The Battle

The first page belongs to the game. A skill fires, finds no fitting soul, and the world forms one out of the Great Nothing: an ancient Basilisk, reborn inside a temple, its roar blowing out the coloured glass. (The skill is Brood Hen; in The Duty Max used one on basilisk eggs.) Lonely, sensing only the spark of an unborn king far to the east whom it must serve, it grieves, and its grief turns hundreds of players at its feet to stone. Shot, poisoned and burned in a stone trap, it is freed by a bomb packed with mithril shrapnel, ploughs east through the city and dies across the outer wall’s gate tower, apologising to its lord. The world declines to unmake its soul; the chat later counts more than 3,500 players dead.

In his castle courtyard Max feels the ground jump and does the religious arithmetic. The altar of the Bright-Faced One’s Main Temple has fallen from level 6 to level 1, so every worshipper of the Light now loses 5 per cent of their experience; the Dark keeps its First Temple, Lolth’s shrine and Aule’s. His staff, a demon’s soul caged in crystal above an adamant sting, has been licking the god’s blood off its blade and snaps at his fingers until he roars it down. He licks the blood from his own palm, then orders the lame goblin Timur to shoot him, so the gift sets as an immunity; Timur picks the knee. His officers lick the staff in turn, and the albino troll Umka begs the last hardened drop for his wife Bomba, who has grown suspiciously round.

His mother, over the shock of her kidnapping, plays nanny to toddlers in a sandbox. Badabum, the clan’s bomber, walks back from the respawn hall in issue trousers counting new achievements: Widow-Maker, Personal Enemy of God, Saint Unmercenary. Max swears him to secrecy and plans more temple bombings. Then, eyeing Tavor’s masterless castle, he goes to ask the Fallen One for blood for an uber-golem, the Juggernaut.

Chapter 2 cuts to Earth, to a grey panel block where people have slept well for a month because a vampire clan out of AlterWorld is feeding there quietly. Their Patriarch, an NPC woken to thought by a player’s spark, escaped a Frontier dungeon when a rare amulet’s random jump threw the clan through the curtain between worlds. The youngest picks a bride at an open window.

In the empty First Temple, the gods just gone, Max gathers eight vials of floating Sparks of Divine Presence and two doses of the gods’ leftover cocktail. Then the discovery that shapes the book: in Tavor’s lair time runs fast. His mother spent six hours captive there while ten minutes passed outside. He sends Lizka, the drow he made in a hiring generator, out of his bedroom; there is no closeness like the one he had with Taali, and no jolt like the one he feels near Ruata. Falling asleep, he uses his princely powers to have every suit of armour in the drow House of Night painted pink.

A chat montage follows: Light players defecting, mithril shards on sale, a Russian graffito on the cathedral ruins. The castle’s hellhounds lap up his spilled coffee and get high, and he orders a ration for every hound. Then a hundred parents and grandparents of the hospice children fill the Main Hall to take them home. Max calls up the Fallen One’s power, the darkness thickens and his figure swells, and he lays down the law: the children stay, enrolled as if in a military school, and relatives may join only by going perma. He gilds the hall, and the goblin rogue Vzhik, ninety-five in real life, tells a grandmother the mind grows young after the crossing. If time runs fast in Tavor’s refuge, the children could grow strong there; it tops his list.

In an echo from the infosphere, an unnamed Olympian mourns the Bright-Faced One’s wound and wants Max kept alive in endless torment. The coffee joke has gone sour: fifty berserk hounds flipped from allied green to hostile red inside the castle, so Orkus fits armoured doors and the engineer Pribluda’s crossbow turrets. Three hounds, Spark among them, go with him to Inferno with coffee kegs strapped on like St Bernards, to buy the help of the packs there. Klop of military intelligence has warned of a hundred thousand Light players on the way.

His summoning ring drops a cargo portal right under him, and a Higher Demon leads him through to Asmodeus’s Lesser Citadel. There a hundred ear-cutters, the drow women soldiers of his clan, drill a blow of air that needs no casting under a winged demon, and Max recalls designing them as future wives for his men with feminism left out, one of the passages reviewers object to most. Asmodeus, gaunt from rebuilding his army, presents the general of his Silver Legion, a soul pulled back after two thousand years. Could Taali be brought back the same way? No: after nine days a mortal soul drinks from the River of Oblivion. Max lets her go. The allies plan a joint parade in five days and drink to the union, and Max asks to be put into Tavor’s body.

Chapter 5 opens on his mailbag. Klop calls him an idiot: the temple strike has made the West take the Dark seriously, a lavishly funded new clan has hired two thousand high-level mercenaries, with rumours of camouflaged instructors, and the Russian cluster is to become Mordor. A spy inside the Chinese clan Shuifong reports a 27,000-strong coalition aimed at the First Temple and the Alliance castles, slave pens ready, and warns that the pro-Russian Maoist clan will be crushed without help. In Asmodeus’s arena he strips off his gear, leaves a quarter-tonne aviation bomb beside his own body, gives Kutuzov secret orders and a password, and wakes inside Tavor: level 340, an adamant wound still weeping in the shoulder, patchwork power armour studded with red crystals of Divine Blood. The fee, the Necklace of Blood, falls due later.

The Gate drops him into the tomb of the sleeping god, among heaps of bones around a cracked crystal sarcophagus. Out of a pile rises Humungus, his bear mount, starved, grey and scarred, who knows him only when Max says his own name. A voice counts twenty-nine years. It is the mercenary Max digitised by force in Inferno, still level 12, a bearded madman in a scrap of bear hide who has spent three decades of crypt time training on the bear: five years before he first killed it, ever since eating it, and in his raving a tally of 109,000 deaths. He beats the level-340 body to a pulp and kills Humungus again. Max forces his hand through the crack in the lid into the sleeper’s open wound, licks the blood, and from then on takes 90 per cent less damage in melee; Tavor’s war cries drive the madman off into stealth.

Max plants his Portal Beacon (one minute outside is a week inside) and kneels to apologise to the dead bear. Beyond a low arch lies a spiral techno-tunnel of droid Stations, levels 200 to 300, that drop holed octagonal coins, platinum and blueprints; Pribluda’s turrets keep him alive. A flashback has him, a week earlier, feeding rare gifts to the Veterans’ castle hearth and calling on Hestia, a thread the book never pays off. Back in the crypt he reads the interface, decides the sleeper is Chronos, master of time, and resolves neither to kill nor to wake him. With under six days before the First Temple’s immunity ends, about 150 years of crypt time, he will level his clan here and sell perma souls new high-level bodies.

Upstairs, a magic veil tastes his borrowed blood and lets him through. Tavor’s fawning steward reports a fresh batch of slaves and asks whether to ease the torture of Tavor’s father; Max cancels every torture in the castle. In the octagonal Control Hall the orc torturer Vasilyok sees through the act and takes him by the throat, and Max orders eight heavy golems onto him and drags the whole heap through a portal to Inferno.

Asmodeus carves runes into Vasilyok’s back and throws him into the real Hell, and out of the fiery window falls a man burned black: Georgy Matveev, a Court Councillor of Catherine the Great’s Secret Expedition, nearly three centuries in Gehenna, now a level-30 Assassin. Asmodeus returns Max to his own body and takes the Necklace. Then Orkus’s emergency code: the Light has started early, on every front. Asmodeus lends the general and two hundred level-300 demons of the Silver Legion, and the new clan’s squads are already massacring Dark newcomers in the starting zones.

The crypt base, meanwhile, lives like a submarine: a hundred people in curtained bunks, officers months older playing cards for octagonal coins, the clan’s average level up four in two hours, and Pribluda brooding over droid parts. Orkus’s report is grim: nine Alliance castles attacked and three taken, two through moles; the Maoists lost unless helped within twelve hours; the cigarette factory and the fields burned, seven clan members held hostage against the hospice children, and complaints on Earth accusing the clan of kidnapping. Mladkor asks whether this is war.

The enemy’s own chat log shows a campaign run like a modern military operation whose hired clans loot and disobey. Max’s Analyst counts 408 fighters, seventy hounds, the dragons, forty-two golems and a Juggernaut 80 per cent built, which the Fallen One, amused to be a golem’s godfather, has agreed to bless. Max orders a mirror strategy of scattered raids, blows to the enemy’s purse and no mercy for mercenaries, and drives Lolth’s blade into the table; the officers’ steel follows and the table collapses. The raids are told from the victims’ side: bombs in a Temple of Hermes and the Bright-Faced One’s Small Temple, the rubble signed by the white beast, and 288 players of the Young Europeans walled into a dungeon.

At the Veterans’ Southern castle Dan and General Frag watch fifteen hundred attackers break the dome. On a hillock a camouflaged instructor lounges in an armchair under a parasol beside five bound prisoners, an obvious trap, and Max steps out of a portal alone. An astral storm shuts off teleportation and thirty fighters close in. He pins the instructor to his chair with the adamant sting and cuts the first wave down with the staff alone. When a hundred more arrive he fights two-handed, staff and Lolth’s Spider Dagger, every victim crumbling into spiders while he heals and levels, and Lolth’s laughing face forms in the clouds. Barely fifteen escape. Max gives the signal and collapses, dozens of portals pour out his clan, General Frag leads the sortie, and Lolth, as a beautiful maiden, kneels over the fallen priest and strokes his hair.

The author’s free chapters end there; the rest is pieced together from readers. The fight on the hillock was, his readers’ wiki says, a mass sacrifice to Lolth, and the strangers’ skills, knowledge and memories it poured into Max drown his mind. A reader on the author’s forum has him reassemble himself out of the Great Nothing; the borrowed skills are gone, but, the author replied, he keeps his former self. Ruata, by the wiki, pulls his mind free against her goddess’s will, and Lolth excommunicates and curses her. Someone teaches him how souls come back: the more people remember you the better, and three loving children guarantee rebirth.

The Dark Pantheon has a family row. Macaria rages at mass excommunications made in her name, the Fallen One lashes out, and Max, caught between them, remembers his father’s advice never to step into a family quarrel; at one crisis his god does not answer his call. Somewhere in these chapters (the sources do not say exactly where) the Juggernaut is stolen. The thief is Pribluda, the Belarusian golem genius who built it; a space-breach module throws him and the uber-golem out of AlterWorld into Eve-4, a science-fiction virtual world without magic, readers say. The author’s explanation on his forum was that they would not let the man create, and punched him in the face.

Everyone wants to level free in the time crypt, nobody to stand on the walls, and Max reaches for Napoleon:

“Napoleon was right: those who do not wish to feed their own army…”

His war aims: help the good, punish the bad, frighten everyone else; an adviser warns against moving Chinese allies into the Russian cluster.

Under a military-intelligence agent’s eye, Max and his officers watch a slideshow of real-world killings; one Czech reader nearly gave up the book here. Max decides to go to war for the Maoists, reasoning that Russians finish wars rather than start them. The Fallen One, a Cloak of Darkness on his shoulders and universes dancing round him, comes out onto a porch, a sullen Macaria behind him, and promises to be the army’s banner.

The counter-offensive falls on Shuifong’s castles. Gates open onto one after another, a golem kicks arriving enemies into the gates like footballs, a FAB-500 bomb goes off at fifty metres, and Shuifong’s colossus turns out to stand on feet of clay. Max picks up a castle at half price, with five thousand angry Shuifong fighters under the walls. Then the spy-diplomat Lazar arranges an address: from the real world, the President of Russia, New Russia and Little Russia speaks to the pioneers of the Frontier and decorates the defenders, and someone in the hall sobs. Reviewers single out this scene, the asides admiring Stalin and the West cast as the enemy; the book was written between April and September 2014.

By the readers’ wiki (quoting Chapter 18), Max summons a goddess for Aule and as a counterweight to Lolth: Yavanna, the smith-god’s wife, who sinks from the temple dome onto the altar slab with her eyes shut and her face twisted by the Void. Her blood turns to green diamonds, his mother becomes her High Priestess, and Ruata, for saving his mind, one of her priests. Barrymore wakes Max in a panic: the Nameless One is suffering, roaring and weeping. “Refugees flood the Valley,” says the English blurb, and the slow masses of the Russian cluster finally stir and arm. Couriers step into the crypt for a smoke and come back a week later; the greedy pig whispers that one Basilisk is not only a weapon against enemy cities but ten or twenty unique artefacts, while the creature’s grieving call pulls Max the other way. The book stops mid-stride on news that the First Temple’s immunity falls tomorrow.