by Tao Wong
When I see the Council individually or in a group, I almost pity them. The strain is beginning to show, the pressures of keeping the city together beginning to pull them apart. More and more people are blaming the Council as monsters continue to spawn in the town, even if we aren’t losing people to those attacks anymore. More and more people are wondering why they’re being asked to contribute Credits when they see so little results.
Through all this, Roxley stays hidden in his offices. No one sees him, no one speaks to him. The Yerick and his guards bear the brunt of the growing animosity, the glares and the whispered insults. Still, no one takes direct action as the threat of being sold into debt slavery keeps people in line. For now, anyway.
As I enter the Nugget, I find it filled with Adventurers and Crafters kicking back after a hard day’s work. Looking around, I spot Lana, Mikito, Amelia, and a few others sitting together. Ali floats alongside me, ogling the waitresses, as I walk up to the table.
“John,” Lana says, flashing me a smile.
“Ladies…” I blink, realizing that the entire group is made up of women. Oh. Right, not joining them then. “Just thought I’d say hi.”
“Good evening,” Mikito adds as I beat a hasty retreat.
There’s only a single table left, way too big for me alone, but what the hell, it is what it is. I grab a seat facing the doorway, and Ali plops down next to me. Out of idle curiosity, I glance over the group again.
“So, Lana, you … sleeping together yet?” Amelia says, her head turned just enough that I can lipread her. I almost feel guilty about intruding, but curiosity keeps me looking.
“No.” Lana shakes her head, emphasizing her answer. “I told you, we’re not like that.”
“Why not? We all know you … the hots for him. Not … it. I mean, he’s … looking but he’s so angry all the …” Amelia says, her hair occasionally sliding across her face and blocking my line of sight.
“Is he ever,” Mikito mutters. “I think he likes being angry.”
“There’s no future for us. One day he’s going to leave, even if he doesn’t realize it yet,” Lana says, shaking her head.
“…” another girl interjects and the group laughs.
My eyes narrow as I wonder what was said, and when Lana begins to speak, my line of sight is blocked by a large armored form. I snarl slightly, looking up and up and up before I meet the placid gaze of the ten-foot-tall Yerick leader.
“First Fist,” I say, plastering a smile on my face.
“Redeemer. Will you allow us to join you?” He gestures to the table and benches and I look around, realizing that there are no seats anywhere else.
I nod, and Capstan takes a seat in front of me, permanently blocking my view of the ladies. His party mates join him, and I suddenly feel rather crowded among the large and slightly musty-smelling aliens.
“First Fist, I didn’t expect to see you here.” Ali hugs his beer mug to his body.
“We are celebrating this day and were informed that the Nugget carries a passable alcohol for our purposes.” Capstan glances at his companions before waving to them. “Redeemer, may I introduce my companions—Aron Hauser, Nelia Renar, and Tahar Ocasio.”
Aron, of course, is the Minotaur fighter who was with Jim. Nelia I’ve seen before, a Level 48 Shaman Truthseeker—whatever that is—and Tahar seems to be another generic Yerick Adventurer.
I greet them in turn before I ask the obvious question, “What celebration?”
“What drink?” Ali adds.
Ali’s question is answered when the waitress comes over with a dark, almost black liquid in mugs the size of a pitcher. Even from my seat, I can smell the alcohol in them.
“Good gods,” I mutter, leaning back a bit. Sure, the beer I drink really doesn’t do anything for me with my Constitution, but that’s for the best. Being drunk in an unsecure city seems like a bad, bad idea. “What is that?”
“Your brewery calls it Apocalypse Ale,” Capstan says, pushing a mug to each of his companions. “It is decently strong.”
“And the celebration?” I ask as Ali floats over to a waitress to order an ale for himself. I watch the waitress nod before letting my gaze flick to the other tables. We’re getting more than one nasty look, but no one feels the need to start a fight they’ll lose.
“We completed a dungeon!” Aron butts in, grinning as he leans forward. “Level 35 and up!”
Capstan nods while keeping a straight face, though I can tell he’s quite proud of the group. The robed and hooded Nelia nods as well.
As Ali floats back with his mug in hand, I pick up my own. “Well, congratulations then!” They stare at my glass that I hold in the air before I chuckle a bit awkwardly. Right, culture. “Uhh… humans normally drink after the congratulations.”
The Yerick look at one another then simultaneously pick up their drinks, quaffing them without hesitation, followed by Ali and myself.
“A strange custom. Yerick prefer to enjoy their drink,” Tahar speaks for once, looking morosely at his empty glass.
“I’ll remember that.” I’m saved from more embarrassment as the waitresses bring dinner out at last. Capstan makes a face at the food laid out before me. “Problem?”
“No,” Capstan replies immediately, shaking his head while Tahar keeps his head down.
“Yerick don’t eat meat, boy-o.” Ali shakes his head. “You’d think you’d know that, what with them looking like cows.”
“We are not cows,” Aron snarls. He immediately subsides when Capstan gives him a look.
“Ali didn’t mean that.” I glare at the Spirit stealing a fry from one of my plates.
“Yeah, yeah. So you guys cleared a dungeon, eh? We did one too, a month and a half back. Boy-o lost his mojo though when he lost his bike,” Ali adds, and I grunt, shaking my head.
“You cleared a dungeon by yourself?” Capstan says.
“Just a Level 20 one,” I say. “I’ve run into a few locations since then, but I got run out of one and another, well, I figured I’d test it out soon.”
“Really?” Capstan leans forward. “Would you care to trade on the locations? Unexplored Dungeons are quite important.”
I stare at them for a moment, my lip pulling up slightly into a smile. “Well, now that you mention it…”
“This is the dungeon you cleared, eh?” I look at the large building in the abandoned village the next day, frowning. Unlike most of the other buildings around here, this one looks to be in pretty good repair. “It doesn’t look that big.”
“It isn’t out here,” Capstan answers me, rotating broad shoulders as he adjusts his gear. “You stay in the back. Use your Spells and rifle and watch our backs. Nelia is our mage and healer, so she’ll be ahead of you and backing us all up. The three of us, well, we’ll be in front.”
I nod and turn to look for Ali. The Spirit floats in mid-air, staring at the abandoned buildings. I let my gaze wander over the remnants of the small community, a place where a hundred or so might have lived before the System. Happily, I guess, or at least as happily as you could be in a place like this. There aren’t that many corpses around, just a few scattered bones, broken-down houses and cars. All of it abandoned and slowly being overrun. A part of me wonders if I could find more corpses if I looked for them. Most of me decides against looking.
“You good, boy-o?” Ali asks and points toward where the others are already entering.
“Let’s go,” I reply, following the Yerick.
When you think dungeon, you think stone walls or caverns or maybe a castle. What you don’t expect is an old office building that stretches on and on, hallways that lead to rooms that loop around back to the hallway, never seeming to end. Off-white walls with fluorescent lights that work without electricity, lighting everything just a little off. It’s a weird reminder that the System doesn’t necessarily line up with our expectations.
No traps in this dungeon but golems, lots and lots of golems. Humanoid, bipedal constructs that totter f
orward, raining energy beams and fire on us, occasionally interspersing the attacks with more exotic weaponry like sonic grenades or ice darts.
The Yerick plow forward through the attacks using portable shields, firing from under the cover of the glowing blue domes. Aron and Tahar lead the charge with wrist-mounted beam weaponry till they’re close enough to engage the creatures in melee. Capstan uses a rifle behind them, ignoring the occasional shot that gets past the shields and picking off those behind us. Nelia in her robes does little, occasionally casting a healing spell or a weird web-spell that constricts and slows the monsters. The team is a well-oiled machine, each of them covering for the other with a minimum of words and confusion. I don’t even bother attempting to shoot past them, knowing that I’m as likely to hit a friendly as a monster.
Instead, I keep an eye on the back and deal with the occasional Golem that pops up behind us. Blade, rifle, and spells are more than enough to deal with the threats, especially since their flanking attacks are limited.
I have more than enough time to muse, being safely ensconced in the back as I am. More than enough time to think about the peculiarities of character builds and team tactics. In a “traditional” multi-player game, every character gets a Class and that Class generally has a role. Tank, damage dealer, healer, crowd control. More complicated pen-and-paper role-playing games added less direct combat-oriented Classes like the Bard. Everyone specialized because you had to, that’s what the game required.
Of course, most of those games were set in a fantasy world. Modern-day combat stopped having people carry around melee weapons because a spear isn’t much use against cannonballs and muskets smashing into your ranks, killing and wounding before you could near your opponent. Machine guns that threw hundreds of rounds a second meant that rushing an entrenched position led to thousands of casualties.
All that reasoning seems to kind of go out the window in System reality, as I told Jason months ago. Classes are given, and at first glance, it seems you should specialize and become a fighter, a healer, a mage. But none of that matters since you can purchase nearly anything in the System, including Class Skills. You can and probably should become a jack-of-all-trades with a minor specialization in your original Class. Watching the Yerick fight, that seems to be the preferred method among them at least. Probably a good idea to have everyone dabble a little bit. After all, you don’t want to get caught out if your only healer goes down or your only ranged fighter dies.
On the other hand, armor and shields soak up a bunch of ranged attack damage in the System, even if they don’t stop the damage entirely. Every single person is a moving tank with the right kind of equipment and Skills. The Yerick cover ground quickly, ensuring that they bring their physical strength to bear in any encounter, using melee weapons that deal as much, if not more, damage as beam weaponry. Take the shots, deal a little damage on the way in, then get close and rip them apart while the healer/mage keeps your health up and ensures you aren’t too overworked. I do wonder what it’d be like if they met a sentient group willing to run away as much as they were willing to charge. Would it just be a giant running battle?
Hours later, Capstan holds up a hand as the last Golem falls in the room we’re exploring. The others turn to him, and he makes a few gestures with the same hand. The group quickly splits up and sets small boxes in front of the doorways. After a moment, the boxes glow green and the Yerick relax, grinning.
“Portable shield generators. More powerful than the personal ones the Yerick use but with a lot less time on the clock. They have an in-built alarm and scanner, so if something tries to come through, they’ll activate.” Ali yawns. “You bored as I am?”
“No.” I join the Yerick as they sit on the floor, pulling cubes of green and brown paste from their inventory. “Lunch?”
“Yes. We are two thirds of the way through the dungeon, I believe,” Capstan replies, nodding. “Single floor, but long, as you can tell.”
“Yeah.” I grimace and sit down, tapping my helmet to make it fold down and free me to breathe unencumbered. “Where do the Golems come from? They aren’t evolutions from Earth for sure.”
“Probably a template somewhere. Maybe in the ground, maybe in a wall. The System diverts the Mana in the dungeon to the template to create the golems. Each golem birthed this way requires Mana, which is the main reason dungeons are created.” Capstan pops open the cap of his green paste. “Leave it alone long enough and they’ll spill out, but most dungeon-born monsters prefer to stay in the dungeons they were created in.”
“That’s the prevailing theory of dungeons anyway,” Ali sends to me as he fishes out some soggy fish and chips from my Altered Space. My nose wrinkles slightly at the smell, but he doesn’t seem to care about it.
I nod slowly as I suck on the all-in-one meal I brought for my lunch. It’s edible—sort of like apple sauce, just a little grainier. I figured the Yerick would prefer if I kept my meat eating down around them, though Ali of course doesn’t give a damn. “So what about the Alphas? The Bosses?”
“If a monster group has an Alpha, the System creates an Alpha because that’s what the monster group should have,” Aron answers, looking at me as if I’m stupid. “Why would the System change what works?”
I open my mouth to retort, but Ali adds, “It’s a safeguard too. Alphas and Bosses require more Mana, so in a golem dungeon like this, the Boss is just a monster that’s had more Mana diverted into it. You can’t do that too much to normal monsters or they go pop, so only a few special ones can be Bosses. The System has to do it because the Mana flow isn’t even. It’s more like waves in the ocean. If there’s a surge, it needs a place to dump.”
“That… makes sense.” I switch over to some juice, staring at the doorway as the group continues to chew placidly on their food. “I don’t understand why the System wants to deal with Mana that way though.”
“8Ink,” Nelia says.
“Gesundheit.”
“It’s an old story, idiot,” Ali says.
“Sad story,” Capstan says.
“Stupid,” Aron adds.
“Still not explaining,” I grumble.
“When the System came to 8Ink, the ambassador let the inhabitants of the world know. The inhabitants were supposedly a psionic race, an empathic one. They decided, as a world, to reject the System. When the System came, none chose to interact with it. No one leveled, no one used Mana. So the Mana kept pooling and pooling and pooling. The Council tried to divert the Mana elsewhere, but back then, we only had four Dungeon Worlds. It wasn’t possible to get rid of enough of it,” Capstan says. “Eventually, well, the Mana density became too much and even the sentient inhabitants started transforming, evolving. Still, they refused to interact. Eventually, the entire world evolved.”
“So’s Earth,” I point out, tossing my used meal into my inventory.
“Not like… the entire world evolved. 8Ink became a World Titan,” Nelia clarifies.
I wince. Oh, shit. “What…?”
“It got up and flew away. Records of where it went and what it’s doing have been lost. Some say hidden,” Tahar says, sudden passion entering his voice. “8Ink’s return is quite a popular branch of fiction. If you want, I have a few books on me.”
Aron rolls his eyes while Ali actually nods in excitement. Aron lets out a low huff of exasperation while Nelia and Capstan go back to eating, waiting for me to continue.
“Let me get this straight. Too much Mana means giant Elementals. To stop that, the System puts Mana into monsters it stores away? Isn’t killing a monster then releasing the Mana?” I ask.
“No.” Nelia shakes her head, glitter-decorated horns flashing in fluorescent light. “Some Mana goes back into the environment, but… the System uses a lot. Mana is necessary for the Loot, for our experience, for running the…?”
“System,” Capstan finishes for Nelia absently, filling in when the mage falls silent.
Brows furrowed, I puzzle through it. “If you could do al
l that, why bother with all the intervening steps? Why not just convert the Mana straight away?”
“Why do you think it’s a Quest, John? If we had the answer to that, the Quest would have been complete,” Ali says mockingly.
Capstan and the others nod as Capstan stands. “Do not chase that Quest, Redeemer. It leads nowhere and the rewards decrease as you journey along the path. Gravity pulls you down, the axe hungers for blood, and the System is the System.”
As the group gets ready to get going, Aron and Tahar grabbing the portal shield generators, I sigh and put that question away again. Ali smirks at me then flicks a finger, sending a window to fill my vision.
Quest Update—the System
The creation of Dungeons and Mana are important for the Quest, but why? You have found some answers, but more questions.
Reward: +200 XP
Yeah, yeah, I got it. What is, is. Better to go and kill something.
“Uhh… was he that big before?” I whisper to the Yerick as we huddle around the corner from the doorway.
“No. This might be… interesting,” Capstan says and I stare at him. Really?
I poke my head around the corner again, getting a hiss from Nelia as I do so, but I need to see our opponent again to get my head around this. The Golem boss doesn’t look any different from its brethren really. Bipedal with two heads and four arms, each wielding a combination rifle and fist with a metallic exterior. Sure, it’s green, which is rather unique, but the bigger surprise is that it’s twenty-five feet tall.
Golem Arcana (Boss Level 42)
HP: 7420/7420
“Also, boy-o, it’s an It,” Ali adds. “You’re such a misogynist.”
“Ali,” I snarl, temper flaring.
Capstan claps me on the shoulder, hissing at me. I blush slightly, somewhat embarrassed at my outburst. Right, we’re trying to come up with a plan.
“Spirit, is the creature vulnerable to anything?” Capstan asks.
Ali stares into space, his little fingers waggling. “Water.”