And there were kilograms of it lying at his feet.
Vega squeed at the sight of it, and the two of them knelt down and gathered it up as quickly as they could.
So focused were they on their treasure that they didn’t even notice the corpse behind them rise to its feet. It took a faltering step towards them, and then another, a hissing wail issuing from its mouth. The hideous sound nearly made them jump out of their skin.
“Go! Go!” Vega cried, leaping through the portal. Maverick ran after her, with the corpse right behind him. It crashed into the portal chasing him, derezzing upon contact.
Vega cut the portal as soon as Maverick was through anyway. They slumped against the wall for a minute to catch their breath.
“Mother? Mother is that you?” asked a sad little girl’s voice. Across from them was a barren jail cell, and inside was a little girl in a soiled night gown. Her dark hair was matted with blood, her face and hands covered in lacerations, and her eyes had been gauged out. The cell had a strong scent of feces, and shit was smeared all over the walls. In fact, it looked like she had tried to paint with it.
“Mother, mother please let me out. I promise I’ll be a good girl. I’ll never touch myself down there ever again.”
“She’s from story mode. Ignore her,” Vega said, shaking her head.
“Mother? Mother I’m so thirsty. Please, please can I have some water? Let me have some water and I’ll tell you everything. I’ll even tell you where I hid Teddy, if you promise not to hurt him. Please, please don’t hurt Teddy. I love him so much. If you let me have Teddy I promise I’ll never ask to be let again. I’ll stay locked in here forever, and no one will ever have to know about your degenerate slut daughter.”
“Let’s get out of here. I can’t listen to this,” Maverick said.
“Mother? Mother please don’t leave! Mother? Mother!” the girl cried as they fled from the bizarre scene as quickly as they dared.
They found themselves in a long tunnel full of wooden doors.
“Great. A monster could jump out of any one of those doors as we’re walking past,” Maverick said. “Can you portal us across?”
“My Caster’s only good for six shots,” Vega replied. “I’d rather not waste them.”
Maverick nodded, and reluctantly they started creeping down the hall. As they went past each door they could hear faint sounds of activity from within. Behind one was scratching, and behind another they heard what sounded like furniture being moved around. Behind one of the doors they heard a music box playing ‘Les Toreadors’, along with some mechanical noises. There was a steady rhythmic tapping on the other side of one door, and behind another was a girl chanting gibberish.
One of the doors was completely silent, and that was the one that creaked open all on its own.
They both jumped with a shriek, but nothing came out to attack them. They cautiously peeked into the room and saw a man hanging upside down by his ankles. A Harlequin and a Clown were using a two man saw to cut him in half down his crotch. An impossible volume of blood poured out of him like a fountain.
The man was laughing hysterically.
“You’re not doing it right,” the Harlequin said to the Clown.
“I’m doing exactly as you’re doing,” the Clown claimed.
“No, you’re pushing when I’m pulling and pulling when I’m pushing,” the Harlequin said.
“You’re daft, you is. The problem’s the blade’s too sharp,” the Clown countered. “A duller blade would hurt more.”
“You would say that. You’ve never been the sharpest blade in the drawer yourself,” said the Harlequin. Their victim began laughing even louder. “Oy, you’re none too sharp yourself sir, laughing at your own imminent and agonizing demise and what not. What say we send him back upstairs and see if they can make him squeal before he croaks, and we can go get a pint?”
“Might as well. This bloke’s just like the others; screwy in the head. The Chamber does weird things to folk,” the Clown said, letting go of the saw. The two of them left the room together, leaving the saw navel deep in the semi-bifurcated man who would not stop laughing.
Maverick and Vega had crouched behind the door to avoid being seen, and once the buffoons were gone they snuck into the torture chamber.
“What are we doing in here? This is from story mode,” Maverick whispered.
“Right there,” Vega replied, pointing to a stalactite veined with Mythreal ore, only a few feet from the laughing man. “I saw that sparkle the moment the door was open.”
She aimed her Caster on the wall and shot a portal, its pixelated event horizon gently fluctuating in brightness.
“Someone might have heard that. Get the Mythreal,” Vega ordered.
Maverick raised his pickaxe and swung it into the stalactite as he had before, only this time the pinging of the axe was blunted by the unceasing laughter of the lunatic in the room.
Within seconds the stalactite shattered and showered Mythreal nuggets onto the ground. They crouched down and hurriedly gathered them up, constantly glancing up at the door.
“That’s all of it. Let’s get out of here,” Maverick said. The instant he turned around the laughing man, still hanging upside down with a saw through his crotch, swung up and wrapped his hands around Maverick’s throat.
“Maverick!” Vega cried, instinctively drawing her war hammer.
“There were too many! They oozed from the walls like worms from a corpse, swarming upon our bodies and fornicating inside us, their bastard spawn erupting out of every orifice and soaked with our diseased blood! They left nothing but guilt over our own helplessness, lying among the wiggling bloodied maggots, desperately clutching at them so that we could eat them and regain the tiniest sliver of what they took from us! But we can never get it back, never be whole again!” the laughing man screamed as he strangled Maverick. His bloodshot eyes bulged from their sockets, his long black hair hanging over his pale face, his toothless mouth twisted into a horrified smile.
Vega struck him several times with her war hammer during his odd speech, but within the Labyrinth even her Legendary weapons were useless.
“Pull the lever!” Maverick choked out, gesturing to the switch by the chain spool that was holding the laughing man up. Vega pulled the switch as hard as she could. The spool started to spin and the chain went slack, causing the laughing man’s lower body to fall.
Maverick ran for the portal, and with the laughing man clutching to his neck he hit the event horizon first, instantly derezzing into a cloud of voxels. Maverick gasped for air as soon as he was through the portal, and wondered how realistic the simulation of dying by asphyxiation would have been. Legally Surreality could inflict almost anything upon its users, so long as they could log off at any time. Simply remaining in the game was enough for implied consent.
Vega jumped through the portal and closed it behind her.
“I hate this game,” Maverick told her, still catching his breath. Vega smiled at him.
“We’re doing good though; two deposits of Mythreal already,” she reminded him.
“Getting it was never the problem, it was getting out with it,” he said.
“Well that’s not a problem with me here, is it?” she asked with a proud smile, gesturing to her Teleportal Caster. “I think we’re out of that story mode section now. Hopefully there aren’t any more horrifically abused children in here.”
She held up her lantern, revealing that they were in the Ossuary. The walls of the tunnel were completely coated with ancient Human skulls, staring at them with their empty orbits. Vega gingerly started pressing forward, with Maverick creeping behind her.
The skulls moved ever so slightly, looking up or down or side to side, so that they were always staring at the two of them. Vega cautiously held out her hand at one of them, only to have it snap at her. They all started chuckling softly at her.
“We have to find a way back into the mines. There’s not going to be any Mythreal in a tomb,”
Maverick said.
“Not ore, but there might be grave goods,” Vega said. “I say we keep looking.”
The further they ventured into the tunnel, the more derelict it became. The skulls became more and more decomposed, covered in thick layers of cobweb. They started catching glimpses of the spiders that made it. They looked like cellar spiders, except they were about the size of a dinner plate. They made no move against Vega or Maverick, at most hissing at them when they got too close or scuttling past their feet.
The pair turned a corner, and in the middle of the path was a corpse wrapped in webbing, with the spiders scurrying all over it.
“Vega, I’m pretty sure there’s nothing down here that we’re interested in. We should move on,” Maverick insisted.
Vega nodded reluctantly, and held up her wrist to adjust the Teleportal Caster. As she did so a single drop of acidic venom fell upon it from above. They looked up and saw a grey skinned humanoid clutching to the ceiling. It was gaunt with spindly appendages, and secondary forelimbs emerging from its knees and elbows. It had three clawed toes on each paw, and was sparsely covered with small, spikey hairs. Its wide mouth was filled with needle-like teeth, and the top of its face was covered by randomly spaced spider-eyes of varying sizes.
Flicking out its long tongue, it hissed at them.
Maverick and Vega sped recklessly down the tunnel, with the creature dropping to the floor and giving chase. It bellowed out hideous cries, and fainter cries could be heard in reply. The answering calls echoed through the long tunnels, making it impossible to tell how close they were or where they were coming from.
Maverick stayed a mere foot or so behind Vega, as she had the lantern. She ducked, jumped over or swerved around any obstacle in her path, including the dead. The spiders did not pester them, and in fact cleared out of their way when they heard them coming.
They ran into a magnificent abandoned hall of some kind. There were several more of the creatures perching on the fallen pillars and arches, but none made any move to attack.
As they took in the scene as quickly as they could, the floor gave out beneath them.
They had run over a large hole in the floor, covered only in spider’s web that had given out under their weight. They crashed violently onto a large web that bounced up and down with the force of their impact, sending out powerful vibrations along the silk threads.
It was then that both the spiders and the creatures started to swarm.
“Vega portal us! Portal us now!” Maverick demanded as the monsters started pouring into the hole, salivating acid from their grinning mouths.
“I can’t. My arm’s stuck to the web,” she told him, struggling to break free.
“Son of a bitch,” Maverick muttered. “I knew this would never work. Do you want to just quit now or let these things eat us?”
“I still have one arm free. I can use my lantern,” she said.
“On what?” he asked.
With a throw too strong and too precise for the real world, Vega sent the lantern flying upwards and crashing into a colossal egg sac hanging on the ceiling above them. The lantern exploded on impact and set the entire clutch of eggs on fire.
All of the adult monsters stopped immediately and stared up in horror at their burning brood, abandoning their prey to rescue their offspring.
Through frantic screeching each monster gathered as many unharmed eggs as they could carry, ushering them to a temporarily safe location. Some eggs burst open in the heat of the fire, and their aborted fetuses rained down onto the web below. Some were stillborn, but others twitched about pitifully in utter helplessness that softened their grotesque appearance.
The acidic nature of their amniotic fluids quickly ate through the web, and within seconds it was too weak and collapsed under its own weight.
Vega and Maverick were left to plummet straight to the bottom of the pit. With her right arm now free, Vega shot a portal onto the floor. The fetuses that preceded them derezzed immediately upon crashing into the event horizon, but Vega and Maverick once again passed through unscathed.
Unfortunately they retained all of their momentum, and landed with full force upon the floor of the new chamber.
“Speedy thing goes in, speedy thing comes out,” Maverick groaned sardonically.
“Yeah, sorry about that,” Vega apologized, pushing herself to her feet. “Fortunately in Surreality it’s not the landing that kills you, it’s the fall. Once we passed through the portal we only fell like 12 feet.”
“And where did we end up this time?” Maverick asked, pulling himself up.
They were in some kind of grotto, with a pool of black tar bubbling away in the corner. Floating on its surface was a smooth white mask of porcelain. The mask was expressionless, and its only decorations were some faint black tear stains rolling from the eyes.
Although even the most rudimentary level of genre savviness would have made them incredibly suspicious of the pool, they instead gave all of their attention to their other discovery; a large stalagmite jutting up from the ground, heavily veined with Mythreal.
“Jesus Christ. There must be forty kilos in that thing,” Maverick said in awe.
“Don’t just stare at it; smash it!” Vega said. Picking up his axe where it had fallen, Maverick began striking the stone with all of his strength. Once again their fixation on their treasure caused them to neglect the dangers lurking around them.
The tar in the pool silently began to churn, and from its depths rose a humanoid form. He was nine feet tall and sickly thin with elongated limbs, digits, and neck. He wore the mask as a face over his featureless head, and a pair of appendages emerged from his back. They were either skeletal wings or branching tentacles, depending on how he was using them.
As the intruders smashed the stalagmite into rubble and nuggets, he stepped out of his pool as if stepping out of a bath. He took long, quiet strides across the cave, almost gliding over the floor. Standing beneath him now were the intruders, greedily stuffing the nuggets into their bags. He could kill them right now if he wanted to, but he always preferred it when they ran. If they died before they knew what had happened, then they would never know terror. He would let them live for now, but only so that they could suffer.
Vega was the first to notice the long, dim shadow leaning over them. When she looked up she saw him standing there, the final boss of the Insomnia Labyrinth.
“Idolum,” she whispered, recognizing him immediately. Maverick whipped around and saw the entity there as well. He let out a long raspy hiss and stretched out his wings, ready to embrace them.
“Sorry, we’re not playing story mode. Bye,” Vega blurted out, shooting the escape portal at her feet. She and Maverick fell through the floor, leaving Idolum towering menacingly over nobody. He hissed again, this time clearly in frustration.
Vega and Maverick tumbled out of the exit arch, into the fresh air and relative brightness of the outside world.
“We did it,” Vega muttered in amazement as she looked up at the cloudy sky. “We made it out alive.”
She leapt to her feet and began jumping about in a celebratory manner.
“Screw you Aglet! We got your Mythreal and there’s nothing you can do about it!” she taunted. Aglet did not bother to respond. Instead the archway shimmered as a hunched over Idolum strode through. Vega shrieked and stumbled backwards as the being rose to his full height and completely extended his wings.
“I thought you said mobs couldn’t go through your portals!” Maverick said.
“They can’t, he must be a player,” Vega told him.
“Two little Blue Pills, hiding in the Everdream,” Idolum said in his soft, raspy voice. “One is flesh, one is not. One rots, one rusts, both decay as they lie dreaming. They have nothing but their dreams, but I will not let them sleep. Never sleep. Insomnia will steal your dreams forever, and you will be left with nothing but naked reality until the end of your days.”
“Dude, we’re out of the Labyrinth,”
Vega said, rolling her eyes. “My weapons are fully powered again.”
Idolum cocked his head in confusion, and was sent flying backwards by the force of Vega’s war hammer smashing into his chin. His body splattered upon the ground, leaving only a black humanoid stain with a vapid mask for a face.
Maverick and Vega raced to the site to inspect the body.
“Did I kill him?” she asked bemused.
“What kind of rubbish game lets you kill the villain in one blow?” Maverick asked.
“Achievement Unlocked,” a disembodied voice announced as a holographic plaque appeared in front of them. It read Achievement Unlocked: Perchance to Dream. Defeat Idolum. + 50 000 XP, + 10 000 Gold, + 100 Renown, + 25 Alignment.
“Oh my God,” Vega muttered.
“You can’t defeat Idolum. Even if you win the Labyrinth, Idolum still gets you,” Maverick said.
“Because the bloody idiot’s not supposed to go outside,” Aglet said, burying his face in his palm. “He’s useless outside of the Survival Horror genre. Well, congratulations to you, both on getting one of the most coveted achievements in Surreality and on getting out with my Mythreal. Don’t think it will be that easy next time though. I think I’m going to have a little chat with the admins about the use of portals inside the Labyrinth.”
“Whatever dude, I got what I want,” Vega shrugged. She grabbed Maverick’s hand and pulled him away from the archway and into the relative privacy of the woods.
Neither of them gave any more attention to the corpse that had been Idolum, even as the dark ichor began to stir, the respawning process already begun.
“Let’s check our inventories,” Vega suggested once they were a good distance from the mountain. “I’ve got…twenty nine kilos of Mythreal! Awesome! How much do you have?”
Maverick was quiet for a moment.
“Thirty seven,” he said softly, almost unbelieving it himself. “I have thirty seven kilograms of Mythreal. That’s worth like ten times more than what I’ve made during seven years of gold farming.”
“See, I told you this would work!” Vega exclaimed, excitedly slapping him on the chest.
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