Downfall And Rise Read online

  Downfall and Rise

  Challenger’s Call: Book One

  By Nathan Thompson

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1: First Test

  Chapter 2: Second Step

  Chapter 3: Out-Think, Out-Smart, Out-Stumble

  Chapter 4: Downfall. Again.

  Chapter 5: Rock Bottom

  Chapter 6: Go Tunneling

  Chapter 7: Light at the End

  Chapter 8: Lifeline

  Chapter 9: Grasp

  Chapter 10: Pull

  Chapter 11: Heave

  Chapter 12: Climb

  Chapter 13: Conditioning

  Chapter 14: Commit

  Chapter 15: Combat

  Chapter 16: Monstrosity Denied

  Chapter 17: Hope Unearthed

  Chapter 18: Three Steps Forward

  Chapter 19: Steady Now

  Chapter 20: Stand Tall

  Chapter 21: Trudge instead of Stumble

  Chapter 22: Owning Progress

  Chapter 23: Win While You're Ahead.

  Chapter 24: Old Memories, Late Discoveries

  Chapter 25: Three Steps Back

  Chapter 26: Paradise Under Siege.

  Chapter 27: My Little Nightmare

  Chapter 28: Rise Up and Rage.

  Chapter 29: Last Handhold.

  Chapter 30: Rise Up and Rage. Round Two.

  Chapter 31: From Downfall to Rise

  Dedication:

  This work is dedicated to my mother and everyone else out there battling chronic pain. Thank you for your example of never giving up.

  Prologue

  Beep...Beep...BLARE!!

  The alarm went off, scattering sleep from my brain. I rolled painfully over and swung my shaking hand at it, still missing despite years of practice. Slapping the bedside table sent new waves of pain down my arm and into my brain, and with the alarm going off it felt like the entire world was screaming in my skull. Every nerve in my body wanted to smother the sound with a pillow and go back to bed.

  I fought through it anyway, and this time all my practice helped. I pressed the off button- not snooze, because those people are crazy- and reached for my next item. Groping around, my dizziness cleared enough for me to finally find the grip of my cane. I grabbed it, then gave myself a ten count to see how bad the pain was going to be this morning.

  One...three...five...eleven...twelve... okay, it was going to be bad.

  But I couldn't let that stop me. It didn't mean that it would stay this bad the whole day and mornings were always the worst time anyway. And I didn't have time to wait for it to get better, not if I wanted to try treatment before school. With a deep breath and a careful heave, I pulled myself onto my unsteady feet.

  The pain beginning in my skull and running throughout my entire body argued with me the whole way.

  You're wasting your time, get back in bed so that you can finally hurt less.

  Liar, I told my pain. I wasn't wasting my time and we both knew it wasn't going to get any better if I laid back down.

  You’re still wasting your time. You hurt just as much now as you do every morning. The treatment doesn't work.

  Liar, I told my pain again. The doctor's records show improvement to my condition, improvement I didn't have before the treatment. And I didn't hurt just as much today as I did everyday, I hurt worse. I always hurt worse on important days. That made the treatment matter even more. I went back to concentrating on walking down the hallway, using my cane to find ground every time my feet got confused.

  You don't know if you'll get better permanently. Maybe it won't work this time. Maybe you'll still screw up today, just like you always have on big days.

  I called my pain a liar again. I used to do great on important days before it was there, and I was going to figure out how to do so again. Using my cane and the wall, I turned the corner into another room.

  You're just trying to be positive. Treatment always puts you in a good mood and you'd agree to it even if it didn't work.

  That might actually be true, I admitted as I reached for the VR gaming harness. But I didn’t care. I fastened the helmet onto my head.

  Chapter 1: First Test

  The ground shook. And the air itself roared.

  I lowered my helmeted head to keep the whirling dust out of my face. I shifted and bent my armored knees to deal with the cracking, rattling ground under my nailed boots. Encased in steel, I closed my eyes to the distractions around me, to let the dust ping uselessly off my armor and the ground shake impotently under my feet.

  Because if I lost focus, the monster was going to kill us all.

  Chevelross the Canyon Dragon, Lord of the Navrahai Crevice. I didn't need to see him to remember his appearance. Thirty yards of taut muscles rippling under mud-brown scales. Talons and teeth like rusty gray swords. A claw full of such talons had slammed into the canyon floor earlier, and the ground had been shaking ever since.

  My teammates were scrambling over the uneven terrain right now, but it was preventing them from fighting properly. Those with weapons were having a nightmare of a time trying to dodge the dragon's teeth and claws over uneven ground, while those who could use magic were even more impaired. The stinging wind brought too much sound and pain to concentrate on anything but the simplest spells, and those were not enough bring down the canyon's dread lord.

  So it really was up to me. If this didn't work, we were all going to die.

  Unlike most of the other adventurers, I could work magic in heavy armor. This meant my helmet got in the way of the stinging dust and the padding inside dealt with the ringing noise. The hobnail boots I had chosen to wear under my sabatons kept me from shaking too much. So as rock and air raged about me, I spread my hands to work the one spell that could hopefully could change the situation:

  “Let a fair wind be at our back,

  Let firm ground be beneath our feet,

  As we journey on this long, long road,

  Grant us this small mercy.”

  I brought my hands together to finish the blessing, and golden light spread out from my gauntlets. A loud crack tore through the rest of the noise, and then the air grew still. The rumbling below my feet also ceased, and I tore forward into a run, fingers reaching for the massive warhammer on my back.

  “It worked!” I shouted. “Reposition and attack!”

  Chevelross still had one monstrous claw pressed into the ground, but as the tremors ceased, it stopped roaring and pitched forward, looking down at its claw in surprise. The dragon's massive head whipped to the right, then to the left, uncertain, and flapped its giant wings twice.

  But we'd never know if it was planning to escape to the air, because we weren’t going to give it that chance.

  Having recovered their footing, the warriors around Chevelross renewed their assault. Several leather- clad figures leaped through the air and shredded both wings with their blades, while others in heavier armor interposed themselves between the dragon's still-dangerous limbs and their more vulnerable friends.

  As Chevelross reared back to deal with the many-weapon swarm, lightning bolts and flaming arrows slammed into the dragon, as the mages and archers were finally able to bring their own weapons into play. The trapped dragon rocked and swayed, unbalanced with both wings shredded and its right foreclaw still stuck deep into the ground.

  In another moment of inspiration, I slammed my own hammer down onto Chevelross's trapped claw, then onto the dragon's elbow, over and over, until I could hear its bones crunch.

  Chevelross howled impotently as the dragon finally collapsed on three legs, stubbornly trying to rise back into a standing position. As its neck fell close to the ground a leather-cl
ad form darted across it, spinning and whipping his short, glowing blades all across the dragon’s sinuous, less-armored throat. The howl turned into a whimper as arterial spray gushed from the red dagger-lines my companion had left in his wake.

  Chevelross gave a final shudder, and then its remaining appendages gave out and collapsed to the ground in a giant cloud of dust. The survivors gathered around it let out a throaty cheer.

  Attention! Chevelross the Canyon Dragon has been slain by the Gray Companions and the following un-guilded players: Paladin Player Faren! This is a server first! Congratulations to the players who have unlocked this achievement!

  And because we were first people to kill this monster on any of the game's servers...

  Attention! Chevelross the Canyon Dragon has been slain by the Gray Companions and the following un-guilded players: Paladin Player Faren! This is a world first! Congratulations to the players who have unlocked this unique achievement!

  Other updates scrolled across my interface, including the fact that I had finally hit max level. I had been trying to remain cool up to this point, but the fact that I had reached 70 on a raid boss caused me to crack a smile. Raid bosses, especially ones that had never been killed before, were usually only attempted by at least twenty, usually forty, max-level players. The fact that I had not done so and still played such a factor in its death was huge news, and I pumped a fist into the air so hard I worried I might somehow break my VR gear.

  The rogue that had landed the finishing blow came up behind me and slapped me hard on the shoulder. The Australian player nearly blew out my eardrum with his enthusiasm:

  “Congrats, mate! Con-GRATS!” SkyBladex shouted. “You are officially now one of the top twenty bad-asses in Heroes Unbound!”

  “Thanks, Sky,” I said with a wince. “Great kill-move on the boss, by the way.”

  “Kill-move nothing!” Sky replied, still shouting. “We beat the thing and it was because of you! You found a way to fix a freaking earthquake! How the hell did you figure that out?”

  “A really good guess.” I replied. “Unsteady ground and heavy wind are classified as travel debuffs, so I used the paladin travel chant to see if it would help here. It worked way better than I thought it would.”

  “No way!” one of the other players said. “That spell's like level 15! It never helps in raids!”

  “That's because most raid bosses do things like set the ground on fire or rain lighting on you,” I replied. “The idea for that is to move around or to hunker down and weather the effects. This one triggered natural environmental conditions that affected your senses and balance, and the effect lasted indefinitely. You can't dodge it or outlast it, but it's the exact sort of thing the travel spell is supposed to help with. So it worked here.”

  “That's still amazing, mate,” Skybladex stated. “This boss has been out for over a month and none of the other raiding guilds have cleared it yet. You were the first one to figure it out, and you're not even in a raiding guild!”

  “Yeah,” I remembered uncomfortably. “Not these days.”

  Before the expansion, back when the max level was 60, I had been part of one of the more well-known raiding guilds. We had cleared up to the middle part of the Dread Citadel before my...condition... had kept me from being a consistent member. Then it was scrambling to see what could help with my pain, balance and memory issues. I had tried to keep in contact with the guild but the treatments had become too frequent for me to be involved, and since I was embarrassed at the time, I just told them I was leaving for health reasons that I preferred not to explain.

  And I still didn't prefer to explain them, and Sky knew it, so he gave it an awkward smile and left it at that.

  “Congrats again, mate,” he repeated. “If nothing else, this sure as hell shows you’ve still got it!”

  “Thanks man,” I replied, grinning again, because I was truly grateful. “And thanks everyone, for coming to raid with me this morning. This was the only time I could make it.”

  “Pssht,” Sky sputtered. “It's seven pm over here in Australia, silly American. The only inconvenience for us is to just not eat dinner so early.”

  “Well, I appreciate it all the same,” I replied. “You're the only guys that play with me these days...”

  “Hey this is really sweet and all but can we loot now?” The tank asked. His name was Turtlepants. He had managed to keep the dragon's attention focuses almost entirely on him, for the entire fight, despite the horrible beating he had taken during the process. Great player, terrible name.

  “Yeah, let's go for it,” I said as Sky nodded to Turtle. I was ready for a change of conversation anyway. “This is a world first, so he's got to have some pretty special treasure, right?”

  Every single monster in this game carried treasure, and raid bosses always had the best treasure. Everyone knew that. You kill things, then you take their stuff. Bad advice for real-world living, but it's how you get ahead and have fun in Heroes Unbound.

  Aragonas, the lootmaster- the player in charge of making sure everyone got a fair shot at the treasure- knelt by the lootable corpse and began inspecting it.

  “Let's see,” he began. “The Canyon Dragon's Aegis, a shield with really good defensive stats-”

  “I'll take it!”

  “There you go Turtle. Congrats on cementing your role as the monster abuse magnet.”

  “Damn straight!” Turtle replied.

  Everyone else just smiled and nodded uncomfortably. These days, when games were designed to actually let you feel a tiny fraction of your character's pain through the neural link in the complex VR harness, people who wanted to hold a monster's aggression were considered to be a little strange. Necessary and appreciated, but not quite understood.

  “Aaaanyway,” Aragonas continued. “There's also some Ancestral Foot Wraps- leg gear with a boost to intellect and mana regeneration. Do you want them, Triumph?”

  “Nah,” Triumph said with typical Aussie good nature. “Give 'em to Fatuzen. They'll be a bigger boost for him.”

  There were a few more pieces of loot- a Dragon-bone knife that Skybladex claimed, a Tribal Dream-Catcher that a shaman player was supposed to equip and use somehow, some generic Shoulderplates of the Whale that no one wanted and was marked to vendoring, and then Aragonas stopped looting for some reason.

  “Well,” he said. “I guess we can try and skin the corpse. Can dragons be skinned?”

  “Hey wait,” I interrupted. “What about the rest of the loot?”

  “That's all the corpse has on him, Faren,” Aragonas replied. “Sorry there wasn't anything you could use.”

  “Do you want the shield, Faren?” Turtlepants offered, generously but understandably uncomfortably. I had played a key role in bringing the monster down and everyone wanted me to feel like I had been treated fairly. “Technically paladins can use it.”

  “No-no,” I said quickly. “Keep the shield. Please, keep the shield. I just asked because the boss is still showing as lootable to my character.”

  “That's weird,” Aragonas replied. “He shows up as empty to me. Skyblade, do you want to take a look too?”

  As guildmaster and raid leader, Skybladex had the game-given privilege to double-check the lootmaster.

  “Shows as empty to me, too, Faren. Sorry. Is anyone else seeing the corpse as lootable?”

  A chorus of “no”s and “no, sorry”s answered him back.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Maybe it's a bug?”

  Or maybe my condition is finally affecting me inside the game. I tried not to think about that.

  “Well, the mob's showing as un-skinnable right now anyway, Faren. Go ahead and check it.” Skybladex offered.

  “You sure?” I asked. I didn't want to make him or Aragonas look shady. And one small piece of gear really wasn't worth making a scene over, I admonished myself.

  “Yeah, why not?” Sky replied. “It's not like you're taking something from us if no one else can touch or see the loot. Maybe you
just got a unique drop.”