MH2 - Chapter 2: Horde on the Horizon

Blinding blue and white summoning light swirled in front of Dolli. Excitement trilled through her, and she closed her menu. She didn’t get to kill Keegan often, but she relished it every time.

“I have a fun idea!” she said, putting her hand out to stop Greg and Nubiri from pummeling Keegan the second he materialized.

Dolli cast the first opening for Fold Reality on the ground just in front of the glowing white summoning magic, and the second about ten feet above the first portal. She’d only just figured this trick out with boulders, and was excited to try it on a living specimen.

The light coalesced and took shape as the plate-wearing Dusk Knight.

“Again?” Keegan whined and drew his sword. He took a step forward and fell right into the invisible hole in reality. He dropped from the sky, his hands glowing red. Dolli dodged the incoming Blood Javelin and Keegan kept falling.

“What is this?” He yelled in confusion. He passed through the folds over and over, picking up speed.

“Think you can hit him?” Dolli asked Greg and Nubiri.

The wyvern and Bronzite exchanged devious smiles.

“Wanna put coin on it?” Greg asked.

“Coin? Ussseless. Battle Duty tonight, you take mine, or I take yours.” Nubiri offered in exchange, all the while Keegan picked up speed through the looping portal. Dolli watched the betting with amusement.

“Done,” Greg agreed. He stepped up and took a wide stance next to the looping Keegan, gripping his hammer in both hands over his shoulder.

Nubiri stepped to the other side and turned so her side faced the portal.

Keegan screamed endlessly, flailing his arms and legs as he reached out for anything to catch himself. Dolli chuckled, feeling a bit of twisted satisfaction in this somewhat harmless torment. Sure, he was about to die, but he’d come back—probably.

Greg lined up and swung, but missed. Nubiri laughed and Greg cursed, but stepped back from the portal. Keegan was just a blur of red, black, and screams plummeting through the loop. If the fold closed, Keegan would smash into the ground, and at those speeds, he’d be jelly in an instant; jelly Dolli didn’t want on her newly crafted robes. Dolli backed away to give Nubiri space.

“Running out of time,” Dolli warned the wyvern.

“I’ll get him,” she hissed. Nubiri whipped her tail at the looping Keegan and there was a loud crack. Keegan sailed backwards through the street and rolled to a stop fifty feet away, his armor dangling loosely off his chest.

“Ouch,” Keegan said with a strained inhale. His health bar flashed at fifty percent.

“You’ll take my duty,” Nubiri said to Greg with an impish grin.

“That was pure luck, not skill,” the Bronzite said, waving his hammer at her.

Dolli hummed. “Whatever it was, let’s finish it.”

“Why… are you such… a butthole?” Keegan gasped for air and pulled his sword from the ground.

“If you’d return Nubiri’s eggs, we wouldn’t keep summoning you,” Dolli reminded the hero.

Keegan reached out and ghostly skeleton hands grew from the ground, grasping at Greg. Dolli dropped Gravity Sink below Keegan’s feet. She followed up by casting Zeal on Nubiri, then conjured a Divine Spark Lance. Being a Dusk Knight meant Keegan was weak to Divine magic, something Dolli had discovered in their previous summonings. It made him so much easier to kill.

“Where are the eggs?” Dolli asked again with the force of a Dungeon Overlord.

“Feck, you,” Keegan managed.

Nubiri lunged forward, her bared teeth dripping saliva. Dolli threw the lance and it slipped past Keegan’s dangling chest armor. It speared him all the way through, dropping his health bar to ten percent and throwing him back several feet. Nubiri advanced, pressing her oversized foot against his exposed chest.

Keegan gasped. “Okay, I’ll tell you.”

Dolli held another Divine Spark Lance aimed at his head. “Well?”

Keegan looked up, blood coating his wide grin. “I already sold them at the action and made a lot of money.”

Fury flared through Dolli. “And you call us monsters? You’re despicable.” Dolli looked up at Nubiri. “Finish him.”

“Gladly.”

Keegan screamed some curse, but Nubiri ended it with a single chomp, decapitating him. The wyvern pulled his head free from his spine and spit it across the road.

“Thanksss for the fun, Overlord,” Nubiri said, then retreated to her roost. Dolli could hear the sadness in her voice. Her babies had been sold. It infuriated Dolli.

Greg knelt next to the body, rooting through his inventory, Dolli knew. He came away with a few coins and a small ring, and then Keegan’s body shimmered into white sparkles. The energy zipped through the sky, off for respawn.

A level-up notification appeared in the corner of Dolli’s vision. She opened her menu to find she’d achieved level thirteen and earned two new spells she could allocate points into. She spent stat points on leveling up her Magical Affinity and Mental Prowess first, then panned over to the spell list.

[Wispelle Ability: MORTMOSIS]

Spell type: Passive

Spark Alignment: Nether

Description: You feed on death and destruction.

Effects:

- Allow Spark Regeneration while in combat at 5% normal regeneration rate

- Gain an additional 1.5 x experience when you deal a killing blow on an opponent

- Replenish 1.2 x your Magical Affinity in Spark when an ally dies within twenty feet of you

- Increase Spark Regeneration by 5% for two minutes when you deal a critical strike to an opponent

-----

That was an impressive skill, and Dolli could see it helping a great deal with hero farming, but she wasn’t going to hastily drop her points without checking the other option—or the other spells she could level up to increase their potency.

[Wispelle Ability: SOLFLARE]

Spell type: Active

Cost: 80 Spark

Cast time: 1 second

Cooldown: 2 minutes

Duration: Dependent

Range: 15 Feet

Target: Area of Effect, Cone-shaped

Spark Alignment: Celestial

Description: Channel the power of the Sol through your being in a powerful burst.

Effects:

- Any enemy caught directly in the cone will be blinded for 6 seconds and suffer reduced visibility for 30 seconds

- Any enemy within ten feet of the cone will have reduced visibility by 20-50% for ten seconds

- Allies caught within the cone will earn the ZEAL buff for 6 seconds

-----

That spell could be another benefit for hero farming, putting Dolli squarely in the middle ranks of combat. But, Mortmosis was more valuable, so the first point went there. Dolli had too few passive abilities, and as tempting as it was to get two brand new abilities, Dolli had to consider the others she’d neglected from levels past.

She’d been using a lot of Gravity Sink, Fold Reality, and Spark Lance, all of which would only get better the more points she added to them. Spark Lance was her bread and butter for wrecking heroes, and so she decided one point would go there.

[Wispelle Ability: SPARK LANCE]

Spell type: Active

Cost: 80 Spark

Cast time: 1.5 seconds

Cooldown: N/A

Duration: N/A

Range: 60 feet

Target: Any

Spark Alignment: Celestial

Description: Fire a lance of pure Spark energy at your target. This energy is neutral.

Effects:

- Spear your target for 2x your Magic Affinity + 2x your Mental Prowess

- Reduce Friendly Fire damage by 25%.

- If your Spark Lance kills the target, absorb 15% of their remaining Spark

Modification: Spend an additional 25 Spark to apply an elemental energy to the Lance.

Disclaimer: Beware of Friendly Fire!

-----

The upgrade had done a lot for her; friendly fire reduced by 25%, the damage was essentially doubled with the addition of the Mental Prowess modifier, the cast time was cut in half, and the range was increased by 10 feet. Not a bad point spent at all.

Dolli felt the drag of exhaustion pulling on her limbs. She was getting close to hitting her bedtime. “I need to do a few things before I go to the Lifewell. Do you need anything from me?” she asked Greg, who appeared to be lost in his menus as well.

Greg’s pitch-black eyes focused on her. “Nothin’ at all. I’ll keep things going down in the fighting pits while you rest.”

Dolli nodded and waved farewell. Training the troops was a necessary part of being Overlord, but by Nevheröld did it take up a lot of her time. The dungeon was creeping up on Level 6, and Dolli was praying for some kind of “Combat Leader” role she could pass off—perhaps to Brene, the ex-soldier. She knew this was wishful thinking, and she had other matters to attend to: Potion creation.

She made her way over to the creators district where the old abandoned buildings were being renovated into profession crafter houses. Dolli herself had moved much of her materials from her cottage to a new alchemy lab she’d created near Greg’s smithy.

With the Health and Spark potion reserves low, Dolli knew that was her priority. All the dungeon pits had “refill” stations available to the dungeonfolk who were battling heroes, and though they needed less filling recently, it was still necessary. Health and Spark regeneration potions were not complex, but she found the work relaxing, almost meditative.

When she’d made a few good batches and corked the kegs in their respective storage areas, she decided it was time to get to bed. She passed several different bands of monsters on her way to her seat of power and the place where all things in the dungeon were made possible. Since controlling the seat of power was essential for respawning her monsters—and herself—she had it under round-the-clock observation. It was supposed to be Nubiri’s watch now, but Dolli was surprised the wyvern wasn’t there. Though Greg had agreed to take her battle duty that night, that didn’t absolve her of her watch until then.

Moreover, Nubiri didn’t leave her unhatched child unattended, so Dolli opened her menu and sent a message to the Guardian through the Overlord system: What’s going on? Where are you?

Dolli opened her menu and panned to the Lifewell. There were a few monsters doing their time to ward off the exhaustion debuff, but Nubiri wasn’t among them—so she wasn’t dead.

The clouds above swirled with the twisting of air and Nubiri dropped through them like a meteor. She tucked her wings and twirled, playing on the air current. That was when Dolli saw it; something clutched in Nubiri’s right claw. There were flailing arms and legs, and Dolli was just starting to hear the panicked screams of something monstrous.

The huntress unfurled her wings just before impact with the city and pulled up, but not before slamming the creature in her claws to the cobblestones at Dolli’s feet. The monster had long, fluffy ears the color of mud, a pink snout at the end of a short maw, and black circles in the fur around its eyes. It rolled to the side and coughed up blood, its health bar flashing at critical low.

On instinct, Dolli dropped beside the creature and held a minor rejuvenation potion to its lips.

Nubiri snarled and landed on her perch. “This creature is of the Horde.”

Dolli scowled, then poured just a bit of the potion into the monster’s mouth. It coughed and sputtered, then opened big, brown eyes to look at Dolli. It was pretty cute, honestly.

Its pupils dilated, then shrank and it recoiled. “Why you do this?”

“You were dying, and I didn’t know if you had a Dungeon. Are you free roaming?” Dolli asked in a calm, soothing voice. The creature relaxed a measure at this.

“I told you already, it’s of the Horde,” Nubiri said again with more force.

Those words meant nothing to Dolli, but she assumed the Horde was a dungeon. Well, better to have been safe than sorry. “What are you doing in my zone?”

“I—I came to look, sniff, learn.” The creature pulled its furry feet under it, preferring to walk on all fours than upright.

Nubiri climbed down the rungs of her perch and stood before the monster, blocking its view of her egg. “It’s a scout. It’d already come too close to the village and was on its way back to its Overlord—”

“Must do this! He will eat my yekipyip!” The beast snapped back, defensively. The hair on its back raised and its lips curled up to the pink nose, exposing silvery teeth like razors.

The word it had said, yekipyip, was spoken with a dog-like bark, its native tongue mayhap. Whatever it meant, the thing was spooked half to death, and not of Dolli or Nubiri.

“You cannot let it return,” Nubiri warned.

Dolli took a deep breath. “There’s nothing we can do to prevent that. Overlords can recall their monsters when they’re not in combat.”

“Exactly, we keep it hurting, but not dead, and it cannot return,” Nubiri said with a vicious snarl and Dolli questioned for a fraction of a second whether she’d selected the right monster for the role of Guardian.

Nubiri was trying to protect the village—probably her unhatched egg more. But she had grown an affinity for the dungeon, especially for the freedom and protection she was afforded, not to mention egg sitting, so Nubiri was simply doing her job and Dolli didn’t understand.

“What’s this Horde?” she asked the wyvern.

Nubiri’s tongue shot out with a hiss. “Monsters killing monsters. He roams the land, taking the weak and crushing the powerful—never more powerful than himself…” the wyvern dipped her head solemnly. “He stole our roost.”

Dolli nodded. She understood Nubiri’s hatred of the creature better now. It represented the thing that ultimately led to the untimely death of her mate, and the theft of two of her eggs.

But that didn’t mean Dolli was going to torture this creature. It wasn’t at fault for what happened to Nubiri’s mate, or eggs. It likely wasn’t responsible for anything other than ensure its own survival.

“How do you know it’s of this Horde?” Dolli asked Nubiri.

The wyvern’s nostrils flared. “I smell the reek of Kelzoul, its Overlord.”

Dolli’s brow furrowed. She had to take Nubiri by her word that she’d smelled the essence of the other monster in it. She trusted the wyvern, but to torture this creature over that? She couldn’t do it. There had to be another way.

“We’re not going to hurt you,” Dolli said.

The foxy creature cocked its head, puzzled.

Nubiri growled. “You would let it bring ruin to your home? Have you not made this mistake before?”

Dolli glared at the wyvern. She’d have to talk with whoever was giving Nubiri unnecessary history lessons. “I’ve got this.”

Dolli looked back to the scout. “We can kill you and send you back to your Overlord, but I have a feeling you don’t want that. Join us instead. We’ll keep you safe, and give you a community to thrive in.”

The beast cowered and backed away, panic setting in. “Can no do. He come and find and eat all yekipyip.”

Dolli spoke in a hush. “What’s your name?”

“Bakreh. Can no stay. Let go, or let die.”

“I won’t let him escape,” Nubiri said with a snarl. “He will bring back destruction.”

“What’s going on here?” Rufus, Dolli’s Lieutenant, asked with a scowl. Aside from running things in Dolli’s down time, Rufus had appointed himself head of immigration. Every new monster came through him for orientation and instructions, which freed Dolli up significantly.

“This creature is a scout for murderersss. We must detain it.” Nubiri lowered her head and bared her teeth.

Bakreh’s hackles shot straight up, and he curled his back to look larger. He was only about forty pounds, and no bigger than a cattle dog, but boy did he put on a show for survival.

Dolli put herself between the wyvern and Bakreh. “We won’t do that. We mustn’t fall so low.”

“Your righteousssness is misguided. This creature is a murderer, just like its Overlord.”

“No, it isn’t,” Dolli declared. “He’s just a scout, and he’s scared. He doesn’t want to go back to Kelzoul. We must help him.”

Bakreh whimpered. “No matter. He comes. We knew you here already. I came to sniff, see level, see size and number. Tell how many hordlings to bring.”

“But if you stay, he won’t know any of those things. Maybe he’ll think we’re too powerful, like Nubiri said, and he won’t come near,” Dolli offered.

“No work. No work!” Bakreh said, shaking his head and trembling. “He come!”

Bakreh darted for the edge of the nearest alley, but Nubiri was already on him. Her teeth snapped down around his legs before Dolli could stop her. Nubiri ripped Bakreh side to side, then tossed him into the air like a rag doll.

This was not going how Dolli had planned.