"Yeah, the Bountiful Treasure Tavern right there," he pointed at a metal post sign with a dwarf leaning on it. A dwarf!
Sorins, the evil cousins of the dwarves, were plentiful in the Underworld. Shorter, with long noses and thinner build, the sorins seldom grew a beard, and their hair was usually black or white. Seeing an actual red-haired dwarf, with a beard woven in an intricate manner and held by multiple golden rings was awesome.
The dwarf had two swords at his waist and wore "medium" armor, if that's a thing; it was a mix of leather and metal, including his helmet.
"Ho, how much to enter your tavern?" I asked as Daggers and I approached.
He sized me up and down. "We ain't taking no snowflakes like ya."
I smiled. The fangs of my vampire disguise probably showed up in a menacing way, because he straightened up and touched the hilt of his weapons.
"Daggers, I believe this mountain rat just called you, a Blackguard of the City of Darkness, a snowflake."
She took a few steps ahead and positioned herself in front of me. I never saw or heard her draw her weapons, but there were suddenly two blades jutting out from inside her cloak.
"I heard," I said, "that the two-weapons style of the red-bearded dwarves is one of the greatest sword styles in Valia." I had never heard anything like that. "I wonder if you'd be willing to teach a lowly snowflake dagger-user like this Blackguard a few things in a spar." My smile widened.
The dwarves' eyes were now small slits. He was wondering if he should try to take us or not. In the end, he seemed to remember he was just a doorman and there was no point in risking his life to prevent us entry to a tavern.
Even so, he spat on the ground right in front of Daggers. "One silver," he said.
I paid him and the portal opened. Daggers went in first to check if everything was okay and we entered the tavern when she returned.
Just like the previous establishment I had visited, there were no walls or ceiling in the Bountiful Treasure Tavern, but all similarities ended there. The floor here was made of dirty stone and there was only a single long table in the middle of the equally long room. The table was massive, made of a dark brown metal with white etchings of dwarves battling monsters on the top. I couldn't see any maids, waiters or anything, only customers — and there were a lot of those.
Around two hundred people were sitting on metal benches around the table. The place had a life of its own and people were talking loudly to make themselves heard above the medieval tavern music that came from nowhere. In front of every single person stood a beautiful big cup made of worked silver. About fifty of the people were dwarves.
Everyone seemed to be genuinely happy in the place. It was so different from the rest of the Underworld that it made me feel completely lost.
Just as we got in, one of the dwarves came to us still laughing at something his friends had told him. Although his facial hair was white, he looked tough enough that I wanted to avoid causing him any trouble.
"A snowflake! Tukor must be getting blind to let you in, the old fool!" The aged dwarf in front of me said. There was no hostility in his voice though.
"Did ten or so zombies come in here recently?" I asked.
His smile was beginning to fade. "There are two rules to this place, blood sucker," he said 'blood' in almost a whisper, thus emphasizing the 'sucker' part. "First, pay upfront. Second, no questions asked."
"How much?"
He took one of the nearby empty silver cups and threw it to me. "One silver coin per cup. It will automatically refill until you have drunk your deposit."
"Here you go, pal," I gave him a single silver coin. "Don't go spending it all on booze."
"Ha! A funny sucker! Now I have seen it all!" He said before I was too far away to hear.
They turned to look at me. "No mind chat in here, ugly-face! It's rude!" Bear said with a weird voice which made me stop in my track and summon all the morbs I could.
He was drunk. Undead couldn't get drunk in Valia. Something was terribly wrong.
"Hey, hey, hey," Melkier said. "No need for that, now. We're all friends in here. Right, guys?" He gestured to both his zombies and the nearby people, two of which were dwarves.
I don't know what I said that got through to him, but Bear got up — on his second try — and came to me. The others also came, some of them having to step over the table, and formed a loose circle around me.
That's when I realized how alone I was in the middle and how lacking my party was in ranged damage. I'd tell Daggers to get throwing knives or shurikens later. It would even increase her overall fighting power.
"Jezz, you're no fun!" Melkier said.
I didn't answer him as it could have an adverse effect; I was in the mood to insult all the zombies' ancestors up to the hundredth generation for being so gullible. We walked slowly to the entrance of the place, right by the middle of the long table.
My stomach was twisting as I saw that none of the customers were taking notice of us while all the dwarves were. The music was giving me a headache and I was sure my willpower was protecting me, although it wasn't enough protection for a message to appear telling me I had resisted a mental attack.
So, I was okay for now, but if I didn't leave soon, I would succumb to whatever the effects the music had on people.
"Leaving so soon?" The white-haired dwarf asked me when I got close. "I hope you didn't find our service wanting?" He wasn't threatening in any way whatsoever but I was sure that if I said the wrong word, a bloodbath would occur.
The big issue was that we were inside a pocket dimension. It was highly unlikely that we could kill the dwarf who had the portal key if he decided to hide behind other fighters. It was essentially an almost perfect trap.
"There's nothing wrong with your service. My friends are quite weak to alcohol and require a bed, that's all."
"I thought undead didn't require sleep?" He asked innocently.
"They usually don't, but we Travelers are different. I'm sorry for the inconvenience, but could you open the portal for us?"
He didn't answer immediately and the dwarves nearby suddenly became less merry as they openly stared at us.
I took a deep breath. Diplomacy wasn't working, and it had been strength that had made the doorman allow us inside, so it was time for a change of attitude.
"Of course, you might want to run a little experiment instead." My voice was now lazy instead of hasty.
"I don't follow," the dwarf said.
"You seem to be pretty knowledgeable about undead, so you should know how zombies love to eat everything they see. And they can be quite terrifying if they go berserk in a closed space like this. It should be reason enough for you to not want us as customers, but I guess you're a scholar who just wants to find out how long it will take for them to go down. There are about two hundred people in here. Fighting in close quarters against a squad of zombies with high regeneration should be a very enlightening experiment.
"
His eyes narrowed. "You wouldn't dare."
"Me? No, of course not. We are talking about them. I would most surely stay put instead of using the morbs floating above my head. Hell, I would obviously help you! And so would this Blackguard right beside me. Right, Daggers?"
"Yes, sir," she said. "I love helping others. We drow are known for that."
I smiled at him. "See?"
"That's why we don't allow undead in. You don't understand our hospitality." He sighed and waved his hand to his people. The portal opened and he spat at the ground in front of us before going back to his seat.
My interactions with dwarves had been limited to two of them but I already knew they weren't swallowers.
Not wanting anyone to be cut off from the others, I ordered them to form up as tightly as possible, as we walked through the portal out of the pocket dimension. There was no reason for scouting this time; even if it was a trap, it was also our only escape.
We walked outside and I saw the light. Well, there was no real light except for the morbs floating here and there, as all Underworld denizens ended up buying skill books with darkvision. I had found out they were the only cheap things in these cursed lands.
Anyway, we were back to Margs Market. The red-haired dwarf looked curiously at us but didn't say or do anything. We walked away and my headache disappeared a few seconds later. The zombies also started walking slightly straighter.
He meant that the game had taken control of their characters. When the character was affected by mind-altering debuffs, it didn't affect the players themselves — no matter how much blackmail material V-Soft might've had, that would destroy the company. Instead, players could try to play the mind-altered role, like acting drunk or sleepy, or obeying someone else's orders, just like the tabletop RPGs of old. However, if they didn't play the part right or weren't interested in it, an AI took control of the character.
There was no point in berating them for falling for it. I was coming to understand them more and more, and for them, this was just a game. Maybe a slightly more serious one than usual, but still a game. They played to have fun and weren't overly concerned about their characters' lives.
Yelling at them in the tavern had been a mistake. If they got too pissed at me, they could simply leave, no matter if they were theoretically my subordinates in the Resistance's Army. Even training them before coming to the city had to be done with caution as not to push them over their boundaries.
All players could choose to kill their characters at will, to prevent stuff like torture or eternal mind-control from happening. Because of the high penalty though, most only did this if there was absolutely no other choice.
The kid who charged me the toll for entering Ter'nodril was one of the worst people I had met in the Underworld, and that bar was set pretty high!
Melkier also smiled.
They kept nagging me and I wondered when Ted would come back to take Bear's focus away from me.
* * *
"Are you sure?" I asked the gnome beside me.
Mister Baglus was the only gnome I had seen in the game and his main characteristic was being small. Well, at least he was small in height; his nose was huge, his elven-like ears were oversized, and his huge head couldn't possibly be following the laws of physics. His eyes were large as well and his skin was light brown. His thin body and loose linen clothes made him look like a hybrid of a beggar with a teen who thought he was cool.
"Sí, sí! Puedo abrir cualquier cerradura! Incluso las mágicas!" He said with a thin voice.
A Spanish speaking gnome in the game, which supposedly translated everything to the player's most fluent language, was unexpected, to say the least. Zenhit didn't even understand the question when I asked him, and I guessed that it was a little too subjective. I mean, 'why does he speak Spanish' is the same as asking 'why has your creator created something different from everything else,' which wasn't the easiest question to answer.
Anyway, the gnome existed and he spoke Spanish. He was also the best burglar in Margs Market and had just claimed he could open any lock, even magical ones.
Before seeing him, I didn't even know gnomes existed, as there was no mention of them anywhere on the online forums. Surprisingly though, finding him hadn't been hard.
After some questioning, I had found that a place that was essentially a huge market had thieves' guilds operating in the shadows. It had taken me almost a day but I finally had contacted Mister Baglus.
"Alright. Meet me here tomorrow at the seventh cycle and we'll go to the place I want open." The game automatically translated my local Earth time to the local time of whenever I was in Valia. The seventh circle for them was eight AM for me.
"Vale," he said. That meant okay.
He was expensive. Ten gold coins just to open the lock and leave, as he refused to enter a pocket dimension no matter how well I paid. I wondered if I could get this money from Manhart by claiming it had been professional expenses.
I walked back to the camp, which was a generous way to describe the place where we sat to eat on the street. We had watched Robert's house for two days and he had left once per day, exactly at nine o'clock. He would then come back after about one hour.
Enough time to easily steal his map and be far away when he came back.
At least I hoped so.
8. ...and Action!
There was still no news about the police investigation on V-Soft's murderers when I logged back out of the game, but a political faction in New Texas had 'declared independence.' This had backfired; the Texans could see from miles away that those surviving politicians were just trying to use the opportunity to gain even more power. This led to a civil war in the state, with tanks roaming the streets in broad daylight.
Thank goodness I hadn't gone there to hide.
A lot of people were dying everywhere in the country, especially where martial law had been declared, which was almost everywhere. I had the impression that the Army considered civilians enemies, and a lot of civilians considered the Army enemies. Shootings at lunch and explosions over dinner weren't common occurrences, but they weren't that rare either.
I had to force myself not to think about
these things.
I kept repeating to myself that the blame laid mainly with V-Soft. They were the ones reading people's minds and extorting people with what they found there. If I hadn't stopped them myself, there would be no way for the V-Soft Executives to be properly prosecuted by the judicial system, since they held so much power.
However, an unrelenting part of me insisted that even though those who had been in power had been cheating, corrupt, and oftentimes murdering bastards. People always knew that, they just didn't want it thrown at their faces the way it had been when V-Soft was destroyed.
Deep down, I knew that the eighteen deaths in V-Soft weren't the only ones in my tab. Even if I had no other choice, and only ten percent of the blame for the chaos laid with me, ten percent of all the death occurring in the country was a lot.
Did hell exist? If so, I had-
Shit!
I shook my head. I could wonder about hell after I was dead. I did what I had to, and it was already in the past; no point fretting about it now. If I ever came across another situation where I could kill people and cause a civil war in a country, I might consider things a little more.
For now, if that guilty part of my mind was right, and I really was an incorrigible murderer, fated to cause chaos wherever I went, I had the perfect place to unleash that side of myself; in Valia.
* * *
Bear and Daggers were with me as we waited for Mister Baglus.
The gnome was fifteen minutes late. This was the first time ever I had seen an NPC be late to an appointment with a player, unless said lateness was used to start a quest. But I sure as hell wasn't interested in saving the gnome from whatever evil may have befallen him.
"Hola, amigos!" I heard the voice behind me and turned to look at the dude who barely reached my waist.
"You're late," I said.
"Pero estoy aquí ahora! Vamonos pendejo!" He said, as he gestured to follow him. But what he said was that he was here now and we should go.
I didn't like his lateness or his attitude, but we had no option besides moving on with the plan.
Unbound Deathlord: Obliteration (The Unbound Deathlord Series Book 2) Page 9