Victor of Tucson

Despite his obvious berserk nature, the shelled warrior didn’t grow with his rage, aside from his bulging and swelling muscles. Still, his bruises and scuffs disappeared as his fury fueled his regeneration, and he moved with a sudden alacrity that put Victor momentarily on the defensive. He darted forward, whipping his sledge-like weapons through the air, aiming to shatter Victor’s bones with each frenzied attack. Victor, for his part, began to laugh with the glee of good, clean combat, darting back, slipping blows, and slapping the smaller warrior's arms aside as he ducked close.

While Victor enjoyed the contest, ducking, dodging, shoving, and grappling, he could see the green-skinned warrior was getting more and more enraged, his eyes blazing, his skin burning with palpable hate. He may have advanced his Berserk ability to a tier similar to Victor’s, but he certainly hadn’t unlocked Iron Berserk. Victor still felt rage when under the effects of his ability, but he was also rational and able to take joy in combat—his opponent was clearly feeling no joy.

After Victor ducked a wild overhand blow, sidestepping and shoving the back of the smaller warrior’s shell, the turtle-like man stumbled forward and tried to perform a shoulder roll. Unfortunately, Lifedrinker interfered, using her impact with the stony ground to drive herself deeper into the leathery flesh where her razor-sharp, smoldering blade had already begun to draw great torrents of hot, red Energy into her hungry metal. The green warrior roared in pain and frustration, aborting his somersault to flop to his belly and drive himself up with a powerful thrust of his muscle-bound arms. He veritably dove at Victor, whipping his hammers like a whirlwind.

Victor stepped into the charge, lowered his center of gravity with a deep squat, gripped the green warrior behind his bulky, swollen thighs, and drove himself up and back, flinging him through the air with a tremendous roar. When Victor watched his opponent sail, arms flailing, feet kicking fruitlessly, he almost lost his rage in his amusement. He laughed and leaned forward to slap his knees as the hammer-wielding warrior smashed to the ground with a reverberating thud that jolted the ground enough to lift a cloud of dust all over the clearing. At nearly the same time, a System message flashed in front of Victor’s eyes.

***Vek Dydallion has been rescued from certain death and removed from the dungeon. Twenty entrants remain. Prepare for an Energy infusion.***

At first, the message confused Victor because he could see the turtle-man already struggling to his feet. For a second, he thought the System had made a mistake, but then he glanced back toward the central stair and saw his two companions standing together with no sign of the combatant they’d been chasing.

The gray-haired woman, Sora, lifted her bow and started striding toward the downed berserker, but Victor waved her off and shouted, “No.” She and Cam exchanged looks, and the soft-looking wizard shrugged, immediately turning to jog toward the stairs leading up. Sora looked at Victor for a long moment, then waved a hand and hurried after him.

Victor turned back to his opponent, stoking the rage in his pathways with a fresh infusion from his Core. His companions were, apparently, willing to let him fight alone, but they weren’t going to wait around. He was all right with that. The turtle warrior had regained his feet, and he was looking at Victor with murder in his eyes. He’d lowered himself to a squat, his legs spread wide, and Victor could feel the hot rage building in him, even from forty yards distant. Part of him knew he should try to interrupt whatever he was doing, but another part was eager to see what it would be. He’d never fought a berserker before, never seen someone using a rage affinity, at least not so purely as this man was.

He lowered himself into a fighting stance, slowly moving forward, watching with hungry eyes, waiting to see what the warrior would do. The turtle-man was beginning to shimmer with heat and power, and the air around him looked ready to explode as hot waves of Energy wafted away from him. The ground began to tremble, pebbles danced on the ancient flagstones, and hairline cracks started propagating away from the warrior’s feet, spreading outward like a spider’s web. Whatever he was building up to was going to be awesome, and Victor peeled his eyes, eager to see it. “Come on!” he roared, “Show me!”

The turtle warrior screamed something inarticulate. His hammers suddenly blazed like twin, molten stars, and the ground erupted under his feet. Victor, staring at the cloud of dust and broken stone, almost didn’t see the warrior ripping toward him, tearing the earth in his passage, streaking like a comet, hammers held high, ready to crash into him on impact. He was moving very close to the extremity of Victor’s perception, almost too fast for him to track, but not quite. If Victor hadn’t been boosting his agility, and if he hadn’t been further enhanced by Iron Berserk, he surely would have been devastated by the charge. He was boosted, though, and he had a fraction of a second to react.

Some warriors might have dodged to the side. Others might have jumped. Still others would have braced for the impact, hoping to use their opponent’s momentum to slip the majority of the force. Victor’s mind never contemplated those actions; he immediately channeled a torrent of glory-attuned Energy into his pathways and cast Energy Charge, answering the turtle-man’s charge with one of his own. He ripped over the ground, a brilliant sparkling gold missile of meat and metal. He didn’t wield a weapon but lowered his head and let his massively dense Juggernaut Helm lead the impact.

The green warrior was beyond fear or caution—he’d stoked his rage to apoplectic levels, and even if he’d been able to react in time, he likely wouldn’t have turned aside or aborted his charge. They met in a full, head-on collision that resulted in such an explosion of physical force and discharged Energy that the entire dungeon level shook. Victor felt his glory-attuned Energy drain like water down a whirlpool, the shielding portion of the spell valiantly trying to protect him from the destructive forces. The turtle-man must have had a similar function with his charge ability because the two of them hung together for a pregnant second as their Energies bled out, erupting in a nova-like mixture between them.

Victor grinned hungrily while his opponent snapped his beak and scowled. Then, the turtle’s red, glowering Energy flickered out, and his flesh rippled with force as the explosion took him. He flew back like he’d been hit full in the chest by a streaking comet. The concussion continued wracking Victor, and his glory-attuned Energy burned out a second after the turtle’s.

He, too, was thrown back, hot gasses, burning Energies, and shockwaves of force flinging him head over heels. Victor bounced and tumbled, his bones cracking, his skin ripping, but only briefly—he had a surging store of rage-attuned Energy, and his Iron Berserk drew on it, healing him almost as quickly as he took each new injury. When he finally slid to a stop, dozens of yards from the impact point, he was quick to clamber to his feet.

As he’d suspected, his opponent either didn’t have multiple affinities or couldn’t use them while enraged, much like Victor under the effects of Volcanic Fury. The turtle-man lay crumpled at the end of a deep, long furrow in the ground, heaps of upturned flagstones and churned-up soil piled along the track of his passage. Victor started toward him, noting the eager, hungry, keening song Lifedrinker was emitting, either directly into his head or into the sudden silence left in the wake of their collision—it wasn’t clear to him which.

He walked into the trench, followed it to its end, and the battered, broken man who lay there, his arms and legs bent and bloody, the leathery skin of his shell half peeled away, and his face a mass of scrapes and purple bruises. He was on his side, and Victor could see Lifedrinker pulsing with stolen red Energy, still digging and throbbing, trying to get something more out of the broken man. Even so, the shattered warrior lifted a bent, bloody arm, formed half a fist with his crooked fingers, and muttered, “Drobna,” from a mouth full of blood and bits of broken beak.

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Victor’s rage was subsiding; he knew he could extend it by pulling more Energy out of his Core, but he let it fade, and as he rapidly contracted back to his normal size, he made a fist and pressed his knuckles against the sturdy, battered, nearly dead warrior’s. “Victor.” A soft silvery glow encompassed Drobna, and as he dissipated into a pearly fog, the System sent out another message:

***Drobna Wyrm-shell has been rescued from certain death and removed from the dungeon. Nineteen entrants remain. Prepare for an Energy infusion.***

Victor stooped to snatch up Lifedrinker, noting her satisfied glow and the thick rivers of angry, red Energy marking her silvery axe head. “Nice work, beautiful.” He had no doubt that Drobna would have had another round in him if not for her. The axe hummed in his hands, and as he slung her onto his shoulder, looking up at the sky to track the incoming Energy infusion, Victor could feel her pleasure; she’d enjoyed tormenting his foe while he wrestled around with him.

He watched the Energy ball form in the sky, watched it explode into nineteen different golden missiles, and braced himself to receive the one streaking straight toward him. Two others shot for the base of the stairs, several others went up the top, and quite a few streaked away to distant areas of the first level. When the Energy struck him, Victor was instantly lifted, poleaxed by the tremendous influx. He was glad the System had waited for him and Drobna to finish their fight before awarding the Energy from the guy Cam and Sora had taken out. Still, the combined award was a lot, enough that he fell to his knees after the infusion while the System informed him of another level gained.

***Congratulations! You have achieved level 62 Herald of the Mountain’s Wrath and gained 12 strength, 17 vitality, and 12 will.***

“That’s fast,” he grunted. He supposed it made sense; five entrants had been taken out of the contest since his last level. That meant all those awards were being split with fewer and fewer people. What would happen if everyone kept getting knocked out? What if he were the last one standing? It seemed certain he’d stand to gain quite a few more levels in this contest, and he was beginning to understand why so many people were willing to risk so much for a shot. Thanks to his gains, he’d already started to mitigate the risk of getting “rescued.”

Victor stood, hopped out of the trench Drobna had created, and started toward the stairs, just fifty yards or so distant. He chuckled as he walked, noting the clean-blasted ground—his impact with the berserker had sent a shockwave out that had blown all the rubble and gravel to the edges of the clearing. He slowly turned in a circle and realized they’d done more than that. The impact had toppled many of the nearby walls. He craned his neck as he approached the smooth, white marble stairway, trying to trace it to the second level but losing track as it faded into the misty clouds.

“Well fought, Victor,” a youthful, exuberant voice called from the stairs.

“Cam,” Victor chuckled, lifting his hand to his eyes, shading them so he could squint into the shadows of the spiral steps. He spotted the youth’s tousled blond hair peering over the rail about twenty yards up. “Thought you two would be up to level two by now.”

“Nah,” Sora said, stepping out from behind the stairs. She held her bow in a relaxed grip with no arrow in sight, putting Victor’s thoughts of betrayal to rest. “We just wanted to get out of the way and, well, position ourselves to run if you lost.”

“As if he would!” Cam laughed.

“Was it a struggle, Victor?” Sora lifted one of her silvery gray eyebrows.

“It was a good brawl—a good clean fight. Nothing against Drobna, but he wasn’t ready for me.” Victor shrugged and started up the steps.

“Is anyone?” Cam hopped down a few steps to get closer, awaiting an answer.

“In here?” Victor shrugged. “No idea. I’m new around town.” He looked at Cam, then down to Sora, who still leaned against the railing at the bottom of the stairs. “So, what’s this? We traveling together some more?”

Sora nodded. “We’d like our gentlefolk’s agreement to stay in place if you’re willing.”

“Sure.” Victor smiled, inhaling deeply through his nose and sighing, feeling far too relaxed and generally good—a side effect of the Energy infusion, he was sure. “Wonder how many are above us. I saw a few Energy balls go that way, but I figure if we stay together, maybe they’ll think twice about jumping us. Let’s clear some levels, yeah?”

“Yeah!” Cam cried, pumping his red glass wand in the air.

#

“God, he’s a monster!” Darren cried, his eyes nearly bugging out of his head while the crowd around them erupted in similar shouts and cheers. Valla glanced sharply at him, initially thinking it was an insult but then realizing it was a sort of compliment. Lesh slapped his strange protégé’s shoulder, laughing as he slammed down another pint of harsh, fortified ale.

Valla turned back to the screen, looking over the heads of half a hundred other patrons who crowded the floor of the drinking establishment, sitting around low tables strewn with empty cups, pitchers of beer, and stacks of chips, dice, and other gambling implements. The “viewing house” was a wild, rough establishment, and Lesh had already proclaimed his love for it several times.

Lam seemed right at home, too, but Edeya was happy to be sandwiched between her and Valla, secure in the middle of the bench. Lesh had already drunk more than Valla had seen anyone drink in one sitting, and that included Victor when he was actively trying to get drunk. Darren was a bit red-faced, his words a little slurred, but he seemed to be having a great time watching the screen. Of course, it helped that Victor had been center stage a few times, his “view” filling the big screen while he got himself into fights. The latest one, with the shelled warrior named Drobna, had driven the crowd wild.

Valla had enjoyed it, but only because Victor had been laughing. She’d never seen him lose a fight when he was doing that. Well, she reconsidered, had she ever seen him lose? She supposed it had come close a few times—when he’d fought Rellia, back before she even knew him, she’d thought he was a dead man. Naturally, he’d surprised her and everyone else that night. Then there was the reaver army, the night-brute prince, the warlord, the Ridonne, his various arena battles, the ancient wyrm, his . . . Valla shook her head, refocusing on the present, content to admit that he’d been in a lot of close calls.

“He’s not a monster,” she said, finally deciding to correct the record.

“I didn’t mean . . .”

“No, I know what you meant, but someone should speak for him. Victor has a big, good heart. It might prove his undoing, but he’ll never be pleased to be considered a monster.”

“Undershtood, Lady Valla,” Darren slurred.

“Well, that charge . . .” Lam shook her head, snorting. “Those two nearly knocked the stairs out of the sky. Hah! I wonder what would have happened if they had broken them, cutting off the second level. Forfeit?”

Lesh cleared his throat, slamming his glass down and gesturing to a serving boy. “I’d pay all my wealth to see that! The System’s in charge of that dungeon, after all.”

“The, um, the dungeon Darren and I are going to,” Edeya shifted while she spoke, sitting up straighter between the two larger women, “it won’t be competitive, right? I mean, other people won’t be in at the same time, right?”

“No!” Lam smiled, leaning against the booth's rear wall so she could look more easily at Edeya’s face. “That’s why you had to sign up for a time slot—they only allow one party in each instance at a time, and you only get thirty-six hours in there.”

“Some of them have much longer permit expirations,” Darren said, slapping his hand on the guidebook on the table before him. “There’s a tower dungeon for tier-twos that has week-long passes.”

Edeya nodded and started to say something, but Valla heard Victor’s voice coming from the viewscreen, and she hushed them, pointing. They all got quiet, listening as Victor spoke to his two new friends, agreeing to stay together for the time being. Then they started climbing the steps, and the proprietor switched the view to another entrant—a black and gold-feathered avian woman who was digging through the lair of a great multi-headed, wyrm-like creature she’d slain.

“I’m glad he made some friends in there,” Edeya said.

“I think he’ll want to be friends with that berserker, too!” Lesh laughed.

Edeya nodded. “They touched fists! Victor loves that.”

Valla sighed and stretched, wondering what sort of toilets she might find in the establishment. “I’m tired of watching and waiting while others do things,” she said, surprising herself. “I’m eager for our dungeon, Lesh.” She glanced at Lam. “You’re still invited, Captain.” Lam certainly held higher ranks than captain these days, but the old Legion title brought back many memories for the two of them, and Lam didn’t seem to mind.

“Well, Captain,” Lam said, returning the favor, “I might take you up on it. I was thinking I should stay out and wait in case Edeya and Darren needed something, but . . .” She trailed off for a second, looking into Edeya’s eyes. “Watching Victor has brought back something of an old hunger.”

“Good!” Edeya smiled. “You should go with them!” Valla had a hard time telling if she was being sincere or just brave, but Lam smiled, nodding.

“I’ll think about it.”

Lesh pounded his empty glass on the table, waving his huge, thick arm in the air. “Come over here!” he said under his breath. “These folk are ignoring me!”

Valla, ironically, ignored him, still looking at Lam. “Don’t think too long. Less than two days until our entry slot.”

“No, I won’t. I’ll let you know tonight. Look!” Lam pointed to the screen. “They’re back on Victor’s party. Are they approaching some kind of lair?