The Dead Rogue

by Pavel Kornev

Deadman’s Bloody Flamberge: +2% to Damage and Accuracy

  Any other flamberge: +1% to Damage and Accuracy

  Was it only a little? Probably. But it would definitely do no harm, especially at higher levels...

  I grew gloomy, took off the mask and spat on the ground.

  At higher levels? Damn. I hoped I’d get out of the game before reaching those heights!

  My desire for exercise disappeared. I stuck the flamberge in the sand and sat down on the cold stone. The sun became lighter faster and faster and I had to put on the necromancer’s robe which I’d thrown on the ground. Here was the new day...

  I shivered and slid my palm along the hilt of my flamberge.

  I wondered whether anyone else had ever thought of spending so much game time on pointless swinging their blade around?

  Suddenly, the lines of the altar drawn by the priestess burned with a red fire and a dark figure appeared in the circle almost instantly. I drew my flamberge from the sand, but my alarm was false — it was Isabella returning to the game.

  The priestess went directly to the cave and called out to me on the way, “Are you ready, Kitten?”

  I glanced at the boy who was sleeping by the remains of the fire and nodded.

  “I’m ready.”

  “Let’s stop wasting time then!”

  Isabella was the first to disappear into the hole. I followed her, climbing over a rock lying near the entrance, bent down to avoid the stalactites hanging off the ceiling and stood back up straight in the dungeon with the high ceiling.

  “It’s probably quite nice here under normal light,” flashed through my head.

  The fallen gates were ahead. Isabella stopped by them, waiting for me and warning, “We enter together.”

  “That’s fine,” I replied and we simultaneously stepped into a dark corridor with roughly worked walls, an uneven stone floor and a high ceiling.

  The priestess paused.

  “Strange...” she said with a perplexed note in her voice.

  “What’s up?” I asked her with alarm.

  “There are no system messages!”

  “There might be something further along.”

  Isabella made no reply and carefully looked at the gate we’d left behind us.

  “Very strange,” she muttered again.

  I just shrugged and set off further along, carefully peering into the cloying darkness of the dungeon. The corridor soon became wider and taller and the walls started to reflect the echo of my steps. The cave turned out to be incredibly large.

  Something darted right by my face, slid along my cheek and immediately sped away.

  Damage taken: 5 [595/600]

  What the hell?

  I started to turn around and something immediately flew at my back, cut at my neck and disappeared back into the darkness with a scratching sound that receded into the gloom.

  I took my flamberge off my shoulder and slashed through empty air. I still earned two more cuts. The damage was low, but I simply couldn’t see my opponent! I remembered my exercises and started to spin my blade in a figure of eight, but my invisible antagonist easily overcame my defense and slashed my back. Thankfully, my chainmail defended me from being wounded this time.

  “Isabella!” I shouted. “Come here!”

  The priestess emerged from the gloom and raised her staff high. A blood-red fire shone from the eyes of the skull and I managed to notice a shadow flying towards me. I cut at it with my sword, but the cluster of darkness easily avoided my blade, caught me on the shoulder and flew towards the priestess.

  She had no time to dodge, but she didn’t bother. Her staff bent and the jaws of the skull clacked, ending up holding tight of a huge, struggling black bat.

  What made me curse was not the size of the dead creature. The light from the shining skull pushed back the darkness of the dungeon and I could see the shadows circling under the high ceiling.

  Dozens of shadows. Dozens of bats.

  One rapidly dived at me and whipped me with a razor sharp wing while another two or three attacked the priestess, but I had no doubt that the whole swarm would soon attack us.

  “Stand still!” Isabella shouted and raised her staff again.

  The skull opened its maw and the cave was filled with a bizarre and unpleasant sound, as if a hundred mosquitoes buzzed just under my ear, both piercingly and just at the edge of hearing at the same time.

  The coordinated circular motions of the swarm immediately changed into a chaotic struggle, as the bats started to crash into each other, the stalactites and the walls, falling down and convulsing on the floor.

  Isabella shot forwards and pushed me in the back, shouting, “Run, you idiot!”

  The priestess sprinted through the dungeon, while I stopped to kill one of the creatures that was struggling on the ground. Which was why I was late. As soon as Isabella had disappeared into a dark hole in the opposite wall, her skull immediately fell silent and the bats started to dive at me one after another yet again, slicing through my flesh with the razor-sharp edges of their wings.

  I had to roll sideways and activate stealth mode. I calmly tried to move towards the hole and immediately earned about a dozen cuts! My health immediately fell by fifty points!

  Damn! The bats found their way through their surroundings using ultrasound! I couldn’t fool them using stealth!

  I rushed towards the sanctuary of the corridor and saw a fireball fly towards me. The flame burned several of the creatures over my head, while the others quickly rose up to the ceiling of the cave.

  “You’re such a cretin, Kitten!” Isabella told me off angrily.

  “I’m a cretin?” I argued back. “Look at yourself! A level 53 priestess running away from a bunch of bats!”

  “Well, of course!” she snorted. “There’s no experience from them, they’re just a waste of effort! Enough! Lead the way!”

  “Why me?”

  “Which one of us is a rogue?”

  “I haven’t learned to find traps!”

  “Walk ahead anyway!” Isabella demanded. “Go! I’ll cover you!”

  I shrugged and stopped arguing with the priestess. At the end of the day, I would regenerate sooner or later, while there was little point in a priestess with a broken leg. She didn’t know how to heal. What could you ask of a fury?

  Roger had completely stopped shining by that time and we kept going in pitch darkness. We kept coming across stones and gravel, but there were no side passages or stairs along the way. There were no traps either. No flying balls of fire, no falling ceilings crushing us and no spikes coming out of the walls to stab at us.

  This was an unusually boring dungeon for a game world...

  Were they trying to make us have a false sense of security?

  “Hear that?” Isabella suddenly spoke to me in a quiet whisper, breaking the silence for the first time as we meandered through the darkness.

  I listened hard and heard something in between the splashing and rustling.

  “Is that the flow of water?” I guessed.

  “Sounds like it,” the priestess agreed with me for once and pushed me in the back. “Get a move on!”

  Soon, we saw water streaming down the walls and felt mud squelching underfoot. Large drops began to fall from the ceiling, as if a river flowed above us and then the sound of a spring intensified and we saw a hole in the floor where the excess water disappeared.

  I crouched and looked downwards.

  “There are steps here!”

  “Go first,” Isabella replied as she stood by my side.

  I put my foot on a stone step which had been smoothed over by water, covered in slime and so slippery that I almost lost my balance and grabbed Isabella’s outstretched hand.

  One step and then another. Muddy water started to run down my back. But that held no fear for me. I was more afraid of what awaited us below.

  I let go of Isabella’s hand and entered stealth mode.

  2

  THE SPIRAL STAI
RCASE made a few turns and then took us into a narrow room, occupied by short and ugly creatures with greenish-grey faces, large noses and big ears. They all wore leather clothing and were armed with stone hammers and black obsidian blades. Only the largest one of them was the proud owner of a steel helmet, breastplate and pickaxe.

  A tag saying “Kobold Leader” lit up.

  Stealth mode safely hid me from the underground creatures. I jumped over the hole where the water poured down and sidestepped, trying to occupy a position behind the backs of the ugly beings. However, the kobolds immediately seemed more alert and started to sniff at the air with their noses and move their ears. Remembering the mess with the bats, I didn’t rely on the skills of my rogue and charged into the attack, activating Sweeping Strike along the way. And then another sweep, but in a different direction.

  The hilt of the flamberge almost got torn from my hands when the undulating blade cut into the kobolds, easily slicing through their leather jacket and aprons, ripping open their flesh and hacking through bones.

  The game log exploded with red messages about critical hits and kills. The two creatures at the edge got cut in half. The head of another came clean off and the fountain of black blood from its neck covered the floor and walls. The crossbowman that got away with only losing a hand ran to the far corner, where it fell down, finished off by the bleeding, but the leader survived. It stood in the very center and only caught the strikes when they were significantly weakened, so the flamberge hadn’t managed to cut through the iron breastplate.

  However, its rusty pick easily pierced my chainmail.

  The kobold suddenly lunged and hacked it into my side in the blink of an eye, immediately causing one hundred and fifty points of damage. The leader immediately pulled the pick back, but I managed to catch the haft with my left hand as I smashed the hilt of my sword into its gaping maw with my right.

  I was aiming for its teeth, but the leader managed to tilt his head and take the attack on its helmet. This didn’t help it at all, however — Isabella came from the stairway and thrust her staff at it, with the pole piercing through the rusty iron of the armor with surprising ease. The kobold immediately turned to dust.

  “What a mess you’ve made here, Kitten!” the elven priestess whistled, as she looked over the kobold bodies which had been hacked to death with my flamberge. “Did any escape.”

  “No,” I replied as I opened the game stat window.

  Even though the priestess had killed the kobold leader, I’d earned three hundred points of experience for killing five kobold guards and one crossbowman. This was enough to raise the level of my undead side, which made me question which stat to raise. Strength, Agility or Perception? My Constitution was great anyway and I planned to leave the development of Intelligence till last.

  “Kitten!” Isabella called out to me, as she stepped up to the wide open door. “Stop standing around!”

  I added a point to my current level of Perception, as I’d decided to get to at least 10 so that I could increase accuracy and the chance of critical hits as well as the level of Energy. The longer I could maintain Incognito, the better.

  “Are you sure that none of them got away?” the elven priestess asked in distrust when I joined her by the door and looked out into an empty corridor.

  “Is that so important?”

  Isabella snorted.

  “Revolutionary artificial intelligence” isn’t just an advertising slogan. A guard would bring the whole tribe and we would have to waste time on a kobold genocide.”

  “You don’t want fight our way through?”

  “No, Kitten, I don’t.”

  “My name is John,” I reminded again and stepped through the door first. I sneaked along the corridor, stood at the corner and used stealth mode, but there was no one in the next dungeon, so I decided to stop wasting Energy and continued onwards in the open.

  Isabella silently padded after me at a distance of a couple dozen paces. The priestess’ staff kept bending slightly, so that the empty eye sockets of the skull never lost sight of me. This made me a little nervous.

  One empty corridor followed another and then a third one stretched out ahead. However, the dungeons were not uninhabited — there were more than enough smudged tracks in the dust, there was a burning smell coming from somewhere and the occasional sounds of muffled blows. We soon passed the empty opening of a well and then came across an abandoned smithy. I got the impression that the landslide on the riverside had uncovered some kind of accidental path into the outskirts of the domains of the kobolds.

  Even though the victory by the stairway was easy, I kept alert and always entered stealth mode at every turn. When we started to come across crossroads, the dark elven priestess always spent a while standing still, before selecting one of the underground passages. I had no idea how she navigated, I just obeyed her orders and asked no questions.

  We came across a kobold guardsman when we were about to descend to the next level of the dungeon. A short and ugly kobold stood by the stairway, lit up with the glint of torches on the walls. He held an obsidian axe and had the end of a rope going into a hole in the wall tied around his free hand.

  “We can’t let him raise the alarm,” Isabella whispered into my ear.

  The priestess was saving her powers for the lower levels, so it was me who had to act. I entered stealth mode and silently crept up to the guardsman. The kobold started to worry and loudly sniffed at the air when we only had a pair of steps between us. It took me a single leap to get to its side, grab the rope and sink my teeth into its scrawny neck.

  Something crunched. My mouth filled with hot blood that had an unpleasant taste.

  Fearsome Bite! Critical damage! Damage: 80

  Bleeding wound! Additional damage: 5

  Poisoning! Additional damage: 5

  The kobold started to convulse, but I held it close to me, not letting it run away or pull on the rope. The guard tried to get away, but the bleeding and poisoning finished it off and the body went limp.

  The bite let me restore my Health and Stamina, but my Energy went into the yellow, which caused me some concern. It was unlikely that the dark elf would let us make camp so that I’d have time to restore my powers. I just had to pit my hopes on the Silver Deadman’s Amulet.

  “You eat in such an unpleasant way, Kitten,” Isabella noted when I pushed the lifeless body away from me. The priestess herself seemed to be way too clean and fresh when surrounded by the dark and grim dungeon.

  I spat the blood on the floor and released the rope leading into the hole, which the guard never got to pull on.

  “Come on and keep going!” the priestess demanded and I started to go down the stairs in front of her. I saw that the tunnel mouth was haphazardly blocked up once I reached the bottom, as if the kobolds wanted to barricade themselves from those that lived on the levels below them, but they didn’t do it particularly well. The rocks were strewn around and there was a hole in the middle which was easily large enough for a human to squeeze through.

  “What’s down there?” Isabella asked me as she was covering me from behind my back.

  “I can’t see anything,” I replied and slipped into stealth mode again. I jumped from one rock to another, slipped into the hole and crawled to the other side, quickly stepping aside to the wall to free the way for the priestess.

  The dark elf didn’t keep me waiting, but as soon as she joined me, there was a scratching sound and then the blockage shook and slid downwards, burying any chance we had of getting out of here the same way we’d come in.

  “What the hell?” I swore with surprise.

  “Be quiet!” Isabella shushed me, closed her eyes and even put her fingers to her temples. “I have two pieces of news, one good and one bad,” she reported after a long pause. “The good one is that the boy was right. We are in the right place.”

  “What about the bad one?” I couldn’t stop myself from asking.

  “There are two of them,” the priest
ess sighed, opening her eyes. “If they kill us, there is no way we can come back here. The monsters have also been generated to be our maximum level, as opposed to being in the middle. My level.”

  I whistled.

  “What does that mean for us?”

  “You will either die and drag me with you,” Isabella shrugged, “or you will gain a lot of levels. If you die, I will kill you another couple of times. Got it?”

  The eyes of the dark elf flashed with dark fire and I hurriedly changed the subject of the conversation.

  “So why didn’t I get any notifications?”

  “Set up notifications to show when there is a change to the status of your active quests,” Isabella advised, but then waved her hand. “No! Not now! We shouldn’t waste time!”

  I nodded and set off to reconnoiter. It turned out to be much drier on this level, with clouds of dust rising under our feet and I couldn’t make out any tracks on the floor. Every step could activate a hidden trap, but corridor after corridor came and went and nothing happened. There was only the appearance of some scratches on the walls, as if something that was covered with spikes had been moving through these places.

  Finally, we came to a pair of doors which had been torn off their hinges and broken down.

  “Go!” Isabella quietly whispered behind me.

  I entered stealth mode and slipped into the next dungeon as an invisible, ghostly shadow. This was when my foot caught a rope stretched over the floor.

  A rope?

  I froze, hoping to prevent the trap from working and then carefully drew my foot back, but the rope had stuck fast to my trouser leg and dragged after me.

  I immediately heard the rapid patter of claws.

  My leg hadn’t got stuck to a rope, but to the thread of a spider web!

  A gigantic spider in a chitin carapace which was the size of a well-fed boar jumped out of the darkness and immediately charged into the attack. I thrust my flamberge out in front of me and pierced a cluster of compound eyes, but this didn’t stop the horrific monster. The cave spider was by my side in a heartbeat and sank its poisoned mandibles into me!