Steel Orc- Player Reborn

by Deck Davis

  “I have two choices. Ignore them and let them die. It’s a crappy thing to do, but at least I’ll be okay.”

  “Or?”

  “Or I warn them. It’s a risk, but I might meet a few new friends as long they aren’t assholes.”

  Bee bounced into his arm to draw his attention to the right of him. “Tripp, hey, look over there. Something big.”

  “Yep, I already saw it. Orc vision.”

  “Go out there and destroy it.”

  “Are your screws rolling around again? I’m a level two craftsman with a bone dagger. You might as well ask a toddler to punch a lion.”

  He watched it get closer to the party, coming up from behind like an obsidian leviathan ready to strike without warning.

  Screw it.

  One of his life philosophies was this; if you were stuck between two choices, choose the one that made you feel like a better person. Then again…that was how he’d ended up in a medical regrowth pod in the first place. If Dr. Benner was watching right now, he’d be pissed.

  He grabbed his bone dagger and charged away from the campfire. Not too far, but enough that they’d hear him shouting.

  “Way to go!” said Bee. “Tear it a new one for me, Tripp!”

  Although he’d decided to help the players, he wasn’t insane, and he hadn’t developed a sudden taste for death and pain. He wasn’t going to fight this thing.

  The monster was getting closer now; as it moved over the plains toward the party and as Tripp got closer to them too, his orc vision picked out its specifics.

  It was a squid with a giant head. It floated over the plains with three tentacles writhing behind it, each lined with hook-like spikes. It had no eyes, no nose, just a gaping mouth – again, lined with hook-like teeth. Obviously, because why not make an already-terrifying thing even scarier?

  It was not a damn frorarg, that was for sure. While the plains might have welcomed level one and two players in the daytime, in the nighttime Godden’s Plains were meaner than a bad drunk with a mountain of empty cans next to him.

  Tripp ran just a few more paces. Incredibly, the party still hadn’t seen him, but his vision let him look at them perfectly now.

  He saw their name tags above their heads.

  Jon - Spirit Elf - Level 4

  Warren – Cleric - Level 7

  Lizzy - Grey Tusk - Level 3

  Wow. As organized as these guys seemed to be, they were lower levels than he’d expected. The Soulboxe levelling system ran to 200, but these guys had barely gotten started.

  Was that really so strange? They were sitting in Godden’s Reach at night, unaware that a giant animal was stalking them. Maybe they weren’t so organized or dangerous after all.

  This was it. He took a chance.

  “Hey,” he said. “You might want to-”

  “Orc!” said the elf, noticing Tripp. He lifted his bow and tightened the string, and Tripp found himself staring at an arrow with a buzzing red tip.

  A fire elemental arrow, maybe? Whatever it was, he’d had enough of fire things being shot at him.

  “I’m not an orc NPC,” he said. “See my campfire?”

  “We saw it,” said the elf. “Warren was deciding whether to approach it.”

  “You might wanna make a snap decision because there’s a giant squid coming to sniff your ass.”

  The squid swooped into full view now. Like the bleached skull he’d seen, this animal’s head was massive, almost too big for its body. It floated ten feet off the ground, and Tripp saw little pores on its body open and shut as if it were gulping air.

  Though it was on land, the squid still gave off an overwhelming fishy stench, competing with the smell of his campfire and souring the surrounding air.

  “See?” said Tripp.

  The elephant, Lizzy, shrugged her shoulders. “Yeah – we know. That’s why we’re here. We want to kill it.”

  “The squid? It’s enormous!”

  “No kidding,” said Lizzy. “Warren, Jon, what did you say we have to do again?”

  The cleric, who had the name Warren floating over his head, approached Tripp. “Mind if we set our respawn markers at your campfire?”

  “You have to give us permission,” said Jon, the elf.

  While Jon and Warren had similar accents, Lizzy’s sounded more southern. She also sounded a lot older than the two guys, who Tripp would have guessed were his own age.

  Should he let them respawn at his campfire?

  Right now, he was far enough away from his campfire for them to attack him, but close enough to retreat if they did. If they screwed around, he’d just ban them from his fire. Problem solved.

  “Go ahead,” he told him.

  “Thanks,” said the cleric. “C’mon, Lizzy.”

  Jon the elf gave him a curt nod, while Lizzy the elephant slapped him on the back as she went past him.

  Now, the squid was closing in, close enough that he could see its information.

  Lone Sleel [Night-time elite]

  Level 67

  HP: [IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII]

  “Level 67?” said Tripp. “And you guys were looking for this thing?”

  He couldn’t believe it. Sure, he knew that there were some brutal creatures roaming the plains at night, even in rookie areas, but to go from daytime frorargs to this monstrosity? It was like setting a grizzly bear on a man smeared with honey, then slapping its ass to make it mad.

  “Thanks for the respawn,” said Warren, as they ran away from his fire. He had a bible-like book strapped around his right thigh, and he held a sword in his hand.

  Jon was next, slinking low and with a steelier look in his eye than his friend, his magic-tipped arrow trained on the sleel.

  Then Tripp heard thuds on the grass, and he felt something slap on his shoulder. When he looked, he saw a grey snake wrapped around him.

  He jumped. Then, he heard Lizzy laugh, and he realized that it had been her elephant trunk.

  “Don’t do that!”

  “It gets people every time,” she said, laughing.

  Warren turned around. “Yeah, she’s really annoying with that thing.”

  Lizzy joined her friends, and the three of them headed toward the sleel.

  Tripp felt Bee swooped beside him. “They’re insane,” he said.

  “They have loot in their eyes,” said Bee. “When people see the chance of something special, they ignore the odds. Greed is the alchemy that turns fear into recklessness.”

  “A level 67 versus a four, a seven and a three. Impossible.”

  “You don’t think…”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know,” said Bee. “That maybe they know something we don’t?”

  “We’re going to find out, but we’ll do it from the safety of the campfire.”

  “You aren’t going to help them?”

  “Hell no! If there was a slight chance they could win, then maybe. Charging in now will just add another corpse to the mix.”

  The party of three stopped in front of the lone sleel. The level 67 hovered above them, its tentacles twisting, its mouth open.

  Jon was the first to act, firing a fire arrow directly into the gaping hole and down the creature’s throat.

  It flicked its body, flinching in pain, and then swept out with a tentacle.

  While the elf was nimble enough to leap away, the tentacle struck Lizzy, digging a hook dug into her chest. Blue sparks shot out and zapped her, a sign of shock elemental damage.

  Warren held out his hands and muttered something, and a layer of yellow light gathered on his fingers, like little fairies dancing tip to tip.

  “A healing spell,” said Bee.

  “Unless he’s the Florence Nightingale of clerics, it’s not going to help.”

  As a level three grey tusk, getting hit by an attack from a level 67 monster had killed Lizzy instantly. She was only kept upright by the monster’s hook stuck in her chest. When it whipp
ed it away, she fell to the ground.

  That left Jon and Warren - the spirit elf and cleric. Jon already had another fire arrow nocked and ready to go, while Warren let the healing light die on his hands and instead held his sword in a two-handed grip.

  “These guys must have hit every branch of the stupid tree when they were born,” said Tripp, “and then fell straight into moron canyon.”

  A tip of red pierced the darkness, flying in an arc and landing home on the sleel’s rump. The sleel gave it the attention a dinosaur would to a flea bite.

  Warren raised his sword high in the air and shouted a word Tripp didn’t understand – maybe it was a spellword – and waited as lashings of silver light gathered over him.

  Whatever the spell was it looked impressive as hell, and Tripp could actually smell the manus coming from him now; sour and almost sulfuric.

  Drenched in silver, fired up by bravery, and with his weapon raised, Warren charged toward the sleel. There was a look on his face now. Determination, and something else. Maybe confidence, as though he knew a way to bring the sleel down.

  CHAPTER 13

  Warren put everything into the blow, and it was that show of effort which doomed him. He lifted his sword high and then slashed with it, grunting at the effort and hitting nothing but air. Losing his balance, he stumbled one step and then two before recovering himself too late.

  It was a simple thing for the sleel to float higher, away from the strike, and then glide behind the cleric.

  Lashing out two of its tentacles – one left, one right – it delivered a burst of pure lightning energy on Jon and Warren, zapping them dead amid a flare of blue light and the smell of burning skin. After fighting the sleel for just a few seconds, the party were deader than a cemetery in a ghost town.

  That left Tripp standing 20 meters away, the sleel in front of him, the fire burning not far behind him.

  “You should destro-” Bee said.

  He cut her off. “Don’t even think about it.”

  When Tripp got back to the campfire – unharmed, since he wasn’t crazy enough to take on a level 67 sleel – he found that Lizzy, Jon, and Warren had already respawned.

  Jon was sitting with his bow on his lap. Unlike most elves, he’d foregone the classic silken blond hair and opted for a shaved head and a beard. His ears were pointy and looked as if a rat had gnawed on them.

  As a cleric, Warren had curly hair, thick and messy like a bird’s nest. He wore white trousers and a white shirt, but he also had a green hood that didn’t look like part of a cleric’s outfit. It must have been something he’d looted.

  Lizzy was sitting with a wide smile on her elephant face. The fire glowed on her tusks – one broken, one full – and colored the ivory orange. She was by far the most menacing of the three of them. If Tripp was ever forced chose one to fight, he’d have gone with Warren, the cleric.

  The three of them didn’t look especially tough, and Tripp couldn’t even think of a reasonable explanation for why they thought they could take on a sleel. He was going to find out. Maybe they’d figured out some kind of game glitch that could help him.

  Warren waved his hand. “Hey, pal,” he said.

  Jon gave a nod, while Lizzy wrapped her trunk around Tripp’s leg.

  He moved his leg away. “Quit that.”

  “Don’t worry about her,” said Warren. “You wouldn’t think she’s our older sister, would you?”

  “It’s the novelty. I never had a trunk before,” said Lizzy. “Jon, since we’re at a fire, do you want to do the honors?”

  Warren, who sounded like the youngest of the three going by his voice, held up his hand. “Hang on, you’re forgetting Soulboxe etiquette. Your name is Tripp, right?”

  “Yup.”

  “Do you mind if we cook at your fire, Tripp?”

  “Be my guest, as long as you save some for your host.”

  Warren nodded to Lizzy, who took two full-sized hams out of her inventory bag and gave them to him. “Warren earned the cooking skill,” she said. “In-game, anyway. I bet outside of it he can barely make some toast.”

  While Warren got busy with the ham, Jon took his arrows from his quiver one by one and laid them out on the ground in front of him, ordering them by the color of their tips. He hummed under his breath, and Tripp was sure he recognized the tune.

  It only took a few more bars of notes before he had it; Jon was humming the theme tune to a tv show called Crosshammer: Chicago PD, a crummy detective show that was repeated endlessly in the early hours. It reminded Tripp of his insomnia-driven channel surfing.

  Lizzy flapped her trunk at Bee, who made a game of it, darting in and out of range and laughing in her charming way.

  Tripp felt easy around the three of them, despite their suicidal display. They seemed comfortable around each other, and that made him relax in turn. But watching Bee and Lizzy play, something occurred to him.

  “You guys don’t have guide orbs,” he said.

  Warren, who had merely held the hams against the fire and now held fully cooked ones, began cutting them into pieces. “Nope,” he said. “That’s a tier-five package. I’m so broke even muggers want to donate money to me.”

  The smell hit Tripp now. Smoked ham, a meaty aroma that seemed to squeeze his gut. Mmm….

  “Here,” said Warren, passing him a portion of it. “Get your orc chops around that.”

  Tripp put it in his mouth and chewed, though the very sensation of chewing felt strange with his new orc teeth. Even so, the taste was divine, and his stomach yelled its thanks at him one second, then asked for more the next.

  “So, you guys know each other outside of the game?” said Tripp.

  Warren nodded. “We’re brothers, and she’s our sister.”

  “Half-sister,” said Jon.

  Warren glared at his brother and was about to say something.

  Lizzy held up her hand. “It’s okay, Warren.” She faced Tripp. “I’m twenty-eight years old, and I never knew about these guys until a year ago. Can you imagine that?”

  “You didn’t know you had brothers?”

  “I was gifted a DNA kit for Christmas, and when I got the results, I was only expecting a bunch of 4th or 5th cousins. I nearly crapped when it told me I had brothers halfway across the country.”

  Jon, having arranged his arrows in order, collected them back up and put them in his quiver. “Dad was a screw-up. Literally. He used to travel around a few states selling timeshare villas, but it looks like when he wasn’t selling, he was screwing around. Cheating on Mom,” he said, with an edge to his voice.

  “And it’s not Lizzy’s fault, is it?” said Warren.

  “It’s okay,” said Lizzy.

  Jon stared at his elephant sister. “I’m not blaming you, Lizzy. Don’t think that. It just annoys the piss outta me. At least Mom didn’t have to find out about this before she passed away.”

  Tripp sensed the mood turn, almost matching the darkness of the plains. Beyond the glow of the campfire, the lone sleel was waiting, making an arcing path around them and going back and forth, waiting for them to come out again.

  Warren shared out meat from the second ham, and Tripp ate it so fast he almost breathed it in.

  “What’s done is done,” said Warren. His voice might have sounded younger than Jon, but his words sure didn’t. “At least we met Lizzy. Well, we kinda met her.”

  “I can’t travel,” said Lizzy. “Broke my leg and ruptured two of my discs test-driving a Harley. I want to buy one when I have enough cash saved, but for now, I need to be content with test driving. It’s nice to pretend, you know? Even if the salesmen get pissy when they realize I don’t intend to buy one. I’d revved the engine after a green light when some crazy bastard ploughed into me.”

  “That’s rough. How about you guys?” said Tripp. “How old are you?”

  “I’m twenty-one, Jon’s twenty-five. We can drive, but we don’t have a car.”

  “Haven’t we told him enough?” said
Jon. “This is Soulboxe, not a confessional booth.”

  “Hey, it’s his fire, and he asked. It’s not like he can track us down outside of the game, is it? Lighten up a little.”

  Tripp held his hands up. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to pry.”

  Warren shook his head. “Don’t sweat it. Jon and I used to share a car, but we had to sell it when Mom got ill. She had crappy insurance. So, when we found out we had a big half-sister across the country, we were excited. The problem is that she can’t travel and we don’t have wheels. We wanted to meet up, and we thought about getting a Greyhound coach, but then Lizzy had a better idea.”

  “I saw the Soulboxe ads on tv,” said Lizzy. “You know, how they try to spin Soulboxe as a vacation instead of a game? Well, we figured why not meet up here? I still had a trial account from years ago when it first launched, and the free week of playing time was still valid. That’s why I’ve got this grey tusk character. If I’d known how rare it was, I would have sold it ages ago.”

  “I told you,” said Warren. “Level it up first.”

  “Actually,” said Tripp, “That’s not the best thing to do. Yeah, grey tusk accounts probably sell for a lot of cash online, but they’re like action figures; take them out of the packaging, and their value plummets. The more you level-up your grey tusk, the less customization you leave for the buyer.”

  “I didn’t think about it like that,” said Lizzy.

  “You don’t sound like a level two newbie,” said Jon. “You on a replay?”

  Tripp shook his head. “It’s my first time. I just watched a hell of a lot of streams. That leads me onto something I wanted to ask you guys.”

  “Go on…” said Warren.

  “I was wondering why the hell you tried to take on a level 67 creature?”

  Warren stood up and had a wide grin on his face. “We’re loot hunters,” he said.

  “Loot hunters? You don’t do any quests, anything like that?” asked Tripp.

  “Nope. We just collect things. Monsters drop loot after you kill them. You can sell that in towns or trade it with other players and then use in-game currency to buy other stuff. Or you can withdraw it and exchange it for real cash, at a rate of 1:50. It’s a crummy exchange rate, but you never know when you’ll score something big.”