by Deck Davis
He didn’t think he could take her. At least, not with his morning star. Damn it, he should have taken that into account!
“You treacherous little bastard,” she said, reaching to the giant quiver behind her back and pulling a spear from it.
“Your brothers started it.”
“You boys are all the same. Infants.”
“Yeah, I won’t argue with that. Bee?”
Bee whizzed around Lizzy’s head, around and around, trying to disorientate her. While she did, Tripp equipped his flagellation flail.
He felt dirty even holding a weapon like that, but he’d always kept it in the back of his mind. He wouldn’t be able to do enough damage to Lizzy with his morning star, so he had to improvise.
Gritting his teeth, he smashed the flail into his own leg. Pain sprung up in his thigh; hot, spreading, making his stomach churn.
The flail glowered red now, a sign that it had taken the damage he’d done to himself and converted it using its artificery.
“You’re a psycho,” said Lizzy.
She raised the spear above her head, ready to throw it. As she released it, Bee flew in the way, taking the hit herself, knocking her down to the ground.
Tripp charged forward with his flail, and with one almighty effort smashed it into Lizzy’s skull, feeling the energy transfer from it.
The force was so much that she fell onto her back, landing on the ground with a thump. Tripp felt the energy reverberate in his knuckles, stinging them.
He bit through the pain and raised the flail, ready to hit her again, but her health bar was empty.
Bee floated back to him now, her movements wonky.
He let his breaths catch up with him, and he felt the adrenaline course through his veins. Seeing the siblings dead, looking at their bloodied bodies…it felt good in a way that worried him. It had to be done, he told himself.
Checking his post-fight notifications, he saw that he hadn’t earned any EXP from killing the siblings. That figured; he already knew that player-versus-player fights didn’t bring those kinds of rewards. There was something, however.
Morning Star of Sleep Attack legacy change
- Legacy increased from 18 to 22
- Weapon lore added: ‘Incensed by a previous betrayal, Tripp Keaton used poison and brute force to gain his revenge.’
- Legacy benefit added: +10% damage on poisoned or blighted enemies
He wasn’t so hot about his plan being called revenge, since he had a different way of framing it, but he guessed that Boxe hadn’t seen it that way. Nevertheless, it made him feel good to add more lore and legacy to his weapon, and who knew when the poison damage bonus would come in handy?
“You okay?” he said to Bee.
Bee nodded. “My head feels scrambled, but yeah.”
As he stared at the three dead bodies and watched them become faint and started to evaporate as they respawned elsewhere, he realized three things.
One, he didn’t get any exp from killing players.
Two, he couldn’t loot them, but that made sense since he hadn’t lost anything from his inventory when they killed him.
Three, that had felt a lot better than he’d expected it to.
“Can you explain something to me,” said Bee, as they walked back to Mountmend. “What was the point of that? You didn’t get any EXP, any loot, nothing.”
“I thought you of all people would have enjoyed it.”
“Not as much as I’d thought. With the sleel and the fiends and now this, I’m starting to wonder about that kind of thing.”
“It wasn’t about what I would get from it. It was about what doing it would say to them, to Warren and Jon and Lizzy.”
“I thought your uncle said something about revenge and digging a grave twice?”
“This wasn’t about revenge. Revenge is, I don’t know. Something hot. A feeling burning inside you that you have to act on. Revenge is emotional. This wasn’t the same.”
“Then what was it?”
“If you let someone walk over you once and do nothing, all they’ll see you as is the guy they trampled into the mud. If I’d have taken up Warren on his offer after what he did, there was no reason for him to have any respect for me.”
“So you did it to get him back for what he did to you.”
“Just to restore the balance a little.”
“That sounds like revenge to me, Tripp.”
He had to wonder then, was she right? He thought that his motivation had been what he’d told her – that if he was going to party up with Warren, there would have to be mutual respect. A kill for a kill; that made them even.
But he’d enjoyed it a lot more than he’d thought, and maybe that was what his uncle had meant about revenge and digging two graves. Your actions changed you. Small actions meant small changes, whereas big choices could transform you in ways you didn’t expect.
This was a game, sure. He hadn’t actually killed Warren and his brother and sister, because he wasn’t really a psychopath. But while the things he saw, touched, smelled in the game weren’t real, the emotions they provoked were.
It made him think that maybe everything he did here would have an effect on him when he eventually left. In any other game, then that wouldn’t hold true. But here in Soulboxe, where the sensory overload was indistinguishable from reality, it might be different.
He thought on it more as they approached Mountmend, and by the time he crossed the town gates, he wasn’t sure how he felt. The only thing he had concluded was that his belief that games were escapism still held true, but a game that was as real as the world outside it couldn’t be classed as just escapism.
The adverts had lied; that was the truth of it. Soulboxe wasn’t just an escape from reality. It looked, sounded, and felt like a reality of its own.
Now that he was even with Warren, Jon, and Lizzy, he felt a little better about things. He didn’t hold a grudge against them. Killing people in a game was par for the course and it wasn’t like they’d done it maliciously.
It didn’t feel particularly weird to get a little help, either. Partying up in a game wasn’t the same as real life; it was completely normal for a couple of strangers to buddy up for a while to navigate a dungeon or kill a tough monster.
The fact was, Tripp needed the help. With the siblings as his friends, they couldn’t kill him, and he’d be able to use their skills in the labyrinth. With their kill count score even now at 1-1, he didn’t see anything to worry about, and he’d just remove them as friends if he ever needed to.
“What’s going on?” said Bee.
They were at the Mountmend gates now, and Tripp could see what she was talking about. Just ahead of them, there was a giant wooden sign with writing on it.
Three-dozen players had gathered together to gape at it, some with their hands in the pockets, others holding weapons at their sides. A few players went by unaffected and uncaring, winding their way deeper into Mountmend.
Tripp walked ahead and joined the crowd, bustling until he could get close enough to read it. When he did, he couldn’t believe it.
CHAPTER 36
‘We built Soulboxe to be ever changing and to be adaptable to everything we wanted to tweak or add. The code was flexible enough to do that, but we didn’t count on one thing.
People don’t like change.
I remember when I decided to get rid of a tavern near the Fossy Grove and replace it with a house where an old mage lived who would give passing players a quest.
Trouble was, people loved the tavern because the innkeeper’s gold inventory refreshed three times a day, and there was a lake nearby where there were schools of scuttle fish.
He was the only person for miles who’d buy fish, and that had made it a gathering spot for anyone who played Soulboxe to level up their fishing skill.
They’d stay by the lake and cast their rods and talk and then have the thrill of landing a fish. Then they’d go to the tavern at the end of the day as if they were rea
l fishermen finished with their labors.
It might have seemed small, getting rid of a tavern, but I was an irresponsible god destroying an ecosystem that I didn’t understand as well as I’d thought.’
- Lucas Coombs, speaking in a lecture titled ‘The Ripple Effect.’
~
The troll pyromancer spread his hands in front of him and conjured a stream of dragon fire from his palms, trying with all the manus in his body to burn the announcement to cinders. When the sign withstood his best spell without a scratch he stormed off, muttering, “Blood Wave? What the hell are they thinking? We can get attacked in towns now?”
The volume of the surrounding chatter suggested that everyone else was just as surprised as Tripp was. He re-read the announcement and tried to make sense of it.
Announcement: Godden’s Reach Event
This is Boxe5 the great, the powerful, the knowledgeable.
In preparation for a new event to take place in Godden’s Reach titled ‘Blood Wave’, all settlements henceforth will be classed as non-safe zones.
PVP zones will not be affected, however, NPC monsters may now enter towns and villages.
Note: Goddenstone and Tillicult will be closed off during the wave.
More information to follow when I feel like it.
Even a second read didn’t tell him much else, and the rest of the Mountmend players seemed equal measures excited and confused.
“This is weird. I’m going back to Alomdra. You don’t see any of this shit there.”
“There goes Godden’s Reach. Guess they’re doing a re-write.”
Tripp found some space beside a cart filled with rocks so he could think this through alone. “I guess this is Boxe rewriting things,” he said.
Bee shook her head. “He doesn’t have complete autonomy. Only a dev could approve changes like this.”
“Godden’s Reach was an expansion to Soulboxe, and they say that game development costs as much as Hollywood movies these days. Do you think they’d start dismantling an asset and messing around with it?”
“A shark drowns when it stops moving,” said Bee. “Or so they say. That isn’t strictly true, according to my data logs. Soulboxe is always evolving; they’re always coming up with new ideas, listening to player feedback. They must have decided that Godden’s Reach needed a makeover.”
“This isn’t just putting make-up on the nerdy girl to show that she was a hottie all along; towns are one of the pillars of the game. A place you can go when you’re done leveling up, where you know frorargs or sleels aren’t going to attack you. If people have got to worry about sleel attacks while we’re out buying manus potions, then Godden’s Reach just became an entirely different place.”
“Think about it, Tripp. This isn’t just an arbitrary rule change done for the hell of it. Lucas might have some crazy ideas, but the other devs keep him in check, test everything he suggests for logic.”
“How do you know this was Lucas’s idea?”
“I know him. This is just the sort of thing he’d enjoy.”
“So there’s a reason they’ve decided to allow NPC’s to attack towns. I’m guessing it’s not just going to be so that frorargs can stroll around the streets shooting fire at people.”
“Yep.”
“Hmm. They’re planning something bigger than that, aren’t they? Bigger monsters, maybe? Some kind of town assault?”
“Whatever it is, it’ll be something that gets people talking. Soulboxe thrives on having people discuss it. Events like this are designed to draw people from other areas of Soulboxe to this part of the map, and then to make the event crazy enough to get the rumor mill operating at full capacity.”
“They want this to go viral. Get people crowing the word for them,” said Tripp.
“There’s also another reason,” said Bee. “If a place in Soulboxe doesn’t get enough traffic, it’s more cost effective to shut it down. For what they save on keeping a place like Godden’s Reach going, they can try out some new content.”
“You think they might want to wipe the place out?”
“Perhaps.”
Tripp nodded. “It’d make sense, I guess. When they make in-game changes, they try to do it in a lore-friendly way. If the upcoming event is supposed to be something that closes Godden’s Reach, it’ll be scripted so that it seems natural. A giant monster will come and destroy the towns, or something.”
“Exactly. That would accomplish two things: get the people who were here to witness it talk about it online, and shut off an underused part of the map while keeping everyone immersed by wrapping it up in a story,” said Bee.
“We might be wearing our tinfoil hats. It might just be a one-off event, nothing more insidious than that.”
Tripp saw people approaching him from the corner of his eye. He turned to see Warren and his brother and sister. How was this going to play out? They couldn’t fight each other in Mountmend; the Blood Wave event rule change only meant that monsters could attack.
Jon wore a look of thunder on his face, while Lizzy stayed back, glaring at Tripp.
Warren grinned at Tripp and slapped him on the back. “I was pissed at you for a minute there,” he said. “Then I thought about it, and I laughed like hell. A kill for a kill makes us even, right?”
Tripp had already decided that it would. He needed their help in the labyrinth, and killing all three of them had balanced things. Not in a revengeful way; his poisoning and subsequent murder of all three of them couldn’t have been further away from revenge. Of course not.
After exchanging friend requests, Tripp and the others were now a party. This gave the three siblings access to Konrad’s mines but after testing it, they found that they couldn’t go into the labyrinth itself without Tripp.
“Even though we can get into the mountain,” said Jon, “It won’t let us into the labyrinth. Weird; I have Konrad’s quest on my quest log.”
“It’s Boxe,” said Tripp, and added nothing else since there was no other explanation needed.
This suited him fine. Becoming Soulboxe friends meant they couldn’t kill each other in PVP areas now, and so he could trust them to a point. Like trusting a dog not to bite you just because it was on a leash; if the leash broke, its jaws were snapping your way.
The only thing he was a little unsure of was loot. He wasn’t against them taking loot in the labyrinth from the things they killed, but he didn’t want to enter a loot auction when it came to the chests he’d find when he finished each room.
He suspected that wouldn’t be a problem since this was his quest. If it was an issue, he’d figure it out. The fact was that without their help he wasn’t going to get any more chests.
In the meantime, they needed to get ready for the second room.
They went to Konrad’s work studio. The early morning sun breathed life through its dirt-crusted windows, illuminating dust motes and spreading dappled yellow over the workbenches and flooring. Over in on the far side of the room the forge glowed red, its coals seething with heat and huffing out warm air through the room.
Tripp leaned against one workbench. Warren hopped up onto one across from him and sat cross-legged, while Jon leaned casually against it. Lizzy paced, never standing still, her grey tusk bulk enough to make a pile of spare tools in the corner rattle with every step.
“I have ideas for handling room two,” said Tripp, “but they’re weak. I need some input.”
“Can you walk us through it again?” said Jon.
“Sure. You have a tunnel that leads to an oval room,” started Tripp, then saw that Jon had closed his eyes. “Something wrong?”
“I was a crappy student,” said Jon. “I’d take notes in class, but the minute I took my pen away from the paper there was nothing. The information had disappeared into the cosmos. Not like Warren, he’s got a memory like an elephant.”
“Like a Lizzy, in fact,” said Warren.
“You’ve only seen my nice side so far,” warned Lizzy.
; “Ask Warren,” said Jon, “and he’ll tell you; the way I was going, I wasn’t going to graduate. Then one teacher, Mr. Yates, started taking an interest in me. Asking me stuff, getting me to take little tests, quizzes. Ended up telling me to go to the doctor, who referred me to a bunch of other people. Then, I found out I had a learning disability. Nothing severe; I can grasp the same things anyone else can, but I just need to learn them differently.”
“What can I do to help?” asked Tripp.
“Just walk me through the room as if you’re there. When I close my eyes, I’ll imagine it like it’s a movie. It helps me take it all in.”
Tripp nodded. “Ready? Okay. So, I’m walking down a tunnel. At the end, it opens up into a circular room with a door opposite, across a platform. When I step onto the platform, two things happen. One, if I put my weight on either side, it tilts on an axis that must be underneath it. Two, a hidden compartment in the ceiling opens, and either rocks or creatures called rotwood fiends drop out. Four of them.”
“Didn’t we see some of those?” said Lizzy. “When we went south to…what do ya call it?”
“Soliman’s Sorrow,” said Warren. “A low-level dungeon supposed to drop decent loot, but it took us an hour to get through and we didn’t find shit.”
Jon’s eyelids flickered as he seemed to process what Tripp had said in his head.
“Was that a good enough walkthrough for you?” said Tripp.
Jon nodded. “That was great, thank you.”
“This is where we try to come up with something. Getting through each room is supposed to be a test of armorer and artificery, so that part is down to me.”
“What about us?” said Warren. “This is a two-way street. I might have been an ass in the sleel pit, but I’m not here for loot handouts. Whatever we get, we’ll earn.”
Then, he looked back at Lizzy, who gave him a nod. It was obvious that the older sister had spoken to him about what he’d done and how he needed to act going forward.