The Dragon's Revenge

  The Dragon’s Revenge

  Conor Kostick

  Copyright © Conor Kostick 2019

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without prior written permission from the publisher.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any person or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. No affiliation is implied or intended to any organisation or recognisable body mentioned within.

  Published by Level Up in the United Kingdom in 2019

  Cover by Claire Wood

  ISBN: 978-1-912701-83-4

  www.levelup.pub

  A big thank you to Mike Virtue, Russ Liley and especially Patrick Reed.

  Praise for Conor Kostick

  “The most important Irish novel of the year.” Celia Keenan, the Independent reviewing Epic.

  “Just as Saga (2008) exploded beyond opener Epic (2007), this third volume ratchets up this science-fiction gaming series to a whole new level.” Kirkus reviewing Edda.

  “Contemporary and futuristic fantasy can provide a powerful critique of dehumanisation and help explore ideas about identity. Conor Kostick’s Saga falls into this category.” Sunday Independent review of Saga.

  “It is a rock 'n' roll, helter-skelter time, a journey not for the faint-hearted but bound to enthral wired-up skateboarders, the mathematically literature and those who just enjoy a well-written narrative. This is what happens when Hal from 2001: A Space Odyssey meets A Clockwork Orange.” Village Magazine review of Saga.

  “Irish author Kostick’s powerful debut imagines an agrarian world where violence is illegal, except within a massive computer game that provides the economic and governmental structure for society.” Publisher’s Weekly review of Epic.

  “A gripping first novel… A surefire winner.” Kirkus review of Epic.

  Chapter 1

  Dragon Attack

  ‘Let’s try again,’ I spoke patiently.

  It’s not easy getting a heal rotation to run smoothly, especially if the clerics are relatively new to each other. The Restore spell is a complete healing spell but takes eight seconds to cast. Far too slow for a dragon fight. So you have to recruit eight high-level clerics for the raid, each of whom begins to chant one second after the other. That way, woosh, woosh, woosh…there is a continuous series of powerful heals landing on your tank. It works like kids singing ‘Frère Jacques’ in the round in primary school and is just as messy to get it going properly.

  ‘And go!’

  ‘One.’

  ‘Two.’

  ‘Three.’

  ‘Four.’

  I was sitting on a rock - well, my warrior avatar, Tyro, was - with the clerics all gathered around me, calling out their number as they began to cast the spell. The curious thing about the scene was that even though all avatars can be fully customised in the world of Epic, these players looked pretty similar. It was like I was circled by clones. That’s because they all had the same quest gear: Neowthla’s Breast Plate, a shield of warding and Mov’s Hammer of the Elements. Top ranking cleric items, representing years of effort. Nothing but the best for my raids. Except.

  ‘Five.’

  ‘…’

  The sixth cleric just stood there. No raised arms to cast a spell. Nothing but a blank stare into the distance.

  ‘Oh, come on Triggle. Where are you?’ This time I couldn’t keep the exasperation out of my voice.

  ‘Sorry, man, pizza arrived just at the wrong time.’

  And that encapsulates the challenge of organising a big raid. One hundred and twenty-three avatars, all logged in to Epic in the hope of making history. Some were just kids, maybe waking up in the middle of the night to join a raid, the way I used to. Others, perhaps, were middle-aged, hot-shot lawyers, closing their office door and lowering the blinds for an hour of Epic play. And everything in between. I felt responsible for their time and was very conscious of the need to keep everything running to schedule.

  ‘Start over please. And go!’

  Now the rotation was established properly, the clerics twitching in order, landing their spells about a second apart. I let it run through five cycles and called a halt.

  ‘Good. Go over to your starting places behind Braja.’

  As the clerics obediently trudged past me up the hill, I swapped my communications from local to the raid channel, which I’d earlier defined as ‘Dragonattack’ and made an announcement. The pizza incident had caused me to worry.

  [Channel Dragonattack] ‘Ten minutes to start,’ I announced. ‘This is your ten-minute warning. Eat, drink, go to the toilet. We begin in ten.’

  Then I took my own advice, raising my foot off my little tracking pad and unclipping from the gloves and helmet. It was always a little disconcerting phasing in and out of Epic. The game was this huge fantasy environment, with extraordinary landscapes and incredible skies. There are two moons in Epic and whether by design or just the way the game had evolved, you could get breath-taking evenings, like the one I’d just stepped away from, where the sun was setting on one horizon and the moons had risen from the other, to glow as though burnished with copper.

  By contrast, I unclipped from the game to see a dingy room barely wide enough to fit my bed. My clothes were strewn on a floor whose faded brown carpet had a well-worn path from door to bed. It was dimly lit, my bedroom, mostly because my curtains were nearly always closed: who wanted to look out at the grim walls and barred windows of a factory on the other side of the alley? I had put shelves in myself and these ran around high up, above my poster-clad wall (two trance-metal bands featured, but the majority of the posters showed scenes from Epic, including one of the dragon Mikarkathat).

  If there was one feature of the room that did not look typical for a teenager’s bedroom in overcrowded Dublin, it was the high-tech gear on top of the shelving. Black boxes there had small blue and green LEDs, blinking in and out of phase. Thanks to my sponsors, I had enterprise-grade computing and online access. No lag for me.

  On entering the bathroom, I was met with a waft of warm, moist air and a strong scent of flowers. The glass panes of the narrow shower stall were covered in droplets. Evidently, Mum had just been in here.

  ‘Mum?’ I shouted downstairs. But there was no reply. Her new cleaning job was in the Bartlett Private Hospital, over an hour away on the south side of town. She’d probably just left. And I wouldn’t have heard her call goodbye, not while in Epic.

  Refreshed, I clipped up again.

  And a whole new - far better - world rushed upon me.

  Even clipping up is an intense, addictive experience, let alone fighting dragons. You place one foot on a tracking pad, a foot that becomes adept at spinning it in whatever direction you need to move your avatar; you place the helmet over your head, seeing the login screen and hearing an ambient theme music, and you slide your hands into the gloves.

  Then, the moment I lived for. A gesture with your index finger and a sinuous line of pastel colours surges over you like a crashing wave, accompanied by a rushing sound like that of an aeroplane taking off. As your heart beats fast in expectation, the colours turn kaleidoscopic before crystalizing into the environment in front of your avatar.

  With a quick flick to bring up and then slide away one of the game settings menus, I checked the time. [Channel Dragonattack] ‘Six minutes, thirty seconds to start. We start on time. No delays for anyone. Long duration buffs on.’

  It was crucial to start on schedule. There were pe
ople in the raid from all over the world who were making sacrifices to be here. For those from India and further east, the timing probably wasn’t too bad, unless they were skipping work for the afternoon. For those west of me, on the other side of the Atlantic (we had a lot of Brazilians in this raid), it was about four in the morning.

  No delays for anyone. Except Raitha. I signalled I wanted to speak to him in private chat and he accepted, the flashing red chat bubble beside his name turning green.

  [Channel Tyro/Raitha] ‘You there? All good?’ I asked.

  [Channel Tyro/Raitha] ‘I am more than good, thank you, I’m PUMPED!’

  Raitha was from Kerala in India and was usually softly spoken. This declaration, however, was nearly a shout and it made me smile.

  Back my early days, Raitha and I had found each other and liked what we found: commitment, determination, drive, good skills. She - I say ‘she’ but I had a feeling it was a ‘he’ behind the avatar, not that I cared - was a warrior too. Two warriors are not normally a good combination. It works for one fight, after that you have massive downtime as you recover without the help of magical healing.

  Raitha and I smote our way through the mobs of the Kastrival Desert, recruiting healers to join us when we could, but pushing on together regardless. Hours and hours. Days and days. And yes, years too, four years. Fighting. Recovering. Maybe chatting a bit, mostly about tactics, although Raitha also had a taste for philosophy. Then fighting some more. Grinding out the levels and sharing everything that dropped without the slightest rivalry. By now, it felt as though Raitha was my sibling. Probably my older sibling, even though I was more of a raid leader than her.

  [Channel Tyro/Raitha] ‘Let’s do it then,’ I said and changed channel to make the announcement. [Channel Dragonattack] ‘Form up.’

  I was pleased to see an immediate response from the avatars all around me.

  [Channel Dragonattack] ‘Where do the druids go?’ an adult female voice asked. I didn’t recognise her. Then again, half the players in the raid were unfamiliar to me.

  [Channel Dragonattack] ‘If you are not sure about anything: where you should be, what your priority is, ask your section leader. Keep this channel clear for my voice and for emergencies.’ I tried not to sound like I was delivering a reprimand. We were all raid noobs once. Not that anyone here was less than level sixty. Most were at the game’s cap of seventy-five.

  By contrast with the main body of raiders, my section leaders were pretty much hand-picked and even the newest had raided a dozen times with me. Eighteen of them were veterans of the first time we fought Mikarkathat, the ice dragon. That had been a closely fought encounter. Close enough to give me the belief that victory was possible. [Channel Dragonattack] ‘Two minutes. Short-term buffs on. Electricity resistance on the tanks.’

  By now our formation was established. It was the one some gamers called the bull’s horns. Side by side in the centre of the formation were the raid’s two main tanks: Raitha and me. Curving forward to my left was half the army and to my right the other half. The reason for this formation was that when engaged, we’d envelop the dragon and once the warriors at the base had firmly gained the dragon’s attention, the rogues and backstabbers at the tips of the horns would run around behind her and do their worst.

  Not everyone was in line. I had two sections of hunters out of formation, behind me. Also, both Raitha and I each had a paladin immediately at our backs. These guys were doomed. And of course, the eight clerics were off to the side, to Raitha’s right. They had to get close enough to be able to land their heals but it was imperative that the clerics stay out of the way of the forked lightning that Mikarkathat would breathe against us.

  I raised my sword. [Channel Dragonattack] ‘Advance, walking pace.’

  The pleasure of leading an army of heroes against the most powerful dragon in Epic is hard to describe but I’ll try. In part, it was visual. When, in the real world, would you ever see anything like this? A windswept, heather-covered hill, a purple and navy sky, with two large, near-full moons ahead and a setting sun behind. With the darkest of our three shadows stretching ahead of us towards the crest of the hill, a hundred and twenty-three comrades in full battle-mode marched to the toughest battle of their game lives.

  Each one of us had already been on a journey of several years to arrive at this moment. Everywhere I looked was a figure to make me proud of being part of this army. Near me was Grythiss, a Shadow Knight lizardman. Wearing shimmering black plate mail, he walked tall, a lance in his hands with an emerald pennant. That had been his reward for completing the Serpent of the Golden Spire quest. I’d organised the final raid for him and, ever after, he’d never failed to turn up when I needed him. Right now, his forked tongue was flicking in and out of the gap in his polished helmet. It was as though he were nervous and excited, although surely the game’s animations were not smart enough to pick that up?

  Across to the right was Sapentia, an elven sorceress with turquoise hair and a gold-lined cloak to match. In the real world, she was well known for her hosting and writing Japanese dating sims. Here, she was a level seventy-five specialist in the art of elemental summoning and utterly disdainful of any attempt to flirt with her or mention her other role. Here, in other words, she was Sapentia and there was no other world.

  Everywhere I looked, whether I knew the person’s story or not, I saw resolute, skilful champions striding towards battle. And it made me proud to be leading them. A seventeen-year-old Irish kid from Cabra, one of Dublin’s most deprived and neglected areas.

  In case everyone wasn’t feeling the intensity of the moment enough - we all were, of course - I called up my Epic playlist and broadcast Ride of the Valkyries in the raid channel. It was something of a trademark of my raids.

  [Channel Tyro/Raitha] ‘My friend,’ said Raitha immediately, ‘this is what I live for.’

  [Channel Tyro/Raitha] ‘Me too.’

  With a glance at my comrade, I took a moment to appreciate that life was great. It really hadn’t been. Only in the last few months, when Mum had seen that I was becoming a celebrity and was able to earn some money from sponsorship, did the constant battle between us ease up. Naturally, she wanted me to concentrate on schoolwork. Equally naturally, I wanted to concentrate on Epic. Our conflict and the need for lying and secrecy about how much I was playing the game had made me utterly miserable at times. Her too, I’m sure. And even when Mum and I had been getting on together, there was still our grim, tedious battle with poverty to put me off the real world.

  It was all good now though.

  Raitha and I were the last to march over the curve of the hill and there in the rocky dip below us was Mikarkathat, staring right at us of course. She knew we were coming; she’d probably been waiting ever since that last raid when she had feasted on our bodies.

  This was the queen of the dragons. Mikarkathat was enormous. Her size alone made you feel your cause was hopeless. With her wings spread out, she’d have covered half a football field. Her head soared ten metres or so above the ground. And in her monstrous way, she was beautiful.

  Those outspread wings were an amazing opalescent colour, shot through with blue veins and a purple that began deep at her shoulders and faded to violet at the tips of her claws. A colour so dark a blue as to be nearly black ran along her jagged spine, while the underneath of her body was that opal-white again. The contrast between dark and light was so strong that Mikarkathat looked more like a snake than many dragons do. Her head, too, was serpentine, flat in shape, with wicked, black eyes and a wide mouth which you could see was full of sharp curved teeth when she dropped her lower jaw, as she was doing now to hiss at us.

  There was a lot of murmuring and swearing in the main channel from those who had never seen Mikarkathat before. And also from those who had.

  [Channel Dragonattack] ‘Stay at a walk,’ I instructed and the voices immediately ceased, at least in the raid channel; probably they were swearing away in their sections, which was fine. �
��Our right flank needs to edge away more.’

  Mikarkathat was on the rise, it seemed as though the whole hillside was lifting up. An incredible, deep whomp sound swept over us as she beat her wings. You could feel it in your body. And another. And another. The dragon was airborne.

  [Channel Dragonattack] ‘Warriors: charge!’

  It seemed as though the dragon was looking directly at me with her wicked eyes and perhaps she had singled me out (did she even remember me?), for with a huge roar she plunged downward and from her fearsome jaws blasted lightning at me and those immediately beside me. On our previous attempt, this initial, shocking pulse of purple and white electricity had knocked out about a third of the raid and even though we resurrected the dead as fast as we could, we never caught up.

  This time, only two of the dozen warriors who had run slightly ahead of the rest of the raid were dead. Admittedly, all of us had suffered significant drops in our hit points, but this was still a good start.

  [Channel Dragonattack] ‘Move in to position but wait until Raitha has the aggro before attacking.’

  We didn’t want the dragon spinning around taking out characters left, right and centre. Not at all, we wanted her focused on Raitha (and me), the toughest warriors in Epic.

  In the past year, when we had started to organise raids in earnest, Raitha and I had decided to diverge in our priorities for character advancement. I’d gone for pure defence; she’d gone for the ability to hold the monster’s attention with aggro-creating abilities and gear. So now, Raitha was triggering every means she had of building hate in the dragon.

  Streams of black vapour poured towards Mikarkathat from a mace that Raitha was brandishing. This was a quest reward, Oveade’s Mace of the Pit. It was a crappy weapon to hit with, but you could target a creature and draw its rage upon you with the mace’s Demonic Taunt effect, one of the best aggro-creating spells in the game. I knew too that Raitha would be mashing her Taunt ability as fast as she could. I had a macro for that and it was constantly pushing Taunt for me so that I was building up aggro too, that way, if Raitha died the dragon would attack me and remain facing in its current direction rather than turn on someone else.