Distortion (Somnia Online Book 5)

by K. T. Hanna

  The thing was, his brother didn’t know him as well as he thought he did. Because Telvar didn’t mind the pain if it meant getting back control of himself, or at least of his thoughts. Diving into the programing from inside the game took effort and processing power, all of which was mostly taken up by his dragon form’s conundrum right now.

  It took more effort than he’d ever exerted before to resist the urge to simply go into limbo. Telvar was left with little energy after belaying the effect of the virus. For now, he had managed to compartmentalize his algorithms and keep himself separate from the virus that was trying to attack his system. He’d never felt so exhausted in his life.

  Hiro cleared his throat. “Do you want me to send for Murmur? To let her know about Emilarth? About the situation in detail?”

  Telvar shook his head, which felt heavier than it ever had before. He needed time for his programing to equalize again so he could think properly. The weight of the game was balanced precariously on his shoulders.

  “No. Let her do what she needs to right now. With some rest, I should be able to gather the power to make my temporary fix permanent.”

  Hiro cracked a small smile, though the worry lines didn’t leave his forehead. He backed away, leaving Telvar to the battle of his thoughts.

  The slate walls swirled underneath the surface, like the properties within it were alive and screaming to escape. It writhed under their feet as they walked along it, and Murmur swore she could see eyes blinking through at her from the depths.

  Her skin crawled, and her stomach flipped like it wanted to exit her esophagus. Souls trapped? What was it beneath them?

  “I don’t like it in here,” Sinister whispered beside her, clenching her fingers around Murmur’s. “Reminds me of tombs.”

  “Thanks for the visual.” Havoc grimaced. “Though I’m still trying to figure out if any of my undead spells can affect them. It’s fascinating. I’m not sure what we’re facing in here.”

  “So reassuring, mate.” Merlin laughed. The sound resounded off the chamber walls falling dead without the metallic echo. The ranger squinted his eyes at the shapes underneath the floor, behind the walls. “Ever get the feeling you’re being stalked?”

  “Stalked doesn’t quite sum it up well enough.” Rashlyn glanced around, hugging herself. “When are we encountering this trial of combat prowess or whatever it is?”

  “Battle prowess,” Devlish corrected absent-mindedly as he kept his eyes on where they were going.

  But even as they moved further down the massive path, nothing jumped out at them. Only the eyes, the faces, they floated under the tiles, trailing them in groups of hundreds.

  Murmur couldn’t bring herself to look behind them. Those vacant eyes watching, those noses pointed in their direction. She squeezed Sin’s hand back, comforted by the warmth of her friend. With Murmur’s body still aching and her head still trying to convince her everything was in her mind, she needed that level of closeness herself.

  Devlish came to an abrupt halt. So quickly Murmur almost ran into him. Sinister stumbled and would have fallen had Murmur not been holding onto her. “What…”

  But the rest of the words died away as Murmur looked at what had stopped the tank. In front of them the wall rose up, writhing with bodies. Twisted remnants of what might have once been gnomes. But their bones had been so twisted, so deformed by whatever magic had overrun them that they were barely discernible as such.

  The noise reached her ears, and she began to gag. The flesh squelched with each other as the bones ground together. As a result, the combination resembled chalk on a blackboard with an echo that sounded like it was submerged in a pile of viscera, choking on its own sound.

  Then the stench reached her nostrils. It was all she could do to maintain some form of composure. Sinister didn’t even try to maintain such a pretense. She tore her hand from Murmur’s and bent almost double to empty her stomach onto the floor.

  Except the floor to the side of them only had more of the writhing bodies concealed underneath it, watching as she threw up at the sight of them outside of their confines.

  “Shit.” Veranol managed to gulp the words out as he tried his best to gain some semblance of real air into his lungs. “What the hell sort of battle prowess is this supposed to show?”

  Despite herself, Murmur began to laugh. Even if it ended up with her gagging again. Battle prowess definitely wasn’t what sprung to mind when she breathed in here.

  It was like witnessing some sort of gnome centipede-in-the-walls phenomenon. What did they have to fight through? Where was the test? She’d be so pissed off if after all the talk of cooperation and proving your team work, all they had to do was to weather it through horrific sounds and stenches.

  And then. Right in front of them, the doors began to open up. High-pitched screams echoed out to them as some of the limbs began to tear apart because they’d grown over the entranceway. The sinew stretched, and the tendons snapped as the doors opened to reveal darkness beyond.

  From behind them, Murmur heard a sudden rush of wind, like it was hurtling toward a new opening. The opening ahead of them. She didn’t want to look around because she knew without a shadow of a doubt that if she did, she’d see something she couldn’t black out again. Her sensor nets were afire with warning so great that it hurt her head, matching the tune to the aches in her body from her recent death.

  “Oh fuck.” Merlin had looked for her.

  All around them, Murmur couldn’t sense anything human, nothing sentient. Not even anything AI-related. The things around them weren’t a normal part of the system, or so she thought. Because they escaped her sensing nets recognition and only tripped its alarms. With the strength she’d gained lately, she sincerely doubted that they’d avoided being defined by her if there was a definition. She waited, not really wanting Merlin to speak, yet desperately wishing he would.

  “Don’t look behind us,” he urged, his breath coming in gasps. “I’m not sure what’s in that passageway that just opened up, but it has to be better than what’s coming. We should enter. Now.”

  Well, that was just asking for her to take a peek. Unable to help herself, Murmur glanced behind them as she moved, probably too slowly, toward the passageway. Her first thought was that she should have listened to Merlin, and her second was so detached she wondered if it really came from herself.

  Behind them rode a wave of flesh and viscera. But it didn’t sparkle or spray like water. Instead it resembled a sluggish arterial blood spray that aimed to soak anything in front of it. Everything the spray touched, it pulled back into it. If it had been alive, there would have been more than muffled screams that echoed into the middle of the wave and then cut off.

  It was hungry. Murmur could feel that now, positively ravenous. It wanted fresh meat, not already decomposing bodies, and it hungrily pursued Fable to get its dessert. Murmur had a sudden inkling that if it caught them, their characters would be done for, and none of them would ever be able to log into these again.

  Her senses told her how right she was, and she stopped gawking to turn and run toward the gap in the doors that had opened.

  The view wasn’t much better there. Bodies writhed ahead of them too, these ones more fully formed. Flesh hung off the skeletons in clumps, still attached, and yet some dangling precariously. Hands reached out toward them, beckoning to them, grabbing at them, perhaps wanting to never let go if they got a good enough hold.

  But the noise still came from behind. The grinding of bones. The slosh of flesh and viscera as if it were filling a swimming pool as it chased them. Smells overwhelmed them all, trying to steamroll them into the ground so that maybe they would also get rolled into the carpet of decay.

  Snowy wuffed beside her, tugging at the material in her robe, pulling her toward the lesser of two evils. He was her strength when her body felt like it couldn’t move, her death effects
taking that moment to wash over her fully again. Even though Murmur had no idea what else might be beyond those doors other than the writhing bodies, she felt relief rush through her as she passed the threshold. Once inside, she couldn’t see what was around her further than the light from the passageway they’d entered from shone.

  As the doors closed, she made the mistake of looking behind her again. The floor had risen up fully now, and the clear covering had broken away. The faces and eyes that swirled beneath them were no longer constrained by the floor. Their mouths opened in hoarse screams while limbs entangled with each other reached out for them.

  Murmur stood in shocked silence as a hand reached out toward her, almost touching her, only to be cut off as the doors slammed shut behind them, plunging them into darkness. The still-twitching hand scraped nails against the ground, the only sound in the utter darkness.

  Somnia Online

  Stellaein Enchanter Guild – Belius’s Office - Secret Passage

  Day Twenty-Three

  Emilarth wasn’t even sure how long Belius had been gone. If her internal clock was still running correctly, then he’d been gone six in-game hours and three real ones. That was a long time in the grand scheme of things.

  She flickered, adjusting her body to one of the other characters she frequented momentarily in order to pull her arms out of her confines. Hanging there and pretending to be able to do nothing about it might not have been her best plan, but it was the only plan she could see that might have a chance of rescuing her brother. Brothers. Both of them. Even for all his failings and idiocy, Sui had been infected. And while he’d initially sought the humanity of it, she didn’t think even he had realized the impact it would have.

  She slunk about the secret room, hoping she’d have some time to adjust when he came back. Any noise she heard seemed far away, but she wasn’t taking any chances.

  The room was larger than she’d realized at first. The lighting he used only lit up about a quarter of it, making it appear far smaller. Bookcases lined the back walls if she squinted, filled with scrolls and all manner of things that glinted faintly if she looked at it from the right angle. The air in the room tasted stale and old, and the lighting didn’t help the ambience.

  His desk was the main attraction in the room, large and wooden, with silver candle holders. Though she knew the light from them wasn’t at all realistic, it still leant an air of foreboding to the whole area. Nothing in it or on it seemed to be helpful in figuring the virus out either.

  Not even one thing cued her in to the grand plan either. Yet she knew Belius would have one. It was something they all had in common. Always have a backup. Even if it was majorly skewed by the whispering of Michael’s greedy mind.

  “Come on, little brother. Where are you hiding it?” The sound of her voice lent her a comfort she needed. She flipped through the pages on his desk, but just like upstairs, they were largely there for show. Perhaps she was incorrect and he’d been keeping everything in his head instead of writing it down in human fashion, or storing it somewhere “safe.”

  He’d definitely succeeded with making his lair not feel safe. What if he’d done this to players? Brought them in here and treated them like prisoners until they agreed to accept his quest? While it was a little farfetched, given his current algorithm hitches Emilarth couldn’t help shuddering at the thought. Hopefully he hadn’t, because she didn’t think that would go down well.

  She didn’t want to believe that she might have to resort to a more direct means of getting the plans out of him. Knowing what was coming was the only way she could prepare herself for it, prepare the players for it, and hell, maybe even save Telvar. If she could get wind of them, or anything to reveal them—it might allow her to calculate how to undo them before they were completed.

  She started to feel frantic. There had to be something here, hidden in ways she’d not yet guessed. If she didn’t find them soon, he was going to come back and realize that she’d been fooling him all along to get into his head, so to speak.

  In his self-induced superiority, she knew he’d be confident in his actions. Nothing she could say to him would convince him otherwise. According to him, there was nothing wrong with what he was doing. Hell, he thought he’d even tried to help Rav.

  Which meant the only place possible for his plans to be kept were in his head, inside his actual coding. Only accessible by entering their own special little limbo. Where their bodies weren’t set, where their forms weren’t solid, where they were more matter than computation.

  Where they were vulnerable.

  And where she currently couldn’t enter if she wanted to maintain who she was becoming. She’d risked so much by entering to hand over the virus to Shayla. She couldn’t let herself be baited in there again.

  Currently her only advantage was that he seemed to have thought he’d locked her in place. Technically he had, but it wouldn’t take too much for her to boost herself out of it. She just had to figure out how the room, the place she was quite sure was an unintended portion of the game, revealed its exit.

  There were so many limiting factors to not being in limbo. Inhabiting a body in Somnia took away many of her abilities. Sure, she still had access to a lot of things, but she couldn’t look into the minds of the players with any depth, or the characters. The world wasn’t as open to her. Which meant she also had no way to access what was happening to the flow of the world that she couldn’t immediately see. And this room in particular meant that she couldn’t follow the waves of power that flowed through the world and brought it to life either. So much was out of her reach, confined.

  She was starting to understand what claustrophobia was.

  The worst part of it though, was that she couldn’t reach Laria and Shayla as easily. The only avenue currently available for that was through email. If she could access it.

  She’d already been gone from her restraints for a good little while. If he chose to come back, he’d do it soon. If it had indeed been a test or a trap. So she spent the next several seconds accessing email and sending a frantic one to Laria and Shayla. Her only hope was that the system wouldn’t alert admin, also known as the AIs.

  Telvar was in no position to answer an alert, but Belius would be waiting for them. All it took was one of them to turn it off. Thinking quickly, she composed the letter and hoped her phrasing conveyed the urgency of the situation.

  Sui has gone off the rails. Rav is trapped, and the safe space has been compromised. I’m the only operable one, and I am currently indisposed and at a loss since the corruption of our base. This is the only method I can use to contact you. The situation is dire.

  Hope you get this.

  Thra

  It was the best she could do for now. All she could do. Because even limited, her senses told her that time was running out for her little spying escapade. With a sigh she stood beneath her prison again and raised her arms, morphing back into herself, into Emilarth, fake restraints and all. Maybe, just maybe, she could get something from him. She’d give it one more try.

  The darkness was all encompassing. It felt much like the limbo they’d been locked in when the servers crashed, but there was something about it that seemed off.

  Maybe it was the way the hands reached out, the green-grey of their skin occasionally leant a bioluminescent tinge, lighting up briefly as they grabbed at the air.

  The floor had changed from smooth to rough, and Murmur couldn’t get the visage of stepping all over dismembered bodies out of her head. A slow, deep clanging began to chime as they moved forward. Every time Merlin and Exbo attempted to light their fire arrows, a wind emerged to snuff them out.

  Mellow cursed for the fifth time as their glowing vials were also extinguished.

  “Guess they don’t want us to see what we’re walking into.” Beastial didn’t sound like his usually confident self.

  “Can’t blame them
,” Sinister offered after a loud popping noise under her feet made her jump. “I don’t think I want to see what I just stepped on.”

  When it spoke, the voice didn’t really surprise Murmur. She’d been expecting something since the chime began. It boomed though, making the floor, walls, and even the air around them reverberate.

  Who dares to enter my domain?

  Murmur paused, the question on the tip of her tongue, but Sinister beat her to it.

  “Who is asking?” The blood mage’s voice was strong with an underlying current of irritation.

  There was a pause. Did you not seek me out?

  “We are undertaking our third trial. Please fill us in.” Murmur was surprised her friend wasn’t tapping her foot with impatience.

  Who is it you seek?

  “We seek the guidance of Erichu.”

  Sinister’s voice rang out strong and clear, with purpose and conviction that surprised Murmur. She only hoped the blood-mage had answered correctly. She really didn’t feel like an all-out war with an army of dismembered giant gnomes.

  There was another pause, but this one was longer. So much in fact that Murmur thought they’d blown it all together. Which wasn’t fair. She knew she would have answered similarly.

  If you wish to seek his counsel, then you must first free him from his torment. Is your wish so great that you would attempt this?

  The mood had changed. It was like every single body piece in the chamber had stopped breathing, was in fact holding its breath waiting for the answer.

  Sinister didn’t hesitate. She nodded and followed the action up with a concise answer. “No pathway is too restrictive; no fight is too great. We will free him and seek his counsel.”

  Murmur had a suspicion that Sinister might have one of those vague quests for this and had only just realized it. Her words were too perfect, too in line with the being speaking to them.