker and needle one another. I wasn't like this on Earth. Were the others?

Two more packs of orcs are slaughtered to the last orc, before Conner and his guild comes into sight. Seven against fifty or seven against five hundred, they won't stand a chance against us Dvergar. Orcs are strong, brutal, and violent, but based on the limited education of the Thorrin whose body I've taken over received, orcs seldom Coalesce and almost never Transcend. They're limited by their very nature, and we're stronger than they are in smaller numbers. Everything would be fine if we weren't facing them in their tens or hundreds of thousands.

“Ho! Thorrin!” Connor waves in our direction. His shout easily carrying over the background din, in a voice that would make a drill instructor envious.

There must close to a thousand players with him. It's far better than I expected, but nowhere near what I hoped for. Their numbers are the only good part. A contingent of several thousand orcs has them pinned down. Connor is staying in the back rows of their formation, trying to direct the battle, but the players are on the verge of panic. Groups of thousands of more orcs are visible closing in on them.

Connor gesture vaguely in the direction of the players and the orcs. “I've collected as many of the civvies and weekend warriors as I could get my hands on, but how do we get them out of here, now?”

“Wihtred?” I glance at the tattooed Dvergar with numerous piercings.

The murderous smile on Wihtred's lips would do Ahlred proud. “I have just the thing, but with this number of ass-fucking pigs, I can only pull it off three sister-fucking times.”

“Do it!”

Wihtred pulls out a half-dozen necklaces made up of several dozen grape-sized rubies. Within each ruby, a flickering crimson glow is visible. Staring at the flame-like rubies making up the necklaces, Wihtred shivers almost imperceptibly.

“More than seven shit-eating years of experimenting and I still can't make these fucking things right. Every fucking time these cunts come out fucking unstable. You're supposed to be able to use each gem individually, but pull one off an' the whole necklace might go boom, right in your hands. You know, I really fucking hate using the piss-drinking thing, don't ya?” Wihtred's complaints are only half-serious. He loves to blow things up.

Ahlred glares at Wihtred, as he complains. “Shut the fuck up, already! Stop bitching and throw the damn things!”

“Alright! Alright!”

While speaking, Wihtred winds up into a pitching form that would probably pass muster for a Major League baseballer and hurls the necklaces. Pulling out a throwing knife, he whispers under his breath, and a faint reddish glow surrounds the knife. Streaking after the necklaces, the knife spins like a vegetable shredder. Separated from their necklaces, individual rubies drop to the ground among the horde of orcs.

As though they were being carpet bombed, explosions detonate among the orcs. The ground shakes from the force of the blast, and pressure waves send blood and body parts flying into the air. Billowing smoke and red mist drift back over the players. While some of them look sick, none of them lose their lunch, but they all look more than a bit shocked. This isn't the first time they've seen Wihtred's fire rubies in actions, but they've probably never been so close to the explosions.

Cackling like he's more than a bit demented, Wihtred dances a victory jig.

“He upped the Power in those things again, didn't he?”

Cwichelm's question is rhetorical and doesn't get a response. The other Dvergar, even Ahlred, have slightly pensive looks on their faces. We've all seen more battlefields than we want to count, both here and on Earth. Even when it's the enemy, seeing living breathing creatures reduced to nothing but bloody chunks of meat in an instant hits home. It's something you never really get used to. At least, I hope I never do.

Shocked and stunned, the orcs left alive between the devastation and the players are quickly mopped up. There are still more orcs in the area, but they look even more stunned than the players. Some of them are looking around for easier targets, while they are arguing or trying to psych themselves up for another charge.  We have a window of opportunity, but it's going to close fast.

“EVERYONE, GET MOVING! WE'RE HEADING WEST!” My voice thunders out louder than I could possibly have made it on Earth, even with the best megaphone ever made.

The players turn toward me in staggered waves, staring blankly at my arm pointing toward the western horizon.

“You heard the man! Get a move on, slackers! Assess and elbows! Assess and elbows! That's all I want to see!” Connor's drill instructor voice booms out. Compared to my bellow, he sounds like he's using a normal conversational voice, but it gets the job done.

The players turn and begin running toward the west. It's not quite a rout, but their fear is palpable in the air. The looks they turn on us as they pass makes it clear they're almost as afraid of us Dvergar as the orcs.

“What's got them faggots so scared? It was just a few bombs.” Ahlred's voice holds nothing but contempt for the other players.

It's more than just a few bombs. We've been trapped in this world, that's probably not the right word but it's close enough, for eleven years. Still, almost none of them have grown or developed beyond the point of using the powers and abilities that already existed in their bodies. Probably less than five percent of us have improved our powers and our bodies, and maybe only a few hundred have done so significantly. We Dvergar are among the freak that did that. Connor is another one. Talon was the biggest freak of all, and he scared the shit out of most of the players. With his death, we're the biggest freaks left.

“Let's get out of here, before the orcs get their shit together.”

Danleib's calm voice cuts through our individual thoughts, and we glance at one another. Without any need for orders or comment, we move out at a steady jog. I'm at the point of our wedge, with Ahlred and Wihtred flanking me, and Cwichelm is pulling drag. This is our usual formation.

Without knowing our plans, the orc leaders can't use their overwhelming numbers to stop us. Other groups of players that refuse to head west for whatever reasons provide enough confusion and distractions that we have a chance. The bulk of the orc horde is still behind us, and the few groups we run into are crushed.

The farther west we travel, the higher and more jagged the stone ridge becomes, as it moves closer to the water. Unlike the lowlands, this ridge is nothing but bare stone with some moss and lichen clinging to it. There is not soil to give purchase to the stunted trees and brush we are moving through.

Vibration of Power brush against us. The players are casting spells or using powers, a lot of them. As we near the narrow strip of land where the ridge comes closest to the water, we see a wall of rough granite rise a good fifty feet above the land.

A smirk tugs at the corners of my mouth, before I fight it down. At least one of the stronger Geomancers has to be among the players. Probably more than one, considering the height of that wall.

There is no gate in this wall. Some of the players climb up ropes thrown down by those up top. Other leap or teleport to the top of the wall. While still other use levitation and limited flight spells to reach the top.

As narrow as this strip of land is, there are still close to five hundred players looking out from the top of the wall. Standing nearly shoulder to shoulder, except for gaps where arriving players are ascending the wall, their fear is visible on their faces, as they stare past us at the smoke and fire rising up from what were our camps.

We Dvergar wait in front of the wall, while the other players escape to the illusion of safety provided by the wall. More groups and some individual players are still coming behind us, but their numbers are dwindling fast.

“About six to seven thousand people were caught on the causeway from that whatever the hell you want to call that thing. The ones that fight are being killed and the ones that surrender are being collared.” Danleib still has his clockwork sparrows out.

“What's your count on the orcs?” Farnulf's quiet question is delivered in a tense voice.

All seven of us are tense, even Ahlred. I can feel that tension filling the air around us, making it almost like standing in the middle of a chill fog, so thick, you can't see your hand in front of your face.

“Around half a million. Probably, more.”

It feels like a cold iron hand grabs me by the balls when I hear Danleib's response. Half a million!

“With that many of the shit-licking cunts, we can't fucking win, and we can't fucking escape. If all the piss-drinking players were Dvergar, we'd slaughter them. Even if there were just a thousand hard, pipe-hitting, mother-fucking players in Dvergar bodies, we'd still kick their asses. With what we have? We're fucked, completely, royally, one hundred percent fucked. I guess it's a goddamned, good, mother-fucking day to die.” Wihtred looks like he can't decide if he's happy or pissed.

Ahlred glares a Wihtred. “Why the fuck do you keep using quotes from that asshole's movies?”

Wihtred smirks. “I don't care if he was a mother-fucking asshole that hated us for serving America in uniform, he made great movies with great lines. It's a cock-sucking shame that they were all banned under the new anti-violence laws.”

It's nothing new. Wihtred always misquotes movies that Ahlred hates. Most people would shit themselves if Ahlred was mad at them, but for Wihtred, it seems like a sort of stress relief. They knew each other before they started playing Taereun: Battleground of the Damned.

“We'll make a stand here, while we figure out a way to put enough distance between them and us to escape.” As much as I try to make my words sound decisive, they sound hollow to my own ears. I don't believe we can escape from a horde of over five hundred thousand orcs.

“I see orcs along the water. They're capturing the stragglers.” Cwichelm is staring through his binoculars, with their optical enhancement formations.

The sound of tortured metal is barely audible over the surrounding din, as my right hand squeezes the haft of my axe in frustration. I'm failing again. How many times have I been too weak to save the people who needed me the most?

“Relax, Thorrin. There's only so much one man can do.”

Cwichelm's words just make me feel more impotent. I'm not just a man any longer. I'm a goddamned Dvergar! I'm superhuman, but I'm still not strong enough to stop a horde of over five hundred thousand orcs.

Thorrin, I've got over twenty pyromancer type Casters up here. Connor's voice echoes in my mind through his whisper charm.

I look toward the top of the wall. He has a steel bow in his hands, with an arrow casually nocked against the string. Connor has a strange fixation on his skill with a sword and almost always uses a sword & board. Even if he doesn't use a bow much, he's still a master archer, much better than he is with a sword, one of the best I've ever seen.

I have to struggle to keep from letting my frown turn into a smirk. My frown is trademark, and letting it crack in a situation like this just wouldn't do.

A group of people stretches out to either side of him on the top of the wall. I recognize most of them. Most of them aren't pyromancers, they're pyromaniacs. They love to see things burn and have a terrifying mastery over fire magic. They're among the players who improved the most in the mastery and expansion of their bodies' skills. Maybe having a love for your body's Power makes it easier to adapt and improve.

Magical fire doesn't need fuel to burn. As long as it's not cast inside of water, it will draw on the ambient Mana to burn nearly forever if the Caster's spell is designed that way.

Have them drop walls of fire in the middle of the orcs once the last of the players are close. Make sure they do it at max range so we have as much room to work as possible.

“Connor has a pack of the firebugs up there. They're going to use firewalls to temporarily block the orc advance. We'll take out any orc one our side of the fires.”

Ahlred's murderous grin almost makes me shiver. Even though I trust him with my life, he's still the second most viciously violent person I've ever known. No one sane could avoid being at least slightly unnerved by his unbridled malevolence.

As the last of the players that are going to make it ahead of the orcs close in on our position, several long minutes pass. Mixed in among the stragglers, fighting a running battle with them, there are several groups orcs. Following hot on their heels, five packs of orcs, totaling over fifteen thousand bulls, are closing the distance with each step.

Swish! Swish! Swish! Swish! Swish!

An arrow from Connor's bow impales the lead bull in one of the nearest band of orcs. In less than ten seconds, another four follow striking the lead bulls in the other four band. Connor's arrows might not break the sound barrier, but they're so close reaching supersonic speeds, the difference is barely noticeable.

Shocked or surprised by their leaders falling, the pursuing bands of orcs slow for a few seconds. Next to me, Ahlred is quivering with anticipation, as we watch. With the momentary respite provided by Connor's arrows, the last of the players have the chance to get inside the maximum range of the pyromaniacs above.

Fwoosh! Boom! Fwoosh! Boom!  Swoosh! Swoosh!Fwoosh! Boom! Fwoosh! Boom! Fwoosh! Boom! Swoosh!

Fireballs streak outwards and fall among the orcs. Roaring walls of bright orange-red flame reach toward the sky in the middle of them. The agonized howls of flame engulfed orcs mix with the fear and rage-filled roars of their brethren on the far side of the fires. Despite hundreds, if not thousands of orcs being caught inside the fire, there are still close to a thousand that are on our side of the walls of fire.

“NOW! LET'S GET 'EM!” Fueled by massive Dvergar lungs, my bellow rises loud and clear above the background noise.

As we charge, our metal boots ring against the rocks and stones on the windswept shingle. The smaller or more fragile stones shatter under the impact of Dvergar steel driven by superhumanly powerful Dvergar legs. Despite our disproportionately short legs, each step hurls us forward several meters.

Rage and hate I cannot control rise up from my belly, and a soundless roar echoes from my lips. To my left and right six more roaring, rage-filled voices join it. It embodies sound and emotions that send shivers through the surrounding air, ground, and water.

Ahead of us the orcs turn eyes on that are filled hate and fear. Though, there is more fear than hate in their expressions.

The sound chills me to my soul. The hate and rage make me want to run and hide, but I can't. It feels like these dark, violent emotions have taken control of my body and refuse to allow me to do anything but fight. This kind of hate and rage is not something a human should be capable of.

A few days ago, I don't think I was capable of feeling emotions like these. Since we left the Labyrinth something has changed, but what is it? And why did it happen? Are we going to lose control of ourselves and become ravening monsters?

With my shield, I barely deflect a hammer aimed at my head and wrench my thoughts away from my fears. Now is not the time to be worrying like an old woman. If I don't stay focused on this battle, the orcs will end my quandaries once and for all.

My personal favorite weapon buff puts an edge of magical force on my weapons that is similar to the concept of a hypersonic vibrational blade, a vibro-blade in sci-fi parlance. It creates a vibrational force at nearly the molecular level and can cut through almost anything that isn't protected with some kind of defensive ability.

My return strike rends the orc's shield, and I twist my axe, hooking the sundered shield with the beard. I jerk the shield down and away. As the orc pulls back with all its might, I reverse the direction of my motion and twist into a punch-like chop. The razor sharp edge cleaves through the orc's helm and jaw. As the orc rears back, howling in agony, my Dvergar steel shod foot hammers into its groin. As the orc doubles over, my shield bash shatters its skull, like an overripe melon.

“Taking over for Talon?” Danleib's words are delivered in an ambiguous tone.

“A kick to the balls always worked wonders for him. Remember when he brought the Kerran Emperor to his knees?”My frown is filled with bitter regret.

“Heh! Good times. Good fucking times.” Wihtred's comment is followed by his cackling laughter.

With the exception of Ahlred, the others chuckle at the memory of Talon kicking an emperor in his balls in the middle of his own throne room. As usual, Danleib's simple words served their purpose. For all but one of us, he pulled our minds back from the anger and hate surging from within our bodies. I don't know why we seem to suddenly be feeling such overwhelming emotions that are apparently related to our bodies, and it scares me.

“RAAR! RAAAARRRRRR! RAAAAAARRRRRRRR!” The bellowing comes from inside the flames. Even as a Dvergar, I can't reach that kind of volume, and the Power carried within the sound is disturbing.

Despite my worries and our banter, the orcs are falling around us with only a handful of blows needed to take down each one. The superior strength of our Dvergar bodies almost makes a mockery of their attempts to stop our blows. From the memories of the real Thorrin, the only way orcs defeat Dvergar is by outnumbering them hundreds to one.

“RRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRR!” Louder and more pain-filled than the previous roars, the sound seems to reverberate from the cliff and sea.

THUMP!

A gust of gale force wind scatters the flames, and a massive orc charges out. Its face is a motley of black and red: charred black in places and raw burned flesh in others. Its blackened armor is filling the air around it with a heat shimmer. That orc must be cooking inside its own armor.

“RAAAARRRRRR!” Its pig-like eyes filled with rage, the beast sprints into the cold, grey water of the sea. Trailing behind it, howling in agony, another four orcs hurtle into the water in its wake. The abrupt hissing and steam rising from them gives testimony to the brutal heat of the metal armor enwrapping their tortured bodies.

Growling, snarling, and cursing, the orcs splash huge handfuls of water over the parts of their armor that are not already submerged. The glares that they direct toward the wall burn with unquenched hate and rage.

As orcs and players stare at the five orcs squatting in the waves, a collective pause settles on the battlefield. Whether shock, fear, awe or other emotions, their impact is enough to still the vicious combat.

*Connor, get as many people up the wall as you can, while the orcs are distracted.*

My message, sent via my whisper charm, sparks Connor into action. From behind, the sounds of people continuing to scale the wall as quietly as possible reach my ears.

After a couple minutes, the first orc stands up and stalks out of the water. Its bloodshot, beady eyes rake the battlefield and the wall, before settling on the pyromaniacs on top of the wall.

The words it growls to the orcs around carry clearly across the strand, otherwise silent except for the susurrus of wind and waves. I can pick out maybe one in five words from this orc dialect, but it is clearly talking about fucking and killing.

“Just like an ass-fucking orc to think with its needle dick, course its brains are nothing but the shit in its ass.” While he wiggles his pinkie in the air, Ahlred's words boom out in one of the orc dialects form the Lands of Despair.

The orc's glare locks onto Ahlred. It may or may not have understood the entire sentence, but it knows it's being insulted. Raising a maul with a head bigger than a quarter keg or beer, it snarls something else in its dialect.

All six of the orcs begin to chant something in a language I don't recognize. It's definitely not an Orcish dialect, and I don't remember ever hearing anything quite like it. As their chant continues, faint auras of bloody light spring up around the orcs.

The other orcs that are trapped on our side of the flames begin to clash their weapons together or pound them on their shields. The clatter is in time with the six orcs chant.

“Look at the Power threads around that orc! It's Coalescent!”

“Fuck, all of them are.”

“No. Only three are Coalescent. The two on the left haven't completed Coalescing their Power.”

Altering my vision so that I can see patterns, I stare at the orcs. Within their aura, threads of Power are writhing. Looking closely, I can see that each thread of Power is made up of twisted smaller threads of Power. It's not just the lead orc. All of their orcs are Coalescent or on the path to it.

We don't really understand Coalescence. Despite all of us having memories dealing with it, none of the bodies we've been put in have ever begun to Coalesce their Power. All we really know is that it's a type of meta-magic that allows a Power user to somehow increase or magnify the level of their Power. Every Power user can use one or more of three types of Power: Mana, Ki, and Psi. Even if you can't use one or two them, there is still a latent pool of those Powers inside of you. Coalescence allows a user to somehow use all three of those pools at once to fuel their abilities.

“We really have shit luck. God must be punishing us.” Farnulf frowns, as he stares at the orc champion.

“Which god? The biblical one, The Nameless, or one of the others?” Dacbold's comment is delivered in deadpan.

Farnulf's frown deepens, but the rest of just snicker. Farnulf is a Christian in real life, one of the few left in America that dares to be open about it. Or maybe, I should say he was one on Earth. He takes the Nameless' claims to be a god as a personal insult. Any mention of a god beyond the Bible offends him, but he has never been able to rationalize The Battleground of the Damned or The Lands of Despair with the Bible. It must he hard on him.

“Now is not the time for this. We have Coalescent orcs to deal with.” Danleib's soft word cut off the argument before if can get started.

“The leader's mine!” Ahlred's words are a vicious snarl.

All seven of us whisper the mnemonics to trigger our buff spells. Since the beginning of the Great Fuck Over, I've increased the number of buffs I can maintain at once to nine. I seldom use that many, but right now, I cast six of my strongest support spells and my three most destructive attack buffs.

My eyes are drawn to the side as Ahlred is surrounded by flames as red as his hair. He taught me the spell for that damage shield, and it burns Mana faster than anything else I know. He'll have about twenty to thirty minutes tops before he's suffering from Mana depletion with just that damage shield running.

The intensity of the pyromaniac's fires appears to be waning. Glancing at the wall, I see several of the weaker ones already leaning heavily on the roughly made parapets.

“RRAAAAARRRRRRRR!” The lead orc bellows in rage as it charges toward us.

Ahlred's lips peel back in a nasty grin, and he starts charging at the orcs. “EAT SHIT, ORC FUCK!”

The rest of us follow Ahlred's charge. There is nothing else to do. If we don't break the orcs on this side of the flame wall before it fails, we are going to be in deep shit.

As we close with the Coalescent orcs, a few of the normal orcs begin to rush toward us. Seeing the few moving toward us, tens and then hundreds more follow, while others turn back to their interrupted battle with the other players. Spells and missiles weapons rain down from the top of the wall in support of the human players.

“Cwichelm! Wihtred!” I gesture toward the incoming orcs.

“Fucking, fucked fuckers!” Wihtred digs out a couple more of his fire necklaces.

“Hurry up with those Coalescent bastards!” Two of Cwichelm's crystal lasers float up over his shoulders.

Boom!

A couple seconds later Ahlred and the orc leader slam into each other. The explosive force of their weapons impacting one anther sends sand and small stones flying in all directions. As the sand settles, the orc stumbles back a few steps, and Ahlred falls back one.

Ahlred should have the advantage. He just needs to finish the battle before he runs out of Mana. He's not like Talon who drags, would drag, out fights for the sheer love of fighting. Ahlred always goes for the fast kill.

BOOM! BOOM! Zap! Zap! Zap! BOOM!

The explosions and crystal laser fire from Wihtred and Cwichelm fill the air, but I don't turn to look. One of the Coalescent orcs is right in my face, with another coming up beside it.

Clang! Boom! Bang! Clang! Boom!

The orc is wielding an axe and a hammer. As it hammer meets my axe, my weapon buffs detonate the air, but the bloody aura around the orc seems to absorb much of the force. The impact of its axe on my shield sends a tingle up my arm to the shoulder. If not for the defensive buff on my shield, I think that axe blow might have punched right through it.

Boom!

Danleib intercepts the one coming in on the left flank of mine. His shield charge sends it flying backward a dozen feet, but the orc twists and leaps to its feet like a wild animal.

Orcs are brute force creatures. They're not much different from other beast-man races. They only think about being stronger.  They almost never use Power-based attacks. All of their Power is consciously or subconsciously used to enhance their physical prowess. They're ridiculously strong, but they're not Dvergar. My orc is less skilled and weaker than I am, and after thirty or forty exchanges, it's reeling backward. As it stumbles, I take a quick look around.

Danleib's orc is bleeding from a wicked gash in its chest. He'll finish it in a moment or two. Dacbold has his orc on the ropes too. Farnulf has already killed the two orcs that were only partially Coalescent and had gone to the aid of Wihtred and Cwichelm.

Ahlred is the only one with a serious fight on his hands. Both he and the orc are wounded. Though, none of the wounds look serious. Physically, Ahlred is the strongest of us, but that orc seems to be just as strong, if not stronger. That orc leader must be a horde champion, a monster that is strong enough to crush most of the horde, but not strong enough to challenge the chief.

As my orc steadies itself, I shield charge it, knocking it back again. While it's off-balance, my Dvergar steel shod foot plunges into its groin. Its brownish-grey skin turns greenish, and almost comically, it crumples to its knees.

“Skeevy whore what dumped me out...” At least, I think that's what it says. I guess that's 'mommy' more or less in Orcish.

“Orc boy's got nards.” It takes real effort to maintain my frown and not smirk. I love the old movies, the ones that were on the banned media lists for so many stupid reasons, before the lists were banned as well.

My words are in English, and the orc just stares at me in dumb brute confusion. It doesn't even try to resist, as my axe takes its head off.

“Talon would be proud to see how well you've learned, Grasshopper.”

“Fuck off.”

Danleib laughs, as he rolls the corpse of his orc over, and cleaves open its throat for good measure.

Only Ahlred hasn't finished off his Coalescent orc yet. Dacbold has already engaged the oncoming orc tide with the others.

“Ahlred stop fucking around and kill it. What do you think you are, Talon fighting for the fun of it?”

Ahlred's beard seems to bristle at Dacbold's words.

*Was that a smart thing to say?*

*He needed a kick in the ass. That damned orc is stronger than we are. It's probably to the second level of Coalescence already.*

Without waiting for Ahlred, Dacbold and I charge into the cliff side flank of the orcs pressing in around the other Dvergar. Even with the destruction wrought by Wihtred and Cwichelm's weapons, there still six to seven hundred orcs still alive.

With a whispered mnemonic, I put a one-shot buff on my shield.

Thud!

As I slam my shield into an orc's shield, the buff goes off. The explosion shatters the orc's shield, and the wave of fire and force hurls it back into the orcs behind it. Knocked over by the blast wave, eight or ten more orcs fall to the ground, with burns and obvious broken bones.

“HOOYAH!” Ahlred's bellow drowns out the cacophony of the battlefield. Even fifty yards away, the Power driving the sound is palpable.

The orcs in front of me are staring past their fallen brethren and over my head, with slack jaws.

Glancing over my shoulder, I almost smile.

Ahlred has his axe raised over his head, with the head of the orc champion jammed onto the top of one of its bits. His malicious grin and the hint of madness in his eyes would give pause to anyone or anything.

“Fuck me sideways with a dragon's dick. I never knew he was a fucking squid.”

Wihtred's quip causes Cwichelm to snicker, and I can't keep from snorting.

Spinning in a circle, Ahlred launches the orc head into the middle of the surviving orcs.

“Die, mother-fuckers!” Wihtred digs out another one of his necklaces and flings it toward the arcing orc head.

BOOM!

As the necklace impacts the head, it detonates in midair. A huge fireball and concussive wave slam down into the orcs on the ground

“AAAARRRRGGGH! RAAAAAARRRRRRRR!”

Howls of agony erupt form the orcs, and the survivors from the edge of the blast try to force their way out through the packed mass of other orcs. Some squabble and fights break out in the middle of the orc bands.

“NOW! HIT THEM HARD!”

Stomping on the fallen orcs, living or dead doesn't matter, in front of me, I attack the nearest still standing orc. Danleib closes ranks with me on my left launching his own attacks on the orcs. These orcs aren't Coalescent, and they go down after a handful of strikes at the most.

“RRAAAAARRRRRRRR!” Ahlred's wordless roar is more bone-chilling than the orc champion's was. The madness that is normally barely visible rings out clearly.

Slamming into the orcs, between myself and Cwichelm, every swing of his axe scatters orc body parts and orc blood around the battlefield.

As brutal as Ahlred's fights normally are, this time he is in a whole different realm. He's never been this out of control before. Could the cause be whatever is causing the unbridled hatred we've been feeling for the orcs since first seeing them today? What is happening to us?

The walls of fire are clearly thinner and far less intense than they originally were. I don't have time to brood about what ifs and angle toward Ahlred, as I cut down more of the orcs. Orcs kill Dvergar by outnumbering them hundreds to one, but we aren't just seven Dvergar. With the added numbers and attack power of the other players, we continue to slaughter the orcs, but we are in a race against time. All around us Dvergar, the orcs are closing in.

“JACKHAMMER!”

With Ahlred on point and Dacbold on drag, we form into a 1-3-2-1 formation, with a Dvergar wide space between each of the 2s. Danleib releases two clockwork bats that circle overhead, while Cwichelm's lasers float over the middle.

“DIRTY DEEDS DONE DIRT CHEAP!”

Ahlred drives into the orcs, with Farnulf and myself a step behind him. The crystal lasers lay down a crisscrossing pattern of fire behind us, and the clockwork bats cover the side with subsonic attacks. The few orcs that push through the brutal weapon's fire are cut down by  Dacbold, Danleib, and Cwichelm. While singing, Wihtred stays in the middle ready to backup anyone who needs it.

“If you're havin' trouble with the high school head.”

Wihtred backs up, and Ahlred steps back between Farnulf and myself. The crystal lasers change their fire from the back to the front carving up the unsuspecting orcs with their beams of coherent light. In the back, with the sudden lack of laser fire, Dacbold, Danleib, and Cwichelm carve into the hesitant orcs waiting for a chance to get at our backs.

“He's givin' you the blues.”

As the lasers pause, Ahlred steps out and we shift back to our forward movement. The laser once again covers our backs.

“You want to graduate but not in 'is bed.”

Again, we attack the orcs behind us.

As we move through the orcs, continuous shifting our attack pattern based on the lines of a song they can't even understand, the orcs are cut down one after the next. It takes around ten minutes to whittle the orc numbers down to a bit more than two hundred, and the walls of fire are already guttering. Glancing at the wall, all but a few of the firebugs are barely able stand. Their suffering badly from Mana depletion. There are still too many humans down below the wall. If the firebugs' Mana gives out before we finish off these orcs, we're fucked. We need to get our people up on the wall now, before the rest of the horde gets to us.

“HUMANS, PULL OUT! GET UP ON THE WALL!” My bellow should be clearly audible to everyone in the battle.

The people who stayed down to fight are all from the better guilds, with the stronger, more battle savvy combatants. They start a fighting retreat to the wall, reducing the width of the combat lines while covering each other.

“THE SAFETY DANCE!”

“Ah we can dance if we want to, we can leave your friends behind.” His Dvergar singing voice is terrible, but before the Great Fuck Over, I saw videos of some of his performances. As a human, he wasn't bad.

Dancing and bouncing in time to music that only exists inside his head, Wihtred is having the time of his life performing for this unappreciative audience.

The people up on the wall are looking at us like we're insane, or maybe, like we're monsters. We Dvergar are the only ones out in the middle of the remaining orcs. Ahlred turns toward the orcs still pressing the human players.

Fear and desperation are visible in the little pig-like eyes of the orcs, as they turn to meet our onslaught. They've seen hundreds of other orcs and know that they have no more chance than the trails of orc corpses marking our path.

Fwoosh!

A carefully controlled wall of fire springs to life behind the orcs directly engaging the human players. Led by Connor, archers mercilessly slaughter the orcs inside the wall fires, while they're occupied by the melee battle.

The last of the players jump, climb, and levitate to the top of the wall. Now, the only ones left outside with the orcs are we Dvergar.

With the easy targets gone and seven Dvergar hunting them, the orcs begin to scatter toward the dying walls of fire separating them from the rest of their horde. When they have an advantage in number and strength, orcs are merciless blood-thirsty enemies. When they are a disadvantage, orcs are cowards.

When we Dvergar do not pursue the orcs, the pyromaniacs above let their spells end. Beyond the blackened stones and sand, shimmering from the rising heat waves, the rest of the orc horde is lined in ramshackle ranks. At their head, a huge orc glowers toward the wall. It's a monster with bulging muscles and jet black skin and fur. The vicious intelligence in its yellow eyes leaves a cold feeling in the pit of my stomach.

“That black fucker has to be eight feet tall, if it's an inch.”

“If it wasn't so ugly, I'd swear it was an ogre and not an orc.”

“Black Orcs. They're like the royalty among the orcs. They can be born to any kind of orc, and the status, strength, power, and skin color of the parents seem immaterial.” Danleib almost sound like a lecturer talking to students. Before he became a counselor, he was a college professor, but he was terminated for having the wrong political views.

“Looks like the orcs' god of fuck had to make them perfect.” Cwichelm's comment is delivered in complete deadpan.

“Oh, it's Black Power time.” Wihtred's smirk makes it clear he's digging for a reaction.

“Don't associate me with those racists fucks just because I'm Black.”

Wihtred tilts his back, with his eye opened in an exaggeratedly wide manner, and carefully examines Cwichelm. “You're looking mighty white to me. Just like the rest of us.”

“Fuck off!”

Wihtred cackles like a madman.

Danleib ignores the byplay. “We're really fucked no matter how you look at it. That's an orc  with a Black Orc for a horde leader.”

Grim expressions settle on all our faces. Most of the players won't understand just how bad the situation is. Black Orcs are something almost never seen inside the Labyrinth. If it weren't for our Dvergar memories, we wouldn't know how fucked we are either.

A dimension gate opens behind us, and one of the Casters looks out. “You guys coming or what?”

As we step through the gate, I feel the Black Orcs hate-filled stare boring into my back. Even so, it doesn't attack or move. It just watches us pass through the gate. That could be because of the scorching hot ground where the walls of fire were, but I doubt it. Unlike normal orcs, Black Orcs are said to be exceptionally intelligent, considerably above the average level of human intelligence.

From the inside, I see how thin the wall is. Despite its height, it is barely more than six or seven feet thick. Even with the perpendicular ramps running from the ground to the top of the wall roughly every fifty feet, it will never hold against the assault of the orcs. They wouldn't even need siege engines to break this wall.

*Connor, we need to make this wall thicker. It won't take that horde more more than a few hours to bring it down.*

Connor looks down at me from the top of the wall. *There's nothing we can do about it . The geomancers are on the verge of Mana Depletion. It'll be five or six hours at least before they can strengthen this wall. All but a few of our pyromaniacs  are in the same boat.*

*Get as much firepower as you can on that wall. These orcs are nothing like what we faced inside the Labyrinth, and that Black Orc is a monster that will make your worst nightmares seem like sweet dreams.*

Connor just stares at me for a few moments. He's not much younger than I am. After being wounded in Desert Storm, I was forcibly given a medical discharge from the Corp. After becoming a computer engineer, I became a civilian IT contractor with the Corp. That is when we first met. He knows I've been keeping secrets from him about the what's going on, and he must be feeling somewhat betrayed.

Connor isn't the only one staring down from the wall. More than a thousand players are on top of that wall along with him, and most of them are staring down at us. Unlike Connor, the majority of the other players are looking at us with a mixture of trepidation and distrust. Human nature is to fear that which is stronger than itself and that which it does not understand.

Danleib rests his hand on my shoulder. *Relax, Thorrin. Our strength, our level of Power, our skills and techniques, all of them are far above theirs. We already knew it would be like this, but at least for now, they're still alive. If you want them to stay that way, you can't hold back. You have to use the Power contained in your body to its fullest. I don't understand why you fear your own Power, but if you let that fear rule, the people you want to save will all be lost.*

The skin of my face feels itchy. Even rubbing my calloused palm over my cheeks and nose does nothing to dispel the feeling. I've never feared power in the hands of another, but ever since Desert Storm, I've been afraid of having power myself. The logic defying nature of the Power I control now only makes that fear worse.

I nod my head. Whether I'm acknowledging Danleib's words or my own though, I can't even tell myself. Not looking away from the fearful gazes of the players on the wall, I head up the nearest ramp. The rest of the Dvergar follow me in a loose group.

When we reach the top of the wall, the Black Orc is still staring from the far side of the scorched strip along the shingle. A few orc that appear to be tribal shamans are fawning over him from behind, while he ignores them.

Connor is giving orders to the human players. The firebugs are retreating from the walls along with the players who were fighting below the walls. The players coming up are mostly archers and Casters specializing in long range assault spells.

“Danleib, send up your birds again. See if you can find a route we can use to escape. This is all well and good for a temporary stand, but we can't stay forever.

Danleib nods and pulls out two clockwork birds in the shape of hawks or eagles. From top to bottom, they are completely lacquered black. Every single feather has been carefully painted so that its finish is smooth as glass. With an expression that says butter wouldn't melt in his mouth, he holds up the black birds in front of Wihtred.

“These are my perfect eagles.”

With a huge smirk, Wihtred holds up a single fist.

“Soul!” Cwichelm stares at the two of them, while he rubs the corner of his eye with just his middle finger, before turning his back to them.

The never ending antics continue. Even facing hundreds of thousands of orcs, the rest of the Dvergar are still their usual selves. I seem to be the only one getting bent out of shape. I stare at the orc horde, without really thinking about anything.

The Second Day

The Great Fuck Over Day 4,182

It's been almost eight hours since the end of the battle below the wall, but the orcs still have not attacked. The sun is a fiery red ball, midway up the northeastern sky, but heavy cloud cover is moving in from the west. It's mid-fall in this part of Taereun, so we don't exactly have a lot of time before the harsh winter weather sets in. For us Dvergar, it won't be much of an issue, but for too many of the humans, it could prove lethal if we don't find a base to operate out of that will provide some real shelter from the elements. Of course, that assumes we survive the orc  facing us to the east.

Right now, those orcs are stacking up logs for bonfires and building some rough frames. I try not to think about what's going to be coming.

Besides the other Dvergar and Connor, there are more than thirty guild leaders gathered atop a stone staging area at the back of the wall. The geomancers have recovered enough to raise three staging areas where we can gather our people and are working on thickening the wall itself.

Danleib is using one his constructs to display a topographical map of the area. Staring at the map, everyone her has a grim expression on his or her face. Our situation couldn't be much worse.

Assuming the orcs don't scale the cliffs on the far side of the ridge, the valley runs toward the northwest for about eighty miles, before connecting with another valley that runs straight back to the shore. About a hundred miles from here, the terrain gets extremely rugged, where some true mountains rise from the water running in a more or less northerly direction. There is no place to run, where we can escape from the orcs. We should be safe from any attack on our rear for two days, but that's the best we can hope for.

“Despite the bad news, we're truly fortunate that we have Danleib's long range scouting abilities to rely on. Seeing how bad the situation is, we really should set up a proper chain of command. If we don't have competent leadership, we're not gonna stand a chance. I'd be willing to take on the responsibility.” Dark Guardian's southern drawl somehow comes through even in the Slave Tongue.

He's the only guild leader that brought an entourage with him. One man and two women are standing behind him, all of them healers or sorts. Dark Guardian is so fixated on being a “tank” that he's driven all the other heavy armor warrior types out of his guild, Silver Horn. Rumor has it, that it takes all three of them to keep him alive in battles.

*Of all the guilds that made it here, why are we stuck with Silver Horn?* Wihtred's sneering tone carries clearly in our party channel.

*I would've settle for almost any other guild, as long it wasn't part of Thug Horde's coalition.* Cwichelm's annoyed. He doesn't like Dark Guardian.

*He's an incompetent prima donna, but we need the bodies. Paragon at least has ridiculous skills at keeping people alive with those wards he uses. He may be the best warder I've ever encountered.* Connor is in our party channel this time.

“Shut your bung hole already! No one of note is going to follow an idiot like you!” Ahlred's vicious snarl cuts off Dark Guardian's monologue.

The naked fear is easy to see in Dark Guardian's eyes as he stares at Ahlred. There aren't many people that have the balls to stand up to Ahlred when he's really pissed. The problem is telling whether he's really pissed or just annoyed.

*Is this going to be the usual, Connor? You're the Light Colonel. Are you willing to try and coordinate this cluster fuck too?*

Connor looks at me, his expression unreadable. *Who is going to step up that knows his ass from a hole in the ground, if I don't?*

“Dark, to put it bluntly, you're incompetent. Unless someone else has any objections, I think Connor is the best choice.” As I deliver my statement, I keep my voice monotone.

“Dark Guardian is the best! You should be begging him to lead you!” Eternity, the blond healer, interjects in a shrill voice. Despite the cold weather, she's wearing blue leather pants and a halter top.

“Yeah, he's way better than that loser Connor!” Forever, the brunette, jumps in right on Eternity's heels. Like Eternity, she's wearing leather pants and a halter top, except hers are red.

With a smirk on his face, Dark Guardian puts arms around the girls shoulders and slips a hand in each one's halter top.

“I think there are a...”

Clank! Clank!

Ahlred takes two step in the Silver Horns direction. “Shut the fuck up! Your two slitches aren't guild leaders! Take your fucking hands off their tits and stuff them in their mouths so they don't piss me off!”

Dark Guardian takes several steps backward, pulling the girls in front of him, like a couple of living shields.

*Ah, Ahlred. He's always the diplomat.*

*You can fuck off too.*

Wihtred cackles like a lunatic, with a smirk big enough to land a 747 on.

“I think Connor commanding is the best option. When we don't have Thug Horde around to fuck up our plans, he always does a good job.” Bastion speaking up is unusual. If he wasn't more than seven feet tall, he would be one of the most forgettable people I ever met. Outside of a battle, he's so innocuous that he passes for scenery. His entire guild is made up of such ridiculously low key people that I always have to resist the urge to check their pulses to see if they're still alive.

*You all really have a talent for bullying the weak.* Connor's tone of voice is a pure deadpan.

Ahlred snorts. *It's their own fault for being weak. This isn't Earth. We're on Taereun proper now, and it's even more dangerous than the Labyrinth.*

Connor's head snaps around to stare at Ahlred for a few moments before he turns his gaze to me.

I sigh. “It's true. We're on Taereun.”

I point to the massive spined construct in the water. “That thing is the Labyrinth of Yggr.”

Most everyone on the platform starts murmuring and whispering among themselves.

Along with the rest of them, Connor turns to look at the Labyrinth. “Then, if we want to find Haven, we need to get back inside.”

“Haven's not in there; it's out here.” Ahlred's annoyed growl cuts of any comments from anyone else.

“Bullshit!”

“How do you know that?”

“That Nameless God said it was in the Labyrinth.”

“If you knew about this, why didn't you say something sooner?”

“We all had a right to know about this! Why are you keeping secrets?”

The shouts of the guild leaders are instantly filled with blatant accusation, and their faces display naked hostility.

“SHUT THE FUCK UP! You're nothing but pissant humans, and we're Dvergar. You have a right? What fucking right? If you had a right, you would have been given Dvergar bodies too. You can shove your self-entitled crap up your asses; we're not on Earth anymore.” There's no question that this time Ahlred is really pissed.

Danleib wordlessly puts his hand on Ahlred's shoulder. Even though Ahlred glares at Danleib, he doesn't say or do anything else.

The humans are staring at us, and theirs are filled with a mixture of fear, resentment, and hostility. No one deals well with being insulted to their face, and Ahlred doesn't care who he insults. He really hates almost everyone, on top of having no respect for anyone who isn't from a military background.

After sweeping his gaze across the humans, Danleib takes a half step forwards, putting Ahlred slightly behind him. “Ahlred tends to be an overly blunt individual. Like you, we are in possession of the memories of those whose bodies we now possess. Which of you has told everyone here everything you know from your current body? Is there even a single person?”

Danleib pauses for a few moment, but there are no responses. “If you haven't shared all that you know, why are you demanding the same of us? Why are you ridiculing us for not telling you everything in our bodies memories? Before we exited the Labyrinth, how were we know what was true from false about the Labyrinth, Taereun, and Haven?”

Again, Danleib pause, and again, no one responds. “We were waiting for Thorrin to wrap up matters that occupied him after we left the Labyrinth. You might not have noticed, but Thorrin, our fried, was busy burying his friend Talon. The orcs' attack derailed our plans to pass on what we know and surmise, and now you are acting like this toward us. What kind of response did you expect from Ahlred?”

Bastion stepping forward from that general pack is a bit surprising. “You're nothing but humans, just like us. If we had those bodies, we'd be just as powerful are you are. What gives you the right to take that attitude? Is it because you lucked into getting superior bodies and knowledge? You're nothing special because of those bodies. You were born on Earth, the same as us. You played Taereun, the same as us. You were caught up in The Great Fuck Over, the same as us. So, why are you acting so high and mighty?”

I'm disappointed in Bastion. I would never have expected that he would have such a typical modern American attitude. He always struck as being someone more like the older generations of Americans, but I guess you really never can tell how a person will jump when push comes to shove.

Zardoc, Another guild leader steps up. “You're hoarding your knowledge and power when it should be used for the betterment of everyone. From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs...”

“FUCK OFF!” Ahlred's bellow cuts Zardoc off mid-sentence.

The Power contained in Ahlred's body is visible in a distortion effect like heat shimmer surrounding his body. The hate and rage boiling inside of him are actually causing his eyes to glow faintly with bloody light. While that bloody glare may not be able to kill them, a few of the assembled guild leaders look like they're on the verge of incontinence.

“You can stick that Marxist shit up your ass. Weak, cowardly, user fuckwads, that's all that you pieces of shit are. I spent my best years in the Teams, fighting for you cocksucker's freedom to malign me, and when my squad carried out a mission with civilian casualties that embarrassed the political pieces of shit who had the operation initiated, we were court-martialed, jailed and dishonorably discharged. I'm done with that bullshit. You want something here, then earn it with your own strength. I'm not giving you jack shit because you think it's owed to you.”

Several moments of silence settle on the staging platform, as the guild leaders mostly shuffle around like children. Looking at the guild leaders surrounding him, one that calls himself Pancho sneers and crosses the gap between the rest of the guild leaders and ourselves.

“Semper fi!” Pancho's back is ramrod straight, but he doesn't salute.

Ahlred stares Pancho for a moment, before nodding his head. “Welcome, Brother. Even if you are a jarhead.”

“Sounds like jealousy to me, since you're just a squid. My guild is mostly ex-service and their family members.” Pancho takes up a position next to Ahlred, while he's talking.

After glancing at one another, the rest of us Dvergar and Connor form ranks with them. We're nine facing off against more than thirty, but there is no question of where the power lies.

I don't like doing things this way. Might does not make right. Once you know what is right, you should use might to protect and nurture it, but the world does not necessarily give the option to always do what is right. Even if I intend to save as many of these people as I can, I will not do it on their terms.

“So, how do you want to do this? We can fight amongst ourselves and be fodder for the orcs, or we band together and maybe survive. It's your choice.” Connor's tone is neutral. If it wasn't for two groups of armed people facing off, he could easily be talking about the weather.

The assembled guild leaders looking around and whispering together among allied guild leaders. Even though I cannot hear what they're saying, I was part of the group that designed the original whisper charms, and we Dvergar modified those charms to create the more powerful ones in certain trusted people's hands. There are a few tricks you can use to spot the usage of whisper charms, if you know what energy forms you need to watch and can see into the Astral Realm, the realm of Mind.

*They're bitching up a real storm, aren't they?* Wihtred has superior smirk guaranteed to antagonize plastered on his lips.

*Give it a rest! We want to get them behind us, not fragment the raid force.* Danleib's words are delivered in the tone of a parent disciplining an unruly child.

Wihtred's smirk disappears, and if he's running true to form, the target of his ire should be Danleib, instead of the guild leaders.

*Now, we need to get them focused on defending against the orcs, but later, I want to know what the hell you all have been keeping secret.* Connor has not forgotten that we've been keeping him in the dark on what we know, just like the civvies.

“Well, what do you want to do?” Connor's bland tone from before is replaced with a much sharper edged one now.

Bastion makes eye contact with a half-dozen or so of the other guild leaders, before nodding imperceptibly. As he looks at us, he can't hide the fear in his eyes. “If you don't submit to the will of the people and work for the greater good of everyone, we'll see to it that everyone drives you out.”

“Fuck this shit! These are our Dvergar! They're heroes! What they fuck are you idiots thinking?” Kamehameha, who has been silently standing amidst the other guild leaders, pushes his way to the front.

Dark Guardian's expression is filled with nothing but contempt, as he turns toward Kamehameha. “Look, kid. We're talking about adult things here. Just shush up and let us resolve it. You're too young to understand what's really going on here. We'll make sure the orcs don't hurt you and your friends.”

“Fuck you, asshole! Stupid old man. You suck at being a warrior. If I had my hands tied behind my back and was hopping on one leg, you couldn't beat me. Who'd listen to a loser like you?”

“Punk, where do you get off insulting Dark? You're probably still a virgin.”

“That little shit will be a virgin forever. The only way a faggot like him will ever get laid is a mercy fuck.”

“Fuck you, cunts! You've already got wrinkles! Better get some Botox, bitches! Who would want to fuck old women like you?”

“ENOUGH!” Using a variation on a force weapon buff, I turn my shout into a physical assault.

“What the fuck is wrong with everyone? We have an orc horde out there, and you want to play one-up games. Do you want to die? Have you already given up and are just waiting for the axe to fall?”

Suddenly, none of the opposing guild leaders will meet my eyes. They start looking down, or away, or to the sides of me. That's the reason for this bullshit. They have already given up and are arguing because they're afraid of what is coming.

An air of defeatism settles on the staging platform. Looking down at the people behind the wall, I only see more of the same expressions of hopelessness. I can't keep from sighing.

*They're already given up. They don't even have the balls for a last stand.* Ahlred's contempt comes across clearly in our party channel.

*I'm not very good at motivating people who have already given up. How do we get them to man up?* I've never been a leader of anything more than guilds or production teams in my days in the working world, and I've never had to deal with people who had completely given up any and all hope.

*Man up? I see more than a few slitches, and half the men are no better than slitches. They're probably a bunch of faggots, pumping away in each others' assholes in dark corners where no one can see them.* Ahlred is in a real mood. They did one hell of a job of sending him off the deep end.  It could take days for him to calm down.

*Let me deal with it. I have a few ploys that might get them motivated.* Danleib sounds a bit uncertain.

*No. I'll do it.* Connor's rigid expression makes his face look like it's carved out of stone.

“So, are you all just going to give up and let the orcs kill you? Do you think that's all that will happen? Do you think the orcs will let off that easily? If you really think that's the case, you had best slit your own throats here and now. If you don't stand, fight and escape, you're going to be nothing but slaves to the orcs.” Connor pauses and stares at the guild leaders who aren't looking at him anymore than they looked at me.

After more than a minute of silence, Connor points toward the orcs and their construction. He has no delusions about what the orcs are planning. “Look out there. Look at those orcs. What do you think they're getting ready for?”

When no one responds after several moments, Connor sneers. “Those orcs already have some of us, a lot of us, probably thousands. Those people have really become the Damned, like most of them call themselves. Since we killed some of the orcs' best fighters, they're going to have a little party. They're going torture, rape, mutilate, and kill some of our people. If you just give up, you're going to join them in a day or three. If you're lucky, you'll die from their abuse. If you're unlucky, you'll live on as a slave.

“So, what do you want to do? Are you going to give up and die, or are you going to fight for a chance at life?”

None of them say anything for close to a minute.

“What's wrong with you losers? You talk like you're bad-asses, but you're just a bunch of fucking cowards. Hey, ragged old sluts, you're wrong about me being a virgin, and I'm gonna fight with these guys here. I'm more of a man than that faggot Dark Guardian that you're hanging onto. Hey, Dark Guardian, you like them saggy middle age tits? You should try groping some young tit. They're way better than your ragged bitches.”

Kamehameha struts over next to Pancho and holds out his fist. “Hey, bro. I seen you around, even if we've never talked. I'm Kamehameha, like in Dragonball. Let's fuck them orcs up.”

Pancho laughs and raps knuckles. “Pancho, as in Pancho Villa, the hero of Mexican Revolution. Least you got some balls, ese. If we die, make sure all your wounds are in the front.”

“You old men all worry about the dying. I ain't dying. I'm kicking orc ass and getting the fuck outta here.”

Connor stares coldly at the rest of the guild leaders. “One of the youngest among you is ready to stand with us. What about the rest of you? What about your guild mates?”

Moving to the inside edge of the staging platform, Connor looks out over the players. Most of them are gathered together in small groups, with an entire guild clustered together being the largest grouping.

Connor uses Power to enhance his voice. “Everyone, listen up!”

While the players gather, Connor waits a couple minutes. “Saying we're in a dangerous situation is an understatement. We have hundreds of thousands of orcs ready to kill us and no good escape route. If we don't fight, we're going to be dead or enslaved. Being dead would be by far the less painful option. Just because the situation is bad, it does not mean that it is hopeless. If we work together as one force, we can survive. We need put aside the divisions of guild, the differences of the past. We need to fight like our lives depend on it.

“I'm not going to promise that everyone will survive. You all would know that I was lying if I did. In truth, none of us may survive, and if we don't come together and fight as one army, that will be a certainty.

“For hope! For a chance! For survival! For a future! WHO IS WITH ME?”

Kamehameha draws his sword and holds it over his head, pointing at the sky. “I'm with you, OLD MAN!”

“Punk!” Pancho words are only audible to those of us close to him, as he laughs.

We seven Dvergar all step forward, lining up on either side of  Connor.

After a few seconds, two of the mercenary leaders move forward.

“I'll fight with you!”

“It's a good day to kill orcs!”

Slowly, the players begin to step forward, pledging to fight. They're still obviously scared. It is entirely too likely they'll die, and they know it.

Ahlred turns around and glares at the guild leaders. “Your people are ready to fight. What about you? Are you going to fight? Or are you going to go hide in some dark hole like faggots?”

Bastion frowns and seem to think things over. “I'll fight with you. I won't contest your leadership. For now.”

One by one, the other guild leaders acknowledge their compliance, until only Dark Guardian is left. He is using a party channel to talk with Forever and Eternity. While smiling coquettishly, Forever takes his hand and slips it back inside her halter top.

Kamehameha gets an angry look on his face. “Don't worry, loser. We don't need you. Your people are fucking competent anyway. Just hide in a corner and play with those saggy tits.”

Clank! Clank!

As Forever opens her mouth, Ahlred moves forward. “Get the fuck off the wall, slitches. Take this gutless sack of shit with you.”

With near terror making their face comical to look at, the three from Silver Horn practically fall all over themselves in their rush to get off the wall.

Ahlred turns to Connor. “What now, Colonel?”

Looking at the guild leaders, Connor briefly makes eye contact with each of them. “The far side is just as steep and forbidding a climb as this one, but that doesn't mean the orcs won't climb it. Also just because it's extremely unlikely that the orcs will have flight magic, it doesn't mean that they absolutely can't have it. I know some of those with levitation and flight magic, but you all should know better than I who those people are. We need to get them spread out across that ridge as scouts. If the orcs try to scale that ridge, we need to know as early as possible and deal with it.”

The guild leaders nod, and a number of them begin using whisper charms and guild bracelets to contact people.

“We can't get out of this by running away. The orcs will just hunt us down and kill us. We need to make a stand here and survive until we can escape. Getting back inside the Labyrinth would be the best option, but any means of completely eluding the orcs will be good. Danleib, can you scout out the Labyrinth and see if there are any doors other than the causeway door?”

Danleib nods. “I noticed one the other day, but it was too high to be usable. It didn't appear to be open either. That thing is monstrous; it could take me days to find a viable entry.”

“That's fine. Just be as quick as you can about it.” While his eyes scan the more or less bowl shaped valley opening out inland from the strand, Connor grabs the hilt of sheathed sword with his left hand and strokes the pommel stone with his thumb. It's a nervous tic he has when he's planning.

Connor looks at the sea. “The problem will be the water side.”

Ahlred laughs nastily. “That's no problem. Orcs and water don't mix. They are almost as bad as Dvergar at swimming. You can't swim when you sink to the bottom like a rock.”

Connor smiles faintly. “I've never fought orc where bodies of water came into play. At least, that makes things a little easier.  Dacbold, you know about defensive fortifications, right?”

Without saying anything, Dacbold meets Connors' eyes.

Connor points toward the spur of mostly rock extending out into the sea. “Since orcs can't swim worth a damn, do you think you can make something useful out of that with the help of the geomancers?”

For several minutes, Dacbold silently observes the spur. When he speaks, his voice is an almost sub-sonic rumble. “It'll take at least a day and a half to make something really viable. The more time you can give me, the more the orcs are going to hate assaulting it.”

Connor nods a slow thoughtful motion. “We'll do our best, but it's going to be hard to hold this wall more than a few days.”

As he follows Dacbold, Farnulf has a faint smile. “You better stay focused on setting up a functional defense, before you get fancy with traps.”

“Why don't you go tie a couple sticks together and kneel in front of them.”

As the two leave, everyone on the staging platforms pretends that they don't hear anything. If they start bickering, it's better to just ignore them.

* * * * *

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

The thunderously oppressive sound of the drum rolling over the wall is enough to make most of the players on sentry duty cringe nervously. It began before sunset and continues to reverberate through the dark and cloudy night.

Lurid firelight from the huge bonfires has turned the shingle into a scene from hell. At the very least, hundreds, probably more like thousands, of orcs are wildly dancing on stone and coarse sand. Their brutal clashing with one another makes the most violent mosh pit ever look like a nursery school class. Enraged from the clashes with one another, orcs are engaged in fistfights, wrestling matches, and knockdown, drag out brawls.

Clearly illuminated by a half-circle of torches, the Black Orc is sitting on a throne. That throne looks like it was carved from a single block of obsidian and must weigh several tons. It's hard to believe the orcs would cart it around with them. We haven't found signs of bitches or brats, so this has to be a war party, but who or what are they going to war with in this area?

Once our scouts reached the top of the ridge, they saw tens of thousands of orcs moving through the valley on the far side. They're already cutting us off like we expected. Our only chance to escape will be if  Danleib can find a way back into the Labyrinth.

*Do you think these idiots realize what's going happen?* Ahlred is looking at the players standing watch on the wall.

Most of the players are in eating or resting in camps in the bowl valley behind the wall, with only a hundred or so sentries on the top of the wall. They're all nervous at the very least, and some seem to be on the verge of outright terror. They can tell the difference between these orcs and what they're used to fighting.

*Probably not. When the orcs get the real party going, some of them are probably going to freak.*

A nasty smirk twists Ahlred's lips. It's been a long time since I've seen him showing his hatred of civilians like this.

After another hour or so, the orcs begin dragging out some of the captured players. They're all naked with crude collars on their necks. Despite the crudity of the collars, there is not question as to their purpose. They're meant to cut off the prisoners' ability to use Power. Without any Power, those players are helpless to resist the orcs. They may be prisoners, but if they survive the night, they will be nothing more than slaves to the orcs.

The prisoners are grabbed by orcs and thrown to the ground or over rocks. Screams, pleas, and shrieks punctuate the orcs' rapes of the prisoners. After a few minutes, the screams die out as the victims are abused by orc after orc, sometimes two or more orcs at a time, as every available hole is filled with orc dick. It doesn't matter if the victim is female or male; the orcs are equal opportunity rapists.

*Tomas.* I use my whisper charm, not wanting the rest of the guild to hear me.

*What's up, Thorrin?*

*Don't let anyone come to the wall.*

There are a few moments without anything from Tomas. *What's happening over there?*

*You don't want to know. This is going to be ugly, probably uglier than anything you've seen since the start of The Great Fuck Over.*

There is another short pause. *I get the feeling you've seen stuff this ugly.*

*Don't ask.*

*Alright, I'll keep everyone away. What do I do when Nessa gets a wild hair up her ass?*

*Sit on her. Tie her up. Knock her out. Whatever. Just don't let her come here.*

Drawn by the screams, the top of the wall is being packed with more and more players. Even though the screaming has already died out, they still want to know what caused it. Only a few of them manage to take in the scene without any apparent reaction. Most of them can't keep the fear, disgust, or both off of their faces. Some are vomiting over the wall. Too many of them are shivering where they stand, and some are forcing their way through the press of the crowd behind them, trying to run away.

When Nessa tries to call me with her whisper charm, I block her attempt.

Then, there are the really twisted fucks, both males and females. They have their hands inside their clothing or armor while playing with themselves. Here and there, there are couples tearing off each other's clothes and fucking while they watch the show. Luckily, there aren't too many of them.

*The more I see of people, the more I want to puke.*

I don't respond to Wihtred's comment, but I can't help but feel the same.

Ahlred snorts. *That orc's not dumb. Except for the really twisted fucks, his little show is doing more to unman our faggots than an all-out assault would.*

I'm not sure who I hate more the orcs or these sick bastards that are jerking off or fucking while being sexually aroused by the sexual assault of people that they've known for years. With the orcs, this is just the way their race is. I have no idea why they are like this, but it seems the be their very nature. With the players, I don't know how of why they could be so fucked up. Sure, Earth is a shit hole, but that doesn't justify descending to the level of creatures like orcs. They're human. They should be better than orcs.

The orcs start tying some of the prisoners to the crude timber frames. They seem to have been chosen at random, but their struggles were more energetic than the ones sprawled limply on the ground or rocks while being raped. There are ten frames, and each one has a prisoner bound to it.

At the Black Orc's orders, orc light torches from the bonfires and approach the bound prisoners. Seeing the orcs coming, the prisoners scream and shriek, begging for mercy. Those pleas turn into shrieks and howls of agony as the orcs begin running the torches along their limbs time again.

The players on the wall begin to flee. Even most of the twisted shits that were fucking while watching the gang rapes have stopped fooling around. One after another they flee the wall and run off to who knows where, until only the sickest bastards, the sentries, Connor, and we Dvergar are left. There is no bullshit banter. No comments or stupid jokes. The rest of the Dvergar who were working on the fortification of the spur of land silently join us. None of us like all that many of the players. Given a choice, we wouldn't associate with most of them, but they're still human. As the torture drags on for over two hours, we silent bear witness. While we look on in impotent rage, the last of the prisoners dies.

“Looks, those bastards have Princess.”

Scanning the orc party, I see a muscular blond woman with huge breasts being dragged out. Two orcs have her by the arms and are frog-marching her toward the Black Orc's throne. Despite struggling like a wild animal, she can't even slow them down.

*Is that the nasty bitch that runs The Amazons?* Ahlred usually doesn't pay much attention to who is who.

*That big blonde giving you a chubby?* Wihtred has an eager look on his face. He's probably looking for something to blunt the images of the torture we just forced ourselves to watch, and he never passes up a chance to possibly needle someone.

Ahlred hawks up a huge mouthful for phlegm and spits it over the wall. *I'm not into man-hating cunts that think I should kiss their feet. Had a run in with her a few years back, and I was never sure who she was.*

*A few years? Damn, are you dead? Even in this body, I could work up a boner to titty-fuck that bitch. If you stick something in her mouth so she can't talk, she's damn good looking. I hear that if you like getting the shit beat out of you by a woman, when she's done, she'll hogtie you and ride you like a dildo.*

*So that's what you're into. You should ask her to put a collar on you.*

*Fuck off!*

Despite what's happening, it takes real effort to keep my frown in place. Ahlred is one of the few that can torque off Wihtred without seeming to try.

When the orcs with Princess drag her in front of the Black Orc, he stands up while stroking his dick. At some point during the torture, he took off the lower half of his armor, but I never noticed.

“ZUG! ZUG! ZUG! ZUG! ZUG!”

Zug is the orc god of fuck. For an orc, fuck can be anything from consensual sex to rape, but it's mostly rape. There probably isn't a single orc dialect that has a proper term for consensual sex; the closest thing would be hitting a bitch only two or three times before mounting her.

*Fuck! Is that a dick or a baseball bat. He'd make John Holmes turn green with envy.*

*You're showing your age.*

Wihtred stares at Ahlred like he's examining something unnatural. *You're older than I am.*

*I'm not ashamed of my age.*

After staring at Ahlred for a few seconds, Wihtred pretends to ignore him.

“ZUG! ZUG! ZUG! ZUG! ZUG!” The orcs' chanting gets louder.

The Black Orc grabs Princess by the hair and jams his already hard dick into her mouth. Well, it's only about four or five inches that go in, less than a quarter of the thing.

*I knew that bitch had a big mouth but damn!* Ahlred's smirk is venomous, and the light in his eyes is pure murderous intent. Whether it's for the Black Orc or Princess, that's anybody's guess. It's quite likely for both of them. Ahlred holds grudges.

Princess spasms violently, and fluid sprays out around the Black Orc's dick, spattering its legs and torso armor.

*Did she just puke on him?* Wihtred's eyes are wide open in shock.

*That orc is going to hurt her really bad.*

For a few seconds, the Black Orc just stares at Princess, then its face twists into a mask of pure rage. The force of its slap slams Princess into the ground, and her body actually bounces close to a foot back into the air, before slumping limply on the coarse sand.

When the Black Orc tears a whip off the weapons girdle laying on its throne and starts lashing Princess, her screams echo off the ridge. While howling like a damned soul, she tries to crawl toward our wall, but the brutal strikes of the whip keep flattening her on the beach. Her back turns into a patchwork of raw meat and white bone. Blood splatters twenty feet in all directions.

After her agonized howls die out and she stops moving, the Black Orc picks her up by her blood drenched hair and throws her belly down on a rock that's about waist high for him. As he starts raping her, she struggles vainly reaching toward our wall.

Except for the sound of some of the people standing watch puking, there isn't anything other than faint sounds of breathing from the people on the wall. They've seen brutality in the past twelve years, but this kind of offhanded destruction and abuse of a person goes beyond anything most of them have ever encountered.

When the Black Orc finishes, other orcs start taking turns, and by the third, Princess isn't even twitching.

*Is she dead?* I have a feeling she is.

*Yeah. I didn't like that cunt, but it's a worse ending than even she deserved.* Ahlred has an uncanny knack for knowing when something is dead or alive.

“Why didn't you save them?” Kamehameha's voice is unsteady, and his face still has vomit spatters on it. He wasn't one of the sentries, but he still must have watched it all.

I force myself to not sigh. “There are too many orcs, too many prisoners, and too few of us. There's nothing we could've done.”

Ahlred glares at Kamehameha. “There was a time I would have been stupid enough to rush out and try to save them. Now, I know better. I won't try to save people who would try to have me jailed for not giving them the special privileges they think they're owed.”

Kamehameha looks like we just destroyed his world. “You're supposed to be heroes. Heroes don't let people die like that.”

Ahlred turns his back on Kamehameha. “Heroes? We're not fucking heroes. We never were. We're just soldiers and sailors that didn't get killed when we were sent to war. There's no such thing as fucking heroes. It's a bullshit fucking lie that politicians and other scum tell you to make you willing to die for them.”

Kamehameha shakes his head. “No. You're wrong. Heroes are real. You're fucking wrong!”

The clatter of his metal shod boots fades as he runs down the ramp and disappears into the camps.

“He's still a fucking kid. Doesn't matter that he's been in the middle of this bullshit for ten years. He still hasn't grown up. Kids shouldn't have to see this kind of fucking shit.” Ahlred's tone is vicious. The rage he's barely suppressing is audible in every word.

None of us reply to him.

The Third Day

The Great Fuck Over Day 4,183

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

The drums start pounding again before dawn.

Crackle-boom!

Thunder temporarily drowns out the drums, as lightning illuminates the undersides of the heavy storm clouds overhead. The heavy rain makes it so we can't even see the orc camp or the scene of their torture party.

I'm surprised the attack has been this long in coming. I have been waiting on top of this wall since the orcs finished their torture games. With this storm, the orcs could have reached the wall and possibly overrun us before we could respond. That Black Orc doesn't want to just defeat and capture us. He wants to break us.

I turn to the nearest sentry. “Call up our forces. The orcs are attacking.”

The sentry's face pales, and he activates his whisper charm. He's probably calling Connor.

*The orcs are preparing to attack.* I spend the message in the party channel that I'm in with the other Dvergar.

Faint vibrations reach my feet through the stone wall. The marching feet of the advancing orc is enough to shake the ground. With my Dvergar eyes, I see the uneven ranks of the orcs long before the humans around me do. There are five rows of warriors, and behind them, there is a line of shamans.

Connor reaches the top of the wall and stands next to me.

*Their sixth rank is a pack shamans. There are enough of them to make something closer to three ranks, but there is no order to them.* I use a whisper charm. Connor is no longer in a party with us Dvergar.

Connor glances at me. He knows that Dvergar eyes are better than human eyes, but he doesn't know just how much better.

*What can we expect from these shamans.* Connor yawns and rubs his eyes. His mannerisms say that he's bored.

I shrug. *Not much different from inside the Labyrinth in terms of spells. Orcs tend to like elemental and weather type magic. The big difference will be the amount of Power they can shove into their spells. Expect these shaman to be casting spells two or three times as strong as what you'd face inside the Labyrinth.*

Connor is stretching out his muscles in a relaxed manner. *That's not good.*

I snort. *It could be a lot worse. It'll be very good if they don't pull out any wildcard spells. The nubs are in no condition mentally to be dealing with too many surprises. That fucking orc's show last night has put the fear of Zug in them.*

Connor looks at me with one eyebrow slightly raised. *If that's supposed to be a joke, it's not particularly funny.*

*Wihtred would have laughed.*

*Wihtred's a fucking lunatic. The only bigger nut job I've ever met in my entire life is Ahlred.*

*Yeah. Ahlred's got a few issues to work out.*

*A few? It would take a supply division a month to haul all his issues.*

Connor narrows his eyes and stares at me. *Asshole. This is no time for stupid jokes!*

*You feeling a bit less tense?*

*Fuck you. Thank you.*

Connor walks off and starts talking to some of the players on the wall.

“I see them!”

The shout raises the tension levels of the players through the roof. Nearly everyone watching tightly grips the hilts and haft of weapons or wands and staves meant to focus Power or hold embedded spell formations.

Appearing from the darkness and curtains of rain, the five ranks of orc warriors advance toward our wall. Behind them, the loose clusters of shamans follow. Within the large gap behind the shamans, the Black Orc is carried on his massive obsidian throne. The faces of the massively muscled orcs on whose shoulders the throne is borne, are filled with fierce pride.

“WARDS UP!” Connor's bellow is clearly audible from the cliff to the sea, and certainly, is heard by the advancing orcs.

Though the orcs probably cannot understand the words, they find out the meaning of them in seconds. All along the wall, a variety of wards are erected. Depending on the natures and disciplines of the Casters, the types of ward vary markedly in their natures. Among them, there are walls of force; shields of wind, lightning, and fire; walls and webs of light and darkness.

At a gesture from the Black Orc, one of the orcs walking next to his throne bellows a command. I recognize what should be the Orcish word for use, but none of the rest of it.  Their dialect is radically different from the ones my body learned in the Battleground of the Damned.

The orc shamans begin to chant and dance. Some of them make ritual incisions on various parts of their bodies, drawing blood. A couple starts raping slaves with symbols tattooed on their bodies. One of them starts masturbating. Despite the seemingly insane casting rituals and slow casting, shamanic magic is nothing to laugh at.

Over a few minutes, one after the next, wards spring up over and in front of the ranks of orc warriors. Made up of earth, wind, water and fire, each is equal to or stronger than the strongest ones put up by our Casters.

The already cowed players are visibly shaken seeing the birth of those wards. Most are looking around, as though they're searching for some way to escape. Some are even shaking in their boots. Only here and there are a few visible who seem unaffected by the scene, as they quietly watch the orcs below.

“Har har har. Look at that fucking orc with the puny little pecker. He just did five ugly chicks, and all he got was that crappy little wind wall.” Wihtred is slapping his thigh with one hand while pointing at one of the orc shamans that was raping slaves.

“He must be a soldier.” Ahlred's tone sounds nasty, but he's probably in a good mood.

Wihtred stares at Ahlred with an evil expression. “A needle dick bitch like him wouldn't make it in the fucking Army. That orc's an ass-fucking squid.”

“You should know if that orc is an ass-fucker. Scuttlebutt has it you always dropped the soap in the showers. I'll let you watch while I cut the dick off your future shower buddy down there and stuff down his throat before cutting his head off.”

“That orc's mine.”

Cwichelm glances around at the surrounding players. “You two better not let Thorrin get to him first. Now that he's picked up Talon's habit of kicking them in the balls, you two won't have much to cut off.”

“Shut it, gyrene.”

“Fuck off, leatherneck.”

The players nearest us are staring. Some have their mouths hanging open as the stare at Ahlred and Wihtred in confusion. One thing about all of them is that they no longer seem quite so scared.

Ahlred immediately turns back to Wihtred. “So that orc's yours. You gonna whisper sweet nothings in his ear while giving him the reach around.”

“Coming from a shit eater who took long fucking tropical cruises on ships full of nothing but swinging fucking dicks, your scuttlebutt ain't worth an orc's farts.”

A few of the watching players have started laughing.

“You sound jealous, but we had women on those cruises. Why do you the navy let women in? They're there to give us swinging dicks some pussy on those long cruises.”

“Hey, you sexist bastard what kind of fucking sexual harassment bullshit are you spewing now?” The one screaming is a pretty good looking woman in armor. She's got one hell of rack under that armor too. That's just the way Wihtred likes them, the bigger the tits the better. I know I've seen her around, but I can't remember her name. I may have never learned it to begin with.

Ahlred glances over his shoulder at the woman. “Life support for a pussy. Don't get killed, after this battle, there will be plenty of swinging dicks looking for a wet hole.”

Almost every male player in hearing range is either laughing or smirking. The few that aren't probably aren't worth much in a fight, to begin with.

“What the fuck? You fucking bastard you should be in jail for saying things like that. No, I'm going to make sure you go to jail once we get out of this shit.” As she screeches The woman stalks over and jabs her finger toward Ahlred with each word.

Wihtred's smirk would make the Cheshire Cat green with envy. He flexes his muscles stretching his vest to the limit. Like usual, he's not wearing any armor, so he can show off his tattoos and piercings better.

“Hey, baby doll. You can chill out. I'll let you ride my pole when we get a little break in the fighting. Look at how thick my body is, and you can imagine how thick my pole is.”

The woman involuntarily glances down at his groin, with a speculative look in her eyes. Seeing her action, most everyone nearby, male and female alike, breaks out in roaring laughter.

Her skin flushed and her eyes gleaming with rage, the woman glares at Wihtred. “You asshole! I'll make sure you rot in jail along with your friend.”

Ahlred's single harsh bark or a laugh cut through the air. “There isn't a single social camera here. By its own laws, without social camera footage, the government can't persecute you. Get a clue about where we are, bitch.”

Danleib loudly clears his throat and points toward the orcs. “We have some orcs to kill, and there are plenty for everyone to get their share of orc dicks and balls for trophies. You three can get together later for your little orgy.”

The laughter isn't quite as natural as people turn toward the oncoming orcs, but a lot the near terror has been dispelled.

*Sometimes, I don't know what to make of you two.*

*The faggots needed something to break through that Black Orcs little mind games. That orc piece of shit is too smart by half.* Ahlred glares down at the Black Orc on his obsidian throne.

A few minutes later, with a barked command from one of the orcs attending the Black Orc, ranks of orc archers advance from behind the throne. A horn blows and thousands of arrows are launched toward our wall. As the arrows take flight, the orc shamans begin to cast new spells.

“FIRE!” Connor's voice booms out once again, not requiring any Power amplification to be heard clearly across the battlefield.

The martial players begin shooting bows and crossbows, hoping to find a hole or chink in the wards. The Casters begin to launch their spells in an attempt to break the wards. Between our wall and the advancing orc horde, the sky lights up with a show of magical pyrotechnics that rivals a late twentieth century or early twenty-first century Earth battlefield.

With the existence of wards, the only purpose of the exchange of missile and spell fire is to make sure that the other side doesn't stick their noses out from inside the wards. Under the cover of their wards, the orcs reach the foot of the walls. Armed with mauls that have heads bigger than quarter kegs of beer, they begin to pound on the stone at the bottom of the wall.

We can't afford to keep up this kind of an exchange for too long a time, but we can't back off, or the orcs will have free rein to do what they want. The orcs doubtlessly have more shamans in reserve than we have combat level spell Casters, so we'll ultimately lose a battle of attrition, but the longer we drag it out the better.

Cwichelm looks over the edge or the parapet. “That's a trick I haven't seen from orcs before.”

“Too bad we don't have a lot of oil. Would could give them an early Christmas present.” A wistful expression on Ahlred's face almost makes me lose my frown.

“Let me through! Make way!” One of the firebugs, a big burly redheaded man pushes his way toward the battlements from on of the staging platforms. A huge staff, a foot taller than the man, thumps on the stone in time to his steps.

“Who the fuck is that?” Wihtred is giving the man his evil eye, the one that means he's probably going to start trouble.

“Leave him alone. He's one of the biggest pyromaniacs you'll ever meet. Calls himself Fizban.” Danleib watches the man with a half-smirk on his lips.

“Fizban? Why does that sound fucking familiar.” Wihtred narrows his eyes.

“Old fantasy novels. A few years older than you, I think.”

Wihtred looks at me, with a malicious glint in his eyes.

“Don't even start. I'm not in the mood.”

Fizban reaches the battlements and looks over. His face changes from annoyed to gleefully vicious.

“That face reminds of a tattooed idiot that can't sing for shit.”

“Fuck off!”

Reaching into a bag of holding attached to his belt, Fizban pulls out a dozen miniature kegs ranging from pint size to gallon size and sets them on the walkway at his feet. Raising the huge staff into the air, he begins drawing a spell pattern ten or twelve feet in diameter. The lines of the pattern glow with mix of red and gold. As its complexity grows, the lids pop off the kegs, and the contents float into air, becoming a ball of liquid floating over the spell pattern. When all the kegs are empty, streamers of red-gold Power rise from the pattern into the ball, and it still keeps growing in size. After several minutes, the ball of liquid is easily thirty feet in diameter, and Fizban is pale as a ghost.

“Ignis!” As the liquid bursts into flame, Fizban sweeps his staff left and right.

The flaming liquid sprays outward in a sheet, covering the orcs' wards. Instead of being blocked, it flows along the wards. Finding the edges of each ward and the gaps between them, the flaming liquid streams down onto the orcs below.

“AAARRRRR! RAAAAAARRRRRRRR! AAAAIIIIIII!”

Bellows and roars of agony rise up from the orcs below. Engulfed in flames, orcs run around helter-skelter. As they slam into other orcs, the viscous flames set more of them alight.

“Magic napalm. Nasty.” Ahlred sounds impressed. Him being impressed is even rarer than a government bureaucrat caring about doing his job.

The initial burst of the magic napalm covered about a quarter of the length of our wall, but the damage is spreading as the orcs run out of control. The other orcs are mercilessly killing any of the already flame engulfed orcs that get near them. The fires have still spread across half of the front ranks of orcs, before the last of the flaming orcs lies dead.

Leaning heavily on his staff, Fizban is pale and shaking, as the sweat rolls down his face. Connor claps him on the shoulder.

“It's over. Good job.”

Walking unsteadily, Fizban retreats to the staging area and slumps down onto the stone. With his back bent like a U, he sits cross-legged on the wet stone. None of the other players gets too close to him, and a number of them look at him askance, fear visible in their eyes.

*He just bought them some time, at a cost that could have resulted in permanent damage to himself, but these chicken shit bitches are terrified of him. Why are we fighting for these gutless faggots?*

None of us responds to Ahlred's comment or question. I don't know about the others, but I don't have any answer. As much as I want to save the other player and send them all safely back to Earth, I can't keep from being disgusted by them. Once poisoned by Earth's warped society and complete lack of resembling a coherent system of values, most people are beyond redemption. Even so, it doesn't mean that they deserved to be used by The Nameless God in this Great Fuck Over.

The orcs pull back while rebuilding their ranks. The common orc and a number of the sub-leaders seem scared, but the Black Orc just scans the top of the wall, its face a mask of fury.

Compared to the orcs, our losses are minor. No one was killed, and only thirty-seven were injured. Unless there is significant damage to a joint, organ, or bone, our healers will have most any injury healed within a day or so.

Looking at its coterie of sub-leaders, the Black Orc snarls instructions at them for a good fifteen minutes. Nearly trembling with fear, the sub-leaders scatter when the Black Orc finishes with them.

Thousands more orcs gather together. This time, they are not in semi-regimented ranks, but rather, in a huge mass. Half of them are in heavy armor, like the ones that assaulted our wall with their mauls. The rest are dressed in lighter armor but are bristling with weapons.

Following the delivery of the Black Orc's orders, the shamans gather together and change the spells they are casting.

*They're going to send those lighter armored orcs up the wall.*

Connor stares at me, his eyes widening slightly in surprise.

*How?*

I faintly shrug my shoulders. *Not sure. The heavy armored ones with the tower shields should advance in front. The lighter armored one will have some means to scale the wall. It's not an atypical orc tactic. They might use ropes. They might have some ability or device to walk up it like a spider. They might have some way to jump this high. It could be some other way entirely. I don't know anything about this horde, though, so I can't really guess which.*

*Damn.* Connor turns to a couple of guild leaders next to him and starts issuing orders.

The players on top of the wall are shuffled around and the Casters with most of the close combat armed players all move back onto the staging platforms. Behind the mostly missile weapon using players at the battlements, polearm and spear wielding players take the place of the close combatants.

With the sacrifice of a hundred or so slaves, the orc shamans complete their ritual. After working together, they cast a single wind based ward that spans the length of our wall. There won't be any gaps for something like Fizban's napalm to slip through. After seeing what happened that Black Orc understood the weakness against a spell like that in the way orcs, especially their shamans, normally work. Ordinary orcs may be borderline idiots, but the Black Orc is smart and dangerous.

With that huge wind ward covering them, the orcs begin to advance. Our archers and Casters fire spells and missile at it in vain. No matter what they use, at best, it's dissipated or deflected by the ward, but some of the spells and missiles are turned about and come flying back at us. After our wards get hammered by a dozen of our own spells, Connor orders our Casters and archers to stand down.

*Get all our Casters with decent electrical spells to target the same location.* By using a whisper charm, I keep most others from knowing that I'm giving Connor advice.

Connor glances toward me. *Why?*

*All spells have their strengths and weaknesses. Air is a strong insulator, but a wind ward like that lacks the ability to reflect or deflect it. The few lighting bolts our side used, cut into that wall of wind but weren't enough to penetrate with the way they were scattered.*

Connor looks around, before giving orders to the guild leaders near him. With the whisper charms and guild bracelets, it's as quick to pass orders as having radios. Even so, we don't have our Casters coordinated before the orcs reach the foot of the wall. Our command structure is inefficient. There is no uniformity to the sizes of our units because they are all based around the guilds. I have to hand it to Connor to be as effective as he is in controlling battles like this.

“RAAAAAARRRRRRRR”

A roaring orc lands in one of the crenels not far from where we Dvergar are standing. A heavy spiked mace in its left hand crushes a players head, while the axe in its right is deflected by a player next to the battlement.

“What the fuck?” Wihtred is blankly staring at the orc a second, until a second orc lands in the crenel in front of him.

“Not interested. Take your shit fucking vacuum and go home!” After blocking a dozen or more attacks while he talks, Wihtred's shield bash sends the orc flying out of the crenel, spinning head over heels.

All along the wall, orcs are landing in the crenels and on the merlons between them.

Stepping up in the crenel, Wihtred nearly splits an orc in two with his axe and looks down.

“There are pairs of orcs with tower shields to sling these bitches like FedEx packages.

Wihtred blocks a rising orcs sword slash and kicks it in the groin. As the orc flies through the air turning greenish, he laughs like a madman. “Ha! Ha! Ha! Now, I know why fucking Talon loved to fucking kick people in the fucking balls so much! Come on, faggots! Batter up! Pitch some more of your ass-fucking fags!”

The orcs may not know English, but they can tell when they're being mocked. As dozens of javelins and arrows bounce off the battlements and his shield, Wihtred jumps back down from the crenel.

An orc lands in the crenel vacated by Wihtred, followed by two more landing on the merlons next to it. As Wihtred engages the one in the crenel, the orc on the merlon to his left drops one of the players with a blow to the head. When it jumps down, I spring forward crushing the one on his left between my shield and the stone of the merlon. Momentarily dazed by the impact, the orc can't defend itself, and its body falls to the parapet walkway minus its head.

With the wall of wind blocking spells and missile, we can't do much to impede the orcs on the ground. More and more of them keep landing on top of the battlements. They're dying by the dozens, but there are still places where they are forcing breeches. Not all the players are equal as combatants, and we already have dozens who are injured, some probably dead.

After a few minutes, I feel the vibrations from the orcs' massive mauls beating on the base of the wall again. Even with the geomancers' reinforcing it, those orcs can probably bring the whole thing down in the three of four days at most. With their current assault method, there isn't much we can do to stop them either.

Looking to the east, there are thousands more orcs streaming toward our wall. Even though this phase of the battle has been going on for less than an hour, only three areas on the wall are holding firm: the section controlled by us Dvergar, the section controlled by Connor's King of Taereun, and surprisingly, the section controlled Kamehameha's Dragonball Warriors and a couple other mini-guilds.

*He's been different since we left the Labyrinth.* Danleib's words are sent via whisper charm, even though we're in a common party channel.

*What do you mean?*

*While you were beating yourself up over Talon's death and preparing his grave on the side, Kamehameha kept watching you the entire time.*

*I wasn't beating myself up.*

Danleib looks at me derisively out of the corner of his eye, while emasculating an orc with a rising strike of his axe. *No matter how you cut it, you're Thorrin, formerly Harold T. Sawyer of Earth. You were beating yourself up over something you had no control over.*

*Whatever. What's the point about Kamehameha?*

*I don't understand exactly what Kamehameha's fixation with Talon was, but his hostility toward him was not driven by dislike. There is some other reason behind it. I was watching at Talon's funeral. He seemed to have come to terms with something or made some kind of choice. Talon's death had to be the catalyst for it, and I think his outburst about heroes last night has something to do with it.*

Kamehameha always seemed like a smart-ass punk to me. Because of his almost gang-banger level bad attitude, I never gave him the time of day. The rest of his guild seemed the same. They always hung together like a pack of inner city street thugs outside a convenience store.

Whatever caused Kamehameha to change, I don't have the time to think about it right now. We have dozens of orcs on top of the wall trying to expand their beachhead, and the only thing keeping them back is the constant deadly rain of missiles and spells. Without the wall of wind to block their spells, our Casters and archers are showing off their expertise in sniping.

From the first time I played head to head in a first person shooter till now, gamers have always been addicted to sniping. It gets them the most reward with the least risk. Even in this world of Taereun, many of the players with strong ranged spells and ranged weapon skills have thought like PvP gamers and honed their ability at sniping attack.

*Connor, if you and your Kings can reinforce the players between you and Kamehameha, we Dvergar will reclaim the southern half of the wall. Get some guilds with strong combatants up here to reinforce the space between the five of us.* Dacbold and Farnulf are working on preparing the spit of land for our final stand, but with some decent fighters to back us up, the rest of us are more than enough to control the top of this wall. At least, we are for now.

In just a couple minute, a group of more than fifty players starts climbing up the ramp nearest us. They are all people who were part of the front line clearing forces for all of the eleven plus years of the Great Fuck Over.

“We Dvergar are going to spread out across the southern half of the wall. You cover the spaces between us. If the orcs put too much pressure on your groups, we'll back you up where their pressing their attacks.”

“You sure talk big for a little guy.” I don't need to look to know the speaker is Li Xi. He's about seven feet tall, with skin the color of polished ebony and the facial features of a Caucasian. It's a typical combination in certain parts of the Battleground of the Damned. In a lot of places in the Battleground and the Lands of Despair, the typical mixes of facial features, body types, and skin colors are all mixed up based on Earth perspectives.

Leaving my spot to Li Xi and some of his people, I move toward Connor. The other Dvergar spread out as well, and more front line fighters fill in the gaps between them. In less than fifteen minutes, the situation on the wall stabilizes. Now, the orcs are lucky to last ten seconds after hitting the top of our wall.

There is still nothing we can do about the orc attacking the wall itself, but I'm sure Connor doesn't plan on holding this wall indefinitely There are too many orcs, and by tomorrow or the next day at the latest we'll be fighting a battle on two fronts, when the orcs circle around us and hit us on the west side too. The spit of land is where we will make our final stand. It's the only place we'll have a chance of surviving.

* * * * *

As the sun sets, still hidden behind the storm clouds, the orcs stop assaulting the wall. As I watch them retreat, still guarded against spells and missiles by their wall of wind, I'm not sure I keep the surprise off my face.

*What the fuck? Are those shit-fuckers actually retreating?* Confusion is plain as day in Wihtred's voice.

*That fucking Black Orc is way too smart for our good.* Ahlred's angry voice holds a touch of grudging respect.

*An orc leader actually resting his troops, instead of mindlessly attacking until they win or get routed. I think I've seen everything possible under the sun.* Cwichelm is staring blankly at the retreating orc lines.

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

*Looks like it's time for another fucking orc party!* Wihtred spits over the wall.

Connor joins us and accepts my invitation to our party channel. *We're in trouble.*

I snort to keep from laughing. *We've been in trouble since those bastards showed up, but yeah, we might be in really deep shit now. The wind wall. Assaulting the top of the wall to screen his troops attacking its base. Resting his troops. This orc actually knows how to plan a battle.*

*So what's the difference between these orcs and the ones we've been fighting?*

*Think of the ones inside the Labyrinth as the retards on the short bus, and that will be close enough.*

Connor stares at me for a minute, before walking off without asking anything else. When he reaches the guild leaders acting as officers, he gives them orders to rotate out the fighters on the wall and get a fresh watch up here.

After glancing at one another, we Dvergar leave the wall as well. Even though my body could keep going for another few days without any real need for rest, I'm tired. The cruelty and brutality of the orcs have already taken its toll on me. Their lust for dominance and destruction is even uglier than the bullshit repressive society that has dominated America.

*This is a world where the strong eat the weak.* Danleib has a sad smile and uses a whisper charm so that I am the only one hearing his words.

*Is that really any different from Earth?*

Danleib appraises me with a strange look on his face. *Even though we never talked about it, I always thought you understood. America, Europe, and East Asia are all tyrannies of the weak. On Earth, through the manipulation of democratic political systems, the weak have crushed the strong into submission. Our moral codes and values are all shaped by those systems. Here, what passes for morality is dictated by the strong.*

I sigh. *It's wrong. The wanton cruelty of the orcs disgusts me.*

*The destruction of the exceptional on Earth is no better. Look at you. You fear letting the other players see that you're superior. It doesn't matter what we are on Earth. Here, we are Dvergar, and we are superior to any mere humans. If you don't stop hiding and holding back, you and maybe the rest of us along with you will die here, in this battle. You've may have been broken by our warped society, but you can't let it kill you for real.*

My glare doesn't phase Danleib. *If I'm broken, what are you?*

For a few moments, Danleib seems to not see they world around him. *Destroyed.*

With a self-mocking smile, Danleib's turns and leaves me to my own thoughts. As I watch him walk away, his manner sends a chill down my spine. I have the eerie feeling that I'm watching a man who is already dead.

Trying to shake off the dark mood, I continue through the rain to where my Hammers are camped. Under a canopy to keep off the rain, the rest of the Hammers are gathered around plank tables. I stand in the darkness where they can't see me and just watch them for a time. They are eating a meal with little to no conversation. Periodically, one or another of them looks toward the wall with a bleak expression.

Even though they have bodies with the ability to use Mana, they are still all human. They aren't in freakishly overpowered bodies. I wonder what their reactions would be if they ever saw me really use this body to its fullest potential? Would they ever be able to look at me without a hint of fear somewhere deep inside?

“Thorrin!” As I approach the camp, Tomas is the first one to notice me.

“Tomas.”

Tomas stares at me as I exchange greetings with the rest of the Hammers. He's known me longer than any of them. Taereun was not the first game we played together. It's probably not obvious to the rest, but I can tell that he's worried about me.

Sitting down on a chair built to withstand the mass of my more than five hundred pound body plus the weight of my heavy plate armor, I eat with my guild. Surreptitiously looking at their faces as they eat, I realize that rather than friends, I see them more as my children. While I was married three times, I never had any children. Of the player inhabiting these bodies, even Tomas, the oldest at fifty-something, could still be my grandchild.

After so many years together, in many ways, this guild is more like a family than a guild. The silence from before has been replaced with small talk about the weather, gear, abilities, and other players. None of them mention the orc horde, even though it must be weighing on minds. We all know the orcs are out there, on the other side of the wall. It is impossible not to hear the pounding of the drums and the screams of their victims, but we still pretend to be unaware of their presence.

No matter the cost, even if they come to fear me, I'm not going to let them die at the hands of the orcs. I'm going to see that these people get home to Earth.

Once the meal is finished and the camp policed, the rest of the guild retires to their tent and hopefully a nights sleep, but I'm not tired. Even after being up for two and a half days, this body still isn't anywhere near fatigued, and my mind is too restless to be able to relax.

Digging out my tobacco pouch, I ruefully bounce it on my palm. It's more than a year since we found any supplies of decent tobacco, and my pouch only has enough left for three or maybe four more pipes. Though, if I don't smoke it now, I may never get another chance to. Taking out my pipe that is carved from a block of petrified wood, I fill it.

“Steel is stubbornness.” The words whispered under my breath are inaudible to anyone else. Even though I don't need to actually say the words aloud anymore, a feeling of nostalgia prompts me to do so anyway.

With a muttered mnemonic, I create a glowing spark above the tip of my finger and light my pipe. As the rich warm smoke flows into my lungs, the rich flavor of tobacco without any artificial additives fills my mouth. I smoked in my early years, around the time I was in the Marines, but I quit before I was forty. This body was being accustomed to smoking, I reacquired the habit as a Taereun player and never gave up once The Great Fuck Over began.

“Hey, old man.” Kamehameha's words reach me, as he cockily struts out of the Darkness. He had been watching me for a while, but he probably had no clue I could see him in the night and rain. His mannerisms and attitude are off. This isn't the usual brash and arrogant to the point of offensiveness Kamehameha.

“Kameha.”

He stares at me for more than a minute, before taking a chair and setting it down so there's about a forty-five degree angle between his and mine. With our chairs' positions, we have to turn our heads to look straight at each other. More than a quarter hour passes, while Kamehameha sits in his chair looking at me out of the corner of his eye. In the background, the partially drowned out screams of the players being raped and tortured by the orc die out.

“Why?” Kamehameha's voice is hollow.

“That's a pretty open ended question.”

“Why do the orcs have do that? Why won't you and the others save them? Why… I don't know. . .why is everything so fucked up?”

I sigh. The hollow empty feeling inside of me that I've been trying to ignore seems to dig deeper, clawing at my pride and self-worth.

“There are too many of them and too few of us. There was no way we could have saved them, and if we tried, we would have just been killed. Orcs like hurting and killing. I think it's a part of their DNA.”

“So why is the world so fucked up?”

“If you figure it out, let me know.”

“We're gonna make it out of this, right?” Kamehameha sounds like he's trying to suppress his anxiety. In the almost twelve years of The Great Fuck Over, he's never been in a situation as bad as this one. There is no way anyone could blame him for being scared shitless.

I don't try to stop from sighing. “No. Unless we get really lucky, we're probably not getting out of this in one piece. The odds are stacked so hard against us, it'll take a miracle to survive.”

Even though I'm still looking mostly away, Kamehameha stares at me for a couple minutes without saying a word. His breathing is a bit ragged. Finally, he takes a deep breath and slowly lets it out.

“Yeah . . . that's what I was afraid of. I guess this means it's a good day to die?” The questioning tone is clear in Kamehameha's voice.

“I didn't think you young ones knew that phrase anymore.”

Kamehameha smirks. “I'm special.

“Uh, so how do we get lucky? I got some loaded dice if that will help.”

I chuckle and struggle to keep my frown in place. “No, that's not gonna help none. If Danleib manages to find another viable way back into the Labyrinth, we'll get lucky. If he doesn't, it'll be better for you if the orcs don't take you alive.”

Kamehameha stares off into the rainy night, a despondent look on his face. From things that I've heard in the past, I know he was only a high school kid on Earth. Like Ahlred said, he hasn't grown up much during The Great Fuck Over. That seems to be pretty much the case for all the teenagers that got caught up in this mess.

While we're sitting here not talking, Danleib comes near the camp but stops a distance away. He is far enough out that Kamehameha should not be able to see him, but he's close enough that with Dvergar senses he'll have no trouble hearing what we say.

“Hey, Kameha, where the hell did a kid like you learn about Dragonball? It was on the banned media list for thirty years, until they banned the banned list.”

Kamehameha laughs smugly. “Middle school. We found a stash of old flash drives that had movies, books, comics, manga, all kinds of shit. There was Tarzan, Conan, Captain America, Lord of the Rings, Bleach, Dragonball. Dragonball was the best. I've always wanted to be like Goku, a hero.”

A string of emotions flashes across Kamehameha's face. As he roughly rubs his cheeks, he almost looks like he's ready to cry. “I'm no fucking hero though. I already learned I don't have the balls to do it.”

As his eyes seem to focus on something far away, a grin splits Kamehameha's lips. “Did I ever tell you I saw Talon in the Battleground. It was Noobageddon. We were new to the game. We were trying to be heroes. We couldn't do it. Thug Horde was killing us, and he showed up. A couple Thugs crapped their pants for real. Talon killed them all.”

“Yeah, Talon loved Noobageddons. He always went Thug hunting.”

Kamehameha starts to laugh. He laughs so hard tears start to leak out of the corners of his eye, or maybe, the tears aren't falling because he's laughing. “We didn't know who he was. When we called him a hero, I thought he was gonna kill us. I nearly shit my pants.”

I can't stop from sighing. “Talon was just another survivor. He hated Thug Horde. Killing and torturing them was a game to him. Even after The Great Fuck Over started, he still killed any of them that was dumb enough to fuck with him. I should be disgusted by that or look down on him for it, but with Talon, I just can't do that.”

His face nearly purple from rage, Kamehameha stares at me. “You say he was a survivor, but he's dead now. Survivors don't save people they know are gonna kill them. Heroes do that. He helped that bitch. He saved her ass a bunch of times that I know about. He helped her guild, and those fucking cocksuckers murdered him.

“If I find them when they don't have backup, I'm gonna kill them. I'm gonna kill all of them and shit on their corpses.”

*Do you understand what's going on with him?* I use my whisper charm to talk with Danleib.

*Without counseling, I can only make an educated guess. He has a bad case of hero worship for Talon, but Talon not living up to his ideals has left him with some very contradictory feelings regarding Talon. I'm not going to play counselor for him.*

I snort. *I'm not asking you to.*

His attention drawn by my snort, Kamehameha looks at me, and then, looks around. At first, he doesn't notice Danleib, but after a few moments, his stare settles on the darkness where Danleib is standing.

“Who's there?” Noticeable hostility fills Kamehameha's words.

Danleib walks into the camp. Even with his feet shod in Dvergar steel sabatons, his footsteps are silent.

“I'm not a hero either, kid. I stopped believing in heroes long before the best part of you rolled down your mommy's leg, and you should probably just give up on killing the Bohemian Cats.”

Bristling with anger, Kamehameha rises to his feet in a confrontational manner. “What do you mean by give up? I'm going to kill those backstabbing mother-fuckers!”

Danleib's smile is cold as ice, and Kamehameha unconsciously flinches.

“You're lucky I'm not Ahlred. He would just slap you to the ground instead of giving you the chance to sit down again. You're not bad for the typical run of players. You have become stronger, since the start of The Great Fuck Over, but you're not a Dvergar. This world is harsh, and if we survive, you had better learn who you can and cannot offend.

“Now, sit down!”

When Kamehameha slumps back into his chair, Danleib looks at me. “You go too easy on these smart-mouth punks. It's not doing them any favors, and where we're headed, they will only get dead, if they don't learn to behave. Intellectually, I understand your reluctance to use your strength, but it's only hurting people like this to let them think that they can act out in face of people with superior strength and live.”

Danleib's words are meant as an admonishment to both myself and Kamehameha. Glancing at Kamehameha, I see fear mixed with an unusually introspective expression on his face.

“Then, I just need to be stronger than you to do what I want.”

Danleib's smile is anything but friendly. “No. You need to be stronger than who or whatever you want to disregard. If you have that kind of strength in this world, no one will contest your right to do what you want to. At least, they won't contest you, if they value their lives.”

Kamehameha eyes move down and back up Danleib's near five feet of height before an extreme wariness becomes visible in his eyes. He knows that he's no match for Danleib in a fight.

“That's right. You not even close to being my equal. The strongest non-Dvergar among the Damned isn't close to my equal, and you're still a good way short of being his equal. So, you just sit there, watch, listen, and learn.”

Danleib takes a massive steel chair out of one bag of holding and sets it on the ground next to mine. The chair is almost a work of art. Every surface has been engraved with precise schematic like drawings of the inner workings of machinery that were done by Danleib himself. Still, he claims that on Earth he had no artistic talent and was no more than a fair shade tree mechanic before the permanent banning of internal combustion engines.

After sitting, Danleib sets up his projection crystal for displaying the scenes monitored by his constructs and inserts a crystal in one of the slots on it.

“When I sent birds to search the Labyrinth, I also sent a number of birds inland on a fixed pattern. This is a compilation of  images recorded from multiple birds.”

I've never known if Danleib's equipment originally had the ability to record images or if he added the functionality. I don't suppose it really matters.

A stream of images shows the general layout of the orc horde. It's hard to make an accurate estimate of the total number of warriors, but it has to be at least four hundred thousand of them.

“There are no bitches or brats. That's nothing but bulls. If we can outlast their supplies, we might have a chance.” My words are soft, but I can hear the hope in my voice.

Tapping the control crystals for the display, Danleib moves the video to another section. “You sure? Look at those orcs. Have you ever seen that kind of military precision in an orc horde. They look like a professional elite regiment. That is close to a hundred thousand orc elites.”

It feel like a cold hand has clamped around my heart. I had seen some of these orcs in the feed but did not pay attention to them. Maybe, I didn't want to see them. The marching orcs are dressed in uniformly styled platemail, and each one is carrying a twelve foot spear resting against his shoulder. While their steps aren't at parade ground quality, they are still uniform and in sync with one another. Just being well drilled doesn't mean much, but these are orcs. Orcs never have the patience and focus to be trained into disciplined troops. Various overlords have tried in the past, but no matter the threats, the orcs always violently rebelled against strong discipline. Since my memories about this are from childhood schooling, they could be wrong, but I don't think that they are.

“This is going to be the hardest battle we've ever faced. The way the orcs carried out the second assault today was nothing like other orcs we've fought.”

I sigh. I seem to be sighting a lot in the past few days. “Most of the players have several months worth of food supplies, and a few have a lot more than that. I think we have more supplies than the horde. At least, I hope we do.”

“Even if we have enough supplies, can enough of us survive long enough to outlast that horde?”

For a few minutes, the only sounds come from the storm, the nearby camps of other guilds, and the screams of the few remaining victims of the orcs that can still scream.

Hoping to see something that will give me an idea, I stare at the spliced together footage of the orc hordes. I have no idea what Danleib and Kamehameha might be thinking about, but they both are staring silently at the same images.

After a bit Kamehameha's hand clenches into a tight fist. “I don't give a fuck how many of them there are. I'm going to get out of here, and I going to kill those fucking traitors. Even if I can't be a hero, I can kill those cowards!”

Danleib's tone is flat. “I already told you, you probably won't get the chance.”

Danleib fiddles with the control crystals again. The images fast forward to the scene of a group of players being marched along as orc prisoners. Naked and chained, there are bruises, welts, and other minor wound all over their bodies.

“Fuck! The orcs have those Cat traitors!” Kamehameha's voice is loud enough to echo off the cliff.

Danleib stands and his casual backhand knocks both Kamehameha and his chair to the ground. “Keep it down! Let other people get what rest they can without your histrionics to disturb them.”

Blood running from his mouth and nose, Kamehameha stares at Danleib in shock from his position, sprawled on the wet sand.

“WHAT THE … fuck was that for?” From a roar, Kamehameha drops his voice to lower than normal conversational volume when Danleib raises his hand again.

“Control yourself! I'm not as tolerant of punks running off at the mouth as Thorrin. He's too soft and let's bratty kids get away things that he should smack them down for.” Danleib is staring at me and not Kamehameha as he delivers his statements.

I don't think I'm keeping the shock and surprise off of my face. This is not the first time I've seen Danleib go off like this, but he's never directed his ire at me before. What is going on? Why is he acting like this? When I think about how oddly all seven of us Dvergar have been acting at times in the past couple days it worries me. Talon once told me that he was barely able to handle the memories and emotions of his Half-Dvergar body when first awoke at the start of The Great Fuck Over, but while it was jarring and unsettling, I never came close to not being able to deal with the original Thorrin's memories. I never heard any other Dvergar mention any problem dealing with their memories either. Could this be some years delayed backlash?

“I don't see that bitch Talon was always protecting or the two leaders.” Anger and hate are easily audible in Kamehameha's voice.

“Their scouts are missing too. The Bohemian Cats had a couple archers that used to do their scouting, but they're not there either. The healer is Yoh and Galadri is his sister. I can't remember the rest fo their names” Even though I'm sure I've heard their names, I never paid attention. I don't like the Bohemian Cats. From the very first, their arrogance and general snottiness irritated me.

“Ha! Another Galadriel knockoff. Lord of the Rings has been on the banned list since the list was first introduced. How many of these fucks that played Taereun even know who Tolkien was?” Danleib's voice is filled with nothing but contempt.

“I read Lord of the Rings.” Kamehameha has a half confused and half belligerent expression on his face.

“You acquired some contraband copies of the books. Most people don't have that luxury in America anymore. They're too scared of the Reculturization Seminars.”

As his eyes open wide, Kamehameha unconsciously shivers. “Those Seminars are just bullshit stories to scare kids with.”

Danleib smiles faintly. “You're looking pretty scared over some bullshit stories. Lucky for you, those stories are real. I've known more than twenty vets who found themselves thrown into the Seminars after going to the VA clinics for treatment.”

“What's a VA clinic?”

Looking at each other, Danleib and I can't keep from laughing, but there is no humor in our laughter. The mix of disgust and hatred for what has been done to the country I was born in is a bone deep poison that I can't escape from anymore. On Earth, as a crippled old man, there was nothing I could do to fight back against the changes in the government, and I couldn't escape either. I never want to see Earth again.

Danleib looks toward the sky, but I don't think he seeing the clouds above. “The United States Department of  Veteran's Affairs, it was abolished about twenty years ago. It used to be an agency that administered benefits programs for military veterans, including hospitals run specifically for veterans. They shut it down and rolled the medical services into the Department of Health.

“The Reculturization Seminars started at least thirty years ago, and the VA hospitals used to force veterans who still believed in the Constitution and not the rule of the government into the camps. I made sure to keep my beliefs well hidden in those days.

“The proglodyte fucks in the government and proud brown shirts in the supposedly progressive left that supported them destroyed America. We shed our blood to protect their rights, and they fucked us and destroyed our country. Now, there is nothing in the history books about what America was or what it once stood for. The media only tells you what the Party wants you to hear. Stupid punks like you think that the worlds great because you see it on the video streams.

“And look at us! We're sitting in the middle of a rain storm, with hundreds of thousands of orcs looking for the chance to ass-rape, maim, torture, and kill us, not necessarily in that order mind you. So, why the fuck am I still hung up on and bitching about the fucking shit hole of a fucked over world I'll probably never see again?”

After a moment of silence, with Kamehameha staring at Danleib in a mix of confusion and wide-eyed horror, I just can't keep my mouth shut. “They are fucking orcs, so they're just as likely to start with a kill followed by ass-rape.”

Trying to keep a straight face, Danleib looks at me for a few seconds and breaks out in laughter. With his laughter provoking me, I can't keep my frown in place or hold back my own laughter.

“Brother, are you sure you were a psychiatric counselor?” As he walks out of the darkness, Cwichelm's voice reaches us.

Following a few paces behind Cwichelm, Dacbold enters the camp and nods toward me. Next to him is a man who goes by the name Agun. He's one of the Casters among the players, but not someone that I know well.

Danleib shrugs. “Heh, they took my license after I taught a rape victim how to use a knife. Another south of the border migrant tried to rape her, and she gutted him like fish. The pigs and the district shyster wanted to prosecute me as an accessory to murder, but there was no social camera footage of me teaching her. The social cameras were always going on the fritz in that clinic. Damn shame that.”

“You were always too soft-hearted. How the hell such a sap ever became a top Red Flag pilot is beyond me. Where are you perfect eagles?”

“Out earning their keep.”

“Your constructs are good, but if you want them to be perfect, you need more black ones.”

Danleib holds up his first in a black power salute. “Soul, brother!”

Cwichelm snorts. “You will always be too white to be doing that.”

Cwichelm was a Marine pilot and Danleib was an Air Force pilot. I have no idea how the met, but the pair of them have been like blood related brothers since the first time I met them. They have the same terrible taste in movies. The worse a movie is, the better they seem to like it. I can't remember the name of that damned movie or much else about it. I just remember the black robot. The two of them could probably quote every line of that shitty movie from memory, along with hundreds of other movies just as bad.

“And how are we supposed to sleep with all of you making such a racket right outside our tents? Can't you take your horror fantasies and go keep some others awake? There's a whole camp full of orcs just east of here. I'm sure they would hate being kept awake by your insane ramblings.” Standing in the open flap of her tent, with her tightly clenched fists on her hips, Nessa is glaring at the group of us. Her face is the perfect picture of righteous indignation, and her head is tilted back slightly, as if she is looking down her nose at us. A wave of tousled brown hair is draped across her shoulders, and a blanket is wrapped around her body.

When The Great Fuck Over happened, Nessa was only sixteen. For her, Taereun had been nothing but a wondrous game. Now, she acts like everything is nothing but a nightmare, and she will return to her normal like as soon as she wakes up. In nearly twelve years, she has barely changed in her views or attitudes. Danleib calls it a mix of denial and post traumatic stress, but as he does with anyone and everyone else, he refuses to treat her. Her body still looks to be in its late teens, the same as it has for almost twelve years. The lack of physical aging is the same as everyone else who became caught up in the Great Fuck Over.

Nessa will fight but refuses to kill anyone or anything. She has several healing arts that she uses to treat the injured, and a couple of them border on miraculous. As the years of bloody battles have dragged on, she has become more and more convinced that she is better than the rest of us who kill to survive, but if we did not do the killing, how would she be able to survive without killing?

Behind her, inside her tent, a boy who looks to be barely over twenty is scrambling to get dressed. He was her friend on Earth and started playing Taereun to sniff after her. After living through twelve years of near hell, to chase a piece of ass, he has finally nailed it. Until Talon was murdered his chances of actually getting Nessa were slim to none, but now that Talon's dead, she's finally spread her legs for her fallback.

“You should be sleeping, girl.”

Nessa fixes her general glare on me. “I was trying to sleep, old man, but a pack of warmongering, argumentative old coots are parked outside my tent. There probably isn't anyone in the camp or any other camp near us that is sleeping with the lot of you yelling and carrying on like you are.”

Danleib cocks his head to the side, making an exaggerated show of looking into her tent. “Ah, so that's what you call it. Sleeping, I'll remember that.”

Her cheeks flushing red, Nessa glares at Danleib. “Dirty old man!”

Spinning around, she ducks back inside her tent and closes the flaps. “What are you getting dressed for we're not done sleeping! I'll be damned if those old men are going to look down on me.”

“She's still mad that you wouldn't let her up on the wall?”

I shrug. “More likely, she's mad I didn't miraculously save everyone without killing a single orc in the process.”

Dacbold glances at Nessa's tent. “She's turned into a little, holier than thou bitch.”

“Yeah, there's that too.” Suddenly, I'm nearly overwhelmed by a weariness that is not physical in origin.

I'm not as close with my guild's members as I was when The Great Fuck over started. I'm not sure if it's because of the changes in me or the changes in them. If I haven't learned anything else in my life, I have, at least, learned that nothing ever stays the same. No matter how you may try to hang onto the shape and essence of a moment, it will always slip away from you. If you try to remain static, life will run you over and leave you behind as the dust of the past. To live, you have to accept or oppose the changes and keep moving forward, but right now, I'm feeling too tired to keep struggling forward.

“Thorrin, there is something I need you to look at.”

Dacbold's words draw me partly out of my morass of ennui, and I look at him. “What is it?”

Dacbold points toward the west. “They valley. After you tell me what you see, I'll explain why.”

I glance and Danleib, and he just shrugs. I want to know more, but I know from years of experience, since Dacbold didn't elaborate you couldn't pull anymore out of him no matter how you tried.

I stand up and start walking toward the valley. “Okay, let's go.”

“Not like that. Agun!”

Turning, I see Agun silently drawing a spell pattern. The pattern is extremely complex, and it takes him close to a minute to complete it. Physically drawing the pattern is usually the sign of the school of Caster philosophy called Wizardry, but it's not always the case. I've never spoken much with Agun and do not know much about the school he or the person whose body he possesses follows.

As he finish casting a silvery-grey lintel forms from the spell pattern and a door opens. On the far side of the door a windswept expanse of stone becomes visible. Agun is one of the small handful of players that has abilities associated with spatial magic.

Stepping through the door, I find myself on top of the ridge on our north side. As I look toward the north, I can just barely see another ridge two miles or so away, but the bulk of the ridge I'm standing on blocks my view of the valley between them. Looking to the west, the bowl valley opens out below me. Despite the dark stormy night, my Dvergar eyes can see well enough to make out the general features of the valley.

At it's deepest, the roughly circular valley cuts through most of the two mile thick ridge. The walls of the valley have a much gentler slope than the rest of the ridge along the coastline. The walls have a roughly even slope toward the center of the valley  The center of the valley is below sea level and has a pool of water filling it. Its elevation rises toward the water, and the coastline there has a lot more large boulders than the rest of the shore in this area. In places, the stone of the valley walls has an odd appearance, almost like an ancient lava flow. The only thing is this ridge isn't volcanic stone.

Looking at the Labyrinth rising above the storm tossed sea to the south, I squint a bit as I evaluate the nearest of the stone and rubble piles around it.

I turn to Dacbold, who has been watching me. “That looks like a blast crater, but the boulders and the valley walls are a lot more heavily weathered than the stone dug up around the Labyrinth. Is there something else significant about it?”

Dacbold nods. “I had one of the geomancers with a strong stone sounding spell do some checking. There appear to be tunnels under the valley floor, but of the ones he found, the closest they come to the surface is about fifteen feet. He wasn't certain, but he thinks the tunnels are more or less rectangular.

“You were a tanker. You would say that is definitely a blast crater and not an impact crater?”

I look at the valley again. “Yeah, that is definitely a blast crater. I've see enough to be pretty certain.”

Dacbold was a combat engineer. He should be a better judge of the difference between a blast crater and an impact crater than I am. Despite being an engineer, he has an odd personality and doesn't like trying to force his ideas down people's throats. He'll drop the hints and let them reach the conclusions he seems to want.

“Do you think there is still something there that could be of use to us?”

Dacbold shrugs slightly. “We're dead if we don't create a miracle. I can't fortify that peninsula well enough in the next day or so for us to survive with that horde looking to kill us. There was something in there that was able to detonate with enough force to blow out around a cubic mile of stone, and there are still tunnels underneath. The geomancers tell me that there is something down there that is keeping them from probing too deeply. At best they can probe about fifteen feet below the ground level in the middle of the valley.”

“Is there a way into those tunnels?”

“A couple of the geomancers can make one.”

Looking at the weathered stone of the valley walls, I don't exactly feel hopeful. “You realize that explosion happened one hell of a long time ago. After tens of thousands of years, there may be nothing worthwhile left under there.”

Dacbold nods. “It's probably more like hundreds of thousands, but there is still something that blocks magic probing. Do you have any miracles in your bag of holding?”

“I'm fresh out. Let's talk to Connor.”

The Fourth Day

The Great Fuck Over Day 4,184

Dawn is still more than an hour away, but a dozen of us are clustered in the northeast end of the valley. Besides myself, Danleib, Dacbold, Cwichelm and Agun, there is Connor with a couple of other guild leaders and their guild officers, a pair of geomancers, and Kamehameha.

The circular hole in the valley floor is close to thirty feet deep. Danleib's clockwork sparrow drops down the shaft, and an image of the tunnel below shows up in grey scale above his projection device.

Dirt or dust covers the floor, but the walls are smooth stone. It was clearly worked and finished by someone or something in the past. The floor of the tunnel is sloped, and going up about ten or so feet from where our shaft cuts into it, the tunnel in a wall of roughly agglomerated stone. From its appearance, at some point in the past, that stone melted and flowed into the tunnel blocking it.

“Whatever caused the explosion that made this crater, it was hot enough to melt the stone. If there is anything left in there, we might be able to show the orcs what hell feels like.” Connor stops speaking and looks to the west.

As he listens to someone communicating with him through a whisper charm, Connor's face turns grim. “The orcs are at the west wall. More of them have been scouting the cliffs on the north side of the ridge, probably looking for a good what to climb it. We have no way out of this if we can't find a way back into the Labyrinth. Our only other hope is if you find something in there.”

I meet Connor's eyes. “This place is old. Even if the Casters can't scan too deep, we're probably grasping at straws, if we're looking for salvation.”

“I'll take any straw you can find.”

I look at Agun. “You ready.”

He nods. “Anytime.”

“Okay, do it.”

Agun draws his spell pattern again, and the grey outline of a doorjamb with a wide lintel appear in midair. Runes that I can't read and scrollwork decorate the lintel. When Agun knocks on the seemingly thin air inside the doorjamb, a dimensional door opens between the valley floor and the tunnel below. Myself, Cwichelm, Danleib, and Agun step through it. Agun has a light crystal torch in hand, but should we need to, we Dvergar can see in pitch blackness.

Even with the shaft letting in fresh air, the air has a stale smell. We may wind up needing the handful of rebreathers that Danleib has. As the tunnel slopes down, it curves in a clockwise direction. The unpainted walls and roof, which appear to have been carved out of the surrounding stone, are perfectly smooth with right angle corners between them. There are no signs of any lighting or any other fixtures.

Picking up a handful of the dirt on the floor, I find it had a gritty texture but does not seem like naturally occurring dirt or sand. I pass the dirt do Dacbold.

“Take a look at this.”

Dacbold takes out a crystal magnifier and examines the dirt. “I don't think its stone, and it doesn't seem like decomposed vegetation. I don't have the equipment to test it, but it seems like a carbon compound.”

“You mean like quartz?”

Dacbold brings out metal plates and creates a blue-white fire on it, dumping the gritty dirt into it. The dirt seems to burn a little but not quickly. “More like coal, but it doesn't seem to be as combustible. I'd like to know what this stuff is.”

*Can you hear me?*

*Yeah, though it sounds odd.* Connor's voice has a tinny sound to it. It's the first time I've ever heard a “voice” come across a whisper or party charm like that.

*Same for you. I'm going to go deeper. Let's see if we lose connection when I get past the depth the geomancer's spells stop working.*

“Wait here.” I start walking down the sloping tunnel.

*Start talking.*

*There is a lot of unrest among the Damned. Dark Guardian's been acting suspiciously. So have a few of the others Pancho shamed. I can't imagine ….*

When Connor's voice suddenly cuts out, I've traveled about three-quarters of a circle from my starting point.

*Connor? Do you hear me? Yo?*

I can still feel the channel from the whisper charm, but there doesn't seem to be anything being transmitted. I start retracing my steps until I hear a voice again.

*... because you didn't tell them about what you knew.*

*Connor, I lost you just a step beyond where I'm at.*

*Not good.*

*No, but the whisper channel still seemed to be open. I'm going back in again. Wait fifteen seconds and kill the whisper channel.*

*Got it.*

*Okay, moving now. Do it in fifteen.*

I walk back into the dead zone and wait. After maybe sixteen or seventeen seconds that whisper channel breaks, and I return to the dimensional door that Agun set up.

I pass a special charm to Connor through the dimensional door. With the same type of charm, I bind him to it and open a channel.

“Bind me and open a channel. I call that a dead-man charm. As long as you keep it on you, the channel stays open until you deliberately close it or die. The same goes for mine. We may not be able to communicate, but we can use it to let each other know the shit has hit the fan.”

After staring at me for a moment, Connor nods. “Got it.”

I look at the three with me. “Let's go.”

The spiral ramp corkscrews down through seven full turns, about five hundred to six hundred feet by my estimate. At its end, the tunnel opens out into a huge cavernous space, lit by a faint, sourceless, greyish light. It's hard to accurately measure it by eyeball, but it looks like this cavern is larger than the valley crater above. The two main reason the giant space's dimensions are hard to estimate are the irregularity of the walls and the uneven column of stone in the center. This cavern or room appears to have been a natural cavern that was deliberately enlarged by intelligent beings. A stagnant briny smell fills the air, but I don't get the feeling that it's noxious.

The giant column of stone appears to have fallen from the roof of the cavern as molten stone and solidified in the process. From where I am standing, the point where the column of stone meets the roof of the cavern has extremely straight lines of demarcation that meet at right angle corners.

“What do you say, about three-fifty to four hundred feet from floor to ceiling?” Danleib's question is muttered in a pensive tone, sounding almost rhetorical.

Cwichelm scratches his chin through his beard. “Closer to the four hundred side. Looks like that stone came from an almost perfectly leveled and squared off tunnel in the ceiling.”

Piles of corroding metal and other substances are scattered around the chamber. Along the walls and in certain places those piles appear to have once been some kind of equipment laid out in even rows. The metal remains are mix of gray and black, porous, fragile material.

Danleib picks up some of the corroded metal, breaking it apart and examining it. “I have no idea what kind of metal this is. I've never heard of anything that corrodes in this manner.”

Screech-scrape thud. Screech-scrape thud. Screech-scrape thud.

Echoes make is a bit difficult to be certain, but the sounds seem to come from the other side of the stone slag column in the center of the room. The four of us look at one another and spread out, with we four Dvergar in the front and Agun behind us. I don't know how strong his combat ability is; I want him for his movement abilities.

Despite the greyish light having no obvious source, there are shadows in many parts of this cavern, including around the central column of stone. Moving out from the shadows, a mishappen figure lurches toward our general location. It stops and turns its head in a one hundred eighty degree arc.

The figure is a construct, bipedal and roughly humanoid in shape, but much of it is twisted, broken, and corroded. As it drags its mangled left foot across the floor with each step, the joints in its left leg screech with the sounds of tortured metal. The left knee seems to only have a quarter or so of the range of mobility that the right one does. Its left arm was torn off at some point in the past, and now, the jaggedly shorn metal remains are heavily corroded. Most of the left side of the head has been crushed, and a single blood red ocular glows where the right eye would be on a humanoid.

The construct keeps sweeping its head back and forth. Clearly it is searching for us, but for an unknown reason, it cannot find us.

“Science or Artifice?”

At the sound of my voice, the construct narrows the arc its head is traversing, but still seems unable to lock onto us. Does it only have functional auditory senses?

None of the others responds immediately. They are just staring at the construct in near rapt fascination. After a couple minutes, Danleib stores his axe and shield in his bag of holding and takes out a massive maul.

“That thing is probably somewhat of both. It looks like a combination of Artifice and engineering, but whatever is, we're going to have to destroy it. It has to be an automated sentry, but we're lucky its targeting systems seem to be broken. I really don't want to find out what those projectors on its wrist and shoulder do.”

“The crystals?” There are two large crystals the size of baseballs on the back of the construct's remaining wrist, and a housing on the shoulder has one the size of a soccer ball. All three crystals are a pale blue color. On the left shoulder, there is a crushed housing that probably contained a fourth crystal.

“Yeah. The only use I know for that type of crystal is energy projection. The facets direct the energy.”

Cwichelm puts his axe away and takes out a heavy pick. Two of his crystal lasers float up above his shoulders. His smile is self-deprecating. “With the crystals in my lasers, they would be lucky to put a tenth of the energy that those crystals can channel. If the thing manages to lock onto us, we're dead.”

Spreading out more, we approach the construct from three sides. The sound of our footsteps coming from multiple directions causes the construct to jerk its head around erratically. Whether it's controlled by an AI or an extremely complex sigil array, the construct's inability to detect with whatever else it uses for sensors is inhibiting its functionality.

Stuck with an idea, I begin to pound my war hammer on the floor every few steps. Following my lead, Danleib and Cwichelm begin doing the same. Behind us, Dacbold takes out a crossbow almost as long as he is tall, and Agun starts picking chunks of metal out of one of the corroding piles and throws them around at random.

Surrounded by more sounds it cannot locate a source for, the construct lurches in one direction after another.

Clang!

Danleib is the first to make a move. As the construct unsteadily turns in my direction, he leaps in close to it and hammers his maul into the back of its functional knee joint.

The construct stumbles closer to me. Swaying to the point of nearly toppling over, the construct regains its equilibrium and turns toward Danleib.

Thunk!

My war hammer slams into the corroding metal below the knee joint on the construct's damaged leg. I don't hold back my strength in the slightest. Despite the corrosion, the durability of the limb is incredible. My hammer only leaves an inch or so deep dent in the armor plate. I jump back as the construct spins toward me, fanning its remaining arm far above my head.

Fwoosh-crack!

A crossbow bolt a solid inch in diameter slams into the construct's head, twisting it to side but not doing any damage.

Crack!

Cwichelm attacks the construct from its flank, and with his pick shimmering with silvery light, he sinks it six inches in the construct's damaged leg. Ripping his pick back out of the construct's leg, he backs up dragging the pick along the ground to make a screeching sound.

“Steel is stubbornness.” I murmur the mnemonic under my breath and follow up with the mnemonics for the best force and impact buffs I have, casting them on my hammer. Other than creating Items of Power, the greatest strength of a Maker is buffs, the temporary enhancement of items.

Fwoosh-crack!

A crossbow bolt penetrates into the damaged shoulder of the construct, but it appears to do no damage. The construct does not even react to the attack.

Crack-Boom!

I chase after the construct and strike the knee joint of the damaged leg with as much force as I can muster. With the thunderous detonation from my weapon buff, the structure of the knee joint is cracked in multiple places, and it begins to seize up. As the construct tries to turn on me, it begins to fall to the side but saves itself with a twist and shuffled step. Considering that movement, its agility must have been frightening when it was undamaged.

BOOM!

Danleib jumps at the construct and falling from a height of more than ten feet hammers a massive overhand strike into the bent knee of the construct's good leg. Glowing gold from his weapon buffs, the head of his maul shatters the poleyn like piece of armor protecting the knee joint.

Astonishment obvious on his face, Danleib barely gets his maul between himself the construct's terrifyingly fast return strike. The force of the blow sends him flying more than thirty feet before he hits the ground rolling.

“Danleib!” Cwichelm's voice contains a clear note of fear, something almost never heard in the former marine pilot.

Recovering its balance, the construct keeps twisting its head around, still unable to get a fix on our locations. Agun's continuous stream of thrown debris is doing more to keep it distracted and uncertain of our locations than anything. I like his way of thinking. He doesn't seem to have the need to be the big nuker like so many Casters and acts to support the team instead of being a star.

Danleib grunts and shoves himself to his feet. Shaking his head to clear it, he looks in our direction. “That thing hits hard. It's at least six or seven times stronger than any construct or golem of its size I've ever encountered.”

“I think the only time that thing is sure of our location is when we're actually hitting it, but it has no clue how tall or short we are. If you hadn't been in mid-air, that blow would have gone over your head.”

Danleib turns his eyes toward me. “Are you sure?”

I shrug. “Ninety percent.”

Danleib starts banging his hammer loudly on the floor. The construct keeps turning its head back and forth in a small arc.

“Good enough. You two attack, then back out and make noise.”

Cwichelm goes for the mangled foot, tearing it open with his pick, and I go attack the knee that Danleib shattered the armor on, denting and deforming part of the mechanism.

Bzzzt! Bzzzt! Crackle-Boom!

As a field of lightning arcs up from the crystal on the construct's shoulder, we both dive away from it. After arcing over the construct's head, the lightning only forms a bit more than a half-circle on the construct's damaged side. Cwichelm is bathed in the ropes of electrical energy, but I'm not touched by it.

“Aargh! That fucking hurts!”

We make a clattering racket, as both hit the floor and roll to our feet. Still impotently searching for us, the construct's head keeps arcing, and it doesn't drop the lightning field.

Cwichelm's displays a disgruntled frown. “There is more than electric in that damn lightning field. Something repulsed me at the same time the lightning tried to fry me.  And how the fuck do you make that kind of crystal emit electrical energy! It's clearly a fucking light focusing crystal!”

Danleib snickers. “That thing is not entirely the result of Artificing. Who knows what the hell the Maker did with it.”

Cwichelm snorts. “Do you think you could do it?”

Danleib shrugs faintly. “Just because we can't use everything that our bodies have in them doesn't mean this guy was any worse of a Maker than whoever made that thing.”

I cast a spell that shifts vision to pattern sight and immediately feel a dull ache in my eyes. I hate looking at the world like this. It gives me a headache that can last for days every time I do it for more than a few minutes.

The construct turns into a rat's nest of lines and blobs of Power that is completely meaningless to me, but the arcs of electrical energy are different. I can clearly see three types of energy, even if I can't tell which is what.

I drop my pattern sight spell. “Use pattern sight. There are three kinds of energy in that lightning curtain.”

At my words, both Danleib and Cwichelm grimace, but they still cast the spell.

“Damn, I think I can tell which is the electricity, but I can't tell what that other energy is supposed to be.” Danleib seems frustrated.

After almost twelve years, we still can't understand very much about patterns. Even with the memories of our bodies about patterns, they don't make sense to us. Of course, the Dvergar, whose bodies we have, didn't know a lot about patterns to begin with. Out of the seven of us in Dvergar bodies, Dacbold seems to be able to figure out the most, but that doesn't mean he really understands them.

“Agun, try to punch a spell through that lighting!” Cwichelm has a perturbed air about him.

“Alright.”

Agun begins to draw a pattern. It only takes him a few seconds to complete it. The spell pattern isn't very complex, but the raw Power contained in it is obvious. As he finishes drawing the pattern, he pushes his palms through the center.

Crack-boom!

A shimmering silvery-grey ball of energy streaks toward the construct. A low roar of displaced air marks the ball's passage, and it slams into the lightning field around the construct. The energy's thunderous detonation fills the cavern. Even standing twenty to thirty feet away, Cwichelm and myself are both rocked backward by the impact wave, but the lightning curtain only deforms slightly.

I glance at Agun, and he is panting like he just ran a 1000m race with sweat running down his cheeks. He didn't hold back on that Power with that spell, and he probably can't cast more than two or three of those in a short period of time.

Looking at the other two Dvergar, they have the same grim expression as I do. If this construct was not already damaged, we would probably not be able to take it down in a straight up fight.

Crack!

With the construct facing Agun, Danleib charges in and hammers his maul into the still fully functioning knee. As metal inside the joint breaks, the construct sways and turns unsteadily toward him.

Taking advantage of the opening, Cwichelm darts in, and his pick pierces a braided metal line that starts spurting grey fluid.

Crack-boom!

The construct starts to fall as it turns toward Cwichelm, and Danleib charges back in. His maul shatters part of the knee joint. As the construct pitches face first toward the ground in Cwichelm's direction, he dives to the side, to avoid being crushed underneath it.

Grounding out into the ground beneath it, the lightning field loses its umbrella shaped coverage, exposing most of the construct again. With the knee joint on its good leg destroyed, the construct flops on the ground, unable to get either leg in a position to rise back to its feet.

“We can finish this one off later. Let's scout out this area and make sure there aren't any more of them.”

The other Dvergar nod in reply and we spread out through the huge cavern.

The left and right sides of the cavern have open corridor mouths that lead into more fully finished corridors. On the opposite side of the column of stone, there is another spiraling ramp leading deeper into bedrock. The stagnant briny odor seems to originate from this ramp. There are cracks in the upper part of the chamber wall on this side, and the damp wall, floor, and ramp are covered with algae.

“Those cracks must reach all the way up to the seabed.” Cwichelm scratches his bearded chin while staring at the upper part of the wall.

“Footing is going to be bad if we try to go down there.” Danleib is looking at the tunnel.

“Yeah. Any lower levels may be flooded too. How do old you think this place could be?”

Danleib glances at me. “I can't even make a guess.”

I snort. “Me either.”

Cwichelm looks around the cavern behind us. “I have a feeling this may turn into a dead end. Why don't we take apart that construct?”

At Cwichelm's words, Danleib gets a gleam in his eye. “Yeah. Why don't we?”

We return to the construct to find Agun staring at it. As we approach, he doesn't look in our direction, seemingly lost in thought. Dacbold and I stand next to him while watching Danleib and Cwichelm disable the construct's joints one by one, until only its head can move.

The lightning field is still grounding out beneath the construct, but it can no longer move to attack or defend.

“Does that thing's proportions remind you of an orc?” Agun's soft words are barely louder than the crackling of electricity coming from the construct.

The construct has a slight hunched back and legs that are a bit shorter in proportion to its torso than a human. The arms are also disproportionately long in relation to the legs, and the shoulders exceptionally broad. The head is in the shape of a skull, but that skull does have a protruding jaw structure similar to an orc.

“Yeah, it does.”

Pulling out hammers and chisel's, Danleib and Cwichelm split open the armor of the back of the construct's torso and pry it back. The armor was mounted on a skeletal frame that is shaped like a wire-work outline of the body, with structural supports crisscrossing through the body cavity. Inside of it, there are silvery-grey cables running between plates inscribed with spell sigils or formations and the motors that control the joints.

Staring at the interior of the construct, Cwichelm scratches his head. “This thing looks more like a robot than the product of Artificing.”

Squatting next to it, Danleib pokes around inside of the construct, as well. “I've never seen symbols like the ones used on these sigil plates. They give me the impression that they're more like circuit boards than magic sigils. Instead of Mana, there is electricity running through these platinum wires. This thing isn't built using any school of thought on Artificing I've ever encountered.”

Confusion apparent on their faces, Danleib and Cwichelm look at one another.

Standing up, Danleib looks around. “East or west? I'm getting more curious about this place.”

“West.” Cwichelm starts walking toward that corridor as he answers.

The rest of us follow behind Cwichelm until he stops about thirty yards from the tunnel. The same gritty dirt that was on the floor of the ramp leading down to this cavern spills outward from the corridor. Reaching down he picks up some of the dirt.

From the cavern to where this corridor ends in a heavy door, which seems to be a blast door, there are no rooms off it, but there are ten unevenly spaced cross corridors that have rooms and other corridors off of them. The main corridor is a bit more than thirty feet wide and the same height. The blast door at the end fills it completely, with its frame obviously embedded in the surrounding rock.

A panel that appears more technological than magical is embedded in the right side wall next to the blast door. Like the door, the panel's surface is tarnished, but the crystal keys in it still retain their glossy sheen. Pressing the keys, we don't get any response.

“These look like LjosAlfar script.” Cwichelm is squinting at the keypad.

“It is. It's the numbers 0 through 9.”

While I already knew that Ahlred and Wihtred couldn't read LjosAlfar, I did not know that Cwichelm was unable to. LjosAlfar and DokkAlfar use different languages. Because of the original Thorrin's experiences, I know them both, including their written forms, but not all the other Dvergar do.

With an air of being offended, Agun stares at the door. “This body had developed a spatial awareness type spell that is rather interesting. He managed to scribe the spell pattern into his body, and its ability to detect solid matter from empty space works to a range of about a hundred feet normally. Since we entered this place, even though I can see what is right in front of my face, I can't detect anything. This door may as well not exist for all the feedback that I am getting from my spell.”

“So, your detection spells are being completely blocked?”

“It's more like I'm in the middle of a fog so thick that I can't even see my hand in front of my face.”

After Agun's response to my question, I'm feeling a bit out of sorts. The structure of this underground complex feels more like a technological base than one built by a race that relies on magic. We never found anything resembling keypads inside the Labyrinth, but from the memories of this body, I know that at some point in the ancient past the Dvergar once used a Power based technology that they have since divested themselves of. Could the LjosAlfar be the same, and is this one of their ancient bases?

“Alright, why the hell does a derelict subterranean compound have a technological keypad with LjosAlfar script on the keys and a blast door?” Cwichelm's irritation is audible in his harsh tone.

“If you figure it out, let me know.” Danleib turns his back on the door and wanders off in the direction of the nearest cross corridor.

Most of the rooms have sliding doors. While some are open, none of them are in working order, and many are so corroded they are little more than piles of rust in the doorway. In several locations, we find normal stairways leading up and down to more floors with similar layouts that do not connect to the big cavern or whatever is behind the blast door. No matter where we go, we find the floor covered to varying thicknesses by the gritty dirt.

The corridor leading out of the opposite side has a similar layout, with the exception of a blast door at the end.

Back in the big cavern, Danleib looks toward the end of the cavern with the spiral down ramp. “We've been here for over six hours already. This place is big, and we still don't know what's down that other ramp.”

I glance in the direction of the corridor with the blast door. “Unless we can open that door, I don't think we'll find anything useful on this level. As for going down, I don't have a good feeling about it. From the smell, it has to be at least partially flooded below, but we should check it out anyway.”

No one disagrees, and we move to the top of the ramp. I test the footing, and the algae on the ramp is as slick as I feared.

“Cwichelm, can you take care of it?”

Cwichelm nods. “Not a problem.”

A pair of crystal lasers float up from their belt sheaths. Hovering over Cwichelm's shoulders, they fire out overlapping wide angle beams of coherent light. In just a second or two, under the touch of that light, the dark green algae turns into dried out brown remains mixed with greyish ash. Stepping forward, Cwichelm tests the footing.

“It's not perfect, but we won't break our necks. There doesn't seem to be any of that sand on this ramp.”

Cwichelm's lasers cut out a path a little more than six feet wide, and we follow him down in single file. After three circles, the ramp reaches a flat spot before continuing down.

We're two hundred fifty feet deeper, give or take a bit, and another corridor leads off into a T intersection. The floor is covered in more algae, but it doesn't reach the intersection. Checking the intersection, we find another corridor with more doors and corridors leading off of it.

Danleib raises his eyebrows. “Just how big is this place?”

Cwichelm snorts and looks back toward the spiral ramp.

I shrug. “No clue. Do we explore this floor or keep going down? I vote for down.”

Dacbold turns back toward the ramp. “I want to find out what is at the bottom first.”

No one has any objections, and we continue down the ramp. After three more loops, we reach another corridor leading off the ramp.

Agun loosens the neck of his grey robes. “Isn't it getting hot in here?”

We four Dvergar look at one another. The others have slightly sheepish expressions on, and I am hard pressed to maintain my frown.

Cwichelm displays a faint smirk. “Your frown is slipping.”

Ignoring Cwichelm, I look at Agun. “We can't really tell. Uh, well, you see, we Dvergar have a significantly higher tolerance for temperature ranges than humans. Before we really notice higher temperatures, you would be suffering from heat stroke.”

As he nods his head, Agun's eyes don't even widen in the slightest. There isn't a hint of surprise visible on his face. “I thought so. I noticed it years ago. When Dacbold and I were in the jungles of Texalaco'pa, he didn't even break a sweat. Seems like you would slap Captain Social Justice like a bitch, if he walked out of the pages of Marvelous Comics.”

Dacbold spits on the ground. “Don't compare us to that sexual deviant. It takes a sick bastard to push that crap on children like it's normal.”

Agun's faint smirk gives me the impression he was just baiting Dacbold. Even though Dacbold never says much, he probably hates what has become of America more than even Ahlred. Over the years, he's deliberately practiced repressing his emotions and maintaining his silence under almost any and all conditions so that there will never be evidence against him recorded by the social cameras.

“Forget about it. Let's see what is in the bottom of this place.” I follow the path cut by Cwichelm's lasers back to the spiral ramp.

With Cwichelm in the lead again, we keep going down. Roughly every two hundred fifty feet there is another flat landing and another floor. After five more, the temperature has risen enough that it's perceptible to us Dvergar. Agun is sweating buckets from the heat.

“Hold up!”

Cwichelm pauses at my word looking over his shoulder. With his lasers temporarily turned off, I am certain that the change in illumination ahead was not an illusion. The darkness is lit by a light source that seems to be flickering and changing colors every second or two.

“There is a light source ahead.”

Danleib's words focus everyone's attention ahead instead of on me. Without any further chatter, tightly gripping our weapons, we advance around the last turn in the ramp. Opening out in front of us is a chamber that has its far ends cloaked in shadows due to the way the flickering light illuminates it.

Like that massive cavern above, this chamber is on the north side of the spiral tunnel we have been descending. Unlike the cavern above, I can't see any sign of it once being a natural cavern that has been expanded. The ceiling is only about fifty feet above our heads, instead of hundreds, and there are regularly spaced octagonal columns of stone between the floor and ceiling. At a guess, the chamber is roughly as wide as the cavern above. Visible through an open aisle between rows of the columns, an irregular energy field is in what could be the middle of the chamber.

In places, standing water is visible, but throughout most of the visible chamber, the floor is covered in salt crystal deposits. The air in the chamber is steamy, but there seems to be a faint breeze drawing the steam to the north.

Each time the field of energy flickers, the color of the energy shifts. A large piece of equipment made of black metal and crystals sits within the energy field, but its semi-regular outline gives no clue as to its purpose or function.

Cwichelm takes out an ocular device and examines the energy field. “It's a light curtain of some kind. Though, I think it might be more accurate to call it a laser curtain. There is a lot of energy in that field.”

Danleib taps his foot in a puddle of algae and water on the floor of the chamber. “At least, we can see why this complex isn't flooded with the water leaking in from above.”

Cwichelm buries the end of his pick in the salt crystal buildup. “Yeah, but how long has seawater been leaking into this place? This is more than two feet of salt crusted on the floor.”

“I'm not even going to attempt to make a guess. Let's call it a long time.”

As I step onto the salt, it barely shifts under my weight. I can barely remember anything from my college chemistry classes. I don't know where to begin to estimate how much seawater would have to evaporate to leave this much salt behind. Millions of gallons? Even more?

Crunch. Crunch. Crunch.

As I move toward the laser curtain, the others follow behind me. Other than a faint hum that grows louder as we get closer to the center of the chamber, the only sound is the soft noise of salt crystals on the surface of the build up.

From a distance of a few yards, I can feel the intense heat generated by the laser curtain. The device inside of it is clearly still operational, but I don't have any clue what it does.

Cwichelm takes out a variety of devices from his bag of holding and sets them up on the salt pack at his feet. After a few minutes, he gets a strange look on his face and takes out more equipment.

“As near as I can tell, it's a Power broadcaster, but it seems to broadcast using an alternate dimension. It's actually similar to what we did with the whisper charms and guild bracelets. Except, this doesn't send any data. It's just transmitting raw Power.”

My frown is all too real now, and I stare at the device inside the laser curtain with squinted eyes. “Do you think this is what is blocking the whisper charm and guild bracelet transmissions?”

Cwichelm shrugs slightly. “My guess would be yes, but we've never really understood a lot of the principles behind them. You should know better than I do that it was pure blind luck that Graham and Alva stumbled onto that strange carrier dimension pattern we used for the basis of these things.”

“If we could shut it down, our whisper charms might work again, but how do we shut it down?” Danleib looks the laser curtain up and down.

There appear to be crystal projectors buried in the floor and ceiling, but the flickering of the curtain makes it seem like the sigils or equipment generating the curtain are damaged.

Dacbold is staring into the shadows on the east side of the chamber. “There is a tunnel over there. Even if this is broadcasting Power, it's probably not generating it. We should find the generator and shut it down.”

No one disagrees and Cwichelm puts his equipment away again. With we four Dvergar in a line in front and Agun behind us, we head to the east side of the chamber. The corridor entry is a good thirty feet or so wide and just as high, forming a perfect square. The crumpled remains of a massive, corroded blast door half fill it, but we can still see that the corridor beyond is the beginning of another spiral ramp.

“Agun!”

In response to Cwichelm's calling his name, Agun quickly draws the spell pattern for that force blast spell and unleashes it on the corridor mouth. After the first one partially opens a path, he follows it with a second and third, leaving a cleared space wide enough for a Dvergar to pass.

Despite the dilapidated condition of the blast door, there are no signs of the leaked in seawater passing it. The floor of this tunnel is dry, and the heat rises the further down we go.

Clank. Thud. Clank. Clank. Thud. Clank. Thud. Clank. Clank. Clank.

Hearing the noises from below, I trade glances with the other Dvergar, but none of us offer any opinions. As we descend the sounds grow louder, and after about five hundred feet, a reddish glow is visible in the corridor.

Before finishing the descent, we kill our light sources. Rounding the final bend, the tunnel opens out on a catwalk. A scene that could pass for a kind of hell spans the cavern below us. The floor of the cavern is a mix of worked stone and black metal grating. Below the grating, orange-red molten lava flows turgidly. Strangely shaped equipment, with irregular outlines, dots the apparently naturally formed cavern and a single massive edifice of metal and crystal stands in the center.

The noises come from a number of constructs that are duplicates of the one we defeated up above. While the metal grates appear to have no wear from the constructs, the stone has deep paths worn into it, and in places, it has collapsed where it meets the metal grates. In several of those holes, constructs are stuck and flailing about in an attempt to extricate themselves.

“Dumb as a box of rocks.” Cwichelm's face has a blatant sneer on it.

“They're non-sentient. What do you expect?” Danleib is carefully surveying the cavern, while absentmindedly scratching his bearded chin.

“Dollars to donuts that thing in the middle is the Power generator.”

Danleib's eyes flicker to me for a moment, before going back to the cavern. “Oh, I don't think there is any question about that. The question is how do we shut it down?”

The Power generator has to be close to two hundred feet square. With lava flowing through crystal tubes that run along its surface and into its black metal body, the thing is giving off a frightful amount of heat. The area surrounding it is so hot that it's visually distorted by the heat shimmer. From the top of the generator, a glowing silver tube rises to the roof of the cavern and penetrates it. There is little doubt that is the source of the Power for the broadcaster above.

The catwalk we are on encircles the Power generator, but there are no connecting walkways that reach the generator itself. There are still six of the constructs moving freely around the cavern. Any one of them could kill all of us. Turning off this thing off looks to be problematic.

“I'm up for any good suggestions on how to reach that generator.”

My deadpan tone draws a querulous look from Cwichelm. It's a sure sign that he doesn't have any good ideas and was expecting me to be the answer man. “You're the leader here. You should be the one coming up with a plan.”

Danleib doesn't quite turn his head away fast enough to keep me from seeing his faintly amused expression. Despite being friends or maybe because of it, Danleib and Cwichelm go to extreme lengths to one-up one another most times.

“Danleib, you want to share with the rest of us?”

Even though he does his best to hide it, he has a natural talent for breaking things. As he turns to look at us again, Danleib's smirk is gone. “There may not be a way for us to shut down the Power generator, but I'm pretty certain that I can sever that pipe coming out the top.”

“How?”

Danleib frowns. “I can turn one of my automatons into a bomb.”

Danleib's automatons are precious to him. The effort he puts into crafting every one, borders on obsessive, and if one gets even slightly scratched, he'll spend hours painstakingly restoring it to its original condition. Him offering to sacrifice one means that he doesn't see any other option.

Looking down at the floor of the cavern, I feel an involuntary shiver run down my spine. If we try to get past or through those constructs, we'll be lucky to come out of it as ground meat.

I look at Danleib. “How long?”

Danleib sighs, before glaring at us. “I don't carry around ready made bombs for destroying my babies. I have all the materials to make a bomb, but it will take a couple hours to create the explosive.”

“While you do that, I'm going take a better look around this place.”

Dacbold silently trails behind me, and the others stay with Danleib.

Following the circular catwalk, we don't find another ramp connecting with it, but there is a tunnel that leads out onto the level of the cavern floor.

“That tunnel is big enough for the constructs to use.” Dacbold stares silently at the tunnel entry, his expression unreadable.

“Yeah, let's see what is up above.”

Returning to the chamber with the Power broadcaster, we take a look around. Because of the stone pillars and the erratic lighting from the laser curtain, even Dvergar eyes cannot pierce the shadows around the sides of the chamber. With no other option, we travel along the wall to the north side of the chamber.

From south to north, there are a total of twenty rows of columns that cross the chamber. I can't tell whether they were left for structural or decorative purposes, but assuming they are for structural integrity, even in the event of an earthquake, this chamber would be unlikely to collapse.

The layer of packed salt reaches all the way to the north wall, but it is noticeably thinner on this end. In the center of the north wall, there is the partially collapsed remains of another blast door. By standing on Dacbold's shoulders, I can see the room beyond. It's filled with the decaying remains of only partially identifiable equipment. Though, some of it appears to be collapsed gantries mixed with the remains of constructs like the one we fought.

I jump down from Dacbold's shoulders. “Looks like a maintenance depot for the constructs.”

We continue our trek around the chamber, finding that the columns are set up in a twenty by twenty matrix, with one hundred total in the room.

In the west wall, there is another decaying blast door opposite the one in the east wall. Behind it, is another spiral ramp heading down.

“This should be the tunnel that exits onto the floor of the generator cavern.”

Dacbold doesn't respond to my comment, as expected.

With a discernible snap, the channel from Connor's whisper charm breaks. My carefully cultivated frown turns into a silent snarl.

“What's wrong, Thorrin?”

“The whisper charm. Something has gone wrong on Connor's end.” Without waiting for a reply, I take off at a steady jog, heading back toward Danleib and the rest.

Connor is a real world friend. I have known him since the early 2000s when I was a civilian IT contractor with the State Dept. in Iraq. Even though I haven't seen much of him or anyone else since being crippled, we still stayed in touch.

As we approach at a jog, Danleib does not take his eyes off the chemicals he is mixing. “Stop! If you disturb me and I drop the wrong thing, we'll all go boom!”

Dacbold and I abruptly halt. We both have a healthy respect for explosives.

“What's got you so worked up?”

I take a deep breath and calm myself. “The whisper channel with Connor was broken a few minutes ago. We're out of time.”

“It's going to be another hour, maybe a little less. If you can't wait, you better head back to the hole and try to get in touch with him from there.”

After watching Danleib mix his explosive for a few moments, I turn and head back up the ramp. Again, Dacbold follows behind me.

“Agun, go with them!” Cwichelm's voice has a clear ring of command to it.

Climbing up the circular ramps, I keep my pace to one that Agun's human body can maintain. Being frustrated by the slow speed, I have to keep a tight rein on my temper. Not everyone was lucky enough to be given a Dvergar body, and I have no idea why I was when others were not.

When we reach the hole bored into the tunnel, I open a channel to Connor with my whisper charm.

*Connor? What's happening?*

I can feel that the channel connected to Connor, but a reply is not immediately forthcoming. I can hear the sounds of battle, sounding distant from my position inside the tunnel. My hand is gripping my axe haft so tightly that I can hear the sounds of tortured metal from my gauntlet.

Barely visible in my peripheral vision, Agun stares at my hand with a more than faintly shocked expression on his face.

Dacbold wordlessly places a hand on my shoulder.

Close to minute passes before Connor's response reaches me. *It's bad. Somehow the orcs got on the ridge to the west of the bowl valley. We lost everyone at the west wall, including all the mercenaries that were with us. In the chaos getting to the land spur, we lost probably two-thirds of our numbers. If we hadn't dumped the boulders piled along the ridge in front of the wall on the orcs, we would have been effectively wiped out.  Do you have any good news?*

My heart feels like a steel fist is clamped around it, and until I take a deep breath, I do not answer Connor.

*This is some kind of ancient underground complex. We think we found the source of the interference for our spells and communication, but it's not going to help us.*

Even without being able to see Connor, I still feel his disappointment mixed with the beginning of a loss of hope though the whisper channel. *Then, we will be making our final stand here.*

*There is one part of this complex we haven't been able to inspect. A blast door is blocking access to a room and with the Power broadcaster blocking our communication and scanning spells we don't know what is inside.*

Connor mentally sighs. *I'm not holding my breath on the chance of a miracle.*

I look at Agun. “Can you open a gate between here and Connor's position?”

Agun draws a complex spell pattern, and with his brows furrowed, he appears to be looking at something in the distance.

“They seem to be on that small peninsula. I have several places on it memorized well enough to open a door to them.”

“Do it!”

“Thorrin?” Dacbold is staring at me with a questioning look on his face.

“The orcs somehow overran the ridge to the west. Everyone at the west wall was lost. Connor and the rest have been forced to retreat to the spit of land. I'm going to go fight with them.”

Agun finishes drawing his spell pattern and another grey doorjamb appears in the tunnel. As he knocks, the dimensional door opens up on the spit of land to the south. The setting sun has tinted the brownish-grey stone red and orange. Less than a hundred feet away, the wind tossed grey sea is covered in whitecaps. The whistling of the strong wind drives the partial cloud cover across the dusk sky in puffy streamers.

The three of us step through, and the not so distant din of the battle reach our ears. The middle of this spur of rock is twenty to thirty feet higher than the shore, and I lead our small group to the highest point we can easily ascend to.

To our north, mushroom clouds of black smoke and blood red flame from fireballs rise into the sky. Crackling blue-white lightning bolts bathe the lower parts of the clouds with an actinic glare. Dirty grey whirlwinds throw out dark grey wind blades. Underneath the hellish displays of Power, players clash with the orcs in a brutal life and death struggle.

Scattered along the shoreline and around the bowl valley, groups of players that were cut off from reaching this spit of land are desperately fighting for their lives. They are battles the players are destined to lose. Surrounded and vastly outnumbered, they don't have a snowball's chance in hell of escaping. Dying would probably be the kinder fate than being captured.

Anger and frustration fill me, eating away at the last remnants of hope that I've been futilely clinging to. We're trapped and the underground complex is a ruin. Without powerful intervention, we're all going to die or suffer fates worse than death.

*Don't give up, Thorrin. No matter how bad thing have gotten, I've never seen you despair.*

When I look at Dacbold, he seems to be projecting an air of unyielding determination.

*I'm tired. This time, I can't see any way out. I've seen too many innocent people die, because of this madness.*

Still, Dacbold is right. No matter how many are dead, I have to think about the living. Until my last breath, no matter how difficult it may be, I have to keep fighting. I can't give up. We don't know what is inside the room with the blast door. There may be something there that will give us a chance at survival.

“Agun, I want to know what is on the other side of that blast door. Do you know casters with spells that could cut through it?”

“A few who might. That door should be as old as all the ones that collapsed into piles of rust and it's still standing. We might not be able to cut through it at all, but at the worst case, that shouldn't apply to the walls around it. As long as the room behind it isn't walled with similar metal, we'll get into it.”

Dacbold nods. “Get them over here.”

“I have to find someone who has seen two of them. They don't like whisper charms.” Agun steps away and begins contacting people through a whisper charm.

After a few minutes, Connor arrives with a few of the guild leaders in tow.

“How many made it here?”

Connor shrugs slightly. “Less than three thousand. We lost too many.”

“How did the orcs get on the ridge in broad daylight? I thought we had patrols up there.”

Connor's face turns cold. “That's what I want to know. There should have been enough people patrolling to counter any attempts to scale the north wall, but they got up without anyone seeing.”

“Did anyone make it back from the patrols?”

“I haven't had time to check.”

“Silver Horn was part of the patrols, right?” Agun's voice has as cold and hate-filled a tone as any that I've ever heard.

Connor's expression turns questioning. “Yes. Is there a reason you're asking?”

“Have you checked to see if the Dark Guardian is here?”

“I haven't had time to figure out who is here. Where are you going with this?”

“Ashir's Pass.”

Ashir's Pass was one of the worst losses we faced during out journey through the Lands of Despair. Over five hundred players and thousands of mercenaries died in what would have been a complete route, if not for Talon's actions. With the help of three others, he destroyed a horde or undead under the control of some kind of lich like creature. There were a lot of recriminations and finger pointing, but we never did get to the bottom of what happened.

The questioning expression on Connor's face turns into one of cold anger. He lost friends that day. “What's the point?”

“I was there. I used to be in Silver Horn. Dark Guardian pulled out with Silver Horn's officers and the POSes that were his biggest ass lickers. The lines collapsed when we were overrun. The only reason I'm alive is Talon's insanity. I don't know where he came from or why he was there, but he was like an engine of destruction cutting down the walking corpses.”

Agun may not know why Talon was there, but I do. Some of the Bohemian Cats were there, and Selestra was one one of them. His capability for obsessive loyalty was even more frightening than his rage or combat ability.

Connor looks toward one of the other guild leaders. “We're in no position to do anything about them now. None of us are likely to see many more sunrises. Just find out if Dark Guardian is among the survivors and do it quietly.”

“You got it, Connor.” The guild leader nods and heads back toward the battle line.

“Right now, the battle is all ranged fire. Orcs really do suck at swimming. We're trying to keep them from filling in the trench Dacbold dug between here and the mainland, but it doesn't stop them from tossing over attackers or keep their shamans from casting spells. Our geomancers are running out of steam. They were already tired. So, they won't be able to much more than slow down the orcs by shifting the rubble a bit.”

Connor's assessment of our position just leaves me more depressed. We start talking about plans to delay the orcs, ways to slow them down. There are no ideas for actually winning. We're just trying to find ways to survive a little longer. Is twelve years of struggling going to end here? Are there no other options left?

Three Casters arrive while we are discussing the best way to drag things out. One man and two women. Like the majority of the player's bodies, these three are all of above average appearance, but they have that reclusive, standoffish demeanor you find in a lot of tech geeks. The three of them cluster up behind Agun, and he makes not attempt to introduce them. They are all the kind of people that stay to themselves in the middle of a crowd. I know I've seen all three around over the years, but I can't remember ever saying a single word to any of them.

“You ready?”

Agun nods. “Good to go.”

“Open a gate back into the tunnels.”

Without a word, Agun draws the spell pattern for his dimensional door, and the grey doorjamb appears in midair. At his knock, the door opens into the tunnel again, and a surprised orc turns to gape at us.

Before I can react, Dacbold hurtles through the dimensional door, his shield slamming into the orc's chest. As the orc bounces off the wall, an upward swing of Dacbold's axe splits it open from balls to sternum.

As Dacbold spins to confront a second orc to his right, a third moves on him seeming to appear out of thin air as it passes through the space where the dimensional door is. My axe cleaves through the back of its armor and severs its spine between its shoulder blades.

“Aaaaarrrrrrrrr!”

With a wordless scream, the orc falls to the ground. Its arms and head flail around helplessly, while the rest of its body lies limply on the stone floor like a sack of flour. The shouts and scream of at least a dozen more orcs echo through the dimensional door. The few words that I can pick out of their dialect are mostly curses or crude references to biological functions. Orcs must have at least fifty different ways to refer to shit and shitting.

The three Casters behind Agun shrink back and start retreating from the dimensional door. I have never understood why some of the extremely timid players like them ever joined the expeditionary force rather than staying at Emer with most of the dedicated crafting types.

Dacbold glances through the dimensional door. “Now! Left!”

Not hesitating, I step through the dimensional door, while blindly slashing toward the left side of the door. The startled orc barely manage to halfway block my strike, and it doesn't penetrate the chainmail covering its ribs. Still, the force of the blow staggers the orc, and the impact probably bruises or breaks its ribs.

Connor comes through the dimensional door behind me and engages an orc to the right of it, followed by two more of the guild leaders who move to support us.

There are already at least twenty orcs in the tunnel, and another one drops through the hole bored from the surface by the geomancers. A human body, even many of the players, would have a hard time dropping through that hole and not breaking at least a few bones, but orc are an entirely different beast from humans. Their strength and physical durability make the majority of humans look weak and frail.

Putting the tunnel wall at our backs, we form a small box facing the dimensional door, with Dacbold and myself in the front. With only a single orc able to attack them at a time, Connor and the other guild leader should have no issues holding their own. Connor is good enough to take on two or three orcs himself, but I don't know how solid the other guild leader is.

“Get reinforcements!”

Following Connor's command, the last guild leader quickly starts communicating with someone through his whisper charm.

The fight in the tunnel quickly turns into a nasty knock down drag out battle. If not for the stone of the tunnel wall giving us an unassailable rear flank, we would be overwhelmed.

“More of them keep dropping down the hole! Why are they sending so many orcs down here?”

“There must be half a million of them. What's the big deal if they drop a few hundred down a hole? Just keep fighting!” Connor's tone of voice is calm in comparison with the other guild leader, but I can still hear the tension in his voice.

We keep killing orcs, but their numbers don't diminish. For every one that falls to our weapons, at least, one more drops down the hole.

The last guild leader kills the orcs that try to squeeze through the dimensional door. His attacks are flashy, surrounding his sword with visible ability effects at ever strike. Too many of the players are dependent on those types of combat abilities. Even after twelve years, they still are only halfway competent at using weapons without them. That kind of fighting doesn't make for good longevity in combat. As soon as they run out of Mana, they can't fight effectively.

Every time he has a clear shot at an orc's back, Agun turns the orc into meat paste with one of his force balls.

It takes close to three minutes for reinforcements to start pushing through the dimensional door. Ahlred and Wihtred are at their head, and they tear into the orcs like a pair of berserk demons. Orc body parts begin to fly through the air, and orc blood falls in the tunnel like rain.

Leaving the orcs still coming into the tunnel to them, Dacbold and I attack the orcs that are already past the dimensional door. Neither of us are as driven as Ahlred and Wihtred, but we still slaughter every orc that stands in front of our axes. Still, with every orc that falls, I feel a bloody rage rising inside of me.

Human players back us up on both sides, but they do little more than clean up the orcs that look for an easier target than pairs of Dvergar.

With a clear space opened up around the dimensional door, Agun comes into the tunnel, but the three Casters he summoned do not follow. Seeing the orcs dropping down the hole bored into the tunnel, he begins casting his high powered force balls at the hole. Each orc hit by one turns into meat splatter and blood mist drenching the orcs beneath.

“The spell for this door has run through its timer. If I keep it much longer, it's going to drain my Mana.”

Connor glances back over his shoulder. “Let it close. You can open another when we need it.”

With the last of the orcs on our side dead, Dacbold and I turn back toward the bore hole, but Ahlred and Wihtred have the orc there well in hand. There are only ten or fifteen left standing, and no more seem to be dropping from above. Orcs may be dumb, but they are not generally suicidal.

“Can you go back to Danleib and Cwichelm and tell them what happened?”

Dacbold nods and turns to head back down the tunnel.

“Torak, Morris, go with him!”

Following Connor's command, two of the human players chase after Dacbold. Seeing the two leave, Connor starts contacting people through his whisper charm.

Except for cleaning up a few orcs that get past Ahlred and Wihtred, the rest of us just watch them work. With just the two or them, unless the orcs have a way to drop a hundred or so warriors into this tunnel at once, this battle is basically over. Their murderous efficiency is impressive, and judging from the human players' expressions, more than a little eye opening for them.

The speculative gazes that these players turn on me leave me feeling a cold lump in the pit of my stomach. Every time we Dvergar fight like Ahlred and Wihtred are, we strip away more of the illusions the other players have about our being anything close to human. I have never thought of myself as someone who seeks the approval of others, but I also know that I don't want to be feared by others. The normal sheep-like herd of humans fear things which they don't understand and things which are stronger than they are.

After the last of the orcs is ruthlessly butchered by Ahlred, the tunnel quiets down.  While the problem is passed up the orc chain of command, and now orders come down, we will have at least a short respite.

“Connor, I'm going to see what's behind door number three.”

While never stopping his whispers, Connor half-smiles, and waves in acknowledgment.

“Agun, get your friends in here!”

Neither questioning nor acknowledging me, Agun begins to draw the pattern for his dimensional door once again. He is sweating and starting to breathe heavily. Even though he seems to have a fairly large Mana pool, the strain of casting multiple high power spells is catching up with him.

With the dimensional door open, the three faint-hearted casters enter the tunnel. Looking around at the mangled corpses of the orcs, they shudder before looking at the bloodstained pair of Ahlred and Wihtred with naked fear in their eyes. There have been other ugly, bloody battles along the way. How did these three manage to make it through twelve years with the expeditionary force? Did they somehow mange to avoid all combat?

When I look at Agun, he shakes his head slightly and opens a whisper channel to me. *As long as I've known them they have been like this. They were orphans on Earth. They never talk about growing up in the Foster Care system, but it must have been pretty bad. I don't know why they played Taereun, or how they were able to deal with the violence.*

*They probably just death-ported if they got in over their heads.*

Agun frowns. *Probably. As long as they don't have to fight, they'll do what you tell them to. If you waited long enough, you would eventually be ejected from the Land of the Dead without having to fight.*

*Really? I never know that.*

Death-porting, it's as old as online gaming, but I'm a little surprised Agun knows it. In some of the early games, when you wanted to get out of someplace quickly or when everything went south, you could just die and respawn at your bind point or the nearest spawn point. Death-porting was what old timers like me called it, but the term seemed to fall out of use fairly quickly. In the Battleground of the Damned, there were respawn points like in a game. When our bodies were killed, after fighting our way out of the Land of the Dead, we would reappear in the world only at certain locations. In our ignorance, we thought that they were respawn points. Now, I have no clue what they were, or why we would reappear there.

“You three, come with me! You're going to open a hole in a metal blast door.”

With their heads bouncing up and down like bobble heads, the three Casters follow me down the tunnel. By the time we reach the cavern with the solidified magma column, Dacbold has already disappeared into the ramp tunnel on the south side of it.

The Casters point at various things and whisper among themselves. They give me the impression of a gaggle of geeks at a convention. While they are Casters, their bodies are still a little bit robust. Twelve years ago, their bodies were probably athletic marvels that they could have only dreamed about, but without maintenance, human bodies will naturally go to pot. Now, while still retaining a little of their past development, the Casters' bodies have mostly deteriorated.

The Casters' real bodies are probably pasty faced and pimply. Modern Earth medicine could cure both of those conditions, but people like them tend to ignore or not realize the existence of the treatments. They were probably so wrapped up in their games, models, and wish-fulfillment light novels that they didn't care enough about how people viewed them. I worked with too many of them during my corporate IT days to not recognize the type.

Seeing the disabled construct, the Casters run over toward it, but they are too timid to approach it closely. Most likely, the futile spasms of the construct's crippled limbs have them all but ready to piss their pants.

After picking up pieces of the armor ripped off the construct and casting some spells, the Casters look around in confusion and start whispering to each other again. Seeming to come to a conclusion, the three walk over to me, with the slightly taller male in the lead.

“Mr. Thorrin, there is something blocking our detection and analysis spells. We aren't going to be much use to you in here. Do you want us to go back again?” Since he actually says “Mr.” in English, his mini-spiel sounds a little weird.

“I want you to open a blast door, not analyze it.”

The look he gives me makes it seem that he thinks I'm an idiot and is afraid to say it. “If we don't analyze the door, we can't open it.”

“It's metal. I expect you to use spells to cut it open.”

The Caster looks slightly taken aback. “It's okay to break it?”

“Of course.”

The three Casters exchange looks and whisper together again. Before they hide them, grins appear briefly on their face.

“Where is the door?”

As I lead them down the corridor, I have the feeling that something is definitely off about these three, but I can't figure them out well enough to understand it. They have a lack of maturity and presence that doesn't sit well with me. It's not like they were teenagers when The Great Fuck Over began and haven't grown up; they are more like an animal that was never socialized and doesn't know how to interact with other animals or people. Before the Great Fuck Over, Taereun: Battleground of the Damned was a refuge for all kinds of people, and some like them, just fit in with the rest of the world even more poorly than a bunch of tired old vets who lost the country they fought for to the warped insanity of the modern culture.

Seeing the blast door, the three Casters run past me and begin examining it. Even though they know the spells won't work, the still cast dozens of detection or analysis spell on the door. With each failure, they look over their shoulders at me, before whispering together about the results.

“Get it in gear! The orcs aren't going to stand around waiting for you find out what's in there.” After close to fifteen minutes, I'm losing my patience with them. They are even worse than some of the out of touch with reality American otaku types I had to deal with as a programmer and IT manager.

“My Crass Detection and Analysis of Metallic Structures formation just worked!” The female Caster's exclamation is almost a shriek of joy.

Her spell worked? I immediately open a whisper channel to Danleib.

*Danleib! Can you hear me?*

*Talk about mental shouting. You sound like a kid getting his favorite Power Ranger toy at Christmas.* The sarcasm carries clearly through the primarily Psi based channel of the whisper charm.

*You're showing your age again.*

*Don't take after Wihtred. It's unbecoming for an elderly man, one older than me, to be so childish, and I'm still not ashamed of my age.*

Danleib's comments almost make me laugh, and I have to fight to keep my frown in place. *Are you coming back up?*

*Well, we might have a little problem there. You did say that there was another ramp leading down opposite the one we used, right?*

I get a cold feeling in the pit of my stomach. *Yes. Why?*

Danleib sighs. *I cut the conduit. There is a ton of distortion from wild Mana escaping from the broken conduit, but our whisper charms are obviously working. Five of the constructs took off up the opposite ramp. One of them broke through the grating bridging the lava channel between the central area and the tunnel, but the rest just walked over the top of it. They were moving way to fast for us to outrun them.*

*Tell Cwichelm to get Agun to open a dimensional door to get out of there.*

*Not yet. Before we leave, I want to see what these constructs are doing. I sent a bird up to the broadcaster room, and we'll decide what to do base on what the constructs do. You better be ready for them to come up after you.*

*Damn it all to Hell! Keep me posted.*

*Will do.* Danleib breaks the whisper channel.

I turn to the three Casters.

“Well, can you open it?”

The taller one looks at me bobbling his head. He seems to be their designated spokesman.

“We can do it, but it's going to take a few hours.”

It feels like the other two are using him as a buffer against the rest of the world. I still haven't asked their names, but their personalities make me not really care what they are. If I didn't need them right now, I would not have anything to do with them. In IT, I was forced to deal with people that can't even develop enough character to face the world head on. Too many years of that bullshit has left me with an aversion to people like them.

“Then, do it!”

After the taller one bobbles his head for seconds, the three of them begin to work on their spells again.

I open a whisper channel to Connor. *Connor, we may have a real problem.*

While briefing Connor on the constructs, I move to the south tunnel. There isn't any sign of the constructs moving up the ramp yet, but if they do, we need to get our people out of here quickly. With their lightning field, undamaged constructs may prove unstoppable.

Less than ten seconds after I get there, Dacbold and the players Connor sent with him come around the last turn in the tunnel. He stops dead and looks at me for a few seconds.

“Danleib already told me about the constructs.”

I nod to Dacbold. *There is no sign of the constructs, but you better post someone here to keep any eye out. Dacbold is back with the people you sent with him.*

*Tell them to stand watch there. I have other problems to deal with. The orcs are up to something.* Connor breaks the whisper connection.

“Connor says to keep watch here. If those constructs come up here, do not try to fight them, just sound the warning. They can project a lightning field. If you touch it, it will probably one shot you.”

After the human players acknowledge the orders, I return to the blast door with Dacbold walking at my side. When we arrive the taller Caster turns half toward us. He stares at my feet for about fifteen seconds without saying anything.

“What do you want?”

“With our detection spells working, we found out what is on the other side of this door. It's just a tunnel. Do you still want us to break it down?” He sounds like a kid that is afraid of me taking away his toys.

“What is at the end of the tunnel?”

The taller Caster shrugs. “I don't know. Our detection spells only work to about two hundred yards at most.”

“Break it down. No matter what we find, we'll probably need to get in there.”

The taller Caster immediately perks up and turns all the way around to face me, but he still doesn't meet my eyes. “Great! We'll break it open!”

Turning back to the door, he whispers to the other two. The taller Caster stands facing the door with the other two on his right and left facing each other. As the three draw spell patterns in the air in front of themselves, blue-white light the size of a basketball forms in between the two facing one another. The taller one holds his hands in front of his chest, thumbs and index fingers touching in a triangular shape and a baseball size ball of blue-white light forms in front of his hands.

When the three of them speak what must be an activation phrase, a beam of light connects the taller Caster's ball or light with the other one, and another beam of light hits the surface of the blast door. Almost immediately the surface of the door under the beam of light turns cherry red and sparks begin to fly.

Dacbold raises his eyebrows. “A cutting laser. Interesting.”

I don't have Agun's aura burned into a whisper charm, but Dacbold does. While he calls Agun I contact Cwichelm. *Cwichelm, how is going down there?*

*We may have really screwed the Taco Hell Chihuahua with Godzilla's dick. Two of the constructs came down the tunnel we used. The other three are back in the generator room. They aren't coming out on the catwalk, but if we make leave here, there is no telling what the constructs will do. Also, the crystals on their arms are more lighting projectors.*

I feel like screaming and cursing, but I manage to keep it to a sigh. *There is a tunnel on the other side of the blast door. While the three geeks are cutting open the door, I need to have Agun scan the tunnel. So while I'm checking on you, Dacbold is getting him down here.*

*You don't have his imprint do you?*

*No. Why?*

Cwichelm chuckles tauntingly. *You're really not acting like yourself. Normally, you would be the first one to get an imprint of someone you just met on a whisper charm. If you don't get your head straightened out, you're probably gonna wind up dead before this is all over.*

*I've been getting enough of that out of Danleib; I don't need it from you too.*

*No problem. Just, please, don't die on me, Thorrin. I've lost too many friends. We've all lost too many friends.*

I can't believe Cwichelm is actually thinking we'll survive. It may just be that if he admits we're completely one hundred percent fucked, he won't be able to handle it and will break down.

*I don't plan on dying here.*

Cwichelm doesn't say anything else before breaking the connection.

It only takes a few minutes for Agun to arrive, moving at a quick jogging pace. Unlike the Caster trio, he show a remarkable level physical fitness. Despite being whipcord lean, he is all wiry muscle and bone.

I don't wait for him to say anything. “With the interference down, your friends have found there is a tunnel on the other side, but they can only see a couple hundred yards and don't know where it ends. They extolled the virtues of your magic.”

Agun frowns. “My range is only about seven or eight times that. If the tunnel is longer that, I won't be able to see the end of it. It would be easier to just open a door and follow the tunnel to the end.”

I nod. “That works. Do it for me.”

While Agun casts his spells, I take out a whisper charm and record his imprint on it. In the past, I would have probably done this not long after Cwichelm brought him to meet me last night. Was it really just last night? It feels like days or weeks have passed in a single night and day's time.

Cwichelm is right. I have not been acting like myself recently. Caught between feelings of ennui and hopelessness, I have been on the edge of burning out for the past couple of years, but now I'm in the middle between those feeling on one side and the drive and rage of a born Dvergar warrior on the other. Talon's death and the surge or emotions that seem to originate in this body finished off something that has been building for years. Since he was murdered, I have really been acting abnormally, but I don't understand why. He's not the only person I've cared about that died, and I don't even know if he was my friend or not. I was always a friend to him, but he kept anyone and everyone at a certain distance. So, why was his death the trigger?

Despite what happened to me in my real life, I was still always a very social person in the game. I was always attempting to broaden my network of contacts and would never pass up the chance to add people to my whisper charms. That was different from how I was on Earth. On Earth, except for other veterans or gamers, I had mostly cut myself off from the world.

I was married three times. Why can't I remember what my second wife looked like or a single thing about her? I remember being captured by DokkAlfar slavers like it really happened to me, but I can barely remember anything from my human childhood. When my clan was killed, and I was taken by slavers, I was only two years old, which is the equivalent of about five for a human. Why can I remember being enslaved but not my real childhood? Which is my real childhood now?

Am I no longer Harold T. Sawyer? Am I the Thorrin Hammerfist that once occupied this body of mine? Have I become someone else? Now, I don't know what I am becoming. I don't know if the other six are in the same condition. I'm afraid to ask.

Even though I am not sure who I am, I don't want to go back to Earth. There is nothing left for me on Earth. Everything was crumbling around me. The only people I could maintain any type of friendship with were a handful of veterans and some other Taereun players. What is there to go back to?

“Thorrin!”

I don't know how long Agun has been trying to get my attention. His eyes are narrowed, and there is a slightly worried expression on his face.

“Are you alright?”

“Yeah. Sorry. I was just thinking about something and not paying attention. Sorry.” I don't have time to deal with my issues right now. We have to get out of this alive for any of my personal baggage to matter.

Looking behind Agun, the silvery-grey doorjamb with a door opening into the tunnel beyond the blast door awaits. Squaring my shoulders, I step forward.

“Alright, let's do this!”

Stepping through the dimensional door, the air on the other side is staler than in the complex, but it doesn't seem poisonous. The tunnel was carved out of the raw bedrock, with the walls, floor, and ceiling each being the same length, making it a perfect square. A thick layer of dust has settled on the floor of the tunnel, and there is a little bit of the black carbon based grit, but there is not sound and no sign of anything moving.

Agun is staring at the walls of the tunnel. There are lines etched into the walls and roof of the tunnel. Sweeping, aside some of the dust on the tunnel floor, I find more of the same kind or lines. It seems to be the same basic design repeated over and over again, with minor variations between the repetitions. They look like a spell formations.

“Is something the matter?”

Agun starts to nod but turns it into a head shaking motion. “I don't think so. These sigils are still active. My detection spells are being warped. If I didn't know this was a tunnel, I would think there was no world beyond it. I'm pretty certain it works in the same way from the outside. If you aren't lined up perfectly with the blast door, this tunnel is undetectable. Anyone on the surface that doesn't know it exists will never be able to find it.”

“Interesting. A concealed tunnel. Let's see where it leads to.”

Having seen Agun jogging when he reached the blast door, I set out at a fast jog for a human, even a human of the Labyrinth. He is not using a light source, and I don't know what kind of spell he is using to see in the pitch blackness. After ten minutes, since he shows no signs of fatigue, I maintain the same pace.

As the monotonous, never changing walls and floor of the tunnel pass by, we cover more than fifteen miles, until the tunnel slopes upward at about a thirty-five degree angle. I stop for a moment and stare into the darkness.

Looking up the tunnel, Agun frowns and squints. “There is a bit over a mile, maybe a mile and a half, till the end of the tunnel. It looks like a lava flow has sealed it off at that point, but I can't tell where the lava flow came from. It's maybe fifty or sixty yards thick with a cave on the far side, but there is no sign of flues or any other source for the solidified lava.”

I still can't tell what kind of spell or device he might be using to see, but I suppose it really doesn't matter.

“Do you have any idea how long it would take our geomancers to cut through that much stone?”

“Assuming Selvans is still alive, they should be able to do it in six or seven hours at most, but it would probably be a lot faster.”

I use an improved party charm and create a party with Agun, but when I try to use the whisper charm imprint to invite the other Dvergar and Connor, it fails. The same thing happens when I try to contact them with the whisper charm.

“I can't use a party or whisper charm to reach the other. Can you get us out of this tunnel from here?”

Agun looks back the way we came from, his face a mask of concern. “My spells can see through the blast door, even if they don't get past the tunnel walls. The sigils here seem to have some kind of warping effect on space. Someone went of their way to make this tunnel hard to find, but I should be able to get us out as long as I do it in a straight line through the blast door.”

After we step through the dimensional door back into the main complex, my party charm works again. Using whisper charm imprints, I bring the other Dvergar and Connor into the party and pass leadership to Connor. He brings in the other surviving guild leaders.

Agun stares at me with his face showing blatant surprise.

“We improved some things. Don't talk about it. We don't want word of what we've been up to getting to Thug Horde.”

Agun nods in acknowledgment. “I would expect there to still be Thug Horde sympathizers among the survivors.”

I don't try to hold back my snort of anger. “There are probably more than just sympathizers among us. I'm sure we have a few Thug Horde sleepers around.”

Connor doesn't say anything until it's obvious no one else is joining.*What's going on, Thorrin?*

*The tunnel runs more than fifteen miles, and the end is plugged with solidified lava. We're going to need geomancers to cut through it, but we have a way out. The other end should be on the far side of that mountain to our west.*

The sense of relief and hope is obvious though the party channel. After we improved the party charms, they began carrying clear emotional impressions.

*Agun, how long will it take you to get everyone into the tunnels?* Connor sounds distracted. He is probably already planning how to get the rearguard out alive.

*How many people are left? How many made it to the peninsula?*

*There are somewhere between fifteen and sixteen hundred.*

Fifteen to sixteen hundred out of more than thirty thousand. We've effectively been wiped out as and expeditionary force. The quest to reach haven is probably over, but if anyone is thinking about it, no one is mentioning it.

Even though the others cannot see it, Agun's face has a strained expression. *If someone has enough Power batteries that I can drain, it'll take twelve hours, maybe longer. The last two hundred fifty to three hundred people will have to wait for two hours or so, while I build up enough Mana to get them out in one shot. I'll be useless for a couple days after that.*

*What do you mean?* There is a hard, questioning tone to Connor's words.

*My dimensional door isn't very efficient. If no one is using them, I can keep one open and ready for about twenty minutes, before the Mana cost to keep it open becomes more than the cost of opening a new one. Once people start using it, the Mana cost jumps up I'll hit Mana depletion after moving two hundred fifty or so people. If I really want to push, it I can do three hundred, but it'll put me flat on my back.*

Connor's tone turns pensive. *Is there anyone else who can use a similar spell.*

*There were two, but with the western wall being overrun, I'm sure they're already gone. Neither one is the type to stick around if it looks like a losing scenario.*

*What about the other tunnels near the surface? Do they connect to the rest of the underground complex?*

I feel hope to turn into a lead weight in my stomach. *We didn't find anything. They were probably part of higher level, and the spiral tunnel or the hole where the molten stone fell through the roof was the connection between them.*

There are several long moments of silence.

*We're going to need the strongest fighters up to hold the line as the rear guard.* Danleib's words hit us all like a bucket of cold water.

The rear guard, the last wave to get out, is going to face the real possibility of being overrun and never making it out. Only the strongest fighters are going to have a chance of getting out alive.

*This is going to have to be a volunteer job. We're not a real military, so I can't order people to do it. I'm back on the surface already, so I'll stay till the end.* Connor's solemn words and tone make it sound like he's making his last stand.

In his military days, Connor had a reputation for never ordering his troops to do something he wouldn't do himself. Political, desk job officers hated him because his men were always among those with the highest morale and personal loyalty toward him. Career operations officers always seem to hate and fear real combat officers who engender personal loyalty in their men. His sense of personal honor and responsibility toward his men eventually led to him being court-martialed over a combat action. He refused to retreat until all of his men were recovered. He wasn't cashiered, but the career political officers him behind a desk until he retired.

It's a bit strange. Everyone chosen by The Nameless, with a military background that I know the details of, seems to have been someone who was given the short end of the stick during their military career. Everyone except me that is. I was just one of the unlucky few to be wounded in action during Desert Storm. I was just given a nice shiny purple heart, and due to my injuries leaving me unfit for military service, I was forcibly discharged.

*I'll hold the tunnel.* Ahlred's words carry heavy overtones of hate and anger. Whether it's toward the orcs or the players is anyone's guess, but most likely, it's both groups.

*I'll stay with the squid. Can't trust a squid to do a job right, without a soldier to supervise him.* Wihtred's sarcastic tone lightens the heavy air left by Ahlred.

*Fuck you.*

*Sorry, sailor. I only fuck chicks.*

*You're going to have your work cut out for you. The orcs are up to something at that bore hole.* Connor's statement puts an end to the banter before it gets off the ground.

*We'll stop them.* The cold, murderous intent in Ahlred's words leaves no question as to his intentions.

*I'll go back up to the surface. My guild is still up there.*

Dead silence meets my words. For a few moments, no one says anything, but I can almost hear the gears turning in Danleib's mind.

*Thorrin, you don't have to ...*

I cut Danleib off in mid-sentence. *It's my choice! Just let it go. Please.*

I don't have to stand with the rear guard, but if I don't, I know I'll hate myself. This time it's more than just my unrelenting sense of responsibility. I have the memories of a Dvergar child, helplessly seeing his small clan destroyed at the hands of the DokkAlfar. He carried the hate and regret over being unable to do anything for his entire life, and now, those regrets are becoming a part of my own psyche. The real Thorrin is dead and gone, and Harold T. Sawyer is dying. I am becoming a fusion of both. Who or what will I be when it's over?

*You can tell your friends to stop cutting apart the blast door. It might be our last line of defense against the orcs. We're just going to need a hole big enough to get through single file.*

My words were directed at Agun, and he nods slightly, before using his whisper charm.

*I've been preparing a little surprise for the orcs down here. It'll take a couple hours to finish it, but I'm pretty sure I can turn this complex into a huge magma pit. Well, it might turn out to be a small volcano, but it should peter out pretty quickly.*

*What are you talking about?* Blatant confusion fills Connor's words.

*There is a Mana generator down here at the bottom of the complex, and it's basically the magic equivalent to a theoretical magma tap reactor. Except, instead of using steam to generate electricity, it somehow converts something from the magma, heat maybe, to Mana. The magma appears to be under a huge amount of pressure. If we crack the containment fields, it should take out the entire complex.*

Danleib's assessment seems off to me. *What do you mean by a lot of pressure? The magma in the streams down there could be called turgid at best.*

*That's just runoff being released from the reactor. It's probably flowing through tunnels back to some river of magma at a much lower depth. The magma in the reactor is being funneled from a high pressure source, maybe the planet's mantle itself.*

Danleib chuckles nastily. *If the orcs want in so bad, we should let them chase us in and blow the reactor while we escape through that tunnel.*

After a few moments of silence, the party channel fills with Ahlred's murderous intent. *I like the idea. Killing half a million orcs in one fell swoop, what could be better?*

*Fine. Let's do it.* With Connor's agreement, the decision is set.

I pass leadership of the party to Connor, and he brings the surviving guild leaders in. A few of them make stupid objections, but what can you expect from gamers? Someone always has to want to do things his own way. When the objectors have no plan of their own to offer, Connor gets the rest of the guild leaders on board. There is not another option, and no matter how dense some of them can be, they will have to take the chance, if they don't want to die at the hands of the orcs.

The Last Day

The Great Fuck Over Day 4,185

It's around midnight. Unlike the preceding nights, the orcs aren't having another rape and torture party. A pack of ten or eleven thousand of them are clustered at the mainland end of our spit of land, keeping up the pressure on our defensive line.

Scattered around the bowl valley, fifteen groups of orcs and their slaves, human or otherwise, are surrounding excavation pits in the valley floor. From his throne, set atop a huge hill made from excavated dirt and stone, the Black Orc watches over everything. Periodically, runners take a message from the Black Orc to the excavation sites.

Agun's three friends have already cut a man-sized hole through the blast door. Because of the sigils in the escape tunnel, Agun cannot open a dimensional door from directly inside of it to the surface. Without having a hole in the door, Agun would have to double gate everyone, and our escape would take over twice as long. The geomancers were taken into the escape tunnel with a double gate hours before the hole was made in the door and should be hard at work clearing the stone blocking the other end of the tunnel.

Agun should be starting to move the main bulk of the players about now. My guild is scheduled to be part of the third wave and will be more or less out of harm's way. To keep the rest of players from fearing abandonment, Dacbold, Farnulf and I will stay until the very end. That was the demand of several of the more cowardly guild leaders. They feared the plan collapsing if there weren't still Dvergar among the defender, but to keep them from stirring up unrest, they also demanded to be part of the first wave moved into the complex.

The orcs aren't making a serious push. Their only purpose seems to be keeping us more of less pinned down with spells and missile fire. It feels like they are more worried about us interfering with the excavations, or more accurately the Black Orc is the one worried about it. Not knowing that we have the dimensional doors, he must be trying to keep us out here from hooking up with the forces we already have inside the complex. That is just fine. The more time we can gain without having to seriously fight, the better it is for us.

Dacbold and Farnulf are standing silently beside me. From the elevation where we are standing, we can more or less clearly see the entire defense line built. Since I don't remember this high of a hill, Dacbold must have had the geomancers raise it while they were working on the bulwark.

The defenses at the shoreward end of this spit of land are rather impressive. A trench was opened, letting the seawater flood in between our refuge and the massed orcs. With orcs being such bad swimmers, it will be a huge obstacle for them. Probably using the stone dug from between the spit and the mainland, another twenty foot high crenelated wall was built across the width the of the strip of land. The only problem is that this is a bit more than three times the length of the one we had on the beach.

Looking at Farnulf, he has hands clasped at waist level. His head is bowed and his eyes are closed. Knowing him, he is probably making his final peace with the God he still believes in. I was raised Christian, but it's been a long time since I believed. I suppose I stopped believing when I learned the truth about the circumstances surrounding my cousin Danny's suicide.

The orc have brought in thousands of goblin slaves. I never saw anywhere near that number of goblins in the footage from Danleib's clockwork birds, but considering the orc horde seemed to be moving in groups scattered over a huge area, it's not too surprising. With goblin slaves digging and prebuilt frames with block and tackle to haul up barrels of stone and rubble, the orcs are too well prepared to be digging here. Was this valley their original goal and our luck just that bad?

As if I just heard some dry cosmic joke, I almost like laughing, but the cold reality of the situation leaves it stillborn.

After notifying Connor about the situation, I can do nothing but watch the orcs and goblins work.

* * * * *

It's only an hour or so until dawn. Even though humans can't see the difference, to Dvergar eyes, the eastern sky is already lightening. The orcs can probably see it too. Their darkness vision is superior to a human by orders of magnitude.

The evacuation is moving faster than normal, but Connor said Agun is pushing himself so hard that he's probably going to at least partially cripple his Power before he's done. That leaves a sour taste in my mouth. Does the good of the many outweigh the good of the few or the one? The few or the one always seem to be the people like Connor, the other Dvergar, and Agun. The ones who get fucked over, used up, and killed are always the ones who have the courage to step up and take responsibility for others failings. I used to accept that, but after the past twelve years of seeing it happen time and again, I'm beginning to feel like it's wrong. Sacrificing myself I can accept, but I can't accept sacrificing others like them any more. Why should Agun have to burn himself out for these people, many of whom won't even feel a shred of gratitude for it?

Mentally shaking off the questions I can't answer yet, I take a look around. The warriors main body of the orc horde are stirring. It's almost time to make our final stand.

At the sound of metal-shod footsteps behind me, I turn and see Tomas and Kat. It feels like heart turns to stone and falls down around my balls.

“No. Why?”

Tomas and Kat look at each other smile. Despite the sadness apparent on their faces, they seem content. On Earth, even though they are still a good bit younger than me, they are an old married couple with grandchildren.

Tomas puts his hand on my shoulder. “Don't worry it's just us. We sent the rest through the gate.”

“This is a suicide mission. There's no guarantee that anyone else will get out of here. What about your children and grandchildren.”

Kat smiles. “We're old like you. Well not quite as old as you. Even if we survive and get back to Earth, it's been twelve years. How much time do we have left? I probably have great grandchildren by now. I'm sad I won't get to see them, but let the younger ones survive. They still have futures ahead of them. Besides, we've been in gaming guilds with you since before Taereun ever started. How could we abandon you now?”

“The main reason I'm here is so you and the other Hammers can escape. Without me, they'll need your guidance.”

Tomas shrugs. “Maybe, it's time for the Hammers to end. Nessa and the other young ones have sort of grown up, and the whole purpose of our guild was to protect the young ones in that wonderful, insane, and lawless environment that was Taereun: Battleground of the Damned.”

I sigh. “Damn.”

Kat bends down and kisses me on the cheek. “you're too willing to suffer for others. If you weren't so self-sacrificing you never would have been crippled in that plant accident.”

“I lost the use of my legs, but that kid would have died. He was was fresh out of college and just standing there like a moonstruck calf.”

“Your need to watch out for yourself more.” Kat hugs me and whispers in my ear, before straightening up again. She is acting like there is a real chance we can get out of this alive.

They have made up their minds. After knowing them for more than thirty years before the start of Taereun, I know them well enough to know there is almost no chance of them changing their minds. Too tired to argue, I turn back toward the bowl valley.

Despite being upset at Tomas and Kat sacrificing themselves alongside me, I can't stop myself from feeling the heartwarming feeling of camaraderie, but it's followed by guilt. If I wasn't here, they would have both left with the rest of the Hammers.

As the eastern sky slowly grows brighter, the orcs form up in ranks. By the time the sun begins to rise over the eastern horizon, there are close to a hundred thousand of them ready to assault our defenses. It looks like this time the orcs are here to finish us off. Even though the Black Orc isn't commanding them, the orc in command is a lesser chieftain that is still probably Coalescent, but I will need to see it using Power to be certain.

Farnulf and Dacbold, who were inspecting our very thin line of defenders, join me up on the command platform again.

Dacbold looks at the massed orcs. “We'd best stay off the line so we can intervene wherever they break through.”

Farnulf looks like he wants to disagree but sighs instead. “He's right. Even with the bulwark, there is no way humans are going to hold a line this long against that many orcs.”

Before I can stop myself, I momentarily laugh. “The two of you are in agreement; looks like the world will end by midnight.”

“Should it matter to us? We're going to be dead by noon.” Farnulf's voice has a matter of fact tone.

“It won't get bad until the next group is pulled out. With only two hundred fifty people to hold a two thousand foot defensive line, we're going to be in trouble.”

Farnulf frowns. “It will be less than that on the line. Thirty of those people are some of our strongest AoE Casters.”

AoE is gamer slang for area of effect. Those thirty casters may be able to lighten the burden somewhat, but it's really going to depend on how the orcs attack. With a line this long, their shamans would be much harder pressed to keep up a spell like that wind barrier they used on the beach. They will probably focus on a smaller area where they are making their hardest push and leave most of the other orcs unshielded. Assuming they do, our AoE Casters will allow us to hold until we can get evacuated.

“That Black Orc seems more interested in digging than killing us. It's like he already knew about the underground complex when he came here. That is probably our only real hope.”

Dacbold squints his eyes and stares at the Black Orc sitting on his throne. “We already know that Black Orcs are a superior breed of orc. Do you think they could have genetic memory?”

“Do you think that just because those constructs look like giant orcs, they have something to do with that complex?”

Dacbold meet my eyes with a hard stare. “You have some of the same historical memories I do. Orcs were supposed to have been made by Dragons when they were multi-dimensional space faring conquerors. Do you think they never had technology?”

Dacbold's statements hit me like a barrel of cold water. Orcs, for me, the name goes back to fantasy novels. It's the same word Tolkien used for his corrupted race. They don't really look the same, but in my mind, they were the same barbarous, ignorant, animalistic race as in fantasy literature. I feel a strong urge to laugh at myself.

I nod. “You're right. These aren't fantasy orcs. They're a real race with a completely different origin. They're certainly acting like they knew the complex was there. If it's a racial memory, I wonder what he's looking for?”

Dacbold just shrugs.

When the orcs begin their assault, the Casters who are being pulled out in the next wave are the ones who use their spells. Like every other assault, it begins with an exchange of missile and spells. The Casters who are staying with us till the end just watch for the most part. Every now and then, one of them casts a spell, but it's never their big stuff. The last two hundred fifty odd of us are all volunteers. Even if no one is saying it, they all know that we are probably not going to make it.

The orc in command stares intently at the patterns of attack and defense for a while. When he starts issuing commands, the orc shamans create a wind barrier around five hundred feet wide on our left flank, and the real attack begins. The seawater in the trench freezes solid in a matter of minutes, giving the orcs a solid avenue of attack. The hundred foot wide trench becomes nothing more than a slippery pain for them, but they don't seem to be bothered by they slickness of the surface under their feet.

There are a few times that the orcs gain a minor foothold under the cover of the wind barrier, but we Dvergar intervene and shove them back each time. Still, there are losses on our side. By the time the fourth dimensional door opens, we are down to about four hundred and eighty people.

Crack! Boom! Crackle! Crack-BOOM! Crackle-boom! BOOM!

The Casters staying till the final wave go into action. Their fusillade of destructive spells is on par with a company of M1 Abrams opening up on the orc lines. In two places huge lightning bolts tear through the wind barrier chaining across dozens of orcs each.

While most of the spells are lightning or fire based, the most frightening are a couple acid clouds that drift into the orc horde. The onshore winds make certain that acid won't engulf our side, but the orcs are engulfed in them. As the afflicted orcs tear at their melting eyes or jump into the chilly waters in front of them, their screams of agony fill the air.

The two casters who unleashed the acid clouds look at one another with malicious grins on their faces. I don't know either of them personally, but like many of the players, I've seen them around over the years.

The chaos in the orc ranks buys us the time to sort out our lines and get the people being evacuated through the dimensional door.

As the last person passes through the door, I look at Agun. His skin is pasty white, and his bloody colored eyes look like someone beat him black and blue. Seemingly unnoticed, a trickle of blood is running down from his nose, across his lip, and dripping off his chin. He should only be on the third batch of evacuees, not the fourth, according to his own timetable. With the condition he seems to be in, there might not be a fifth batch.

As the dimensional door starts to flicker, Connor meets my eyes. The stony expression on his face tells me he knows as well as I do that this is probably our last time seeing each other alive.

“Semper fi.” I let my frown slip for a moment, and my lips curve into a fractional smile.

“Semper fi.” Before Connor can say anything else, the door disappears from existence.

“Heroes always rise to the occasion!” The voice is one that should not be here.

As I turn to look at the speaker, Kamehameha takes off a great helm that matches the armor that is different from his usual.

“You should already be gone.”

Kamehameha smirks. “If I was already gone, I wouldn't get to see you be a hero.”

“All your likely to see is both of us die. Agun's a wreck. He probably won't be able to open another door. Everyone here knew they were signing up for what was probably a suicide mission.”

Completely unflappable in his mistaken beliefs, Kamehameha laughs. “With you and two more Dvergar, we'll pull through.”

“Idiot. Take your place on the line!”

Before putting his helm back on and heading for the bulwark, Kamehameha grins at me.

“You should have roped that one into the Hammers, Thorrin.” Kat's voice has a pensive tone to it, as she stares at Kamehameha's departing figure.

While the orcs reorder their lines and bring in a few more shamans to cast new spells, we get close to a half hour reprieve. As the new shaman's finish their spells, heavy offshore winds start clashing with the natural onshore winds. I won't complain about the extra time we bought, but these new shamans are cutting out one line of attack.

However, the two Casters who used the acid clouds don't seem perturbed. They are gesturing toward the bulwark while talking and laughing.

With an even stronger wind barrier screening the attacking orcs, they resume their assault on our left flank. Across the rest of the bulwark, the sky turns black from the sheer volume of arrows arcing downward. Most the arrows are blocked by magic wards or physical shields, but we still suffer casualties.

Dozens of more waves of arrows follow the first, and the entire defensive line, thin as it is, hunkers down in the shelter of the crude battlements. There are no more casualties, but we have no way to effectively slow the orcs advance. Under the cover of the arrow storm, the orcs dump the rubble from their excavations into the trench. I have the strange urge to laugh. Orcs are dumb, but they aren't imbeciles.

After watching the show for a ten or fifteen minutes, the two Casters that used the acid clouds start casting something new. Ephemeral clouds that don't really seem to be a part of this world appear along the landward side of the trench, and dark green rain begins to fall. It only takes a few seconds for the orcs to start screaming and fighting to get out of that acid rain.

As the sun climbs higher into the sky, our losses continue. One here and a couple there, they mount until we have lost nearly thirty people, while more than half the rest have some sort of wounds. More than twenty times, we Dvergar have been forced to intervene at the bulwark to stop the orcs from overrunning us.

Ironically the two acid Casters are holding back the orcs along the almost two-thirds of the trench, where they are trying to fill it manually. Without the wind barrier that seems too Mana intensive for the number of shamans available to make a larger one, the orcs appear to have no way to deal with their acid rain.

*Thorrin, get ready. It will be about fifteen minutes.* Connor's tone through the whisper channel sounds strained.

*What's going on?*

*We have orcs in the big cavern with the rock column. They opened up holes in the roof of the caverns and started dropping down. We've pulled back to the west tunnel and are holding a defensive line about fifty yards in. Danleib sent some of his birds up with explosives. Once we retrieve your group, we're going to blow the tunnel.* Connor can't conceal the anger in his voice.

*What about Danleib and Cwichelm?*

There is a pause before Connor continues. *Agun can't get them out. The wild Mana running out from that reactor is making the area to turbulent for him to open a gate. He wore himself out again trying, which is why you are still up there. He's in bad shape, Thorrin. You had better move fast when that gate opens.*

*Got it. We'll be ready.*

An empty void seems to fill my chest. I've known Danleib for over sixty years, and Cwichelm for more than fifty. I want to fight my way down to the Mana reactor, but I know that it would be a futile attempt. Instead, I pass the word to the leaders of the player groups still alive.

As if they know that we are about to escape, the orcs begin to push their attacks ever harder than before. Even where the acid Casters are dropping their acid rain, the orc leaders are driving their troops into the watery trench. In spite of the acid rain, the orcs have still managed to fill the trench to the point when those crossing are only chest to neck deep in the salt water. Here and there, orcs misstep and sick under that surface without rising again. Their corpses are trampled under by the orcs behind them, helping to help fill in the spaces between the stones and small boulders filling the trench.

BOOM!

When an explosion sends a geyser of rubble flying into the sky, slightly less than ten minutes have passed since Connor contacted me. As the rubble settles, a section of the battlements on the left side of our line crumbles, opening up a ragged ramp for the orcs to climb up onto our spit of land. What the hell did the orcs do?

“RAAAARRRRRRR!” The collective, victorious howl of hundreds or thousands of orc voices fills the air. The gap in our battlements is close a hundred feet wide, and the voracious orcs come pouring up it.

As I rush toward the breach with Tomas and Kat following, I see Dacbold and Farnulf headed the same way.

On this side of the breach, a small guild, Happy Travellers, is pushing into the orcs flank, cutting down a dozen of them before the orc can respond.

Kamehameha looks at me from the far side of the breach, and I'm certain he's smiling under that great helm he's wearing. As he charges into the oncoming orcs, four others are right at his heels. They work well together, and orcs immediately start to fall to their teamwork.

Our Casters start dropping AoEs in front of the orc advance, stopping them in their tracks.

“Aaaarrrrr!” Howling wordlessly, with that curtain of spells blanketing the land to my left, I tear into the head orc advance. I have no idea how my face looks to the orcs, but I can see fear in their eyes when they look at me. The rage and hate for the orcs build with each swing of my axe.

With the rage clouding my mind, I am not consciously controlling my strength. Each swing of my axe is harder and heavier. The weapons and shields of the orcs are easily battered aside, while blood and body parts fly, as my axe severs limbs and cleaves torsos.

Dacbold and Farnulf cut their way to my right hand side, and we begin cutting down the orcs, like lumberjacks felling trees.

*Old man, I think we're fucked over here. Remember, you have to start being a hero!* Kamehameha's whisper cuts through the rage that is blinding me.

I look across the ramp cut into our defenses and see Kamehameha and about a dozen more players surrounded on three sides by the orcs with their backs to the battlements.

“Farnulf! Give me your jump buff!”

A lot of the Casters and many of the Adepts among the players have various kinds of buff spells that enhance movement. None of them are as powerful as the buffs that Makers cast. A normal jump buff will boost a person’s jump distance by a solid thirty feet. The jump buff that Farnulf casts is more than eight times as powerful.

While barely slowing the swings of his axe, Farnulf murmurs the mnemonic under his breath and casts the spell on me. As it lands, my legs are filled with explosive power.

Boom!

As Farnulf was casting the jump buff, I was putting the one-shot explosive buff on my shield. My shield charge into the orc in front of me detonates it, destroying a half dozen orcs in a more or less ninety degree arc in front of me.

The distance between me and the players with Kamehameha is around a hundred and eighty feet, well within my current jumping range. With three quick steps, I launch myself into the air in the direction of Kamehameha and the other players.

“LEEEEERRROOOOOOOOOYYY!” I can't help myself. It's been way too many years since I've done as stupid a Leroy Jenkins move as this one. I wonder, do they still have any Leroy Jenkins videos floating around the internet?

Most of the still living orcs that have already pushed through the breach turn to look at me. As they stare at me hurtling through the air, almost comical expressions or raw shock leave them slack jawed. Luckily, that shock at seeing eight hundred pounds of flying armor, weapons, and Dvergar slows their reactions enough for me to be only feet away from my target zone before they start to swing on me.

My kick knocks aside the axe of the orc I'm going to land on, but without having any footing in midair, it twists me around. My mail-clad elbow slams into the orcs exposed face, and his head explodes. Amid a shower of blood and brain parts, I crush the orc's corpse beneath me.

Rolling to my feet, I chop through the nearest orc's knees, and it falls to the ground screaming in horror. My steel-shod foot crushes its skull, and I look around to get my bearings.

I erred too much on the side of caution and jumped to a point too far out in front of Kamehameha's group. There is still twenty-five feet between me and them, and orcs are pressing me from all sides. An orc champion standing nearly eight feet tall is right on top of them, and I can't do a thing about it.

“Fuck off, orcs!” The orcs have no clue what I shout, and my axe lashes out faster than a human eye can follow.

With the sound of twisting metal and shattering bones, an orc trying to block my blow with its shield is sent flying a dozen feet to the side. Three orcs in its line of travel are knocked to the ground, with one clearly unconscious from the impact.

Kamehameha's helm focuses on me in apparent shock, and the orc champion brings its two-handed mace down on his shoulder. The sounds of shattering bones are audible over the cacophony of the battle, and Kamehameha collapses to the ground.

“RRRAAAAAAARRRRRRRR!” My wordless yell of rage echoes around the battlefield, and I lash out in a berserk fury. With no thought for defense, both my axe and shield become weapons. The last few orcs between me and the champion fall.

As the champion grunts something in its bastard language, the two orcs next to it press the attack on the players, and it turns to face me. Its attack is several times faster than the one it just made against Kamehameha. Even though it must have been just toying with Kamehameha, it had dropped him so easily. This one must be Coalescent, like the ones we Dvergar fought in front of the wall the first day.

Blocking the orc's massive overhand blow warps my shield and nearly forces me to my knees, but I still stop what was probably one of the orcs strongest blow. Shock and maybe a hint of uncertainty flicker across the orc's features, only to be replaced with hate and rage.

I return the orc's attack with a slash to its knees that it barely blocks. Blow for blow our weapons hammer at one another. This isn't a battle of skill; it's a head to head clash of raw, brute strength. Coalescent orc versus Dvergar, the first one to falter dies.

As both humans and orcs watch our titanic struggle in near awe, the thunderous clashing of metal on metal brings a temporary lull to the battle near us.

After several dozen strikes, blocks, and parries, the orc gets a clever look in its eyes, and it tries a lateral strike instead of the overhead and oblique angles of attack it had been using. As I let my frown turn into a smirk, confusion enters the orc's eyes.

“Aaaaarrrrr!”

Leaning heavily into the block, I stop the orc's mace cold, and almost in the same instant, half sever its knee with a short chop. The orc's scream of pain resounds, and I cut off its other lower leg with a second heavier chop. As the orc crumples to its ruined knee, I hack off both its arms and kick it over onto the ground.

As I moved over to Kamehameha and pull off his helm, stunned silence covers the battlefield. Whether human or orc, the combatants stare at the scene of me kneeling next to Kamehameha, while the crippled orc rapidly bleeds out on the ground, unable to even turn over without its arms.

Blood is running down Kamehameha's face from his mouth and nose. The mace crushed his right shoulder and the right side of his rib cage. Almost certainly, his right lung has been destroyed, and he must have catastrophic internal bleeding. He coughs a few times and smiles weakly.

“Hey, old man, you have to be a fucking hero now.” Kamehameha's voice is barely a whisper.

My laughter is self-mocking and bitter. “I've told you, kid. I'm no hero. I never have been. I never will be.”

I could lie to Kamehameha and tell him that I'll be a hero, but he deserves better. No matter how cruel it might be, he deserves the truth when he's dying.

As I look around, the surviving players move into a defensive circle around us. They look like they are not going to budge an inch in the face of the orcs.

Kamehameha tries to grab onto my arm, but he doesn't have the strength hold on.

“Talon's gone. You and the Dvergar are the only ones that can do it. So strong . . . he should have been a hero . . . like Goku . . .”

Kamehameha's heartbeat stops.

“Steel is stubbornness!” Seeming to carry a weight of meaning far beyond their simple definitions, my words have a strange resonance in the silence.

Without even using mnemonics, fueled by a cold rage, I cast a succession of weapon buffs on my axe. The multiple effects combine into a sullen silvery-orange glow around its head. The air around me shimmers with the heavy aura of Power, as I step out to engage the orcs.

Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!

Driven by hate and rage that I cannot control, I wade into the attacking orcs. One by one, they fall to my axe. Not a one of them can take more than two or three blows before falling before my relentless assault.

*THORRIN!* Kat's screech would be ear-piercing in the flesh, and it's still painful in the guild channel.

Jarred out of my killing rage, I look around. Damned orcs! I let them surround me. What a stupid mistake to make. No one is anywhere near me anymore. I'm all alone here. At least, only three or four can attack me at once. As wide and heavily muscled as a Dvergar body is, an orc still makes me look like a runt.

The last of the players I was trying saves falls to the ground. At the very least, her spine was crushed and probably most of the right side of her rib cage along with it. As the orc that hit her from behind turns in my direction. Another champion is coming at me from the left.

I shift my vision into pattern sight, and immediately, the headache hits me. The Power visible in that champions pattern is a good order of magnitude higher than the other orcs. I can see the braided strands flowing through him, four strands in the braid. Any time we've faced something with braided Power like that, we've lost people. Only Talon, Menton, and we Dvergar could ever stand toe to toe with Coalescent beings like those.

Looking around there are hundreds more orcs between here and Kat and Tomas. Farnulf's buff has already worn off, so I can't jump out. They'll get annihilated if they try to reach me. Dacbold and Farnulf are fighting near them. The only thing keeping the orcs from overrunning the players is the AoE Casters and the two Dvergar.

*Stay back. Don't try to reach me. Link up with the Happy Travellers, and shut down those fucking orcs that are coming up the ramp!*

*No! We'll...*

Trying to deflect orc attacks, while you're arguing with someone, is a good way to get dead. A brutally spiked mace almost takes my head off, but I barely manage to deflect it.

*Do what I'm telling you to Kat! If you make it out of here, you and Tomas try to keep everyone together.*

Neither of them say anything, but from where I am, I see Tomas nod.

*Thorrin, we're opening the door now!* Connor's whisper is a repeal on a death sentence for most of the surviving players.

*Be careful. The orcs somehow blew a hole in our ramparts and are on the peninsula. We're almost getting overrun here. Coordinate with Tomas. I'm a bit busy.*

The orc champion snarls something in its bastard language. Zugg, the name of the orc god of fuck, is the only word I recognize. As the champion forces its way through packed mass, the orcs are opening up space around me. It looks like the champion wants to prove its mettle by giving me a one on one beat-down. Stupid orcs, they should have overwhelmed me with numbers.

Power flows from the champion's hand, engulfing its weapon, an axe, in a bloody glow. It's not a weapon buff or any other type of spell I can recognize, but it carries an aura of destructive malice. This orc is as strong as the Coalescent champion Ahlred fought.

Out of the corner of my eye, I see Agun's dimensional door open. In the air over the breach in our battlements, a fiery cloud forms and begins to spin.

Boom!

Letting my frown turn into a mocking grin, I spring at the orc champion. Its face twisted by rage, the orc block my blow. The thunderous detonation from the impact of my buffs with its Power staggers both of us and scatters sparks and streamers of fire over a five yard radius. Not pausing, we both step back in and start chopping brutally at one another.

There is no technique or skill to this fight. It is nothing but a contest of reflexes, brute strength, raw Power. The first blow the orc tries to take on its shields leaves the shield nearly split in two. My own battered shield is turned into scrap metal by the first few blocks.

Behind the champion, the swirling clouds turn into a fiery funnel cloud, and the other orcs start scrambling to get out of the breach in the battlement. Along the battlements to the east of the orc shamans' wind barrier, acid rain and lightning storms are holding back the orcs.

The only place the players are still engaged is where the orcs have already pushed out of their breach in the our battlements. There are only a hundred or so of them, and they should be killed quickly enough. Most of the players are already escaping through Agun's door.

It looks like this is the end for me. I feel a strange sense of relief.

Boom! Boom! Crackle-boom!

Fireballs and lightning balls drop into the orcs watching my slug fest with their champion. As the orc jerks its head in startlement, I drive the the twisted, mangled edge of my shield into its balls. The jagged edges of rent metal tear through the orc's mail shirt, and blood sprays outward from the orcs groin.

The orc champion looks down at its balls in shock for a few seconds, before it starts to howl in agony. I guess it takes a few seconds for the pain to register over the shock when you go from bull to ox. Before the orc can do anything but scream, the upward swing of my axe takes off its jaw and half its face.

Thump! Thump!

Two eight hundred plus armor-clad forms land next to me. My mind blanks from surprise, I stare at Farnulf.

“What the fuck?”

Farnulf grins. “I'm not letting you die yet.”

With Farnulf grabbing me by one arm and Dacbold the other, they leap back to the safety or our retreating forces.

CLANK! CLANK! CLANK! CLANK! CLANK! CLANK! CLANK! CLUNK-THUD!

Even from miles away, the tremendous ratcheting sounds of a pair of doors opening in the face of the Labyrinth of Yggr rumble across the battlefield.

“What the fuck?” My comment from earlier is unknowingly repeated by a dozen or more people.

“I never realized there was a gate up there on the Labyrinth.” Farnulf's soft words echo my thoughts.

“If it's something coming out of the Labyrinth, I can't imagine it being any good for us.” Dacbold's quiet comment is probably dead on. Staying here to find out what new surprises are coming is one of the worst choices we could make.

“Everyone! Get through the dimensional door now! LET'S MOVE IT!” My bellow stirs the players who were staring at the Labyrinth into action.

As the players move through the door, I watch the gate and the flickering scarlet glow within it. It only takes a couple of minutes for the remaining players to file through the door, and not waiting to see what might be coming out of the Labyrinth, I quickly follow them. Glancing over my shoulder, I see the door disappearing.

Agun is sitting on the floor of the tunnel, leaning against the wall, with the lower half of his a mask of blood. Agun has pushed himself way past Mana depletion. His skin is so pale that he might well be bloodless.

Nessa is kneeling next to him, with a sad and frustrated expression. She turns to look at me, and there is a mix of helplessness and condemnation in her eyes.

“What was that noise?” Connor is standing next to Agun.

“A gate that we couldn't see in the upper part of the Labyrinth opened.”

Connor looks toward the central cavern. “Things are probably going from bad to worse.”

“Probably.”

As I look around, gold letters appear in the air in front of me. No one else can see them, but that doesn't make them look any less real.

You have been invited to join Danleib's party.

Do you accept?

Yes. I just have to clearly form the word and intent in my mind. Unlike the party charms we were using at the start of The Great Fuck Over, the ones we improved do not require a verbal response.

All the other Dvergar are already in the party.

*You need to get past the blast door and block the way behind you. As soon as you do that, we'll detonate this reactor. Taking a few hundred thousand orc with me, I don't suppose that it's too bad of a way to go.* Danleib does not mince words and gets straight to the point.

*There has to be another way out.*

Danleib sighs. *Unless you have another Caster who can open a gate or teleport through the interference from the wild Mana, we're stuck here. I'm surprised the whisper and party charms even work. It's probably because they are primarily based on Psi.*

None of us say anything for a few moments. With Dacbold and Farnulf, I was the last of the human players funneling through a hole in the blast door that will be a tight fit for us Dvergar. It's pretty likely that most of the orcs in this horde won't be able to squeeze through.

Along with a group of Casters and Adepts, Ahlred and Wihtred are holding a barricade against the attacks of the orcs already inside the complex.

*Don't give me any good of the many outweighs the good of the one bullshit.* Ahlred's vicious tone gives his words a poignant impact. There was a time long in his past, when he was in Teams, that he believed in that bullshit, as he calls it now.

Danleib chuckles. *I stopped believing in that long ago. If you give the many an easy path by having the few pay the prices for them, they become the piece of shit sheep things you have running what used to be America today. If there was a way out, there is no way I would be sacrificing myself.*

Connor and Nessa help Agun through the blast door. Except for us Dvergar and the rear guard, there is no one left on this side of the blast door.

“Bring the rain!” Connor's bellow echoes inside the confined space of this tunnel corridor.

Cackling like a lunatic, Wihtred pulls out a handful of his explosive necklaces and waves them over his head.

“OH FUCK! RUN!” I don't know who shouted, but except for Wihtred and Ahlred, the rest of the players take off like bats out of hell.

Boom! Boom! Boom!

Snapping them into pieces, he hurls them among the orcs. Billowing black smoke shot through with sullen red rolls back over the two Dvergar. Orc howls of pain and rage fill the tunnel in the wake of the explosions.

Walking out of the smoke unharmed, with Cwichelm at his side, Ahlred looks around for the Casters that ran, with a half-smile, half-sneer on his face. “You can stop cowering and drop some AoE to keep those fuckers busy for a few minutes.

With expressions ranging from unperturbed, to embarrassed, to angered, the eleven Casters in the corridor begin casting spells. Two of the Casters with the group are the acid Casters who just arrived from the rear guard. A hell of fire, lightning, and acid fills the tunnel.

All of the humans pass through the hole in the blast door leaving only we five Dvergar. Two of us are still below at the Mana generator. After twelve years of carrying secrets about the truth of this universe that we knew because of these Dvergar bodies, two of our number are going to die. It's not a sudden death in battle, but one that we can all see coming, and none of us can do a damn thing to stop.

*Only the five of us are left. There are ton of AoEs in the corridor that should keep the orcs back for a few minute.* Even though I'm only saying the words mentally, they taste like ashes in my mouth.

Danleib's tone is calm and collected. Resigned might be a better term for it. *Everything is ready on this end. Once you all are clear, I'll detonate the reactor. I don't know if it will go up fast or slow, but it should be fast enough to give most of those orcs a taste of hell.*

*Logic clearly dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.*

Wihtred bristles with anger. *Fuck you, Cwichelm! I hated that stupid line. It ruined the fucking movie. You're just as important any of those fucks getting out of this alive. Hell, you're almost as important as I am!*

Cwichelm laughs *See you on the other side. Just learn to sing before you get there.*

Standing in the corridor, while clenching and unclenching his fists repeatedly, Wihtred looks almost ready to cry. He doesn't say anything else, before turning and squeezing through the hole in the blast door.

*Catch you later, you damn fly boys.* Ahlred doesn't bother to hide the anger in his tone. He probably can't hide it any longer and may not even be able to control it. Where I've been teetering on the edge of a rage that could overwhelm me if I'm not careful, Ahlred seems to have been on the edge of drowning in rage since the orcs' first attacked.

*See you around, squid.*

The others say their goodbyes with less banter.

*I'm sorry.*

*What are you apologizing for? This is my choice. Though, it's not like we have fuck all for options down here. You need to stop shouldering blame that isn't rightly yours. Goodbye, Thorrin.* Danleib sounds tired, now.

*I'll see you both on the other side.* It might not be very long before I see them again. Even with their sacrifice, I don't know how much longer I'll survive. The orcs are still here and the effects of detonating the reactor may not even get many of them.

*Don't show up too quickly. I'll be pissed and send you back if you do. Seriously, live well my brothers. You've got thirty seconds.*

With Cwichelm's final words echoing in our minds, the rest of us squeeze through the hole in the blast door. It's a tight fit for bodies as massive as our Dvergar bodies, but we get through it without issue. Wihtred takes out a black metal box with a single button and presses it.

BOOOOMMMM!

The tunnel on the other side of the blast door collapses, and dust is blown through the hold in a huge billowing cloud.

Not waiting around we quickly move down the tunnel. Before we catch up to the stragglers among the players, I hear a faint echo of an explosion that might be Danleib's bomb.

“That's it.” Wihtred's tone of voice is dejected, and he's looking at the ground, instead of looking ahead.

Agun is among the last of the players. With an arm over the shoulders of the person on each side of himself, he is staggering along. His head is drooping, and blood is still trickling from his nose.

Nessa who is one of the people he is leaning on glares at me. Her eyes seem to be filled with accusation. “Killing, killing, and more killing. That's all we do. Even if they aren't real people like us, why can't we find some other way than just killing? Look how many of us are dead. We might be next.”

Nessa looks at Agun's face, only inches from her own, and her lips quiver. “He's destroyed his blood vessels and his nerves. I can't do anything for him. The pain is too much.”

Looking down the tunnel toward the other players, a look of superiority quickly flashes across Nessa's face. “None of them are good enough to do anything for him. The best of them are more killer than healer.”

Kat who is next to Tomas, the other person holding up Agun, has an ugly expression, as she stares at Nessa, but she doesn't say anything.

I feel like I may have never seen the real Nessa. I'm not even sure this is a glimpse of the real Nessa.

An emptiness void takes the place of my heart. Maybe Kat is right. It might be time for the Hammers to come to an end.

Rumble. Rumble. Rumble. Boom. Rumble. Rumble. BOOM! Rumble! BOOM! RUMBLE!

The floor of the tunnel begins to vibrate and then shake under our feet. Dust filters down from the roof, but there is no indication that it will come down on our heads.

Dacbold grabs Agun and puts him over his shoulders in a fireman's carry.

“I can walk.”

“Shut up. You're too slow, and you're in my way.”

All of us speed up to a quick jog, with the players ahead of us doing the same. There are less than four hundred people in total. Except for the rear guards from the peninsula and in the tunnel, everyone else has long since passed through the tunnel.

As time passes, we don't slow our jog. After maybe half an hour, the rumbling stops but the humans say the tunnel is getting hot. With my Dvergar body, I can't tell how bad it is. The tunnel is definitely warmer, but the tolerance of Dvergar body make everything from arctic cold to boiling water within our range of tolerance.

By the time we reach the upward slope of the tunnel, it has only been forty-five minutes since the first rumbling, but there is the clear smell of molten stone in the air. Looking back I see a faint orange glow down the tunnel.

A shiver runs down my spine. Molten lava is so far out of the range of Dvergar tolerance that our bodies may as well be human. Despite the rubble from digging through the plug on the tunnel littering the tunnel floor, I involuntarily increase my pace, and the others do as well.

At the top of the sloping tunnel, there is a round six foot wide by seven foot high rough tunnel bored through the old lava flow. After fifty-odd yards, we reach a natural cave, with daylight visible ahead.

Leaving the cave, we find the rest of the survivors. At a quick glance, there looks to be a bit over twelve hundred people, maybe thirteen hundred. Not counting the who knows how many players that were enslaved, we have less the five percent of the number of people who walked out of the Labyrinth a week ago.

“Is this what you call winning?” Wihtred's anger turns his voice into a vicious snarl.

“At best, it's a pyrrhic victory.” Farnulf's mournful tone matches his bleak expression.

“We need to get everyone away from the mouth of this cave, to higher ground. If that lava we saw makes it here, we'll be in trouble.” Suiting actions to his words, Connor starts contacting the surviving guild leaders via whispers.

As we move up the side of the mountain, toward a plateau to the north of the cave, the rest of the players follow in a ragged migration.

After pulling blankets from a storage ring, Dacbold lays Agun down. Agun sighs and stares up at the midday sky. The whites of his eyes are a bloody red.

*Ahlred.* I gesture toward Agun with my chin.

Ahlred shakes his head faintly. *He's dying.*

All the other Dvergar heard Ahlred's words in the party channel, and Dacbold squats next to Agun.

Agun smiles, showing his bloody teeth. “You know it hurts like hell to push yourself this far, but I couldn't leave you to die.”

With his face scrunched up from pain, Agun pauses for a moment. “The rest of my friends died in Ashir's Pass. Dark Guardian abandoned us. The lines broke, and they died. I'm the only survivor from Silver Horn that didn't run with Dark.”

“Do you want them to die?” Dacbold's voice is cold.

“I was going to kill Dark myself. I didn't think I would have the time to get the rest of them, though.”

“I understand.”

Agun smiles and stares at the sky again. “Now that the storm is over, it's such a beautiful blue.”

After squatting next to Agun for a few minutes, Dacbold reaches out and closes his sightless eyes. Agun is dead.

Rising to his feet, Dacbold takes out his axe and holds it with the top of his hand against the head. Striking the center of his chest with his closed fist and the flat of his axe, Dacbold stands with his back ramrod straight facing Agun's corpse. Starting with Ahlred, one by one, the rest of us do the same. This is the Dvergar way to salute one of superior rank or one deserving of honorable recognition.

After a minute, Dacbold turns and scans the surviving players. Locking his gaze on Dark Guardian, Dacbold stalks toward him. The raw menace and hostility in Dacbold's bearing draw the attention of most of the players, but no one makes a move toward.

“Thorrin! Stop him!”

I turn to look at Nessa. She is the living picture of righteous outrage.

“Why?”

Nessa looks at me like I've suddenly grown three heads. “He's going to kill them! That's murder! You can't let him do that! They're real people! They're from Earth like us!”

Crack!

“Shut up, Nessa!”

A brilliant red palm print on her cheek, Nessa stares at Kat flabbergasted.

“You never took a life when we've been attacked. People have died right in front of you so that you could live. You may be one of our healers, but you've become a hypocritical little bitch.”

More than a little fear in her eyes, Nessa backs away. Her new boyfriend, Elijah, wraps his arms around her, and she doesn't struggle. That one is more suited to her than Talon ever would have been. He pretty much has no balls, and after The Great Fuck Over started, he almost never actually killed anyone. Considering the disdain she's been showing for us killers in the past couple days, I don't understand why Talon ever caught her interest.

“You're only a kid on Earth. You never went to war. You were never betrayed by the nation you fought for. You never had your beliefs criminalized and your freedom stolen by the ungrateful fucks you fought to protect. You still seem to be under the delusion that this world is somehow less real than Earth.

“Agun's friends died when Dark Guardian betrayed them. Agun died before he could avenge them. Dacbold is a man who never had many friends. He is taking revenge in his friend's name. Who the fuck do you think you are to try and stop him?”

Nessa stares at me aghast, and Elijah looks at me with fear in his eyes.

Dacbold close with Dark Guardian, who is half hiding behind Forever and Eternity. The naked fear on Dark Guardian's face is almost comical to behold, but Dacbold isn't laughing.

“Agun is dead. I am his surrogate.” Dacbold's voice is loud and carries clearly. Probably all the surviving players can hear him clearly.

“You fled like a coward at Ashir's Pass, and most of your guild died. Agun was the only survivor. You abandoned your post watching for attacks from the ridge yesterday, and most of our forces were wiped out. Agun wanted you dead, and you will die by my hand.”

Dacbold springs on Dark Guardian too quickly for him to react. Without even using his axe, he rips off Dark Guardian's arm. Using the arm as a club, Dacbold beats Dark Guardian to the ground before stomping on his legs crushing both thighs.

“AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH! No! Please! Stop! No more!” Dark Guardian's agonized shrieks echo off the mountain behind us.

With two quick chops of his axe, Dacbold sends the heads of Forever and Eternity flying. The other nine members of Silver Horn turn tail and flee. After watching them run off, Dacbold looks down at Dark Guardian.

“Don't worry. The next time I encounter them, they'll join you in hell.”

With a single stomp, Dacbold turns Dark Guardian's head into meat paste.

As he looks around, none of the other players meet Dacbold's eyes. Their fear is palpable. If any of them are outraged or upset by Dacbold's actions, they are prudently keeping their silence.

“That is the proper way for a Dvergar to settle a blood debt.”

The deep bass voice startles me, and I spin around to look up at a ledge thirty or forty feet above the plateau. Three Dvergar are standing there looking down at us. I have no idea when they arrived or how they reached that ledge without being seen.

They are between 4'6” and 5' tall. Their shoulders are nearly as wide as they are tall. Like me, their legs are too short in relation to their body, and their arms are too long. In the middle, a grey-bearded Dvergar is slightly shorter than the other two. His full suit of chainmail has a flat black color to it, and an axe is hanging from his belt, while a shield strapped to his left arm. On his left, the tallest of the three is a red-bearded Dvergar with great axe resting across his shoulders. The one on the right is a black-bearded Dvergar with a spear.

I think the speaker was the on on the left, but it doesn't matter. These three Dvergar leave me wanting to fall to my knees in worship. They are dangerous, dangerous beyond anything we have ever encountered.

“Who are you?” I try to keep my tone of voice neutral, but I can hear the fear in my words.

The grey-beard looks at me. When he speaks, the voice is clearly different from the first. “So, ye are Thorrin the Possessed Dvergar.”

“You know me?” I can't keep the surprise and shock out of my question.

“Should ye still be living, Boran Second Father commanded me to provide ye and the other Possessed Dvergar sanctuary and arrange for one to train ye as a proper Dvergar. Out of his kindness, the Second Father has decreed that the humans with ye can build dwellings on land under Dvergar protection.”

I look behind me at the surviving players, before facing the grey-beard Dvergar with my back straight. “I promised them that I would help them all return to Earth, to their rightful bodies. I can't go back on my word.”

The grey-beard frowns. “They humans have no bodies to return to. The nameless trash has slain all yer bodies. These are the only bodies the humans have.”

When I look back at the players again, many of the players faces are pale. Also, it's clear that many of them don't believe the grey-beard's words. Still, Connor and a several of the other surviving guild leaders nod in acknowledgment.

Meeting the grey-beard's eyes is the most difficult thing I have ever done. “We'll take you up on your kind offer.”

“Ye have made the right choice. I am Grimnir, Son of Auoun, Son of Alfodr, Son of Boran. The lands the humans will live are the fief of my descendants.”

Boom!

Rubble and a spray of molten stone blast outward from the cave we exited from. Everyone present just stares at the cave. A minute or so later, lava begins to turgidly flow from the cave.

After glancing at the lava, Grimnir stares in the direction of the underground complex, a frown upon his lips.

A few moments later, Grimnir stares at me, and it feels like he is weighing and measuring me with his eyes. “Take hope. Yer old lives are gone, but the Second Father offers hope for the future. Yer minds and souls can be integrated with yer bodies. In time, it will be as they were the bodies ye were born into.”

After twelve years of fighting and struggling, it has all just ended. It's almost an anticlimax. Our bodies died offstage, and we couldn't do a fucking thing to stop it. Hope. I'm afraid to hope for anything at this point. The future will bring what it brings. All we can do is move forward.