The floor boss was a Lesser Lich Foreman named Earl. Earl was everything you’d expect from a classic lich type – he was skeletal, his clothes were tattered and rotted, and he appeared to be a sorcerer of some sort. Everything a lich should be but somehow, he didn’t quite feel like he lived up to those expectations, either. There was nothing tangible I could put my finger on specifically. He was just…lesser. Hence, the name.
When we entered the boss room, Earl was sitting at a desk seemingly stamping paperwork for a mine that had ceased production centuries ago, if not millennia. I felt a little bad for him sitting there like that, doing the same inane tasks over and over for time so interminable it may as well have been forever. Wait. Why did that sound so familiar? A shiver of déjà vu ran up my spine, chilling me to the point of shivers. The doors shut behind us and he raised one boney finger in the air.
“One moment, please. Be right with you,” he beckoned us. Every syllable sounded as though it were tearing apart vocal cords that were ages beyond desiccation. It was the sound of dead, hollowed out trees creaking in the wind. It was the death rattle for a death that never came, and so it decided to take up permanent residence.
“Take your time, we’re in no rush,” I replied. Shrek and Juniper began to take positions on opposite sides of the room. I stood at the entrance, Juniper stood on the northern wall, and Shrek on the southern wall. It was Shrek’s idea to try a pincer style attack, should we get the opportunity and, having no better ideas of our own, we deferred to the man with the most battle experience.
Earl sat his stamp down and pushed his chair back. The wooden legs scraping against the stone floor was like nails on a chalkboard. The sound reverberated through the room and set my teeth on edge. The room actually looked more like a cavern of sorts, with scaffolding scaling the walls marking work that had never been completed. He rose to his full height, wisps of white hair floating in the air as he spun around to greet us.
“Ahhh…adventurers. Thank you for your patience. It has been…some time since I’ve had visitors, here in the deep. Have you come to give yourselves to the cause?”
“What cause?” I asked, mostly to keep him talking while I used Threat Assessment on him.
It seemed like old Earl here was a bit of a damage sponge. That probably made sense for an undead. His high Intelligence and Charisma stats, plus the fact that he was a lich meant that he was likely a magic user. I shot a message to both Juniper and Shrek to let them know what I’d discovered. We were formulating a plan as the guy monologued.
“The cause of my immortality, of course! I have suffered here alone in my work for a thousand years, waiting for worthy fodder to reach my lair! You are the first to make it past the first room. For that, I must congratulate you. But alas, I must also offer you my condolence as I am afraid this is where your journey ends.”
“Oh, no,” I said in feigned despair.
“Oh, yes! It is a sorry state you find yourselves in…nearly as woeful as my own! I stand before you a mere shell of what I should have been. I am not truly immortal, but neither can I die. When I culled the souls of my fellow dwarves in these mines to power my spell that would grant me my immortality, I failed in just one respect: thought I that my sacrifices’ inferior quality could be made up for by their sheer quantity. ‘Twas that miscalculation which unmade me.”
“You’re saying that you’re responsible for the state of this place? For the workers’ undeath?” Juniper asked, a note of disgust creeping into her tone.
“Exactly! But now that you have come, I can finish what I started all those centuries ago. I can sense the power in your souls! Come…sacrifice yourselves to me so that you may live forever. The memory of you shall be carried forward by the great Lich King Earl!”
I snorted.
“You killed all those dwarves, your colleagues and likely kin, it didn’t work out for you and now you want us to give you our souls?”
“Precisely.”
“So that you can live forever.”
“Indeed.”
I glanced at Juniper and Shrek. Each nodded at me in turn.
“Not for nothing…but you’re a massive dick,” I said, and before he could reply, I had drawn my handgun on him and started firing. I landed four or five solid hits before he could react. Juniper summoned ice wraiths that slicked the floor beneath the lich and Shrek launched a nearby table at him. The stoat leapt from my pocket and started harassing the lich with bites and scratches around his lower legs. We were slowly but surely lowering the boss’ HP until he finally reacted.
He turned his eyes toward Shrek and froze him with Daunting Glare. Shrek was paralyzed instantly. Juniper moved in to assist, but the lich caught her with Larkspur Clutch. With them out of the way, he turned his icy eyes toward me. I could feel him trying to do something, and a notification popped up: “You have resisted Paralysis”. I remained still, anyway. The lich smiled, grotesquely, his decayed and taut flesh straining to accommodate the gesture.
The stoat ran up my body and perched on my shoulder. I whispered instructions to it. It scampered away, disappearing into the dark recesses of the room. The lich watched it go with amusement and turned back to me.
“A valiant effort performed in vain, I’m afraid. There is no way out of this room, even for one so small.”
Earl approached me slowly, and since he thought I was helpless, he was barely paying attention to me at this point. He strolled lackadaisically in my direction as I kept a careful eye on him. When he finally stood right in front of me, he gave me a mockingly apologetic look.
“I did say this would be the end of your journey, young adventurer,” he said, as he raised one hand dramatically. “Rest peacefully knowing that you are contributing to something…greater.”
He was likely about to cast a spell that would have ended me right there, but I lashed out with the Blade of Seredh. The dagger easily pierced his paper-like skin, causing massive damage as I poured all my intent and will into the strike. His eyes widened so far that one of his eyelids split in half. He roared in rage and backhanded me so hard I flew across the room, landing at Juniper’s feet. I groaned and got swiftly back to my feet.
“How much longer?” I asked.
“60 seconds,” she replied through clenched teeth.
I nodded and decided that, since I had a captive audience, this was as good a time as I was likely to get to debut my new fighting style, which I had tentatively named Orckata. I charged the lich and as he swung at me, I slid, firing two shots from my handgun directly into his gut. Once I was behind him, I pivoted, spun, and sliced at him with the Blade. He struck at me again, but I was already mid-dodge. When I finished rolling, I fired two more shots with my handgun. I was starting to run low, I knew. I had less than half a magazine left. Every shot from here on out was going to need to do as much damage as possible.
Earl whirled around and began swiping his old stoney claws at me. I blocked with the dagger, ducked, feinted a swing at his thigh, then fired a shot straight into his face as he moved to block. He reeled back from the impact of the bullet and brought his foot up at the same time, catching me in the chin with his heel. I flew backward and landed hard on my back. I scrambled in reverse a bit to put distance between us, but Earl, it seemed, was done fucking around. He stood over me, his palm outstretched and started a spell he’d never get to finish.
Shrek was free from paralysis and he. Was. Pissed. His axe slammed into the lich’s chest, launching the undead foreman into the air like a rocket. He slammed into the wall on the opposite side of the room and seconds later, a massive shard of ice blasted the exact spot where he had landed. It pinned him to the wall. Juniper’s paralysis had also worn off, apparently, and she seemed every bit as angry as Shrek. I looked back at Earl and his HP was down to just under a quarter left. He was mumbling something, but I couldn’t tell what it was.
Suddenly, the ground started to tremble. Shrek wobbled around uneasily, but Juniper and I were more or less unaffected by the quaking – I was holding steady because of my Pathfinder Treads and Juniper was completely immune in the first place since her feet weren’t even touching the ground, most of the time. Moments later, hands started to emerge from the floor beneath us, rising straight out of the stone as though it were topsoil. I realized then what was happening. He was a lich. He was summoning undead minions to fight for him, because of course he was. The guy had already killed all these innocent people, now he was going to use them as meat shields. He really was a dick.
The stoat bolted back toward me, dodging the grasping hands of the undead as it made its way across the room. It scampered up my leg, up my torso, and retook its spot in my pocket. In its mouth, there was a manila envelope. I took the envelope from it and read the label: Transient Production Schedule.
“No!” Earl screamed. “Give that to me!”
I immediately understood what I was holding. The undead had mostly stopped their ascent from the ground, as Earl’s attention was interrupted by this new development.
“Earl, please don’t tell me you made a phylactery out of a manila envelope for…TPS Reports.”
“It’s all I had available! I was mid-spell by the time I figured out I needed a container! Please…just give it back to me and we can forget all this every happened.”
I shook my head, disappointed.
“Did you ever finish those TPS reports?”
“N-not technically, no.”
“Typical,” I said, and held the envelope in front of the stoat. It chirped once and the envelope went up in flames. Simultaneously, the same thing happened to poor Earl. Juniper, Shrek and I stood and watched grimly as he burned. The screams went on for too long for any of us to be comfortable with before the kill notification finally arrived.
We spent the rest of the night feeling fairly morose about the way that Earl died. He was an evil son of a lich, but that was absolutely brutal to watch. Juniper, of course, was taking it the hardest. I sat next to her after we had set up camp on the scaffolding platforms. I didn’t really know what to say to her. She’d done her part in putting down many of the undead workers in the mines, but that had all been in the heat of action. With Earl, we all just kind of stood around and watched as he slowly burned to death. That was a different thing altogether. I nudged her.
“You gonna be alright?” I asked.
“I think so,” she said, softly. “I just wasn’t ready for something like that. It felt…wrong.”
“Karma,” Shrek grunted from the scaffold above us.
Juniper didn’t respond. Instead, she asked, “How did you know that setting the envelope on fire would kill him?”
“I knew liches use phylacteries. I looked around with Environmental Mapping during our fight and noticed a small resource dot on my map. Took a chance that was it and had the stoat go grab it for me.”
“When did you start fighting like that? With the gun and knife as one, I mean,” Shrek asked.
“A couple of days before we left. I figured it out one night after you were done hitting me with sticks.”
He snorted in amusement.
“Likely won’t be much more of that, now,” he said.
“No,” I agreed. “Likely, there won’t be.”