by Deck Davis
“Did getting killed scramble your head?”
“It hurt. You’ll have to fight more than I will, and you’re gonna feel that kind of pain a lot. I want to be able to help you.”
This was a change; together with herbalism, healing was just about the least combat-based skill a person could learn.
“What are you going to learn next? Knitting?”
“Oh, and you’re so tough, Mr. Crafter?”
“I’m kidding, Bee. If you learn the healing skill, that would be a massive help.”
“I’m glad to do that,” she said, giving him a sweet smile.
“So… now I need to craft armor good enough to deflect the arrows, I guess. Or come up with another way to stop them from killing me when I get in there. It looked bad from the outside, but I guess as traps go, it could be worse.”
“That’s the thing,” said Bee. “It was worse than that. A hell of a lot worse.”
As he listened to Bee explain what she’d seen, he built a mental picture of it in his head. It wasn’t a pleasant thought, and a coil of dread inside him got tighter with every word.
He’d already seen that there were two platforms twenty feet apart, with a lever on the other side of the room. He’d need to get to the lever while avoiding the archers when the alcoves opened.
Easier said than done. According to Bee, there wasn’t just a drop in between the two platforms. There was a pool of goddamn lava.
“Orange and churning and spitting,” Bee had said. “It looked deep.”
Figuring out how to deal with the archers and getting across the 20-foot gap had been enough, but now? He scraped his brain for answers but came up empty.
“So, about the lever,” he said. “Do you think we could make something to reach it from the first platform?”
She shook her head. “It’s clipped into place on the wall. You’ll have to get over there.”
“The thing is that we don’t even know what it does. From what you told me, there was no sign of the door to the next room.”
“Nope. The lever might reveal it.”
Tripp nodded. “Or maybe it’s there as bait to get me to waste time. Perhaps it does nothing, and the real test here is coming up with a way to kill the archers and get across the platform, and then one of the alcoves is the way out.”
Bee chewed her lips a little. “Could be. It’s a start.”
“I need to think about what I can make that will help me. I already know that the defense of my steel armor is too low to deflect arrows, since Jon got me in the gut with one of his. I guess their realism doesn’t go all the way; I don’t think an arrow would have gotten through steel in reality.”
“A shield, maybe? New armor?”
“A whole new armor set might be a little beyond me. I’m guessing Konrad won’t expect me to make all kinds of crazy stuff so soon. Let’s go mine a little steel and then I can try something out. I guess I either have death by arrows or lava to look forward to if I screw this up. Lovely.”
The growing shadows on the streets of Mountmend were a warning that the day was ending, and players raced around the town to turn in their quests and finish their trades before the town’s NPCs started their pre-programmed routines of sweeping doorways, turning over ‘closed’ signs, and locking their doors.
Tripp was heading back up to Old Kimby when someone shouted his name. The streets were so narrow that the acoustics made the sound echo, and he imagined his name bouncing from houses to house.
He winced at the sound, because he recognized who it was straight away. “Great. Exactly who I needed to see.”
Warren, Jon, and Lizzy were running toward him from a side street. Warren had bought new cleric robes, sporting lime green ones that looked artificed judging from the dashes of light that ran up and down them.
Lizzy’s face was a mess of wrinkles, the folds of her grey skin overlapping where her tusks protruded. It really wasn’t a good look for her. Jon was beside her, his eyes squinted and bird-like.
Tripp had to resist the urge to draw his morning star. It wouldn’t have helped. Mountmend was a non-PVP area which meant that he couldn’t attack them and besides, he already knew they could kill him if it came to a fight. Still, he didn’t like the anger throttling inside him and he felt like he needed to do something with it.
“What do you assholes want?”
“Good morning to you too, hon,” said Lizzy.
“We’re cool, Lizzy, but your brothers need spikes shoved up their asses.”
Warren stepped closer to Tripp. “Can I talk to you alone for a second?”
“You know you can’t attack a player in a town, don’t you?”
“It’s important.”
Tripp sighed. “Come on then.”
They moved away from Lizzy and Jon so they were standing by the wall of one of Mountmend’s houses. Tripp couldn’t tell if it was an NPC house or player owned, but the woodwork was weathered and splintered.
“Jon told me that he messaged you,” said Warren.
“I don’t have time for this,” said Tripp. “This is a game, not some prime-time soap opera. He didn’t need to apologize, but I suppose it shows some character that he did. You killed me to get some loot, and that’s fine. I was a little pissed, but I really don’t have the time to worry about this kind of stuff.”
“I was pretty offended when you defriended me.”
“I’m busy, Warren. Good luck with the loot.”
“Yeah, you have some mining to do, don’t you?” said Warren.
“How would you know?”
Warren nodded. “We saw that you were up in the mountain, and we tried to follow you but the way through is blocked off. Well, to that part of the mountain, anyway. There are a few ways into the mountain itself, and we saw a bunch of people mining there. But no way into the part that my map showed you in.”
“So?”
“So we tried to get through to it, but I couldn’t find the way.”
That’s because you need to go through Konrad’s shop, thought Tripp. Not that he’d actually tell Warren that. Although, he guessed that his quest was made so that nobody else would get into Konrad’s part of the mountain unless Tripp was friends with them.
“Where do you come into this, Warren? Whether I have a quest or not, it’s not really your problem. Shouldn’t you be spending time with your sister instead of worrying about me?”
Warren’s expression changed now, and his features sagged a little. “We weren’t completely honest with you,” he said. “About Lizzy. About needing a car and stuff. It’s not just about that.”
“What is it about?” said Tripp.
Warren scratched the side of his head. “Lizzy’s ill. She’s not dying or anything, but it’s serious enough that we’re worried. The money’s not just for a car, but so we can go and stay with her for a few weeks. She doesn’t have family down there. If we hadn’t done the DNA test, she wouldn’t have found us, and she’d have had nobody.”
“Don’t you and Jon have jobs? You’d be better off working instead of playing Soulboxe.”
“I’m in college on a scholarship, and Jon’s job barely covers his rent. When we decided to meet up in Soulboxe, we decided to try to make some money, too. Kill two goblins with one sword.”
There were times when Tripp wished he had a heart of stone. Instead, he was somewhere in between. He had a heart of half-dry cement.
“I don’t begrudge you the loot you took,” said Tripp. “It’s yours, it’s done. As I said, this is Soulboxe, it’s not like you killed my dog or something.”
“The loot wasn’t much in the end,” said Warren. “Turns out that lower-level sleels don’t crap out gold. But when we saw you in the part of the mountain we couldn’t get to, I started asking around.”
“Yeah?”
“I was careful not to mention names. I sort of did it hypothetically, I never mentioned you or what you were doing.”
“Thanks for taking my privacy into consideration.
You’re a gentleman.”
Warren smirked. “Turns out that the quest line you’re on is pretty rare. Not unique, but rare enough. There’s a few conditions and actions that come into play to turn the dwarf guy from someone who will just sell skill upgrades for gold, into part of a quest.”
That part made sense to Tripp, that there was a way to just pay Konrad for instant skill gain. It went against the credo of grinding, but the devs had inserted the option of master craftsmen selling skills after petitions from players who were on their second or third characters, and couldn’t face spending hours grinding their mining skill to a decent level.
Their compromise was that certain vendors would sell their skills but only at crazy prices, and only up to a certain level. You couldn’t pay your way up to gold level in a skill.
This was interesting. Something in Tripp’s actions, or a combination of his actions, had made Boxe5 unlock a quest path involving Konrad and his part of the mountain. How many other quest paths were out there? Most people would go buy skills or equipment from Konrad and think nothing of it, whereas Tripp had been given a quest.
He couldn’t wait to get started in the labyrinth now. He was sure something cool was waiting if he could just get through all the rooms.
“It’s been great catching up,” he told Warren. “Good luck getting loot. I really mean that as well; it might have been a jackass move killing me, but I hope you get to see Lizzy in person.”
“That’s why we’ve come to see you, actually,” said Warren. “It turns out that if you do your quest a certain way, if you get things right, you can finish with some hellbrick as a prize.”
“Konrad told me about that stuff,” said Tripp. “It’s rare.”
“It’s more than rare. It’s hardly ever listed on the auction sites. The last guy to sell a cube of it got $10,000.”
“Wow, that’d buy me a lot of steaks. That’s real-world money, right?”
Warren nodded. “But it depends. You can fail the quest permanently. Most quests will let you retry them, but this one won’t.”
“How can I fail? I know I’m expected to die over and over.”
“I don’t know; the only guy who failed it deleted his Soulboxe account, went dark, wouldn’t talk to his online buds. I guess some people don’t handle failure too well.”
“How do you know all of this?” said Tripp.
“I told you; I asked around. I hung out in the taverns, even in the craftsman’s guild until some stick insect NPC kicked me out.”
“What else did you learn?” asked Tripp.
“That whatever it is you have to do to finish this quest, there are different ways of doing it. Some will end with good loot, others might score you something rare. Get everything just right…and you get yourself some hellbrick.”
Tripp’s mind started working fast. There different ways to complete Konrad’s quest, and there was a way to fail. Okay, so how?
It had to be something to do with how he solved the labyrinth rooms. Were there different ways of solving each one, and doing it one way would lead him to the hellbrick prize?
He needed to be alone to figure this out.
“Thanks for the tips,” he said. “I better go.”
Warren grabbed his shoulder. “I wasn’t just here for the fun of it. I want to make a deal.”
“Does this deal involve hellbrick?”
Warren nodded. “What else? The guy I was talking to in the Slaughterman’s inn said that there’s some kind of maze you need to work through, and it’s full of all kinds of nasty stuff. Nobody knows what, though.”
“If people have had the quest before me, then someone will have written about it. Blog posts, a guide, something.”
“Nope. The labyrinth gets randomized. The rooms change for each person.”
“I see where you’re going with this,” said Tripp. “You want to help me in the labyrinth, and in exchange, you want a cut of the loot.”
“You’re a smart guy.”
“I’m also a guy you killed.”
“Technically, that was Jon.”
“I can’t see any good reason to party up with you guys. Kill me once, shame on you. Kill me twice…”
“Here’s the thing. We can’t get access to Konrad’s mine if we aren’t your friends, right? So if we party up, you can add all three of us as friends. That way, we can’t kill you again, but we can also help you in there.”
“Nah, I don’t need you.”
“Don’t be so stubborn. We’re a pretty well-balanced party; a healer, a spirit archer, and a grey tusk. That’s gotta be helpful in there. All we’re asking is a cut of the loot. Without us, it doesn’t sound like you’re going to make it far. Not from what I heard about the labyrinth, anyway.”
Tripp hated to think it, but Warren was making sense. The first room seemed hard enough, with the lava and the archers. If that was the first room, then Boxe5 was bound to ramp up the difficulty as he went on.
He needed them. It pained him, but he did.
The problem was that he’d trust a man with a gun who said “Give me all your money” more than he’d trust Warren. He was certain he’d need help in the labyrinth, but he could already feel the wound in his back from the knife Warren was sure to stick in it.
Above all else, Tripp was practical. It came with his trade, the idea of thinking with logic instead of emotions. Of considering what a tool could be used for. He didn’t want to refuse outright, even if he doubted he’d accept.
“Let me think on it,” he said.
“Don’t take too long; we don’t have much playing time left.”
“Meet me here tonight,” said Tripp. “There’s stuff I need to do. I’ll meet you later and let you know.”
“There’s something else you didn’t consider,” said Warren.
Tripp eyed him warily. “What?”
“Right now, nobody else knows you have Konrad’s questline. If people found out, they’d want the hellbrick too.”
“So? They can’t get into Konrad’s mine.”
“No, but you can’t stay in Mountmend forever. You’re gonna have to go into the plains and level up and collect stuff. If people knew that you might have loot from Konrad’s mine in your inventory, maybe if they thought you even had hellbrick…let’s say that you might find more people waiting to kill you.”
“You can’t steal from people’s inventory after you kill them,” said Tripp.
“They can threaten you. Something along the lines of, if you don’t give them what they want, they’ll kill you every time you set foot in the plains. Eventually, you’d get so sick of being sent to respawn that maybe you’d give up some hellbrick just so you could level up without getting a sword jammed up your jacksie.”
“I don’t have any hellbrick.”
“They won’t know that. If someone was careless in what they let slip…people might find out about your quest.”
“Is that a threat?”
“Yep.”
“Great way to start a friendship.”
“It’s only a threat if you don’t make the right choice. I’ll let you think on it.”
CHAPTER 30
Uncle James’s favorite saying was “Try and reason with an ass and the only reply you’ll get is a fart.” He usually muttered it in between swigs of Coors after coming back from an argument with Kent, their next-door neighbour who was fond of property-encroaching fences, but the advice always stuck with Tripp.
That was why reasoning with Warren and explaining that his time would be better spent earning his own damn loot was a just flicker of a thought, gone from one blink to the next.
The thing about reason was that people didn’t listen to it unless you used the words they wanted to hear. The only words Warren and his siblings wanted were sure, let it all be water under the bridge. Come and share my loot.
He walked back to Old Kimby with Bee floating beside him, darting this way and that, caught on the winds of her curiosity like a plastic bag swept up
in a storm. Tripp felt a storm of his own brewing in him; either a headache coming on, or an ass-ache from what a pain in the behind that Warren had become.
“What did you make of that?” he asked her.
“Depends; do you want sympathy or honesty?”
“A mix would be good.”
“I wouldn’t like to try to take on room one without friends.”
“Do you think people who killed me the first chance they got are friends? I mean, I get it; I’m going to get my ass handed to me over and over again. But do I wanna trust those three?”
“I kinda feel bad for them,” said Bee.
“Maybe I’ll feel better if I settle the score a little. Even things out.”
“Ominous words.”
“I’ll think on it. For now, we have some mining to do.”
When he got back to Old Kimby he walked down the tunnel that branched to the right, following it to a passageway where the air became stuffy and the ceiling so cramped that he had to duck as he walked. It was dark and cold, a womb of stone inside the body of the mountain where the only sounds were the clangs of pickaxes from faraway tunnels.
The pickaxe sounds meant that Konrad’s goblins were somewhere down there, but the tunnel forked off in half a dozen directions, and Tripp wasn’t in the mood to make friends with the goblins in any case. He needed hard work to clear his mind, and he needed steel as the product of his work.
“This’ll do the job,” he said, grabbing a pickaxe from a pile of spare tools in a nearby mine cart.
“Where do we start?”
“I’m I mine some iron, I can ask Konrad to turn it to steel for me. Better yet, I can learn how to use his forge.”
Bee hovered near a wall of stone. “I mean, where do you start mining?”
“I thought about that. Watch.”
Tripp stared at the stone wall to his right. There was something unforgiving about it. It was so dark that it seemed like if a mage shot a rainbow at it, the black stone would swallow it up, and he felt cold just looking at it.
He activated his underlay skill. It sapped five of his manus and he had to wait a while for it to work, but the information came to him.
Underlay Analysis