Path of Transcendence 1: Ultimatum of the Nameless God
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Authors: Brian McGoldrick
Tags: #Fantasy
Brian McGoldrick
Ultimatum Of The Nameless God
Brian McGoldrick
Copyright © 2015 by Brian McGoldrick
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Edition: July 2015
Taereun: Battleground of the Damned was never really a game. It was a testing ground to find minds and souls for the The Nameless God to use.
For tens of thousands of players, what they thought was a just a game became reality, when they were put in the bodies of their characters. The Nameless God told them that he would return them to their real lives, if they fought through the Labyrinth of Yggr and freed his body from beneath the city of Haven. After searching for over 11 years, they found the Gate leading to Haven.
In Taereun, Mark McGuinness was Talon, a Half-Dvergar monk, a hybrid freak created by the forced union of a Dvergar and a human woman using magic. Once the game became real, he was one of the explorers who sought out the path to Haven, but Talon was murdered right before the gate to Haven was opened.
Waking up in a hospital, Mark McGuinness finds himself in his original body. As a child, he was in an automobile accident. A freak whose body rejects most medical treatments, he was left scarred and disfigured. Angry, bitter and disgusted with the world, he used Taereun: Battleground of the Damned to take out his frustration and anger, so he would not lose control and hurt or kill someone in real life. The closest he had ever come to being happy was living as Talon, during the eleven year search for Haven.
Having learned about the Power called ki, Mark McGuinness discovers that his human body is capable of channeling and using it. Once again armed with Power, he finds a way to travel from Earth to Taereun. He has questions he wants answered and people he owes. Whether mortal or divine, he will let no one and nothing stand in his way.
After eleven and a half years of searching, the Damned, as the former players of Taereun: Battleground of the Damned now called themselves, had found what was supposed to be the entry to the zone where Haven existed.
Tens of thousands of the Damned, along with several times their number of native mercenaries, were mixed in a swirling melee battle with hundreds of thousands of humanoids and monsters. The battle was taking place in a massive cavern, so large that even with the pervasive but diffuse lighting the walls could not be clearly seen from the center. The objective of the players was a massive, silver-grey double-valved gate in one wall. After nearly a week of continuous battle, with guilds and mercenary companies rotating in and out of the battle, the gate was finally in sight.
Once the gates were open, the zone containing the city of Haven would be accessible. The Damned would only have to subjugate the city's forces and take control of its underground labyrinth, where they would find the Nameless' body. This was the beginning of the final campaign that would lead to their freedom.
* * * * *
Virtual reality hardware and games had become common in the decade preceding the release of
Taereun: Battleground of the Damned
but The Nameless Entertainment, Inc., the company that built and ran the game had revolutionized the virtual reality game industry. After 3 years or media hype and an extended closed beta test, the company had released both the game and new VR hardware to run it on. As a result,
Taereun: Battleground of the Damned had a level of realism to it that exceeded all other VR games.
In the years that followed, much of The Nameless Entertainment, Inc.'s technology was incorporated into most mainstream VR hardware, but no other game ever achieved the level of realism that existed in
Taereun: Battleground of the Damned
. Other game companies blamed it on black box components that were only available in The Nameless Entertainment's custom VR rigs.
Taereun: Battleground of the Damned had been released as niche game that targeted the most hardcore of the role-playing and PvP audiences. Even though the two audiences were almost diametrically opposed in what they wanted from a game,
Taereun: Battleground of the Damned
had acquired a following of rabidly fanatical players. While it never became a mainstream success, it had a continually growing player base. Its player base was loyal nearly to the point of rabid fanaticism, and the game manufacturer had posted average quarterly player numbers that were constantly growing.
The Battleground of the Damned was a series of pocket dimensions, and the players were searching for the Departure Gate, which would open the way to Taereun proper. The Nameless Entertainment billed the current game as the prelude to what would become the real game, but almost no one took them seriously. The Battleground of the Damned had hundreds of millions of square miles of real estate. Most of the players accepted the fact that the current game had never been fully explored. How much content could The Nameless Entertainment reasonably be expected to develop?
Its selling point had always been total immersion role-playing in a dynamically changing world, and the designers had never strayed from that stance. After nearly thirteen years, no was certain how big the Battleground of the Damned really was, or even what it really was. Some of the zones seemed to be entire worlds, even though no one ever explored them in their entirety, and others seemed to be only a few miles in diameter.
Taereun: Battleground of the Damned
ran for 12 years and 364 days prior to the event called the Great Fuck Over by its victims. Over seventy thousand players, the players never performed an accurate headcount and were only estimating their total numbers, were trapped within the bodies of their characters, by a being that called itself The Nameless God. The Nameless God claimed that the game was never really a game; their characters were real people; they really were in the bodies of their characters.
Most of the players were not sure whether or not to believe The Nameless. The minimal user interface from Taereun: Battleground of the Damned was inaccessible, but that did not mean that were not necessarily in another world. Nor, did it mean that their characters were real people. There had been dozens if not hundreds of novels about people being trapped inside of life or death computer game written in the past century.
When players were playing the game, the NPCs had always called the players the Possessed, but the players had discounted that as just part of the programming. Strangely, in some places, they were driven out or executed, when discovered to be player. Thy players had never quite why the game was programmed that way, but after The Nameless God's announcement, some players began to wonder about what Taereun: Battleground of the Damned really was.
The Nameless also told them that if they died in these bodies, their real bodies would die. A death for them here would be a true and irrevocable death, game over and life over. When
Taereun: Battleground of the Damned
had been a game, the players would have to fight their way out of the Land of the Dead to return to their bodies, but no one who had died after the Great Fuck Over was ever seen alive again.
The Nameless' demands were simple: his body was trapped somewhere beneath a city called Haven, and he would release them once they broke into the city and freed his body.
* * * * *
Even though the end of their ordeal was in sight, the Damned were not a single cohesive force, and it was hindering them. Their combat units were of irregular sizes and makeups based on parties, guilds and alliances. With the mercenary units added into the mix, their force structure was near chaos. Due to their lack of a true command structure and overall coordination, the center and left wing of their assault had become bogged down. They were unable to force their way through the packed ranks of orcs and goblins driven on by the DokkAlfar Whip-Masters, with their constructs and elementals. Thug Horde, the self-proclaimed Lords of Taereun, with over ten thousand of their members in the raid force, was stonewalled by the fierce resistance.
The only progress in the battle was being made on the far edge of the right wing. A
small guild called the Bohemian Cats was made of a group of real-life friends and family members that had been playing together for as much as six years before the Great Fuck Over. The core of the guild was together from the time they were sophomores in high school, fifteen years old was the youngest age that The Nameless Entertainment would accept a parental consent form and allow a minor access to
Taereun: Battleground of the Damned. Then, a few of their younger sibling had joined, once they reached the minimum age for game access
. Of their twenty three members, only fifteen had been caught by the Great Fuck Over. They were not a raiding guild, let alone a top tier guild, but they were pushing relentlessly forward. Backing up the one person who was not a member of their guild, their tight wedge was engaging and destroying unit after unit of the DokkAlfar's slave army.
*This guy is unbelievable.*
The Lady of Gold was using her guild bracelet to “talk” in the the guild's chat channel. She was one of the two leaders of the Bohemian Cats, the other being the Lord of Jet. Dressed in gold washed chainmail, she was wielding a pair of rapier-like swords. Her near six-foot height; inhumanly beautiful, pale features; and waist length golden hair made her stand out, even among the plethora of more than naturally attractive members among the Damned.
Guild bracelets, which gave the wearers access to an almost telepathy like chat room, were a player invention in the early days of Taereun: Battleground of the Damned. The game had been unlike any other game before it and did not have the basic social features that players expected. To compensate for the lacking features, the players had developed the guild bracelets and spells that provided much of the basic chat and party functionality of other games. The fact that their character's bodies had been in possession of the guild bracelets was one of the things that made the players question the reality of their situation. If they had made the bracelets in the game, why did the real bodies of their characters have them?
*He's not all that great. We would have done even better, if you all didn't get so fixated on partying with a so-called legend.*
The Lord of Jet could not keep the petulant sounding tone out of his voice. He was angry about the way he sounded, but he knew that he was not wrong. In his eyes, Talon was nothing special, just another loser solo player, who could not tow the line and stay in a guild. At 6'4” tall, he was the tallest member of the party, and his jet black plate armor made him appear much more heavily built than he really was.
*Jet, let it go already man. You're better than this. He's really like nothing we've ever run with before. I'm not even using healing magic on him, just damage wards.*
Yoh called himself a shaman.
Even though
Taereun: Battleground of the Damned
had not been a traditional game that followed normal game design theories, the players still brought the concept of the “holy trinity” of MMOs with them, the combination of tank, healer, and dps. As with the games of the past, most players built their parties around the trinity. They shoehorned and pigeonholed the almost limitless options into their preconceptions of how classes should be designed and played.
Yoh used magic that resembled the shaman class in traditional MMORPGs, hence he was called and called himself a shaman, and acted as the guilds main healer. A human, he was an inch or so under six feet, and more heavily built than the Alfar.
*Really, Sel, this guy is even more of a legend for being a murderous loner , than he is for his skills, as incredible as they may be. How did you ever get him to agree to party with us?*
There was an odd note in the Lady of Gold's voice.
*I'm sorry, Goldie. Its a secret. I promised Talon I wouldn't talk about him, and no matter how much I hate it, I owe him.*
Selestra was the half-breed child of a SvartAlfar mother and LjosAlfar Father. In the real world, she had been friends with the Lady of Gold and the Lord of Jet for much longer than they had been playing the game.
*Oooohhhh, sounds interesting. Did you know him in real life? Have you got the hots for him?*
“Voices” in the bracelet chat rooms sounded just like they did when heard normally. That included pitch and inflection, making it very easy for a person to hear when they were being teased.
*Of course not! He's even uglier in real life! I only like handsome guys!*
Selestra glanced to her left at the Lord of Jet, and nearly had a crude sword embedded in her skull. The kick that flashed past her head shattered the sword's blade. The following kick fractured the iron plates on the orc's gauntlet and shattered the hand inside. As the orc bellowed in pain, Selestra ducked and lunged, driving both her short swords into the gap between its helm and breastplate. Her heart hammered in her chest, as she realized that she had almost died. She was not sure if this was a game or reality anymore, and the idea of dying for real terrified her.
“Get your head out of your ass! Keep sneaking peaks at your boyfriend and you'll get dead!” The angry growl was too deeply pitched to have come from human throat. Talon, the one person not part of the guild, was not human, or at least not entirely human. He had been a legend in
Taereun: Battleground of the Damned
for many reasons, among them he was a Half-Dvergar, the only player ever to be one, and one of only three ever seen in the game. Almost six feet tall, he was as nearly as broad as a Dvergar, and far stronger than any human.
“He's not my boyfriend, you idiot! He's Goldie’s . . .” Selestra's words trailed off, as she realized what she was shouting. She was so lucky that her dusky grey skin did not blush, it would just make her even more embarrassed. Talon always brought out the worst in her, for as long as she had known him. The others did not know how she knew Talon in real life, well she really could not call it knowing him. He was just as much of an antisocial asshole in real life as he was in the game, maybe even worse than in the game.
Talon's kick sent a bull orc flying, with almost every bone in its torso shattered. The force behind his attacks was far beyond what even his massive musculature should have been capable of. When he stopped and looked around, Selestra realized that there were no more orcs in front of them. Earlier in the day the right wing's reserves had been moved to reinforce the center, where Thug Horde's banners were. The DokkAlfar commanding the orcs must have thought that Thug Horde was the greatest danger on the battlefield. Whatever the reason, the Damned's right wing was given the opportunity to break through the orc lines.
“A lot of people died this time.” Selestra's voice was barely more than a whisper.
“What the fuck did you expect? Since getting trapped here, this is one the nastiest battles we've seen.”
The parties to the Bohemian Cats' immediate left had not broken through yet, but it would not take long now. They were all breathing heavily and took the chance to relax.
Selestra watched Talon out of the corner of her eye. He was the only one not breathing hard, and he had been fighting harder than anyone else. Whether in real life of in the game, there was something about him that unnerved her. Her father said that he a natural affinity for fighting that was almost inhuman. Since the Great Fuck Over, he had become a killing machine on a level that no one else even came close to.
