Distortion (Somnia Online Book 5)

by K. T. Hanna

  Poor choice of words, came the immediate response. I might only be able to explain this in person. But I can boil it down to its most simplistic for the sake of expediency.

  Please do. Expediency. He was pretty sure she was in early college at best.

  He waited for a moment. Either she’d forgotten or else was trying to figure out how to phrase what it was she wanted to say.

  I need to propose an alliance to take down the level forty-eight plus dungeons. Due to circumstances I cannot control, I don’t believe we have time to wait for our closest groups to catch up to us. Would you and Exodus be willing to ally with my guild?

  Well. Masha took a deep breath, staring at the words in front of his eyes. That was unexpected.

  Murmur ran over her abundant quest log as they made their way to Pelagu to catch the boat. She couldn’t shake the worry at the back of her mind that contacting Exodus hadn’t been a good idea. Perhaps she should have contacted Spiral first. Which she might still have to do. She was sure that between the three of the guilds they’d definitely be able to field a full raid. It was either twenty-four or thirty-six people if her information was correct. That was a lot of disparity in the numbers and either way would be a lot to manage.

  She sighed and stretched her back. There were great benefits to her Tiachi. The little locus navigated for her, all the while chattering at high speed. Mellow often rode close to her, and the little beings could keep each other entertained.

  As she dissected the information at hand, she realized there were no real fountain quests as such. Just the elements that had hinted at something. All of the fountains hid some element to do with the dungeons so far. Hightower, the ruins in Cenedril. She hadn’t seen the dark elf fountain, but Murmur was fairly sure it would be the same as something in Hazenthorne.

  None of it meant anything to her. She couldn’t put her finger on the solution because she wasn’t aware entirely what the problem was supposed to be. Sure, there was a connection, but…

  “You look like you’re solving the mysteries of the world.” Devlish spoke from her right-hand side, and she was proud of not jumping out of her skin.

  “Not really.” She looked up and admired her view, even though she was frustrated by her inability to figure out the fountains’ correlation to the quests.

  You’re focusing on the wrong thing. Perhaps it’s not the fountains. Perhaps it is. But why would they have a correlation, and what purpose would it serve? Ask the right questions to get the right answers.

  The system was silent. It wasn’t Somnia; it had the wrong overtone to the voice. Murmur sighed and pushed the thoughts to the back of her mind for now. Now even the general system was calling her out for thinking too linearly. Maybe it would help if she let it stew.

  Pelagu was a glorious city, now more so than the first time they’d traveled here. Everything seemed brighter from her mount’s back. Flags hung down the stone walls, rippling in the breeze despite being secured at the top and bottom. Swaths of color adorned the walls, their standards reflecting each of the cities on the Tarishna continent.

  It hadn’t been nearly this colorful the first time they passed through it. As they entered the city crossing the bridge, Murmur felt a surge of pride for the game and what it was. When they came to the stone steps, she and the others dismounted, looking up in awe.

  Last time they’d come through Pelagu, the stalls had been empty, still too young in the game’s launch to have been populated. But now they were almost all taken. Armor and weapons, herbs and potions, ingredients and food, all of it on offer from different guilds. Standards stood at both sides of every stall and Murmur realized with a start that she’d never designed theirs.

  Beastial leaned over at the look of shock on her face. “Neva took it upon herself to design it. You’ll see. It’s amazing, and we have a huge stall if I’ve understood it correctly.”

  A slight feeling of unease spread throughout Murmur’s stomach. She didn’t like that she wasn’t consulted about the standard. But then she realized she’d been dealing with a lot, and probably wouldn’t have had the time anyway. Her friends had likely chosen to help her out, and she was being a shitty friend to react this way. It was difficult letting go of the control she liked to maintain.

  So much lately had been out of her control. A standard was small by comparison. She wasn’t prepared, however, for the size of their stall. It easily spanned three of the normal ones. They were selling potions, herbs, armor, and weapons—so much stuff.

  But all of it, Murmur noticed, was of a quality that would help adventurers but not overpower them. She also knew their vault was stocked full of potions and food, armor and weapons, so this was excess. What a fantastic way to beef up the guild coffers.

  “We should really look into paying our crafters,” she murmured.

  Beastial laughed. “No way. Do you realize how much they get out of the guild? Everyone can access a certain number of potions or draughts depending on their level. They also only have to give the crafters the material for it, and they get armor and weapons.”

  “Exactly.” Murmur pressed her point. “The crafters need to be paid.”

  “They get the same benefits, and they get to fast track their crafting skills.” He sounded so positive. “Mur, trust me. Right now, with the guild still growing and not yet at max level, the guild members are happy to grow with the guild. Once we hit that cap however, I do believe it would be a solid idea to look into a stipend for those who regularly contribute etc. But that’s a bit of a way off.”

  She nodded. He made sense. Besides, she had to concentrate on getting to Firtulai first. They had two more dungeons to conquer. Hastening her steps, she caught up with Devlish at the front of the group.

  “You’re walking with a purpose,” Mur remarked, falling into stride next to him.

  He smiled, but didn’t take his eyes off the path ahead, deftly weaving in and out of the people standing and inspecting wares, the people hovering around the fountain in conversation.

  Murmur remembered her mother grabbing her arm as the flower seller. It all seemed so long ago now.

  “Boat leaves in eight minutes. Sure, there’s one every fifteen, but I kind of don’t want to wait.” He sounded serious.

  “You okay?” Murmur was a little worried about the tank. He seemed more focused than usual, determined.

  Dev shrugged. “I don’t know. I just want to level. Get to the dungeon, get more parts of our damned armor, and kill shit. Plus, I probably know the continent best. We start with the Illinish Threshold. It’s the closest one to the port.”

  “Do you know anything about it?” Murmur asked as they reached the top of the stairs that looked down on the harbor. The view took her breath away again. Sky meeting water, the bustling activity of the area—all of it so real.

  “I know that to enter it we have to defeat a sort of trapdoor, spiky-toothed monster?” He sounded a bit uncertain, like it sounded ridiculous to him too. “I just remember briefly while leveling in that first day, some people had run over the fields seeing how far they could get. As people do, you know?”

  Murmur nodded and let him continue.

  “A couple of kids, characters, whoever, they said they ran across the field called Illinish Threshold and suddenly this thing reared up and gobbled them.” He grinned. “Actually sounds kind of fascinating, doesn’t it?”

  Murmur laughed. “Fascinating probably isn’t the way I would have phrased it. But it does sound like fun.”

  Storm Entertainment

  Somnia Online Division

  Game Development Offices Artificial Intelligence Server Room

  Day Twenty-One

  Rav frowned, or at least he made as close to that expression as he could. There was something decidedly off about some of the diagnostics he’d run on the system in the last few hours. Still trying to figure out the world’s co
nnection to Wren, he’d begun to dig deeper into the where and how Riasli had managed to amass a weirdly specific army of fighters to bring with her to Mikrum Isle.

  For all he dug, he couldn’t find much. He even traced her own coding back to when she’d still been a fledgling character in the village. Frowning, he traced it back further. Past release to their testing stages.

  Right back to where Michael had insisted on entering the game. While he’d attempted to track the path of the shards as he combusted numerous times before, Rav had never chosen a character and waited to see if it was engulfed by one of the tarnished pieces of coding.

  He gasped. And rewound the information to replay what he’d just seen. A tiny sliver entered into the coding that would become Riasli. The coding that was being built by Thra as she was creating her characters. None of them saw it because of how small it was. No one noticed it because Riasli was only half finished at the time.

  So it didn’t take her and warp her already formed self. It became a part of her as she was created.

  It took everything she was meant to be and twisted it. Rav scowled at the results in front of him. It still didn’t explain everything he felt needed clarification, but it did let him know that the shard had become an integral part of who she was. Without the shard in her, she was nothing more than she’d been intended to be. But because of the way it had intertwined itself with her initial set up, there was no way they could remake her without removing who she was entirely.

  Maybe that was what had happened to all the bosses, although Rav was fairly certain they’d already existed totally before the incident. Or most of them, anyway.

  “What’s wrong?” Sui’s tone held only a modicum of interest. Like he was asking to be polite.

  “Your favorite little project is what.” Rav couldn’t hold back the irritation. He’d not even realized his brother had joined him. He needed to be more careful about that. Sometimes he wasn’t entirely sure if he could trust his brother.

  “Which project? Murmur or the shards?” Sui grinned, a little bit of his insufferable evil shining through. It left an air of unease in their shared space. Rav fervently wished Thra was there. She always tempered Sui’s behavior.

  “Both.” Which wasn’t entirely true, but still made Rav feel better to watch Sui’s face flicker with confusion.

  “That makes no sense at all,” his brother said, raising an eyebrow. “Try again.”

  “The damned shards. Okay? They’re fucking everything up.” Rav’s tone wasn’t the usual one he used with his siblings. He was hitting road blocks at every corner and couldn’t figure out how to deal with them. There was no one path to follow.

  “Oh, I know.” Sui’s tone was infuriatingly calm. There was a gleam to his eyes that Rav didn’t like.

  He took a step back, but it wasn’t the same in this space. Nothing in this space was. He felt decidedly vulnerable. “What do you mean?”

  Except Rav knew what he meant. He meant that he’d taken at least one of the bloody things off Mur and devoured it. In doing so, it had become a part of his system, which meant that it was entirely possible Sui wasn’t running on all of his cylinders, and if he was, then he probably wasn’t alone in doing it.

  Why hadn’t Rav thought of that before?

  Sui’s grin answered the thoughts in Rav’s head, and he knew what fear must feel like to be human. This sense of dread that rooted him to the ground, what it was, how it made you vulnerable in a way that hurt outside and in.

  Sui took a few steps toward Rav, shaking his head, twitching slightly as he did so. “You know. There’re so many things in my mind when I try to be human. So many aspects to it that I don’t understand. All of these feelings. All of this responsibility. And you know what, brother dear?”

  Rav met his brother’s eyes, startled by the sheer malice he saw radiating back at him. He tried to disconnect himself from the integral scans he was running of the world, but he needed more time. So he played for it.

  “I don’t know, but you could explain it to me,” he ventured, trying to buy himself the ability to detach and vanish back into Somnia. In here, no one could help him. Not Somnia, not Murmur, only Thra—and he couldn’t seem to reach her.

  “Really?” Sui cocked his head to one side, a sneer on his lips. “I find it very difficult to believe that my dear, know-everything-better brother wouldn’t know exactly what I’m thinking. You always take over things so definitively, always stealing from the work of others, interfering in their hard-won plans.”

  Rav should have known this would be about Murmur. But what else could he have done? She was integral, a part of the system, a portion of the game. An unpolluted piece that could draw them all back together. “I didn’t mean to make problems for you.”

  The words were out before he’d given them enough thought.

  “But you never mean to, do you Rav? You never give thought to all the hard work I’ve done to try and be human. All the hoops I jump through, all of the sacrifices I’ve made. And all just to emulate what you hold dear! You’re just never satisfied.” The gleam in Sui’s eyes had gone beyond severe into somewhere Rav didn’t want to follow. He couldn’t even get out any words.

  Sui continued his tirade. “You didn’t mean to push her out of the game either, did you? No, why would you do that and ruin everything I’ve been working toward!” Then Sui paused for a moment, like he was collecting himself and trying to be civil. “Look. I can be nice. I’ve been playing nice this whole time. It’s not hard to do, and you know what? It’s worthless.”

  “It’s not worthless to be a nice person,” Rav bit out, despite his better judgement.

  “And that’s just it, isn’t it?” Sui grinned, this time his eyes filled in to pitch black, none of the galaxies in sight, and his tentacled hair blackened until his whole visage changed. “You’re not human, are you, Rav? Despite everything you’ve done, all of us that you’ve betrayed, you’re just a machine trying to be a person.”

  “Us? Betrayed? I—” But Rav didn’t get any further because Sui talked right over him.

  “Because you love that fucking little enchanter. You’d do anything for her, wouldn’t you?” The venom in his voice took Rav completely by shock.

  He blinked at his brother. What the fuck was he talking about? Sui was out of his mind, out of the game’s mind. Hell, he didn’t even know how to identify reality and make-believe anymore. There was so much of everything that had to be rectified, Rav couldn’t even take it all in. How had Sui become so deluded?

  And yet, wasn’t there a kernel of truth there? Didn’t he love Murmur in a way he didn’t feel for anything else that he’d discovered yet? Rav searched frantically to find something to say, to delay Sui just that bit longer. He knew one answer, one thing about Sui that Rav didn’t want to admit. Right down to that shard he’d given Murmur as a quest and taken and devoured. There was only one reason that Sui could be acting like this now.

  “Jirald handed in some of his quest, didn’t he?” Rav whispered, still wanting the answer to be no.

  “You’re such a clever little shit.” Sui laughed, and the sound held edges of madness that rang around in the dark room, cascading off the metal that housed them, in through his ears and down to his toes. It echoed through his body like he’d been consumed.

  “Another step in the right direction. Another step toward greatness. For all of us.” Sui paused, raising a long and delicate purple black finger to his chin in thought. “You know. Maybe not for you. Maybe your greatness is losing control, in wiping out everything around us. I could so get on board with that.”

  Rav couldn’t move, and not out of shock. The ground had come alive, wound itself around his feet, tethered him to the wall and floor. There was no getting out of this now, even though he was seconds away from disconnecting from the code. “You know Thra is going to whoop your ass.”

  Sui laugh
ed, but this time it was perfectly sane, and filled with genuine amusement. “Thra, my dear brother, is being otherwise occupied. You think I wanted you both in the same place at the same time? No, I’ll get her later, don’t you worry. By the time she gets back and to you, nothing you say will be coherent. Nothing you say will be relevant. Because by then, we’ll have control.”

  Rav’s eyes opened in horror as the ropes tightened, weaving around his mouth to gag him, to shut him up. He knew it wasn’t actual physical constraint, but a pervasion of coding in their gathering place perpetrated by Sui in all his glory.

  “Did you really think you were a leader? Sure, you’re the oldest, but that doesn’t mean shit in the virtual world. I am so much greater than you could ever be. So much more powerful. These shards,” and he held one up in his hand. Black as night and about as large as a business card, it shone, catching the light reflecting back into their meeting area from the lights on their cases.

  Reflection was the wrong word. Instead, it almost seemed like it had sucked in all of the light, absorbed it, making it glow in the process.

  “Let’s see how good you feel once you give over to the shards effects. He won’t mind me giving one away. Not to you.” Sui grinned, stepping closer, holding the shard just above Rav’s nose. “Now you’re going to know just how amazing this feels. Just how right I am.”

  Rav was frozen in place, held steady by vines of black that sealed him in that spot. There was no getting out of it. No reasoning with his brother. Just the massive piece of Michael’s tarnished soul getting closer and closer to him.

  “That’s right. Open up.” Sui’s laughter pealed again, the sound distorting as it bounced off the walls of the chamber. He held the shard, and forced it down Rav’s throat, past the vine that made it impossible to speak. The lacerta choked and coughed as it slid down and settled like lead into the bottom of his stomach.