Chapter Fifteen

The Black Guard

"WHAT?"

The noob mage cowered beneath Leafdarking's anger. "Yes that's what happened. A messy level 12 mage got Luthandros and rescued the prisoner."

Leafdarking messaged someone, burning with quiet anger at what a prize Luthandros had lost. If he had successfully delivered his prisoner... he was under her command... what a reward it would've been for one of her men to bring in a prisoner like that.

Freak was another member of the noob's army, one of Leafdarking's top leaders. His full name was Freakoldman, but that was too... unlike a name for most noobs, so to everyone he had been shortened to Freak. Freak by name, and in Leafdarking's opinion, by nature as well. But to many of his fellow soldiers, Freak wasn't freakish at all, so he was often simply called Jhonny.

Since they had raided the major towns of Asgarnia and Misthalin, Freak had taken black armor to wear. His weapon also was black; a mace. It wasn't as if he couldn't wear anything better, he actually cared about what it looked like. What noob ever cared about how they looked? He actually scared Leafdarking, in a way... he always followed orders as good as anyone, often better, but he was obviously cleverer than most noobs... and a good deal nicer, too. What he wore, how he behaved... 'Yep, he's definitely a black sheep, but still a sheep all the same.' Leafdarking thought, as she forced the disturbing thoughts to the back of her head.

"Yes?" Leafdarking flinched slightly at the leveled voice coming from directly behind her. She turned, and looked straight at the tanned golden face of Freak.

"Freak, there's an enemy lost in the woods east of Lumbridge; you are to take a few men, and recapture him." She ordered. Freak inclined his head.

"I'll catch him, if he's in the vicinity. But he could've teleported, or ran easily." He replied.

"If he ran, then find him. And don't come back here until you do." She said, and turned her back on him, signifying that the interview was closed.

Freak walked back outside, and then jogged towards the main noob headquarters, the old underground H.A.M. encampment. He had known about the noob's movement for years... he had known ever since the mysterious old man tried to cast the spell over him.

Whether the old man's spell had worked or not, he didn't know. But he did know that the army he was in was wrong, destroying Runescape as it was. He knew that he was unquestionably part of the army, so was in the perfect position of a spy. Problem was, no high levels had ever believed him, so he had no one to spy for.

But there had been a few who had believed him... a few like himself, who had been chosen for the noobs army. Like him, they believed that the army was wrong, but was way to powerful for them to do anything about it. Together, these adventurers had formed the Black Guard, a clan built to destroy the noobs army... from the inside.

So far, there were only three members of the black guard. All others in the army were well and truly noobs, who wanted nothing more than wealth, and revenge on those who had dubbed them noobs...

Freak reached the headquarters, and entered. The noobs guarding the place waved cheerfully at him as he approached. Freak couldn't help feeling a pang of sympathy for them... They were reduced to mindless members of the crowd, under a magical spell, fighting because others had taunted them to the point of great anger.

"Hey guys." Freak said as he approached the two sitting around a fire in the corner. One of them, clad in similar black armor as Freak, was just staring into the flames, and another was heating a bar of steel in the fire. A hammer and a bar of adamant that would serve as an anvil lay nearby.

"Hey Freak" Said the smith, without looking up from his work.

"What'd Leaf want?" Asked the black-armored warrior.

"Apparently Luthandros lost a prisoner in the woods; she wants us to get him." Said Freak, seating himself at the fire.

The warrior laughed. "Luthandros is the biggest idiot, I swear. Still, I kinda feel sorry for the guy... when Leafdarking gets to him."

"Luthandros shouldn't even have tried." Replied the smith, turning the steel bar over with her hammer to see if it was hot enough yet.

"Luthandros doesn't have enough brains to know not to try. He gets himself into so many hopeless fights... I reckon it's not a day for him if he isn't killed at least once." Said the warrior.

"He's a good fighter though, Calladus. He could own you anywhere on a fair fight." Said the smith. "And it's actually pretty brave, when you think of it, entering a fight that you know you can't win and trying your best anyways." He added on an afterthought.

"Ha! Luthandros is pure noob. He doesn't know what 'fair' is. And he's not smart enough to recognize a hopeless situation neither. And he couldn't really own me - he could win, but not easily." replied the warrior, Calladus.

"Win is enough for him. To a noob, win and own are exactly the same thing. He may have won by a little bit, but in the story told 'round the campfire that night, you would've been owned by Luthandros with both hands tied behind his back." Said the smith, carefully.

"Shut up Blaze." Replied Calladus, slightly annoyed at the smith's truthful words.

"My name is Blazingwarri, not just Blaze." Said the smith, equally annoyed.

"Hey, guys, we should go now, and see about that high level." Freak cut across their bantering.

"Ok... another minute while I bang this up..." Blazingwarri said, as he took the dull red steel ingot out of the fire and hammered it into a scimitar on the green adamant bar.

"Are you taking your plate?" Asked Calladus.

"Of course I am. I'd never see it again if I left it here." Replied Blazingwarri, pulling on his mithril plate as he spoke.

Ten minutes later, they were outside the headquarters striding off in the direction of Draynor village. Their plan was simple: find the high level, and make him aware of their helpful presence. Then offer him teleportation runes for his escape, or an invitation to join their clan.

Half an hour after that, the trio was on the track from Draynor village to Lumbridge. Freak and Calladus had been sitting beneath the trees, resting and watching Blazingwarri's attempts to locate tracks or signs or... something that might've been left by a high level adventurer.

Blazingwarri was an explorer, a miner and a smith. From when he had first arrived in Runescape, he had left the castle of Lumbridge to explore the world. His explorations had uncovered many rich sources of silver, gold, coal and mithril. He discovered quickly that he didn't have anywhere near the right skills for mining these minerals, so had taken his pickaxe and mined the lesser metals of tin, copper and iron.

To make some cash on the side he had smithed these metals into bars and from bars into weapons and armor. Now, he was a respectable miner and smith; but his hobby lay in exploration. His knowledge of the land around the kingdoms of Asgarnia and Misthalin was awesome. He knew every pebble, tree, house, inside of buildings, above ground and below. The earth was his living... it gave him all he needed to survive, and he knew to read it's language better than most.

So far, his searches had uncovered the tracks of two travelers apparently moving in single file. Their tracks were deep, indicating a heavy person, and they were walking irregularly like they were exhausted or carrying something really heavy and unstable or something. The tracks were also an even distance apart, and there were strange depressions in the ground that Blazingwarri couldn't identify.

He had tracked these heavy footsteps to Port Sarim. Where the unconscious pirate and shape of the ground told him that there had been three people here besides Redbeard, and they had been fighting. Only two had walked away from the seaport, two tracks heavily laden...

And then nearer to the headquarters, there had been a large dent in the earth, and two considerably lightened sets of footsteps running in different directions. In the path of one set of footprints, there was a dent in the ground similar to the first.

After half an hour of studying marks in the ground, Blazingwarri had deducted that the pirate and another human had been attacked by two people at Port Sarim. The attackers had won, knocked out the pirate and tied Redbeard's friend to a pole of sorts. Calladus had affirmed later that the pole was probably a mage's staff.

The staff and its prisoner had been carried by both attackers, east. They had been waylaid by a single attacker a short distance outside of H.A.M. headquarters. The ground told him that the new attacker had probably won, and teleported the pirate's friend away. Or the friend teleported himself away.

Now, they were following tracks deeper into the forest, south. Following the tracks of whoever had attacked Luthandros, his friend and their prisoner.

"Hey, who's that?" Calladus tapped Freak on the shoulder, his question making both his companions look in the direction of his pointing finger. He was pointing at a scruffy-looking female mage. From the looks of her, she could've been a noob... but... what noob was ever able to drown a goblin in a magic spell?

"It's her tracks." Blazingwarri whispered.

Freak nodded. He was a friendly person by nature, always looked for the best in anyone. He had rarely felt anger, definitely not the enraged lust for revenge that had possessed most low leveled adventurers, that had made them such easy targets for the army. He was a fairly good warrior, but he excelled as a leader, of sorts.

Problem was, he didn't want to be a leader. His endearing personality made him a good friend of anyone... he had many noobs that would follow him to anything if he commanded them. But he didn't want to command without orders, for the reason that the noob leaders may discover where his loyalties lied... And he also doubted his intelligence to handle big decisions.

Looking at the red-haired mage now... she was only level 12, despite the fact that she had just cast a powerful water attack spell. Freak knew that she wasn't a noob, for no noob in the army was that advanced in magic, except perhaps the ultimate mage Skraine. To Freak, anyone who wasn't on the noob army was a friend, an ally... and anyone who was on the army was a friend of his anyway.

He rose and left the shadow of the bush the trio had been hiding behind, and walked towards the mage, ignoring Calladus's urgent-sounding whisper,

"Freak..."

"Hey there!" Freak called out as he neared the mage. The mage's reaction was much like Luthandros's reaction to a similar greeting hours earlier. She spun around, yelling "Liquidatus minor!"

'Liquidatus minor...?' thought Freak... for a split second before a sheet of sparkling water smothered him. It drained off him quickly, leaving him totally drenched and coughing water out of his lungs.

"Who are you?" The strange mage demanded.

"F...freak..." Freakoldman gasped out through the water that was still inside him.

"Entangle!" She yelled, summoning a bolt of pure lightning out of the air. She threw it, not at waterlogged Freak, but at Blazingwarri and Calladus behind him. Both of them yelled as they dived for cover.

"What'd we ever do to you?" Called Calladus indignantly, from the relative safety of an oak tree.

"You're noobs!" Cerrin yelled back, throwing a heated fire spell in the general direction of the oak tree. The tree burst into flames, forcing a painfully scalded Callauds to evacuate.

"We're not noobs!" The warrior basically screamed. "We're members of a highly significant organization created and designed to infiltrate adversary's technical systems and disrupt as many procedures there as is humanely possible!"

"...huh...?" A confused Cerrin said quietly.

"We're not noobs!" Said Freak, echoing Calladus's first statement.

Cerrin was staring at Calladus with a strange expression on her face.

"Ohhkaayy... noobs never spoke like that before." she said. "Even normal people don't talk like that. But there was this one guy at school, he taught history and used so many big words you needed a dictionary for every sentence he said."

"Ok... just... please understand that we're friends." Said Blazingwarri, emerging from beneath a bush.

The red-haired mage grinned. "Sorry 'bout that. I just thought you were noobs... the other guy there, Luthandros, said that noobs were the only things in these woods 'cept me and the black haired guy."

"Yeah Luthandros's an idiot noob... every sense of the word." Said Calladus, lapsing back into normal speech. "I'm Calladus by the way, and this is Freak... Blazingwarri." He said, gesturing towards his companions as he introduced them.

"Hey, I'm Cerrin. I'm kinda new here, so I didn't know much..." said the mage, Cerrin.

"Hey, how were you casting entangle? And how does level 12 combat go with 79 mage..." asked Blazingwarri, curiosity prominent in every word. Cerrin sighed. She had already explained to Kryarn... now these people too? Resigning herself to the fact that people in Runescape weren't as smart as the people back home... but then, that warrior Calladus sounded clever enough... she explained who she was and where she'd learnt everything.

"Well... he's gone but you're welcome to join us if you want." Cerrin Wyver had explained her history to the Black Guard, and they had told her about their work against the noobs. At this proposal to join their clan, she shuddered.

"I hate noobs, any kind. We got noobs back home, they're everywhere... I'm not joining noobs, never." She said.

"Ok, well... it's getting kinda late, and we've gotta get back to camp soon... Leafdarking's gonna kill me if I'm late, literally." Said Freak.

"Ok, see yas later. Lemme know if the noobs give you more trouble." Replied Cerrin.

The trio turned and began walking back towards headquarters. Blazingwarri felt the side of his head cool... it was hot... hot and sultry the weather... hot enough for sweat to be running down the side of his face. And now it was cooling... Sweat only cools from wind, a breeze regardless how faint... Blazingwarri turned his face into the slight breeze, the breeze from the west...

"What the hell is that?" Calladus, Freak and Cerrin all turned around to stare first at Blazingwarri ... then to where Blazingwarri was looking, to the west... at the darkness that rolled towards them... darkness carried on a breeze that was quickly picking up into a wind... On the wind, preceding the darkness... was a voice... a strange, throaty, tone with murderous evil prominent in every detectable syllable... They blocked their ears, trying the shut the sound out... but it couldn't be done... it was everywhere...

"Run... hide..." said Calladus, sounding pitifully feeble beside the sound of raw evil emanating from the wind. But none of them moved. Simple, primeval curiosity had rooted them to the spot.

And the cloud was upon them. The voice... it was everywhere... couldn't be shut out... the cloud was worse... The cloud was everywhere... in their face, nose, eyes, ears, mouth... in their veins, in their minds... The cloud carried the voice with it... Trapped inside their minds, the voice was amplified one hundredfold... Yelling from the torturous pain... they blacked out...