Chương 11: 10-The Hunt for Akiros

Jenna opened her eyes as her spirit settled back in her body. She stood as she faced Bob and Billy.

"Akiros' army is placed along a sixty-mile-long strip, bordering on Serpenta's territory. There are lots of camps in it, composed mainly of centaur and hag troops," she explained curtly.

"I don't know why, but his army is not as varied as Paul's was."

"What are those two playing at? They seem to growl a lot at each other, but they do not really commit to it," observed Billy. He had a serious expression, far unlike his usual laissez-faire attitude. There had not been much laughter since they learned that the Reclaimers were dead. No matter how they tried to rationalize it, the Losers felt they had fallen short of what was expected of them. Bob intervened, with one of his usual convoluted-but-usually-right theories.

"The Tribulations on Earth were loosely based on the kaiju myth, probably because of the influence of mass media. Vorians have a culture roughly similar to the Norse cultures of our world. Their Tribulations are based on giant versions of true animals, very much like the Ragnarok myth. I think they are more feral, too—they rely on instinct."

"That could explain a lot of things," Jenna assented.

"All that posturing reminds me of two beasts marking their turf. Paul kept most of his mind intact when he was transformed into a Tribulation, but I think he was a special case. It did not work like that for Memnon. If they are truly more bestial in nature, perhaps we could make it work to our advantage."

"How do you want to play this, Jenna?" Bob asked her, deferring to her superior tactical prowess.

"We must think of him as a beast. Nothing but a wolf. A giant, powerful wolf, but a beast at the end. How do you hunt a wolf?" she asked.

"You bait him," answered Billy, without a doubt. He was the only one with wilderness survival training.

"We are going to do this, aren't we?" Bob asked them.

"And by this I mean hunting a five-hundred-ton beast, just to be clear."

"Of course we are, Bob," Jenna assured him.

"We are the Losers. There is nothing we can't cheat our way to."

"What sort of bait are you thinking of, Jenna?" asked Billy.

"Another tribulation, of course." Jenna smiled at him.

"You have one in your Library, Billy."

"Those are expensive. We are going to need a lot of achievement points," he answered.

"Start drinking your experience tonic then, Billy, because we are going to get you all of them," Jenna answered grimly.

"Courtesy of our centaur friends," she added. Bob approached the enemy troops under the cover of night and his own Shadowcraft skill. They had been studying the enemy all day and had decided to make their move when the sun set. More than forty centaurs and hags ate and joked around a bonfire. On top of it, something that looked suspiciously like a human corpse was cooking. The centaurs and hags got along like brothers and sisters, and there seemed to be casual flirting among them.

Bob realized they were members of a sexually dimorphic species whose males and females looked so different that they seemed to belong to different races. Jenna and Billy were just behind him. Billy had adopted his shadow ninja form to be more adept at stealth. Jenna, being Jenna, was basically adept at everything. Bob put the Pipes of Hamelin on his lips and improvised a perk. He could feel Jenna empowering his Spirit, making his magic irresistible.

Lullaby (Harmony 3): Play subtle, almost inaudible music that slowly lulls anyone hearing it to sleep over the course of minutes, acting as a subtle spirit attack. Blocking the ears will negate the effect. Bob watched as their enemies slowly fell asleep, unaware they were being attacked. Both Jenna and Billy had plugged their ears to avoid being affected by it. When all their enemies were asleep, Jenna walked among them, casually touching each one and trying to glean information from their sleeping minds.

"This one saw the Reclaimers," she finally announced.

"They were quickly overwhelmed by the Tribulation, but Raelgar stood firm and tried to buy Bila time for her escape."

"Only Bila? Where was Orun?" asked Bob.

"That's the odd part. When those two faced Akiros, they were alone. Orun was nowhere to be seen," answered Jenna.

"It does not make sense. They were pros. They would not have started such a fight with one less. Could he have panicked?"

"Seems like he bolted just before the fight started," confirmed Jenna.

"Did Raelgar make it?" Billy asked earnestly.

"No. Akiros devoured him, but Bila escaped. With some luck, she can still be alive."

"What do we do with these guys, Jenna?" Billy asked.

"I do not feel comfortable killing them while they are defenseless."

"They have nothing to do with the Essentials we know, Billy," she answered him.

"They have been molded by a Tribulation. Their minds are filled with hate and hunger. They are nothing but living weapons, capable of thought only because the Pull controls their minds. They will turn on each other as soon as Akiros is dead, much as the members of the Sea of Chaos did when Paul fell." Billy seemed to doubt for a moment, but then his gaze fell on the grisly remains of their feast. He bade Jenna and Bob stand back a few feet and went to the center of the clearing.

Then he exploded, taking the whole Essential camp with him. Bob thought he could hear the achievement points rushing into him. That was the first of the night's attacks. They cleared four more camps during the night. It was surprisingly easy. The centaurs were overconfident—they were accustomed to humans trying to flee from them, not fighting back. Most of the camps had no defenses or guards, not that they would have helped much against Bob's magic. Bob knew it would not last.

The whole centaur army would go to war as soon as they realized they had been attacked. They had to put Akiros down, or innocents would pay for their actions. The last camp held a surprise. Truth Reveals Itself flashed briefly, calling Bob's attention to one body partially buried under a mound of corpses. It was that of Bila, the runesage, one of the Reclaimers. The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

"She did not make it, after all," Billy said sadly.

"It is worse than that," Bob answered.

"She was not slain by arrows or magic. Her throat was cut from behind with a very thin blade. An assassin's blade."

"Orun," Jenna's voice shook with anger.

"They were betrayed by one of their own. Why would he do this? Is he working for Akiros?"

"I doubt it," Billy answered.

"Tribulations only work with Essentials they have enslaved through the Pull. We do not know everything that is happening here."

"That is the understatement of the year," agreed Jenna.

"How are you doing on AP, Billy?"

"I am still halfway there, Jenna," he answered her, while he covered Bila's face with a blanket he had taken from one of the centaurs.

"She only wanted to help her people. What she did, she did out of kindness. She did not deserve this," he said.

"When the morning comes, we change tactics. No more music in the night," the Primordial said grimly.

"We are going to face them in battle, then?" asked Billy.

"Of course not, dumbass," she said, linking his arm with hers while she smiled affectionately at him.

"We are just going to cheat a different way." The following morning, Jenna and Billy sat cross-legged, holding each other's hands, their eyes closed in concentration. Bob knew Jenna was enhancing Billy's visualization, helping him get the right mix for a new essence gestalt. Billy could do this on his own by respawning as a Headshaker, but doing it this way saved on achievement points. As a rule, their powers worked better when they combined them.

Bob thought that it was probably because they had once been part of a whole. He did not remain idle while his friends were so occupied. He used his pipes to summon some small wildlife they could use for the second part of the plan. Anything but flying animals, Jenna had said. It made sense. They were meant to be used as weapons, and you did not want your weapon to fly off the battlefield. He got a couple of hares, one fox, and something that looked like a cross between a mole and a rabbit.

He stored them inside the small wire cages they had brought along. Billy and Jenna finally opened their eyes.

"I think we got it, Bob. Are you ready?" Jenna asked. Bob showed them his catch.

"As ready as I will ever be," he announced. Billy disappeared in a flash of blue light and returned as a two-headed floating snake, its twin bodies as thick around as tree trunks. The skin had a chameleon-like quality that made eyesight slide off it. It also had two vestigial but still functional arms.

"This will work fine. It is a Mist Hydra," Jenna explained.

"He got it by combining gryphon, river dragon, shadow ninja, and machetist in the right proportions."

"Machetist. How novel," Bob said ironically.

"Don't do that, Bob, sarcasm does not suit you," Jenna gently chided him.

"At its basic rank, it only has two heads," she went on.

"It gains more the more AP Billy spends on it. It is strong enough to carry a rider on each head, and its camouflage powers make it hard to detect it from the ground. We will use it to bombard the centaurs from above." Jenna mounted the left-hand head, leaving the right one for Bob. The Hydra rose slowly from the ground, like an aerostatic balloon, and started to pick up speed as it went east, where they knew the centaur army to be.

Thirty minutes later, they flew over a horde of centaurs and hags, almost four hundred strong.

"Ordnance, please, Bob," said Billy inside his head, using the blood link. Bob caught one of the hares by the scruff of the neck and passed it to Billy, who caught it with one of his hydra's arms. Billy gently shook the terrified animal, imbuing it with a corpse-camping charge, and then let it fall on the amassed Essentials below. An already familiar scene took place below as the hare was killed again and again, becoming a fiercer monster each time.

Billy fed it twenty charges in total, only stopping when he thought that the process would make the monster too powerful to be defeated. It would not do to release yet another monstrosity in this plane. The centaurs eventually won the battle, but at a huge price. More than half their number were dead when the fight ended. None tried to flee. They were brave to a fault. They flew to a different spot, located a new camp, and repeated the process three more times.

They camped when the sun set, and readied themselves to do it all over again the next morning.

"This would not have worked against the Sea of Chaos," Billy said, as Bob prepared them a Pantean dinner.

"They would have adapted to it, would probably already have found a way to detect us and take us down from the sky."

"Yes, they were much smarter than this bunch, probably the effect of having Paul as leader. I don't think Tribulations are supposed to be intelligent," Bob reflected.

"They designed Paul just for us. The Coven also knows how to cheat when it suits them." They went to sleep on that note and resumed their campaign the following morning. On their third strike, they struck gold. Akiros himself was nearby, and he came to lend a hand, giving Bob a very sought-after opportunity to study him with Gaze of the Eternal Warrior. One Out of Three Combat Patterns Detected: Akiros has a powerful danger-sensing ability that allows him to dodge a potentially lethal attack.

This ability has a one-minute cooldown. Two Out of Three Combat Patterns Detected: All creatures who hear Akiros howl while in combat with him suffer a 1% debuff to their physical attributes each ten seconds. The debuff can take a stat down to 25% of its original value. Essentials under his Pull are immune to this effect. Three Out of Three Combat Patterns Detected: Each time Akiros draws blood, he will get a 1% buff to his physical attributes that will last until the end of the battle.

His stats can't go over double his base value, and he gets a maximum of one buff stack every ten seconds. Weakness Detected: The Blood Buff turns Akiros mad, making him more bloodthirsty and feral the more his attributes grow. That evening, they made plans for the following day.

"We now know how he fights. A buff-debuff hybrid strategy, plus a powerful dodge ability, usable only once per minute," Jenna explained.

"Now we have to design an essence gestalt for Billy that can counter his powers." She turned towards Bob, "You and I will handle healing. You will keep your restoration powers on Billy at all times, and I will enhance your Mind so that they are powerful enough to heal a Tribulation."

"I think we should also pick carefully where we fight him," Bob added.

"There are some hills to the south that are riddled with caves. If we fight him there, we can retreat into the caves if something goes south. He is too big to fit inside them."

"That is actually a very good idea, Bob," Jenna beamed at him.

"Let's do it." Bob smiled ruefully. He and Jenna had this silly game in which he proposed ideas, and she acted as if she had not already thought of them, so he would not feel bad. He pretended not to notice it. That made him feel good. He had the nagging suspicion that Jenna knew that he knew, and she feigned that she did not know, so that he would feel like the winner. You never knew with her. On the third day, they had almost wiped out the centaur army, which was the requirement for trying to take out Akiros.

They did not want to unleash retaliation on the Vorians if they failed. Billy had already designed an adequate Tribulation form and had enough points to pay for it. They waited for Akiros to roam near the spot they had chosen to fight him. Then they dropped another corpse-camped hare on him. They only respawned the monster six times—they wanted Akiros to get the Blood Buff so that it would cloud his judgment, but not to such an extent that it would give a significant advantage during the next battle.

When the hare monster finally fell, Billy dispelled his camouflage, making his hydra form clearly visible to the Tribulation. Akiros spotted them and pursued them, howling in fury. Billy flew deftly to the desired spot and landed, letting Bob and Jenna down. Then he turned to the approaching monstrosity and disappeared in a flash of light.

He returned as a thirty-foot-tall centaur, with bark for skin, armed with a machete and with his head in the middle of his torso, an exquisite combination of Amazon Druid, Centaur Bowman, Fungal Tree, Ethel Tribulation, and, naturally, Headless Machetist. It possessed powerful anti-debuff abilities and sap for blood—they would negate two out of three of Akiros' main powers. The centaur stood his ground, readying his machete and waiting for his enemy's charge.

Akiros charged, trampling the ground, like a furry earthquake descending on its prey. Bob focused his mind and readied his Restoration perks.

"I am ready, Jenna," he announced, expecting her powerful mind to enhance his magic. Jenna groaned softly. Bob turned around and saw her fall to the ground. A wicked dagger was sprouting from her back. Orun the Whisper was standing over her, his hand on the hilt. Billy readied his spirit to receive a healing that never came. Akiros jumped on him. The fight began.