Rune Seeker

“Before our Ancestor brought the Urn of Ur’thul to…” Odi began, his voice full and carrying as he went into lecturer mode—until Hiral interrupted him.

“Let me stop you there,” Hiral said.

“I just started,” Odi complained.

“It’s a quick thing,” Hiral said. “You keep calling our Ancestor our Ancestor. Doesn’t she have a name?”

“Uh…” Odi said, his eyes darting to the side and his scaled cheeks coloring as if he was blushing. “She does… I mean, I’m sure she does… She must, right? But… we… uh… don’t know it.”

“Isn’t she somebody really, really important?” Hiral asked, and Odi nodded. “Then, how can you not know her name?”

“As far as we can tell, she removed it from history. All records of her name, her travels, exploits, everything but what she finally did when she enshrined the Urn of Ur’Thul. It’s all… gone. Like it never existed.”

“Why?”

“We don’t know,” Odi replied with a shrug. “And I’ll tell you, it made it very difficult to track back to the original resting place of the Urn of Ur’Thul. Decades of intricate and precise work. Long, sleepless nights. Months on end away from friends and family. Broken promises, lost lovers.” The Lizardman literally wiped a tear from his eye. The curious glance he shot at the party kind of ruined it, though, and when he saw exactly zero sympathy on their faces, he cleared his throat.

“You have no idea what she’s done other than put the Urn in the Forge?” Nivian asked. “And she’s still that important?”

“Oh, yes,” Odi said. “The Forge of Ur’Thul was more than a rite of passage for our toddlers…”

“Again with the toddlers,” Hiral hissed.

“It was also a legacy. A way for our people to grow stronger. It taught us the value of hard work, of applying oneself to…”

“Wait,” Seena interrupted. “You told us before she helped free you from the Troblins. How do you know that if…?”

“For asking me to tell the story from the beginning, you’re really interrupting a lot and skipping all over the place,” Odi said, crossing his arms.

Seeyela simply ran a finger along the flat part of one of her fangs, and Odi uncrossed his arms.

“But I respect the eagerness of those wishing to learn more,” Odi said. “The story of bucking the chains of our Troblin oppressors may have seen some… creative license. You see, it all happened around the same time. Our best guess? The Ancestor used the Urn.”

“One of the most pivotal points in history is based on your best guess?” Hiral asked.

“Our best educated guess,” Odi said confidently.

“Okay,” Seena said, pinching the bridge of her nose. “Why are we here?”

Odi pointed at the Urn glowing fiercely on the pedestal. “This is where our Ancestor originally found the Urn. We believe,” he added in barely a whisper.

“The Ancestor found the Urn of Ur’Thul, a relic of unimaginable power, in a graveyard?” Wule asked.

“Well, where else would one find a burial Urn?” Odi asked back, and when Wule didn’t have an immediate reply, he continued. “The long years the Urn spent within the Forge of Ur’Thulhas somewhat dimmed its power. Maybe clogged is a better word. It was focused so long on the trials, like the ones you faced, that its power can only go in that direction.

“To unleash its full potential—which is what we need to save our people—we determined we needed to bring it back to its original resting place, and to perform a minor ritual of cleansing. Let me tell you, figuring out the ritual we needed to use was a chore and a half. Like somebody didn’t want us to ever, ever find it.

“But through more hard work and diligence… travel to and from the edges of our empire, and even perilous journeys into Troblin-infested…” Odi trailed off when none of the party members looked impressed with the recounting of his struggles. “Yes, so, as you can see… Urn, original resting place, ritual of cleansing. We’re all set. Yay.”

“Odi, are you sure you should be doing this?” Hiral asked. “The Urn tried to do something to us back in the dun… forge.”

Odi shrugged. “It doesn’t matter if I’m sure or not. The emperor is, and he has commanded me to do this. He is certain this will save what’s left of our people. And, even if we wanted to, it can’t be stopped now. The ritual is self-propagating once begun.”

Hiral looked at Seena, and she obviously had the same question he did. “If that’s the case, Odi, why are we here?”

“Well, there are several very disastrous possibilities if something were to interfere with the ritual,” Odi said, his scaled hands wringing in front of him.

“How disastrous?” Nivian asked.

“Well, considering the true power of the Urn, it could… explode,” Odi said.

“Oh? Is that all?” Nivian asked, relaxing. “We’re kind of familiar with explosions.”

“The kind that removes entire continents from the world?” Odi asked, a forced smile on his face.

“Pardon?” Nivian asked, his jaw dropping.

“And that’s the least of the problems we could end up dealing with,” Odi said. “Which is why I filled out the paperwork to have guards provided. And here you are! Yay again.”

“Guards… against what?” Hiral asked, something sending a shiver up his spine.

“Ah, yes, well, there… there was one theory, a m-minor one, really, hardly worth mentioning.”

“Spit it out, Odi,” Seena barked as the rest of the party started looking around. Whatever Hiral was feeling, he wasn’t the only one.

“It was theorized that the cleansing of the Urn may… disturb… some of the energy around it,” Odi said. “Rile it up, if you will.”

“And that means what, exactly?” Hiral snarled. Whatever he was feeling, it was building, like a knife stretching for the back of his neck. And no matter how quickly he turned to look, he couldn’t catch a glimpse of it.

“Must I spell it out?” Odi asked.

“YES!” everybody shouted at the same time.

“It might raise the…” he said at the same time a rotted arm burst through the ground just off to the side of the party. “…dead…”

Hiral didn’t hesitate, aiming his RHC and pulling the trigger. The arm exploded at the exposed elbow and spun off down one of the mausoleum paths. The stump of what was left continued to wriggle in the ground, while the earth around it grew loose and bulged.

“Oh, no, you don’t,” Hiral said, stalking over and aiming both barrels at the moving ground. Pulling his triggers on cooldown, he unloaded shot after shot into the earth until it stopped shifting, and he got an experience notification.

“That wasn’t so bad,” Odi said. “I was worried there for a second. But, just one? Hah, no problem!”

Dozens of rotted arms burst out of the ground all around, and low moans echoed though the night from further away.

“And that’s why you don’t say things like that,” Yanily said.

Dynamic Quest

The Ritual of Cleansing has disturbed the nearby spirits.

Defend the Urn from the Restless Dead.

Note: You really, really don’t want them to interrupt the ritual.

“You all saw the quest,” Seena said. “Spread out and stop those monsters. If you get in trouble, call out.”

With that command, the party quickly stretched around the Urn, each taking a section of ground without having to coordinate. The hours and hours they’d spent practicing under the two sisters’ strict guidance had them moving like a single entity, and Hiral put the others out of his mind while he focused on his task.

Just in front of him he quickly counted four, seven, ten, fourteen corpses pulling themselves out of the dirt. Like the first one he’d blasted, a little more than half of the undead were rotting corpses—zombies, from the looks of things—while the others were skeletons. A quick View confirmed his theory, and the monsters weren’t even elite. While the numbers weren’t on his side, the staggered way in which the undead were unearthing themselves certainly was.

With Racial Growth already at level three for both skeletons and zombies—thanks to Seena’s liberal use of her fireballs back in the city—he had a fifteen percent damage bonus. Two trigger pulls, and two zombies that’d almost pulled themselves clear of their graves dropped back to the ground, their heads missing.

Now that he was stacking up Killing Spree+ on top of the Racial Growth bonus—oh, and he was far enough from the others for One-Man Army—all it took was a single head shot to put one of the undead down. Almost casually, Hiral shifted his aim from one target to the next, taking his time to line up each shot, and put them down with one-hit kills. Even better, the others’ kills were racking up his Killing Spree+ bonus even faster, and at the point he’d only killed half his targets, he was already at the full twenty-five stack.

Yup, very overpowered.

Another shot, and he popped a skeleton’s skull like an overripe melon. The whole body exploded in a blast of razor-sharp bone shrapnel, dropping the two zombies beside it with their own grievous wounds. Still, even with their blue health bars empty, their heads were still intact, so they kept pulling their ruined bodies in Hiral’s direction.

“Whoa, these things explode!” Wule said over the party chat. “Be careful, everybody!”

Hiral felt heat rise up his neck and into his cheeks, but he just couldn’t bring himself to correct the healer, and he instead poured his attention into killing more of the undead in front of him. Two more shots finished off the crawling zombies, and he hadn’t even taken a step yet. A few seconds more, and he was done with the monsters in front of him.

How are the others doing?

Keeping one eye on the ground for more Restless Undead, he checked on the others’ fights. Right had gone to help out Wule, though the healer seemed to be doing pretty well on his own with his new fighting style. Left was darting back and forth to make sure Seena and Seeyela didn’t get overwhelmed, but from the looks of things, he needn’t have bothered. Both women were clearly in control of their battlefields. That just left Yanily and Nivian, and they’d already mopped up their packs.

“I hate to say it,” Yanily said.

“Then don’t,” Seena snapped.

“But that wasn’t so bad,” Yanily finished.

“He said it,” Wule deadpanned.

“Yan, didn’t you just tell Odi not to say stuff like that?” Nivian chimed in.

“What? We whooped those undead,” Yanily said. “They could’ve been better experience, though. Too bad they weren’t elite.”

With that proclamation, a pulse of energy washed out of the Urn, arcs of it crisscrossing the ground and tearing divots in the dry earth. Hiral sidestepped left and right to avoid the churning sparks, but it was almost like it wasn’t interested in him, turning aside even before it reached him. The others, likewise, didn’t even need to dodge. The sweep of energy quickly spread past them and vanished into the night.

“What was that all about?” Yanily asked.

Then Hiral heard the rattle of chains, and the screech of a metal gate opening. No, not just one metal gate… all of them.