Skylair Online

Episode 5

About a minute or so later, there were three flashes of blue light and the rest of their team appeared. As they did, a bar above their heads displayed their names.

The first was a figure in a long, black cloak with the hood up so that their face was completely obscured called Obsidian. The second was a young man with bright orange hair wielding a bow and a matching bright orange cape called Dash45. The third was a heavy set man with a grizzled beard and wielding a machine g*n called Extreme123.

Dash and Extreme looked at each other and sighed, then looked over at Leo.

“You’re a scout right, not another artillery?” Dash asked at Leo.

Leo nodded.

“Well,” Dash said and turned back to Extreme, “Looks like we need a guardian.”

Extreme pulled a face that said he really did not want to play guardian.

“Rock, paper, scissors for it?” Dash asked.

“Sure,” Extreme replied, his voice sounding an awful lot younger than his avatar.

Dash won the right to play artillery and Extreme skulked off to the screen to change his loadout.

Ben turned to Leo, “Don’t worry too much, when you get let out of the starting zone just run towards the shrine furthest from us, you’ve got a map so you can’t get lost, drop a sentry sphere there and then run to the next one. Drop another sphere there and run to the third shrine. If the enemy team show up on the map that’s great, if they don’t then it means they are either in a desert or on the last shrine. Most people will take at least one shrine before heading for the desert so we will try and take what they don’t and head for the other desert. Once we’ve got our shrines and killed some of the desert monsters join up with us and just try and hit any enemy you see with arrows. Got it?”

“Yeah,” Leo replied.

Extreme came back, this time wielding a shield as large as himself and an axe almost as big.

“Everyone ready?” Extreme asked.

They all nodded and were teleported into the starting zone. Leo looked down at his left forearm where a map was hovering just above it. As he moved his arm about the map followed, always maintaining a fixed distance from his arm and a parallel orientation to it.

The map looked like a diamond with their starting position on the far western edge, a mountain in the middle, little dragon icons on the north and south points and four dots surrounding the mountain, one yellow, one green, one purple and one brown, each representing one of the shrines.

There was a white countdown on the bottom right of his vision, counting down from 35.

“The assault on the Skylair begins in 60 seconds,” said the female voice from the tutorial.

When the countdown hit 0 Leo started to run as fast as he could towards the first Shrine, leaving the others behind him. He wasn’t running at the same breakneck pace he achieved during the tutorial but it was fast enough to make it hard to control where he was going.

The closest shrine to him was the earth shrine so he made a beeline for that.

As he approached the shrine, the ground got more and more rugged, dotted with boulders and ravines that he had to climb over. Eventually he scaled over a particularly large rock and the earth shrine came into view. It was another circle of standing stones surrounding an altar with a glowing orb floating above it.

He threw a sentry orb into the middle of the circle and ran on towards the sky shrine.

The sky shrine was obvious to spot even from where Leo was, as it was continuously being struck by lightning.

Leo got about half way to the Shrine when he heard in his ear that Ben and the rest of the team was released from base.

“The shrines have been unlocked. You may now claim their blessings,” said the announcer.

“Gambit,” Ben said in Leo’s ear, “Any sign of anyone?”

“No, not yet.”

He reached the Sky shrine, dodging lightning bolts as they rained down around him, and threw in a sentry sphere.

As he turned to leave, a red cloaked figure jumped out from behind a standing stone, slicing at him with a pair of daggers.

He jerked backwards instinctively, hitting his head on the headboard of his bed and winced in pain.

The distraction was all the figure needed, slashing in a whirlwind of blades and Leo’s vision flashed red.

Regaining his composure, Leo jumped back from the figure and loosed an arrow in his direction. It struck the figure but he ignored it, ducking under Leo’s guard and slicing upwards at his head. Again, Leo’s vision flashed red and then went white.

‘You have been slain’ appeared on the bottom right of his vision in purple text.

“Scout, what happened?” Extreme asked.

“I think I met the enemy assassin,” Leo replied.

“Unlikely,” chipped in Dash, “I think you just got killed by the enemy scout.”

“Don’t worry,” Ben said, “We’ve got the earth shrine and if their scout is on sky we can go to Heart just fine, at worst we will fight four on four.”

Leo’s vision returned to normal and he found himself in their starting point, watching a timer count down from 25. He tested if he could leave the base but there was an invisible barrier stopping him.

He sighed and looked down at the map on his arm, it was just a white sheet.

Reluctantly he turned back to the timer and was forced to just wait as it ticked down to zero.