Эрнест Клайн - Ready Player Two

Up above, demonic-looking vultures perched on the rocky cliffs, glaring and squawking down at us. I realized that Aech’s invisibity spell didn’t appear to have any effect on the creatures that resided here, so I asked her to deactivate it. She complied, and we continued our way up to the two massive iron doors set into the sheer cliff wall ahead.

When we came within a few hundred yards of the gates, our horses refused to proceed any farther. Aech and I dismounted, then I spoke the name of each horse once again, and they shrank and morphed back into tiny glass figurines, which I scooped up and placed back inside my inventory.

On foot now, we reached the gates—to see that they were standing wide open. But a giant black wolf lay guarding the rocky plateau in front of them, glaring down at us with a pair of unblinking eyes that glowed bright red in the shadow of Angband.

This was Carcharoth—one of the most fearsome creatures of the Elder Days.

When Aech got a look at the size of the wolf, she reached down with both hands and tapped the stripes on the sides of her Adidas once again, and their color scheme changed from blue and black to silver and gold.

“Got a pair that I wear when I’m playin’ ball,” Aech recited. “With the heel inside, make me ten feet tall .”

When she finished speaking the command phrase, she suddenly grew in size, until her avatar stood exactly ten feet tall. Thanks to the change in proportions, Carcharoth would no longer tower over her. Now she would be able to stare him directly in his demonic red eyes.

Carcharoth continued to glower down at us until we reached the end of the road and arrived at the base of the steps leading up to the entrance. As Aech and I started to ascend the steps, she began to cast her sleep spell on the giant wolf, making intricate patterns in the air with her hands as she whispered the words of the incantation.

But when the spell was complete, Carcharoth didn’t close his glowing red eyes. And he did not drift off to sleep. Instead, he bared his teeth and lunged down to attack us.

He ignored Aech and came directly at me, probably because I was the one with the shards in my inventory. I raised my sword and took several steps backward as Carcharoth snapped with a black maw full of razor-sharp fangs.

I continued to retreat back down the steps as the giant wolf advanced upon me, snapping his jaws again and again, just inches from my face.

I struck him repeatedly with Glamdring, but the sword’s glowing blue blade didn’t even appear to break the wolf’s skin, not even when I managed to stab him directly in his black, slime-covered gums.

Carcharoth turned to lunge at Aech, snapping his jaws shut on her leg. Then the beast shook her fiercely and hurled her aside. But Aech landed on her feet and counterattacked, hurling balls of fire and lightning from each of her hands, firing off one spell after another.

I tried to attack the giant wolf while he was distracted by Aech’s fusillade, but he somehow sensed my approach, and before I could land a hit with my sword, he craned his neck around and bit me in the shoulder. My avatar took over a hundred points of damage, and then a message popped up on my HUD, informing me that the wolf’s teeth were covered with some sort of venom, and that I would keep on losing more hit points every few seconds from poison damage. Carcharoth’s venom had also temporarily immobilized my avatar, leaving me wide open for another attack….

Aech and I had faced a lot of formidable enemies over the years, on a lot of different planets. The two of us once took down a Tarrasque on Faerun in less than five minutes. We livestreamed it. It was a cakewalk. But after less than thirty seconds, Carcharoth already had both of us on the run and hemorrhaging hit points.

I took a Potion of Cure Poison out of my inventory and swallowed it in one gulp. But to my horror, I saw my hit-point counter continue to fall. I was still taking poison damage. The potion was supposed to cure it, but it wasn’t working. Just like Aech’s sleep spell hadn’t worked on the wolf. Clearly, I had missed something….

Just as Carcharoth began to slink toward me to make another attack, I saw Aech’s enlarged avatar leap off the stairs behind him and onto his back. As he began to whirl and thrash around, Aech somehow managed to flip up and over the beast, land with both feet on the bridge of its nose, and stab it directly between its fiery red eyes.

Then, as the beast howled and reared back in agony, Aech did another somersault and landed on the ground directly in front of him. While he was temporarily blinded, she put everything she had into another volley of attacks with her sword.

Aech had saved me for the moment, but I could see that the bite to her leg had seriously weakened her. She appeared to have been poisoned by its venom, too, because her movements had slowed considerably.

She dodged desperately as Carcharoth continued to swipe at her with his massive black claws—but after just a few seconds, the giant wolf knocked her off balance and clamped his jaws shut on her avatar’s midsection. I cried out Aech’s name in anguish, because I knew the beast had struck a killing blow.

Aech turned to lock eyes with me just before she went limp and fell to the ground. Then her avatar slowly disappeared, leaving behind a pile of spinning items—all of the weapons and armor in her inventory.

I stood there in shock for a second, wondering if I’d just lost my best friend forever. But I couldn’t let myself believe that, so I lunged forward and scooped up all of the items Aech had dropped, adding them to my own inventory, with the hope that I would be able to return them to her later.

Then I took up the sword I had given her, Andúril, and equipped it in my left hand, so that I could wield it along with Glamdring in my right. Both of the Elven blades continued to glow bright blue as I turned to face Carcharoth. (I may have looked a bit silly wielding two such large swords at the same time, but my avatar’s combat stats made it effortless, and I had double-weapon proficiency and ambidextrous attacks, so I got three attacks per round with each sword, with each hand.)

Carcharoth glared at me with his glowing red eyes, and as he did I noticed that they matched the hit-point counter on my HUD, which was flashing to remind me that my avatar was just a few seconds away from being dead. And when my avatar died, I wasn’t going to respawn and wake up in a brand-new virtual body. I was going to end up just like Aech and Shoto and all the others. Trapped in an ONI-induced coma, with little hope of ever regaining consciousness.

Carcharoth kept advancing and I kept retreating, until he had me cornered at the edge of the plateau. He moved in closer and prepared to make his second kill, spreading his massive jaws in a rictus grin as he approached me. I raised both of my ancient Elven swords in an attempt to defend myself, but I knew it was hopeless.

This was it. I was about to die a very real death, and my quest was about to end in total failure—a failure that would likely result in the deaths of millions of other people, including my two best friends. And I would never have the chance to make things right with Arty. To tell her that I loved her more than any other person who had ever come into my life….

This was not how I wanted to die. Not even close.

And then my ex-girlfriend fell out of the sky.

First, I heard the insistentsqueaking of a bat as Carcharoth snarled and closed in on me. I caught a brief glimpse of the bat’s wings, flittering across the edge of my peripheral vision. Then I heard a familiar transformation sound effect—one I knew had been lifted from the old Super Friends cartoon—and a split second later, Art3mis made a superhero landing on the rocky ground directly between me and Carcharoth. Then she rose to her full height and faced off against the Wolf-warden of the Gates of Hell, her long black cloak whipping out behind her in the wind like a cape.