Skye is the Limit by Phenomenal Pen (best time to read books txt) 📕

His celebration was short-lived because the long, talon-like fingers regenerated with the arrival of waves upon waves of Orc reinforcements.

Bear Tooth had the same problem. As he made his way towards Nethril’s position, more Orcs picked up his scent and gave chase. He ran at full speed and his pursuers did too; in spear formation and down on their knuckles like gorillas. Finally, one especially large Orc, the tip of the spearhead, tackled the tank from behind and he fell. Several other Orcs threw themselves on top to pin him down.

“Guys,” he grunted, “there’s too many of them.”

Man-At-Arms couldn’t help but agree because, with their sheer number, the Orcs were replenishing their ranks faster than his microgun could blast them away. The talons of their giant hand formation were closing in around him again.

From her vantage point, Nethril tried to help as much as she could with her Anima bow and arrows. But their enemies were like a flood and some of them had started climbing the pile of flowstones where she was perched. The mission was rapidly slipping out of their control.

Mage had it worst. He was still single-handedly preventing the Orc Mother from rising. The chain wrapped around her nape creaked and strained but held her in place. Mostly because Mage had buried himself like a nail on the edge of her rock.

It was a losing battle as the magma rose and swallowed Mage’s shins. Even as his robe and flesh sizzled though, his face betrayed no discomfort whatsoever.

The Count watched all these in horror. He was sitting where he had fallen on the ice, inert and completely overcome by panic. The Orcs must’ve sensed he was no threat because they left him alone and rushed to aid their brothers against the team tank, adhering to the game mechanic of agro or enmity, which focused forces based on a player’s ranking on the threat list.

The chains binding the Orc Mother’s neck finally burst and Mage sank waist-deep into the boiling magma.

The Orc Mother towered. Her four-pointed fin hair brushed and broke some of the stalactites on the high ceiling. Then, with the speed of a centipede, she scuttled off her precarious ice floe and back onto solid ground.   

Mage sank down to his chest but swiveled his head like a doll. He looked the Count in the eye and said with his customary poker face: “Do not allow your fears to consume you.”

Some of his nerve signals must’ve gotten crossed because he said it over and over. “Do not allow your fears to consume you. Do not allow your fears to consume you. Do no—”

Soon, nothing was left of him except bubbles in the red-hot magma.

The Count consoled himself with the thought that they were going to see Mage again at the Save Point, the stone table along the mountain pass. In fact, they were all going to see each other there very soon. It didn’t matter if they died here and now – squashed by the Orc Mother or mobbed to death by her progeny – they would automatically respawn.

No matter how much he reassured himself, he still felt the terror of death. 

****

Bear Tooth’s pointed ears detected it first, under the clamor of the mob of Orcs stacked on his back. It was a tiny sound, very easy to miss, but it was also distinct and sharp. A crackling.

At first it confused Bear Tooth and he thought it was just more ice breaking around the Ice Throne, but he knew the source was much closer. His eyes widened in realization. Just a couple of feet from his face, Fairy’s prison was cracking open and hatching like an egg. Mesmerized, he watched as Fairy’s tiny limbs quivered very rapidly. They were vibrating so fast she looked blurry. She was nothing but the bright silhouette of a tiny human.  

Then, her ice prison shattered.

It didn’t shatter in the conventional sense. First, it flickered like a light bulb burning out. Then, with a sizzling sound like sand pouring out of a bag, the ice vanished. It disintegrated into a rain of pixels – literal cubes of matter – right before Bear Tooth’s eyes. Finally, it exploded in dazzling brightness and burned an afterimage in Bear Tooth’s and his captors’ eyes.

From where he sat slumped on the ice, the Count squinted as Fairy’s silhouette rose amid the light show. It was completely dark like a sunspot but the shape was definitely hers.

When his vision went back to washed-out lowlight, the Count beheld Fairy hovering overhead exactly as he remembered her. She seemed to flap her peacock-butterfly wings rather limply, the aerial equivalent of hobbling, but she had on the same miniature lime-green dress. She was also chanting a spell in arcane Seelie Court tongue and her thick English accent. All the Dreamwalkers could hear the words with overlapping translation on their Anima radios:

O Gnomi of the flowing earth, chthonic brethren,

lend us thy legs crooked and thy magick true;

So the damp musty bosom of the One True Mother

spawned and nourished these foul creations –

scratching, gnawing, nibbling away at Her flesh –