Of course, he wasn’t proud of the ulterior motive. But at least he acknowledged it. And even if some of his reasoning was selfish, it was also sound.
Besides, hadn’t Emerson recently been thinking that he wanted to get some screen captures of Veia’s creation to hang in his office? He’d wanted to see Stonehaven for a long time. Might as well do the two birds with one stone thing.
He typed up the last bits of instruction on how she could use the special tracker he intended to create through the GM scripting interface, then saved the message to a drafts folder. He would explain all this in person as well, but he wanted her to have a written record. It would be hard enough to keep track of her identity in the coming hours. The last thing Emerson wanted was for her to have to remember a set of verbal instructions.
The message finished, he checked her status again. Still offline. There couldn’t be a network outage in St. George, could there? On one of his screens, he pulled up an independent monitoring website that tracked traffic over the major carriers. No, no outage. He shrugged. At the bottom of another screen, he had a toolbar app running that provided a limited portal into the customer support tool. He searched for Devon’s handle and was rewarded with a green icon showing her as online.
Strange.
Well, just like he’d shut out the world to focus solely on puzzling out information on Zaa and Owen, maybe she’d eliminated all distractions while raising her Shadowed stat.
He pulled up the GM scripting tool and dragged in an item template. First, he needed to choose the physical representation. A gem of some sort? Something she could wear so she could use it while leaving her hands free? He settled on a bracelet, nothing too ornate because he didn’t want things to feel awkward, like this was some sort of token of affection.
Not that he didn’t feel affection. He hoped the item would make her ordeal less horrific. But he just didn’t want to give off the “guy giving jewelry in hopes of mating” vibe.
Next, he opened the advanced settings and started whipping up a custom script to search the geographical environs for Owen’s particular data signature. The actual implementation would be hidden from Devon, of course. She’d simply notice that the bracelet began to glow when it detected that Owen was near, vibrating once she was within a few feet. It only took a short time to get things configured, and then he saved the item and recorded its unique identifier so that he could summon it later.
Devon’s messenger contact was still offline.
Emerson sighed, took a deep breath, and forced himself to drag open Cynthia’s contact and message history.
His pulse thundered when he read the text of the first message and saw the long, long list of contact attempts that had come after.
“Shit,” he muttered.
Chapter Thirty-One
ABRUPTLY, THE CORRIDOR began to vibrate. Devon had been walking for twelve minutes since Zaa had added the quest timer to her mission, taking turns at random. She’d begun to worry she’d still be wandering empty corridors when the quest timer ran out and dumped the penalty for failure on her shoulders.
Unfortunately, the reverberation in the walls didn’t make her feel any better. The smoke filling the ceiling niches wavered as the stone vibrated faster, and Bob shrank as the wisp tucked closer to her shoulder.
With a hiss and a bone-shaking thunk, a dark-iron plate dropped into place around twenty paces before her, sealing the corridor. Devon squeaked and jumped backward, her heels catching on her wingtips. The wings tugged hard at her shoulder blades, and she threw out a claw to catch herself on the corridor wall.
Silence fell, the crackle of flames in their niches subdued, the not-quite-audible howls of the tormented snuffed. Devon turned slowly and looked behind her. A few paces back, another of the plates blocked the passage.
“O…kay?” she muttered.
As if in response, the vibration began again, and her eyes widened in horror as the ceiling dropped by a centimeter.
You have begun the Trial of Strength.
Your task is to survive.
Oh. Shit.
“So remember that garbage compactor conversation? For the record, I regret mentioning it.”
Bob spun a few circles around her head and darted up into the ceiling voids, lighting the smoke from within. “The creator entity hasn’t expressed knowledge of such starborn lore,” it said. “It seems unlikely our conversation prompted this.”
“If you ask me, it’s too much of a coincidence to say it wasn’t due to our conversation. Even if Zaa doesn’t remember the seed content verbatim, it’s part of the AI’s mental model, right?”
“Beats me, Sherlock.”
After another prolonged vibration, the ceiling dropped again. Devon reached up a claw. She could almost touch the lowest of the spikes. “Speaking of, remind me to ask you what relationship the arcane realm has to Veia and Zaa.”
“Well, I’ve been hoping you might inquire—”
“Remind me to ask you later.”
She wasn’t quite clear on how Bob and its ilk had come to be if they hadn’t been created by Veia as she’d assumed. The way Bob talked about it, arcane manifestations inhabited some entirely different space. They seemed to have bootstrapped themselves by siphoning from the data used to create the other AIs. But that didn’t make a lot of sense. From what Emerson had said, the creator AIs each had a set of dedicated servers which hosted their neural nets. Surely someone at E-Squared would know if another set of entities had co-opted some of this processing.
The ceiling dropped again, and she cringed. Back to the problem at hand…
“Okay. Trial of Strength.”
“Not your strong point, I might point out.”
Devon groaned. Unfortunately, the wisp was right. As a human, she was about as puny as they came. With the same Strength score housed in a demon body, that made her what? Animated papier-mâché?
The ceiling dropped again, farther this time. Devon snapped up an arm and brushed a spike with her claw. Was she supposed to do anyway? Hold up the ceiling while it tried to make her into a demon pancake?
She shook her head. Stasis, even if she could achieve it, probably wasn’t the solution. Shuffling forward, she reached the iron plate and pressed her leathery palms against it. She gave the slab an experimental shove, but it was like trying to topple a barn. The plate didn’t budge.
She scanned the edges of the barrier, searching for weaknesses or seams. The plate was nearly flush with the wall, but not quite. A thin crack showed around the sides and lower edge. She crouched and tried to dig her claws beneath the bottom of the slab. The tips of her nails caught the barest amount of purchase, and she gritted her pointy teeth while trying to wedge them deeper beneath the heavy slab.
With a demonic grunt, she heaved. The door raised a millimeter before slipping off her claws and slamming back down.
The ceiling dropped again, this time falling a good two inches.
“I’d say A for effort, but actually that would be a lie,” the wisp said. “C- at best.”
“And you think you can do better?” she snapped.
“As you may have noticed, I am rather bodiless, having only the merest hint of substance.”
The ceiling fell another inch. When Devon stood to her full height, the spikes were less than half a foot from the crown of her bald skull.
Remembering a trick from long ago where she collapsed a temple entrance by sending ice into weaknesses in the stone and expanding them via the freeze-thaw cycle, Devon focused on the lower lip of the plate and cast Freeze. With a squeal, the metal rose perhaps an inch, and she quickly dropped to her haunches to shove her claws beneath.
“If nothing else, it’s an ingenious way to trap yourself,” Bob commented.
She rolled her eyes as the Freeze timed out and shattered, and the weight of the door came down hard on her claws. She felt the strain in her nail beds, but at least her claws didn’t break.
Wi
th a deep breath, she summoned all her power and tried to stand.
Her back seized.
“Lift with the legs, I believe,” Bob said.
She grimaced. Legs, back. It didn’t matter. She wasn’t going to get the stupid plate off the ground this way. She just wasn’t strong enough.
Twisting her hands—or rather, trying to—she attempted to extract her claws.
Unfortunately, Bob was right about how effectively she’d trapped herself. She cast another Freeze in order to get herself free, then stood.
The ceiling fell again, and a spike brushed her head.
“You know…” Bob said before making a weird ticking sound that sounded an awful lot like a clock.
“Yes. I got it.”
Problem was, she wasn’t coming up with any brilliant ideas. Waking up every hour during the night to cast spells increasing her Shadowed stat hadn’t done her mental acuity any favors today.
If she were outside, she could probably do something fancy with a sun-based Shadow Puppet, forming it into a long pole she could use to lever the door up. Obviously, there wasn’t a lot of sunshine in the Citadel of Smoke.
Too bad she hadn’t invested in Strength along the way, balancing out her character build like Jeremy seemed to think was so important. Actually…wait. Devon yanked open her character sheet. She’d almost forgotten that she had leveled from the discovery experience when entering the dungeon.
Character: Devon (click to set a different character name)
Level: 22
Base Class: Sorcerer
Specialization: Unassigned
Unique Class: Deceiver
Health: 352/352
Mana: 603/603
Fatigue: 39%
Shadowed: 100%
Attributes:
Constitution: 22
Strength: 13
Agility: 17
Charisma: 42
Intelligence: 29
Focus: 16
Endurance: 28
Unspent Attribute Points: 4
Special Attributes:
Bravery: 7
Cunning: 7
Dignity: -1
Looking at her stats, Devon sighed. She’d lost a lot of attribute points when her gear had Hulk-exploded off her body. When—if—she got out of here, getting suited up in some new armor would have to be an early priority.
Even knowing she needed to do it to avoid eternal torment—for her avatar at least—it still wasn’t easy to squander points on a stat that her character really just didn’t need. Curling her lip, she dropped the four points into Strength and accepted and closed the window before she could talk herself out of it. A flood of power rushed through her, her muscles hardening. With a snarl, she cast another Freeze and got her nails under the door. With a roar, she heaved.
The slab rose a centimeter before her strength failed, her claws slipped out, and she fell backward onto her wings.
“Ow.”
“I suppose you don’t need me to tell you your plan needs refinement,” Bob said.
Devon gritted her teeth hard, this time piercing her gum again. Ichor flooded the space between her gum and her lower lip flap, and with it, the faint copper tang of blood.
Of course. Blood Mist.
Devon focused on traces of blood that still flowed in her veins, the remnants of the woman now imprisoned in the demon’s form. As she stretched her awareness of their vitality, she bit down harder against her gum. The taste of blood blossomed on her palate. The fact that it tasted good to her demon self made her want to hurl. No doubt this experience would cause her major issues later on. Shrinks would have a heyday with it.
She twisted her awareness to activate the Blood Mist spell, and though the red tendrils that escaped her mouth were faint, they seemed to be enough to power the ability. She felt the first pulse of healing as a tingle where her gums were scratched.
Closing her eyes, she summoned her willpower and laid her claws against her thighs. With a screech, she cut deep gashes in her flesh. The next healing pulse was stronger.
She scanned the ability description again, making sure she wasn’t just being an idiot.
Ability: Blood Mist – Tier 1
Channel the blood of your dead and dying opponents into energy which heals your wounds. When the healing effect fades, leaves behind a secondary effect, Sated by Blood, granting +2 Strength for 5 minutes.
Heals 13-15 damage every 6 seconds. Healing and Strength gain scales to +65% as your health approaches zero.
Duration: 45 seconds
Cost: 85 mana
Cast time: 1.5 seconds
Okay, so she might be being an idiot about other unknown things, she was right about the scaling of the Strength buff. The lower her health while Blood Mist worked, the greater the effects of the Sated by Blood effect that would be applied once the spell ran out. With another shriek, she tore into herself, opening wounds across her ribs and her belly, spreading her wings enough that she could tear into the membranous flash with her razor claws.
“You know,” Bob said, “I’m not sure I even have a comment for this situation. Honestly, I’m not sure it needs one.”
“I’m just glad you’re not a livestreamer,” Devon said.
Bob shimmered. “Which makes me think, maybe I ought to get into videography. No shortage of material lately.”
The heal effects couldn’t keep up with the damage, but the pulses were stronger, and Devon had to keep tearing at her flesh to work her health percentage down into the teens. She hoped Zaa wouldn’t take this opportunity to throw an enemy at her.
After the sixth pulse, Blood Mist faded and left behind the Sated by Blood effect. Devon heaved a sigh of relief as she cast Blood Mist again to heal up the self-inflicted damage. For good measure, she cast Adamantine Strike on herself. If nothing else, it would harden her claws against damage.
Hoping for the best, she dropped a Freeze into the gap between the slab and the floor, then shoved her claws into the space the ice created. With a howl, she poured herself into the effort of lifting, and the door rose by a foot, then two. When it reached two and a half, she began to shake. At 3 feet— around the height of her kneecaps—her body shuddered. She felt her claws begin to slip and howled again as she crammed a leg into the gap. The weight of the door came down hard, her shin and foot bones the only thing holding up the massive plate. She cast another Adamantine Strike, hoping it would harden her bones. Her Fatigue score quickly rose, and as she felt her shinbone start to bow, she screamed and grabbed the bottom of the door again. She heaved, throwing the door up to chest height, then ducked her shoulder and jammed it underneath, bearing the weight on her skeleton.
Devon’s screams echoed through the halls, discordant and repulsive.
Ducking her head, she transferred the weight of the slab onto the back of her neck, and one last push from her legs lifted it to ceiling height.
Trial of Strength complete.
As the weight of the plate vanished, Devon dropped to the floor in a demonic heap.
Chapter Thirty-Two
CYNTHIA WAS SO disgusted with Emerson’s delayed responses that she’d nearly ignored him when he finally wrote back. At this point, she rather wished she had. Okay, so he said he’d get in touch with E-Squared’s PR people to try to get ahead of the situation. But as for the legal help, she’d told him not to bother. It hadn’t taken much cajoling to convince Frank Galavis to go outside the legal bounds of his profession and follow up on the power of attorney grant request.
The request had already been granted. And with time to spare before the family’s proposed deadline to move Owen to their estate. Sometime tomorrow, they’d arrive with whatever staff and equipment they needed to transport her beloved out of her—or anyone’s—reach. If she were to guess, they’d probably be taking a private jet from Atlanta to Savannah followed by a hired ambulance for the final leg to the family’s country estate. Or maybe they’d opt fo
r a helicopter instead. That would bring them straight to the helipad at the family home.
The family’s home and their strict wireless-free zone.
By this time tomorrow night, Owen would be severed from the connection to the servers. Everything the company believed about his condition was speculative. They didn’t truly know whether the sudden withdrawal would drive him insane or whether it would kill him or whether—by some miracle—he would wake and once again become the man she loved. But given that E-Squared could’ve shut down the rogue servers a few weeks ago, eliminating the risk that more players would be afflicted or that someone would discover the connection between the game and Owen’s coma, she assumed they were quite confident in their assessment of the risks.
“It’s too late,” she’d told Emerson. “Unless you can free Owen from whatever hell he’s trapped in by early tomorrow, he’ll be beyond our help.”
She hadn’t bothered to tell him about the last-ditch plan brewing in her mind. After thirty-six hours with nothing but a pair of catnaps, she could scarcely articulate her thoughts within her own mind, much less describe them to someone else. And anyway, she didn’t want to give him any reason to think there might yet be rescue outside of his company’s efforts. At this point, anyone with a chance to save Owen must believe they were the only hope in the situation.
Which was exactly how she felt.
She turned and paced the other direction, her bare feet padding across the polished travertine tiles in her modern apartment.
It was all going to come down to the governor’s vanity.
A vain man’s weakness, and one woman’s desperate attempt to exploit it.
Chapter Thirty-Three
DEVON JUMPED AND let out a disturbing wheezy squeak through her demonic vocal cords. After thirteen more minutes as reckoned by the quest timer, two more heavy iron plates had abruptly dropped from the ceiling, one ahead by about twenty paces, the other behind at the same distance.
Citadel of Smoke: A LitRPG and GameLit Adventure (Stonehaven League Book 4) Page 25