Chapter 22: Chapter 22: The Star-Spangled Boy with a Plan

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The Star-Spangled Boy with a Plan

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A memory flashed in my mind; me sitting on a park bench next to a beautiful redhead who was wiping a stain from my young cheeks while giggling at how dirty I’d gotten. It was a nice memory, one that carried a lot of lost feelings with it that I had no clue how to manage. Luckily for me, this vision of childhood happiness fritzed out in the seconds it took for time to rewind and life to sputter back into me. When my eyes flew open once more, I’d mostly forgotten what it was that caused a tear to roll down my cheek.

“I didn’t slap you that hard,” Liara said as she noticed that stray tear.

“You hit like a Valkyrie...” I sat up and rubbed my eyes.

“And you look—”

“Like I’ve got a troll’s extra-thick skin,” I recited as if I’d just read her mind.

Liara frowned. “How did you—”

“Everyone has secrets,” I answered coolly. “Maybe one day I’ll tell you mine...”

I rose to my feet on wobbly knees with my head still aching from that phantom pain of having my skull split open.

“Are you—”

“I’m fine,” I said, sounding a little irritable. I couldn’t help it. Coming back from death made me ill-tempered sometimes. Particularly when death wasn’t an expected outcome. “I’ll see you later...”

Liara might have chased after me and wrung my neck for being rude, but Morph arrived in the nick of time to ask her for that cool enchantment she’d given him in the previous run, allowing me to slip away before the she-elf could find out why I was being cranky.

The raid through the second and third floors didn’t go as easily as the last iteration because there were some very obvious alterations in the timeline that upped the difficulty. More enemies, fiercer battles, and the Irish ogre in the final room before that passage that led to the secret garden had exchanged his cigar for a spiked iron club.

“Watch out for its homerun shot!” Mistress Lorelai warned. “Tankers get upfront! Shield wall!”

This was my fault. Somehow, my fights after coming back to life always seemed to be tougher than in the last go-around as if the Norns were pitting the scales against me to balance out the fact that every death only made me stronger.

So, yes, I did feel a twinge of responsibility for all the broken bones and spilled blood the ogre’s club cost my fellow novices. On the bright side, however, at least no one nearly died from burn wounds this time. I almost felt guilty for stealing Liara’s kill too—a kill that she’d stolen from me originally.

I’ll make it up to her, I thought while I hefted my glaive in both hands like a long-ranged rifle and aimed its blue pommel at the ogre’s distracted face. Here we go...

“I call on thee, oh ancient spirits of fire. Come forth and bring life to my desire.” The wood between my fingers hummed with power as I poured my magic into the glaive’s pommel. “Burn into a single sharp blade and carve away all defenses in your brilliant blaze...”

At that moment, a memory flashed across my mind. It was that of a withered face; its two bull horns sticking out of a mass of unkempt hair, the hide of deer skin wrapped around the shoulders of a body that looked to be wasting away from hunger. The thought of this monster sent a deep-seated annoyance clawing into my chest.

“Firebolt!” I roared.

There was a sound akin to the cracking of wood as it broke against heat and flame, and then a brilliant orange light shot out of the blue stone pommel like a laser blast. It flew toward the ogre’s face and into its open fang-filled mouth and then right back outside through the hole my spell bore into the back of the monster’s skull.

Firebolt wasn’t as flashy as me stepping on the ogre’s pride with Volcanic Step, but it got the job done easily enough. Of course, my first-tier firebolt wouldn’t have been fatal if the ogre hadn’t been weakened already while also being affected by Flame Heart’s buffs. Then again, I like to think the anger I felt for those monsters waiting beyond the path the ogre was guarding helped in making my spell more deadly. Emotion was a powerful catalyst in magic, and this Irish ogre was just in the way of my rematch.

All eyes turned on me, and Zen’s familiar complaint, “Why was Will left in the rear all this time?” reached my ears once more.

Funnily enough, I received more praises with this one-shot stealth kill than I ever managed with Volcanic Step. Possibly because I didn’t antagonize the frontliners this time. Still, none of the praises made my mood any lighter, and that temper hounded me through that final passage that led into the secret garden.

See, there was this frustration in me that needed to be resolved. A frustration born from having lost a battle right as victory had been so close at hand to a creature Divah could have beaten black and blue with one arm tied behind her back.

So, in my hurry for a rematch, I was the first to step into the lip of the secret garden. I breathed in that heady scent and now knew what the stench of alcohol and vomit meant.  

“I don’t recall asking you to scout for us, Mr. Wisdom,” Mistress Lorelai called after me. “Mind telling me what it is you’re doing?”  

Our dökkálfar instructor was referring to the fact that I was blocking the path into the garden with my body and glaive.

“They’re here,” I whispered. “Up in the rafters... waiting for us to spring their trap.”

“How would you—”

“I cast the Star-Spangled Sight, and that’s what was revealed,” I lied.

Such a useful tier-three spell from the school of invocation wasn’t included in my collection of known spells. No one but Dwalinn knew this though, and I needed the idea of the Star-Spangled Sight to help sell my lie to Mistress Lorelai.  

“I know what they are...” I made sure to make my next words sound appropriately ominous. “They’re a nest of maenads… and I think there’s a ‘royal’ leading them too.”

“Are you certain?” Mistress Lorelai asked in a skeptical tone.

Maenads weren’t common monsters in the realmsverse, but the pungent smell wafting into the passage was enough to convince Mistress Lorelai that I might be telling the truth as maenads were famous for their drunken orgies and frenzied murder sprees. Still, adding a royal into the mix—well, that was a very hard sell.

“Well, Lieutenant Doyle?” Mistress Lorelai turned her gaze on our LEPRCON guide. “Could Mr. Wisdom’s deductions be correct?”

“As I’ve explained to you, mum, our investigations could nay properly discern the nature of the monsters inflicting Kells Falls with their curse…” As he said this, Lieutenant Doyle sniffed at the air. “But I will admit that maenads are a plausible theory… a royal though. Now, that sounds like poppycock to me.” 

Neither of these adults might have believed me no matter what I said if Liara hadn’t come over to the front and vouched for me.

“Wisdom’s a lot of things, but he’s no liar, mistress,” Liara chimed in. “It also fits. Maenads are monsters born of overpowering desire that are known to push people into an overabundance of alcohol, sex, drugs—”

“And rock n’ roll,” I added.

Liara stared pointedly back at me as if warning me not to crack any more jokes.

“I was going to say death,” Liara finished.

“Be that as it may, a royal among these maenads seems far too unlikely for me to trust your word, Mr. Widsom,” Mistress Lorelai replied. “Even if you claim to possess the Star-Spangled Sight whose scroll that I know is locked away within the Grandmaster’s study.”

Well, I was planning to steal that particular spell scroll from Dwalinn, but I hadn’t had the time to thoroughly study the guide’s notes on his study’s security yet. So, I went with the plausible lie that Divah had already taught me about the Star-Spangled Sight.

“I believe I may have a theory on this as well, mistress,” Zen piped up.

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The yeti in his too-small blue cloak had made his way to the lip of the passage alongside Liara and was now coming to my defense in the nick of time.

“If a ‘royal’ is truly involved in this quest then we now know why so many residents of Kells Falls have succumbed too quickly to the miasma encroaching on the land,” he deduced.

“What do you mean?” Liara asked.

Zen hefted his staff over his broad shoulder. “While the curse born from this grove of maenads corrupts the residents of Kells Falls, the emotions born from the town’s rising crime rate also feed the prime maenad’s power in turn, which must be how it has evolved quickly into a queen-variant strong enough to even bamboozle the previous raid suppression force that had conquered this floor from discovering their existence.”

“The so-called wheel of sin,” I muttered.

“That makes more sense than running into an ancient royal on the third floor of a low-tier dungeon that doesn’t even make the national news,” Mistress Lorelai admitted. “But what does it say about our raid group’s luck that we’re facing off against a one-in-a-thousand chance encounter right now?”

“My master often says that with great challenges come great opportunities,” I whispered, and then I finally cracked a grin. Remembering Divah lightened my mood considerably because I realized that my master had been right yet again.

It didn’t matter that our next boss fight was against a maenad queen. Because no matter how many more gruesome deaths I would have to endure, I would eventually sus out her weaknesses, and then I would own the maenad queen completely. With that epiphany, the cloying sense of anger that had filled my mind cleared and calm finally returned to me.

“And if it’s a young queen…” Liara began, to which Zen replied, “…then we can kill it.”

I grinned widely at them. “With great challenges, come great opportunities.”

Interestingly enough, I’d had this exact conversation with Zen in my previous run of this battle too. Although it was the crossbow-wielding red-headed dwarf Delphine who had been part of the discussion instead of Liara and Mistress Lorelai. We were neck-deep in Maenad blood at that point too.

“You better be right, Mr. Wisdom, or you’ll be on Drengr Longhouse latrine duty until the coming of Yggdrasil’s next winter,” Mistress Lorelai warned.

I waited patiently for her to decide to trust me, although I was resolved to do my own thing should our dökkálfar instructor rule against me. Payback was a vargr best served hot in my book, and feeling calmer didn’t mean I couldn’t still be vindictive.

The memory of that embarrassing defeat was still fresh in my mind. Along with that phantom pain that caused my head to feel like a thousand fire ants were crawling inside it.

Finally, Mistress Lorelai gave me a nod of approval. “I assume the star-spangled boy has a brilliant plan to counter these maenads up your sleeve or you wouldn’t be looking so smug at me right now.”  

“Yes, ma’am.” I pointed to the grapevines hanging down from the room’s unfathomably dark ceiling. “We burn them out.”

I explained my three-fold plan to Mistress Lorelai who seemed to look more and more interested the more she heard me out. Getting her invested in it was a good thing too as I half-feared she would end our excursion early out of a misguided sense of keeping us safe from the big bad maenad queen. Soon enough, however, Mistress Lorelai agreed to my plan and then restructured our entire raid formation in that passage to fit the strategy I laid out for them.

This earned me a lot of envious looks from the older journeyman novices, but I didn’t much care just like in the last run.

Now, as for the plan, first came the fire. To achieve one strong enough to make even monsters panic required something we’d been saving inside the supply cart since the start of the dungeon excursion.

A few minutes after Mistress Lorelai called her over, Brunhilde arrived at the mouth of the passage with two barrels of blessed oil slung across her shoulders.

“Should I...?” she asked uncertainly.

“Pitch them as far as you can and let their contents leak all over this dumb garden,” I said with savage glee.

Unlike me, Mistress Lorelai was more tempered when she ordered my fellow blue cloaks to ready their fire spells. “Make me a bonfire big enough to be seen from the heavens.”

Liara elbowed me on the shoulder and whispered, “You could do that all on your own, can’t you?”

“Participation is key to making everyone happy,” I whispered back. Plus, I didn’t want to waste my magic until it was time for my rematch.

Brunhilde threw one and then another of the barrels deep into the garden while the holes the green cloaks had systematically drilled into them made the blessed oil splash everywhere. We waited for the barrels to break against the grassy floor before the two lines of blue cloaks—seven to each side of the passage walls—began our cooperative chant for a ‘Conflagration’ spell.

“Oh, mighty servants of the god of flames,” we chanted, “we beseech you, come forth and rampage across these mortal planes…”

Our finisher of “Conflagration!” was a scattered cry of awkward timings. It was a pathetic display, but the spell worked well enough. Fires sparked to life everywhere in the garden. They spread outward, blossoming like orange flowers that consumed all the greenery they caught in their fiery embrace. This included the grapevines that led up to the rafters hidden in the gloom.

Soon enough, we heard their panicked shrieking from above—and I swear that the sound of it was music to my ears.

“Here they come,” I reported.

They were dropping onto the burning floor like cockroaches crawling out of every nook and cranny. Hags who might have once been beautiful were they not cursed with the madness of a capricious god and given horrible visages to reflect their frenzy; a pair of bull horns sticking out of wiry unkempt hair framing faces blackened with dark dyes and ash. Their bodies were wrapped in deerskin hides that smelled of puke and alcohol while doing little to cover their emaciated forms. It was all very NSFW, to be honest.

“Mages retreat into the shield wall!” Mistress Lorelai commanded.

While my fellow blue cloaks moved to follow her command, I lingered by the mouth of the garden’s entrance bathing in the intense heat, and watched as the maenads burned in a blessed fire.

“Stage one of the strategy’s a success,” I reported.

“Get back behind the shield wall, Mr. Wisdom!” Mistress Lorelai snapped. 

Okay, maybe I was channeling the Roman emperor Nero a little too much here, but I managed to get within the safety of the shield wall in time and avoid the dozen or so maenads rushing into the passage which was the only way in and out of that burning garden.

“Get ready, novices!” Mistress Lorelai yelled. “This will be the fight of your lives!”

And all around her, they cheered. Even me. We were all caught up in this awesome beginning to my first raid’s first boss fight.

 

Glad tidings, fellow novices!

So, in this chapter, I tried something different. Instead of showing off how he died in the previous run first, I went ahead and started at the point where Will revived from his latest death. What did you guys think? Was it properly written so that it didn't feel confusing? Let me know in the comments!

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