Bog Standard Isekai-Book 5 - Hogg Interlude (part 2)

Bog Standard Isekai-Book 5 - Hogg Interlude (part 2)

If Hogg thought he was going to get to see what was inside the castle, he was disappointed. Instead, the illusion shifted and truly gargantuan tent walls seemed to grow out of the distant mountains and cover the entire world. All sorts of people and animals appeared. Herds of horses rode in rings, elephants stood on their hind legs, dragons climbed on themselves to form pyramids, and one truly massive mile-long dragon lazily let out a steady gout of flame that trapeze artists threw themselves through.
That was all window dressing and Hogg barely gave it a second glance, except to note that Keetes must not mind that they knew there were [Illusionists] here. Their enemy probably figured that if Hogg hadn't thrown down an Eveladis already, he didn't mean to. He was right on that count.
The castle wall had transformed into a wooden ring separating the outside from the inside, and a cadre of circus performers stood inside waiting for them. Hogg would bet that these ones were more real.
The one illusion outside the ring that Hogg did pay attention to was a juggler, practically as tall as a mountain. He wore colorful clothes and face-paint and looked like could squish Hogg's entire group at any moment if he stepped wrong as he danced around. He dropped one of his balls, and Hogg, Odessa, Jeeves, and Bedelia dashed inside the open doorway to avoid it.
He noticed with [Shadow Sight] that something actually did land right where the illusionary ball had fallen. It felt like stone, maybe from a catapult.
He'd long since noticed that high-level [Illusionists] liked to couch their illusions on top of something real. He'd always done it, too. For some reason, it was more effective to put a giant bear on top of himself and fight with his shortswords than it would be to use the bear as a distraction and strike from behind. He'd always given tactical reasons for that, but Brin's book made him think it was the Wyrd. When you made people know that your illusions always had at least some truth to them, you brought them into your game and made them play along. You strengthened your argument, as Brin would put it.
A man swung down on a rope, holding it lightly with one hand. His other held a scepter with a diamond head, which he also used to keep his top hat in place. He wore the overdressed uniform of an archaic general, and had a tremendous mustache.
He treated the act of swinging through the air on a rope as if it were effortless, and for him it would be. That was Keetes.
Obviously not the real Keetes. He wouldn’t be that stupid. Hogg thought he saw Odessa throw a spike in that direction just in case, though.
“Ladies and gentlemen! Boys and girls! Welcome, one and all! And what a show we have for you tonight! You’ll see feats of might and agility! Brave warriors, cunning tricksters, alluring dancers to inflame the passions! And beasts! We have the best horses of Prinnash, the great mammoths of Olland, and even the jungle terrors of far away Polissia. So start the music! Cue the lights! And for those of you joining us for the first time, put your hands together for the Great Circus of Dunsting!”
A swell of music began when Keetes mentioned it, and spotlights cast the entire arena into darkness except for Keetes himself and Hogg’s group.
Hogg, Odessa, Jeeves, and Bedelia reflexively moved to the center of the lit area and turned back to back. The music changed to something tense and mysterious. There were bird calls, leaves in the wind, and the sounds of animals moving through underbrush.
“The place: Polissia. The time? Unknown. Empires have risen and fallen in the outside world, but since time immemorial, the jungles of Polissia have remained unchanged...”
Hogg tuned out the exposition. It was ignorant, anyway. Polissia didn't have much in the way of jungle, it was nearby Sarnut you wanted. He understood the need to set the mood for your audience, but you could at least make an effort to get your facts right.
By the growling sounds coming from the darkness around them, Hogg figured that they'd attack with lions next. It was the right tactical move if you identified Odessa as the greatest threat in the group. The [Assassin's] power came with some trade-offs. One was how many Achievements focused on stealth—she wouldn't always be stronger than a [Warrior] at the same level. The other problem was that many of her Skills specialized on human opponents. She'd be weaker than her [Rogue] base Class when it came to fighting animals.
Odessa made the hand sign for
swap me
.
He cast crackling bolts of shadow around his hand, as if he were gathering energy, and then slammed his palm into the ground. “[Armaments of Shadow].”
A wall of darkness surrounded them, and when it returned their enemy was treated to the sight of him, Jeeves and Bedelia covered in heavy black armor. Odessa looked unchanged, except that in actuality, he’d transformed Bedelia into a mirror of Odessa, and Odessa was now sitting inside a shell of hard light to look like an armored Bedelia.
A lion crashed into the false Odessa before anyone could react, raking its claws against her back and biting into her neck. Creating fake blood was not easy with hard light–liquids were tricky to emulate–but again Hogg’s time in the tower proved its worth. He cast the spell to make Bedelia’s arteries spout streams of red.
In actuality, the lion had managed to score some gouges into the hard light construct. It wasn’t invincible, it just didn’t really matter much if it broke because it cost him little to summon more.
Jeeves was quick on the draw and killed the lion in turn before the false Odessa even hit the ground, and then Hogg reflexively ducked, obeying instincts he’d learned to never doubt.
A second lion appeared over his head. He was sure this time–they had some kind of teleportation pounce ability. Nasty things. It landed on the ground and swiveled. He shot a spear of hard light at it, already summoning a band of arrows, but every time he got close to striking it the beast blinked away again.
Jeeves was struck in the side from one of the lions, and then from the front by another. He dropped his sword and physically pulled one of the lions off, tossing it away, but it just bounced and leapt onto him again. The lions clawed and tore at Jeeves’s black armor, and the mind controlling the construct let pieces of the armor get torn away.
One crashed into Odessa, also armored in hard light, and awkwardly stabbed at it with a spike, losing most of the lethal grace she’d had against human opponents.
Hogg was able to keep the lion stalking him at a distance by sending a constant barrage of projectiles, but he couldn’t pin it down. He’d already seen their weakness, though. They really didn’t like disengaging when they had their teeth into their prey.
He held his arms wide, and without delay, the lion blinked on top of him, mouth open for his throat. He pushed a bar of hard light into its mouth, wedging it open. The lion scratched with its hind-legs and gouged his hard light armor, but it was already too late. Hogg stabbed it with a spear of hard light from the side, then bubbled it out from inside the beast, using some nice words in the Language like <Explode> and <Burst>. The lion popped into two parts.
The rest of them retreated; no doubt their masters didn’t want to waste any more before they knew they had to. The lights went dark and when they came on again, a wide space was clear. A woman with only a few leaves of clothing and elven ears sat atop a unicorn a good distance away. She held a bow, and the horse was already at a full gallop.
“The sands of time pass quickly for the mortal races, but there are those who watch the mountains rise and fall and laugh. The immortal races. Elenaril Springbow has mastered the art of archery over the course of a hundred thousand years! Watch in awe as she…”
Hogg turned to look at the fallen Bedelia pretending to be Odessa and yelled, “No! Odessa!”
He ran towards her, summoning a fake potion. If he could pretend to heal her, he could put Bedelia back in the fight. He noticed that the real Odessa had disappeared during the brief blackout, which was fair. A crucible where your enemies sent specialized units one after another to try to suss out your weaknesses wasn’t really an [Assassin’s] scene.
The first arrow nearly took him out. It shot straight through Hogg’s hard light armor, then through his leather coat. Luckily, passing through the coat redirected the arrow just barely enough to move it away from his body, but that was lucky.
He summoned more shields of hard light in the air, wedge-shaped because his magic couldn’t actually stop them head on. The arrows weren’t fair, though, and they didn’t come from the same direction. Keetes must’ve been using that one elf illusion to disguise an entire team of [Hunters].
Some of his shields deflected arrows, many of them shattered, and he found himself dancing like a fool to avoid the rest, stretching his Dexterity to its limits. What made it extra tricky was the fact that he could only “see” about thirty feet, but the elf would send fake arrows that his instincts couldn’t help but dodge.
Through the hard light armor he’d put on the real Odessa, he could feel where she was. She wasn’t going towards the archers. He was on his own for now.
Well, he wasn’t going to make up any ground just dodging around here. One option would be to send back projectiles of hard light. He could
probably
take care of things that way, but his hard light lost a lot of power at long distances. No, this is what consumables were for.
He pulled out a fireball wand from his storage bag and set it off. It screeched and shot towards the archers, a massive ball of glowing death. It would definitely destroy anything it touched, but it wasn’t all that fast. It was a nice distraction though, and the arrows momentarily stopped. The [Illusionists] did a pretty good on-the-fly thing that made it look like the elf girl sucked the fireball up into a magic wand, but Hogg was already sending his next thing.
He shot swarms of consumables at the archers, using his hard light as slings and catapults. Little paper balls exploded into sound and light that even the [Illusionists] couldn’t fully repress. Scrolls encased in hard shells hit the ground and cast themselves, sending torrents of cutting water or blades of air. He didn’t know the exact positions of the archers–they kept moving–but he didn’t need to. These were wide-area spells cast by quality [Mages] in the tower. A slew of kill notifications told him they were effective.
A lion appeared on his back, and managed to gouge his thigh with its thrashing before Jeeves grabbed it and tossed it away. Hogg covered the wound with hard light and stood as if he were invincible and unbothered. Appearances were everything.
An [Assassin] appeared above the fallen fake Odessa and held a knife to her neck. “Stop right there.”
They hadn’t even sent a real guy out, this was pure illusion. They were getting desperate. Hogg pointed and made Odessa's head explode. “She was weak.”
The illusion faded out. Whoever was controlling it didn’t even have the presence of mind to make the [Assassin] jump away. Hogg couldn’t read the Wyrd like Brin could, but that meant that he was winning, right? They weren’t even playing by their own rules. They were making mistakes. Getting desperate.
He noticed that Odessa was moving up now. Had she found a second floor? Apparently, there really was a second floor here.
He decided to join her rather than wait around and see what challenge the “circus” would come up for him next. He dismissed Jeeves, letting him sink into a shadow, and then summoned a moving machine for himself. He still hadn’t figured out how to make Brin’s flying machines, but he had experimented with moving himself and if it was across ground he could go
really
fast.
The author's tale has been misappropriated; any instances of this story on Amazon.
It was an amalgamation of springs and wheels, using machinery that would never work with anything except hard light. It looked kind of awkward but it worked, and soon Hogg was barrelling across the ground at speeds that would make a [Courier] jealous.
He ran into a wall. His thirty feet only gave him a split second to react, it wasn’t enough to slow himself down. He turned his body so that he wasn’t head first and then ran through six sheets of hard light designed to slow him before hitting the wall. He got to his feet and then rushed to the open door. To his relief, he saw that it led to a staircase.
In the stairwell, he could manage his sightlines pretty well. No one was around, and he would be able to spot anyone entering or leaving. He groaned and he sank to the floor. That was a broken rib or two, and his leg still throbbed from earlier. He allowed himself five, no, ten seconds of rest, and then fished in his pouch for medicine. He wouldn’t waste his only Healing potion on this; instead he took something for the pain, something to get his energy up, and a pill to increase his healing spell. Then he used hard light to bind everything in place and started the walk up the stairs. By the time he got to the top, he felt as good as new again.
Right before he opened the door to the next floor, he noticed people entering the stairwell below. He tossed out a particularly nasty potion of flame down and then walked through, shutting the door behind him.
A hundred soldiers were waiting for him at the end of a long hall. The walls were all stone like the castles in movies, a red carpet on the floor, and armored statues on the sides.
Not all of the soldiers were real, but plenty of them were, and numbers were numbers. He summoned Jeeves and Bedelia back to him, and they rose like spirits from shadows on the ground.
Then he summoned more soldiers to join the enemies. After all, they started the game of swelling their numbers with fake copies, and he could do the same. He grinned when he noticed that none of them reacted to seeing more copies added to their ranks. These men were trained not to make a big deal out of [Illusionist] shenanigans.
They charged towards him as one, yelling, and making a show. He bet they hoped he’d be intimidated and run back down, but they had no such luck. He made his own copies of hard light run faster, bumping them into the men next to them so they’d know they were real.
Then he pointed, and the head of the leading man burst open in a swell of flaming shadow. He pointed and three more of his fakes died in the same way. One man was lashed by a tendril of darkness and pulled into the ceiling where a mouth full of jagged teeth was waiting for him. He screamed, and kept screaming. Hogg had the men he controlled start to slow down. They jibbered in fear and the real enemies who might have kept charging regardless had to stop when they ran into the bodies of the men in front of them. The whole press slowed to walking speed.
Hogg sent out a stream of black snakes and spiders, and when they got to his hard light constructs, they climbed up, biting and then sinking into their skin. The hard light men screamed in fear and then agony as they were transformed in front of the eyes of their comrades. They changed into evil monstrosities, hands giving way to claws or bone hooks, eyes melting and then growing to stalks.
Then they turned and fought. Some of the men were braver and stood firm. Some were smarter and noticed they didn’t actually recognize any of the ones who’d turned. They all died, and the rest fled. There were several side-doors that the illusions hadn’t shown. Again, their game was breaking down.
Hogg followed Odessa, remembering to turn her hard light shell back to her real shape now that he had Bedelia back beside him. Hopefully she was out of sight, whatever she was doing. He reached the end of the hall, blasted open the doors, and stepped through.
Keetes was there. He wore the same performer outfit that he’d had as an illusion, but Hogg thought that this was the real guy. He smiled, looking confident.
The illusion changed. Suddenly, there was no long hallway behind him, and the room was much larger than it should be. Not just large, they were outside. He’d never really given it much thought before, but it was
really
annoying to fight [Illusionists]. How were they on the ground floor again? He knew he had gone up some stairs, but he could
feel
the desert wind. He could feel the sun on his face.
One thing he knew from his [Illusionist] life was that he couldn’t let it get to him. The people who always needed an answer were the ones who died first. The opponents who he really struggled against were the ones who just went with the flow, who kept fighting even if nothing made sense.
Keetes wasn’t alone. Three lions stood in front of him, one badly injured. Four dozen soldiers with various exotic weapons, a row of badly scorched and injured archers behind him. There were three men in robes, casters of some sort. And he really did have some Ollandish mammoths, five of them, with an armored [Knight] atop each one.
Apparently, the [Ringleader] was done sending specialists one by one trying to suss out a weakness. He’d swarm him with everything he had.
Back in his [Illusionist] days, Hogg would be in trouble. Even as a [Conjuror of Hard Light], he would be in trouble. But he was a [Mage] now.
The first step was thanks to Brin again. He’d gotten that interesting word, and he’d made it work. <Laser>
It didn’t burn like Brin said his light did. Hard light cast with <Laser> didn’t hurt what it touched at all; the spell stopped the second it hit anything at all. All it did was make a super-thin line of hard light appear instantly. Not super interesting on its own, but what if he summoned a thousand of them?
He fed the commands to his Lightmind, and it sputtered, failing to take hold of his magic. He tried again, sweating now. Another failure. Keetes was opening his mouth to say something, some stupid villain monologue, probably. Hogg tried again, and felt the drain on his Mana.
A web of black threads appeared, enclosing the entire space, filling it with lines of hard light. The first man who flinched received horrible cuts all over his hand. It made him panic and he thrashed around in the cutting web which made it worse and worse. The lions reacted the same way, yowling with pain. Those who held still were fine, and those with armor or tough skin would still be able to move through it. That was hardly the point. The point was, Hogg now had a perfect map of where every single person and creature was in this room.
He let loose. Spears and swords, grasping hands, smashing boulders, and spinning sawblades. Multiple attacks from hard light struck every single enemy in the area, all at the same time. The carnage was unspeakable; even with Hogg’s history it was a memorable slaughter. Keetes managed to bat away the attacks aimed at him, and all the [Knights] survived, though they had to drop down from their mammoths who were now charging wildly in a panic.
Hogg gasped at the Mana drain; that was nearly all of it. He’d barely be able to keep Jeeves and Bedelia going at this rate.
The two Shadow Elementals rushed to take on the [Knights], but they didn’t overwhelm them like they had the [Assassins]. Their armor had few openings, and Hogg’s couldn’t give his constructs the power to bash through the enchantments, not right now. When Keetes joined them, it got worse. [Ringleader] was a Class for empowering people the way that [Beast Masters] empowered beasts, and the five [Knights] now fought with the strength of ten. Hogg couldn’t keep up.
A [Knight] swung down and cut Bedelia’s hands off. Hogg couldn’t stop it, so he chugged a Mana potion, and bought some time.
Bedelia looked down at her hands, now stubs bleeding black onto the ground. “No. No!” Milky white tears poured from her eyes. “No! Help me Reggie!”
Jeeves lost all his cool composure when he saw Bedelia’s state. “Amy, no!’
He lurched towards her, but soon took a spear through the chest. Still he fought on, with trembling steps to try to make it to Bedelia.
Bedelia screamed in horror as she saw Jeeves take wounds. “Reggie!”
Jeeves was pinned to the ground by the spear-wielder. Another raised a sword to take his head.
“Amy!”
Both constructs died, melting into shadow. Hogg received the memories of the Split Minds who were controlling them, both of whom were delighted in the dramatic display.
Odessa, screaming with anger, appeared from nowhere with an iron spike in her hands and fury in her eyes. She struck two furious blows against Keetes, who managed to block them both. She dashed back, zoomed in again, and again, Keetes managed to disappear again.
It looked like she had the upper hand, but that was only looks. This was a bad matchup for Odessa; [Assassins] traded stealth for defense which meant that they were in danger fighting openly. A [Warrior] against an [Assassin] at the same level would usually leave both of them dead, and that wasn’t even counting the [Knights] who were now circling to defend their master.
Hogg shot a couple arrows of hard light, all he could manage until the Mana potion kicked in, and thought desperately about what consumables he still had that could help here.
Keetes didn’t defend against his arrows. Instead, right before they struck, the [Ringleader] burst into a flurry of flapping wings. Odessa might have been quick enough to catch and kill the little wings, except instead of flying away, they disappeared.
Now all that was left were the [Knights]. Odessa circled around to stand behind him, and Hogg did his best to look intimidating. He lengthened the shadows with the dregs of his power, growing armor back over his leathers, and lifting a sword into his hands.
They should surrender. Their duty here was done now that their master had fled. But [Knights] didn’t always see things that way.
After a tense stand-off, the [Knights] dropped their weapons. Hogg stifled a sigh of relief. He wasn’t sure if Odessa would accept a surrender, so he quickly wrapped their arms in bands of hard light, which grew stronger as his Mana pool filled. Maybe accepting their surrender was a bad idea, but… well, Hogg’s son was a [Knight], for Nedramus’ sake.
Odessa seemed more interested in where Keetes had gone anyway. She looked around, and padded over to where he’d been to tap the ground with her foot. “What happened?”
Hogg searched his memories. He always had a Visible Eye around to [Inspect] everything. He dismissed the Split Mind controlling it, and searched for an answer.
Keetes had a pretty long status screen for him to look over, but none of that answered his question. What about that scepter? No, just a magical focus with some mental manipulation powers. Maybe valuable, but not for him. He noticed a memory of a thin slip of metal around Keetes’s neck. It had been under his clothes, but in the fighting a tiny sliver peeked out long enough for Hogg’s eye to [Inspect] it.
Amulet of Perfect Escape - Those chosen by Arcaena shall not be permitted to die.
“Damn,” said Hogg.
“What is it?” Odessa asked.
“Arcaena has gifted her personal escape Skill to those of her favored servants,” said Hogg.
“Ah. How frustrating,” said Odessa.
“So we failed. At that part, at least,” said Hogg.
“I wouldn’t say that,” said Odessa.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, if I brag about it and then it doesn’t happen, I’ll look quite silly, won’t I?”
Hogg waited, tapping his foot. After maybe half a minute, another notification popped up. He normally muted his kill notifications for later perusal, but this one was interesting.
You have defeated: Keetes the [Ringleader] 55
Experience split between party members based on contribution.
Hogg laughed. “I should’ve known. Poison?”
She tsked. “Don’t be crude.”
The illusion started to fall. They really were in a tower. A very large tower, though it thinned as it went higher. The breeze he’d felt was answered by open windows, and the sun on his skin had just been a good illusion.
Out the windows, he could see the other part of their plan coming to fruition. An Eveladis burst in the distance. Then another in a different direction. Both revealed a fleeing [Illusionist].
“How do they land them so precisely?” Odessa asked. She walked up close, putting a hand on his shoulder as they gazed out.
“[Trappers] have the whole perimeter closed off. They set their traps to chuck an Eveladis at anyone crossing the boundary. Then we just go off and round them up. [Illusionists] are valuable. It’d be a shame to waste them,” said Hogg.
“Hm, is that so?” asked Odessa, neither agreeing nor disagreeing. She leveled from killing, after all. In her eyes, leaving anyone alive was a waste.
Soon, Frenarian soldiers arrived to take the [Knights] into custody and Hogg and Odessa climbed further up the tower. No further dangers presented themselves, though Odessa kept stumbling so that she’d have a chance to grab his hand.
They made it, and the top floor resembled a lighthouse. There was an opening in the wall for light to shine through, and a giant mirrored gemstone, as high as he was tall, dominated the center of the chamber.
It was beautiful. Even now, inert and unpowered, it sparkled in the light, casting prisms of color on the walls. He reached out a hand and touched it.
“This is it. It’s really here,” he breathed.
“It’s what they said, then?” Odessa asked. “This [Illusionist] spell focus can project illusions to anywhere in the world?”
“We were right. I think hitting this with an Eveladis would’ve destroyed it,” Hogg said. “But as for what it can do… I think the Tower will spend years unraveling everything it can do.”
“Ah. Well, unfortunately for them, I wasn’t paid by the Tower.”
Hogg had to think a second about what she just said, and when the implications set in, his heart was sent racing. She held a spike in her hands, a slight smile, a dangerous glimmer in her eye.
The double cross by the [Assassin] was the most predictable thing ever. So how had he missed this? He didn’t have any illusions that he would be able to do more than flinch before she drove that spike through his brain.
Think
. What did he really know about Odessa? She hinted she was being paid by someone else, but she didn’t really need money. No one at their level really did. She liked wearing pretty dresses and going to parties and being popular. So what she
needed
was legitimacy, and she got that by toeing the line. She didn’t kill anyone if she wasn’t directed, which meant that getting to cut loose like this was a rare treat. She didn’t get paid for killing. The killing
was
the payment. Or so he thought.
Obviously, there was something else going on here. Who were the usual suspects? Prinnash? Not likely. There were three dukes in Frenaria who might…
Odessa giggled, then broke down laughing, putting her spike away. “Oh, I do apologize, but the look on your face? Priceless.”
“What?” Hogg asked, pulse still pounding.
“I was joking, of course. I work for the love of country and loyalty to the crown, dear man. And I
was
paid for this little venture, and not by the Tower. No, it was Lumina who funded this operation.”
“Oh,” said Hogg.
He’d been right on the tip of resummoning Jeeves and Bedelia, and now that he relaxed they both appeared in a cloud of darkness.
“Inappropriate, my lady,” scolded Jeeves.
“That was really rude, miss!” said Bedelia.
Odessa clapped in delight. “Oh, you aren’t dead? Wonderful! I was horrified when I thought you’d kicked the bucket.”
Naturally, a bucket appeared next to Bedelia. Jeeves leaned to the side and whispered, “Don’t do it.”
Odessa smirked and then turned back to the gemstone. She snaked an arm around Hogg’s waist and said, “Let’s get this little bauble back to your mistress, shall we?”
Hogg nodded. She was nuts, but he had to admit, this type of thing really made him feel young again. For a moment they just stood there, gazing at the gemstone together.

.
!
Book 5 - Hogg Interlude (part 2)