by G. D. Penman
There was a little bit of extra pleasure to be taken from the fact that if the Masters hadn’t made such a bad job of trying to screw him over then he wouldn’t have been able to break out. With a smile on his face, Martin sat himself down in front of the breach, crossed his legs and logged out.
Seven
Descent in the Darkness
The nightmares were bad that night. The green eye down in the dark. The whispering voice. Come to me. Die for me. Become mine. Become me.
Mixed into the usual mix of Strata nightmares were faceless men in suits, their heads shrouded in the same darkness that enveloped the Masters’ faces and kept them out of sight. They pursued him down through the dungeon, demanding that he stop and turn himself in. Calling him a murderer. Calling him a cheat. He wouldn’t stop running until he found some dark hole to curl himself in, tail wrapped over his snout and shivering.
The darkness wrapped around him, protecting him, hiding him from anyone that would do him harm. His hammering heart slowed to a steady pace, then to a rare thump, then to a dead stop. He opened his eyes to that same darkness. Blinking it away as fast as he could. Gasping for air. His heart. He couldn’t hear his heart beating. Martin’s paws came up to his chest, clutching and feeling for the beating of his heart beneath the fur. He knotted his hands together and hammered them against his chest. Live. Again. Beat.
In the distance, he could hear the beat he needed. He could hear his heart thumping, miles away. He burst out of the apartment at a run, leaping and tripping his way down the stairwell, down past all the other apartments, down through some dark muddy hole in the foyer and deeper still. Running as fast as he could, paws stretched out ahead of him. Reaching for his own heart. Reaching for it desperately as he felt the cold of death spreading out through his body, all the way out to the tip of his tail and snout. He fell dead, still twenty flights up from the heart he could hear beating. He was never going to reach it.
This time when his eyes snapped open he leapt to his feet with a barely suppressed scream before he could clamp his hands over his mouth. His hands were shaking. His whole body was shaking. The bed was drenched in sweat. His eyes were leaking too, but he wouldn’t call it crying. There was no emotion involved, just raw fear made liquid.
Beyond the walls, Martin could hear his neighbors going through the motions of their pointless lives. The drunk two floors down was in a screaming match with his sober partner. Somebody was playing a shooter a room up and to the right. Somebody was aggressively bouncing on their bed for some reason. It took Martin a moment to realize that it might be sexual, which made him uncomfortable to have been a part of it, even peripherally.
All of a sudden, the cozy little nest of his apartment felt claustrophobic. The walls were pressing in on him, bodies behind them, just like the corpses glimpsed through cracks in the walls in Strata. Pressed all together, leaking their life through things that should have been solid to taint Martin’s home.
He stared at the door as he went through the motions of preparing himself food for the day. Ramen. A prepackaged boiled egg. Jerky. Things that could sit by his side through the day without spoiling until those moments he took a break from the game.
Nobody was knocking at his door. Nightmares were meaningless flares of his subconscious mind, not premonitions. None of his dreams were real, he had to remember that. Nobody was outside the door waiting to break in. He could walk across the apartment, open the door and step safely into the stairwell without ever seeing any of the Masters’ secret police.
He could do that, but he wouldn’t, because even acting to deny the reality that his dreams presented would be giving them power over him. He was a creature of reason and logic. He would not succumb to this sort of fuzzy thinking.
Still there was the nagging sense of unease. He checked his phone as he prepped noodles and protein bars for the day. No sign of Klimpt’s death in the news. No sign of anything relating to the hotel invasion. No sign of anything. When the whole world was filtered to Martin through news feeds, and the news feeds were decided by the algorithm, the people writing the algorithm could make him know or not know whatever they wanted. If he hadn’t seen things with his own eyes, he wouldn’t have believed them.
Even now, staring at the absence of news, he started to question himself. What was more likely was that there were shadowy conspiracies behind the scenes manipulating the drip-feed of information, or that one person was having a mental breakdown and hallucinating events that were not taking place.
He knew, statistically, that he was much more likely to have gone mad than for the world to be as mad as he perceived it to be, but even those statistics could be skewed and biased. How long had this sort of manipulation been going on? When all that he could rely on were his own senses, how did he know they weren’t lying to him?
As soon as food was prepared and laid out, he slipped on the NIH and lay down to escape all these impossible questions. Here, in the real world, Martin’s power and knowledge were as limited as anyone else’s, but in the game the only limits were rules that he could not only understand, he could master himself. Was it any surprise that he liked the game better?
He was still early for the arranged starting time, but, as it turned out, Lindsay was too. She came scampering out of the darkness the moment she saw the flare of his arrival. “Dude! I thought I was going to log in and find you still here from last night, banging your head on the wall.”
He didn’t care for the maternal nonsense – it felt far too much like his old boss and her grand shows of overbearing concern – but he was pleased by her phrasing. “Bang my head against a wall? Like this?”
He took one step forward and slammed his face through the solid stone and into the space beyond. He pulled back to let Lindsay see his spreading grin.
“You found a way out?!”
“I found a way out.”
She did a little dance in a circle. If she’d been a real crow, Martin would have thought she was trying to trick worms into surfacing. “Dude. I can’t believe it. I thought we were going to have to work out a suicide pact, or something.”
“Nah, the Master who has been screwing with us set this whole thing up, and since he’s completely incompetent he left a nice big hole in the side of the trap.”
“You’re still doing the persecution paranoia thing?”
“It isn’t paranoia if they really are out to get you, and that Master literally told me he built this pit to screw us over.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“And it is going to let us skip to the next deep instead?”
Martin grinned so wide his oversized front teeth popped out. “Oh yeah.”
Jericho and Julia arrived in a flare of light that lit up the stark gray nothing of the pit.
“Just in the nick of time!” Lindsay cawed. “We’re getting out of this dump!”
Jericho opened his mouth to growl something bitter, but Julia was too quick for him, rushing forward to catch Lindsay by the arms and bounce up and down with glee. “We’re getting out!”
They bounced for a moment, caught up in the excitement while Jericho and Martin stood back in silence, eyeballing each other. Eventually Jericho grumbled, “You fix the problem you made?”
“The problem you made by killing all the Brotherhood? Yeah, I fixed it. Same as I always do.” Martin didn’t sneer. His temper may have gotten the better of him for a moment, but now wasn’t the time for antagonizing Jericho. He could save all the bitter recriminations for later.
Maybe have a chat with Lindsay about looking for a new tank before they moved on to the next game, since this one seemed incapable of keeping a level head. If she could be talked into it, Lindsay would probably make a halfway decent tank, she was always bang in the middle of every fight that happened, making a load of noise. They might as well capitalize on that.
One by one, he led them over to stick their heads through the hole in the wall. Lindsay was so bouncy with excitement w
hen she came back in that Martin was worried she was going to go diving out without them. Jericho came back looking elated. Lindsay, taking a third turn, came back even more giddy than before. Finally, Julia looked into the abyss and came back with concern graven into her features. “This isn’t a good idea.”
Martin blinked at her. “It is our only workable idea.”
“No. Sorry, but no, Martin. This is cheating. This is stepping outside the game and coming back in somewhere else. Cutting corners. Exploiting glitches. That isn’t how Iron Riot plays.”
Lindsay flung an arm around her shoulders, “Julie, baby, we wouldn’t even be in this mess if the Masters weren’t trying to screw us over by throwing a pit in to keep us from dying or progressing.”
“It doesn’t matter what the challenge is, cheating isn’t our solution.”
Martin ground his teeth together. “There is no rule about leaving the dungeon. There isn’t even any lore, just hints about some world up above that doesn’t even exist. Someplace that none of the NPCs have ever even been. The dark out there, that is fair game. They moved pieces around, we can move the pieces around. That isn’t cheating, that is gameplay.”
Lindsay stopped dead in her tracks. “Do that again.”
“Do what?”
She pointed at him. “The eyeball thing.”
“What eyeball thing?”
“That eyeball thing you did before you started talking. Your eye just went wiggle wiggle wiggle.” She waved her hands back and forth at the side of her head.
Martin’s mouth opened and shut a few times. “What?”
Jericho rumbled. “It is true. Your eyeball did wiggles.”
“What the hell are you guys talking about?”
Julia snapped her fingers. “Boggling.”
They all turned to look at her. “What?”
“It is called boggling. My sister used to work in a pet store. When rats grind their teeth, their eyes pop out like that.”
Martin gave his teeth an experimental grind and all their faces brightened up instantly. “I can boggle?”
Lindsay clapped. “Does that mean the rest of us can do what our animals do? Julia, can you shed your skin?”
She rubbed at her bare arms self-consciously. “I guess I might if we play for long enough?”
“Could you imagine?” Lindsay cackled. “You make it down to deep 50 and all of the loot is snakeskin boots.”
Martin pinched the bridge of his snout. “Could we get back to the point?”
Lindsay stuck her fist up in the air. “Show of hands. All in favor of jumping down to the next floor and screwing the Masters that tried to screw us, stick your hand up.”
Martin cautiously raised his hand, as did Jericho, albeit a little more bashfully. “I am sorry kitten, I do not like it, but this is the right plan.”
“Do you have any idea what will happen to us if we fall?” said Julia.
Martin sighed. This was veering toward dangerous territory. “Nobody does, because nobody ever has. It doesn’t matter. We aren’t going to fall.”
“What happens if we do?”
“Then it is game over. Same as if we stay here. The only difference is that, out there, we have a chance of making progress.”
Julia crossed her arms, but there wasn’t much she could say. It wasn’t like she got a veto.
Since it was his bad idea, Martin had the honor of heading out into the abyss first. He reached through the wall carefully until he could feel that he had a solid grip on the uneven surface outside, then he slowly pressed himself through the gap and into the silent darkness.
He hadn’t really noticed just how quiet it was out here before.
Inside the dungeon he could always hear his own breathing, the echoes of movement, even just the gentle shift of air around them, but out here there was no sound at all. It was deafening.
Lindsay slipped out next, which was hardly a surprise given how desperate she had been to get out into the void outside the game from the moment they discovered it was accessible. She gave Martin a wave and tried to say something, but the sound didn’t carry. He tapped at his oversized ears as she looked ever more confused, then it seemed to click. She touched the guild crest on her chest and it came through loud and clear. “This is awesome.”
Martin double checked his grip and footing, then eased his hand off the wall and touched his own crest. “Focus.”
Soon enough, the four of them were inching their way around the outer wall of the dungeon. They had to move along the full length of the pit before they were above the section of tunnel below, edging out slowly so that the next could follow.
Martin led, but soon found he regretted it. His low-light vision helped him to see where the next handhold would be, but it was obvious that Lindsay was better at climbing. He should have let her lead. That was how their life worked – Lindsay barreled in, and he carefully picked his path along her trail. Why did he have to try and prove some point about this plan?
While the inside of the pit in the dungeon had been perfectly smooth so that they couldn’t climb out, it felt like the outside was all rough-hewn rock. Almost as if the more the Masters tried to push the dungeon one way, the more it acted in the opposite way.
Martin was doing his even best not to look down. He could still remember where he was headed. He had no good reason to look down at his feet when he could feel his way along just as well. If anything, his low-light vision was an impediment more than a help. Shadows weren’t cast properly out here. It was as though his body was as transparent as when he had been dead and floating in the nothingness of the game menus.
He kept looking at his own hands to remind himself they were there, and at the rocks to confirm that what his touch was telling him was true – that he really was holding on tight to the next outcropping before moving on the next.
Even this was just a distraction from the green eye down below. Try as he might to pretend he couldn’t see it. Martin could feel the gaze of Strata. The weight of the living dungeon’s attention pressed against him. The fur all over his body stood on end. The scars on the palms of his hands, the soles of his feet and his blinded eye all ached. Not fully realized pain, just the promise of the pain to come. The awareness of the injuries that would not heal.
Every time he gripped the next handhold, the jagged stone pressed into the hole in his hands. Whenever he shuffled his feet along, it was as though one sharp rock always jutted up into him. Hooking in his flesh. Like the dungeon was trying to get inside him any way it could.
He couldn’t think about it. If he thought about it, he might start to panic. If he panicked, he might make mistakes. This was just a game. He didn’t need to worry about the things he saw in his dreams. He didn’t need to think about the eye down there in the dark. He didn’t need to think about anything except for the practicalities. Moving his hands, his feet, his body. Moving along the wall was all that mattered. It was all that he could control. He just had to focus.
They were almost halfway to safety when he blinked and realized that his stamina gauge was close to bottoming out. He missed his next grip point and swung dangerously away from the wall for a moment before flattening himself back against it and fumbling for his crest. “Stamina is draining fast. Need to get down faster. Health will drain next. Move.”
They moved, but Martin’s careful pacing was the biggest roadblock to progress. He had to stop and feel, test each foothold and then carefully edge along. Even as he was doing it, he knew he was killing them all, but he couldn’t be reckless, he just didn’t have it in him. Not with the void beneath their feet staring up at him. Sucking at him. Trying so desperately to pull him off the side of the dungeon and down into nothingness.
He hadn’t spoken to the others about the potential consequences of falling, in part because there was no way of knowing them for certain, but just as much because it might have put them off the plan, and off their stride. That didn’t mean the knowledge of all the potential outcomes wasn’t bou
ncing around inside his head though.
One missed grip, one wrong step, one little slip – that was all it would take to send them falling into a pit with no bottom. A darkness with no end. They could fall and fall and fall forever, and worst of all Martin didn’t even know if they’d be able to log out of the game once they’d started falling.
Outside of the strict structure enforced within the dungeon proper, he hadn’t even known if their stamina would drain or their menus would be accessible. It was quite possible that if he tried to log out, out here, the game wouldn’t be able to position them and they’d just be stuck. Their bodies left sitting hollowed out and empty. As dead as Klimpt, but unaware of it. Hearts still beating, blood still flowing, brains empty.
To the others, this was a game. Even to Lindsay. She would never risk her real life to win a game. That was why Martin was so essential to the guild. He was willing to push them past their cowardice and the distractions of their real life. Normally, he had to manipulate them into it, presenting them with carefully tailored motivations that they could use to justify their actions to themselves. But sometimes he just had to outright lie, as he had today.
They rounded the curve and salvation was one wild leap of faith away when Martin blinked and realized that it was already too late. His health bar was draining just as fast as his stamina. If he died out here, would he come back, or would his body tumble uselessly down into the dark, never to return? Every other time he’d died, he’d lost control of his body before the end. His vision had turned gray. His strength had drained. What if the same thing happened again? What if the game wouldn’t let him drain his stamina so far that it killed him, and instead he pitched off into the darkness and fell, half-unconscious for all of eternity?
Julia lost her grip.
Martin didn’t know if her smaller stamina pool had run out that much quicker or if she genuinely made a mistake, but either way the result was the same. She toppled back from the wall, her mouth wide in a scream that none of them could hear. Martin froze. All he could do was watch as she fell down into the darkness.