Chapter 32: The Aengus Nowak Podcast: Grouping with a Prawn Cocktail Crisp. Episode 13 The Raid

Welcome to another edition of the Aengus Nowak podcast. Remember to subscribe, like, and share if you enjoy it.

This my story of the raid against the titan Syceus. I’m sure some of you were also there watching so please comment if you think I’ve forgotten anything or if it looked different for you.

We went to watch the battle from the two hills to the west of the rose garden of Queen Elisend the Good, all the other the spectators were there too. I felt safe on the hills, because we were a decent distance away from the raid, far beyond any possible spell effects or breath weapons. In fact, I was so relaxed I even lay down on the grass and had a short nap.

I was woken by the ground shuddering beneath me and when I looked around I felt that the world I’d returned to was stranger than my dreams. For a start, in the valley below every colour you can imagine was swirling around as the raid party buffed their tank, the angel Mithelasin. He was standing in the middle of a hundred people with arms raised and wings wide as all these magical, flowing lights landed on him. I remember wishing that it was me down there, the person who the whole raid looked to.

Not only would you be preparing for the greatest challenge of your life, but imagine being given all the possible buffs in the fifteen planes. His stats must have been incredible. If you are the kind of person who likes to work out all the details, please put your calculations in the comments, but I’m thinking his Hit Points would have been up around five hundred; his Strength and Agility fifty? His Physical Attack, Magical Attack, Natural armour, and Magical Defence all in the hundreds. He’d have been Hasted; given protection against fire with a Fire Shield and Elemental Resistance (Fire); also Hit Point and Mana regeneration; basically, every useful magical enhancement you could possibly get.

Even before the last of the buffs had landed, Mithelasin started flapping his wings and with a dazzling sword held out before him in his right hand and a gleaming shield on his left he soared towards the incoming titan. It did my heart good to see it. Honestly, I felt like there was nowhere I’d rather be. And I felt sorry for everyone back on the Plane of Life who hadn’t witnessed the flight of Mithelasin into battle. I nearly had tears in my eyes, it was such a heroic moment.

In that old-fashioned way of his, Lord Azanth tried to denigrate the heroism of Mithelasin, saying something like: ‘An angel! Nonsense! Everybody around us is sighing with awe; and yet I find it impossible to tell you how limited that warrior is, or why he would not have caused me the slightest anxiety were I to have faced him in battle with my full demonic powers: suffice it to say he has captivated all who stand and watch but not I.’

Speaking of standing, everyone was on their feet and there was plenty of shouting and cheers. I think many of the spectators were refugees looking forward to getting their homes back. The pull was perfect. Mithelasin struck the monster with a golden ray from a skill I didn’t recognise and the monster immediately focused on him. The angel swooped down to the base of a nearby tower, turning the titan away from the raid and bracing himself, shield held high. Thundering up to the angel, Syceus struck at him with fists of thorns; yet the angel stood strong! It was magnificent: angel versus titan. The compact and bright-burning warrior remaining defiant despite the furious battering of immense blows and the thrusts of long, sharp thorns. Behind the titan, all the raid Adventurers hurried into position and the healers poured out their magic in order to keep their tank alive.

I was pretty much dancing up and down with excitement.

And then Liam, who was looking through our magic telescope said, ‘that’s odd.’ Two words. But there was a concern in them that had me rattled right away. I know my brother well and he was saying, ‘that’s odd’ in the way that the lookout of the Titanic would have said those words after spotting a large shadow in the sea ahead.

‘What?’ asked Kate.

‘I’m seeing double. Well, double Syceus. But when I remove the telescope, the second one disappears.’

I haven’t yet described Syceus and I won’t be able to do justice to the titan in this podcast with my words. He’s really overwhelming. It’s a shame cameras don’t work on the planes. But I’ll do my best. Firstly, he’s huge: really, really massive. Like bigger than the tallest building in Dublin, which is a place called Liberty Hall and which is sixteen stories high. The titan is about as wide as that building too. He moves on two powerful legs with elongated arms that swing through the air and could land on the ground ahead of him if he wanted to lever himself forward like an orangutang. His entire body was a mass of vines and thorns and leaves, so when he was stomping after the angel, it was like watching a copse of thorn bushes on the move. A forest with an intelligence. And yet at the same time he somehow gave me the impression of madness. I felt that even if I had some kind of language in common with the titan, talking to him would be as nonsensical as talking to a thunderstorm.

The crowds around us cheered and clapped as the raid closed up on the titan and as it became clear that the heals landing on the tank were powerful enough and coming fast enough to keep the angel standing, even in the face of punches by thorn-covered fists that were bigger than a double-decker bus. Lord Azanth, though, was urgently shouting in my head.

‘Flee! Flee now! Flee with such a raging liveliness that you can hardly think. Flee until you cannot draw breath. Flee if you want to live.’

If you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while, you’ll know that Lord Azanth is good in a crisis. He’s been around the block a time or two. You don’t get to Level One Hundred without seeing a lot of fighting on a lot of the planes. So at his urging I was ready to run.

It was Kate who voiced the question in my mind: ‘which way?’ The problem was we were a good distance from the portal and there were hundreds, maybe thousands, of people in the way. Did you ever have to go the wrong way in a queue? Like the time I pulled out of going on the Cú Chulainn ride at Tayto Park, as it was then called. I was high up the scaffolding, near to getting on to the rollercoaster train, but feeling sick; I’d turned around rather than risk throwing up while moving fast in the air and splattering the other people on the rollercoaster in vomit. I had to push past everyone in that queue, saying, ‘excuse me’ over and over. It was an awful experience but that would have been nothing compared to trying to get through the excited crowd watching the raid, who were totally focused on the battle and who would have deeply resented anyone coming past and blocking their view.

While dithering about where to run, I checked out the battle in the valley, and it seemed that the raid was going to plan. Mithelasin was still up, a white blaze visible from time to time as the titan swayed from side to side and revealed the angel to our view. From behind Syceus, all sorts of skills and attacks were lashing down upon the titan from the mass of demons and fighters crowding as close as they could.

‘Follow me,’ said my brother and he ran northwards, away from the portal, along the ridge of the hill. As we sprinted away from the battle, I could hear cheering and the swooshing sounds of long-range magical attacks. There was a scent in the air like that of ozone. Nothing seemed amiss and yet we were running for our lives.

‘A fatal mistake has been made,’ Lord Azanth spoke into my thoughts, the way he does with Telepathy. I was glad to hear from him because I wanted to know why I was running so hard. ‘There is a mage skill, Mimic Self. When the mage uses the skill, they become invisible and beside them appears a doppelganger with the exact appearance of the mage and even some shadowy version of the powers of the original. It is my belief that the ranger of the raid who pulled Syceus failed to appreciate that they have triggered a doppelganger and that the real Syceus is free to strike as he pleases.’

Before we descended the hill and out of sight of the battle, I couldn’t help but look back. Faint cheers reached me as the giant titan fell forward onto its face. Was Lord Azanth wrong? Of course not. Even as the Adventurers of the raid swarmed over the fallen giant with shackles of cold iron ready to bind him tight, another Syceus appeared beyond them and from its upraised hands poured two streams of fireballs. Seeds of Fire flowed so fast that it looked like the monster was sweeping the ground before it with orange lasers. The effect on the raid was devastating. Not many people could withstand the damage of that beam. It was so unfair. Like playing Top Trumps Adventurers against someone who suddenly pulls out a new card: Syceus. And they keep asking Magical Attack, which was is so high that no other card can beat it.

I was standing there watching in horror and awe too. I mean, these were famous people level eighty and ninety and even one or two at a hundred; now dead or severely wounded. Beside me, Liam had also stopped running to watch. I can’t speak for him, but I wanted to help the raid and I suddenly appreciated just how weak I was in comparison to those in the valley below. It was frustrating. By the time the Seeds of Fire attack stopped, half the raiders were dead. Spectators were streaming back down the far side of the hills towards the portal, which was already massively congested.

Now the raid was on a timer. They had to reorganise before Seeds of Fire reset. With Mithelasin still buffed, especially with his various resistances to magical fire, I had some hope they could turn the battle around. But as you all know by now, there weren’t enough healers alive to be able to set up a rota, so even though Mithelasin took the aggro and turned the real Syceus away from the raid, the angel was pierced to death by the long thorns of the titan’s fists. Not that I saw this with my own eyes.

‘Tarry not! The titan is wild fire on a dry prairie; he is a tsunami rushing towards the beach; he is a volcano flinging massive rocks into the sky; he is a hurricane; and we need to be far beyond all his senses by the time the last of the raid dies.’

With Lord Azanth yelling right into my head, I began running again and soon we were downslope and out of sight of the battle, although I could still hear the sound of magical blasts and screams. Hearing a lot of people screaming in the distance is pretty motivating. I was in a patch of sunlight, pounding down a path that brought us to a stile. Over that and we were in a corn field, whose unripe crop rose to my waist. I remember thinking that the corn would make good cover if I dropped to my hands and knees.

We didn’t stop though. Lord Azanth kept us going. Kate was so bright red around the cheeks she looked like she’d burst. And only when we’d reached a copse of tall poplar trees at the far end of the cultivated field did the demon reckon we were safe. There, I collapsed onto the ground and spent several minutes just breathing and waiting for my heart to get back to normal. In the distance, on the other side of the hill, the grey sky sometimes flickered with purple and gold and I could just about hear the faint rumble of a powerful skill being used. Those flickers became less frequent though.

‘It’s a wipe then?’ asked Liam and presumably Lord Azanth answered him in the affirmative.

‘What now?’ Kate was sat gasping out the words with her head between her knees, brown hair hiding her expression.

‘Beyond yonder hill top is the peace of the graveyard. In all the treetops you perceive scarcely a breath. The small birds in the trees are silent. Wait then; or we too will join the repose of the slain.’

You can guess who said that.

We must have waited for hours until the sun was low in the sky, so low it was beneath the layer of cloud that had covered the sky all day and there was an ominous red colour to the sky. At last, when a flock of starlings had begun to play above the hill in the evening light, Lord Azanth allowed us to head back towards the portal. When we came up over the hill, well, what a sight. Carnage.

You can probably imagine what a wiped-out raid looks like, bodies strewn all around the tower, the glow of magic faded from their arms and armour. Large dark rings in the grass where the fireballs had landed. Demons and humans mixed together, banners broken and trampled. But that grim mess was nothing compared to the scene at the portal. There the bodies were piled up three or four deep. Five hundred? A thousand? I couldn’t say. And I felt deeply despondent when I looked at the dead. It was all very well for the raiding party. They would have a plan for raising the dead. Probably a few clerics had been kept back for the purpose. And if not, they were rich and their friends and families would pay for a Resurrection.

The people who had come to watch though, that was a different matter. They were – they are – in serious danger of perma-death. I know there are groups of volunteers who take on rescues for free. Maybe someone in the Anarchist Healers’ Network listens to this podcast and can step in. Because standing on the hill, looking at all the dead, was absolutely heart-rending.

I was well aware the sun was nearly gone and the last place I wanted to be was in the dark, with all these bodies lit only by the ghostly blue of the portal. So I hurried on, finding a route through the people killed by the titan, with Liam and Kate close behind.

Then, the ground began to shake and out of the shadows came Syceus! A dark mound that I had mistaken for a distant hill resolved itself to be the titan and he was right beside us. Even as I started to sprint, I knew it was hopeless and that I was going to be smashed into the ground by those spiked fists.

‘Stand still,’ said my brother, with surprising steadiness. I stopped running and he moved to stand between me and the monster, who was looking at us with wing-shaped eyes of poisonous green. Syceus raised a fist high.

A flash of green came from Liam’s hand. He had cast Thornskin from the Hazel Wand of Syceus on the titan, its owner.

For what felt like a minute, but was probably only a few seconds, no one moved. Maybe a few of the crows that had come to feast on the dead hopped around, I don’t know. Bathed in purple from the twilight, the titan was unreal. He was death but he was also a dream. Was this really happening? A strange calm came over me and perhaps over all us, Syceus included. Slowly he lowered his fist and then turned away, the ground trembling as we hurried on to the portal.

‘Was that Lord Azanth’s idea?’ I asked Liam.

‘I know you find it hard to believe,’ he replied, ‘but sometimes I have a good idea.’

To be fair, Liam, sometimes you really do. This podcast is dedicated to you.