Trials of a VRMMO Healer

Chapter 21 - Holdfast

We saw the plume of smoke before we reached Holdfast. As we crested the final rugged hill before the port town, Arti and Aria took off ahead while I hopped down the cliff with my limited gliding abilities. There were dozens of ships in the harbor, divided between some that looked more... pirate-y, like galleons or whatever, while the others lacked sails and were extraordinarily long. The former had cannons and were firing at the longships, while the longships seemed primarily armed with ballistas. I don't know much about boats, so I couldn't tell who had the advantage. Besides, the sounds of combat in the town meant that whatever the raiding party was after, they'd made landfall and were busy setting fire to the town.
The gates were open and the guard nowhere to be seen as we entered Holdfast and got the gist of the situation. Even as we did, I heard a shout from Aria and saw her surrounded by four... well, we'll call them snake-men. They looked like snakes with bright, vivid coloration, like a coral snake, but the scales on their head were far longer and gave the impression of being feathers. They also had arms, ending in reptilian claws. Two of them held scimitars, one had a spear, and the last one a metal rod. They had noticed us began charging down the town's cobblestone streets.
"Wait!" I called out. Aria held back but the snake-men moved forward, raising their weapons.
"God dammit, fine. Aria, I'll get the spear-user, you hold off the rest."
Aria nodded and engaged the others. I started by casting [Font of Healing] and allocating mana to my strength and agility. It had been a while since I'd engaged in the sort of one-on-one combat, honestly. I had fought monsters that were more or less all instinct and they tended to be way bigger than me. Plus, since I had gotten Aria to tank, I had someone taking the heat off me. But a spear was a mount's greatest enemy, and while Arti had his scales protecting him up top, a spear from below could deal a lot of damage. So this really was up to me. The snake-man knew it, too, and wanted to finish me off as quickly as possible so he (I think) could do his job.
The snake-man sent the point of his spear flying towards me in a thrust that caught me off guard. I deflected it easily enough with Earthsinger but it was clear he was just testing me. I lamented my lack of PvP experience. He thrust again, and again, and I soon realized that I had a problem. I was a Faerin, so I was already shorter than average, and his spear and long limbs gave the snake-man a massive reach advantage. I had promised to help Aria, but I was the one in trouble. I blocked and dodged his attacks, but without a good way to counter, I was stuck. The snake-man surely knew that all he had to do was keep attacking and chipping away.
But he was wrong. That's the thing about fighting intelligent opponents. They think and they form strategies. They go, "What is my opponent thinking and how can I exploit that?" But once you think you have all the information, that's when you're blindsided by something unexpected. Sure enough, eventually, one of his thrusts landed square on my shoulder. It hurt, but players had dulled senses of pain, since nobody would do anything dangerous if it hurt as much as in real life. The snake-man had limited facial expressions but even I could tell that his look of triumph quickly faded and turned into surprise as his spear ran through my shoulder. I had caught it with my shoulder intentionally, so it wouldn't hit any organs and result in a critical hit. I wasn't a melee fighter, after all; I was a healer. As I drew in for an attack, he tried to pull away, but it was too late. I had built up enough stacks of [Virulent Curse] that I summoned a scorpid right on top of him. His spear was still stuck in my shoulder and my Font of Healing was still healing me, so the damage was minimal. The fight had suddenly become two on one and he couldn't divide his attention between me and my minion. I landed one hit, then another and another, and the fight was over. Aria was still fighting off her enemies, but I couldn't help her just yet. I pulled the spear out, which stopped the bleed effect and healed myself. Aria had done a great job keeping her opponents busy, but her skills and equipment weren't as good as mine. I took a moment to heal her as well and went after the caster. He was hiding behind his comrades, but that wasn't going to save him from me. I hopped onto Arti's back, then I jumped towards one of the buildings beside us. It had been a while since I had pulled this trick, but my skills, especially in jumping and gliding were way better now. I hit the side of the building feet-first and bounced off it. [Glide] was really coming in handy here, slowing me down and giving me plenty of maneuverability. Hooray for wings! I leapt well over the heads of the snake-men and behind the caster. In moments, they had gone from a solid defensive position to being pinned. The swordsmen had impressive coordination and one peeled away from Aria to defend the caster, but it was too late. I was already charging and it only took a single good swing of Earthsinger to bring the caster down. How were they talking to each other? I hadn't heard anything. But spirit sight was giving me... some kind of impression. I hadn't seen any spells flying so I guessed he was their healer. The odds were even now... or so I thought.
"Look out!" Aria shouted to me and I pivoted sideways to see another six of the snake-men coming down the street. Well. That was bad.
"Bjorn!" I heard a voice from above shout. A massive wharrin charged through the crowd of snake-men, swinging a maul wildly. Our attackers scattered and circled around him but before they could act, I heard the voice shout again. "[Rain of Steel]!" An attack streaked overhead, slamming into the snake-men. Three had fallen with the surprise attack. A human man dropped down from the rooftops. He brandished a set of flintlock pistol and aimed at the snake-men.
"Sorry about this, I wish we had a better welcome for visitors, but do you think you can handle those while we wrap this group up?" he asked me.
"No problem," I told him and got to work. Surrounded as they were, the remaining snake-men didn't pose a significant challenge. I could duck behind Aria when I needed to heal and jump out back to the front lines when I saw an opening. After a few minutes, the skirmish was over. In the distance, down the street and across the harbor, the longboats were retreating. As we caught our breath, the town experienced a stunning transformation. Shops and homes unlocked and opened and people began filtering out onto the streets as though nothing happened.
"Hey, like I said, sorry about that," the gunslinger told me. "I'm Rufus, he's Bjorn. We're part of the Holdfast militia. Normally when they attack, we seal the gates but this time the assigned gatekeeper was offline for some reason."
"Does uh, does this happen often?"
"Ahh, um, yeah. Hey, we'll treat you to a meal. We run an inn down the road. Bjorn's a great cook."
Bjorn looked a bit embarrassed but nodded. Their inn, The Kelpie, was one of the wooden row houses near the docks. Honestly, it felt less like a medieval inn and more like a seaside hotel or bed and breakfast or something. They'd clearly spent a lot of time building it. A number of guests were in the dining room and lounge on the first floor.
"Wow, this is nice," I commented.
"Oh, thanks. I'm a carpenter as a secondary job and Bjorn is a cook. Everything else was made by Holdfast's artisans. We're proud to be one of only player-run cities in EO so all this stuff is player-made."
"That's pretty awesome."
"It would be, if it wasn't for the Serpentine attacks."
"Yeah, I was kind of wondering. Does that happen much?"
Rufus nodded while Bjorn emerged from the kitchen with food. I'd mostly eaten the rations you could buy in NPC shops but this was surprising. The food... generally didn't taste like much, but this was different. There were seared burgers with thick fish fillets, something like ahi burgers and shoestring fries. Aria absorbed herself in her meal."
"Oh wow, I didn't know you could do this in EO."
Bjorn nodded, "It's not easy. First think you gotta do is forget about any of the in-game recipes. That'll only give you, like, average food, at best. It works best when it's food you know..."
"So you cook this out of game?"
"Some of this. Other stuff I go to restaurants to research. It takes your own experiences to generate the flavor, right? So you gotta, like, examine it really carefully."
Rufus grinned, "I'm okay with eating the failed research." Bjorn, however, gave him a sharp look.
"Player-made stuff is weird. Building is easy, compared to cooking, though. The game helps you out a lot with it. I made maybe a third of the buildings in town? And I fix them if they get wrecked in the invasions," Rufus explained.
"Yeah, what's up with that?" I asked. "Game event?"
Rufus shook his head. "No, no. When you walked into town, did you notice anything? Or anything missing?"
Now that he mentioned it, I had. When I had entered Illium, there was a faint tingling and brief glow that indicated that I had entered a sanctuary. PvP was disabled there and even PvE was highly limited. There had been no such indicator when I entered Holdfast.
"Exactly," Rufus said, nodding. "Holdfast is a player-made city, but it's technically not a city in game terms. 'Real' cities have a city core that handles administrative functions."
"Even Illium?" I asked.
"Yeah. It's heavily guarded, though, since accessing the core could give you control over the city."
"How do you get something like that?"
"You can't. At least, nobody's figured out how to. To keep the entire countryside from becoming player houses, the cores are limited. You could invade another city and take it's core for yourself, but..."
"But?"
"You need an army, really. Think about Illium. A few people wouldn't be able to overcome the barrier and trigger the invasion event. That sort of thing happened a few times in beta, but nowadays nobody wants that."
"Seems like an oversight of Holdfast's founders..."
"Well, no. That's why we're here, actually." He looked out the window. The thin outline of an island was visible against the horizon, far in the distance. "See that? That's where Kedgeport was."
"Kedgeport?"
"An NPC city. It was meant to be a pirate haven. During beta, there was an invasion by the Serpentine. It happened to coincide with a login server outage. The players defending the city were overrun and unable to log in for two days, out-of-game time. When they came back, the city had been burned to the ground and the Serpentine set up their base. Officially, the city was gone, but the Serpentine are monsters, not NPCs, so they can't run a city. The core's still out there. Holdfast's founders chose this location because they figured they could raid the Serpentine camp and take it back, then bring the core here. But... it didn't work out."
"Why not? Seems like you have enough people."
"They're tough, first of all. And you need to get out there on boats. We've tried to mount raids, but after a few losses, players get bored and move on. They have some strong magic users that sunk most of our ships before they reach land and they're well entrenched. They wouldn't get anything if they win, anyway. We get experience for defending against their raids, anyway."
"Hm. How about a smaller team? Sneak in and steal the core."
"We've tried and do keep trying. The core's not a little thing, though. It's a stone pillar three meters tall."
"Negotiation? They can't use it, after all."
"They're intelligent, but they don't speak any language we can understand. We've tried that a few times, but there's a lot of bad blood here. I mean, I'd try if I could..."
"I noticed they were communicating somehow."
"That much is obvious, but if it's telepathy or something, I haven't figured it out."
"No, I mean... I have a skill that lets me see certain things that I normally can't, and it was picking up... something. But I can't tell what. If I could figure that out, maybe we can communicate."
Rufus blinked. "I mean, if you can, we'd appreciate it. Even just being able to understand them would be an advantage."
I glanced over at Aria who was stuffing cookies into her mouth. "Want to go for a swim?"