The Duty (Play to Live: Book # 3) (22 page)

Bagheera, you son of a bitch! My sweet kitty! While we'd been busy looting, negotiating and waddling through the Frontier quicksands, he'd been doing his killing bit.

My swollen bag was in full overload, packed to the brim with all sorts of miscellaneous junk. The items, while meaning nothing when viewed separately, could however be grouped together in separate piles that gave you some idea of my pet's battle path. I began unloading the loot under the mercs' surprised gaze.

Pieces of ore: iron, copper, silver and a hefty ten-ounce lump of pure gold. Two mining picks, both rather interesting, giving you a plus to Mining and increasing your chances of discovering rare earth elements. So apparently, Bagheera had encountered some miners on his way—hopefully of the Shui Fong variety even though if the truth were known I doubted it somehow. In any case, I wasn't going to run around a strange cluster looking for the loot owners. Tough luck, shit happens. I wasn't a holy man, after all, you shouldn't romanticize us Death Knights.

And then the panther had apparently broken into some smithy or other: I could see some forging tools and a few ingots of various colors and... and a couple of slaves' collars with magical locks and worn eye rings. Was it something from a slave driver's bag or could I now claim the liberation of a few more slaves? I wondered if some of them had been smart enough to give the passing panther a stroke with their hammers which might have earned them a slap from Bagheera's deadly paw and sent them to their respawn point just in time to leg it in the middle of the commotion?

Then I had half a bucket of various jewelry, from junk rings "+1 to whatever" to the artifact Necklace of the Rebel Paladin worth seventy grand. Made of thirty silver pieces blackened with time, the necklace allowed you to attach a level 1 to 10 spell to each coin, permitting you to activate the spells instantly in battle without spending any extra magic. To make up for its definite wonderwaffliness, the artifact had a twenty-four hour cooldown so I had to make sure I used it prudently as an extra pack of trump cards up my sleeve.

Very clever, definitely something to use in the future. I had no time to ponder over it now, so I just filled the necklace with twenty Life Absorptions 90 points each and various control spells: blinds, fears and the Deadman's Hand. I dragged the multitude of new quick access icons to the main panel, once more overloading the combat interface. I just hoped that in a few years' time it wouldn't resemble my old computer's desktop where you couldn't see the wallpaper behind all the hundreds of icons.

So, what next? I left all the wealth of weapons and armor till last—and God only knows there were enough of them to decorate the Hall of Trophies in an average-sized castle.
Clink, clink, clink
, cold steel kept dropping onto the straw mat: shields, swords, battle axes, katanas and miscellaneous quaint items of Asian origin, barely recognizable without checking the built-in prompts. You know what I mean—all those Jī Dāo Lián, tonfas, bana spears, kanabô, sansetsukons—who was I supposed to sell them to in the Russian cluster? Admittedly we had our fair share of exotica freaks even though the mere sight of a tiger hook sword—a cross between a saber, a hook, a sickle and a knuckle duster—made me wonder how one was supposed to use it and where one was supposed to learn all the little techniques—because every weapon had its own clever little tricks you could only learn from NPC masters.

The pile of trophies kept growing. Finally, I had to tear myself away from it in order to mouth an order into the auxiliary chat. "I need a mule to expedite half a ton of personal trophies."

Clink,
the last pair of shiny chainmail gauntlets dropped onto the heap and slid tentatively down, causing in its wake a minor avalanche of various petty gear. That seemed to be it.

Bang
, the bag jumped in my hands, receiving yet another trophy with compliments from my tireless kitty. A familiar gold-inlaid headdress tall with colored feathers, followed by a fancy belt generously studded with gems and riddled with all sorts of little slots and pockets. Bagheera had finally caught up with his quarry! It had taken the gangsters' crisis manager quite some time and a lot of running to avoid the black death but he'd got his comeuppance in the end. Thanks for the hat and the belt, dude—I just couldn't wait till I could troll the pompous parrot a little.

A portal popped nearby, its echo making the guards jump. The relaxing sentries swung their heads in the direction of the soft tapping sound of feline paws. Bustling an absent-minded guard out of the way, Bagheera plunged into the camp, looking utterly pleased with himself even if way too worse for wear. Purring thunderously, he rammed me with his powerful head, making Widowmaker—who was trying to catch a few Zs during a well-deserved break—wince in his sleep and turn round.

The kitty looked like a garbage truck rescue after having had six lives squashed out of him. He must have escaped on his willpower alone. His skin was burned with chemicals and magic, exposing areas of charred flesh covered with dozens of cuts and deep scars, the few remaining tufts of hair sticky and matted. His life blinked orange at 11%, dangerously close to red.

"Is my kitty hurting?" I whispered, not even daring to pat him behind his non-existent ears.

His head was in a state. The whole left side of it was covered with a nasty crimson wound, still bubbling and breathing purple smoke. The right side was virtually all skinned by one hell of a blow, muscles included, the scaringly exposed skull bones scratched and dented.

Bagheera sniffed his wet nose, miaowing softly as if complaining about life in general and his careless master in particular who'd set him objectives beyond the doable.

I glanced at the heap of trophy freebies, feeling like the bastard I was. Then I tried to heal kitty with the standard Necromancer package: Reviving the Undead, a classic heal spell for summoned creatures. As if! The impotent pale droplets of Necro magic slipped off the beast's warm side, causing Bagheera to glance at me in bemusement.

But where there is a group of people coming together, there will be a cat person within it. One of the mercs just couldn't see the battered beast suffer any longer. He cast the Great Heal. An indignant growl; then a clever blow from a powerful paw sent the head of the uninvited helper flying high through the air far beyond the camp's limits. The head's eyes were open wide, filled with bewilderment and righteous indignation.

Sorry guys, I thought you were smart enough to understand. A well-trained dog would never accept food from a stranger. A battle horse wouldn't let anyone but his rider near him. Not to mention cats, an independent and highly sensitive species.

The byproduct of this experiment was that it had failed to restore Bagheera's health. Apparently, to all other players he was but a regular monster which you normally couldn't heal. Had I had any healing skills, I could have fixed my beastie in sixty seconds flat, but the contrary was true: I was a Death Knight any way you looked at me which made my owning of a living pet a mere freak of nature, a hiccup of the developing new world. Of course scrolls were a simple enough alternative but restoring Bagheera's thirty thousand hits would cost me the equivalent of a meal in a Michelin-star restaurant.

With my inner greedy pig's blessing—received as he was purring over the pile of loot—I rummaged through my inventory for the Reset Potion and gulped it down, then activated the Help of the Fallen One. The panther flew arcing in the air as his broken bones snapped back into place. A silver wave ran across his body, restoring his gorgeous fur and healing the wounds. In a show of special effects, Bagheera was lowered down. He emitted a puzzled grunt. It looked as if the God's healing hand had also given him a considerable boost: the beast seemed taller, darkness gleaming within his gaze, the taut bulging muscles rippling throughout his body.

Aha! That was much better! With a content purr, kitty sat at my feet, squinting his mesmerizing stare at the campfire.

That got me thinking. No one could ever receive another Holy Unmercenary achievement. That was a one-off thing granted to the person who'd been first to stumble across that particular branch. But as for the basic Unmercenary status that protected your possessions from the PKs' greedy mitts—this particular secret was worth millions. And it deserved being either sold to some very serious clans or used as a negotiations lever. The information was just too precious.

Actually, now I could have made one hell of a PK. All my faction relationships could only improve; I could wear the ultimate in top gear without fearing someone could wrestle it away from me; and all the enemy's stuff ported into my bag automatically. Shame I wasn't in the position to play this kind of game. As clan leader and First Priest, I was basically the Dark side's official representative. A High Elf, yeah right! I would have looked a bit like Gazprom's multimillionaire director who'd been granted invincibility and other superpowers and then decided to use them by doing a bit of nocturnal mugging to earn a quick buck on the side. Lucrative but utterly pointless.

In any case, this raid had already improved my situation a lot. Money and skills, positive changes to my image and status, hundreds of map files and possibly, more clan members.

The second incident had taken place right after the next jump. Having received the points' go-ahead, our group dived into the portal arc, finding ourselves about fifteen miles away inside an enormous skeleton half-buried in the sand. The eons-dead creature was only slightly smaller than Tianlong. His mind-boggling size defied description. His rib cage was large enough for our two hundred raiders to make themselves comfortable albeit unceremoniously.

I looked up, studying the massive vertebrae looming overhead. The rangers faltered impatiently nearby, waiting for their buffs to be renewed while the golems were making a pit stop, having lost part of their original assembly-line shine. The impassive treasurer had forwarded me a list of spare parts compiled by the Belorussian golem builder. All I could do was grind my teeth in bewilderment and sign it: you really shouldn't mess with the mechanoids' unhurried regeneration.

The rangers' leader cast me a tired glance. I raised a quizzical eyebrow. "What's all this with stuffing us like maggots into this pile of bones?"

He shrugged. "It's the shade, Sir. You can't find more of it anywhere else here. It's all sand, bones and basilisks' petrified eggs. Petrified as in turned to stone—everyone here think themselves funny, asking me what the eggs are so petrified of. Everything points at this place being a dried-out source of magic. Apparently, basilisks used to come here for millennia in order to bury their eggs in the burning-hot sand and then die covering their nests with their bodies. Even in his death, the stench of a basilisk would scare every creature away for miles around while his rotting body provided perfect nutrition for the hatchlings."

"I just love their life cycle."

"You can say that, Sir. They eat and grow, all the while looking for an ideal partner. And once they find him or her, a quick screw and then they die... Isn't that symbolical?"

I shook my head in dismay, more at the ranger's erudition than at his laidback philosophy. "Are they all this big?"

"God forbid!" the captain shuddered. "These are Ancient relics. The earth can't bear these kind of creatures any more. We have enough trouble with Young, Adult and Mature ones. The latter are fifteen feet long. Normally it takes you ten warriors to fell one. Very high resistance to magic plus some quite obnoxious skills. The loot is worth it, that's for sure, this kind of beast isn't easy to come by. Talking of which, Sir, purely between us archaeologists, have a look over here, would you?"

He pointed at some boulders peeking out from under a rather flat dune. Holy shit! If those weren't eggs!

A petrified clutch of four Ancient Basilisk eggs.

The boulders were the size of a fifty-gallon barrel and probably weighed accordingly.

Having made sure I'd got a good eyeful of our conversation starter, the ranger went on, "Have you copied its stats, Sir? Now look here: an egg of a Mature Basilisk is slightly smaller than a soccer ball. Imagine the size of this monster? If we could only find one like that and check what it had inside! It can drop anything at all—even some ancient heroes' weapons..."

Oh well. I went through my personal skill list, pausing over the Bone Dragon's gift. Broody Hen? Making me able to
"instantaneously hatch any egg of my choice, bringing a new creature into this world"
?

So how could I not try it?

Man is a funny creature, really. Put a big red button on the wall and I assure you, within five minutes someone too curious for his own good would come near, shrinking in anticipation of a Big Bang—but still he'd press it! Well, I was only human too. My inner greedy pig didn't help, either, as the only word he seemed to have understood out of the whole exchange was
loot
.

"We will see," I whispered.

"Pardon me, Sir?"

I didn't answer. Instead, I switched to the common channel. "Attention to the raid. Code Orange Four Four. Kick-off in three minutes."

Code Orange stood for the highest probability of military contact. Four Four described the potential enemy: a monster, uncategorized.

Widowmaker came running. He faltered for a moment, trying to swallow an unfinished chunk of meat, and nodded his gratitude for an offered flask of cold
kvass
[ii]
. "What's all that about the mobs, Sir? This is a basilisk graveyard! Even desert wolves won't come anywhere near, they start pissing themselves within a mile's range of it."