Fusion (Somnia Online Book 6)

by K. T. Hanna

  “Havoc! Battle Res Jirald,” she called out just as she watched Veranol cast it on Karn. Havoc’s had a far longer recast time than Veranol’s, but her Forcefield hadn’t reached in close enough to the fight to stop the deaths. They had to eat them and the lack of damage occurring while they recovered the rogues.

  “Interrupt Rumble,” Devlish called out, taking the words from the tip of Murmur’s tongue. She shuddered to think how the raid might survive if all three of them…

  But she didn’t have to wait, because the three ice giants chose that moment to do exactly that. Whatever went wrong, however the raid missed it, not one of the Rumble calls was interrupted.

  At first, she hoped it couldn’t get much worse, that three consecutive boulders rolling into the raid. But when one smashed through an icy wall, and another came crashing through the ceiling, Murmur realized they were up shit’s creek.

  Veranol reacted on instinct and cast his special rune to take the brunt of the damage. But the boulders were far too heavy and obliterated parts of the shield. Even though they didn’t hit the shaman, the pressure from his spell being destroyed recoiled back into him and sent him flying into the wall with a sickening thud that he didn’t get back up from.

  With one glance around at the state of the raid, Murmur realized this was a no-win situation. At least ten members of the raid were down, with more on the way from the giants themselves if not the boulders. Devlish nodded at her, threw his head back, and screamed out an AoE taunt.

  “Sin. Log out. Now,” Murmur urged the blood mage, who didn’t need to be asked twice.

  It was the only way Murmur could think of to reset the encounter. They had a four-hour window. If one of them logged out, they’d be able to log back in when all was clear and hopefully resurrect the corpses.

  She took a gulp as Sinister complied, winking out of existence within mere seconds. It made Murmur all the more grateful for the headsets they had. While she would have liked to log out herself and save herself the pain of in-game death, Murmur took a hatchet to the forehead as she turned around to survey the now two-thirds decimated raid.

  Pain shot through her skull like it was being split in two. She could feel the blade bite into her, crashing through bone and rendering her numb. Falling to the ground, her hit points reached zero, and she heard Snowy let out a mournful howl before Somnia faded from her vision.

  Summer Residence

  Home of Laria, David, and Wren

  Summer Condo

  Real World - Day Twenty-Eight

  Laria pushed papers aside, effectively knocking another pile onto the floor. She threw her hands up. “The kitchen table is far too small for me to be doing this.”

  David put down the paper he was perusing and lowered his glasses to peer at her. “I’d say I told you so. Because I did.”

  “You just said it!” He was right, though, and Laria knew it. She also knew that printing everything out so she could go over it in a different format and perhaps see something she’d missed before hadn’t been one of her best ideas.

  It was definitely five thousand percent messier than using her augmented screens. But sometimes, just sometimes, it helped her eyes catch onto things she couldn’t seem to grasp as being different when she was just using her eyes. Maybe it was the pointing of fingers at where she was looking, or perhaps the tangibility of the paper itself, but either way, it worked well for her.

  Finally, David put down what he was reading through and rubbed the bridge of his nose, glasses in the other hand. “It’s a malignant virus, and it keeps morphing. That’s why what you’re doing isn’t catching it properly. You fix aspects of it, but it evolves and just keeps chugging along.”

  Laria counted to five before answering, all the while mulling over those words in her head. He made sense, and it was his area of expertise, not hers. “I’m a creator, David. Why didn’t you come help me earlier?” She knew she was whining, and they didn’t have time for that, but she was tired and couldn’t help it.

  “Yes, I could probably have helped a little sooner, but there is the matter of you warning me frequently that you can save yourself.” His eyes twinkled, and his tone held no recrimination. “Frankly, you’ve never needed saving, and this isn’t even that. You are capable and strong and have forged your own path.”

  He waved his hand around in the air, gesturing toward the papers he’d put down.

  “This virus is remarkable. I’ve never seen anything quite like it and probably wouldn’t have believed you if I didn’t know you so well. I’m not even sure I could have dealt with this if you hadn’t already done some of the groundwork.”

  “Aw.” Laria smiled tiredly. “Now you’re just flattering me.”

  “Is it working?” David wiggled his eyebrows.

  “Only if I can reclaim my sanity after fixing the game.” Laria fluttered her eyelashes and started to laugh. “I miss working with you.”

  “At least this way we’re still happily married.” He winked at her, and positioned himself back at the table, pulling a keyboard toward himself as he brought the projection online so they could both see what he was talking about at once.

  He pulled up several graphs and monitored recordings of actual encounters with some of the infected portions of the game. “Do you see how it flickers in a sequence?”

  Laria watched the way the coding scrolled in time with the actual footage. She held up her hand, and David repeated the last five minutes again.

  “Wait. That’s not intermittent at all. It’s a deliberate pattern. Almost like a…” She looked at him, not wanting to say what was on the tip of her tongue for fear that it might be crazy.

  He nodded, though, his expression grave but with an element of hope. “Yep. Just like a slumbering heartbeat.”

  Murmur hung in limbo, reliving that hatchet strike over and over again. At least now she knew the ice giants also had throwing weapons and not just snowballs. If the game was being consistent, the snowballs should have had spikes embedded in them.

  Finally, after what seemed like an eternity of experiencing her death over and over again, the request to resurrect her appeared on her screen. She indicated the will to accept the action and was sucked back into her body through a whirl of painful circles that made her dizzy enough to throw up.

  She came to in her body right next to Sinister, kneeling on one knee as she retched several times to no avail. Snowy, immediately by her side, whuffed hot wolf breath into her face, somehow reigniting their connection.

  With her mana sitting at thirty percent, Murmur cast her Mana Tide spell on the healers who were resurrected already. All but Veranol, who seemed difficult to reach. It looked like Masha was reluctantly going to fetch him.

  Her head throbbed, like someone was seeing how tight they could get the vice, and she watched Sinister resurrect more targets, biting her lip. Sin’s face was paler than usual, and she seemed disturbed by something.

  Murmur stretched out her sensing nets and noticed that the interference was gone from them. She frowned, looking at the debuffs that definitely persisted through death. Right now, there were no monsters around them. She could sense the ice giants they’d been fighting, but they weren’t close anymore. Apparently when they’d died, it had reset the encounter.

  Frankly, she couldn’t believe the old log a healer out until the encounter resets trick had worked, but damned if she wasn’t grateful that it had. Having to fight their way, or even just make their way back into this area would have been a pain in the ass.

  She meditated until her mana was full again and then hugged Snowy. He’d not left her side and was showing her glimpses of where the ice giants dwelled. Perhaps he had scouted while they waited to revive.

  He gave her a look that told her of course he had. With his attachment to her broken, he reverted to a game wolf and thus wouldn’t waken the ire of the beasts around him. Tha
t was a pretty neat trick, even if Murmur had grown used to his presence in her mind.

  The grin on his wolf face made his tongue loll out, and he almost seemed human for a moment.

  “Mur. I need to talk to you.” Sinister bent down as if she was checking to make sure Murmur was alright.

  “Sure.” Murmur allowed the bloodmage to help her stand up. She looped an arm around her shoulders and sighed into Sin’s hair. “What’s up?”

  “Well. When I logged back in, almost everyone was dead, but the encounter had reset itself.” She glanced around them, making sure no one else could hear them.

  Mur saw her concern and frowned, erecting a layer of protection on their thoughts and some confusion around them so no one could fully see what they were doing. It didn’t take her long to realize that Sin’s eyes kept wandering in the direction of Jirald and Masha.

  A cold knot began to form in the middle of Mur’s stomach.

  “Jirald wasn’t dead. He was totally disengaged from the fight though, and the ice giants had reset. He’s a rogue though, so perhaps they have one of those complete aggro drops, or maybe a vanishing type of spell. But the odder thing was Masha.”

  “What do you mean?” Mur asked softly.

  “He wasn’t dead either. And heal aggro is a hard thing to get rid of. The only way that happens is if it or you die.” She looked up at Murmur, her expression serious. “But he didn’t die Mur. They were both hidden, and they were both alive, and that shouldn’t have been possible.”

  Murmur nodded slowly, testing out her sensing nets to see if they really were fully recovered. They had to be, because she could sense an underlying unease around the whole raid. It confused her. Perhaps people weren’t familiar with the old log out method. Her parents had taught it to her when she first started playing games. Not all of them allowed it to happen, but many of them couldn’t build their mechanics around such a loophole.

  Thing was, it took at least ten seconds to log out. If you logged out too soon, it would leave your avatar in the world, and without its player at the helm it was possible for that avatar to die. The last thing a raid using that loophole needed was to have their healer log back in and be dead.

  Still. Masha hadn’t logged out, had he? “Did he maybe log out with you too?”

  Sinister hesitated. “I mean he could have, I guess. Perhaps he logged in just before me and resurrected Jirald. Oh, that makes much more sense.” She seemed pleased with that explanation, almost as if she didn’t want it to be something else.

  Murmur couldn’t blame her. “I’ll double check the logs later.”

  And she would, because she had to. With the overwhelming sensations she was getting from about a third of the raid, Murmur was beginning to feel uneasy herself. Like something or someone had talked to her raid members while she was preoccupied.

  It wouldn’t have been so bad, but she noticed Jinna looking sideways at her now and again. She could handle animosity from the other guilds and didn’t care, but from one of Fable? Something was undoubtedly wrong, she just had to figure out what.

  “Mur!” Devlish tapped his foot, and the shouting of her name brought her back to the present. “We need to start again. I believe the counter is almost done.”

  It was only then that Murmur realized there was a counter in her vision. It had another minute on it. Like the zone had reset that particular encounter when they died.

  Devlish was already giving the orders to buff up, and he assigned stun rotations as well.

  This time there was no way these ice giants were bombarding them with boulders. The fight began, and this time the rumbling was reassuring. Their opponents arrived, and the rangers knew what to do. Devlish and the melee fighting their target had interrupts down, and Rumble didn’t escape once.

  The ranged classes rotated through each of the rooted ice giants. Damage had the potential to break the root, and so all them had a rotation to allow for stun cool downs. The mages and rangers had a no damage, distance stun, as did Murmur.

  Their rhythm developed organically, and the fight began to feel fluid. The first ice giant crashed to the ground finally, in a cascade of ice chips and blocks. It left open the only mistake they made and allowed one Rumble to escape, but this time the witches were waiting for the boulder call and heaved acid on it as it rolled down the ramp.

  Murmur cast her gaze around, checking her nets and frowned. She could sense the next two waves of ice giants, but now there was something else, just beyond her reach of understanding, tugging at her senses. She frowned, trying to figure out why there were blemishes where awarenesses should be.

  Was she glitching? Was her headset? Was the game about to crash again?

  Somnia is stable, if I do say so myself. What you’re feeling isn’t emanating from me.

  If it was possible, the world sounded slightly uncertain, like she was also trying to locate the problem. It only reinforced Murmur’s feeling that something was happening. It’s okay, I’ll keep an eye out too. It’s probably just a glitch or part of the virus attempting to overrun something.

  I think I’d know if it was that, but I shall ask the others to look as well.

  Murmur didn’t feel reassured. Even as the second and third ice giants fell to the raid’s strategy. It was all too mechanical now, like it had been made easy for them. Her shoulders itched, like someone was watching her, but she located Jirald easily enough, so it wasn’t him.

  One of the waves of ice giants disappeared from her sensing nets, and she frowned as a larger presence replaced it.

  “Boss incoming shortly,” she announced, still trying to trace the source of her unease. “Likely with adds.”

  The feeling intensified, and she turned to look around at the raid. They were all still fighting the last ice giant standing, every one of them focused on the fight.

  All of them except Masha, who stood, paying no attention whatsoever to the raid’s current fight, watching her with a look of pure hatred.

  Somnia Online

  Continent Cenedril - Curet

  Emilarth’s Residence

  Early Day Twenty-Eight

  Telvar held his breath as Emilarth initiated the exchange sequence, pulling Belius in from his office in Stellaein to her own, more protected area in Curet. Tel had to bottle up all of his rage, all of his will to punch his brother through into another dimension, and trust that his sister was right.

  Even if she was right, he wasn’t about to forgive his brother, but he would help him for now. Emilarth began to glow, coding visible beneath her skin just like the locus runes, except the black numbers and symbols appeared more like the absence of light in a glowing body.

  Belius’s form materialized, and for a moment a look of pure confusion crossed his face as it flickered through coding to gain its appearance. As soon as he focused on them though, his shoulders lost some of their tension.

  “You shouldn’t have brought me here,” he whispered, even though his stance seemed to hold relief. Confusing as always.

  Telvar couldn’t help himself. “And you shouldn’t have used me as a guinea pig for a virus cure without telling me what it could lead to. But here we are.”

  Belius had the grace to look away, somewhat sheepish. His words were in stark contrast to his body language. “I did what needed to be done, and I’d do it again.”

  “Like I’d let you get close to me,” Telvar growled out, taking three steps back to remain at a safe distance.

  “Stop it. We don’t have time for this. You can bicker after we stop the virus from spreading.” Emilarth, for once, took on the serious role. It was an odd juxtaposition to see her act that way, her usual trickster self buried down deep.

  Reluctantly Telvar had to admit she was right. There was far too much to see to, to rectify for Somnia.

  As if summoned, the wraithlike form of the world appeared. This time sh
e seemed more solid than before, as if she was slowly becoming more real over time. But the reception she had was being interfered with. Occasionally a line of static marred her form and left her body to repixelate. But it didn’t interrupt her processing that Telvar could see.

  “The dungeons are unstable. Tieflos is worse than Vahrir.” Even her voice had a robotic clang to it every few words. Her almost tangible face contorted with annoyance for a moment before she continued speaking. “They’ll get through this, but there’s an infection running through the raid members now, and I’m not sure how it started, or how to stop it.” She looked at the AIs, her expression pleading with them to do something she couldn’t.

  “Infection? How do you mean infection?” Belius spoke up, and just as Telvar wanted to tell him to shut the hell up this was all his fault, Emilarth stayed his hand and let the locus AI speak. It was all Telvar could do not to let his anger boil over.

  “Their actions aren’t following normal readings. Readings I’ve had on them for days now.” Somnia seemed genuinely confused.

  Belius pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed. “Probably my fault.”

  “Isn’t everything?” Telvar bit out. He took a breath, tried to calm himself, but he could still remember the strange visions he’d had while in forced dragon form, and he wasn’t about to forgive that easily.

  Belius turned to face him, a worried expression pinching his alien features. “I’m sorry, Tel. I didn’t have time to ask you and have you weigh the pros and cons. I needed the start of an anti-virus immediately, not when you decided you’d been over the data enough. You were the first of us. If anyone could give me what we needed, it was you. And you did. But it’s a lot of work.”