by R. A. Mejia
I shrug and very slowly and carefully describe what I’m about to do. “I’m going to turn back to the prompt asking for the code and enter 5313. Are you ok with that?”
She hits me again, but more playfully this time. “Go ahead and do it.” She pats her rifle and continues, “I’ll be ready for a monster spawn.”
I turn to the prompt and once the final number on the blue prompt is entered, the sounds of gears turning comes from inside the large metal doors, and then I hear a loud click. I cautiously pull on the doors’ handles and find that each is easily moveable now. Nancy helps me pull each to the side on a hidden track, and we slip between them. The darkness beyond makes me cautious, and I whisper to Nancy, “I’m going to activate Sneak and slip into stealth mode.” She acknowledges and goes into her own sneak mode and follows behind me, rifle at the ready.
Unfortunately, I can’t see anything, and I wish that I had some night-vision goggles or something. Blindly moving forward with my hands outstretched, it comes as quite the surprise when a spotlight turns on ahead, blinding me momentarily with it’s brightness. I stop moving, worried that we’ve been noticed somehow, but the spotlight does not turn toward us. Instead, it lights up a man in a ragged-looking dark hooded sweatshirt about twenty feet ahead. His back is to us, but his hood is down, and I can tell that his shoulder-length hair is unkempt and wild-looking. Even from here, he looks broad-shouldered and muscular. But it’s hard to tell anything else.
You’ve completed the quest - Locate the Dungeon Boss.
You receive 50,000 XP.
Defeat the Dungeon Boss
Now that you’ve located the dungeon boss, you just have to beat him to complete the experimental dungeon. Good luck. Please report any bugs or abnormalities to your supervisor.
Reward: 100,000 XP, complete dungeon.
Woah, those quest rewards are no joke. If I beat this guy, that’ll be enough XP to get me to my next level. But something just feels off. I’m unsure why the notification mentions an experimental dungeon and supervisor, and this isn’t the first time I’ve seen the prompt while here.
The man turns and looks out wildly into the darkness surrounding him. “Who’s there? I know you’re there. The lights don’t come on unless there is movement, and I already heard the doors unlock. Are you my supervisor? I’ve done everything the machine told me to do, but it keeps telling me that I need to report to my supervisor.”
Supervisor? Has this guy been getting messages about a supervisor too? I stay still, not wanting to risk this unknown man in the Boss Room knowing where I am. He stands up, and I get a good look at him. He stands at six foot two, and his clothes are little more than thin rags at this point with lots of wear and tear. His face looks like that of a man that’s had an unhealthy and rapid weight-loss. His skin hangs loosely around his neck, but his physique is so muscular that I can see his muscles even through his thin clothing.
“Please, answer me! I’ve been here so long without anyone but the monsters and the machine!”
My heart goes out to the obviously lonely man, who is either one of the most convincing NPCs ever made or just some poor slob that stumbled inside this dungeon. I mean, that’s basically what happened to me. Before I give in to my desire to call out to this guy, my brain kicks in, and I remember to use Inspect.
William Munro
Level 17
Health 850
Mana 100
TP100
Picked by experimental dungeon #65032B52 as the dungeon boss, William was resistant to go through the preparation process. His attitude has been noted and will be forwarded to the project supervisor.
Likes: Serial killer movies, Crime dramas
Dislikes: Bullies and the weak.
Disposition: Fearful
Bonus: Two-time convicted felon, William Munro was released on parole two years ago. He views the world as having wrongly pegged him as the bad guy when all he has done is try to get by or stop people from hurting him. His extreme acts of violence indicate there may be some deeper issue.
Holy shit. This guy is definitely a boss if he has 850 hit points. But I’m confused. His information is a mix of stuff that I’d get if I was fighting an NPC and stuff that I’d get when I’m inspecting a normal person. How can he be both a dungeon boss and a regular person? I don’t understand. When I look up at the man, I see him looking off into the distance, muttering to himself. I recognize the look of someone reading their own notification.
The lights in the room start to come on, and I instantly feel more vulnerable as I lose stealth completely. My eyes scan the room, looking for Nancy, who is nowhere to be found among the massive piles of boxes and debris that litter the room. It seems I’ve found where all the stolen stuff from the neighborhood has gone to.
The man finally sees me and smiles. “There you are.”
I nod to him, knowing that Nancy is somewhere hidden among the boxes and trash, but not wanting to give her away I reply, “Yes. Here I am, William Munro. I’ve been here in this dungeon for a while now. But I’m more curious about you and how you got here.”
The man stands and starts to roll his shoulders, loosening them up. “I was drawn here. Same as you. The computer just told me that you aren’t a supervisor, but someone like me who was brought here to get stronger. It says that, if I beat you, I’ll be let free. That’s all that I need to know.”
With those words, William dashes toward me, covering the twenty feet between us more quickly than I expect, and swings at me with a wide left hook. I’m able to lean back just enough to avoid a direct hit, but he still catches the corner of my chin with the last knuckle of his fist, and I’m sent spinning to my left with a red 5 floating away, even from that slight blow. His right fist follows up and hits me like a brick in my stomach, and I curl over. I have a hard time breathing as I drop to the floor. I’m sure I took more damage that time, but I can’t see exactly how much. As I focus on just getting air back into my lungs, I hear William laughing over me.
“I don’t know why you’re here if you’re this weak, but that works fine for me. The sooner I beat you, the sooner I can leave and use these powers to take what I want from the world. No one will stop me. No one will call me weak and useless.”
I feel a foot kick me while I’m down, but I activate Shadow Step before another lands. I hear the crack of a rifle as the world goes grey, and I can’t breathe, but at least I’m not getting beat for the moment. A quick look at my character sheet tells the story.
Anthony Tinoco
Level 12
Health 228/270
Mana 320/320
TP 370/370
With only three blows, one of which was glancing, this guy has already knocked off 42 hit points, over 15% of my HP. It only took him seconds to do so too. A close-up fight is not going to be in my favor here. I need to keep my distance from this guy, or I’ll die. Getting to my feet carefully, I can see the greyed-out figure of William Munro. He has a manic expression on his face, even as his head is flying forwards a bullet having impacted it and sent a red 105 floating away from him so very slowly. Still, from his posture and his raised right knee, I can tell he was planning to stomp down on where I was on the ground. The man was not kidding. He planned to end this fight quickly and brutally. I smile, glad to have Nancy as backup with her own plan.
A familiar burn in my lungs reminds me that I don’t have much time left in the shadow-verse. I activate Bounce as I jump backward. My legs feel like jelly, but I’m able to double my jump distance. I use the ability two more times, and I am able to put 15 feet of distance between us at the cost of 30 TP. The moment my feet land after the third jump back, the world returns to normal, and I see William’s foot slam down on the ground with a resounding thud. He looks confused that, not only has he missed, but that he has some pain at the back of his head. I use the precious seconds he’s distracted to Dual Cast Ice Needle. The two thin shards of ice shoot from my outstretched palms with tremendous force and hit him in his ches
t, causing two red 13s to float away from him.
William stands there and looks at me, hardly noticing the damage from the Ice Needles. And why would he? Even after two of them, the magical attack took less than 5% of his HP. I do the mental math and realize that I’ll only be able to Dual Cast Ice Needle another 4 times for a total of 104 more damage--nowhere near enough to take down his massive HP. But if I keep to the normal casts, I can use Ice Needle 11 more times and do 143 points of damage. Neither scenario is going to win me this fight on its own. I have to think of something different.
“Well, that’s better, little man. Here I thought that you were going to drop like a new inmate on his first conviction.” He chuckles at his personal joke, but I don’t get it. Standing there, he seems to actually be having a good time. His laughter stops, and he scans the room and continues. “But don’t get confused. Just because you have a friend out there somewhere that was able hurt me a little, it doesn’t mean that this fight will end any differently. All you’re doing is making your pain go on longer.”
There’s a small flash of green near his feet, and he dashes towards me again just as another rifle shot sounds, but the shot misses, and the concrete floor cracks where the rifle bullet hit. Having seen his ability once before, I expect the movement this time, and I dive to the left, rolling as I go. I feel his form brush past me, and by the time I’m back on my feet with my arms raised in a defensive stance, he’s past me and turning. He jabs with left fist, and I take the blow on my raised arm. I strike back with a front kick, and the blow catches William in his stomach, and a red 7 floats away from him. I start to back away, and he takes the bait and rushes forward, swinging with both fists. I’m smaller, apparently more agile, and I’m able to stay just out of reach. It doesn’t hurt that he’s suffering from the slow effect of the Ice Needles. The exchange of blows leaves me the worse off with my HP down to 192 while his is still at 725.
I cry out in shock as a punch that I thought was going to come up short causes a burning pain in my stomach, and I lose 20 points of health. I look down and see a cut in my leather armor and a small amount of blood leaking from the slash. In the corner of my vision, a small bleeding icon tells me that I’m losing 5 HP per second. When I look at William again, I can see he now has a sharp knife with a fading red glow in his right hand.
“Ha! Stuck you like a pig, didn’t I?” He barks a laugh as he lunges forward, and I fall back, having to push myself to stay out of the range of the knife. He slashes left and right, putting me completely on defense and unable to block his attacks. I’m so focused on avoiding the knife that I don’t watch where I’m being herded and suddenly slam into a wall. I panic for a moment, feeling trapped as William Munro laughs, ready to skewer me. I roll to my left, turn to face the wall, and activate Spider Climb, which lets me run up the wall out of the dungeon boss’s reach. The ability only costs 1 TP per second, which was an expensive cost when I was low level, but I can now sustain the ability for almost 6 minutes before I run out of TP.
From the floor below, William yells, “Your tricks won’t save you, boy. I’m gonna shove my foot so far up your ass, you’ll be sneezing my shoelaces.”
Another shot rings out and William Munro stumbles forward as his body is impacted by the bullet, and he loses another 68 HP. He turns searching the room for the hidden sniper. I don’t let him search for long and instead quickly cast Ice Needle again and again. The convict catches on fairly quickly that he’s at a disadvantage. He attempts to dodge both the spells and the bullets being fired at him. I switch to my Fireball spell and fling a ball of flame at Munro. He tries to dodge the projectile but cries out in pain as he’s still hit with the area of effect spell. His clothes catch on fire and he bats at them with his hands, surprised that he’s taking ongoing damage.
“You stupid firebug! I’ll make you pay for your resistance. You think a little fire is going to stop me from crushing you like the nothing bug you are?”
My response comes in the form of another Fireball, but he’s wise to the spell now and activates his special dash ability to avoid the area of attack and takes no damage. I note that the power of the rifle shots has lessened and worry that Nancy has run out of TP to fuel her sniper abilities. I know I’m out of mana as I burn the last of it on another Fireball, and just like before, he uses his special movement ability to avoid it.
After dodging my last attack, William walks closer to me, unafraid, and put his hands on his hips and laughs at me. “I know you’re out of your MP, kid. I can see your numbers, just like I could see those monster’s numbers. Why don’t you come down from there, and I’ll make your death nice and quick?”
It’s true. I’m out of mana. But what the fool doesn’t know is that he’s out of TP. I’d been watching him through Inspect, and every time he used his Dash ability, it burned 20 TP. He only has 10 left and can’t use the ability anymore. Exactly what I’d been waiting for. Instead of answering the jibes of the man, I quickly access my inventory and equip my grenade launcher with the last Ice Grenade. The look on William’s face when he sees the weapon in my hand is priceless.
“NO! No one said we could use something like that!” He turns and starts to run, but without his special ability, he cannot out run the Ice Grenade. As it lands, there’s an explosion of cold energy that radiates out and catches the fleeing man. The grenade doesn’t do much damage, just a few points, but the ice slows William down by 50%. I deactivate Spider Climb, drop to the ground, and sprint toward him. As I run, I drop the grenade launcher into my inventory and equip my war hammer.
The now-severely slowed man hears me coming, turns, and tries to execute a roundhouse kick. The attack might have caught me off guard before, but it’s moving so slowly that it’s not any challenge to avoid it. I duck slightly, avoiding the kick aimed at my head, and swing the war hammer downward, two-handed, while activating Break. There is a sickening crack as his knee shatters, and he screams in pain as he drops to the ground, the leg he’d been pivoting on no longer able to support his weight. I don’t let the screams dissuade me from my task and quickly activate the special ability again and again and again as I break each of his limbs. The knife in his right hand drops to the floor with a clatter as his arm breaks, and he lies there, huddled in a ball, curled up and sobbing.
“Please no more. I give up. Don’t hurt me anymore.” His plea reaches me and I stop any further attacks. Nancy, seeing that William Munro is down, comes out from her hiding place behind a toppled, broken washer. She jogs up to me while keeping her distance from William. “That guy’s a beast, Anthony. I ran out of TP with that last Overwatch shot and was running low on bullets too. I don’t think I’d have been able to take him down on my own.”
I nod at her assessment. Without her powerful sniper shots I don’t think I’d have done much damage on my own either. The guy would have sent me to respawn pretty quickly.
“Thanks for your help, Nancy. But I have some questions I have to ask this guy.” I turn my attention back to William, who’d been trying to crawl away.
I quietly drop an item from my inventory into my pocket and walk in front of the beaten man. Then I ask him again, “Now that I’ve got you settled down, how about you tell me again how you got here?”
The crying man tells me everything: How he felt drawn to the blue house and how eventually he gave into the desire to go there. He broke into the basement one night and opened a red door that he found there. Inside, he was told that he was helping with an experiment and that he had to fight monster after monster until the computer told him to rest. Then it fed him, and after he slept, it all started again. Until, finally, the computer made him the Boss. It then stuck him with wires and tubes, and it felt like the machine was sifting through every single one of his memories. Then, when he finally awoke, he was in this room. He explored the place and recognized his old apartment building, the playground around it, and even his old apartment he grew up in.
He could partially command the monsters he saw aro
und himself, and they never attacked him, even when he hit them. But they did listen to him, and as time went on, he found that he could even send them out into the world to get him things. They weren’t smart enough to understand what he wanted, but they kept bringing him stuff. It was mostly junk, but eventually, a person, and then another. He gestures to a corner of the room I hadn’t noticed before. There, a ragged tarp covers a round pile, and when I move it, there is a pile of junk items and, more disturbingly, two bodies. They’re not identifiable at a glance because of the decay, but with The Magnifying Glass of the Detailed Detective, I’m able to tell that one body is of a Caucasian man over the age of 60 and that the other is a woman of African descent in her 20s. Seeing the information makes seeing the remains real and I feel myself getting nauseous. It’s one thing to look at bones in a classroom lab and another to know that they’re people that lived in your old neighborhood.
The explanation brings together exactly why seemingly random stuff in the neighborhood would go missing, and eventually, people as well. I wonder how many dead bodies and items are spread throughout this dungeon, hidden in corners or consumed by the monsters. I suddenly feel tired, having discovered exactly what was the cause of all the problems here: one depraved man found a dungeon and became its boss somehow. Not some randomly generated monster. But a man. Knowing what I have to do, but not liking it, I turn off the recording app on the phone in my pocket and stow it back in my inventory.