The Bathrobe Knight: Volume 3 (12 page)

“Did . . . Did he just . . .” the enemies around him started speaking, but Darwin’s hearing faded along with his sight.

Soul Devourer has been activated and consumed your
70
soul charges. You have been restored to full life and will have a +50% increase on all stat values for 350 seconds after the resurrection process is complete.

Due to having no soul charges remaining, you will awaken with Hunger active.

This effect may not occur more than once an hour.

The familiar, blood-hued flash overtook his vision again as it beckoned forth a wave of pain to fill his body. The wound in his chest where the fiery blade impaled him throbbed and ached as if he were being run through by a hundred soldering irons. Despite the fact that he was slumped forward, propped up only by the cross guard and hilt of the zweihander spitted through his body, his knees bent, and he slowly started to stand back up. His body quickly began healing itself, trying to close to gash through his chest. It felt like he was being run through over and over again as each second passed.

Standing, he reached up to his chest and slowly, awkwardly pulled out the long and unwieldly sword. His wounds healed after each new injury the process created until the sword was fully removed. The only thing to show that he had ever been harmed was a hand-sized tear on both sides of his bathrobe where he had been shish-kebabed. There was a very brief moment of relief, then the pain flared up again. His shoulders, his knees, his legs--every muscle twisted and turned in agony as if his skeleton was being ripped to pieces. He tried to scream, but the torment pressed in on his lungs and left every muscle below his neck involuntarily tightening and untightening in discomfort.

Then it stopped. The burning faded, even though his chest still felt like it was fifty degrees too hot, and his vision, still seeing the world with a red tint, cleared up enough for him to make out what was around him. Everything seemed smaller. Everyone seemed weaker, more pathetic, like ants to be crushed. Most importantly, he now understood why he had killed himself. He needed to activate this skill. Hunger wasn’t just the name of a curse that ravaged his health and forced him to act. It was psychological too. He had tasted this power twice before, and now he had cause to taste it a third time. He wasn’t about to be denied his rampage.

They killed seven of mine? Then I will kill seven times that number of them!
He embraced his Hunger, and gripped his sword, which now felt as light as a feather. He slammed it into one of the long-armed troll players, cracking his yellow shield in two swings and dismembering his bow-holding arm with a third. He could feel a need, the thirst for carnage, grow stronger as he punched into the troll’s screaming mouth and ripped out its tongue.

Everyone else on the battlefield stood transfixed. They had all paused to watch his Lazarus-like rebirth and the subsequent brutal destruction of one of their players. Before they could react, before people could come to their senses, his blade had already pierced through another player, one without a shield.
So he’s one of the healers,
he thought as he decapitated him with his sword.
How many more are left?
He grinned, the pull of his want and need driving him towards yet another lamb for the slaughter.

“What . . . What the hell? These guys are cheating!” the Jotunn complained again.

“He’s not cheating. He’s just a higher level. This dungeon is flagged as Level 45. He might already be 50!” the obvious leader responded. He was a few dozen feet away from Darwin and closing in quick. “I mean, remember how difficult that scout group we encountered on the way here was? If it weren’t for our healers, we wouldn’t have been able to kill them so quickly.”

“Yeah, and if the shields are failing! It’s your fault! Why can’t you cast good shields like you did against those red-eyed pipsqueaks earlier?” They were already shifting blame, making excuses as their arrows, axes, spikes and the occasional ball of fire bounced off Darwin’s shield bot’s defense.

They’re low level . . . They’re only Level 40 to 45?
Darwin processed the information.
And . . . And that’s a healer!

“Hey! Are you guys checking this out? He’s got a bathrobe on . . . and his eyes are red! He’s the boss of the dungeon we’ve been sent to kill!” one of the Jotunns he passed shouted to the others as Darwin closed in. “We don’t even have to worry about that plan we had to burn the phalanx alive, we can just kill him here!”

Plan . . . to burn the phalanx alive?
Darwin had managed to impale the healer who had been stupid enough to let his identity be known to an enemy, when the leader finally caught up with him, slamming into Darwin’s side with all his strength. The shield didn’t stop the force of the man’s attack entirely, and Darwin was knocked back a few inches.

“Crap, he’s got both our healers. Let’s get him before the other groups show up!” the leader shouted. “Everyone focus on him! We can bring down his barrier. He’s not a PK! He’s the boss!”

“Darwin!” Kitchens moved through another foe like a hot knife quickly slicing through butter. It was just as he had done countless times before, walking forward and the enemy falling apart, but this time Darwin could see everything--and this time it was the last thing he saw as the red haze filled his vision and grew stronger and stronger.

He hadn’t noticed until it was too late, but each time he killed someone, the red tint grew just a little bit more and his vision grew a little bit blurrier. He had thought he was behaving of his own free will after the resurrection, but as he tried to speak out and answer Kitchens, it became painfully obvious he was still on auto pilot. The red had grown to the point where it completely obscured his vision and he couldn’t even watch.

Darwin had no idea when he lost himself to the blood rage, but he could slowly feel himself regaining control, still in the middle of a fight.
Dodge,
he screamed at his body as a sword slashed down at him and a quick sidestep barely saved his skin. He realized he had slightly more control as he used his blade to parry the attacking longsword, which had gone from its downward position into another sideways slash at him. When the parried blade returned once more for another downward swipe, he didn’t just sidestep, he caught the blade with his cross guard and threw it to the side. While his attacker tried to control the momentum of his deflected blade, he lunged forward, shoulder first, and caught whomever it was right in the center of his chest, knocking him back three paces.

There wasn’t even a moment’s pause in the fight. As quickly as his foe was knocked away, he was already back, pressing Darwin with another three consecutive slashes. Two came from the side and one came down at his head with such speed that Darwin had to back up while parrying in order to avoid being hit.
I’m not going to be pushed back this easily.
Darwin dug his foot in the ground, summoning all the power he could muster, and arced his sword upwards at a 45-degree angle to make it nearly unavoidable for the opponent.

It worked--for the most part. His opponent parried the blow, lifted his legs, and let the force of the impact carry him backwards. When the enemy landed, Darwin tried the same thing again, repeating the heavy swing right at his opponent from the opposite direction. This time, however, the man caught the blade with his own and used its downward momentum to drive Darwin’s flamberge into the ground. His katana danced up Darwin’s zweihander and plunged into his arm. The pain almost made Darwin drop the blade, but he gritted his teeth and jerked his blade directly up instead. His adversary quickly moved out of the way, and the zweihander didn’t even nick him as Darwin had hoped, but it still put Darwin’s weapon in front of him once more so he could parry incoming blows.

Watch the center of their body. It lies the least.
Darwin started to remember what Alex had taught him and began to focus less on the katana that was now striking at him and more on the opponent’s center.
Parry. Good. I can do this.
He fought through the distraction of his injury. But, just as Darwin thought he was about to triumph over his foe, two feet planted into his back so hard he fell forward with enough force for his horns to dig holes in the ground. He struggled, almost throwing off whomever it was that had kicked him in the back, until a new weight, which felt like it must have been heavier than a truck, pressed him further into the earth.

What the hell? This is how I die?
He grumbled into the dirt as he finally gave up struggling to free himself and proceeded to wait for his inevitable death, one that wouldn’t be undone by resurrection.
Wait . . . Has it been an hour since the fight started?

Then, unexpectedly, the dirt around his face started to shift and unclamped little by little until he had plenty of room to breathe. Bright sunlight once more assailed his face as it was cleared of dirt. He grumbled, spit out the muck that had made it into his mouth, and looked up from where he was being held down against the ground.

“You about cool yet, big guy?” he heard someone say.

“Huh?” Darwin tried to turn his head to see who was talking, not entirely sure what was going on.

“Well, he’s speaking again,” the voice said, clearly not to him. Whatever was sitting on top of him roared and started moving, but the voice stopped it. “Hold on, Fuzzball. We don’t know if he’s back to earth again. Stay there for a moment.”

Fuzzball? Fuz . . . “
Fuzzy Wuzzy?” Darwin said, then started to recognize the voice, “Daniel?”

“There we go! He’s back. The boss is back,” he said to whomever else was watching. “Alright, Fuzzy, get off Darwin. We don’t want him to get angry again,” Daniel laughed. “You really gave us a scare there, boss.”

“Yeah, what happened there? You kind of . . .” Mclean asked, trailing off. “Got more handsome.”

Huh?
I got more . . . Wait . . . What the heck?
Darwin finally pushed himself off the ground as Fuzzy Wuzzy got up and let him stand again. “Huh? What are you talking about?”

“I was going to say you went kind of crazy back there. Don’t know what Mclean is talking about,” Daniel responded. “We were lucky Kitchens was able to hold you off until we could get you pinned there.”

The opponent, the katana--so it was Kitchens.
Darwin put the pieces together. The entire fight he had been so obsessed with worrying about the enemy, watching his arms, his legs, his blades, his style, and making sure that he could defeat and kill him, that he never once looked at the face or thought about whom he was fighting. He had just known that there was a fight, and he desperately wanted to win it and kill the other person. If they had said anything to him, he either hadn’t heard it or it just hadn’t registered.
So this is the true face of the madness my bloodline is cursed with.
Darwin frowned, realizing that, although this particular moment had passed, there would inevitably be more and more like it.

“Think nothing of it.” Kitchens sheathed his sword. “It was good to fight a worthy opponent for once.”

“Were you going easy on him?” Minx asked her dad with wide, expectant eyes. “You never take that long to kill someone. You’re a superman!”

“That’s a rude question to ask, Minx. Do not belittle the skills of the man we follow.” Kitchens turned and started heading towards the entrance behind the now-mostly-crumbled and destroyed wall of earth.

Minx tilted her head as if she didn’t agree with him and then shrugged and followed after her father. “How come you don’t get taller?” she asked her dad as they walked towards the entrance.

“I’m taller?” Darwin looked at his body. It didn’t feel or look any different. It wasn’t like the time he had resurrected to feel horns.

“Yeah, man, you are at least three inches taller than you were before.

“And beefier. Mmm . . . I know a few guys that would die to learn that magic trick.” Mclean giggled and then nudged Daniel.

“Hey! I’m happy with my height!” Daniel tried to defend himself, but Mclean and Fuzzy Wuzzy both just snickered at him.

While they continued to tease Daniel, Darwin couldn’t help but look around. He had remembered around fifty or so players when he first came to the fight, but there were well over a hundred bodies from what seemed like a dozen different races. They were scattered apart, cauterized, cleaved and destroyed, some in ways that just didn’t make sense. Darwin couldn’t imagine how or why someone would have everything from their jaw to their collar bone missing. “What . . . What happened here?” Darwin desperately tried to scavenge his memories for even the slightest clue to what had just transpired. “What did we do? What did I do?”

Kitchens, who had been walking with Minx back towards the phalanx at the entrance of Mt. Lawlheima, stopped for a moment and turned around. “Darwin!” he called out to him. “Come here. I think we need to talk. Minx, you go play with Fuzzy Wuzzy.”

Darwin didn’t exactly run, but he didn’t walk either as he darted to meet up with Kitchens, who had changed direction and started heading towards Darwin’s left, away from the entrance and the sea of corpses.

“So what’s up?” Darwin asked when they were out of earshot of anyone else.

“Hmm, Darwin, you knew this issue would come up?” Kitchens looked at him with a type of square, flat face that made him feel like he was staring at an angry Easter Island statue.

“Yeah,” he nodded. “Like I said earlier, it’s caused by a class skill.”

“I believe you said that when this skill comes up, everything goes red and you find it difficult to control what you’re doing?” Kitchens had a rather serious look on his face, one that reminded Darwin of a patient expecting to receive bad news from a doctor, yet his tone was more in line with the doctor giving the bad news.

“Yeah, but it’s kind of difficult to describe though. This time was worse than the others. I’m usually like a passenger, watching the turns a bus makes through a window from a seat near the front, but this time it felt like I was losing consciousness.” Darwin wasn’t exactly sure how to explain what had happened except by comparing it to being possessed. He had control of himself, but then he didn’t, and he could watch, but then he couldn’t. The spotty mastery of his own faculties wasn’t even the worst part of it. The worst part was knowing that Hunger hadn’t trigger it, and that it hadn’t been triggered by dying either.

“When you killed yourself, were you the one driving?” Kitchens still hadn’t blinked. It was weird that Darwin noticed this, especially since it was a game, but it was somewhat offsetting when someone was staring right at you with such an intense look. It’s not like avatars in most games blinked, but now he was beginning to wonder if Tiqpa even had the feature.

Blinking, huh
. Darwin’s lips fell halfway into a frown.
I really wish he would just blink and make this feel less awkward
. “It--whatever it is--was driving. Not me,” he answered honestly, starting to feel uncomfortable about the conversation.
Why does this bother me so much? Why is talking about it making me feel so uneasy?

“Hmm . . . I see. And when it’s in control, do you want the driver, for lack of a better word, to ever stop what it’s doing? Do you ever tell it to behave itself and not kill?”

“I . . .” Darwin hesitated to answer.

“So you didn’t tell it not to attack me? Not to try to kill me when we fought?” Kitchens’ words stabbed through him.

No. No.
“No, it wasn’t like that, I --” He started trying to explain his actions so he wouldn’t lose a friend, one of the few people he actually felt comfortable using the word ‘friend’ to describe, but Kitchens cut him off.

“You just didn’t see my face, didn’t know it was me you were fighting? Did you?” Kitchens explained it for Darwin, much to Darwin’s relief.

“No. No, I didn’t. All I saw was the sword, the arms, when and where the attacks were coming from. . . I lost consciousness somewhere in the fight, and by the time I regained it, all I knew was that a sword was coming at me, and I didn’t want to die. I just saw that I was being attacked, and I didn’t want to lose,” Darwin sighed.

“Was it fun?” Kitchens pressed the topic squarely back into the realm of accusation with just those three words.

“Uhh . . .” Darwin tried to recall. He had been so focused on his actions that a concept like ‘fun’ never came up. He hadn’t been sad, happy, bored or entertained. He had been almost like a machine that was utterly dedicated to a single task. “No,” he finally spoke. Certain that it was the truth.

“Lighten up, Darwin. You look too tense. Be like water,” Kitchens clasped Darwin on the shoulder, knocking a sigh of relief out of him. “I only have one more question: What were you thinking about before it started? Did anything of note happen first?”

“I remember . . .” Darwin didn’t have to think about it for more than a second before he recalled the trigger. “I was thinking about how they had killed seven of our guildmates already, and they were acting like it was their right to do it. They were talking as if, since they had come first, they had the right kill our people before anyone else, and . . . because they came here first, I wasn’t able to stop them before people died.”

“So anger set it off.” Kitchens nodded as if he already anticipated this answer. “Darwin, what you’re experiencing, I know a bit about it.”

“You do?” Darwin wasn’t sure how anyone else knew anything about his unique, inherited curse. Maybe there was a berserker class that had a similar attribute, but Kitchens hadn’t even started selecting abilities yet from the sound of their earlier conversation.

“There are some things, small details about a man’s first time in a live combat zone, that you just can’t help but notice a lot of war stories have in common. Most of them start when the fan gets assaulted by fertilizer, and they are generally all told by a hero. If you were telling the story about your first time in combat, for instance, you’d be the hero, and the story might start off rather simple. You might be just walking through a town on a day so hot that five topless supermodels on a beach couldn’t compare to it when all of the sudden a bang happens. Two bangs, three bangs, and either you or your buddy next to you, especially if you’re both green horns, will piss himself. You’ll duck and run for cover. And I don’t mean the general cover where you sleep under the truck so a loose shot in the night doesn’t pick you off, I mean the type of cover where you need something solid to hold you up because your legs start shaking and your breath goes ragged.” Kitchens started his story, and while Darwin wasn’t sure if he was talking about his own experiences or just stories he had heard, he couldn’t stop listening to every detail. Kitchens normally had a laid back personality, but as he spoke now, his hands came alive a bit, and his voice seemed to move up and down like it was trying to sweeten the story with a rhythm that wasn’t suited for any song.

“It gets worse as time goes by too,” Kitchens went on. “If you watch the movies, especially war movies, it makes the fights seem like they last forever. Who knows? Maybe they did at one point, but from the stories I’ve heard, the tellers were thankful they usually only lasted about ten to fifteen minutes, rarely up to thirty. Each second that clicks on by your first time, you feel big. Huge, but not in a good way. Not in a macho, masculine way. Well, some people do since they are born out of steel--but for the people I knew, their first time, they felt big in the sort of way where you were aware of every square inch of their body that was exposed. Every single possible piece of flesh that could be hit by enemy gunfire added to the panic, and they wished they would shrink up, and they prayed to be small for the first time in their lives. Then, as if it’s just the way of the world, things escalate because your NCO, your squadmate, that driver you split a cigarette with when you couldn’t find a shop nearby, whomever it is next to you, won’t take cowardice on the field. They won’t have anything against you for it, but they just don’t want to die. A trenchmate who won’t carry his weight is a surefire way to end up in a bed of posies to them, so they kick and push you to go out and do something.

“That’s when you grab your 240 bravo, man up and start shooting the first thing you see that looks like a threat: a window with a flash that might have been a gunshot or a man who looks like he’s holding a gun--not that you can be sure from the distance he’s at. Not that you can see anything but movement to begin with. You unload and keep unloading, one shot after another, until your NCO knocks you to stop because your barrel has melted, and he doesn’t want the bullets to turn the end of your weapon into a small shrapnel bomb.” Then Kitchens said nothing. He just looked at Darwin for a good long minute. Darwin wasn’t sure what to say after a story like that, but just as he was about to open his mouth and break the silence, Kitchens started again.

“Darwin, life isn’t much different than this video game. You didn’t go into some berserk rage that you couldn’t control. You just snapped under the pressure. You weren’t on autopilot; you were just acting so fast your brain couldn’t keep up. It’s not like you’re slow or stupid or can’t think faster than your hands can move. It’s just that you and your brain both know that, when the time comes, if you spend even a second trying to figure out if that guy in the window is a friend or a foe, armed or unarmed, if it actually is an enemy, then it’s a second that just got you shot. My guess is that you’ll never be able to get rid of that tunnel vision in some fights. It’s just not possible . . . but you can solve the lack of control. That is something you can fix.”

“How?” Darwin asked, though he was already starting to draw a conclusion as to what the answer would be. Kitchens had practically spelled it out.
The problem exists because I’m emotionally weak.

“Well, for starters, it never flares up in dungeons, does it? We’ve leveled together for a while, no problems. But it pops up instantly when you are fighting people with lives on the line? I’m guessing this isn’t the first time you’ve been worried about something or someone dying while fighting and gone into that autopilot state, is it?” Kitchens asked.

“No, it isn’t.” Darwin remembered that the first time he had ever experienced it was when he was in the tournament and found out that it was a fight to the death. He had thought that if he failed, he’d end up as a corpse permanently.

“This world is so realistic that no human can reasonably tell the difference, and NPCs don’t come back. I understand that, but other people aren’t having this issue because they aren’t failing to separate the game world from reality. Sometimes, when your emotions turn on, you need to learn to shut them down, bottle them up and pack them away for when you can process them with a cool head. If you can learn that patience, learn to focus on the objective without fretting over the consequences if you fail or about the things going on around you, I think you won’t have that problem again.”