by Deck Davis
CHAPTER 1
An explosion tore a hole in the tower, the blast coming from so high that it was almost level with the gods. The force was powerful enough to rain stone, mortar, bone, and steel onto the onlookers below.
A figure catapulted out of it. It could have been a man, but it was hard to get a detailed look at someone who was plummeting out of a tower. Especially when they were screaming and flailing their arms as if they might learn to fly. They fell to the ground, shouting all the way down, before a thud put an end to the noise.
Tripp Keaton had watched them plunge, counting the seconds in his head until he heard a thump.
“Twenty seconds,” he said. “Poor guy. I bet it felt like hours to him.”
There was a squelching sound as the hole in the tower knitted together, sealing up like it was made from flesh.
Excited voices rose all around him, coming from players who’d made it in time to see the blast and the poor man’s ejection. They talked amongst themselves in a chorus of excitement and gossip.
“Did you get a look inside?” a bear-shifter rogue asked his artificer friend.
“Nah. Happened too quickly.”
“Damn it! I always miss stuff!”
“Was he thrown out, or did he jump?”
“Jump? Did you see the explosion, dumbass?”
A dragon the size of an eagle swooped down from the air, settling on a man’s shoulder. The man wore chocolate brown leathers with padded forearms and shoulders. His gloves had a faint gleam around them that suggested artificery. Tripp tried to work out what effect it was, wondering what artificery had been woven into them.
The dragon was coal-black from its head to wings to clawed feet. Its eyes were bulging and friendly, especially when it gave a burped a tiny stream of fire out of its mouth.
The man and dragon stared at each other, both sets of eyes turning blood red. They held each other’s gaze for a minute.
“He’s watching what happened through his dragon’s eyes,” said a girl next to Tripp. “Seeing what it saw. I wish I’d thought of that. Course, you need to learn falconry. Then taming. Then some kind of mage skill that lets you control things with your mind. Nah, too much work.”
More people had been listening than she thought. The area around the man became crowded, and some of them weren’t as respectful of his personal space. They tapped, jostled, and prodded him, trying to break his concentration.
“The dragon was yours?” asked an archer.
“What did he see?”
“I’ll give you all the gold I have if you spill it.”
There was a tension in the air now. It was so real and heavy that the place buzzed with it, but nobody said another word now in case they broke the spell.
They didn’t dare interrupt the man looking into his dragon’s eyes. They watched with pounding hearts, wondering what he was seeing. Wondering if he’d even share it; most of them wouldn’t if they were in his place. Why would you?
It wasn’t a great time to be altruistic. Not when knowledge was worth more than the rarest sword. Not when every single person standing there wanted to know the same thing; how to get into the tower.
The dragon-man took one last look at the tower. There was a strange expression on his face now. Was it fear?
Whatever it was, he and his bird-sized dragon stalked off without answering questions. He pretended that the stragglers who followed him and peppered him with queries didn’t exist.
Tripp didn’t blame him for keeping what he’d learned to himself. Everyone wanted to get into the tower and learn its secrets, but only a few could enter. Getting into the tower meant beating everyone else to it. This made people even crazier about it, but Tripp guessed that was what the devs had wanted.
The tower had appeared from nowhere and without warning only five days ago. It sprouted near Windborne, one of the largest cities in Soulboxe Online. It was so tall that you could look to the clouds and still not see its tip. The façade was bone-white and covered in carvings of words and images nobody understood.
It reminded Tripp of some of the gothic cathedrals he’d seen in eastern Europe. Ones with lots of spikes and spires, with haunted faces chipped into the stone and looking on you in anguish. With gargoyles and demons and other creatures watching from ledges and door archways.
One thing nobody could agree on was its shape. Some said it was like a sword pointing way up into the heavens, others said it was something rather more phallic.
To him, it was shaped like a giant’s tooth, but no giant had left it here. At least everyone could agree on that; Soulboxe’s new development team had created it. Their lack of warnings, announcements, or even explanations were standard by now.
It was the way the new devs liked to run Soulboxe. The last dev team used a genius artificial intelligence to control the game world. The new guys, since taking over, had transformed things.
No longer did they dance to the tune of a sadistic digitized intelligence named Boxe. No more did they rely on a virtual entity to keep the world running. they didn't go along with whatever cruel whims an AI had planned.
Nope, they’d learned their lesson about letting an AI have free reign, ever since the last digital god had run amok.
Everything was scripted now. Every quest, every location, every new addition to the world. The only things left to roam free were the non-player-characters, or NPCs, of Soulboxe. These were controlled by a less intelligent AI these days, one who was easily regulated. Despite that, he was still advanced enough to siphon his wits to them, making them seem real.
So, there had been changes. It was a new era for the players of Soulboxe online. Not just for the players, either. For its citizens. Because this was more than a game, more than digital colors and sounds. For long-stay players suffering disability or loneliness, Soulboxe was their world.
Right now, a mysterious tooth-shaped tower was dominating it.
A bunch of folks gathered on the western side of the tower where the unfortunate person had landed. Their corpse was battered and bruised in the realistic way that the devs refused to change. They refused even when faced with petitions from parents of kids who had accessed the 18+ game.
Tripp wandered over to them. As an orc, he towered over most of the hunters, warriors, mage, arcanists, archers. Over anyone, really, save half-giants. It meant that a lot of people thought he was thuggish on first glance, but it couldn’t have been further from the truth.
He didn’t want to jostle his way into the group to get a look at the corpse. He stayed back, standing next to a minotaur lady who wore leather shoulder bracers over a red cape. Her golden braids hung over her horns, which were the same color as the tower. When she breathed it sounded like the snort of a snoring pig.
“Did he say anything?” said Tripp.
She turned her minotaur head toward him now. Her eyes were small, her stare sharp. “He fell from a skyscraper’s height. I don’t think he did much speaking when he hit the bottom, do you?”
“Good point. But we’ve seen half a dozen people fall from it now, haven’t we? It seems to be their corpses are either ejected from the tower or…”
“Or those god-damn monks bring them out,” said the minotaur lady.
She was talking about the creepy figures who carried corpses out of the tower. It usually happened an hour or two after someone went in. Sometimes days, though. The longest anyone had lasted in there 48 hours.
If the dead weren’t blasted out of the tower from a great height, they were carried out of the front. The great oval doors would rumble open and four shrouded figures would walk out carrying a body.
They would take twenty-two steps, always that number, and place the body on the ground. Then they would return to the tower, ignoring anyone
who tried to speak to them.
A few days ago, a sword-mage bragged that he was going to kill the monks the next time they carried a body out of the tower. Nobody believed he’d do it, though everyone agreed that he looked stupid enough to try. The tower-crowders waited for the doors to open.
When they did, silence fell amongst them all.
What would happen when the mage assaulted the monks? If they died, would they drop some important loot? Or a clue? Would their corpses provide knowledge about this most mystical of towers?
Soon, four specters carried an assassin from the tower and placed him twenty-two steps away.
The sword-mage attacked, casting a spell that fired flaming blades at their faces. The blades, sharp enough to slice most NPCs to shreds, hit the monks and vanished into nothing.
And then the mage screamed like a cat with its tender parts caught in a trap.
In a blink, the monks covered thirty feet and were already upon the mage.
Their hoods fell back to reveal faces pale as bone, with blood-red lips and teeth like daggers. The four of them ravaged him like animals, tearing chunks from his face, neck, chest, arms. They eviscerated him, leaving no evidence behind. Then, gorged on their meal, they pulled their hoods over their heads and walked back to the tower.
It had been a strange morning, that was for sure. Tripp had made a mental note to never, ever provoke the monks.
The group began to disperse now, and Tripp saw why. The body on the ground had evaporated as its owner respawned, though he would not return to life back here.
This area of Soulboxe, imaginatively named The Bone Plains, had changed recently. Visually, the Soulboxe devs had left it untouched. It was still a jungle of bleached white and obsidian-black bones. The ruins of ancient people were littered around, cursed by the bone creatures that came out at night.
But the rulebook had been torn and rewritten. It reminded Tripp of Godden’s Reach. This was the site of the devs' last attempt to increase the player base by wreaking havoc on the game world.
Now, whenever anyone died in The Bone Plains, they could not re-enter it. The reason for that was obvious to everyone; the tower.
A person only had one chance at reaching the top of the tower once they entered it. Climbing to the top was how people assumed they could beat it, anyway. Nobody knew for sure. In any case, nobody got the chance to die in the tower twice.
In fact, most people couldn’t even figure out how to get in there.
That was Tripp’s task today.
CHAPTER 2
As he approached the tower doors, he heard hooves clomping behind him. Following this was a breathing sound so heavy it was like an overweight boar training for a marathon.
The minotaur girl had followed him to the doors, and he saw her name tag floating above her now.
Etta - Paladin – Level 29
At level 29, she was seven levels above Tripp. That meant either she hadn’t been playing long or, like him, she hadn’t been trying to grind her way to the higher levels.
His excuse was that he’d only just returned to Soulboxe after a few months away. His first stint was to occupy his mind while his body was in a regrowth pod, the result of getting acid thrown in his face.
A lot had happened the first time he was here, and it would take a whole damn novel for him to explain it to someone. Suffice to say, Tripp had fun. He beat a sadistic dungeon, and then faced off against a more sadistic AI. All in time for his first regrowth spell to finish, restoring some of his acid-splashed sight.
After another regrowth pod, which fixed his sight, he traveled around western Europe. He then headed east, where the weather was colder but the cities were beautiful.
When he got back, he picked up his fledgling carpentry business and tried to grow his client list again. After working for someone else for so long, he’d been looking forward to owning his own business so much. He could take the jobs he wanted. The ones that spoke to his expertise and creativity, and he could reject the ones that he hated.
It had gone so well at first. But soon, Tripp began to realize that he was lacking something. Something that a wise man might say is vital to every business.
He had no customers.
Clients were more elusive than a cop when you need one. After struggling for a few months, Tripp had to swallow his rather large pride and take a job with his old boss.
Working for someone else, lining their pockets rather than his, sapped his motivation. One night he’d had enough, and he needed to relax. He needed a break; he needed a little thinking time.
That was why he presented himself at a long-stay VR complex outside of town. He booked two weeks’ vacation and he spent the last of his acid compensation on a long-stay VR pod. The machine took his mind to Soulboxe Online, where he could pretend he wasn’t a man who worked with timber. Now he was an orc who weaved magic into swords and shields...and also worked with timber when he needed to.
He hadn’t advanced beyond level 22 yet, and Etta was only seven levels ahead of him. She was shorter than him by a foot, though she was built like a fleshy tank. Her horns looked like they’d pierce a hole in a bank vault.
Despite seeming like the kind of minotaur to avoid in an alleyway on a dark night, she had an awkward way about her. Shifting her long, curved sword from hand to hand, scratching the skin around her horns. Tripp liked it because he used to be a little awkward when he was younger.
“Hey! You’re the orc from Godden’s Reach, right?” she asked him.
Godden’s Reach had been a notable event in Soulboxe’s history. Mostly for the wrong reasons, given it had spelled the end for Boxe, the game’s old AI master. It had spread through forums and video streams. For a few weeks, it was all anyone had talked about. Tripp was in demand as Soulboxe influencers tried to get him to appear on their streams and podcasts.
Tripp had enjoyed his digital fame, because it made him feel like he’d done something worthwhile. His real business was suffering, but at least there was one area of his life where he’d succeeded.
But as with everything, his fame began to die down. People stopped recognizing him. Offers to appear on streams and podcasts ceased. Tripp felt a little empty.
Even so, he guessed it shouldn’t surprise him that the girl knew who he was. Being the sole steel orc meant that now that he was back in Soulboxe, players recognized him.
“That was some other orc,” he told her.
“Nah, it was you. I was too late to get into the Reach before they blocked people entering, so I watched the streams. It was definitely you. I can tell by the way you walk. Like you’re a drunk guy trying to be confident, but you sat on a spike and now you’re pretending it doesn’t hurt. Can I get an autograph?”
“You want me to sign something?”
“No, you dope! I’m kidding. So, uh, what are you looking for?” she asked him.
Tripp was kneeling beside the tower doors. He felt like an ant being so close to it, and he wasn’t too proud to say that it unnerved him a little. He felt like the monstrous structure could break apart and tumble down on him, burying him. It wasn’t just that it could happen, either. He got a bad feeling from the tower, almost like it desperately wanted to crush him to dust.
He pointed at the stone carvings that lined the bone-like material around the metal doors.
“The carvings change every time someone goes into the tower,” he said. “It’s a code, and the people who figure it out can get the doors to open. I’ve been watching them. Sometimes they say a word to the doors. Other times they present something. An offering.”
Etta nodded. “Did you see the warlock a few days ago? He took a barrel of lich oil. He poured it by the door and there was so much of it that it took him half an hour. It seeped underneath and then the doors opened.”
“The warlock,” said Tripp, trying to think. “Nope. I must have missed him going in.”
“I’ve seen every single entry. I’ve slept here every single night. The warlock hasn’t co
me out yet.”
“After three days? That must be a record.”
“Not quite. The record is actually four. Remember the red cleric who the monks carried out? He’d been in there four days. When they brought his body out, he was covered in burns, and he’d aged fifty years.”
“What did he see? Someone must have contacted him after he respawned.”
“That’s the pain in the balls, isn’t it? Doesn’t matter what he saw, because the tower changes for everyone who goes inside. The only thing we’re all agreed on is that you need to reach the top.”
“And before that, you need to get into the damn place,” said Tripp.
“You have problems entering things?” said Etta.
“Huh?”
She blushed then, which was a strange sight on a minotaur’s face.
“Forget it, Stupid joke. I make idiotic jokes when I’m nervous, and the more idiotic they are, the more nervous I get. The more nervous I get, the more idiotic my jokes become. And that makes me more nervous. Soon enough I’m apologizing in church because I told the congregation a limerick. One that starts there was a man from Lyle, who found a young maiden to defile. That was four years ago, and I haven’t been to church since. I haven’t been back to my hometown once I moved out, in fact. My parents screen calls and they must always be busy when I call. Weird, huh?”
“I get it,” said Tripp, smiling and trying to put her at ease. “Social situations make people like us say stupid things at stupid times.”
He knew that plenty of people played Soulboxe because it was an escape from life. It meant they could leave their real-life hang-ups behind for a while. For people like Etta, their hang-ups were like lost puppies who followed them everywhere.
“You’ve been camping out here every night?” he said.
“I’m on a long-stay, so I’ve got the time.”
Long stay meant one of a few things, but they all boiled down to a simple motivation. Anyone playing Soulboxe on a long-stay pass was escaping from something. Tripp knew that from experience, after spending weeks here so he didn’t have to be conscious in his regrowth pod.