by Deck Davis
“I think we found ourselves a sleel,” he said.
CHAPTER 20
Lizzy picked up a femur bone, held it close to her eye for inspection, and then tossed it over her shoulder. It hit Tripp’s knee and bounced onto the ground. Whoever it had belonged to was long dead, and possibly a victim of the kind of creature they were following now.
“Are you trying to track that thing, or hump it?” said Lizzy, shouting at Warren who was walking a brisk pace ahead of them.
“I wouldn’t put it beyond Warren to screw it,” said Jon. “You should see the kind of things in his browser history. It’s nastier than the Vegas underbelly at sunset.”
Warren stopped walking and shook his head. “What happened to the brotherly code?”
“You broke it the time you snitched to Mom about me smoking.”
“I was five years old! Give me a break.”
“You guys obviously missed the influence of an older sister who could teach you not to behave like a pair of jackasses. All the same, you’re getting too close to the sleel, hon,” said Lizzy.
Warren shrugged. “So what? It doesn’t have eyes in its ass.”
They had followed the sleel an hour south across the plains to where the terrain became boggy. Some parts were so wet and deep that Tripp had to watch his footing or he would sink knee-deep into the mud. Another thing to remember; walking through a bog wearing steel armor wasn’t fun.
All in all, it wasn’t the best of nights, and he doubted the devs would use Godden’s Reach in their ‘Come have your vacation in Soulboxe’ advertisements. It stank like crap, it was cold, and his new trousers were already muddied. The wind sneaked in through the joints in his steel armor, snaking down his neck, his arms, and his chest, chilling him.
The plains themselves were more alive than they had been the night before, with groups of players venturing out when it got dark to hunt and level up. Way over east, close to the forest, streams of purple light shot in arcs in the sky like fireworks. His vision wasn’t good enough to see something that far away, but he guessed that arcane mage players were battling something. Whoever it was, he liked the colorful display.
Every so often, Tripp heard strange sounds. Sometimes it sounded like someone was walking nearby, other times it was a high-pitched laughing. Looking around, he couldn’t see anything, but the sound gave him a throb of unease.
While they walked through the bog, Tripp used his night vision to keep the sleel in sight, watching it slink this way and that in a way that was too graceful for its size.
It was a little unnerving following it, knowing that the sleel – this one a level 29, so weaker than the last one he’d seen but still a beast – could turn around at any point, see them, and then that’d be that; at least a couple of them would die.
Even making a campfire wouldn’t help, since once you’d engaged in a battle with an NPC, you couldn’t make a safe zone until the battle was done. Nope, the only way was to be careful and trust Jon’s tracking skills.
While the rest of them kept out of distance, since there was a ‘safe’ range where you could walk without aggravating Soulboxe NPCs, Tripp saw with dismay that Warren couldn’t help himself. The loot hunter was so determined to hunt this thing that he kept straying beyond where Tripp judged was safe.
“Warren,” he said. “You’re going to get us zapped. Stay back a little, yeah?”
“Sorry, Tripp. Getting ahead of myself, but I just wanna see what this thing drops. Imagine if it’s something rare. You never know what you’re gonna get when it comes to loot; that’s Lady Chance at work. I heard that one guy sold a rare scepter and got $90,000 real cash.”
“Sounds like a scam,” said Tripp. “You can make money here, but not that much. Besides, I thought we were done with the suicide runs? We need to find its nest, remember?”
“Don’t talk to me about scams,” said Lizzy. “I hate to think of myself as a dope but last year, I got suckered into spending $400 on Loncoin, one of those cryptocurrencies.”
“Everyone got suckered by those,” said Jon. “if they didn’t do their due diligence.”
“They aren’t all scams, are they?”
“Nope. Some of them are real projects by honest people, others are straight up huckster’s playgrounds. You have to do your research. Take them with a bowl of salt rather than just a pinch, and you’ll be sweet.”
“You’ve got us to do that for you now, sis,” said Warren.
“Good,” said Lizzy. “I’m either an optimist, or I’m a sucker. Either way, get-rich-quick schemes always reel me in. I guess it comes from growing up with nothing.”
It seemed to Tripp that Jon was more computer savvy than his older sister, but the southern girl was way more optimistic. That was how schemes suckered people in; by offering great rewards for little work.
He guessed that the brothers and sister weren’t so different from each other. Warren was trying to get rich quick by scoring rare loot in the game, while Lizzy had tried to get rich quick outside of it. What about Jon? What was he looking for?
Tripp saw the sleel stop ahead of them. He held up his hand to halt the group, and Bee bumped into him.
“Let’s cool it a few seconds. I don’t want to spook it.”
“Spook it? Anger it, more like,” said Lizzy.
“I prefer to think of it as spooking it, rather than us pissing ourselves in fear.”
They took only a few more steps before something thudded into Tripp’s chest, making a tink sound on his steel armor and knocking the wind out of him.
“We must have aggroed something else,” said Warren.
While Jon drew his bow and Warren and Lizzy got out their swords, Tripp looked at the object that had been thrown at him.
Tripp smelled sulfur, and then he saw the black object on the floor. Fire was fizzing on the end of the string.
That wasn’t usually a good sign.
He picked up the bomb, and as the fire burned to the end of the string he tossed it, putting all his effort into the throw. The bomb exploded mid-air in a shower of red and yellow sparks. The boom sounded like the groan of a mountain, a blast echoing into the night-time plains.
Piercing the darkness ahead with his orc vision, he saw who had thrown it at him.
“Undead straight ahead,” he said. “They’re throwing bombs.”
“Woo-hoo!” shouted Warren. “This is where a cleric gets to shine.”
Jon let a red-tipped arrow loose, and Tripp heard the rattle of bones hitting the ground.
“I can’t see anything,” said Warren. “What are you even aiming at?”
“Just black shapes. My archery skills aren’t leveled enough for me to see better.”
“Tripp?” said Bee.
He peered into the distance using his orc vision. “I see five short guys. They’re made of green bone, and they have glowing red eyes. Kind of like goblins that have been dug up from the grave. Wait, I can see one of their tags.”
Undead Tinker Imp
Level 12
HP [IIIIIIIIIIIIIII]
“It’s undead alright. When we get close, don’t let them bite you. You’ll get a blight or something like that.”
“According to game lore,” said Lizzy, “There are tons of undead creatures in Soulboxe. There’s a sect of necromancers in the mainland who raised them by the hundreds. They were trying to destabilize all the different factions so they could take over. If people are busy fighting zombie wolves and undead goblins, they can’t stop a bunch of power-mad necros attacking their castles, right? Only, the idiots raised more undead than they could handle, they lost control, and the creatures escaped. Everything they bite becomes undead.”
“Running an undead production line is dangerous, who knew?” said Warren.
Ahead of them, the sleel was staying still. The bomb blast hadn’t brought it over to them, so it must have still been out of aggro range. If that was the case, it was a narrow margin.
“We need to move back a few
meters,” said Tripp. “We don’t want to annoy our slimy friend.”
“He’s moving,” said Jon. “If he gets too far away, we aren’t gonna find him again.”
Then, three black objects flew through the air and landed in the middle of them and started hissing, giving off the aroma of sulfur.
Tripp looked down at the floor, and he felt his stomach tighten when he saw three more bombs lying by their feet.
He grabbed his bomb, while the others did the same, tossing them back at the tinker imps.
Only Lizzy had the strength to get hers far enough away, the arc of her throw so precise that it exploded by one imp’s feet and turned him into a shower of bones that clunked onto the ground one by one.
The blast rang in Tripp’s ear, and a splattering of mud hit his steel armor. Hell, that was loud!
Bee flew next to him. “That was a level 12 creature and you were part of the fight, even if it was Lizzy’s who had killed it. You earned a hell of a lot of EXP for that, but I’ll save your notifications until after the battle.”
“Thanks, Bee.”
Jon pointed ahead. “Our friend is getting skittish.”
Their sleel target was slinking north. If it got too far away, they’d lose it.
That made it all the worse that the three undead tinker imps were closing in from the east, this time learning from their mistakes and keeping a safer distance.
“They’re holding onto their bombs for longer,” said Tripp. “They’re going to time their throws so that they explode on impact.”
“Imps are like wasps around a soda can. Now they’ve got a whiff of us, they won’t leave us alone,” said Warren.
“Damn it,” said Tripp. “We can’t lose the sleel. Jon, can you stay glued to her ass?”
“No problem.”
“That’ll leave us against three imps. They’re tinkers so they might be a higher level than us…well, me…but they’re not made for hand-to-hand fighting.”
Jon moved north and used his tracking skill to trail the sleel. Tripp looked at Warren and Lizzy. The cleric was level 13, the grey tusk 15. That left him as the weak link, with only six paltry levels to his name.
Still, the imps were all level 12. A level 13 human might have been only 1 level above them numerically, but the human part of it gave them a giant advantage. There was a lot to be said for the ability to think strategically.
That was the key. NPC levels were not on a like-for-like scale as their player counterparts, since they were missing a key ingredient; true intelligence. NPCs like the imps were clever, but nowhere near, say, Bee’s level of intelligence.
That was the only reason Tripp wasn’t already planning ahead to what he’d do after they killed him and sent him to respawn. He could win this.
“Move out of the range of their bombs,” he said.
They retreated far enough so that when the imps launched their bombs, the projectiles exploded onto empty plain terrain, harming nothing but the dirt.
“Pick your imp,” said Tripp. “Mine’s the taller one.”
They charged forward, taking advantage of the break where the imps had to produce new bombs from their rucksacks and light them.
Warren reached his imp first, and Tripp heard the thud of his sword hacking into bone.
The imps made nervous chittering sounds now that they had been forced into face-to-face combat. It was a sound he liked, a sound that meant the imps were more worried about him than he was about them.
Even six levels below his foe and with a crappy bone dagger, Tripp was delighted to find that not only was his imp easier to hit than frorargs, but he knocked off more HP than he’d expected with each strike.
Every hit was a score, and every score drained the imp’s hitpoints further until the creature backed away from him, beaten and on the brink of death.
When Warren’s imp was down to a quarter HP and Lizzy’s was one swipe away from death, Tripp’s foe squeaked to its friends.
“What the hell?” said Warren.
The imps dropped their rucksacks on the ground, and each opened them to reveal five or six bombs.
Before Tripp could do anything, the imps snipped the fuses of their bombs and then lit them. His stomach sank as if he’d just swallowed a cannonball.
“It’s a suicide attack,” said Warren. “Move your asses!”
They ran like their lives hinged on it. Which, in a digital sense, they did. Tripp huffed as he sprinted in his steel armor, working up a sweat that cut through the chill of the nighttime air. Adrenaline rushed through his veins, but his orc body was too slow and it was like running over sludge.
He heard the hiss of the fuses behind him, he heard the pattering of the imps as they tried to catch up. But they didn’t need to catch him, just to get close enough so he was in their blast radius, and then pulped orc would rain down over the pastures.
I can’t make it! I can’t get far enough away.
Then he heard the explosions; one, two, three, and more booms echoing out like the fists of the gods hammering on stone.
The heat was searing, and he heard shrapnel smash against his armor. The buzzing in his ear was so loud that it hurt.
He braced for the pain of the explosion, but it didn’t come. Did I make it?
Then he heard the loudest sound of all, one that drowned everything else out; a scream.
CHAPTER 21
‘What started with insomnia has turned into nightmares now that he has been prescribed sleeping pills.
He sees the artificial intelligence in his mind. He says it has a face made of stars, though the nonsense of this statement is yet another signifier of the boy’s illness.
Danny has reported hearing the artificial intelligence’s voice coming from the radio in his bedroom. When the radio was removed, it spoke to him through his lamp, and then through empty electrical sockets.
We have so far not been able to record this, but testimony from other players is soon to come.’
- Attorney Dag Fletcher, discussing his client’s failed lawsuit in Danny Crowder vs Soulboxe Online.
~
Warren’s sister’s body, all dozens of pieces of her, was scattered over the plains, her flesh scorched and bloody. The sight turned Tripp’s stomach.
“Damn it, she wasn’t fast enough,” said Warren. “I told her to scrap the grey tusk and just pay for a new account. You can pick up a trial account for fifty bucks these days. It only lasts a week until they wanna hook you on a subscription, but it would have been better than walking around like Dumbo on steroids.”
Tripp didn’t answer; he was still focused on the pulped elephant flesh nestled in the grass. In their pursuit of realism, the Soulboxe devs hadn’t skimped on gore. The fact that any full immersion game got an 18+ certificate meant that the devs had known they’d never be able to sell to the young market, so they thought ‘screw it.’
Kids can’t buy our game? Fine, let’s make it brutal.
“I really thought she’d make it,” said Warren.
“The respawn counter is two seconds for every level,” said Tripp. “She’ll be back before you can scratch your ass.”
“Our respawn markers are at Goddenstone. We set them there again after we left your campfire. It was a slog getting all the way out here, and we need to go further south to catch up to Jon.”
“I know it might not seem like it, but we got lucky. Of all the things we could find out here, undead tinker imps seem tame.”
“And yet, one of us snuffed it. I thought you’d read up about the game? Watched all the streams?” said Warren. “You should have seen this coming.”
“Not all of them. C’mon, it’s impossible to know everything about a game as big as this. Like watching a dozen football matches and thinking you’ve seen enough to be a professional coach. Besides, there’s only so much you can pick up from watching other people play. Add in the random factor of Boxe5 and how he tailors situations to the players, and it’s impossible to know everything.”
Tripp noticed a figure hurrying back toward them from the south. “Jon’s back,” he said.
Jon gave him a nod when he rejoined them, and he slapped Warren on the shoulder. “The sleel is cooling her heels 500 meters south of here,” he said. “Looks like this strip is her patrol area, so I don’t think she’ll stray from here until daybreak. Boxe5 probably programs them all to take their own routes.”
“Yeah; I can see her. Thanks,” said Tripp.
Jon looked around. “Where’s Lizzy?”
“Waking up groggy in Goddenstone, probably,” said Warren.
“Dead?”
“Yup. If you’re quick, you might be able to gather up a few pieces of exploded grey tusk.”
“Damn it. She’s not going to make it back by daybreak. She’ll say we’re having all the fun without her.”
“You could always go back for her,” said Tripp.
Warren looked torn now between catching up with his sister and staying here for the potential of more loot. “Nah, she’ll find us. She won’t mind.”
“I guess we just have to wait it out now,” said Tripp. “When it starts getting light we’ll follow the sleel to its nest, and that’s that. You have her tracks marked on your map, right?”
Jon nodded. “When she moves, I’ll know.”
“Good,” said Warren. “Can we divide the loot already?”
Until now, Tripp had been alone in his fights and he hadn’t had to share the loot with anyone. It was only now that he was going to have to use Soulboxe’s loot system for the first time.
To say it was controversial would be an understatement.