Dungeon Duel (Rogue Dungeon 5) - Chapter Thirty-Two

Randy meant to just jump right into a Deep Dive POD as soon as he made it to the VIP lounge and changed into the sensory suit. The Griefer needed him, the fate of several worlds hung in the balance, and yet…

And yet this was his probable death he was staring down. He was old enough to remember when Green Gate Online had crashed back in the early days of ultra-immersive VRMMOs, killing hundreds of players who’d been online at the time and leaving a thousand more brain damaged for life.

Randy didn’t have a family or friends to miss, no job or great purpose in life that only he could fulfill. In all likelihood, he would be forgotten not long after he was gone. Just another name in the endgame credits that nobody ever read. Especially not with Hearthworld on the chopping block, just waiting for the axe. How was it that he could still be so attached to Earth?

Simple. It was his home world. Roark must feel the same about Traisbin, even though it sounded like an absolutely horrific place overall.

That hardened Randy’s resolve. It wasn’t just Roark’s home world at stake if they lost, it was Earth, Randy’s home. Already he was seeing the real-world consequences of the Tyrant King’s magic. His troops laying siege to buildings. Otherworldly creatures mercilessly unleashed against unsuspecting humans. Powerful magics that his world simply wasn’t equipped to handle. Randy couldn’t allow someone even worse than Lowen to get a foothold in this world. He loved Earth in spite of the fact that he had nothing tying him to it, and by gosh, he was going to save it from the crushing fist of a tyrant. Even if doing so meant he had to die.

He might not be the hero the world wanted, but he was the one it was going to get.

With a final determined breath, Randy climbed into the POD, letting his body float in the bed of semisolid blue goop. The capsule’s lid came down automatically with a soft hiss, closing over him like a coffin. Swallowing hard, he logged into Hearthworld for what could very well be his final time.

“Welcome, Randy Shoemaker!” the familiar voiceover boomed. “The battle awaits! Which character would you like to select?”

The choice was obvious. He had begun this endeavor tracking anomalous code as an Arboreal Herald, and he would finish it as one.

Within minutes, he was soaring through the red rock canyons around the Vault of the Radiant Shield on silver-gray wings. An eerie stillness blanketed the battle-scarred canyon. Randy hadn’t seen the encampment when it was teeming with besieging armies or during the skirmish, but the smoldering wreckage of enormous towers and trebuchets and so many bodies made it seem as if the clash of war should still hang in the air.

Instead, there was only smoke and quiet.

The corpses of mobs both Infernal and Divine littered the narrow path that wound toward the golden Vault perched high atop the rocky pillar. He banked sharply—letting a red updraft arrow carry him higher—and passed over the destroyed ruins of the Vault’s main heroes’ entrance, landing instead on one of the many flight porches dotting the side of the structure. Here, too, the wounds from multiple attacks showed in the crumbling threshold, but so far, it hadn’t caved in. On the plus side, Randy knew from seeing late-development maps of the Vault that this particular access point was only a few rooms from the throne room, which he felt certain was where Roark and his army must be.

He cast a cloak of invisibility and carefully padded through the hallways, stepping over smoldering corpses riddled with what could only be gunshot wounds. He even found signs of tread tracks, smeared across the floor. Just what in the heck had Roark managed to cook up this time? The Dungeon Lord’s sheer ingenuity never ceased to amaze or inspire. He was a leader, and not like PwnrBwner, or rather Scott—Randy supposed saving the world together put them on a first-name basis—who was all bravado and overconfident swagger. Roark had self-assurance in spades, but he didn’t flaunt it.

His action and resolve spoke for itself.

Roark was the kind of man Randy had always wished he could be—daring, bold, fearless. Principled and not afraid to back down from a fight. As he crept through halls, Randy realized for the first time that this must’ve been what Roark had felt like the night he’d tried to assassinate the Tyrant King. A tight-bellied fear mixed with white-knuckled anticipation and heady adrenaline. A willingness to lay it all down for a shot to do the right thing, even knowing the odds were against him.

Randy smiled to himself. Maybe they weren’t so different in the end.

After passing through another few rooms, similarly splattered with carnage, Randy found the warring Dungeon Lords. Dead ahead, a throng of mobs from the allied dungeons were crammed into the corridor and antechamber outside the throne room, jockeying for position, all trying to catch a glimpse inside. Some of the smaller mobs were going so far as to climb on top of larger mobs’ heads.

Praying he wasn’t too late, Randy took to the air and glided over their heads on silent wings, thankful for the Vault’s high ceilings. He landed just inside the throne room’s doorway. The tension in the air was thick enough to choke on. Randy felt like he had to push his way into it. Heralds lined the walls, spells and weapons in hand, jaw muscles tense, wings twitching. The place was a powder keg waiting for a spark.

And at the center were a pair of kids playing with matches—Roark, the Level 70 Draconic Chaos Harbinger, facing down Lowen, the Level 99 Malaika Herald.

Relief washed over Randy. They were just talking. The World Stone Pendant still hung safely around the Griefer’s darkly scaled neck. There was still time. Roark obviously had no idea that his pendant had lost its soulbinding—nobody could face down a mortal enemy that many levels above them with that kind of cool equanimity if they knew they could lose the one thing that gave them an edge—but he was still alive, and that meant Randy could stop him before he did something rash.

“Roark!” Randy dismissed his Invisibility and stepped forward, waving a hand to get the Infernal Dungeon Lord’s attention. “We have to talk!”

Ignoring him, the Griefer pulled a rapier glowing green with Undead Enchantments and—in defiance of all the coded laws of Hearthworld—a handgun straight from Earth etched with what looked like an old-school sailor tattoo.

“Let’s make this official,” Roark said, bringing the rapier up in a gentlemanly salute. “Lowen von Reich, I challenge you for Dungeon Lord of the Vault of the Radiant Shield.”

Randy’s stomach sank.

The two Dungeon Lords streaked toward one another, light versus dark. Randy couldn’t interfere now, or Roark would lose. And this time there would be no respawning.

A soft, feminine chuckle sounded at his side.

“Did you honestly think that was going to work?” Zyra asked, human arms crossed and human legs floating inches above the floor, suspended by the arachnoid limbs jutting from her back. “When that fool Jotnar gets an idea in his head, he only sees and hears the way forward. Nothing else.”

“He’s working on incomplete information,” Randy said, pushing at the bridge of his nose before remembering that he’d left his glasses behind with his Earthly vision problems.

“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “It wouldn’t change anything.”

“It might make him more cautious,” Randy insisted.

Zyra shook her head, white ringlets whispering over her midnight blue shoulders.

“You don’t know him like… like some of us,” she said without turning her veiled face away from the battle. “Where paranoia and caution would be the wisest course of action, he charges in like he can never die, and damn the odds stacked against him.”

At the center of the room, Lowen attacked. Roark shot the Herald twice in the chest. Except instead of tearing twin holes through Lowen’s shining breastplate—much like Randy had read about in early historical accounts of crossbow and gunpowder projectiles versus plate armor—the bullets slammed into it and flattened, then fell to the floor. The only damage left behind was a pair of slight dents in the metal.

“They call this a bulletproof vest—or at least a modified version of it,” Lowen sneered, rapping gauntleted knuckles on the breastplate. Rather than a hollow ring, it gave a series of dull thuds. He raised his hands. “Lined with some sort of mesh fabric called Kevlar. You bring Other World weapons to the table, and I counter it with Other World armor straight from the god of Hearthworld himself. As you can see, half-breed, you’re not the only one who can cheat.”

Roark’s face twisted in cold fury. “You haven’t begun to see cheating, you overwriting coward.”

With that, the Griefer launched himself into the air and turned into a huge skeletal dragon. The throne room, a sweeping room of domed ceilings and hulking columns that would put any cathedral in Europe to shame, was able to accommodate his new form.

Lowen took wing, too, darting ahead of the less maneuverable Undead beast and throwing Divine Missile after Angelic Lance at Roark’s draconic form. The spells landed with devastating blasts that rocked the Vault on its already destabilized foundation, but they didn’t deter Roark. With a rumbling roar, the skeletal dragon breathed a gout of green-and-purple fire through the air toward the Herald, making Randy and many of the other onlookers flinch away from its deadly flames.

“If he dies, he’ll lose the World Stone,” Randy said, desperate for Zyra to understand the stakes. “It’s not bound to him anymore. It can be stolen.”

To his frustration, she only replied, “Then he’d best not die, hadn’t he?”

Randy curled his hands into fists at his side. It was fine for her to talk like that, but he needed contingencies, backup plans. His mind raced, searching out other avenues to save the various dimensions. True, he couldn’t interfere now, but if the worst did happen, if Roark died in this duel, he would have to intervene. Take the World Stone before Lowen did. Finish the coup over the Tyrant King that Roark had begun.

Silently, Randy vowed he could do it. If Roark failed, he would rise to the challenge and be the hero.

In the air, Divine spells flew, chewing away Roark’s Health in fits and starts. Roark’s Infernal nature was vulnerable to Lowen’s potent magics, but his Undead nature was entirely immune. Green fire melted through Lowen’s flesh, though the purple flames rolled off harmlessly. Roark attacked, but Lowen dodged, and the draconic fangs scraped off the Herald’s shining plate with a sound like a fender bender. Lowen threw an explosion of Solar Glory in return.

For a moment, Randy was caught up in the awe of the spectacle. This was what a battle between warlocks looked like. Hexes and magical deflections flared with brilliant multicolored lights. Swords, talons, and fangs sliced. As he watched, Randy wondered what it would be like to live in a world where this was the normal way to settle disputes between warring factions. A world where anyone with enough determination could work their way up to becoming that awesome. Would he even have what it took to survive in a world like that?

Roark countered an attack from Lowen with a whip of the razor-sharp bones in his tail, spinning around and touching one clawed skeletal paw on the wall as he did. The angular, deep purple rune of a hex sank into the golden metal. A few moments later, Lowen unknowingly brushed the rune and it exploded, slamming him with a blast of Undead Chaos energy.

Surprisingly, Randy noted, not all of the Malaika Heralds around the throne room looked upset at that. Several of them were actually excited to see Roark strike such a powerful blow against Lowen—a strange hope lit up their golden-skinned faces.

Was it possible that they were ready for a change in leadership? Maybe they were suffering under the Tyrant King’s rule, too. There was precedent for it in Earth’s history—dictatorships where even the most trusted members of the despot’s court were as desperate for freedom as the common people.

The battle raged on. The Dungeon Lords seemed to be pretty evenly matched. Randy didn’t want to jinx anything by getting his hopes up, but there was even the possibility that Roark might be able to win this. His Mega-Evolution looked like it was making up for the ridiculous level gap, and then some. Though Roark’s own Health was sitting at fifty percent, the Griefer had managed to drag his opponent’s down to three-quarters.

And it dropped a little with every new attack Roark launched at the Divine Dungeon Lord.

Randy was just starting to think that this might end in a victory for their side when Roark’s skeleton dragon form ran out, and the Dungeon Lord shifted back from the powerful Undead beast into a massively out-leveled Draconic Chaos Harbinger.