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The Gamer Chapter 1687 – Chase for the Cure 5 – The Fourth Rider
🕑 Added 2024-05-28 14:50:50 +0000 UTC“Shhh, shhhhh,” John whispered to Momo.
The fairy maid was trembling. After the initial shock had settled, she had joined them in combat. With all of the ants on the surface reduced to paste, Momo had suddenly tackled him. She was crying and he did not yet fully understand why. He did know that he needed to console her more than he needed to worry about Lorelei though. At least for the moment.
“What’s wrong?” he asked her, when the trembling had diminished.
“I saw your death,” she said. “It… did not feel like an illusion. I saw the death I feared the most, John. Tiamat will drive a claw through your neck. You will die alone and with hate in your… heart…” She barely managed to press out that last word, before she started to cry again.
“I’m here right now,” he whispered to her. “Nothing changes that.”
Momo stayed pressed up against him for a long while. What she described did worry John. It could have been a true prophecy, a moment that was the outcome of their current path in life. If so, then the Grim Reaper was even more terrifying than John had first thought.
Between strokes of the fairy maid’s hair, he wrote Lorelei a message via the Harem Comms. That avenue of conversation should be untraceable and unblockable. If he did not get an answer soon, he would drum up every support he had and attack the Grim Reaper wherever he was hiding. Depending on the kind of answer, he would do it anyway. If Lorelei let him know that she was being treated with respect, then…
John didn’t quite know what then. One of his haremettes was more important than Fianna, but if Lorelei was in no danger as a hostage, then she could wait. It irked John to no end to be involuntarily separated from her. The wise decision was, outside of his emotions, to address the events in order of urgency.
This seemed to be within the expectations of Lorelei’s visions. He had to trust that.
“Ready to inspect some ruins?” John whispered to Momo.
The fairy maid put her chin on his collarbone. She sniffed. Reddened white eyes looked up at him. She sniffed again. “Yes,” she answered, too adorable not to be kissed.
“It’s like you exist to be protected, bulliable creature,” Ehtra weighed in from the side. “What do you think, Metra?”
The First of Wrath had nothing to say. Teeth clenched, lips pulled back, she was still livid. Had it not been for their investment in these temples, she probably would have turned the ancient buildings into a field of pebbles.
Letting go of Momo, the Gamer walked over to her. “There was nothing we could have done,” he told her.
“Is that supposed to console me?!” she barked back, clenching Rex Magnar tighter.
“It’s supposed to let you know that we have to accept this loss,” John told her. “You know how much I hate that, but we cannot dwell on it.”
Metra forced herself to breathe evenly. “I do not fail,” she pressed out. “I am the Breaker of Armies. I am the chosen weapon of my king. I am Metracana Metra.”
“And you failed,” Ehtra stated.
“Don’t make me throw you from the Palace walls again,” the wolf woman hissed. It was an attempt at a joke. No one laughed, but no one went at each other’s throat either. Air hissed between Metra’s teeth on the inhale. The exhale was slow and audible. “Haaaaaaaaaah…” She hit her forehead with the back of her hand several times. “I was starting to forget that there are enemies I can’t beat.”
“You’ve been on quite the winning streak,” John agreed. Losses were a bitter pill at all times, but usually they weren’t this absolute. Metra hadn’t suffered a personal loss since he had put her under contract. The closest she had gotten to it was when they all had run away from Jevaine back in the Iron Domain and that was hardly her sole loss.
Neither was this, truthfully, but it was the closest she had gotten to it.
“We didn’t even stand a chance.” Metra kept knocking against her forehead.
“He’s probably about twice our level,” John theorized, “and he has been preparing for a long time.”
John viewed the cream of the crop of the Abyss in a few categories. First there was the kind of power they had. There he differentiated between generalists and specialists. Generalists grew in many fields, while specialists pushed a single one to an absurd level. Generalists were usually more dangerous. Himself and Romulus fell in that category, as had Arkeidos. They all had multiple elemental types and schools of magic at their disposal. For an incredibly powerful specialist, most gods came to mind. Nathalia, Eliana, Nightingale, Krieg, even Tiamat fit into this mould.
Then there was the differentiation of the shape this power took. Roughly speaking, there were hoarders and evergreens. Hoarders benefitted from a particular quirk of their ability that let them stack a benefit over time. This was not to be confused with people like John, who grew their powers. Rather, it was that they stole or accumulated power that let them exceed their limit, but required a resource to be spent later.
Romulus was like that. The power he got from slaying gods had an end to it. Galku, the ruler of New Libraria, had been like that, growing in power the more demons he had under contract. The benefit of these powers was obvious since they allowed people to prepare for a time where they had to go further than their limits.
Evergreens, as the name implied, just had their power. It was always available. Most people were evergreens. Those truly powerful that also had a way to exceed those limits for limited times were rare.
The Grim Reaper had an undead army. If there was even the slightest bit of positive feedback from that, giving him additional power based on how many minions he had, then he was beyond powerful. Unlike other gods, particularly the ancient variety, the Grim Reaper had not gotten involved in any known large-scale conflicts either. He would have been hoarding power for the better part of ten thousand years.
A truly scary prospect.
Even if he did not, he had the Four Horsemen, the weakest of which appeared to be around level 500. Famine was beaten by Metra even while she had to protect Lorelei. War and Glory were notably stronger.
‘I wonder when the Grim Reaper picked up the scythe,’ the Gamer allowed himself that little curiosity. ‘Since he’s older than that piece of farming equipment by several thousand years…’ “The point is that, without Nathalia and Eliana around, fighting the Grim Reaper is suicide.”
“Should we call Krieg in?” Momo suggested. Since all of them were now a reasonable level of calm, they could talk as they walked to the half-destroyed central temple. “Since we learned that the Grim Reaper is probably outside his patron guild’s territory.”
“Wait, when did we learn that?” John asked.
“Were you not listening to War?”
“I was sort of busy getting swarmed by the Gluttony Emissary and fending off two riders of the Apocalypse while smashing in the heads of a bunch of other things.” John rubbed his forehead. “Also I am fighting Mummy Lords over at the main body right now and I am having a heated phone call with an unreasonable judge.” The Gamer put all of his memories in order. “These have not been a pleasant thirty minutes anywhere.”
“Alright, I guess I’ll just ask a source.”
Once they were on top of the temple, Momo reached into her inventory. The head that had enabled their survival was placed on a piece of rubble, putting it at head height with the rest of them.
Famine started to cough. It was unclear to John why he needed to do that without lungs, but he was a separated head still fully animated, so the coughing was the least weird part of that.
“Start talking!” Momo demanded, poking the head with her index finger. “Now!”
John enjoyed the view. That was both in reference to Momo’s butt and the fact that she was her usual self again. They were all mentally sturdy enough to bounce back even from traumatizing events rapidly.
“Your… inventory… is awful!” Famine wheezed. “Crawling with the sickness… it thinks it can eat me!”
John eyed the purple stains all over themselves. The blood and saliva of the ants had been of this specific colour and he refused to believe it was coincidence. They were probably crawling with a fresh batch of the pathogen. Constant, annoying coughing was a greater priority though.
“Metra, can you let him take a bite of you? Just enough that I don’t feel like talking with a grandpa with 450 ping across TS1?” John requested.
Famine took the offered arm and gulped down some of the life essence of the First of Wrath. Once the shrivelled head had gone from ‘five years in the grave’ to ‘mid-sixties’ in appearance, he was torn off again. “And I was starting to enjoy the taste,” the Horseman complained. “Want to fill me in why I am here?”
“I took your head when you weren’t looking,” Momo told him. “Then-“
“We shan’t just breeze over that,” Famine said. “How did you do that?!”
“I just walked up behind you and picked you up from your neck.”
“I…” the rider’s eyes darted to Momo’s wings. “Fairies,” he groaned. “Your kind has plagued me since I sat down at that damned Round Table.”
“You were an Arthurian Knight?” John asked.
“Are we exchanging questions?” Famine wondered.
“No, actually… I doubt you have protection while you’re a head.”
That was about what John had expected from the rider named ‘Famine’ in terms of Innate Ability. The Stats lined up with the typical undead knight as well. Nothing surprising to any of it. “So here is the summary of it,” John continued. “Your boss has my seer and we got you.”
“Hah!” Famine laughed. “You got screwed in that exchange. Lost the pretty lady, got a talking head.”
“Yes. You can imagine I’m annoyed about that. If you’re going to answer our questions, then I won’t have to make your stay unpleasant.”
“Okay,” Famine agreed.
John raised an eyebrow. “Just like that?”
“Now that the Lord of the Necropolis has leverage on you, you are in his grasp either way.” Famine wiggled his eyebrows. “That was me shrugging. The point is that I’ll answer your obvious questions, as long as you keep me from being parched… and do not stuff me into that inventory for too long.”
That was an acceptable deal, all things considered. “So, Momo, you said something about the Grim Reaper being outside his guild territory?”
“Yes.” The fairy maid stood cross-armed in front of the head. “I heard War call your lord the Wanderer – is that the same Wanderer up in Canada?”
John went wide-eyed at the implication. The Wanderer had been a mystery for a long time and an unresolved mystery to his foreign department since its inception. The people of the northern North American reported they followed the teachings of a Wanderer that bound them through common customs and a code of conduct. If the Grim Reaper had been that Wanderer, that meant Fusion had been rubbing up against the Grim Reaper’s territory for a year now.
“Yes and no,” Famine answered. “The Wanderer is one of my king’s titles, but the territory is not his guild, as you seem to think. We simply have been operating there because it’s scarcely populated. We use an alias for a reason… and War barks it out because he is a big brutish idiot.”
“Sounds like you’re avoiding rule violation by technicality,” John pointed out. “I wonder what Krieg will think of this?”
Famine wiggled his eyebrows. “That was me-“
“Shrugging again, yes, we get it,” Metra growled. “Answer the question before I play golf with you.”
“You remind me of Mordred,” Famine commented drily. “Krieg knows we are here, and unlike you, we are here in a sanctioned endeavour. You can call the god of war, but he will not aid you.”
“You mean you talked to Krieg beforehand, and because you are here to collect on a debt, you are permitted on this territory?”
“As long as we do not war on other locals than Huitzilopochtli, this is true.” A crooked smile showed the vampire’s sharp, yellowy teeth. “You are not locals, are you?”
John did not like this revelation. It effectively changed nothing about their situation, but it did remove Krieg as an option to call on if things got truly out of hand. “Next question: what are you after? What is this debt?”
“Can you not guess?” Famine asked. “You should have enough context clues, nay?”
“…The fourth Horseman,” John mumbled and rubbed his forehead.
“Explain,” Ehtra demanded.
“The Four Horsemen are a project of the Grim Reaper, they are not a naturally occurring force in the way other gods are. In other words, they are being recruited. We have only met Famine, War and Glory so far because the Grim Reaper wants to recruit someone that is adept at manipulating disease.” John gestured at the stains of purple all over the party and the soaked battlefield below. “Why settle for any disease worse than this one?”
“No wonder he’s so annoyed,” Momo mumbled. “We’re ruining his pet project.”
“Indeed, you are,” Famine answered. “Huitzilopochtli was taught the secrets of necromancy and in return he promised to prepare a rider worthy of the name Plague. Since this land was already being afflicted by the Giant’s Puss, it’s only a matter of time. Now my Lord and Master is scouring this land for his price or, short of that, Huitzi’s head.”
“Is that what the Purple is called? Giant’s Puss?”
“It is the most common of them. I know there are more potent derivates that require powerful hosts to survive, one of which the giant ant covered you in.” He raised one eyebrow in Momo’s direction. “Good news for you, Artificial Spirits were not known around these parts. The disease does not affect you.”
“How long will it survive on us?” John asked.
“Am I Plague? No idea.”
John sighed and scratched the back of his head. “You were there back then, yes?”
“Ay.”
“So, you saw the Aztec society in action?”
“In snippets, yes?”
“Momo…?”
“Already on it.” Momo wiped off her hands with a towel, then pulled out her notebook. “I have questions! A lot of questions.”
A lot, lot, lot of questions.
Comments
Askance
Metra losing a large chunk of priceless astrotium to the artifact eater was a pretty big loss. It required a deux ex meteorite to fix, and John assumably gets a limited number of those.
Charles Bell IV
What do you mean by that last sentence? A point in the favor becoming the true heir?
Christian Krueger
Momo might not be interogating Famine in the most exact of terms, but to him, it might be worse than any other type. And i feel like Fun is going to gloss over it mainly because he has 50 different plots going on rn. honestly, i want to know what the judge is arguing about, if only because it gives a flaw to John's presidency idea, and a point in the favor of John becoming the true heir to Akkad.
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