As soon as we Logged In Katy and I headed downstairs to where the others were waiting for us at our usual table. Since we had spent quite a bit of time at Gransoft Headquarters we had assembled a bit later than usual and both Fern and Evie had been Logged In for a while already.

However, they had joined us so that they could officially meet Petra and Gordy for the first time. Gordy had decided to take a massive sword for his main weapon and a shotgun for his secondary. Both weapons suited his personality quite well and I was really looking forward to seeing what he was going to be capable of. Petra on the other hand had decided to pick up a pair of pistols which didn’t seem like quite so much of a fitting choice to me. But then again, I didn’t really know her that well, so I decided to withhold my final opinion on that for the moment.

Fern was also pleased to announce that her own AI partner would be joining us soon which prompted Evie to claim the same a few seconds later. Evie had actually been acting oddly again but none of us decided to call her out on it. I was guessing that she was jealous that we were all working together but none of us called her out on it. Whatever was going on with her right now it was personal and none of us really knew enough to talk to her about it.

Come to think of it, Evie introducing her AI to us might actually help her open up to us more. Once we had all been introduced to each other we started making our way to the Guard’s barracks where we were greeted by the sight of Harmon shouting at the Guards who were currently in the middle of training.

“Oh, hey there Zeke, everyone,” Harmon greeted the group. “You’re a bit late if you wanted to take part in training today but I have a couple of jobs for you if you’re interested.”

“Sounds good to me,” I nodded as Harmon frowned slightly as he noticed Petra and Gordy.

“You seem to have picked up a couple of new faces,” Harmon said. “Are they with you?”

“That’s right,” Warren nodded cheerfully. “These are our spiritual guides. Their names are Gordy and Petra.”

“Oh, I see,” Harmon nodded. “It’s very nice to meet you two. Let’s head to my office and talk about those jobs that I have for you.”

Having said this Harmon turned and barked out several more orders to the Guards letting them know that he would know if they stopped training and punish them later. Turning towards us with a smile he asked us to follow him to his office.

“Well then,” Harmon said as he sat down at his desk. “It’s getting a bit cramped in here isn’t it?”

“Yeah, you really don’t have the largest office do you, old man?” Warren chuckled as Harmon snorted in amusement. “So, what jobs do you have for us?”

“First, there have been sighting of Undead approaching the town so I’d like you to locate them and take them out if you can,” Harmon explained. “The second one though is a bit different. Apparently, some of the Adventurers in town have been heading in the direction of the Barrows. These Adventurers are ones that have caused problems around town before so we think that they might be trying to join the Undead.”

“Would they even be able to?” Kelly asked curiously.

“In theory they could yes,” Harmon sighed. “Liches are highly intelligent monsters that actually used to be people. So, it’s entirely possible that it could allow them to join it and if it does, they will become a great danger to us. So, what I want you to do is find out what they’re planning and if I’m right I want you to do anything that you can to make life difficult for them.”

Before I could respond to the Quest notification that appeared in front of me Evie started speaking to me inside my head.

New Quest!

Turncoats?

(Event Quest)

Some Adventurers seem to be planning to betray Polson to the Undead. Harmon has asked you to ascertain whether or not this is true and to do what you can to make sure that they can’t grow too much in power.

Success Conditions

· Identify any Adventurers who are trying to join the Undead horde that is going to assault Polson.

· Do anything in your power to prevent them from growing powerful enough to a threat.

(As this is an Event Quest that requires you to deal with your fellow Players that has issued in preparation for an upcoming Event you have more leeway on how you handle the situation.)

Rewards

· Dependant of how successful you are in preventing any traitors from growing stronger.

‘Tyler, before you answer just remember that Harmon is one of the NPC’s that will give you jobs that come directly from either the AIs that are controlling this world or from Gransoft itself,’ she explained quickly as I allowed a thoughtful expression to cross my face like I was considering what Harmon had just said. ‘Which means that this is just a way for Gransoft to provide content for any players who want to play for the ‘evil’ team. As you can see this is a special type of Quest with more relaxed requirements’

‘Okay, I actually thought that might be the case,’ I replied.

“Do you think that you can do that for me?” Harmon asked. “I know that it’s a lot to ask but having enemies that can come back to life could ruin everything. Especially if they manage to become stronger than the Adventurers who are siding with us.”

“Sure,” I nodded. “We can do that can’t we everyone?”

“Yeah, sounds like a plan to me,” Warren agreed while the others nodded in agreement. Having come to a conclusion I reached out and accepted the Quest.

“Thank you,’ Harmon said as he sighed in relief. “I will send some Guards to help you as often as we can manage but we’re a little low on manpower right now since we’re going to start evacuating the city today.”

“That’s fine,” Fern replied. “We can deal with this. You just worry about your people and we’ll worry about ours.”

“Well, that’s one way to put it,” I sighed. “But Fern is right. You have more important things to worry about than a few Adventurers joining the Undead right now. You get the civilians evacuated safely.”

Harmon thanked us once again as we left. We headed to the same gate that we had left through when we’d headed to the Barrows before we decided to break up into two groups. Gordy and Petra were only Level 1 so they would cease to be useful the moment we encountered a monster anywhere the Level of everyone else. After a few moments we concluded that it would be best if Warren and Evie helped the new AIs train since Warren could tank the monsters close to town with ease while Evie could heal them if anything went wrong.

While they were doing that the rest of us would be trying to track down the players and find out what they were planning to do. I was pretty sure that there would be quite a few of them that were actually planning on joining the Lich, but I had a sneaking suspicion that some of them were just overestimating their own skills and hoping to prove themselves against the Undead that we had been telling them about.

Katy, Kelly, Fern, and I made pretty god time and did so quietly at that. If Warren had been travelling with us, we would’ve alerted twice the number of monsters just because of his armor making more noise. We still ran into a couple of things but even the four of us were able to deal with them fairly easily.

A few minutes after that Fern found a mound of flesh. Just flesh like something had stolen the corpses bones.

“It’s got to be the Undead right?” Fern asked. When she’d first found it, she had nearly puked everywhere but she had managed to hold it in long enough to come and show us.

“Almost definitely,” I nodded as I poked the mound with a stick. From the looks of the fur that was scattered around the area the mound of flesh was a former wolf. “I mean, I suppose that it could have been one of the Players if they had managed to get their hands on a Soul Core that allowed them to raise the dead, but the more likely option is that the Lich has been sending its Undead out to find more bones for it to raise.”

“Yeah,” Kelly agreed. “I kind of hope that seeing stuff like this will scare some of the Players off because of how realistic the world and the NPCs are. Not all of them of course. But some of them would be nice. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had fun playing as the evil side in the past so I don’t really have any problem with that, but I don’t think that I could do that here.”

“Agreed,” I nodded. “It can be pretty therapeutic playing for the bad guys sometimes, but I couldn’t do it in this game.”

Having finished our little conversation, we continued on. The mounds of bloody flesh became more and more common as we got closer to where we expected the Undead to be. We also started noticing further signs of the Undead as well as the Players.

These signs were often in the same places and wherever the Undead and Players met they fought. Kelly and I were pretty sure that this was because the Undead had simply been ordered to attack anything that they found. However, what was interesting was that we didn’t find any of the mounds of flesh that looked like they had come from the Players. Since we knew that Players did leave corpses behind that lasted until they were able to Log In again this suggested that they had been captured which only served to raise even more questions.

Not long after that we encountered the first group of Undead. However, there was no way that the four of us were going to be able to defeat the patrol which numbered twenty skeletons. All of the Skeletons were higher levels than the ones that we had fought before and had better equipment as well. But the thing that really caught our attention were the strange carts that looked like they had been built out of bones and were being pulled by skeletal beasts that looked like they had been made from the skeletons of multiple different monsters.

Inside most of the wagons were piles of bones that we immediately realized had to have been taken from whatever the piles of flesh used to be. However, it was what was in the other wagons that caught our attention.

“Looks like we’ve found our missing Players,” I whispered. “Although that seems like a lot of them. Could there be some Locals who got mixed up in all of this as well?”

“Perhaps,” Kelly nodded. “Maybe we should contact the others and ask them to go let Harmon know what we’ve found?”

“That actually sounds like a great idea,” Katy agreed. “They can ask if anyone has gone missing from the surrounding area recently. I suspect that the answer will be yes though. But he might decide to tell us to wait so that he can send some Guards to help us rescue them.”

“Sounds like a plan to me,” Fern nodded. “Let’s get on that right now and follow them.”

We quickly sent a message to Warren letting him know what we’d found before continuing to follow the wagons. As we followed them more wagons joined the train. Thankfully, most of them were full of bones and not people which was still worrying since the Lich could use them to raise even more Undead.

Eventually we did get a message back from Warren letting us know that our suspicions were correct. People had been going missing from the farms and what small towns there were near Polson for the past few days. While most people lived in the larger towns like Polson there were smaller communities that lived outside the walls of the town. Normally it would still be the job of the Polson Guards to investigate anything going wrong in these communities, but they had been pretty shorthanded since the Players had started arriving. The problem was that since Harmon and the Captain had no idea whether they were even alive let alone where the missing people were, they weren’t really able to do much about it. Especially since they had to worry about evacuating Polson and preparing for the attack.

However now that they knew that at least some of the people were still alive they decided to send some guards help us try and rescue them. This meant that Warren would be joining us after all since they needed someone who could track us down quickly. Apparently Tylie and Jameson would also be joining us since we had worked with them before as well as several other Guards who would hopefully be more cooperative than that idiot Yarrol had been.

We followed the wagons for several more hour while our backup rushed to catch up to us. It was dark by the time when the surprisingly large group caught up to us. Warren had been in contact with us for the whole time, so we didn’t need to explain the situation to Jameson who was in charge of the Guards that he had brought with him.

“It’s good to see you Jameson, Tylie,” I greeted my two friends. “What’s the plan?”

“And you,” Jameson rumbled in reply while Tylie nodded quietly in agreement. “As for the plan I was thinking that we would split up into two groups. Most of the men that we’ve brought with us are strong enough to stand up to the Undead for a while so while we’re drawing their attention the other group can try and free the prisoners.”

“I take it that Warren is going with the first group then,” I joked. “Since he’s about as stealthy as a bull in a china shop.”

“Hey!” Warren hissed before stopping like he was rethinking what I’d just said. “Nah, you’re right.”

“That’s right,” Jameson nodded as he chose to ignore the rest of us sniggering in amusement. “I was also thinking that Kelly could join us since we didn’t mean many of our spellcasters with us.”

“So, who’s in the second group?” I asked as Kelly nodded in agreement. “Other than Tylie and Fern?”

“I was hoping that you could join us in case we needed some extra muscle,” Tylie said. “And we’ll take someone else to help you out. Just in case something goes wrong.”

“Sounds good to me,” I nodded. “So, I guess that all we need to do now is find a good place for your group to attack them then, right Jameson?”

“That’s right and there’s a good spot coming up not that far ahead,” Jameson agreed. “Let’s head out.”

Sure, enough we came to a crossroads not that far up the road from the slow moving Undead and broke up into our respective groups. While my group hid in the woods just off the road Kelly got to work making sure that the Undead would be forced to fight them by forming a large wall across the road. As the wall grew out of the ground most of the Guards formed up in front of while what few spellcasters and other ranged attackers climbed to the top of the wall so that they could fire over the others.

Not long after they finished preparing the Undead arrived. Upon spotting the guards the carts came to a halt while most of the Skeletons made their way to the front of the train. They just stood there staring at the Guards with their empty eyeholes for a few seconds before making a strange rattling noise and charging towards them.

While these Skeletons did have better equipment than the ones that we had fought at the Barrows most of them were only armed with melee weapons which meant that the Guards did have one advantage over them. The Guards had also brought bottles of some strange oily substance that they coated their weapons with. According to Tylie and Jameson this substance was known as Undead Bane and increased the damage that weapons dealt against Undead. When we heard this Kelly immediately asked why we hadn’t been given any when Harmon had sent us to scout out the Barrows. Confronted by the angry woman Jameson had immediately apologized before explaining that the potion had been sent by the church so that the Polson Guards could fight any Undead that arrived before the Templars did.

As the Skeletons surged towards the Guards, I noticed that some of them were considerably larger than their fellows and had even better gear. These monsters were called Skeletal Knights and their weapons crackled with an eerie green lightning as they engaged the Jameson and the Guards that he had hand picked to deal with them. Jameson was wielding the same massive battle-axe that he had used when he had saved me from the Terror Birds the first day except for one crucial difference. Apparently, Jameson had decided to slot a Soul Core that added Light Damage to his weapon because the double blades of the axe shone like the sun as he brought it down on one of the Skeletal Knights which raised its longsword to block the attack. The two weapons collided with a bright flash of light that nearly blinded me, and I was left blinking for several seconds. By the time that I could see clearly again I could see that Jameson and the men that he had chosen had all engaged the Skeletal Knights while the normal Skeletons were trying to break apart the formation that the Guards had made to defend their position. I could even see Warren bashing one of the Skeletons over the head with his Scepter with a wide grin on his face that would’ve sent chills down the spine of a human enemy but the Skeleton that he was fighting was unfazed.

“Right, now that the Undead are worried about the others lets see if we can save some of the civilians,” Tylie whispered before both her and Fern disappeared from my sight and started making their way towards what few Skeletons that had been left to guard the wagons.