Steel Orc- Player Reborn

by Deck Davis

  “Wait for a second; that was way too easy. Bee had to earn the herbalism skill before she could use it properly, but you didn’t have to earn anything. Do you come pre-loaded with skills?”

  Clive gave a smug smile. “I told you. DFs were different back in my day.”

  “Lemme see your skills.”

  Telekinetic Pickpocket [Mercury 2]

  Charm & Beguiler [Tin 4]

  Anti-Illusionist [Silver 1]

  Wow, that was quite a complement of abilities, and it made him wonder why Clive had pre-existing and leveled up skills, while Bee had started with nothing. Well, it must have been because Clive was an old DF and had been given the digital equivalent of a decommissioning, but still, why did they devs stop pre-loading their guides with skills?

  That notion set off a chain reaction, leading to Tripp feeling bad for even having the thought, but a small part of him knew that Clive was way handier to have around than Bee.

  Boxe had messed with him by replacing Bee, but had he also helped him? Was Boxe a god with two faces?

  Whatever he was, he gave with one hand and he took with the other. Now, Tripp was sure that Boxe had caused Lizzy’s death. Just like he’d redacted parts of Lucas’s message, he must have messed around with the message Tripp had sent to Jon and sent them to an ambush. The tricky part was going to be convincing Jon about that.

  He got his chance when the two brothers approached the Mountmend gates. Warren stopped just outside of them. Seeing Tripp, he took off his cleric robe and undershirt until he was bare-chested.

  The Forgestriders tittered, while other players gathered to watch the scene. Tripp didn’t blame them. It wasn’t every day you saw a cleric perform a striptease.

  Warren raised his fists in the style of a nineteenth-century pugilist. He almost expected him to say: “come on, put ‘em up.”

  “Well?” said Warren, anger writ in his face. “Are you going to take off your baby armor and get your ass out of the non-PVP zone?”

  Tripp looked to Jon, who apart from Lizzy had normally been the calming influence of the group. Jon looked at Tripp with a glare of hate and crossed his arms.

  He thought he could take a cleric one-on-one even though he hadn’t put many points into power. This was because as a cleric, he guessed Warren hadn’t loaded up on power either. His healing ability was a spell, and magic was governed by the mind attribute, something that his rage indicated had left him right now.

  Even so, he wasn’t going to fight Warren. What would be the point? “I know what you think, but you need to hear me out.”

  “I’ll hear you out. Come out here and I’ll listen carefully.”

  Tripp sighed. It was like reasoning with a bull that had just been zapped by a cattle prod.

  More players crowded around now, some laughing and others whispering to each other. It seemed that after the intensity of the Blood Wave, a half-naked cleric challenging an orc to fisticuffs was a welcome diversion. One guy, a warlock wearing green pantaloons and a skull cap, flapped his arms and made clucking noises.

  “You think I’m a chicken for not fighting him?” said Tripp.

  “Nope; you have a chicken icon above your head.”

  “Right.”

  Ugh. Tripp had another thought now: Boxe was watching. If he really couldn’t persuade Warren to calm down a second and listen to reason, then he couldn’t just walk away. You didn’t lose your status as a chicken by laying eggs of cowardice.

  He gave it one last try. “I know you think that I sent you to an ambush, but it’s not like that. Boxe is screwing with us. Or, with me specifically.”

  “Yeah? With you? Could have sworn it was Lizzy who got torn in half.”

  Tripp flinched at the idea. Even at muted pain settings, it would have still been horrible to watch.

  “Fair enough,” he said. “But I didn’t tell you to go south. Here, I’ll prove it.”

  Warren gritted his teeth and Jon crossed his arms tighter as Tripp opened his message menu and searched for his sent items. He opened the one he’d written to Jon, and then felt a weight in his stomach.

  Jon – great news! I think I know how to solve room three because I’m really clever and I know it all. How about you meet me at the Cathedral of the Damned? Even though I’m stubborn as hell and really don’t understand as much as I think I do, I need your help.

  “What the hell?” said Tripp. Boxe hadn’t just set up an ambush; the message was dripping with passive-aggressive jibes at Tripp. What the hell had he done to piss Boxe off so much?

  “So? Where’s your proof?”

  Tripp faced Jon. “C’mon, you seriously believe I wrote that message? Look at it, for God’s sake. Who writes like that?”

  Jon gave Warren a wary glance. The cleric stepped forward, a little closer to Mountmend but still in the PVP-enabled area. “You can’t prove you didn’t do it, because you’re guilty as hell. What, poisoning us wasn’t enough revenge?”

  His options were closing. Should he fight an enraged, bare-chested madman, or deepen his status as poultry?

  “Clive,” he thought, “does your charm skill work on people?”

  “Only NPCs,” said Clive.

  The clucking noises rose around him now. It was a well-observed social phenomenon that once a person started making chicken noises at someone, it was impossible for the crowd not to join in.

  Tripp sighed and started to unclasp his steel breastplate.

  Then he stopped. “Wait,” he said. He eyed Jon, the more level-headed of the two. “Come a little closer so I can show you something.”

  The elf approached the gates, suspicion glaring from his eyes. Tripp had come to see Jon as the more thoughtful of the three, but at the beginning, he’d also been the wariest of Tripp. Jon was a bit of an introvert, he guessed, and that side of his personality had formed a protective shell around him.

  Tripp scanned through his messages. The one he’d sent to Jon was useless since Boxe had altered it. Instead, he went to his inbox and showed what he’d received from Lucas.

  “See? All the redacted stuff?”

  Jon read it again, then he looked back at Warren, who was rubbing his naked arms, probably feeling the chill but trying not to show it. The thing about adrenaline was that it made you do things like take your robe off and start a fight, but when the adrenaline washed away, you felt stupid for getting carried away by it.

  “There’s something to what he’s saying,” Jon told Warren. “Come and look.”

  Warren didn’t move for a minute. Finally, he sighed and kicked a rock and then strode forward while putting his robe back on.

  “Okay, Tripp. Tell us everything.”

  He nodded. “I’ll need you to do the same for me. Come on, Warren, cross the town boundary. See those guys over there? They’re Forgestrider jerks who are keeping tabs on us.”

  CHAPTER 59

  “And then she turned into ashes right in front of me,” said Tripp.

  He told them what happened to Aubrey and how Boxe had acted like a pain-in-the-ass genie and swapped Bee with Clive. Jon listened with growing interest, restraining himself from butting in to ask questions. Warren’s face softened, and he had unclenched his fists by the time Tripp was done.

  “And the final ingredient in Boxe’s crap-cake is that he’s messing with my messages, and he says that he’s seen me outside of the game.”

  “Woah,” said Warren. “You need to log out. That’s getting too heavy.”

  Tripp nodded. “I was edging toward that.”

  Jon stared at Tripp. “If you’re logging out because Boxe has accessed images of you outside of the game world, I wouldn’t be so quick. Are you worried about data breaches or something?”

  Tripp scratched his head now. “I was, but then I thought about it some more, and I realized it’s just another of his tricks.”

  “Exactly,” said Jon. “I can understand you being worried though. You were scared that because of Boxe’s network reach, maybe he could mess
around with your regrowth pod or something.”

  Tripp nodded. “He has enough intelligence to make that a possibility.”

  “Nope. I saw a news piece once. A company called Indulgent, or something like that, had paid to use Boxe for market analysis. That’s what they used to do, and I think they might still do it a little; they let companies pay to use Boxe’s processing power and intelligence. Anyway, pretty much as soon as Indulgent let Boxe start analyzing their customer data, someone stole money from their bank account and cleaned them out.”

  “And they suspected Boxe.”

  “Right. The police had zero evidence, and Lucas and the others were able to prove beyond any doubt that Boxe has no ability to make changes on anything he accessed outside of Soulboxe. When they give him access to view stuff outside of the game, it’s like he’s standing behind a pane of plexiglass. He can only watch things, not change them.”

  “Okay, that makes sense. I feel a little better. I still don’t understand if he actually saw me in my pod, or if he just pieced it together from overhearing me telling you about it.”

  “Whatever it is, you don’t have anything to worry about.”

  “Fine,” said Warren. “I believe you about the messages now. That doesn’t change the fact that Lizzy is gone. I messaged her asking where she respawned, but she hasn’t replied yet.”

  “Messages aren’t reliable anymore. What happened? You got a message from me asking you to meet me at the Church of the Damned, then what?” said Tripp.

  “So, the church is all overgrown with black, stinking plants. You can hardly see the brickwork, and when you get close you can sense something changing in the air, right? We guessed you wouldn’t have wanted to meet there without a good reason. Even so, we were careful. We stayed away from the church for a while and watched.”

  “Then we got another message from you,” said Jon. “Saying that you could see us, and what were we waiting for?”

  “That’s when we went into the church.”

  Tripp felt a shudder go through him. “Then what?”

  “The door slammed shut behind us, and everything went pitch black. Jon shot a few fire arrows into each corner and that helped some, but that was when we saw them; weird black creatures forming from the black vines.”

  Warren tightened his cleric robe around him. “We had to fight like hell to get out, but Lizzy didn’t make it. She got scissored in half. Frigging disgusting.”

  Tripp imagined himself going to the Church of the Damned, and he imagined Boxe watching and springing his trap. He could hear the doors closing, the sinister slithering sounds of creatures forming from darkness and creeping up on him. The image gave him a stab of fear.

  “Now she’ll be outside Godden’s Reach, and she can’t get back,” said Warren. “Which leaves us with a dilemma.”

  “Are you going to go find her?” asked Tripp, sensing that pretty soon he was going to be alone.

  Warren paced. “I don’t want to miss the wave. Everyone’s talking about what we’ll get if we make it through. But the whole point of coming here is to spend time with Lizzy without having to travel across the country. Man, I didn’t expect to get so wrapped up in this. Soulboxe has a way of needling you.”

  “Wait, I just got a message,” said Jon. He read it, furrowing his brow. “Here, I’ll give you both access.”

  An alert appeared in front of Tripp, with a tick icon next to it. Accepting it, the message appeared.

  Wow, that was a first…never been cut in half before. Disgusting, or what? I’m so glad I opted for muted pain and graphics!

  Jon, I got your message and yeah, I respawned outside of Godden’s Reach. I’m near a town called Bridgebrook, if that helps?

  I’ll wait here for a while until you get here. See you soon!

  “She wants us to go and meet her,” said Warren. Looking at him, Tripp could see the conflict building in him, and he thought he knew why.

  “You don’t want to go, do you?” he said.

  Warren stared wistfully at the plains of Godden’s Reach, as if now that he might have to leave them they weren’t just expanses of frorarg infested grass, but had transformed into the nostalgic pastures of his youth.

  Or maybe he was just staring. Hard to say.

  “I wanted to see this out,” said Warren. “Get to the end of the wave, see what prizes they give out.”

  “If they give out any,” said Jon. “We haven’t had dev confirmation.”

  “One rumor is just a trail of smoke. A dozen rumors is a fire.”

  “We can’t just stay here and leave Lizzy alone. Remember the whole point in playing Soulboxe in the first place?”

  Warren kicked a rock away from him. “Damn it.”

  Three players walked by them, chatting to each other excitedly. Tripp recognized Stefan and Ossie, the lizard and the demon. Stefan stopped in front of Tripp and patted him on the shoulder, dinking his metal with his lizard claws.

  “Hey, Tinny. Glad to see you’re still here! I heard about the chicken thing. Don’t let it bother you. A brave dead guy is still a dead guy.”

  “Boxe really doesn’t like people backing off from fights.”

  “They’re trying to thin the numbers,” said Stefan. “Didn’t you hear? We found out what the prize for surviving the Blood Wave will be. Well, kinda.”

  Warren focused on Stefan now like a puppy whose ears pricked when he smelled a treat. “Oh yeah?”

  “Some girl claiming to be an ex-dev started an anonymous blog, and she’s been spilling all kinds of things that the other devs probably don’t want people to know about. Mostly tame stuff at first, like company emails where they talked about cutting out popular content because it wasn’t making enough money.”

  “What’s wrong with that?” said Jon. “They are a business, after all.”

  “True, but you’ve got to remember that some people have played Soulboxe so long that in their minds, they own the game. It doesn’t belong to the devs anymore.”

  “So this blogger, who’s to say she’s not full of crap?” said Tripp.

  “Because she posted a copy of her employment contract. She censored anything that would identify her, but it was proof enough.”

  “And what did she say about the wave?”

  “The third wave will be the last, and the toughest. Anyone living when the sun comes out will be rewarded. Basically, whatever the prize is, it’ll be shared by however many people are still alive in Godden’s Reach after the last wave.”

  Ossie, the demon, tugged Stefan. “Come on. Lots to do.”

  Stefan playfully punched Tripp’s armor. “Stay safe, Tinny. We’re defending the east sectors in the next wave. Come find us if you want.”

  Tripp watched Stefan, Ossie, and their friend leave, and he tried to make sense of the reported reward. It should have been motivating, but he felt worry coil inside him.

  He was no psychiatrist, but he liked to think he knew at least something about human nature. To some people, the idea of sharing the prize would mean they’d work together.

  To others, it’d mean that it was time for a cull. Not wanting to share the prize, some people might start actively hunting other players and trying to reduce the number of people who’d get a share. Selfish sons of bitches, in other words. Or pragmatists; he guessed that what you called them depended on how you saw things. He was somewhere in the middle.

  Still, it didn’t make sense to get mercenary about it. Never mind that the fewer people fighting, the less chance anyone had of surviving; the prospect of money was a punch to the temple that knocked otherwise logical people off balance.

  Warren looked so agitated he was ready to pop. He wrung his hands. “What do you think?” he said.

  “I know what you think,” said Jon.

  “I won’t stay here if you don’t. But c’mon…just one more wave. That’s all we need to get through. One more night.”

  “Meanwhile, Lizzy is on her own.”

  An idea hit Tripp the
n. “There’s always the chance that Lizzy didn’t write the message.”

  “What?” said Jon.

  “Would Lizzy tell you to leave Godden’s reach? Maybe. Or maybe she’d tell you to stick around and try to see it through. I don’t know that because I don’t know her well enough, but I know that Boxe likes to mess with people’s messages. Who’s to say he didn’t write it? It could be another of his games to split us up.”

  “Yeah,” said Warren, getting excited. “He’s got a point! It could be.”

  “Or you want that to be the case.”

  “Either way, why don’t we take a chance? If the reward at the end of this is good enough, maybe we can afford to see Lizzy in person. If it isn’t, then at least we tried. I’ll get a job, and I’ll work my ass off and then we can hire a car and take a road trip. Come on, Jon.”

  Tripp and Warren watched Jon now as he turned the decision over in his head. Tripp wouldn’t have blamed them whatever they decided to do.

  All the same, he felt a little tense when Jon spoke.

  “Okay,” he said. “One night. Let’s make this worth it.”

  CHAPTER 60

  Tripp felt more urgency an hour later, when they were facing the door to room three of the labyrinth . Knowing that there was just one more round of the Blood Wave left, he felt like he needed to solve the labyrinth before then. He just couldn’t shake the feeling that when the Blood Wave was done, he might not get a chance to stay in Godden’s Reach.

  He grabbed the door handle and faced Jon and Warren. “When I open this, you’ll have 21 seconds before it closes, okay?”

  “Why 21?”

  “No idea, but Bee and I tested it. As long as you’re not in the room when the door closes, you won’t get locked in. It’s important we don’t yet. This is a recon mission, and if we get locked in, then we have to solve the room or die, and if we die…”

  “Then there’s no coming back to Godden’s Reach. Got it,” said Jon. “You need me to stay by the door and fire arrows into the room?”