Terramyr Online: The Undiscovered Country: A LitRPG Adventure Page 21

  Some heavy thuds let Brian know that Augustin was landing hits on the bear, but he couldn’t see the animal’s HP bar. He couldn’t tell who was winning. In the meantime, Rhonda had taken up a position on the opposite side of the road and was calmly plinking arrows into the bear’s side with a shortbow. It occurred to Brian that it was strange the way the bear was going after each of the guys while completely ignoring Rhonda. Just then, Little Man’s head popped up from the satchel. That’s right, he has a deterrent effect.

  A moment later the bear rose up and swatted Augustin atop his horse. The bear’s claws slapped the metal armor and flung Augustin down to the ground several feet away. The bear then dropped to all fours and lowered its head. Augustin’s horse was on the bear’s right, Augustin flat on his back to the bear’s left. The shoulder quills started to quiver and vibrate. They made a strange sound, a little like the plates on the steggo creatures Brian had seen when they had first landed on Prirodha. Several spikes shot out in both directions.

  The horse was impaled multiple times in the side. Like Brian’s horse, Augustin’s stumbled to the side and then began bucking wildly.

  Augustin, on the other hand, was protected by his metal armor. The quills clanged and pinged off his breastplate.

  Brian knew he had to act quickly though, because with or without armor, the bear was much stronger than Augustin, and Augustin had yet to get up from the ground. If he was stunned from the bear’s last attack, then he was vulnerable. Brian launched two more arrows.

  “Come on Mike!” he shouted. “Let’s get it!”

  Brian fired one more arrow and then charged in with his sword.

  The bear now resembled a pin cushion, multiple arrows protruding from the neck, shoulders, and chest. It turned its eyes to Brian and roared, snorting once before charging.

  This might be a mistake... Brian knew he didn’t have the strength to match the bear, but he also had a plan he hoped would outsmart and outmaneuver the bear. Each step brought the two of them several feet closer. Brian calculated the distance and, just before either were within striking range, he launched into a headlong somersault.

  He felt the furry graze of the bear’s arm as it swiped over him, but the claws missed. Brian made it to his feet just as the two almost passed each other. The bear’s deadly front paws were now out of reach, and the animal would need to fully turn around to strike. Brian, on the other hand, allowed his momentum to propel him forward, but twisted his torso around to land a solid slash on the bear’s backside, opening a large gash and spilling a decent amount of blood.

  Got you!

  Brian’s enthusiasm turned to dismay, however, when he realized that instead of a graceful backwards leap, he had over-rotated his body and was now stumbling backward.

  The bear still had a quarter of its HP, and it was turning around fast. Brian could already tell that the bear would be upon him before he could regain his footing. Worse than that, the HP bar was flashing with a red border. The bear’s entire fur coat changed to a darker shade, and the animal was snarling terribly as saliva spewed from its mouth. Brian didn’t have to be fluent in this game’s mechanics to understand the animal was enraged.

  Ah crap.

  Brian hit the ground. A heavy vibrating sensation rolled through him, but neither his HP nor stamina reduced. Still, as he had guessed, the bear was already lunging toward him. A right paw batted him to the side, dropping forty percent of Brian’s HP. A moment later, a glancing left paw struck Brian’s leg and spun him around atop the dirt road. Another twenty percent of his HP vanished, and his stamina dropped to barely above fifteen percent.

  The bear then lurched down and clamped down on Brian’s left leg with his mouth. The bite took another ten percent, but the subsequent lifting and violent shaking took another ten percent. Brian was down to just a fifth of his HP, and his stamina was entirely gone. He wouldn’t be able to block or move. The bear flung him to the side like a rag doll. Brian tried to push up from the ground but could barely move with his stamina gone.

  In from behind came Augustin. Konnons were not only strong, they were fast.

  Augustin landed three attacks on the bear before the beast could whip around to face him. Just as the bear stood on its hind legs and the left paw went up, preparing to strike, Augustin lunged in with a thrust, stabbing the bear in the chest and toppling it backwards. The beast fell with a heavy thud, its fur and flesh shaking with the impact. Its head lolled to the side and its tongue flopped out grotesquely.

  Augustin knelt down and looted the animal. A moment later it vanished from view.

  [+300 XP]

  Brian commented, “That was a bit harder than I thought.”

  Augustin nodded. “It was called a quillbear. Or at least that’s what it says on the hide and claws I got from it. It also had a pair of leather shoes and some human bones.”

  “Pleasant thought,” Brian said, realizing that the bear must have found and eaten some other poor passerby at some point earlier.

  “Hey Mike, where were you at?” Brian said as he struggled to his feet.

  “The quillbear has a powerful venom in its quills,” Rhonda replied. “I had to drag him out of sight and administer a lingering-effect health potion to counteract the lingering effects of the venom to keep Mike alive. He took a quill to the chest.”

  Upon hearing her words, Brian realized he didn’t hear the horses anymore. He scanned the area. His horse was lying on its side, twitching and kicking its right foreleg at the air. Augustin’s horse was entirely still upon the ground.

  Sorry horsey.

  “I’m all right though,” Mike called out. “The venom hit my avatar pretty hard. I started having spasms or a seizure or something.”

  “The venom mimicked a toxin that attacks the nervous system,” Rhonda said.

  Brian nodded his agreement. That was pretty obvious to him now. His horse hadn’t panicked, it had been losing control of its body.

  “Did you harvest any quills?” Rhonda asked.

  “No, but you can have the claws and hide.” Augustin went to her and transferred the items.

  “Give me the human bones too. I can make potions with those.”

  “Well, that escalated quickly,” Brian joked. “Rhonda has gone from novice to someone willing to grind up and mix human bones into potions.”

  Mike chimed in, “What was that you said about it being a good thing we were in a game so you could still trust me?”

  Augustin jumped in. “True. I would rather have someone steal my money than grind my bones.”

  Rhonda laughed and shrugged it off. “You can judge, but you’ll be happy when we have a potion to stabilize the effects of an undead poisoning. As it is, you look like you’re in need of a saving potion right now. How much HP do you have left right now?”

  “Yeah… like nothing almost,” he admitted. She tossed him a bottle with a gently glowing, lavender potion. He consumed it and immediately his HP bar jumped back to full. “That’s fantastic!”

  They all shared a laugh and then looked around, apparently all realizing the problem at the same time.

  “Four of us and two horses,” Mike said.

  “I’ll see what the horses can offer,” Rhonda said as she went to Brian’s old horse and looted it. “Just its hide,” she said before moving to the next one. “Same thing.” The two horses disappeared after she finished.

  “Alchemist and mage on horses then?” Augustin suggested. “Warriors up front?”

  “Sounds good,” Brian said.

  They resumed their journey, albeit at a slower pace with Brian and Augustin running alongside the horses. They could jog without draining stamina, but the sprinting would cost them and could only be maintained until one of them exhausted their avatar.

  Still, it was an easy way to increase the athletics stat. Brian had increased his athletics from level thirty to thirty-four, gaining an additional four hundred experience points by the time they neared a large stone bridge spanning a wide, de
ep ravine. Mike had made a couple of jokes about Brian needing to jump around at the same time to get his acrobatics level up, but Brian wasn’t able to do that and keep ahead of the trotting horses.

  “According to the map, this ravine is only a few miles away from Bohotes,” Rhonda said. “So we’re the majority of the way there.”

  The road ended where the bridge began, supported by great stone archways perhaps sixty feet wide, covered in dense, green vegetation that plunged down into the ravine, giving the heavy stone architecture an air of belonging to the living landscape more than a piece of artificial infrastructure. Sistered to each of the piers, pairs of columns rose on either side high over the bridge deck and were connected by arches beautifully decorated with intricately carved fretwork.

  As they drew closer, Brian caught the faint sound of moving water. He jogged to the edge of the ravine and saw a wide, slow-flowing river fifty yards down. The river was a calm, slow-moving feature perhaps a thousand feet across, with water that sparkled a vivid, deep blue, even in the shade of the ravine.

  An enormous stone gargoyle, probably fifteen feet tall, sat on either side of the first arch on the near side of the bridge where the clearing that flanked the road dropped off to the river below. A matching pair appeared to be guarding the drop-off on the far side of the river as well. Brian assumed they had been placed to be both decorative and a safety measure to prevent people from accidentally continuing forward and taking the long tumble to the river below.

  He noticed smaller decorative gargoyles perched on the top of each archway as the bridge stretched away across the width of the river until it connected with the other side of the ravine. There was a small clearing where the bridge ended, and then the thick forest swallowed up the road as it continued on from that point. The archway halfway across the bridge seemed to be unique, having the appearance of two enormous gargoyles perched at the top of the half wall that ran along either side of the bridge, hunched over toward each other so the spiked tips of their wings came together to create the point of the arch.

  “Oh my,” Augustin breathed out appreciatively, marveling at the sight.

  “Must be a very old river system,” Rhonda commented, “to cut a swath like this through the land and still be this wide, I mean. And just look at these carvings!” Rhonda dismounted and approached one of the gargoyle statues. She inspected it all around and then paused in front of it. “There is a notice written here that an offering must be paid to the guardians of the river for their beneficence.”

  “I don’t know what that means. Do you?” Mike asked, shrugging.

  “No, just thought I’d share,” Rhonda replied, returning to her horse.

  The group moved onto the bridge, though Brian did slow down a bit and looked to the skies. His encounter with the manticore and the subsequent sighting of a dragon flying over the troll cave made him acutely aware of how easily they could be picked off if there were any large, flying predators around.

  They hurried across the stone bridge, running along as fast as Brian and Augustin’s stamina bars would allow them to. As they reached the halfway point, they heard a series of shouts and whistles. From behind one of the gargoyles at the far end of the bridge emerged two three-foot-tall, gray-skinned gnomes with pointy ears, bald heads, and round little potbellies that protruded out over their thick belts.

  “Gray gnomes!” Mike shouted. “There will be more of them, they can camouflage against anything made of stone!”

  Brian turned around to see four more walking down the bridge behind them.

  “Are they strong?” Rhonda called out.

  “I don’t think so,” Mike said.

  Brian turned back to face the two in front of them. “Gray gnome” appeared in green letters over each of their heads. “No, we should be good to power through them.”

  The sound of cracking stone pulled Brian’s attention to one of the statues ahead of them on the right. Dust exploded from the joints of one of the gargoyles comprising the central arch across the bridge as an orange dot appeared above its head.

  “Pay the bridge toll with your gold or with your life!” one of the gray gnomes shouted as the gargoyle continued to stand and then stretched its wings. It turned to look at Brian with glowing red eyes. It sneered at him, revealing a set of stone fangs that looked far worse than anything the bear had presented.

  “I spent everything on the horses,” Rhonda said.

  “The toll is one thousand gold per traveler,” the second gnome in front of them said.

  “Looks like it’s a fight, then,” Mike shouted. “I’ll go for the gargoyle, your weapons won’t be able to inflict full damage.”

  Brian pulled his longbow and fired at the gray gnome in front and to the right. The arrow sailed straight and true, sinking into the gnome’s chest with a bright yellow flash as the HP bar appeared and instantly emptied. The gnome crashed to the ground.

  [+100 XP]

  “Attack!” The second gnome fired a crossbow, but Brian was able to dodge to the side.

  There was a terrible grinding of stone on stone, and then the gargoyle launched into the air and sailed at Rhonda. Mike let loose with a lightning bolt which struck the gargoyle’s face. Acting entirely unaffected, the monster’s HP bar barely shifted. It slammed into Rhonda’s horse. The animal cried out as the gargoyle bit into its neck and tore it apart from under Rhonda with its ferocious claws. Rhonda was thrown to the ground and tumbled several feet across the bridge but seemed to be all right. She started cycling through potion bottles in her hand as the gnomes cheered all around them.

  Mike rushed his horse forward and fired two more lightning bolts at the gargoyle while Brian fired another arrow at the second gnome in front of them. The arrow missed, but the lightning bolts hit their target.

  The gargoyle snarled and turned to face Mike. It stretched out a hand and a barely visible shockwave pulsed from the monster’s palm, striking Mike and knocking him and his horse to the ground.

  Augustin charged in.

  “Augustin, no! Focus on the gnomes!” Mike shouted.

  Augustin equipped a war hammer and turned it around to use the spiked end. He launched up into the air, his back arching as his arms cocked back for a power attack. The war hammer came down on the gargoyle’s back, chipping a small bit of stone off in a shower of sparks. The HP bar dropped maybe five percent, but more than it had with any of the lightning bolts.

  The gargoyle hissed and flexed its wing, knocking Augustin several yards through the air.

  The gnomes hollered and cheered again.

  Brian fired a single arrow at the gargoyle. It struck its mark but did zero damage to the creature’s HP bar.

  Yup, useless. Brian turned back to the remaining gnome in front of them. Better to focus on what I can help with. He rushed forward, firing two arrows as he charged to help keep the gnome off balance. The gnome expertly dodged the arrows, backpedaling and juking out to the side with such dexterity that Brian immediately regretted his decision to charge in.

  The gnome fired a crossbow bolt, striking Brian in the arm. The initial HP loss was something he could absorb, but his vision flashed with a light-green filter for just long enough to let him know what kind of message was coming.

  [YOU’VE BEEN POISONED]

  Dang it! Brian fired another arrow and managed to score a hit. His own HP bar dropped a bit with each passing second, but he couldn’t worry about that now. He fired a fourth time, forcing the gnome to dodge to Brian’s left as Brian’s longer legs closed the distance between them. At the last moment the gnome put away his crossbow and pulled a dagger, but Brian was already switching to his longsword. Brian also had the longer reach. He launched his attack and cut down the gnome in a shower of blood.

  [+100 XP]

  He then turned around and called out to Rhonda. “Have any antidote? I’ve been poisoned!”

  Rhonda didn’t respond.

  Mike was busy blasting the gargoyle, but his horse was now lying behind hi
m, ripped apart like Rhonda’s had been. The gnomes farther away on the bridge all had crossbows out and ready but were chanting something in their language that Brian didn’t understand.

  Augustin looked like a paddle ball with an invisible string, charging in to score a single hit on the gargoyle before being batted away. Augustin’s character was tough, but he was starting to slow and show signs of injury.

  Brian knew his bow was of no use. His only way to help would be to join the fray.

  “Rhonda, I need an antidote!”

  Rhonda stood up, holding an orange bottle in her hand. “Everyone back away!” she shouted.

  Mike let loose another lightning bolt while Augustin limped backward.

  Rhonda threw the orange bottle. It spun through the air end over end and then shattered on the gargoyle’s back. As soon as the glass broke, the bottle exploded with tremendous force. A shockwave expanded, throwing the gargoyle headfirst into a stone archway and cracking its skull. Its wings fell off, broken loose by the explosion that left a charred crater in the monster’s back.

  [+450 XP]

  Holy smokes! If 450 XP was the divided share for each of the four of them... then that gargoyle was worth 1,800 XP! He didn’t have much time to think, however, because the remaining four gnomes all shouted and hissed. Brian turned to look at them just as their crossbows fired.

  One arrow struck Mike in the back. Another hit Rhonda in the shoulder. A third bounced off Augustin’s armor harmlessly, and the fourth went wide, missing Brian by a healthy margin. Brian put away his sword and began firing his bow. Mike turned and let loose with a medium-sized fireball. Both projectiles arrived at the same time. Brian’s arrow missed, but the fireball exploded upon impact, incinerating one gnome and throwing the other from the bridge, screaming and wailing as it fell to the river below.