Prissy and Corbin took the next portion of their journey a little easier. He was down to only 5HP, so the recon efforts were short and careful. His pet Shadow Walker, for the first time, kept her eyes open. She moved with grace and the natural quiet all house cats are capable of. She certainly didn’t need the silent movement card in her core slot.

They skirted around something that appeared to be a rhinoceros crossed with a shark. The thing was snuffling around a large clearing, puked up about a dozen bodies, and trotted away.

“Blimey,” Prissy said, her eyes locked onto the putrid tangled-human mess. ”Looks loike someone ‘ad too much tipple.”

Corbin bobbed his head. It didn’t matter that he didn’t understand.

The bodies started moving.

“It’s the bloomin’ Dawn of the Dead! Run fer yer lives!”

Corbin wished he had a hand so he could slap his forehead with it.

“Just another monster, really. No need to fuss or be scared. You’ve already died before, right? Just let me scope them out and do my thing.”

These were Revenants, Corbin’s Inspect skill informed him, and were each level 7 with lots of hit points and plenty of resistances. If a gigantic land shark couldn’t stomach them, Prissy had very little chance.

“Well, these guys are super tough. We don’t need to run, but let’s just say we don’t wanna tussle with them either.”

Prissy cast him an evil eye and Corbin sighed, letting out a crackling caw that soared over the undead. They moaned and contorted, beginning to stumble in their direction.

“Super tough? That means heaps a’ treasure and lots of experience points, dunnit? And ya can fly and they can’t. Just fla, get rocks, and keep dive-bombin’ them while I keep walkin’ away from them at a leisurely pace.” Prissy drew her daggers. “And if wahn of them catches me I give him the ole King Tut.”

Corbin fluttered up to settle in a circle about her. “They’re slow but I don’t think we can game them like that. I don’t want to risk it. And, really, King Tut them? That’s disgusting.”

“Your dad’s philandry is disgusting. Just sayin’ I’ll cut them a lil’,” she grumbled. Before them the undead continued to stagger after them, at a pace robust for them but hardly faster than a turtle running from a lawnmower.

“Nothing about King Tut’s embalming procedure can be described as just a little cutting. Weren’t you a Kindergarten teacher?”

“In’cha a dumbass ‘oo got ‘imself turned into a Richard the bloody Third?” she retorted.

“I don’t even know what that means!”

“It is obvious if you just fink about it a lil, ya dimwit.”

She glared, and he glared, and the zombie revenants inched ever closer like the worst test case of a Zeno’s Dichotomy paradox ever.

“Fine,” she relented. “We won’t take on the bloody bastards.”

The two of them walked out a ways in the opposite direction of the revenants, then made a long circle around, making sure they weren’t in range of any heretofore unknown special attacks and what-not. The revenants, for their part, stood and shuffled, always in the direction the two had just last been.

Setting off again in a straight line it wasn’t long before they came upon another of the Fur Mounds they’d battle before. This time they were ready for action, and the way that Prissy tore into it suggested she’d built up a little bit of fury during their conversation before. Corbin was glad to see it taken out on the combover monster rather than himself, and the two of them murderhoboed it without much issue. He didn’t end up reaching level 3, not yet at least.

But, as they traveled further and further north and west, the great portal came into view, and grew steadily larger. At first they only caught glimpses of it in between gaps in the branches, the purple and pink light beginning to peek through, small, wispy-arced trails rising up like flares from the sun. From there they trudged through a valley and avoided several crocadillos a good twenty or thirty feet in length, given they were level 12 and sported a hefty thousand two hundred HP each.

Prissy gave Corbin another evil eye.

“Nope,” Corbin said.

“Jes… no? That’s it? Nah discussion on the topic?”

“Do you want to be eaten?”

“Now that ya put it that way, not particularly.”

“Then we rid the world of some other monsters.”

When they crested the next ridge, the portal came fully into view over a long, scenic vista, maybe twenty miles distant. They also got a good look at Niagara Falls happily roaring away. A city sat off to one side of the portal, the eastern side, and that was taking the word city and stretching it to include somewhere around three hundred buildings surrounding a large and impressive castle. More hovels, tents and shanties ringed the walls in zones around the whole deal. Between that and Corbin were some farms, some copses of trees, one river with at least one bridge they could see, and a lot of rolling hills. A few more minor villages were in view, but the portal itself was the main attraction.

The gigantic arch full of burbling magic energy was big. Big enough you could fly a 747 through it and the wings wouldn’t get torn off. Maybe two of them side by side. It towered over the castle by perhaps another entire castle in height, reaching easily two hundred feet and possibly even higher. It had pimples of pink and purple expanding and popping all along the edge, but the central portion was simply flashes of different colored light, always appearing and disappearing.

Just the sight of the castle took him down memory lane.

***

The old Corbin, the pre-raven Corbin, was scaling those castle walls. Halfway up, he came upon a magical shield composed of interlocking hexagonal plates that were generally invisible. This close, inches away, and they were easy to spot. They reminded him of the top bits of a tortoise shell, with ridges. A few moments later, he had a device stuck in the space where two plates came together. The device whirred, expanded outwards like he was jacking up a car to replace a flat tire, and soon he was able to squeeze through the magical perimeter, and continue the climb up the keep’s outer wall. Behind him, he heard the device make a strange sound, a groaning, before it imploded under the force of the magic shield.

Raven him wasn’t sure how long ago this was. Heck, Raven him was starting to have trouble telling time at all, other than the rigid binary of day and night. Regardless, he was able to recall the old human version of him had spent most of the day traveling in from the exterior defensive walls to the keep, and he was almost to the top tower window. Non-raven Corbin wore a dusky cloak that somehow gave him glowing eyes, a malevolent shade of green, and made the rest of him more difficult to see. Blurry, or darker, or both. The bits of him that peeked out were clad in spotless enchanted clothing: tight pants strung up along the outside of the leg by leather cord, knee high boots folded over to make large swashbuckling cuffs, a padded doublet with hundreds of tiny glints, where minuscule gemstones were sewn in… raven Corbin was sure this was a magic item of sorts, providing protection somehow.

Just above him, one of The Five (whatever that meant) was leaning on a balcony’s crenelated wall and staring out toward the portal. She was pretty, a fae with the long pointed ears angling back away from her head, and her hair a peculiar shade of aqua blue. She was his target, and he was not a raven.

Her name… her name was… beyond him.

Corbin went invisible. Present Corbin wasn’t sure how, or how he could see his human version in this memory, but he was mostly transparent. Maybe one of the skill cards like Prissy had. Maybe some kind of spell. Or maybe he had smelt some burnt toast, dropped to the ground at the local supermarket, and was convulsing on the floor just fever dreaming all of this. Didn’t really matter. What mattered was he had the drop on her.

The fae suddenly had a rope tied around her neck, and found herself pulled downward, where Corbin clamped a pair of specialized iron maiden handcuffs around first one hand, then the other. He locked these with a command word and a flash of white blue magic that appeared like runes for a moment before dissipating with a quiet hiss, reminiscent of Han and carbonite. The cuffs fully encased her hands and constantly pricked them to keep her from focusing. A mage without the ability to concentrate was no mage at all. Her bulging eyes stared directly into him, and these two were a pretty shade of aqua blue, like the waters right around the Maldives, the kind you only ever see in photos. Her mouth opened and closed, but the noose was tight and she was running out of air.

With incredible speed, he scaled the rest of the wall, leaped over the balcony, and produced another item, a blue cube made entirely of glowing thorny bits. This one opened, with the thorny bits stretching out and interlocking, into a teleportation circle out of the fantasy sprawl consuming the great state of New York bit by bit, and into the game affected area that still had that Buffalo suburbs look. Dane would’ve recognized the pizzeria very near the edge of the expanding magical pink bubble. With that open, he drank a potion, swelled to enormous musculature, and hoped that the fae girl wasn’t dead yet. If she was, this was all for naught.

One of the other Five came into the room, spotted him, and froze. This was the bard, the little guy with the lute, and he stared in shocked incomprehension for a good few seconds before spotting the taut rope at the balcony.

Corbin used the bard’s shocked incomprehension as an opportunity to accomplish his mission: he flung the fae girl’s lavish four poster bed, with the silky tent top and all, through the portal.

That did it: the small bard roared, produced a dagger that flared with blue magic, and charged at Corbin. But the deed was just about done. Pre-raven Corbin threw himself back, fell back even more, then cut the rope holding the fae girl aloft.

She fell a good fifty feet, straight through the perimeter shield, which was designed to keep people out. At the end of her descent, her body bounced, left a blood splatter, and immediately vanished.

Corbin shortly followed her when he vaulted over the balcony wall to his death.