The Grand Tournament Page 11

  He glared at the orc while Ves tugged on his sleeve to try and get him to move. He didn’t want to. He was angry—because of her Morgan had nearly died. That moment had been his first wake-up call, his first realization that he could in fact die. Emily looked at him with an innocent expression, but he knew her true face and he could see the smugness hidden in her eyes.

  “Perhaps you have mistaken me for someone else,” Emily said finally, her voice rising up so that it could be heard by everyone. “I know how you humans sometimes have trouble telling other races and people apart. If so, I understand. Being betrayed like that…it is a horrible thing. But you have survived, and have learned a valuable lesson about trust.”

  Morgan nearly summoned his Energy Blade and rammed it through her smug little mouth. The only thing that kept him from doing it was Ves’s hand on his elbow. He could see that the orc knew it, her lip curving slightly upward as she saw him struggle. Before Morgan could speak again, Lucius and Vall stepped next to him, grabbing his shoulder.

  “Apologizes,” Lucius said smoothly. “My friend is tired and has mistaken you for someone else. We will step out of your way.”

  By now, Morgan had realized that they were making a commotion. People were standing around them, looking at the disturbance. He took a look at Emily’s companions, seeing the giant looking at him with amusement on his brutish face. The elf was sneering with barely concealed disgust. The two Úlfriir watched him intently with looks that made him think they wanted to eat his liver. Without saying anything else, Morgan allowed himself to step aside. Emily and her team stepped by them without even a second glance.

  Morgan was too angry to even speak as the others urged him to get outside.

  “Morgan,” Ves said, trying to get him to snap out of it. After a few seconds he managed, the anger leaving him and he started to laugh, first chuckle softly and then he was shaking with laughter so much that people around them looked at him as if he was crazy.

  What did I think, really? That when I found her again I was going to challenge her to a duel? That I would kill her and get revenge? Foolish, he chided himself. Morgan had had dreams about what he was going to do to her once he found her again. In his head he had built her up like this big nemesis, the overarching villain of the story, someone who he would encounter eventually and then do battle with. But this was not a world like his own, was not like the worlds of his games. He would’ve never been able to fight her, not without being marked as a murderer; and as much as she had been present inside of his own head, for her, Morgan was nothing. She hadn’t even remembered him. He was sure that even now she didn’t. Oh, she remembered the act, as she had done the same to many, but he himself had mattered so little to her that Morgan might as well have been an ant she had met one day on the road. To her, an ascended from a guild, a person who had power, Morgan and his friends—back then not even level ten—had been utterly insignificant.

  The others were looking at him, but Morgan could tell that they were upset as well. They stood there in an awkward silence. Morgan could see Borodar wanting to speak, probably to ask what that was about. Then Clara was the one who broke the silence.

  “So, that was her huh? The big bad?” Clara asked, looking at Morgan.

  He nodded his head.

  Clara nodded in return, and then she got angry herself before slapping him across the arm.

  Shocked, he jumped back and stared at her in confusion. “What the hell was that for?”

  “That is who you confused me with? She doesn’t look anything like me!” Clara exclaimed and slapped him again.

  “Ow! Hey, stop that, what the hell are you talking about?”

  She punched him in the shoulder. “Don’t you remember the first time we met?”

  “Uh…” Morgan started to remember. She had come with Titus and another to their Guild Hold and had been kept captive by Rann. When the rest of them arrived he had…confused her with Emily. But in his defense, Clara was only the second orc he had ever seen, so it was not like he had much experience with telling them apart.

  Clara narrowed her eyes at him. “She is brown, and I am green! And she is taller than me!”

  “Okay, okay, I’m sorry!” Morgan said as he evaded her next striker. “Really, I am!”

  She stopped running after him and simply glared at him.

  “We should go to the inn,” Vall said when the silence started stretching again.

  Morgan nodded somberly, looking up at the still confused Borodar. “Yeah, let’s.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  “That is completely evil!” Vrshar, Borodar’s teammate, exclaimed.

  The two teams were now in the Coldnight Inn, where many of the teams that were participating in the tournament were. They had returned and checked into their suite, and afterward they had met up with Borodar’s team in the common room. The two teams had pulled up two tables and the ten of them were now sitting and drinking together. Morgan had just finished explaining to the Last Vanguards what exactly Emily had done to them.

  Morgan nodded at Vrshar, and the Gnoll put his hands up in the air, splashing some of the ale he had. “I understand perfectly why you wanted to fight!” he added.

  Morgan had come to like the Gnoll. Once he had gotten past the fact that he was talking to what looked like an upright hyena, he learned that they were quite alike.

  “It might be understandable, but this is not really out of the norm for some ascended,” Hexna, a human, said.

  Morgan liked her fine enough, but only when she wasn’t near him. She gave him the creeps, probably because she was some type of warlock. He didn’t know exactly what she did; adventurers kept their classes and capabilities private, so he knew only the generalities and not what she specialized in. He wasn’t really surprised by her words; she seemed like the downer of the group.

  “I have always thought the same,” Lucius added. “But I had not believed that an ascended that experienced would actually take advantage of beginners.”

  “It is unfortunate, but it is the reality of the world,” Jelara said. She was a Sassakra, which essentially meant lizard folk, but their people did not like that term. She looked like an upright lizard, with bright blue scales covering her back, and white-yellow scales spreading from her jaw down to her torso. She was dressed in what to Morgan’s eyes looked like a tribal garments, coupled with a headdress with feathers in it.

  “It might be the reality, but it was also a dick move,” Morgan added.

  “Hah!” a loud voice boomed, followed by a clash of a tankard on the wooden table, spilling ale all over. Gravough the dwarvar laughed at Morgan’s choice of words. “Dick move, hah! I’ll remember that!”

  The dwarvar was most certainly drunk, but perhaps not as much as Morgan thought. He had a strange sense of humor and an appreciation of foul and curse words, and Morgan knew some pretty impressive ones for this world. They had even spent one night competing by insulting each other with increasingly vile insults. That was a fun night. Morgan grinned at the man.

  “Nevertheless,” Jelara continued. “There is little that you can do about it, even if you had proof. The valley where it happened hadn’t been claimed by any guild at the time, and so no laws applied to it. They were free to do whatever they wanted as long as they didn’t break the Guiding Force’s rules.”

  The others around the table all nodded in acceptance. “Which is complete bullshit. She had killed who know how many people using the same method!” Morgan exclaimed angrily.

  The others just shrugged, which was what Morgan had come to expect. That was the way this world worked; to them, there was no point getting worked up by it. Ves took his hand and squeezed it. He shook his head and stood up.

  “I need to clear my head.” He left the table and went for a walk. He wandered out of the building and into the street. It was late afternoon, so the sun was slowly disappearing behind the horizon, painting the city in orange. He looked up into the sky and tried to forget where he was. In that moment
, looking at the sky with the exclusion of everything else, he could almost imagine that he was back on Earth. It wasn’t like he missed his previous life, but there were just so many things that he knew he would never be able to experience again. He would never step foot on his world again, he knew, even if he managed to climb the Tower and find Oxy once more. He had promised him that if he did so he could send him back to Earth, and Morgan believed him; but the truth was that no matter how much he might miss Earth in a few rare moments, he would never want to go back there. On Earth, he had been a nobody, his future bleak. But this world, with all of its flaws, was more of a home for Morgan. He liked this world, even with the dangers and the near constant threat of death. It was beautiful, harsh, but also rewarding.

  “Are you all right?” a voice said and Morgan turned to see Clara standing behind him.

  “Sure,” Morgan said, shaking his head.

  “I know that they don’t understand, but I do,” Clara said. “They had all grown up knowing about the ascended, about the rules and the ways that everything worked—it is just the way things are for them. But you and I are different. I grew up in the tribe, and my kind don’t concern themselves with the ascended; only the one chosen for ascension does. And you… Well, your crazy world is… What are the words you use? ‘Completely bonkers’?”

  Morgan chuckled. “Yeah, that’s it.”

  “Come, let us get back to the inn. We should get some rest for tomorrow,” she said, locking her arm through his.

  “Yeah.”

  * * *

  The next morning both teams walked out of the inn together and made their way to the arena. There was little talk on the way. All of them were nervous since they didn’t know exactly what to expect, but soon enough they would find out. Once they arrived, they found that there were already people there forming lines near the entrance.

  Quickly they reached the entrance and stopped in front of a tall human man who wore white armor with red lines crisscrossing them. His adventurer’s badge was clipped to his shoulder, and Morgan recognized the mark as that of the Erthirium Riders Guild. The badge itself was made out of platinum, making the man both high level and a great adventurer.

  “Team name?” the man asked.

  “Sky Force,” Morgan answered.

  He checked something on a list in his hands and then looked them over before nodding and letting them through. Once they got past him they waited for a moment for Borodar and his team to get through, and then all of them walked inside together.

  The first shock was the number of people. Even before they exited the tunnel that led to the interior, Morgan could tell that there were hundreds of people there. But then they were inside and he saw the arena. It was massive—larger than the biggest stadiums he had seen on Earth. Tall, with empty spectator seats all around them, it was the arena floor that was filled with people; by his rough count, there were at least five hundred, if not a thousand adventurers there. They were all standing talking with one another in front of a raised platform in the middle.

  Morgan and the others headed that way and fought through the crowd before reaching the base of the platform, and Morgan saw that there was a woman standing there. She, like all ascended, looked young, but in her eyes Morgan saw that she was far older than she looked. She was a human, with bright blue hair that was pulled back in a tail at the back of her head. She wore a dress and her fingers were adorned by rings. Morgan couldn’t help but feel the power radiate from her. For a moment he considered using his Inspect skill on her, but he knew that he wouldn’t see anything apart from her name. His skill wasn’t a high enough level for him to be able to use it on people with any success, especially not on people who were probably at least twice his level. It was unlikely that she would allow such an inspection regardless—Azil had told him that most high-level ascended had skills that prevented such intrusions. Only the people that specialized in using skills that revealed information would be able to get by those defenses.

  They waited for about another half an hour before the woman’s eyes scanned the crowd, and she nodded. A moment later she raised her hand to her temple and spoke softly enough that Morgan couldn’t hear her. Then there was a commotion somewhere to the left and Morgan watched as people moved away to allow someone to pass.

  A few moments later, four people climbed up on the platform and looked over the assembled teams. Morgan blinked as he took them all in. Only one of them was a human, another was an orc, the third an elf. The last person looked human, but Morgan wasn’t certain. They had skin as dark as a night without stars, and that same coloration was all over their body—from what he could see, even what should have been the whites of their eyes were black, with piercing silver irises offset by similarly black pupils. The man blinked and suddenly there were multiple pupils all moving around his eyes like what Morgan had seen on the Nel he encountered when they first arrived in Al’Valor. Then the man blinked again, and the pupils were gone, replaced by the eerie, single silver iris. And he was tall, towering over the others on the platform, as tall as the giant Morgan had seen yesterday with Emily. He took a step forward and looked the crowd over.

  “That is Ragnor Raam,” Lucius whispered in awe.

  Morgan turned to look at his friend, seeing the wide expression on his face. “Who is he? What is he?” Morgan asked.

  “He is Shara Daim, another one of our cousin species. They live mostly up in the deserts to the west, and their guilds are very powerful. Ragnor Raam is one of four Guild Leaders of The Call Guild—powerful, high level. My grandfather told me stories about him. He was old when my grandfather had arrived on this world. Some say that he had reached level sixty. The person behind him, the orc, is Richard the Bone Splitter, Ragnor’s right hand and leader of The Call’s Hammers, a scarletite-ranked team. I don’t know who the elf or the human are; I assume they are with the Erthirium Riders.”

  Morgan nodded. He had noticed the same white-with-red-lines theme of their clothes. “And the woman?” Morgan asked, indicating the woman in the dress with all the rings on her fingers.

  “I have no idea,” Lucius admitted.

  Someone leaned in on Morgan’s other side and answered. “That is Ta’elara, the Grand Mage. That is both her title and her class—she runs the academy for mage-class ascended in The Call Guild’s territory,” Hexna told him. Morgan could tell that she was very much impressed by her. “I have no idea what she is doing here. She would have little interest in climbing the Tower. She earns so much wealth by teaching the ascended of other guilds that she could probably buy enough crystals to live forever.”

  “Wait, there are schools of magic here?” Morgan asked.

  Hexna nodded. “A person can learn skills and abilities by themselves, or buy them if they have enough points, but they can also be taught. Most agree that being taught not only saves you points, but it also makes your utilization of newly learned skill or ability better.”

  Morgan nodded his head. It was the “self taught” versus “professionally educated” argument, and Morgan had seen just how much more he could learn about his skills and abilities from Azil’s training.

  Before he could ask any more questions the man, Ragnor spoke in a booming voice that carried across the arena.

  “Greetings, adventurers! I thank you all in the name of The Call and the Erthirium Riders for answering our call. If you are here, then you have met the minimum requirements for this tournament. I know that you are all impatient to get started, so I will cover the basics now. We have organized this tournament because we are seeking those worthy of climbing the Tower, with the intent of getting to the top.” There was some murmuring at that statement, but Ragnor continued quickly. “We are looking for those qualities which we believe are necessary in people we would trust our lives with, and climb the Tower with.

  “In service of that, this tournament will be executed in three stages. The first stage will be a dungeon dive, the second a hunt, and lastly we will have single combat. Through
each stage, we will be eliminating teams that we find do not have what we are looking for. But before we go much further than that… Grand Mage, if you could kindly ready the contract?”

  The woman, Ta’elara, stepped forward, and a rolled-up piece of parchment appeared in her hand. She then threw it up in the air and it disappeared in a flash of fire. A moment later Morgan’s HUD had a notification and as he pulled it up he was surprised by what he saw.

  The Grand Tournament Contract.

  By agreeing to this contract, the user acknowledges the risks and accepts the rules written out in the contract itself. Y/N

  After that was the text of the contract itself. He hadn’t expected anything like this. Morgan could see that everyone around him was looking at their HUDs, and he turned his eyes back to the contract. It was written in very simple language that left little to the imagination, with little room for mistakes. From what he read it didn’t really have much in the way of rules—it just basically said what they already knew: that people accepting it agreed to follow the rules set by the tournament organizers. It covered the topic of accidental deaths briefly, stating that such deaths would not be punished. From what he could see it was almost the same to the rules already in place that were enforced by the Guiding Force, but there were added rules that forbade anyone from intentionally sabotaging another team, meaning poisoning or the like. Morgan turned to the others and they quickly consulted with them, and afterward they all accepted the contract.