Portal Mage - A Viridian Gate Serial Adventure #3

I looked at Nil’s unsettling red eyes, full lips, and shark’s-tooth smile and said, “You can put me down, now.”

“Are you sure?” it said.

“Positive.”

“Because it’s my understanding human males are quite comfortable being carried by others.”

Gnaeus and Zara burst out laughing.

I scowled and squirmed like a fussy baby until the mimic set me down, feet first.

My right leg collapsed as soon as I put weight on it, and I pulled Nil down on top of me. “Ow!”

“Well, hello again,” Nil said, face-to-face.

“Get off me, you ridiculous creature!” I said, both trying to keep from laughing and from looking down at Nil’s overflowing décolleté.

The monster brought its knees up and sat up into a straddle. “You used to be more fun.”

“I used to be more single, you mean. You said you were here on business?”

“Sent by the Realm Tree himself.”

“And you’re a monk, now? Last time I saw you, you were a bard.”

“You are what you eat,” Nil said, flashing me another toothy smile.

Gnaeus cleared his throat. “Not to interrupt the happy reunion, but we seem to have gathered a crowd.”

Dozens of people were milling a few feet away from the demolished building, and more were leaning out from their windows. The Mystica Ordo preferred to keep Portal Mages’ destructive potential low-key. I sighed and patted Nil’s knees. “Come on, get off. I need to do something about this.”

Nil pouted and dismounted.

I sat up and pinged the Mystica Ordo’s support channel.

“Yes, Senior Mage? How can we help you?”

“I need a memory wipe in Harrowick, lower quarter. A crowd saw me demolish a building.” I tapped my user interface to share my coordinates with the operator.

“We’ll send someone immediately. Anything else?”

“Contact the Free Radicals for an alchemical cleanup as well. There was a plaguebringer on-site.”

“We’ll take care of it. Call us back if you need anything else.”

I closed the connection.

“Wish we had support that good in the Inquisition,” Gnaeus said, looking down. “How’s the leg?”

“I’m sure it’s fine.” I pulled my robe up, drew up my right pant leg—which was torn—and got a better look. “Actually, no. I’m not all right at all.”

The scratch from where the plaguebringer’s scythe-arm had nicked me hadn’t healed, and looking closely, I realized my Health bar wasn’t completely full. The skin around the wound was waxy and toxic green, and I couldn’t really feel anything when I poked it.

“What is that?” Gnaeus asked, bending forward.

I brought up my current effects.

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Current effects

Viral Load (Level 3): You have been exposed to a virulent plague. When its incubation period finishes, you will start to experience increasingly debilitating symptoms over time.

Effect 1: Spreading weakness. Strength checks are made at a 50% penalty for infected limbs. Infection spreads over time.

Effect 2: ??????

Effect 3: ??????

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“Well, that’s just great!” I said.

“What’s wrong?” Zara asked, then she got a look at my leg and said, “Oh, that does not look good at all.”

“Thank you, Page,” Gnaeus said sarcastically. “Let me see if I can help.” He pulled his gauntlets off and took a knee by my leg.

“I wouldn’t do that,” Nil said.

“It’s fine. I’m just going to heal it.”

Gnaeus placed his hands on my leg and muttered a prayer. Light flared under his palms, and I felt heat radiate into my leg. Then, it was more like a cleansing flame, burning away impurities. Just… really taking a torch to the illness. “Stop! Not working!”

Gnaeus pulled his hands back and grimaced. “That’s never happened.”

“What?” I looked, and saw the cut was an angry purple, and the green skin had spread up to my knee. “What happened?”

“It’s like no one heard me say, ‘I wouldn’t do that,’ you know?” Nil said.

“I know exactly how you feel,” Zara answered.

“My leg is on fire,” I said. “Maybe, next time, lead with the pertinent information.”

Nil sniffed. “Plaguebringers are the horned one’s answer to other Overminds abusing the Champion mechanic. Their debuffs get worse if you use holy power.”

I tallied up the fight in my head—breathing in the spores, calling on the power of Time, the scratch, and now trying to heal it using the power of Order—then I checked my debuffs, and sure enough, Viral Load was up to level four.

“Maybe you’d better tell them what’s going on,” Zara said.

A whirling blue portal opened behind us, and two Ordo Illusionists stepped out. “Senior Mage Juniper?” the older of the two asked.

“Over there,” I said, pointing to the crowd. “Make it go away.”

“Yes, Senior Mage.”

Nil, Gnaeus, and Zara all looked at me.

“What? Okay, yes, that was rude, but you know Illusionists freak me out. Now, what’s going on with the plaguebringers?”

The mimic looked at each of us in turn and said, “I don’t know.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose.

“What do you mean, ‘You don’t know’?” Zara said. “You’re at the scene of the crime, you attacked Senior Mage Juniper—”

“In fairness, I attacked Nil first.”

Zara stopped me with a finger. “You could have said something instead of fighting back, and then you lord it over us about Templar Gnaeus’s healing cant!”

Nil, Gnaeus, and I looked at each other, then we all laughed.

Zara flapped her wings, buffeting us with street grit and Accipiter wing dander.

“Okay! Okay! We surrender!” I said, laughing. “But seriously, Nil. What’s going on?”

“You all know about the Compact, right?” Nil said.

“How could we not?” Zara said, but in fairness it was central to her civilization’s creation myth.

There was a flash, and I turned to see the Illusionists feeding the crowd a made-up version of why the building came down.

“JJ!” Nil said, snapping its fingers. “I swear. Power, good looks, attention span of a Labrador.”

“The Overminds of cities and monsters got into a fight, their mom broke it up, no monsters in cities,” I said. “I’ve heard it before.”

“Then you know that Cernunnos abides by the treaty. Scrupulously.”

“Except for Wyrdtide,” I said, raising an eyebrow.

Nil smiled. “Perfect example, actually. Wyrdtide ceased to be a city because of Imperial greed.”

“That’s not how we tell it,” Gnaeus said with a sniff.

“I think you might be on the wrong side of history on this one,” I told Gnaeus. “So, one plaguebringer in the city would be rare, and three is as suspicious as... what’s really suspicious?”

“How about a new Traveler arriving in Harrowick after sixteen years?” Zara asked.

Kaivai. I’d forgotten.

“You’re right, Zara. Well done,” Gnaeus said. “Remember how much chaos you people unleashed before Grim Jack used the Reality Editor?”

“Don’t,” I said, putting my hand up.

“What?”

“Say his name in that reverential tone. Every time one of you Skalahólt veterans goes all starry-eyed over what he did, I get a headache.”

Gnaeus looked at me like he’d scraped me off his shoe. And I got it. If Grim Jack had saved my life instead of cutting it short, I might worship him, too.

“As much as I’d love to watch you two fight—and I would,” Nil said, biting its lower lip, “there are still two plaguebringers in this lovely, fragile little anthill you call a city, and they breed fast.”

“How do we find them?” I said. Nil was right. I was angry, and I needed somewhere to focus that energy.

“If you hadn’t been in such a hurry to drop a building on one, you’d have seen they burrowed into the sewers.”

“Hold that thought,” I said. I placed my right palm on the ground and closed my eyes.

Okay, straight talk? Teleporting into places you can’t see is dangerous and stupid. Sometimes it’s hilarious, like when you open a two-way portal into solid rock and a junior mage bounces off it like a wall. One-way portals are less fun. Porting into a pocket of methane, or lava? Most Portal Mages only get to make that mistake once.

I used the lowest tier of Remote Sensing to feel for underground voids. I ignored the obvious stuff—spaces too small for me to fit in, passages that didn’t connect to anything—and looked for the sewer line Nil had mentioned. “Help me up,” I said.

Nil grabbed me by the upper arm and hauled me to my feet. It was easy to forget the petite woman in Victorian riding clothes was an at least two-hundred-year-old monster that could take on any appearance and learn any skill. “Thanks,” I said, and I started limping back toward the ruins.

“JJ, we’re not finished!” Gnaeus said.

“Yes, we are,” I said without looking back.

“Damn it, JJ! You can’t just—”

Most people think being a Portal Mage is all about portals. And it is. It’s a lot of grinding out spells, a lot of trying new things as safely as you can, a lot of opening doors for other people.

But if you look further down the skill tree, things start to get less polite.

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I cast Level 3 Alignment Shift as I rounded on the Templar, and it felt like getting hit with a flamethrower. My skin flaked off in strips of char and ash. Bones cracked as I got wider and taller. My reflection in Gnaeus’s eyes glowed like molten rock.

“What is it you think I can’t do, Gnaeus?” I rumbled, my whole body a conduit to the Shattered Realm.

To his credit, Gnaeus stood his ground. “You’re lucky I’m not that kind of Inquisitor.”

I snorted black, oily smoke into his face.

“Don’t completely destroy this one,” Nil said, its voice serious. “You’ll need to harvest its thymus gland intact, otherwise you won’t be able to cure the debuff.”

“I can always respawn,” I said.

Nil hissed in frustration. “I know you’re channeling Discord, but think for a moment. I told you this disease was designed to bring down Champions.”

“It survives the respawn mechanic,” I said, the flames covering my body fluttering as the seriousness of the situation hit me. If I killed the last plaguebringer without getting that organ, I could be permanently trapped in a cycle of illness and death. “I’ll be careful.”

Nil nodded.

Then I melted my way down through the pavement.

There’s nothing subtle about Level 3 Alignment Shift. It hurts. It lasts as long as you can bear it. Anger numbs some of the pain.

I dropped into the ankle-deep muck of the sewer with a hiss of steam and the screech of fleeing rodents. I could see the caved-in cellar the plaguebringers had burrowed out of. The trails of slime and pitted rock went off in both directions.

I picked one and started running. I didn’t have much time.

And yeah, I was a jerk to Gnaeus, back there. But I did it for the greater good, honest. I dare anyone to call me a liar.

It wasn’t long before I found the first brood.

When Nil had said that plaguebringers bred fast, I didn’t realize it meant they pushed eggs out faster than Kinder, and the toys were an aggressive choking hazard. A miniature version of a plaguebringer screeched at me from the muck, and I stomped on it without slowing. Another two leapt at me from a shoulder-level drainpipe, and I swatted them out of the air with a flaming forearm.

A bellow of rage reverberated down the passage. Yeah, you gigantic scythe-armed sack of pus. I’m coming for you, I thought.

The baby plaguebringers were no match for me. I probably could have taken them on without Shifting, but this was more fun. I pictured all the people who’d pissed me off in the past month, even if they’d just interrupted me or taken the last cup of coffee. The things looked like yellow-carapaced chickens from the refrigerated section of a supermarket. I popped them like spore-filled balloons, filling the tunnel with a yellow haze my internal fires burned away. It made me laugh, like when I played Halo as a kid, smashing my way through waves of the Flood, except there was no controller between me and the mayhem.

It might have been that I was channeling pure Discord, but even after sixteen years, I still loved that playing video games was my job.

The adult plaguebringer’s roars changed pitch. They sounded more drawn out. I hoped the others hadn’t somehow gotten ahead of me. That thing was dangerous, and I was the only person in our group who would respawn if I died.

Juvenile and adolescent plaguebringers came at me in waves. These mid-level mobs weren’t as fragile as their younger siblings, but they also weren’t as cute—if that’s a word that can be applied to a bug. These things looked less like Butterballs and more like velociraptors with too many eyes and scythes for arms. I bellowed in rage. They chittered and screeched, spewed acid, and trampled over each other to get to me.

They were a lot easier to hate. I’d seen the Vastatores Vitae—the berserk Risi shock troops of the Imperial Legion—smash into a battle line during the Crimson Rebellion, and in these moments, I understood them completely. My Alignment strength actually increased, searing the air around me, even though some of the pain was starting to make it through. Inch-thick carapaces blistered and cracked as I kicked, stomped, and smashed the bugs to charred goo. Pain and power built and overlapped until Discord and Chaos exploded from my body as a wave of fire, engulfing the whole family tree of monsters and tossing broken blackened bodies back the way they came.

In the room up ahead, the plaguebringer crooned. It was a plaintive sound, something like a wolf howl crossed with a whale song, but ten times sadder. As I entered the wide, empty cistern, I found it crouched over one of its children. The adolescent plaguebringer was still alive—though not for long. Its lower body was burned and cracked open, steam rising from spilled bug guts. It reached to stroke its mother’s face with a scythe, its mouth working silently. The adult plaguebringer nuzzled it, trying to get it to stand up, like I’d seen elephants do in old documentaries.

I hit me with all the feels. I was the monster. I’d killed Bambi.

A combination of pain and guilt broke my concentration, and the Alignment Shift ended. I shuddered from the sudden chill as the light went out and my body scabbed over with new skin.

The ability went into a sixty-minute cooldown.

Which, of course, was the precise moment the plaguebringer decided the time for grieving was over. The creature’s jaw and mandibles spread open, barbed tongue whipping about as it shrieked, forcing me to roll a check on Level 4 Horror.

I passed. This was going to be fine. I couldn’t fight the thing in Human Torch mode anyway—I needed that thymus gland. New plan. Use portals to keep my distance, take its arms and legs off with Warp, and then vivisect it. I raised my fists and stepped forward into a fighting stance.

My right leg folded like a Gentleman’s War player caught cheating. “Ack!” I yelled, and I slammed into the two-inch-deep slush. The infection and weakness in my leg was back with a vengeance. My eyes widened as the plaguebringer sailed through the air, body extended and scythes raised.

“Kiai!” Nil smashed it aside with a flying reverse spin kick, split riding skirt trailing like a flag. An adolescent plaguebringer burst from the muck to attack the mimic, but Zara rolled over it mid-flight and tore its throat open without slowing.

The adult plaguebringer screeched.

“She’s mine!” Gnaeus said, walking in holding a heater shield and a drawn broadsword. He beat the flat of the blade against the shield, making the whole cistern ring out, and a translucent shield fell over both him and the plaguebringer.

Like Wendy—Lady Camilla Favonius, his master—Gnaeus had chosen to follow the path of the Templar Errant, and as the defender of the Empire’s citizens, he could challenge a monster to a duel. No collateral damage, but no help, either. I think there’s some level scaling involved as well, but Templars don’t like to discuss it. The point is, the battle always comes just short of killing them until it finally does.

And there was nothing I could do about it. The plaguebringer pounced. Gnaeus stepped aside and cut. The monster back-swung a scythe. Gnaeus deflected it, trapped it, and stabbed. He never lost his nerve. He never overextended. He’d come a long way since I’d last seen him fight. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised; we were about the same age.

“Senior Mage, are you okay?” Zara said, rushing over.

“Stay back!” Nil said, raising its hand. The mimic crouched in front of me, cocking its head. “Idiot. I tell you not to use holy power, and what do you do?”

I grinned and tried to say, I used a truckload of it. But instead of words, blood bubbled up and overflowed from my mouth.

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Current effects

Viral Load (Level 7): You have been exposed to a virulent plague. When its incubation period finishes, you will start to experience increasingly debilitating symptoms over time.

Effect 1: Spreading weakness. Strength checks are made at a 50% penalty for infected limbs. Infection spreads over time.

Effect 2: Dark rot. Infected areas have a 0.5% chance to develop Gangrenous Sores. Can cause necrosis.

Effect 3: Aggressive decay. Necrosis actively poisons your blood. Suffer 5 DPS2 until limb is cured or amputated.

Effect 4: Hemorrhagic toxophagia. The poison viciously attacks your organs, causing them to bleed internally. Suffer 10 DPS2 per affected organ, stacks with Aggressive decay.

Effect 5: Hemorrhagic shock. For every 20% under Max Health, lose 1 level of proficiency in all Class Skills. Level cannot go below 0.

Effect 6: Genetic tampering. Viral Load can no longer be removed by respawning. Instead, the progression of the disease resets on rebirth.

Effect 7: Virulent. You are now contagious. Anyone who comes into contact with you or your fluids has a 4.5% chance of contracting Viral Load per second of exposure.

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I recoiled from my own Status Effects page. None of that was good. My head spun from the blood loss and the pain. I had to fight hard not to pass out.

Nil steadied me with its hand, and I tried to bat it away. I didn’t want to infect it, too.

“It’s fine, JJ. I can’t catch diseases. I am a disease,” it said with a shark's-tooth smile.

Oh God, this really hurts, I wished I could tell the mimic.

It seemed to understand. “Your organs are liquefying. There’s nothing we can do right now. We’ll get the gland to the Free Radicals to prepare the counter-agent. In the meantime, do you want me to… help you along?”

My Health bar was draining, but my Health Regen was fighting it. This could take a while, and Viral Load hurt enough another minute would be too long.

Gnaeus had hacked one of the plaguebringer’s arms off, and was now pushing it back with sword strokes, cants of condemnation, and blasts of light from the Realm of Order. He’d be okay. The city would be okay. I’d be okay, once I got the counter-agent and got this bug out of my system.

I looked Nil in the eyes and nodded.

The mimic snapped forward and bit my throat out.

And that hurt, too, but it was fast, and everything went dark.

                                                                                      ***

This is the bit that sucks a little. Viridian Gate Online is a video game, right? And the gods of this place—the Overminds—well, they were just personalities plugged into powerful neural lattices…

No, forget it. I’m not here to get into theology.

The point is, I was both a Portal Mage and a Cleric of Time. When most Travelers and their offspring die, they get sent to Morsheim for a quick checkup and pop back up at their respawn point eight hours later with a nasty hangover and no memory of that time.

My Overmind decided that one way to make sure the priesthood didn’t try to usurp them was to give us a taste of what it’s like to remember everything—even the traumatic stuff your brain is supposed to protect you from.

So I was conscious as I fell thousands of feet through the stinking, green-tinged air toward corpse piles below. I was sitting in a car without pedals or a steering wheel while it went off a bridge. Crystal crabs tried to pluck my body from the air, and stalactite lizards swooped, trying to catch a free meal.

Today was not their day.

It wasn’t my day, either.

Today, I got to fall all the way and stick the landing.

And I was going to feel every bone-breaking, neck-twisting moment of it.

Lucky me.