Chapter 28 Ironclad

Where was I? Was I dreaming? Where was my bone blade? Why did my body feel so feeble? Everything was grey, muggy. Outside, the rain pattered relentlessly against the window. I saw the mould. Damnit. I’d been meaning to fix that window for months.

I heard the machinery, as I entered the living room. She was asleep. I didn’t want to wake her. I saw the envelope on the table. It was open.

No, this isn’t real. This isn’t real. I raged, wondering how to escape. I looked to the window, the muggy London afternoon there. I raced for it, I’d shatter through, I’d plummet the twenty storeys, anything to escape this place…

I wasn’t dead. So that was something. I also wasn’t back…there. Also something. That might’ve been a fate worse than death as far as I was concerned.

Imprisoned. That much was obvious, but I seemed to have fared better than the Komo prisoners. I hadn’t been strung up like cured meats, nor had I been beaten any further. In fact, judging by my hit points, I’d actually been healed by someone. Not just my health poultices, but true shaman’s magic.

I was in a cage. I wasn’t going anywhere, but it was large. Large enough to stand, stretch out my legs. There was also food and water, some broth that was now stone cold as well as some of that roasted deer I’d smelled from earlier. I wolfed it all down.

All of my gear was intact. Nothing had been removed from my inventory. Then again, I wasn’t sure if things could be removed if I wasn’t dead. There were several notifications. I had gotten new achievements, ones for rescuing the Komo tribe and another for fighting at less than ten hit points. That last one was courtesy of my Beast Fury, of course.

I saw the rescue quest had been completed. With the experience I’d earned, I was now a third of the way to level seven. In the quest log, upon clicking complete, I saw that I’d been rewarded with the rare weapon fragment.

With a name like that, I was more than excited, but was disappointed to see that it wasn’t an object at all. Instead, it simply told me the location of a rare weapon fragment. I opened up the mini-map and saw where it was. I hovered my mental cursor over it and saw that it was another fragment of the Spear of Midnight. I already had one. Okay, that was useful. In all of my time here in the Stone Epoch, I’d only encountered two named weapons. The Vandal’s Shard had proven very powerful already. If I was going to challenge the Warlord, I knew I would need this weapon.

Or at least, I knew, damn did I want it. Badly.

There was one other part of the quest that had been updated. Warlord’s vulnerability. Curious, I clicked on this, and it took me back to the mini-map. This time, however, it appeared that a new overlay had been put atop it. Now the map glowed red, with some areas less intense until they formed into a solid red area. I saw a little tooltip, and clicked on it.

[Quest unlocked: Warlord’s Grip – The Warlord is the indisputable master of the humans of the Disputed Lands. Work with the local tribes to break his grip, attacking his strongholds and forces. Only once weakened will the Warlord be vulnerable himself to attack.]

I opened the map up again. Clearly the areas of red were where the Warlord was strong. So I would need to keep completing quests, breaking up his power, just as I had done today. The quest had stated the Warlord was the indisputable leader of the humans. What about the vandal tribes? I had an increased factional reputation with the Yukon tribe. I mentally filed that away as someone approached.

He regarded me. I couldn’t read him, but if he was trying to be coy, I didn’t know why. I was a prisoner here. I didn’t even know where here was, and yet he neither threatened nor postured. Instead he simply said, ‘so you’re the one.’ His voice. His tone. Too contemporary to be one of the mobs. I tried to examine him and found that I couldn’t. My eyes narrowed as I realised. He was an avatar, too.

‘So I am.’ I had no idea what he was talking about, but he wasn’t skewering me, or beating me over the head with a club, so I’d play along. He came right up to the bars of my cage, pressing his face there. His face. I realised I knew it. Dreadlocks, but cleanly shaven.

‘When I heard one of you had finally broken through, gotten to level five despite the quests being completely broken in the starter area, I thought it would be some great warrior.’ I felt a shiver down my spine. This was no psychological tactic. I knew, I could feel it. Genuine disappointment. ‘How did a shrimp like you get through?’

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‘You tell me,’ I said. My eyes were on the cage, searching for a weakness, a way through. ‘You’re an avatar, you’re here. So you must’ve hit level five as well.’

‘Not without help.’

The cage had been built by mobs. No weak points, but it was built with wood. My little dirt nap had counted as a long rest. That meant I had Beast Fury back.

‘Well, we all need a little help sometimes,’ I muttered, ‘I’m not dead, so you clearly want something. My name is Reaver.’

‘Stupid name.’

‘So I keep hearing.’

‘I’m Ironclad.’

‘Huh. Glass houses. Stones.’

He gripped at the wooden bars of my cage. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Nothing at all, Ironman.’ Shit. It wouldn’t work. The wooden bars of my cage had the sturdy property. That meant I needed to do greater than forty damage per strike for it to register as having done any damage at all. The cage also resisted martial weapons — bludgeoning, piercing — though it did take increased damage from siege weapons.